Posts from June 2022

Posts from June 2022

Crushed By Envy

Theagenes of Thasos, an ancient Greek Olympian from the 5th century B.C., was renowned for his extraordinary strength. He became distinguished in every kind of athletic contest, and gained numerous victories at the Olympian, Pythian (Delphi), and Isthmian (Corinth) games. He was said to have won 1300 crowns in the games and came to be known as The Prince of Wrestlers. The Greek traveller and geographer Pausanias, in his work The Description of Greece, recounted a rather curious incident in…

Moving the Fence

During World War I a Protestant chaplain with the American troops in Italy became a friend of a local Roman Catholic priest. In time, the chaplain moved on with his unit and was killed. The priest heard of his death and asked military authorities if the chaplain could be buried in the cemetery behind his church. Permission was granted. But the priest ran into a problem with his own Catholic Church authorities. They were sympathetic, but they said they could…

Authority of Christ: Final or Flexible

The fact that the church is a kingdom clearly indicates that a democratic form of government (a government which people in this nation are familiar with and by which many denominations are patterned) in the church is against the Bible. As King over His kingdom (1 Tim. 6:13-15), Christ has absolute rule and authority (Matt. 28:18). In a kingdom there is an absolute monarchy. A monarchy is “a system of government according to which the supreme power is vested in…

God is Needed By His Offspring

A sign in the local textile mill read, “When your thread becomes tangled, call the foreman.” A young woman was new on the job. Her thread became tangled and she thought, “I will just straighten this out myself, after all how difficult can it be.” She tried but in vain; the situation worsened. Finally she called the foreman. “I did the best I could,” she told her boss. “No you didn’t” he quickly remarked. “To do the best, you should…

No Picture of Him Exists

James Butler Bonham (1807–1836) was a 19th-century American soldier. Born near Red Bank (now Saluda), South Carolina, Bonham moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in October 1834; the following year he travelled to Mobile where he helped to organize a company of militia cavalry called the Mobile Greys to serve in Texas. The company reached San Felipe, Texas in November 1835, and Bonham was commissioned a lieutenant in the Texian Cavalry one month later. On December 1, 1835, Bonham wrote to Sam…