The Bible in a Nutshell :: By Rick Segoine

For those who might not have ever read the entire Bible from cover to cover, this article is a synopsis that follows the progression of main biblical events that comprise our Heavenly Father’s plan for humanity. Of course, there are many details to these biblical events that are best attained by reading the Bible cover to cover. Our Heavenly Father’s plan for humanity is also known as His “Week of Creation.” A “week” being seven millenniums (2 Peter 3:8; Psalm 90:4).

Before Almighty God created the earth, He had created the angels. Job 38:4-7 tells us that when God laid the earth’s foundation, the angels “shouted for joy.”

A third of the angels rebelled against their creator and became fallen.

Almighty God, the Holy One of Israel, the Creator, spoke all things into existence through His Son Jesus at least 4,000 years before Jesus came to earth in a human body (John 1:1; Genesis 1:1).

God, who is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, created the entire universe and everything in it. Suns, moons, stars, planets, solar systems, galaxies, nebula, black holes and everything else found in outer space, as well as the earth and everything on the earth (Genesis 1:1).

Animals of all kinds, birds that fly through the air, fish that swim in the oceans and rivers. He created all living creatures of every kind. He also created all of the elements such as gravity, an atmosphere full of air to breathe, and every other mineral and atomic component that allows living beings to exist comfortably and hold the universe together.

Our Heavenly Father is the all-time master chemist.

He created first Adam and then Eve in His own image and bestowed upon them free will (Genesis 2).

He created many fruit-bearing trees in the Garden of Eden to sustain Adam and Eve but instructed them not to eat of a certain tree in the midst of the garden called the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil because if they did eat of it, they would surely die” (Genesis 3).

The fallen angel called Lucifer took the form of a snake and tempted Eve, saying, “If you eat of this fruit, you will not surely die but rather, you will be like God and know good and evil.”

Lucifer was calling God a liar, and Eve believed him.

She shared the temptation with Adam, and together, of their own free will, they ate of the fruit.

Symbolically speaking, Pandora’s Box was opened, and evil began to leak out and then spill out and engulf the earth as the now fallen human population multiplied and grew until over one and one-half days of God’s “Week of Creation” had passed.

Wickedness and evil became so prevalent (partly due to the influence of the fallen angels) on the earth during this time that God decided to start over (Genesis 6:6-8).

About 1,600 years had passed since God created Adam. A little more than a day and a half of God’s “Week of Creation.”

God made a covenant with Noah to build an ark that took Noah and his sons 120 years to complete. Then God flooded the earth. Only Noah and his wife, his three sons and their wives, and two of each kind of animal that God led onto the ark survived to repopulate the earth in this new beginning.

Although Noah and his family were chosen by God, their genetics from fallen humans were imperfect.

It seems that the fallen human nature has a very hard time resisting evil, and as the years passed and new generations multiplied, wickedness once again reared its ugly head.

Lucifer, in his never-ending efforts to place himself above his creator, inspired some wicked humans to attempt building a tower to the highest parts of heaven. It was known as the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9).

God nipped that project in the bud by causing them all to speak in different languages and scattering them all over the earth.

Meanwhile, humans continued to multiply, and so did wickedness.

Human propensity to embrace evil led to God calling Abraham to become the father of a nation that would be called Israel. God planned to reveal Himself to and through the Israelites. Abraham’s wife Sarah gave birth to Isaac. Isaac’s son Jacob had twelve sons. God changed Jacob’s name to Israel. His sons became the fathers of tribes, and the nation of Israel was formed; yet, at this point, they still had no permanent land of their own.

Unfortunately, The nation of Israel began a pattern of drifting back and forth between obedience to God and rebellion, from its earliest inception as the tribes of Israel multiplied.

Looking for a place to call their own, the Israelites came into Egypt where they became enslaved for 400 years, until being freed by God through Moses and ten astonishing supernatural miracles to convince the Pharaoh of Egypt to let God’s people go.

The way of their escape led them through the miraculously parted waters of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:22).

After they were freed from bondage in Egypt, the Israelites spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness, sustained by manna from heaven and water that miraculously flowed out of rocks. After 40 years, when the younger generation had been raised up, minus the slave mentality, God gave the Israelites the land He had promised them. The same land we now know as modern Israel.

It was also in this time period that Moses received the Ten Commandments from our Heavenly Creator atop Mt. Sinai. Moses stood in the holy presence of God, who, as he had earlier in Exodus 3:14 (when He had first called upon Moses to free the Israelites from bondage to the Egyptian Pharoah), identified Himself to Moses as “I am that I am.”

God continued to reveal Himself to fallen humanity by doing miracles for and through the Israelites.

There were many struggles in establishing the nation of Israel in the land known as the Promised Land; however, eventually, the Israelites began to flourish as a nation.

God also, at this time, began to raise up a unique and select few Holy Spirit-led individuals that He called prophets.

The time of King David and his son, King Solomon, was and is still considered the golden era of Israel.

As the centuries rolled by, those Holy Spirit-led God-chosen individuals known as prophets had been prophesying.

The prophets detailed events that would occur in their own lifetimes, the more distant future, like the 1st advent of the Messiah, and the far distant future, like the 2nd coming of the Messiah and the times we live in this very day.

The prophets prophesied about the future regarding the nation of Israel itself and the future revealing the coming of a Messiah that would reconcile Israel and all nations and peoples back to God.

The prophets spoke of this Messiah coming to earth on two separate occasions and in two different epochs.

Hundreds of years before Jesus appeared on earth for the first time, over 300 prophecies about Him were made by prophets that lived hundreds of years apart from each other. Jesus fulfilled every single prophecy.

The first advent of Jesus saw Him come to earth as the Lamb of God. The “Only Begotten Son of God,” born to an Israelite virgin named Mary, by the conception of the Holy Spirit.

God’s only begotten son, Jesus, had supernatural powers to do miracles, overcome death, and forgive sins.

After three and a half years of ministry that saw Jesus spread the good news of God’s eternal kingdom and healing all manner of afflictions, raising the dead to life, and speaking words of great wisdom like no one before or after Him have ever spoken, Jesus did the most amazing thing of all.

He allowed the God-haters of that time and the jealous religious hypocrites (Pharisees) to convince the Romans to crucify Him on a cross at a place called Calvary.

As the sinless Lamb of God, hanging on that cross, He took upon Himself the punishment for all of the sins of everyone past, present, and future, and that includes you and me. He did this to reconcile any and all who believe in Him back to our Heavenly Father (John 3:16-17).

“For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, so that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Many of the 300 or so prophecies, made hundreds of years before Jesus spoke of these exact things (Isaiah 53:5-12; Leviticus 17:11; Isaiah 9:6-7; Deuteronomy 21:23; and Peter 2:24 (which explains the fulfillment of Deuteronomy 21:23) are just a few of the many prophecies that came to pass.

The 2,400 years that passed between the flood of Noah’s time and the appearing of Jesus Christ the Messiah, along with the 1,600 years from Adam to the flood, at this point equaled four days of God’s “Week of Creation.”

The next two days of creation leading up to the present time we live in is often referred to as the “Age of Grace.”

These two full days of creation are described as the time to fulfill the great commission given to His disciples by the Messiah Himself. In Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus says to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Two thousand years or two days of God’s “Week of Creation,” known as the “Age of Grace,” have been blessed by God to bring the gospel, the good news of salvation by grace, to the ends of the earth.

When that has been accomplished, it brings us to the end of six days of God’s “Week of Creation.”

There are even more prophecies by those Holy Spirit-led Prophets of God concerning what is referred to as the “end times” or the “last days” and the 2nd coming of Jesus than prophecies about the 1st coming of Jesus.

Those who study prophecy today, they who allow the Holy Spirit to do the leading, can see by the signs of our times, as given by Jesus Himself, that we are in those last days.

We are right now at the very end of the sixth day when two prophesied events are about to take place, just before the seventh day of creation in God’s “Week of Creation” can officially begin.

The first is revealed in 1Thessilonians 15-17 and the second in 2Thessalonians 2:3. These two scriptures describe two things that happen at the same time. One is the Rapture of the remnant church, and the other is the removal of the restrainer so that the “antichrist” can be revealed. It is the Holy Spirit that guides the lives and beliefs of true born-again believers, and it is the Holy Spirit who restrains the forces of evil. The great “catching away, and the removal of the “restrainer” also dovetails with the great “falling away” of the church prophesied to happen in the last days.

Once these amazing events happen, the “antichrist” will be revealed and be instrumental (peace treaty with Israel) in opening the doors officially to a seven-year period that precedes the beginning of God’s seventh day of creation, which will be the last day in God’s “Week of Creation.”

This seven-year period following the rapture and the removal of the restrainer is known mainly by these three titles: “The Seven Year Tribulation,” “The Time of Jacob’s Trouble,” and “the 70th Week of Daniel.”

It will be a time when that ugly thing called evil will gush and rush like the foulest of raging rivers and will reach its apex of destructiveness.

This will bring about the long-prophesied wrath of God upon Satan/Lucifer and all of his God-hating Christ-rejecting minions as the judgments revealed in the Book of Revelation are released upon the world.

At the end of the Tribulation, aka “the Terrible Day of the Lord,” Jesus will return to the earth in great glory and supernaturally put an end to the madness of evil and an end to the wrath of God.

At that point will begin the seventh and last day of “God’s Week of Creation.” A thousand years of peace on earth with Jesus as King, ruling the world justly from the holy city of Jerusalem.

The “antichrist” and his false prophet, who together had deceived millions of people, will have been banished by Jesus to the Lake of Fire. Satan will have been chained up in a bottomless pit (Revelation 20:1-3).

Near the very end of the thousand-year final day of creation, Satan will be released temporarily to test the loyalties of those who have been born into mortal bodies as the progeny of the tribulation survivors. This one last rebellion will be short-lived, and then Satan will also be banished to the Lake of Fire.

Then comes the White Throne Judgment, where everyone who ever lived in the “Week of Creation” who embraced evil and/or rejected God’s amazing grace and free offer of salvation, will stand before the Judgment seat and accept the punishment for their sins.

These are all those who chose, by their own free will, to receive the perfect justice of God rather than the bountiful mercy of God.

Then they, too, will join Satan/Lucifer, the “antichrist” and his false prophet, and all of the fallen angels, as well as all lovers of and unrepentant doers of evil, in the Lake of Fire.

So many warnings along the way such as, “The day you eat of the fruit of the tree of good and evil, you will surely die” and “the wages of sin is death.” Also, much of the Book of Proverbs.

It is not God’s will that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9).

Though God provided a way to Eternal Life through repentance of sin and belief in His Son, many instead (when it is all said and done) will have chosen to believe in the lies of the evil one. As a result, they will perish into the Lake of Fire.

The seventh day of God’s “Week of Creation” at that time will be over, and God will then create a new Heavens and a new Earth.

In Isaiah 65:17, God declares: “For behold, I create a new heaven and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.”

In the new Heaven and the new Earth, there will be no evil. No evil at all, zero evil. Think of it: all who choose to believe in Jesus and accept God’s grace upon your life, an eternity without even the slightest trace of that horrid thing called evil.

God’s Week of Creation. Seven millenniums. From being tempted by evil to realizing evil is no good and we are all far better off without it.

The Bible in a Nutshell…

Praise you, Holy God, my Creator, my Heavenly Father. Praise you, my Lord and Savior, my most Precious Jesus. Praise you, Holy Spirit, my most Wonderful Companion. Praise you Now and for all Eternity.

Rick Segoine

The post The Bible in a Nutshell :: By Rick Segoine appeared first on Rapture Ready.