Posted on 11/06/2011 6:11:04 AM PST by pastorbillrandles
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.(2 Timothy 4:2-3)
There are a growing number of evangelicals who have been denying the Christian teaching on several key doctrines, including the Christian definition of marriage, the exclusivity of the gospel, the nature of God and the final fate of the wicked.
The recent publication of the Rob Bell book “Love Wins” is only the tip of the iceberg of the steady evangelical departure from the faith. This has been going on for some time and the erosion of faith and practice has been deep.
A good many evangelicals, (including Pentecostals ) resonate with the book, already having succumbed to the presuppositions of the church growth movement, which is a market driven approach to congregational increase. It seems that emphasis on sin, judgment, Hell, and on the nature of God, are “turn offs” from a market standpoint.
The premise of Rob Bell’s book is that the Christian revelation that God is Love, is contradicted by the teaching of Hell. How is LOVE to triumph in the end, if most people who ever lived, are doomed to a fiery hell ? Bell asserts that the traditional christian teaching on hell as the fate of sinners is “toxic” and contradicts the message of Jesus.
“A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better…. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear” (from the preface-Love Wins,Rob Bell)
Many others have already been writing to refute Bell’s error.Almost all of them begin with the point that nearly everything accurate we know about Hell came from the Words of Jesus himself. So much for Bell’s assertion that warning sinners of their fate contradicts Jesus’ message!
I have been pondering why it is that so many are so ready to drop the teaching Jesus committed to us, about this subject. Why are we so ready to accommodate the world Spirit? I believe that it comes down to two reasons;
1) A downgraded presentation of the vision of God-
There is nothing as important to Christians and sinners alike, as to how the person of God is presented in the church. The people of God need a constant vision of God.The sinners need a witness to reality by the church.
We worship a Holy God! Our God is an infinitely good, utterly righteous, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, Sovereign, awesome,terrible Being. The highest use of the mind is to consider the beauty of God.
But the church doesn’t really preach all that much about God anymore. The sermons rarely present the awesome attributes of God anymore, his perfections are never held up for all to behold.
How often in church do we tremble as the minister holds forth the person of God himself ?
Are we not often supposed to be moved to holy fear and adoration,as we are made to consider subjects such as the majesty of God, the meaning of Holiness, the Mercy of God, The wrath of God, the Righteousness of God, and yes the Love of God?
But the preachers are humanistic, (in ways they don’t realize).They cater to man, as a matter of fact they are man centered.
They preach a lot about human relationships, they encourage, and bolster human confidence, they shore people up who are discouraged or who feel angst, they put salve on wounded egos, and exhibit much human empathy and compassion, but rarely is God himself the subject of their message.
That is why they simply cannot hold on to the witness of perdition.
In order to believe what Jesus said about the prospect of “Weeping and gnashing of teeth”, “outer darkness”, “a fire where worm dieth not” which it would be good to cut your own hand off in order to avoid…you would have to believe that there is a God so high, so exalted, so good, that to sin against him is to sin against goodness itself!
The “new and improved” evangelicals and those influenced by them no longer believe in such a God. They can’t conceive that there could be someone so awesome, so utterly terrible in a Holy sense, that those who transgress against are liable to an eternity of woe.
Of course they still speak of God, but when they do their speech is always of a God of “unconditional love”, ( a psychologized term, not a biblical one).
The vision of God is distorted, therefore many in this generation will deny the biblical witness to the reality of eternal conscious punishment of the unrepentant.
In the next part we will discuss the second failure which has brought about this denial of the faith.
This is the mistake the Rob Bell crowd makes in their "God is love" analysis. They use that verse to validate defining God by their subjective opinions as to what love is. The verse, however, tells us we must define love by what the objective revelation of scripture tells us about God.
Good word again from Bill......thanks....
Once you start making up your own religions - like the heretics of the ‘reformation’- there are really no rules.
Paul warned us about this - “I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, "I follow Paul"; another, "I follow Apollos"; another, "I follow Cephas"; still another, "I follow Christ."
You could easily read the above as “One of you says, "I follow Luther"; another, "I follow Calvin"; another, "I follow Wesley"; still another, "I follow Christ."
Christians cannot be “perfectly united in mind and thought” when they have different beliefs on, say, the necessity of water baptism, while others believe “This is my Body” means “This is a cookie”
Fortunately, we have Christ’s promise that heresies will never prevail against His Church. They will arise, endure sometimes for centuries, like Protestantism, but we can be confident in Christ’s promise that the Church will always teach the Truth.
Looking forward to part II.
Or you could read it as the Catholic inquisition saying, "I murdered Huss"; another, "I murdered Tyndale" or others; "We slaughtered the Waldensians", or "We tortured Jews to death in Spain", etc. etc. Some unity.
Rob Bell is merely a regurgitation of John Shelby Spong.
There is nothing new under the sun.
I agree with you, although it is novel that now a Spong wannabe has a constituency among confessing evangelicals-
Nice!
It’s good to hear the arrogant rantings of “The One Superior Church” to slam other Christian religions. There is a One True God and there are true believers but to believe that the Catholic church has a lock on anything superior is a stretch I can’t believe. The Catholic Church has as many faults as the rest of them but it is their unwillingness to admit such that is probably the most egregious.
Promising perdition ping
All men have sinned - we know that. But we also know from Scripture that the basic premise of “Protestantism” cannot be true.
“Careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. One body and one Spirit: as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism.” Eph 4:3-5
The Church is to be one, not many.
“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Mat 6:18
Here Christ says his Church will not be destroyed.
“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.” John 16:12-13
“But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.” 1Tim 3:15
Here Christ says, and Paul reaffirms, that the Church will always teach the TRUTH.
"Then Jesus came to them and said, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.'"Mat 28:18-20
Again, here Jesus assures us that He is always with us, to the very end.
So Christ says His Church will not be destroyed or fall away from him, that the Holy Spirit will guide the Church to always teach the Truth, and He will always be with us. If there are “many” Churches Christ is a liar.
There has to be more than that, for Scripture to be true.
How would you make sense of the following?
"If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony 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, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. "I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Mat 81:15-18
Where do you take your concerns? To which 'body of belivers?' Makes no sense whatsoever without the visible Church Christ established with teaching authority, and the power to loose and bind. People who call themselves Christians can’t even agree on what the meaning of the word “is” is.
The Church of the apostles was definitely one: "There is one body and one spirit," Paul wrote, "just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all" (Eph. 4:4-5). Paul linked this unity to the Church's common Eucharistic bread: "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of one bread" (1 Cor. 10:17). Jesus had promised at the outset that "there would be one flock, one shepherd" (John 10:16).
Think about it. Would Christ establish his Church – to teach the way, the truth – and allow thousands of interpretation as to what is the truth? If the Church doesn’t teach the Truth, Christ is a liar. If He would allow multiple versions of Truth, he’d be an idiot. I don’t believe He is either.
So what is it? The body of Christ as He was in the flesh here on earth or the body of Christ’s transfigured perfected body as He is in heaven?
Nice you could find those verses proving your point. Maybe you could find the verse that proves the bodily assumption of Mary for me?
??? This is circular reasoning. “I believe Luther taught the truth, so since the Church doesn’t accept Luther, the Church is false.” You could make the same argument for the Mormons, or Islam.
But that is not what Christ said about His Church.
However, Luther was not wrong about everything:
"Who, but the devil, has granted such license of wresting the words of the holy Scripture? Who ever read in the Scriptures, that my body is the same as the sign of my body? or, that is is the same as it signifies? What language in the world ever spoke so? It is only then the devil, that imposes upon us by these fanatical men. Not one of the Fathers of the Church, though so numerous, ever spoke as the Sacramentarians: not one of them ever said, It is only bread and wine; or, the body and blood of Christ is not there present.
Surely, it is not credible, nor possible, since they often speak, and repeat their sentiments, that they should never (if they thought so) not so much as once, say, or let slip these words: It is bread only; or the body of Christ is not there, especially it being of great importance, that men should not be deceived. Certainly, in so many Fathers, and in so many writings, the negative might at least be found in one of them, had they thought the body and blood of Christ were not really present: but they are all of them unanimous.” –Luther’s Collected Works, Wittenburg Edition, no. 7 p, 391
So Martin Luther says only the devil believes the bread is only bread.
Where would he get such an idea? From Christ Himself!
First, answer a couple easy questions:
1) Where did Jesus give instructions that the Christian faith should be based exclusively on a book?
2) Other than the specific command to John to pen the Revelation, where did Jesus tell His apostles to write anything down and compile it into an authoritative book?
3) Where in the New Testament do the apostles tell future generations that the Christian faith will be based solely on a book?
4) Where in the Bible do we find an inspired and infallible list of books that should belong in the Bible? Where did the table of contents come from?
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