PBI Directors Elected

The members of the Pastoral Bible Institute have elected these seven individuals to serve as directors for the next 12 months:

Francis Earl
Len Griehs
Carl Hagensick
Michael Nekora
Andrew Polychronis
George Tabac
Tim Thomassen

I do thank you for The Herald you’ve subscribed me to. Thanks and blessings. I saw one of your handouts in a prison year when I went there to preach as an evangelist. I found it to be a help and wanted more to enhance my outreach service in my community since I do serve at other institutions. I also found the content very useful since this is not preached in our local churches. I would like your help in my outreach activity. Please send me more hand-outs and also some personal study books to equip me in this calling.

In what was called an important victory for religious freedom in Russia, a Moscow court threw out a case that sought to outlaw the [Jehovah’s Witnesses] in the capital. Prosecutors in Moscow’s northern district launched the case in early 1999 based on Russia’s controversial 1997 law on religion, designed to limit the activities of foreign religious organizations. Human rights groups welcomed Friday’s decision but cautioned that harassment of many religious groups by bureaucrats and police remains common in Russia. The court called in five experts to examine the literature of the Jehovah’s Witnesses before the judge dismissed the prosecutor’s case for the ban. The 1997 religion law forced many denominations to go through a difficult registration process. The only ones excused were those defined as "traditional" to Russia: Russian Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. The Salvation Army’s registration was rejected by the city of Moscow in 1999, and it has been struggling since then to have the decision overturned.

Rev. Dirk Ficca of Chicago, delivered a paper at the Presbyterian Peacemaking Conference in Orange, CA. He discussed the criteria for salvation. The Presbyterian (USA) Church’s statement of faith affirms that salvation is only possible through belief in Jesus Christ. Rev. Ficca, the director of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago IL suggested that an omnipotent and merciful God might provide other avenues to salvation for Jews and Muslims and other non-believers in Christ. This suggestion ignited a firestorm of protest from conservative elements within the Presbyterian Church. Twenty-one sessions and one presbytery called for the church’s General Assembly Council (GAC) to . . . either discipline Ficca or disavow the heretical views he expressed. The GAC approved a document that affirms, "the Lordship of Jesus Christ and our salvation through Christ." However, the GAC did not comment on the salvation status of the other four billion humans on earth.

Of the 36 million adults and children in the world living with HIV/AIDS in 2000, more than 70% were in sub-Saharan Africa. 17 million Africans have died since the AIDS epidemic began in the late 1970s, more than 3.7 million of them children. An estimated 36% of adults are infected with HIV/AIDS. in Botswana, the highest rate in Africa. Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho are at 25%.The rate for South Africa is 20%, up from 13% in 1997. Infection soars, stigma hardens, denial hastens death, and the chasm between knowledge and behavior widens. The present disaster . . . could wreck the region’s frail economies, break down civil societies and incite political instability.

—Time, 2/12/2001

Tuberculosis and malaria are raging out of control in much of the world. It is sobering to note that more than 400 million people fall ill with malaria each year; of these, up to 3 million die, most of them children. At present, neither disease is a tremendous problem in the U.S. or Western Europe, but that happy situation may not last forever, especially where TB is concerned. In 1992, at the height of a mini-epidemic in New York City, 3,800 new cases of TB erupted; hardest hit were AIDS sufferers and the homeless, as well as prison and hospital populations, a third of whom showed drug resistance.

Scientists have decoded the DNA of a lethal strain of E. coli bacteria-an advance that could one day save lives and prevent thousands of illnesses each year. The complete genetic blueprint of E. coli type O157:H7 should help guide scientists toward the creation of a vaccine against the germ for cattle and other animals. That, in turn, would lower the risk that people will get sick from contaminated hamburger or other sources. "Now we have the whole picture," said James Kaper, a University of Maryland microbiologist who specializes in E. coli research. The study was done by a team of more than two dozen University of Wisconsin researchers and others. While harmless E. coli lives in the gut of humans, the dangerous type has been responsible for major outbreaks of disease since 1982 when it was first identified in contaminated hamburger. It causes a severe form of bloody diarrhea and can cause serious, even fatal, kidney damage. About 73,000 people were infected last year in the United States, and 60 died, according to the federal government. The infections are most dangerous to young children and the elderly.

Leaders of the most populous Muslim nations, some of them entangled in crises at home, aired grievances about globalization at a summit in Cairo. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, taking over chairmanship of the D-8 group of developing countries, opened the one-day gathering with a gripe about unfair terms of trade. "Open markets in today’s world are basically accessible for the products of advanced countries, while our exports . . . are faced every day with new protectionist procedures, overt or covert, that impede their access to the advanced countries’ markets," [he said]. D-8 members-Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey-have a combined population of 800 million, but only a four percent share in world trade.

China has launched a nationwide crackdown on tax fraud that may rank as the country’s biggest corruption scandal since the communist revolution in 1949. Government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the fraud could eclipse a smuggling scam uncovered last year that involved about $6bn. The scandal appears to have centered around port cities in the southern province of Guangdong. In all, 11 provinces or autonomous regions are being investigated. The scandal, which involves the issue of fake export certificates that allow exporters to claim tax rebates, is disrupting Chinese trading companies and hitting the country’s trade balance, traders and offi cials said. The crackdown, ordered by Zhu Rongji, the premier, in December, is part of frenetic attempts to combat a tide of official corruption and organised crime that appears to have infected almost all of China’s body politic. Total exports last year were reported at $249.2bn, up 27.8 per cent from 1999-an increase that some trade experts believe may be overstated because of the volume of faked export certificates.

A U.N. tribunal on Monday convicted a Bosnian Croat political leader and a military commander of war crimes for ordering the systematic murder and persecution of Muslim civilians during the Bosnian war. Prosecutors protested that the sentences-25 years and 15 years-were too light for the severity of the crimes. The men could have been sentenced to life imprisonment. Presiding Judge Richard May of Britain said attacks on villages "were characterized by a ruthlessness and savagery and in which no distinction was made as to the age of its victims: young and old were either murdered or expelled and their houses were burned. The total number of dead may never be known, but it runs into hundreds, with thousands expelled," he said. The court convicted Mario Cerkez, 41, a Croat military commander, of leading attacks against Muslim villages during the Bosnian war in 1993-94. He received a 15-year sentence. The tribunal said Dario Kordic, a leader of the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union and of the Croatian Defense Council, helped plan and organize a campaign to drive Muslims from an area the Croats wanted to make part of the newly created state of Croatia. Kordic, 40, was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment. The worst of the massacres was in Ahmici on April 16, 1993, when Croatian militiamen stormed into Muslim homes. Entire families were gunned down and houses set ablaze. Some victims were burned alive. Before the attack, 356 Muslims and 87 Croats lived in the village. Immediately afterward, no Muslims remained. Croat homes were left untouched. Kordic and Cerkez were charged with 44 counts of murder, persecution, plunder and other war crimes or crimes against humanity.

A large concentration of Iraqi troops was recently deployed on the Syrian border under an agreement between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Syrian president Bashar Assad. Saddam moved the troops into position after consulting Assad and securing permission. Assad apparently seized this as an opportunity to warn Israel that if it enacts its threat to attack Syria as a response to a strike by Hizbullah, then Israel would have to face a much larger-scale threat of Syrian forces backed-up by Iraqis. The United States warned Damascus it was playing with fire and the Middle East could take a dangerous turn for the worse. The Iraqis have concentrated troops on the Syrian border twice in the past few weeks. The first time, the Iraqi force was four to five divisions. A short while later the troops were withdrawn deep into Iraqi territory and Baghdad said it was an exercise. A similar maneuver took place a short time afterward with a smaller force.

Israel and the Mideast region are under a potential threat from nuclear weapons in Iraq and Iran, the chief adviser to Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon said in an interview in a German newspaper on Friday. The short-term danger was small "but we must not forget that Iraq and Iran are working hard on dangerous weapons," Zalmon Shoval, 70, the former ambassador to the United States, told the mass-circulation Bild Zeitung. He said the two countries were working on carrier systems and nuclear weapons, which represented a threat not only to Israel but to all other states in the region. However, Israel would defend itself "very effectively" if it were attacked, Shoval said.

Ariel Sharon, flush from an election victory seen as a mandate to veto more concessions to the Palestinians, pledged in a symbolic pilgrimage to Judaism’s Western Wall on Wednesday that Jerusalem will remain in Israeli hands forever. Sharon’s promise, delivered the day after his decisive win over incumbent Prime Minister Ehud Barak, ran directly counter to a key Palestinian demand for control over Jerusalem’s walled Old City and its holy shrines. Palestinians said they would not contemplate any Israeli proposals that fall short of Barak’s most recent offer-a Palestinian state in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as parts of Jerusalem. Sharon has ruled out such concessions, and said he wouldn’t begin talks until violence ends.

The Restitution of All Things, Andrew Jukes, Concordant Publishing Concern, Canyon Country, CA. (Originally published in 1867; reprinted in 1976.) 194 pages.

Andrew Jukes was born in England in 1815 and studied at Trinity College in Cambridge. He was active among the Plymouth Brethren assemblies and authored many works. Many Bible Students have at least one of his popular writings in their library: The Four Views of Christ; The Law of the of the Offerings; Types in Genesis; The Names of God. However, most do not know about Jukes’ most unpopular book: The Second Death and The Restitution of All Things. Written after many of his other publications, it was suppressed for many years. Kregel Publishing, which has reprinted most of his works, still refuses to publish this one.

For many years, Jukes entertained unpopular thoughts about the destiny of the human race, discussed them with friends, and finally put them down in this treatise. His then unpopular conclusion is best communicated in his own words from the preface:

"Men’s hearts, now perhaps more than in any former age, are everywhere moved to enquire into the nature and inspiration of Holy Scriptures, and the destiny of the human race, more especially the future state of sinners, as taught in Holy Scripture. Many are perplexed, hesitating to receive as perfect and divine a revelation which, they are told, in the name of God consigns a large proportion of those who in some sense at least are His offspring to everlasting misery."

The Restitution of All Things was written as a letter to a friend who was perplexed by this issue. In it, Jukes supports the propositions that: 1) the purpose of God by the first-fruits or first-born is to save and bless the later-born; 2) this purpose is fulfilled in successive worlds or ages through a resurrection from the dead, not all at once, but in stages; 3) unbelievers will be reconciled to God through a resurrection, not abandoned in torment.

Jukes was born and wrote mostly before the time the harvest message took shape in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He died in 1901. Even this treatise shows a rather rudimentary understanding of truth by today’s standards. However, his insights into man’s salvation are worthy of note, especially considering the opposition he faced from other prominent scholars. Clearly, sincere seekers of truth at that time were questioning the doctrine of eternal torment, embracing the concept of man’s return to his original state, and noting the Scriptures that taught resurrection, not immortality.

The book in photocopy form may be obtained by writing to Concordant Publishing Concern, 15570 W. Knochaven, Canyon Country CA 91351.