Laughed or Ignored? I Prefer Laughed.

Yes, as the title imply, would I prefer to be laughed at or ignored? Well, what I received instead was an angry response. But put it this way, whether laughter or anger, I would be far happier to receive either of those than to be ignored. At least with an angry response, I know that whatever I had contributed has received attention. With laughter, that too is a response. But by being ignored, I have no idea if anyone had read my contribution to the discussion.

So what did I write to stir up this anger? The answer to that was, in one of my comments, I hinted at the possibility that humans and dinosaurs co-existed. Yes, you read that correctly.

Stegosaur at Ta Prohm Monastery, Cambodia 

My comment appeared when an atheist YouTuber posted a video asking whether his feelings were hurt after a barrage of insulting remarks were thrown at him. Those insulting comments mainly consisted of foul names and rudeness spouted at him in anger, mainly by "Christian" flat-earthers - from whom this kind of emotion is shown when an argument is lost and cannot be gainsaid. Although disagreeing with him on his commitment to Darwin's evolutionary theories, I had this to say to him:

Scimandan, I have always admired your level of education, your marathon runs, and the way you present yourself on video. Yet I am a Christian, a young-earth Creationist who believe that man and dinosaurs once co-existed.

I know, I'm aware that I'm one of those who should be ignored. But do you know what my real wish is?

For you and me to get together at a pub or coffee house for a two-hour, man-to-man discussion where we can exchange our views without prejudice. But I suppose both time and distance will prevent this from happening.

By the way, I'm not a flat-earther. Instead, I believe as much as you do that our planet is spherical. 

Good luck with your videos.

Then another commenter (not SciManDan) aimed one directly at me:

This is dreadful. People like you are charlatans, pagans, heathens and nothing more than heretics.

THERE IS ONLY ONE TRUE FAITH and that is:

Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sikhism, Shinto, Judaism, Confucianism, Spiritism, Korean Shamanism, Caodaism, Bahai's Faith, Jainism, Cheondoism, Hoahaoism, Tenriism, Rastafari.

Or any infantile mumbo jumbo you can invent for yourself.

Theism is dying on its arse and not a moment too soon.

Send ALL your money now, you know the baby jesus (sic) needs it.

Here is no ignorant runt! This rather angry man looks to be well-educated. He names eighteen different faiths here, and there is quite a number which I had never heard about, but he is right on one issue: All the religions listed here are defined as salvation by works. And except Catholicism, Judaism and Islam, all the others are found in the far east of Asia, although I did see an edifice dedicated to Bahai's Faith on the slopes of Mt Carmel, overlooking the city of Haifa in Northern Israel.

Another also commented:

It would help if you had some evidence that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. The Noah flood is also a ridiculous fairy tale.

My answer takes the form of a series of questions. In the above photo, there is a carving of a Stegosaur at the Ta Prohm Monastery in Cambodia. This structure was completed in 1186 AD. That is 835 years ago up to the time of writing. Were the people back then very familiar with fossils? If so, were they able to flesh out the bones as accurately as our modern paleobiologists can do now? And assuming that they were able to flesh out the bones of an ancient beast, why did they feel it was so important to have an image of a living version carved inside a religious structure?

Or could it be - just could it be - a witness that this dinosaur was alive at the time the structure was built, and they preserved an image of it?

There are other images, even models of dinosaurs supposedly found in Mexico, Peru, and other parts of the Americas. But I don't feel it's right to include those in this blog due to their lack of authenticity. They could be fakes, and as such, I do not want to use these as evidence to prove the reliability of the Bible.

Ta Prohm Monastery, Cambodia

The YouTuber had posted his video just three days before I wrote this blog, but already over this short time, he had collected 77,687 views. How many would have read our discussion, who knows? However, I did reply to the first commenter that he was almost right that there are only two faiths: one is salvation by works, as defined by the 18 he had listed, and the other is salvation given as a free gift through faith in Christ, without any works done to earn it. I then quoted Romans 10:9, 13, where Paul writes that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.

And verse 13: And whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

His response?

He recommended I join any of his long list of idiotic, non-existent religious groups to search for any magic (oops, he meant "truths") such as Pastafarianism, Frisbeetarianism, and Bullet Baba's Motorbike - a list of 24 pseudo-organisations in all. He then, in bad grammar and lacking punctuation, ends with:

Remember send money the baby jesus is desperate.

I have checked this guy's profile, but since his channel is empty, I wasn't able to find any information of his whereabouts, whether he was living in the UK or in the States. But, since the atheist YouTuber himself is English and lives here in the UK, I take it that this fellow lives here too. If true, then he mirrors the appalling state of our nation spiritually.

And two weeks previously, I walk through the streets of London, as already mentioned in my last blog, wheeling my partially disabled beloved from Waterloo Station to the Premier Inn hotel, just outside Euston Station. We passed massive crowds of England football fans, all cheering their team as if they had won the tournament already. They cheered for glory, but not for the glory of God, but for the nation, that is, for themselves.

We watched the match against Italy in our hotel room. Yet England lost in what is, in my opinion, the worst possible way, by a penalty shootout after a 1-1 draw and extra time. This humiliation, this defeat, this anticlimax of the whole tournament - is God trying to tell us something? And now, the Olympic Games.

The opening performance at a Tokyo stadium lacked the verve which characterised both the Rio and the London Games within the past decade. But as we watched the athletes enter the stadium, all of them masked, all I could do was sigh. And so, they all marched into this huge chamber with a massive hole in the ceiling, through which firework displays are easily seen from inside, thus classifying the interior of the stadium as outdoors. Yet, they all had to wear masks, the athletes, the volunteers, the organising committee, and the 600 or so VIPs who occupied seating that would have accommodated around 66,000 spectators. Instead, the stadium was almost entirely empty, while outside in the streets of Tokyo, the people protest, calling for the Games to be cancelled - while the rate of Coronavirus infections keeps on growing in numbers.

Oh, what has happened to us? It's as though this pandemic is a fulfilment of the novel by H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, where a mighty British Empire of the 19th Century suffered a Martian invasion - right at its very heart - London. Here, the whole of the Earth, including the Empire, was at the mercy of an alien power over which they had absolutely no defence. But, after so many deaths, the remaining human inhabitants were rescued by the mercy of God, using bacteria - the most minute and the lowliest of all creatures - to infect every Martian and without an immune system, succeeded in killing them off, their corpses became food for the birds.

And so, after more than a year of lockdown and restrictions, July 19th - the so-called Freedom Day - came and went without any real significant changes. I would still have to wear a facemask if travelling by public transport, and on the London Underground, masks are still mandatory, thanks to the orders delivered by our present London mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Although I despise those face cloths, I would still wear one if it means keeping the peace. But yesterday, I dared walk into our local superstore maskless. At last, the absence of the door marshall checking us out at the shop's entrance gave me more confidence. However, I could see that the majority of shoppers continue to wear their masks. Apparently, all the female adults wore them. As for the men, the majority of them were also wearing them. But there were also several younger men going about maskless, making me feel a little better. And nobody gave any dirty looks.

2021 Olympic Opening ceremony, Tokyo.

And the churches! This week will mark the first Sunday we as a church can get together. After more than 16 months of weekly virtual services via the internet. There was something totally unnatural about this way of worshipping God, yet each week brought a reminder that we as a church continue to exist. One benefit has arisen from this pandemic. That is the weekday twenty-minute Zoom prayer meetings held every morning. As for one who has no car but gets everywhere by bicycle, any idea of cycling for 25 minutes to get to a 20-minute prayer meeting, then ride back home again, especially on a cold winter morning...

Nope. Here, a computer gives a big advantage, and I thank the Lord for the advance of technology that was unheard of by all previous generations. The good news is that our Zoom prayer meetings are here to stay.

And this week? Church life begins with a picnic. Nothing unusual about that. We, as a church, picnic every year. The only difference this time is that after three weeks of glorious Summer sunshine, this Sunday will have heavy rain and storms, according to the Meteorological Office forecast. Yep, typical British Summer! After all, Summer in Britain would not be Summer if we didn't have wind-driven rain! Great for our first meeting after 16 months.

But we're determined to picnic regardless of the weather. The only difference is that, should it rain, our food will be eaten inside the marquee, while raindrops impacting on the canvass outside could create a noise loud enough to drown out the sermon. Ah, don't we love our British Summers!

It's great to be back!

The Rock of Ages - Yes Indeed.

I was alone in the house during a stormy evening of Spring, 1973. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled outside. I sat on the sofa with a King James Bible in my hand and I was curious to find in it how it had all started. As an avid believer in Evolution, I thought of no other alternative, as this was taught at school, along with stories of a six-day Creation and a family saving themselves in a boat shared with animals all confined to a fanciful myth.

Before that evening, I have read books on Darwin's theory. This was true especially during schooldays, when the weekly Look and Learn magazine-type periodical appeared in the newsagent's shelf alongside other magazines - TV Times, fashion magazines, cooking magazines, periodicals on domestics, Women's Own, as well as DIY and car magazines. I recall having Look and Learn delivered through the front door with the daily newspaper. For several weeks, it had a big, central feature on Evolution with colour illustrations spanning two whole pages, covering several weeks.

The artist based his pictures on the same site, with a large rock protruding from the ground at one side. The first set of pictures were based under the sea, with sponges, ammonites, trilobites, and primitive-looking fish, all flourishing around the submerged rock. In the next picture came fishes, including large, shark-like predators. After this the rock was on a beach crawling with amphibians. The following week, the boulder was located in thick jungle where a Brontosaur reached its long neck towards a nearby tree. After this, a carniverous Tyrannosaur crashes through the foliage, followed by mammals grazing in grasslands, and eventually Stone Age Neanderthals having set up home near the same rock, still on the same site surrounded by treeless ground which is covered with snow, and woolly mammoths can be seen sauntering in the background. Surely, by now the permanently fixed lump of stone can be referred to as the Rock of Ages as well as having a very long story to tell! 

Although the huge colourful illustrations and accompanying text were both informational and delightful to look at, the periodical was published with an authoritative, schoolmaster's format of communicating. The very front page title, Look and Learn was blazoned across the page with the intention of driving home some useful knowledge into the brains of us apathetic, out-of-school, leisure-minded teenagers of the mid-sixties. Yet I was fascinated by such a presentation of prehistoric life. The very illustrations were inspiring enough for me to have separated these pages from the rest of the magazine and tape them on the wall above my bed headboard, where they stayed on display for months to come. Never for a moment had it ever crossed my mind that any typical Uniformitarian Geologist would have disagreed with those pictures from the moment he would have set eyes on them. The constant presence of the exposed rock would have caused dissension.

Because the whole theory of Evolution has always been based on fossils found in stratified rock layers. So how was it that the rock protruding from the seabed throughout the whole of the Cambrian Period was not buried by layers of sedimentary rock by the time good old Brontosaur was grazing in the jungle during the Jurassic Period, let alone during the time the Neanderthal was lighting bonfires in the blizzard during the Quaternary, some 500,000,000 years later?* Going by what historical geologists would have insisted, this particular rock should have been buried underneath tens, maybe hundred of feet of sedimentary rock layers by the time the Neanderthals were walking around. Never mind. I was enthralled with primeval life on our planet. It gave me something to believe in, to be committed to, and even comparing and sharing my knowledge and interest with another pupil in our classroom. However, one thing that I instinctively knew: that favouring Darwinism was incompatible with religion. Without knowing why, somehow I could not mix evolution with anything to do with religion, especially Christianity. Not surprisingly, I had already declared myself to be a teenage atheist. In truth, deep in my heart there was no genuine questioning of God's existence. Rather, I hated him due to my Roman Catholic upbringing with the constant threat of Hell.

And so I should not be too surprised that the other, more intelligent classmate David, who also had a greater knowledge of Dinosaurs than I had, especially the carnivorous species, was also an atheist who debunked religion. And therefore, my youthful fascination with palaeontology walked hand-in-hand with my teenage rejection of religion, which I believe to be a setting to be looked back upon which is to be the underlying bedrock, so to speak, for the near-universal rejection of God in our country at present.

The Grand Canyon is an example of sedimentary rock strata.

And so, according to a video I watched recently on Creation.com website, one answer was given for why such a large contingent of mainly younger people leave their churches every year. For example, according to a faith survey website, the numbers who regularly attend church here in the UK has declined significantly between the years 1980 to 2016. The Roman Catholic Church number of attendees declined from 2,064,000 in 1980 to a mere 608,000 by 2016. That is a loss of 1,456,000 in 36 years. Likewise, the Anglican Church numbers declined from 1,370,400 to 660,000 - a fall of 710,400 in the same time period, and looks to be totally nonexistent by the year 2033. Our denomination, the Baptists, had an attendance number totalling 286,900 in 1980. Thirty six years later it had fallen to 226,000 - a drop of just 60,900. This is small compared to the others, but still in the wrong direction. Likewise, the Methodists suffered a fall from 606,400 attendees in 1980 to 200,000 in 2016 - a fall of 406,400. On the positive side, however, it is the Pentecostals who has enjoyed an increase in the past 36 years, from 221,000 in 1980 to 298,000 in 2016, which is an increase by 77,000. To total up, the total loss of church attendance among the four listed denominations is 2,633,700 in 36 years, or averaging 73,158 annually. And all these statistics apply to the UK only.

A video on Creation.com had listed the belief in Darwinism as one of the main reasons for the decline. And if going by my own experience is of any value, then the belief in evolution over divine creation can destroy the faith of one who grew up in a Christian household. I can see the connection. With secular websites such as Wikipedia calling Young-Earth Creationism a pseudoscience, I can't help how adult believers at work in an office would feel if he was to admit his belief in such Biblical revelation. Among all the suited colleagues, he would be regarded something of an idiosyncratic, or a nutcase, and he would not be taken seriously. There is a possibility of even losing his job. If the office employee can feel rather foolish in believing in Young-Earth Creationism, along with a universal Flood with a family and all land animals confined in a large barge, then such embarrassment can be justified in an environment populated with secular graduates. This could be the backbone behind the thinking of young Christian graduates I have associated with in the last four decades.

Their "Halfway House" belief in Theistic Evolution looks to me to be an escape, or at least a partial escape, from office embarrassment. In regard to his Christian faith, if he was asked his opinion on what he perceives to be the dawn of history, he would answer with some confidence that he does believe in Evolution, albeit theistic. Saves a lot of embarrassment that way! Just about every graduate I have crossed paths with inside the church building believed in theistic evolution, which is essentially Darwinism under the control and supervision of God, as opposed to pure chance. Ironically, it is atheists such as Richard Dawkins who has greater respect for the literal Young-Earth Creationist than for one believing in Theistic Evolution. Furthermore, I have been around long enough to realise that the graduate's belief in Theistic Evolution has robbed him of any spiritual vitality, which was meant to set him apart from the secularist, and to live out his life as a citizen of Heaven.

Therefore I have found it difficult to tell the difference between a Christian graduate from a non-believing academic. Both are well-educated, both are in respectable professions, both are patriotic, both are conscious of social class, which leads to both being cliquey and having an in-group/out-group subconscious need to mix with and fellowship among those of the same characteristic model. Or in other words, I never felt that I truly belonged, but kept to the fringes of the fellowship, with any opinion or contribution offered not taken with any higher degree of seriousness.

I'm convinced that rejection of literal Divine Creation for Theistic Evolution, or even straightforward Darwinism can have devastating repercussions. Belief in Evolution, theistic or otherwise, undercuts faith in Jesus Christ who was Crucified, Buried, and Resurrected for the Atonement of our sins gotten through the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This is a major foundation for the faith which can only be borne from Divine Creation. Many offspring of Christian parents, who grew up believing in Evolution, having been taught this at school and endorsed at home, more likely tend to have hearts resembling rocky ground. The word of God from the pulpit may fall on such ground, and lacking proper soil for the shoots to take root properly, when social pressure builds, they quit, leaving the church and renouncing their faith (Matthew 13). And believe me, I have seen it.

The acceptance of Young Earth supernatural Creation is what makes a believer a true Christian. Such a believer in Divine Creation will know that every person he sees and relates with is a creation of God and the one whom Jesus died for. This changes all perception of fellow human beings. Just by reading Psalm 139 should be enough to eradicate any thoughts of inequality, whether it'll be racial, cultural, or national. Also believing in Divine Creation will eliminate any thoughts of Eugenics, an offshoot of Darwinism, as discussed last week. This is serious stuff, so much so that God himself had to challenge me.

Referring back to that stormy evening back in 1973. I was alone in the house. The thunder rolled outside. I opened the Bible I had on me, and turned to its beginning, and read the first three chapters of Genesis. I reeled back in wonder. It was then when I felt the Lord as if confronting me with a stark choice. What am I to believe? Divine Creation or Darwin's Evolution? One or the other, there was no halfway house. No option for Theistic Evolution. Immediately and without hesitation, I chose the Divine Creation revelation, and completely repudiated Evolution. Just like that. But there was no other option. God would not allow it. But once the decision was made, I knew that I had to stick with it. This meant being fully open about it among work colleagues. According to experience, I have found factory shop floor workers to be more tolerating of my Creation conviction than had I worked in an office among clerical employees. From time to time I had serious discussions with work colleagues on the shop floor. At worst, they may have poked fun at me, which is not as bad as having a feeling of ostracism and being ignored - even by fellow church-going graduates.

And so with the new revelation about supernatural creation, I had to accept the truth about the universal, earth destroying Deluge. And so I had no quibbles in my acceptance of such a revelation. From 1973 onward I entered into studies for geological and biological evidence of Creation and the Flood, alongside for the tangible proof for the veracity of the Bible by visiting the Holy Land, particularly Jerusalem. But even if I had never set foot in Israel, being sure about the truthfulness of the Bible would have still make me stand my stead among mocking unbelievers.

And to round up, when it comes to browsing Google Maps on the laptop, or better still, browsing at Google Earth, I was astonished at the sight of a dendroid image of undersea river courses flowing across the edge of the continental shelf exactly southwest of the Irish Republic.  If you were to switch to Google Earth, and pan the satellite version of the map to an area of the Atlantic Ocean directly southwest of Cork, you will come across a valley, now partly filled in with silt, but with river courses forming underwater canyons emptying out into the abyss. In the past there were many of them, even up to 300 km 185 miles long, all eventually joining to empty at the one mouth. But over the course of time, silt has filled in the majority of these canyons, with only a couple still visible south of the valley. The depth of the valley is from 1,400 feet to 10,200 feet 430-3,110 metres approx below the surface, which strongly suggest that that part of the Continental Shelf was once above sea level. Is this now submerged valley an echo of the later stages of Noah's Flood, when the floodwaters gushed into the oceans as "the mountains rose and the valleys sunk down" of Psalm 104:6-9?

Maybe so, maybe not. But whatever the case might have been, this has stronger correlations with the truthfulness of Holy Scripture than Charles Darwin could have ever come up with.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood, Baker Book House, 1975, page  133.

Our Eternal Home.

Not long after I became a Christian in 1973, I found my Dad's Bible, a KJV given to him by a Jehovah's Witness back in the 1950s, when I was still a small boy. Up to then I had an interest in General Science subjects, including physics, chemistry and biology. Within the third category was the teaching of the Theory of Evolution, with which as a young teenager, I became fascinated with the Dinosaurs, as I try to imagine a near paradise world of herbivores such as Brontosaurus, Triceratops Iguanodon and others, when suddenly their paradise was shattered by the approach of the carnivorous Tyrannosaurus Rex, the king of all Dinosaurs, sending all the herbivores running for their lives, with the possible exception of Triceratops, with its three huge horns protruding from a shield for a forehead, squared up to the carnivore and pierced its underside. A victory for the herbivore.

This kind of primeval imagination was still with me as one evening in 1973, alone in the house, during a thunderstorm, I was curious on the Bible's version on how it all began. I turned to Genesis chapter one, and I was emotionally moved to read about the six-day creation, the narrative of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden of chapter two, with my tension mounting up as I began to read chapter three.

"No, Adam, don't eat of that tree!" I thought, tensely as if I was watching a movie. Then it happened. First Eve took a bite out of (I assumed) the apple, then Adam himself took a bite as she held it up to him.

"Oh no!" I thought. So that's the origin of sin. Soon after, when God must have killed an animal to provide the couple with clothing made from its skin, they were expelled from the Garden.

There and then, my assumption that we are products of millions of years of an organic process was shattered. Why? Because when I read those chapters, I believed, and more so, I found myself praying. When I began to share my new beliefs, several unbelievers asked me who was Cain's wife. A question at the time I could not answer, which verified their beliefs that the Bible was a book of fairy tales, while their belief in organic evolution was based on facts. But I never ceased believing. Instead, I began to buy books written on this subject, and to reconcile the existence of Dinosaurs with Biblical Creation, and finished up with the idea that early man and Dinosaurs must have co-existed within the same time frame, and both were wiped out during the Noachian Deluge. This idea is regarded as absolutely ridiculous by evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins, but I find nothing amiss with this theory.

You can read more on this, including Cain's wife and the density of the primeval population in one of my earlier blogs:
Adam and Eve Historical? You Must Be Joking!!! Published August 14th, 2011, together with the blog which follows it.

Not much later, I was reading the book of Revelation, and chapters 21 and 22 absolutely stunned me! These chapters describe a city, New Jerusalem, coming out of heaven to settle upon a newly created Earth. The sheer beauty of the city and the pure holiness of it as given in its description, made me feel so unworthy. I was struggling with the idea of entering this city as one of its citizens. Why was this?

Because back then I had a poor idea of the meaning of God's grace. In the English language, we have the acronym that "grace" stands for Gift Received At Christ's Expense. In other words, the righteousness of Christ was imputed the moment I first believed. Absolutely true, my own righteousness could not get me into this beautiful city, for all my deeds were as filthy rags. But the righteousness of Jesus Christ, who lived a life perfectly without sin and his undeserved death on the cross, followed by his resurrection three days later, meant that, as a believer, God sees my life as Christ lived it. That is grace.

But it took me many years after conversion to fully realise it. Mainly due to one of my seniors looking for every shortcomings as a boy, alongside the Roman Catholic teaching that one mortal sin committed meant Hell for all eternity.

But the truth of grace still stands as fact, and it always will.

Reading the Bible, I was able to see that there always have been a steady pattern, each taking a similar but slightly different form. Starting with the Garden of Eden, this was an area of perfection and natural beauty, the paradise of God. Together with our first parents, God himself dwelt in the Garden, even walking in the cool of the day. When the couple sinned, they were expelled from the garden and from the Tree of Life which flourished within it. In the outside world, after the Curse was pronounced, (Genesis 3:14-19) they first noticed that various trees no longer yielded edible fruit. Trees such as Oak, Elm, Ash, Birch, Spruce, Cedar, Pine, along with many others were now yielding seed which were unfit for human consumption (See Genesis 1:29-30). Therefore mankind ever since lived by the sweat of his brow as he prepared and ate bread. In turn, he also watched the spectacular contest as the Tyrannosaurus Rex turn on to the Triceratops, and realised the gravity of the sin they had committed in the Garden, and therefore their own struggle for survival. According to the narration, T.Rex was a vegetarian before the Fall of Man, along with all other predators, they were all herbivores before the Curse (Genesis 1:30) as the plants that they were meant to feed on became unfit to eat after the Curse.

Later, God established the Tabernacle among the children of Israel. Represented by the Ark of the Covenant, situated within the Holy of Holies which was a cubic structure, this was to be the dwelling place of God. As with the Garden of Eden, nobody was allowed near it except the High Priest, and only then once a year, to offer the Atonement for the whole nation.

The Jebusite city of Jerusalem was captured by King David and was made the capital of Israel. His son, Solomon built the First Temple. Thus this original principle carried over from Eden, a dwelling place of God within the midst of the habitation of Man. Jerusalem was a good representation of Eden and a shadow of a more glorious Jerusalem which is still to come. But for it to happen, sin must be dealt with permanently, and so God became incarnate as the Man Jesus Christ to forever atone for all our sins, and to have his righteousness imputed on us who believe. As such we are cleansed from our sins and made fit to dwell in his more glorious city, the New Jerusalem, of which the present capital of Israel is a figure.

The New Jerusalem will be huge - about 1,500 miles (2,430 km) each side. The Scripture gives it as 2,430 km long, wide and high, to form a cube. Whether this was what the writer meant it is still, to me at least, unclear. If true, then if the city was placed at the Northeast of the USA, so that the east wall is aligned with New York City, then we would be able to see the upper side of the wall from the UK, three thousand miles away. If the city is a cube, then this is backed by both Solomon's Temple and the Second Temple, existing at the time Jesus Christ was on earth. The inner sanctuary, known as the Holy of Holies, was cubic in shape. When the Lord Jesus returns to set up his throne of his father David, his throne will be housed within the cubic sanctuary of the Third Temple of Ezekiel 40, which will overlook the city of Jerusalem, wherein it will be built. Again, this will be a figure of Eden restored.

On the other hand, Scripture describes a very high mountain, on which the city will rest (Revelation 21:10). Could the mountain itself be 1,500 miles high? For it is also written that the wall will be 65 metres high. But this could equally mean 65 metres thick. We can't be sure.

On each side there will be three gates, each made of a pearl, all twelve of them, each also with the name of each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Therefore if the city has twelve gates, that means that people will be free to enter and leave the city, as in the case of Jerusalem today. Revelation 21:24-26 says that the nations shall bring their glory and honour into it, with splendour brought in by the kings of these nations. So there is strong indication that there will be a large population of the saved living outside the city, but will have full access to the city every day, as the gates will never be shut during the day, and there will be no night there.

But who are these people living outside, and who will live within it's walls? The city rests on twelve foundations, each having the name of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. The Bible also says that the city comes down from heaven as a bride prepared for her husband. (21:2,9). The New testament teaches that the Church is the Bride of Christ (for example: John 3:29, 2 Corinthians 11:2, Ephesians 5:23-33). The twelve foundations bear this out, as the twelve apostles were the founders of the churches after the resurrection of Christ. Therefore its the saved from the Resurrection to the Rapture - the Church Age, who will have their homes within the city walls (See John 14:1).

The city will be 2,430 km square. This gives an area of 5,905,900 square kilometres. Of course, it would be utterly impossible to give any accurate numbers for its population, because only God knows exactly how many there will be. But by using some population statistics, we can give some guesses, but please bear in mind that that's what they are - guesses.

According to the 1997 census, the population in the UK was 243 humans per every square km. This was equal to a square 64x64 metres per person, if everyone was equally distributed. That is over half the length of a football pitch for each person. In an area of 5,905,900 square km, this would support a population of 1,434,890,700 people. Then again, if we multiply this by four, leaving each with a square 32x32 metres per person, the population would reach 5,739,562,800. Then again this is just a rough guess. To round up the number to 5,800,000,000 it looks very small compared to the number of people who ever lived throughout the whole of human history. But taking a look at the population of some of the largest nations in the world (1997), we get this:

China...1,210,000,000
India...980,000,000
USA.....268,000,000
UK......58,000,000

China comes very close to the original conservative population number in the New Jerusalem. But again, if the number looks small, this would endorse what Jesus Christ had once said, that the road to destruction is broad, and there are many walking on it. But the road to life is narrow, and very few will be able to find it (Matthew 7:13-14).

But the fact that the city has twelve gates seem to indicate that there will be many more living on the new Earth outside, but will have full access to the city. These may include all the Old Testament saints, among them a number of antediluvian saints. These include Adam, Abel and Enoch. Seth, the son of Adam, born to replace the murdered Abel, had a son, Enos - who was an evangelist. From him men began to call upon the Lord. (Genesis 4:26). There could have been a remnant of several thousand saved souls before the Flood, failure for others to repent eventually dwindled the number down to eight - Noah and his family. Then there might have been a remnant of Shem's descendants saved, then from Israel, a remnant from each generation (See my last blog, I Have Reserved 7,000..." On top of this, after the end of the Church age, 144,000 Jews will convert a multitude, so great that they cannot be numbered (Revelation 7). Added still to this will be those born during the Kingdom reign of Christ in Jerusalem. A significant number of these will be saved. Hence, throughout eternity, nations living outside will bring their glory and splendour into the city.

Finally, let me define this narrow path. It is not whether it's the right church, denomination or the right religion. The gate to the narrow path is Jesus Christ himself. For there is no other name under Heaven in which we can be saved. Only Christ himself and him crucified. There is no other way.

Now is the time to turn to Jesus Christ for salvation, after being convicted of your sin and your unworthiness of eternal life, having broken the Law of God. If you repent and believe on the Lord, you will eventually have a home within the New Jerusalem.