PBI News "God's Millennium" The Chicago Bible Students recently published a new booklet entitled "God's Millennium" which is especially suitable for witnessing at this time when many are concerned about the turn of the century digits from 19 to 20. We have enclosed one for your review. Those who want more copies should contact the publisher at 1-800-GODS-PLAN. Note that the PBI does not have extra copies of this booklet. "The Bible as a Rising Civilization" Dr. Paul Mali has written an extensive treatise on the world's future based on the teachings of the Bible. (Please see the book review on page 20.) An enthusiastic reader of this book contacted us and offered a generous subsidy to make it more affordable for others. As a consequence and for a limited time we are pleased to offer this book at half the usual price. Please see the enclosed four-color flyer for more details. Be sure to use the special order form if you want to take advantage of this special price. Letters I am very grateful to come in contact with those of like faith. Although I am not a Bible Student proper, I am a Bible student with close beliefs, but I differ on a few understandings. My wife and I run a motel and I am in a good position to leave booklets on Bible questions . . . to further the ministry of the wonderful Ransom Plan of our Lord and Savior. I am always short on good literature to place in the rooms. Many I'm sure are thrown away, but who knows how much good information is getting out to those in need? —Roger Medlin, Missouri Over the years I have been greatly blessed reading The Herald. The messages are very helpful and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you from the bottom of my heart. God has blessed me with [an understanding of] his divine plan for now and the ages to come. We have a blessed Lord. Your journal and the Dawn magazine over many years has helped me to understand the scriptures. We wait patiently for the [time when] all people can be blessed and enjoy peace, joy, and everlasting life on this wonderful planet earth. Around the World Russia has postponed—indefinitely—a national census scheduled for this year. It would have been the first full census since the breakup of the Soviet Union and was expected to confirm demographers' worst fears: that Russians are dying off so fast and giving birth so infrequently that the population may shrink by nearly half in the next 50 years. In the last ten years . . . the death rate has climbed from 11 deaths per 1,000 people in 1991 to 15 per 1,000 last year. Meanwhile women are giving birth at a rate far below the population maintenance level: For every 15 people who die, only nine are born. The result is that Russia's population has been dropping steadily since the 1991 Soviet collapse. —Los Angeles Times, 8/21/99 Eritrea and Ethiopia have been set back years by their bitter border war. More than 300,000 Eritreans have been drafted into fighting since May against an enemy they believe has annexed their territory. On the other side, Ethiopians are equally adamant that Eritrea invaded their country in May 1998. To outsiders the war is a family feud between former allies who together toppled the Derg regime in Ethiopia. It appears to be an act of pure folly by two leaders who have been hailed as pioneers of the African renaissance. However the situation is resolved, both countries have been set back years. No one is clear how many people have died but the carnage of battles suggests staggering casualties in the tens of thousands. The economic cost has also been high. Factories have lost much of their workforce and 300,000 people have been displaced. Israel The cataclysmic earthquake in Turkey and its attendant human tragedies, of an unprecedented scale in our tremor-prone region, provide an opportunity to consider the implications of one of those mantras intoned by many peace-minded Israelis: that we need to integrate ourselves more fully into the region in which we live. The main lesson we must learn is that we are already fully integrated in the system of geological faults that crisscross our region. Geologists have long been warning that we in Israel are overdue for an earthquake of 6+ magnitude on the Richter scale. —Jerusalem Post 8/23/99 In the first half of 1999, some 12,000 Russians arrived in Israel, more than double the number during the same time the previous year. Driven by the crash of the ruble, dim job prospects in major cities and a nasty resurgence of Russian anti-Semitism, nearly 100 immigrants from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok arrive every business day. The spike in Russian immigration to Israel this year is the first since the colossal influx of Soviet Jews in the early 1990s. With this new wave of immigrants, about 1 million Israelis—roughly one in five Jews in the country—now speak Russian, and the vast majority of them have arrived since 1990. Religious Israelis and older immigrants from North Africa in particular see the Russians as a threat to the long-term cohesion of Israel's already Balkanized society. The Russians tend to seek nothing more complex than a better life for their children. However, nearly one-third of those arriving this year cited another reason—increased anti-Semitism in Russia. There has been an increase in attacks on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries and shrill broadsides against Jews in nationalist newspapers. Unlike Russian immigrants of the early '90s, many of whom were ardent Zionists, the latest arrivals tend not to care much about building a Jewish state. Just two in five people in the current wave say they were motivated to come to Israel by a wish to be among the Jewish people. —Washington Post, 6/28/99 Islam The earthquake in Turkey has revealed the dearth of independent civil organizations in Turkey and many are now questioning what price the state has paid for the clampdown on Islamists and other groups seen as a threat to state power. Hundreds of efforts to bring food to the devastated country were hampered by lack of civil organization. Piles of bread have rotted in the streets. The vans delivering the supplies have clogged local roads, making travel difficult for ambulances and other emergency vehicles. In many places, frustration has translated into an almost revolutionary desire to start afresh with barriers on Islamic government activities removed. —Financial Times, 8/23/99 The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) urged Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who met in Washington with PA official Abu Mazen on Friday, to pressure him to publicly retract his claim that the Nazis did not murder six million Jews. Abu Mazen whose real name is Mahmoud Abbas, is the author of a book, "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement," which argues that the Nazis may have really killed less than one million Jews and that "the Zionist movement was a partner in the slaughter of the Jews." Other senior Palestinians have also engaged in Holocaust denial in recent years, notes ZOA President Mort Klein. —Arutz-7, 8/27/99 Pope John Paul II's scheduled December visit to Iraq is a triumph for President Saddam Hussein according to diplomats in Jordan's capital city. The visit should help the Iraqi leader attain greater international legitimacy and "open the way for dialogue to put an end to the suffering of the Iraqi people," said one diplomat. Iraqi children under five are dying for lack of food at more than twice the rate they were a decade ago in what's become a humanitarian emergency according to the UN. —Bloomberg News, 8/27/99 Fighting between Christian and Moslem farmers in the southern Philippines has left nine people dead and forced more than 600 villagers to flee their homes. Clashes were triggered by a land dispute between the farmers in Tagoloan town in Lanao del Norte province. Fighting worsened when Moslem rebels and Christian cultists backed the warring sides. "Nine people were massacred by the Moslem farmers and a woman was taken hostage," said Lorna Inot of the provincial office of the Department of Social Welfare and Development. According to military intelligence reports, Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels backed the Moslem farmers after the Christian Ilaga cult sided with the Christian farmers. —Deutsche Press Agentur (DPA), 8/16/99 Christendom Duke University researchers reported that those 64 and older who attended weekly religious services were 46% less likely to die over a six-year period than those who went less often. Doctors think that those who attend benefit in several ways from having a larger social network. They are less likely to suffer from depression. And any new ailments they develop will probably be noticed earlier by family and friends and thus be treated more quickly. —Time, 8/2/99 The Kansas Board of Education rejected evolution as a scientific principle. The 10-member board, ignoring pleas by educators and scientists, voted new standards for science curricula that eliminate evolution as an underlying principle of biology and other sciences. Kansas' six public universities had written a letter to the board saying that the new standards would "set Kansas back a century and give hard-to-find science teachers no choice but to pursue other career fields." Tom Willis, director of the Creation Science Association for Mid-America, which helped write Kansas's curriculum proposal said that evolution misleads students. "You can't go into the laboratory or the field and make the first fish. When you tell students that science has determined evolution to be true, you're deceiving them." —Washington Post, 8/12/99 U.S. Lutheran leaders passed a historic union with Episcopalians, enabling the two churches to recognize each other's members and sacraments and making their clergy essentially interchangeable. Slightly more than two-thirds of the bishops voted in favor of the union. It will take effect following approval by the Episcopalians, who are scheduled to meet in July, 2000, but have already approved an earlier draft of the document. The agreement makes Lutherans a bridge between divergent traditions of the Reformation churches that broke away from Catholicism in the 16th century, with the more traditional, hierarchical Episcopalians on one end, and the more progressive United Church of Christ—with whom the Lutherans have a similar agreement—at the other. Ecumenicism has taken on more urgency in the last few years as mainstream Protestant denominations realize they are fast losing members to evangelical churches. By banding together, many church leaders believe they can regain some of their vitality. —Washington Post, 8/20/99 Economics Billions of dollars in loans have propped up an unproductive socialist monetary system in Russia. To date, it has gotten $16.5 billion from the International Monetary fund. Millions have been spent to show ex-communists how to be good democrats and capitalists. The results have been a handful of fabulously rich Russians amid widespread misery and corruption. Unemployment has reached 14%. The dollar value of the ruble has sunk to 4 cents. "The reforms have left many Russians worse off than before the breakup of the Soviet Union, and many blame the Western aid and advice," said Janine Wedel, research fellow in Eastern European studies at George Washington University. —Investors Business Daily, 8/11/99 Science Global water shortages, aggravated by wasteful irrigation practices, will worsen in the next 25 years and affect food supplies, according to a new study by a private environmental group. Current irrigation practices <%-1>in many arid countries are unsustainable,<%0> Worldwatch analyst Sandra Postel said. "Some 40 percent of the world's food comes from irrigated cropland, and we are betting on that share to increase to feed a growing population," Postel said. As some countries run out of water for irrigation, food imports could become more expensive as nations compete for those crops. Today 500 million people live in "water stressed" areas and the number will rise to 3 billion by 2025, Postel said. Other experts disagree. "The problem of depleting water solves itself," says Dennis Avery, a farm expert with the conservative Hudson Institute. Market forces will come into play as the water costs increase, forcing farmers to use it more efficiently, he said. "We've seen an unprecedented food abundance in the last 250 years, and I see nothing to alter that," Avery said. —Reuter's, 7/20/99 Scientists using a novel computer technology have found no sign of alien life forms despite enlisting the help of over one million enthusiasts. Officials at the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) said that since the May launch of their scheme to allow idle computers to crunch deep space data collected from a radio telescope, over 1 million people in 223 countries signed up to participate. According to experts the phenomenal sign up rate makes the SETI screen saver the largest computation ever. But though the 1 million users have racked up over 50,000 years of computing time so far, there has been no sign of extra-terrestrial life, said Dan Werthimer, a research physicist at the University of California's Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley. —Bloomberg News, 8/18/99 Scientists observing X-ray emissions from swirling gasses in a galaxy 100-million light-years distant found direct evidence of a black hole sucking matter into it,NASA said. A black hole is a region of space where the force of gravity is so powerful that nothing, not even light, escapes its pull. NASA said the use of an X-ray satellite launched in 1993 detected emissions from iron atoms in gasses swirling around a central dense object. The gas was heated to millions of degrees under the force's gravity. Buried in the emission spectrum was a "rare glimpse at a red-shifted absorption" feature that suggested matter was moving away at the rate of some 10 million kilometers per hour. —DPA, 8/16/99 Book Review The Bible as a Rising Civilization, Dr. Paul Mali. Horizon Publications, 1998. 726 pages Paul Mali is well known in business circles for his management skills and ability to advise companies on organization effectiveness. He has been a consultant to Fortune 500 companies as well as small start-up businesses. A prolific writer, his management books have been used in both the classroom and as material for business seminars. Within smaller circles, Paul Mali is recognized as a thoughtful expositor of Bible truths. In his first religious-oriented book, Dr. Mali combines his business logic and his biblical background to produce an interesting treatise on the history of man. <M>The Bible as a Rising Civilization could be described as a brief history of the spiritual condition of the world. Beginning with the basic question, "What is the true meaning of life?" Mali explores mankind's quest to find meaning in his limited existence. Mali defends the Bible as the only true source of life's answers and shows how biblical principles and characters have influenced the course of man's existence on the earth. Scientists, archaeologists, philosophers and religious leaders have all attempted to construct some meaningful logic to the world and its progress, yet only the Bible provides a concrete logic to show that the transformation of civilization has not been random nor without purpose. Continually integrating the writings and prophecies of the Bible with history, Mali documents the progress of man in his quest for the ultimate truth. In each major segment of history, progress has been limited by man's inability to find a true meaning and purpose to the world. At stops along the journey through civilization, we discover the probable location for the Garden of Eden, the geological evidence for a universal flood, and the likely route of the Israelite exodus. All this reaches a climax in the historical evidence of the person of Jesus Christ, not only as a real person, but also as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God. The exploration of early Christianity forms a big part of the development of Western civilization. A key understanding is that evolving Christian thought soon lost the real sense of the person of Jesus and gave its loyalty to the corrupt Roman State. Important to our understanding of truth, there is significant evidence that Christianity eventually incorporated multiple pagan ideas such as the tripartite constitution of human nature (body, soul, and spirit) and a trinity of gods. Eventually Christianity took on the nature of the state and went from persecuted to persecutor and finally became the empire itself embodied in the form of Roman Catholicism. The Reformation movement that emerged in the 16th century, so important in the development of the late period of Western civilization, unfortunately receives almost no analysis. Shifting from the corruption of the church and modern Christianity to our own time, Mali's most intriguing analysis is on the modern movement of globalization. Put in a biblical framework, this reconsideration of Marshall McCluhan's "global village" concept is an excellent summary of the emergence of the one-world economy. The lengthy treatise closes with a look at the biblical philosophy of man's existence, finally posing an answer to the very questions asked at the beginning of the book: Who are we and where are we going? Although long and containing some typographical errors, the book is a well-documented presentation of man's existence on earth written in a friendly and easy-to-read style. It is obvious that the author writes from a sound base of social, economic and biblical knowledge. The book makes an ideal gift for witnessing to those who normally reject writings of a purely expository nature. —Len Griehs |
