Judgment, Revival Hope, Judgment, Revival Hope, Judgment, Revival Hope.

I've been saying for years that the US is under God's judgment, also that the churches are in such  bad shape we can't expect God to give us a revival.  But I keep hoping I'm wrong.  Couldn't the erring churches repent and reform, give up their false teachings about heaven experiences and Jesus Calling and the rest of the bad teachers and seek God from a pure doctrinal position and He'd give us a revival?  And if that happened then we could get somewhere pushing back the evils of the culture.

I still hope even when I keep finding out how much worse it is thanb eveb U gad tgiyggt,

Sigh

Come soon, Lord Jesus.

Do We "Throw Out the Baby With the Bath Water" When we Condemn All "Mysticism" as False?

Since I try to expose false Christian teachings which usually means experience-based practices that slight the biblical revelation, while at the same time I have positive things to say about a sort of "mysticism" that I think is legitimate, it can get confusing.  When I have to get into something like the Jesus Calling book as I  as I just did I do start wond3ering if maybe I should just completely abandon any defense of anything that goes by the name "mysticism" and maybe i should.  I need to pray more about that.  Even A. W. Tozer can be wrong after all even though Ihe bases his "higher life" teachings on the Bible and emphasizes the Bible as the foundation of everything we do as Christians.

Maybe I will eventually have to renounce my own arguments along these lines but since it has come up again I just want to make the case once more.   John MacArthur is always denouncinbg the "higher life" as a delusion and that sort of thing and I just heard a vid3eo in which he says that again.

So my defense is that all the "higher life" is is experiences that come to people who spend more than the usual amount of time pursuing the usual normal Christian biblical practices.   People who do say morning devotions, Bible reading and prayer for half an hour or so or even an hour, then maybe an eventing prayer time as well, aren't going to have this sort of experience.  But those who pant after God to the point that they spend hours in prayer and Bible reading and Bible meditation beecause they have an unusual passion or zeal for the things of God are very likely to have extgraordinary experiences of God.   No, not audible speaking, but inhtensified messages of great clarity through the bible, deep experiences of love for God that can carry you away, that can be called as the old mystics called them, "transports<' experiences of great peace, deep peace, experiences of "glory" as Jessie Penn Lewis described hers, and so on.    These come often with self-denial, denying self, taking up the cross and following Him.    These things are BIBLICAL.  And I think that's all Tozer is talking about.  When all you hear is debunkery of such things you are likely to get cooled down to the poinbt that you stop spending "too much" time with the Lord.   I think that's what tozer was complaining about in his introduction to his book The Pursuit of God.

Fasting is also biblical but we don't hear that preached much outside of charismatic circles where it gets used to promote some bad teaching.  This is too bad because it IS biblical, and it DOES promkote deeper experiences of God.  It brings more spiritual power, more self denial, more ability to actually do good in the world around us.  It can bring an "anointing" that draws people to the gospel, and anointing is another concept that is too often denounced by people who are so woreried about the mystical they quench every tiny way it might be expressed.

It is true that the extra passion and extra zeal that can deepen one's experience of God can also get demons involved and that has to be guarded against.   The most trustworthy of the mystics, in my opinion. are always warning about being misled and the need for special care and prayer against deception.

Reading or listening to Christian books is a legitimate part of the normal Christian life, but of course it matters WHAT books you are reading.  Jesus Calling is not the right direction.  Nor The Shack.  Nor The Prayer of Jabok.  Nor The Purpose Driven Life.  Etc.  But there's plenty of Charles Spurgeon out there, and J C Rule and i'd recommend that kind of reading myself.  I'm listening to a You tube audible book by SPurgeon, at the moment titled According to Promise.  It has som some very inspiring chapters in it that could carry a person away with "mystical transports" I suppose.

Jesus Calling Part 2

As I listened to various critical discussions of this book  in the end the one that stood out as the best expose of its heretical New Age character was Warren B. Smith as interviewed by Janet Medford, so I wanted to make sure I highlighted that one in a separate post:

Warren B Smith - Serious Problems With Jesus Calling - YouTube

The book Jesus Calling is one of the latest and maybe the biggest piece of heresy to be accepted by Christians.

It's disappointing to find out that Christians I know are enthralled with a teaching that seems to me to be herettical or close to it and it may take me a while to catch up with my o9wn impression of it because I really don't want to think that's true.  Although I want to keep up with the errors that are affrecting Christians it's such an unpleasant task to familiarize myself with such teachings I neglect the obligation.  

Then something happens so that i can't avoid it.  That happened recently as ai discovered that a group of Christians meeting for Bible Study used two sources I know to be false, and a couple others were referred to approvingly.  The book "Jesus Calling" is read as part of the meeting, and one of the materials that was handed out was a teaching by Beth Moore.  Both these teachings are at least close to heretical.  The more I find out about Jesus Calling the more outright heretical it appears to be.

My own gfirst take on it was, is this writer saying she actually heard these words from Jesus or is she just putting words in His mouth that she thinks express His thoughts or what?  In either case this is highly questionabhle to put it mildely.   My second thought was Why would Jesus need to talk through this woman and why would He need to say the things He says here if it is Him which I doubt.  the message that day was about the importance of thankfulness, a perfectly biblical idea but my question is Why do we need a special commm7unication from jesus to be aware of this biblical teaching?  We can find it in scripture and take it to heart from there.

Since i've been avoiding this kind of thing for a long time I wasn't familiar with this  so I've had to spend some time finding out more about it.  Fortunately You Tube has plenty of discussion of it.  Most of the discussion is repetitive but I did like the one by a yo8ung college student who went a bit further into it than the others I'd heard:

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JESUS CALLING DEVOTIONALS - YouTube

As I was thinking about it I realized the main sign when it comes to content of any teachihing I suspect of being a heresy is that the gospel message is neglected or distorted in some way so as to obscure it.  That is a sure sign that the author of the teaching is demonic.  This colleege student Angela touches on this problem but doesn't go into depth about it.   She mentioned hearing Michael Horton, a Refored Pastor, had discussed the book so I wanted to find what he had to say:I ccouldn't find Michael Horton on You tube so I suppose he has a written article somewhere that I won't be able to find .  But there's a lot of discussion on You tube anyway.  Here's Justin Peters:

Justin Peters on Jesus Calling and divine revelation knowledge - YouTube

nd here's a former New Age practitioner Warren Smith being interviewecd on a radio show:

Warren B Smith - Serious Problems With Jesus Calling - YouTube

The book has New Age connections and Gnostic connections according to many of these videos.  The main thing is that this is not Jesus Christ talking.  I would think if we stopped to hear it a Chrtistian should be able to recognize that it's not His voice.  "Myh sheep hear My voice" He told us.  This is not His voice.    

Jesus Calling is heresy.  I hope the message gets out to more Christians.

Chris Pinto radio show on the Scarlet Beast of Revelation as Communism, and another on the Georgia Guidestones

Chris Pinto on his latest Noise of Thunder radio show talks about interpretations of the scarlet beast of the ook of Revelation as Communism as we are seeing it today, interpretations that go back to the early nineteenth century, Alexander Hislop being a major voice.  I've often mentioned his book "The Two Babylons" which traces the pagan religions from Nimrod to the Roman Catholic Church, but he also wrote a book titled "The Red Republic" which makes a connection between Rom and Communism and the scarlet beast of Revelation.  

 THE SCARLET COLORED BEAST - 07.21.2022 by Chris Pinto (soundcloud.com

And here's Pinto's previous radio show on the Geogia guidestones.  Somebody blew up the monument on July 6th and he goes into the background of who might have had the motive to do that.  Pinto did a documentary in 2015 by the way, called Dark Clouds Over Elberton, which is an investigtion into the Guidesones in which they managed to uncover the identify of the man who had them erected.  Few seem to know about this expos.  but of coruse there's a lot of globaility communist lore involving them that nneed s to be explored.

GEORGIA GUIDESTONES & THE GLOBAL AGENDA - 07.15.2022 by Chris Pinto (soundcloud.com)

Dawkins Says Geologist Kurt Wise A Disgrace to the Human "Species"

 Kurt Wise, who has degrees in Geology and Paleontology, one from Harvard,  has famously said that even if all the evidence in the universe supported evolution he would be the first to acknolwledge it but still be a Young Earth Creationist, which is what got himj such an excoriating denunciation from Dawkins.  

Of course Dawkins doesn't believe the Bible himself but you'd think he could grasp the thinking of someone who does.  I could be wrong but as a Young Earth Creationist myselelf I understand WQise to be saying that no matter how much evidence there may seem to be that we have no answer to, nevertheless because we know the bible to be Go'ds word we know it is wrong, and maybe someday we can prove it's wrong.  Meanwhile we stand with God even if all the  world is against us.

I personally think cbiblical creationists have shown in ma ny ways that it's false but because the evidence of any historical science is mostly a matter of imaginative reconstructions that can't be proved we can't get anywhere showing them that it's false.

Mutational Variation is a pipe dream for starters, then natural selection cuts it down anyway.

 Yes, natural selection, and indeed any kind of selection whatever, the most common most likely being simple geographic isolation of a portion of a population, means a loss of genetic diversity to the new populationj as compared with the parent population.  This reduction in genetic diversity means that evolution has a natural limit bewyond which no more genetic variation is possibl.

But they always think that mutation imakes up the difference, insofar as they notice there is a problem at all, which of course they don't, I've tried to point it out for years.  Mutation is  always the answer and my answer to that is that it doesn't matter what the cause of the variation is, natural selection MUST reduce genetic diversity, that's how it works.  Mutation or not mutation there is a limitation to evolution built into the processes that bring about change.

But this idea that mutation could contribute anything positive at all is crazymaking.  I just watched a couple of videos making that claim.  Oh golly gosh, mutation is the CAUSE of variation.  WSigh.  If you have a population of black mice a mutation may occur that makes one white and on a white background that mouse will survive predatory birds while the black ones will be picked off, so the white mice will proliferate.

Sigh.
First the idea that mutations just popp up when need3ed is a biizarre article of faith.  If mutations so easily cam along to save the day for any species surely they would have saved the dcheetah long ago by now, but no, the poor cheetah goes on generation after generation with no mutation coming to the resue, endangered as always by 8its genetic depletion.

No.  Plain old Mendelian genetics is all we need to explain variation.  In a word, heterozygosity.  When you have two alternatives for a gene you get vriation.  The recessive alternate may not appear in the phenotype for some generations but when it does if it is beneficial it will proliferate in the populationj.  So once in a while black mice on a black background will get a white individual in its midles.  It will be eaten by a big bir.  but if a few more appear over time and they wander onto the white sand near the lava flow it is the black mice that will get eaten.  

You don't need anything more than normal heterozygosity for this kind of variation to occur in any population.  A And heterozygosity is really what genetic variability IS.  It's when you get a population of homozygous genes for asalient traits that become the only genetic gype in the population that you can't get variation.  This is the natural limit to evolution.  It's the common situation in engangered species and it is alwso what used to be the definition of a purebred in domestic breeding.  The more fixed loci or homoZygous genes the more a breed will "breed true.
   And that's what breeders used to want, until it was disocvered that this genetic condition usually brings genetic weaknesses and diseases with it, so they've had to modify their standared.

Ha ha.  They've got such an investment in their fake theory I guess there's no may to get them to see the truth.  

Sigh.