{"id":1913,"date":"2013-11-23T14:57:04","date_gmt":"2013-11-23T22:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/?p=1913"},"modified":"2013-11-23T14:57:04","modified_gmt":"2013-11-23T22:57:04","slug":"before-the-world-began","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/2013\/before-the-world-began\/","title":{"rendered":"Before the World Began"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"bible\">&#8220;In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began&#8221;<\/span> (Titus 1:2).<\/p>\n<p>When I came to that verse as I worked on a new Grade 8 Bible course, I had two questions come to my mind:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How long has God had His salvation plan?<\/li>\n<li>To whom did He make the above promise<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Since God is eternal, all His plans are likewise eternal. Inhabiting the eternal present, God knew man would need redemption and had a plan to offer us that. This truly is mind bending and logic defying for mortals such as we.<\/p>\n<p>How can such a thing be?! I don&#8217;t know. But I accept it by faith. The Bible tells me so.<\/p>\n<p>Now notice an additional awesome truth nestled in that verse:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center; font-weight:bold\">God made a promise &#8220;before the world began!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To whom could He have made that promise?<\/p>\n<p>Since only He is eternal, who else?<\/p>\n<p>I get this picture of the triune Godhead covenanting with Himself (or would you say <em>Themselves<\/em>?!) to offer salvation to me and you and billions of other humans-not-yet-living. So I borrow from these two verses:<\/p>\n<div style=\"margin-left:25px; margin-right:25px; font-size:88%\"><span class=\"bible\">&#8220;And God said, Let us make man in our image&#8230;&#8221;<\/span> (Genesis 1:26).<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"bible\">&#8220;He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved&#8230;&#8221;<\/span> (Mark 16:16).<\/div>\n<p>And I imagine this happening sometime before Genesis:<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align:center; background:pink; color:red; font-family:verdana,arial,sans serif; width:300px; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; font-size:90%\">And God said,<br \/>\n&#8220;Let us give eternal life<br \/>\nto those who<br \/>\nbelieve and are baptized.&#8221;<\/div>\n<p>Amazing!<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of God&#8217;s pre-Genesis promises&#8230;to you&#8230;and me.<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[43,41,42],"class_list":{"0":"post-1913","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-titus","7":"tag-eternal-life","8":"tag-faith","9":"tag-salvation","10":"h-entry","11":"hentry","12":"h-as-article"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prJBV-uR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/pantinghart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}