When Job proves Satan wrong, Satan is no longer mentioned in the book of Job. In chapters 1 and 2, Satan is persistent in attacking Job's faith. But when Job's Christian critics take over in the next section, they do such a good job of verbally pounding on Job, perhaps Satan felt he could leave Job in the hands of his ash heap critics and go destroy some other believer's faith
Read moreThe Problem of Suffering and Evil, Part 1
Chris Sheeter and I were students at BJU and friends in 1981. Chris was tall, handsome, musical, with a great personality. He also was a good preacher. Chris was studying to pastor. We attended the same church, Southside Baptist Church and worked as waiters at the same Seafood restaurant, Old Mill Stream Inn. I graduated one semester before he did and started pastoring in N.C.. I drove back to Greenville, S.C. just to fellowship with Chris. During his last semester, he was a lifeguard at a local hotel. At the end of a shift, he dove into the pool just to swim across and go home. As he was swimming across the bottom, his friends noticed he stopped about halfway. Chris drowned.
Chris studied for seven years, spent nearly $100,000 to prepare to pastor, and never got to pastor one day. I remember asking myself why did God lead him to go through the rigors of four years of undergraduate work and the even tougher studies of three years of seminary and then allow this tragedy to happen.
Read moreN. T. Wright's Denial of the Rapture
Kurt Willems writes a post entitled “Why the Rapture isn’t Biblical … And Why it Matters at Patheos.” He has adamantly repudiated what he was taught at church as a child and is also disturbed by the success of the Left Behind series (65 million have been sold). I’m sure the new 2023 Left Behind movie only adds to his frustration.
Read moreDo All Religious Roads Lead to Heaven? (Part two)
Madonna stated in an interview, “I do believe that all paths lead to God. It’s a shame that we end up having religious wars because so many of the messages are the same.”[12] In other words, there are many religious roads up the mountain to God. In Do All Religious Roads Lead to Heaven, Part One, we discussed resortationaism, universalism, and annihilationism. In Part Two, we continue to move to the theological right.
Read moreDo All Religous Roads Lead to Heaven? (Part One)
You have probably had a conversation with someone who believed that there are many ways of salvation and that there are many religious roads to heaven. I have had discussions with people who have strongly expressed this view. I was eating out with members of my extended family on this very subject. They described me as arrogant for believing that only my religion out of all the religions in the world today is the only correct way to heaven.
Read moreWill the church through social justice usher in the Millennium?
Gary North and Gary DeMar in the Christian Reconstruction Movement take social justice to another level. They teach that the church should practice social justice to reconstruct society in order to bring in the kingdom.
Read moreIs There a Gift of Exorcism?
Since the 1973 movie, The Exorcist, there has been one exorcist movie after the next. There are six installments in the Exorcist franchise. The latest is The Exorcist: Believer in 2023. One exorcist movie, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, produced by a Biola University graduate is based on the true exorcist tragedy of 24-year-old Anneliese Michel. Two Catholic priests performed 67 exorcism sessions, one or two each week, lasting up to four hours, over ten months in 1975–1976. Anneliese Michel died the next year and her parents and the two priests were found guilty of negligent homicide.
Read moreWhat is the anointing of preaching?
Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel.” Jerry Vine and Jim Shaddix wrote: Without a doubt, something mysterious is at play when the Holy Spirit attends to the preaching event. This fact can make any attempt to describe the work of the Spirit in preaching very difficult. But in the area of speech communication—even among Christians—it seems that the gospel preacher has an advantage that separates him from all other public communicators. Even secular public speakers can be passionate about their subject matter, but one particular ingredient is reserved solely for those who speak the words of God. This ingredient enables the preachers’ words to be pointed and powerful. This ingredient has been called anointing. Some homileticians and preachers do not believe the anointing actually exists, contending it is an unnecessary and unbiblical notion that often weighs the preacher down with guilt (Vines is referring to Alex Montayo in his book Preaching with Passion, Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2000, 35). I agree Alex Montayo. (Jerry Vines; Shaddix, Jim. Power in the Pulpit: How to Prepare and Deliver Expository Sermons (p. 76). Moody Publishers. Kindle Edition).
Read moreCessationism verses Non-cessationism, Part Three
The operative spiritual gifts for today
Every believer has a spiritual gift or gift/mix.
Peter in 1 Peter 4:10 confirmed this truth: “As every man has received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” God in grace not only gave us the gift of eternal life but a spiritual gift to serve Him.
Cessationism verses Non-cessationism, Part Two
Spiritual gifts fall into two areas: Temporary sign gifts and permanent service gifts
Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:22 states that the Jews require a sign. There have been three periods in the history of Israel when there have been sign gifts performed because Israel refused to believe God’s messengers and their God-given message:
Read moreCessationism verses Non-cessationism, Part One
Michael Horton, a reformed theologian is a cessationist. A cessationist believes the sign gifts such as healing, prophesying, and speaking in tongues ceased with the passing of the apostles and the closing of the canon of Scripture. Horton corrects Wayne Grudem another reformed theologian who is a non-cessationist. I am posting Horton’s refutation of Grudem in Part One. I will follow up in Part Two with a further explanation of the differences between cessationism and non-cessationism. Michael Horton Refutes Grudem's Continuing Gift of Prophecy in his article Reformed and Charismatic (click to open):
Read moreThe Crossless Gospel
The late Zane C. Hodges proposed this dilemma in his famous desert illustration:
Let me begin with a strange scenario. Try to imagine an unsaved person marooned on a tiny, uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He has never heard about Christianity in his life. One day a wave washes a fragment of paper up onto the beach. It is wet but still partly readable. On that paper are the words of John 6:43-47. But the only readable portions are: “Jesus, therefore, answered and said to them” (v. 43) and “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life” (v. 47). Now suppose that our unsaved man somehow becomes convinced that this person called Jesus can guarantee his eternal future since He promises everlasting life. In other words, he believes Jesus’ words in John 6:47. Is he saved?
Read moreReview of Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor (Part One)
Bart Ehrman argues that only John has Jesus claiming to be the Son of God
In an interview with Ehrman by Ruth Graham (2014) with the Boston Globe, Ehrman stated:
The problem is that Jesus only makes claims for himself as being divine in the Gospel of John .... But what scholars have long noted is that Jesus doesn’t say any of those things in Matthew, Mark, and Luke and that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are [written] much earlier than John .... What I argue in the book (How Jesus Became God) is that it’s virtually inconceivable that if it was known Jesus called himself God, that Matthew, Mark, and Luke would just leave that part out.
Read moreThe First Adam and the Last Adam
The influence of Jonathan Edward’s (1703-1758) sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is legendary. It has been called the most well-known sermon in American history. Edward’s influence, however, was greater with his family. Jonathan and Sarah had eleven children. For one hour before dinner, Edwards would gather his children together and help them with schoolwork and talk about their day. Edwards wrote, “Every house should be a little church.”
Read moreOrigins of Life (Part Two)
Tim Keller rejects the view of Richard Dawkins who “argues that you cannot be an intelligent scientific thinker and still hold religious beliefs.” But Keller believes the view of a six twenty-four-hour day creation is “fortunately … losing credibility with a growing number of scholars.” In both Dawkins’ and Keller’s view, science has undermined the interpretation of Scripture. Keller even says, “There is no necessary disjunction between science and devout faith.” Keller repudiates the literal interpretation of Genesis one and two in order to believe in theistic evolution: “It is false logic to argue that if one part of Scripture can’t be taken literally then none of it can be.” The theologians who hold to the different forms of theistic evolution contradict themselves in rejecting the creation of the universe in six twenty-four-hour days in order to accommodate the science of atheistic evolution.
Read moreYou Can and Must STAND against the Devil
I read of a local satanic assembly that actually held all night prayer services, praying against the pastor of one church. This cult met in a house located directly behind the church. They even sent letters to the church telling them of their evil practice. The pastor, a great pulpiteer, soon left his wife. The Satan worshipers then left the area (Merida, Tony. Faithful Preaching (pp. 146-147). B&H Publishing. Kindle Edition).
Read moreCan Believers be Demon Possessed?
Those involved in “deliverance ministries” say it is necessary to bind Satan in the unsaved to give the gospel. “The experienced deliverance minister can compel evil spirits to tell the truth. I do so all the time….To evangelize the demonized we must learn how to bind demonic activity from the minds of demonized unbelievers” (Ed Murphy, We Are at War, pages 51 and 58). What about Romans 1:16 which says that the gospel is the power of God to those who believe?
Read moreThe Canon and the Apocrypha
Michael Horton (2011) writes that most of the 27 books of the New Testament in the first century "were already widely recognized and employed regularly in public worship as divinely inspired. In fact, this was one criterion that was used for determining which texts were canonical" (p. 194). This is also why determining which books were inspired and canonical was important. The early believers wanted to know which books to read in their public worship services.
Read moreAttacks on The Canon of Scripture
The Church of the Latter Day Saints believes that the Book of Mormons was inscribed on golden plates in some form of the Egyptian language, described as Reformed Egyptian by Joseph Smith. The golden plates were buried in the hills of Manchester, New York by the last of their prophets, Moroni. Later, Moroni, the prophet returned as an angel and informed the prophet Joseph Smith where the golden plates were located. On September 22, 1827, Joseph Smith started translating the Book of Mormons and three years later the Book of Mormons went on sale.
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