I was aware of and had even begun reading Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, but then I saw the promotional material around it and it’s absolutely shocking.
On the dust jacket inside cover it says, “The Greatest Show on Earth comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is menacing as ever before. In American schools, and in schools around the world, insidious attempts are made to undermine the status of science in the classroom. Dawkins wields a devastating argument against this ignorance”[1] In other words, as Dawkins has said elsewhere, if you don’t believe in evolution “that person is ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.”[2]
The promotional piece also says,
“In 1859 Charles Darwin’s masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook society to its core. Darwin was only too aware of the storm his theory of evolution would provoke. But he surely would have raised an incredulous eyebrow at the controversy still raging a century and a half later. Evolution is accepted as scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question it’s veracity. Now the author of the iconic work The God Delusion takes them to task.”[3]
How does Dawkins take people to task in his latest work, The Greatest Show On Earth? His presupposition is that Darwinian evolution based on common descent is an established fact as reliable as the law of gravity. In other words, you can know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you are the product of common descent that you came from monkeys. Well, even worse maybe you came from a turnip or a banana. Surely Dawkins would not go that far would he? Actually he does:
Evolution is a fact: beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt, evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of the chimpanzees, some what more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips…continue the list as long a desired.[4]
Let’s think about that for just a second…here’s Dawkins is suggesting that you and are the distant cousins of bananas the turnips if you don’t believe that your “ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.”[5] He is saying Darwinian evolution is a fact. He is saying that inequality within in the races is an established fact. In other words, he is saying that there is a degradation of races.
Remember he’s not just touting evolution in general, he’s touting Darwinian evolution. He must be as aware as anyone else that Darwinian evolution postulates survival of favored races in the struggle for survival. This was the subtitle of Darwin’s magnum opus, The Origin of the Species. Dawkins must know that Darwinian evolution postulates that:
The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world. [6]
So Dawkins must understand that for evolution to succeed it is as crucial that the unfit die as that fittest survive! If the fittest give up survival for the sake of allowing the unfit to survive, the unfit would infect the fit with their unfit genes, rendering evolution inoperable. So Dawkins is the latest militant purveyor of inequality and to believe in the biblical Christian position of equality is “ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.”[7]
No doubt since he is taunting Darwinian evolution, he is well aware of Darwin’s statement in his book The Descent of Man under the subheading “Difference in the Mental Powers of the Two Sexes,” he attempts to persuade his followers that “the chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn [sic] by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.”[8] In this sense, he is well aware of sexism.
Yet, here we are in the twenty-first he’s touting Darwinian evolution and saying that any theologian who doesn’t buy it or believe it is ignorant. He saying that there is an insidious attempt afoot to undermine evolution and that fact of the matter is nobody is trying to destroy evolution.
Evolution is crumbling! We now, Mr. Dawkins, live in an age of scientific enlightenment. We now know that a fertilized human egg is not merely a microscopic blob of Jell-O. It is among the most complex, ordered structures in the entire known universe. So we’re no longer in 19th century science, Richard Dawkins, we’re in the twenty-first century and because we are evolution is crumbling under the weight of evidence.
There is no real evidence for Dawkins’s ape to man icon. That’s a dogmatic declaration not a defensible argument. The icon has become the argument. Again we should be able to question that which does not appear in the book of nature; which is the odd predilection of people like Charles Darwin and his new rottweiler Richard Dawkins.
You know of course that Darwin’s has had a lot of dogs. He’s had his bulldog Thomas Huxley who said,
No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still the less superior, of the white man…It is simply incredible [to think] that…he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites[9]
In other words, Huxley carried on the racist idea of inequality suggested by his mentor, Charles Darwin. Now in the twenty-first century, you could maybe give a pass to Thomas Huxley he was a 19th century guy, but Dawkins in the twenty-first century is carrying on the legacy and now wants to believe that nothing produced everything but that we evolved from turnips.
It’s simply amazing to me but I’ve said this numerous times pagan are going to exercise their job description, their going to march lock step unthinkingly into the abyss. That’s not the problem. The problem is Christians who do not have an answer to Richard Dawkins. They don’t have an answer when Richard Dawkins suggest that a woman reproduces the evolutionary process or that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” This is basically the idea that the emerging embryo goes through all the evolutionary processes. Here’s how Dawkins’s puts it,
That irascible genius J.B.S. Haldane, who did so much else besides being one of the three leading architects of neo-Darwinianism, was once challenged by a lady after a public lecture. It’s a word-of-mouth anecdote, and John Maynard Smith is sadly not available to confirm the exact words, but this is approximately how the exchange went:
Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling.
But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months.[10]
And he calls “that irascible genius”? I mean this is a plain old, simple category mistake. First, in Dawkins view life is not frontloaded to become all that life is it has to gain information along the way over billions of years. Conversely, a conceptus or zygote contains chemical instructions that fill more than 500, 000 printed pages. In other words, it is front loaded every aspect of the developing embryo from height to hair color is included in that genetic library.
So this is a plain old category mistake, but Dawkins brings this out and calls it “irascible genius” and the gullible buy it! And Dawkins gets millions of dollars, an advance on a book, puts it out, and he says there you have it an iron clad case for evolution against Intelligent Design.
Now if you watched the movie Expelled with Ben Stein, you see that Dawkins does possibly believe in Intelligent Design of some sort, to see this is priceless, first he sweats and then stumbles and there is this exchange between Ben Stein and Richard Dawkins
Ben Stein: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution?
Richard Dawkins: It could come about in the following way: It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded on to, perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that, if you look at the details of bio-chemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.
Stein: Wait a second! Richard Dawkins thought that Intelligent Design might be a legitimate pursuit?
Dawkins: And that designer could very well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence itself would have to had have come about by some explicable or ultimately explicable process. It couldn’t have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That’s the point.[11]
Dawkins doesn’t have an answer for the most basic questions, yet he provides an iron clad case for evolution.
Well, again pagans are going to exercise their job description they’re going to be pagans. The question is: are you as a Christian going to exercise your job description? Can you take the very weak arguments that militantly portrayed, deceptively communicated, with great pomp and circumstance and use them as springboard or opportunity for sharing truth? Not the caricature of Christianity but truth and then do this with gentleness and respect. If you can, be on the vanguard of doing something totally significant in the twenty-first century. That is, you can be announcing the demise of evolution, and demonstrating that it is no longer tenable in an age of scientific enlightenment.
Then we can get back to the basics, and that is Richard Dawkins and all else who don’t believe in the design revolution are sitting in a very dark room. They may have very good eyesight, but the room is dark, and they can’t see.
We have many resources on this topic such my book, Fatal Flaws and the DVD I mentioned earlier Expelled and much, much more. Check these all out at our Website of www.equip.org or call us at 1-888-7000-0274.
________________________________________
[1] Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2009). Inside front cover of the dust jacket to the hardcover edition.
[2] Dawkins, Richard (1989), “Book Review” (of Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey’s Blueprint), The New York Times, section 7, April 9. This is also quoted by Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, (Downers Grove: IVP, 1993), p. 9.
[3] Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2009). Inside front cover of the dust jacket to the hardcover edition.
[4] Ibid., 8.
[5] Dawkins, Richard (1989), “Book Review” (of Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey’s Blueprint), The New York Times, section 7, April 9. This is also quoted by Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, (Downers Grove: IVP, 1993), p. 9.
[6] Letter from Charles Darwin to W. Graham, 3 July 1881, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1, 316, quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), 343, quoted in Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism, public school edition (San Diego: C.L.P. Publishers 1981), 179; emphasis added.
[7] Dawkins, Richard (1989), “Book Review” (of Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey’s Blueprint), The New York Times, section 7, April 9. This is also quoted by Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, (Downers Grove: IVP, 1993), p. 9.
[8] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, in Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World, vol. 49, Darwin (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 566.
[9] Thomas H. Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews (New York, Appleton, 1871), 20, quoted in Henry Morris, The Long War Against God (Grand Rapids, Mich, Baker, 1989), 60.
[10] Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, 211.
[11] Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed with Ben Stein (Vivendi Entertianment/Premise Media Corporation, 2008).
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Is the Bible the Words of Men or God?
I was thinking the other day, just how significant it is for Christians to be able to demonstrate that the Bible is divine, rather than merely human in origin. More and more versions and translations of the Bible are out but few and fewer people are able to demonstrate that these are the words of God and not the words of men.
An article in USA Today on October 19, 2009 caught my attention. It’s about Robert Crumb, who is Underground Comic’s hero. He created his very own version of the Genesis in pen and ink for the very first time. This had a big spread in USA Today, and he is interviewed and said, “To take this as a sacred text, or the word of God or something to live by, is kind of crazy.”[1]
So here’s a guy who spent four years translating the book of Genesis, 50 chapters into comic book style, illustrated with pictures. When he gets all done with the process, he says; “I don’t believe a word of it. I don't believe it's the Word of God. I believe it's the words of men,” and by the way he also says; “So much of it makes no sense.”[2]
Now the problem is not with Robert Crumb saying what he said. The problem is that Christians have not been adept at demonstrating that the Bible demonstrates itself to be divine as opposed to merely human in origin.
I’ve written about this in various forums such as The Legacy Study Bible and Doctrines Flip Chart and for the cliff notes version you can go to The Complete Bible Answer Book. I’ve given them to you in such a way that you can memorize the information. All these resources give you what we believe and why we believe it.
Now one of things we believe is that these are the words of God, not because we have blind faith, but rather because we have faith in evidence. In other words, we can demonstrate this to be the case. So the Christian faith is never irrational. It’s based on revelation, but it’s not irrational. We say not that there is a victory of reason in Christianity, but rather a victory of revelation which informs reason.
If all you have is reason, you’re like a man with perfect 20/20 eyesight sitting in a dark room. Your eyesight is laser sharp, but if you’re in a room pervaded by darkness, no matter how good your eyesight is, you can’t see. Revelation informs reason and God has givens us revelation not only through nature but also through sixty-six books of knowledge. In others words the Bible, the first of which is the book of Genesis.
The problem is that if you’re illustrating the book of Genesis, and you start with the wrong presupposition instead of that God is condescending to speak to us in language that we can attain to you might very well get the wrong impression. Why would God say to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” If God knows everything, He would know where they are. Now if you don’t understand that the language of the Bible condescends to our corrupt fallen nature and speaks to us in language that we can attain to, then you’re going to get the wrong impression of what Genesis is communicating.
You have to know the art and science of Biblical interpretation. Again, these principles are available in various forums such as The Complete Bible Answer Book or Doctrines Flip Chart. Wherever you get the information, if you’re a believer make it your passion to reach not repel a Robert Crumb. Don’t say, “What a terrible guy he is, how could he say such things.” Pagans are going to exercise their job description in not believing the truth of God. A Christian’s job description is to be a well informed ambassador for Christ.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Illustrator R. Crumb is Drawn to God with his latest Project” by David Cotton, USA Today, 10/19/09 (http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Illustrator+R.+Crumb+is+drawn+to+God+with+his+latest+project+-+USATODAY.com&expire=&urlID=412925602&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Flife%2Fbooks%2Fnews%2F2009-10-18-r-crumb-old-testament_N.htm&partnerID=1663)
[2] Ibid.
An article in USA Today on October 19, 2009 caught my attention. It’s about Robert Crumb, who is Underground Comic’s hero. He created his very own version of the Genesis in pen and ink for the very first time. This had a big spread in USA Today, and he is interviewed and said, “To take this as a sacred text, or the word of God or something to live by, is kind of crazy.”[1]
So here’s a guy who spent four years translating the book of Genesis, 50 chapters into comic book style, illustrated with pictures. When he gets all done with the process, he says; “I don’t believe a word of it. I don't believe it's the Word of God. I believe it's the words of men,” and by the way he also says; “So much of it makes no sense.”[2]
Now the problem is not with Robert Crumb saying what he said. The problem is that Christians have not been adept at demonstrating that the Bible demonstrates itself to be divine as opposed to merely human in origin.
I’ve written about this in various forums such as The Legacy Study Bible and Doctrines Flip Chart and for the cliff notes version you can go to The Complete Bible Answer Book. I’ve given them to you in such a way that you can memorize the information. All these resources give you what we believe and why we believe it.
Now one of things we believe is that these are the words of God, not because we have blind faith, but rather because we have faith in evidence. In other words, we can demonstrate this to be the case. So the Christian faith is never irrational. It’s based on revelation, but it’s not irrational. We say not that there is a victory of reason in Christianity, but rather a victory of revelation which informs reason.
If all you have is reason, you’re like a man with perfect 20/20 eyesight sitting in a dark room. Your eyesight is laser sharp, but if you’re in a room pervaded by darkness, no matter how good your eyesight is, you can’t see. Revelation informs reason and God has givens us revelation not only through nature but also through sixty-six books of knowledge. In others words the Bible, the first of which is the book of Genesis.
The problem is that if you’re illustrating the book of Genesis, and you start with the wrong presupposition instead of that God is condescending to speak to us in language that we can attain to you might very well get the wrong impression. Why would God say to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” If God knows everything, He would know where they are. Now if you don’t understand that the language of the Bible condescends to our corrupt fallen nature and speaks to us in language that we can attain to, then you’re going to get the wrong impression of what Genesis is communicating.
You have to know the art and science of Biblical interpretation. Again, these principles are available in various forums such as The Complete Bible Answer Book or Doctrines Flip Chart. Wherever you get the information, if you’re a believer make it your passion to reach not repel a Robert Crumb. Don’t say, “What a terrible guy he is, how could he say such things.” Pagans are going to exercise their job description in not believing the truth of God. A Christian’s job description is to be a well informed ambassador for Christ.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Illustrator R. Crumb is Drawn to God with his latest Project” by David Cotton, USA Today, 10/19/09 (http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Illustrator+R.+Crumb+is+drawn+to+God+with+his+latest+project+-+USATODAY.com&expire=&urlID=412925602&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Flife%2Fbooks%2Fnews%2F2009-10-18-r-crumb-old-testament_N.htm&partnerID=1663)
[2] Ibid.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Discerning Myths that Abound
October 12, 2009 was Columbus Day, and its kind of ironic for me because just the other day, maybe about a week ago, my 10 year old daughter came up to me and told me the most incredible story. She told me the story of Christopher Columbus and his raw courage in the face of mutinous sailors who were in mortal terror of sailing over the edge of a flat earth. I thought to myself, my goodness, for a 10 year old, you’re waxing eloquent on Christopher Columbus. So I asked her; “Where in the world did you get that type of information?“ “Social studies,” she replied, “my teacher taught it to me.” And I thought, how incredibly bizarre that a teacher in an age of enlightenment would teach such a thing?
The truth of the matter is for the first 15 centuries of the Christian era, unanimous scholarly opinion pronounced the earth spherically. In other words, everybody knew that the earth was not flat. In fact, the whole notion of the flat earth was concocted as a way to discredit Christianity. They tried to point out even after Christopher Columbus had established the world to be round in 1492 that the church by its highest authority continued to erect theological barriers to this geographical truth. In other words, the church was bent on teaching flat earth even though Christopher Columbus had demonstrated that the earth was a sphere. So this is a story or myth concocted to discredit Christianity, and yet the irony of ironies is that even in Christian schools, Christian school teachers are teaching young Christian students this myth. Again, this is a complete myth, and the ancient Greek philosophers knew that the earth was spherical.[1]
So one of things that you as a Christian need to do, and this is one of the purpose of the Bible Answer Man show, is to learn to put on your bologna detector, because this ministry and the Bible Answer Man broadcast is all about discernment, learning how to exercise your God given discernment skills. You have to discern between wheat and chaff and heat and light. There are all kinds of myths circulating in the secular and spiritual world and you have to know the difference between truth and error. Why? Because we are told in the Word of God to put on the belt of truth (Eph. 6:14), it is the belt of truth that holds up the Christian’s armor. When that buckle breaks the cloak that protects you against the devil’s schemes simply falls from your shoulders and crumples to the ground.
We live in an age in which lies travel halfway around the world before truth has had a chance to put its boots on. An Internet lie flies around the world in micro seconds, so it is ever more important for you as the believer to distinguish truth from error because, if not we’re going to fall for all kinds of things.
We’ve got a guy coming to Charlotte; his name is Bishop John Shelby Spong. He is a former bishop in New Jersey and he’s writing all kinds of books, and in his books, he is making the following declarations:
• There is no supernatural God who lives above the sky or beyond the universe.
• There is no parental deity watching over us from whom we can expect help.
• The idea of Jesus in perpetual orbit doesn’t mean much to me.[2]
In other words, this guy is a sort of fundamentalist on the left. He thinks that when the Bible says, “Jesus ascended into Heaven” that He’s traveling out of our little universe now and struggling with oxygen deprivation. He doesn’t understand that Jesus as the God-Man transcends time and space. In other words, he’s not particularly sophisticated, but he’s writing and speaking under the guise of sophistication that we now live in a scientific world and there is no need or room for the supernatural. He goes on to say,
There are no record books, and no heavenly judge. Heaven and hell are human constructs designed to make fair in some ultimate way the unfairness of life. [3]
Well, if you look at his background you get some kind of an indication of where he’s coming from, and we can all commiserate with him. Spong tells the story that he lost his father—a man given to alcoholism, gambling, cigarette smoking and profanity—and yet “when callers coming to our home to express their regrets,” they told him “what a fine Christian man” his father was, and that he “should be comforted by the conviction that he was to receive his reward.” Spong says, “The words simply did not add up. If religion was designed to comfort me, it failed. It brought me, rather, into intense emotional conflict."[4]
So he uses this experience as a way of getting rid of the supernatural. There wasn’t any great relief in the story he was being told, therefore, the biblical story from his perspective can’t be true. He’s now going around the country asking disaffected Christians to consider his crucial questions such as “What will happen if our suspicions are validated and this defense shield called religion loses its credibility?” In other words, we live an age of scientific enlightenment, religion doesn’t work any more, it’s the belief of obscurantist. So can we still survive even though we have demonstrated that God does not exist? He goes on “What will happen if the external supernatural God of religion dies? Can the human psyche bear the experience of self-consciousness without the narcotic of supernaturalism?"[5]
This is the idea Spong has of God, who was a bishop in an Episcopal church by the way. Spong thinks that Christianity is crutch for weak minded people. It’s a narcotic that we take to feel good. But all of Spong thinking is a delusion and it’s in this age when God is said to be a delusion, which by the way Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion is also coming to Charlotte. That we have to demonstrate—not as an apologetic issue but as the apologetic issue—that the universe didn’t spring out of nothing, but that God created the universe. This should be obvious to every thinking person anywhere that a cause requires an effect equal to or greater than itself. You don’t have a cosmos without a cosmos creator. This wouldn’t make any sense. Spong and Dawkins are 19th century thinkers living in the 21st century—that’s the problem—and they act like the Christians are a 19th century thinkers living in the 21st century, nothing could be farther from the truth.
We have all the evidence and support we could possibly want for a biblical worldview, and John Shelby Spong is headed in the wrong direction. Should I feel sorry for him? Well of course, he’s 78 years old and he’s facing his own mortality. Of course I feel sorry for him. But what I don’t feel sorry for is the fact that he is a man with premeditation leading all kinds of people into a ditch.
It was Spong who said all of the following: no biblical scholar thinks that John wrote the fourth gospel;[6] John’s Gospel does not contain “a single word…actually spoken by the historic Jesus;”[7] the Gospels presented a Jesus who is sometimes as “narrow minded, vindictive and even hypocritical;”[8] no reputable scholar accepts the virgin birth;[9] the miraculous works of Jesus were myths;[10] Paul was a “self loathing” “rigidly controlled gay male;”[11] the Bible is full of errors and contradictions;[12] and anyone who holds that the Bible is without error is ignorant, culturally backwards[13], fearful and insecure people who are not serious Christians who don’t even read the Bible they pretend to defend.[14] Now I’ll give him that last point that he is generally right that Bibles are gathering dust, but what is not gathering dust is those that discredit the Bible.
We live in an age of professors gone wild: Daniel Dennet, Christopher Hitchens, Bart Ehrman, Richard Dawkins, and Bishop John Shelby Spong. They are touring the country, they are on television shows, and radio shows.
Our local newspaper talks about Spong’s venues as being overpopulated by people, and that everyone wants to come hear him talk, and they so intrigued. They don’t know that he’s talking nonsense. Why? They don’t know truth.
At CRI and the Bible Answer Man we have a tag line, “Because Truth Matters.” We do what we do “Because Truth Matters.” We defend the reliability of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus Christ “Because Truth Matters.” We demonstrate that the universe is not eternal and that it did not spring out of nothing “Because Truth Matters.” We say how one views their origins will ultimately determine how they live their life, that evolution is the great cosmogenic myth of the twenty-first century, and we ask people to live with eternity in mind “Because Truth Matters.”
John Shelby Spong is dead wrong when he says, “Heaven and hell are human constructs”[15]. The ancients knew better. Without a Heaven and Hell, Hitler dies in the comforting arms of his mistress without any eternal consequences. The ancients knew better than to think such rubbish. Ideas have life and death consequences; consequences not just for time but for eternity.
I’ve addressed a lot here on history and John Shelby Spong. I would recommend three resources, first on the Bible and theology I recommend my Complete Bible Answer Book. On history I recommend the book Truth and Transformation by Dr. Vishal Mangalwadi and his CD series Must the Sun Set on the West. All available at our Website of www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-7000-0274.
________________________________________
[1] See Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians by Jeffrey Burton Russell (Praeger Paperback 1997)
[2] “Controversial Bishop Returning Home,” by Miriam Durkin, The Charlotte Observer, 10/9/09, More Information Section of Web article, under What Spong Thinks (http://www.charlotteobserver.com/479/story/993680.html).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. Main article
[5] Ibid. Main article
[6] Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, John Shelby Spong (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 193.
[7] Ibid. 191.
[8] Ibid. 21.
[9] Ibid. 215.
[10] Ibid. 129-33, 143-44
[11] Ibid. 109-126.
[12] Ibid, 16-23.
[13] Ibid.9.
[14] Ibid., 3-5, 79, 133, 217
[15] “Controversial Bishop Returning Home,” by Miriam Durkin, The Charlotte Observer, 10/9/09, More Information Section of Web article, under What Spong Thinks (http://www.charlotteobserver.com/479/story/993680.html)
The truth of the matter is for the first 15 centuries of the Christian era, unanimous scholarly opinion pronounced the earth spherically. In other words, everybody knew that the earth was not flat. In fact, the whole notion of the flat earth was concocted as a way to discredit Christianity. They tried to point out even after Christopher Columbus had established the world to be round in 1492 that the church by its highest authority continued to erect theological barriers to this geographical truth. In other words, the church was bent on teaching flat earth even though Christopher Columbus had demonstrated that the earth was a sphere. So this is a story or myth concocted to discredit Christianity, and yet the irony of ironies is that even in Christian schools, Christian school teachers are teaching young Christian students this myth. Again, this is a complete myth, and the ancient Greek philosophers knew that the earth was spherical.[1]
So one of things that you as a Christian need to do, and this is one of the purpose of the Bible Answer Man show, is to learn to put on your bologna detector, because this ministry and the Bible Answer Man broadcast is all about discernment, learning how to exercise your God given discernment skills. You have to discern between wheat and chaff and heat and light. There are all kinds of myths circulating in the secular and spiritual world and you have to know the difference between truth and error. Why? Because we are told in the Word of God to put on the belt of truth (Eph. 6:14), it is the belt of truth that holds up the Christian’s armor. When that buckle breaks the cloak that protects you against the devil’s schemes simply falls from your shoulders and crumples to the ground.
We live in an age in which lies travel halfway around the world before truth has had a chance to put its boots on. An Internet lie flies around the world in micro seconds, so it is ever more important for you as the believer to distinguish truth from error because, if not we’re going to fall for all kinds of things.
We’ve got a guy coming to Charlotte; his name is Bishop John Shelby Spong. He is a former bishop in New Jersey and he’s writing all kinds of books, and in his books, he is making the following declarations:
• There is no supernatural God who lives above the sky or beyond the universe.
• There is no parental deity watching over us from whom we can expect help.
• The idea of Jesus in perpetual orbit doesn’t mean much to me.[2]
In other words, this guy is a sort of fundamentalist on the left. He thinks that when the Bible says, “Jesus ascended into Heaven” that He’s traveling out of our little universe now and struggling with oxygen deprivation. He doesn’t understand that Jesus as the God-Man transcends time and space. In other words, he’s not particularly sophisticated, but he’s writing and speaking under the guise of sophistication that we now live in a scientific world and there is no need or room for the supernatural. He goes on to say,
There are no record books, and no heavenly judge. Heaven and hell are human constructs designed to make fair in some ultimate way the unfairness of life. [3]
Well, if you look at his background you get some kind of an indication of where he’s coming from, and we can all commiserate with him. Spong tells the story that he lost his father—a man given to alcoholism, gambling, cigarette smoking and profanity—and yet “when callers coming to our home to express their regrets,” they told him “what a fine Christian man” his father was, and that he “should be comforted by the conviction that he was to receive his reward.” Spong says, “The words simply did not add up. If religion was designed to comfort me, it failed. It brought me, rather, into intense emotional conflict."[4]
So he uses this experience as a way of getting rid of the supernatural. There wasn’t any great relief in the story he was being told, therefore, the biblical story from his perspective can’t be true. He’s now going around the country asking disaffected Christians to consider his crucial questions such as “What will happen if our suspicions are validated and this defense shield called religion loses its credibility?” In other words, we live an age of scientific enlightenment, religion doesn’t work any more, it’s the belief of obscurantist. So can we still survive even though we have demonstrated that God does not exist? He goes on “What will happen if the external supernatural God of religion dies? Can the human psyche bear the experience of self-consciousness without the narcotic of supernaturalism?"[5]
This is the idea Spong has of God, who was a bishop in an Episcopal church by the way. Spong thinks that Christianity is crutch for weak minded people. It’s a narcotic that we take to feel good. But all of Spong thinking is a delusion and it’s in this age when God is said to be a delusion, which by the way Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion is also coming to Charlotte. That we have to demonstrate—not as an apologetic issue but as the apologetic issue—that the universe didn’t spring out of nothing, but that God created the universe. This should be obvious to every thinking person anywhere that a cause requires an effect equal to or greater than itself. You don’t have a cosmos without a cosmos creator. This wouldn’t make any sense. Spong and Dawkins are 19th century thinkers living in the 21st century—that’s the problem—and they act like the Christians are a 19th century thinkers living in the 21st century, nothing could be farther from the truth.
We have all the evidence and support we could possibly want for a biblical worldview, and John Shelby Spong is headed in the wrong direction. Should I feel sorry for him? Well of course, he’s 78 years old and he’s facing his own mortality. Of course I feel sorry for him. But what I don’t feel sorry for is the fact that he is a man with premeditation leading all kinds of people into a ditch.
It was Spong who said all of the following: no biblical scholar thinks that John wrote the fourth gospel;[6] John’s Gospel does not contain “a single word…actually spoken by the historic Jesus;”[7] the Gospels presented a Jesus who is sometimes as “narrow minded, vindictive and even hypocritical;”[8] no reputable scholar accepts the virgin birth;[9] the miraculous works of Jesus were myths;[10] Paul was a “self loathing” “rigidly controlled gay male;”[11] the Bible is full of errors and contradictions;[12] and anyone who holds that the Bible is without error is ignorant, culturally backwards[13], fearful and insecure people who are not serious Christians who don’t even read the Bible they pretend to defend.[14] Now I’ll give him that last point that he is generally right that Bibles are gathering dust, but what is not gathering dust is those that discredit the Bible.
We live in an age of professors gone wild: Daniel Dennet, Christopher Hitchens, Bart Ehrman, Richard Dawkins, and Bishop John Shelby Spong. They are touring the country, they are on television shows, and radio shows.
Our local newspaper talks about Spong’s venues as being overpopulated by people, and that everyone wants to come hear him talk, and they so intrigued. They don’t know that he’s talking nonsense. Why? They don’t know truth.
At CRI and the Bible Answer Man we have a tag line, “Because Truth Matters.” We do what we do “Because Truth Matters.” We defend the reliability of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus Christ “Because Truth Matters.” We demonstrate that the universe is not eternal and that it did not spring out of nothing “Because Truth Matters.” We say how one views their origins will ultimately determine how they live their life, that evolution is the great cosmogenic myth of the twenty-first century, and we ask people to live with eternity in mind “Because Truth Matters.”
John Shelby Spong is dead wrong when he says, “Heaven and hell are human constructs”[15]. The ancients knew better. Without a Heaven and Hell, Hitler dies in the comforting arms of his mistress without any eternal consequences. The ancients knew better than to think such rubbish. Ideas have life and death consequences; consequences not just for time but for eternity.
I’ve addressed a lot here on history and John Shelby Spong. I would recommend three resources, first on the Bible and theology I recommend my Complete Bible Answer Book. On history I recommend the book Truth and Transformation by Dr. Vishal Mangalwadi and his CD series Must the Sun Set on the West. All available at our Website of www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-7000-0274.
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[1] See Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians by Jeffrey Burton Russell (Praeger Paperback 1997)
[2] “Controversial Bishop Returning Home,” by Miriam Durkin, The Charlotte Observer, 10/9/09, More Information Section of Web article, under What Spong Thinks (http://www.charlotteobserver.com/479/story/993680.html).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. Main article
[5] Ibid. Main article
[6] Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, John Shelby Spong (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 193.
[7] Ibid. 191.
[8] Ibid. 21.
[9] Ibid. 215.
[10] Ibid. 129-33, 143-44
[11] Ibid. 109-126.
[12] Ibid, 16-23.
[13] Ibid.9.
[14] Ibid., 3-5, 79, 133, 217
[15] “Controversial Bishop Returning Home,” by Miriam Durkin, The Charlotte Observer, 10/9/09, More Information Section of Web article, under What Spong Thinks (http://www.charlotteobserver.com/479/story/993680.html)
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
If you are not healed, do you lack faith?
A social media question via Facebook from Frieda recently got my attention. She wrote, “How do you answer people when they tell you, you are lacking faith? My brother is a paraplegic since he was three years old and has prayed all his life to walk. He knows he will walk one day with the Lord but people in the church feel it necessary to comment to him that he doesn’t have enough faith. It has caused him at times to question God on why he cannot get his healing but he does understand that God uses him because of his disability. So what should his answer be to these people?” So imagine this scene you have a paraplegic in the church, and people are telling the paraplegic he doesn’t have enough faith because if he had enough faith he wouldn’t be a paraplegic.
If you look at the reasoning that is used, you hear the echoes of the prosperity teachers. You hear T.D. Jakes saying, “The devil is a liar. Healing is the children's bread. It's promised to us in the word of God…God can do things that medicine cannot do.”[1] So if God has promised us healing and someone is still a paraplegic it means that you don’t have faith in their view.
This of course begs the question: What is faith? Faith teachers have a ready answer for you. They look at Hebrews 11:1 and they say faith is a force, words are the containers of the force, and through the force of faith you create your own reality. So if you learn to access the proper vocabulary, use the right words, you’re not going to be a paraplegic because Hebrew 11:1 says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” So—say the Faith teachers—you have right it there, faith is the substance—the stuff—and words the containers of the stuff.
Of course that’s not what Hebrew 11:1 really has in mind. A proper reading of Hebrew 11:1 in context demonstrates that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Which is to say; true biblical faith is not stuff contained in your words, it’s not a substance a tangible reality, it’s living assurance, a channel of living trust between an individual and their God.
Faith is only as good, therefore, as the object in whom it is placed. We place our faith in God and we say with Job, “though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (13:15). The reason for that is that God has given us enough evidence to trust in Him despite the difficulties of life. He had demonstrated to us that in this life we are going to have trouble because we live in a fallen world. So if you’re a paraplegic, it’s not because you don’t have enough faith, it’s because you live in a fallen world. We are called in this fallen world to put our trust in God and ultimately that trust in God is going too eventuate in a new heaven and new earth in which there will be no more paraplegics. Like Joni Eareckson Tada has said, “They will pole vault the pearly gates,”[2] because then the old order of things will pass away, and everything will become new.
In the meantime, do not follow the Faith teachers or swallow their formulas, they are dead ends and deceptions. The last thing you want to tell a paraplegic is that he doesn’t have enough faith. Some of greatest faith bearers and exemplars of faith that I have met in my life are blind people. Joni Eareckson Tade, a quadriplegic, is my hero of faith and she taught me the true meaning of faith. Through the overflow of a life spent in a wheelchair, she has blessed the lives through her faithful service of literally millions of people around the globe. So encourage those that are hurting that they will one day walk with the Lord and have pity for people in the church who find it necessary to tell people that they don’t have enough faith.
For further information on this topic, please check out my book Resurrection and Christianity in Crisis 21st Century both available at our Website www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.
________________________________________
If you look at the reasoning that is used, you hear the echoes of the prosperity teachers. You hear T.D. Jakes saying, “The devil is a liar. Healing is the children's bread. It's promised to us in the word of God…God can do things that medicine cannot do.”[1] So if God has promised us healing and someone is still a paraplegic it means that you don’t have faith in their view.
This of course begs the question: What is faith? Faith teachers have a ready answer for you. They look at Hebrews 11:1 and they say faith is a force, words are the containers of the force, and through the force of faith you create your own reality. So if you learn to access the proper vocabulary, use the right words, you’re not going to be a paraplegic because Hebrew 11:1 says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” So—say the Faith teachers—you have right it there, faith is the substance—the stuff—and words the containers of the stuff.
Of course that’s not what Hebrew 11:1 really has in mind. A proper reading of Hebrew 11:1 in context demonstrates that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Which is to say; true biblical faith is not stuff contained in your words, it’s not a substance a tangible reality, it’s living assurance, a channel of living trust between an individual and their God.
Faith is only as good, therefore, as the object in whom it is placed. We place our faith in God and we say with Job, “though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (13:15). The reason for that is that God has given us enough evidence to trust in Him despite the difficulties of life. He had demonstrated to us that in this life we are going to have trouble because we live in a fallen world. So if you’re a paraplegic, it’s not because you don’t have enough faith, it’s because you live in a fallen world. We are called in this fallen world to put our trust in God and ultimately that trust in God is going too eventuate in a new heaven and new earth in which there will be no more paraplegics. Like Joni Eareckson Tada has said, “They will pole vault the pearly gates,”[2] because then the old order of things will pass away, and everything will become new.
In the meantime, do not follow the Faith teachers or swallow their formulas, they are dead ends and deceptions. The last thing you want to tell a paraplegic is that he doesn’t have enough faith. Some of greatest faith bearers and exemplars of faith that I have met in my life are blind people. Joni Eareckson Tade, a quadriplegic, is my hero of faith and she taught me the true meaning of faith. Through the overflow of a life spent in a wheelchair, she has blessed the lives through her faithful service of literally millions of people around the globe. So encourage those that are hurting that they will one day walk with the Lord and have pity for people in the church who find it necessary to tell people that they don’t have enough faith.
For further information on this topic, please check out my book Resurrection and Christianity in Crisis 21st Century both available at our Website www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.
________________________________________
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
What Foundation Are You Laying for Christ?
One of the resources that we have available for those that make a donation to the Christian Research Institute is a booklet on rewards. Rewards are not commonly talked about in contemporary sermons but they were common fare in the sermons of Jesus Christ. We see this in the Olivet Discourse, in the Book of Revelation, and the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus Christ is not alone, the apostles spoke about rewards. Whether we’re talking about the apostles Peter, James, or Paul, rewards are a common theme in the Bible. Therefore, we should be familiar with the concept of rewards.
I love what the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15,
For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.
This illustrates the sober reality that some Christians will be resurrected with precious little to show for the time they spent on earth. They “will be saved, but only as one escaping the flames.” This conjures up images of people escaping burning buildings with little more than the charred clothes upon their backs. Christ whose eyes are “like blazing fire” (Rev. 1:14) will incinerate the work of those whose built monuments to themselves, monuments build of “wood, hay or straw.” That will be the lot of even the most visible Christian leaders whose motives were selfish rather than selfless. They were there not for the love of the Master but for the love of what was on the Master’s table.
On the other hand, those who build selflessly upon the foundation of Christ using, “gold, silver, and costly stones” will receive enduring rewards.
For further information on this topic, I recommend getting the whole booklet entitled Rewards! You can get this on our Website at www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.
Jesus Christ is not alone, the apostles spoke about rewards. Whether we’re talking about the apostles Peter, James, or Paul, rewards are a common theme in the Bible. Therefore, we should be familiar with the concept of rewards.
I love what the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15,
For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.
This illustrates the sober reality that some Christians will be resurrected with precious little to show for the time they spent on earth. They “will be saved, but only as one escaping the flames.” This conjures up images of people escaping burning buildings with little more than the charred clothes upon their backs. Christ whose eyes are “like blazing fire” (Rev. 1:14) will incinerate the work of those whose built monuments to themselves, monuments build of “wood, hay or straw.” That will be the lot of even the most visible Christian leaders whose motives were selfish rather than selfless. They were there not for the love of the Master but for the love of what was on the Master’s table.
On the other hand, those who build selflessly upon the foundation of Christ using, “gold, silver, and costly stones” will receive enduring rewards.
For further information on this topic, I recommend getting the whole booklet entitled Rewards! You can get this on our Website at www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Is Benny Hinn Right About End Times Prophecy?
Before I went into the studio to do the Bible Answer Man broadcast the other day, I picked up the most recent issue of Charisma Magazine. Sometimes I wonder if these “Christian” magazines are for real. The cover story has a picture of America and the Statue of Liberty drowning in the ocean waves. It says on the front-cover, “Some Christians say the world is coming to an end. Others reject that fear. What can we know for sure about the end times?”[1]
So I opened it to the center spread and here is an article by a leading voice in dispensational thought—Dr. Benny Hinn. And he writes an article titled, “The Fig Tree is in Bloom: What God has Through the Modern Creation of Israel is Nothing Short of a Miracle of Bible Prophecy.” So through his special insight, usual unbridled speculation, and subjective flights of fancy, Hinn looks at the Bible and interprets it for us in the article. He notes that there are three specific prophecies with respect to 1948. He says, “I have been told that for centuries Jewish rabbis have been waiting for the fulfillment of three Old Testament passes they believe point to the Messiah’s coming. The first two have already occurred, and the third is taking place right before our eyes.”[2] So you have Jewish Rabbi’s looking at three passages and—in agreement with Benny Hinn—they think that the passages say what Benny Hinn thinks they say.
Benny then lays out these prophecies for us. Number one, according to Hinn
Traffic in the streets of Jerusalem. Nahum wrote of a time after Israel would be scattered and persecuted, when “the emptiers have emptied them out and ruined their vine branches.” (Nah. 2:2). He saw a day when “the chariots come with flaming torches in the day of His preparation…they jostle one another in the broad roads; they seem like torches, the run like lightening” (vv. 3-4).
The prophet saw cars in Jerusalem and did not know how to properly describe them––vehicles speeding in the streets of the city he called “broad roads.” These wide roads didn’t exist in the prophet’s day, but they certainly do now![3]
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this. Now, obviously, all Nahum is taking about is broad places, and I suppose broad places existed in Old Testament times just as they today.
When you read something like this in a Christian magazine or by a Christian teacher, I think the first thing you better do is put on your bologna detector. What can you know for sure? That Benny Hinn does not know how to interpret the Word of God and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who are following him into a ditch. So we have to learn discernment skills, test what these people are saying with scripture really says.
The second thing to do is look at the context, this passage in context is a prophecy concerning the destruction of Nineveh. It has nothing to do with cars in the streets of Jerusalem in the twenty-first century. Nahum didn’t see cars in Jerusalem as Hinn claims, he saw chariots in Nineveh.
We need to look through the subterfuge and deceptive reasoning of men like Benny Hinn, go back to the passage, and realize that Old Testament prophets were not using poor analogies, like saying chariots with flaming torches because they didn’t know how to say cars were fast and had headlights. This is nonsense, this is dealing with prophetic language and hyperbole with what is going to happen to Nineveh.
All one needs to do is pick up the book of Nahum and see that’s what Nahum is writing about. However, people don’t do that they read this and say, “Oh my goodness, the most significant of the prophecies that Jewish rabbi’s believe, we should believe this as well.”
After all the anointed man of God, Benny Hinn, has spoken. Of course this is the same guy who is telling is that faith is a force and words the containers of the force. He’s the same guy who is distorting the nature of God and talking about thousands and thousands of miracles in his venues, but yet cannot produce a single authentic miracle.
The point is simply this, test all things in light of Scripture, hold fast to that which is good. (1 Thess. 5:21). Don’t fall for last days fever and don’t read Charisma magazine to get your end times fix. It’s sensationalism, sophistry, sloppy journalism, and it’s seducing people. Quite frankly, it’s like a freak show and it drags Christ’s name through the mud.
For further information on how to interpret the Bible regarding the end times and the Word of Faith Movement check out my books, The Apocalypse Code and Christianity in Crisis 21st Century at our website www.equip.org
________________________________________
So I opened it to the center spread and here is an article by a leading voice in dispensational thought—Dr. Benny Hinn. And he writes an article titled, “The Fig Tree is in Bloom: What God has Through the Modern Creation of Israel is Nothing Short of a Miracle of Bible Prophecy.” So through his special insight, usual unbridled speculation, and subjective flights of fancy, Hinn looks at the Bible and interprets it for us in the article. He notes that there are three specific prophecies with respect to 1948. He says, “I have been told that for centuries Jewish rabbis have been waiting for the fulfillment of three Old Testament passes they believe point to the Messiah’s coming. The first two have already occurred, and the third is taking place right before our eyes.”[2] So you have Jewish Rabbi’s looking at three passages and—in agreement with Benny Hinn—they think that the passages say what Benny Hinn thinks they say.
Benny then lays out these prophecies for us. Number one, according to Hinn
Traffic in the streets of Jerusalem. Nahum wrote of a time after Israel would be scattered and persecuted, when “the emptiers have emptied them out and ruined their vine branches.” (Nah. 2:2). He saw a day when “the chariots come with flaming torches in the day of His preparation…they jostle one another in the broad roads; they seem like torches, the run like lightening” (vv. 3-4).
The prophet saw cars in Jerusalem and did not know how to properly describe them––vehicles speeding in the streets of the city he called “broad roads.” These wide roads didn’t exist in the prophet’s day, but they certainly do now![3]
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this. Now, obviously, all Nahum is taking about is broad places, and I suppose broad places existed in Old Testament times just as they today.
When you read something like this in a Christian magazine or by a Christian teacher, I think the first thing you better do is put on your bologna detector. What can you know for sure? That Benny Hinn does not know how to interpret the Word of God and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who are following him into a ditch. So we have to learn discernment skills, test what these people are saying with scripture really says.
The second thing to do is look at the context, this passage in context is a prophecy concerning the destruction of Nineveh. It has nothing to do with cars in the streets of Jerusalem in the twenty-first century. Nahum didn’t see cars in Jerusalem as Hinn claims, he saw chariots in Nineveh.
We need to look through the subterfuge and deceptive reasoning of men like Benny Hinn, go back to the passage, and realize that Old Testament prophets were not using poor analogies, like saying chariots with flaming torches because they didn’t know how to say cars were fast and had headlights. This is nonsense, this is dealing with prophetic language and hyperbole with what is going to happen to Nineveh.
All one needs to do is pick up the book of Nahum and see that’s what Nahum is writing about. However, people don’t do that they read this and say, “Oh my goodness, the most significant of the prophecies that Jewish rabbi’s believe, we should believe this as well.”
After all the anointed man of God, Benny Hinn, has spoken. Of course this is the same guy who is telling is that faith is a force and words the containers of the force. He’s the same guy who is distorting the nature of God and talking about thousands and thousands of miracles in his venues, but yet cannot produce a single authentic miracle.
The point is simply this, test all things in light of Scripture, hold fast to that which is good. (1 Thess. 5:21). Don’t fall for last days fever and don’t read Charisma magazine to get your end times fix. It’s sensationalism, sophistry, sloppy journalism, and it’s seducing people. Quite frankly, it’s like a freak show and it drags Christ’s name through the mud.
For further information on how to interpret the Bible regarding the end times and the Word of Faith Movement check out my books, The Apocalypse Code and Christianity in Crisis 21st Century at our website www.equip.org
________________________________________
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