Ministry and Website Programming Updates

Spare time from my “other” job (the one that pays the bills) has been quite minimal over the past couple of years, but I'm finally seeing a small work decrease the past few weeks. The maritime port in South Jersey is under construction and the electrical design for the International Terminal in Virginia is getting close to completion. I still have the electrical substation, transmission, distribution, telecommunications and street lighting design for a few industrial cities in the Middle East, but they've been relatively quiet for the past few months. I'm hoping the trend continues and that I can even drop back to flex or even part-time withing the next couple of years. I can just hear many of my friends thinking, "yeah, we've heard that before", but I did turn down the offer of taking the lead for the substation, and electrical and telecom distribution for the downtown renovation of a city in the western US, something that I would never have done a few years ago.

That said, my primary goal is to be able to devote more time to our ministry. I have dozens and dozens of articles in various stages of completion, some from over ten years ago. I'd get to a certain point, get interrupted (job deadlines, questions from readers or class members, deciding to do additional research on a particular topic ect) and be off on another engineering or ministry project. I'm still planning new articles and series, but will attempt to place a priority on finishing existing ones.

Website Programming Update

Still, although we neglected our blog during this time, we were able to make excellent progress on many articles and series for our main website. We’ve completed two articles on the historicity of the Bible that includes a discussion of the sources and methods used in dating bible events, difficulties and challenges that are often encountered, and a look at the history and development of various calendar systems from Biblical times to our modern day. We should have these formatted and uploaded in the next few days and will continue work on other articles in this series. We’ve also made some headway on the series of articles related to the OT prophets overview that was loaded last fall.

By the grace of God, we were able to format and upload some articles during this busy time. We added Bible Genealogies to our Bible Genre Analysis section that explores some of the common literary types found in the Bible. In this latest entry, we examine the nature and purposes of genealogies in the Hebrew culture, along with some various interpretation challenges when encountering the genealogical records. Many people skip these lists when reading through the Bible, but they have some very important applications which we include in the discussion.

Finally, a good friend emailed us with a question that came up in their Bible study class, “Did Judas Go to Heaven or Hell?” In response, we wrote an article examining the most popular arguments for and against, reveal what we believe to be the key question in the matter, and provide reasons for our answer to the subject question.

We’d like to thank our readers for your patience during these times of heavy workload. The good (and bad) news is that Obamanomics is catching up to us again, so it appears we’ll have more time for writing this fall. Let us continue to pray for all those who are unable to find work in this economy or must work multiple jobs in an attempt to support their families.