Pre-Tribulation Rapture

I'm pretty much convinced of the Pre-tribulation Rapture now, and I've come to believe it's very very close, like perhaps as close as this coming Rosh Hashana a little more than a week from now.

I believe the Pope is the Antichrist who is to be the major player in the Tribulation which follows the Rapture, based on the work of the Reformers but Martin Luther in particular, and that he has already been revealed so we are not waiting for that event, people just need to wake up to it.   The Pope may instead be the False Prophet and the Antichrist a particular political leader, however, but there is no doubt in my mind that the papacy is the man of sin of scripture.  Since he's already been revealed, the lifting of what restrained his revelation is already long in the past, which the Reformers regarded as the Roman Empire.  This makes sense if we understand that since the fall of the Empire the Pope has essentially occupied the seat of the Caesars with his title Pontifex Maximus and his Roman garb.

I want to do a post on these things in more detail but I'm going to post this now because laying it all out is going to take time and I want at least to get this much said.

What is SPEAKING IN TONGUES?

Just ran across this news report on a study of what happens in the brains of Christians while they are "speaking in tongues."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZbQBajYnEc

I've posted a link in the margin to the "Strange Fire Conference" which was held a few years ago to examine the claims of the charismatic movement in the Church that they are practicing the "gifts of the Spirit" described in the New Testament, speaking in tongues being one of them.  The conference convinced me that the phenomena being called the Gifts of the Spirit today are not the New Testament gifts.

I myself received the "gift of tongues" when I was a member of a charismatic church back in the 90s,  Whatt they are describing in the news report is what I also experienced:  we have no control over this, it just comes out.  I was praying out loud when these other sounds just started coming out instead of my English words.  I could repeat them at will but I could not control what sounds came out.  I could start and stop them but I couldn't control what was being "said."

People in the charismatic movement claim they are speaking by the Holy Spirit, that it is a prayer language, that the Holy Spirit is praying through them.  They claim to experience spiritual feelings as they exercise the gift.

My own experience did not feel spiritual or worshipful at all and that bothered me a great deal.  I would let the sounds continue as I went about my chores during the day.  They had a definite pattern to them, a pattern that would repeat itself, maybe about the length of a sentence.  The SAME sounds kept repeating in other words and I was not controlling them at all.  But nothing about it felt like prayer as so many charismatics claim it is.  None of it evoked God in my mind or heart in any way.  After some time I began singing the sounds, and when I recognized that the tunes were anything but spiritual I simply had to conclude that this has nothing to do with God.  The tunes that came out were "Three Blind Mice" and "Reuben Reuben."  There is nothing spiritual or prayerful or worshipful about those tunes, just as there was nothing spiritual or worshipful or prayerful as far as my own feelings went in connection with the "words" that I was speaking.

It took a while to convince myself to completely give it up though.  The pressure is strong in charismatic circles to embrace the "gifts of the Spirit."  I read studies that aimed to debunk the whole charismatic movement but couldn't be completely convinced of those arguments.  I remained in suspension about these things until the Strange Fire Conference which finally made the case I'd been needing to hear.

So what ARE these phenomena?  Certainly what the scientist in the news report says is true:  the people are not doing this on purpose, it just "happens" to them.  I experienced this personally.  It is in SOME sense "supernatural" therefore.

The most convincing explanation I've run across comes from Watchman Nee who wrote on the subject of "Soul Power."  These are capacities he understands to have been abilities God gave to Adam and Eve that were lost at the Fall, such as psychic abilities, the ability to read minds and other capacities.  These things are often discovered through various religious practices, particularly Hindu practices.  Sometimes they are intentionally cultivated, but what seem to be the higher forms of these religions discourage them as distractions.  In general they may be more or less akin to "siddhis" which include psychic powers.

Nee particularly identified spontaneous laughter of the sort that overtook a charismatic congregation in Toronto in the 90s and then spread to other charismatic congregations.  It occurred in some Chinese churches in Nee's time and he identified it as related to this "soul power" and something that should be discouraged rather than encouraged.  In Toronto it was strongly encouraged and became known as the Laughing Revival.

He said he himself had the power to read minds and thought it was a gift of the Holy Spirit until he realized it was not that and exerted himself to suppress it.

The Strange Fire Conference to my mind definitively proved that whatever these phenomena are they are not the Gifts of the Spirit that were given by God to the early Church:  the "healings" are nothing like those in the New Testament, the "prophecies" are more like fortune telling than the prophecies people gave in the New Testament, and the "tongues" that are spoken are not real languages as they were at Pentecost.  We may well wonder what they really are, if they have any qualities of language at all, and that I don't know.  The excuse that they are an angelic prayer language has to be doubted because none of the other "gifts" are those of the New Testament.

Watchman Nee's interpretation that they are a version of "soul power" seems the best to my mind, and in any case they should not be cultivated but abandoned.  God will restore to us whatever powers He gave Adam and Eve when His kingdom has fully come, but until then they are not to be practiced and it is even possible that they are subject to demonic manipulation in this still-fallen world.

"Christian" support for Trump?

Hearing from Infowars today that a pastor claims to have heard from a Congressman that there are plans to get rid of Trump, not by impeachment, he's just going to be suddenly taken out.  The pastor turns out to be Rodney Howard Browne, well known charismatic "revival" leader who in the 90s became famous for the "laughing revival."  Infowars showed a clip of him exhorting the "body of Christ" to continuous prayer for Trump.

A few weeks ago or so some pastors assembled in the White House to lay hands on Trump and pray for him.  Charismatic pastors like Rodney Howard Browne.   Why is this?  Why are the charismatics the ones doing this and not others? 

This is disturbing to me.  Trump needs all the prayer he can get so shouldn't I just be glad he's getting so many pastors interested in doing that?  But the charismatics are NOT representative of Christianity.  In my opinion the Strange Fire Conference I've linked in the right margin finally showed that the charismatic movement is following a false idea of the "gifts of the Spirit."  I'm not going to say they aren't Christians, although there are some of them I do doubt are Christians, such as Kenneth Copeland, and Benny Hinn who has prayed at the graves of Aimee Semple MacPherson and Kathryn Kuhlman, to receive the kind of charismatic power they had.  This is akin to witchcraft,   How can it serve Trump or his supporters or the nation to have the prayers of occultists?  Browne's call to the Body of Christ is pretty standard but I don't know enough about him to know how far to trust him.

I certainly think we should all be praying for Trump, and just judging from the way the headlines every day are calculated to present something negative about him I have no reason to doubt that there's a plan to bring him down.  The headlines are already part of such a plan. 

I wish we'd hear from more trustworthy Christian leaders calling for prayer for Trump.     

Cultural Marixsm, the Devil's Sledgehammer against the West

I'm still making an effort to keep up my reemphasis on the Christian life but as always happens I'm again distracted by other concerns.  In this case I'm focused on the undermining of western culture. 

The video below is a really good condensed presentation of what Cultural Marxism is. The opening statement identifies it as the application of Critical Theory, the utterly diabolical thinking of the Frankfurt School who were so influential in the sixties, and makes it clear that it's intrinsic to today's Leftist politics.  

It includes an explanation of why the epithet "Islamophobia" is Marxist, which is often not recognized,  I'm particularly glad to see it includes an expose of the utterly destructive work of Theodor Adorno, a member of the Frankfurt School who is usually not mentioned in this connection, but his attack on the basic principles of western civilization that made the west great, through his "sociological study" titled The Authoritarian Personality, has been very influential, and I believe it should be called satanic.

Political Correctness is the term for the popular tool of intimidation used by the Cultural Marxist Left to enforce this program of destruction of everything good, consisting of the epithets racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and so on, intended to suppress all dissenting views.

I believe the west has come under these influences because we have abandoned Christianity and incurred God's judgment, but that's my view, not the video's.  It's high time we took back our universities and our institutions and threw the bums out, but if God doesn't grant us revival there's a limit to how far we can get with that.
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Back to God

Tired of myself, disgusted with myself, wanting to start my Christian life over and put aside everything of this world.  Hoping to keep it up and to chronicle it at my blog Things of the Spirit

The Way Back: Ponderings

So I'm on a sort of binge thinking about what all the Church needs to get back to.  Some things are obvious and up front, but there are many ways different churches have deviated from orthodoxy over the years, and I don't think conservative Christians usually think of liberalism, for instance, as our responsibility, do we?   But Daniel prayed for all the sins of Israel, which he certainly hadn't committed himself.  So if a deviating church body considers itself to be Christ's then aren't their deviations our deviations too?   But of course we have enough of our own for starters:  Bible versions, head covering. 

And then there are the little things, the "secondary" issues that divide denominations.  My previous post was about psalm singing although it had never entered my mind before that such a practice could be something we need to get back to in order to recover orthodoxy.  I've certainly thought for years now that women's head covering is an important one most churches neglect.  Now I'm pondering the usual secondary issues like baptism.  I'm convinced that believer's baptism is orthodox but it would be hard to convince the denominations that believe in paedobaptism.  (Of course it would be hard to convince anyone of a differing opinion on any of these issues I mention.) 

I recently read somewhere --  I'm SO bad at keeping track -- that Zwingli favored believer's baptism but was influenced by the political trend of the times to paedobaptism -- not by scripture, but by common practice.  In scripture he found believer's baptism.  Something else confirmed my conviction about baptism:  I believe it was David Cloud who has a picture in one of his books (about the Bible versions I think), of a large baptismal font in which a person would be immersed, going back to ancient times.  Roman?  Sorry again I'm so bad at providing evidence.  I read things and put them aside and then remember them without any easy way to recover the evidence.  But this post is to be one of those skim-overs in the hope that I'll do a better job later.

Another issue that comes to mind is where ethnic Israel stands in relation to the Church.  This one is extremely polarized, some believing Israel has no place at all, others giving it such prominence the Church might as well not exist.  I believe strongly that scripture shows the Church to be the fulfillment of a great deal of what in the Old Testament is ascribed to Israel:  the "Israel of God" is believers, and ethnic Israel is certainly not made up of believers.  However, Paul's discussion in Romans 9 through 11 certainly implies a future for ethnic Israel, in repentance and conversion to Christ, and there are some passages in the writings of the Puritans and the Reformers showing their belief that God will ultimately restore the Jews.   There remains a huge area of varying interpretations to be sorted out. 

And by the way I've been reconsidering the Rapture again, thanks to the book "The Rapture:  Don't be Deceived" by Billy Crone.  He makes some good points in favor of the Rapture, but as usual I still find scripture that to my mind doesn't support it.  The problem with this as with so many other issues is that once a person gets convinced they put enormous emphasis on the proofs of their view and other views go begging.  I can say at this point at least that there is no other end times scenario convinces me anywhere near as much as Futurism, although Chris Pinto has made some good arguments in favor of Historicism at least for interpretations concerning the Antichrist as the Pope.   

  What am I suggesting?  How could all these different opinions find resolution?  Shall we have more conferences like the "Strange Fire" Conference where the big issues that divide churches are discussed?  I like the idea myself.

And we could always use some thorough review of why Roman Catholicism must be rejected. 

So there are some half-baked ponderings for today.

The Way Back: Psalm Singing

Thinking about practices the Church has lost over the years on its rocky path to modernity, woman's head covering looms large in my mind, but in pursuing that topic in the last few days I discovered another possible loss.  That is, I discovered that there are denominations, or at least one anyway, the Reformed Presbyterian, where the singing of psalms is practiced as the authentic form of worship given by God.  I'd heard of this practice before but it didn't catch my attention as a possible lost truth until I ran across it in Rosaria Butterfield's book on her conversion, then also in the first sermon of a series by Brian Schwertley at Sermon Audio, on Headship and Headcoverings.  He mentions psalm singing very briefly as a practice that fell out of common practice in the churches because of the popularity of other forms of singing that took its place, which he understands to have been the way the head covering was lost as well -- it became popular not to wear hats and then it was theologically rationalized away until it was completely given up.   I don't know if his historical analysis is correct, but it had the effect on me of considering that perhaps psalm singing was once the common, and the authentic, practice which has since been dropped.

I continue to think of such losses as being steps down a path of deterioration of the Church over the years or even centuries, that has finally brought about God's judgment to the point that we are losing all Christian influence in the cultures of the West, and the West is on the brink of total annihilation.  I keep coming back to the principle that "judgment begins at the house of God" when I see how difficult it is to recover the heritage of western civilization by political or educational means.  We've had high hopes for Trump's Presidency, and I haven't completely given up on his having some important influence in rescuing the culture from its battered condition, but the wolves of God's judgment continue to howl so loudly I doubt they can be held at bay for long.  And that takes me back to the Church, which after all we understand to be where the health of the culture is built up or undermined.

There are so many failures littered along the road of the Church's fall, from liberalism to evolutionism, to feminism to abortion "rights" and gay "rights" and so on, it's hard to arrange them all in their historical order, and it's hard to know where to start if we want to recover God's blessings and especially His strengthening hand on His people.  I suggested starting with women's covering our heads in church, because it seems like a simple thing to do.  But of course that means persuading people that it's worth the try, and like all the monuments to modernity that have supplanted truth in the churches it's just as vexed with opposition as any would be, and in some cases angry indignant opposition, even in some churches the disciplining of women who DO cover their heads.  Or so I've heard. 

So we pray then of course.  Pray for starters that God would show us the paths to truth, without telling Him what we think about it, if we can be that humble.

Anyway, all that was to lead up to this new idea that psalm singing might be one of the lost practices of the Church that God originally ordained for us.  I don't know enough about it yet to have a clear opinion.  The scripture that tells us to sing "psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" doesn't seem to insist on limiting us to any one form such as psalms, but it does suggest that psalms are an important element in worship that no church I've ever personally attended practices.   Well I should note that psalms or parts of psalms have been incorporated into popular worship singing in the last couple of decades, but I don't think that's quite the same thing, though maybe a step in the right direction.  At the very least it's a very appealing idea that we should all learn to sing psalms as PART of our services.  It's something I've become interested in learning anyway. 

Here's a page of Psalters that are used for the purpose.  I ended up choosing the Trinity version based on the descriptions given of each, but that's subject to change.  Some of the music appears to be familiar hymn tunes, but even the folk song "Scarborough Fair" is included in the first psalter.  I was expecting something more ancient I guess.   But anything is a start at this point, just to feel around in unfamiliar territory.

I don't know if psalm singing is something to be recovered or not, but I was intrigued by Schwertley's comment and it seems worth thinking about.