In the wake of the devastating explosion that destroyed two buildings in Harlem, the discovery of a Bible is being called a miracle by not only members of the Spanish Christian Church that was destroyed in the blast but firefighters and emergency personnel.
On the third day of their recovery efforts, rescue workers found a waterlogged Bible under the debris of the church. The Bible was not singed by fire at all and the water damage was minimal.
Members of the church hailed it as a miracle because the Bible was the one placed on the church’s altar because it was the used for the founding of the church 80 years ago.
The church’s pastor, Rev. Thomas Perez, became so overwhelmed at the sight of the Bible being brought out intact from the rubble that he had to be hospitalized for observation.
Attendees told reporters the Spanish-language Bible belonged to the founding couple of the church.
Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano said the discovery of the Bible means a lot because now the church will have a remnant as they rebuild.
Air Force officials have banned Gideon volunteers from giving Bibles to new recruits at Maxwell Air Force Base.
Gideon’s volunteer Michael Fredenburg told Fox News they were told by base officials to “get their Bibles out.”
The public affairs officer for Military Entrance Processing Command told Fox News that the Gideon’s claim was not “entirely” true. Gaylan Johnson said that the Gideons have been banned from standing at a table and speaking with anyone who is a recruit. They will still be able to put materials on a table.
The Gideons had been meeting recruits and handing out Bibles for over a decade. Four days a week the Gideons would stand by a table, shaking the hands of those who had just enlisted and offering them a pocket-sized Bible.
Johnson told Fox that the Gideons are no longer allowed to be within the building to speak to anyone. Johnson is claiming that this is a new command-wide policy against any organization that is not a member of the Federal Government.
A woman who ordered two prints online of Bible verses for her Bible study from her local Walgreens was told she couldn’t print them because Bible verses violated copyright law.
After a clerk told Kelly Taylor that they would not print her order, she received an e-mail that told her to contact a photo team associate. When she called the number, she was told that printing Scripture violated copyright law.
She was given prints of the Bible verses after Fox News obtained copies of the e-mails between Taylor and store officials and provided them to Walgreens’ corporate offices.
A Walgreens spokesman then sent a statement to Fox News that the employee who rejected the printing of the verses was not acting on behalf of the company.
He went on to say the employee may have had concerns that graphic designs behind the verses could fall under copyright protection and that the whole situation could be resolved by Taylor signing a waiver of copyright law.
Taylor said she hopes the incident will be a teachable moment for Walgreens and that in the future Christians won’t be denied the opportunity to print Scripture verses.
Many teachers of Bible prophecy believe that the antichrist himself will suffer a fatal head wound, but if you look at the scripture carefully, you can easily get a different impression: “One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed” (13:3, niv).
Remember, John saw the Beast rising out of the sea, which probably means rising from many peoples. But John used the term “beast” in several ways in Revelation, sometimes talking about the antichrist and at other times talking about the antichrist system, the one-world government system that is against God. Here, I believe the latter is the more correct understanding, that is, this beast is the antichrist system. This one-world government will have ten horns, seven heads, and ten diadems (13:1).
Revelation 17:12–13 tells us that the ten horns are ten kings who will receive power with the Beast for a relatively short time, and their sole purpose is to give their power to the Beast. The seven heads, according to Revelation 17:9–10, are seven mountains on which the harlot rides and seven kings: “Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while.” Continue reading →
A copy of the Message translation of the Bible was more than a spiritual lifesaver for a Dayton, Ohio bus driver.
49-year-old Rickey Waggoner, a driver for the Dayton Regional Transit Authority, had been working on his bus when he was approached by three youths. The youths shot Waggoner in the chest at point blank range.
However, a copy of the Message Bible that Waggoner had in his pocket stopped both of the bullets. Police say the Bible saved Waggoner’s life.
While not specifically attributing the act to divine will, a Dayton police officer said there had to be something special that happened for the bus driver.
“There was obviously some kind of intervention involved in this incident because he should probably not be here,” Dayton Police Sergeant Michael Pauley told the Dayton Daily News.
Police believe the attack was a gang initiation because Waggoner reported one of the youths said “if you want to be all the way in the club” to the one who pulled the trigger.
The man who created the Message translation, Eugene Peterson, said that he had heard of similar incidents in World War II where Bibles stopped bullets.
“It’s good to be in the club,” Peterson told Fox News.
The anti-Christian Freedom From Religion Foundation is suing another municipality to try and remove any trace of Christianity from any public area.
The FFRF sent a letter to Pinellas Park officials saying that the existence of the Bible on a podium inside the city council chamber means the city is endorsing Christianity over every other religion. According to Fox News, their letter cites court cases that resulted in the removal of Bibles from public facilities.
“Not only is the city council sending a message of endorsement for Christianity over other religions and nonreligion,” the letter says, “but display of this King James Bible sends a message of endorsement of one particular Christian sect over all others.”
Incoming city manager Doug Lewis says they are reviewing the FFRF’s most recent letter but they believe because the Bible was given to the city during the dedication of the building by the city’s Kiwanis Club, it’s part of the history of the building.
A Texas city’s mayor is drawing fire after he declared 2014 the “Year of the Bible” in his city.
Tom Hayden, the mayor of Flower Mound, Texas, made the declaration at last month’s city council meeting. Hayden told reporters that he had been considering the declaration for two years because he wants his community to connect through the Bible.
“The morality that helped build our country is based on the values that are found in the Bible,” Hayden told Fox News. “And as we look at problems, maybe we’re getting away from those values. And in my little small way, I want to encourage people to get back into those values.”
Hayden hopes to encourage residents to join together in reading the Bible in its entirety in 2014.
While some residents are critical of the Mayor’s move, it is not without precedent. President Ronald Reagan made a similar declaration in 1983.
Costco released an apology yesterday for Bibles at a California store being labeled as fiction. Now, a woman in Missouri has discovered Bibles labeled as fiction in a store in Manchester, Missouri.
Not only were the Bibles labeled fiction, they were put in a display with Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Mary-Margaret Meyers-Walker said she offered to move the Bibles to the correct section of the store. She called the regional office and was told that the store apparently never received the memo to move the Bibles.
Meyers-Walker said she visited the store because she had heard of the controversy in California.
The local management refused to talk to St. Louis area station KMOX about the incident.
Costco has released a statement apologizing for at least one of their stores selling Bibles with a label on them that read “fiction.”
“We deeply regret the mislabeling of the Bible and meant no offense to anyone,” read an e-mail statement. “The buyer has let us know that this was an error and the books are being pulled off the shelves to be re-marked.”
Fox News says Costco sent them a statement claiming their distributor made a mislabeling mistake on a small percentage of Bibles but that the company should have spotted and corrected the mistake before the books were placed on store shelves.
A pastor in Simi Valley, California who snapped a picture of the Bible and posted it on twitter first discovered the labeling. The photo of the Bible went viral and led to hundreds of complaints to Costco’s offices.
The government of North Korea has murdered Christians for possessing a Bible.
A South Korean newspaper reports that the people labeled criminals by the North Korean government for owning a Bible were killed in public execution events arranged by Kim Jong-un’s government.
A source said in the city of Wonsan, those being executed were tied to stakes in a local stadium and shot to death with machine guns while over 10,000 residents were forced by military forces to watch. He said the bodies were so riddled with machine gun bullets that identities could not be determined.
Relatives or accomplices of those murdered were taken to prison camps.
Some North Korean experts say the executions are an effort by the government to quell any possible opposition.