Wanting to know more about basic teachings of Christadelphianism

Those who would like to know more about what the founder of the Christadelphians wrote, can find several parts of his writings and some other authors from the early days of the brotherhood in the new look at "Messiah for all".

At the new website concerning the messiah, Jesus Christ from Nazareth, whose real name was Jeshua, an effort is made to place the master rabbi and his teachings in a clear biblical light. To come to know Jesus better it is important to go back to the early times of mankind. Therefore the site starts by the total beginning of mankind and looks at the evolution of man. Eden was the original place that God created where He would meet with man and later we shall see this place recreated in Ezekiel’s vision and how the choices of those first people triggered the need of a provision made by God, which came to fulfilment with the life of the Nazarene born in Bethlehem.
Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden with the task “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Ezekiel’s vision of a temple was given with a similar command to “keep the whole form thereof, and all the ordinances thereof’’ (Ezekiel 43:11). Adam failed to keep the Garden of Eden and its ordinances and was cast out. Israel had likewise failed to keep the first temple and its ordinances and had been exiled.

After placing the first man in the spotlight the site "Messiah for all" will continue to look at the position of man and what human thinking introduced by the years of different approaches to the Word of God and to the religious attitude.

To do this it uses also writings from brothers of the begin years of the Brotherhood of the Christadelphians. One of the major works is the exposition of the Kingdom of God with reference to the time of the end and the age to come as presented by John Thomas, writer of a.o. Apostolic Advocate 5 volumes, 1834-38), Herald of the Future Age (4 volumes, 1845-48) and Herald of the Kingdom and Age to Come (11 volumes, 1851-61). Like Christendom Astray, the book Elpis Israel also emerged as a result of a series of lectures (given in 1848) dealing with the Hope of Israel. It sets out in systematic form Bible teaching about sin, death and reconciliation, and the purpose of God to fill the earth with His glory as the waters cover the sea.

You may find the book Elpis Israel in the Christadelphian bookstore.

Fragments from Elpis Israel and added Bible quotes, starting from the article:

Necessity of a revelation of creation 1 Works of God and works of man

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Find additionally to read:

1. To whom do we want to be enslaved
2. Not words of any organisation should bind you, but the Word of God
3. Priority to form a loving brotherhood
4. Two new encyclopaedic articles
5. What are Brothers in Christ
6. Who are the Christadelphians
7. Christadelphians or Messianic Christians or Messianic Jews
8. February 2015 got new little lights shining on internet
9. The Christadelphian magazine 150th anniversary
10. Christadelphian people

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A question to be posed

At the Belgian ecclesia site there is a series going on about the necessity to look for and to find God. One of the presented ways its by going to look at the old writings which found their way from one generation to the next, throughout the ages.

From the writings people should come to see that they may find more insight in the happenings of the world and in the way human beings behave in this world and how we can stand straight in this system of things. There is also shown the way how people can gain encouragement and hope from spending time in God’s word.

It is not always easy to stand straight in life or to find your ways in life. For many people life seems a struggle. Lots of people can use some encouragement and need to find hope.  The hope available in God’s word ought to be reason enough to read it on a regular basis.

Often we hear people questioning God and His position and actions. But when going into discussion with such people we come to hear that they have no clue of what happened earlier in history. They only think about an apple for the story of Adam and Eve but have no idea what really happened there in the Garden of Eden and which promises where made already so early in human history. 

They often do not know that God has given everybody to see His works and to hear His Voice.
Today many are interested in the social media but are not so interested in going to look for the number 1 best seller of all time!
The Bible earns its place on the most read book, even when so many do not want to have a look at it. But they better did.

The Creator of everything has something to say to them and to you.  Whatever your situation is, God will speak to you about it.  Any problem, any obstacle, any hindrance or fear you may have has already been addressed by God in this book.

When you have questions in life it is not bad to pose them. Concerning the Book of books: the question is not “Should I read the Bible” but rather “When will I read the Bible?”

Preceding article:

Bible sayings about God

Bible, helmet of health, salvation and sword of the spirit

The article series to look for:

No insurmountable obstacles to come to know God

Daily Spiritual Food To prepare ourselves for the Kingdom of God

Cognizance at the doorstep or at the internet socket

In a world which knows no peace sharing blessed hope

Genuine message of salvation

God who knows the heart

The Right One to follow and to worship

May the Lord direct your hearts to …

Dealing with worries in our lives
God’s never-ending stream of much-needed mercies
Best intimate relation to look for
A voice and a Word given for wisdom

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find also:

1. Creator of heaven and earth and everything aroundיהוה The Only One Elohim who creates and gives all
2. Bible basic intro
3. Bible Word of God, inspired and infallible 
4. Trusting, Faith, calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #3 Voice of God #4 Words in Scripture
5. Trusting, Faith, calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #3 Voice of God #5 To meditate and Transform
6. Trusting, Faith, calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #3 Voice of God #6 Words to feed and communicate
7. True God giving His Word for getting wisdom
8. The Word of God in print
9. Bible, helmet of salvation, God’s Words put in the mouth of prophets for perfecting, to reprove and correct
10. Bible, God speaking words profitable for doctrine, for reproof and for correction
11. Bible, God’s Word to edify (ERV)
12. Bible, sword of the Spirit to come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man
13. Bible, helmet of health, salvation and sword of the spirit
14. Bible, best Book of books to get to know the truth 
15. No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation
16. Eternal Word that tells everything
17. Hearing words to accept
18. Plain necessary food of the gospel
19. Looking for wisdom not departing from God’s Word
20. The holy spirit will bring back to your minds all the things told
21. True God giving His Word for getting wisdom
22. Words to inspire and to give wisdom
23. Bric-a-brac of the Bible
24. Bible a guide – Bijbel als gids 
25. Bible, best Book of books to get to know the truth 
26. Coming to understanding from sayings written long ago
27. We should use the Bible every day
28. May reading the Bible provoke us into action to set our feet on the narrow way
29. Feed Your Faith Daily
30. The Bible and names in it
31. Bible power to change
32. May reading the Bible provoke us into action to set our feet on the narrow way
33. A way to look for Christ, the Bible, Word of God
     

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Has the Bible’s Garden of Eden been found — and restored

Despite ongoing violence in the region, NewScientist is reporting that the “‘Garden of Eden’ has been saved.” The country’s Council of Ministers recently approved its first national park, restoring Mesopotamian marshes in Iraqi’s southern region.

Biblical scholars say this massive oasis in the desert may have been the Garden of Eden. For more than five millennia, tribal groups of Marsh Arabs lived sustainably in this water world, using the dominant plant, a giant grass called Phragmites australis, for housing, animal feed, fuel, and commerce. Under their ministrations, the marshes teemed with life, serving as one of the world’s most important stopovers for migratory birds and as breeding habitat for Persian Gulf fisheries. 

After the Gulf war in 1991, Iraq's president, Saddam Hussain, used dykes, sluices and diversions to cut off the country's two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. This drained 93 per cent of the marshes, largely obliterating the largest wetland ecosystem in the Middle East.

Please find more about it in:

Garden of Eden to become Iraqi national park

Restoring Iraq's Garden of Eden

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A promise given in the Garden of Eden

A covenant of grace or the covenant of redemption.

In the Old Testament you will find God described as ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’. God also speaks of Himself as ‘the God of Israel’, but in the New Testament we find ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’. This is in order to teach us that all the blessings that come to us come in and through the Lord Jesus Christ, and as a part of that covenant that was made in the Garden of Eden when God took care that the seed of the woman would be bruised.
God was able to tell Adam about that in the Garden of Eden when He told him that ‘the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head’.

So when people think to find that Jesus existed before Adam or already from the beginning they are confused with the Plan of God, which had existed. The Salvation had been planned before Jesus was born and before the majority of the population was born. Adam and Eve had not made any children yet, so therefore we can speak of the beginning of the world, because it still had to start.

God began to announce it there at the Garden of Eden.The Father gave a people to the Son, and the Son voluntarily made Himself responsible to God for them. He contracted to do certain things for them, and God the Father on His side contracted to do other things. God the Father said He would grant forgiveness and reconciliation and restoration and new life and a new nature to all who belonged to His Son.

Asherah called the wife of God

The Bible's Buried Secrets
BBC's Religion and Ethics

Mixing one religion with an other is a theme of every day. So, the ancient Israelites did not escape it either.

In 1967, Raphael Patai was the first historian to mention that the ancient Israelites worshiped both Yahweh and Asherah. The theory has gained new prominence due to the research of Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who began her work at Oxford and is now a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter and presents Bible's Buried Secrets. Francesca Stavrakopoulou's passion for the Bible springs directly from the fact that it's such a fantastic and diverse collection of texts that can tell us something about the beliefs, concerns and cultures of the people who wrote them.
Information presented in Stavrakopoulou's books, lectures and journal papers has become the basis of a three-part documentary series, now airing in Europe on the BBC, where she discusses the Yahweh-Asherah connection.
According to her the Bible itself contains many different versions of the past it seeks to describe, and some of these are often the stories that are more commonly overlooked.
So the legitimate nature of the worship of the goddess Asherah was an obvious story to tell in the documentary series, as was the alternative view of the Garden of Eden presented in biblical books beyond Genesis.

"You might know him as Yahweh, Allah or God. But on this fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: There is only one of Him," writes Stavrakopoulou in a statement released to the British media. "He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many ... or so we like to believe."

J. Edward Wright, president of The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, backs Stavrakopoulou's findings, saying several Hebrew inscriptions mention “Yahweh and his Asherah." He adds Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors.

"Traces of her remain, and based on those traces... we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant," he told Discovery News.

Aaron Brody, director of the Bade Museum and an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion, says the ancient Israelites were polytheists, with only a “small majority” worshipping God alone. He says it was the exiling of an elite community within Judea and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C that lead to a more "universal vision of strict monotheism." (via Discovery News)
Stavrakopoulou bases her theory on ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in the ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit, now modern-day Syria. All of these artifacts reveal that Asherah was a powerful fertility goddess.
Asherah's connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.
J. Edward Wright, president of both The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, told Discovery News that he agrees several Hebrew inscriptions mention "Yahweh and his Asherah."
"Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors," he added. "Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant."
BLOG: Atheists Best Informed About Religion
Asherah -- known across the ancient Near East by various other names, such as Astarte and Istar -- was "an important deity, one who was both mighty and nurturing," Wright continued.
"Many English translations prefer to translate 'Asherah' as 'Sacred Tree,'" Wright said. "This seems to be in part driven by a modern desire, clearly inspired by the Biblical narratives, to hide Asherah behind a veil once again."
"Mentions of the goddess Asherah in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are rare and have been heavily edited by the ancient authors who gathered the texts together," Aaron Brody, director of the Bade Museum and an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion, said.
Asherah as a tree symbol was even said to have been "chopped down and burned outside the Temple in acts of certain rulers who were trying to 'purify' the cult, and focus on the worship of a single male god, Yahweh," he added.
SLIDE SHOW: Sacred Techs: Religion and Spirituality 2.0

Find out more > God's wife, Asherah, was a powerful fertility goddess, according to a theologian.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/22/fertility-goddess-asherah-was-gods-wife-edited-out-of-the-bible

> The Bible's Buried Secrets

Do not be afraid. Good news because a Saviour has been born

But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people."

Luke 2:10, New International Version

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Thought:

Don't be afraid! What can cast away all fear in the presence of God's glorious messengers? The joy of knowing that God has brought His son to earth to bring an end to sin and the curse of the first sin in the Garden of Eden and to bring salvation to all people!
Fear must not master our hearts when we know that God has broken through every barrier to reach us with his overwhelming grace.
We may also look up to that child in the manger that grew up to become a great teacher and an example for us.

I praise you, Almighty God, for the gift of joy that chases away all fear. Fill my heart with that joy and fill my mind with wonder as I try to comprehend your love for me. Stir me to greater concern for those who have not heard, or who have not yet accepted, your offer of grace in your Son Jesus, in whose name I pray. Amen.

Dutch version / Nederlandse versie > Wees niet bang, er is goed nieuws want een redder is geboren
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2013 update:

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Around pre-existence of Christ

If Jesus had existed before his birth, he would have been a
different Jesus to the one who lived on the earth.

The Old Testament word ‘davar’ its equivalent in Greek ‘logos’ used by John as embroidery on the Tenach (OT). We may not become entangled in the ideas of Plato, the stoics, Philo, apologists and others. John uses the word ‘logos’ to indicate the Word of God, thinking about all those things God had said previously. He had it about the Plan of God that became reality. For the apostle John the promise of the Saviour came into existence by the birth of the Nazarene Jesus. Gods Plan became flesh (John 1:1,14)

In Kenneth S. Wuest's "The New Testament -an expanded translation" John 1:1 is being translated as: "And the Word was to His essence absolute deity."  Wuest was Teacher Emeritus of New Testament Greek by The Moody Bible Institute.

Irenaeus, Origenes and Tertullianus played their part because they believe in the pre-existence of Jesus and thought he also was God who did exist forever and could not die.

Some Christians today teach that he was an angel before his birth but Hebrews 2:7 shows that he was made lower than the angels, he was a man with human nature which means that he could die. Luke 20:36 tells us that angels are immortal, it is impossible for them to die and yet we know that Jesus did die a horrible death and wasn’t immortal until after his resurrection. Again we see that Jesus couldn’t have been an angel.

If Jesus existed before his birth, (we read about his birth at the beginning of the New Testament in the gospels) we would expect to read about him in Old Testament times. However, even though we find that much of the Old Testament does speak about Jesus it is all prophecy. Prophecy is looking something that is going to happen in the future. So everything we read about Jesus is saying that he will come in the future. We are told that he will be born of the virgin Mary (Isaiah 7:14); that he will die (Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53); that he will be King of the whole world (Zechariah 14:9); and that he will sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem (2 Samuel 7:11-16). God promised David that one of his descendants would sit on his throne for ever and rule over Israel, and we know that this is speaking of Jesus because in Luke 1:32-35 it says so. Now, if Jesus already existed, why is God promising to Abraham and to David that Jesus will come in the future, that he will be a descendant of them. It doesn’t really make sense. The prophets say what the Messiah would be like and what he would do, so that when he came the Jews would recognise him. These promises all speak in a future tense showing that Jesus had not come yet but that one day he would.

In Isaiah 7:14, the prophecy that shows Jesus would be born to the virgin Mary, it says “a virgin shall conceive”, (shall has the same meaning as will) so again it is using the future tense, showing that this still has to happen.

In Luke 1:32, “he shall be great”. This would be strange if Jesus did already exist, because it is saying that he wasn’t great before his birth, but if we understand that Jesus didn’t start to exist until his birth it makes sense.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16 AV)

Gave His ‘only-begotten Son’: It is possible Jesus draws his words from Psalm 22:20 LXX and Psalm 2:7. The Isaac-type also suggests, “only begotten.” The Greek is monogenes. (John 1:18) a junction of two words. Genes coming from the verb ginomai, which means coming into existence, becoming born, being created, being produced. When the force of God, the Holy Spirit, placed Jesus in the womb of Mary, a new Adam was been created by God. After Adam and Eve this was again the first human who was directly created by the Elohim Jehovah. For Jesus there was no other man involved to pro-create him. Mary was a virgin and became pregnant without intercourse. Muslims often say that our God did have intercourse with a human because we say that Christ Jesus is the Son of God, but God does not need sexual contact to create a human being. When God thinks about something He can take care that it is there. His wishes, His Plans can come into existence without any human interference. But God used a human, Mary to give the world a man who would be like all men, able to be tempted end being part of this world. It should not have been a god to whom the world could do nothing or who could not die. No Jesus really suffered and found an end to his life on a terrible way. While God cannot die Jesus really died on the wooden stake, to be lifted out of dead as an example to what can happen to us as well.

For John the risen Christ is the same as the Jesus he followed and who died. In his writings he therefore reacts to the Gnostic writers of his time and uses words in his gospel to make it clear for the bystanders.

The Word of God and the Plan of the Creator became more then 2000 years ago flesh (John 1:14). The fulfilment of the promise made in the Garden of Eden (Genesis) was procreate in Mary (Luke 1:35, Matthew 1:20) Jesus is the completion of that promise which was spread for centuries that came at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, direct descendent of David, and leader of a new kingdom.

Read more in:
Pre-existence of Christ #1 Look #2 Jesus in the Old Testament
(http://bijbelonderzoekers.multiply.com/journal/item/1119/Pre-existence_of_Christ_1_Look_2_Jesus_in_the_Old_Testament)
Pre-existence of Christ #1 Intro #4 Jesus - His Parents #2 Difference (http://bijbelonderzoekers.multiply.com/journal/item/1040/Pre-existence_of_Christ_1_Intro_4_Jesus_-_His_Parents_2_Difference)

For the texts in Dutch:
Lees ook over het ontsaan van Christus Jezus in: Christus Jezus: de zoon van God #3 'de eniggeboren zoon'
 (http://bijbelonderzoekers.multiply.com/journal/item/1016/Christus_Jezus_de_zoon_van_God_3_39de_eniggeboren_zoon39)
 waar wordt ingegaan op de betekenis van de 'eniggeboren zoon).

En op onze hoofdwebsite staat de Nederlandse versie van bovenstaande tekst: Pre-existentie van Christus Jezus