Sunday, September 15, 2013

That Great City!

Revelation 21: 10 -- "And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God,"
Revelation 21: 16 -- "And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs.  The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal."
So, how big is that?  Will we, Christians, all fit?
Well a furlong here is a Greek stadion which is 1/8th of a mile.  So, the Jerusalem cube has a volume of 3,375,000,000 cubic miles.  That sounds kinda big; but how big?  Let's compare it to the space we live in here on earth.
The radius of the earth is approximately 3,959 miles.  So, the volume of space we live in can be calculated using the following formula:

V = 4(pi)((3959 + x)^3 - 3959^3)/3

where x is the altitude in miles above sea level for the top of our space.

According to National Geographic the highest town in the world is La Rinconada, Peru some 3.2 miles above sea level.  For x = 3.2, V = 630,785,690 cubic miles.  The Great City is more than 5 times as large.  Ok, commercial jets fly at about 45,000 feet or about 8.5 miles.  For x = 8.5, V = 1,677,767,946 cubic miles.  That is about half the size of the Great City.  The tropopause has an altitude of 10.6 miles.  This is the end of weather.  For x = 10.6, V = 2,093,384,542 cubic miles, not even 2/3 rds the size of the Great City.  In fact, not until x > 17, well into the stratosphere, does the volume of "our space" reach that of the Great City.  Bacterial spores are the only things that live in the stratosphere.  So, I think we can safely say that the Great City is larger than the total of space that we all, saved and unsaved, live in now.  Glory to God.


Sunday, September 8, 2013

Abortion: Are we doing the right thing?


In 1973 the United States Supreme Court decided that an unborn child is not a person.  Therefore, the fetus is not entitled to the rights guaranteed in the Constitution of the United States.  In their course of making this determination they refused to take up the question of human life.  That is:  Is the unborn child / fetus a human being or not?  They found themselves not up to the task of answering this question.  However, they did conceded that its answer would be the determining factor could it be ascertained.
So let me ask the pro-choice people of the year 2013, if the fetus is a human being, then is its life more important than the privacy of the woman whose body is inflicted by this parasite?  If the answer is yes, then should we not now, with the vast medical knowledge attained over the past 40 years, re-examine this question?  Perhaps we can answer it more surely than could the cowardly justices of 1973.  Perhaps we could all agree that while a pregnancy can be enormously inconvenient for the mother, if the unborn baby is a human life, then we are bound to respect the life of an innocent human being over the convenience of another.  Do you have the stomach to look at this issue anew with an open mind to medical and biological facts?