Satan’s Messiah Is Coming

And then, the lawless one will be revealed,

whom the Master will destroy with the breath of his mouth

and will bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming,

him whose coming is by the work of Satan,

with every miracle, and deceptive signs and wonders,

and with every unrighteous deceit among those who perish

because they did not receive the love of the truth so that they might be saved.

And God will send a strong delusion on them because of that,

to make them believe the lie, so that they might be damned

who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in unrighteousness.

Paul, in 2Thessalonians 2:8–12

Satan's version of our Messiah, Jesus, is coming.  In the book of Revelation, that wicked messiah is called “the Beast”, and to him, Satan will give all his authority and power.  He will do this in imitation of the Father giving all power in heaven and earth to the Son.  

After the Beast appears will come the backslidden holiness preacher called “the False Prophet”.  This False Prophet will be key in turning the Beast’s secular rule on earth into a deeply religious matter.  He, not the Beast himself, will be the one who demands that every person on earth worship the Beast or die, and he, not the Beast, will utterly deceive all believers who are committed more to the Church than to Christ.

When James said, “Purify your hearts, you double-minded!”, that warning was for us, not the world, for James knew full well that God’s people who do not purify their hearts are in danger of being “turned over to believe a lie and be damned”.  This is what God has revealed that Satan, through the False prophet, will do to children of God in the last days who love the forms and fashion of religion more than they love Jesus.

May God help us to search our hearts with His candle, and purify our hearts from every worldly influence, so that we may believe and love the truth!

God Is Not Old

In the visions of the night, I was there, watching,

and behold, one like a son of man was coming with the clouds of heaven,

and he approached the Ancient of Days, and they ushered him in before Him.

And dominion was given to him, and majesty, and a kingdom.

And all peoples, nations, and languages shall serve him.

His dominion shall be an eternal dominion that will not pass away,

and his kingdom will not be destroyed.

From Daniel’s Vision in Daniel 7:13–14

In Daniel’s vision, the Son of God is the one to whom the “Ancient of Days” grants an eternal kingdom, and God the Father is the “Ancient of Days”.  But don’t let that title fool you.  God is indeed “ancient”, but God is not old.  If I may say it this way, God has for a very, very long time not been old, and throughout eternity to come, He will keep on not being old.

Age is the shadow of death, and death is the end result of sin.  God cannot sin, and so, He cannot die.  Therefore, He never ages.  And for those who love Him, He has promised the same kind of life He has: eternal, ageless life.

The Truth Can Become a Lie

As also Paul writes in all his letters when he speaks in them about these matters, among which are some things hard to understand, which those who are ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they also do the other scriptures.

2Peter 3:16

All the words of my mouth are in righteousness;

there is nothing froward or perverse in them.

The Son of God, in Proverbs 8:8

The truth is not the truth if it is spoken at the wrong time, or to the wrong person.

Zophar, one of Job’s three friends, told Job in the midst of Job’s horrific suffering:  “Should not this multitude of words be answered?  And should a man full of talk be justified?  Should your lies make men hold their peace?  And when you mock, shall no man make you ashamed?  For you have said, ‘My doctrine is pure,’ and ‘I am clean in your eyes.’  But oh, that God would speak and open His lips against you! . . . Know that God exacts of you less than your iniquity deserves!” (Job 11:2-5, 6b).

Now, it was true that God was exacting of Job less than his iniquity deserved – if we think of iniquity from a New Testament understanding.  When the Son of God came, he revealed a new kind of righteousness, the previously unknown righteousness of God, and with that revelation came a new and more perfect understanding of sin.  According to that newly revealed definition of sin, Job was sinful, along with every mortal who had ever lived on earth.

But that is New Testament truth.  It did not apply to Job.  God did not feel as Zophar did about Job because He is a just God, and He only judged Job according to the standard of righteousness that existed in Job’s time.  And according to that standard, God judged Job to be “a perfect and upright man, one who fears God and eschews evil” (Job 1:8).

Zophar was wrong.  He was telling the truth, but he was ignorant of the truth he was telling.  He was saying right words, from the perspective of what the Son of God would one day reveal, but the Son had not yet revealed it.  Zophar was condemning Job according to a human standard of righteousness, but Job was not a sinner by any human standard of righteousness.  Only God, at that time, could have said to Job what Zophar said and be telling the truth, but He did not say it.  And God did not say it because it was not His appointed time for such truth to be said.

My father taught his congregation that a person can do more damage with the truth than he can with a lie.  In other words, if we use something true in order to accomplish some evil thing, we will succeed more often than if we use a lie.  Satan, you will recall, quoted truth from the scriptures during the Temptation of Jesus; he knew that no lie would accomplish his purpose.  Consider how much damage would have been done if Jesus had fallen for that truth-turned-into-a-lie!  False prophets and false teachers have always used the holy Bible to persuade people to believe them and to follow their ungodly ways.  The truth has power that lies do not have.

It is our prayer that God would help us tell what is really the truth whenever we say anything, for if what we say is not spoken at the right time, and to the right person, it is not really the truth at all.

Humility: the Mother of Learning

From a sermon on Slander by Pastor John in 2006

The Spirit is teaching all of God’s children all the time, but if at any point along the way, we become proud of what we think we know, our growth in the knowledge of God will cease – until we regain our humility.  Pride is the mother of spiritual blindness, but humility is the mother of learning.  Humility makes us wise because it makes us willing to receive instruction.  If you stop and think about it, you will realize that everything you know – even so small a thing as knowing how to tie your shoes – you learned by humbling yourself to someone who was teaching you, whether it be to God or to a person on earth.

Solomon said, “A wise man will hear” (Prov. 1:5), but it is the willingness to hear which enables someone to become wise.  And, as Solomon repeatedly pointed out, it is the unwillingness to hear, that is, pride, which makes a person foolish (e.g., Prov. 1:7; 15:5; 23:9).  When someone becomes proud, he cannot become wise for his heart will no longer receive instruction.

May God give us the humility to become wise by listening to the instruction of the Spirit of God, and by listening to the wisdom of those who have been taught by the Spirit before us!

Proverbs 1

5.  A wise man will hear, and will increase learning, and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels,

6.  to understand a proverb, and the interpretation, the words of the wise, and their dark sayings.

7. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

8.  My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:

9.  For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck.

“Wine Is a Mocker”

“Wine is a mocker, strong drink is boisterous,

and whoever is deceived by it is not wise.”

Proverbs 20:1

From conversations with Preacher Clark in the 1970’s.

Sometimes, alcohol makes people act the way people act when they are under the power of the holy Spirit.  Those drunk on the wine of heaven may stagger, shake, fall to the ground, shout and praise God, or a thousand other glorious things, all of them perfectly good and clean in God’s sight.  On the day of Pentecost, when Jesus’ disciples first received the Spirit, they were overcome with joy and the power of God, and they spilled out into the street from the upper room where they had been staying.  Some onlookers concluded, “They are full of new wine!” (Acts 2:13), but those onlookers were wrong.  The disciples were indeed drunk, but not the way those onlookers supposed.  Peter told them so:

Acts 2

14. Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and declared to them, “Men of Judea,   and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and pay attention to my words!

15. Contrary to what you think, these are not drunk, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.

16. But this is that which was spoken through the prophet Joel:

17. ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

18. In those days, I will even pour out my Spirit on my slaves, male and female, and they will prophesy.

Preacher Clark taught us that when God’s people are under the power of the Spirit, they are not imitating the drunks of earth.  Rather, the drunks of earth are imitating, and so, mocking, the power of God when they are drunk.  We need to look at it the right way.  Instead of saints mocking worldly drunks, worldly drunks are mocking happy saints.  And as we all know, “God is not mocked.  For whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap” (Gal. 6:7).  God will have the last laugh, and He will be laughing hard when He strikes the whole earth with such wrath that the earth itself “shall reel to and fro like a drunkard” (Isa. 24:20).  On that day, who will be mocking who?  God says this to those who mock Him now:

Proverbs 1

24. Because I have called, and you refused, I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded,

25. but you have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof,

26. I also will laugh at your calamity.  I will mock when your fear comes,

27. when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction comes like a tornado, when distress and anguish come upon you.

Paul exhorted the saints not to be drunk with wine, but to be filled with the Spirit (Eph. 5:18).  He exhorted God’s children to participate in life, not to imitate it.  The holy ghost can move our mortal bodies with its power, the power that will someday raise us from the grave.  The world’s version of this is being drunk with earthly wine, but that only hastens the day that we enter into the grave; it can do nothing to get us out of it.

May God fill us with the kind of wine that thrills the soul with its purity and love, the holy “new wine” from heaven that flows from the throne of God and has filled thirsty souls with His righteousness, from the day of Pentecost until now.

Losing a Member

“Command the children of Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper,

and every one that hath an issue, and whosoever is defiled by the dead.

Both male and female shall ye put out, without the camp shall ye put them,

that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof I dwell.”

Numbers 5:2-3

“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away from you!

It’s better for you that one of your members perish than that your whole body

be cast into Gehenna.  And if your right hand causes you to sin,

cut it off and throw it away from you!  It’s better for you that one of your

members perish than that your whole body be cast into Gehenna.”

Matthew 5:29–30

“Put that wicked man out from among you!”

1Corinthians 5:13

Whether under the law or in this time of grace, there are times when, for the good of a body of believers, ties must be broken with an individual member.  Sin is like a contagious disease, and when left unopposed, it always grows.  As Paul said to the saints in Corinth, who had allowed a grievous sin in their midst to go unopposed for a long time, “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1Cor. 5:6).  And what was the medicine that Paul prescribed for this body of believers?

1Corinthians 5

3. Absent in body but present in spirit, I have already judged, as if present, the one who has done this deed.

4. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you and my spirit are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ,

5. turn such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

6. Your glorying is not good.  Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?

7. Purge out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, since you are unleavened.  For Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us,

8. so that we might keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

9. In a letter, I wrote to you not to associate with immoral people,

10. not meaning, of course, the immoral of this world, or the covetous, or swindlers, or idolaters, for in that case, you would have to leave the world.

11. But now I write to you not to associate with anyone called a brother, if he be immoral, or covetous, or idolatrous, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler – not even so much as to eat with such a one.

12. For what have I to do with judging those outside?  Do you not judge those who are inside?

13. Those on the outside, God will judge.  So put that wicked man out from among you!

Of course, many times, those who are put out of the congregation feel misunderstood and mistreated, and some, like Satan when he was put out of heaven, become angry.  But the important thing is that the body be protected from the influence of souls that have gone astray and are now committed to some ungodliness.

To lose a member of the body of Christ is no more pleasant than to lose an eye or a hand.  But those in the medical field, and men who truly know God, will tell you that there are certainly times when a body must lose a hopelessly diseased member, or lose its entire self.

Unwanted Blessings

And it came to pass after these things that God, testing Abraham,

said to him, “Abraham.”  And he said, “Here I am.”

And He said, “Take now your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac,

and go to the land of Moriah, and there offer him up for a burnt offering

on one of the mountains that I will point out to you.”

Genesis 22:1–2

Abraham was not being punished when God told him to slay and sacrifice his young son Isaac.  On the contrary, he was being rewarded.  The great test of being told to offer up his only son as a burnt offering was reserved for no one but Abraham because there was no one else on earth who qualified to face that test.  By his great love and faith in God, Abraham had earned the privilege of being tested with fire.  It was, no doubt, a blessing that Abraham did not want, but it was the blessing God wanted him to have.  And because Abraham met that trial with faith toward God, we are still talking about him today as a wonderful example for us.  

The apostle James exhorted God’s people to rejoice when they were tested (Jas. 1:2).  He understood that a hard trial is a compliment from God.  Those who have great faith do not fall into and stay in the pit of “Why me?”  Instead, they rise up and face their unsavory circumstance as Jesus did his, with meekness and faith in God.

As a rule, God does not scourge His children for doing wrong.  He may chasten them for doing wrong, but He reserves His scourging, that is, His hardest trials, for those, like Abraham, who have demonstrated great faith already.  In his gospel tract, “Trials Are Opportunities, my father once wrote, “The strongest type of character always receives the hardest trials.  What a glorious opportunity we have – the privilege to be stamped with the trademark of heaven!  Trials of faith are God’s greatest compliments to His earthly children.”  To this wisdom, he added this exhortation: “One should never look upon his trials as mere attacks from the Devil.  Not at all!  God's sheep should be taught that it is God who designs and sends trials of faith and that they are intended for our greatest blessings!  There is great peace in understanding that faith must be tried, and that when it is tried, it is being tried by God!  From trials, one learns his most precious lessons, lessons custom-designed for each of us by our heavenly Father, to match our faith and to enhance our spiritual development.”

Solomon said that “no evil shall happen to the just” (Prov. 12:21).  This means that the hurtful things that happen to us, as with the pleasant things, are designed by our heavenly Father for our good.  And if we love Him, and if we are among those called according to His purpose, everything that happens to us can only be for our good, just as Paul said (Rom. 8:28).  Paul was a hated and maligned apostle.  As an old man, he was deserted by most of the people he had won to the Lord in his lifetime, as well as by some of his closest fellow-workers in Christ.  His aged body bore the scars of the great physical abuse he had suffered.  Still, he said, “I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in distresses, in persecutions, in troubles for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2Cor. 12:10).  He did not necessarily want those blessings; at the same time, he understood those “blessings” were necessary for him and that overcoming them meant that he would receive a better resurrection.  Let us emulate Paul’s faith!  If we do, we will have the same joyous testimony he had!

Scourged...but Saved

“No discipline at the time seems joyous, but grievous;

however, afterward, it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness

in those who have been trained by it.

Therefore, straighten up the listless hands and the feeble knees,

and make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned aside,

but let it be healed instead.”

Hebrews 12:10–13

From a 2006 sermon by Pastor John on Slander.

Carnally-minded people whom Paul described as “natural men” frequently speak of what God will or will not do.  One such man, a professor of the New Testament, once declared to us seminarians that God would never take the life of an innocent child.  When this brilliant but foolish theologian told us that, King David came to my mind, and what God did to his new-born baby after the prophet Nathan confronted David about his  adulterous affair with Bathsheba:

2Samuel 12

13. And David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord!”  Then, Nathan said to David, “The Lord has put away your sin; you will not die.

14. Nevertheless, because by this deed, you have caused the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the son that is born to you will certainly die.”

15. And Nathan went to his house.  And the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and he was very sick.

. . .

18a. And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died.

God is not a big one of us, and His ways and His thoughts are so far beyond us that without His help, we cannot comprehend them.  God will do whatever He pleases to do, without regard to what humans think He should do.  In a parable, Jesus described God as “austere” (Lk. 19:21–22); Peter warned us that the trials God appoints for us can be very difficult and confusing (1Pet. 4:12); and the author of Hebrews went so far as to say that God “scourges” His children (an extraordinarily painful event) and that only those who humbly submit to the scourging will be saved in the end (Heb. 12:6).

James did say that God does not tempt anyone (Jas. 1:13), but in context, what James clearly meant is that God does not tempt anyone with evil.  For example, God tempted, or tested, Abraham (Gen. 22:1), but what He tempted Abraham to do was good, not evil.  

Old and New Testament writers alike made it absolutely clear that God tests His people (e.g., Jer. 17:10; 1Thess. 2:4), and the Psalmist even revealed that the opposite of being tested by God is to be hated by Him (Ps. 11:5).  James also said that when those who are being tried by God resort to evil, it is not that God has led them into sin but that they have yielded to the ungodly desires of their own fleshly nature (Jas. 1:14).  In other words, it is not that the test God gave them was too hard (that is never the case –1Cor. 10:13); rather, it is only that they failed the test.

You can overcome anything you face in this world because your heavenly Father, who loves you with all His heart, designed that trial for you, knowing you could overcome it.  Yes, at times, He has more confidence in our ability to overcome than we have, but He is always right.  You can win.  You are going to win.  Nothing can separate you from your heavenly Father’s love and care.  Every creature in heaven is on your side, and best of all, God and His Son are on your side.  You will be tested, but after you weather the storm, you will know God – and yourself – better than you ever have known Him.  That will make you a happier and wiser person than you ever were before, and when that happens, you will feel a very deep joy, and gratitude for the awful test that you had to go through.

Being Cut

God is looking for fruit from you.  And if you bear fruit, Jesus said the Father would prune you, so as to enable you to bear even more fruit.  That may sound harsh, but Jesus added that if you do not bear fruit, the Father would cut you off completely (Jn. 15:2).  This means that you are going to be cut on, one way or the other.  You are going to be cut on or be cut off.

Those who bear fruit to God earn the blessing of receiving another level of holy discipline; they have earned the privilege of being scourged and perfected.  He scourges every son who will be judged worthy to escape eternal damnation.  Every child of God who will be saved in the end will have submitted to His scourging – after they had borne good fruit!  Every one of them!  If you never receive that kind of scourging, it is because God considers you to be a bastard (Heb. 12:8).  He will not even consider you to be a son because you did not receive the Father’s correction.  When Israel failed to receive correction, God commanded Jeremiah not to pray for them anymore (Jer. 7:16).  Tender-hearted Jeremiah must have kept on praying for Israel after God told him to stop because God had to tell him at least twice more not to pray for them any longer (Jer. 11:14; 14:11).

If you receive no correction from God, you get no comfort from God.  If you receive His correction, He has oil to pour on your wounds.  As the prophet said, “He has wounded us, and He will bind us up” (Hos. 6:1).  “The wounds of a friend are faithful,” said Solomon (Prov. 27:6), and Jesus is the friend who sticks closer than a brother (Prov. 18:24).  How precious to have your wounds bound up with the balm of Jesus!

When your wound is bound up by Jesus, you find that you have a submissive, grateful attitude similar to my father’s attitude after he had been scourged by God with cancer.  He often referred to the disease as “that blessed cancer” because he felt that he would not have been prepared to meet God in peace had he not been afflicted with it.  “Uncle Joe” Murray was the same way.  He looked back on the days of his affliction as a good time, when his fellowship with God was perfected.  Given sixty to ninety days to live by physicians, no one on earth could help him, no matter how much they loved him.  Nobody on earth could do anything, either for him or against him.  He was altogether in God’s hands.  God had him all to Himself, with Uncle Joe’s future in the balance.  And when Uncle Joe met God’s expectations, an angel came to him and anointed him to be healed, and Uncle Joe’s sixty-to-ninety-day death sentence was transformed into thirty-seven healthy, happy years!

I know how it feels to be in a place where no one can help you.  You can feel the love that people have for you, and their desire to help, but when God puts you in that place, there is absolutely nothing anyone on earth can do.  God may give them credit for wanting to help, but He will not allow them to do a thing.  It is you, alone with God, where the hottest fires burn and the greatest amount of dross is burned out of your soul.  However, as lonely and hard a place as it is, it is still a very good place for God to have you, for it will make you cry out to God as you never have before.  It will make you spend some nights on your knees, but when God has gotten the fruit from you that He is looking for, when you have done the will of God to His satisfaction, when the heart is perfected, you will lift your battered head and say from the heart, “Thank you, heavenly Father, for loving me enough to have put me through that.”

Of course, those who do not humble themselves and render to God the desired fruit will become bitter at what they went through.  They will always see themselves as victims and will never be able, from the heart, to thank God for their trial.  But every person who accomplishes God’s purpose for the trial will end up thanking God forever for every bit of the suffering He put them through.  There will be no bitterness in their souls.  They were scourged, but in their time of hurting, they gave God what He wanted from them, and in His presence, they will be full of joy and peace.

True Humility

“My thoughts are not your thoughts,

and your ways are not my ways,” says the Lord.

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways,

and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8–9

Being humble before God includes humbling ourselves to labor because to labor was God’s original curse on humans for their sin.  What this means is, a lazy man is a rebel against God.

Being humble before God also includes humility in the face of natural disasters, disappointments, and inconveniences because they are just more of God’s ordained consequences for our sin.

Being humble also means standing up for the right, even if few others have the courage to do so.  Moses was the humblest man on earth, according to the Bible (Num. 12:3), and yet he stood fast with God and the truth through some very perilous situations, even daring to smash the people’s beloved golden calf to very tiny bits – and then making them drink it!  Jesus was even meeker than Moses, but he became furious when he saw his Father’s house being used by men to make money, and he overturned their tables and drove them out of the temple (Jn. 2:13–17).  Jesus once said, “I am meek and lowly”; at the same time, he always “called a spade a spade”, and he would boldly stand up for the helpless against the powerful who were abusing them (e.g., the hapless woman caught in adultery).

Men can appear to be humble by making a show of their humility.  But be careful.  Before judging someone to be humble, let us pause to consider what God thinks humility is.  His thoughts are not our thoughts, and He is not fooled by appearances, as we so often have been.

Worth More Than Half

Herod, on his birthday, made a feast for his chief officials, the captains of a thousand, and the leading men of Galilee, and the daughter of [Herod’s wife] Herodias came in and danced, and she pleased Herod and those banqueting with him.  And the king said to the girl, “Ask of me whatever you desire, and I will grant it to you.”  And he made an oath to her: “Whatever you ask of me, I will grant you, up to half of my kingdom!”  So when she went out, she said to her mother, “What shall I ask for myself?”  And she said, “The head of John the Baptizer.”  And immediately, she hurried in to the king and made her request, saying, “I want you to give me, right now, the head of John the Baptizer on a platter.”  And the king was deeply grieved, but because of the oaths and those feasting with him, he would not refuse her.  And so, the king sent an executioner and commanded that his head be brought in at once.  And he went out and beheaded him in the prison, and carried his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl, and the girl gave it to her mother.

Mark 6:21–28

If Herod wanted to give this dancing girl anything up to half of his kingdom, it was no one’s business but his.  It was perfectly lawful and permissible for him to do that, even if it was foolish for him to make such an offer because he enjoyed someone’s dancing.  Herod was probably drunk, having been at his birthday bash for a while before the girl danced; but again, the King was well within his rights as king to make that offer.  Even one of Jesus’ parables upheld the legality of a man doing whatever he wanted to do with what is his (Mt. 20:15).

But it was when the young girl, after being advised by her wicked mother, asked for the head of John the Baptist that Herod showed what a great fool he really was.  A sane response to the girl’s insane request would have been that John the Baptist was worth more than half his kingdom, more even than all of it.  God certainly thought so.  That is why He warned His people, “Touch not my anointed, and do my prophets no harm!” (1Chron. 16:22; Ps. 105:15).

But Herod was a fool.  He did not value John as he should have, and so, he foolishly fell into his wife’s trap and assented to the ungodly request.

The apostles warned us that there are people around us like Herod’s wicked wife who will also lay traps for our souls.  They hate the truth as she did, and those who speak it, and if we get drunk on the things of this world, they will take advantage of our weakness and get us to agree with something that we should not agree to.  Our safety is in esteeming the things of God above everything in this life, all we have and even all that we are.  When the love of God fills our hearts as it did the prophets, Jesus, Paul, and others, nothing can move us to say or do anything which does not please God.  We will please God in everything, and keep our victory over sin. 

Comparing Yourself to the Giants

Moses sent [twelve men] to spy out the land of Canaan, and he said unto them, “See the land, what it is, and the people that dwell therein.”  So they went up, and searched the land.  And they returned from searching of the land after forty days.  And they came to Moses, and to Aaron, and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, and said, “We came unto the land to which thou sent us, and surely it flows with milk and honey, and this is the fruit of it.  Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great, and moreover we saw the children of Anak there.”

And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, “Let us go up at once, and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it!”  But the men who went up with him said, “We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we!”  And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eats up the inhabitants thereof, and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature.  And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants, and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”

– excerpts from Numbers 13

The spies whom Moses had sent out to scout the land of Canaan were troubled.  God had already done the impossible for the Israelites.  He had delivered them from Egyptian slavery and taken them safely across the burning sands of the Sinai Peninsula, miraculously feeding them every day with manna, the sweet wafer-like substance that David called “angels’ food”.  Now, here Israel was, just about to be given the whole land of Canaan, but the spies discouraged them, telling them they could not take Canaan, and they convinced their fellow Israelites that they should all return to Egypt.

Two of the spies, Caleb and Joshua, did not agree with the other spies.  Caleb and Joshua believed God and were thrilled that He was about to give Canaan’s land to Israel.  But because they were thrilled about it, and because they told their fellow Israelites that they could take the land, the other spies and Israelites set about to stone Caleb and Joshua, and they would have succeeded if God had not miraculously appeared and stopped them.

God was so angry with the ten spies who discouraged Israel that he struck them dead.  Then, He cursed Israel by sending them all back into the desert wilderness to wander about until that whole generation died.  Forty years later, a new generation of Israelites did take the land, including old Caleb and Joshua, whom God spared because they had put their faith in Him and did not fear the giants of Canaan.

This was the kind of faith Preacher Clark was exhorting us to have when he said in a sermon in 1972, “Don’t compare the giants to your own strength.”  The giants of this world can indeed defeat us.  We are small, and they are big.  But God has promised to be with us, and to give us the victory.  And as Paul said, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”  That is how Caleb and Joshua felt, and because they felt that way, they were allowed to enter into the Promised Land and to possess a portion of it.  If we believe God as they did, if we look to God instead of the giants that oppose us, we, too, will enter into the Promised Land and be given our portion, with all the rest whose faith is in God instead of in the giants.

My Father’s Greatest Achievement

Perhaps the greatest achievement of my father as a servant of God was that he left behind a congregation that was spiritually alive; that is, a congregation willing and able to hear from Jesus and to follow him. He didn’t leave us with the feeling that we had to circle around what he taught us and never grow beyond it.

There is a group in Indiana who has been spiritually dead in the water since their leader died.  Their meetings, I hear, consist of gathering to listen to recordings of him preaching.  God help him.

Preacher Clark would have been displeased with us if we had done that.  He expected us to follow on with Christ and grow in the grace and knowledge of God.

God has more to tell us, and He has more to do to us to make us like Him.  Let’s seek Him and wait for His voice.  He is a faithful Father!

Just You

God has been good to us all.  He is worthy of all our praise and devotion.  The next time you thank Him for His goodness, however, I want you not to think of “us”.  I want you to think only of your life and the grace God has shone toward you, alone.

Yesterday, I realized that when I give God praise, I often do it with reference to us all.  And at other times, the many who have refused His grace will come to mind while I am talking to Him.  But the Lord impressed on me to forget about all others (for the moment) and to just praise and thank God for His great mercy shown to me as an individual, to make my praise very personal, between Him and me without reference to anyone else.

That kind of communication with God brought with it a sweet, humbling feeling.  Try it sometime, and let the Lord take a walk with you through your past and remind you of how merciful and kind He has been to you as a solitary soul, throughout you life.

The Rock of Scandal

As we were translating the ninth chapter of Romans recently, we came across this verse:

33. As it is written, “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stumbling stone and a rock of offense, and everyone who believes on him will not be ashamed.”

I pointed out to my fellow translators that the Greek word translated “offense” in this verse is skandolon, from which is derived the English word “scandal”.  It is a word used to refer to something that causes people to turn to sin.  Jesus, himself, was the “stumbling stone and rock of offense” that God laid down in Israel.  His doctrine and manner of life became a “stumbling stone and a rock of offense” in Israel.

Religious leaders were the main culprits.  Their slander about Jesus made the people think that what Jesus was teaching was wrong and that what he was doing was evil.  Having found out that Jesus’ mother was pregnant before she and Joseph came together, they claimed that Jesus’ father was one of those despised Samaritans, thus making him what some would have contemptuously called “a half-breed” (Jn. 8:48).  Mary’s pre-marriage pregnancy was probably also the reason for the rumor they spread among God’s people that Jesus was a bastard child (Jn. 8:41).  These well-respected religious leaders also denounced Jesus as demon-possessed (Mk. 3:22; Jn. 7:20), and the slander that Jesus was insane was believed and spread by even Jesus’ own relatives (Mk. 3:21), apparently including his own mother (Mk. 3:31).  Speaking through the prophet, the Son of God foretold of his coming to earth, saying that he would be the butt of public jokes and “the song of the drunkards” (Ps. 69:12).  All that happened, and worse.  Nevertheless, God comforted Jesus so that none of the cruel slander spoken of him discouraged him (Isa. 42:4).

It has always been the case that religious leaders slander true men of God, for the appearance of a man sent by God exposes them as not having been sent by Him, and they want to maintain their status and influence over people.  Their poisonous seeds of slander cause the people’s joy at hearing the truth to wither, and changes that joy into contempt for God’s servants.  The truth of Christ is a rock upon which we may stand to gain a more perfect view of the glory of God, but slander makes people see that rock as a stumbling stone and rock of offense (scandal).

Paul was also accused of being insane (Acts 26:24), and his words were often twisted by leaders of the body of Christ to turn believers away from Paul (2Pet. 3:16).  In Romans 3:8, Paul mentions one false doctrine that he was slanderously accused of teaching.  And in Acts 21:21, James tells Paul of another; namely that among the Jews, including Jews who believed, it was being reported that Paul taught that Jews everywhere should forsake the law of Moses, which Paul never did.  By the end of Paul’s life, sadly, the slanderers had won, and multitudes of saints (Paul said all of them) in the Roman province of Asia, saints whom Paul had labored hard to win to Christ, had turned against him:

2Timothy 1

15a. All they in Asia have forsaken me. . . .

So, just as Jesus said would happen, many and varied lies were spread against Paul.  However, Jesus told his followers to rejoice when men spread vicious rumors about them.  Being spoken evil of, he said to them, is one sign that they were on the way to a great reward in heaven:

Matthew 5

11. Blessed are you, whenever people revile and persecute you, and say every evil thing against you falsely, for my sake.

12. Rejoice, and be glad!  Your reward is great in heaven, for that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

This has happened to me, and I can tell you from experience that it requires a lot of faith to obey Jesus and rejoice when it happens.  Slanderous reproaches hurt; Jesus’ heart was broken by them (Ps. 69:20), but Jesus prayed through the pain and received the comfort that God alone can give.  Jesus learned by painful experiences on earth that he could rejoice in persecutions, and Paul learned to do that, too (Col. 1:24), both of them trusting God to have prepared for them a very great reward in heaven.

I paused recently to make a mental list of the scandals that have been spread about me, which have no doubt turned many a soul away from the truth Christ has taught me.  I thought it might be good to list them so that you can see how truly Jesus spoke when he said that men will speak “all kinds of evil against you”.  Here are some of the many different evils that I have been accused of, none of which were true:

• In my hometown, the rumor was spread by Christians that I and my congregation secretly sacrificed children at night in a field east of town.  (Just so you know, there were no reports of missing children during the time this was supposed to have been happening.)
• Also in my hometown, a highly-regarded pastor and two members of his congregation spread the rumor that I had molested a little girl.  One of those men even said he had been an eyewitness to it.  (He did not explain why he only watched the purported crime and did nothing to stop it.)
• Another rumor was spread in my hometown that we have home prayer meetings so that we can use the bedrooms.  (This rumor was spread, in one case I know of, by a man who was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife, and who finally drank himself to death on one of those nights when he was away from home.)
• By chance, on a remote job site in the middle of the state, a Church of God pastor met a relative of mine, Bob, without realizing that Bob was my relative or that Bob even knew me.  Somehow during their conversation, my name was brought up, and the minister told Bob that three women were living with me in my house.  (Amused and curious, Bob kept asking about the situation until he learned from the pastor that one of the women with whom I was supposedly living was Bob’s wife!)
• A newspaper in the town where I now live ran a large, front-page article about me that included a Christian minister’s accusation that I routinely break up marriages.  (Ironically, the minister in this case was a brother whose marriage I played a key role in putting back together after his wife left him.)
• In the same article, I was accused by yet another Christian minister, this one from the other side of the country, of teaching that whoever does not live in North Carolina will go to hell.  (Yes, this actually was printed in the newspaper.  Actually, however, I am not sure that anyone can go to hell from outside of North Carolina, or even inside it, for that matter.  What I teach is that the place from which people go to hell is the place God calls “sin”.)
• Also in that newspaper article, I was accused of phoning a lady out of the blue and for no reason whatsoever, coldly telling her that she was evil.  (The fact that I did not even have the woman’s phone number and could not have called her even if someone put a gun to my head was not reported.  Nor was it reported that what this woman was really angry about was that I refused her offer of a donation to my ministry because of her filthy conduct, in particular, taking indecent pictures of her own adult daughter and showing them to visitors in her home.)
• I am routinely accused by Christians of being after money.  (Odd as it is, the three people I know of who have accused me of being after their money are three people whose money I refused because of their ungodly conduct.)
• A brother who abandoned his godly wife told his relatives that one reason he had to leave my congregation was that he found out I was planning, through my “underground international connections”, to move the entire congregation to a foreign country.  (The only international connection I can remember having at that time was with a man in Australia who has since moved to the United States – which would explain, I suppose, why I am still here.)
• A brother brought a lawsuit against me for what is called “alienation of affection” because, he said, I had turned his wife’s affections away from him.  That was humiliating for his godly wife and me because “alienation of affection” suggests to the public that there was a love triangle, which was absolutely not the case, as even that brother’s attorney admitted.  (What the public did not know is that just two months after his marriage – and a number of times after that – this brother’s despairing wife came to me, wanting out of the marriage, saying that marrying him was the biggest mistake of her life.  I begged her to stay and try to make it work, and she went back and gave it her best effort, but his increasingly ungodly conduct eventually became more than she could bear.)
• Besides all this, there has been the usual Christian slander, calling me a false prophet, a heretic, a money-and-power-hungry cult leader, and a manipulator of people’s minds, among other unimaginative things.  The more intelligent and more theological-minded Christians call me such things as a “Pneumatomachianist” and “Binitarianist”.  But don’t laugh.  They will call you those same names if you do not believe their doctrine of the consubstantiality of three co-equal and co-eternal hypostases in the Godhead.  Really, they will.

The list above of the slander that people, especially Christians, have spread about me should give you a good idea of what Jesus was talking about when he said that people will “say every evil thing against you falsely, for my sake.”  Yes, it is embarrassing, and yes, such rumors can hurt the heart, but if we will humbly pray for the Christians and others who spread such slander, and if we seek God’s comfort, we will at some point be able to do as Jesus said and as Paul learned to do, and “rejoice and be glad” for it all, knowing that our reward up in heaven is great – but also knowing that down here on earth, God is using even that slander for our good!

God uses the scandalous slander surrounding His servants in order to keep certain people away from them.  The people who believe the lies of the slanderers are the same people who are a headache to God’s servants whenever they are close to them.  They are a distraction and a burden to God’s ministers, and when slander trips them up and turns them aside, God’s ministers are spared the burden of having to deal with their foolishness.  “God is not mocked,” my friend.  God is so wise and cares so well for His servants that when the foolish are turned away by slander, even that brings glory to Him and relief to His ministers.

Not “Us and Them”, Just Us

“Putting away lying, let each of you speak truth to his neighbor,

for we are members of one another.”

Ephesians 4:25

Daniel was a very great man before God.  When God wanted to emphasize how crafty the coming world ruler would be (the man called “the beast” in Revelation), he said through Ezekiel, “You are wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that can be hidden from you” (Ezek. 28:3).  And when God wanted to emphasize how furious he was with His people for their godly conduct, He said this, to stress that even the prayers of the most righteous men in history would not help them now:

Ezekiel 14

14. Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord God.

15. If I cause noisome beasts to pass through the land, and they spoil it, so that it be desolate, that no man may pass through because of the beasts:

16. Though these three men were in it, as I live, saith the Lord God, they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters; they only shall be delivered, but the land shall be desolate.

17. Or if I bring a sword upon that land, and say, Sword, go through the land; so that I cut off man and beast from it:

18. Though these three men were in it, as I live, saith the Lord God, they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters, but they only shall be delivered themselves.

19. Or if I send a pestilence into that land, and pour out my fury upon it in blood, to cut off from it man and beast:

20. Though Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, as I live, saith the Lord God, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter; they shall but deliver their own souls by their righteousness.

Remember what God thought of Daniel as you read the following prayer from this wonderful man of God:

Daniel 9

1. In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of the seed of the Medes, which was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans;

2. In the first year of his reign, I Daniel understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem.

3. And I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplication, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes.

4. And I prayed unto the Lord my God, and made my confession, and said, O Lord, the great and dreadful God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love him, and to them that keep his commandments;

5. We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments:

6. Neither have we hearkened unto thy servants the prophets, which spake in thy name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land.

7. O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion of faces, as at this day; to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and unto all Israel, that are near, and that are far off, through all the countries whither thou hast driven them, because of their trespass that they have trespassed against thee.

8. O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee.

9. To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him;

10. Neither have we obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets.

11. Yea, all Israel have transgressed thy law, even by departing, that they might not obey thy voice; therefore the curse is poured upon us, and the oath that is written in the law of Moses the servant of God, because we have sinned against him.

12. And he hath confirmed his words, which he spake against us, and against our judges that judged us, by bringing upon us a great evil: for under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon Jerusalem.

13. As it is written in the law of Moses, all this evil is come upon us: yet made we not our prayer before the Lord our God, that we might turn from our iniquities, and understand thy truth.

14. Therefore hath the Lord watched upon the evil, and brought it upon us: for the Lord our God is righteous in all his works which he doeth: for we obeyed not his voice.

15. And now, O Lord our God, that hast brought thy people forth out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and hast gotten thee renown, as at this day; we have sinned, we have done wickedly.

16. O Lord, according to all thy righteousness, I beseech thee, let thine anger and thy fury be turned away from thy city Jerusalem, thy holy mountain: because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and thy people are become a reproach to all that are about us.

Other righteous men of God felt the same way.  Consider Ezra:

Ezra 9

1. . . . the princes came to me, saying, The people of Israel, and the priests, and the Levites, have not separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing according to their abominations, even of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites.

2. For they have taken of their daughters for themselves, and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands: yea, the hand of the princes and rulers hath been chief in this trespass.

3. And when I heard this thing, I rent my garment and my mantle, and plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down astonied.

. . .

5. And at the evening sacrifice I arose up from my heaviness; and having rent my garment and my mantle, I fell upon my knees, and spread out my hands unto the Lord my God.

6. And said, O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God: for our iniquities are increased over our head, and our trespass is grown up unto the heavens.

7. Since the days of our fathers have we been in a great trespass unto this day; and for our iniquities have we, our kings, and our priests, been delivered into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, and to a spoil, and to confusion of face, as it is this day.

8. And now for a little space grace hath been showed from the Lord our God, to leave us a remnant to escape, and to give us a nail in his holy place, that our God may lighten our eyes, and give us a little reviving in our bondage.

9. For we were bondmen; yet our God hath not forsaken us in our bondage, but hath extended mercy unto us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and to repair the desolations thereof, and to give us a wall in Judah and in Jerusalem.

10. And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? for we have forsaken thy commandments.

Ezra was, himself, not guilty of marrying a heathen woman.  But with this prayer, Ezra was not being overly pious.  Nor was Daniel being overly pious when he confessed the sins of his people as his own.  These men of God were thinking the way the Son of God thought when he came to earth.  He was moved by God’s love for us to become one with us, to share in our shame, to taste of the death we must taste, and to become sin for us so that we might become his righteousness.  We find prayers of the Son throughout the book of Psalms, in which he is begging God to forgive him, to cleanse him, to deliver him, though he could have cried out for his own deliverance from this world at any time, and angels would have come and taken him away.

This is not just the way a few of the very most righteous men of history have felt.  This is the way the love of God makes everyone feel who feels it.  This is the way every child of God feels who loves with the love of God.  It is a a love that makes you love the family of God so much that you want to share in their destiny; it makes you want it so much that you become willing to take their place if they are wrong.  It makes you want their guilt, if your brother and sisters are guilty; it makes you want to take their guilt on yourself and then go to God with that guilt to get rid of it for them and you.  Isn’t that what Jesus did?  Paul felt this way.  Paul said that he was willing to be cursed if he could just reach the hearts of his fellow Jews with the gospel (Rom. 9:3).

He explained the unity Christ died for us to have like this:

Romans 12

3. For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.

4. For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office:

5. So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.

1Corinthians 12

12. For just as the body is one, and yet has many members, and all the members of the one body, though many, are one body, so also is Christ.

13. For by one spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and all were given to drink of one spirit.

14. For the body is not one member, but many.

15. If the foot say, “I’m not part of the body because I’m not a hand,” does that mean it is not a part of the body?

16. And if the ear say, “I’m not part of the body because I’m not an eye,” does that means it is not part of the body?

17. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?  If the whole body were hearing, where would the smelling be?

18. But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He was pleased.

19. If everything was one member, where would the body be?

. . .

24b. God has blended the body together

25. so that there might be no division in the body; instead, members would share the same concern for one another.

26. And then, if one member suffers, every member suffers with it; if one member is honored, every member rejoices with it.

27. You yourselves are the body of Christ and, individually, members of it.

If the body of Christ is broken, the man is broken who loves the body of Christ as Christ loves the body.  If the body of Christ is confused, the man is confused who loves the body of Christ.  If the body of Christ is rebellious and disobedient, the man feels rebellious and disobedient who loves the body of Christ as Christ loves the body.  He became sin for us because we were sinful, and he loved us.

Now, do we love the body of Christ they way Jesus does?