Another Church Attack

I never get tired of defending God’s truth. I do get tired of all the ways people try to attack that truth.

If you are paying attention to the Scripture, you know that this could not be the End Times. The one defining factor of the End Times is an effort to oppress faith itself. Religious oppression is common to mankind from beginning to end, but genuine attacks on faith are quite rare. Right now, human governments aren’t paying any attention to genuine faith. Their focus is on other kinds of power. Thus, the only source of attack on genuine faith is from religious folks who are threatened by a true biblical faith.

That doesn’t mean the attacks from Zionists. Indeed, genuine biblical truth does not support Zionism. If we tell the true story about Judaism/Talmudism and how it continues to influence the Jewish tribal agenda of today, then it threatens the Jewish lie that they are still God’s Chosen. They are not. Telling that truth threatens the Zionist agenda. Once you understand the centrality of covenants in God’s revelation and and in His dealing with humanity, you realize that the Covenant of Moses died on the Cross, and the Covenant of Christ is the only covenant God offers. The only way to be His Chosen today is in Christ.

And that’s the key to understanding a genuine attack on faith itself. It’s really not about the Jews, because their agenda isn’t really about the issue of faith. Things have drifted quite a ways since the First Century Judaizers fanned out across the Mediterranean Basin to undermine the churches by attacking genuine Christian faith. The churches became corrupt, but genuine faith still stands. Jews went on to fight other battles.

Thus, the current attack on true faith comes from church folks.

This is an example of that. The podcast is more than two hours long, and the speaker drones on and on about something he regards as too complicated to address in brief. He’s wrong. His argument is pretty simple, and it boils down to an effort to paint genuine faith as Gnosticism. He does a fair job of it, if you aren’t really up on the religious and philosophical debate he attempts to address.

On the one hand, there’s plenty of churches that muddle through this minefield without a clear sense of purpose, except to exist as a corporate entertainment franchise. They appear to be movers and shakers, and their doctrinal purity is never much of an issue. On the other hand, among churches with a strong historical legacy to defend, there’s typically a potent reliance on reason. They simply redefine the word “faith” to mean a bundle of theological doctrine, and each different tradition asserts their bundle is the only true biblical version, to the exclusion of others.

They all arrive at these theological positions by relying on reason, not the mystical union of man submitting to God personally. It’s all of that pagan Aristotelian thing again, where they insist that faith is reasonable, but some reason they cannot find a path to unity with others. That’s because the key failure of reason is that it always strives to justify whatever it is a man really wants, and they all want something different. That’s how reason works; it will seek to find “objective rules” that justify one particular kind of fleshly lusts. Those, while those lusts are highly cloaked, they haven’t gone away. Human reason is a function of fallen flesh, and it never escapes the Curse of our fallen nature.

They all still believe that human reason is not fallen, and can be perfected. They then try to define (restrict) God according to reason, which is just human rebellion in disguise.

It’s not that reason is useless, but that is must be subject to faith. And faith is not something in your head, but in your heart. The Bible itself suggests the heart is superior to the mind, though you won’t find it clearly stated anywhere. Here’s the kicker: The real scholars of the Ancient Near Eastern cultures, of which the Hebrew people were a part, will tell you that they all uniformly rejected the supremacy of reason and trusted first in the heart. The objects of their faith varied widely, but the principle of faith over reason was unanimous with folks like Abraham and all of his descendants. Every educated man knew that, so it wasn’t necessary to state such a principle.

God revealed Himself in those terms. Further, He specifically built the culture of the Hebrews and their language, because His truth can be captured only in the mysticism of faith over reason. Hebrew mysticism is the defining character of Hebrew scholarship, and Jesus was a Hebrew mystic.

So, in that linked podcast, the speaker tries to make the case that a non-rational approach is “Gnosticism” because it sets aside fact and reason, and asserts a truth that comes down from above. How does he imagine God spoke to Moses? How did God speak to Balaam, who went into a trance of sorts, or Elisha who did the same thing when the kings asked about the coming battle (2 Kings 3)? Elisha called for a praise musician so he could enter a proper contemplative state to hear from God. And how about Jesus and His penchant for climbing mountains in darkness where He would could turn His face to the blowing winds and hear the voice of His Father?

Oh, but that’s “Gnosticism” according to that podcast. It’s as if we can’t afford to trust God to meet us when we move out of the realm of reason. That’s “out there” in non-rational space where anything could happen. Yep, there’s a risk. If you don’t first embrace the God of Creation, then you are in highly unprotected space. But it’s not that hard to get comfortable with that space and make God your Master. The Bible talks about it a great deal, and what you should expect to experience when you get there. It’s not just “spiritual space” where demons roam by themselves; the angels outnumber them two-to-one. We are talking about heart space where God meets us, unless we haven’t bothered to submit to Him in feudal commitment. And that feudal commitment is what the word “faith” actually means. It means meeting personally with God in your heart. The Bible specifically says the heart can be perfected, but not the intellect.

Of course, there’s one other thing the podcast doesn’t approach, at least not the part I listened to (I didn’t have two hours to waste on something like that): If you venture off out of rational space, you won’t end up in the preferred safe behavior of church leaders. Specific to that podcast was the attempt to use religion to justify a very specific brand of political libertarian belief. Yeah, of course Jesus taught that — not! Jesus taught tribal feudalism, His Father’s only provision for how we should live on this earth.

Right now, the attacks on faith have been pretty weak. I’ve gotten more grief from Zionists on this blog. However, Zionists are in a weaker position, so they tend to be more reactive. Church folks still rule the vast sweep of religious western folks. If their position should ever weaken, expect them to start being more activist. Until that happens, the biggest threat to this blog is Zionism.