Bethel Church’s “Apostle” Bill Johnson: A Comedy of Errors, Part 2

Before I report on Apostle Bill’s endeavor to involve his followers in his “grave sucking,” undertaking, I must tell you a brief story that involves an angel, a gift, and slaying a dragon.

May 2005

Wednesday night at half past 11, I was in bed reading when a white lightning bolt struck the floor and out stepped a dazzling creature with wings the length of a 747.  “Do not fear!” he said when he saw the alarmed expression on my face. “I am the angel Archibald!”  My husband was sacked out next to me with a pillow over his head so he announced in a quiet voice, “I have come with a message from the Lord of hosts.”

A flood of feathers floated around the room so I covered my nose and mouth with both hands.  But it was too late.  “Ah-choo!”

“God bless you!” said the angel.

Now I was certain that he was the Lord’s messenger.  I tapped my husband on the back and whispered, “Wake up.”  Dead to the world.  A poke in the ribs and, “Honey…you gotta see this.”

A muffled voice groaned, “Whuuut?”

“We have a visitor.”

The pillow came off his head and he sat bolt upright in bed.  Seconds later he spotted Archibald hovering in the corner.  “Holy cow!” he exclaimed.

“Cow?” said the angel, seeming a bit cross.  “Hardly!”  His eyes shifted from my stunned husband and settled on me.  In a strong clear voice he stated matter-of-factly: “The Spirit of God has bestowed upon you a new gift.  Forthwith you will become a blogger.”

He eyed me quizzically, waiting for my response.  When none was forthcoming, he said firmly, “You are to use your new gift to expose ravenous wolves that have slipped into the sheep pen under the cover of darkness.  These wolves are teaching doctrines of demons…”

I didn’t have to ask what he meant by doctrines of demons.  He had to be alluding to Word of Faith…New Apostolic Reformation…Purpose Driven…Emergent…Social Justice…New Age…New Thought and other false teaching that had made its way into churches and seminaries while our shepherds snoozed.  “I’ve tried telling people about false teaching, I said to myself, “but what I say goes in one ear and out the other.”

I heard the angel say: “There are counterfeits who call themselves new apostles and prophets.  These men and women are giving Him (he glanced up at the ceiling) a bad name. Expose them as false teachers!”  His wings ceased fluttering and he became as still as a stone.  “Are you ready to serve the King?

“Are you kidding me?”  I exclaimed in disbelief.  “First of all, I’m not gifted to write – or at least I wasn’t, until now.”  I searched for excuses.  “And…and I got a B in English by the skin of my teeth—“

The angel cut me off sharply.  “Certainly you do not think this is news to Him (he glanced up at the ceiling).”

True.  God knows all things, including my grades in college.  Perhaps He wanted to get me out of my comfort zone.  Writing a blog would definitely accomplish that.   One last try: “But…um… I’m nobody!  No one will listen to a word I say.”

“Some will listen,” Archibald assured me.  “And others will fall for lies. It is always that way with humans.”

I turned to my husband and said, “Tell him no one will take me seriously.”

My husband came out of his stupor and said in a serious tone, “God uses nobodies all the time.  But there’s a catch.  You’ve got to be willing.”  He looked me straight in the eye. “Are you?”

Am I willing, I wondered?   I needed but a moment to ponder his question.  Yes, I guess I am, I said to myself.  I’m more than willing.  Suddenly I felt as if I could go out and slay a dragon.  “OK, I’ll do it!” I glanced over at my husband.  “The two of us can do it together.”

We high-fived and he said with a grin, “We make a good team.”

I gave Archibald a thumbs up.  “We’re in.”

Poof!  The angel disappeared, feathers and all.

—–

The next morning I found a large silver feather on the floor where Archibald had appeared to us.  He had left his calling card.

Bentley’s Angels

In I covered ’s rock-star evangelist Todd Bentley and the shame he brought on the Name of our Lord and how “Super Apostles” Bill Johnson and Rick Joyner restored him to ministry despite his obvious character flaws. There were exaggerated healings and dangerous “healing” practices that included assaulting the sick with leg drops, high kicks and head punches which he claimed the Lord told him to do to people who came to him for help.  Moreover, Bentley drank excessively, committed adultery and soon thereafter left his wife and children and married the . There’s a whole lot more to report on the fraud evangelist, but space does not allow.  So – why bring him up again?  Because he says him.  It’s not uncommon for people who are into “signs and wonders” strange manifestations, and other esoteric experiences to boast of angel visitations.  Two angels who supposedly come to Bentley are and the Winds of Change.  Winds is supposedly “a high-ranking angel over all the ones assigned to healing, breakthrough and revival unto harvest.”

To the best of my knowledge Todd Bentley has never met the Angel Archibald.  But I have.  Or have I?

Do you see the problem? I made up a story and so can you.  Anyone with a vivid imagination can make up a story about angel visitations, trips to heaven, and whatnot.   But there’s no way to validate all the wild claims people make.  Sadly, NAR leaders pitch their stories to gullible sheeple who want desperately to believe that their heroes would never lie to them. This might explain why “Super Apostle” Rick Joyner’s followers hang on his every word as he looks straight into a video camera and testifies that he’s been to heaven.  During one of his many visits he claims the Lord handed him the key to eternal joy.  Watch the he made and you’ll see that I’m not making this up.  In it Apostle Rick crows that he’s had a number of encounters with , and he knows many others who’ve had Elijah encounters too!  He’s quick to point out that it’s not necromancy (communicating with the dead) because Elijah was taken up to heaven without dying.  At 9:20 minutes you’ll learn how he met Enoch.

But this is not about Rick Joyner’s spiritual gift of pulling the wool over the sheep’s eyes.  So I’ll move on.

Grave Sucking

It’s hard to imagine anything more ludicrous than “grave sucking” yet Apostle Bill endorses this macabre practice.  Grave sucking aka “mantle grabbing” occurs when the Holy Spirit draws powers from the bones of a deceased person who, while alive, was allegedly Spirit empowered.  Since God’s mission for the dead is thwarted when he dies, the Spirit passes on his powers to individuals who visit their graves.

According to Victory Ministries, Apostle Bill led a group to John Lake’s grave where the following ensued:

He was looking for Lake’s anointing to heal the sick by a supernatural power. The people seeking this new paranormal anointing prostrated themselves upon Lake’s grave weeping, worshipping and expecting that Lake’s ministry power would strike them and his spirit would infuse them with a sign and wonders ministry like he had when he was alive.  Thus, a new preternatural cult was formed that day that is now referred to as “grave sucking.”

 Mr. Johnson testified about this bazaar act of desecration and necromancy (the practice of attempting to communicate with the spirits of the dead in order to predict or influence the future) that he and his group committed on Sid Roth’s radio show, “It’s Supernatural”

Johnson spun a weird mystical/Occult experience tale to Sid Roth about meeting the Late John Lake’s angel in the building where Lake had previously ministered in his healing rooms. He testified that two ladies went to a back room and they met a giant angel there that healed one of the women. They called Johnson and when he came into the room, he claimed there was an angel about 10 feet tall. Sid asked him, did you see the angel? Johnson replied “No, but I knew he was there and the angel said to me, ‘What took you so long, I’ve been here for 80 years!’” ()

It should surprise no one that Bill Johnson claims that he had a tête-à-tête with an angel.

What does the Bible say about playing around in the spirit realm?:

Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.  ()

Bethel School Of Sorcery

Apostle Bill runs the  in Redding CA.  According to its website:

(BSSM) is committed to the truth that God loves people, gave Himself for them and has given His Church supernatural power to bring individuals and nations into wholeness. The mission of BSSM is to equip and deploy revivalists who passionately pursue world-wide transformation in their God-given spheres of influence. Students are trained to continue in the ministry style of Jesus: to enjoy the presence of God, say what He is saying, and do what He is doing. (emphasis added)

Basically, BSSM trains people to heal the sick and raise the dead.  This raises the question: why do these folks not bring dead people back to life in America, Canada and western European countries?  Why only in the developing countries?  If the dearly departed are coming out of their graves in the developed countries, the media would surely report on it.

Insanity

The describes one man’s experience at Bethel Church (BC):

After a strange experience with an erratic Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry student who baby-sat his children, Bart McCurdy of Cottonwood decided to find out for himself what was going on at Bethel.

McCurdy said he attended a Friday night service at the church, during which he saw people painting on stage, dancing and flailing around on the ground. He found their worship music unconventional when one line of the same song was played for at least 11 minutes, he said.

McCurdy said the repetitive music, dancing, painting and excessive stimuli serve to get people worked up into an emotional frenzy where they’re expecting to see miraculous things.

“They come looking for that feel-good feeling, that high, for supposed miracles, supposed signs and wonders, speaking in tongues, gold dust, diamonds, feathers[floating down from the ceiling]. … It seems like they’re just ready for it,” he said.

Once, as she ran through her house frantically searching for her journals, the baby sitter told McCurdy the anti-Christ was in her house and Jesus was in hell saving people, he said. Shortly after that, she went into a trancelike state and said she felt 20 feet tall before losing consciousness…. The behavior made him believe she was demon-possessed, he said.

McCurdy said he regularly downloads podcasts of Bethel messages and hasn’t heard the Christian gospel message taught at Bethel. …

Then what gospel does Apostle Bill preach if not the taught in the Bible?  He teaches the (WoF) that saves no one.  What is the true gospel message?

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. ()

See also

Despite the fact that Apostle Bill teaches a false gospel he’s hugely popular with many professing Christians.  His book sales are in the millions.  He’s become so popular that a large number of churches around the globe are affiliated with BC.  This speaks volumes as to the current state of evangelicalism.  Sadly, a growing number of believers have zero discernment, thus they accept every “wind of doctrine.”  Translation: Every sort of false teaching that blows their way.

A Challenge

Christians have been warned that , as some call it, represents a danger to millions of people around the globe, especially to (low information evangelicals) and the unsaved.  Because of self-professed apostles and prophets such as C. Peter Wagner, Rick Joyner (mentioned in part ), Bill Johnson and a , we’ve seen an unbridled abuse of the Holy Spirit.  After reading this series, I challenge you to do your own research (links below).  Before starting, pray that God will reveal truth to you.  What you’ll discover is that teaching isn’t remotely close to historic orthodox Christianity — and it certainly isn’t the Christianity for which the martyrs shed their blood!  Flee from it!

Part 1

Resources:

—Phil Johnson interviews John MacArthur

–By John Lanagan

1. –Around 54:00 minutes into the session, Wagner responds during the Q&A. He tells the audience that when the Holy Spirit stopped revealing things through the written Word, He kept on revealing new things to us through the “Rhema Word.” He claims that the Holy Spirit still speaks to us today by giving us information that you cannot find in the 66 books of the Bible; info that the Bible doesn’t address, but it’s not contradictory.

—Tony Miano, host of Cross Encounters radio, discusses, among other things, the music of BC’s music team Jesus Culture (more below). Listen to Tony tell of his Twitter chat with Beni Johnson, Bill’s pastorette wife.

…scroll down—Apologetics Index

—On Solid Rock resources

–On Solid Rock Resources

Bethel Church’s Music & Entertainment:

—Ken Silva

—Amy Spreeman

Watch And Weep:

—My Word Like Fire

Helpful Scripture:

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,

,

Bethel Church’s “Apostle” Bill Johnson: A Comedy of Errors, Part 1

Bill Johnson is no stranger to controversy.  For one thing, he claims to be an apostle, as in the unique position held by the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ.  He was given this high honor by C. Peter Wagner who holds many titles himself, including president of Global Harvest Ministries, chancellor of Wagner Leadership Institute, convening apostle of theNew Apostolic Roundtable, and my personal favorite: presiding apostle of (ICA).  So for the purpose of this article I’ll dub him Presiding Apostle Peter or PA Peter for short.   What’s important to know about him is that he’s sort of like the pope of the “new apostolic-prophetic movement.”

Following is ICA’s definition of modern day apostle:

An apostle is a Christian leader gifted, taught, commissioned, and sent by God with the authority to establish the foundational government of the church within an assigned sphere of ministry by hearing what the Spirit is saying to the churches and by setting things in order accordingly for the growth and maturity of the church.

What role do the so-called apostles play?  There are a couple of tasks, says PA Peter.  First, apostles are to “set things in order” and “they’re to assure that the body of Christ is operating on the basis of sound, biblical doctrine.”

Sound biblical doctrine my Aunt Fanny!

PA Peter and his self-proclaimed apostles and prophets are out-and-out false teachers!  These men and women (yes, there are women apostles) are well aware that accusations of heresy have been leveled against them by a large number of highly regarded orthodox Bible scholars and still they continue the pretense.

In this two part series you’ll discover the many twists and turns the new apostolic-prophetic movement has taken over the years and why those of us who are in an online discernment ministry believe it is a clear and present danger to the Body of Christ, thus we will continue warning the brethren.  ()

Now, keep in mind that the men and women involved in this heretical movement are sincere in their belief that they’re in the same league as the Old Testament prophets and the Lord’s hand-picked disciples who later became the Twelve Apostles.  The leaders have convinced their followers that the office of apostleship is not reserved for a select few, as the Bible teaches.  Moreover, they’ve led people to believe that Christ is once again choosing apostles and prophets to preside over His Church.  Listen to ’ dire warning:

Those claiming the office of apostle seek authority equal to, or at least rivaling, the authority of the original twelve apostles. There is absolutely no biblical evidence to support such an understanding of the role of apostle today. This would fit with the New Testament’s warning against false apostles ().

So – if it’s true that Christ is giving authority to a select few apostles and prophets why, pray tell, would our Lord give it to individuals who possess questionable character?  I’ll have more on this in a moment.

Suffice it to say C. Peter Wagner and Bill Johnson believe that the Lord has given them the authority to rule over the Church.  So – if it’s also true that the so-called apostles arecalled by Christ to form a government to control the Church and that they will hold Church leaders accountable then who, pray tell, is going to hold them accountable?

Itching Ears

Without getting too far afield, since the new apostolic-prophetic movement’s inception it has been referred to in a number of different ways, i.e. …Latter Rain……Manifest[ed] Sons of God…Kingdom Now…Charismatic Renewal…Positive Confession and a few others.  Its current handle, (NAR), was coined by Presiding Apostle Peter in the 1990s.  He “reinvigorated the Latter Rain/Manifest Sons of God false prophecies about a great endtime revival accompanied by signs and wonders.”  As I said, NAR leaders teach that God is restoring the lost offices of church governance – and they are His chosen ones to bring it to fruition!

Do not be surprised:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions,;and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths

In Paul’s final warning to the Church he never suggested that they embrace new movements.  On the contrary, he warned that they would not listen to the truth.  Commentator clarifies:

Having itching ears; for their ears itch, and they must have those that will scratch them. The disease of lust in their souls brings forth an itch in their ears, that they will have a mind to hear only such as will by scratching please them.

Shall they heap to themselves teachers, will be finding out teachers, not according to God’s, but to their own hearts; and there will be plenty of them to be found, they shall heap them up, choosing them without any judgment, regarding nothing but whether they will not be smart upon their lusts. (emphasis in original)

Paul’s message throughout his entire letter was that the church must “follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me” (1:13); “guard the good deposit entrusted to you (1:14); “what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2:2).

Unity Over Doctrine

Now to Bill Johnson, head pastor of Bethel Church (BC).  BC’s leadership holds to the theology of the (WoF) movement.  WoF doctrine teaches the occult belief that:

He [God] framed the world with His words. You can’t build without substance. He took words — faith-Filled words were God’s substance. Here, essentially, is what God did. God filled His words with faith. He used His words as containers to hold His faith and contain that spiritual force and transport it out there into the vast darkness by saying ‘Light be!’ That’s the way God transported His faith causing creation and transformation. ()

One word: unscriptural!

BC also has its roots in the early1980s movement dubbed by C. Peter Wagner the (TW).

Following is an excerpt from Apologetics Index.  What they’ve laid out here should help prevent people from getting drawn into TW:

[D]istinctives of the Third Wave movement include — but are not limited to — the following:

• The baptism with the Holy Spirit is identified with conversion. This is unlike other Pentecostal movements, in which the baptism with the Spirit is either a separate and/or a recurring experience.
• the belief that the spiritual gifts are valid for today; that Christians can ask for, receive and learn how to use these spiritual gifts (and become better at using them with practice.
• the belief that the primary use of the is for ministry in the power and anointing of the Holy Spirit – both to bless and heal those inside the church and to minister to those outside the church (“.”). This ministry includes , , , etcetera.
• active promotion of unity — sometimes at any cost (e.g. the ‘s acceptance of certain Word-Faith teachers. “ over “
• the belief that people, Christians included, can be possessed (or ‘demonized’ — or ‘oppressed,’ something seen as a lesser form of possession) by evil spirits with or without their consent
• the belief that objects or places can project evil influence and act as conduits for demonic oppression
• the belief that traumatic events, either in our lives or in our ancestral past, can make us particularly vulnerable to demonic influence, possession or oppression
• the belief that some Christians — using appropriate spiritual gifts — can identify and cast out demonic spirits
• a general acceptance of theology, which has led to the practice of so-called ‘‘ or SLSW — an unbiblical concept in which Christians identify (through ‘‘) and then target (with SLSW) ‘.’ (all links are AI’s)  ()

WoF and TW leaders are false teachers.  (You’ll find the names of these as well as many other false teachers on my .)   Over the years self-proclaimed apostles and prophets have managed to coax undiscerning individuals to involve themselves in some of the strangest physical manifestations imaginable.  Those who participate in church services where “signs and wonders” take place like to blame their crude behavior on the Holy Spirit.  Now, try to imagine giants of the faith such as John, Peter, James or even Paul “,” crawling on all fours barking like a dog, clucking like a chicken, jerking and twitching, rolling on the floor, themselves into a convulsive state.  People involved in NAR have done these things in the past and continue them to this day.  When I think about it, it really wouldn’t surprise me to witness Apostle Bill on all fours, nose in the air, howling like a wolf.  But I digress.

Two Super Apostles Restore A Fraud

During the alleged Lakeland Outpouring aka Lakeland Revival in Florida, a story hit the news that put NAR evangelist Todd Bentley in a bad light.  It was revealed that that the rock-star evangelist was in an adulterous relationship with a female intern – and suddenly all hell broke loose.  In my column “” I scrutinized the NAR’s leaders and pointed out that Apostle Bill,

calls those who exposed Todd Bentley as a false prophet “sharks.” He also says:

“I’ll never blame the opponents [sharks] of this outpouring for Todd’s choices [sin].  However, it had a greater effect on the outcome than any of his critics will likely own up to in this lifetime. History proves this.”

(More on the Bentley brouhaha , and .)

Apostle Bill and fellow apostate – oops! — apostle-prophet decided to involve themselves in Bentley’s “.”  Just so you know, Rick Joyner’s the founder and Executive Director of MorningStar Publications and Ministries and is a big promoter of the “new breed” of apostles and prophets.

Both Bill Johnson and Rick Joyner, who are seasoned apostle-prophets, claim to hold the title “Super-Apostle” and/or “Super-Prophet” which is comparable to holding the high office of cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.  Chew on that for a moment.  As an aside I should mention that some “” have been accused of using cultic mind control techniques on those they prey upon.

Listen to Apostle Rick pontificate about how he sees himself:

Even though I have not been able to go to journalism school, or even Bible school, in many ways I would not trade my education for anyone’s. Like Paul, I can say that what I received I did not receive from men.

I mean, really, are we supposed to believe him?  And why would we?

Now, back to Bentley.  Bringing this man under submission took place following his divorce and after he married the woman, who, by the way, wasn’t the only woman he had an extra marital affair with.  Apostle Bill was well aware that the fraud-evangelist had had a .  Both “Super-Apostles” knew that he was drunk during his Lakeland stage act yet they chose to return him to ministry.  But, then, no one has ever accused NAR leaders of doing much of anything by .

Todd Bentley is no more qualified for ministry than is disgraced televangelist/prosperity preacher , who was incarcerated for fleecing the flock (fraud).  After his release from prison, what did Bakker do?  Still craving attention, he returned to .

So – how should churches handle a person in a leadership role when he/she brings shame on the Name of our Lord Jesus?  I’ve already addressed this topic in my column entitled   In a nutshell the biblical way to handle it is for the church hierarchy to apply an appropriate level of discipline necessary to bring the person to true repentance.  Church leaders who have a “moral failing” must publically repent of his/her sin against God.  They then must seek spiritual guidance and accountability and move out of the limelight altogether.  Once the person’s restored, he/she’s most often encouraged to serve the Lord behind the scenes.  Sadly, this hasn’t been the case with Todd Bentley.  And the reason for this is that the self-appointed Super Apostles Bill and Rick found it in their hearts—not in the Bible—to reinstate the man to public ministry.

I’ll close part 1 with a plea from a genuine apostle:

I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naive. ()

Part 2 coming up!

Resources:

—Phil Johnson interviews John MacArthur

–By John Lanagan

1. –Around 54:00 into the session, Wagner responds to a question during the Q&A. He tells the audience that when the Holy Spirit stopped revealing things through the written Word, He kept on revealing new things to us through the “Rhema Word.” He claims that the Holy Spirit still speaks to us today by giving us information that you cannot find in the 66 books of the Bible, info that the Bible doesn’t address, but it’s not contradictory.

—Tony Miano, host of Cross Encounters radio, discusses, among other things, the music of BC’s music team Jesus Culture (more below). Listen to Tony tell of his Twitter chat with Beni Johnson, Bill’s pastorette wife.

…scroll down—Apologetics Index

–On Solid Rock Resources

Bethel Church’s Music & Entertainment:

—Ken Silva

—Amy Spreeman

Watch And Weep:

—My Word Like Fire

Christian Meditation: What’s Biblical And What’s Not

In Joshua 1:8 God said: “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it.”  So, what exactly did God have in mind when He told Joshua to meditate on His word?  Well we can be certain of one thing.  The Lord was not suggesting that Joshua sit in the lotus position and repeat a mantra until he attained .  “These help bring one into states other than normal waking consciousness, in which a person becomes open to mystical experience, the spirit realm, or cosmic consciousness,” warns .

The sort of meditation God had in mind was not Eastern meditation.  He has made it clear that His people are not to adopt pagan practices and those who do are out of His will. The purpose of eastern-style meditation is to “seek the God within.”  That’s , brethren.  People who hold this view believe that God is all and all is God.  “A tree is God, a rock is God, an animal is God, the sky is God, the sun is God, you are God, etc.”  The biblical view is that God is separate from His creation.  

More on biblical meditation in a moment, but first…

Sit Still!

Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still and know that I am God.”  There’s been a huge misunderstanding in the Christian community as to what this verse means.  Let’s take a look at noted Bible teacher Kay Arthur’s Precept Ministries International (PMI) to see if she has it right:

Can you remember the last time you sat in total silence except for the sounds of nature – listening intently to hear the voice of God.   It is time to:

Be still and know that I am God. –

Be still (cease striving)

Rest, relax, chill out, stop fighting, drop your weapons

Know that I am God

Learn that I am God, or “see that I am God”, “Get to know me better”

God is telling His children who are living in a busy world to stop, get quiet so that they can listen and get to know Him. It is only in stillness, the quiet, that we can hear the voice of God. (Bold PMI’s – )

Ken Silva penned a piece , which is where I came across the above quote.  It could be a coincidence that right after Silva wrote his blog post and upbraided Kay for her erroneous teaching on Psalm , PMI’s webmaster changed the paragraph that begins with God is telling His children to As children of God, who are living in a busy world, we need to stop, get quiet and listen for His voice as we read His Word. God most often speaks in that small still voice. (Bold mine)

So, was Kay Arthur correct in explaining what be still means in context?  Not according to Ken Silva:

This passage isn’t about any kind of meditation; and it has absolutely nothing to do with sitting in some lotus position and subjectively trying to “hear” God’s voice in creeping crickets or inner burblings of bellies. Rather, this is a firm admonition and warning for all nations—particularly His people Israel—to stop worrying and to recognize God’s sovereignty. ()

What do Bible scholars say the meaning is?  One source, Barnes’ Notes on the Bible, states, among other things, that be still is “the idea of leaving matters with God, or of being without anxiety about the issue.”  ( – follow this link to discover what several Bible scholars say the meaning of be still is)

Low-Information Evangelicals

A growing number of low-information evangelicals (low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence — ) endorse meditation, or what’s known as (CP).  This is bad news for the evangelical community as it’s easily provable that CP has its roots in paganism.  In spite of this well-known fact, many LIE-celebs continue to lead people into eastern-style meditation.  Yes, you read that right.  Eastern, as in Buddhism.  Now, some of you are thinking, “Seriously?  Christian leaders are pointing people to Buddhism?”  Bingo!

Unfortunately many LIEs promote problematic pagan practices even though God is adamant when He says:

When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. And because of these abominations theLord your God is driving them out before you. You shall be blameless before the Lord your God, for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you to do this. ()

There’s no question that God’s warning to Israel still pertains today.  His people are not to indulge in pagan idolatry.  This means that Christians who practice a form of meditation that brings him/her into the alpha state is actually defying the God they profess their love for!  That alone should scare the bejeebers out of believers who take that approach to prayer.  And it matters not what the reason is — even if it’s to go “deeper with God.”

Biblical meditation always includes a fully engaged mind.  Listen to Professor of Philosophy Doug Groothuis’ advice on biblical prayer:

The biblical concept of prayer assumes that rational and meaningful communication between God and humans is possible. There is no summons to suspend rational judgment even when prayer through the Holy Spirit is ‘with groans that words cannot express’ (Rom. 8:26).

The manner in which the Christian shall meditate on it day and night is through the reading and study of the Bible.

Space does not allow for a comprehensive explanation of Eastern mysticism. For several years I’ve blogged on the encroachment of mysticism into the visible Church.  For those who wish to learn more on this subject, my articles can be read .

Christian Meditation Made Clear

Now to the subject at hand — biblical prayer.  It’s important that believers begin each day with the Lord.  What we call “quiet time” involves finding a place to read and pray where there are no distractions — so turn off that cell phone!  Before reading, ask the to illuminate your mind and reveal truth.  Also ask Him to help you make the biblical principles you’re learning meaningful and practical in your life.  In Charles Spurgeon’s sermon “,” he asks four important questions:

What do these words imply? Secondly, What do they actually mean? Thirdly, How shall we obey them? And, fourthly, Why should WE especially obey them?

These are the sort of questions we should be asking as we read our bibles.  We must stop and ponder what God has spoken through the words on the page. It may be necessary to read a passage repeatedly, reflect on it, analyze it, and listen while the Holy Spirit guides us into all truth.  )

And always consider the context!  Apologist explains how this is done:

I read the paragraph, not just the verse. I take stock of the relevant material above and below. Since the context frames the verse and gives it specific meaning, I let it tell me what’s going on.

Context, context, context!
Because many Christians lead busy lives they fail to put aside time to spend with the Lord.  In point of fact, data shows that most believers spend very little time in their bibles — but there is certainly a whole lotta prayin’ goin’ on.  In this fast food nation in which we live Christians continually fire off bullet prayers hoping God will answer them quickly. Especially if they want the God who grants their wishes to see to it that they find a parking space at the mall during the Christmas rush or stop a torrential downpour when they’re sitting in the stands at an outdoor sporting event.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  God loves it when His people pray umpteen times a day.  Moreover, we’re commanded to “pray without ceasing.” ()  We’re also commanded to abide in Christ:

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. ().

So, not only are we to begin our day with the Lord reading His word and praying, we’re also to abide in (stay around) Christ throughout the day for the reason that there’s an ongoing relationship between the Vine and the branches. Got Questions reminds us:

We need to fill our minds constantly with the things of God; God should always be on our mind, and everything we do should be done with reference to Him (Colossians 3:17; 1 Corinthians 10:31).

When we fail to abide in Christ—fill our minds with the things of God–the fruit we bear, no matter how appealing it appears, is not off Christ’s vine!  In other words, it’s doneapart from Him.

There’s a story in of two sisters, Mary and Martha, who thought differently about how to serve their Master.  When Jesus came to their home Martha stayed in the kitchen preparing food for their guests.  She had developed her own agenda for serving Christ.  Martha became vexed that Mary wasn’t helping with the meal.  What was her sister doing that caused Martha’s consternation?  She was sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening to His words.

It’s certainly no crime to prepare a nice meal for a guest; however, we must remember that we are children of God before we’re servants of God.  Like Mary, we must take time to sit at our Lord’s feet.  Martha was so busy serving Jesus that she neglected Him!

Have I hit a nerve?

Why Pray?

If your prayers are mainly the bullet variety then it would be wise to develop the biblical model of praying.  Biblical prayer is intended for praise, confession and repentance, thanksgiving and asking for others.  In our quiet time with the Lord we find His love.  Through prayer believers are conformed to God’s will.

Prayer isn’t meant to be an esoteric experience.  Nowhere in Scripture does it say that we are to go into altered states of consciousness to commune with God.   As I said above, biblical meditation does not seek the “God within.”  This is the purpose of those who cling to Eastern religion and !

The Christian who truly wishes to please God will let “the words of [your] mouth and the meditation of [your] heart be acceptable in [the LORD’s] sight …” (paraphrased)

Recommended:

—By Ken Silva

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

The Low-Information Evangelical – Part 2

Appearing in part 1 is the phrase “low-information voter” (LIV) which is oft used by a popular radio talk show host.  The host suggests that those who make up this population set are individuals who vote for a candidate or important issue having little or in most cases zero knowledge about either.  LIVs are highly opinionated even when they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Also included in part 1 was the following quote from D. Edmund Wright.  I appreciate the way he expands on the LIV concept:

But forget low-information voters for just a minute; the malignancy that is really destroying this country is low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence.  You know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact.  Such felonies are then carried out by low-information bureaucratic microbes with the power to destroy lives and businesses with impunity, and a political and talking-head class with the access and sway to codify these common malfeasances. Destruction of private property and liberty – and these two concepts are not divisible – takes place in government cubicles every minute of every day across the country.  And why not?  ( – emphasis in original)

His thoughts fit nicely with what I’ve come to believe about many leaders in the evangelical community.  Specifically, a large number of them are uninformed people with high-profile power and/or influence.  The LIVs Wright’s pointing a finger at are liberals.  Likewise many of the evangelicals that came to mind for me are liberals but because liberal has a negative connotation they prefer “progressive Christian” or “.” Take your pick.  But whichever one you go with has its roots in communism.

So to Christianize the LIV phrase I simply changed “voter” to “evangelical,” thus it became “low-information evangelical” (LIE).   I defined the LIE in this way:

Reminiscent of the LIV, the high-profile LIE does not understand the impact that his unorthodox view has on the visible church.  When it comes to the Bible, the LIE has opinions on a variety of challenging topics.  Even when his opinion is decidedly unbiblical, he presents it as the gospel truth.  The LIE’s arguments are often based, not on what God’s Word clearly teaches but instead on esoteric experiences he’s had or what he’s picked up from LIE celebrities.  

More on esoteric experiences in a moment.

There’s also a group of evangelicals that fall into the category of undistinguished LIE (ordinary folk).  The term I bestowed on them is u-LIE.  This group is also uninformed on many things (both Christian and otherwise).  They are often biblically illiterate.  In part 1 I made this observation:

Sadly, some undistinguished low information evangelicals (u-LIEs) assume that popular pastors, teachers and best-selling authors would never steer them wrong.  But nothing could be further from the truth!

Last but not least, I coined the phrase LIE-celebs.  These individuals are prominent Christian leaders who are uninformed people with high-profile power and/or influence.  Many of them are false teachers who do not speak for God.

LIE-celebs And Their Vain Hopes

God tells us how we are to handle false teachers:

Thus says the LORD of hosts: “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD.” ().

We are to pay these folks no mind.

One example of a LIE-celeb is popular women’s Bible teacher .  In part 1 I reported on Moore’s claim that she receives personal direct revelation from Almighty God.  In other words, God tells her things.  According to her, He calls her “baby” and “honey.”  I’ll have more to share on this modern day prophetess in a moment.

LIE-celeb  also claims that she receives extra biblical revelation or “revelation knowledge” from the Almighty.  Both Moore and Meyer’s respective claims clearlydeny the sufficiency of Scripture.   Equally troubling is that Joyce holds to heretical  (WoF) theology.  So naturally her students are swallowing the poisonous prosperity health and wealth gospel that does not save anyone.  Following is an erroneous assertion made by her:

The Bible can’t even find any way to explain this. Not really.  That is why you have got to get it by revelation. There are no words to explain what I am telling you. I have got to just trust God that he is putting it into your spirit like he put it into mine. ()

Why do I say this is erroneous?  Because it’s not taught in the Bible.  She made it up.  How do I know this?  I searched the scriptures.  ()   Nowhere does Scripture teach that God’s people are given special “revelation knowledge.”

“The fact that contemporary evangelicals seek ‘fresh’ revelations from God,” says Larry DeBruyn, “indicates that they no longer consider Holy Scripture to be sufficient and authoritative in matters of faith (). This seeking is Gnostic and mystic.  Harvie Conn …a former missionary in Korea, noted that the ‘central feature of mystical religion is its ‘belief in special revelation outside the Bible.’ Yet if the Bible is no longer considered sufficient, the coming of “new revelations” raises the following conundrum. I repeat it.

“If added revelations repeat what’s in the Bible, they are unnecessary. If new revelations contradict the Word of God, they are heresy. And if they supplement God’s Word, then the new revelations imply Scripture’s insufficiency, and about this Proverbs warns: ‘Add thou not unto his [God’s] words, lest he [God] reprove thee, and thou be found a liar’ ().” ( – emphasis added.)

 is esoteric mysticism – a desire to “know the unknowable.”  One of the obstacles the early church faced was Gnosticism.  The Gnostics believed that the masses are not in possession of spiritual knowledge, and only the truly “enlightened” can experience God.  The Apostles condemned Gnosticism as a heresy.

But Gnosticism is not the issue; the issue at hand is this: how can one know for certain if Meyer’s so-called revelation came from God?  “Is she on par with the apostles who received revelation knowledge from God himself?” asks apologist Matt Slick.  He continues:

Or how about the Old Testament prophets?  Does she, like them, also receive revelation knowledge from God?  If so, how would we know if it were true or not? The answer is simple:  we test what she says against Scripture, and it is obvious that she is getting a lot of things from somewhere else that contradict the word of God. ()

More On Moore

In part I brought the reader up to speed on Beth Moore’s slide into mysticism and also gave a heads up on her unbiblical teaching and had planned to leave it at that.  But then the news came that she made an appearance on Joyce Meyer’s TV show.  This is the sort of news Beth fans should be made aware of, so I decided to include a bit about it here.  Just before her appearance Beth tweeted:

I have the great privilege of sitting down w/@ Joyce Meyer in her studio today to talk about unity. Pray for Jesus to be so present & pleased.

The unity Meyer and Moore espouse is man centered, not Christ centered.

Scoffers And Bullies And Meanies, Oh My!

So – Beth Moore sitting down for a chat with a WoF heretic is a problem in and of itself.  But the reason she gave for appearing on the show was to talk about unity.  The obvious question is why would a “solid Bible teacher,” as she is called, choose to unite with a woman who preaches a false gospel?   Although their tête-à-tête is troubling it’s not the only concern people have with her.  As I pointed out in part 1, she’s been under fire for, among other things, engaging in , likewise for her acceptance of “” which is odd for someone who’s an .  Another problem arose when she appeared on Life Today with “” and big time promoter of   and proceeded to advise the audience to tune out the “scoffers”:

We’re going to have people that are honestly going to want to debate and argue with us about awakening and downpours … But there will be scoffers and they will be the far bigger threat, the one within our own brothers and sisters, our own family of God — far, far more demoralizing. And yes, it will come from bullies, and yes, it will come from the mean-spirited. ()

Beth’s attempt to shut people up who question her teaching should be concerning to Christian women who read her books and participate in Bible studies she has written.

Be Watchful! 

For those of you who are Joyce Meyer fans, it’s imperative that you wake up to the fact that some of this woman’s teaching is outright heresy.  Anyone who continues learning from her is choosing to remain under the teaching of what Jesus referred to in  as a ravenous wolf.  Listen to John’s warning:

Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting, for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works. ()

Sadly, a growing number of LIE-celebs, likewise u-LIEs, are taking part in the wicked works John spoke of.

We are living in perilous times, brethren.  It’s now common place for professing Christians to dabble in mysticism.  The result?  Many believers boast of having subjective magical mystical experiences such as visions; dreams; impressions; hearing inner voices; experiencing private illumination; and .  Warning! Christians who engage in esoteric mysticism deny  – the sufficiency of Scripture.

God’s people must come to grips with the fact that historic orthodox Christianity holds to the belief that everything we need to know about our Triune God is contained within the pages of the Bible.  ()

Stranded In Spiritual Infancy

Following is an observation by apologist and author Bill Muehlenberg from a post entitled :

We have millions of believers who may have been saved decades ago, but are still acting like spiritual infants. They have not grown much, they have not progressed much in their walk with Christ, and their spiritual condition is rather anaemic [sic] and shallow.

They have not become genuine disciples in other words, and they are still stranded in a spiritual infancy. They can’t even handle the deep truths of God as revealed in Scripture. Indeed, many of them hardly even read their Bibles, barely pray, or engage in in-depth fellowship.

No wonder they are still floundering around as babies. They have not moved beyond the nursery. They are all stuck in day care. They are permanent residents of Christian kindergarten. Sadly this is so very widespread today in our churches.

This brings me back to the low information evangelical.  As Muehlenberg pointed out, many Christians prefer milk to solid food.  ()  Consequently they’re biblically illiterate…which is the reason for the colossal lack of discernment among Christians.  So it should come as no surprise that the worst sort of unbiblical teaching has reared its ugly head in the visible church, thanks largely to diaper-wearing milk-fed u-LIEs who rarely, if ever, go to the Bible to scrutinize someone’s teaching.  ( These same u-LIEs are the ones who put on a pedestal/promote/pay tribute to and finance the lavish lifestyles of LIE-celebs, some of whom are prosperity preaching/health and wealth televangelists. What will it take to get professing Christians to understand that they’re propping up heretics?

Before I close I must also mention that the liberal media seems to think that all Protestants are evangelicals – and that includes WoF heretics such as Joyce Meyer, , and Oprah’s pal /New Thought/ guru .  Nowadays evangelical is such a broad term that it has lost its meaning.  Even Tony Campolo and , who have abandoned the biblical gospel for the “social gospel,” call themselves evangelicals.

Campolo, Wallis, Osteen, Bell, et al can say they are monarchs and wear a crown if they so desire.  But as I’ve said many times, a mouse in the cookie jar is not a cookie.

Resources:

—Apprising Ministries

—Apprising Ministries

–On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

God, Heaven, Hell & Demons: Do They Exist?

Rev. Robert Barron was chagrined, but not entirely surprised when he read Woody Allen’s recent ruminations on ultimate things. To state it bluntly, said Rev. Barron, Woody could not be any bleaker in regard to the issue of meaning in the universe. We live, he said,

“… in a godless and purposeless world. The earth came into existence through mere chance and one day it, along with every work of art and cultural accomplishment, will be incinerated. The universe as a whole will expand and cool until there is nothing left but the void. Every hundred years or so, he continued, a coterie of human beings will be “flushed away” and another will replace it until it is similarly eliminated. So why does he bother making films — roughly one every year? Well, he explained, in order to distract us from the awful truth about the meaninglessness of everything, we need diversions, and this is the service that artists provide.”  (Woody Allen’s Bleak Vision, , Aug. 12, 2014)

Like millions of other evolutionary humanists in rebellion against our Heavenly Father, Woody Allen is a nihilist—a non-person.  The source of his nihilism is the belief that our Heavenly Father is dead and there is no Absolute Truth, that all truth is relative.  According to Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, nihilism is the basic philosophy of the 20th century:

“It has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any ‘front’ on which it may be fought.” The heart of this philosophy, he said, was “expressed most clearly by Nietzsche and by a character of Dostoyevsky in the phrase: ‘God is dead, therefore man becomes God and everything is possible.”  (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, )

Rev. Richard Wurmbrand (1909 –2001), a Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent possesses penetrating insight into nihilism because it was his own philosophy for many years.  But after fourteen years of physical and mental torment in a man-made hell on earth operated by soulless psychopaths, this courageous pastor emerged with an unquenchable love for Jesus Christ and his fellow man.   According to Wurmbrand, nihilism freezes and hardens the souls of its’ dehumanized believers:

“You freeze when you think of yourself as only a complicated product of chemical reactions….You cannot see stars (or your soul) through the microscope or microbes through the telescope.  Men who cannot think rightly come to the conclusion that God does not exist because they cannot find Him through the senses, which are functions of life in the realm of matter.  Senses are not the right means to see God.” (The Answer to the Atheist’s Handbook, Wurmbrand, p. 105)

The common denominators of Allen’s particular form of nihilism as well as those of militant secularism and its’ theological and New Age Eastern oriented counterparts are the denial of the supernatural Triune God and creation ex nihilo, the fall (original sin), man as person because created in the spiritual image of the One God in three Persons, Moral Law, immutable Truth, Jesus Christ God enfleshed, His death and Resurrection, heaven and hell.

Within the secular framework there is also denial of angels and demons, especially of Lucifer as the fallen angel Satan.  Other common denominators are the embrace of the idea of either pre-existing or spontaneously generated evolving matter and energy and mankind collectively dehumanized and reduced to aspects of the evolving universe.   All of these myths are validated by scientism—the instrument of fallen man’s will.

Whether matter and energy are held to be eternally existing or spontaneously generated (Cosmic Egg/Big Bang) matters not since the common point of departure for all worldviews grounded in matter and energy is metaphysical nihilism,

“… This position has been held by philosophers such as Parmenides, Buddha, Advaita Vedantins, and perhaps Kant (according to some interpretations of his transcendental idealism). Blob theory can also be considered very closely aligned with mereological nihilism (there are no parts and wholes). Obviously if metaphysical nihilism is correct, empirical reality is an illusion.” (What is Metaphysical Nihilism? OpenTopia.com)

Concerned creationists have long pointed out that evolutionary scientism is at the heart of the spiritual and moral crisis facing modern man.  A booklet titled The Surrender to Secularism (Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, 1967) written by Most Rev. Cuthbert O’Gara, former bishop of Yuanling, China, provides a powerful testimony to this truth.  Rev. O’Gara relates the following:

“When the Communist troops over-ran my diocese they were followed in short order by the propaganda corps—the civilian branch of the Red Forces—an organization…more fanatical, then the People’s Army of Liberation itself.  The entire population, city and countryside, was immediately organized into distinctive categories (and) forced to attend the seminar specified for his or her proper category and there (forced to submit) to the official Communist line.   Now what…was the first lesson given to the indoctrinees?  The first, the fundamental, lesson…was man’s descent from the ape—Darwinism!   Darwinism negates God, the human soul, the after-life.  Into this vacuum Communism enters as the be-all and end-all of the intellectual slavery it has created.  In the Red prison in which I was held, the slogan, ‘Bring your mind over to us and all your troubles will end,’ was hammered into the minds of the prisoners with brutal and numbing monotony.  Nothing but a groveling holocaust of the human person can satiate the lust for dominance of Peking’s Red Regime.”  (Article 12: The Quintessential Evolutionist, )

All forms of the evolutionary scientism dominating our modern societies, from the Neo-Darwinism force-fed to our children to militant forms of secularism, occult New Age evolutionary pantheism and their evolutionary theological counterparts, all are variations of metaphysical nihilism demanding a holocaust of the human person:

“It matters little whether we are dealing with Communism, Socialism, Nazism, abortion, the whole secular culture of perversity and death, the exclusion of God from public education, the crisis within the Church, or a whole host of other individual and social agendas – all are intimately related, and have as a powerful causative factor, belief in Darwinian Evolution.” (ibid)

Within the Western civilized world, including America, the idea that everything in the universe reduces to matter and energy is found for example, in the thinking of global NWO socialists, America’s progressive ruling class, the evolutionary ‘Christianity’ of Michael Dowd, the Hindu-pantheism of Teilhard de Chardin, the integral evolutionism of Ken Wilber, the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, and the 20th century’s murderous dictators, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot.

In his article, “Leftism a Radical Faith,” Bruce Riggs notes that much of the political history of the extended twentieth century is that of massive extinctions of citizenries by their dictatorial governments:

“Take the engineered mass starvations, torture chambers, firing squads, and gulags of Lenin and Stalin; Nazi gas chambers; Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killing fields; the genocides of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”; and the tyrannical North Korean Sung dynasty, and one will find that over one hundred million people
have been slaughtered.” (American Thinker, Jan. 1, 2014)

In one way or another, these dictatorial governments systematically dehumanized and murdered millions to create an imagined earthly Eden, said Riggs, and this is clearly irrational.  In this sense, leftist ideology is an atheist religion with the look of a religious inquisition. Klaus Fischer puts it this way:

“[T]otalitarianism represents the twentieth-century version of traditional religiosity; it is in many ways the secular equivalent of the religious life. Unless this crucial point is captured, the quintessential nature of totalitarianism will elude us.” (ibid)

This “totalitarian religiosity” is grounded in metaphysical nihilism and the dehumanization and reduction of mankind to aspects of the evolving universe on a par with slugs, weeds, and apes.  This evil religion continues today as a “scientific,” secular, politico-centric faith,

“….disdainful of theistic beliefs and contemptuous of those who subscribe to them.  It is a faith that, in its historical manifestations, has birthed the murderous tyrannies of the extended twentieth century — tyrannies that have marched under left-wing banners of Marxism, Communism, and National Socialism, or, more generally and descriptively, Coercive Collectivism.” (ibid, Riggs)

As it was for murderous 20th century dictators, so it is for todays’ individual evolutionists that metaphysical nihilism and dehumanization of ‘others’ is liberating, at least during younger years when death is not yet a blip on the radar.  This is  because for the uncreated, liberated autonomous ‘self’ who is the measure of all things and whose life no longer has any ultimate meaning or purpose there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his debauched, even murderous friends should not do what they want to do.  But the nihilism, egotism, lying, perverse license, and sadistic pleasure attained through psychological domination and manipulation of dehumanized ‘dupes’ and their children, all of which nihilists rejoice in during their younger years becomes an unbearable source of  despair, horror, night terrors, dread, and thoughts of murder and suicide with the advent of old age and the approach of death.

God, Heaven, Hell, Souls and Demons:  Do They Exist?

At issue for evolutionary humanists is the existence of the supernatural God of Revelation, the Heavenly Creator who spoke everything into existence ex nihilo.   Does He exist and did He reveal Himself to men or not?    Rebellious evolutionists say no, all that exists is the natural dimension of matter and energy in continuous motion measured by time that may or may not involve the working of a god invented and controlled by man.

However, existence within the natural dimension of space and time is not the only form of existence.  Timeless is the supernatural realm (third heaven) of the eternally existing, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Holy God of Revelation.

There are three heavens.  The first is the immediate sky, or earth’s atmosphere. (Genesis 2:19; 7:3, 23; Psalms 8:8; Deuteronomy 11:17)  The second is the starry heavens or outer space. (Deuteronomy 17:3; Jeremiah 8:2; Matthew 24:29).  The third heaven is outside of time and space, meaning the first and second heavens, thus outside the reach of man’s science.  The timeless heaven is where God and the holy angels and spirits of righteous men in possession of eternal life dwell and to which Paul was taken. (Deuteronomy 10:14; 1 Kings 8:27; Psalms 115:16; 148:4; 2 Cor.12:2)

Furthermore, all people who have had out-of-body experiences by way of near-death or drugs, astral plane travels, or through shamanism for example, can testify to the existence of their own souls as well as of the timeless abode of demons and fallen angels, the “spirits of wickedness under the heavens” (Eph. 6:12) and their chief, “the prince of the powers of the air.” (Eph. 2:2) According to the Apostle Paul, fallen angels thrown down from the third heaven are dispersed in a multitude throughout the first heaven.  It is with this timeless abode of fallen angels and demons that shamans interact and to which astral plane travelers from the time of Nimrod to our own have been visiting. According to Francis Huxley and Jeremy Narby:

“Western observers began participating in shamanistic sessions involving hallucinogenic plants, (and) found, to their astonishment, that they could have experiences similar to those described by shamans.”   ‘Life’ magazine popularized shamanism in a 1957 story, “In Mexico, American banker Gordon Wasson ate psilocybin mushrooms in a session conducted by (a) shaman.”   Wasson described to ‘Life’s’ readers his experience of “flying out of his body.”  Narby and Huxley report that “hundreds of thousands of people read Wasson’s account, and many followed his example.”  (Modern Shamanism: Spirit Contact & Spiritual Progress, James Herrick, p. 17, from “On Global Wizardry, edited by Peter Jones)

When the soul comes out of its’ body, as happened to the Satanist William Schnoebelen, it is immediately within the timeless realm of evil spirits.  According to early Church Fathers, if the soul is that of a faithful believer it will be met by one of Gods’ Holy Angels and escorted to the third heaven.   If not, as was the case with Schnoebelen, it will meet with deceiving, malignant spirits.

William Schnoebelen was a great hardboiled sinner whose damnable transgressions included Satanism and receiving the mark of Satan during an out of body experience.  His autobiography, Lucifer Dethroned, is a gripping and horrifying account of his descent into the darkest, most frightening side of the occult, magick, spell-casting, vampirism, astral travel and Satanism and his subsequent restoration through grace and the love of Jesus Christ.

Bill was a demonically-empowered Druidic high priest, high-order Mason, ordained spiritist minister and Satanist who frequently “went out of his body” into the timeless realm for various reasons.  As he tells it, one night he was “yanked” out of his body and drawn up through the paths of the Tree of Life toward the zone of Binah or Saturn.  His terrifying journey took him to a vast, obsidian trapezoidal shaped temple called the Cathedral of Pain situated in the midst of swirling stars. The inside walls were clear glass,

“…holding back a transparent green fluid.  Floating within the fluid…were hundreds of naked (horribly mutilated) human bodies.  They were all dead, most with expressions of exquisite terror etched in a rictus on their frozen faces.”  Then a pillar of light struck an “obsidian throne,” a sacrificial altar, and out of the light “appeared a huge being…robed in white…”  Mighty wings swept his shoulders.  At one moment the winged being was an incredibly handsome man, the next a “bull” and the next a “woman.” Chanting began in Latin: “Ave Satanas, Rege Satanas (Hail Satan, Satan Rules)”  Then the terrifying being reached out his left hand “and placed it on my forehead….I felt a claw tear into my brow (and) insert itself into my brain like a white-hot poker..”  Then a voice spoke: “Now you are mine forever.”    (p. 157-159)

Schnoebelen was forced to return to the Cathedral of Pain a few more times before turning to Jesus Christ for salvation.  One night he finally got down on his knees and confessed,

“…to the Lord that I was indeed a sinner—perhaps the chiefest of sinners (but) I repented (Luke 15:5) and confessed that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins and rose from the dead so that I might have eternal life (Romans 10: 9-10).  I asked Jesus to save me from my sins (Romans 10: 13), and to be the absolute Lord of my life (Romans 12: 1-2)”    Jesus Christ forgave me and set me “free from unbelievable darkness and evil...”   Jesus Christ liberated his demonically oppressed soul.”(p. 315)

All people, including ‘scientifically enlightened’ evolutionary nihilists live in a mysterious world of which we see in part, and that only darkly, because we are imprisoned in the jail of our senses.  But as Schnoebelen, shamanists and practicing occultists such as Carl Jung know, there are all about us and even here on earth powerful, intelligent beings that move so fast we cannot not see them, who emit rays outside the spectrum of our vision and communicate among themselves on a wavelength beyond what man can hear and apprehend, thus they can observe us, inflate our most disordered passions and influence our dreams and thoughts for good or bad.  They can also, by way of telepathy or automatic writing, transmit through someone like Nietzsche or Carl Jung teachings from the demonic realm.

According to the highly celebrated Jung, Philemon, a winged, horned demon, supervised and inspired the writing of the “Seven Sermons to the Dead.”  Jung described the occasion like this:

“The whole house was….crammed full of spirits.   They were packed deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick I could hardly breathe…Then it began to flow out of me, and in the course of three evenings the thing (Septem Sermones ad Mortuos) was written.” (Jung relates how his soul departed into the timeless realm)…the mystical land of the dead (and) soon after the…..’dead’ appeared to me and the result was the Septem Sermones.”   (To Hell and Back, Maurice S. Rawlings, M.D., p.143)

Spirits can, and do, influence the minds of proud evolutionary humanists who then trumpet the nihilistic ideas dropped into their minds as their own brilliant ideas and do the work of devils by leading astray millions of people with their damnable soul-destroying teachings.

Evolutionary seculars and their theological and occult New Age counterparts commit grievous sins and live as if they will never die. But the God of Revelation, heaven, hell, angels and demons exist, and even now, without their knowledge, rebellious nihilists are being prepared to receive the mark of Satan on their foreheads unless they repent.   Before it’s too late, let them learn from the despairing words of other adversaries of Jesus Christ:

“I am suffering the pangs of the damned.”  Talleyrand (ibid, Wurmbrand, p. 158

“Give me laudanum that I may not think of eternity.”  Mirabeau

“I am abandoned by God and man.  I shall go to hell.  Oh Christ, oh Jesus Christ!” Voltaire

“What blood, what murders, what evil counsels have I followed.  I am lost, I see it well.” Charles IX, King of France

“I would give worlds, if I had them, if the Age of Reason (an anti-Christian book) had never been published.  Oh, Lord, help me. Christ, help me.  Stay with me.  It is hell to be left alone.” Thomas Paine

“…I had a feeling that life was ebbing from me.  I felt powerful sensations of dread (then suddenly everything) turned a glowing red.   I saw twisted faces grimacing as they stared down at me (I tried to defend myself but) could no longer shut out the frightful truth: beyond the faces dominating this fiery world were faces of the damned.  I had a feeling of despair….the sensation of horror was so great it choked me.  Obviously I was in Hell itself (and then suddenly) the black silhouette of a human figure began to draw near…a woman…with lipless mouth and in her eyes an expression that sent icy shudders down my back.  She stretched out her arms…and pulled me by an irresistible force (into) a world filled with….sounds of lamentation….I asked the figure…who she was.  A voice answered: “I am death.”  (German actor Curt Jürgen’s, To Hell and Back, pp. 76-77)

Nihilists are lost and spiritually blind— to the reality of the timeless realms, but especially to the third heaven of our Heavenly Father.  So too are they are blind to the reality of their own frozen souls and to the existence of devils all around them for their foolish hearts are darkened (Rom. 1:21) and their thoughts evil (Gn. 6:5).  They are ignorant, guilty, and corrupt.  They have exchanged God’s Revelation for scientism and His Truth and Way for a lie (Rom. 1:25), and their darkened minds are wholly blind to the saving Light of Christ that shines into the hearts of the faithful. (John 8:12)

From his own experience, Eugene Rose believed that a nihilist cannot come to Christ fully until he is first aware of how far he and his society have fallen away from Him, that is, until he has first faced the Nihilism in himself:

“The Nihilism of our age exists in all,” he wrote, “and those who do not, with the aid of God, choose to combat it in the name of the fullness of Being of the living God, are swallowed up in it already. We have been brought to the edge of the abyss of nothingness and, whether we recognize its nature or not, we will, through affinity for the ever-present nothingness within us, be engulfed in it beyond all hope of redemption-unless we cling in full and certain faith (which doubting, does not doubt) to Christ, without Whom we are truly nothing.”  (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, )

“This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.”  “For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.… (John 3:19-20)

For all who repent of their sins, combat their nihilism with the aid of God and unite with the faithful who persevere in the Way of Christ, death is merely a doorway to eternal physical life, first in the third heaven for a while, then in a physical Paradise—the earth and heavens renewed and remade in unimaginably wondrous ways.   But for the stubborn, dehumanized nihilist who prefers darkness to Light the approach of old age and death are accompanied by increasing afflictions of the mind—despair, depression, nightmares, inexplicable feelings of dread and horror—because beyond the grave lies only eternal remorse in utter darkness.

The Monopoly of the Government Education Cartel

Learning is a noble pursuit, but the ancient Greek text is one of the few places where the Socratic Method survives. Sanctioned political doctrine of required thinking is the mainstay in today’s august temples of purification. Forget about a classroom, the curriculum core of New Age studies has no room for the classics, much less instructions into the process of thinking itself. Except, of course for the need to electronically check off the loan applications and assign grants to the business office. In the end, university is big business and developing intelligent graduates happens as an afterthought, if at all.

College Education Economics has become a black hole for most students. Even wealthy families bear a heavy burden to ship their offspring to an experience that continually produces diminished cash flow benefits to offset the costs. Parents know there is a profound disconnect. However, when attempts for making significant changes to the way the higher learning cartel does business, the usual suspects ride to the rescue of the established order.

Jordan Weissmann in a Slate article, Smash the System?, slams Senator Mike Lee for proposing “A dangerous plan to make college cheaper by busting “the college cartel.” What else would you expect from a DC Metro and Associate Editor at The Atlantic? Nothing is more important than defending a failed system and attacking innovative ideas on how to re-create a viable and relevant education model. Quoting Mr. Weissmann,

“In January, Lee introduced legislation that would give states a major role in the accreditation process. The bill has nods of approval from potential presidential contenders Marco Rubio, who has his own proposal on the issue, and Paul Ryan, who dedicated a little-discussed section of his anti-poverty plan to “shaking up the accreditation status quo.”

The hope is that once Washington breaks the hold of today’s accrediting agencies, new, high-tech approaches to education can flourish.”

Nor dare challenge the sacred philistines of detached inculcation, might be a more appropriate title.

Over a year ago, the Washington Examiner looked at the Higher education is a government-created cartel and focused upon how the Federal Government exerts dominance over the accreditation process.

“The Department of Education has deputized eight regional accreditation entities that serve as gate keepers for the entire higher education industry. If you are not approved by one of the Department of Education approved eight regional accreditation agencies, then none of your students can qualify for Pell grants or federally subsidized student loans. With the federal government alone pumping almost $30 billion into higher education every year, if a school is not approved by a regional accreditor, it is essentially dead.”

Why is the issue and control of accreditation of such importance? Even the most naive believer in the ritual of dunking your sheep into the college culture wants to obtain some kind of gradation certification, in the end when the money runs out. Accordingly, the Federal Government uses their time test method of bribes and sanction to shape the kind of education expected from the degree mill. Inducements of low cost loans to the students and embargos to any institution of higher learning, who dares waver from the accepted low standards of fleecing enrollees.

Debating if it is worth the investment to jump through the hoops of perpetual financial indebtedness, for the implied promise that future earning power will be the reward has certainly come into doubt in the last few decades.

Going back twenty-five years, Professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo wrote the Americas OPEC: The Public School Cartel, which describes the monopoly of state and local public school districts. When he cites a case in point of how the public schools have been a cartel designed primarily to benefit the public school bureaucracy, not the public; he could substitute the corporate trust of allied Association of American Colleges and Universities in place of public schools. The primary difference is that government schools primarily operates for the benefit of teachers unions, while a federation of colleges and universities lobby for their own profit advantages in complete cooperation with the federal government.The parents and students are stuck with the bill, just as the property owner gets to pay their school tax. The only saving difference is that attending higher learning sessions are voluntary, if you have the courage to ignore all the guilt-ridden advertisement that pushes ill equipped and confused students into financial ruin, paying for overpriced and useless schooling.

The cartel of higher learning has infected the minds of “PC” conditioned meatheads. Government bureaucrats love pushing innocent adolescents into circumstance of useless education so the acclimation process adapts them to working their lives at minimum wage.

It is crucial to separate the academia component of an educational school with their financial planning and business operations. Courses vary in content and quality depending on the skills and dedication of the instructors. However, the fiscal stability and future expansion opportunities often depend upon perpetuating the myth of the indispensible necessity of becoming an alumnus.

More families become aware of this hoax and start searching for other alternatives. Teaching, once was the staple and primary purpose of renowned traditions, now are shifting towards research as reported in the UK, Universities putting research before teaching. Major US research institutions grow into closer associations with government projects and their accompanying budgets. Distinction between the gift of teaching falls short to the science of commercialization or defense.As long as the student loan bubble keeps expanding, the windbags in the liberal press will keep defending the inept higher education establishment. The true accreditation one seeks to learn comes from the success from your own learning experience, not from some, hand- picked government board that has a budget increase when additional student loans are booked.

If cartels are bad in business, they are even worse when run as a tag team effort between universities and government. Accreditation is a state matter and the federal government has no lawful authority to curtail competition in higher learning.

Five Aces

If the Beast pushes you into a corner, do you come out swinging with haymakers?  Or sit down cross-legged and meditate?  Both could, conceivably, be actions that lead to salvation depending on what type of mood one might be in on any given day.  Do you fight fire with fire?  Or apply jiu jitsu techniques in a way that wears down the aggressor who strikes out against you?  Sometimes it is best to step out of the way and allow that which is evil to self-destruct from within.  Sometimes, however, it is best to rear back and punch a bully square in the nose.

How wrapped up are you in the causes of a lost Republic?  Do you still believe in the ideas put forth in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States of America?  Or are such revolutionary visions now laid to rest forever?  Are we destined now to return to what has been the common state of societal rule throughout the history of humanity: Authoritarian Dictatorship?  Probably.  For awhile at least.  Until the people have been dumped on long enough to get pissed off and fight back.  As long as we are fattened up on bread and wine and have big screen televisions broadcasting soap operas, sporting events and idol-worshipping nonsense to hypnotize us, chances are we will let the abusers go right along with their methods of tyranny.  But once the power plug is pulled and the food trucks shut down delivery, things might get a little edgy in the living rooms across this country.  From that point, the time remaining before the discontent spills out onto the streets is surely short.

Hysteria gets hyped up and pierces inside of ragged veins with hypodermic needle intensity correlating to the desired high of helium lift off.  Up floats the kite until hitting the big black void of deep space.  All lines cut adrift.  All focus depleted and put into a trance.  Hazed coordinates.  Fog and smoke distorts the scene.  Mirrors cast back naught but a karmic black eye.  Blue orbs inside the electric light buzz with anticipation of that which must come next.  Featureless wisps of absolute nothingness dance across the atmosphere as the vast array of entropy holds fast to its silence.  A vibrating hum of illusions reciprocates at five degrees of fantasy to function with the full force of final preparations.  The bigwig moneychangers laugh all the way to the bank as they madly rush to shut down the accounts.  Paychecks deposited under the mattress.  Gold nuggets laid low in a six-foot grave.  Silver stars start singing amber tunes of golden currency as the raft sets sail from shore.  A river of Tao processing through the time stream.  Bounty system adds up on deliverance.  Cuts down to subtract.  Multiplies to build back up.  Divides, finally, to conquer.

Always one more extreme to push.  To the limit.  Over the edge.  Off the reservation.  Mutiny in its most sublime form.  An anarchic gift from the Goddess.  A neon war sign in the sky.  Look up and see chemical trails laced between clouds.  Agent Orange on a bad day throwing a fit and raining down upon the unsuspecting populace.  Until they wake up, that is, and come to fully realize the awesome righteousness of noncompliance.  Until they straighten their spines and fill up on the sweet nectar of spiritual empowerment.  Until they cry out with wild abandon, informing the enemy in no uncertain terms that not one more move in the current direction of decadence and desolation shall be made.  Tables get turned.  Lines in the sand get drawn.  The rebellion marches along in full swing.  One foot right after the other.  Left, right, left.  Lockstep to the beat of a new paradigm as the shifting cycles of history spin around to taste the glorious consequences wrought when David stands up to Goliath and fires the rock. Glass houses shatter.  Ivory towers collapse.  The best is yet to come.  Overthrown empires are dumped down and laid to waste.  Walked tall until it fell hard.  Spoke loud when it had kings and queens hidden up its sleeve but then shut up quickly and fell silent when the Phoenix Generation showed that we had five natural aces up ours.

Ash to ash and dust to dust.  The drama plays out over and over.  Eternal recurrence of the spinning cycles.  Circles within circles.  Movement to and fro.  Past and future entwined in the present moment.  All events become fixed at one point.  The screen fades to black.  The curtains come down.  Then, just when it all seemed to be over and the ending was closing in, a fresh beginning erupts from out the constant continuation of life’s perpetual motion and evolution pulses forward toward the New Age. Version 2.0.  Coming soon to a mind near you.

Calico Discussed At The Google Camp

When the billionaire tech jet set decides to let down their hair, what do they talk about around the campfire? According to the New Your Times, “Google is sponsoring an elite conference this week at a golf resort in Sicily, with a guest list of chief executives, investors and celebrities, all of whom were invited to bring their families. On the agenda are high-minded discussions of global issues — along with relaxation by the Mediterranean Sea.” How quaint! . . . For the real scoop, Here’s What Went On At Google’s Exclusive Conference For The Rich And Famous In Sicily.

“Sicilian blogger Tony Siino talked to an attendee about what went on, and told Business Insider via email that the conference, dubbed “The Camp,” was three-days of intellectual discussions, relaxation, and sight-seeing.According to Siino’s source, morning discussions included a wide range of topics, including how to extend human life and the design of cities of the future.”

Reported by NBC local TV channel in the Bay Area has “guests include Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd C. Blankfein, executives from German and Spanish banks, Uber chief Travis Kalanick, Tesla boss Elon Musk, Comcast CEO Brian L. Roberts and Snapchat boss Evan Spiegel. Also on hand is Ben Horowitz, venture capitalist with Marc Andreessen at make-or-break Silicon Valley fund Andreessen Horowitz.”

Spending quality time with the family between sessions in the next round of tech discoveries hardly seems to be the best use of time. Yet, time may well be the ultimate objective if you can uncover the mysteries of anti-aging research. Life Extension Magazine reports that Google Life Extension is investing in a venture called California Life Company, or Calico for short, and its goal is to extend human life by 20 to 100 years.

At this point, Google is being highly secretive about their plans for Calico. All Google would reveal is that Calico will focus “in particular on the challenge of aging and associated diseases.”

Calico could produce startlingly counterintuitive breakthroughs, as a result, of Google’s strengths in the following areas:

• Non-commercial dedication — rather than a focus on commercial marketing of mediocre drugs as pharmaceutical companies now do.
• Vast consumer access and core data-handling skills — with unprecedented data gathering, pattern-matching, and causal-relationship detection.
• Ability to attract the brightest minds — potentially preferring to work on life-and-death problems instead of cutesy apps and games.

Further speculation in an essay – How’s Google Dabbling in Health, Life, DNA, and Immortality? – cites areas of research has cutting-edge technology pushing the limits of the wheel of life itself.

“A CNN article listed a few common subjects, like cryonics (a process where the body is preserved in liquid nitrogen), cryotherapy (which exposes injured patients to very low temperatures for short periods of time), cloning and body part replacement, nanotechnology (deploying small robots to overcome the problem of incorrect DNA replication, one cause of aging), and even research into telomeres, the ends of a chromosome that protect cells against degradation.”

Hidden within a “feel good” sentiment behind the altruism to elevate the life span of the human race is an unconvincing skepticism. In an article like Google Wants You to Live 170 Years, just does not seem believable to a rational observer.

“What Google brings to the table is data. “Not just one set of data, multiple forms,” says Harry Glorikian, founder of life sciences consulting firm Scientia Advisors. “Search data, GPS data, all sorts of other pieces, electronic breadcrumbs that you produce all out there to get a picture of you.”This data could be paired with each person’s genome — a partial genome can be mapped today for $99 via 23andMe (another Google investment), but many are hoping a full genome will cost as much in the next few years.”

Even if such ambitious projections that life extension might become common-place for the masses, it does not guarantee that everyone will be a candidate for future “Camp” invitations. Google hardly needs to market the secrets of the gods in order to maintain or enhance their cash flow. The Globe and Mail describes the gathering, “Like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – an annual gathering of the elite at a snowy ski resort – the upstart conference from Google projects an aura of exclusivity. Its existence has not previously been disclosed.”

Following the example of other enigmatic elitist stratagems, “The Camp” shows no signs of a charitable motivation when the onion is peeled. Michael Downey in the account, Google Wants To Extend Your Life laments that not enough is being done to achieve the holy grail of Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.

“Tragically, while the government spends over $3 billion annually on “health concerns” of the elderly, it operates on the assumption that aging is not a disease. Corporations lack the longer-term view needed. And extremely few of the world’s 1,426 billionaires, with a total net worth of $5.4 trillion, have included anti-aging research in their charities.”

Do you really believe that the beautiful people, much less, the corporatist return on assets crowd, or the great democracies of the planet are eager to share any medical, genetic or nanotech leap forwards with the chattel serfs? Attending boot camp for the peasants is quite different from rubbing elbows with these Nouveau riche Sicilian Dons in the global technocratic mafia. The blueblood patricians of the banksters’ families will enlighten their newly made men into the rules and ways of the global syndicate.

The Calico family franchise promises to be more alluring than the temporary ecstasy of a drug high. Most godless souls want to live forever, since rejecting an afterlife is automatic to such atheistic masters of the universe. Google has proven to be a “New Age” android. Hence, it is natural for apps, developed to manage the life cycle, become part of the smart set. The key question is will the source code become available to the masses, or will the elites maintain the restricted knowledge only for their devil witch coven.

The Low-Information Evangelical – Part 1

We are told throughout the New Testament to judge, to test, to discern, to assess, to rebuke, to hold one another to account, to make moral distinctions, and to pronounce judgment when and where it is due. ~ Bill Muehlenberg

The phrase low-information voter (LIV) was made popular in the mid-1990s.  Although the LIV is uninformed on the issues, he casts his vote.  The LIV is often highly opinionated even when he has no idea what he’s talking about.  A popular conservative talk show host has labeled a segment of those who vote for liberals LIVs.

D. Edmund Wright expresses his disdain for the LIV in a rather harsh way:

But forget low-information voters for just a minute; the malignancy that is really destroying this country is low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence.  You know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact.  Such felonies are then carried out by low-information bureaucratic microbes with the power to destroy lives and businesses with impunity, and a political and talking-head class with the access and sway to codify these common malfeasances. Destruction of private property and liberty – and these two concepts are not divisible – takes place in government cubicles every minute of every day across the country.  And why not?  ( – emphasis in original)

While reading Wright’s rant against the organized left (and rightly so) it occurred to me that evangelicalism is dealing with the same sort of crisis – low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence.  So for the purpose of this piece I’ll refer to them as low-information evangelicals (LIE).

Reminiscent of the LIV, the high-profile LIE does not understand the impact that his unorthodox view has on the visible church.  When it comes to the Bible, the LIE has opinions on a variety of challenging topics.  Even when his opinion is decidedly unbiblical, he presents it as the gospel truth.  The LIE’s arguments are often based, not on what God’s Word clearly teaches but instead on esoteric experiences he’s had or what he’s picked up from LIE celebrities.  As a side note, whenever I write a column for the express purpose of exposing a LIE-celeb’s unbiblical teaching and even though I included an abundance of evidence to support the biblical view, the LIE rarely uses logical argumentation to contest the facts and win me over to their way of thinking.   Instead he resorts to personal attacks.  For example I’m often scolded for being unloving…ungracious…mean spirited…hateful…homophobic……and far worse.

Facts are stubborn things.  And the fact of the matter is that it’s biblical to report on a high-profile Christian leader whose teaching is unbiblical.  Much of the problem lies in the fact that oodles of LIE-celebs are unapologetically  in their worldview and their teaching reflects that.  (For the record, “progressive Christian” is an oxymoron.)

Several influential Bible teachers started out as good Bible expositors but got off track when they became enamored with Eastern mysticism.  Today the beliefs some Christians hold contain a good deal of New Age/New Thought ideas borrowed from Eastern mysticism.  Bible teacher, conference speaker and founder of Living Word Ministries  is one of those teachers.

Over the years Moore has gained substantial popularity with women, so much so that her resources line the shelves of churches and Christian book sellers everywhere.  Because she’s affiliated with the  her overt acceptance of “” surprised a lot of people.  For instance, at one of her conferences she shared a vision she supposedly received of “the church as Jesus sees it.”  Listen to this bombshell:

You know what He [God] told me not too long ago? I told you when I first began this whole concept, He first started teaching it to me about five years ago, and He said these words to me: “Baby, you have not even begun to believe Me. You haven’t even begun!”

You know what He said just a few days ago? “Honey, I just want you to know we’re just beginning.” Oh, glory! That meant I had begun. Hallelujah!

But He was telling me, “When this ends, we ain’t done with this. Honey, this is what we do for the rest of your life.” And He says those words to me over and over again: “Believe Me. Believe Me. And I hope it’s starting to ring in your ears, over and over again, Believe Me.” ()

Does that not make your hair stand on end?   “He said these words to me…” is the same as saying “Thus saith the Lord!”   Any discerning Christian will no doubt find Moore’s alleged chats with God troubling.

Contrary to what Beth Moore believes, when the Lord allegedly speaks to her it couldn’t be His voice she’s hearing.  How do I know that?  Because the way in which she claims the Almighty communicates with her is unbiblical.  How does God speak to us today?  We are told in  that He speaks to us by His Son through His Spirit in His Word.

In  Paul commands us to “test everything; hold fast what is good.”  With this in mind, I challenge Beth’s fans to test her teaching by the Word of God.  Those who are open to the truth will discover that this Bible teacher is feeding her followers rotten fruit!

Erin Benziger has been warning of Beth Moore’s shift into mysticism for quite some time.  Erin points out that:

Beth Moore has demonstrated time and again that she cannot properly handle the biblical text. And yet, she is a mentor and teacher to many women who look to her leadership and knowledge as a foundation for their own spiritual walk.

In recent months, Moore participated as a speaker at the Unwrap the Bible conference, which was held at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church. The event was hosted by ministries, and also featured such dangerous teachers as Priscilla Shirer, Christine Caine, Lisa Harper, Sheila Walsh and of course, Victoria Osteen. Nearly 11,000 women were in attendance at this event. 11,000. That is a tremendous number of women who were exposed to deceptive and erroneous Bible teaching. These are women in your Bible study and in your church. These are women who will now take the principles they learned and will begin to influence other women and girls within their church. This ought to be of no small concern to those who love and revere the Word of God. ()

Before I move on, I should mention that I don’t enjoy tearing down the powerful magnetic personalities professing Christians revere.   My purpose for taking aim at Beth Moore is to get undistinguished LIEs (ordinary folk) up to speed on her unbiblical teaching.  Sadly, some undistinguished low information evangelicals (u-LIEs) assume that popular pastors, teachers and best-selling authors would never steer them wrong.  But nothing could be further from the truth!

The Undistinguished LIE

The u-LIE learns Scripture in a variety of ways:  (1) Best-selling “Christian” books; (2) Blog posts; (3) Religious TV programs; (4) “Christian” radio/podcasts; (5) Trendy market-driven/seeker sensitive churches; (6) Family and friends (some of whom are nominal Christians at best and Bible illiterates at worst.)

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that the u-LIE who utilizes the above resources won’t learn anything worthwhile. He will!  In fact it’s a good idea to gain knowledge from mainstream Bible scholars/theologians/apologists/bloggers and ministers of the gospel; likewise from TV, radio/podcasts of solid Bible expositors.  But we must see to it that those from whom we learn, including LIE-celebs, continually guard against error.  As I said above, when someone’s theology lands outside of the pale of orthodoxy it’s appropriate to challenge what’s being taught and to (gasp!) “name names.”  How else will we know who to be wary of?

Christians must never lose sight of the fact that false teachers are deceptive and evil.  And by the way, anyone who’s exposed as a wolf or wolverine must swallow their pride and repent of their sin against God.  The objective is restoration.

What has resulted from all the abysmal teaching in the Church?  U-LIEs have accepted liberal/progressive theology.  Likewise, they’re up to their eyeballs in aberrant/heretical movements such as liberal/progressive/social justice; emergent/emerging; /health & wealth/name-it-claim-it; New Apostolic Reformation/Dominionism/Latter Rain. Moreover they’ve become easy prey for the .  How does one avoid becoming ensnared by the wiles of the devil?  By becoming a Berean!  ()

Christian Mysticism

Thanks largely to Christian mystics such as recently deceased ordained Baptist Minister Dallas Willard and Quaker Richard Foster, many u-LIEs have been introduced to spiritual formation.  Sounds biblical, but I assure you it’s not.  In a nut shell, spiritual formation,

encourage[s] believers to incorporate a wide variety of extrabiblical spiritual practices, such as contemplative prayer, silence, meditation, creative expression, and yoga.  In fact, some of the most popular methods of spiritual formation have been lifted from Catholicism, new age mysticism, or other religions and rebranded with biblical-sounding terminology. ()

Ken Silva cautions that involving oneself in mysticism can lead to a “denial of the Reformation and the acceptance of apostate  as a viable form of Christianity.”

Both Willard and Foster, as well as Rick Warren, John Ortberg, Ruth Haley Barton and Tony Campolo have encouraged believers to read the writings of Roman Catholic Trappist Monks such as Thomas Merton, Basil Pennington, William Menninger and Thomas Keating to name a few.  From individuals like these, Eastern pagan practices have been introduced into mainline Protestant churches, likewise independent, nondenominational, charismatic and Pentecostal churches.

Because of books penned by Catholic monks, an increasing number of u-LIEs embrace the idea that  in much the same way that He spoke to the patriarchs and apostles.  And this is the primary reason Christians boast that they hear directly from God.

LIE-celebs and u-Lies who are exposed to mysticism will say things such as: “I had a word from the Lord” or “God said (this or that)…”  Or “God told me to do (this or that)…” And “I have received revelation knowledge.”  Anyone who makes these claims is saying that God speaks directly to them!  The danger in thinking this way is that when God doesn’t “speak” to a professed Christian, she worries that He’s silent because she doesn’t have enough faith, or she has a “hidden sin” in her life because if she didn’t, God would speak to her; or perhaps the Lord’s silent because He’s angry over an act of disobedience…and the list goes on.

The Silence Is Not Golden

The aforementioned monks, or , allege that by engaging in a prayer method called The Silence they’ve been able to achieve a profound experience with God.  “We enter the silence to consciously experience our oneness within the one Mind, God.”  The idea of experiencing oneness within the mind of God comes, not from the Bible, but from Eastern mysticism.  It makes no sense for God’s people to borrow from a corrupt religious system that God despises.  Listen to :

For you [God] have rejected your people, the house of Jacob, because they are full of things from the east and of fortune-tellers like the Philistines, and they strike hands with foreigners.

The Desert Fathers have so little discernment that they not only participate in recycled paganism, they encourage others to go that route!  Willard and Foster and other LIE-celebs know full well that they’re “striking hands with foreigners” and they do it anyway!

Being that the Lord condemns paganism, His people are to have nothing to do with it.  No dabbling!  Steer clear of anything to do with .  Methods such as…centering prayer…breath prayer…are forbidden!   Even though this will ruffle some feathers, my advice is to steer clear of “.  “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” ()

Part 2, coming up!

Recommended:

 (Posting this with a warning)

The following is a concise presentation of the contemplative practice known as “Entering the Silence” taught by the  [a cult] founded by

—By Mike Ratliff

Research links:

–On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

Nihilism: The West’s Evil Religion of Idolatry, Lies and Hate

“The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our prevalent notions of the character of God, the great moral governor of the universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions.” (William McGuffey, d. May 4, 1873, professor at the University of Virginia, president of Ohio University, and author of McGuffey’s Readers; )

Andre Comte-Sponville, one of France’s preeminent atheist philosophers agrees.  In his New York Times bestseller, “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality,” Sponville observes that even though Western and American civilization has become nonreligious it is nevertheless profoundly rooted in transcendent Biblical morality and traditions.   That overt and implied atheism has all but supplanted Biblical beliefs pleases yet simultaneously frightens Sponville as he clearly sees that if Western civilization entirely ceases to be Christian it will fall into something like a refined nihilism.  And if we believe that nothing remains,

“….we might as well throw in the towel at once.   We would have nothing left to oppose to either fanaticism from without or to nihilism from within—and, contrary to what many people seem to think, nihilism is the primary danger.  We would belong to a dead civilization, or at least a dying one….Wealth has never sufficed to make a civilization, poverty, even less so.  Civilizations require culture, imagination, enthusiasm and creativity, and none of these things come without courage, work and effort.”    Without these necessities, “Good night…the Western world has decided to replace faith with somnolence.” (pp. 28-29)

Sponville admits that in his younger years he had believed in the supernatural God of Revelation and been raised a Christian.  Up till around the age of eighteen his faith was powerful. But then he embraced evolutionary scientism and fell away, and this falling away said Sponville, was liberating because for the liberated autonomous ‘self’ whose life no longer has any ultimate meaning or purpose there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not live in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves.

But the lies, amoralism and perverse license, the nihilism Sponville rejoices in becomes an unbearable source of horror and dread when reproduced in millions of souls.  Sponville is right to fear the spread of nihilism, for when multiplied by millions it means there is no longer an ultimate, transcendent source of unchanging truth and moral law independent of sinful men, and as Sponville knows, therefore dreads, the lie is the father of violence:

“(The lie) is the word, act, sign of cunning or silence which makes use of wiles to deceive (all who seek) truth….the attitude of the liar, who full of subtlety, audacity and at times cruel cynicism, misleads his neighbor into the quick sands of falsity.  The use of the lie reveals the liar as a person of evil intentions.  He who tells lies as a way of getting ahead lacks a love of truth (he or she is) a self-centered dissimulator, cunningly manipulating his fellowmen for his own evil purposes.”   (The Roots of Violence, Rev. Vincent P. Miceli, S.J., p.29)

Nihilism is the satanically inverted philosophy of violence, lies and license of America’s president, his cabinet, and the amoral progressive ruling class of which they are members.  It is also the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and the Sophist Callicles in Plato’s ‘Georgias’ who declares:

“The fact is this: luxury and licentiousness and liberty, if they have the support of force, are virtue and happiness and the rest of these embellishments-—the unnatural covenants of mankind-—are all mere stuff and nonsense.” (Making Gay Okay, Reilly, pp. 31-32)

In other words, with a consensus of lies backed by force and the threat of violence, the Revelation of God, the Christian Church, virtue, true truth, marriage, gender, your children, your humanity, your wealth, your home, your business, and your Constitutional rights become whatever agents of violence and the mobs in back of them want them to be or not to be from one moment to the next.

What nihilism has already led to in England, said Nate Steuer of Jeremiah Cry Ministries, are buildings that once served as churches that are now museums, stores and even nightclubs, a strong belief in evolution and a strong homosexual-rights movement:

“They don’t want to hear the gospel. The gospel is pressed down,’ and the homosexual-rights movement is so rooted in England that Christians are afraid to go ‘into the streets and preach,’ fearing what the LBGT community will do.”  (“Fate of Christianity in UK not too far from U.S., warns evangelist,” Chris Woodward, OneNewsNow.com, July 8, 2014)

Evolutionary scientism is a form of nihilism leading in practice to dehumanization, demoralization, reckless irresponsibility and genocide.   It is a sham science said G.K. Chesterton.  It is a license by which the stupidest,

“…or wickedest action is supposed to become reasonable or respectable, not by having found a reason in scientific fact, but merely by having found any sort of excuse in scientific language.”  The program and attitude of scientism is a “serpent….as slippery as an eel,” a “demon…as elusive as an elf,” an “evil and elusive creature.”   (The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, Michael D. Aeschliman, p. 43)

Evolutionary scientism has amply demonstrated itself as a virulently anti-human, catastrophically destructive, demonically murderous worldview. In just the first eighty-seven years of the twentieth century, violent spirits who love evil and devouring words and breathe out slaughter and death brutally exterminated between 100-170 million un-evolved ‘subhuman’ men, women, and children in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

In the Soviet Union, the Triune God-and-human hating nihilist of violence, Vladimir Lenin, exulted that,

“Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to oneanother (and) that they were created by God, and hence immutable.” (Fatal Fruit, Tom DeRosa, p. 9)

In other words, the ‘death’ of the God of Revelation allows unfettered violence against millions of people because they are no longer the immutable image-bearers of the Triune God but rather expendable products of evolution on a par with slime, weeds, slugs and rocks.  Empowered by evolutionary scientism, Lenin exercised godlike power over life and death. He saw himself as, “the master of the knowledge of the evolution of social species.” 

Fueled by hate, contempt and murderous rage it was Lenin who “decided who should disappear by virtue of having been condemned to the dustbin of history.” From the moment Lenin made the “scientific” decision that the bourgeoisie represented a stage of humanity that evolution had surpassed, “its liquidation as a class and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to it could be justified.” (The Black Book of Communism, p. 752)

In Nazi Germany evolutionary scientism resulted in gas chambers, ovens, and the liquidation of eleven million “useless eaters” and other undesirables.

Alain Brossat draws the following conclusions about the two regimes of nihilism, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and the ties that bind them:

“The ‘liquidation’ of the Muscovite executioners, a close relative of the ‘treatment’ carried out by Nazi assassins, is a linguistic microcosm of an irreparable mental and cultural catastrophe that was in full view on the Soviet Stage. The value of human life collapsed, and thinking in categories replaced ethical thought…In the discourse and practice of the Nazi exterminators, the animalization of Other…was closely linked to the ideology of race. It was conceived in the implacably hierarchical racial terms of “subhumans” and “supermen”…but in Moscow in 1937, what mattered…was the total animalization of the Other, so that a policy under which absolutely anything was possible could come into practice.” (Black Book of Communism, p. 751)

As in England, evolutionary scientism has replaced the God of Revelation, thus with the animalization of Americans millions of unborn humans have already been aborted, growing numbers of unwanted adults euthanized and late-term unborn babies cruelly dismembered.

Writing in, “New York Abortion Bill Allows Shooting Babies Through the Heart With Poison to Kill Them” Steven Ertelt reports that New York is already the abortion/murder capital of the United States, with practically no oversight of the industry.   Throughout the second trimester, developing babies can be completely dismembered,

“… even when they can feel pain (by) pulling the baby out piece by piece until the mother’s uterus is empty. After the abortion, the abortionist must reassemble the child’s body to ensure nothing has been left inside the child’s mother.” (LifeNews.com | 5/20/14 6:28 PM)

What nihilists now demand for late-term abortions that will be legalized in New York by the abortion-expanding Women’s Equality Act, is the murder of babies,

“… by sliding a needle filled with a chemical agent, such as digoxin, into the beating heart, before being delivered.”

Then there is Wisconsin-based abortionist Dennis Christensen and his partner Bernard Smith who have performed 85,000 to 95,000 abortions in a 40 year period:

“So I see it as a calling, I guess,” Christensen said. “But I’ve been called, I’ve served and now I’d like to call someone else.”  (Abortionist Who’s Killed 95,000 Babies in Abortions: “I See It as a Calling” Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com, 7/7/14)

Something “called him” to murder 95,000 babies, but it wasn’t the Holy God of Revelation.

When for millions of nihilists the God of Revelation does not exist and life has no higher, fixed meaning or purpose with neither hope of an afterlife nor any accountability to their Maker for their actions here in this world, then men no longer have reason and purpose for being good, thus are free to be evil.  They are at liberty to invoke meaningless law and perverted justice to destroy freedom, dismember babies, and force disordered appetites upon men, women, and children.  They are free to accuse the good man of evil, to enslave other people and deprive them of life-sustaining electricity, gas, and water.  With this freedom they vandalize and plunder the property and wealth of others and throw our borders open to floods of illegals, rapists, drug-lords, terrorists, pedophiles, murderers and other sinister individuals.

Nihilists can freely lie so as to “normalize” whatever wicked fantasies and schemes they desire, such as global warming/cooling/change, redistributive justice, common core, ‘gay’ equality and Decadence Festivals:

“The Southern Decadence Festival is one of our nation’s most notorious celebrations of sodomy, public sex acts, prostitution, drunkenness, and worse, but is by no means the only such festival….decadence festivals are held over and across post-Christian America and Western Europe as well as in Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, Thailand, Brazil, Belarus, Ireland, Japan, Scotland, China, S. Africa, India and Taipei.” (Sex slaves, sexual anarchy and decadence festivals: ominous signs of something really rotten,” L. Kimball, Renew America, Oct. 25, 2012)

A society of nihilists is a welcome mat to human predators of every stripe from drug lords, ISIS, and the Muslim Brotherhood to flesh-peddlers and the world’s criminal elite: the occult Luciferian New World Order super-wealthy criminal consortium and their merciless leftwing and rightwing allies.   This cohort of sinister nihilists believe in nothing, know only hate, contempt, violence, greed and egotism and share a foundational hatred of the Tri-Personal God of Revelation, faithful Christians and Jews and  traditional Christian grounded Western and American civilization.

In the impeccably documented book, “Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie,” Bruce Walker describes the super-wealthy consortium and their like-minded allies as Sinisterists, making political labels like Far Right (Nazis/Fascists), liberals and Far Left (Progressives, Bolsheviks, Marxists, Communists) and even like-minded Radical Muslims the same thing.

What unite all Sinisterists are their hatreds:

“They hate Christians…Jews…America (and) Israel.  They hate truth.  They hate the very idea of truth.  They hate the idea of humans as unique and special in the universe.  They hate the idea of a great moral purpose unfolding in our lives.  Sinisterism is a bundle of connected hatreds.  For the sake of their hatreds, Sinisterists lust for power.”(preface)

Because Sinisterists hate the idea of man as God’s spiritual image-bearer they have ‘killed’ the Triune God and forced nihilistic Darwinism upon us because it reduces mankind to less than nothing.  They also invent words and sound-bite phrases such as heterosexist, homophobe, global change and nonexistent categories of mankind such as “racial species” and “emerging genders” that imprison thought.   Following are some other examples:

1. Multiculturalism: the stealthy destruction of America’s traditional Christian based culture by insidious elevation of pagan and pantheist cultures and belief systems in the name of politically correct tolerance, pluralism and inclusion.

2.’Gay rights/’gay’ marriage: rebellion against and negation of the two created sexes, procreation, and the idea of normal.

3. Political correctness, speech codes, sensitivity training, and hate crime laws:  psychic-cages for the minds of traditional-values Americans.

4. Perverse sex education: As was the case in the Soviet Union, its ultimate purpose is the subversion and perversion of our youth—the awakening of the Devil, as Karl Marx’s comrade Bakunin admitted.

5. Critical theory: the mindless vomiting out of destructive criticism upon everything good, true, excellent, normal, and traditional.

6. Global change, Agenda 21, Green Movement, redistributive justice: the evisceration of our standard of living and individual liberties in order to ‘save the planet’ — in other words, penury, misery, death and slavery on behalf of Gaia.

7. Sustainability: Extreme population control calling for the annihilation of billions of people to achieve spiritual communism.

8. Religious pluralism: the erasure of faithful Judaism, Christian theism and America’s founding Christian-based worldview by way of elevating Wicca, animism, Islam, New Age occult spirituality, Gnostic paganism, Buddhism,  shamanism, goddess worship, Luciferian Masonry and atheism in the name of politically correct tolerance and inclusion.

In order to destroy rational thinking, nihilists use words and phrases (i.e., change, “make love not war,” “we are Trayvon” “evolution is an established fact of science”) to create images rather than ideas and then concentrate on endless repetition of the same word-pictures,

“…to create a hypnotic effect to defend an otherwise hopeless case.  Sinisterists use the same words over and over again.”   (p.12)

Nihilism’s black heart is the worship of lies, particularly the Big Lie of evolution.   ‘Elite’ transnational Robert Muller, father of Common Core Curriculum and former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN and former Chancellor of the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica speaks of the fate that will befall all politically incorrect thinkers, especially anti-evolutionists:

“…all those who hold contrary beliefs” to politically correct thought favored for the “next  phase of evolution” will “disappear.”  A hellish fate awaits all who resist political and spiritual globalization, “…those who criticize the UN are anti-evolutionary, blind, self-serving people.  Their souls will be parked in a special corral of the universe for having been retarding forces, true aberrations in the evolution and ascent of humanity.”  (False Dawn, Lee Penn, p. 133)

With malice aforethought, sinister nihilists have dumbed-down Westerners and Americans by infiltrating our education institutions and even our seminaries with nihilist philosophies, propaganda and schemes such as evolutionary scientism, perverse sex education, so-called ‘higher Biblical criticism,’ critical theory, multiculturalism and revised history.

As evolutionary scientism and the relativity of truth are fatal doctrines– types of nihilism that deny objective truth and reality— they result in the rapid disintegration of critical thinking, faith in God, respect and manners resulting in a twisted, inverted society dominated by moral imbeciles—narcissistic despots, thugs, human parasites and bizarre polymorphously perverse beings— at every level of government and society who know how they feel and what they covet and are thus entitled to but can’t think straight, can’t spell, and don’t know right from wrong.

It should be obvious by now, said Walker, that the relations of people in American and Western society are growing coarser,

“…..more dishonest….shallower….lonelier…more desperate for the narcotics of power, applause and fear as we perceive ourselves moving closer to the status of gods and goddesses.  If we choose, as individuals, that idolatry, then we are doomed.  All the dystopian nightmares of Orwell, Bradbury, Huxley and others will become real all too soon….we will (either) surrender to thugs governing enslaved nations or embittered terrorists.” (p. 252)

Our so-called “scientifically enlightened” age is an age of nihilism.  Ecstatic with the voluptuous delight of destruction which rolls humans into satanic depths; nihilists keep pushing society to the brink of social chaos and suicide:

“The Modern Liberal will invariably (and) inevitably side with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. When I say the Modern Liberal is morally and intellectually retarded at the level of the five-year old child, it is not hyperbole: its diagnosis.” (Evan Sayet, The Kindergarten of Evil,)

Nihilism is lawlessness, idolatry, violence, perversion, fear, terrors of mind, and horrors of conscience and loss of true freedom since the despair of nihilism ends in man’s slavery to his dark side, death and damnation.

In his poem “The Second Coming,” Yeats reveals the murderous delight of de Sade’s, Nietzsche’s, Marx’s, and Callicles modern offspring:

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are
Full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

If Western and American nihilists continue to set the God of Revelation aside in favor of “self” and what they really do know are lies and empty, shallow, meaningless evil, then a tyranny of evil will come upon us swiftly and terribly.  But there is another path before us: the way of repentance, truth, decency and God’s Divine Truth.  His eternally unchanging Truth will set us free. We should choose the path of Truth and goodness:

“On that choice hangs the fate of humanity. People will either embrace goodness or deny that goodness can exist and commit moral suicide (and) worship The Lie.”   (ibid, Walker, p. 252)

People who choose the way of true truth will find the goodness and Light of God.  As they follow the Way of Truth they will stumble sometimes, occasionally journey down blind alleys, and perhaps be on the wrong side of causes at times, but they,

“…will never lose hope or the help of other normal people and the Blessed Creator of the Universe.” (ibid, p. 233)

The narrow way leads ever up toward truth, light, beauty, goodness, courage, hope, peace and eternal physical life in an unimaginably beautiful Paradise.   The other way is a broad highway spilling into a downward spiraling vortex marked by the despair of nihilism, the darkness of lies, the sulphuric stench of soul-destroying hate, and the horror of nothingness finally issuing into an eternity in outer darkness.

The Evolving Universe of Matter & Energy: America’s Rising Worldview of Evil Spirits

After two mystical encounters with the evil spirit Zarathustra, the dark prophet Nietzsche announced the “death of the Christian God.” Dubbing himself the Antichrist, Nietzsche proclaimed:

“The greatest recent event — that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable — is even now beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe; however, few really understood ” what has really happened here, “and what must collapse now that this belief has been undermined — all that was built upon it, leaned on it, grew into it; for example, our whole European morality.” (False Dawn, Lee Penn, p. 433)

From the beginning of Christ’s earthly ministry, there were those who received Him but many more, like Nietzsche, who would not, and so it will be until the end.   The former are those who admit and humbly confess their sinful condition while the latter, being full of stubborn pride, covetousness, and envy will not.

Not even the mighty miracle of creation ex nihilo as described in John’s Gospel and Christ’s own bodily resurrection (Luke 16:31) can persuade those who choose not to believe.

This willful unbelief in Christ had been prophesied long before.  In support of this John cites Isaiah 53:1-3,

“He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.”

In order to be received, one must be acceptable.  Christ is rejected by proud, rebellious, sinless men along with His offer of salvation because He is not acceptable to them.  Thus their final word to Him is the cross.

At the root of the rejection of Jesus Christ God incarnate is the rebellious assertion that man has not been created by Him.  He is a free spirit neither dependent upon Him for his life nor created in His spiritual image but rather a conscious product of evolution.  He is a man-god who can choose either to murder God or to invent sock-puppet deities to do his bidding, for he is the master of science, evolution, matter, energy, time, and being who through his own knowledge and powers will save himself, or so he foolishly believes.  In reality, an inner blinding prevents him from ‘seeing’ that his liberty does not lead to greater freedom but to slavery because willful rejection of his Creator means he becomes Satan’s infernal tool.

“I am become a monstrous machine of annihilation…”  Ritual of Destruction, the Satanic Bible, Anton LeVey

The ritual ‘murder’ of the Christian God led to the collapse of far more than just European morality.  Consider the following:

In Christian thought, a person is a spirit and personality is the total individuality of the spirit. Without spirit there is no person.  The term ‘person’ originated in Christian theologies developmental struggle to comprehend the nature and experience of the Christian God, the transcendent, personal Triune God:

“The derivative concept of human personhood is a gift of the Christian faith to culture…” (Stephen P. Stratton, Chapter 14, p. 247, The Self, Paul Vitz & Susan M. Felch, Editors)

Whether the Founders were individually Christian or not, there was among them a strong Christian consensus that finds some of its greatest spiritual and moral expression in the scholarly works of Samuel Rutherford in “Lex Rex” (1644) and in the writings of the 18th century jurist William Blackstone.

Rutherford reasoned that since all people are sinners, then no sinner—whether President, Att. General, Senator, ‘gay,’ pastor, cop, jurist, perverse sex-educator, abortionist, evolutionary biologist, or Supreme Court Justice for example—is superior to any other sinner. No sinner is above the law but rather subject to the law without exception.  All must recognize that they are sinners under the unchanging transcendent Law of God.

Blackstone greatly influenced early American understanding of the Christian God, the Bible, Law and nature. He taught that since the eternally unchanging Triune God is the omnipotent Creator who works and governs the affairs of men then all law should be consistent with His Revelation in the Bible. No law should be passed that is contrary to the higher law of God.

Furthermore, as all men are created spiritual equals in the eyes of God, then life, property, worth, dignity and other unalienable rights are conferred upon each human person at conception.   For example, the unalienable right to life is because all people are God’s spiritual image bearers while freedom of religion and speech are the temporal property of a person’s God-given spiritual property of conscience and reason.

In “Property,” published in The National Gazette on March 29, 1792, James Madison outlines the meaning of a person’s God-given spiritual property, some of its’ temporal rights and the meaning and intent of just government as opposed to unjust government:

“He has a property….in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.”  “He has a property…in his opinions and the free communication of them.”  “He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.” “He has property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.”  (The Heritage Foundation)

Property is,

“….a man’s land, or merchandize, or money (and) as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.” 

Just government is instituted to protect property of every sort:

“This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” (Samuel Rutherford, )

The Constitution therefore, recognizes the divine nature of man’s creation, that man is a person endowed by his personal Creator with spiritual property, a divine right to life and liberty, and the means of acquiring and possessing property. Hence our Republic recognizes Law is unchangeable because the Creator (John 1:1) is the unchanging Lawgiver Who is the same today as yesterday and for all eternity:

“It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated.” (James Madison, Speech at the Virginia Convention, December 2, 1829)

Vishal Mangalwadi, India’s foremost Christian scholar affirms that the Christian gift of personhood gave birth to the “belief in the unique dignity of human beings,” and this is,

“…the force that created Western civilization, where citizens do not exist for the state but the state exists for the individuals. Even kings, presidents, prime ministers, and army generals cannot be allowed to trample upon an individual and his or her rights.” (Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations, pp. 12-13)

 Death of the Christian God: Catastrophic Consequences

“And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” John 3:19

Once the citadel of the Light that came into the world, modern Western Europe and America are roiling seas of darkness punctuated here and there by shrinking islands of light because evil-minded men love darkness rather than Light. Thus the perversely twisted, upside-down, lawless atmosphere of our age is the “death of the Christian God” made tangible.

When people fall away from the knowledge of God and transgress against His commandments, these actions effectively turn them back to their natural state. This means that in forsaking God, the fount of living waters, they have become cracked cisterns that hold no water. (Jer. 2:13) In other words, the death of the Christian God logically means the death of spirit (person), hence also spiritual and temporal property, and by extension the collapse of Western civilization and America’s Constitutional Republic— “if the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?”  Psalm 11:3
The methodology of the ‘murder’ of Christ the Creator (John 1:1) requires that the miracle of six day creation (Genesis account) together with Adam and Eve and their fall be de-historicized and reduced to myth and fable (annihilated), a project already underway by the time of Descartes and fulfilled with infernal ‘higher criticism.’

In her book “Total Truth,” Nancy Pearcy, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, writes that one of the great ironies of history is that the enduring impact of Descartes philosophy has been precisely the opposite of what he had intended. Descartes had intended the defense of the human soul/spirit over and against the dehumanizing mechanistic and materialistic conception of the universe. Instead, soul/spirit was reduced to a shadowy substance totally irrelevant to the material realm known by natural science. The immortal soul/spirit became a kind of ghost only tenuously connected to the physical body.

After the success of Newtonian physics natural science began to take on the trappings of religion. Epistemologically, science began to be viewed as the way to true understanding, and by extension, true progress. Nature itself took on the guise of an impersonal, mystical entity described as a cosmic machine governed by deterministic energies working through natural laws as strictly as the gears of a clock. Though soul/ spirit are crucial for reason, conscience, morality, belief, faith, prayer, theorizing, science, math and religion, there was no room for them in the cosmic machine.

The mechanistic conception gave rise to evil ‘isms’–rationalism, positivism, skepticism, relativism, and scientific materialism (atheism), which granted the sovereign reason of sinful man and naturalistic science an epistemological monopoly on so-called “real” knowledge, facts and truth while trivializing everything else to faith, personal belief and social constructs.  The devilish consequences of this have been horrendous, for whereas the creation of universal moral law was traditionally the function of the Triune God, now this function is arrogated to the individual human will, making the “reason” of sinners into God and science into a dictatorship of the knowable.

“…men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” John 3:19

With “reason” sitting on the throne of the Christian God, heaven was shut-down and the physical world of the senses elevated to the supreme reality. The six day Genesis account was de-historicized and replaced with imaginative evolutionary cosmologies claiming vast ages of time.  As supernatural Christian theism declined, immutable truth, moral law and sin disappeared under the onslaught of evil “isms” and apostate Protestant Liberalism (pantheism) in tandem with reductionist evolutionary biology, which became the most prestigious way to study the depersonalized human organism. With knowledge limited to the sensory realm, Jesus Christ the Word Incarnate was “murdered,” meaning reduced by evil men to an immanent mystical evolutionary force (Christ consciousness) while man’s soul/spirit was lost in an endless cycle of reductionism and determinism. Man, the person created in the spiritual likeness of the One God in three Persons would be lost.  In his place would stand the subhuman hominid, a conscious product of evolution, the god of forces.

Today, the ‘god’ evolution has so thoroughly replaced the living Word (John 1:1) and Special Creation in the consciousness of vast numbers of scientifically endarkened men and women within and without the whole body of the Christian Church that one of the leading evolution-worshippers of our day, Professor S.J. Gould, describes scientism and evolution as the story of mankind that tells us,

“….where we came from, how we got here, and perhaps where we are going. Quite simply, it is science’s version of Roots, except it is the story of us all.”   (The Religious Nature of Evolution Theory and its Attack on Christianity, John G. Leslie and Charles K. Pallaghy, Ph.D, )

In glowing affirmation, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) , a prominent evolutionary biologist and progressive creationist sees the ‘god’ evolution as a light that illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow, for if man,

“…has arrived at his present state as a result of natural processes rather than a supernatural will, he can learn to control these processes…The concept of evolution, which is now basic to the life sciences, has provided new and in some ways revolutionary answers to questions men have been asking for centuries. The two most important of these are, ‘Why am I here, what is the purpose of human existence, and what is the nature of the world of life that surrounds us?”   (Dobzhansky, T., Ayala, F.J., Stebbins, G.L. and Valentine, J.W., Evolution, W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1977)

Triumph of Scientism and the ‘god’ Evolution

At its founding and for about 150 years after America was the world’s beacon of freedom and hope because it was founded on the true Light of unchanging truths such as,

“all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .”

Now however, an endarkened generation of law makers, politicians, entertainers, professors, seminarians and high school graduates no longer believe that anyone knows ‘the’ truth or even if whether males are meant to be males or females too. For them, anyone who claims to know the truth is a bigoted fundamentalist because they know there was never a fall from God’s good creation but rather an evolutionary ascent moving from primordial matter to creeping things, crawling things, knuckle-dragging things to man. They know with certainty that human beings were never created but evolved. And as the ‘god’ evolution endows nothing—not soul/spirit, personhood, unalienable rights and the freedom to exercise them—then our Constitution is as meaningless as Xmas and Special Creation.

The real source of this evil and madness is a godless left-right confederacy of nihilists described by Professor Angelo Codevilla as America’s Ruling Class.  In “The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It,”  Codevilla, emeritus professor of international relations at Boston University, argues that America’s real war is between Americans who still worship the supernatural Triune God and a class of evolutionary humanists who dominate both political parties, academe, Hollywood, science and media.  They preach from pulpits, run big business, our economy and the country’s major institutions and imagine themselves entitled to reshape an America that they regard as composed of un-evolved subhuman hominids.

The Ruling Class affirm that scientism and evolution trump the Revelation of God, and as they are the evolved products of the ‘god’ evolution they are science’s authoritative enlightened priests and god-men who pray to themselves,

“… as saviors of the planet and as shapers of mankind in their own image..” (The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It, p. xix)
After more than eighty years of nearly unopposed evolutionary evangelization in the schools, media, seminaries, academia and elsewhere the Ruling Class is finally at liberty to declare that evolution is “mind,”

“….enlarging its domain up the chain of species.”  The god evolution is the “universe…a mind that oversees, orchestrates, and gives order and structure to all things.”   (Algeny, Jeremy Rifkin, 1983, p. 188)

Now that scientism and evolution reign supreme, Satan’s infernal machines, such as the demonized Rifkin,  no longer feel like guests,

”….. in someone else’s home and therefore obliged to make our behavior conform with a set of pre-existing cosmic rules. It is our creation now. We make the rules. We establish the parameters of reality. We create the world, and because we do, we no longer feel beholden to outside forces. We no longer have to justify our behavior, for we are now the architects of the universe. We are responsible to nothing outside ourselves for we are the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever.” (ibid)

According to Robert Muller, the father of World Core Curriculum, now that evolution is “mind” highly evolved men are free to spiritually evolve into higher and higher forms, to become one with the ‘divine:’

“Once again, but this time on a universal scale, humankind is seeking no less than its reunion with the ‘divine,’ its transcendence into ever higher forms of life.  Hindus call our earth Brahma, or God, for they rightly see no difference between our earth and the divine.  This ancient simple truth is slowly dawning again upon humanity.  Its full flowering will be the real, great new story of humanity as we are about to enter our cosmic age…” (New Genesis: Shaping a Global Spirituality, Robert Muller, father of Core Curriculum, 1984, p. 84)

“…..the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.”  1 John 5:19    “Therefore take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness.”  Luke 11:35

From the post-flood world of ancient Babylon to our own, the majority of the world’s people have lived under the tyranny of powers, principalities and various determinisms—karma, reincarnation, evolution, fates, furies, chance, cause, doom, natural selection, and genes. They believed that all events in the real world were predestined and controlled by unseen forces of the cosmos that the apostle Paul described as the elemental spirits of the universe.

When Jesus Christ God incarnate demonstrated His absolute control over the elements (Luke 8:24) the tyranny of determinism was cast down and utterly broken.  In the fourth century Gregory of Nazianzen suggested that at the very moment when the Magi came to worship the child of Mary and Joseph, it was then that the tyranny of determinism was broken:

“From that moment onward, the cosmos has orbited around the newborn king…Christ is the logos—the word and the reason by whom all exists and to whom all is ordered.” (American Babylon, Neuhaus, p. 226)
Determinism crept into the West when evil spirits entered into the heart of Christendom during the Renaissance.   They came quietly, first to certain theologians who rejected Jesus Christ in favor of Hermetic magic, Babylonian Kabala, Eastern mysticism, reincarnation, evolution, karma and other occult traditions and determinisms, and then openly with the brazen claim that laws of matter and evolution ultimately govern the world and man.

With penetrating insight, Father Richard John Neuhaus connects modern evolutionary scientism to its’ ancient spiritual foundations in astrology. In his book, “American Babylon,” Neuhaus argues that astrological elemental spirits have been recast as,

“…evolutionary dynamics, life forces, or laws of nature.”  Though described as laws rather than spirits, these elemental “forces”…. work their inexorable ways in cold indifference to reason, to will, to love, and to hope. In short, it is suggested that the elemental spirits are in charge and that human freedom is a delusion.“(p. 226)

“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”  Colossians 2:8

According to Pastor Larry DeBruyn, the word “rudiments” (Greek, stoicheion) relates to the universe of matter and energy and is variously,

“…. translated “elemental powers” (NAB), “elementary principles” (NASB), “basic principles” (NIV, NKJV), “evil powers” (NLT), and “elemental spirits” (ESV, NRSV). Translations indicate that stoicheion’s meaning diverges between “principles” and “powers,” between the “physical elements” constitutive of the cosmos or universe, or the “spiritual powers” that inhabit it. In 2 Peter 3:10, the first sense—that is, the “elements” which “shall melt with fervent heat”—is evident, while in Galatians 4:3 and 9, the other sense—that is, “world forces” which once “held in bondage” the Galatian believers—is evident.” (The Supreme Supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ,)

The Worldview of Evil Spirits

“….we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”  Eph. 6:12

During the 1970s Satanism and possession became front page news in America.  It was during this time that the eminent theologian Malachi Martin, a former Jesuit professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome published his shattering book on demon oppression and possession.
Martin’s “Hostage to the Devil: the Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans,” presents five cases of actual possession that express important aspects of the worldview of evil spirits which allow us to not only identify these elements but discern their devastating effects within the whole body of the Christian church, the minds of millions of Americans and by extension, our nation.

The worldview of evil powers always takes the form of nature worship, or celebration of created things such as matter and energy as opposed to worship of the living, personal Creator Who created everything. Thus in support of the idea that living beings created themselves it is virulently anti-supernatural and Genesis account creation ex nihilo in favor of one dimensional naturalism and evolutionary cosmologies.

In one case, an evil spirit’s evolutionary cosmology teaching the self-created “universe of matter” and human life was disclosed wherein,

“…men, women, animals, plants, cities, oceans (are) interconnected.  There is really no difference between one thing and anything else….land, ocean, animals, humans, plants are one living organism clad in the shell of breathable atmosphere.  Psychic forces bind it all together….It is a self-creating, self-protecting, self-developing thing…..Earth as mother, as womb, as god, as tomb, as a whole unity protected by its own shell and its own strength (is) all there is.” (p. 395)

From the Big Bang (exploding cosmic egg) which supposedly created matter and energy in the demon’s description of the universe as “self-creating” to inflationary in the description of the universe as a “self-developing thing” to Gaia as “Earth as self-protecting mother” the possessing demon’s evolutionary cosmology is very similar to occult New Age spirituality.

Another important case involved David, a Catholic priest who became obsessed with the evolutionary scientism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  Teilhard’s destructive influence is widespread today within transnational Trans-humanist circles, the U.N., the Catholic Church, and increasingly within the Protestant Church.

In “Teilhard de Chardin: Trojan Horse of Vatican II/Heretic Extraordinaire,” Dr. J. P. Hubert wonders whether based on Teilhard’s admission of a mystical encounter if his evolutionary science was satanically inspired.  Teilhard describes his strange encounter:

“The man was walking in the desert…when the Thing swooped down on him.  Then, suddenly, a breath of scorching air passed across his forehead, broke through the barrier of his closed eyelids; an irresistible rapture took possession of him….mightily refashioning the enfeebled fibres of his being.  And at the same time the anguish of some superhuman peril oppressed him, a confused feeling that the force which had swept down upon him was equivocal, turbid, the combined essence of all evil and goodness.  You called me: here I am grown weary of abstractions, of attenuations, of the wordiness of social life, you wanted to pit yourself against Reality entire and untamed.  I was waiting for you in order to be made holy.  And now I am established on you for life, or for death….He who has once seen me can never forget me: he must either damn himself with me or save me with himself.  O you who are divine and mighty, what is your name? Speak.”

Hubert concludes that Teilhardism is,

“…no doubt of Satanic origin—a true “religion of man,” if ever there was one.”

America’s Unfolding Spiritual Catastrophe

For over eighty-five years, America has been incrementally conquered by the same madness-inducing demon of hatred and violence that earlier took over Russia, China, Germany, and Italy.

This demon is mainly embodied within America’s “scientifically endarkened” Ruling Class which is deeply oppressed and possessed by elemental spirits and the delusion that the true enemy of America is always on the Right.  Having rejected the biblical God and the religious heritage of our civilization, they embrace instead an ancient order of beliefs of which Communism and Socialism are logical expressions.  A new world order is what they seek, but in order that it can emerge, the still remaining remnants of America’s Christian-based culture must be completely destroyed.
What this means is that the spiritual catastrophe that unfolded in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is unfolding on America’s stage.

Can this catastrophe be averted?

Repentance: The Only Way Back

Returning to David, prior to his obsession with Teilhardism he was destined to become a professor of anthropology at a Catholic university.  But under the influence of Teilhardism, he came to see that the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo, Adam and Eve as the first man and woman and parents of all mankind who fell and passed on Original Sin to all human beings were utterly contrary to modern scientific thinking and evolution.

Therefore David taught anthropology from a modern “evolutionary science” perspective, even going so far as to exclude traditional presentations of doctrines about creation ex nihilo and Original Sin.  But after introducing Teilhardism to his students, doubts arose when he observed the breathtaking transformative effects of this teaching upon Jonathan, one of his students, a priest who now insisted that all the sacraments are “…no more than expressions of man’s natural unity with the world around him.” 

David’s eyes were suddenly opened and he saw clearly for the first time that Teilhardism exalted man as an animal and pictured,

“God as no more than the very bowels of earth and sky and the spatial distances of the universe with all its expanding galaxies.” (Martin, p. 107)

Meanwhile, Jonathan left the church and quickly founded his own cult among wealthy Manhattan families.  He preached that the universe and all people were evolving as ‘one’ in a naturally occurring mystical union which he called “Abba Father.” (p. 127)

Martin writes that Jonathan had come under the dominion of an evil spirit and David was called in to exorcise him.  However, the demon possessing Jonathan ridiculed David, saying they both believed the same things, therefore if Jonathan needed exorcism David needed it more.

Reeling in shock, David was led to an agony of soul-searching over the course of many weeks during which he re-examined and finally repented of the intellectual arrogance that led him to embrace Teilhardism and the “higher criticism” of Scriptures that reduced the Revealed Word to myth, allegory and delusion and the death of Jesus to an insignificant event of the evolutionary past rather than,

“…an ever present source of personal forgiveness and unshakable hope for any future.” (p. 149)

According to Martin, the evil spirit who had nearly succeeded in killing David’s faith now taunted him that to return to faith would entail slavery of mind and will.   But when a repentant David deliberately rejected the demon’s taunts,

“…a great and breathtaking dimension full of relief….flooded his mind and will and imagination….And when he now looked at the world of nature around him…and heard the song of a mockingbird nearby, he received it no longer as he had while a Teilhardian evolutionist, as ‘intimations of molecules endlessly regrouping,’ but rather ‘of endless life for each person, and of love without a shadow.” (pp. 163, 165)

Speaking through Nietzsche, Zarathustra had declared the death of the Christian God on behalf of all willful unbelievers, but now for David, “He’s alive and I’m forgiven!”   His faith in God, Christ, the Holy Spirit and Scripture restored, David was ready to exorcise the evil spirit who possessed Jonathan.  He did so,

“…in the name of God who created him (Jonathan) and you (evil spirit), and of Jesus of Nazareth who saved him!  You will depart and get back to the uncleanness and agony you chose.” (p. 169)

Glenn Beck Goes Off On “Religious People”

“The Doctrine and Covenants leaves no doubt about the Mormon teaching of exclusivity when it says the LDS Church is, ‘the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth, with which I, the Lord, am well pleased….’”

Glenn Beck recently threw a hissy fit on his daily radio program over “religious people [who] claim to be followers of Christ” getting upset that he was the featured convocation speaker at  (LU).  Beck accused those who were concerned over a cultist preaching a sermon of “absolutely smearing” LU.

Let’s cut to the chase.  Glenn Beck is a Mormon in good standing.  Mormonism is a theological cult.  Thus Beck’s not an authentic Christian — period.  That some Christians have the temerity to object to a cultist giving a sermon at a Christian university offended Mr. Beck, thus his rant.

In an earlier column I wrote Questioning with boldness: Which is it Glenn, are you a Mormon or a Christian? I provided an in depth examination of the .  So I’m not going to spend a lot of time re-examine it here.  However, to help you get a handle on what Mormons believe, the following is a snippet of Mormon Christianity from my column.  As you will see, what they believe isn’t even close to biblical Christianity:

LDS Christianity outright denies the Trinity which is an essential of biblical Christianity.  So LDS Christianity and orthodox Christianity do not believe in the same God.  Mormon Christianity teaches that there are many gods who are overseers of other planets.  The god of planet Earth, the one they call Elohim, was just a man with a body of flesh and bones who progressed to godhood and was rewarded with his own planet.  [Founder]Joseph Smith taught, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret… [Y]ou have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you…”

Brigham Young believed in a plurality of gods: “How many Gods there are, I do not know. But there never was a time when there were not Gods…” (Journal of Discourses 7:333).

Mormons believe that after death they will become gods and will be rewarded with their own planet.  Thereafter they will spend eternity with their many wives (polygamy) producing offspring to populate their planet.  Traditional Christianity says that God is not a man. (Numbers 23:19) Mormon Christianity teaches that man first existed as spirits in heaven.  Biblical Christianity says that the physical body comes before the spiritual. (1 Cor 15:46) 

And LDS Christianity teaches this humdinger: Jesus and Lucifer are spirit children of God, which makes them spirit brothers. 

Bible believing Christians will understand that historic orthodox Christianity does not hold to any of what Joseph Smith conjured up.  There is no way that Glenn Beck is unaware of Smith’s beliefs and background.  Later in my column I brought to light that,

…it was Joseph Smith and subsequent Mormon hierarchy that attacked Christianity.  The truth is Joseph Smith’s religion, which he made up out of whole cloth, is an abomination to God! 

It seems weird to me that Glenn Beck spends oodles of time gathering dirt on leftist radicals and that he digs deep to get the skinny on President Obama but has neglected to do some deep digging on …  Joseph Smith.  His church’s so-called prophet was a charlatan, a polygamist, an adulterer, and he was up to his eyeballs in the occult as was his father.  There’s plenty of evidence on the web for inquiring minds that want to know the truth about Mormonism’s founder.  ()

For reasons known only to him, Glenn Beck holds the LDS Church in high regard.  Consequently, he’s deluded.  Why do I say that?  To put it bluntly, Mormonism is a satanic cult.  (Those who wish to research the LDS are invited to visit my .)  LU knows this full well, yet Beck was invited to speak to its students.  As I mentioned above, Beck preached a sermon saturated with Mormon theology.  Moreover, he shared a valuable artifact — Joseph Smith’s pocket watch.

Liberty University Enlightens Us

Following is LU’s explanation, in part, for their decision:

We have explained over the decades repeatedly that convocation is an opportunity for students to hear from people of all faiths and from all walks of life.  Liberty has also made it clear repeatedly that it does not endorse any statements made by any convocation speaker.

So far so good.

By contrast, our faculty are all required to profess Liberty’s statement of faith and to affirm our doctrinal statement.  Our students are all required to take many credit hours of theology and Bible courses, regardless of their major.  Our students have no question about what Liberty’s doctrinal statement is.  It is posted publicly for all to see. Our doctrinal statement is our public statement on Mormonism.  It is the same statement that Liberty was founded upon and it will never change.

College is about learning.  How can you defend what you believe if you don’t understand what others believe? 

Good point.

I believe our students are stronger in their faith because of our convocation speaker series and the wide diversity of views that they have been privileged to hear in person over the last few decades.

By the way, many conservative evangelical leaders who are closer to Beck than me have told me that they believe Beck has had a born again experience recently.

Hold it right there!  The “Glenn Beck is saved” rumor has been circulating for several years thanks largely to Wall Builders Founder , “American evangelicals’ favorite historian.”  If it’s true, then why is Beck keeping the good news from his friends and fans?  Moreover, if he truly is  then why hasn’t he cut all ties to the LDS Church and joined a church where the true gospel of Christ is preached?

LU’s explanation continues:

I do not know his heart but our audience knows that he was speaking only for himself and expressing his personal opinions and beliefs, not those of Liberty University or even of Mormonism generally. As Jerry Falwell, Sr., our founder, often used to say about speakers at Liberty who had different views than him, Liberty students are smart enough to eat the fish and spit out the bones! I believe that’s as true today as it was in his day.

Are we to assume every student is mature in their faith and has spiritual discernment?  Are we to assume that every student who attends a Christian university has been born again and thus saved? Did it not occur to Jerry Falwell, Jr. that some of the students who ate the fish Glenn Beck dished up could have choked on the bones?!

Now, don’t get me wrong. Liberty University has the right to invite whoever they wish to speak to its students.  But lately they seem to have an affinity for Mormons, as Glenn Beck has spoken at the university twice.  In 2010 he delivered the commencement address and received an honorary doctorate degree.  Likewise, Mormon Mitt Romney gave the commencement speech in 2012.

A Martyr?

Is it true that Joseph Smith died a martyr, as Glenn Beck declared to LU’s students?  Not so fast, Glenn!  The factual account of what led to Smith’s death reveal that he and his brother Hyrum were charged with treason and conspiracy by Illinois authorities whereby they were arrested and imprisoned in a minimum security cell in the Carthage city jail. According to The Martyrdom of Joseph Smith by Eric Johnson:

He and his brother Hyrum Smith were murdered on June 27, 1844, by an armed mob, an event that has prompted Mormons to classify them as martyrs. It has caused others, however, to raise the question whether someone who dies in a gun battle fighting against his enemies can be considered to be a martyr. A close examination of the term reveals that one must meet specific requirements to be considered a martyr, which involve, for example, the reasons why one is put to death and the way one faces such a death. An investigation of the reasons why Smith was murdered and the actions he took to avoid this fate inevitably makes it difficult to maintain that Smith was “like a lamb led to the slaughter.” ()

Johnson offers several reasons why he believes it is not accurate to classify Smith a martyr which you’ll find in his essay under the heading: THE FALLACY OF DEEMING SMITH A MARTYR.

Glenn’s Rant

To spare you from having to read Beck’s ridiculous rant, I’ll post a few quotes from a piece by Erica Ritz:

This is why your churches are dwindling. … You think you’re standing for something, when indeed, you’re standing for hate and bigotry. I think Jesus was hanging out with prostitutes and sinners, wasn’t he? You won’t even listen to a man who says … ‘I challenge you to know your faith, not my faith, your faith so well that you’re willing to die for it. Stand with one another.’ That frightens you so much? If it does, you might want to consider that you’re on the wrong side.

Let’s see.  “Prophet” Joseph Smith said that “Christianity had become apostate, and all of their creeds were corrupt, and all of their followers were deceived.” Therefore, it fell to Smith not to “reform” the Christian church, but to “restore” it.”

And anyone who rejects Mormon heresy is “standing for hate and bigotry.”

More…

I look at every single lover of light and truth as my ally, my friend, my brother. … I look at everyone who is my enemy as my brother. I don’t care what you say; I don’t care what you think your belief is; I don’t care what your lifestyle is — you’re not going to change me. And I invite you to join me, join others of multiple faiths — never asking anyone to change their faith — asking you to strengthen your faith, whatever it is. ()

Beck is oblivious to the fact that his truth is NOT biblical Truth.  On the contrary, what he’s “preaching” to anyone who’s willing to listen, and to a captive audience at LU by the way, is .  This New Age Mormon who professes Christ vociferously urges his followers to join together with other religious faiths and sing We Are the World.  If Michael Jackson were alive today, he’d be proud of Glenn.

Partnerships

Glenn claims he’s read the Bible several times.  Perhaps he has.  However, he must have skipped over Paul’s teaching in :

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial?  Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?  What agreement has the temple of God with idols?  For we are the temple of the living God.

Unbelievers are in darkness.  For this reason believers are not to unite with them in any sort of spiritual enterprise.  And those who are in darkness, the unsaved, are not our brothers and sisters.  Thus, we are commanded to share the gospel of Christ with them.  ()

One last quote from Glenn Beck’s hero, Joseph Smith where we learn a bit more of his bizarre and unbiblical understanding of God, which, by his own admission is the view of God Glenn holds as he is, after all, a professing Mormon:

I say, if you were to see him [God] to-day, you would see him like a man in form–like yourselves, in all the person, image, and very form as a man . . . it is necessary that we should understand the character and being of God, and how he came to be so; for I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity,  I will refute that idea, and will take away and do away the veil, so that you may see . . . and that he was once a man like us; yea, that God himself the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did.  ()

Now a bit of wise counsel from Erin Benziger in What If ‘My God’ Is Bigger than ‘Your God’? :

It is sinful pride that leads men into idolatry as they create imaginary gods that suit their own personal needs. It is the same sinful pride that prevents men from bowing low before the True God. It is this pride that refuses to acknowledge one’s own inability to offer anything truly “good” and refuses to acknowledge his own sinfulness. Yet it is God Who can, by wonderful, amazing grace, break a man of this pride and bring him to his knees in humility. It is God Who can bring the most stubborn, prideful man to a place of repentance and faith in the Savior, Jesus Christ. May we pray this day and every day that God would use us to proclaim the truth of His Gospel to such men, and may we pray that His Spirit would stir and work within those men to bring them to repentant, saving faith and knowledge of His Son. ()

Recommended:

—On Solid Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

Glenn Beck’s “pure personal truth,” , —Marsha West

Does The Bible Really Say We’re Not To Judge?

Some professing Christians become infuriated when a “watchblogger” has the chutzpah to report on a false teacher by name, as if naming names is unbiblical.  High-profile leaders and bloggers who mention heretics by name are often accused of demonizing or judging them.

For example, when I expose  latest effort to unite with , , , , and when I examine his  and his penchant for (he often uses it as a tool to cover his own ideas with a pretense of divine authority), complaints come pouring in by the truck load.  Many of his defenders write to set me straight on what Scripture says about “judging him.”  Others scold me for not giving him credit for all the good he has done, as if doing good deeds, meeting felt needs and ignoring doctrine and creeds is biblical.

Invariably someone will cite  :

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

And then they’ll ask if I’ve gone privately to Rick Warren to correct him.  My response is “Of course not!”  Why?  For the reason that Christian celebrities like Rick Warren are generally not accessible.  Many are, in fact, akin to Hollywood celebs.  No doubt some of them rationalize that their popularity affords them certain privileges, one of which is to choose not to have a dialogue with those of us who write anything negative about them.

Yet the Bible says that those who are in sin (false teaching is sin) must be admonished.  In  the Apostle John calls out Diotrephes and promises to publicly correct him upon his return. In  Paul stands up to the highly esteemed Apostle Peter!   He even got in Peter’s face for fearing false teachers. What resulted from Peter’s “fear of man”?:

And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.  But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?’ (bold added)

In context the Matthew 18 passages (above) addresses the ways in which the leadership must go about disciplining a brother or sister in their church who has fallen into sin.  It also provides the proper steps to take before excommunicating someone who refuses to repent.  First, we are to go to him in private and if he refuses to repent we are to go a second time taking with us two or more witnesses.  If he still refuses to repent, the pastor must go before the church and proclaim his sin.  Ouch!

It’s essential that elders are involved in the process.

Likewise, the passages in Matthew 18 don’t apply to doctrinal issues nor do they apply to Christians who have put their work before the world.  A person’s willingness to do so makes them fair game for anyone who wishes to scrutinize and even criticize his or her work.   Consequently, Christians who can’t stand the heat should get out of the kitchen.

But I’m drifting from my point.

When believers make a judgment, we’re not to judge self-righteously.  Moreover, we’re not to judge a person’s heart or motives.  Those who do are sinning.

Because I name names I’m often accused of being judgmental.  All I can do is respond with Scripture:

The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. ‘For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’  But we have the mind of Christ.()

What?  You mean the true believer has the mind of Christ?  Yes!  This is a difficult concept to grasp to be sure, so I’ll point you to Matthew Henry’s commentary:

The apostles were not guided by worldly principles. They had the revelation of these things from the Spirit of God, and the saving impression of them from the same Spirit. These things they declared in plain, simple language, taught by the Holy Spirit, totally different from the affected oratory or enticing words of man’s wisdom. The natural man, the wise man of the world, receives not the things of the Spirit of God. The pride of carnal reasoning is really as much opposed to spirituality, as the basest sensuality. The sanctified mind discerns the real beauties of holiness, but the power of discerning and judging about common and natural things is not lost. But the carnal man is a stranger to the principles, and pleasures, and actings of the Divine life. The spiritual man only, is the person to whom God gives the knowledge of his will. … And the apostles were enabled by his Spirit to make known his mind. In the Holy Scriptures, the mind of Christ, and the mind of God in Christ, are fully made known to us. It is the great privilege of Christians, that they have the mind of Christ revealed to them by his Spirit. They experience his sanctifying power in their hearts, and bring forth good fruits in their lives. (bold added — )

In short, it is the spiritual man () who possesses the mind of Christ and has received the knowledge of His will which is laid out for us in Scripture.  Therefore, the believer who is truly walking with the Lord— –has the authority to judge words and actions — especially when the teaching is unbiblical.

How do we know when someone’s teaching is unbiblical?  That’s easy!  Test his teaching against the Word of God and if it doesn’t line up with what’s in the Bible, then what’s being taught is not from God! And if what’s being taught is not from God it’s from another source – the !

Bible teacher and expositor John MacArthur cautions:

It should be noted that [Matthew 7:1-5] has erroneously been used to suggest that believers should never evaluate or criticize anyone for anything. Our day hates absolutes, especially theological and moral absolutes, and such simplistic interpretation provides a convenient escape from confrontation. Members of modern society, including many professing Christians, tend to resist dogmatism and strong convictions about right and wrong. Many people prefer to speak of all-inclusive love, compromise, ecumenism, and unity. To the modern religious person those are the only “doctrines” worth defending, and they are the doctrines to which every conflicting doctrine must be sacrificed.  ()

In my experience, many professing Christians stubbornly stick to their position that those who expose the unbiblical teaching of Christian celebs are unfairly judging them so they play the card: “Judge not, that you be not judged” followed by a resounding rebuke from verse 5: “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye?”

Christians who fail to grasp the notion that those who are Spirit-filled have the mind of Christ is mind boggling.  Only believers can make this claim — no one else can.  And that includes Miss Spirituality herself, !  Why?  Since Oprah is unregenerate she cannot possible understand spiritual truth because her !

God’s ways and His Word make little sense to the unsaved.  Listen to what Paul says:

The natural person [unregenerate] does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” ()

There is no other place we can learn about the things of the Spirit of God except in the Bible.  Moreover, the Bible’s the final authority in all matters of faith.  In  we’re told that “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”  And   says “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”  Although every page of Scripture is , a growing number of Christians choose to reject hard to understand Bible stories and doctrines.  Two examples that come to mind are the  in Genesis chapters 1 & 2 and our Lord’s teaching that  is a place of fire, demons and everlasting torment.  Some readers will be surprised to learn that Christ preached more on hell than all the other persons in the Bible put together!

It’s unbelievable how many professing Christians don’t study their bibles.  They may attend church regularly but because they’re biblically illiterate they have no clue if the pastor’s teaching God’s truth or outright heresy.  In many cases they wouldn’t know biblical truth if it walked up and bit them on the nose!

I regularly hear from Christians whose heart’s desire is to attend a healthy well-balanced church where they can be confident that they’re receiving good solid biblical teaching.  They’ve searched high and low to find a gospel teaching church near their home but there are none.  And they’re discouraged.  The sad fact is that only a handful of ministers still preach the true .  My advice is always the same: “Don’t give up searching!”  But this is a subject for a whole other article so I’ll move on.

As if we didn’t have enough to deal with in the visible Church, a large number of ministers and so-called Bible teachers in churches and on the airwaves are selling a false gospel to consumers. Front and center is the /name-it-and-claim-it/prosperity charlatans such as , , , , ,  and , to name a few.

Be on the alert for the  (NAR) a heretical movement that holds to the view that God is restoring the lost offices of church governance such as the prophets and apostles.  “Super Apostle”  is the head of the NAR and there’s a swarm of so-called apostles and prophets worldwide.  The wolves and wolverines in this movement believe they possess the same gifts as the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles.  (Learn more about the NAR by visiting my .)

Other celebs to be wary of are , , , , , .

Again, we’re not to judge a person’s heart or motives, but we can certainly judge the fruit they produce!  Jesus himself said:

Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. ()

Believers who read and study their bibles are far less likely to blindly follow false teachers.  But it’s not out of the realm of possibility for mature believers who cease being  to have the wool pulled over their eyes.  For this very reason John warned:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. ().

Occult Evolution: Antediluvian, Babylonian, & Modern Expressions

In “The attack on biblical creation in UK schools continues,” Phil Robinson reports that in the dechristianized U.K. unrelenting attacks against special creation (Genesis account) display a level of aggressive intolerance that is hard to stomach, coming as they do from self-proclaimed scientifically-enlightened ‘voices of reason.’  Some schools have already banned the teaching of special creation in favor of evolutionary science.   (, Mar. 9, 2014)

Other shrill ‘voices of reason’ go so far as to connect special creation to mental illness and child abuse. During a radio interview in Australia famous physicist and atheist propagandist Lawrence Krauss said that while in the United States recently, he stated that “teaching creationism is child abuse and I think it is.” (Prayer News, a publication of Creation Ministries, Apr. 2014)

Throughout the West and here in America a slash-and-burn operation conducted against the Genesis account, particularly its’ literal and historical elements, is justified by the false idea that evolution is science, thus intolerance of special creation is often presented as a ‘science versus religion’ or ‘faith versus reason’ issue.   So successful has this war of attrition been that younger generations of Westerners and Americans have been disconnected from both Western history and its’ founding Christian-based worldview, thus like seedlings recently popped up from the soil are unconcerned that special creation, where the ultimate source of life, being and unalienable rights are found, has nearly been displaced by anti-human pagan conceptions positing billions of years of evolutionary transformism from lower kinds of things to higher and higher kinds of things— even non-human kinds of things:

“For us, the best way to create new (‘artificial’) life forms and intelligence is to allow them to emerge through evolution, as nature does, only in much shorter timeframes and with much greater efficiency and variety.”

“For conscious evolution to be successful, we need to observe and understand the actual workings of nature, in all its dynamism, to the point of profound reverence, or ‘worship.’ This is what I call extreme nature-worshipping… From the perspective of extreme nature-worshipping, the real significance of Darwin’s evolutionary theory is not that humans descended from lower species, but that we can continue to evolve.”(Cosmic Beings: Transhumanist Deism in Ted Chu’s Cosmic View, Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technology, Giulio Prisco)

The vicious name-calling, seething resentment toward and censorship of the six day creation account and of all who profess and teach it should raise the eyebrows of any rational thinking person.  If evolution really is a fact of science then why the irrational name-calling, ridicule, scorn, shunning, resentment, intolerance and demonization?

The answer is that the zealous worshipper of evolution is the Spirit of our age that emerged out of the Renaissance whose answer to the Lord Jesus Christ is the Cross (crucify Him) and whose fulfillment will be the Wicked One. (2 Thess. 2:1-8)

From the Renaissance to our own time the Spirit has been transgressing, blaspheming, and departing that it need not obey His voice.   Like a dog returning to its own vomit, the Spirit has returned to its first love: the cult of demons in the Godless universe of matter, psychic energy, and animated forces where time is changed, past history rendered meaningless, and the liberated Spirit imbibes the cup of wrath, an intoxicating mixture of Babylonian Mysteries, incantations, spiritism, Gnosticism, sorcery, witchcraft, Hermetic magic, Kabbalah, reincarnation, astrology, and other devilish occult traditions.

The Book of Revelation pinpoints Babylon as the post-flood center of an occult pagan Mystery religion based on advaitic monism, science of magic transformism, exalted priesthood, gnosis, secret initiations, psychic-powers, familiar spirits, androgyny, sexual perversions, and other evils.

Babylon embraced the Great Lie. Its inhabitants claimed the title, “I AM.” The root source of this evil religion and its occult power was the Great Dragon himself….Lucifer:

“…. the Great Lie (is) the foundation stone of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, Jainism, Sikhism, Taoism, the Kabala, the Greek Hermetic, Eleusinian and Gnostic beliefs, Neo-Platonism, all the occult creeds from Theosophy and the Masonic orders to the Rosicrucian’s (and) the New Age movement. The Great Lie is…the belief that man is God, that his true identity is the immortal self…that as God, he will never die (and) Sin and depravity are…illusions since this inner divinity is at man’s core.” (The Great Lie, Tal Brooke, SCP Journal, Vol. 29:2-29:3, 2005)

Though the Spirit of our age claims the title “I AM” it nevertheless follows after and falls down before other fascinating men: theoreticians of evolutionary science, nature philosophy and evolutionary pagan theology. These charismatic Pied Pipers are possessed of surpassing powers of persuasion and inflexible determination of will to which the Spirit assigns more honor than to anything else.

The Spirit has usurped the throne of the Word Incarnate (John 1:1) because He is not good, not just or benevolent but a devil, an evil Tyrant Who, with His infliction of suffering in this life and eternal punishment in the next must be deposed. (Psalm 2:2-3)

Blaming our Lord for their own sins the proud, self-righteous Spirit of rebellion, hypocrisy and negation says to Him, “…you are not my father.”  My father is the god of forces, therefore:

“I am I, I come out of myself, and in choice and action I make myself.” (Daniel Bell, quoted by Herbert Schlossberg in “Idols for Destruction,” p. 43)

In the final analysis, the Spirit of our age is the “striving human will” seeking desperately to launch itself,

“…into minor godhood in an evolving cosmos through the mechanisms of directed spiritual evolution, spiritualized science and spirit contact.” The ‘new’ spirituality now presents itself as the “rightful replacement for the Revealed Word (and) proclaims its spiritual liberation from the worldview that informs Christianity and its freedom from (the) personal and wholly other God.  But this new way of self-salvation (is) little more than the refurbishing of an ancient spiritual mistake.”  (The Making of the New Spirituality: the Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition, James A. Herrick, p. 279)

“As it was in the days of Noah…” 

The ominous signs of this age are obvious, said the English theologian G.H. Pember (1837-1910) in his book, “The Antichrist Babylon and the Coming Kingdom.”  Just as it was during the pre-flood generations, open intercourse with demons (spiritism) is now common throughout Christendom and even in Russia.   In France it is the national pastime.   The apostles of the powers of darkness are everywhere proclaiming their scientific and evolutionary theories demonstrating that the world created itself and had no need of a Creator (p. 60) while the miseries which have resulted from sin,

“….are blasphemously charged upon the Almighty, Who so loved the world as to give His son for it (but is now) impiously forbidden to curb and discipline the rebels who owe their existence to the breath of His mouth.  And when we see such men as John Stuart Mill (and) John Morley, the late Chief Secretary for Ireland…guiding their fellows to defiant insubordination, we can scarcely wonder that Bradlaugh…said, ‘This world might have been happy, had not the shadow of God fallen upon it.” (pp. 35-36, 1888)

Rise of Occult Evolutionary Science 

In the impeccably researched, “The Making of the New Spirituality,” James Herrick observes that the scientific tradition in Renaissance Europe developed around three basic approaches: the organic, the mechanical and the magical.   It was magical and/or occult science that provided the greatest impetus for scientific exploration. (p. 45)

C.S. Lewis underscores this point in “The Abolition of Man:”

“You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak.”

In “God and the Knowledge of Reality,” the Catholic philosopher and historian, Thomas Molnar (1921–2010), reveals the ‘temper of that age’ as a spirit of rebellion against the Christian God, and this is why occult science and evolutionary thinking provided the greatest impetus. During the Renaissance, certain Christian theologians, mystics and scholars such as Emanuel Swedenborg had discovered Hermetic magic and occult Jewish Kabbalah texts which they studied and translated resulting in Hermetic Kabbalah. Then like Pico della Mirandola, they argued that occult hermetic science – the divine technology or Magic Way of reaching divine status and powers through ritual procedures (spiritual evolution) is the best proof of the divinity of Christ. In other words said Molnar,

“…..by the time of the Renaissance the esoteric texts of the first centuries A.D. had acquired in scholarly and humanist circles an unparalleled prestige, confronting as equals the texts held sacred by the church. In Pico’s estimation, ‘nulla est scientia que nos magis certificet de divinitate Christ quam magia et Cabala’ (there is no science that would prove for us Christ’s divinity better than magic and the Cabala.)” (pp. 78-79)

Hermetic magic and Jewish Kabbalah are ancient Mystery Religion traditions, as affirmed by G. H. Pember in his classic work, “Earth’s Earliest Ages.”   Pember thoroughly examines the role of fallen angels in connection with the magic (occult transformism) they taught to pre-flood generations and compares them to the explosion of spiritism (open intercourse with evil spirits), astrology, the Mysteries and other occult traditions sweeping over Christendom.

Pember writes that the Mysteries are no longer veiled in mystery but boldly presented by the powerful occult brotherhood that emerged out of the Renaissance as the fruit of modern science, especially evolutionary philosophy, which the brotherhood assert was included in the instructions given,

“…to the initiates of the Hermetic, Orphic, Eleusinian, and Cabbalistic mysteries, and were familiar to Chaldean Magi, Egyptian Priests, Hindu Occultists, Essenes, Therapeutae Gnostics, and Theurgic Neo-Platonists.” (Pember, pp.243-244)

Hermetic Magic

Hermeticism is an ancient Egyptian secret magic tradition based on a set of fourteen books known

collectively as the Corpus Hermeticum attributed to a mysterious figure known as Hermes Trismegistus. Implied in Hermeticism is an evolutionary process of magical transformism (spiritual evolution) moving from one kind of lower thing to another kind of higher thing:

“Human beings are themselves the product of a long spiritual evolutionary process that moves from ‘creeping things’ to fish, mammals, birds and then people.  Humans can—through occult knowledge and extraordinary ability—continue this evolutionary process and become daemons, then gods, and finally planets or stars.” (The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition, James A. Herrick, p. 40)

With respect to Hermes identity, researchers of antiquity are divided.  Some believe Hermes was a mythical figure.  Others argue he was Ham or his son Cush.  The historian Samuel Shuckford argues that Hermes was Pathrusim, king of Thebais, the son of Mizraim, the son of Ham.   His Egyptian name was Tyoth or Thoth.  (The Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected, 1808)

In any case, it was Thoth-Hermes who instructed his brothers in the arts and science magic of alchemy or transmutation of a lower kind of thing into a higher kind of thing. For example, after a lengthy transformative process out of the eternally existing divine abyss (primordial matter), the self-created Sun-God Ra boasted that he “came into being from primordial matter.”  He made all the forms under which he “appeared by means of the god-soul” which he raised up out of Nu, primordial matter. (The Long War Against God, Dr. Henry Morris, p. 243)

Occult Kabalah

“The Kabalah is the key to the occult sciences; and the Gnostics were born of the Kabalists.” (Occult Mason Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 626)

Like its’ Hermetic counterpart, Kabala implies a process of evolutionary transformism:

“…the older Enoch book (gives) a fuller insight into the “Merkabah” and “Bereshit” lore of the ancients than the “Hekalot,” which present but fragments, while the central figure of the Cabala, Meṭaṭron-Enoch, is seen in ch. lxx.-lxxi. in a process of transformation.” (Cabala, Jewish Encyclopedia)

According to Helena Blavatsky, one of the key architects of Luciferian New Age pantheism, Kabalah derived,

“…. from the older secret doctrines concerning divine things and cosmogony, which were combined into a theology after the time of the captivity of the Jews in Babylon. All the works that fall under the esoteric category are termed Kabalistic.” (Blavatsky, Theosophical Glossary, p. 168)

The godless cosmogony of Kabala teaches the gradual condensation or evolutionary progression of a primal substance into visible matter.  This is a fundamental,

“… doctrine of the Cabala (and) is the ancient Semitic conception of the ‘primal ocean,’ known to the Babylonians as ‘Apsu’ and called by the Gnostics βύθος =  (Anz, ‘Die Frage nach dem Ursprung des Gnostizismus,’ p. 98).

The Chaldean occult science and pagan Mystery Religion was embraced by apostate Jews during their captivity in Babylon and delivered to subsequent generations of initiates by word of mouth. According to Blavatsky, these initiates of the Chaldean tradition in the centuries before Christ were known as Tanaim:
“The kabalist is a student of ‘secret science’, one who interprets the hidden meaning of the

Scriptures with the help of the symbolical Kabala… The Tanaim were the first kabalists among the Jews; they appeared at Jerusalem about the beginning of the third century before the Christian era… This secret doctrine is identical with the Persian wisdom, or ‘magic’.” (Ibid. p.167)

The Essenes were also associated with the Kabala. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the cabalistic practices of the Essenes, which were Judaized elements of Eastern mystical traditions:

“So, too, were the Essenes familiar with the idea of the journey to heaven…and they were also masters of angelology. The practice of magic and incantation, the angelology and demonology, were borrowed from Babylonia, Persia, and Egypt; but these foreign elements were Judaized in the process, and took the form of the mystical adoration of the name of God and of speculations regarding the mysterious power of the Hebrew alphabet …, ‘the name of God creates and destroys worlds’, to become, finally, foundations of the philosophy of the ‘Sefer Yetzirah.”  (Cabala, Jewish Encyclopedia)

According to Blavatsky the Essenes were pagan priests of the Greek goddess, Diana of Ephesus, where the Tanaim had established a college for instruction in the Chaldean mystery religion:

“Essenes… had many Buddhistic ideas and practices; and it is noteworthy that the priests of the Great Mother at Ephesus, Diana-Bhavani with many breasts, were also denominated… It was at Ephesus where was the great College of the Essenes and all the lore the Tanaim had brought from the Chaldees… Essenes, believed in reincarnation.” (Theosophical Glossary, pp. 113-14; The Secret Doctrine, Vol. II, p. 111n)

Eventually Alexandria, Egypt became the epicenter of cosmological and pagan religious ideas as well as the intellectual meeting point between Greek Mystery Religion/Hermetic magic initiates and nature sages and guardians of Kabala.  After the fall of Jerusalem, Alexandria was the center from which occult pagan Jews would disguise their mystery tradition in Christian terminology and attempt to penetrate the fledgling Church with heresy.

One of the primary tactics employed by Cabbalist pagan Jews for this purpose is the same one employed by their modern evolutionary Gnostic pagan counterparts.   It involves the reduction of the Genesis account, particularly the first three books, to allegory and myth, a ploy that eliminates the physical Adam from which all people descended and the sin that he transferred to the rest of the human race. This strikes directly at the heart of the Gospel: the need for the ‘last Adam’ to provide for us an escape from the wrath of God against sin incurred by the first Adam.  In this way, not only is the work of Christ on the cross rendered superfluous, meaning the heart of the faith is ripped out, but God is made responsible for sin and evil. (1 Peter 3:18-22; 1 John 2:22)

Long ago, the teachings of some of the early Church Fathers regarding the apostasy toward the end of the church age predicted the reappearance of this evil tactic. The fathers categorized it a Gnostic pagan heresy.

In “Heresies 6.10″ Hippolytus writes that the Gnostic pagan Simon Magus feigned faith and allegorized much of Scripture, especially Genesis, to support his evolutionary Hermetic and Gnostic occult pantheist teachings.   Church Fathers Ireneaus, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria reveal that Gnostic cult leader Marcion rejected the Old Testament, taught that the God of the Old Testament and his prophets are evil, made God the author of sin and removed all references that Christ was Creator (John 1:1)   (Ireneaus, “Against Heresies 1.26, 5.1,” Tertullian “Against Marcion 2.17,” Clement of Alexandria, “Against Heresies 4.29)

In conclusion, the Babylonian Mystery Religion is the mother of evolutionary Cabala, Gnosticism and all other occult pagan traditions:

“….especially does Gnosticism testify to the antiquity of the Cabala. Of Chaldean origin… Gnosticism was Jewish in character long before it became Christian… Gnosticism—that is, the cabalistic ‘Hokmah’ (wisdom)—seems to have been the first attempt on the part of the Jewish sages to give the empirical mystic lore, with the help of Platonic and Pythagorean or Stoic ideas, a speculative turn; hence the danger of heresy…of which the systems of Philo, an adept in Cabala…show many pitfalls…Jewish gnosticism unquestionably antedates Christianity, for Biblical exegesis had already reached an age of five hundred years by the first century C.E.  Judaism had been in close contact with Babylonian-Persian ideas for at least that length of time, and for nearly as long a period with Hellenistic ideas. Magic, also, which,…was a not unimportant part of the doctrines and manifestations of gnosticism, largely occupied Jewish thinkers. There is, in general, no circle of ideas to which elements of gnosticism have been traced, and with which the Jews were not acquainted.”  (Cabala, Jewish Encyclopedia)

Building  the New Tower of Babylon

In the essay, “The Paganization of Biblical Studies,” Dr. Peter Jones, director of truthxchange and adjunct professor of Westminster Seminary CA., writes that the books of the evolutionary Gnostic pagan Presbyterian heretic Lloyd Geering, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University, are promoted by the most powerful element of the Spirit of our age—the international occult New Age Luciferian elite-pagans—as programmatic templates for the future utopian pagan community from the point of view of Christian apostasy and socialism undergirded by evolutionary pantheist orthodoxy.

According to Geering, the world’s future culture will be post-Christian, global, religiously pagan and evolutionary.  This agenda is remarkably similar to that of Teilhard de Chardins’ disciple, the ex-Roman Catholic Thomas Berry in his book, “The Great Work” which is also being implemented through texts of the UN’s global programs.

The rising New World Order will be post-Christian because evolution proves that human beings, as they evolved out of primordial matter, created language, then symbols, then religious explanations and God Himself.  Therefore tomorrow’s culture will be pluralistic, syncretistic, relativistic and poly-gendered because evolution integrates all scientific, cultural, religious, economic and human gender into one worldwide anthill thus when the global society emerges from the evolutionary process,

“…it will require humanity to develop a new consciousness and a new form of spirituality” because “the new story which has become basic to the global world begins with a new word or idea…evolution.” (ibid, Jones)

Like its’ mother, Mystery Babylon, the scientifically-enlightened ‘new’ global religion of evolutionary transformism is occult pantheist advaita monism, which means that as an ancient impersonal god-force is within the cosmos, earth, human beings, rats, weeds, tumble bugs, cancer and everything else then all things are essentially ‘one.’  Since the god-force is within all things it is within the demonically ‘illumined’ consciousness of every spiritually evolved initiate and adept.

This being the case, by means of trance states, brain-altering drugs, transcendental meditation, visualization, channeling, Zen Buddhism, Kundalini yoga, tantra, and other occult ways, the initiate can channel the god-force within thereby becoming a little god who controls matter because he controls mind. The physical world then, is an illusion because reality is inside the divine mind of the god-man.

This way of thinking is captured by Orwell in his book, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in which negation of the physical world is an integral part of the social and political philosophy of Big Brother and his despotic Party. At one stage in the book, Winston stumbles upon the shocking realization that in the end the Party would announce that two plus two made five because the logic of Big Brothers’ position required it since the existence of external reality was denied by his philosophy.  Thus when the Thought Police agent O’Brien tortures Winston for politically incorrect “wrong thought” he states,

“We control matter because we control the mind.  Reality is inside the skull.  You will learn by degrees, Winston.  There is nothing that we could not do.  Invisibility, levitation—anything.  I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to….You must get rid of these nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature.  We make the laws of Nature.” (Orwell, “The New Spirituality and its Hallmarks, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal, Vol. 30:4-31:1, 2007, p. 19)

Evolving Toward Catastrophe

In “The Aquarian Conspiracy,” a book that has been called ‘the New Age Bible,’ Marilyn Ferguson (1938-2008) admits that the ‘new age’ evolutionary pantheism and occult technologies being employed throughout America were at one time the private domain of ancient initiates.   In fact, as Constance Cumbey reveals in her thoroughly researched book, “The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow,” many New Age historians claim their occult religion and techniques originated in Atlantis and afterward were preserved in the ancient land of Babylon,

“…and surrounding Plains of Shinar and from there disseminated throughout the earth, including Taoist doctrines of China, Mayan-Aztec teachings of Mexico and Central/South America; Great Spirit teachings of the American Indians, Hindu/Buddhist teachings of Asia, etc.” (pp. 250-251)

After the Flood, said Shuckford, while the faithful Noah remained in the East and established the worship of the true God, eighty years after the Flood his rebellious son Ham and his sons together with other family members departed and eventually settled in the plains of Shinar where they resolved to build a tower, a monument to their own pride, vanity, ambition and rebellion against God. (ibid, p.94)

It was Noah’s son Ham, according to ancient Church Father Clement, who  ‘preserved’ and revived the Mystery Religion of ‘Atlantis’ and its attendant evils:

“Fallen angels taught men the use of magical incantations that would force demons to obey man. After the flood Ham the son of Noah…discovered this and taught it to his sons.  This became ingrained into the Egyptians, Persians, and Babylonians.  Ham died shortly after the fall of the Tower of Babel.  Nimrod, called Ninus by the Greeks, was handed this knowledge and by it caused men to go away from the worship of God and go into diverse and erratic superstitions and they began to be governed by the signs in the stars and motions of the planets.” (Recognitions of Clement 4.26-29)

In his well-researched book, “Ancient Post-Flood History,” Ken Johnson, Th.D., reports that the sons of Ham persuaded the people to accept that the true God was merely an impersonal creative force within all of nature, making man the highest form of life/god.  Through the power of persuasion, Ham and his sons revived magical evolutionary transformism, pantheism and idolatry. (pp. 47-48)

Eventually Ham was deified and worshipped by later pagans as the gods Cronus and Jupiter:

“Ham is represented by many writers as a very wicked, immodest, and profligate creature: Berosus (i) makes him a magician, and to be the same with Zoroast or Zoroastres, and speaks of him as the public corrupter of mankind; and says that he taught men to live as before the flood, to lie with mothers, sisters, daughters, males and brutes, and creatures of all sorts; and that he actually did so himself, and therefore was cast out by his father Janus, or Noah, and got the name of “Chem”, the infamous and immodest…” Upon seeing his father’s nakedness Ham,  “told his two brethren without; he went out of the tent after he had pleased himself with the sight… and in a wanton, ludicrous, and scoffing manner, related what he had seen: some of the Jewish Rabbins (k), as Jarchi relates, say that Canaan first saw it, and told his father of it; and some say (l), that he or Ham committed an unnatural crime with him; and others (m), that he castrated him; and hence, it is supposed, came the stories of Jupiter castrating his father Saturn, and Chronus his father Uranus.”    Genesis 9:22 Gill’s Exposition

History did not begin after billions of years of evolution when primitive hominids swung down from the trees and discovered how to scratch crude symbols onto rocks.    Nor did it begin after the Flood.  At least 2,000 years of human existence preceded the Flood, meaning that when Noah and his family entered the ark they carried at least one hundred years of pre-flood memories, traditions, technology, and superior knowledge. Their world view was shaped by the historical Adam and Eve and the generations of their offspring.   Thus Noah and his family brought with them not only the knowledge of the personal God, Special Creation, fall of man, the Deluge, sacrifice to God for the propitiation of sin, the arts of weapon-making and warfare, knowledge of letters, symbols, math, architecture, science, cosmetics, and agriculture  but knowledge of  first-hand encounters with Watchers, their occult teachings, the Nephilim, and primeval pantheism tied to magic, spiritism, herbal abortifacients, human and animal sacrifice, drinking of blood, males marrying males and even beasts, and many other evils.

In affirmation, the eminent researcher of antiquity James Bailey said:

“…human history can now be hesitantly traced back as an unbroken narrative to 4000 B.C….the picture emerging…is one of the Fall of Man in historic terms as well as his rise; it is a picture…more of degradation than of success; it is a picture of monotheism breaking down into polytheism and of the struggle to return to monotheism.  The establishment view of the history of religion gradually progressing from animism to polytheism (then) to monotheism is the reverse of facts.” (“The God-Kings and the Titans: The New World Ascendancy in Ancient Times 1973, p. 296)

Four thousand years before Christ were the antediluvian generations and the Watchers in the post-flood world, making the billions of years of evolutionary transformism a fabulous fable.  It is neither ‘new’ (Ecclesiastes 1: 9-11) nor scientific except in the sense of pre-flood and post-flood occult science and attendant traditions revised and revamped for our own time, as Geering unhappily discovered.

Dr. Jones writes that Geering was surprised when he found out that the ‘New Spirituality’ has “links with pre-monotheistic…nature religions,” leading Jones to wryly comment that in an odd turn of events,

“….contemporary spiritual’ evolution goes backwards!  Biblical theism disturbed evolutionary progress.  The clocks have to be put back (for we are in the presence of) a powerful pagan/Gnostic theological agenda, claiming to be spanking new, objective and scientific, but as old as the hills.”

Clocks have to be turned back, all the way back to the days of Noah in the pre-flood world where evolution is closely connected to the devil’s lie that man is a being who though presently limited in time and space is nevertheless capable of achieving a great leap of being and magically evolving into a much more powerful god-like being in the future.

As the scientifically endarkened Gnostic pagan Spirit of our age simultaneously worships on the altar of ‘self’ as it self-righteously peers down its’ long, pointy nose and contemptuously sniffs and sneers at the remnant of backwards, unscientific, anti-evolution  faithful, in reality it is the entirely deluded pagan Spirit that is on a collision course with a modern version of the pre-flood world catastrophe—-and we know how badly that ended.

Addressing Concerns Over “Son of God” Film

Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. ~ Eph 5:11

Not surprisingly the movie “Son of God” has created quite a stir in the Christian community.  Before I gave the theater my money I read several reviews, blog posts, Facebook comments and viewed TV interviews of husband and wife team Mark Burnett and Roma Downey promoting their film.  Roma is a familiar face to many and is best-known for her role on the successful TV show “Touched by An Angel.”  Mark Burnett is the executive producer of a string of hit TV shows such as “Survivor,” “The Voice, “Celebrity Apprentice,” “Shark Tank,” and he has won several Emmys.

When I first heard that another full-length feature film about the life of Christ was coming to the silver screen, I was skeptical for several reasons.  First, Mark and Roma are  and I was concerned that the movie would be produced from this perspective; a perspective that in many cases I disagree with.

Second, I learned that Roma earned a degree in “spiritual psychology” from the University of Santa Monica, a private graduate school founded by New Age spiritual and self-help quack John-Roger.   P.J. Miller is not being flippant when he asks:

What do you call someone who is a student of new age psychology and spiritualism? Do you call them new agers? Do you call them seekers? Would you dare call them Christian? Well, if you’re Roma Downey, then yes, you would call yourself all the above. ()

Third, a  shows Jesus asking Peter to follow Him. Peter looks skeptical and asks Jesus what they’re going to do.  Jesus grins and replies “Change the world.”  Well, no.  Jesus never said those words to Peter!  Here’s what Jesus actually said:

While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. (Mat 4:18-20)

Jesus commanded  — Peter and Andrew dropped what they were doing to follow Him.  (More on this in a moment.)  Another clip shows a woman sitting in a boat on the Sea of Galilee with Jesus and the apostles during the storm where Jesus walks on water.  But according to Scripture there was no woman in the boat:

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds.  () 

In the movie Mary was the woman in the boat.  But why would they have a woman in the boat when Matthew informs us that the  got into the boat.  Mary wasn’t one of the twelve disciples/apostles – no woman was!

Finally, S. Michael Houdmann revealed in his review of the movie that, “the reason for Jesus’ death and the meaning of His resurrection are completely missing. The fact that Jesus’ death is the atoning sacrifice for sin is not mentioned at all ().”

As I said, “Son of God” has elicited a great deal of controversy as did Mark and Roma’s “” miniseries produced by LightWorkers Media, a company owned by them. This “” program aired on the History Channel last year. “We knew when we were shooting,” said Downey, “that the Jesus portion of our ‘Bible’ series was special and we shot much more footage and we’ve re-edited many more scenes into a stand-alone feature film called ‘Son of God.'”   I don’t have the space to tackle the “The Bible” brouhaha.  I will say, though, that several highly controversial pastors sat on the . They include , , ,  and.  (For more on “The Bible” go to Resources below)

The Son of God?

“Son of God” opened on February 28, so by now a lot of folks have had the opportunity to view it in theatres and many more will have it streaming into their living rooms in a few months.  Naturally, reviews were quickly written, some good, some not so good.  (You’ll find links to the reviews at the end of this piece.) Suffice to say that in a short amount of time a lot has been said about the film.

Many of you won’t be surprised to learn that Mark and Roma asked Saddleback Church founder Rick Warren to help spread their version of the “good news.”   He happily agreed.  “I’ve seen most of the films produced about Jesus in the past 50 years,” said the pastor, “and ‘Son of God’ is the best.  We’re excited Jesus is back on the big screen, and we’re going to fill the theaters. I want every other faith leader in America to do the same.”

So – why would the man who is affectionately called “America’s Pastor” agree to promote a film that its critics describe as outright unbiblical?

Not only did Warren endorse the film, according to the Baptist Standard staff report :

Pastor and author Rick Warren partnered with LifeWay Christian Resources to release a Bible study related to the Son of God movie from 20th Century Fox, which hits theaters Feb. 28.

The small-group curriculum resource by Warren, , is a companion piece to the movie produced by husband-and-wife team Mark Burnett and Roma Downey.

The six-session study features video clips from the movie and videos from Warren explaining Jesus’ teachings and their impact on people’s lives. Topics include baptism, temptation, suffering, death, resurrection and ministry. ()

As a Southern Baptist preacher, Rick Warren knows perfectly well that the Roman Catholic Church holds to the view that it is the one true Church.  Thus, any church outside the RCC is anathematized (excommunicated, cursed or damned). The Protestant Reformers held the view that the RCC’s gospel is not a gospel that saves; therefore the RCC is apostate.  Anyone who rejects the true gospel – we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone – is an unbeliever.  Period.  Warren also knows what the Bible teaches regarding believers going into :

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness. ()

Here’s the thing.  Not everyone who professes the name of Christ has a true saving faith.  What about Mark Burnett and Roma Downey?  Do they have a true saving faith?  Let’s examine the fruit.

Endorsements

Popular pastor and author Mark Driscoll’s church bought out 3,500 seats.  In 2013 he and his wife shared a stage with Mark and Roma at Resurgence 13.  Driscoll later remarked:

We watched the world premier trailer for  at the conference, and the footage choked me up as I thought of the millions of people who will hear about Jesus through this project. I am so encouraged by God’s work through this couple. ()

God’s work?

The connection between the Passover sacrifice (Exodus 12) and Jesus as the Lamb of God () is not made. The fact that Jesus’ resurrection proves His victory over death and sin and guarantees a resurrected eternal life for all who believe in Him (1 Corinthians 15) is nowhere to be found.  — S. Michael Houdmann

Another endorser of the film was “Social Justice Christian” Rev. Jim Wallis.  In my column  I wrote:

This man wears many hats.  He is the founder of Sojourner’s Magazine, speaker, author and activist.  He’s also President Obama’s “spiritual advisor.”  This alone speaks volumes.  Rev. Wallis insists that he’s an evangelical Christian even though he has abandoned the biblical gospel for the “social gospel.”  He believes he’s on a mission from God to assist the poor and oppressed to bring forth the Kingdom of God on earth. 

When this purveyor of the false social justice gospel was asked for advice by the couple, he gladly gave it to them:

What won me over to the whole series was the clip about Jesus meeting Peter, the fisherman. In a Washington, D.C., premiere of “The Bible” series a few weeks ago, I had wonderful conversations with Mark and Roma. Mark asked me if they were right to have Jesus say that he wanted to change the world. Those words are not literally in the scriptures, but it seemed to him and Roma that’s exactly what Jesus was talking about. Absolutely correct, I told them both. And we went through the first few chapters of Mathew which demonstrate that truth. I love the clarity and courage of the statement from Jesus in “The Bible.”

Sunny Shell disagrees:

Christ came into the world to save sinners from the righteous wrath of God, which is the just penalty for our sins. He never said He came to change the world. He said He came to transform people by giving them new hearts and new minds through repentance and faith in Christ alone. ()

The Examiner listed the names of churches and organizations that distributed tickets for a so-called “Theater Take-Over”:

Joel Osteen, pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Tex., who is distributing 8,000 tickets donated by an anonymous donor; Jerry Falwell, Jr., of Liberty University which has more than 12,000 students; Craig Groeschel of LifeChurch which has 18 campuses in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Oklahoma; Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles with over four million members and Miles McPherson of the Rock Church with weekly attendance of more than 10,000 in San Diego, Calif. (Emphasis in original – )

In an article that appeared on Fox News, Mark and Roma wrote:

In all our combined years in the entertainment industry, we’ve never seen anything like this kind of grass-roots support for a project. It is truly miraculous.

So, too, is the unprecedented depth and breadth of those who have endorsed the film. Pastors like Rick, as well as scholars and faith organizations, have graciously supported our effort to share this story of our Savior – though they belong to different denominations, adhere to varying theological doctrine, worship God in their own unique ways. 

Bishop T.D. Jakes of The Potter’s House in Dallas said “the audience will be enthralled, encouraged and inspired.” 

S. Michael Houdmann was not enthralled by the movie.  In his review he writes:

The Son of God presents a Jewish Messiah who is crucified, dies, comes back to life, and commissions His followers to spread the word. But why did He have to die? What is the meaning of the resurrection? What is the message the apostles were supposed to proclaim, and why was it worth dying for? 

More from the Fox News article…

Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston called it “an epic work that touches the heart.”

The Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles Jose Gomez says it’s “a very important movie because it gives us the opportunity to realize God’s presence in our own lives.”()

Certainly there are by now “Church leaders” that are sincerely shocked to find out that they endorsed a movie produced by New Age Catholics.  Here’s more proof from a 2010 article  that shows she’s an advocate of New Age/New Thought spirituality:

Says Roma, who lives in Malibu, ‘My kids go to school about a 40-minute drive away. I’m open to the group’s opinion about what we listen to on the way there. On the way back, I get my own selections — books on tape by Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins…My husband says I’m so self-realized I’m practically levitating.’

For those who are unfamiliar with Eckhart Tolle, he’s a New Ager.  A few years ago Tolle paired up with  to do 10 online classes on XM Satellite radio on his blockbuster book “A New Earth: Are You Ready to Be Awakened.”  Oprah and Tolle took participants through his book chapter by chapter.  Regrettably, a large number of professing Christians took the class!

 guru and “coach for success” Anthony Robbins once said: “My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel tons of pleasure and very little pain.”  Evidently no pain is experienced after completing a barefoot firewalk, a self-empower technique Robbins’ teaches to get an otherwise sane person to walk on a bed of burning hot coals during his “Unleash The Power Within” seminar.  On this  you’ll hear the sound of drums beating and the crowd chanting “YES! YES! YES!” as Robbinswhips them into a frenzy in preparation for the firewalk.

More…

Roma appeared on “psychic medium”  TV show and allegedly spoke to her deceased mother.  What does the Bible have to say about consulting a medium?

And he burned his son as an offering and used fortune-telling and omens and dealt with mediums and with necromancers. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. ()

Well, it’s apparent that Roma, who says she loves the Bible, is unaware—or doesn’t care–that God says consulting a medium is evil.

Later she collaborated with Edwards by providing a CD to accompany a book he wrote:

Roma prays the entire rosary on the beautiful CD that comes along with this book. It’s quite lovely and gives you the special opportunity and a unique spiritual closeness to Roma to be able to pray right along with her as if she was right there at your side.” ()

So now you know a bit about two New Age gurus Roma Downey looks forward to listening to each day and an occultist she collaborated with.  The worldview of these men is as far from Christianity as the Earth is from Pluto.

P.J. Miller sat listening to Jim Bakker introduce Mark and Roma on Bakker’s TV show and recalled “their previous work on the History Channel’s The Bible and how they managed to literally re-write the Bible itself, and presented another gospel message altogether. I was captured by their … aggressive but subtle attempt to portray themselves as ‘believers’.  The sappy spiritual love fest that permeated on set showed me that something was indeed changing within Christianity, and that something was another Jesus being introduced to the masses.”

Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. ()

After several weeks of due diligence I’ve decided that “Son of God” is not a film I wish to see.  In addition to the concerns I have included in this article, my research has turned up many more — way too many to incorporate here.  Most troubling is the astonishing lack of discernment shown by some of our so-called Christian leaders.  The Son of God I serve is best described in the Bible which is the inerrant, infallible, inspired Word of God.  Inspired means that God moved through the writers to convey to those who read it the words He wanted us to hear.  So to change the words that Christ spoke is prideful and wicked.

It’s unfortunate that those who are unfamiliar with the biblical Jesus and see this film will not come away with a clear understanding of His mission here on Earth.

He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. ()

Resources:

“Son of God” Reviews

 by Sunny Shell

 by S. Michael Houdmann

 by Ben Kayser

“The Bible” Review

 by Sunny Shell

 by Stand Up For The Truth

Endorsements

 by Stand Up For The Truth

New Age/New Thought Movement

 by Marsha West

 by Marsha West

Rick Warren

 by Stand Up For The Truth

 by Marsha West

 by Ken Silva

Miscellaneous

 by Michael Horton

Rome anathematized itself at the Council of Trent

 by Marsha West

 – 

Kundalini (Serpent Power) & Satan’s Servants of Deception In America

“We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us.  Hereby know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.” (1 John 4:6)

In this verse the emphasis is on the believer’s ability to discern between a spirit of truth and a spirit of error, heresy, apostasy, lies and cleverly disguised deceptions such as modern evolutionary thinking and methodological naturalism.

The spirit of truth is relatively easy to discern as such people come willingly to the light of truth (John 3:21).  Having a heart for truth, they really and truly want to know and embrace Truth.  On the other hand, the spirit of error is more difficult to discern because the taproot and energy of this spirit is in Satan, the father of lies, of false gods, cleverness, sophistry, false science and evolution, heresy, apostasy, rebellion, murder, and envy.

Satan is the great deceiver (Rev. 12:9).  He uses his servants of deception to manipulate, confuse, and mislead (Ephesians 4:14).   Today his most powerfully influential servants are the world’s occult ‘elites’ but are also found throughout the secular, Christian, cult and occult New Age arenas. (2 Cor. 11:14-15)

One of Satan’s important servants, the evangelical apostate Alice Bailey (1880-1949), is a major architect of today’s rapidly spreading serpent-powered occult New Age movement, a spiritual juggernaut effecting a counter-conversion of consciousness that closes the soul to Jesus Christ while opening it to powers of darkness.

According to Bailey’s contemporary apostles, the ‘Plan’ telepathically revealed to Bailey for the coming New Age can be traced back to the fall of Lucifer and his angels from heaven. Bailey’s demon-master, the Tibetan, described the revolt of the angels against the Holy God as part of the“divine plan of evolution,” by which angels “descended from their sinless and free state of existence in order to develop full divine awareness on earth.”  (Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 224)

In this total reversal and inversion of the Revealed Word of God, the Fall of man was really an evolutionary ascent to liberating knowledge by which man’s eyes were opened to good (Satan) and evil (the Holy God).  Thus Helena Blavatsky, another important servant of Satan and architect of New Age spirituality concluded that it is but natural,

“…to view Satan, the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind.  For it was he who was the ‘Harbinger of Light,’ bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah…Indeed, (mankind) was taught wisdom and the hidden knowledge by the ‘Fallen Angel.”   As man’s benefactor, Lucifer continues to assist man’s evolution.   In the words of the apostate evangelical, now New Age theologian David Spangler, a disciple of both Blavatsky and Bailey, Lucifer is ‘the angel of man’s evolution.”  (ibid, pp. 224-225)

From the time of the Apostles of Jesus Christ to our own day, an unbroken chain of Satan’s servants have disguised themselves as super apostles and ministers of righteousness who as always are,

“…the inventors of impure heresies (the) profaners and apostates (who open) their mouths wide against the divine glory”. ...Church Father Cyril of Alexandria

These spirits hate Truth and most generally elevate themselves among God’s family so as to lead believers into compromise and conformity with the pagan world system.

On behalf of what Satan’s contemporary ministers term ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ they sweep away the essentials of the faith necessary both for salvation and the recognition of evil. (2 Peter 2:18) And without the grace and spiritual discernment that is born of true faith, Satan ceases to exist in the eyes of the spiritually blind, whether secular or Christian.

Commenting on the incredible blindness of our scientifically enlightened, theologically compromised and apostate modern society, the cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985), author of “The Devil’s Share, An Essay on the Diabolic in Modern Society” observed:

“What appears to me incredible is not the Devil, not the Angels, but rather the candor and the credulity of the skeptic, and the unpardonable sophism of which they show themselves to be the victims (they say) ‘The Devil is a gent with red horns and a long tail; now I cannot believe in a gent with red horns and a long tail; therefore I don’t believe in the Devil.’  And so the Devil has them precisely where he wants them.” (The Coming Darkness, John Ankerberg and John Weldon, p. 61)

When believers find spiritual Truth trivialized and diminished, marginalized and ridiculed in the church, some will go in search of a faithful church, some will fall away entirely, and others will turn to cults and the occult.

Tragically, since Satan’s ministers ridicule and reject the authority of God’s Word, the second and third groups have no guidelines for evaluating and testing the occult/Eastern spiritual experiences and devices they encounter such as the Enneagram, Jungian psychology, the MBTI, kundalini yoga, and meditation techniques already popular in our culture, apostatizing churches and steadily creeping into compromised churches.  Thus they can easily stumble into the spirit world and if not already fallen away, then onto the broad smooth way of apostasy:

“…..acceptance of the enneagram, if not already a sign of apostasy, must lead to a loss of faith since it distorts the Gospel and contradicts Catholic doctrine, depriving the individual of a genuine Catholic language and setting in its place what has been most aptly termed as psychobabbling. What is most puzzling, however, is the continued silence of the Church’s official teachers who know that this absurdity is being promoted and spread among our Catholic school teachers and priests.”  (NCCB Preparing Cautionary Note on Use of Enneagram, Paul Likoudis, Catholic Culture.org)

For an eye-opening look at the demon-oppressed Carl Jung and a penetrating analysis of his occult, alchemical, Gnostic, and demon-informed psychology and connections to the wildly popular Enneagram and MBTI, read “Carl Jung, Neo-Gnosticism, & the MBTI,” by Rev. Ed Hird, past National Chair of Anglican Renewal Ministries of Canada:  

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” 1 John 4:1

In his best-selling book “Strange Fire,” Pastor John MacArthur masterfully chronicles the unsavory history underpinning the modern Charismatic/Apostolic Movement (NAR) and its false prophets.  The New Apostolic Reformation is both a breeding ground for scandal, bad doctrine, and spiritual chicanery and the fastest growing “Christian” movement in the world.  MacArthur lays out a chilling case for rejecting its false prophets and for exposing their errors to the cleansing light of Truth.

In his own penetrating analysis of the Charismatic/Apostolic movement, Fr. Seraphim Rose notes that the spiritist manifestations (i.e., impartation, holy laughter, drunk in the spirit, roaring, barking, hissing, slain in the spirit) experienced in Charismatic churches are found in the occult New Age movement.   The spirit that invaded the Charismatic movement during the ‘Toronto Blessing’ is not the Holy Spirit, said Rose, but the kundalini spirit (serpent power), the same spirit that ancient Egyptians, Hindus, yoga practitioners, and New Agers are familiar with.

From the time of the ancients serpent power has been important to religious and mythological symbolism all around the world. Within the Egyptian mysteries, serpent power was associated with,

…“the elemental forces that were in play before the creation of the world.” (Carl Teichrib, Gods of Ancient Egypt, p. 182)

In his book, “The Sign of the Serpent,” Mark Balfour relates how pervasive serpent symbols are within India and the Hindu religion:

“Any observant traveler who moves from the snow-tipped Himalayas in the North to the sun-soaked sands of Cape Comorin at India’s southern tip, will encounter – particularly in the rural areas and at sacred centres of pilgrimage wherever Siva, God of both Divine Wisdom and regeneration, is the presiding Deity – the serpent motif sculptured within shrines, impressed on myriads of stone implants in the ground and depicted in art.” (A Short Guide to Occult Symbols: Serpent Power, Carl Teichrib, 2005, Kjos Ministries)

Balfour elaborates on this belief:

“In Hinduism, the Cosmic Serpent – Ananta Sesha – symbolic of timeless eternity, carries the world on his 1000-fold [Cobra] hood…As the creative impulse stirs within the great Serpent in the Sky – when passive idea becomes active thought – the forces of attraction and repulsion come into play as ‘spirit’ begins its involution into “matter.” (ibid, Teichrib)

Moreover, Kundalini yoga, a discipline within Hinduism, teaches that latent serpent power lies at the base of the etheric human spine,

“…like a coiled serpent, ready to spring.” (Harper’s Dictionary of Hinduism, p. 156, ibid, Teichrib)

Through strenuous yoga techniques, serpent power uncoils and rises through seven “chakras” or power centers within the human body. Serpent power is considered,

“(to be a) concentrated field of intelligent cosmic, invisible energy absolutely vital to life beginning in the base of the spine as a man or a woman begins to evolve in their first incarnation.” (The Donning International Encyclopedic Psychic Dictionary, p. 343, ibid, Teichrib)

“Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field…” – Genesis 3:1

Serpent power is imparted by laying on of hands, or Shakti-pat.  The demon-possessed Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajineesh was called the “divine drunkard” by his disciples, and according to Tal Brook, author of “Riders of the Cosmic Circuit,” by his millions of worshippers in India, America, and Europe and throughout the world.  Rajineesh encouraged his devotees to come and drink from him, meaning, receive his touch:

“His spiritual ‘wine’ was often passed on with a single touch to the head (Shakti-pat), at which his followers would collapse in ecstatic laughter. Another famous guru, Swami Muktananda, would hold meetings at which thousands of his followers from around the world came to receive his touch.  They experienced uncontrollable laughing, roaring, barking, hissing, crying, shaking, as well as falling unconscious.”(Rose, p. 217)

These demon-possessed gurus were imparting to their adoring worshippers experiences they had undergone during initiation rituals and which they attributed to spirit-possession.

Veteran researcher Brooks Alexander observes of Rajineesh, Muktananda and other gurus:

“All of these gurus espouse a similar philosophy, and they all turn it into practice in a similar way.  It is a pattern that we find not only in tantra (Indo-Tibetan occultism), but in European Satanism, antinomian Gnosticism, and ancient pagan sorcery as well.” (Book Review: Riders of the Cosmic Circuit,” in SCP Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1987, p. 39)

According to Alexander, Satan’s servants have successfully assimilated occult Eastern teachings and techniques into our church and our culture.  With remarkable speed and ease, Eastern and occult ideas and spiritist techniques for contacting spirits such as trance music, brain-altering drugs, meditation and yoga are being propagated to undiscerning Westerners and Americans, within and without the church, on a mass scale:

“…they are filtered through the pervasive secularism of our culture.  In this way they are demystified without changing their essential content.  The basic components of an Eastern/occult world view are recast in forms of expression that are naturalistic, scientific, and humanistic…Occult philosophy is being secularized and psychologized with increasing refinement….Their underlying themes run through contemporary science, economics, politics, art, psychology, and religion.”  (The Coming Darkness, p. 55)

“Be sober, be vigilant: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” 1  Peter 5:8

Satan’s servants are out in the open today.  They have successfully initiated a devastating assault upon the whole body of the Christian church and by extension, upon Western and American society in ways that to previous generations would have seemed unthinkable.

Therefore,

“Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil.”  Ephesians 6:11

And though all may seem dark, hopeless and lost, fear not, for the faithful believer, the one who seeks and perseveres in Truth, is of God:

“Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.” (1 John 4:4)

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