LAKELAND, Fla. — Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous “supernatural healing revival” in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don’t bat an eye when he tells them he’s seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven. “He was looking very Jewish,” Bentley notes.

Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read “Joel’s Army.” They’re evidence of Bentley’s generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that’s gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other “hyper-charismatic” preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel’s Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian “dominion” on non-believers.

“An end-time army has one common purpose — to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion,” Bentley declares on the website for his ministry school in British Columbia, Canada. “The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel’s Army. … Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God’s kingdom on earth.”

Joel’s Army followers, many of them teenagers and young adults who believe they’re members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world, are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they base their beliefs on an esoteric reading of the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Joel, in which an avenging swarm of locusts attacks Israel. In their view, the locusts are a metaphor for Joel’s Army.

Despite their overt militancy, there’s no evidence Joel’s Army followers have committed any acts of violence. But critics warn that actual bloodletting may only be a matter of time for a movement that casts itself as God’s avenging army.

Those sounding the alarm about Joel’s Army are not secular foes of the Christian Right, few of whom are even aware of the movement or how widespread it’s become in the past decade. Instead, Joel’s Army critics are mostly conservative Christians, either neo-Pentecostals who left the movement in disgust or evangelical Christians who fear that Joel’s Army preachers are stealing their flocks, even sending spies to infiltrate their own congregations and sway their young people to heresy. And they say the movement is becoming frightening.

“The pitch and intensity of the military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially increased since the beginning of 2008,” writes The Discernment Research Group, a Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity. “One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual warriors.”

‘Snorting Religion’
Joel’s Army believers are hard-core Christian dominionists, meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism.

Dominionism’s original branch is Christian Reconstructionism, a grim, Calvinist call to theocracy that, as Reconstructionist writer Gary North describes, wants to “get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”

Notorious for endorsing the public execution by stoning of homosexuals and adulterers, the Christian Reconstructionist movement is far better known in secular America than Joel’s Army. That’s largely because Reconstructionists have made several serious forays into mainstream politics and received a fair amount of negative publicity as a result. Joel’s Army followers eschew the political system, believing the path to world domination lies in taking over churches, not election to public office.

Another key difference between the two branches of dominionism, which maintain a testy, arms-length relationship with one another, is Christian Reconstructionism’s buttoned-down image and heavy emphasis on Bible study, which contrasts sharply with Joel’s Army anti-intellectual distrust of biblical scholars and its unruly style.

“Some people snort cocaine, others snort religions,” Joel’s Army Pastor Roy said while ministering a morning program at Todd Bentley’s Lakeland, Fla., revival in late May.

As this article went to press, Bentley’s “Florida Outpouring” had been running for more than 100 days straight. Many attendees came in search of spontaneous physical healing and a desire to be part of a mystical community marked by dancing, shouting, gyrating, speaking in tongues and other forms of ecstatic release.

Snide jabs at traditional church services are fairly common at Bentley’s revivals. In fact, what takes place onstage at the Florida Outpouring looks more like a pro wrestling extravaganza than church. On stage, Bentley and his team of pastors, yell, chant, and scream “Fire!” and “Bam!” while anointing followers.

The audience members behave as if they are at a psychedelic counterculture festival. One couple jumps up and down twirling red and silver metallic flags. Dyed-haired teenagers pulled in by the revival’s presence on Facebook and MySpace wander around looking dazed. Women lay facedown on the floor, convulsing and howling. Fathers wail in tongues as their confused children look on. Strangers lay hands on those who fail to produce tongues or gyrate wildly enough, pressuring them to “let it out.”

Bentley is considered a prophet both by his followers and by other leaders of the Joel’s Army movement, whose adherents claim to be reviving a “five-fold ministry” of prophets, apostles, elders, pastors and teachers, as outlined in the Book of Ephesians. Not every five-fold ministry is connected to the Joel’s Army movement, but the movement has spurred an interest in modern-day apostles and prophets that’s troubling to the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal church, which has officially disavowed the Joel’s Army movement.

In a 2001 position paper, Assemblies of God leaders wrote that they do not recognize modern-day apostles or prophets and worried that “such leaders prefer more authoritarian structures where their own word or decrees are unchallenged.” They are right to worry. Joel’s Army followers believe that once democratic institutions are overthrown, their hierarchy of apostles and prophets will rule over the earth, with one church per city.

Warrior Nation
According to Joel’s Army doctrine, the enforcers of the five-fold ministry will be members of the final generation, for whom the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade constituted a new Passover.

“Everyone born after abortion’s legalization can consider their birth a personal invitation to take part in this great army,” writes John Crowder, another prominent Joel’s Army pastor, who bills his 2006 book, The New Mystics: How to Become Part of the Supernatural Generation, as a literal how-to guide for joining Joel’s Army.Both Bentley and Crowder are enormously popular on Elijah’s List, an online watering hole for a broad spectrum of Joel’s Army enlistees, from lightweight believers who merely share an affection for military rhetoric and pastors who dress in army camouflage (several Joel’s Army pastors are addressed by their congregants as “commandant” or “commander”) to hardliners who believe the church is called to have an active military role in end-times that have already begun. Elijah’s List currently has more than 125,000 subscribers on its electronic mailing list.

Rick Joyner, a pastor whose books, The Harvest and The Call, helped popularize Joel’s Army theology by selling more than a million copies each, goes the furthest on Elijah’s List in pushing the hardliner approach. In 2006, he posted a sermon called “The Warrior Nation — The New Sound of the Church,” in which he claimed that a last-day army is now gathering and called believers “freedom fighters.”

“As the church begins to take on this resolve, they [Joel's Army churches] will start to be thought of more as military bases, and they will begin to take on the characteristics of military bases for training, equipping, and deploying effective spiritual forces,” Joyner wrote. “In time, the church will actually be organized more as a military force with an army, navy, air force, etc.”

In a sort of disclaimer, Joyner writes at one point that God’s army “will bring love, peace and stability wherever they go.” But several of his books narrate with glee what he describes as “a coming civil war within the church.” In his 1997 book The Harvest he writes: “Some pastors and leaders who continue to resist this tide of unity will be removed from their place. Some will become so hardened they will become opposers and resist God to the end.”

Two years later, in his book The Final Quest, Joyner described a vision (taken as prophecy in the Joel’s Army world, where Joyner is considered an “apostle”) of the coming Christian Civil War in which demon-possessed Christian soldiers enslave other, weaker Christians who resist them. He also describes how the hero of the novel — himself — ascends a “Holy Mountain” in order to learn new truths and to acquire new, magic weapons.

Kids on Fire
Bentley, who claims to be a supernatural healer, is no less over the top, playing his biker-punk appearance and heavy metal theatrics to the hilt. On YouTube, where clips of his most dramatic healings have been condensed into a three-minute highlight reel, Bentley describes God ordering him to kick an elderly lady in the face: “I am thinking, ‘God, why is the power of God not moving?’ And He said, ‘It is because you haven’t kicked that women in the face.’ And there was, like, this older lady worshipping right in front of the platform and the Holy Spirit spoke to me and the gift of faith came on me. He said, ‘Kick her in the face … with your biker boot.’ I inched closer and I went like this [makes kicking motion]: Bam! And just as my boot made contact with her nose, she fell under the power of God.”

The atmosphere is less charged with violence at “The Call,” a 12-hour revival of up to 20,000 youths led by Joel’s Army pastor Lou Engle and held every summer in a major American city (this year’s event was scheduled for Washington, D.C. in August).

Attendees are called upon to fast and pray for 40 days and take up culture-war pledges to lead abstinent lives, reject pornography and fight abortion. They’re further asked to perform “identificational repentance,” lugging along family trees and genealogies to see where one of their ancestors may have enslaved or oppressed another so that they can make amends. (Many in the Joel’s Army movement believe in generational curses that must be broken by the current generation).

As even his critics note, Engle is a sweet, humble and gentle man whose persona is difficult to reconcile with his belief in an end-time army of invincible young Christian warriors. Yet while Engle is careful to avoid deploying explicit Joel’s Army rhetoric at high-profile events like The Call, when he’s speaking in smaller hyper-charismatic circles to avowed Joel’s Army followers, he can venture into bloodlust.

This March, at a “Passion for Jesus” conference in Kansas City sponsored by the International House of Prayer, or IHOP, a ministry for teenagers from the heavy metal, punk and goth scenes, Engle called on his audience for vengeance.

“I believe we’re headed to an Elijah/Jezebel showdown on the Earth, not just in America but all over the globe, and the main warriors will be the prophets of Baal versus the prophets of God, and there will be no middle ground,” said Engle. He was referring to the Baal of the Old Testament, a pagan idol whose followers were slaughtered under orders from the prophet Elijah.

“There’s an Elijah generation that’s going to be the forerunners for the coming of Jesus, a generation marked not by their niceness but by the intensity of their passion,” Engle continued. “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force. Such force demands an equal response, and Jesus is going to make war on everything that hinders love, with his eyes blazing fire.”

Although Joel’s Army theology is mainly directed at people in their teens and early 20s via events like The Call and ministries like IHOP, sometimes the target audience is even younger. In some of the most arresting images in “Jesus Camp,” a 2006 documentary about the Kids on Fire bible camp in North Dakota, grade school-aged kids dressed in army fatigues wield swords and conduct military field maneuvers. “A lot of people die for God and they’re not afraid,” one camper told ABC News reporters in a follow-up segment.

“We’re kinda being trained to be warriors,” added another, “only in a funner way.”

Cain and the Intellectuals
Both Christian and secular critics assailed the makers of “Jesus Camp” for referring to the camp’s extremist, militant Christianity as “evangelical.” There is a name, however, that describes Kids on Fire’s agenda, if you’re familiar with their theology: Joel’s Army. Pastor Becky Fischer, who runs the camp, said that a third of the kids at her camp were under 6 years old because they are “more in touch in the supernatural” and proclaimed them to be “soldiers for God’s Army.” Her camp’s blend of end-times militancy and supernaturalism is perfectly emblematic of the Joel’s Army movement, whose adherents believe their cause is prophesied in the Old Testament chapter titled “An Army of Locusts.”

The stark, evocative passages of that chapter describe a locust swarm that lays waste to Israel (to this day, the region suffers periodic locust invasions): “Like dawn spreading across the mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come.” As remarkable as the language is, most biblical scholars agree that it is a literal description of a locust invasion and resulting famine that occurred sometime between the 9th and 5th centuries B.C.E.

In the Book of Joel, the locust invasion is described as an omen that an Assyrian army to the north may attack Israel if it fails to repent as a nation. But nowhere is the invasion described as an army of God. According to an Assemblies of God position paper: “It is a complete misinterpretation of Scripture to find in Joel’s army of locusts a militant, victorious force attacking society and a non-cooperating Church to prepare the earth for Christ’s millennial reign.”

The story of how an ancient insect invasion came to be a rallying flag for 21st-century dominonists begins just after World War II in Canada. Out of a small town in Saskatchewan, a Pentecostal preacher named William Branham spearheaded a 1948 revival in which he claimed that his followers lived in a new biblical time of “Latter Rain.”

The most sinless and ardent of his flock would be called “Manifest Sons of God.” By the next year, the movement was so strong — and seemed so subversive to some — that the Assemblies of God banned it as a heretic cult. But Branham remained a controversial figure with a loyal following; many of his followers believed him to be the end-times prophet Elijah.

Michael Barkun, a leading scholar of radical religion, notes that in 1958, Branham began teaching “Serpent Seed” doctrine, the belief that Satan had sex with Eve, resulting in Cain and his descendants. “Through Cain came all the smart, educated people down to the antediluvian flood — the intellectuals, bible colleges,” Branham wrote in the kind of anti-mainstream religion, anti-intellectual spirit that pervades the Joel’s Army movement to this day. “They know all their creeds but know nothing about God.”

The Gates of Hell
Branham was killed in a car accident in 1965, but his Manifest Sons of God movement, the direct predecessor of Joel’s Army, lived on within a cluster of hyper-charismatic churches. In the 1980s, Branham’s teachings took on new life at the Kansas City Fellowship (KCF), a group of popular self-styled apostles and prophets who used the Missouri church as a launching pad for national careers promoting outright Joel’s Army theology.

Ernie Gruen, a local pastor who initially promoted and gave citywide credibility to KCF pastors in the early 1980s, cut his connections in 1990. Concerned about KCF’s plans to push its teachings worldwide, Gruen published a 132-page insider’s account, based on taped sermons and conversations and interviews with parents who had enrolled their kids in KCF’s Dominion school.

According to Gruen’s report, students at the school were taught that they were a “super-race” of the “elected seed” of all the best bloodlines of all generations — foreknown, predestined, and hand-selected from billions of others to be part of the “end-time Omega generation.”

Though he’d once promoted these doctrines himself, Gruen became convinced that the movement was turning into an end-times cult, marked by what he summarized as “spiritual threats, fears, and warnings of death,” “warning followers to beware of other Christians” and exhibiting “a ‘super-race’ mentality toward the training of their children.”

When contacted by the Intelligence Report, Gruen’s spokesman said that Gruen stands by everything he published in the report but no longer grants media interviews.

The Kansas City Fellowship remains in operation and has served as a farm team for many of the all-stars of the Joel’s Army movement. Those larger-than-life figures include John Wimber, the founder of a California megachurch, The Vineyard, who, before his death in 1997, proclaimed that Joel’s Army would not only conquer the earth but defeat death itself. Lou Engle founded The Call based on the Joel’s Army visions that KCF “prophet” Bob Jones (not to be confused with Bob Jones III of Bob Jones University) received while at KCF. Mike Bickle, another KCF member, stayed in Kansas City to form the International House of Prayer.

IHOP members and other Joel’s Army adherents are well aware of how their movement is perceived by other conservative Christians.

“Today, you can type ‘Joel’s Army’ into a search engine and a thousand heresy hunter websites pop up, decrying the very mention of it,” writes John Crowder in The New Mystics. Crowder doesn’t exactly allay critic’s fears. “This is truly warfare,” he writes. “This battle is not a game. They [Joel's Army warriors] will not be on the defense; they will be on the offense — and the gates of hell will not be able to hold up against them.”

So far, few members of the secular media have taken notice of Joel’s Army, even as they report on Protestant dominionists like Pat Robertson or the more outrageous calls for the stoning of gays and lesbians emanating from Reconstructionist circles. There are exceptions, however. On the DailyKos, a well-read, politically liberal blog, a diarist has been blogging for two years about her experiences as a walkaway from a Joel’s Army church. She writes under a pseudonym out of fear of physical reprisals.

She may have real cause for concern. As Wimber, the late founder of The Vineyard, put it in one of his most famous and fiery sermons, one that is still frequently cited by Joel’s Army followers: “Those in this army will have His kind of power. … Anyone who wants to harm them must die.”

from Way of Life:

The following is excerpted from New Evangelicalism: Its History, Characteristics, and Fruit (2006, Way of Life Literature): 

Few subjects are more important for fundamentalist churches than this. Most people that leave fundamentalist churches do not join the Roman Catholic Church or the Mormons or a liberal Protestant denomination; most go the way of the positive-thinking, easy-going New Evangelicalism. Church members are confronted with New Evangelical philosophy on every hand–through popular Christian television preachers and nationally syndicated radio personalities, at the local ecumenical bookstore, through members of other churches, through ecumenical evangelistic crusades, through political activity, and through interdenominational organizations such as Promise Keepers. To be ignorant of the insidious and pervasive nature of New Evangelicalism is to be unprepared to identify and resist it, yet, large numbers of fundamentalists know little or nothing about it. When a fundamental Baptist evangelist asked the students of a well-known independent Baptist Bible College to raise their hands if they could define New Evangelicalism, only two could respond. Hosea 4:6 warns, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…”

“A debate is a conflict which clarifies a position. A dialogue is a conversation which compromises a position” (John Ashbrook, The New Neutralism II, 1992, p. 7).

Since the last half of the 20th century, theological dialogue has become a prominent aspect of Christianity. A report issued in 1983 by the Center for Unity in Rome listed 119 official ongoing dialogues between representatives of Anglican, Baptist, Disciples, Evangelical, Lutheran, Methodist, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholic, Oriental Orthodox, Pentecostal, Reformed, Roman Catholic, United, and World Council of Churches.

Dialogue has also become a major aspect of evangelicalism. The late Harold Ockenga, who claimed to have coined the term “neo-evangelical”

for a speech delivered in 1948, said that the new evangelicalism differs “from fundamentalism in its repudiation of separatism and its determination to engage itself in the theological dialogue of the day” (Ockenga, foreword to Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible).

Ockenga was very influential. He was the founder of the National Association of Evangelicals, co-founder and first president of Fuller Seminary, first president of the World Evangelical Fellowship, president of Gordon College, on the board of directors for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and chairman of the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and one-time editor of Christianity Today.

The new evangelical philosophy, which was just blossoming in the late 1940s, has spread throughout the evangelical world in the decades since.

There is dialogue between EVANGELICALS AND ROMAN CATHOLICS.

On the side of the Roman Catholic Church, the Second Vatican Council, in its “Decree on Ecumenism,” called for “dialogue with our brethren”

and said that “dialogues and consultations … are strongly recommended.”

Evangelicals have responded to this call. Following are a few examples:

From 1977 to 1984 Evangelical-Roman Catholic Dialogue In Mission was conducted in Britain. John R.W. Stott was at the forefront, and one of Stott’s co-workers, Michael Harper (formerly assistant curate at All Souls Church where Stott is pastor), wrote the 1977 book, Three Sisters, which contends that the “Three Sisters” — Evangeline (the Evangelicals), Charisma (the Charismatics), and Roma (the Roman Catholic Church) — are part of one family and should be reconciled.

In 1992, Chuck Colson, in his book The Body, called for closer relationship with and dialogue between evangelicals and Catholics.

Colson said, “…the body of Christ, in all its diversity, is created with Baptist feet, charismatic hands, and Catholic ears–all with their eyes on Jesus” (World, Nov. 14, 1992). [Colson is either ignorant of the fact that there are false christs, false gospels, and false spirits, or he ignores the fact.] The Body was endorsed by many well-known Evangelicals, including Carl Henry, J.I. Packer, Pat Robertson, Bill Hybels, and Jerry Falwell.

In 1992, Catholic priest Thomas Welbers announced in the Los Angeles diocese paper that a four-year dialogue between InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and the Catholic Campus Ministry had resulted in an agreement to seek “mutual understanding” and to “refrain from competition in seeking members” (Battle Cry, October 1992).

In 1994, Moody Press published Roman Catholicism: Evangelical Protestants Analyze What Divides and Unites Us. Thirteen Evangelicals contributed. Michael Horton concluded his chapter, “What Still Keeps Us Apart?” with these words: “I do not suggest that we should give up trying to seek visible unity, nor that we refuse to dialogue with Roman Catholic laypeople and theologians, many of whom may be our brothers and sisters” (p. 264). He does not explain how someone committed to Rome’s false sacramental gospel could be a born again child of God.

In 1997, InterVarsity Press published Reclaiming the Great Tradition:

Evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox in Dialogue. It was edited by James Cutsinger and contained articles by Harold O.J. Brown, Peter Kreeft, Richard Neuhaus, J.I. Packer, and others. The book is a collection of material from an ecumenical dialogue held at Rose Hill College, May 16-20, 1995. The objective of the dialogue was to answer the question: “How can Protestants, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians talk to each other so as together to speak with Christ’s mind to the modern world?” (p. 8).

There is also dialogue between EVANGELICALS AND MODERNISTS.

In about 1976, Pentecostal David du Plessis became chairman of dialogues with the World Council of Churches’ Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity. Du Plessis was long at the forefront of promoting ecumenical dialogue between Pentecostals, Roman Catholics, and liberal and evangelical Protestants. Fuller Theological Seminary made du Plessis its “resident consultant on ecumenical affairs.”

In 1983, after attending the Sixth General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver, some prominent evangelicals signed an open letter encouraging dialogue with the exceedingly liberal WCC.

The signers included Richard Lovelace of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and Arthur Glasser of Fuller Seminary. The letter rebuked those who practice separation and said:

“Is there not the possibility that evangelicals have not only much to contribute but something to receive through ecumenical involvement? Do evangelicals not also have the obligation along with other Christians to seek to overcome the scandal of the disunity and disobedience of the churches that the world might believe (John 17:21)? Should evangelicals not seek to receive all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord, even though they may seriously disagree on theological issues apart from the core of the Gospel?”

A three-day dialogue was held October 22-24, 1986, at Fuller Theological Seminary, involving Pentecostals, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and liberal Protestants. The Ecumenical Press Service said, “Although some came with predetermined agenda, many came to listen and learn” (Ecumenical Press Service, November 1-15, 1986).

In 1988, InterVarsity Press published Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue. The Evangelical was John R.W. Stott and the liberal was David Edwards, who rejects the fall of man and the atonement and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Stott said heretics such as this “do not forfeit the right to be called Christians” (Iain Murray, Evangelical Essentials, p. 228). To the contrary, to deny the fall of man and the atonement of Christ is to deny the very gospel itself, and there is no salvation apart from the biblical gospel.

There is even dialogue between EVANGELICALS AND MORMONS.

Evangelicals have been dialoguing with Mormons since InterVarsity Press published “How Wide the Divide: A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation” in 1997. This is a dialogue between Craig Blomberg of Denver Seminary and Stephen Robinson of Brigham Young University.

In November 1998, Assemblies of God pastor Dean Jackson presented Mormon leaders in Provo, Utah, with “a formal declaration of repentance for prejudice against members of the Church of Latter Day Saints.” The document was signed by more than 160 members of Jackson’s Canyon Assembly of God Church in Provo, and roughly 100 Mormon visitors were on hand to receive the official apology (Charisma News Service, March 1, 2000, citing Deseret News of Salt Lake City). The declaration of repentance was also endorsed by the regional presbytery of the Assemblies of God.

Standing Together Ministries was formed in 2001 in Utah “to build greater dialogue between Evangelical Christians and Latter-day Saints.” Founder Greg Johnson has traveled extensively conducting public dialogues with Mormon professor Robert Millet of Brigham Young University.

An “EVENING OF FRIENDSHIP” was held in the Salt Lake City Tabernacle on November 14, 2004, featuring Evangelicals who are calling for dialogue with Mormons. Ravi Zacharias was the main speaker. He was joined by Richard Mouw (president of Fuller Seminary), Craig Hazen (a professor at Biola University), Greg Johnson (director of Standing Together Ministries), Joseph Tkach, Jr., (head of the World Wide Church of God), and Michael Card (Contemporary Christian musician).

Roughly 7,000 attended the meeting, filling the Tabernacle to capacity. Fuller Seminary President Richard Mouw apologized to the Mormons, making the following amazing statements: “Let me state it clearly. We evangelicals have sinned against you. … We have demonized you.”

Evangelical dialogue is witnessed in the way the publishers and magazines print all sides of theological debates while remaining “neutral.” InterVarsity Press, for example, has printed books defending the infallible inspiration of Scripture and books attacking it. Christianity Today has printed articles opposing ecumenical relations with Rome and in support of it, articles warning of Karl Barth’s heresy and promoting Karl Barth, etc.

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT THEOLOGICAL DIALOGUE :

FIRST, THE BIBLE DOES NOT INSTRUCT BELIEVERS TO DIALOGUE WITH FALSE TEACHERS AND APOSTATES, BUT RATHER TO SEPARATE FROM THEM. See Romans 16:17-18; 2 Timothy 2:16-18; 3:5; Titus 3:10-11.

SECOND, IT IS NOT DIALOGUE THAT WE SEE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT, BUT PREACHING. The Bible does not instruct believers to dialogue with false teachers but to preach the truth to them and to rebuke their errors. “I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine” (2 Tim.

4:1-2).

THIRD, THEOLOGICAL DIALOGUE IS BUILT UPON AN UNSCRIPTURAL DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. See Characteristic #4: “New Evangelicalism is characterized by exalting love and unity above doctrine” in the book New Evangelicalism: Its History, Characteristics, and Fruit.

FOURTH, THEOLOGICAL DIALOGUE RESULTS IN “TONING DOWN THE RHETORIC,” IN SOFTENING THE PLAIN CHARGES OF HERESY AND APOSTASY AND UNBELIEF, IN QUIETING DOWN THE WARNINGS ABOUT JUDGMENT. It is impossible to dialogue without doing this, but this is contrary to the Scriptures.

Greg Johnson of Standing Together Ministries in Utah said that we must “cease throwing our theological rocks and start loving as Christ commanded us.” This is his definition of dialogue. Thus, speaking the truth about heresy is likened to “throwing rocks,” which is potentially very hurtful, even deadly. Actually, preaching plainly against false christs and false gospels is a very loving, compassionate thing. If a man is on his way to hell but is self- deceived into thinking that he is on his way to heaven, it is an act of the greatest Christian charity to tell him plainly that he is deceived.

“Toning down the rhetoric” and softening the plain charges of heresy and apostasy is precisely what the Bible does not do and what the apostles and prophets did not do and what Bible preachers today are not allowed to do.

Paul called false teachers “dogs” and “evil workers” (Phil. 3:2). Of those who pervert the gospel he said, “Let them be accursed” (Gal. 1:8, 9). He called them “evil men and seducers” (2 Tim. 3:13), “men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith” (2 Tim. 3:8), “false apostles, deceitful workers” (2 Cor. 11:13). He named the names of false teachers and called their teaching “vain babblings” (2 Tim. 2:16, 17).

He warned about “philosophy and vain deceit” (Col. 2:8). He spoke of their “cunning craftiness.” When Elymas tried to turn men away from the gospel, Paul wasted no time with dialogue but said, “O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?” (Acts 13:10). He warned about false teachers who would come into the churches, calling them “grievous wolves” (Acts 20:29) and their teaching “perverse things” (Acts 20:30). Those who denied the bodily resurrection are called “fools” (1 Cor. 15:35-36).

He warned about false christs, false spirits, false gospels (2 Cor. 11:1-4). He labeled false teaching “doctrines of devils” (1 Tim. 4:1).

In the Pastoral Epistles Paul warned of false teachers and compromisers by name 10 times, and this is the example that the Spirit of God has left for the churches.

Peter wasn’t much of a dialoguer, either. He was much too plain spoken about heresy. Of the false prophets in his day and those he knew would come in the future, he labeled their heresies “damnable” and warned of their “swift destruction” (2 Pet. 2:1). That would end a good dialogue right there, but he wasn’t finished. He called their ways “pernicious”

and their words “feigned” and boldly declared that “their damnation slumbereth not” (2 Pet. 2:3). He warned them of eternal hell (2 Pet. 2:4-9) and called them “presumptuous” and “selfwilled” (2 Pet. 2:10).

He likened them to “natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed” (2 Pet. 2:12) and exposed their deception (2 Pet. 2:13).

Peter is in high gear now. Consider how he ended his little “dialogue”

in 2 Peter 2:14-21. I don’t suppose that Peter would get invited to too many ministerial association meetings or ecumenical dialogues today. He might be invited once, seeing that he is an apostle and the first pope and all, but I can assure you that he would not be invited back!

But what about John, the Apostle of Love? How was his dialoguing technique? Again, not too effective, because he was too often warning about antichrists (1 John 2:18-19), calling them liars (1 John 2:22) and seducers (1 John 2:26) and deceivers (2 John 7); saying that they denied the Son (1 John 2:23) and that they don’t have God (2 John 9).

He put too much of an emphasis upon trying the spirits (1 John 4:1-3).

He even made all sorts of exclusive claims, such as, “And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness” (1 John 5:19).

Just who did he think he was! John even forbade the believers to allow the false teachers into their houses or to bid them God speed (2 John 10-11). It is not possible to maintain a good dialogue when you do such things.

In this, the apostles were only following their Lord, who was not big on soft-spoken, “let me listen carefully and make sure I understand you,” give-and-take dialogue; but He was a great preacher. He scalded the Pharisees because they perverted the way of truth and corrupted the gospel of grace, calling them hypocrites, blind guides, fools and blind, serpents, generation of vipers. And that was just one sermon!

Even when he visited in the homes of the Pharisees He didn’t try to be socially acceptable or avoid offending their self-esteem. He wasn’t concerned about being invited to speak at the next big Pharisee convention. He spoke the truth in love at all times and therefore offended them coming and going! They were so angry that they plotted His murder.

FIFTH, DIALOGUE CALLS FOR “MUTUAL RESPECT,” BUT THIS IS NOT WHAT WE SEE IN SCRIPTURE. Jesus did not show a lot of respect toward the Pharisees who were leading people to hell through their works gospel.

Paul did not show a lot of respect toward the heretics who were bothering the early churches. How much respect did he show toward the following two fellows? “And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus” (2 Tim. 2:17). Didn’t Paul understand that such language would hurt these men’s feelings and might even injure their self-esteem? Today, the ecumenical crowd would say, “Paul, how do you think we are ever going to have a good dialogue if you persist in talking like that? Don’t you understand the need for Christian unity? Why are you so harsh and judgmental?”

SIXTH, DIALOGUE REQUIRES “LISTENING, WHICH AT ITS BEST INCLUDES RESTATING WHAT THE OTHER IS SAYING TO HIS COMPLETE SATISFACTION.” This ignores the fact that heretics lie and try to hide and shade their error. The Bible repeatedly warns about the subtilty and deceit of false teachers. Jesus referred to them as wolves in sheep’s clothing (Mat. 7:15). Though they are wolves, they hide their appearance. Paul warned of “deceitful workers” (2 Cor. 11:13), of “false brethren” who work “privily” (Gal. 2:4), of their “cunning craftiness” (Eph. 4:14), of their habit of “speaking lies in hypocrisy” (1 Tim. 4:2), of those who “who creep into houses” (2 Tim. 3:6), of “seducers … deceiving and being deceived” (2 Tim. 3:13). Peter warned of “feigned words” (2 Pet. 2:2). Jude warned of “certain men crept in unawares” (Jude 4).

Consider some modern fulfillments of these warnings:

The example of Jehovah’s Witnesses

Even the name of the organization has changed several times in its attempt to escape its past and hide its identity. Its many false prophecies have been swept under the rug. Its early history has been whitewashed to hide the deception, chicanery, and immorality of its leaders.

The example of Seventh-day Adventism

It has modified its history, hiding the fact that early Adventists were anti-Trinitarian, hiding Ellen White’s nervous disorder, hiding her false prophecies and her use of the “prophetic gift” to manipulate the everyday lives of her followers, even “prophesying” that Adventist women had to wear a certain type of dress, etc.

It hides its heresy under a re-definition of theological terms. I have an SDA pamphlet entitled “Saved by Grace,” but it actually teaches salvation by grace plus law.

It has tried to hide its identity when conducting evangelistic campaigns. I visited an SDA prophecy conference in Tennessee and the only way one would know that it was sponsored by the SDA was the presence of Ellen White’s literature.

It often downplays its stranger doctrines, such as “the spirit of prophecy” (Ellen White’s role as a prophetess) and Investigative Judgment. In the 1970s I took some correspondence courses offered by the Seventh-day Adventists. In a course designed for the general public, these things were glossed over; whereas in courses designed for Adventists, they were highlighted.

The example of the Mormons

The Mormons have whitewashed their early history, hiding the true character of Joseph Smith, his conviction in a court of law for deceiving people with a “peek stone” that he claimed could locate hidden treasure, his adultery, his violence, his false claim that he could read ancient languages, etc.

The Mormons have gotten rid of inconvenient doctrines –such as that which said black people are inferior (they were not allowed into the Mormon priesthood) and polygamy –by means of new “prophecies.”

The example of the Roman Catholic Church

Rome has re-written its history so that most Catholics do not know the truth about such things as the brutality and extent of the Inquisition, Rome’s persecution of the Jews, Rome’s curses against Bible believers, and the moral vileness and greed surrounding the papacy. It has also downplayed doctrines such as purgatory and indulgences and Mariolatry.

Rome adapts itself to any given situation. Today it is becoming more “evangelical” and more “charismatic” for ecumenical purposes.

Rome redefines terms, speaking of salvation by grace, for example, but meaning salvation through sacraments.

Because of the deceptive nature of false teachers, it is not wise simply to ask them to state their doctrine and then accept what they are saying at face value, as dialogue requires. One must analyze what they are saying carefully and be willing to expose fraud, which makes a fruitful dialogue impossible!

SEVENTH, DIALOGUE RESULTS IN WEAKENING OF BIBLICAL CONVICTIONS. The Bible warns, “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Cor. 15:33). Close association with sin and error corrupts godly thinking and living. Just as a good apple cannot raise the standard of a barrel of bad apples, a true Christian cannot raise the standard of an apostate or deeply compromised church or association.

Contrariwise, it is the man or woman of God that will always be corrupted.

Look at Billy Graham. When he first began his ecumenical ventures, he claimed that he wanted to use ecumenism to get the gospel to more people and that the liberals and Roman Catholics needed the gospel. It wasn’t long before his thinking had changed entirely and was saying that the liberals and Roman Catholics are fine like they are. In a May 30, 1997, interview with David Frost, Graham said: “I feel I belong to all the churches. I’M EQUALLY AT HOME IN AN ANGLICAN OR BAPTIST OR A BRETHREN ASSEMBLY OR A ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. … And the bishops and archbishops and the Pope are our friends” (David Frost, Billy Graham in Conversation, pp. 68, 143). It is Graham who has been converted by the dialogue process. He admitted, “The ecumenical movement has broadened my viewpoint” (Curtis Mitchell, Billy Graham Saint or Sinner, p. 272).

The same is true for Graham’s co-workers. When an evangelist said that he did not believe that Catholics are true Christians, Graham’s co- laborer “Grady” Wilson exclaimed that this is “absolutely wrong”; he continued, “…to say they are not Christians–man alive! Anybody that receives Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour is converted! They’re born again. I believe the Pope is a converted man. I believe a lot of these wonderful Catholics are Christians” (William Martin, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story, p. 461). Obviously, Wilson is not asking any hard questions about what a person means by believing in Jesus as “Lord and Saviour.”

This same thing will happen with those who are dialoguing with Mormons. Do not Mormons also believe on Jesus as Lord and Saviour? Of course they do, but only if we allow them to define these things by their own heretical dictionary

The ecumenical crowd, which has been busy dialoguing for half a century and more, has been so weakened that they can’t even speak out about salvation and say that pagans need to be converted. When the Southern Baptist Convention published a prayer guide in 2000 calling upon Baptists to pray for the conversion of Hindus, ecumenical leaders in India rose up in alarm. Ipe Joseph, general secretary of the National Council of Churches in India, condemned the prayer guide and said, “We should find ecumenical space for followers of other faiths in salvation. … Christians should stop thinking of Christianity as the religion among religions.” The general secretary of the Council of Baptist Churches in North-East India, Pastor Gulkhan Pau, also condemned the Southern Baptist prayer guide. Pau said, “You preach your faith, but don’t play down others. … I am not going to condemn the Hindu or the Muslim for his faith.”

For eleven years the Church of England conducted a formal dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church (the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission); the result was that the Church of England capitulated to Catholic doctrine, for “at no point was there any give in Roman doctrine” (Iain Murray, Evangelicalism Divided, p. 219). The dialogue concluded in 1981 and five years later the Final Report was approved by the General Synod of the Church of England.

“The Vatican delayed its response until 1991 and then, instead of thankful consent, it required that the Catholic teaching–especially on the Eucharist (the Mass)–be spelt out specifically. It wanted assurance that there was agreement on ‘the propitiatory nature of the Eucharistic sacrifice’, applicable to the dead as well as the living; and ‘certitude that Christ is present … substantially when “under the species of bread and wine these earthly realities are changed into the reality of his Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity”’. This confirmation was given from the Anglican side in Clarification of Certain Aspects of the Agreed Statements on Eucharist and Ministry (1994). The Anglicans assured the Vatican that the words of the Final Statement — already approved by Synod — did indeed conform to the sense required by the official Roman teaching” (Murray, Evangelicalism Divided, p. 220).

Eighth, dialogue ignores Titus 3:9-11 — “But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain. A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject; knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself.”

The command of God is not to dialogue with heretics but to reject them.

I detest the prosperity gospel. Ever noticed how the “name-it-and-claim-it” preachers are lining their own pockets but those who support their ministries can barely make ends meet? These smooth talking televangelists are adept at using psychological manipulation and peer pressure to persuade people to pull out their credit cards. (More on this later.)

Televangelists hold to Word-Faith beliefs that are both blasphemous and heretical. Faith preachers say, “Demand what you want by faith and you will receive it!” Moreover, they hold that Christ provided for physical healing at the cross. So not only are Christians saved from sin, they are promised a healthy life! You ask, “Is what they teach biblical?” Nope. Still, Faith teachers contend that their “enlightened” view of the Bible is the gospel truth. Read some of the blogs and you will discover that many in the Body of Christ find the radical beliefs and practices of the false prophets in the Charismatic movement deeply disturbing. Unfortunately much of their unscriptural teaching and ungodly behavior is posted on YouTube.com, GodTube.com, and shown on God TV.

Jesus did not mince words with this warning:

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves” (Mat. 7:15).

What I’m about to reveal illustrates the great lengths two false prophets have gone to to add to their own personal wealth.

In a recent article “God Bless Your Credit Card” [1] Rapport news describes what occurred in Johannesburg during televangelist Benny Hinn’s Miracle Crusade. Around 18,000 people went to the Coca-Cola Dome in Randburg to hear Hinn’s message of healing and miracles. What they heard was that God wants to make people rich. Pastor Todd Koontz, who accompanied Hinn, spoke about financial burdens. He told the receptive crowd that 500 audience members would receive “an exceptional blessing.” He said the service would “yield millionaires and billionaires within 24 hours.” The “exceptional blessing” rested on everyone donating up to $1,000. Here’s the catch. To motivate people to part with their money the blessing would be poured out for only two minutes. That’s right. Folks had only two minutes to receive God’s “exceptional blessing.” Credit-card machines were at the ready to accommodate those who were convinced that the “anointing” was flowing through to them.

Pay God for a blessing? Leave it to a sham artist to come up with something that preposterous.

But what about all the disabled who had come to Hinn for healing? Did Koontz really expect them to get to the stage in 2 minutes?

Pastor Tommie Ferreira was not happy with the underhanded way in which Koontz, on Hinn’s behalf, squeezed money from the gullible sheep. He saw a large number of people push their way to the front. “Poor people, rich people, people from all sections of our society.” So naturally he got to wondering if any of the people who donated $1,000 or more had become millionaires, as Koontz promised.

Later that week Rapport News spoke to a money counter in Hinn’s South African office in Durban who admitted that after a week they were still raking in money. Which is not surprising at all considering that many people give to get — and Koontz promised they’d get rich!

Something else the money counter told Rapport:

“’Americans always talk in dollars. If some of the churchgoers believed that they would not be blessed, then they should not have given their money.’”

And besides

“’The church-goers did not have to give $1,000. If they couldn’t afford it, then they could’ve given less. And, some of them did.”

Does this not make your blood boil?

Ferreira assured Rapport that he wasn’t attacking Hinn and Koontz. “It just20really gets my goat when people make unfounded claims and then they’re off with these people’s money.”

At last, some good news! Someone at the event actually had the backbone to check up on Benny Hinn and put the facts out there!

If this kind of mind-manipulation weren’t such a serious issue in the Church, it would be laughable. But it makes you want to cry. Even though people have been warned about televangelists they continue to contribute to their ministries!

Another televangelist who uses tactics similar to Benny Hinn’s is John Avanzini. At his events a message is flashed across a large screen: INCREASE–INCREASE–INCREASE for the waiting audience to see. Some televangelists induce the “sheeple” to increase a ministries bank account by using psychological manipulation to get what they want.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Crosstalk Radio Talk Show host Ingrid Schlueter drove to Harvest Church in Tinley Park, Illinois to investigate the Inspiring Faith Conference. Ingrid tells us what happened after Avanzini finally arrived on stage: (All quotes by Ingrid are from “John Avanzini and His Talking Stones” [2])

“After a rambling, free-ranging talk about the worsening economy and the price of gas, he told us that he would give us all two things to help us get through perilous times. The first was a list of 7 Bible promises, as he called them, that he had printed up on a card. The mixture of truth and error was very evident here.

The list-gave the following “seven anchors for these perilous times.” Note that the word prosperity as he uses it is referring to material wealth. Spiritual wealth was never mentioned that night.

1. God has already made plans for your prosperity. Jeremiah 29:11
2. Everything you will need and want has already been provided for you by your great God. 2 Peter 1:3
3. God has already given you his best so there is no need to worry about him denying you anything else. Romans 8:32
4. God wants you to live with limitless supply. Judges 18:10
5. Your wealthy place is always on the other side of the perilous times you are facing.
6. It gives God great pleasure to prosper you in good times-in bad times…at all times. Psalms 35:27
7. In good times or in bad times, God is willing to make you rich. Proverbs 10:22

Ingrid describes how truth is mixed with error in the 7 Bible Promises:

“All of those Scripture verses given do talk about the prospering of God’s people. The idea that this is always referring to physical wealth is patently absurd. Avanzini and all of his huckster compatriots only use Scripture as proof texts for their own ridiculous claims that God wants everyone wearing Brioni suits and Rolex watches.”

Avanzini informs the crowd that to help them through “perilous times” he would give them a stone. Ingrid describes what the stone represents:

“He went through several Bible references where stones ‘talked’ in the Old Testament. Here Avanzini introduces the stone idea. He strolled down the aisles, his ring winking in the lights, and held out a shiny stone for a woman to hold. Avanzini told the assembled crowd of about 650 people that these stones should be rubbed whenever people faced rising prices or higher prices at the pump. The ushers went down the aisles with buckets of shiny, smooth stones and handed them out.”

As I mentioned above, Avanzini uses psychological tactics on Christians who come to hear him speak. As soon as he had the Harvest Church audience in the palm of his hand, he conveyed his real message. Incredibly, he takes Bible stories out of context and misapplies the intended meaning to get people to buy what he’s selling. For example, he used the story of Gideon found in the Old Testament book of Judges. Ingrid tells how he skillfully twisted the story to suit his purpose: (My comments in brackets.)

“His [Gideon’s] offering of a goat [to God] was such a sacrifice for someone who lived in a cave. He [Avanzini] described how the angel of the Lord IGNITED the offering on the rock. We, who were in possession of the lucky rubbing stones, would need to ignite ours. I’ll give you a guess how that should be done?[I]t turns out, Avanzini had a whole new doctrinal revelation to tell us about: the doctrine of reverse entrapment. If you’ve never heard of that before, that’s because God just showed it to him right there. Reverse entrapment is when you put a gift to Avanzoni [sic] on a credit card and outsmart the lenders who are trying to get rich off your debt. When you put a gift on a credit card, I quote, ‘something happens in the spirit world.’ Here he tells everyone how to have a credit card breakthrough. Turns out Avanzini has a way for you to get rid of your mortgage debt. All you have to do is to give him a20gift the size of your house payment and God will see that your mortgage gets paid off right away. If you don’t have a house, $500 will do nicely for future debt. Avanzini assured us that it worked for him.

“Perhaps the man sensed a few hostile vibes from the audience (from our row in particular) because he warned us not to let the devil keep us back from getting free from debt by putting a gift for his ministry on our credit card. The credit card ‘invitation’ began as the keyboardist began to noodle around with some mood music. Then Avanzini warned everyone again not to let the devil keep us away. The people streamed down to the stage area and wrote out their credit card numbers and house payment gifts and left them at the expensively shod feet of the speaker. While the people came down to the front to divest themselves of their money, Avanzini appropriately chose to tell an Al Capone joke. I doubt if one other person in the house recognized the irony.

“Avanzini then prayed an igniting prayer over the stones everyone was clutching. Presumably, we still have to ignite our own with a credit card gift, but maybe his igniting prayer was considered the first step. The entire thing was an unspeakable tragedy. These men target the poor in particular because they are the ones desperate enough to need a ‘breakthrough.’ That is the evil in all of this. The rich aren’t stupid enough to give away their cash to the likes of Avanzini. It’s the poor and the needy, the hurting and the ill who desperately need help who are vulnerable to these sharks.”

Speaking of sharks. Did you know that God wants popular televangelist Joel Osteen to be rich? Portfolio.com reported in “God Wants Me to Be Rich” [3] that in these troubled times “Reverend Feelgood” wants us to be rich, too.

“Joel feels our pain and has made himself wealthy (reportedly earning $13 million for his last book advance alone) and his church prosperous ($75 million and counting in annual revenue) by urging us to let go of it, to turn it over to God, to accept God’s favor so that we may be as prosperous as Joel.”

So, if we accept God’s favor He will prospers us financially? Who knew? There is no biblical precedent whatsoever for what Osteen preaches. But that hasn’t stopped the name-it-and-claim-it preachers from going all over the world preaching that God wants us to have a big house, drive expensive cars, even own yachts and jet airplanes – and many of them do!

More

“Osteen is one of a new breed of televangelists — Joyce Meyer, T.D. Jakes, and Creflo Dollar are also rising stars — who are preaching a less sanctimonious, more inclusive message. His church is in that part of the economy that thrives in troubled times, that can count on full pews when wallets are empty and an ever more receptive audience if we do go into a full-on recession.”

As noted above it would appear that Benny Hinn and John Avanzini are already making plans to see that they, or anyone close to them, won’t suffer during a full-on recession.

Lately televangelists are receiving a huge amount of attention, even from the U.S. Senate. Six prosperity ministries are under Senate Finance Committee investigation because of “possible misuse of donations.” The list includes Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, Eddie Long and Randy & Paula White. All of them have become filthy rich because of supporter’s generous donations. For example, televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s ministry (Eagle Mountain International Church of Newark Texas) owns a multi-million dollar Citation 10 and has a private airstrip capable of landing jets that cool their engines in a hangar. Brother Copeland personally owns three other aircraft. According to t he TimesOnline, Copeland told his congregation, “The Lord spoke to me and said ‘you’re gonna believe for a Citation 10, right now.’” He promised them that the jet “will never ever be used as for anything other than what is becoming of you Lord Jesus.”

TimesOnline revealed that Copeland’s ministry “leases land for Mr. Copeland’s cattle and horses and also leases land to the family so that it can operate oil and gas wells.” The ministry also owns a $6 million lakefront mansion. And that’s not the half of it.

Copeland did not cotton to the Senate’s investigation into his finances:

“In a television interview last month, Mr. Copeland’s son John hit back at allegations of financial impropriety:

‘The jet is a tool. It is just a tool to use in ministry. Where in the Bible does it say you should have watchdogs and judgment groups that watch over ministries?’”

Where in the Bible does it say Christians should be rich? My husband, a pilot, would relish owning Copeland’s ministry “tool,” as would most pilots. Christian pilots can “believe9 D for a Citation 10, but the chances of owning one is slim and none.

Certainly the Apostle Paul’s life would have gone a whole lot smoother had he been the CEO of a tent company, instead of a humble tentmaker. As an itinerant preacher having money would have afforded him first class accommodations on luxury sailing vessels. But God did not open up the vault in the Bank of Heaven for his beloved apostles. To Paul he said, “’My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me” (2 Cor.12:9). This is authentic Christianity!

Please join me in “believing” that false prophets like Benny Hinn, John Avanzini, Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland will be exposed as frauds and go flat broke.

“Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take him into your house or welcome him. Anyone who welcomes him shares in his wicked work.” – 2 John 1: 9-11

How Mysticism Misleads Christians

by Bob DeWaay  

To a Christian, praying to God is privilege, a blessing, and a Biblically defined responsibility. We are called to pray. But a genre of literature exists that I call “prayer secrets.” Practitioners claim to have discovered new avenues of prayer that can create power, excitement, success, and even new revelations from God. These “prayer secrets” add unbiblical practices and claims to prayer in the hope of spicing up the topic to make it more interesting. And this is not a new development; mystical practices have been brought into the church under the guise of prayer since medieval times.

However, since these teachings change in form and packaging, I will review three books about prayer and “experiencing God” subjectively. What they have in common is a form of pietism that promises better things than to go before the throne of grace to find help in time of need, as well as other basic Biblical teachings on prayer.

Experiencing God by Henry T. Blackaby

Blackaby’s book, co-authored by Claude King, promises readers that they can come to know God by experience and come to know God’s will beyond what is revealed in Scripture, thereby living out a life full of adventure.1 Blackaby promises his readers that they will, among other things, learn to hear God speaking to them and learn to identify God’s activities.2 He promises to alleviate their problem of being frustrated with their Christian experience.

Experiencing God does start out with some basic facts about the gospel and has a place for people to check to indicate that they have made a “decision for Jesus.” I am glad he told his readers about such things as sin and repentance but am disappointed in the “make a decision for Jesus” approach. We have addressed that elsewhere.3 But having checked the appropriate box, the reader is quickly ushered into the realm of subjectivity that permeates Blackaby’s approach from beginning to end. For example, we are urged to evaluate our “present experience with God.”4 However, I have known people who are totally deceived and in bondage to false doctrine who are very excited about their experience with God, so such evaluation doesn’t do much good. For example, I once met a pastor who just returned from the Toronto laughing revival and was so very excited because he had seen “God” cause people to bark like dogs and quack like ducks. That is just one example why what one thinks about his own “experience with God” is immaterial. What we need to know are the terms God has laid down for knowing Him and walking faithfully with Him.

In Blackaby’s theology, the importance of God’s self-revelation through the Scriptures is de-emphasized while personal experience is given priority. He writes, “We come to know God as we experience Him. God reveals Himself through our experience of Him at work in our lives.”5 I am not disputing that God is at work in our lives if we have truly been converted. But, like other subjectivists, Blackaby de-emphasizes specific revelation (Scripture) and puts unwarranted emphasis on general revelation (what can be observed in the created order). Our personal, spiritual experiences are unreliable. People observing general revelation and interpreting their own spiritual experiences in light of it have created the host of the world’s false religions.

For example, Blackaby writes, “Find out what the Master is doing—then that is what you need to be doing.”6 Here he suggests that by observing what is around us and studying human history we can determine God’s will. He further suggests that God reveals His will by some process in history—that He hasn’t revealed it once for all. But this subjective approach cannot reveal God’s moral law which is His revealed will. Someone’s estimate of “what God is doing” is likely to be based on their own prejudices and inclinations. Let’s look at another example. Consider a person who believes the social gospel. If they see a situation where social services are being provided, they will conclude that they are witnessing “what God is doing.” In the previous example of the laughing revival, that pastor was a charismatic. His thinking led him to believe that anything that appears to have a supernatural cause done in the context of a Christian meeting must be “what God is doing.” So he saw people behaving oddly in such a context and joined it so as to participate in God’s activities. Subjective evaluations can lead to falsely attributing things to God that in fact are not from God.

God’s providence unfolding in history is what we actually observe. But providence contains good and evil. We cannot know what God’s revealed will is by observing providence. We can only know His will through inerrant, infallible, special revelation—Scripture. Even our dreams and inner impressions are part of providence and they too are a mixture of good and evil (and indifferent). They do not reveal what God is doing or His will for our lives.

Blackaby fails to distinguish these categories, and thus uses stories of God revealing things to prophets and apostles in the Bible to suggest that these experiences should be normative for us. For example he includes a section about Moses, not to prove that Moses was an authoritative spokesperson for God, but to prove that God expects all of us to gain revelation like Moses did. This is false, and we have shown it to be false in a recent article.7 In the Moses section of his book Blackaby writes, “His desire is to get us from where we are to where He is working. When God reveals to you where He is working, that becomes His invitation to join Him.”

Such a search for “where God is working” makes no sense. God is working always everywhere as He holds all things together by “the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3). Blackaby’s concept “where God is working” is vague. Is he talking about geography? God’s revealed will is to preach the gospel to all people everywhere. God works through the gospel to convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment and to convert those who will be saved. There is no place off-limits, and this great work of God is not limited by geography. Blackaby’s kind of thinking causes people get on airplanes scurrying to the latest hot “revival.” But how do they know God wants them in Pensacola, for example, chasing a spiritual experience rather than preaching the gospel where they live? The simple answer: they don’t.

Blackaby’s book is filled with claims that we all need personal revelations from God, that these are binding upon us, and that if we do not gain these “words from God” we are going to fail God and live frustrated and empty lives. He claims that we are to obey these words seemingly without question: “When you do what He tells you, no matter how insensible it may seem, God accomplishes what He purposed through you. Not only do you experience God’s power and presence, but so do those who observe what you are doing.”9 This is simply wrong and is a version of works righteousness.

All that I can possibly know as God’s binding, authoritative will is what God TOLD me (Scripture) not what God “tells” me (subjective ideas that may or may not be from God). It is abusive to bind people to non-authoritative, fallible words (even insensible ones) and tell them that obeying such words is the key to God’s presence in their lives. This, in my opinion, is an attack against the gospel. We have the promise of God’s presence because of what He did for us through the cross, not because we have become mystics following ideas that enter our minds which we decided might be from Him. But Blackaby reiterates, “Obey whatever God tells you to do.”10 So, on that point I think I’ll choose to follow his advice based on what I know God has told me in the Scriptures. I know God told me not to listen to people who teach false doctrine; I am going to obey that and not listen to Blackaby.

Beyond promoting these personal revelations as laws to be obeyed (as if they were God’s revealed moral law), he further claims they are also infallible: “When we come to God to know what He is about to do where we are, we also come with the assurance that what God indicates He is about to do is certain to come to pass.”11 This is another problem, because the only things certain to come to pass are those God has predicted in Scripture. Personal revelations that we think might be from God are not certainly from God [we can’t be sure they are] and they will not “certainly come to pass.” Blackaby calls this type of word “revelation”: “When He opens your spiritual eyes to see where He as at work, that revelation is your invitation to join Him.”12 Subjective impressions are now to be considered revelation? This approach could lead to every imaginable error.

Blackaby makes personal revelations not only binding (they must be obeyed) and infallible (certain), but he also declares that they are necessary for everyone’s spiritual well-being: “If the Christian does not know when God is speaking, he is in trouble at the heart of his Christian life!”13 Furthermore, he says, “If you have been given a word from God, you must continue in that direction until it comes to pass (even twenty five years like Abraham).” That means that if someone should get one of these “words from God” and if it actually was not from God, he would be obligated to follow whatever foolhardy, insensible path the “word” led him down. Such teaching, in my opinion, is foolish and abusive to the flock.

God physically appeared to Abraham many times as “the angel of the Lord.” Abraham received special revelations. We don’t. We do not have the same certainty that our subjective impressions are “the word of the Lord.” Amazingly, Blackaby sees the problem with his approach but still presses on with it: “If you have not been given a word from God yet you say you have, you stand in judgment as a false prophet . . . [cites Deut. 18:21-22].”14 EXACTLY! That is the very claim I made in the last issue of CIC.15 If these personal words from God are taken as binding, and we speak them to ourselves and they are not totally accurate, we have become false prophets to our own selves. Blackaby evidently agrees, yet he pushes on.

The flaws of Blackaby’s subjectivism are rather obvious when you examine his claims objectively. God’s revealed will is not found by subjective experiences, but in Scripture. Looking around in the world hoping to discover “where God is working” is impossible since God is always working everywhere as He providentially brings history along toward His ultimate purposes. We will be fooled by our own prejudices because we think “God working” must look something like whatever our religious inclinations tell us it will look like. Furthermore, he has elevated fallible words that may or may not be from God to the level of infallible Scripture and elevated every believer to the status of Moses and Abraham as recipients of special revelation. Following his approach is not how we “experience God.” We cannot not know if we are experiencing God in any way other than to come to Him on His own terms, by faith. When we do, we are assured that God is with us no matter what experiences we have.

Body Prayer by Doug Pagitt

Doug Pagitt,Emergent Church leader, wrote a book (coauthored by Kathryn Prill) that claims that using various body postures can bring people closer to God and deepen one’s life of prayer.^{16 Here is an example of some of the claims of this book:}

Engaging the body in acts of being present with God, including certain ceremonial practices, opens us up to God in new ways. People of faith in ancient times understood that such physical acts and practices as rest and worship, dietary restrictions, and mandated fabric in their wardrobes were of great value to their faith and life.

The problem is that the Bible says that these types of practices are of NO value:

If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!” (which all refer to things destined to perish with the using)– in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men? These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence. (Colossians 2:20-23)

Furthermore, creating dietary restrictions for religious reasons is called a “doctrine of demons” (1Timothy 4:1-5).

Pagitt claims that we can connect with God through body prayers. He calls his approach a “deeper” form of prayer: “This book is meant to be a companion and a guide into deeper forms of prayer; this book is not a specific prescription of how prayer must be done.”18 I appreciate that he does not claim that these postures are mandatory. But that introduces an important question—if his postures are not mandated by Scripture (and they are not) how can they be “deeper” than the sort of prayer the Bible does teach? Such claims are the problem with all the “prayer secrets” books. Why is praying to God in the manner taught in Scripture so inadequate that people need to discover new practices that are superior to those Jesus and His apostles taught? Would God withhold something so good and important to all but those spiritual innovators who discover the secret? The Bible says, “Seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence” (2Peter 1:3). God did not forget to reveal to the Biblical writers key practices we need.

Pagitt teaches the same “breath prayers” that we have discussed in other articles:

As you begin to pray, close your eyes. Then inhale and exhale with deep breaths. Put your hands in a comfortable position—consider turning both hands palms up. Notice the tension in your head … and let it go as you take in a deep breath … and then exhale. Notice the tension in your shoulders and let it go, again by breathing in and then out. Notice the tension in your stomach and let it go. Move down your body doing the same.

Concentrating on one’s breath is a way to achieve an altered state of consciousness. Jesus told us to ask the Father in His name, which we can do when fully conscious and requires no prior stress relief practice.

Some of the postures are similar in that they seem more like a technique for self awareness. One is pressing fingertips together: “There is a theory that pressing each fingertip to its corresponding fingertip activates a certain portion of our brain. Also, it is one of the gentlest ways to feel our own pulse.”^{20 Doing some of these practices is even confused with reconciliation which one comes through the finished work of Christ received by faith:}

Start in a sitting position. Then use your arms to push your body up so you are standing. Inhale deeply through your mouth. Let your shoulders fall, release any stress in the top of your legs, and let your hips fall forward. Feel pressure on the bottom of your feet—and in that space alone. Keep breathing deeply. Allow the deep breaths to prepare you and arm you for the work of reconciliation.

Reconciliation does not happen through some physical process, but through Christ’s blood atonement which we have received by faith (Romans 5:9-11).

It is not surprising, given the theology of the Emergent Church, that Pagitt’s approach is infused with theological immanence at the expense of transcendence. He writes, “So we extend to the rest of the world this hope: that good will be saved and increased and that God’s dreams will be done on earth as they are in heaven.”22 Pagitt claims that we are co-re-creators of the world: “God is never finished with creation, and God is never finished with us. We are constantly being re-created, and we are invited to join God as co-re-creators of the world.” There is no cataclysmic, future judgment of the cosmos in the theology of most Emergent Church leaders. Rather God is working in the world to transform it into a better place through the processes of history.

Pagitt’s terminology reflects a rather panentheistic worldview that is infused with God in some not totally explained way:

There is a rhythm to life. We find it in the ocean tides, in the rising and setting of the sun, in the beating of our hearts. And there is a rhythm of God—a rhythm that encompasses life, both the life we can readily see and the unseen life of the spirit. The rhythm of God beckons us, guide us, and dwells in us.

This highly immanent theology implies that God is in the creation to be discovered, and not as the transcendent One who can only be known by His self-revelation in the authoritative Scriptures and in Christ who came in the flesh and ascended into heaven. Pagitt says, “As those who are created in the image of God, we are endowed with this rhythm.” Since all human beings are created in God’s image this is a universal statement, not limited to those who have been converted through the gospel. He continues, “We can find it [the rhythm of God] step into it, and live in it. This is the kingdom of God — to live in sync with the rhythm of God.”

Sadly, the processes of “body prayer” described in this book reflect a theology that is gleaned not from authoritative Scripture but from creative efforts to create a version of prayer that is in keeping with the sensibilities of the postmodern culture. Key ideas that the Bible teaches about prayer (coming to God on His terms, grace for sinners, how we have access to God only because of the blood atonement, that God hears Christians who ask according to His will, etc.) are missing from this book. The techniques and teachings found in the book are not taught in the Bible. So the bigger question is whether God has spoken and revealed how we can come to Him or whether the means of access to God are discovered in the creation. Pagitt and his co-author leave us searching for the “rhythm of God” in the creation by means God has not ordained.

Prayer Quest by Dee Duke

The subtitle to this book is “Breaking through to your God-given dreams and destiny.” Duke speaks of our dreams and God’s dreams throughout his book. In the Bible God gave dreams to certain people. Those dreams, if interpreted by an infallible prophet, revealed God’s will and God plans. In the Bible, the dreams were from God, but they were not God’s dreams. They were the dreams of the people who dreamt them (for example Nebuchadnezzar’s in Daniel 2). Here we have to add a point of clarification: Only the dreams that are interpreted in the Bible by God’s prophets and spokespersons can be considered to authoritatively reveal God’s will.

The term “dream” in English can mean “hope for an ideal future,” as in, “I have a dream.” This denotes the hope for some better state of affairs that may or may not come into existence. Duke, in his book, is clearly not using the term in the Biblical sense as a dream a person has that has been interpreted by an authoritative prophet. Instead he says, “He calls us now to dream His dreams, to ask Him daily to display His power.” Duke is speaking of a hoped for future when he uses the term “dreams”

Welcome to the reality where dreams come true! God has a dream, and it is certain to happen just as He imagines it. He has placed the stamp of His image on our souls, so that we also dream great dreams. As we learn to passionately share and enjoy God’s dreams, we will see Him work in amazing ways . . .”

This statement involves some serious category problems. Supposedly God’s dream is His imagination about the future. We (all humans evidently because all humans are created in God’s image) can dream like God. Either this is anthropomorphism run amok or some seriously bad theology. God is the one who says this about Himself: “Remember the former things long past, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning And from ancient times things which have not been done, Saying, ‘My purpose will be established, And I will accomplish all My good pleasure’” (Isaiah 46:9, 10). God does not dream, He decrees. God calls things into being and works all things according to the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11). He doesn’t imagine a potential future that may or may not happen.

Concerning us, the only thing we know about what God “dreams” (using Duke’s terminology) is what is revealed in Scripture. Our own dreams about what we would like the future to bring are not going to make God do anything. Duke says, “This book is intended to help you learn to walk so intimately with God that you will see Him fulfill His dreams in and through you.” This brings us back to the typical “prayer secret” genre of Christian writing. Supposedly there is some key to “intimacy with God” that is not based on the once-for-all finished work of Christ, not based on availing ourselves of the means of grace by faith, but based on our own level of personal piety and the use of practices not revealed in the Bible.

Duke asks his readers, “Do you feel as though you’ve given up on dreams you had when your faith was new?” The implication is that our “dreams” (i.e., hopes for an ideal or optimal future) somehow authoritatively reveal God’s will and that we must make these come to pass by some process. But our ideas about what we hope life will be like are nothing more than ideas and may have nothing to do with God’s purposes. Our dreams are part of providence, but providence contains good and evil. Duke is treating personal imaginations about the future as if they were infallible guidance to be nurtured and followed. But personal dreams are not God’s moral law.

Here is a further definition of what Duke means by “dream,”

A dream is a desire felt so strongly that we think and meditate on it constantly until we see it in our mind as clearly as if it were reality. A dream believes that what is desired will happen; it is accomplished by anticipation and positive expectation. People who dream tend to be upbeat and enthusiastic.

This is a very much the type of mind over matter thinking that has enjoyed popularity in self-help circles.

He gives people some practical guidance on releasing their “imagination” in prayer: “Envision yourself embarking on a day trip into the presence of God. . . . Envision yourself approaching God in His glory.” This is strikingly similar to guided imagery. He gives more examples of how to manage your dream time with God, including making lists of dream notes. This is a journey into the subjective realm under the guise of “prayer.”

Much bad teaching comes into the church by route of mysticism, subjectivism, and having faulty theological categories. In previous articles I carefully defined categories to help my readers avoid these pitfalls. Risking redundancy, I must again assert that there is God’s revealed will in Scripture as well as God’s providential will (containing good and evil) that is revealed as history unfolds. Though Duke wants us to dream God’s dreams about the future, he admits that these dreams we might have come from various sources. He lists thoughts from God, your own thoughts, thoughts from the world, and thoughts from Satan. His readers are supposed to sort through their dream notes to find ones that they think are from God. But how? God’s future providential will is not revealed and cannot be known until it unfolds in history. Our dreams about the future cannot be determined to be from God by any means available to us because they are not revealed in Scripture.

Duke reveals his lack of Biblical understanding when he cites the scripture, “My sheep know my voice,” as proof that we can figure out which of our dreams is God’s voice. That passage in John 10 is about those whom the Father has given to the Son and who consequently will respond to the gospel and follow Christ, not about listening to various subjective voices in our heads and trying to figure out which one sounds the most like Christ.

There is no need to belabor how bad this book is theologically. It starts from a series of faulty premises and bad theology and builds from there a concept of prayer that is not taught in the Bible. The term “dream” as he uses it is basically the idea of one’s imagination. The Bible tells us about those who speak in this manner: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility; They speak a vision of their own imagination, Not from the mouth of the Lord’”. (Jeremiah 23:16).

That a publishing house like Navpress produced this book shows how little discernment there is in the evangelical movement these days.

Conclusion:

God has not left us to fish around in the world of spirits and subjective experiences to know Him and speak to Him. God send His Son, who pre-existed as God and with God, to be born of a virgin and live in history in the flesh. The apostles heard Him, touched Him and saw Him (see 1John 1:1-3). He died for sins on the cross, shedding His blood to avert God’s wrath against our sin. He was bodily raised on the third day and He bodily ascended into heaven where He sits at the right hand of the Father. Before He left He promised His followers that they could ask the Father anything in His name. He inspired eyewitnesses to write His inerrant words so that we would know the truth from Him. The Bible promises us that He hears us. It doesn’t give us a set of techniques to hear inner voices and call these techniques “prayer.”

The mystics are confident that their extra-biblical techniques and extra-biblical experiences are certainly from God and are making more pious Christians than those of us who only have prayer as taught in the Bible and the Word of God to go by. Having discovered the secrets to increased piety and “intimacy with God,” they write books so that others can become similarly “enlightened” and be saved from their “ordinary” Christian lives. Dear readers, they are selling you a bill of goods. They are not infallible apostles and prophets, they do not speak authoritatively for God, their theology is unbiblical, and their practices are not ordained by God. I have touched on three examples of this approach but there have been literally thousands of them in church history. The simple application is this: do not listen to them. They can only deceive you; they cannot make you more holy or pleasing to God. Only the finished work of Christ and His ordained means of grace can do that.

2 Timothy 3:13
“But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.”

2 Tim 4:3-4
“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.”

“Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.”

Speech by Joseph Goebbels on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the so-called “Hochschule für Politik”, a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin

I have been thinking about writing this article ever since Abanes showed up here for his usual drive by commenting as he is well known for on the internet.
My hesitance on this matter was due to the fact that I believe Richard Abanes thrives on attention, positive or negative.

And good press or no press is still press at least he is being talked about.

So I measured whether to give Abanes more attention here or not.

Another consideration was the fact that most who don’t like Abanes and his redefineing of apologetics don’t need to be convinced that Richard is deceived. As well as those few fans of Abanes who are drawn to the trouble (not truth) that Richard causes when he shows up will not be convinced by my article.

But if there is even one person out there that is not quite sure how to take Richard Abanes this article is for you.

Again anything I say you will always need to hold it up to the only word that counts. And thats Gods Word.

I am not going to dispute Richard on every point he has made on his comments you can go over to the letters to Richard Abanes post and judge for yourself. I will show a couple of Richards comments here to make certain points though.

The purpose of this article is to show that I do not believe Richard Abanes is a source of any kind of reliable information or truth. Most of all since Richard so often speaks in half truths or limited information on the topic. Not telling the whole story. You the reader will have to determine for yourselves Richards motives.

I have been debating Abanes for a number of years now and am very aware of Richards M.O and techniques. If he doesn’t know you he will try to win you over with some often flattering speech or common ground and then once dialog starts based on your reaction and comments will direct how you stand in the mythical world of Richard Abanes. If you oppose him he immediately changes from Mr Nice Guy to a attack dog. All the while accusing those who oppose him of being attack dogs, users of hate speech etc.. I’ve often wondered how Richard disengages himself from his own writing. Because Abanes seems clueless to the words he uses to describe others in the midst of Richard screaming foul.

Some have asked me why I have given Abanes a voice here on my blog.
Good question.

Two reasons.

1.Richard is his own worst enemy. Sometimes letting him just comment expose’s him better than I ever could.

2. Again Abanes coming here (a very much anti Warren site) and trying to strike up a conversation with me and my readers goes to show the methods Rick Warren uses to dialog and get people to buy into his vision.

I have no common ground with Richard Abanes or do I desire to dialog with him. He is a member of Saddleback and a follower of Rick Warren. Sorry we don’t have anything in common to chat about.

Now Richard may dispute his being a follower of Rick Warren (of course Abanes will state he is a follower of Jesus Christ) but Richards actions of defending Warren all over the internet primarily instead of the Christain faith shows Richards true intentions. Note what I just said. Abanes defends Rick Warrens faith instead of the Christian faith. This I believe shows Richards true colors.
Also note the defence of Rick Warrens associations.

Even though Richard has posted a warning about Ken Blanchards teachings, books etc.. note the disclaimer (back door for Richard I call it) has posted within the warning.

“Therefore, in the coming months, I plan on carefully reviewing the material I have obtained. My findings will be made public after a careful examination of these documents. Until then,-

My hope is to complete ASAP a thorough investigation of the situation, including a look into what has transpired over the last few years between Blanchard and Watchman Fellowship ” end of quote-

Now I want to show why I believe Abanes not only ignores the truth but purposely spreads misinformation to put your focus on anything other than him taking any kind of personal responsibility . Note the use of the phrase “until then”

Richard also uses a back door here “ ” I have received information (c. March 24, 2008) that seems to suggest, at least at first glance, that there might indeed be an ongoing serious problem with Blanchard’s ability to discern biblically sound individuals from persons who are known enemies of the cross of Christ.”

Note his use of the words seems to suggest and at least first glance. Balance this out against the facts. Ken Blanchard has continued to endorse new age authors and books, look at Jim Ballards new book. Ken Blanchard is still a member of the Hoffman Insitute. These are indisputable facts and Richard is aware of this.

And I have a problem with Abanes stating he is an investigative journalist as well as stating true reliable sources such as Lighthouse Trails are and I quote From Abanes article the Blanchard Bashers “As I have stated elsewhere, the Dombrowskis research leaves much to be desired.

“Rather than providing accurate, carefully-researched, and verifiable information, the Dombrowski’s allowed faulty information to be released to the public—information that also has since caused division, strife, and alarm (see my article on the Ken Blanchard issue here).”

When taking a second look at the paragraphs right above Abanes own warning about Blanchard we see Richards statements

“I eventually came to find out that Blanchard was no New Ager.”

“Nearly three years have passed now since the controversy, and I have heard Blanchard speak on various occasions. And by his words and deeds, I can only believe that he has truly fought, and continues to fight, to grow in the grace and knowledge of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. ”

“Blanchard’s admission of errors, his willingness to learn more about doctrinal discernment, his attempts to express regret over decisions he had made, and his ongoing work to spread the Gospel have meant nothing to such individuals. They have continued to resurrect the old controversy from 2005, declaring that Blanchard has not done enough to prove he has truly repented. As of 2008, this is basically where the Ken Blanchard controversy stands.”

Underneath this shows Richards new Blanchard 2008 update.

I find this all to be very confusing since Richard appears to want it both ways. He claims Blanchard is not a New Ager yet warns people about Blanchards teaching and books.

The facts are still the facts and they are out there to the public. The fact is Richard did’nt check to see what was going on with Ken Blanchard and his own research was flawed until he was made aware of the information through Bud Press.

Again Richard speaking things out as fact before he got his facts straight is something he accuses everyone else of doing.

Richard Abanes goes to great lengths to defend new ager Len Sweet ,again I believe the motive here is because of Sweets well documented association with Rick Warren.

Again as with Ken Blanchard, Abanes states for the record

“Leonard Sweet is no New Ager.

Here is the truth about Leonard Sweet-From Lighthouse Trails

“New Age sympathizer Leonard Sweet, who will be training church leaders and pastors at the 2008 Saddleback Small Groups Conference in April, is accepted by Rick Warren as a trustworthy source of Christian leadership. However, Sweet’s view of the value of small groups lines up more with the New Age and Alice Bailey than it does with biblical Christianity. In his book, Quantum Spirituality, Sweet states:

The power of small groups is in their ability to develop the discipline to get people “in-phase” with the Christ consciousness and connected with one another.

What Sweet means by “Christ consciousness” can be determined through his book, Quantum Spirituality. For instance, in the Acknowledgements pages Sweet thanks the “New Light leaders” whom he has followed in his spiritual journey. He names interspiritualists/universalists such as Matthew Fox (author of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ), Episcopalian priest/mystic Morton Kelsey, Willis Harman (author of Global Mind Change) and Ken Wilber (one of the major intellectuals in the New Age movement). In the Preface of Sweet’s book (p. 3), he (referring to other New Agers such as Gary Zukav) says: “Unfortunately, little of this literature is known or celebrated in the religious community.” Zukav’s book, The Seat of the Soul, teaches people how to get in touch with their spirit guides.

Since the release of Quantum Spirituality in 1991, Sweet has never renounced the spirituality of the book, and in fact offers a free online edition from his current website. This means he still agrees with its contents.

A key to understanding Sweet’s meaning of “Christ consciousness” can be partly found in his reference on page 13 to Thomas Merton, whom he quotes as saying:

We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity.

And also in Sweet’s TOE (Theory of Everything) in which he believes that a “unifying principle” binds all things together.

Now if you cant discern that Len Sweet is promoting the New Age here I would question your ability to discern what is true biblically.

As Richard Abanes question’s us “Discerners” (a biblcal term that Abanes uses’s with scorn) and our ability to do any kind of good research. I must call into question Richards ability (or willful ignorance) of the same.

Richard has also went on record defending the Emergent Church here-

http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2008/02/hot-on-the-bl-1.html

I also site that I do not think Warrens defence of Rick Warren is a very good one.

Richard also stretch’s scripture in order to cover and make excuses for Rick Warren as is pointed out in the herescope article quote here.

“Some Christians are concerned about the NCV version of Ephesians 4:6 which Warren quotes and employs to discuss “practicing the presence of God.” The controversy caused spiritual counterfeits author Richard Abanes to defend Rick Warren’s use of that NCV text as a basis for practicing the presence of God. Abanes explained that all Warren meant to teach was the immanence of God, that God is present “not only above and beyond the universe, but also throughout it (His omnipresence).”(2) To accept Abanes’ apologetic that Warren is not a pantheist, several issues need to be resolved. First, the NCV translation of Ephesians 4:6 directly states that God is “in everything.” That may not be what Warren believes, or meant to communicate, but that is what that version states. Though the version may not directly infer a pantheistic way of viewing God, at minimal, it gives a panentheistic impression of God. Though Abanes disclaims that Rick Warren is a pantheist, and did not mean to promote such a concept of God, Warren chose to quote a modern paraphrase that infers such a view of God.

Second, in the context of Ephesians 4, Paul did not affirm the immanence and omnipresence of God in the universe. What he did state is truth regarding the church universal, the Body of Christ (vv. 1-16). In Ephesians chapter 4, Paul sets forth teaching that being a UNITY (vv. 1-6) and consisting of a DIVERSITY (vv. 7-13a), the church ought to grow together into MATURITY (vv. 13b-16). The basis for such UNITY amidst DIVERSITY is that throughout the church universal there is “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (v. 6b, KJV). Being in the Father and Son, and united by the Spirit, the Body of Christ is permeated by the “one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Ephesians 4:6b, NKJV; Compare John 17:20-23.). In this majestic statement, Paul affirms God’s presence in and lordship over the church. Though God is present in the farthest and darkest recesses of the universe (Psalm 139:7), Paul was not stating that in this context. He is teaching that though God is universally present throughout the cosmos, He is particularly present in and throughout the believing and regenerate church.

Third, if by his NCV citation of Ephesians 4:6b we assume that Warren meant to teach that the immanence/omnipresence of God is the basis upon which persons are to practice God’s presence, Warren’s invitation to practice God’s presence is inter-religious. Because God is everywhere, all persons, no matter what their religion, are invited to practice God’s presence. By quoting the NCV, Warren provides a basis for ecumenical spirituality, a practicing of the presence of a generic God by all persons, no matter what their religious persuasion might be. Because God is everywhere, everyone can practice the divine presence.

But the basis upon which Christians are conscious of God’s presence is not that of divine immanence, but divine indwelling which the Bible states is not common to everyone everywhere. Jesus told his disciples that “the world cannot receive” the Holy Spirit “because it does not behold Him or know Him.” He then issues a qualifier to the disciples saying, “but you know Him because He abides with you” (John 14:17). And Jesus further states to the disciples that for reason of the coming Spirit baptism (Acts 2; 1 Corinthians 12:13), the Holy Spirit “will be in you” (John 14:17b).

Richard Abanes’ apologetic on behalf of Rick Warren does not adequately answer concerns regarding the accusation of panentheism. Warren’s NCV citation of Ephesians 4:6b was a terrible choice. Further, it is theologically misleading, and leaves the door open for ecumenical spirituality. It would have been better if both Abanes and Warren would have admitted that the NCV is a bad paraphrase, and that the author had inconsiderately quoted it. But for whatever the reason, they did not. To the point that God resides in everything, Warren’s quotation of Ephesians 4:6b is unqualified and therefore misleading. It does not follow that what is true of the church (the called out ones) is necessarily true of all God’s creatures and creation.”

Another comment from Moriel Ministries and Jacob Prasch-

Moriel Ministries & Jacob Prasch take extreme exception to the long statement highly critical of Chuck Smith, various Calvary Chapels, Roger Oakland and Dave Hunt by Richard Abanes of Saddleback Church in reaction to their expressed position regarding The Purpose Driven Agenda of Rick Warren. Mr. Abanes wrote as an apologist for Rick Warren and the Saddleback Purpose Driven ethos.

The response by Mr. Abanes was an exercise in circumlocution failing centrally and candidly to address the various concerns voiced to the unbiblical nature of The Purpose Driven Agenda. These are well documented in a series of well-researched and strongly lucid books and presentations by Warren Smith, Ray Yungen, Roger Oakland, Bob DeWaay, James Sundquist and others.

The caveats raised by Chuck Smith and various Calvary Chapel ministers, by Roger Oakland & Understanding The Times, and by Dave Hunt & The Berean Call, are scripturally based objections to a compromise of biblical doctrine, biblical standards, and the nature of the biblical Gospel itself.

The Purpose Driven agenda combines the programmatic approach of marketing guru of the late Peter Drucker (a non believer) with a plethora of consumer psychology, New Age, and an ecumenical & interfaith pattern of compromise on essentials of the Christian faith – even advising rabbis who reject their true Messiah how to grow bigger synagogues without the gospel of Yeshua (Jesus). Mr. Abanes’ attempted defense of Purpose Driven involvement with Yoga as mere “stretching exercises” are directly balked at by Christian evangelists saved out of Hinduism such as Tom Chacko, and reflects the incipient New Age infiltration of the church in addition to the more general influences of New Age figures such as Ken Blanchard. …

In conclusion-

In one of Richards comments on this blog he states

“now you guys have just gone kooky. You are living on another planet, in another dimension of your own reality created from the most bizarre religious delusions I have ever witnessed up close and personal. Now, there is simply no reason to talk to you because, well, to be honest, you just can’t even understand plain old English anymore.”

I have to agree there are two very clear camps forming. One that adhears to the fundementals in Christianity by both word and deed.

And another camp that picks and chooses what parts of Christianity they choose to follow and scorn anyone in Christinanity who would refer to themselves as being fundemental.

This is a new form of Christianity that has taken evil form and at its roots is not Jesus Christ or His word.

But a church based on the felt needs of man.

A church that was based on (and grew) because unbelievers ( people on there way to hell) were sought in council on how to do church.

The council of unbelievers were then turned into programs and a unholy church emerged from that.

Growing to great proportions in a short amount of time.

And Christianity in America and around the world was weakned as a result of a counterfeit church and a lack of biblical discerning Christians.

Welcome to the Mythical World of Richard Abanes.

You now will have to compare all of this to scripture and see who is telling the truth.
Tim Wirth

The August 2007 issue of Christianity Today contains a cheap shot aimed at Way of Life Literature in particular and biblical warning ministries in general.

(CT also used Apprising Ministries as an example of its thesis. I am not personally familiar with this ministry and I do not know its writers, but I understand that they are Southern Baptists. I checked out the web site and they warn about such things as the Emerging Church, New Evangelicalism, Harry Potter, Romanism, and the Rick Warren-style Church Growth movement, and the reports appear to be well documented and biblically informed. I do not know wherein we might disagree doctrinally, but I do know that this is powerful stuff from Southern Baptist pens and I pray that their tribe may increase mightily and that plain spoken preaching against sin and error will spread throughout the SBC!)

Titled “Attack Dogs of Christendom,” the Christianity Today article is hypocritical, shallow and unscholarly, slanderous, biblically and historically wrong, unreasonable, prideful, fearful of strong biblical language, and evidential of CT’s own error and spiritual blindness.

CONSIDER, FIRST, THE HYPOCRISY OF THE ARTICLE.

The hypocrisy is obvious on its very head. While Christianity Today claims that it is harmful and objectionable for Christians to issue public warnings against other Christians, they do not hesitate to issue a really nasty public warning against their fellow Christians at Apprising Ministries and Way of Life Literature. If Christianity Today issues public warnings, that is fine and helpful, but others are not allowed the same privilege. That sounds like hypocrisy to me.

THE CT ARTICLE IS SHALLOW AND UNSCHOLARLY.

The quotes they pulled from Way of Life articles in their attempt to present the ministry as an extreme, borderline cultic one were removed entirely from the context of the extensive and substantive doctrinal arguments that surround them and from the serious research that goes into the reports. Unlike Christianity Today’s shallow, unscholarly approach to fundamentalists, I actually read the books and articles of New Evangelicals on a regular basis and attend their meetings and conferences in various parts of the world in order to understand them properly and to know what I am writing about.

Let me give an example of the incredible shallowness of the CT report. They wrote, “Often these sites seem convinced that every translation of the Bible done after the King James Version is a step toward apostasy.” With that one misguided statement they dismiss all of the substantive warnings we have given about the modern versions and the decades of serious research into the Bible version-text issue that stands behind the warnings. Just three of our recent books on that subject total 1,490 pages. I have researched this issue for 25 years, have built a large personal library and read more than 600 books and pamphlets and 2,000 articles on the topic, have done research at places such as the British Library and the libraries at Cambridge and Oxford and Trinity in Dublin, and on-site investigation into this issue in many parts of the world, including Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Slovakia, Italy, and various countries in Asia. To dismiss this type of research so off-handedly and to mischaracterize it so thoroughly is shallow scholarship of a childish level. And this is from a magazine that prides itself in being intellectual and fair.

While we are discussing the unscholarly nature of the CT report, it would be proper to mention that a quote they allege to be from a Way of Life article is nonexistent. The CT article states the following, “Then there is Pat Robertson, ‘one of the greatest deceivers in the church today’ …” This quote is presented as something they found in a Way of Life article and is supposed to represent our position on Robertson. I was surprised by the quote, since I know that I don’t consider Pat Roberson one of the greatest deceivers, and further I don’t use the term “church” singular after that universal fashion. (When writing about churches in general I use the plural form.) I thought perhaps that CT had found an article at the Way of Life web site that was written by someone else, but I did a search of all of the articles posted at our web site and there is no such quote. I have no idea where they got it, but we certainly never wrote it and it misrepresents our position.

THE CT ARTICLE IS ALSO SLANDEROUS.

The charges made against Way of Life are so untrue and seemingly vicious that they could be characterized as slanderous. CT lumps Way of Life in with websites that are “drenched in sarcasm and animosity.” In fact, I do not write in a sarcastic vein, and any sarcasm that appears anywhere in my writings is exceedingly rare. I have a suspicion that there is more sarcasm in articles published by CT than those by Way of Life.

And though my reports could certainly be characterized as forceful and dogmatic, they are not drenched with animosity. My objective always is to be courteous, and hundreds of readers have written to thank me for the gracious attitude of my reports and hundreds of church members have told me the same thing in regard to my preaching.

Further, CT says the reports “are not reasoned or modestly couched.” In fact, the reports are nothing if they are not reasoned, even if CT doesn’t agree with the reasoning, and the criticism of other ministries is indeed modestly couched. Though we are only human and we doubtless make mistakes, we go to much effort to be correct and fair in our warnings and we aim to write in a modest manner.

CT even says that Way of Life’s reports “differ little from the coarse vulgarity of cable TV.”

They should be ashamed of publishing such slanders about a sincere Christian ministry.

THE CT ARTICLE IS ALSO BIBLICALLY AND HISTORICALLY WRONG.

To say that a preacher should not warn of error publicly (Ct writes, “Lashing out in public at fellow Christians is objectionable”) flies in the face of Scripture as well as the example of church history. Scripture commands the preacher to reprove and rebuke (2 Tim. 4:2) and to earnestly contend for the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3). Paul instructed Titus, “These things speak, and exhort, and rebuke with all authority. Let no man despise thee” (Titus 2:15), and we do not have to beg CT’s permission to do so. In practically every epistle Paul issued severe warnings against theological error. He warned of Hymenaeus and Alexander’s blasphemy (1 Tim. 1:19-20) and of Phygellus and Hermogenes’ apostasy (2 Tim. 1:15) and of Hymenaeus and Philetus’ profane and vain babblings (2 Tim. 2:16-17) and of Demas’ love of the world (2 Tim. 4:10) and of Alexander the coppersmith’s evil (2 Tim. 4:14) and of the Galatian heretics’ cursed gospel (Gal. 1:6-8) and of the dogs and evil workers operating at Philippi (Phil. 3:1-2) and of the false teachers “whose God is their belly” (Phil. 3:17-19). That’s some pretty strong “attack dog” language!

And the Lord Jesus Christ publicly called the Pharisees, who were respected Jewish religious leaders of that day, hypocrites, children of hell, blind guides, fools and blind, serpents, and a generation of vipers (Matthew 23).

Now, there is some real “attack dog” language for you, Christianity Today!

When we come to church history we have a continuous stream of godly but plain spoken and sharp public warnings that have been issued against error and that helped to protect God’s people from the heresies of the day. Martin Luther didn’t keep his disagreement with Rome a private matter; he nailed his scathing anti-heresy thesis to the door of the church and published it in tracts for everyone to see. William Tyndale did not keep his disagreement with the heresies of Rome and the moral compromise of the king of England a private matter. He wrote against them boldly in tracts and books that were distributed throughout the land. Charles Spurgeon didn’t keep quiet during the Downgrade Controversy in the Baptist Union. He dealt plainly with its heresies in his very public paper The Sword and the Trowel. The Fundamentalists of the early 20th century did not keep their concerns about theological liberalism a private matter. They lifted up tongue and pen boldly and in a most public manner to warn those who had an ear to hear. James Stewart, a mighty evangelist during the 1940s and 1950s, did not keep quiet about that the compromises of the gospel that were just beginning to bud in evangelical Christianity. He wrote publicly to warn of “Pot-Pourri Evangelism” and “Hollywood Evangelism.” In fact, one of CT’s own editors, Harold Lindsell, took up his pen and published a very public warning about the downgrade of the doctrine of inspiration in well-known schools, and he “belled the cat” by naming the names of the chief culprits (The Battle for the Bible, 1976; The Bible in the Balance, 1979). 

I stand in the footsteps of that worthy and right minority that has publicly defended the faith and warned of error, from the apostle Paul forward, and I am not ashamed of my warnings and I do not apologize for them.

I can testify to the Lord with a clear conscience that in publishing these articles I am trying to be faithful to the God who has called me and to be a help to the people today who need the truth.

The fact that we publish warnings via the Internet changes nothing. If we have the right to publish biblical reproofs via a public sermon or a tract, then we have the right to issue them via the Internet or by any other means available.

Christianity Today’s position is wrong biblically and historically.

THE CT ARTICLE, FURTHER, IS UNREASONABLE.

If preachers are not allowed to warn of error publicly, then error is free to prosper without rebuttal. If Rome can promote Mary veneration across the Internet but we are not at liberty to refute this heresy just as publicly and in the same forum, then Mariolatry can have free reign.

If New Evangelicals can promote their doctrine and philosophy freely on the Internet, should those who oppose it not be at liberty to refute it just as publicly and in the same forums in which it is promoted, when they are convinced by the Spirit of God that it is wrong?

Understandably, the New Evangelical doesn’t like the idea of being the target of a theological warning, but Bible preachers are supposed to be in the business of proclaiming the truth rather than soothing egos.

THE CT ARTICLE IS ALSO PRIDEFUL.

They describe warning ministries as representing “small, but disturbingly visible, fundamentalist Protestant groups.” Small is the operative word here. Apart from the fact that fundamental Baptist churches in particular and fundamentalist Bible-believing churches in general number in the many thousands around the world and are sometimes larger than their evangelical counterparts, my point is to expose the CT’s subtly-presented philosophy that small is of little consequence, that it is the majority that really counts. That is prideful, and it ignores the fact that the truth has been in the extreme minority in this world since the days of Noah.

Another example of pride is the following statement: “It is easy to laugh at these websites, which feature subheads like ‘Mixed Swimming’ (dangerous, of course) and ‘Bible Guidelines for Clothing.’”

It is both carnal and prideful to laugh at such things. The Bible contains many warnings about nudity and lack of modesty and sexual lust in general, and with society and the churches literally drenched with such things today, there is a great need of reproof. 

Further, the evangelical churches and ministries that CT represents once preached against these very things and it was not that long ago. Is it not prideful to laugh about that which one’s forefathers cried over?

THE CT ARTICLE IS ALSO FEARFUL OF STRONG BIBLICAL LANGUAGE IN PREACHING

The article makes a lot of the alleged fact that the warning ministries in question use strong language. This is one of the major points of the article, which ends with the words, “By all means criticize fellow Christians if necessary, but do so with grace.” (We will ignore the fact that this final statement contradicts what was said earlier in the article about it being objectionable to criticize fellow Christians publicly.)

CT characterizes the language of the warning ministries as ungracious, “vitriolic,” “blasts of ire,” “angry,” “intemperate,” “lashing out.” As evidence of this they quote Apprising Ministries calling Rick Warren “milquetoast” and Robert Schuller and Norman Vincent Peale “the devil’s duo” and Brian McLaren and Joel Osteen “vipers of new evangelicalism” and “whitewashed tombs.”

What Christianity Today calls ungraceful and “vitriolic,” I see as gracious and truthful and exceedingly biblical. We have already quoted some of the rough things that Jesus called the Pharisees and that Paul called the heretics of his day. Their statements were no less “vitriolic” than the things quoted above, and who is going to charge them with lack of grace?

How about Peter and John, who has been called “the apostle of love”? We haven’t quoted from them yet. Let’s see how vitriolic and intemperate and ungracious they were in their dealings with error. Peter wrote an entire chapter and a half to warn of false teachers in his second epistle, calling their teaching “damnable heresies” (2 Pet. 2:1), their ways “pernicious” (2 Pet. 2:2), their words “feigned” (2 Pet. 2:3), and their future “damnation” that “slumbereth not” (2 Pet. 2:3). He likened them to the “filthy conversation” of Sodom and Gomorrah (2 Pet. 2:6-9) and called them “presumptuous” and “self-willed” (2 Pet. 2:10). He even likened them to “natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed” (2 Pet. 2:12). Peter made a lot more vitriolic-sounding statements about them, too! Just read 2 Peter 2-3.

And as for John, he was no slacker when it came to rebuking false teachers. He called them antichrists and warned of the fact that “they went out from us, but they were not of us” (1 John 2:18). He called the liars (1 John 2:22) and seducers (1 John 2:26) and taught the believers to “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1). He further warned of the “many deceivers” that are entered into the world (2 John 7) and dogmatically said that “whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God” (2 John 9). That means that a lot of preachers in these end times do not have God and should be publicly exposed as such. John would certainly expose them if he were here today! John even warned of Diotrephes, a puffed-up preacher (3 John 9-10).

To be consistent with its stand against “ungracious” “vitriolic” speech, CT needs to reject the Bible.

In fact, what we have in the CT article is a common thing. It is common for the object of a biblical reproof to charge the reprover with being “mean” and even “violent” and to mischaracterize reproof as persecution. 

FINALLY, THIS ARTICLE IRREFUTABLY EXPOSES CT’S OWN ERROR AND SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS.

It is not surprising that Christianity Today would despise Way of Life Literature, because we have documented and biblically refuted the New Evangelical error that they represent. With the uninformed, CT might get away with mocking those that warn of New Evangelicalism and insinuating that the latter is merely the figment of some fundamentalist’s rabid imagination. But we know that the term “Neo-evangelical” was actually coined by Harold Ockenga, one-time editor of Christianity Today and director on the board of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. In the foreword to Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible, Ockenga recounted the early history of New Evangelicalism and listed its principles:

“Neo-evangelicalism was born in 1948 in connection with a convocation address which I gave in the Civic Auditorium in Pasadena. While reaffirming the theological view of fundamentalism, this address REPUDIATED ITS ECCLESIOLOGY AND ITS SOCIAL THEORY. The ringing call for A REPUDIATION OF SEPARATISM AND THE SUMMONS TO SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT received a hearty response from many evangelicals. The name caught on and spokesmen such as Drs. Harold Lindsell, Carl F.H. Henry, Edward Carnell, and Gleason Archer supported this viewpoint. We had no intention of launching a movement, but found that the emphasis attracted widespread support and exercised great influence. Neo-evangelicalism… DIFFERENT FROM FUNDAMENTALISM IN ITS REPUDIATION OF SEPARATISM and its determination to engage itself in the theological dialogue of the day. it had a new emphasis upon the application of the gospel to the sociological, political, and economic areas of life. Neo-evangelicals emphasized the restatement of Christian theology in accordance with the need of the times, the REENGAGEMENT IN THE THEOLOGICAL DEBATE, THE RECAPTURE OF DENOMINATIONAL LEADERSHIP, AND THE REEXAMINATION OF THEOLOGICAL PROBLEMS SUCH AS THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN, THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE FLOOD, GOD’S METHOD OF CREATION, AND OTHERS” (Harold J. Ockenga, foreword to Harold Lindsell’s book The Battle for the Bible).

Thus New Evangelicalism was founded in the 1940s by men associated with Billy Graham and Christianity Today and it was a public and staunch repudiation of the old biblical fundamentalism with its separatism and dogmatic doctrinal stance. New Evangelicalism determined to put a more positive, intellectual face on Christianity and to allow room for the re-examination of “problems” such as “the antiquity of man, the universality of the blood, and God’s method of creation.” In other words, it would allow room for the heresy of evolution and would not take a stand for the biblical doctrine of creation. In fact, as time passed and the New Evangelical philosophy permeated evangelical Christianity, it became painfully obvious that it would not stand for much of anything and that it would smile in toleration upon a multitude of heresies and that it represented an almost total breakdown of the biblical doctrine of separation from worldliness and heresy.

Way of Life Literature has carefully documented this unscriptural business in its articles and books (see, for example, the 153-page book New Evangelicalism: Its History, Characteristics, and Fruit), so it is no surprise that we are despised by those who are committed to such error.

In the recent hit piece against Way of Life and other warning ministries, Christianity Today set itself up in opposition to ministries that are “outraged that fellow Protestants appear to be holding out a welcoming hand to Catholics or Orthodox Christians.” Thus it is more acceptable, in the eyes of CT, to associate with the gross heresies represented by the Roman Catholic Church than it is to warn of the same. 

The CT article makes light of ministries that warn about Rick Warren, Robert Schuller, Brian McLaren, Joel Osteen, and others. For those who are informed of the very dangerous and unscriptural doctrines promoted by these men, this is plain evidence of CT’s own error and spiritual blindness.

WARREN teaches that God “won’t ask you about your … doctrinal views” (The Purpose Driven Life, p. 34), and God is “not a boss, but a brother…” (p. 79), and God “warns us over and over not to … judge each other” (p. 164). SCHULLER teaches that defining sin as rebellion against God is “shallow and insulting to the human being” (Schuller, Self-Esteem: The New Reformation, p. 65), that sin is “any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem” (Self-Esteem, p. 14) and that every human being is a child of God (Self-Esteem, p. 17). MCLAREN teaches that evangelicals should turn their backs on the old belief that the Bible is the absolute standard for truth and that doctrine is either right or wrong and should adopt a pliable, philosophical position in which “faith is more about a way of life than a system of belief, where being authentically good is more important than being doctrinally right” (from the back cover of McLaren’s “A New Kind of Christian”). OSTEEN, one of the kings of the unscriptural prosperity gospel today, was described by the St. Petersburg Times as “unrelentingly positive  … nonjudgmental … no condemnation … no damnation” (“God’s Cheerleader,” St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 26, 2006).

By implying that it is wrong to warn publicly of such heresies and mocking those who issue the warnings, Christianity Today has aligned itself with heresy and has exposed its own deep theological compromise.

CONCLUSION

Is Way of Life Literature an attack dog? An attack dog presents the image of tearing someone apart and causing them bodily harm, but that has nothing to do with what Way of Life is about. We have not hurt anyone nor have we even wished hurt upon anyone. We are committed to the precept of Christ, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16).

It is not hurtful to anyone to preach the truth in Christian love and to warn of error. The sinner and false teacher might not like the sting of the truth, but if he would repent he would learn to love it!

It is more accurate to say that Way of Life is like a watch dog. We bark at heresy wherever it lifts its destructive head in these evil last days so that God’s people can be warned and beware and can stay on the straight and narrow path.

The New Testament warns that in the last days evil times will come and false teachers and carnal compromise will increase among professing Christians (2 Timothy 3-4), so the need today is for more and not fewer voices of warning.

Christianity Today should be a watchdog, but it isn’t. CT should be warning boldly of the late but still popular John Paul II’s Mariolatry and Billy Graham’s great ecumenical compromise and Robert Schuller’s Self-Esteemism and Rick Warren’s judge-notism and Joel Osteen’s prosperityism and McClaren’s nothingism. They should be warning about those who are breaking down the walls of separation between truth and error in these last days. They should be warning plainly of worldliness in the churches and giving godly and practical instruction on how to dress modestly. They are too busy, though, having a good chuckle at those who are doing these things.

But, then again, the magazine’s name is “Christianity Today,” and it is actually an accurate reflection of the apostasy that reigns in Christianity today. Its banner should be, “They shall heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears.”

The reason why this generation of “evangelicals” is so ignorant of the important issues facing God’s people in these end times is because their watchmen are blind and dumb.

“His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber” (Isaiah 56:10).

The same spirit of slumber and dumbness is overcoming many fundamental Baptist preachers. Today’s “young fundamentalists” are on the same road as that taken by Christianity Today. Take heed!

I, for one, thank the Lord for many warning ministries and for the plain-spoken preaching that has helped me avoid error through these last 34 years since I have been saved, and I pray that God will use me in the same capacity until He takes me home.

Ruuuuf! 

 ”Is this how to bring grace and savor to a crumbling civilization?

The angriest websites are those belonging to small, but disturbingly visible, fundamentalist Protestant groups outraged that fellow Protestants appear to be holding out a welcoming hand to Catholics or Orthodox Christians.”

Apparently Discernment Web Sites are Attack Dogs? You know things are pretty bad in the world of Evangelical Christianity when one of its leading publications doesnt understand why there has been such a growth in discernment web sites in the last five years, its because Evangelical Christianity has went down the tubes!

What I find very disturbing about this article is it not only paints a very false picture of discernment web sites but it lumps them all together as one and the same. And they are not. no doubt the internet has created a medium where if you have an opinion, a computer, an internet connection and a blog, you can pretty much say what you want.

I have said on this website very clearly, that as Christians we all have to be careful what we say and how we say it in this medium, as when there is complete freedom to say what you want you can let your tongue defile you and this will have a very detrimental affect on your relationship with God. But I have not seen this issue on most discernment web sites, where I have seen it is on the web sites and blogs of those who the discernment web sites write about, now isnt that ironic?

Apparently Christianity Today does not see a problem with so-called Christian web sites using profanity, having morally questionable content on their web sites or blogs, and also promoting very anti-Christian ideologies!

Christianity Today would much better serve Evangelical Christianity by writing some hard hitting articles on those types of web sites. Oh but wait a minute, those are the people that are the future target audience for Christianity Today arent they!

The only reason Discernment web sites are now being highlighted in such unflattering and false generalizations is that those people and groups who have been pointed out on discernment web sites for their blatant apostasy are feeling a bit of Biblical conviction. And we all know there are two ways you can react to conviction: Give into the conviction, confess and repent, or refuse to repent and instead turn around and bare your teeth at those admonishing you!

This web site for one gets no enjoyment or satisfaction at having to post articles concerning the increasingly sorry state of Evangelical Christianity today (no pun intended).  I would like nothing more than to be able to write about the ever increasing healthier state of Evangelical Christianity today (again, no pun intended) but sadly that is not the case.

What is the case is that in the last ten years the vast majority of Evangelical Christianity has dressed itself up in harlets clothes and joined hands with the unsaved world around it. And anyone who see’s and understands what is happening has a Biblical obligation to stand on the proverbial roof top and shout warnings, and just as the warnings the Old Testament Prophets bellowed out, the warnings today can sometimes be no less harsh!

John Baker

Zephaniah 3:18 – “I will gather them that are sorrowful for the solemn assembly who are of thee, to whom the reproach of it was a burden. “

This is a dual prophecy by Zephaniah. It has to do with the children of Israel . . and also with spiritual Zion (which is the church of Jesus Christ of the last day). First of all, he was speaking to Jews – that God was going to gather together the dispersed . . . but He was only going to bring back those who had a broken heart for the sad condition of Israel. . . . . He would remember all who carried the reproach. . . all of the horrible things that were going on in God’s House. Those who carried the burden of it, He said, “I am going to gather you”. He made great promises to these. . .

This prophecy is also to the Church of Jesus Christ in the Last Day. In the Old Testament, the children of Israel were called to their festivals for seven days. On the eighth day – it was called an Solemn Assembly. That was when they met especially together – putting everything aside in focused worship and praise to the Heavenly Father. The scripture says, “On the eighth day you shall have a Solemn Assembly”. This Solemn Assembly is all through the Old Testament representing the congregation that is separated unto God needing to meet the Lord.

This is the Church of Jesus Christ in the Last Day. According to Zephaniah, the House of God in the Last Days is going to be under reproach. The Hebrew word hear means “shame and disgrace”.

There is going to be shame and disgrace in the House of God. We are not talking about the backslidden, liberal modern church. . . . The Lord said on the Judgment Day, He will deal with that Church. We can pray for them, but we are not spend any of our grief on that which is not really the Church.

God is looking for a people who will sorrow and grieve over the reproach that is being fostered on the Church of Jesus Christ in these last days. I am talking about the Church that was born at Pentecost. I am talking about the Church that was born in the teaching of the Apostle Paul and the Apostles. The Church born in the doctrine of the Godhead of Jesus Christ. That born-again Church is under attack. That Church is suffering reproach.

It has been prophesied that in this day of reproach, shame and disgrace, God is going to raise up a holy remnant who are going grieve and weep over this defilement. . .

God will have a remnant that will not sit idly by while all of these things invade the Church. God says, “I will have a people that are not going to be satisfied to go their merry way and just ignore what is happening as Charlatans and money-mad false prophets are coming into the House of God and destroying everything in sight.”

God is going to gather a people who grieve over this. . . . If you truly love the Lord and you love His Church, you can not look honestly at what is happening today (and I am going to name these reproaches this morning). If after you hear what I have to say about this reproach, and you can walk out of this Church and you can say, “I just stand on Matthew 18 ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church’, I am not going to worry about, God has everything under control”.

That is not enough. God uses people. God uses people to perform His work. He does not send angels. Angels weep over it, but God does not use angels to accomplish His purposes. He uses burdened broken-hearted weeping men and women. . . . . Judgment is at the door, Jesus is coming. The Day of the Lord is at hand.

Wake up elders. Wake up pastors. Wake up shepherds. Take a look at the Church. Get the burden. Carry it. Why should we take on the burden of the reproach of the Solemn Assembly? Joel said, “because there is a rotten seed being planted.”

A gospel is being preached that is withering everything that is in sight. Everything that is green and Godly and pure is being withered. The seed is rotten . . . . . there is a famine of hearing the pure Word of the Lord. . . . there is no pasture. The flocks are desolate and hungry. The rivers are drying up. A strange fire is devouring the pastors. Ezekiel says that Shepherds are trampling down the good pasture and eating the best for themselves. What are the shameful disgraceful things that are happening in the Church of Jesus Christ today?

First of all it is the rotten seed that is being preached by covetous Shepherds. This is known as the PROSPERITY GOSPEL.

This is one of the greatest reproaches that the Church of Jesus Christ ever perpetrated since Christ. This perverted gospel is poisoning multitudes – even in China, Africa and all over the world. It is an American gospel invented and spread by rich American evangelists and pastors. Rich!

It alarms me that so many people can hear the tapes and see videos that are coming out of these prosperity conferences and not weep over them. This poison has spread all over the world. Cuba is about to open and they are itching to get in there right now with their Prosperity gospel to tell them, “you have been poor enough now, God wants all Cubans to be rich.”

This past week I was given a video tape recently recorded in Kenneth Copeland’s meetings. I listened to the speakers and I was dumbfounded.

Folks, you read the New Testament, you will find that Paul the Apostle named those who he believed were false prophets. He warned and he named their names. I am telling you now that if you can listen to what I am about to tell you, and not be grieved, then you are blind. You are spiritually blind. You have a hard heart. A heart with a shield on it so that the pure gospel can not penetrate it. The mind has been so saturated with this unbalanced gospel that you can not come to many of them. You can not preach the truth. You can not show them anything else in the scripture because they have a shield over their hearts. Hard hearted.

Some of you will not receive it. If you have been feeding your soul on Copeland or Hagin’s tapes, you are not going to like what you hear. Folks, I am a Shepherd, I’ve been called by God. I made this church a promise. As long as we are in this pulpit, if we saw wolves in sheep’s clothing coming to rob the flock, we would stand up and cry out against it. It is up to you to do something about it.

I sat this week and listened to the speakers at this conference and I was so shocked and hurt. The burden of the Lord came on me. That is why I am preaching this message. Grieve over it.

I quote word for word what was said. All the speakers could hardly get by because all of the people were running up stuffing their pockets with money. The reason they do that is a new doctrine that has just come out that says, “if you want to be blessed, you have to find the most blessed evangelist or pastor you can find because he that has been given much receiveth much, he that has little, even that which he has will be taken from him. If you find the most blessed prosperous preacher and give him money, then you will be blessed. The more blessed he is, if you give you to those that are most blessed. . . “. it is a pyramid scheme. If these men were in the secular world, they would be in jail. Ponzie schemes. Pyramid schemes. The man at the top who appears to be the holiest and speaks the loudest. Hundreds of people were running up until the pockets were bulging. The sinner says, “is this the free gospel? Dollar bills?”

Listen to what was said. The speaker got up and he said, “if a poor widow on welfare hands you $5.00, you better take it. Elijah took the widow’s last meal. You are the anointed one, you deserve it, you take it.”

The same speaker said, “I live in a 8,000 square foot house. I am going to build a bigger one now. One that King Solomon would be proud of. I just paid $15,000 for a dog. You see this gorgeous ring on my finger, I was in Jamaica and just paid $32,000 for it. I want you know that when the people in my town come past my mansion and they see my Rolls Royce sitting in the driveway, they know there is a God in heaven.”

Now, you tell me, that is the gospel? You tell me that you can’t weep over that.

One of the speakers got up and said, “We made a covenant along with Brother Copeland that for the next 365 days none of us are going to suffer for a single day. We will not know a moment of discouragement. We will never be sick or in need. We are going to enjoy all the blessings. We reject all suffering, all pain, all financial problems.” That is fine if you are on the top of the heap.

Here is what grieves me most. This was preached. “The Holy Spirit can’t be poured out upon you until first you are in the money flow. Until you are prospering, the Holy Ghost can not do His work.”

Think of it! How does this affect you? What does it do to your spirit when you see poor people who are living from pay check to pay check and suddenly he says, “run for the money” and people are running wildly everywhere and they say as they run, “they are claiming the riches”.

Then I see people withering like snakes out of their seats onto the floor. I see the evangelist going up and hissing like a snake and people falling everywhere. Folks, what is going on?

The Reproach of the Solemn Assembly! The prophet called them “greedy dogs, ungodly watchmen”. Folks, if you had the heart of God and the burden of the Lord you would be crying out with Isaiah, “they are blind watchmen, ignorant, dumb dogs, sleeping, loving to slumber, yea, greedy dogs which can never have enough.”

“I’ve got 8,000 square foot but I am going to sell it and I’m going to make one now that King Solomon could live in….” Never getting enough.

He said, “Shepherds that can not understand, they all look to their own way, every one for his own gain from his quarter. Jeremiah spared no words. He said, “My people are lost sheep. Their Shepherds have caused them to go astray. ” You say, “Pastor, you have no right to speak so strongly on this subject.” If you think I’m strong, listen to Ezekiel 34:1-10. [read this scripture]

You take $5.00 from the widow and you buy a $15,000 dog. You take the pay check from the widow and the poor and you tell them that they do not have enough faith – that is why they are prospering. You take the very wool from off the back of the sheep. You are not out for souls, you are out for money.

“The Shepherds fed themselves and fed not the flock, therefore O you Shepherds, hear the Word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God, Behold I am against the Shepherds and I will require my flock at their hand and cause them to cease from feeding the flock. Neither shall the Shepherds feed themselves any more, for I will deliver my flock from mouth that they may not be meat for them anymore”.

I am going to deliver my flock from the teeth of these men. My God, help us.

Second, the misrepresentation of the blessed Holy Ghost. This is the worst reproach. It should make us fall on our faces. The way and the manner in which the Holy Ghost is being represented to the whole world.

Sad to say, there is so little discernment left in the church among so many pastors and even church leaders. They don’t even know when the Holy Ghost is being misrepresented or blasphemed. There are thousands of Christians that go to crusades and they see things that they think is the Holy Ghost and they don’t even know what they are sitting under. They are clapping and praising God while a man stands up there blaspheming and misrepresenting the Holy Ghost and they don’t even know it.

Entire Charismatic denominations, including the Assemblies of God, are being torn apart, literally torn apart by pseudo revivals. All kinds of things that are happening – there is something new being introduced almost every week. The leaders don’t whether to embrace it or to curse it. They don’t know what to do. We get letters from hundreds and hundreds of pastors from all over the world. They say, “what is right and what is wrong?” Where are the leaders? Where is somebody to tell us?

Folks, what we are seeing today in what is called so many revivals and things that are happening attributed to the Holy Ghost can not be found in the Scripture. Anything that can not be found in this Book has to be rejected outright. Totally rejected!

I weep when I see these videos that are sent to me from all over the country. Whole groups of bodies jerking out of control, falling on the floor, laughing hysterically, staggering around like drunkards, writhing like snakes, howling like wild animals. We have evangelists that stand and blow on people to knock them down, as if the breath of the Holy Ghost is now incarnated him. Throws his “designer” jacket at people and says that is the “hand of the Lord”.

Now a new Gospel has just hit South America. Folks, it is rude and crude, but I have to tell you. When you get away from the parameters of Scripture, when you get up and say: “Oh, it is a New Thing, God is doing a New Thing? I don’t understand it, it is not in the Scripture, but I don’t want to stand against the Holy Ghost”.

Folks, if it is not in this Book, you must stand up against it. Now the New Thing is that you can’t enter the Kingdom of God except you come as a little babe. The people come with diapers under their outer clothing so that they can defecate and urinate in the meetings. This is the New Thing. Folks, where does it end?

A pastor said, “Is it come down to this, that one day some evangelist stands up and says, ‘I’ve got a revelation from the Lord, it is time to add Mary to your worship”. That is what it is going to come to.

Another evangelist calls himself the Holy Ghost Bartender. He says, “Belly up to the bar and take a drink of the Holy Ghost.” They call that drinking the new wine. I hear ringing in my ears the prophet that said, “The day of the Lord is at hand. Wickedness abounds. Weep between the porch and the altar. Put on sackcloth. Fast and mourn for the backslidding of my people.”

Jesus is about to come. The masses are unreached. When I see Christians belly up to what is called the “Holy Ghost Bar”, staggering like drunkards, Joel’s words come to me loud and clear, “Awake you drunkards and weep all you who drink new wine because the harvest in the field is perished.”

Souls are dying by the thousands, what are you laughing about? Anything of the Holy Ghost has to work anywhere on the face of the earth. You have to be able to take it into the most vile wicked places. You have to take it into poverty nations. You have to take it to the dregs of humanity and it has to work there. It can’t work just in prosperous America. It has to work everywhere on the face of the earth.

I dare these men take this gospel, the laughing gospel into the Balkans now. Go into the refugee camps where wives are crying because they saw their husbands shot. Their daughters have been raped. Their children are hungry. They have lost their homes and go in there and ask them to “belly up to the bar” – the Holy Ghost wants you to laugh. This so-called revival is coming to Madison Square Gardens this summer. Knowing what you know about the Scripture, carrying the grief and the burden for the Solemn Assembly, how can you even conceive of embracing such a doctrine?

Let me tell you who is laughing. The world. The ungodly, the heathen. It has become a spectacle. In a time so close to the coming of the Lord when the Church of Jesus Christ ought to be shut away in a secret closet of prayer. Where it ought to be weeping for the lost. Where it ought to have the desire to forsake all and follow Jesus. Where there should never be a mention of the dollar bill. The American god. The American idolatry. We have the world looking at this foolishness and do you know what they are thinking now – that the Holy Ghost is a Ringmaster. It is a Charismatic Circus.

I don’t care what anybody thinks any more. I don’t care if people drop off the mailing list. I care for their souls and the fact that many are into this blindness. I have a duty before God to stand before the congregation that He has called me to minister to and warn you and tell you that these are reproaches of the Solemn Assembly and the Bible says that you are to be sorrowful about it. The elders are to be sorrowful. The congregation, the Pastors, the Ministers, the Evangelists, We should be praying down these strongholds.

Finally, the reproach of downgrading depravity in the Church. Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil – that put darkness for light and light for darkness. They put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. (Jer. 23:15).

I’ve seen in the prophets a horrible thing. They commit adultery, they walk in lies, they strengthen also the hands of evil doer and non returns from his wickedness.”

I received a letter this past week from an irate Christian woman. She said, “My husband, who is supposed to be a Christian, is a big time gambler, in the millions.” She said, “I’ve been so concerned with the crowd and the danger he is in”. I thought, “I’ll urge him to go to the pastor.”

She said, “Brother Wilkerson, you will not believe what happened. I am so angry, hurt and confused. I sent my multi-million dollar gambling husband to my pastor.”

He said, “I have searched the scriptures from Genesis to Revelation and I can’t find one thing in the scripture against gambling. I see no sin in it, enjoy yourself.” She was dumbfounded, “How can a man of God say such a thing to my husband?”

This is exactly what Jeremiah meant, “the pastors strengthen the hands of evildoers that none doth return from his wickedness.” He explains why they have downgraded depravity in their congregation and why they are calling evil good and good evil and bitter sweet and sweet bitter.

He said, “The prophets have committed adultery and are walking in lies.” Any man that has sin in his life is not going to get up and talk about sin in the camp. He is convicted by his own adultery, his own sin and his own evil mind.

I am not painting every minister in the country with this brush. The majority of ministers are on fire for God. There young ministers so clean and so pure in this wicked day and age. I’ve met many of them and I thank God for them. Even in this City I’ve met some of the most righteous preachers I’ve ever met in my lifetime.

Multitudes of ministers feel just like I feel this morning and they are looking and waiting for voices to expose that which is evil. “If they had stood in my council and had caused my people to heard my words. . if they were speaking what I really have in my heart. If they were speaking the mind of God, they should have turned the people away from their evil ways and from the evil of their doings”

You can tell if a man knows the Lord. God says of the others, “I didn’t send them, I didn’t speak to them. They speak their own mind out of their own imagination. Out of the evil of their own hearts.”

“They speak of vision of their own heart, I sent them not. I have not spoken to them. They say unto them that despise me, ‘the Lord said, you shall have peace’ and they say unto every one that walks after the imagination of his own heart, ‘no evil shall come upon there.’”

The reproach upon the Solemn Assembly should be the greatest sorrow to every one who loves Christ and His Church. This should be the greatest sorrow in our heart – these reproaches on His name and on His Church. Weep over the condition of the Church.

When you take your stand and when you take on the burden of the Lord, by fasting and prayer. Every child of God needs to be praying that everyone in this snare will be delivered. Don’t touch it, don’t go near it, if you go in just out of curiosity it will grab you because it appeals to everything of the flesh.

Until you know how to deal with the flesh with the power of the Holy Ghost, stay away from it. Jeremiah said, “The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is Mighty. He will save, He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will rest in His love. He will joy over thee with singing.”

Why? Because He has found a people who are sorrowful over the things that sorrow His heart. Who carry the burden that He carries, the Reproach of the Solemn Assembly.

This is going to become a “love-trap” . You will hear this: “We love everybody. It doesn’t matter what you preach. It doesn’t matter if you are in prosperity. It doesn’t matter what your gospel is – or anything else. God is love. Let us all just get together and embrace one another.”

How can two walk together unless they be agreed. How can you walk with those when you don’t agree with the unscriptural practices, you can not. That is a love trap. They say, “Don’t condemn anybody. Don’t judge anybody.”

That is not what the Bible says. It says that we are to judge righteous judgement. Reprove and rebuke with all longsuffering. I am not on a soapbox, I am on a Rock. God is trying to save you, Church.

What are the riches of God in Christ Jesus? The peace of God, the wisdom of God, the nearness of Christ, all that is in Christ is ours. . . . .

Folks, beware! Beware! Have I scared you? Are you ready to take on the burden of the Lord. You can’t do that in your own flesh. Get alone with God!

The time has come to call a Solemn Assembly. If you have any of these tapes or books, get them out of your house. Don’t give them away, burn them. If somebody invites you to go to these things, say, “I’m sorry, I don’t want a famine of the Word and I don’t my heart to whither and dry. I want the pure Word of the Lord that will cause me to grow. I don’t want any message that is going to appeal to my flesh or to foster covetousness in my spirit.”

God does supply needs and He is a miracle working God, but He does it only His way. Not by misappropriating and not mis-using the scripture.

Abraham was not looking at things on earth, He was looking for a City whose Builder and Maker is God.

http://www.intotruth.org/dev/reproach.htm

In a sermon preached six months ago and circulated widely on cassette tapes, New York pastor David Wilkerson blasts prosperity doctrines, “holy laughter”, and the flamboyance of Evangelist Benny Hinn.

In Wilkerson’s April 11 sermon titled “Reproach of the Solemn Assembly”, Wilkerson warned his 7,000 member Times Square Church to burn books written by any propagators of these doctrines.  He also told his parishioners to stay away from Evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne’s Good News New York crusades that ran from July 7 to August 14…

In his sermon, Wilkerson leveled blasphemy charges at the prosperity doctrine of Bible Teacher Kenneth Copeland with one mention of Word-Faith preacher Kenneth Hagin Sr.  “It’s an American Gospel invented and spread by rich, American evangelists and pastors,” Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson described how one of the speakers at a Copeland conference bragged about owning a $15,000 dog, a $32,000 ring and was selling his 8,000-square-foot house to buy a larger home. Wilkerson says he takes issue with the notion that “the Holy Spirit cannot be poured out until you first are in the money flow.”

 Wilkerson also attacked manifestations common to modern revivals:  “I weep when I see these videos that are sent to me from all over the country.  Whole groups of bodies jerking out of control, falling on the floor, laughing hysterically, staggering around like drunkards … Anything that cannot be found in Scripture has to be rejected outright  –  totally rejected,” Wilkerson said.

 He (Wilkerson) listed Benny Hinn and Rodney Howard-Browne as examples of those who have perpetrated misrepresentations of the Holy Spirit’s manifestations…”

In a ministry letter dated June 21, 1999 David Wilkerson writes:  “Peter warned that false prophets would arise and through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you…”

Covetousness is “excessive cravings”.  It is a constant reaching for more, for that which is bigger, more luxurious. It is a trap multitudes of Christians are falling into in these wild times. Peter warned us to beware of covetous ministers who would use the word to exploit believers – greedy preachers who would develop a false doctrine of avarice and greed.

Someone sent me a videotape of a convention sponsored by a well-known prosperity preacher. I was so appalled by what was being taught. I could hardly contain myself.  It was blasphemy!  One preacher boasted, “I just spent $15,000 for a dog. The ring on my finger cost me $32,000. 1 live in an 8,000 square-foot house, but I’m going to build a bigger one — one Solomon would be proud of. When the people in my town see my big house and my Rolls Royce in the driveway, they know there is a God in heaven.”

I wanted to weep because the entire time he spoke people were running onstage and stuffing money in his pockets.

Another speaker warned the crowd, “Do not ever give to the poor — give only to the blessed. You will be blessed yourself only as you give to the blessed. Giving to the poor is a waste of your money.”

These greedy men were boasting about their multi-million dollar homes, jewelry, multi-million dollar jet planes, and luxury cars.  One boasted he had ten million dollars. They all claimed to be rich men. The tragedy was, the people loved it! They were being exploited by a perverted gospel.

God’s word says of these rich, greedy preachers, “Their judgment is near, and their destruction will not sleep” (See 2 Peter 2:3).  They have become blatant and arrogant in their greed.  They now preach that you cannot receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit until you prosper.  That’s blasphemy!

Beloved, do not listen to this false gospel. It is satanic. It comes from the heart of men who are light and frivolous, jokesters, greedy for more.  Isaiah the prophet has their number:  “Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter…” (Isaiah 56:11).

(End of quote from David Wilkerson)

 Dear reader, if you are one of the deluded multitudes that sup­port these rich preachers, you need to STOP NOW before you wind up in HELL with them! Contrary to what these MINISTERS OF SATAN say, you will be CURSED if you give money to them!  Proverbs 22:16 promises:

“He that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches AND HE THAT GIVETH TO THE RICH SHALL SURELY COME TO WANT.”

The word WANT found in this text means – EXTREME POVERTY.

So again, contrary to what these MINISTERS OF SATAN say, THE BIBLE says that if you give to the rich, you will come to EXTREME POVERTY!  I have a friend here in Dallas who was deluded by these PROSPERITY DOCTRINES some years ago. He told me:

 ”Carl, I lost my home, my new pick-up truck, my car and almost my family, because I gave my money to the prosperity preachers.”

 Another friend in New England lost his home.  He told me, “I was deceived by the prosperity preachers, and it cost me losing my home.”

 Jesus said:  “Take heed that no man deceive you…And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many…For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect… “  (Matthew 24:4,11,24).

 The following quote comes from Cephas Ministry Newsletter dated September 1999.   They are quoting with the idea of exposing and refuting a TRINITY BROADCASTING NETWORK program of August 22, 1999:

 ”…Paul Crouch made another interesting comment:  “Force God to perform a miracle by planting thousands of dollars and your last dollar … Do you have a sick child?  Don’t go to Jesus in prayer, plant cold cash into TBN, and God will make your child well.”

As David Wilkerson so plainly stated:  “Blasphemy” pure and simple.  Plant cold cash and God will heal your child???  And people are biblically ignorant and gullible enough to send in money by the millions!  The late P. T. Barnum correctly stated:  “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

ANGEL FEATHERS FALL ON BETHEL (Charisma Magazine — August 1999)

“…At Bill Johnson’s church in Redding, California, small little feathers fall from the ceiling and have been doing that for some time.  Bethel has been the sight of some awesome miracles recently.  The feathers started dropping after a Morning Star Prophet (the ministry of Rick Joyner) visited the church for a series of meetings.  Mr. Kelly, a member of Bethel AOG of Redding describes the appearance of feathers:  ‘The feathers thing has been truly amazing.  I believe it started when we had the Prophet Bobby Conners come to our church for a series of meetings.  During ministry time people would see feathers fall from the ceiling and Bobby explained it as a sign of angelic activity… I’m not sure if he was saying they were angel feathers or not.  But ever since he came, we have seen feathers falling from the ceiling … they are very small and delicate, and not many fall, but you can see them from a good distance. God is always surprising us with new things.’”

 Ooooooooh!  Isn’t that spooky!  Angel Feathers!!!  How FLAKEY can it possibly get?  Now we have angel feathers falling in a California Church. Let’s all book our airline tickets and rush on out to the “Angel Feathers Church” and see the latest “MANIFESTATION”!   No, on second thought, maybe we should just send a Western Union Telegram to the pastor:  “Check rafters for pigeons…”   And if the dear pastor finds no pigeons in the rafters, then maybe the “Bird” to be removed from the church is “Prophet Bobby Conners”!? 

GOOD NEWS!  GOOD NEWS!  If you live in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex you don’t have to run off to Toronto, Pensacola, or California to see the latest in FLAKEY MANIFESTATIONS.  We have it ALL right here in the BIBLE BELT!   I am now quoting from the DALLAS MORNING NEWS dated Saturday, October 9,1999.   The headlines in the RELIGION section of the paper read with Big Bold Letters:  “GOLD RUSH.”   Glitter-Like Dust is latest proof of God’s Presence,” Pentecostals say.

There is a large color picture above the headlines with a preach er laying hands on folks and praying. The caption reads:  “The Rev. Bob Shattles at Christ For the Nations Institute.  Gold dust appeared on the minister’s clothing.”  The article that follows tells us:

“As Pentecostal services go, this one seemed typical:  dozens of people ‘slain in the Spirit’, some falling as slowly as trees, others dropping like rag dolls.  Holy laughter punctuated the prayers, and here and there people shook as with a seizure.  The Rev. Bob Shattles … moved among the 800 people gathered at Christ For the Nations Institute in Dallas, laying hands on … praying everywhere.  And then the gold dust came — a scattering of tiny spangles that appeared on Mr. Shattle’s shirt and pants and soon sparkled on the clothes of those nearest to him.  Several people used black ‘prayer cloths’ to brush at him, gently folding the dust inside.  Still glittering, Mr. Shattles told the crowd how, beginning last November, God began sending gold dust to him every time he prays.  ‘I wouldn’t care if it was bird feathers falling on me as long as God’s doing it supernaturally,’ preached Mr. Shattles, a Southern Baptist pastor visiting from Atlanta.  For a year a handful of itinerant Charismatic-Pentecostal preachers such as Mr. Shattles have traveled North America leaving trails of what looks like gold dust wherever they go.  Benny Hinn, the television evangelist who recently moved his headquarters to Dallas, reported on the September 10 broadcast of PRAISE THE LORD that he had experienced gold dust.  Paul Crouch, his co-host and Trinity Network president, described seeing the dust on Mr. Hinn’s face, hands and jacket.

“I think heaven’s door opened a crack and a little of the street dust came down on you,” Mr. Crouch told him before an international audience…

“Despite pastors’ reluctance to test the gold, some of it has made its way under the microscope.  Charisma, a Christian magazine … had a lab test for samples… In each case, the “gold” dust was found to be plastic, or plastic with a trace of aluminum.”  (End of Quote from the Dallas Morning News)

Actually the article is much longer and gets more SICKENING as it continues. At the end of the article there is a photo of a lady holding a piece of white tape between her fingers. The caption reads:

“Linda Devine used a piece of tape to collect flecks of gold dust from the clothing of Rev. Bob Shattles.”

The large bold headlines on the second page of the same article declare:  “HEALINGS REPORTEDLY ACCOMPANY GOLD‑DUST PHENOMENON”

Let me draw your attention to these words from the gold-dust article:

“Some of it has found its way under the microscope. In each case the ‘gold’ dust was found to be plastic, or plastic with a trace of aluminum…”

So it is also true, dear reader, that many specimens of America’s modern-day REVIVAL have come under God’s MICROSCOPE.  In each case the “gold” was found to be plastic, or some other cheap imitation!  Believe me, when GOD’S JUDGMENT FIRE falls, all plastic and cheap imitations will be melted and reduced to NOTHING.  (See 1 Corinthians 3:11-13; Hebrews 10:31; Hebrews 12:26-29)  But worse than simply cheap imitations, we are now living in the days of SATANIC DELUSION! (See 2 Thessalonians 2; 2 Timothy 3:1-7; 2 Timothy 4:1-4; 1 Timothy 4:1)  

Up in Toronto, Canada, we have the “TORONTO BLESSING REVIVAL” going on for the last few years.  Thousands of “Christians” and “Christian leaders” have flocked to Toronto from all over the world.  This “REVIVAL” features people barking like dogs, oinking like pigs, jerking like jerks, and many other strange and sundry MANIFESTATIONS.  John and Carol Arnott are the Pastors of Toronto Airport Vineyard Church where the “TORONTO BLESSING” has “fallen from heaven” (or arisen from Hell?). In his book COUNTERFEIT REVIVAL, Hank Hanegraff gives us this insightful glimpse into the “Toronto Blessing”:

” While the Great Awakening was focused on evangelistic priorities, the Counterfeit Revival is focused on egocentric parties.  John Arnott even asserts that God accused him of being pushy when he tried to preach evangelistic messages.  As I mentioned earlier, the Almighty allegedly admonished Arnott with the words:  “Is it all right with you if I just love on my Church for a while?”

At one Counterfeit Revival party, Arnott recounted one man “got blasted, just totally blasted — there’s no other word — by the Spirit. He fell, he shook, he yelled, he thrashed, he did it all.”   When he returned home, his wife extolled the virtue of the party, enthusing, “I sent this worn-out machine to Toronto and a lover came back home to me.”

Hanegraff continues:  “Rarely is the self-gratifying orientation of Counterfeit Revival more prominent than in Arnett’s book The Father’s Blessing.  In a section titled “Jesus wants a love affair with you”, Arnott describes how Jesus appeared to a woman and fulfilled all her fantasies.  Jesus laughed with the woman as together they ran around with arms stretched out like airplanes; Jesus lay on the ground with the woman and played Legos; then Jesus played with her hair and met her deepest needs and desires.

“Similarly, in one of Carol Arnott’s visions, Jesus brings her a bouquet of lilies after which they ‘run and play and have a wonderful, intimate time together.’  Carol and Jesus then get married.  At the wedding feast Carol said she was standing in an open spot when Jesus walked up and said, ‘Carol, may I have the first dance?’  Carol exuded that cardinals and blue jays ‘picked up my veil, and I danced with Jesus.’”  (Quote from Counterfeit Revival found on page 114 of the book. Documentation comes from John Arnott’s book The Father’5 Blessing, pages 20,26,163-165 and also from an audiotape, John Arnott, Discovery Church, Orlando, Florida, January 29, 1995)

The above so-called “Visions” that these two strange women had of themselves with Jesus is nothing less than pornographic blasphemy!  Maybe we should re-label this “REVIVAL — THE TORONTO CURSE”.

Money-Grubbing, Money-Loving, Rich Preachers — Feathers, Gold Dust, Parties, Animal Noises, Pornographic Revelations of Jesus — “Oh, we are having a REVIVAL”  The TRUTH is that not only are we not having a REVIVAL, the so-called REVIVAL LEADERS don’t even know God, nor the attributes of His HOLINESS.  The “Revival Leaders” tell us, “REVIVAL IS HERE’!”  God tells us through His Prophet Jeremiah,  “…I will destroy My people, since they return not from their ways…”

“Oh, Brother Carl,” someone squeals, “God won’t DESTROY us – people of God, the people of God, the people of God are we!!”  To which God Himself replies: 

 ”Trust ye not in lying words, saying, the Temple of the LORD, the Temple of the LORD, the Temple of the LORD, are these.

For if ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings (REPENT) …Then will I cause you to dwell in this place…Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot profit. 

Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not, And come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations? 

Is this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the LORD.  But go ye now unto My place which was in Shiloh, where I set My name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of My people Israel.

And now because ye have done all these works, saith the LORD, and I spake unto you rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not; and I called you, but ye answered not; Therefore will I do unto this house, which is called by My name, wherein ye trust … as I have done to Shiloh.  And I will cast you out of My sight, as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim.” (Jeremiah 7:4-15).

 In Old Testament days God threatened His own people Israel:   ”I will destroy My people…” (Jeremiah 15:7).  “I will cast you out of My sight. . . (Jeremiah 7:15).

In these New Testament-Last Days, again He thunders:  “I will spew thee out of My mouth.” (Revelation 3:16).

http://www.angelfire.com/zine2/nitelight/

God has graciously revealed Himself to us. He approached Adam and Eve before the fall. It was also He who came looking for them after the fall. Since He breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils, it has been interesting to see how we respond to His Word.The account of Micaiah is no different. There are people revealing, receiving, responding, rejecting and refuting the Word of God…all in this section.

Commentary

v 1
Though Jehoshaphat and Judah are generally presented in more favorable terms than Israel and their counterparts, this narrative starts out in a negative tone. For one, Jehoshaphat has disobeyed the Word of the Lord. A king was not to multiply wives for himself (Deuteronomy 17:17 ), even if for political gain. Secondly, Ahab is not the kind of man the Lord is pleased to see a king align with. He was the most evil king Israel had seen to that point (1 Kings 16:30). One is left to consider, “With an introduction like this, things are not going to end well.”

v 2-3
Despite Ahab’s wickedness, he is able to convince Jehoshaphat to align with him. Certainly, their relation through marriage played a factor. Clearly, they are fellow decendants of Abraham and are brothers, despite their political separation. However, verse 2 places Ahab inducing Jehoshaphat to join him in very close proximity to his lavishing him with sheep and and oxen and surrounding him with people. He is not bribing Jehoshaphat, yet he is clearly winning him over with things. Once Ahab requests military assistance, Jehoshaphat is quick to comply.

v 4-5
For some reason, Jehoshaphat wants to hear from the Lord. He has already declared his allegiance to Ahab, yet, he asks the the king to seek the voice of the Lord. Ahab’s response is to bring 400 prophets before Jehoshaphat. The prophets declare that it is the Lord’s will to fight, for He will give the enemy into the king’s hand.

v 6
We do not know what distinguished these prophets, but Jehoshaphat could tell they were not of the Lord. Perhaps their reputation preceded them, and Jehoshaphat knew of their idolatry. It’s conceivable that their “divine revelation” required ritual or statements foreign to the typical practice. It is even possible that these prophets were calling out to foreign gods, for Ahab certainly had no problem with false dieties (1 Kings 21:25-26 ). By whatever means, Jehoshaphat could tell these were not genuine prophets of the Lord. His question, “Is there not yet a prophet of the Lord here that we may inquire of Him?” speaks volumes. It is not only telling that the 400-man throng did not include a prophet of the Lord, Jehoshaphat’s question even wonders if one can be found. Ahab has driven the prophets of the Lord out of his presence. Not only would Jehoshaphat like to hear from a prophet, we wonders if one can even be found.

v 7-8
Ahab tells Jehoshaphat that one such prophet does remain. However, this prophet is not within the 400, for Ahab does not like him. In fact, Ahab states that he hates this prophet for he never says anything good about Ahab. One of the most evil kings in the history of Israel is offended when a prophet of the Lord does not speak well of him. Rather than hear truth, Ahab preferred to have his ears tickled. We have no reason be believe Micaiah had been rude or malicious. He simply spoke the Word of the Lord.It is not that Ahab has merely heard of this prophet, but he knows directly who he is. For one, this prophet had spoken in his preference multiple times, thus Ahab declares he “never prophesies good concerning me.” He also knows the prophets name is Micaiah, son of Imla. Jehoshaphat gently rebukes Ahab’s attitude, telling him that he should not say such things. Yet, to appease Jehoshaphat, Ahab dispatches an officer to retrieve Micaiah.

v 9-11
As the officer pages Micaiah, we are given a description of the scene. Micaiah already had a “strained” relationship with Ahab, but these three verses point out other issues that could cause some intimidation.

1. Royal Pageantry –Ahab and Jehoshaphat were each seated on their thrones. As kings over separate dominions, they would find it necessary to display their splendor before one another, as well as any on lookers. Therefore, these kings sit upon their thrones in full royal garments.

2. Room for Prophets–How could 400 prophets gather before these kings? The author explains that Ahab has constructed a makeshift throne room in the threshing floor at the entrance of the gate of Samaria. The gate would be considered a place of prominence, while the threshing floor would provide a large expanse. Therefore, all 400 prophets could stand before these kings, leaving room for “entertaining displays.”

3. Blasphemous Display–Zedekiah creates an impromptu visual aid for the kings. When the text says that he fashioned for himself iron horns, we should assume this means the horns were positioned on his head. Therefore, Zedekiah is using a prop to transform himself into a bull, goring the Arameans. Surely, Zedekiah would look foolish as he swerves around on the threshing floor, pretending to gore the enemy. But his display goes beyond stupid and is actually blasphemous. He claims the inspiration for this illustration is from the Lord, for God has told him that Ahab will gore the Arameans. Sadly, the other prophets join in as well, declaring that the Lord will give Ramoth-gilead into the hands of the king. v 12-15
As the messanger approaches Micaiah, he informs him of their uniform testimony to the king. He encourages Micaiah to “get onboard,” sharing a favorable message like the others.

v 28-32
While Ahab did not appreciate Micaiah’s counsel, and chose to enter into battle, he did take some precaution. Ahab eschewed his royal robes, disguising himself as a charioteer. Though he many not have believed this disguise would hide him from God, he may have thought he could atleast thwart God’s desired process. If the enemy did not know he was king, perhaps he would survive unscathed.

Yet, it is also intersting to note Jehoshaphat’s response. While Ahab largely disregarded Micaiah’s prophecy, Jehoshaphat appears to completely ignore it. Clearly, Jehoshaphat is merely a participant in a battle instigated by the Israeli king. What would be the benefit of wearing his robes and presenting himself in royal splendor? Surely Jehoshaphat saw his folly when the Aramean army began to pursue him.

We are told a two part procedure that led to Jehoshaphat’s escape. First, he cried out. It is possible that his cry was overheard by the pursuing army and the realized he was not Ahab. However, the text seems to indicate that he may have cried out to the Lord, Who then responded by diverting the army away from him. God graciously spared Jehoshaphat’s life. At this point, it becomes clear to the Arameans that Jehoshaphat is not Ahab, and they quit their pursuit.

v 33-19:1
These verses encapsulate God’s sovereign work. Each step which Ahab took, in an attemp to thwart God’s plan, was actually a meticulous fulfillment of every minute detail. Consider the following:

God predetermines that Ahab should die in battle. (2 Chron 18:19).
The Lord predetermines that false prophets will encourage this battle (2 Chron 18:21).
Ahab enters into the battle inconito, yet God uses a “random arrow” to strike Ahab (2 Chron 18:29; 18:33). But there’s more…

Exposition–”Hear the Word of the Lord”

We live in a world of “information overload.” It is possible to hear from a host of sources, regarding an infinite number of topics, all within a few clicks of a mouse. Of course, with multiplied sources comes multiplied, and often conflicting, messages. How do we know who to trust or who speaks rightly? Of course, the church is not immune to this problem. A quick glance across the denominational landscape will show churches with varying opinions on baptism, eschatology and ecclesiology. But once you enter the doors of a particular church, the multiple perspectives do not end. As each member of the Body comes together, they appear to bring their own unique perspective and points of emphasis. Though the church has the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints, there is a variety of opinion regarding the practice of that faith.

Clearly, the church must be discerning and know which voice to hear. We must acknowledge that our own hearts are deceitful and wicked. Left to ourselves, we are incapable of discerning the truth from a lie.

Micaiah stood before Ahab and declared his impending death. How should Ahab have recognized that Micaiah was speaking the truth?  

Micaiah was outnumbered 400 to 1. In our modern era, politicians rarely lead by conviction, but instead lead according to popularity polls. If the voters are satisfied, then the elected official procedes with his course. However, if the constituents shift, so should the politician. Similarly, many in the church stick their finger in the air, to test where the winds may be blowing. They determine truth by the size of the seminar or book tour. However, Micaiah, the solitary prophet, was the only true voice.

Micaiah was not viewed as nice. Micaiah shows a steadfast devotion to the Lord (v 18:13), yet Ahab perceives that as meanness (v 7). In fact, the deceit in Ahab’s heart causes him to despise Micaiah. This is understandable, for Micaiah was speaking of the Light and Ahab’s deeds were of darkness (John 3:19 ). Ahab preferred the darkness, for then his evil deeds could remain hidden. He perceived Micaiah’s loving work of revealing truth to be repulsive and rude. Left to our flesh, we are just as susceptible to deception. Therefore, we must gauge the integrity of the message according to a different standard. If the number, nor the perceived attitude of the speaker may be our litmus, God certainly offers us another standard.

What it can’t be.–Ahab should have known that his false prophets were of no value. Though they claimed to speak the word of the Lord (18:10-11), there words were empty and destructive. This should not be of a surprise. For why would we consider men who do not commune with God to be the voice of God? They cannot accept nor understand the things of the Spirit of God, for they are left in their natural state. How foolish of us to seek the truth from those who do not know the Truth. What it is.–Contrary to the natural man, the Sprit can direct us toward truth. Micaiah is identified as “a prophet of the Lord” (18:6-7). But how can we know that his words are accurate in this regard?

Micaiah’s message was trustworthy because of its close proximity to the word of the Lord. Micaiah was not sharing his own thoughts or opinions, nor was he seeking the wisdom of other men. Micaiah had spoken with God and was simply sharing God’s message. This caused Micaiah to have an unshaken conviction to the word, despite the negative reaction (18:24, 27).

But God does not speak through prophets today, but through the His Son (Hebrews 1:1). Paul instructs Timothy that the way to spot false teachers and imposters is through the Word of God (2 Timothy 3:13-17). The Bereans were not dazzled by Paul’s resume, but checked his message against the Scriptures (Acts 17:10-12 ). This commitment to the word of the Lord is what allowed Micaiah to declare, “If you indeed return safely, the Lord has not spoken by me” (18:27). Micaiah believed his words could be tested. If Ahab returned, clearly Micaiah was mistaken. He was not relying on opinion or a hunch, he was sure that the word of the Lord cannot fail. Ahab did not share this same conviction to the word of the Lord……and he was proven wrong.

Conclusion There are many voices that compete for our ears today. We cannot assume the majority opinion is always right, nor is the minority opinion a guarantee of accuracy. Age is no promise either. Any of us can be prone to wanting our ears tickled (2 Timothy 4:3-4). Like Jehoshaphat, there is good in the believer (2 Corinthians 5:21 ), yet he is still prone to deception. The sacred writings are what leads a person to salvation in Christ (2 Timothy 3:15-17), how could they ever lead us astray?When we stray from the Word, we stray from the message of the Cross. When we stray from the message of the cross, we stray from Christ. When we stray from Christ, we stray from the Truth. This is how we search our hearts.This is how we test the validity of the message.

http://cariboucommentary.blogspot.com/2007/05/2-chronicles-181-194.html