David

David (Standard Hebrew דָּוִד, Davíd, "Beloved", Arabic داوود, Dā'ūd, "Beloved") was the second king of the united kingdom of Israel (c. 1005 BC – 965 BC) and successor to King Saul. His life and rule are recorded in the Hebrew Bible's books of First Samuel (from chapter 16 onwards), Second Samuel, First Kings and Second Kings (to verse 4). First Chronicles gives further stories of David, mingled with lists and genealogies.

He is depicted as the most righteous of all the ancient kings of Israel - although not without fault - as well as an acclaimed warrior, musician and poet (he is traditionally credited with the authorship of many of the Psalms). 2 Samuel 7:12-16 states that God was so pleased with David that He promised that the Davidic line would endure forever; Jews therefore believe that the Jewish Messiah will be a direct descendant of King David, and Christians trace the lineage of Jesus back to him through both Mary and Joseph.

The nature of his reign and even his existence have been questioned and debated, rejected and defended by modern biblical scholars, but the account given in the Hebrew Bible remains widely accepted by the majority of ordinary Jews and Christians and his story has been of central importance to Western culture.

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history of South Africa

The written history of South Africa begins with the arrival of the first European explorers to the region. The Portuguese, the first Europeans to see South Africa, chose not to colonise it, and instead the Dutch set up a supply depot on the Cape of Good Hope. This depot rapidly developed into the Cape Colony. The British seized the Cape Colony from the Dutch in the end of the 18th century, and the Cape Colony became a British colony. The ever-expanding number of European settlers prompted fights with the natives over the rights to land and farming, which caused numerous fatalities on both sides. Hostilities also emerged between the Dutch and the British, and many Dutch people trekked into the central Highveld in order to establish their own colonies. The Dutch (by then known as Boers) and the British went to war twice in the Anglo-Boer Wars, which ended in the defeat of the Boers and of their independent republics.

The Cape Colony, Natal and the two Boer republics unified in 1910 as the Union of South Africa.
Black people were not granted suffrage in the Boer republics, and the rights of Black, Coloured, and Asian people continued to erode in the Union.

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The Gospels

Books in the new testament referred to as the Gospels:

In Christianity, a gospel (from Old English, "good news") is generally one of four canonical books of the New Testament that describe the miraculous birth, life, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. These books are the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, written between 65 and 100 AD.

Many modern scholars argue that the sequence in which the Gospel accounts have traditionally been printed in the Bible is not the order of their composition, and that the first canonical gospel to have been written is Mark (c 65-70), which in turn was used as a source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Matthew and Luke may have also used the hypothetical Q Document. These first three gospels are called the synoptic gospels because they share a similar view. The last gospel, the gospel of John, presents a very different picture of Jesus and his ministry from the synoptics. The canonical gospels were originally written in Greek.

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John the Apostle

John the Apostle (יוחנן "The LORD is merciful", Greek Ευαγγελιστής Ιωάννης), was one of The Twelve Apostles of Jesus. Christian tradition proclaims he is the same person who wrote:

• the Gospel of John and first epistle of John (the author of these is also referred to as John the Evangelist, John the Theologian or John the Divine)
• the second and third Epistle of John (the author of these is sometimes distinguished under the name of John the Presbyter).
• the Book of Revelation (the author is sometimes referred to as John of Patmos or John the Revelator).

John the Apostle was the son of Zebedee, and the brother of James. One tradition gives his mother's name as Salome.

John and James were originally fishermen and fished with their father in the Lake of Genesareth (the Sea of Galilee).

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Tertullian

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, anglicized as Tertullian, (ca. 155–230) was a church leader and prolific author during the early years of Christianity. He was born, lived, and died in Carthage [] in what is today Tunisia.

Tertullian denounced Christian doctrines he considered heretical, but later in life adopted views that came to be regarded as heretical themselves. He was the first great writer of Latin Christianity, thus sometimes known as the "father of the Latin Church".

He introduced the term Trinity, as the Latin trinitas, to the Christian vocabulary and also probably of the formula "three Persons, one Substance" as the Latin "tres Personae, una Substantia" (itself from the Koine Greek "treis Hypostases, Homoousios") and also the terms vetus testamentum ("old testament") and novum testamentum ("new testament").

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Billy Graham

The Rev. Dr. William Franklin Graham, Jr. KBE (born November 7, 1918 in Charlotte, North Carolina), commonly known as "Billy Graham," is an American Christian evangelist. He has often advised U.S. presidents and continues to be listed as one of the "Ten Most Admired Men in the World" in Gallup Polls. He is of Scottish descent.

Raised as a Presbyterian, Billy Graham switched denominations to Southern Baptist in 1934 during a Christian revival meeting conducted by Mordecai Ham. Graham was ordained a Southern Baptist minister in 1939.

After graduating from Sharon High School in May 1936, Graham attended Bob Jones College (now Bob Jones University) but found it to be extremely fundamentalist and, considering this disobliging, he transferred to the Florida Bible Institute, now Trinity College of Florida, in 1937 and graduated from Wheaton College in 1943.

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Christlike

To be like Christ; showing the spirit of Christ.

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” —Mark 1:35-37, NIV

We know about Jesus

• healing the sick;
• raising the dead;
• throwing the money-changers out of the House of God;
• having mercey on the woman caught in the act of adultery;
• feeding the five thousand from a few pieces of bread and a few fish;
• performing many miracles

However, in the above passage we see Jesus in the fullness of His character.

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scripture

Most religions have religious texts they view as sacred. Many religions and spiritual movements believe that their sacred texts are wholly divine or spiritually inspired in origin. The names of sacred scriptures are often capitalized as a mark of respect or tradition.

⁴For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.
(Romans 15:4 ESV)

The word scripture gets its original meaning from Greek word graphe:

• grafh
• graphe
• graf-ay

which means "writing," "a document," or "Holy Writ." The writings (or documents) of the Old and New Testaments were eventually canonized.

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Kingdom of Kush

The Kingdom of Kush was an ancient African state centered in the confluences of the Blue Nile, White Nile and Atbarah River in what is now the Republic of Sudan. It was one of the earliest civilizations to develop in the Nile Valley. The Kushite civilization has also been referred to as Nubia, and as Ethiopia in ancient Greek and Roman records. The Kushite state was formed before a period of Egyptian incursion into the area. According to Josephus and other classical writers, a Kushite Empire covered all of Africa and some parts of Asia and Europe at one time or another.

The first cultures arose in Sudan before the time of a unified Egypt, and the most widespread is known as the Kerma civilization. It is through Egyptian, Hebrew, Ancient Rome|Roman and Greeks|Greek records that most of our knowledge of Kush comes.

The Egyptians took control of Kush in ca. 1520 BC, but their grip on the area would decline over the next 500 years, until the Kushites became independent. The Kushites buried their monarchs along with all their courtiers in mass graves. The Kushites also built burial mounds and pyramids, and shared some of the same gods worshiped in Egypt, especially Amon and Isis.

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The Four Loves

The Four Loves is a book by C. S. Lewis which explores the nature of love from a Christian perspective through thought-experiments and examples from literature. The content of the examination is prefaced by Lewis' admission that he initially mistook John the Apostle's words "God is Love" (1 John 4:7-9, 1 John 4:15-17) for a simple inroads to his topic. By distinguishing need-love (such as the love of a child for its mother) from gift-love (epitomized by God's love for humanity), Lewis happens upon the contemplative that the natures of even these basic categorizations of love are more complicated than they, at first, seem. As a result, he formulates the foundation of his topic ("the highest does not stand without the lowest") by exploring the nature of pleasure, and then divides love into four categories, based in part on the four Greek words for love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. It must be noted, states Lewis, that just as Lucifer—a former archangel—perverted himself by pride and fell into depravity, so too can love— commonly held to be the arch-emotion—become corrupt by presuming itself to be what it is not ("love begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god").

Affection (Storgē," στοργη) is fondness through familiarity, especially between family members or people who have otherwise found themselves together by chance. It is described as the most natural, emotive, and widely diffused of loves: natural in that it is present without coercion; emotive because it is the result of fondness due to familiarity; and most widely diffused because it pays the least attention to those characteristics deemed "valuable" or worthy of love and, as a result, is able to transcend most discriminating factors. Ironically, its strength, however, is what makes it vulnerable. Affection has the appearance of being "built-in" or "ready made", says Lewis, and as a result people come to expect, even to demand, its presence—irrespective of their behavior and its natural consequences.

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Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) was a German Lutheran mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, and a key figure in the 17th century astronomical revolution. He is best known for his laws of planetary motion, based on his works Astronomia nova and Harmonice Mundi; Kepler's laws provided one of the foundations of Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation. Before Kepler's laws, planets' orbits were believed to be circular. Kepler's laws of planetary motion proved that the planets' orbits were actually elliptical.

Through his career Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a Graz seminary school (later the University of Graz, Austria), an assistant to Tycho Brahe, court mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II, mathematics teacher in Linz, Austria, and adviser to General Wallenstein.

He also did fundamental work in the field of optics and helped to legitimize the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei.

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Babylonian exile

Babylonian captivity, or Babylonian exile, is the name generally given to the deportation and exile of the Jews of the ancient Kingdom of Judah to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II.

Historical account
Three separate occasions are mentioned (Jeremiah 52:28-30). The first was in the time of Jehoiachin Jehoiakim in 597 BCE, when the Temple of Jerusalem was partially despoiled, and a number of the leading citizens were removed.

28 This is the number of the people whom Nebuchadnezzar carried away captive: in the seventh year, 3,023 Judeans; 29 in the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar he carried away captive from Jerusalem 832 persons; 30 in the twenty-third year of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried away captive of the Judeans 745 persons; all the persons were 4,600. (Jeremiah 52:28-30 ESV)

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Mount Nebo

Mount Nebo (Arabic: جبل نيبو; transliterated: Jabal Nībū) is an elevated ridge that is approximately 817 metres (2680 feet) above sea level, in what is now western Jordan. The view from the summit provides a panorama of the Holy Land, and to the north, a more limited one of the valley of the River Jordan. The West Bank city of Jericho is usually visible from the summit, as is Jerusalem on a very clear day.
Distances to various Holy Land locations from atop Mount Nebo, Jordan:

• Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias)
  106 km/351 NNW
• Nablus
  66 km/318 NW
• Jericho
  27 km/289 WNW
• Ramallah
  52 km/284 WNW
• Jerusalem
  46 km/269 W
• Qumran
  25 km/262 W
• Bethlehem
  50 km/260 W
• Herodium
  47 km/254 WSW
• Hebron
  65 km/224 SW

Hebrew prophet Moses was given a view of the promised land that God was giving to the Hebrews.

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Clive Staples Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis was a Northern Irish author and scholar, born into a Church of Ireland family in Belfast, although mostly resident in England in adulthood. Lewis is known for his work on medieval literature, for his Christian apologetics and for his fiction, especially the children’s series entitled The Chronicles of Narnia and his science fiction Space Trilogy. He was also a leading figure in an Oxford literary group called the Inklings.

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Albert James Lewis and Flora Augusta Hamilton Lewis on November 29th, 1898. At the age of 4, shortly after his dog 'Jacksie' was run over by a car, Lewis announced that his name was now Jacksie. At first he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jacks which became Jack, the name by which he was known to friends and family for the rest of his life. When he was six his family moved into a new house called Leeborough or Little Lea in Strandtown.

He had a brother named Warren Hamilton Lewis (Warnie), three years his elder. Lewis' mother died in 1908, and he was schooled by occasional tutors. He was sent to a school in England at age nine following his brother.

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Crown of Thorns

In Christianity, the Crown of Thorns (Greek: στεφανον εξ ακανθων, stephanos ek akantha "crown"+"of"+"a thorn"), one of the instruments of the Passion, was the woven chaplet of thorn branches worn by Jesus before his crucifixion. It is mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew (27:29), Mark (15:17), and John (19:2, 5) and is often alluded to by the Early Church Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others.

John the Evangelist describes it like this:

1 Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. 2 And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. 3 They came up to him, saying, "Hail, King of the Jews!" and struck him with their hands. (John 19:1-3 ESV)

Following Genesis 3:17-19—

17 And to Adam he said,

"Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; 18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (ESV)

— thorns were seen by Christian writers as emblems of The Fall of Man.

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Aleppo Codex

The Aleppo Codex (Hebrew: כֶּתֶר אֲרָם צוֹבָא) was the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible according to the Tiberian masorah, produced and edited by the influential masorete Aaron ben Asher. However, approximately one-third of it, including nearly all of the Torah, has been missing since 1947. It is also considered the most authoritative document in the masorah ("transmission"), the tradition by which the Hebrew Scriptures have been preserved from generation to generation. Thus the Aleppo Codex is seen as the most authoritative source document for both the biblical text and its vocalization, cantillation as it has been proven to have been the most faithful to the Masoretic principles.

The Aleppo Codex has a long history of consultation by Rabbinic authorities (it is cited in numerous responsa). Modern studies have shown it to be the most accurate representation of Masoretic principles to be found in any extant manuscript, containing very few errors among the millions of orthographic details that make up the Masoretic text.

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Georges Lemaître

Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Éduard Lemaître (July 17, 1894 – June 20, 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, professor of physics and astronomer.

Fr. (later Msgr.) Lemaître proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, although he called it his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'.

He was a pioneer in applying Einstein's theory of general relativity to cosmology: suggesting a pre-cursor of Hubble's law in 1927, and then publishing his primeval atom theory in the pages of Nature in 1931. At the time Einstein believed in an eternal universe and had previously expressed his skepticism about Lemaître's original 1927 paper. A similar solution to Einstein's equations, suggesting a changing radius to the size of the universe, had been proposed in 1922 by Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman, as Einstein informed Lemaître when he approached him with the theory at the 1927 Solvay Conference (Friedman had also been criticized by Einstein), but it is Lemaître, with his proposed mechanism, that made the theory famous for several reasons according to historians.

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justification

In Christian theology, justification is God's act making a sinner righteous before Him by His grace, received through the faith given to the person by God, for Christ's sake, because of his life, death, and resurrection. Because the meaning of the term is subject to dispute among Christians, simple definitions should be taken with a grain of salt.

Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that 'the just shall live by his faith.' Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. -Martin Luther

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Christian Music

The Christian church creates Christian music or adapts existing music for Christian use. Contemporary Christian music explores Christian themes, but not always in the confines of the church. Music makes up a large part of Christian worship and includes the singing of hymns, vocalized psalms, vocal and instrumental versions of spiritual songs for the purpose of uplifting and praising God. Musical instruments often accompany singing in the service, either through live performance or the use of soundtracks. Some churches employ only a cappella music to worship God. On other occasions instrumental music only expresses praise toward God. Churches today use these methods of musical expression in many different combinations to offer their praise to God.

Being Jewish, Jesus and his disciples would most likely have sung the psalms from memory.

However, without a centralised music industry, the repertoire of ordinary people was much greater than it is today, so they probably knew other songs too. Early Christians continued to sing the psalms much as they were sung in the synagogues in the first century.

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Young Earth creationism

Young Earth creationism (YEC) is the religious belief that the Heavens, Earth, and life on Earth were created by direct acts of God during a short period, sometime between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Its adherents are those Christians and Jews who believe that God created the Earth in six 24-hour days, taking the Hebrew text of Genesis as a literal account. Some adherents believe that existing evidence in the natural world today supports a strict interpretation of scriptural creation as historical fact. Those adherents believe that the scientific evidence supporting evolution, geological uniformitarianism, or other theories which are at odds with a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account, are either flawed or misinterpreted.

Many Young Earth creationists (YECs) are active in the development of creation science, an endeavor that holds that the events associated with supernatural creation can be evidenced and modelled through an interpretation of the scientific method. This has led to the establishment of a number of Young Earth Creation Science organizations such as the Institute for Creation Research, Creation Research Society and Creation Ministries International.

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