Some are leaving the faith (deconstructing) because they are rejecting a false view of God’s deliverance. How many of us are weak in the face of trials and/or temptations? Pretty much all of us! The person who has been taught and believes that we will have the power in ourselves to overcome all trials in our own strength is bound to be horribly disillusioned. We must rely on God’s strength to give us contentment and have complete reliance on God in the face of trials. The false view should be rejected and replaced with the biblical view.

All of us have heard claims about things the “Bible says” that we do not find in the Bible. Some of these claims are just plain false, while others are likewise untrue but have the advantage of being humorous. The character of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof was constantly spouting things that supposedly “the good book says,” which were comically indicative of a man of faith who was not biblically literate:
Tevye:As the good book says, when a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick.
Mendel:Where does the book say that?
Tevye:Well, it doesn’t say that exactly, but somewhere there is something about a chicken.
In another exchange, Tevye managed to name Biblical characters and quoted Biblical phrases but didn’t seem to be able to match the quote to the correct persons:
Tevye:As Abraham said, “I am a stranger in a strange land…”
Rabbi’s Son:Moses said that.
Tevye:Ah. Well, as King David said, “I am slow of speech, and slow of tongue.”
Rabbi’s Son:That was also Moses.
Tevye:For a man who was slow of speech he talked a lot.
Quite funny, yet Tevye’s conclusion was false because the passages were taken out of their rightful context. It also demonstrates the ease with which someone may think they have biblical knowledge when they do not.
In our lives, we’ve sometimes heard such things as “The Bible says ‘God helps those who help themselves.’” This may have been said so often it seems like it must be in there somewhere. But, as hard as it may be to believe, it is actually nowhere to be found in the text of the Bible. In fact, the Scriptures teach the opposite. God cares for those who are not capable of helping themselves, which, as it happens, is all of us. Another popular text is, “God will never give you more than you can bear.” Again, we just don’t find it in God’s holy writ. The closest text maybe 1 Corinthians 10:13. As it happens, in context, the Apostle Paul is writing about temptation and sexual immorality, not difficulties in general. It will help if we back up from verse thirteen to the beginning of the chapter to get the meaning.
In 1 Corinthians 10:1-6, the Apostle Paul cites the Nation of Israel, who had been “baptized into Moses,” as examples of the engagement of the people of God in idolatry and sexual immorality (1 Corinthians 10:7-8) as well as the resulting judgment (1 Corinthians 10:9-10). Paul applies this to the Corinthians because some in the church there were engaging in idolatry and sexual immorality. He recited this history as examples and warnings and pointed out that this course of action didn’t work out so well for The Nation of Israel – and won’t work out well for them either:
Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. (1 Corinthians 10:12)
There were many idols to be worshiped and temple prostitutes enticing the Corinthian believers to partake, but Paul doesn’t leave the believers with no resources to combat the temptations that were all around them in Corinth. He wrote:
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.  (1 Corinthians 10:13-14)
Notice that Paul does not say God will remove the temptation – God would have to eliminate the city to do that – nor the desire fueled by the temptation. The tools He provides are fleeing and escaping temptation, which He strengthens us to do. Paul gives young Timothy the same counsel.
Read More
Related Posts:

We would like to offer a solution that could bring the deconstructors right back to their senses if they will only accept it. They should put aside their rage, ask God’s forgiveness, and call on the One who purchased and provided redemption for all of us at His own expense. Deconstructionism is really just another version of an age-old story. It’s really the same angry conclusion that many ancient Israelites and Judeans followed.

In the late 1990s, I was asked by a professor at a local community college to teach a class on Christianity in their Religion 101 course. I agreed and spent nearly an hour explaining the reliability of the Bible, the claims and some of the evidences regarding Jesus, His life, death, and physical resurrection. Of course, it was just an overview. Only so much can be done in an hour. Before we finished, I invited questions. An adventurous student raised his hand, certain he was going to stump me with something I had never heard. He asserted, “You can‘t trust the Bible. It has been translated over and over, and it is full of mistakes.” I thanked him for expressing his concerns and proceeded to hand him my Bible, asking him to provide us with a few examples of the errors. He was caught off guard a bit and sheepishly responded that he hadn’t actually read the Bible. I asked how it was, then, that he was so sure it was full of mistakes? He replied that he had heard that was the case. I pressed a bit more for the source of his knowledge on this topic. He didn’t know. I followed up, wondering who he had heard it from. Again, he had no recollection. I then posed a different question.
“Doesn’t it concern you that you are gambling your eternal destiny based on information that you picked up from a source you can’t recall, and from someone who may or may not be reliable? Doesn’t that bother you even a little bit?”
He and the group became more animated as I began pointing to very popular  seeming inconsistencies in the Bible and demonstrated how context resolves the alleged contradictions. I don’t know if any of them have come to the faith since those days, but it was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that asking questions is a good thing – and that there are solid answers for those who will take the time to investigate honestly. I have recalled that opportunity many times over the years when I interacted with those who know little about the Christian faith, as well as many who had been raised in the church and walked away. Perhaps they had been in an authoritarian group led by a false teacher like Bill Gothard and their view of Christianity was skewed. Many times, when we have interacted with “Gothardites” who have left the faith, we have to start with, “Just because God and Gothard both begin with “GO” and end with “D,” that doesn’t mean they are the same person. In many of these cases, they are unwittingly rejecting a caricature of Christianity and not the biblical faith itself.
There are now several new and “cool” names for those who have abandoned the church and left the faith. They are presently “deconstructing” – and call themselves “#exvangelicals.” But what are they deconstructing from? That is unclear. Even answering that question is difficult because, as Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett point out in their book, The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond, it could mean anything from someone trying to sort out the true from the false to those who reject the Scriptures entirely and look for a “personalized” faith separate from the Bible. The way Childers and Barnett describe it is:
Faith deconstruction is a postmodern process of rethinking your faith without regarding Scripture as a standard.1
Read More
Related Posts:

It is odd but in light of where much of Western culture is today, Wild in the Streets seems almost prophetic. For example, at the age of fifteen, Swedish-born Greta Thunberg took her largely ignorant but passionate narrative concerning “climate change” into politics, attempting to sway the Swedish elections. A year later, she publicly scolded world leaders in her 2019 UN Climate Action Summit speech. Now twenty-one, she has an international following successfully demanding governments fall in line with climate change activists’ demands. Lately, she has also come out as an expert critic of Zionism, accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza, where of course, Israelis are trying to wipe out the terrorist organization which attacked, kidnapped, raped, and killed Israeli innocents – because Gazan innocents are being hurt or killed.

The 1968 film Wild in the Streets has been described as an “American dystopian comedy-drama film.” In an era of rebellion against authority – the late 1960s – the premise of Wild in the Streets was simple. High school and college-age youth came to believe that they knew better how to run society and government than their elders. The main character, Max Frost, was a budding revolutionary who happened to be a very popular rock star.
Popular rock singer and aspiring revolutionary Max Frost (Christopher Jones) was born Max Jacob Flatow Jr. His first public act of violence was blowing up his family’s new car. Frost’s band, the Troopers, live together with him, their women, and others, in a sprawling Beverly Hills mansion. The band includes his 15-year-old genius attorney Billy Cage (Kevin Coughlin) on lead guitar, ex-child actor and girlfriend Sally LeRoy (Diane Varsi) on keyboards, hook-handed Abraham Salteen (Larry Bishop) on bass guitar and trumpet, and anthropologist Stanley X (Richard Pryor) on drums. Max’s band performs a song noting that 52% of the population is 25 or younger, making young people the majority in the country.
When Max is asked to sing at a televised political rally by  Kennedyesque Senate candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook), who is running on a platform to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, he and the Troopers appear – but Max stuns everyone by calling instead for the voting age to become 14, then finishes the show with an improvised song, “Fourteen or Fight!”, and a call for a demonstration. Max’s fans – and other young people, by the thousands – stir to action, and within 24 hours protests have begun in cities around the United States.1
As the story unfolds, not only is the voting age lowered, but the age to hold national public office is lowered to fourteen. The mandatory retirement age is lowered to thirty and everyone thirty-five and older were to be shipped to re-education camps where they are permanently kept “high” on LSD. While some thought the premise “ludicrous,” others, like Roger Ebert, thought it actually a cautionary tale. Ebert’s review opens with:
Once you’ve experienced a concert by a group like the Beatles or the Doors, the fascist potential of pop music becomes inescapable. There is a primitive force in these mass demonstrations that breaks down individualism and creates a joyous mob.2
Further down, he notes:
“Wild in the Streets,” on the other hand, is aimed squarely at the younger teenage audience that buys records and listens to the Top 40 stations. This audience can believe, if only temporarily, in the greatness of a performer. They can sense what John Lennon was getting at (although he phrased it unfortunately) when he said the Beatles were more famous than Christ.3
Ebert also comments:
It’s a silly film, but it does communicate in the simplest, most direct terms.4
It is odd but in light of where much of Western culture is today, Wild in the Streets seems almost prophetic. For example, at the age of fifteen, Swedish-born Greta Thunberg took her largely ignorant but passionate narrative concerning “climate change” into politics, attempting to sway the Swedish elections. A year later, she publicly scolded world leaders in her 2019 UN Climate Action Summit speech. Now twenty-one, she has an international following successfully demanding governments fall in line with climate change activists’ demands. Lately, she has also come out as an expert critic of Zionism, accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza, where of course, Israelis are trying to wipe out the terrorist organization which attacked, kidnapped, raped, and killed Israeli innocents – because Gazan innocents are being hurt or killed.
We can see her point. In WW2, we and our allies refused to attack both Japan and Germany directly, even though they were attacking us, since many German and Japanese civilian innocents would have been killed or injured in the process. Oh wait – that’s not how the war ended.
Read More
Related Posts:

How would you know where Jesus is? Answer: by remembering who He is! This is also the only record we have in Scripture of Jesus ever being scolded by His human parents. But, if we believe in the doctrine of the sinlessness of Christ at age twelve, then it was a scolding He did not deserve. But Gothard’s view assumes He did deserve it since he had already gotten out from under their “umbrella of authority.” Fortunately, Luke is telling this story instead of Gothard. And as Luke tells it, the sinless Christ, at age twelve, answered His parents’ question with His own questions: Don’t you know who I am? And don’t you know that who I Am dictates where I am?

Editor’s Note: Bill Gothard’s unique and at times, unbiblical teachings have impacted churches, homeschool groups, and Christians far beyond the over two and a half million that have attended his Basic Seminar. If his teaching on authority is applied consistently, Jesus was a sinner, visualization is “one of the most basic aspects of faith,” and First Century authoritarianism is the biblical model for Christians and the church. We decided to post an excerpt of our updated and newly released book, A Matter of Basic Principles: Bill Gothard and His Cultish Teaching. This comes from chapter three, “The Emerald City.”
The Links in Gothard’s Chain of Authority
Gothard teaches that God had three primary purposes for instituting human authority:

“To [help us] grow in wisdom and character;”
“To gain protection from destructive temptations” (as outlined above); and
“To receive clear direction for life decisions.”1

To prove his point, Gothard writes:
The only recorded incident in the life of Christ between the ages of two and thirty was a discussion with his parents, which involved authority. This occurred when He was twelve. Should he follow His spiritual calling and be about His Father’s business (Luke 2:49), or should he become subject to His parents and leave His ministry at the temple? He did the latter, and the following verse reports, “And He increased with wisdom and stature, and found favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52).2
Here Gothard took a story from Luke, designed to illustrate the identity of Christ as the Son of God and Messiah. But in his hands, it becomes a story about internal conflict within the Lord Jesus over whether to obey the parental authority of Joseph and Mary so he can fit it into his system. However, there is nothing in Luke 2:41-52 that even remotely implies that Jesus was struggling with the issues Gothard mentions here. He reads these ideas into the passage, giving unwary readers the impression that they are in the text itself. As illusionists quickly distract their audiences from what they are actually doing, Gothard quickly moves on without providing readers with a verse to back up his assertion.
He apparently doesn’t realize the theological problems that result from this sleight-of-hand. If Gothard’s interpretation is correct, Jesus deliberately remained behind in the Temple against what He obviously knew (since He was God) to be his parents’ wishes as His authority. This would mean that even before the boy Jesus had resolved His supposed “inner-conflict,” He had already sinned! This, of course, directly contradicts biblical teaching on the sinless nature of Christ.
The notion that this is a story about Jesus resolving His own internal conflict is also at odds with its climactic scene (which Gothard oddly omits). Luke records this in verses 48-49:
And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto him, “Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.”
And he said unto them, “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”
This sure doesn’t sound as though Jesus decided against being about His Father’s business! He clearly stated He must be about it! Why does Gothard contradict Jesus’ words by stating He chose against being about His Father’s business by being subject to His parents? And where does the text teach that being about His Father’s business and being subject to His parents are incompatible so that He cannot do both at the same time?
Luke’s climax also does not uncover any sort of “inner conflict” Jesus may have experienced. On the other hand, he portrays Joseph’s and Mary’s inner conflict quite vividly. We can read and re-read this passage countless times, but we’ll never find Gothard’s teachings— however, we may find Luke’s.
Luke is telling a story in narrative form. Narratives are often about conflict and resolution. In this case Gothard reads into the text the wrong conflict and is teaching a false resolution. When you read this kind of story (or hear it, or see it in a movie), you can tell what it’s about by following the key players in the conflict. A good storyteller knows how to focus your attention on the conflict to build suspense so that the conflict’s resolution makes a memorable impact on the readers.
Everyone who has children or young siblings can relate to the terror of losing track of one’s young charge, even for a brief period of time. Joseph and Mary were a full day’s journey away before they realized Jesus was missing (v. 44), and it took them three days to find Him after they made it back to Jerusalem (v. 46)!
Luke supplies these details because this is what the story is about. He wants his readers to ask the same question Joseph and Mary were asking: “Where could Jesus be?” He wants them to feel the same range of emotions any parent would feel because the lesson for the reader is the same as it was for Joseph and Mary.
Read More
Related Posts:

Peter Singer from Princeton argues that children up until the age of two do not possess full moral status, and parents would be able to choose to euthanize them.3 Michael Tooley, Professor Emeritus from Colorado University, pushes this to about five years old. Now that we have grown used to sacrificing the defenseless young, why not move on to the defenseless aged? The catchy new motto could be: Every grandma should be a wanted grandma! Culture has advanced itself back to infanticide and euthanasia. In Canada, euthanasia accounted for 3.3% of deaths in 2021, and they are currently wrestling with euthanasia for the mentally ill.

What are the signs of a culture advancing from basic survival mode to a developing culture? Is it an alphabet and written language? Is it farming and improved technologies for higher quality and more productive farming? Is it industrialization? Very likely, each of these or all these combined demonstrates advancement in culture. One of the things that never occurred to us as being an important sign of advancement was the practice of human sacrifice! That is until we read Study Points to Human Sacrifice in Europe. The article discusses strong evidence of human sacrifice in a period dated between 26,000 and 8,000 B.C., or what is called the Upper Paleolithic. The author, Heather Whipps, writes:
Investigating a collection of graves from the Upper Paleolithic (about 26,000 to 8,000 BC), archaeologists found several that contained pairs or even groups of people with rich burial offerings and decoration. Many of the remains were young or had deformities, such as dwarfism.
The diversity of the individuals buried together and the special treatment they received could be a sign of ritual killing, said Vincenzo Formicola of the University of Pisa, Italy.
What, then, do these findings indicate to Heather Whipps?
Human sacrifices have never been apparent in the archaeological record of Upper Paleolithic Europe, though they pop up much later among more complex ancient societies, such as the Egyptians. The Maya and the Aztec would also cut out hearts or toss victims from the tops of temples, historians say.
What sort of human beings were apparently being sacrificed? Well, it seems that a good portion of them were defenseless children and/or handicapped individuals and people with physical challenges or deformities. Some were pre-teens, and one of the allegedly sacrificed individuals had congenital dysplasia. Another adolescent was a dwarf. The common theme here is that these sacrifices involved children. Why were they sacrificed? The writer doesn’t really go into that and, incidentally, does not seem bothered overmuch by the findings. There was no horror reflected in the foregoing remarks. However, what is asserted is that the presence of human sacrifice indicates a more advanced society than the simple hunter/gatherer type society that was previously envisioned. The author conjectures:
The new findings could mean the hunter-gatherers were more advanced than once thought.
Even putting these two ideas “advanced civilization” and “child sacrifice” together is rather breathtaking in its callousness, is it not? Until quite recently at least, most of us would never have considered a society that practiced human sacrifice “advanced.” We would instead have called it barbaric.
If, however, child sacrifice does indicate an advanced civilization, then certainly Western culture has “advanced” quite rapidly in recent decades as it sheds the Christian worldview. It seems to us to be advancing ever more quickly today as godlessness holds increasing sway over our culture. Let’s take a quick look back and track our “advancement.”
American Feminist leader Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 became the first woman to be nominated for president by a political party, stated:
Thus society, while expending millions in the care of incurables and imbeciles, takes little heed of or utterly ignores those laws by the study and obedience of which such human abortions might have been prevented from cumbering society with their useless and unwelcome presence. Grecian and Roman civilizations were, it is true, deficient in the gentler virtues, the excess of which in our day is hindering the progress of the race rather than helping or ennobling it. They, by crushing out the diseased and imperfect plants in the garden of humanity, attained to a vigor and physical development, which has never been equated since. And in so doing they were entirely in accord with nature, whose mandate is inexorable, that the “fittest” only shall be permitted to live and propagate. She is a very prodigal in her waste of individual life, in order that the species be without spot of blemish.
Not so our modern civilization, which rather pets its abortions and weaklings, and complacently permits them to procreate another race of fools and pigmies as inane and useless as themselves.1
Read More
Related Posts:

We decided to answer the claims of Russell Moore and the Woke crowd by turning back a century in time to another person who fought this very same battle with liberals in his day. J. Gresham Machen’s book Christianity and Liberalism came out one hundred years ago in 1923, and his response to the out-of-context use of the Sermon on the Mount is instructive. The Sermon on the Mount is not an ethical prescription but a description of a life we are not at all capable of fulfilling in our own strength without the Spirit of God within. It is a demonstration that the wall of separation between God and us is so high we cannot possibly scale it. 

No True Christian … Part One examined what basis there is for an assertion that a true Christian would or would not do certain things or behave in certain ways. By way of reminder, those who do make such assertions commit the No True Scotsman Fallacy. Knowing right from wrong does not guarantee that one will make every decision with that view in the forefront. People are fallible, as we are all aware.
In our present time, the left side of the aisle that identifies as Christian contends that Jesus was a woke Socialist and that his followers must needs be woke socialists also. What do they offer to support their contention? Why, Scripture, of course. Both progressives and conservatives turn to the Word of God in support of their political and cultural positions, but the understanding and application of Scripture differ substantially for progressives and conservatives. For progressives, their social and political commitments sit on top of the Bible, and their preconceived “truths” inform their understanding of Scripture rather than allowing Scripture to inform their positions on a given issue to decide what is true and right.
On the other hand, the historical-grammatical context informs a Christian conservative’s understanding of Scripture. (Not all conservatives are Christians, of course, so they may very well base their choices on the way they were brought up, though those “passed down views” probably stem from “the Christian Era,” a time when society in general judged many issues of right and wrong through the lens of scripture.) As a result, conservative’s social and cultural views – and how they vote for any given position – are informed by their biblical understanding. As Dr. George Yancey,  Professor of Sociology at Baylor University points out:
For progressive Christians, Jesus is primarily the model of inclusion and tolerance. For example, one progressive Christian drew a cartoon of Jesus saying, “The difference between me and you is you use Scripture to determine what love means and I use love to determine what Scripture means.” Progressive Christians focus on the actions and teachings of Jesus that reinforce their values of tolerance and inclusion, which they see as examples of love.1Who’s More Political: Progressive or Conservative Christians?, George Yancy, TGC. April 29, 2021
Progressive pastors may be dumbfounded when they quote from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) and find themselves accused of using liberal talking points. In “Jesus Was a Socialist”: Christianity in Crisis as Conservatives Finally Realize Jesus Was Woke, Russell Moore, one of the Woke, weighs in:
Moore said that some individuals are questioning the origins of these teachings and dismissing them as “liberal talking points.” Even when pastors assert that they are directly quoting Christ, their words are often met with skepticism. “When the teachings of Jesus himself are viewed as disruptive to us, we find ourselves in a state of crisis,” Moore said.
The essential key of interpretation, however, is often missing for progressive liberals – they do not take context into account. Simply because a passage is quoted doesn’t mean the application given it is true. False teachers, cultists, Eastern religions, and yes, progressive liberals and even conservatives can take Scripture out of context and give it a meaning that is not derived from the context.
For example, was Jesus identifying Peter as the literal Prince of Darkness when He rebuked Peter:
But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. (Matthew 16:23)
No, not at all. Jesus was saying that Peter was “speaking as Satan would speak” when Peter tried to dissuade Jesus from going to the cross. Peter was acting as a stumbling block to Jesus since it was His divine purpose to suffer and die for mankind’s salvation.2 Thinking about it here, Peter was “doing unto others (Jesus) as he would want others to do for him” (according to the flesh) since Peter would not think it would be in his own best interest to die on the cross.
Read More
Related Posts:

Nearly all of the New Testament was written to expose false teachers, and false teaching, correct bad behavior, and teach sound doctrine to the believers. Christians are forgiven and cleansed from their sins but still may make sinful choices. This can be true of the church corporately as well. We need to turn to Scripture to determine what a Christian is. This may be a Vince Lombardi “this is a football” moment. But from time to time, we need to go back to the basics of the gospel.

The days of debating national issues and proposing solutions in a civil debate seem to be a thing of the past. The rancor between the small groups of very vocal activists among both Progressives and Conservatives1 alike have increasingly been turning to the No True Scotsman Fallacy in an effort to cancel or silence the “other side” of the debate. What is the No True Scotsman Fallacy you ask? The Logical Fallacies website describes the intent and how it is executed:
The No True Scotsman fallacy appeals to the “purity” of an ideal or standard as a way to dismiss relevant criticisms or flaws in your argument. 
Example of No True Scotsman

John doesn’t drink alcohol. No real man avoids alcohol. John isn’t a real man.

The argument creates an ideal man and uses his supposed perfection to prove a point.

Sarah always wears slacks. No real woman would wear slacks. Sarah is not a real woman.

‘Establishing’ that no real woman would wear slacks creates the fallacy.
A popular current example of this is ”No true Christian would vote for…” Once started, you can fill in the blank with a Republican, a Democrat, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, etc. The group or individual used to fill in the blank matters little. The fallacy confuses what a Christian is with how a Christian may behave, in this case, using voting choices to identify the person who cannot possibly be a Christian. Even though either choice involves choosing a person who is far from perfect, the faults of our guy are overlooked while the other is thoroughly demonized. Even though its use is manipulative, it may be that the person making the case lacks a historical-grammatical understanding of Scripture and doesn’t realize they have created a false dilemma. Of course, we’re not saying that it makes no difference who one votes for. There are better and worse choices based on the policies they promote. That is the whole point of voting in a democratic republic – making the best choice, if you can, between two far-from-perfect human beings. And the truth is people often selfishly vote for who or what they believe is in their best interest. No human endeavor is going to be untainted by mankind’s sinful nature. Sad but true.
Thankfully, Christian belief tells us that believing in Jesus and His sacrifice makes one a Christian, not one’s voting record.
Read More
Related Posts:

We would like to report that Evangelical Christians are always perfect in their handling of the word of God, but that is not always the case. Sometimes Scriptures are completely removed from their context. An idea loosely based on the Bible is, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Some will go so far as to quote Jeremiah 29:11 completely out of context: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Here is the context: Israel was in captivity at the time, and they were listening to false prophets who were lying to them about their imminent peace and restoration as a nation. Jeremiah, in contrast, told the Israelites to settle in and to understand they will be there until seventy years of their prophesied judgment is completed.

In Matthew 22:23 – 33, we read of a group of Jewish religious leaders, the Sadducees, whose theology informed their understanding of Scripture rather than allowing Scripture to shed real light on their faulty theology. “This Jewish group apparently based its doctrine on the Pentateuch alone”1
So, when appealing to what Moses wrote in Deuteronomy 25:5-10, they attempted to trip Jesus up, formulating a hypothetical case of a woman that had married seven brothers, one at a time, from the eldest to the youngest as each one died. Sadducees were skeptics, who didn’t believe in the resurrection, which of course Jesus taught, so they used this question to make belief in the resurrection seem ridiculous. “At the resurrection,” they ask,“whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?” Jesus turned their ploy back on them in Matthew 22:28  when He replied from the Pentateuch, Exodus 3:6, to do so:
Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. (Matthew 25:29-32 KJV)
“Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.” Ignorance of the scriptures does seem to be a popular way of misusing – intentionally (cults for example) or unknowingly – the word of God even today. Many miss, as did the Sadducees, the importance of the main character and theme in the story, God and His power. Many people miss the true teachings in the Bible because of their natural bias against the supernatural. In their thinking, God cannot do things which they deem impossible.
In 1923, J. Gresham Machen’s book, Christianity and Liberalism was published. Liberals of that day were the progressives of Machen’s day. His criticism wasn’t that the Liberals of his era did not claim to be Christian or that they had overtly abandoned the Scriptures. They used the methodology of the Sadducees to deny what seems impossible in human eyes. They held a cynical view of Scripture and created a “theology” which placed their unbelief and their feelings squarely on top of Scripture, vehemently denying what their biased minds could not, therefore did not, believe. Machen describes the premise of his book:
Modern liberalism may be criticized (1) on the ground that it is un-Christian and (2) on the ground that it is unscientific. We shall concern ourselves here chiefly with the former line of criticism; we shall be interested in showing that despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology, modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.2
Many of the things Machen said in 1923 can be applied with equal validity to Progressives today. Like the Liberals in Machen’s day, Progressives do use “traditional phraseology” and may quote Scripture, but context is missing. Their understanding is guided by personal feeling and desire, not by the contextual intent of the word of God. In “Who’s More Political: Progressive or Conservative Christians?”3 George Yancy points out :
For progressive Christians, Jesus is primarily the model of inclusion and tolerance. For example, one progressive Christian drew a cartoon of Jesus saying, “The difference between me and you is you use Scripture to determine what love means and I use love to determine what Scripture means.” Progressive Christians focus on the actions and teachings of Jesus that reinforce their values of tolerance and inclusion, which they see as examples of love.
Read More
Related Posts:

Just as Nietzsche had foretold, freethinkers who mock the very idea of a god as a dead thing, a sky fairy, an imaginary friend, still piously hold to taboos and morals that derive from Christianity. In 2002, in Amsterdam, the World Humanist Congress affirmed ‘the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others’. Yet this—despite humanists’ stated ambition to provide ‘an alternative to dogmatic religion’—was nothing if not itself a statement of belief.

Where do morals come from? Are they objective or subjective? Are their origins from God or are they somehow a result of evolution, a byproduct of Social Darwinism? Our answers to these questions largely determine how we live with and treat other humans and often even define which humans have human rights that should be protected.
About a decade ago, we watched an interesting series by the Dutch public broadcasting system, VPRO. The question of the origin of morality was put to Darwinian paleontologist, the late Steven Jay Gould, in part 6 of their 7-part series, “A Glorious Accident”:
Interviewer:  You said morality cannot be taught by nature – if you seek in nature for morality, or free will or rationality, you won’t find it.
Stephen Jay Gould: I said you won’t find morality which is a question of how we ought to behave… Moral questions are questions about oughts. Nature, as science understands it is a factual set of properties. There’s no way you can go from the facts of nature to the oughts of actions. They’re just different things.
Interviewer:  Nature is non-moral?
Stephen Jay Gould: Yes.
Interviewer:  Amoral?
Stephen Jay Gould: Non-moral. It’s just not, not a theme.1
When pressed as to why we should be “moral,” Gould could only appeal to pragmatism – we should be moral, so we won’t kill each other. But why not kill each other? Given the opportunity, those that are more able to survive will do so, and those less able will be eliminated and be less of a drain on natural resources. Recognizing these enormous global benefits, why not kill each other? Who is to say that would be wrong? Evolution is served very well by killing. Men in competition for mates and necessary goods would all try to kill their rivals, driven unconsciously by the all-important evolutionary drive to survive and reproduce. Since, in a Darwinian world, those are the only two important pursuits, how could that possibly be judged as wrong? And who has the right to place other people under such a burden? Killing others may not be right for you, but it may be completely right from another’s perspective. Evolutionarily speaking, it is just the way it is. Whoever survives will go on to reproduce, provided that some biological females also survive. And if the females should decide for whatever reason that they are not sexually attracted to the available males, evolution has already solved that dilemma by increasing the size and strength of the males while keeping the females smaller and weaker so that the survival of the species would not be hindered by something as silly as mere feelings and/or personal preferences. Evolution is inexorable and not hampered by niceties. The female would simply have no veto power in the matter. As we discover in the book A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion by evolutionists Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, rape is simply a part of the evolutionary process by which a less desirable male continues to propagate his gene pool. The authors helpfully point out that rape isn’t a question of morals:
The biologist George Williams, in his 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection, clarified what Darwin meant when he wrote of natural selection’s rejecting all that was “bad” and preserving all that was “good.” First, Williams noted, these words were not used in a moral sense; they referred only to the effects of traits on an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce. That is, “good” traits are those that promote an individual’s reproductive interests. We evolutionists use the term reproductive success to refer to these reproductive interests, by which we mean not the mere production of offspring but the production of offspring that survive to produce offspring (Palmer and Steadman 1997). A trait that increases this ability is “good” in terms of natural selection even though one might consider it undesirable in moral terms. There is no connection here between what is biological or naturally selected and what is morally right or wrong. To assume a connection is to commit what is called the naturalistic fallacy. In addition, Williams clarified that natural selection favors traits that are “good” in the sense of increasing an individual’s reproductive success, not necessarily traits that are “good” in the sense of increasing a group’s ability to survive.2
So, in a culture that has Christian morality woven into its fabric, rape may be viewed as “undesirable in moral terms,” but from a Darwinian perspective, it is not wrong – in fact, it is good. It is merely an essential tool of evolution. Perhaps women at least need to seriously consider the implications of evolutionary theory.
We are, as a culture, opposed to slavery, but is slavery intrinsically wrong? If morals are simply pragmatic social constructs, without reference to an all-powerful God, on what basis can anyone today claim that the former enslavement of Africans, for example, was immoral?  Why all the judgmentalism? After all, the scientific consensus of evolutionists at the time of the Civil War was that blacks were lesser evolved beings. The people just “followed the science,” and science said the evolutionary gap between blacks and whites was far greater than the evolutionary gap between blacks and apes.
Read More
Related Posts:

True love is transformative. No, we can’t love perfectly while here on this earth. But it will make a big difference in how we live our lives. Law-keeping is far inferior to walking in love. And that is why walking in God’s pure love while firmly maintaining our hold on grace is our aim. And someday, we are completely confident our bodies will be redeemed and “we will be like Him because we will see Him as He is.”

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Galatia to address some very important issues which they had forgotten—Christian freedom chief among them. Along with that, he also laid out some obligations of the Christian life. As Joy and I consider the celebration of the birth of our nation and our freedom in a few days, we are reminded anew of the above letter, written in 49 AD, just prior to the Jerusalem Council. (Acts 15) The theme of the book was, in one word, FREEDOM! And in two words, CHRISTIAN FREEDOM specifically. The Apostle’s exasperation with the Galatian church is clear and unbridled. He was also furious at the false teachers who had come in and led them away from their grace and freedom. They had initially embraced the true gospel of grace, but later on, when he was not there with them, they allowed themselves to be, in the words of Paul, “bewitched” by these false teachers to go back under the law and leave their grace behind. In order to bring them back to the freedom of the gospel, he asked a few rhetorical questions:
Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?Galatians 3:2b
The obvious answer is “by the hearing of faith.” He has been abundantly clear throughout his teaching that no one can be justified, made righteous before God, by the “works of the law.” His next question demonstrates the bankruptcy of the deception to which they had yielded:
Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?Galatians 3:3
The balance of the chapter is spent reminding them that all the law can do is demonstrate to us our desperate condition and that without the freeing gospel of Christ, it will leave us in despair. The law chains and imprisons us—no one could ever or would ever be able to keep it. But faith in Christ’s work—His keeping of the whole law perfectly throughout His life—sets us free. How were the Galatians deceived into giving up their freedom? The false teachers crept in and manipulated them through fear and guilt and made demands on them which sounded “right” to these Christian’s confused minds. They put the heavy weight of the law right back on these Christian’s shoulders. Paul spends chapters three and four on the history of faith and the basis of freedom. He then reminds them of two very important things. The first is Freedom:
For freedom, Christ has set us free…Galatians 5:1a
Why did Christ set us free? To enjoy freedom and to enjoy Him—to experience our spiritual walk with Him without the terrible guilt and shame that human attempts at law-keeping inevitably brings. All down through church history, beginning with the Galatians, many Christians have been deceived and persuaded to give up the freedom bought for them by the Savior. It is certainly happening in our day as well. People are deceived into giving up their grace and returning to the black hole of law-keeping and law-keeping failure that blights the soul. We see it in groups like Gwen Shamblin’s Remnant Fellowship, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons – and even in quite a few evangelical churches—brought in by people bearing the false teachings of Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, for example, or with a whole host of other law-based killjoys that prey on the church. BTW, killjoy is an excellent moniker for these false teachers because putting people back under the weight of the law kills joy for certain.
The second thing Paul reminded them of is obligations. At first, that might sound contradictory, but once we understand the obligations they make perfect sense. The first is the commitment to or defense of freedom:
…stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.Galatians 5:1b
Read More

Related Posts: