Famous Quotes about the Bible ll

   207.   "There are no songs comparable to the songs of Zion, no orations equal to those of the prophets, and no politics like those which the Scriptures teach."---John Milton

   208.   "When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, it is talking to me, and about me."   Soren Kierkegaard

   209.   "You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in new York."---William Lyon Phelps

   210.   "The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world."---Charles Dickens

   211.   "What you bring away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it."---Oliver Wendell Holmes

   212.   "The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold on me." Martin Luther

   213.   "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."---G. K. Chesterton

   214.   "Intense study of the Bible will keep any man from being vulgar in point of style."---Samuel Taylor Coleridge

   215.   "'The Bible,' we are told sometimes, 'gives us such a beautiful picture of what we should be.' Nonsense! It gives us no picture at all. It reveals to us a fact: It tells us what we really are; it says, this is the form in which God created you, to which He has restored you; this is the work which the Eternal Son, the God of Truth and Love, is continually carrying on within you."---F. D.  Maurice

   216.   "Read the whole Bible, and read it in order; two chapters in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament, daily if you can possibly spare the time; and you will have more time than you are aware of; if you retrench all needless visits, and save the hours spent in useless or unimportant conversation."---Adam Clarke, a Methodist circuit preacher of the nineteenth century, believed that only through regular Bible reading would Christians grow wise in their salvation.

   217.   "You may as well quit reading and hearing the Word of God, and give in to the devil, if you do not desire to live according to it."---Martin Luther

Famous Quotes about the Bible l

   195.   "The Book of Books, the storehouse and magazine of life and comfort."---George Herbert

   196. "Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New Testament."---Francis Bacon

   197.   "Most people are bothered by those passages in Scripture which they cannot understand; but as for me...the passages which trouble me the most are those that I do understand."---Mark Twain

   198.   "The English Bible, a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of it's beauty and power."---Thomas Babington Macaulay

   199.   "The Bible is a window in this prison of hope, through which we look into eternity."---John Sullivan Dwight

   200.   "If you believe those four words, 'In the beginning God,' you have no problem believing all of the Bible."---Raymond Barber

   201.   "Unless I am convicted of error by the testimony of Scripture or by manifest reasoning, I stand convicted by the Scriptures to which I have appealed, and my conscience is taken captive by God's word."---Martin Luther

   205.   "The Bible is no mere book,  but a living creature, with a power that conquers all that oppose it."---Napoleon Bonaparte

   206.   "In the twentieth century our highest praise has been to call the Bible 'the world's best-seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say we think it is a best-seller because it is great, or vice versa."---Daniel Boorstin

  

  

  

  

  

  

William Jennings Bryan and the Monkey Trial

   When Charles Darwin began thinking about the origin of species, he raised a ruckus that continues to this very day. At no time, however, has the debate caused more controversy than in the so-called Monkey Trial of 1925. The jury in that case returned a guilty verdict, giving a leading prosecutor a thumping victory, but he never lived to enjoy it.
   It all started when a high school biology teacher by the name of John Scopes decided to test a Tennessee law that prohibited public school instructors from teaching any theory that man is descended from a lower order of animal.
   Scopes was immediately indicted and brought to trial. Overnight, the entire country focused on the town of Dayton, Tennessee. The famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow ran to help Scopes, while William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate, rushed in to advise the prosecution.
  The outcome of the trial was a forgone conclusion. The judge, John Raulston, was a rural magistrate from the hamlet of Fiery Gizzard, Tennessee, who was strongly prejudiced against the defendant. Scopes was found guilty of being in violation of the Tennessee law and fined a hundred dollars.
   The guilt or innocence of the teacher, however, was not what held the nation spellbound. The attraction of the trial lay in the gargantuan struggle between the liberal Darrow and the fundamentalist Bryan, who agreed to testify as an expert witness on the Bible.
   The verdict of history is that the aging politician was no match for his cynical opponent. Through no efforts of his own, his side won the case, but there was a price. Bryan was publicly raked over the coals by Darrow and discredited in the minds of many. Not even the guilty verdict could raise his slumping spirits. After the trial, Bryan trudged home, and within a few days he died in his sleep, never having gained his self-confidence.
   So the Scopes trial was the last battle for the aging warrior, but he did have the last word. He may not have convinced the skeptics, but the statute that set the stage for the Monkey Trial spectacle, although later ignored and unenforced, remained on the books. For a long time the state of Tennessee agreed with Bryan and denounced the theory of evolution, while at the same time turning a blind eye to his fundamentalist arguments.

Strange and Amazing Facts About the Bible ll

   183.   The oldest verses in the Bible are believed to be fragments from "the Song of Deborah."

   184.   The newest verses in the Bible are thought to be found in the Gospel of John, which dates from around A.D. 100.

   185.   Job was written when? Job, the book that appears before the Psalms, is actually a much older book than the books it is located near. Job and Genesis are actually on similar timelines1

   186.   The most press? David receives second place for being mentioned a whopping 1,118 times in the Bible. He is second only to Jesus in this regard. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, receives most references as a woman-fifty-six!

   187.   The name Jesus appears seven hundred times in the Gospels and Acts, and less than seventy times in the Epistles. The name Christ can be found sixty times throughout the Gospels and Acts, but 240 times in the Epistles and the Book of Revelation.

   188.   The most press for an animal? Sheep win the prize with mention of this very necessary animal occurring over four hundred different times.

   189. Who was the oldest? Methuselah is believed to have lived 969 years on earth before he died (Gen. 5:27), making him the longest-lived person. Prior to the flood, people lived very long lives, but afterward, only a few (patriarchs and Moses among them) lived beyond the expected seventy-or eighty-year life span.

   190.   The longest-reigning king in the Bible was Manasseh, who oversaw the kingdom of Judah for fifty-five years (2 Kings 21:1). The shortest-reigning king was Zimri, who wore the crown of Israel for only seven days (1 Kings 16:15).

   191.   Weddings galore. King Solomon, son of David, is the most-often married man in the Bible. This king had seven hundred wives (all of royal birth!) along with an additional three hundred concubines (1 Kings 11:3).

   192.   A longer name can't be found in the Bible than that of Maher-shalal-hash-baz. The Lord told Isaiah, in 8:3, to give his child, born of a prophetess, this name, which means "quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil."

   193.   Though God is invisible and has no body parts, the Bible always refers to him with masculine pronouns, and we are said to be made "in his image" according to Genesis.

   194.   Shakespeare honored?! William Shakespeare is perhaps the only man not of Bible times who is honored in the Bible. How?  In honor of his forty-sixth birthday, which happened to be the year the King James Version was being printed for the first time, the scholars took the forty-sixth Psalm and made sure that forty six words into the psalm appeared the word shake and forty-six words from the end of the psalm appeared the word spear.

  

  

Strange and Amazing Facts About the Bible l

   170.   A stack of scrolls was the form of the Bible until the fourth century A.D. Then it was compiled into one volume, though it was hardly complete at that point!

   171.   It wasn't until the sixteenth century, many, many years after the Bible was first printed, that it was divided into the chapters and verses we are accustomed to today.

   172.   No mention! There are two books of the Bible that never state the name of God: Esther and Song of Solomon.

   173.   There are twenty-four books in the Hebrew Bible. Generally the books are categorized within three sections: the Law (Torah), Prophets, and Writings. The Hebrew Bible has only what Protestants would call the "Old Testament."

   174.   The Protestant version of the Old Testament contains thirty-nine books. This is different from both the Hebrew Bible and the Catholic Bible. The New Testament of the Protestant version contains twenty-seven books.

   175.   The Catholic Bible's Old Testament contains the thirty-nine books of the Protestant version's Old Testament but also includes seven books of the Apocrypha.

   176.   How many chapters? There are 929 chapters in the Old Testament and 260 in the New Testament, making a grand total of 1,189 chapters in all!

   177.   How many letters? With 3,566,480 letters in the Bible, and a word count between 773,692 and 773,746, depending on how the hyphenated words are counted, this Book is quite large.

   178.   The shortest book in the New Testament is 3 John, which contains only 294 words in it's fourteen verses! John's second book has one less verse but four more words.

   179.   The shortest book in the Old Testament is Obadiah.

   180.   The longest book in the Bible is the Book of Psalms. It has 150 psalms.

   181.   The longest verse in the Bible (King James Version) is Esther 8:9, which has ninety words total. The shortest verse, John 11:35, includes only two words: "Jesus wept."

   182.   The Book of Isaiah is the most-often quoted Old Testament book, with 419 references made to it in the New Testament. The Book of Psalms is second and referred to in the New Testament 414 times.

  

  

  

  

Probability

   Probability is the chance that something will happen. It is always somewhere between 0 (impossible) and 1 (certain)
   If you flip a coin nine times and get nine heads in a row, is the tenth throw more likely to produce a head or tail?
   Those who don't understand the principles of probability might be tempted to say, "the next one must be a tail," but, of course, the probability is always the same for each throw (assuming no trickery or cheating is involved). The probability of throwing a head is 1/2 (or 1 in 2) and the probability of throwing a tail is also 1/2 (1 in 2) because there are two equally likely outcomes to flip a coin.
   However, it is easy to see why people get confused, because the probability of throwing ten heads in a row is very small (1 in 1024). Why? Because the probability of a sequence of events is the result of multiplying the probabilities of each event together.
   The probability of throwing one head is 1/2. The probability of throwing two heads is 1/2 X 1/2 = 1/4. The probability of throwing three heads is 1/2 X 1/2 X1/2 =1/8...and so on. The probability of throwing ten heads is 1/2 X 1/2 X 1/2 X 1/2 X 1/2 X 1/2 X 1/2 X 1/2 X 1/2 X 1/2 = 1/1024.


When you throw dice, the chance of throwing a 3 is 1 in 6 or 1/6 because there are six equally likely outcomes to the throw of a dice (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). The sum of all possible outcomes must always add up to 1. When you throw two or more dice and add them together, the probability of getting a two (1 +1) is 1/6 X 1/6 = 1/36 but the probability of getting a seven is 1/6 because there are six ways of doing it out of a possible 36 outcomes: (1+6), (2+5), (3+4), (4+3), (5+2),  and (6+1).

Famous Words and Phrases in the Bible ll

   149.   "A land flowing with milk and honey" were the words God used to describe Palestine to Moses in Exodus 3:8. It's now generally used to describe a fine or pleasant place.

   150.   "The apple of my eye" is a phrase first created in Deuteronomy 32:10 to describe God's perspective of Israel. The Hebrew words literally mean "center" or "pupil" of the eye, but in the poetic sense they refer to someone or something highly valued by another. The poet David asks God in Psalm 17:8, "Keep me as the apple of your eye."

   151.   "Scapegoat." On the Day of Atonement, the high priest would lay his hands on one goat, symbolically transferring the sins of the people onto it. However, instead of being killed, that goat was driven into the wilderness as a symbol of the sins being "gone." The goat, which took the blame for the sins of others, was known as the "scapegoat."

   152.   "Spare the rod and spoil the child." This bit of homely wisdom (generally quoted by senior citizens when somebody else's kids are acting up) is based on the wisdom of King Solomon, who says in Proverbs 13:24 that a parent "who spares the rod hates his son."

   153.   "Pride goes before the fall," one of the most commonly quoted phrases in American history, were the words of King Solomon in Proverbs 16:18, referring to the fact that a prideful attitude can blind us and lead us into trouble.

   154.   "A fly in the ointment" is a phrase commonly used to describe something that has gone wrong with a system or procedure. It comes from Ecclesiastes 10:1, which states that "dead flies spoil the perfumer's ointment."

   155.   "Woe is me!" This phrase, once common in nineteenth-century literature, was first used in Isaiah 6:5 when the prophet came face-to-face with God. It also appears in the Book of Jeremiah as an expression of sorrow.

   156.   "A drop in the bucket." Generally used to refer to "a small amount" or "a meaningless portion," the words are lifted in their entirety from Isaiah 40:15, in which we are told that to the Lord "the nations are a drop in the bucket."

   157.   "Holier than thou." These words, which in our modern culture are generally used to describe a self-righteous person, were used in that same sense by the Lord in Isaiah 65:5 to criticize those who felt themselves better than others.

   158.   "Like a lamb to the slaughter" were words first used in Isaiah 53:7 to describe the coming Messiah's willingness to accept his fate. It's now generally used in reference to an innocent victim or someone who is bound to lose in his or her circumstances.

   159.   "The skin of our teeth." Generally  used to mean "just barely," the imagery comes from Job 19:20. The phrase was popularized when made the title of a wildly successful play by American playwright Thornton Wilder.

   160.   "Can a leopard change its spots?" This rhetorical question, which suggests people cannot change what they are inherently, was coined by the prophet Jeremiah in 13:23 of his book.

   161.   "Feet of clay," an expression which has come to mean a personal flaw in an individual, was first used by the prophet Daniel when describing the statue he had seen in King Nebuchadnezzar's dream. The feet of the statue were made of clay mixed with iron-a weak base for such a big, heavy monument.

   162.   "The handwriting on the wall" is a phrase that comes from Daniel chapter 5. The carnal King Belshazzar had seen a hand appear and write a mysterious message. Calling upon Daniel to interpret the message, the king learned that God had weighed Belshazzar on an eternal scale and found him wanting. His kingdom was to be taken away that very night-leading to our use of the phrase as "something inevitable that we can all see happening."

   163.   "We reap what we sow." Generally accepted as cultural wisdom that means "you get what you earn," the phrase is lifted from Paul's letter to the Galatians in chapter 6, verse 7.

   164.   "The powers that be," a phrase first created by Bible translator William Tyndale, is usually used to refer to "the government" or "those in charge." It means those in positions of authority are there by God's choice and therefore exist only because He wishes them to. The phrase was used by the apostle Paul in Romans 13:1 when, as the King James Version reads, he noted, "the powers that be are ordained of God."

   165.   "A thorn in the side." The apostle Paul first used this phrase in Corinthians 12:7 to describe some sort of physical ailment. Though he pleaded with God to take it away, the problem continued, thus keeping Paul humble. We still use the phrase to refer to an ongoing problem.

   166.   "Money is the root of all evil." This popular phrase is actually a bit of a mistranslation from Timothy 6:10. The actual words of Paul stated that "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil" (emphasis added). Still the fact remains that lusting after money can get us into all sorts of trouble.

   167.   "Nothing new under the sun." This statement by Solomon demonstrates the author's realization that despite temporary changes from one day to the next, there is nothing truly new or unexpected under the rising and falling of the sun each day. The phrase comes from Ecclesiastes 1:9.

   168.   "The fat of the land." Pharaoh spoke these words to Joseph in Genesis 45:18. Joseph was to pass them on in turn to his brothers, who were hungry and in need of a place to live due to the famine affecting the land of Israel. The Egyptian king promised Joseph the best land of Egypt and that he and his brothers would be well provided for and able to eat "the fat of the land."

   169.   "All things to all men." Paul is speaking in Corinthians 9:22 of how he has become all things to everyone in order to win some to Christ. The phrase now is often seen as a "sell out" point, as it is difficult to be everything to everyone and keep sight of one's own welfare.