To Believe

It's been a while since the last post, but I haven't given up.

One of the basic tenets of the Christian faith is Belief in Jesus. John 3:16 says that "... so that whoever believes in Him would not die but have eternal life". In John 11:25 he says "He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live", and John 3:18 says "He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."


Believe is vitally fundamental to having life in God. These are just three of many quotes that emphasise this. So it would seem that we need to be totally sure of exactly what it means "to believe" in God.


The church in general today seems to take it to mean "to mentally acknowledge as historical fact the death and ressurection of Jesus Christ, and to believe that He was God."

This kind of belief is nothing more than just that - a mental acknowledgement, regardless of evidence for or against - in much the same way that I believe that Julius Caeser was a real person who ruled Rome from 49 to 44 BC. This kind of belief leads to all sorts of contradictions in the Bible - a couple of which I will cover below. These contradictions occur because the church's current idea of what it means "to believe" in God is WRONG!! Mentally acknowledging the existence of Christ will not save you anymore than it has saved the demons!


The greek word in the New Testament that is translated as "believe" is pisteuo. Strong's Concordance defines this word as meaning:

"From pistis. To have faith (in, upon, or with respect to, a person or thing), ie. to credit; by implication to entrust (especially one's wellbeing to Christ): - to believe, to commit (to trust), to put in trust with."


Notice the occurences and reoccurences of the idea of trust in that above statement. This word "to believe" isn't to be understood in the sense of "I believe that the Battle of Hastings really occured", but more in the sense of "Come on! You can do it! Go! Go! I believe in you! Go!"


It's so much more than acknowledging the existence of God - it's trusting Him enough to commit yourself to Him - which means trusting Him enough to do what He says and deny yourself, turn from your ways, take up your cross, and follow Him! It means to lay down your life and everything you hold dear and leave the crowds and follow Him alone! It's what the disciples did when they dropped their fishing nets (their only means of livlihood) and followed Him!


I think a perfect illustration of this is the parable of the guy who found a priceless treasure in a field and so went and sold all he had in order to buy this field and claim the treasure! He gave up everything to gain this one treasure!

Or the parable of the wise and foolish vigins - the wise ones were the ones who sold all they had in order to buy enough oil to be awake when the Bridegroom (Christ) came for them! The ones who didn't sell everything ran out of oil and were asleep when He came, and thus they were forever shut out from His presence.


Hopefully some of what Jesus says in the New Testament will become a whole lot clearer now.


God Bless~

The Purpose Driven Deception

You're probably familiar with this book - either you've read it or you've heard about it:



















This is probably one of the most dangerous books a Christian could read.


Why?


Well for starters, let's have a look at one of the most powerful influences on Rick Warren's beliefs - a man by the name of Robert Schuller. Schuller is a universalist and believes that Jesus is not the only way to heaven. He states that making people aware of their lost and sinful condition is the very worst thing a preacher could do, and believes the new-birth experience in Christians simply means changing a negative self-image to a positive one!!

The fact that Schuller highly endorses Warren's Purpose Driven Life (from here on I'm going to call it PDL) is therefore very worrying. At the start of PDL is an endorsement by Schuller, where he says “I’m praying that every pastor will read this book...Rick Warren is the one all of us should listen to and learn from." Add to that the fact that Warren has shared the stage with Schuller at several of Schuller's conferences, and you'd be right to be concerned about just what Warren believes.


In the sister book to PDL, called Purpose Driven Church,Warren makes the claim (while talking about preaching to the unsaved) that “The most likely place to start is with the person’s felt needs...this was the approach Jesus used...A good salesman knows you always start with the customer’s needs, not the product.” In the chapter before that he says “Whenever Jesus encountered a person he’d begin with their hurts, needs, and interests.”

Firstly, Christians are not business salesmen; secondly, a simple reading of Jesus's encounters with (for example) Nicodemous, Levi, and the woman at the well, will show that Jesus did not always begin with a persons needs.

It gets worse. This is a common idea preached by other business-style-church-growth leaders such as Lee Strobel, Bill Hybels, and Joel Osteen. The idea is that by finding out what a person wants from life, you can promise that to them "in Jesus". Strobel states that if you find a person is suffering from a lack of self esteem, then tell him how your own self esteem has soared since you came to Christ; if a person wants adventure, tell him that there's nothing more exciting than a life in Christ. Basically find out what he wants, then sell it to him in a Christian package.


Lets compare that to the preaching of Paul in the New Testament. Paul says himself that he "kept back nothing" (Acts 20:20) and his preaching involved rebuking, convicting, exhorting, admonishing, reproving, and so on. Read his letters to the churches (in a good Bible version like the NKJV) and note how many times those words come up.


It gets even worse; in pages 58 - 59 of PDL, Warren states “Real life begins by committing yourself completely to Jesus Christ. If you are not sure you have done this, all you need to do is receive and believe...bow your head and quietly whisper the prayer that will change your eternity: ‘Jesus I believe in you and I receive you.’ Go ahead. If you sincerely meant that prayer, congratulations! Welcome to the family of God.” That right there is Warren's idea of salvation. Notice that "real life" is whatever it is that the reader wants that has just been promised to them via Christianity. There is no mention of sin, hell, repentance, death to self, forsaking the old life, counting the cost, obedience; no mention of "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12) or of seeking the face of God!


The gospel isn't about meeting people's felt needs. It is about meeting their one true need - the need for salvation. It is not about making people feel good, it is about making them see that they are lost, sinful, and destined to hell! Lost man can never feel this need because he is spiritually dead! This message can never be marketed like Warren's is being, because it is foolishness to the lost! (1 Cor. 1:18)


This false gospel teaches that Christ died for us because we are valuable to Him. That is not true! There is nothing in us that makes us valuable to God! The Bible often talks compares the worthless with the valuable (where sinners are the worthless and the righteous are the valuable). The only reason Christ died for us is that such an act is a manifestation of His grace, His mercy, His love, and His righteousness; everything He does is done because of who He is, not who we are! Everything God does is to bring glory to Himself! To say that sinners are valuable to God is to bring glory onto sinners!


In conclusion, the idea behind PDL is that the bigger the church, the better. This is why Rick Warren (along with the other pastors mentioned above) is often called by critics a "church-growth" pastor. PDL is a seeker-friendly message aimed at bringing more people to church, using business marketing techniques. Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes magazine said of PDL: “This is one of the greatest entrepreneurial books I’ve ever read, and if you merely substitute the word ‘business’ for ‘church’, it’s just a terrific guide that can be taken to a secular and business audience.”

These people seek to bring more people into the church, yet back in New Testament times, having unbelievers enter the church appears to have been a rare event! Why? Well one reason given in Acts is that they were too scared - the power of God was there!

As a result, Warren is leading people to a false Christ - one that has been conjured up to make people feel good about themselves [as lost sinners]. PDL is a book written about how to come to and serve this false god.



"And he [Aaron] received the gold from their hand, and he fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made a molded calf. Then they said, "This is your God, O Israel...
"So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, "Tomorrow is a feast to Yahweh."" (Exodus 32: 5 - 6a)

"And the LORD said to Moses, "Go, get down! ... Now therefore, let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them."" (Exodus 32: 7a, 10a)

Repentance

Very, very good article on repentance here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Check it out!

Beginnings

So the purpose of this blog is to talk about all things Christianity. The Second Coming appears to be nearly here, and the Church is splitting in two, and those of us who are trying to stay true to the God of the Bible have some serious times ahead of us. Hopefully this blog will not only help people be ready for Christ when He returns (that is such an awesome thought!), but also help expose some of the deception that is rampant throughout the church, and even help get a grounding on things like creation (as opposed to evolution) and stuff like that.


So I figured a good way to start would be talking about the beginning. I've been rereading a book recently called The Discovery of Genesis - How the Truths of Genesis were Found Hidden in the Chinese Language. Basically the book is the result of 40 years of research by two guys into how the story of Genesis, up to the dispersion at Babel, was recorded in the creation of the Chinese language. Here's a few examples:



Now I'm aware these are vey badly drawn, in some cases there are several ways of drawing the same word, and in other cases the form shown may actually be archaic - ie. no longer used these days. Apparently there are heaps of different "fonts" in the Chinese writing system, and I think this one was invented around 200BC or something. Anyway, this first word above, the word "create" consists of four radicals - dust or mud, life/motion, walking, and mouth. Why use these specific elements to build the word "create" (it also means "begin" or "from")?

Well Genesis 2:7, which describes the creation of man, comes to mind - "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed (with his mouth) into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. If you remove the character for "walking" from this pictogram, then you are left with another pictogram meaning "talking" - so the character for "create" is also comprised of two parts that shows that Adam was created as an adult - able to walk and talk.



This one is very interesting! Here we see the character for "tempter". It comprises of the radicals for "cover", two "trees" and "devil". Genesis 3 immediately comes to mind - where was the devil when he tempted Eve? In the cover of one of the two trees in the middle of the Garden of Eden! Then there's the character for "devil" itself (shown above in red). This character itself is composed of the radicals for "garden" (also "plot of land"), "secretive" and "man" or
"person". The devil himself is portrayed as "the secretive person in the garden"!


One more for now:



The character for "boat". It consists of the radicals "vessels", "eight" and "mouths". Apparently the radical for "mouth" could also be used to mean person, though I don't know if it still is. Now, why would the word for "boat" mention eight people? Could it be because the first boat in history - the Ark - had eight people on board?!

These are only three examples of about thirty or forty in the book. I'll give some more examples every so often. Is that amazing or what? The ancient Chinese seem to have believed pretty much exactly in the Biblical version of events, yet they lived tens of thousands of kilometres from the Hebrews who wrote the Bible!

Anyway that's all for now.

God Bless~