Another that belongs in the Evolution blog.

 Evolutionary Biology is an amusement I indulge from time to time.  They discuss many things biological that can clearly be discussed without the slightest reference to evoltion and yet they always have to tack it on at some point and carry on as if it were relevant.  You can discuss the mesentery, the membrane that holds together the internal organs of many creatures, without any reference whatever to evolution.  It apparently has interesting properties that have never been fully appreciated.  You don't need evolution to think about those things.  

But then someone mentions Junk DNA and vestigial organs and they have to discuss them as products of evolution --  Junk DNA MUST have a function you see, because after all it's such a huge percentage of the genome evolution requires it.  I dunno, in reality not much actuall function has been found in these otherwise normal-looking genes.  The chemistry is so complex it can still show some signs of life I suppose, long after having lost the normal coding function of a gene, which suggests SOME sort of continuing function of a different sort, though what that function might be is purely speculative.  Something more like rigor mortis comes to my mind but then I'm no biologist.  And it's Evolution that requires the function so they'll turn even rigor mortis into a function to fit the theory if they have to.  (Funny though, some evoltuionists think that just as dead genes it supports evolution, being a record of former evolutionary experiments in the long history of evolutionary change.  Or maybe they've realized that one didn't work, I haven't kept up with it).    

They seem also to think that what are called vestigial organs have a function too.  Organs the creature can apparently survive well enough without.  Seems to me that they could have lost their function and still go on sort of more or less doing something or other even though it's no longer a necessary something or other.    Oh well.   These things are such wonderful evidence for Creationism and against Evolution but oh well, oh well.  All life is running down as it were, the whole planet is running down as it were, the cosmos is running down as it were, all that is evidence for the Biblical accounts of Creation, Fall and Flood, not Evolution.   It all implies a formerly perfect biological system that has lost its functions over the millennia as Death took over through the Fall.   Stages of death over time you could say, the Flood being one gigantic death that all by itself could have brought about Junk DNA in the ensuing centuries.  A long litany of loss is the most likely explanation for what we actually see.

I was pondering again how each creature certainly seems to demonstrate a Species coherence that belies the whole idea that Species evolved from other Species.  Well there are many reasons that idea is bogus but I'm thinking at the moment of how you can often see a structure that defines each that remains quite recognizable through all the variations within a particular Species.  You can always tell a cat from its skeleton, can't you?  Or a dog.  Distortions can occur but the basic structure is reocgnizable.  Many other parts may vary according to the way the DNA gets sexually combined, but something in the basic structure remains definitive of the catness of cats, the dogness of dogs and so on. Birds too..  Penguins don't look a lot like other birds on the surface but they sure do in their skeletons.  Ostriches too.  Yep and the trilobiteness of trilobites, yep, I hope I'll get to spend some time putting that one together some day if I live so long.  Or maybe we'll get to do such things in the Millennium.  That would be fun.

HCQ: Some Lies are More Lethal than Others

 The suppression of a drug that could have saved thousands upon thousands of COVID patients is a crime almost beyond belief.  We've seen a lot of corruption, lies, good for evil and evil for good, these days, but this one is the scariest of them all.  They are facilitating murder.   Truth is suppressed and lies are propagated in countless ways these days, but this one actually tops the others.  They just go on and on talking about the virus as if there were no way to control it.  Maybe it's less virulent than it was and that's a major hope.  But the HCQ is ignored.  Maybe now the drugs used for Trump will be promoted, and since they apparently worked for him that's not a bad thing in itself.  The problem is that HCQ could already have saved the vast majority of those who have died by this virus and it continues to be lied about.

What can be done?  The people with the power are the ones suppressing the truth and promoting the lies and those who see through it have no power.   Well, maybe there could be some lawsuits at least.   Nicholas Sandman who was so viciously slandered has successfully sued his slanderers.   Families of people who died of COVID who could have received HCQ but didn't, could sue the doctors and hospitals and the governors and other politicians who banned the drug, and maybe the propganda machines.  The people censored from social media could sue them.

I'm personally most disappointed in Trump that he has abandoned HCQ.  There was really no need for the new drugs they used for him because HCQ is known to be safe and effective and a lot cheaper.  There is no need for a vaccine for COVID either, let alone a "warp speed" effort to develop one,  since we have such a safe and effective and cheap cure for it.   Greed?  Politics?  Ignorance?  Fake Science?  All of the above?  

Another Doctor Testifies to HCQ and the great scandal of its being suppressed. NOW CENSORED

• UPDATE        Facebook Purge of Alternative Health Sites Coming – Censors Story on Doctor Curing 1700 Patients with HCQ: "Could Cause Physical Harm – Make Some People Feel Unsafe on Facebook"
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• https://vaccineimpact.com/2020/facebook-purge-of-alternative-health-sites-coming-censors-story-on-doctor-curing-1700-patients-with-hcq-could-cause-physical-harm-make-some-people-feel-unsafe-on-facebook/
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• Midical Doctor Cures Over 1700 Patients with COVID Using Hydroxychloroquine

  
  

  California Medical Doctor Cures Over 1700 Patients with COVID Using Hydr... Doctors on the "front lines" treating COVID patients continue to try and speak out regarding the fact that there...

  
  

  Comments by Brian Shilhavy
  Editor, Health Impact News

  Doctors on the “front lines” treating COVID patients continue to try and speak out regarding the fact that there is a 100% cure rate for COVID by using hydroxychloroquine.

  Dr. Brian Tyson from Southern California is one of the latest doctors to grant an interview talking about his experience in treating over 1700 COVID patients using hydroxychloroquine. None of his patients have died, and only one had to be admitted to the hospital.

  This continues to be the biggest scandal of the COVID plandemic, and perhaps the largest scandal in medical history, where so many people are dying needlessly based on a positive COVID test and fear, as this information is censored in the corporate media as well as Big Tech social media platforms.

  Even President Trump, who originally promoted hydroxychloroquine and allegedly was taking it himself, has now turned his back on the Front Line doctors who continue to successfully use hydroxychloroquine.

  With his own alleged COVID diagnosis last week, President Trump instead chose to use and promote two new drugs that are being fast-tracked and are without a history of successful treatment yet.

  Watch the interview on OAN:
  

  ===================
  

  On the video Dr. Tyson says the statistics are inflated because hospitals get paid for COVID deaths, so deaths are reported as caused by COVID even if the patient was already severely sick with something else and merely tested positive for CCVID.  He went on to say that 75 to 80% of the reported deaths could have been cured by HCQ.   

A Rambling Gospel Pondering

 Have they not heard the gospel?  Is that why they continue to think they are safe with their religious teachings and practices, their meditations, their good works?  It's possible they haven't heard it.  Perhaps it was given them but was so inexact it wasn't really the gospel.  Perhaps I have been guilty of that myself.  I blurt things out hoping it to be saving truth but maybe I'm sticking to a general warning about coming earthly judgment and leaving out the eternal judgment?  I think I may be doing that.  Then I am guilty of the blood of anyone who dies not having heard the true gospel of salvation.  

Jesus died to pay for your sins so that you could have eternal life, and if you refuse His sacrifice you will die in your sins, and dying in your sins means going to Hell.  We are all born destined to Hell, because we are all born in the sin of Adam, meaning born inheriting the original sin of our first father, born into the fallen world which resulted from that sin..  The world around us is broken just as we are broken, but we take it for normal because it is all we've ever known.  The only way we can know about it is through revelation by the God who made it all, and that's what we have in the Bible.  Christianity isn't a "religion" the way other religions are, it's the actual speaking of the Creator God to us.  He made us in His own image, with the ability to know Him, but that's what was lost when Adam fell.  He lost his connection to God.  So we all inherit Adam's inability to know God.  That's why He sent Jesus, to restore that ability to us.  That is what it means to be born again, to have a new life given to us, the lif3e of the spirit by which we recognize the God who made us.  Without the new birth, the regeneration of the spirit that died at the Fall, we remain in darkness, unable to know God.

Buddhists and Hindus can meditate forever and never find God because they are fallen as is the whole human race.  The best they can do is explore the Creation itself, the Cosmos and their own nature in which their spirit is fallen, even dead.  They can bring some of their nature under control.  They can to some extent learn to control their own destiny, but it's very limited because they are fallen and they will never discover their fallenness or God Himself.  God can't be recognized until the spirit is "quickened" as the King James Bible puts it, brought to life, reborn or regenerated.  That new birth is given when we believe in the sacrifice of Christ to pay for our sins.  And it isn't just the recovery of our own lost spirit, because the Spirit of God Himself comes to indwell us and be our strength.

Buddhism and other religions teach that we are subject to a unversal moral law which punishes us when we transgress it.  They intuit in an inexact way what the Bible reveals exactly, and they aim much of their religious practice at trying to prevent and/or undo the consequences of that law, which in Buddhism is called Karma.  I don't understand a lot about it but apparently they believe that they can ultimately free themselves from the consequences of Karma and no longer be subject to the punishment it brings about.  Most religions have some version of Hell or Hells, it's a pretty universal concept though its nature varies due to distortions brought about by our fallenness.  There is also the idea of reincarnation which is itself a form of punishment.   The Bible says, by contrast, that we have only one life, no others, and after we die we face the Judgment of God.  If, as we believe, the Bible is the actual revelation given by God Himself, then this is the truth and all the other religions are struggling along under the limitations of their own fallen minds and their fallen minds are their only guidance, not much to which to entrust your eternal fate.

The Moral Law, or Law of God, is spelled out in the Bible in the first five books, principally in Leviticus but also in Numbers and Deuteronomy.  The Ten Commandments are the foundational categories of the Law on which all the others are based.  How we treat God is the subject of the first three, followed by the command to remember the Sabbath Day (which actually applies to the ultimate Rest in Christ as well as a literal day of rest in this life), then we are commanded to honor father and mother (which is usually extended to all legitimate authority)  then we get a list of sins against neighbor after that:  Thou shalt not kill, steal, lie, commit adultery or covet.  Buddhism has a version of the first four of those so they are pretty universal.   Their idea of not killing means you can't kill anything at all even a cockroach, but the Biblical understanding is that it means murder of a human being and nothing else.   In any case this is how you find out what sin is in God's eyes, through His commandments..

The Bible reveals that we cannot be freed from the Law of God by anything we ourselves are capable of.  We can turn from wickedness to righteousness and thereby stop bringing on new punishments, at least to some extent though not perfectly because being fallen we will always be committing sins though not aware of it in many cases, but we can't eradicate those we've already earned.  God Himself had to come to earth to pay for our sins against the Moral Law.  That's what His death was all about.  He died in our place, in the place of every human being who believes in Him.  That is what salvation is.  You can't be freed from the Moral Law, or the Karma version of it, in any other way.  The Law of God is exacting beyond anyone's ability to know it, and every human being has sin in our lives that we will ultimately pay for ourselves in Hell if we do not accept Christ's death on our behalf.

We all suffer the consequences of our sins in this life too, and that continues until death.  Christians who fail to mortify sin, that is, who fail to stop sinning at least in obvious ways, continue to earn such consequences and continue to suffer them in this life.   We often don't appreciate how the Law continues to operate as long as we are in this life.  All sin earns death.  Adam and Eve had eternal life until they disobeyed God, but their disobedeince brought death into the world and all their offspring inherit it.  

That is what fallennness means, the world being fallen and ourselves being fallen.  The world has become a hostile place because of our sins beginning with the original sin of our first parents.  We ourselves continue to suffer the consequences from the sins of our ancestors as well as our own in this life, and we will die with all those sins on our souls which will take us to Hell if we don't throw ourselves on the mercy of God through the death of Jesus Christ which paid for those sins.   

 "The wages of sin is death" says the Bible.  Some sins may bring about literal physical death very soon, but there are stages and phases of "death" in the form of diseases and injuries and misfortunes and every kind of unhappiness in this world short of the death of the physical body.   We are by nature "sinners" so we can't help bringing all this misery upon ourselves.  The breakdown of the body as we age is a form of it.   If some people suffer less it is becauase they have accumulated less sin either from their ancestors or by their own doings, but there is nobody who is sinliess in this world.  Only Jesus Christ was sinless, the only sinless human being who ever lived.  Only an "unblemished" sacrifice could pay for our sins and He is the only one who qualified.

He died that you might live happily forever.   He had all our sins in His own body when He died so that His death paid for them.  Believe that and you will be saved from your sins.  Repent and believe.  

Globalism Galloping Along with Vaccine Tyranny and Voter Fraud Tyranny

A couple of good discussions of the globalism that is shaping up.

Globalism in the midst of Pandemic:  Eric Barger talking mostly about Bill Gates and big-money manipulation as he works to get a vaccine for COVID out.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dDzCd08WMc&t=10s      In October of last year there was a meeting of some globalists including Gates, at which they pondered the question of how the world might deal with a pandemic of exactly the sort we now have, that got started a very short time after that meeting.  Barger mentions the suppression of Hydroxychloroquine as certainly due to its having no economic value to anyone, though it is a definite cure for COVID if used in the eqarly stages.  People are dying because big-money globalists want drugs that will cost a lot and make them a lot of money?   Barger  also talks about Gates' plans for a vaccine delivery system that would implant medical informtion under the skin of recipients, and other ways this pandemic is being used to kill our freedoms.

Also listening to a radio show on globalism in relation to the rampant voter fraud we are already seeing underway with less than a month to go before the election.  This is the subject of Jan Markell's Understanding the Times radio interview with Michele Bachmann on Saturday    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMQzYby-Vo4

Unexpected connection: I was listening to J Vernon McGee (1904 -1988) on the Song of Songs at Blue Letter Bible, and wanting to know more about him I found the following paragraph about his preaching in his bio at Wikipedia:.

...he often spoke of the days of societal apostasy in Christianity and secularism that he believed he was witnessing during his lifetime, warning that spiritual apostasy was always the first of the three stages leading to the fall of nations, commonly observed throughout the Bible, the second and third being, respectively, immorality and political anarchy.

This is scarily true, and we seem now to be entering the phase of political anarchy.  It starts with the breakdown of doctrine in the churches and that started about a century ago in America, another half century or more before that in Germany's theological schools.   That was the trend of liberalism that took over the mainline denominations early in the 20th century, that J Gresham Machem famously fought against.  Spurgeon was already attacking it in England some decades before that.  The immorality phase burst into bloom starting around the sixties, has been growing ever since, and now another half century later we're seeing the fruit of total social breakdown in some of our big cities.  In our case today the consequence is most likely to be the absorption of the nation into the end times global monstrosity unless we undergo a major repentance and reformation.   We don't seem to have the will for that though, the will we need to counteract this trend, which in itself is no doubt a consequence of the judgment of God we're under.   If God in His mercy allows us to have Trump for another four years, although the bombardment by the forces of evil will probably escalate, at least maybe the worst of the worst will be postponed.  

Or perhaps the Rapture will occur and the forces of evil won't have much to fight with the Church out of the way, so the Global government, economy and religion can fall into place with less resistance.  

Meanwhile, McGee's sermon on the Song of Songs is inspiring and I want to spend more time pursuing these things.  He answers the "carnal" interpreters of this book early on and treats it as the love relationship between Jesus and His Church.

The Motley End Times Global Religion Awaiting Its Final Antichrist versus the Simple Gospel of the True God

 Oy.  After listening to that whole series (Wide is the Gate) on the heresies and apostasies in the churches these days I begin to wonder just how much of the true Christian Church still exists.  The Great Apostasy appears to be just about ready for its role as the global end times religion headed by the Antichrist.  It's rejected or mangled or rewritten so much of the Word of God and incorporated so many alien ideas from other religions and the culture, it's reinvented Christianity so that it is hardly recognizable.   

Besides that series I've also listened to the three-hour documentary on the Emergent Church, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF-CHA4Z2FQ   which is perhps the main apostasy at the moment.   Maybe it could all together be defined simply as the rejection of Biblical fundamentalism.   They get rid of Hell, they violate commands such as the command against women preaching in the church, and support what the Bible calls sin, such as homosexual behavior, as normal acceptable behavior.   

In the Charismatic-Pentecostal branches, or the New Apostolic Reformation, supernatural experiences are promoted that are attributed to God but in reality are demonic.  Many of these come out of the New Age and Hinduism.  The dominant philosophy is now Postmodernism which denies absolute truth.

Here's a collection of just a few of the influences that channel into this final world religion, off the top of my head, leaving out dozens, more likely  hundreds, of important names.   Perhaps someone has made a chart to show all the relationships involved.  It could be done anyway.  

Darwinism, Nietzsche Death of God Existentialism.  //Marxism, Social Justice, Postmodernism, denial of absolute truth, deconstruction of history/texts, feminism, homosexual marriage, //Freudianism, Jungian psychology spirit guides twelve- step programs  est Silva Mind Control  //Eckart Tolle Oprah Winfrey Course in Miracles  //Higher Criticism // Emerging Church   Brian McLaren Rob Bell  Doug Pagitt  Richard Foster Contemplative Prayer (Centering Prayer)  Desert Fathers   Universalism   //  Globalism Dominionism anti-fundamentalism   ///   Theosophy, Alice Bailey, Madame Blavatsky -- New Age, Age of Aquarius etc.,  //  Eastern religions, especially Hinduism, meditations, levitations, mantras etc  //  Roman Catholic mysticisms and superstitions, labyrinth walking,   //  William Branham and H. G. Lake  prophecy New Apostolic Reformation Mike Bickle Manifest Sons of God Dominionism    Rick Joyner  ///  Azusa Street Pentecostalism, Charismatic movement   Word of Faith Benny Hinn Kenneth Copeland  TBN Crouch little gods

They all have in common a rejection of the authority and/or sufficiency of the Bible.  Most of it can be traced to literal demonic inspiration, "doctrines of demons" as scripture tell us.    The Bible, however, is where and only where the true Christianity is to be found, the true gospel of salvation and the nature of the true God. 

Yes I have some disagreements with some of what the films present.  I wrote at some length about my objection to the characterization of Calvinism in Wide is the Gate   They also slam the spiritual understanding of The Song of Songs  as about the love between God and His Church, imputing a carnality to it that comes from themselves and not from the Song itself.  The ancient Jews actually called it The Holy of Holies, and no way are they going to call a carnal writing by that name.  Predestination is beyond our normal human abilities, and so is the spiritual meaning of the Song of Songs.  I don't claim to understand them either, just that I know they aren't what the film says they are.  Really it's better to ignore them in the churches than open them up to oremature debate.  As I recall, Luther pretty much said Presdestination shouldn't be preached because it's too hard for us to wrap our heads around, but that at the right time in our Christian lives it is crucial for our reassurance.  It's thoroughly biblical, but some things about the nature of God simply are too high for us.  

The film also rejects Madame Guyon but I'm not going to take issue with that since for all I know she did fall into heresy with all her exploration of different methods of prayer, although I think she wrote some inspiring and perfectly orthodox poetry about the love of God.  

Unfortunately we do need to know about these things to avoid being deceived ourselves. t    The only really safe place to be is solidly grounded in the Bible.

Wide Is the Gate cont'd: film series about building the final False World Religion

 Continuing to watch the series Counterfeit Christianity --  I'm learning a lot from this.  I used to try to keep up with this sort of expose' but this one goes into territory I'd managed to miss.  

This is part 2 of  5:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pgH0_PkkIo   More about the Emerging Church.  Then gets into bad Bible "translations" that are complete rewrites by individuals with an agenda, such as Eugene Peterson's The Message,   It's scary to think what he's looking at when he faces God.   They don't discuss the Greek manuscript problems my Bible blog is about:  The Great Bible Hoax of 1881, but argue for the reliability of the Bible text even referring to the manuscripts that are corrupt, since the are so old (because the Church rejected them as corrupt and disuse preserved them).  Since most of the text even in those corrupt mss is accurate this isn't too serious a problem, but if anyone gets into comparing them with the Textus Receptus the problems will emerge because many important passages are missing from the older texts, expunged by early heretics according to Burgon, and some words were altered in the Greek that change their meaning.  (Dean John William Burgon wrote about all these problems, which is the main subject of my blog.)  

Part 3 of 5:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYGZa6VJ47c   This one covers the New Age movement in the 60s, Woodstock, the influx of gurus from India and spin-off pscyho-spiritual systems like est and Silva Mind Control;  also Anthony Robbins, psychology, Jungian etc.

Part 4 of 5:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0miQLx_Suqw   Globalist indoctrination of children in the schools, Earth worship/ environmentlism, evolution as against biblical creation,     . M. Scott Peck.  Health and fitness systems that incorporate demonic practices from Hinduism and other Eastern sources.  Deepak Chopra, Ayurveda. Yoga, Energy centers or chakras (Kundalini.  An excerpt from the   Andrew Strom film I've linked in the upper right margin is included), Reiki, Acupuncture, Acupressure, etc.  All deceptively described by their practitioners in nonreligious terms of course.   

Part 5 of 5                          Oprah Winfrey    Harry Potter      Rick Warren's Daniel Plan

Turns out there are Three Volumes of this series.  The second volume also has five parts, and apparently focuses more on Church History.   The development of Liberalism in the early 20th centure is where Part 1 starts:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H-ybDrKiU0     World Council of Churches, Catholic Ecumenism, Dominionism, Global Christianizing movement, Calvin's dominionism

Wide is the Gate 2, Part 2   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHUOjzKZpfE      Continuing world Christianization movements.  Dominionism.  Youth movements.  Latter Rain.  Henrietta Meers, Neo-Marxist environmentalism, global warming, evolutionism.  John Piper.  Saddleback occultists.  Willow Creek/Hybels Anti-Israelism/pro-Palestinianism. end times

Wide is the Gate vol 2, Part 3.    Roman Catholicism:  Sacramentalism, Mystical Contemplation, Interfaith Ecumenism Mormonism IslamVol 

Vol 2 Part 4 Reformed Theology:        the New Israel    Allegoricl eschatology.   This one is tricky for me, or some of it is.  

I studied Amillennialism  (allegorical eschatology) enough to reject it completely.  It makes no sense at all and ignores what the Bible actually says..  The literal reading of Revelation has to be true, it makes no sense otherwise.  

As for Reformed teaching about how the Church is the fulfillment of all the promises to Israel, it is possible to defend that from scripture, BUT there is too much left over that doesn't fit into that interpretqation, that must refer to literal Israel.  I had a terrible time accepting the idea that the Church and Israel will be saved separately, and it still bothers me, but John MacArthur's preaching is persuasive and I've accepted it.  It fits with the whole scenario of Rapture - Tribulation - Millennium which follows a simple straightforward reading of Revelation..  I hold out maybe 2% possibility that this is going to need to be revised at some point.  

(One tenet of current eschatology I continue to disagree with is this idea that we aren't going to recognize the Antichrist until after the Rapture which means Christians won't recognize him.  This is part of the idea that the Great Apostasy or "falling away" that must occur before he is revealed is yet future.  But one thing the Reformers argued very effectively was that the Great Apostasy was the Roman Catholic Church itself as it rose to prominence over the centuries before the Reformation.  Its doctrines are apostate.  It started out Christian and accumulated pagan superstitions galore that became its theological life as it were.  The biblical doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone was buried under a mountain of these superstitions that came from pagan Rome.   All this should definitely be recognized as the Great Apostasy too many churches think is unfolding only now.  No, what we are seeing now is in some sense a building on that Roman apostasy.  Most of it is created BY the Roman Church as they seek to bring the whole world under its leadership.  This film series shows the influence of Rome at every turn in the doctrinal corruptions that are the subject of its investigtions.  THEREFORE, we don't need to be waiting for this apostasy, the Reformers nailed it over five hundred years ago.  

Likewise, scripture also says that the Day of the LORD or what we call now the Great Tribulation, can't come UNTIL he is revealed.   But the Great Apostasy has already occured and the Antichrist HAS been revealed according to the Reformers, as well as hundreds of others before them, and he is the Pope.  The Roman Church dominated Europe in the Middle Ages, ruled over Kings;  then lost its power to the Reformation.  But its Popes have always sought to assert their right to rule the world and we see their pursuit of that role in all the recent Popes.  The Vatican is a sovereign state in its own right so the civil power is already latent in the Roman Church and just awaits the time when it can reassert itself.  Which would very likely be the chaotic state of the world we are obviously headed into right now, during which at some point the true Christian Church will most likely be Raptured out of the way so that the Pope can come forward as the great wolrd peacemaker the world will be craving.   So, although I hold out a small possibility that I'm wrong and the Antichrist will be someone else, I'm going with the Reformers and pointing to the Pope as the man who will fulfill the role in the end.)

As for Predestination/Free Will the problem is it's beyond our normal ability to understand, but it's a very simple idea:  if God is sovereign then nothing in Creation can be beyond His reach.  On one level it simply scares me to death that anything would be left up to my own free will because I know how weak I am.  If God doesn't do it all in me I'm a lost cause.  Not exactly fine biblical theology there.   

Generally speaking we have to believe in free will in a casual sense because we are called to obey many things and that means we CAN obey them.   But we don't even have to get that sophisticated about it, we don't even have to address the question and most of us probably shouldn't.  The Bible is written to ordinary people and ordinary people should just read it and obey it, there's no problem with that.  It's a theological nicety that most of us can't wrap our heads around, to say that it is God who does it all.   It may be theologically correct, and I think it is, but we aren't able to understand it so it's far better just to stay on the level of knowing we have to do various things as the Bible commands..  

It does raise the very spectre of boasting that Paul denounces though.  If I can choose anything good, that is to my credit and I can boast about it.  This is one big reason the usual defense of free will doesn't work biblically.  And again, if anything is left up to me I will botch it and the idea that I have that responsibility is terrifying.  I have to think in terms of God's making my obedience possible and in fact He does, after I'm saved, when I have His Holy Spirit within me.  Without Him I'll be falling back into my "old man" all the time and failing to walk by the Spirit.   He MUST uphold me at every turn.  That's what makes me ultimately a Calvinist.  

After we are saved we have His power, so the whole question of free will is really about unsaved people.  Calvin did derive his thinking from scripture, as I recall it's all there.  Fallen man does nothave the ability in himself to choose God.  This really ought to be clear from the simple fact that ithout biblical revelation nobody ever discovers the true God.  Hindus and Buddhists may study their minds for years and never find God.  That's because Calvin is right, fallen man is cut off from God and cannot discover Him and cannot choose Him.  God has to intervene to awaken the spirit in us that died at the Fall for that to become possible.  This is all on a level we simply can't comprehend, that God is sovereign over all things and yet we are responsible for our actions.  Both are true.  God and reality are simply beyond our finite capacities to understand.  But I shouldn't even be trying to resolve all this theologically because I can't claim I understqand it very well either;  and I don't think we sheep should have that job anyway.  Just read the Bible as written to ordinary people and that's all that's required of us.

Later:   I had more to hear in this segment of the film series and as I've gone back to it I'm just appalled at the utter stupidity of this discussion about the character of God supposedly promoted by Calvinism.  They don't know one thing about Calvin's reasoning or the Biblical basis for his views.   The only contribution Calvinism could be making to the Emerging Church heresy is not Calvinism itself but their own utterly ignorant interpretation of it.  Calvinists follow the Great Commission and preach the true gospel, it is only their ignorance that says otherwise.  Blech.  

Wide is the Gate Volume 2, Part 5:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhZAqez4IAk&t=15s    Preview says it's to be about Gnostic and Pagan Meditative techniques in the evangelicqal churches.

Later:  This part is either mostly or entirely the same as the one on this subject I saw in the first Volume of this series.  

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Volume Three deals mostly with the New Apostolic Reformation, following on William Branham and Lake who is new to me, can't remember his initials.    Manifest Sons of God, Mike Bickle.

 Vol 3 Part 1: New Apostolic Reformation   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuCsy1Nkbsg    The New Apostolic reformation    William Branham   Hyperpentecostalism     Laughing revival

Has made me question ALL revivals.    

Vol 3 Part 2  Gifts of the Holy Spirit   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PQmy5o-F7o&t=12s       If tongues are false today why should prayer language not also be false?

Vol 3 Part 3  Five Fold Ministry  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3SEkCcnIXE   Seven Mountains Dominionism   

Vol 3 Part 4  Music:  A Substitute for True Worship      https://www.youtube.com/watchv=k4R1qoTRP-0       Jesus Culture 

Vol 3 Part 5 God Chasers, Mystery Schoolw    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-LH_K7o-hI     Shaktipat, The Arnotts, Todd Bentley initiates 500 pastors

1 Timothy 4:1 is quoted often but 4:3 about mairrage and meats makes it clear it was the Roman Church that was being warned against.  In the latter days ...doctrines of demons...  forbidding to marry and commanding abstention from meats

Vol 3 Part 6   Mystical Divine Within   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOwcAVdPyAQ    Crowder Tokin the Ghost   Drunk in the spirit   felt entities among them   

Vol 3 Part 7   Little Gods in the End Times Battle      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE-W1-2p4nM    Global Agenda.  Rick Warren.  Rapture is denied, Warrior Bride.