What if there was a way for you to know everything. Would you want it? That was the premise of the movie called “Lucy” that came out a while back. The gist of the story is about a woman who was kidnapped by a Chinese crime ring which implanted a supply of a mythical drug called CPH-4 into her (and other subjects) bodies for smuggling purposes. The pouch broke open inside of Lucy before she reached her destination and the hormone/drug went into her body, starting the process for her to be able to use 100% of her brain, thus, enabling her to know everything! It was commonly believed for a long time that humans only used about 10% of their brains. Modern brain imaging techniques show that large areas of the brain are active during various tasks, indicating that we utilize nearly all parts of our brain. Many people still have the misguided idea that the majority of humans utilize only a small percentage of their brains, but this has been proven to be untrue. (However, based on the behavior of a lot of people I have witnessed over the years, I am still tempted to believe it!)
We understand one of the attributes of God to be omniscience. God knows everything, a blonde chic named “Lucy” does not! It is hard for human beings to wrap their heads around omniscience because we are not that way. We are not supposed to be. We rightly understand that God is infinite, totally limitless, without beginning or end. We are not. We have nothing in our limited experience to compare omniscience and infinity to. We were created. We had a beginning. We can have an end. The Gospel promises eternal life to those who have faith in, obey and confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. This means we can have eternal life right now. This does not mean our physical bodies will not wear out and die. They obviously do. It means we can, firstly, experience the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (the third person of the Trinity) right now. This gives us the power that we do not possess in and of ourselves to live righteously right now. The Holy Spirit conforms us into the image of Christ in the here and now. It is also the assurance that when our current physical bodies die that our souls will live on in the presence of God and that our souls will receive a resurrected, glorified body when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead.
Knowing that you are a created, finite being puts things in their proper perspective. It shows you that you are dependent. You are dependent on the One who created you. You are NOT free to choose to do whatever you desire or crave. If you choose to try to live that way, your life will end in miserable failure and defeat. Defiant human beings prove this out over and over. God is a God of order. He spoke order into what was chaos. (“The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep…”) The Sea, in Scriptural language, represents disorder, chaos and danger. In Genesis, we see God speaking and establishing beauty and order over the chaotic mass of water (the sea.) Despite the teachings of a lot of modern-day hyper-charismatics, God does not manifest His power and anointing through people behaving in crazy, nonsensical babbling, chanting, barking like dogs, uncontrollable laughter, etc. such as is witnessed in some of the recent, so-called “revivals”. If you have ever seen video footage of some of these so-called revivals such as “the Toronto blessing” for example, what you see is disorder and hysteria. This is NOT how God operates. God is a God of order and beauty. God does not speak through people via incoherent babbling. There is no such thing as a “heavenly” language manifested by people gibbering in nonsense. When the book of Acts records people “speaking in tongues”, it is referring to people being supernaturally empowered to preach the Gospel to those in Jerusalem from all over the known world in languages that the Apostles had not previously learned. It was a specific act of God, at a specific time, to serve a specific purpose. That temporary power/annointing is no longer necessary, but much to do about the “gift” of speaking in tongues is perpetuated in churches and bodies of believers worldwide. The idea of a “heavenly” unknown language is utter nonsense. That is not to say that a person who believes in the gift of tongues and falls prey to the wrong teaching that tongues is a heavenly, or prayer language, are bad people, they are just misguided, and do not understand it. I knew a very godly woman, about the same age as my mother, who I thought of as my “spiritual” mother, years ago that spoke in tongues, and encouraged me to do it also. I tried but honestly knew in my head that I was just making up gobbledegoop. and uttering nonsense. That is all these charismatic preachers are doing when they “speak in tongues”. The Apostle Paul gives very explicit instructions in his letters to the churches about how Christians are to behave in public gatherings (in other words, church.) Nowhere does he condone chaotic, irrational and hysterical conduct.
The first (original) sin that plunged mankind into sin and death was the partaking of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” What this represents is mankind’s insatiable desire for omniscience, the desire to know everything, be the one in control and rule himself instead of subjecting himself to the rule of God. We probably all know some “know it all’s, the ones who pop up with all the answers, or what they think are the answers whenever a question is asked. Those are the people that probably annoy me the most. News flash: It’s OK to say, “I don’t know.” There is a rehashed heresy called “gnosticism” that has been slowly creeping its way back into the church recently. Gnosticism is basically the idea of secret knowledge. We have all seen commercials on TV and the internet where someone is marketing some secret formula for making enomous amounts of money by buying their book or attending their online training seminar teaching how we can follow their secret formula. The promotion of secret knowledge is gnosticism, a way to gain an advantage over others who do not posess this knowledge they are selling. Gnosticism can manifest itself in many different cultural contexts, secret societies, cults, etc., but what I want to focus on is its infiltration of the church. In charismatic circles it is often referred to as “word of knowledge”. It has become predominant in a movement referred to as “The New Apostolic Reformation” (NAR). This is the heretical idea that new “Apostles” are rising up to lead the church into a new era of church growth and prosperity to usher in the second coming of Christ, as if we can control this, when we have been told plainly in Scripture that no man knows the day or hour. Orthodox Christianity has asserted that the apostolic age of the church ended with the original apostles, those men who were actually present during the time of Christ and experienced Him in the flesh, or the Apostle Paul who was directly commissioned by the risen Lord. There is no such thing as “modern day apostles” and those who claim that authority for themselves are charlatans. They take Scriptures out of context and twist them in order to manipulate people, usually for the sole purpose of raising monolithic amounts of money for themselves. This is what is commonly referred to as the Prosperity Gospel.
Along with this unholy and heretical idea about babbling in gibberish being a “secret heavenly language”, within the “New Apostolic Reformation” there is also an unhealthy fascination and desire for ecstatic experiences. These can get rather bizarre, i.e. shaking uncontrollably, falling down, laughing uncontrollably, barking like a dog, claiming that the Holy Ghost feels like electrical shocks within the body, the list goes on and on. Read the Bible. You will not find any of this nonsense described anywhere. The Gospel message is about forgiveness of sin through Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection from the dead, His glorification and ascension to Heaven, to sit at the right hand of God until the time of the judgement comes, and His second coming to judge, rule and reign. It has absolutely nothing to do with “personal prophecies”, esoteric knowledge, ecstatic spiritual experiences and God promising to make anyone wealthy and healthy. God certainly can make a man to prosper monetarily, and there are many examples in Scripture of this. God can certainly heal people from devastating health conditions, and there are many examples of Him doing this also. But this does not mean we can turn this into a formula we can use to gain health and wealth. But promises of health and wealth are not included in the Gospel, as part of the message. As a matter of fact, the exact opposite of this is what we are assured of if we follow Jesus Chris: trials, tribulation, persecution. Many things from the words of Christ, the Apostles and Revelation indicates conditions in the world will get continually worse before the second coming of Christ, not better. People will become more narcissistic and self-indulgent. These Apostates that preach a false gospel of health and wealth are always encouraging people to seek signs and wonders. Jesus said that an adulterous generation seeks after a sign.
The New Apostolic Reformation, through their “Word of Faith” doctrine teach people something akin to pagan magic: the idea that you can speak things into existence with your words. They say that God has faith, and we need to have the same faith that God has in order for our creative words to have power, like the power God exhibited when Hs spoke things into existence. Firstly, the idea that God has faith in preposterous. God is omniscient. He does not need faith to do anything. Who, or what would He have faith in, since He is the greatest being?
Don’t misunderstand what I am saying. Our words DO have great power, but not the kind of power they are speaking of. If I say, “I will have a wonderful garden this summer” and have confidence in my gardening abilities, and do the work, I may very well have a wonderful garden, so in that sense, my words have had power, power to motivate me to do the work and grow the vegetables I desire. I am certainly not going to “speak” a garden into existence simply because I decree and declare a garden to be. Our words have power to help or harm others, and ourselves. Our words have power to encourage or insult. But the idea that we can speak things into existence by simply “decreeing and declaring” it to be so is merely the pagan concept of magic wrapped in Christianized jargon.
“Personal Prophesy” is also another heretical idea that has gained traction within the church. We used to go to a church that practices this for a while. God certainly has used many prophets to speak to His people throughout the ages, no question there. But the idea that we can speak and receive personal prophesies over and to people is not found in the Scripture. If you listen to it, most of the time it is vague enough for anyone to interpret what it means in whatever manner suits their fancy, like reading a horoscope or using tarot cards, and it is always feel-good stuff, not confrontation of sin. The internet is drowning in a deluge of false prophesy. I could go on and on about all this stuff, but you get the point.
God’s Word instructs us to be wise, not gullible and stupid about the things we take in and believe. We each need to know the Word of God for ourselves. I admit it takes work, a lot of work. But the rewards are eternal. We can judge for ourselves when we are hearing the Word of God taken out of context and twisted to “prove” some heretical theology. People’s ignorance of sound theological reasoning in today’s church is astonishing. We must train ourselves in knowing how to rightly divide (or handle) the Word of God, and learn to read it in its context, and the historical and cultural context in which it was written. Our mindset or worldview today is very different from the worldview of the people to whom the Bible was originally written both in the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. Our modern, atheistic education system has poisoned the minds of our youth who can no longer make heads nor tails of what is written in the pages of Scripture. This should not be so.
To make matters worse, especially since the advent of today’s Mega-Church, much heretical nonsense as I have discussed has found its way into the Church. Men are making merchandise of the Word of God and tickling people’s itching ears to tell them what they want to hear instead of confronting SIN, and bringing about repentance. The Gospel message has been watered down to become a “How to live a healthy, happy and rich life” recipe. That fills the churches up. Let’s abandon all this nonsense and get back to the basics:
1. We are ALL sinners. We were born in sin because the sin of the first humans passed that corruption onto us. We are guilty before a righteous, holy, merciful and fair God.
2. God has given us what we need to know Him.
3. The Gospel message shows us that salvation is by grace, through faith. If we neglect so great a salvation, we are doomed.
4. God is the Judge. He is a righteous and fair judge. We have the opportunity to be forgiven and have eternal life, like we made for. It is up to us to turn to Him and believe Him. If we choose not to, in the end we have no one to blame but ourselves.
5. God does not promise us that we will not have hardships in this life. We live in a broken world full of broken people. But He does promise us glory, peace and eternal blessing if we will turn too Him while we have the chance.
Danny's Stump 