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NASB | Colossians 1:1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Colossians 1:1 Paul, an apostle (special messenger, personally chosen representative) of Christ Jesus (the Messiah, the Anointed) by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, |
Bible Question (short): Who will claim the reward? |
Question (full): Who will claim the reward? I think some of the answers given here are excellent answers but will it satisfy an SDA? Re: need help with Sabbath question Hot news item! TESTING THE FAITH Sunday, holy Sunday? Pastor resurrects Sabbath debatewith 1 million reward By Joe Kovacs © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com One of the longest running disputes in the history of Christianity - Saturday vs. Sunday - is having new life breathed into it with a cash reward of up to 1 million toward a resolution. A. Jan Marcussen, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor in Illinois, is starting with 50,000 of his own money if someone can produce "a verse from the Holy Bible showing that God commands us to keep holy the first day of the week" - Sunday - "instead of the seventh day" - Saturday - "as is commanded in the Bible." He says the reward will increase in 25,000 increments each week for 40 consecutive weeks if no one sends him such a verse, with a final cap at 1 million. "The 50,000 offer is to wake people up out of a stupor," Marcussen tells WorldNetDaily. "People wake up when there's money involved." A. Jan Marcussen and wife Vennita Marcussen, who says he has the money ready to pay if someone is successful, is making the offer to encourage people to read the Bible for themselves, instead of accepting without question what religious leaders have been instructing. "Millions of people believe and have confidence in their clergy that what they're being taught is true," says Marcussen. "They'll find out that the clergy is not teaching from the Bible." Marcussen, 52, is not only a preacher in his local church, he's also a physical therapist, nutritionist, marriage counselor and author of six books. One of those works, "National Sunday Law," focuses on the Saturday-vs.-Sunday debate. Marcussen is asking people to read that book before applying for the reward. (It can be downloaded for free from his website.) As a college student in the 1970s, Marcussen made a similar, albeit smaller, challenge. He posted an ad in a local newspaper starting with a 500 reward and ending up at 1,000. "Certain preachers really got excited," he says. "But the only thing they couldn't do was produce a Bible verse [as proof]." Experts on biblical scripture tell WorldNetDaily that Marcussen has little need to worry about paying out the money. "I am afraid that you are not going to find an exact Bible verse to counter the good pastor's challenge and collect," says James Efird, professor of biblical interpretation at Duke University Divinity School in North Carolina. "As far as I know, there is no verse which specifies that Sunday is the day for Christians to observe the Sabbath." Indeed, neither the words Saturday nor Sunday appear anywhere in most translations of the Bible. Days of the week are referred to by number, starting in the first chapter of Genesis in the account of creation. It was after the work of creating that God made special note of one day of the week: "And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made" (Genesis 2:3). In the Ten Commandments, the seventh day was made the focus of the fourth mandate: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy ... thou shalt not do any work ... For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it" (Exodus 20:8-11). The word sabbath comes from the Hebrew root word "shabbat," meaning to rest, cease or desist. Scholars say the word in Bible scripture not only refers to the weekly day of rest, but also the annual festivals of God such as Passover and Day of Atonement. It additionally refers to a sabbatical year, and it's the term denoting one week. The phrase "first day of the week" occurs eight times in the King James translation of the New Testament, mostly dealing with the circumstances of Jesus' resurrection. In the lexicon of modern society, the debate over which day is holy - that is, set apart to God - goes unresolved by the editors of Webster's New World College Dictionary. While the first definition of sabbath calls it "the seventh day of the week (Saturday), set aside for rest and worship and observed as such by Jews (from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset) and some Christian denominations," its second meaning defines it as "Sunday as the usual Christian day of rest and worship." Cont... |