The old man stood high on the hillside, the Israelites below him hushed and expectant as they waited for him to continue. These were his people, the flock he had shepherded for over 40 years. Moses’ voice rang cjear through the desert air: “The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7:6).

“It was not because you were more in number than any other people,” he reminded them. Numbers have never mattered to God. Quality is more important than quantity, to Him. “It is because the LORD loves you,” he went on, “and is keeping the oath which he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand” (verses 7,8). How He had loved them, in spite of their rebellious spirit, their hankering after the Egypt from which He had called them out! Those decades of eating manna, enduring discipline and wandering in the wilderness had finally forged the Children of Israel into a unique nation, a people with a history and a destiny.

The Chosen Nation

Was Moses being too starry-eyed, too close to the Israelites to see things in perspective, when he spoke of them as the “chosen people”? The answer is …

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Jesus is Unique

There is no doubt at all that the New Testament presents Jesus Christ as an outstanding personality. He gives striking evidence of extraordinary powers in the miracles he performs; he makes the most penetrating observations about human life, and faith, and the true worship of God; and his claims concerning himself, as the only source of life to come, are such as no one else would dare to make. His apostles speak of him, after his ascension, as exalted to all power and authority at God’s right hand. And his own estimate of the vital significance of his person is summed up thus:

“This is life eternal, that (mankind) might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:3)

Clearly, if we are to have any hope of life to come, we need to know the truth about the person and the significance of Jesus Christ.

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The view of planet earth, seen from outer space, is very beautiful indeed. Pictures taken from space have confirm this. The earth is a wonderful jewel in God’s creation and the Bible tells us it is where He has promised to reveal His kingdom in all its glory.

The earth, of all the planets in the solar system, is the one that is perfectly suited to all forms of life and the one that orbits at exactly the right distance from the sun to provide comfortable conditions for the human race.

The bible — Sole Source of Information

The Bible alone explains why this should be. It reveals that it was the Lord God, “who formed the earth and made it, who established it, who did not create it in vain, who formed it to be inhabited” (Isaiah 45:18).

We think it is logical to assert that if there is a God, and if He created a race of beings to inhabit this planet and no other, then there must have been an ultimate objective in His mind. Happily, we have not been left to guess …

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The Bible is accepted as one of the greatest masterpieces of the world’s literature. The grandeur of the opening chapters of Genesis and of John’s Gospel, the moving poetry of the Psalms, the fiery denunciations of the Hebrew prophets, the compelling records of the life and work of Jesus, and the apocalyptic mysteries of the book of Revelation — all these serve together to set the Bible in a class of its own. It is quite unrivalled by any other work, in any language or from any age. But it is more than this: the Bible claims to be the written word of God.

The World’s Most Remarkable Book

The Bible’s contents are of the greatest antiquity. Parts of it are over 3,000 years old and, as any historian worth his salt will tell you, it contains the oldest and the most reliable records of ancient history ever written. Time and again its narratives have been shown to contain a remarkably accurate account of people, of places, and of events of bygone ages. No other book in the world can begin to compare with the Bible for the way it helps us both to understand the past and thereby largely to explain the present.

The Bible’s influence on the history of civilisation …

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The title of this booklet is partly factual and partly a matter of judgement. One Bible — Many Churches … is surely indisputable. Does it matter what we believe? is open to discussion. It seems sensible to begin where there is likely to be the greatest measure of agreement – that there is one Bible. Surely this is manifestly true. The Bible may be a collection of books but they are brought together in one volume, called ‘the Bible’. Of course there are several versions and many translations — but one Bible, whether the language is eastern or western, ancient or modern. The text is not open to alteration in order to bring it into harmony with this view or that. There are hundreds of scholars quick to detect any interference with the book. Thousands of pens are poised ready to condemn any attempt to meddle with the words. The Bible is unique, using the word in its proper sense — there is one Bible. It is true that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches include some additional books which are not recognised by Protestant churches as inspired. But they make little difference to the integrity of the central collection of 66 books.

That there are many Churches seems equally self-evident. There are some who say that there are many names but the church is one. This is a verbal device to hide the divisions. The different names do stand for different causes. True, they are alike in some respects but the differences are real enough. There is a difference of teaching between one church and another, and sometimes the difference is very substantial, even fundamental. Then sometimes within the same church there are ideas and practices which contradict each other. In any case the effect speaks for itself — some seeking to find the true church are puzzled and perplexed and forced to cry at last that they cannot make up their mind when faced with so many different churches clustered around one Bible. The problem is intensified by the fact that most of the differing churches claim to have based their teaching on the one Bible. How has this situation arisen?

The Development of Differences

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The word ‘resurrection’ may sound strange to anyone who has not read the Bible: it is not a word we use in everyday life in the twenty-first century. ‘Judgement’ is a more familiar word: it conjures up in our mind a law court and a judge handing down a sentence on a criminal. So what is a booklet on ‘resurrection and judgement’ about? If you are familiar with the Bible, you will know that — in a Bible context — ‘resurrection’ is the raising to life of people who have died, while ‘judgement’ has to do with God’s assessment of men and women according to His standards.

This is a booklet to explain what the Bible says about a future time, which Christadelphians expect to be very soon, when God will send His Son Jesus Christ back to the earth to raise the dead and judge the world.

Life After Death

Even those few sentences perhaps raise questions and problems in your mind:

• Is there really a God?
• Who actually is Jesus Christ?
• How do we know he is coming back?
• What has happened to dead people?
• How can they be raised from the dead?
• Will everyone be raised?
• Why does there need to be a day of judgement if God knows everything about us?
• What are the possible outcomes of that judgement?
• Where do I fit in all this?

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Let the issue be quite plain from the start: all that we believe — if we claim to be Christians — is staked upon the truth of Christ’s resurrection. Either it is true that the body which hung upon the cross was pierced by the soldier’s spear and placed in a tomb, came out of that tomb with the marks of its suffering still upon it, and was seen and touched truly and physically before ascending to heaven — or Christianity is a delusion. There may be protest against this today: some may urge that Jesus was no less a great teacher of mankind if he decayed in the tomb and was lost, and others will contend that there may have been a kind of “spiritual” resurrection of Jesus without the need for a bodily presence among his disciples which, for some reason, is distasteful.

If Jesus did not Rise …

As to the first of these protests, …

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The question can be simply put. Should we believe in a supreme and all-powerful Being who is the essence of goodness — a God who is so interested and concerned for His creatures that He sent His Son to be the saviour of mankind; or should we place our trust in a supernatural power of wickedness and darkness — the basis of occult beliefs? Only one other possibility has ever been considered, and that has been a belief that man can determine his own destiny and solve the world’s problems. Despite the great strides made by mankind in the technical world — or perhaps because of them — man’s inability to solve the one problem that afflicts every human being has caused him to search elsewhere for answers. Man’s great problem is his certain destiny. The great advances made in the last century-and-a-half have shown that it is not just death that needs removing from the earth; the effects of mortality are equally serious. People are now living much longer than they used to. Yet who really wants to live an extra five or ten years if they bring no improved quality of life?

In years gone by religion would have given mankind the opportunity to discover satisfactory answers to this universal problem. But society today has relegated religion to a very low position. Religion is the butt of comedian’s jokes, and religious leaders rarely comment on anything other than sociological issues. This situation has occurred for a number of reasons. Primarily it has come about because the authority of God’s revelation of Himself and Hid purpose has been forsaken. Men have failed to denounce as “sin” behaviour which is contrary to His law. Self-indulgent thought has been elevated by the producers and consumers of technology, and religious principles are scorned. Unthinkingly, Karl Marx’s comment about religion has been widely accepted; he called it “the opium of the people”.

If religion has become a no-go area for many people, …

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This is a booklet about the God of the Bible, the one unique God. Why is it needed? Because, as Christadelphians see it, there has for many hundreds of years been a serious misunderstanding about the relationship between God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. It is a fact of history that between 300 and 500 years after the death of Jesus Christ, the Christian Church developed ideas about God which centred around a ‘Trinity’. These traditions were eventually written down in what the Church called its ‘creeds’ (credo in Latin means ‘I believe’). We must leave the detailed history of the creeds until later, but the following extract from the Athanasian Creed (around AD 500) will set the scene:

“Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith … That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity … For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son: and another of the Holy Ghost [Spirit]. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal … So the Father is God, the Son is God: and the Holy Ghost is God, And yet they are not three Gods, but one God … Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost … amen.”

For more than 1,500 years, the Trinity has formed …

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There must be many people who feel that there is something outstandingly significant about the person and the teaching of Jesus Christ. Yet when they survey “Christianity”, both in its history and its modern forms, they find a wide variety of churches and communities, all with their differing foundations. teachings and practices. Feeling bewildered by the existence of so many groups claiming the name “Christian”, they may well give up the quest for “the truth as hopeless.

This short booklet is written to draw the attention of the interested enquirer to the existence of a community of believers in Christ, calling themselves “Chtistadelphians”, organised in groups found throughout the world. Wherever they exist they have a fellowship founded upon an agreed basis of beliefs. Fundamental to their faith is the principle that what Christ and his apostles taught in the first century was truth, and it is still the truth today. The holy scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, are their sole authority.

An Apostolic Fellowship

The community has no paid …

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