The Fundamental Blog

“Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord.”

This is a command that tells us that, as Christians, we are to be different from the world to which we used to belong. But are we? When we give ourselves to Christ we commit to living a different life, to hold ourselves to a higher standard and to deny ourselves the perverse and temporal gains that the world pursues. As the church, “…the Bride of Christ…,” we are supposed to be a shining light to the world, we are supposed to stand for something better, some-ONE better, a Saviour in whom we are being perfected. But do we? In this age of scientific enlightenment the importance of the church has diminished to little more than a club for superstitious weaklings that require Christ, as a crutch, to carry them through the daily trials that life places in all of our paths. Society is steadily working to destroy the church by it’s constant barrage of criticisms that are, all too often, being regarded as more relevant than the teachings of the Holy Bible. But we are society! Walt Kelly, the creator of the comic strip, “Pogo,” phrased this perfectly in a poster he did for Earth Day in 1971. Viewing himself in a looking glass the title character, Pogo, remarks, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

The tendency of turning away from the truth of God is nothing new. The problem is as old as the account of Adam in the garden, and when we read the Biblical accounts of the rebelliousness of Israel we think, “How could they be so foolish to disobey God?” We are no better. We have, over the course of time, allowed the truth of God to become mere suggestion. We have stood idly by while the promoters of political correctness tear away the moral absolutes that God established until we call evil good and good, evil, and this as a simple matter of course. Over and over, we find the instruction of Deuteronomy 5:32 repeated, “Ye shall observe to do therefore as the Lord your God hath commanded you: ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left.” Please do not misunderstand, I am NOT advocating a return to the law of the Old Testament, grace has freed us from the death which is in the letter, but the spirit of the law should not be as the baby, thrown out with the bath water!

Man has always attempted to replace the principles of God with his own when deciding on the validity of any specific doctrine. Man says, “There is no Hell;” God says there is. Man says, “All paths lead to the top of the mountain, we will all arrive in Heaven together;” God says otherwise. Man says, “There is no problem with adultery, white lies and homosexual lifestyles;” God disagrees. Man accepts the fallacy of evolutionary supposition and declares, in his own wisdom, that creation is passé and Darwin is factual, even though the Word of God is unquestionably opposed to the idea. The time is coming when we will realize the error of the things we have allowed to pass as valid but by then it may well be too late; I fear that it may be too late already. When we face God at the judgment and have no choice but to accept the truth that He gave to us, all those thousands of years ago, all we will be able to do is lament the fact that our children and grandchildren are on the very road to ruin that we paved for them. God has said, and is not wrong, “[I am the Lord], that frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad; that turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish;”

Many people have made drastic lifestyle changes in order to home-school their children expressly because they want to maintain the values of truth in the lives of their kids. I praise God for you folks! But the tragedy is that not all of us find ourselves in a situation where we can do such a thing. Because of a lack of teaching ability, a financial picture that will not allow a parent to remain at home or a multitude of other possible reasons, most people end up sending their children to public schools. Schools that do everything in their power to discredit God, remove the supernatural miracles from the realm of possibility and ridicule the young believer until they break from the pressure of non-acceptance. People look at the things that assault the sensibilities of children today and, at the same time, bemoan the fact that our youth today are out of control. WE DID THIS TO THEM! As a society, we listen to the advise of the supposed, “experts,” as they change the model of truth, turning it into anything they think convenient to their purpose.

We try to bring our children up in the ways of the Lord and then blindly allow our educators to strip away everything that is true, only to replace it with lies. How long can we defend a position that makes us teach our children to give the answers that the educational system demands in order to pass the exams at school, and then expect them to be able to differentiate those lessons from the truth that they are learning at church? The majority of parents care so little about the quality of education in American schools that they will not even attend a meeting at the school if it conflicts with their plans, (and these plans usually revolve around doing nothing of importance). It seems as though nobody cares who sits on the school boards, or what curriculum is offered, as long as they don’t have to miss Pro Wrestling on TV! If parents cared enough to look, they might be surprised to find that the ACLU mentality is educating our society! If there exists any hint of absolute standards, and all standards are based on absolutes, then we must get them out of the public school system right away. The destroyers of society say it’s far better to teach socially acceptable lies than it is to support a truth that might possibly offend someone. But we stand by, like Saul, and in our silent complacency give approval.

There are certainly many valid reasons to not teach your child yourself, but there is no acceptable excuse for not being active in your child’s education or the development of the society they will inherit. If you are not going to protect the future of your children by safeguarding their education, society and the basis of all they hold as moral and true, why did you have children in the first place? Children are the gift of God, but at the same time, they are a responsibility for the parent. “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.” Mark 9:42.

Could it be that we care only for the immediate needs of our families? How can we pretend to care about providing for the security of our future generations but completely ignore the responsibility of shaping the societal climate that they are going to live in? Christians, (if we be Christians), we value our salvation above all other things in life, whether money, status or any other material considerations. Why do we only concern ourselves with the parts of our children’s future that we, ourselves, claim as secondary? WE ARE SOCIETY! If we do not stand up for the truth in order that our children might learn that there is no higher purpose in this life than serving a loving God, a God who gave His Son Jesus to die for our sins that we might be reconciled with Him, who will?

It is not some faceless, “Them,” who is destroying the fabric of society, ruining the faith that the martyrs died to preserve and are turning our kids down the increasingly steep path to Hell, IT’S US! We must, if it is not already too late, take the reigns of responsibility back from the feel good nay-sayers and make a stand for the truth we claim to believe. Do not say that I am being too hard on the Christian, that I should not judge; open your eyes and look at the fruit that we have wrought by our neglect to keep the things of God holy. How much longer before the generations to come will not even remember the name of Jesus Christ? We need to fall on our faces in prayerful repentance because of the rotten condition we have allowed the Christian orchards to deteriorate into, our fruit reeks, literally; reeks to high Heaven.

We are backward. The church is supposed to be shaping the values of society and instead, society is remaking the morality of the church. You can either stand by and watch as the heathen morality consumes the rest of the holiness that has managed to hold on this long, or you can get involved and do something about it. Go to public meetings and let the voice of truth be heard. If there is no Godly candidate running on the ticket, (regardless of the office), maybe you should toss your own hat into the ring. If you can’t remember the last time you voted, “for,” somebody, because we usually choose between the perceived lesser of the evils, maybe it’s time a new breed arrived on the ballot. This is the kind of action that the world might yet be able to recognize as being…


All for the Glory of Christ

In many circles of alternate theology you may find the idea passed around that we are all co-creators with God. Even within some supposedly Christian ministries, the idea of Naming-and-Claiming is put forth to the laity, though this is generally a thinly veiled prelude to asking for money. To the true Christian, this is rubbish. These professors of need fulfillment by the supposed doctrine of Give-to-Get and Name-and-Claim theologies prey on the unlearned and their doctrinal weakness. What amazes me most is that people will go along with whatever they say simply because the name of Jesus is tossed into the mix. What I can not understand is this; If the concept of giving-to get were a sound doctrine, why don’t the charlatans asking others to give, simply, “give,” away their own wealth and then retire on the bounty of the, “get,” which they would then be due? If we truly are co-creators along side God, why do we still have need?

If co-creation were a reality, don’t you think that we would have figured out by now how to feed, clothe and provide education and medical care to the indigent third world nations, (not to mention ourselves)? Co-creation is a myth. God tells us in Proverbs 14:2, “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” It may seem plausible that we could influence the created things of earth, even cause creation, if a mind can endure a flight of fancy to that extent, but it only made up out of men’s heads. “Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away.” Psalm 144:4. Still, we seem to want to favor the imaginations of men instead of the Word of God which clearly tells us that men are simple fools.

I know that these verses of Scripture are not saying that we can not create our existence but only that men are foolish, and that the things we might create are bound to lead us toward a way which is ultimately death. Before we go on, lets consider just this much for a moment. How could it be that if we were capable of creating anything at all, we would create things that would ultimately harm us? If we were able to speak things into existence, one would think that the training of the use of such power would begin in our elementary years, that our middle schools would be examples of adolescent fulfillment, that there would be scores of university doctoral programs based upon the right use of creative power. But hold on; I guess that if this were true we wouldn’t need training because we could self-create the perfect base of creative knowledge for ourselves. How can people claim that co-creation is even possible when we can not even reconcile the hot-dog industry with the bakers of hot-dog buns in order that they might find agreement on the number of items that should be in a package?

Look around and see if you can come up with anything that you can say was created by man. I’ll wager that you can not. “A man built my house!” No; God gave the abilities and the skill set to men who were then able to re-arrange the resources that God created, to put them together in such a way as to build a house, but they didn’t create it. Making something out of things that already exist doesn’t count as creating. Creation is making something out of nothing and that, friends, is the providence of God alone. In Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, we read, “…there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, see, this is new? It hath been already of old time which was before us.” We may see something that we have never seen before, something that someone has put together in a way that we find unique, but not something that is truly new.

Rearranging the building blocks of God does not make us creators or even co-creators. The idea in the mind that has us stacking those blocks in different ways, the very mind itself that receives the idea, even the blocks themselves, all came from God. But let’s push on a bit and consider this; Can you name anything that was not made besides God Himself? The heavens and the earth and all that is in them are the work of the hands of God. Even the prayer we offer to God is His own, in origin. God established the avenue of communication we call prayer, the petition we set before Him is given to us by Him, the heart to come in prayer by faith is ours only because He has drawn us to Himself, and the utterance of the words is by the power of God’s Holy Spirit living in us. This is, I believe, the point Paul is making in 1Corinthians 4:7 when He tells us, “… what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” Paul is saying that everything we have, we have by grace from the hand of God, and that being the case, we should not act as though we got it on our own, apart from our Heavenly Father.

“But words contain the power of creation.” No, they do not. All creative power remains with God. For the next couple of proofs of God’s sole creative providence, a Trinitarian understanding is essential. We must be able to understand, and agree, that though the God of the Christian Bible is one, He is revealed in three personages, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Three, “who-s,” but only one, “what.” What I am getting at is that Christ Jesus is fully God as the Father is God, and as the Holy Spirit is also God. John 1:3 says, “All things were made by him, [God/Christ]; and without him was not anything made that was made.” Again, in Colossians 1:16, “For by him, [Christ], were all things created … … all things were created by him and for him.” There are other verses as well that attribute creation to God, and not just creation, but ALL creation! The point that ALL was created by God seems to be one that God really wants us to understand, that’s why He repeats it so often in Scripture, He wants us to really, “get it.”

This leaves us to consider that since God is responsible for EVERY-thing that has been created, man can rightfully claim ownership of NO created thing; further, since all things apart from God Himself are created things, man has created nothing. Equally true, man has co-created nothing as well. “But the other day, I was thinking of how much I wanted to talk with my Aunt Edna and I spoke out loud, ‘Aunt Edna, I wish you would call,’ and before the words had hardly left my mouth, the phone rang and it was her!” So you and your aunt both heard the prompting of God through the Holy Spirit at the same time and you now want to claim ownership of the event instead of praising God for His goodness? You, speaking the words, didn’t make her call. “You just don’t understand, words are containers and we fill them with meaning. When we speak that meaning into the realm of existence they go out and return manifest in reality.” Really?

If that were so, why don’t we have thousands of lottery winners every week? If we were able to create, or co-create, why can’t we tell our checkbook that it is going to have an additional $10,000.00 in it the next time we open it up, and when we open it, it’s there? Why does the supposed co-creationist usually end up with negative results? They don’t seem to be able to create security and personal wealth, but when they are caught out in a rain storm and say, “I’m going to catch a cold,” and do, it’s credited as being their own fault for, “putting it out there?” People all have needs. If co-creation were a viable doctrine, how could need still exist? Hungry people would create a ham sandwich, poor people would create a rent check and sick people would create medical miracles! The reality of this world is that it is fallen. We can create nothing on our own; apart from God there is no creative power in the universe and we need to see that as long as we pretend to share in the divinity which is the sole providence of God, we are in sinful rebellion against Him.

Our need is supplied: every needful thing is given; and everything that is given is needed. We may not understand that the things that God creates for us, provides for us and directs us toward, are the things that are truly needed. As we walk down the road that ultimately leads us to Hell, we don’t need lighter clothes, a fan and a cool drink of water, no; we need a Saviour that can turn us around and bring us safely home to paradise with Him. This is a need which God has already supplied but the problem is that too many people don’t recognize the need for Jesus. How can a person ever hope to create, or co-create their own utopia when they can not even see that the lock to the garden gate is already open and that the price is already paid for their admission? When you stand before the bar of God’s judgment and He examines your heart, as he will examine the hearts of all men, we need to be sure that the message He reads there is…


All for the Glory of Christ