2012 A.D.: The Queen of England Purchases New Testaments For Distribution!!
Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II has well surpassed the 60-year point of her reign, the Diamond Jubilee!! This commendably proper and appropriate woman has provided what is, to all appearances, a nearly sterling performance as a national leader up to this point and is still going strong. If she has in truth been even half so unflaggingly committed to the good reputation of her kingdom as she has appeared to be through the lens of media reporting from my distant vantage point here in the USA, then may God bless her soul and preserve her reputation for all ages. She has seemed a most admirable and credible representative of her nation at nearly all possible times. I think that she is a woman for the ages if appearance reflects reality, though she is only human like any person.
Like many royals, Queen Elizabeth II has numerous titles and positions. One of them is 'Defender of the Faith', referring to the Church of England and its denomination of Christianity. So, it was with pleasure that I read an article discussing how she had a plan to distribute hundreds of thousands of New Testaments within her kingdom as part of her celebration for the 60th year of her reign. She will be distributing this cornerstone of the Christian faith to the good souls in her kingdom, and perhaps some of them will become passionate for the Lord because of it! If men and women give their lives to Jesus, repent of their sins, become baptized in the name of the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, stay in the Word and tell others about our Lord Jesus, honor God and love one another, it can save us from the coming wrath. It has that power. Jesus can lend us His righteousness, and if He does, we can be reconciled to God the Father.
The article that I read said that there had been an upward adjustment of how many copies they planned to send. It was their plan, at the time of that particular article's publication, to send 450,000 Gospels!! 450,000!! You could affect a lot of lives with 450,000 copies of the Gospel!! Maybe the parents will read it. Perhaps they will make the children sit down and read it with them. Maybe Grandpa and Grandma will get involved, Aunt and Uncle. Every Bible is holy, the Word of God containing the story of the Son of God, Jesus, who is also the Tree of Life. And that Tree of Life was punched and slapped and beaten then crucified, hanging there covered in His own precious life preserving blood, so that there might be a way for some to be saved from the well-earned wrath of God. And water and blood poured out of His side when the Roman soldier stabbed Him, and through that hole, through that water and blood hole in His side, a way to be saved was provided.
But here is an odd little thought: Jesus is sometimes called the Word. And He was sent to mankind to save us. We preserve His teachings in the Gospel, that very book that the Queen was intending to distribute. (I did not find out the final number, or whether it happened at all, though I looked. I'm pretty sure that they followed through with the plan though!) Anyway, there are some eschatologists that believe that the Ark of Noah, while a real boat, was also a 'type' of the far distant appearance of Jesus, the Son of God, who would walk as a man in the flesh of a man one day, so that He could save those who placed their faith in Him just as the Ark saved those who trusted in and entered into the hole in its side. That turned out to be Noah and his wife, their three sons - Ham, Shem, and Japheth - and their wives: 8 people in all. Just as faith in Jesus through the Gospel can save us sinners from the destruction by God of the wicked and rebellious in the future, in the coming days of the Great Tribulation but also on the day of our individual judgment, so also did the Ark do the same with Noah and his family back in the day of the Great Flood.
So here's the interesting part regarding the Queen's efforts: we are told how big Noah's Ark was. It was 30 x 50 x 300 cubits. That's 450,000 cubic cubits. And the Ark was the only thing which held the secret for surviving the just punishment meted out by God to the wicked. It's like the Gospel in that respect. They both had/have the power to save a person or a person's soul from God's wrath.
The Queen, at the 60 years point of her reign, is perhaps sending out (or perhaps already has) 450,000 Gospels. Noah, at 600 years old, boarded the Ark with his family, and the Ark had 450,000 cubic feet of space by specific Biblical account. How interesting that 60 and 600 have a degree of correlation, and the two 450,000's obviously do as well, and even the purpose of the two objects, Ark and Bible, likewise have a correlation. The ark, let me mention, was covered (anointed?) with a substance inside and out to make it waterproof. It was the blood of a tree......pitch as we call it.
So long as things are as they seem, and I have no reason for skepticism, I have to join so many others in saying: God bless the Queen!!
Here's a bit of a non-sequitur: did you know that once, in Israel, there was a town called Luz? It was later renamed Beth El (house of God) in the times when the Israelites first occupied the promised land. If you placed the name 'Luz' in the middle of the word 'Beth El', and then pronounced the sounds in reverse order, as if you were a Hebrew speaker, speaking the indicated sounds from Right to Left, you would say 'El Luz Beth'. Beth El means 'House of God'. And there are certain people who, right or wrong, believe London was first settled and ruled by elements of the tribe of Judah, the tribe Jesus belonged to, and the tribe who were prophesied and destined to rule the other tribes of Israel. This ancient Beth El also was on the border of Judah's land allotment within the borders of Israel.
In fact, there is one of those ancient legends that are awesome to hear, yet might not be true, concerning England's coronation stone. Their kings are coronated upon it even in modern times. A story claims that Jeremiah the prophet brought that very stone which Jacob anointed (when fleeing Esau) in 1850 B.C. (just an estimated time) to Ireland in the 500's B.C., along with daughters of the last Davidic king of Israel - the daughters of Zedekiah. He also brought an important musical instrument, a harp, it is said.
King Zedekiah was a blinded prisoner in Babylon at that time. His sons had been killed before his eyes, then the great conqueror from Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar had blinded Zedekiah. Israel therefore had no royal son on the throne in their own nation of Israel. There seemed to be no royal heir from Judah to continue the Royal Kingship.
The legend says that Jeremiah met with and convinced Eremon, the first high king of Ireland, to take one of Zedekiah's daughters (perhaps one named named Tea-Tephi) as his wife. Legend says that this united the long-divided family clans of Judah - Pharez and Zerah - the Irish king being of Zera, and Tea-Tephi descended from Pharez through her now blinded father Zedekiah. In this way God may have maintained an unbroken line of Davidic descendants (descendants of king David of Israel) upon a throne of the people of Israel. The assertion of the legend is that the 'Irish' were in part descendants of Jacob/Israel from the tribe of Judah, through Judah's son Zerah who was the strangely born twin of Pharez. They had separated from the main body of the Israelites at some point and sometime not mentioned in the Bible, and had travelled far, with at least part of the family descendants ending up in Ireland. But, part of the family is said to also have founded London, through a man named Brutus. And part settled in Spain, being known as Milesians. Some of the Milesians crossed the water, raided Ireland, and took up residence there. Portions of the tribe of Dan are also said by some to have settled Ireland.
And according to one legend that is how the stone once anointed by Jacob/Israel became the Irish coronation stone, and oddly, it is claimed that the stone actually 'roared' when an accepted king of Ireland was coronated upon it.
Later it was claimed that the Scotts (the strong Irish clan named the Del Riads, who had crossed over the water to dwell in the north portion of the island of Britain) made war upon their cousins back in Ireland and took the stone.
The stone also roared, the legend says, whenever an accepted Scottish king was coronated upon it. These Del Riads had left Ireland, crossed over the water to the North of England, and had prospered there. This clan of the 'Scotts' (Irish were once called Scotts) had become the strongest Irish clan though they now lived in the north of the British Isle, so they thought it appropriate that the stone be brought to the new land where they had gone to live. In time, that northern end of England became known as Scotland. It sort of 'stole' the name of 'Scot'land from what we now call Ireland, the Emerald Isle!
Later, King Edward I, also known as Long Shanks, made war on Scotland and also took the stone, and so it fell into English hands. From that point onwards it became the English coronation stone. But, as mentioned, the English may have had descendance from the tribe of Judah.
As for this storied stone, it has been called 'Liafail', 'the Stone of Scone', and 'the Stone of Destiny' over the years.
Could that legend be true? Maybe. It's a story. It might be true or might not. I know for a fact that there are several variations of the account of how the stone came to be in England, so at least some parts of some versions of this story are very definitely incorrect.
There really is a stone, and it really is slid beneath a coronation chair whenever they have the semi-private portion of the coronation ceremony in which the new king sits and takes his oath. That much is true.
But guess where it was that Jacob saw his vision, and anointed the stone he slept on with oil? Did you guess Bethel, also called Luz? Very good!! And now that very stone might, according to unproven legend, resides in a nation known for having several very prominent Elizabeths, including the current Elizabeth II, defender of the faith, and current reigning Queen.
God bless the Queen for caring enough to distribute the Gospel!! May Jesus remember it one day. May it bear fruit...much fruit...in the United Kingdom and beyond.