17,000 DELUSIONAL PEOPLE

Listen to Jude: "Yet it the same way, these men [false teachers] by dreaming . . . reject authority." 

When we dream, we're divorced from reality and the real world. In a dream, things aren't as they really are but twice a day and once on Sunday, world without end, amen,  people, sitting in church voluntarily hie themselves off into a world that doesn't exist. How so? They do try to go there when they do what the world famous preacher with the 1,000 watt smile, Joel Osteen, tells them to do.

He tells them to say twice a day, "I am blessed. I am prosperous. I am successful.” “I am victorious. I am talented. I am creative.” “I am wise. I am healthy. I am in shape.” “I am energetic. I am happy. I am positive.” “I am passionate. I am strong. I am confident.” “I am secure. I am beautiful. I am attractive.” “I am valuable. I am free. I am redeemed.” “I am forgiven. I am anointed. I am accepted.” “I am approved. I am prepared. I am qualified.” “I am motivated. I am focused. I am disciplined.” “I am determined. I am patient. I am kind.” “I am generous. I am excellent. I am equipped.” “I am empowered. I am well able.” “I am a child of the Most High God.”

To go further into Alice's Wonderland, he says that by saying those words twice a day, you will attract those things to you. Really? No. But every Sunday, 17,000 people gather in Houston to collectively leave reality to try to get to the land of unicorns, pots of gold, and four-leaf clovers. 

In the Bible he holds aloft, no one can find a promise therein that God will make a person beautiful and attractive, qualified and excellent, healthy and in shape, creative and energetic. Saying it won't make it so, Joe. To fall for that is to reject the authority of Scripture.

If you believe this say -it- and- claim- it-claptrap, I have the seven cities of Cibola I'll sell you.

 

TICKTOCK

 In 1516, a man named Erasmus, a Dutch theologian and widely revered scholar,  went back to the original Greek of the New Testament and published it in its original language. He put parallel to it, not the official Latin translation but his own Latin version. He did this because he was naively hoping that it would prompt a healthy reform in the Roman Catholic Church. But he didn't realize that he had produced a ticking time bomb that would change the world and fracture the religious system of his day in such a way that it could never be put together as it was. 

In the irony of historical ironies, he dedicated his work to the pope, who then sent him a letter expressing  his gratitude and thanks along with his commendation for the work. His gratitude was premature. The book that was a bomb had now begun ticking. What Erasmus had done would have ramifications he had never dreamed of.

In Matthew 4:17, for example, he found that the Latin Vulgate which had held sway for over a thousand years had Jesus say, "Do penance." Erasmus translated the Greek word, "be penitent." Then he started the bomb ticking when he translated the word properly as, "change your mind." This meant that Jesus was not instigating the external sacrament of penance, as Rome had taught for eons, but was speaking of the internal need for sinners to change their minds. That one word would be the bomb.

The problem didn't stop there. If Rome was wrong on Matthew 4:17, where else might they have erred? That would raise the question of what kind of a spiritual authority were the popes and the entire system they represented and proclaimed? It was the Bible in its original language that was the time bomb at the feet of the pope who now had the truth in his hands. Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticktock.

Not even Erasmus realized the significance of his accomplishment, His work became the basis for Martin Luther’s German translation of the New Testament, William Tyndale’s English translation, and the Hungarian and Spanish translations.

From this we have the famous statement, "Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched."

IT STILL IS REARING ITS UGLY HEAD

 There's a type of Bible "teaching" that, although it's thousands of years old, we see it rear its ugly head repetitively in church after church at 11 AM Sunday after Sunday. This type of teaching started with the ancient Greeks in regard to their precious Iliad and The Odyssey. 

From there, the Jews adopted it because there were parts of the Old Testament they decided were embarrassing. Still alive, the church fathers, going against the teaching method of Christ and the Apostles, brought it into the church.

There's a name for the method; it's called the allegorical. Its adherents are able to find hidden meanings in the words of the Scriptures, and, in so doing, twist the clear and present meaning of the literal words into something completely different than what the author has written. The peddlers of this method find a meaning below the surface. For example, the preacher deliteralizes  Second Coming of Christ and finds the hidden meaning: the Second Coming becomes Christ's coming into the heart of the believer at his conversion. The fire on an Old Testament altar becomes the Holy Spirit. 

The congregation, hearing this, oohs and ahhs over the brilliance of the pastor who is coming up with these hidden meanings out of thin air, little realizing that the Bible has now become putty in his hands. 

Augustine, often referred to as a brilliant theologian, was an allegorizer on steroids as we see in his treatment of the story of the Good Samaritan. I have reproduced what he did to the story word for word.

 Read it and weep:

 "A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho;  Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, an dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely; of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead.  The priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by, signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament which could profit nothing for salvation. Samaritan means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which He deigned to come to us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travelers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage. The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come. The innkeeper is the Apostle (Paul). The supererogatory payment is either his counsel of celibacy, or the fact that he worked with his own hands lest he should be a burden to any of the weaker brethren when the Gospel was new, though it was lawful for him 'to live by the gospel.'"

The method didn't cease to exist with Augustine. You've heard pastors use it time and time again: Christ calming the storm becomes Christ solving the storms of our problems; David's slaying of the giant Goliath becomes how to deal with our "giant problems." Christ's resurrection becomes His "comeback" and "you can have a comeback too." 

If this is what you're hearing at church, go out and find a Bible teacher who uses the method of Christ and the Apostles: the literal, grammatical, and historical method. Start this Sunday and don't quit until you do.

AN EASTER DEBACLE

We begin with one word: debacle. To be precise, we begin with a complete collapse or failure that, to state the sad fact, few seem to recognize. The collapse occurred in the aftermath of a well-known Easter (better yet, Resurrection Sunday) play. 

The play is a marathon rivaling "Gone With the Wind" in running time--around 3 and a half hours. (I've never seen GWTW because I've always fallen asleep somewhere in its progression.) The play features a great deal of music which consumes some of those 3.5 hours. It's just too long for my tastes. But, that's just me, one of my quirks that pronounces some movies, plays, or books as too long. As I've heard, if one were to read "Moby Dick," to complete the book would take the average reader almost 8 hours and he would have to swim through many, many pages before the great white whale first shows up. 

The play is all about the words and works of Christ, climaxing with the death and resurrection. Then after the play came the pastoral exhortation to the audience to "Stay in your seats, stop moving around, and listen to me for the next few minutes." It was then that the Easter debacle ("failure" and "collapse") began with what's called, "The invitation." 

He kept telling the congregation to stop and sit down. He said, "If you keep moving around, some people may go to hell." (No one will be able to use the excuse, "You can't send me to hell because people were moving around." They will be, in the words of Paul in Romans, "Without excuse."

The collapse was immediate as the speaker began ti address the unsaved who had just seen the play, "If you're here tonight and you haven't submitted your life to Jesus Christ and you want to begin that journey tonight, could there be a better time? It's time to give your life to Jesus Christ. We want you to give your life to Jesus Christ. He continued.

"Friend, if you want to make it right with God, I want you to pray this prayer and really mean it with all your heart. Let me be clear; this prayer doesn't save you. Your faith in Jesus saves you. 

"So when you pray this prayer and you really mean it with all your heart, and you're ready to submit your life to your Lord Jesus Christ, I want you to pray this prayer  and meant it with all your heart: 'Lord Jesus, I'm a sinner and Lord Jesus, I'm sorry  for my sins, I'm so sorry for my sins, I'm asking you to forgive me of my sins. I know you died for me; I know that I'm a sinner. Lord Jesus, save me,would you save my soul and forgive my sins, Lord Jesus, help me, help me to live for you, Lord Jesus, save me' "

After that, he asked those who had done that to raise their hands with every head bowed and every eye closed.

The difficulties abound. The pastor began with, "If you're here tonight and you haven't submitted your life to Christ .. ." What goes unnoticed by the assembled is that "submit" isn't a requirement for eternal life in a verse they all know, John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." Where is "submit?"

Without their realizing the pastor as added four words to the verse so that it reads, ". . . . whosoever believes in Him and submits to Him has everlasting life."

The Easter debacle continued with the pastor's requirement that to be saved, a person must be "sorry for my  sins, so sorry for my sins. This idea is there because he thinks the word "repent" means "feel sorry for" but it means "to change one's mind." When a person does believe as John 3:16 says, he has "changed his mind."

The failure didn't stop there. Next, the pastor tells the person to ask Jesus for forgiveness so he can be saved. "Believing" is in John 3:16, "asking" is not. Asking comes across as pleading or begging.

There are many things this congregation hasn't noticed, and a major one was right there in front of them when we rewind the tape and go back to what the pastor said two minutes earlier: "This prayer doesn't save you. Faith in Christ saves you." That IS in John 3:16, only a better way to biblically say it is that we're saved THROUGH faith.  In reality, Christ saves us  through faith. But my point isn't that; my point is that he's just said, "faith saves you." But then he contradicts that statement by saying,  "Submission" saves you. Asking Jesus to forgive you sins saves you. Then giving your life to Jesus saves you."

Where are all those words, "give your life to Christ," "I'm sorry for my sins, really sorry," "submit," "ask Jesus to save you," and "help me to live for you," in I Corinthians 15:3-4? John 3:16? And Acts 16:32:3? 

Those words are not there.

 

POKER AND A FALSE GOSPEL

There 's a tern used by poker players (so I'm told) called a "tell." For the uninitiated, a tell is a change in a player's behavior or demeanor that is claimed by some to give clues to that player's assessment of their hand. What's psychologically fascinating about a tell is that the player commits the tell unconsciously; he has no idea that what he's doing is communicating to his opponents the contents of the cards upon which he's gazing. 

There's a tell by which you can spot a proud person.Whenever he  does something that isn't easy, he swells with pride. It wasn't easy for him to do his first job interview. But when he's done, he's proud about the fact that he managed to do it well. He was proud because he did something that wasn't easy. He can't wait to tell you how great he performed many, many times. 

That's the way it is with a false gospel. There's a tell that goes along with it. Here's an example of a false gospel, brought to you by an organization that promotes this "gospel:" "Salvation is certainly free, but, at the same time, it costs us everything. Salvation is a free gift from God to those who believe, but discipleship and obedience are the response that will no doubt occur when one truly comes to Christ in faith." (The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association)

With a twist of the English language, the BGEA giveth and the BGEA taketh away by saying, "Salvation is certainly free, but, at the same time, it costs us everything." The logical fallacy is evident on its face, and all the more so when we leave out parts of the sentence: "Salvation is certainly free . . . but at the same time, it costs everything." Wait a minute! "It's free but at the same time, it costs?" That would be like my saying, "This BMW is absolutely free. But it'll cost you your house, your savings account, your checking account, and your pension fund. Everything."

Where does this idea come from, this idea that we're saved by faith but that salvation will cost you everything? One of the places it comes from is from those who do what Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to do in 1937 by proposing the packing of the Supreme Court to get his New Deal proposals approved. There are those who pack the word "faith" and expand it to mean "a lifetime of good works." The packers are legion,but some famous names are James Montgomery Boice, John  MacArthur, R. C. Sproul, and Wayne Grudem who all say that everlasting life is received by faith alone, apart from works. But then . . . hold on ....

But then they define faith in such a way as to include or guarantee a lifetime of good works, cramming it into "faith."They put it this way: "We are to die to ourselves as we change into the likeness of Christ. Where easy believism fails is its lack of recognition that a person with faith in Jesus will lead a progressively changed life."

It's easy to see how such an earned salvation can lead to an overweening and insufferable pride. "I did it! I changed! I gave up smoking! I quit watching R rated movies! I'm now singing in the church choir!" But read Romans 3:26-27--. . . [S]o that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.Where then is boasting? It has been excluded. By what kind of law ("principle")? Of works? No, but by a law ("principle") of faith."

Notice how they slam "faith alone in Christ alone" by calling it "easy believism.' It's a derogatory term that flies in the face of the Bible which clearly says faith, believing, IS easy. It never presents faith as hard to do; it presents faith as the ONLY thing to do. 

Is taking a sip of water easy? Is eating a piece of bread easy? Is looking easy? Is receiving a gift easy? These are all pictures of faith found in the Bible: Is. 45:22; John 3; John 1:12; John 6:51; John 7:37; John 4; Revelation 22:17. This is precisely where II Cor. 11:3 enters the playing field: " But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his trickery, your minds will be led astray from the SIMPLICITY and pure devotion to Christ.Yes, faith is easy as the Bible says.

They call faith alone "easy believism." But, as one pastor asked, "What is 'hard believism?" Good question.

The fact is that even within Christianity, the majority don't believe that salvation is without cost. Yet, the Bible signs off with God's final invitation to man to come and do something easy: ". . . come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost."

THE EMORY UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR AND THE BLIND GIRL

 An English professor at Emory University sits in his campus office having a discussion with a blind female student. He wants to discuss the agitation on the campus at the coming of a conservative speaker who will address those students who want to hear what he has to say. The visiting speaker is one of those we might characterize as a comet--he's having his short-lived run of fame and then he'll  disappear into celebrity oblivion. 

The professor has noted that there's going to be an assemblage of dissenters who've already gone to the president of the prestigious university to make their heated demands that the school disinvite a person who'll spread "hate"  on their  campus. They, of course, will be demonstrating against him if he's not disinvited. (We've seen some of these agitators turn violent to make sure that if such a speaker comes and makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe, they'll shout at him, chant at him, and heckle him until he gives up and has to leave the campus under guard. (It's called "the heckler's veto.")

The professor is mystified: Why are those students so outraged? He wants to hear the young lady's viewpoint by answering his question, "Why are they so upset?" She, being "a millennial," knows why, although the learned professor doesn't. She answers him in one sentence.

She says: "Because everyone deserves to be happy," meaning that the person's lecture will make some students unhappy and feel unsafe and shouldn't be allowed because "everyone has a right to be happy." In fact, just his very presence on campus will make many feel uncomfortable and unsafe. 

The professor gave her statement some deep, long, and hard consideration. He recognized that this was the majority viewpoint of youth today--everyone has a right to be happy. He began to think about what has caused such a false and unrealistic worldview to be so widespread. He came to some important conclusions. 

First of all, not everyone is going to be happy all of the time. There are 32 teams in the NFL. At the end of the Super Bowl each year, only one of the 32 teams will be happy. At the end of every football, basketball, and baseball game, only one team is happy. When hundreds of students apply to the college of their dreams, only the ones admitted will be happy. When two people are being considered for a career promotion, one will be unhappy. In 2022, there were 48,000 unhappy people: they were so unhappy, they killed themselves. The list can go on.

The professor asked himself, "Where in the world did this idea come from, that everyone has the right to be happy?" He asked because a study of history would  them otherwise (all Utopias fail); the Bible tells them otherwise; great art tells them otherwise; wisdom tells them otherwise, great literature tells them otherwise; common sense tells them otherwise; and certainly their own personal experience tells them otherwise. An examination of all those subjects would have told her that "everyone has a right to be happy" is false on the face of it.

And then the erudite professor realized that the girl was blind, not physically, but spiritually. And why was that? Because her education or, better yet, the lack thereof  had blocked her from seeing the truth. History? Gone from the curriculum. Great literature? Banned from English classes. She doesn't read anyway. Great art? She has no frame of reference for that. The Bible? No way.  She's been taught it's just one more old, irrelevant book. She has no wisdom because "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (That's in the "old, irrelevant" Book.) The professor concluded, she and her generation are not only blind, but also they can't be reasoned with.

There's no place on God's green earth where anyone is happy all the time. That's the dream of a Utopia which will never be on this earth. There's no getting back to Eden. This leads her and two previous  generations to anger and frustration and demand the building of  the Seven Cities of Cibola. Their theme song is the song from the 1960s, "The Impossible Dream."

IS THE GOSPEL REALLY "GOOD NEWS?"

 If you were to go back to yesteryear, a yesteryear a long time ago, back to the ancient Greeks, they didn't use the word "gospel" in the technical sense we do today to mean the good news about salvation. No, they used it in reference to the good news of a military victory for example. Only with the coming of Christianity and subsequent centuries did the word take on the meaning of good news about the coming of Christ. 

Spurgeon claimed, "Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else."  Another wrote, "Calvinism is the Gospel and to teach Calvinism is in fact to preach the gospel." And there's someone else who wrote, "Calvinism is the Gospel. Its outstanding doctrines are simply he truths that make up the gospel." 

The question is, is the gospel of Calvinism "good news" since the very word means exactly that?

To examine this, let's look at a statement by John Calvin: "We call predestination God's eternal decree, by which He compacted with Himself what He willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others. Therefore, as any man has been created to one or the other of these ends, we speak of him as predestined to life or death." 

This "compact with Himself" occurred way back in eternity past before the creation of man. Therefore, your destiny, everyone's future state, heaven or hell, was set in stone before anyone was born. Neither you nor anyone else have zero to say about going to heaven or hell. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

So, what's the answer to the question at hand:  

"The biblical gospel is the good news about what Jesus Christ has done on the cross respecting our sins. The gospel of Calvinism is likewise good news--but only if you are one of the 'elect' . . . to the non-elect, Calvinism is not good news at all--it is an eternal death sentence." (Lawrence M. Vance)

Is it any wonder that there is now a large number who are abandoning Calvinism and leaving Christianity altogether; that Calvinism is causing some to ask, "What kind of love is that?" others are brought to tears over such a God, more are saying, "I can't worship a God like that," and some to  become flat-out atheists?