A couple of years ago the latest religious fad was the “Purpose Driven Life.” The fad was welcomed by many churches including Woodland Park and our own LMPC. I participated in a number of weekly small group meetings and like everyone else I have spoken with, I was deceived, and got nothing out of it.
As I studied this book I found only one supposedly gospel presentation, and that was on Page 58. Here it is:
1.”First believe, believe that God loves you and made you for his purpose.” Page 58 – ” Believe that God has chosen you to have a relationship with Jesus who died on the cross for you.”3. “Believe that no matter what you have done, God wants to forgive you.” Page 58
2. “Receive Jesus into your life as your Lord and Savior. Receive his forgiveness for your sins.” Page 58
Is there something missing here? What might be missing here?
Repentance
“So I invite you to bow your head and quietly whisper the prayer that will change your eternity. “Jesus I believe in you and I receive you.”
What Jesus? Who did what? Where is the resurrection?
It goes on…..
“If you sincerely meant that prayer, CONGRATULATIONS!!! WELCOME TO THE FAMILY OF GOD!!” Page 58/59
How does Rick Warren know who is in the family of God?
NO REPENTANCE, NO JUDGMENT, NO HELL, NO HEAVEN, NO SELF-DENIAL, NO DISCUSSION OF SIN, NO BROKENESS , NO SENSE OF GUILT, NO SENSE OF LOSTNESS OR CONDEMNATION, NO FEAR OF ETERNAL TORMENT.
That is an inadequate gospel. That is a gospel that will contribute to defection. Because people are going to come to that which they think is the saving message, and when it doesn’t do anything they’re gone.
A shallow gospel presentation that doesn’t present the reality of eternal judgment, the reality of the Law of God, the reality of condemnation, eternal hell, does not warn of God’s wrath. That is another gospel, and does not make the sinner stand guilty before God. If you are unaware of your lostness, what would you want to be saved from?
The gospel presentation that doesn’t do that is not a faithfull gospel presentation. And then to tell somebody, “WELCOME TO THE FAMILY OF GOD,” as if you knew.
THAT IS A FANTASY!!!!
Recently while reading Acts 17 I marveled at the commendation that the Apostle Paul gave to the Bereans for comparing everything that he taught, with the scriptures. Rather than taking offense at what others might consider “criticism” Paul encouraged them to compare everything he was teaching to the Word of God. He did not regard those who sincerely measured what he said, and did by scripture, as being difficult, or divisive, or having a critical spirit. He understood that for truth to prevail in the church, everyone’s teaching – even his own – would have to be proven by the word of God. He echoed this in I Thessalonians 5: 21 “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.”
self – not the savior,
the secular – not the sacred.
On page 18, Tripp states that “the world is in the process of being restored.” Next on page 105, he describes how “that evil is in the process of being defeated.” Then on page 106, he declares that “the enemies of God and good are being progressively defeated.”
Sadly as he describes his world restoration program, Tripp ignores scriptures such as:
(1 John 5:19)
“We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness in the power of the evil one.”
(2 Peter 3: 5-7)
“For we know this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word, of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water, and in the water: 6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water perished: 7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word, kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.”
(Romans 8:22 – 23)
” For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. 23 Not only that , but we also who have the first fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting the adoption, the redemption of the body.”
I cannot find anything in scripture to suggest that we are to help God restore creation. Our mission statement as believers is quite clear in our Lord’s great commission: Matthew 28:19 “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit.”
Tragically Tripp asserts on pages 20 & 196 that “God is not satisified with the state of his house, and calls us to share in his holy dissatisfaction.” He says that “the ongoing dissatisfaction of our Redeemer is a theme of this whole book” (196). Surely this is blasphemous, and is a denial of our Lord’s exclamation at Calvary, “It is finished”
(John 19 : 30).
From my reading it is evident that Tripp preaches a broken down theology. His gospel is apostate, because he describes man as a restorer of this world, and of man himself. This is contrary to scripture where man is is described as a lost sinful soul on the road to hell who needs:
*to be convicted of sin,
*to repent from sin,
*to confess his/her sin,
*to surrender completely,
*and by grace, through faith, be born again, become a new creature in Christ, appropriate Christ’s righteousness, and enter into a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
Compare John Macarthur’s clear gospel explanation with Tim Keller’s semantic dodgeball performance!
Tim Keller
|
As a believer in, and follower of the Lord Jesus, who is also a literature major, I have grave misgivings with using pagan mythology, in the preaching the gospel of C.S. Lewis.
For your information, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, one of seven stories called The Chronicles of Narnia, is about four children who enter a magical country called Narnia through a closet. It is perpetually winter in Narnia, because the land is under the spell of a witch. A prophecy predicted that two boys and two girls would come to the land and become the rightful kings and queens. The great lion Aslan, supposedly a Christ figure, dies and rises from the dead to make the defeat of the witch and the fulfillment of the prophecy possible.
What about the alleged Christian aspects of this story? At best, any biblical doctrine that is presented in Lewis’s Narnia is vague and distorted and overlaid with heathen mythology. Although some argue that the Bible uses parables to present truth, but Lewis’s fiction is filled with unscriptural things that one will never find in a biblical parable.
Jesus was the greatest storyteller. He never made up any stories about worlds that didn’t exist. He never had any stories that contained alien beings. He never had stories with talking animals or creatures with supernatural powers. He never told stories about life and conflict in some other place, in some other time, and some other dimension of existence. All His stories were about real people, in real places, in real life, in common experiences.
Christ’s parables did not contain a mixture of truth and paganism, but Lewis’s stories unblushingly intertwine a few vague biblical themes with pagan mythology: nymphs, fauns (part man and part goat), dwarfs, centaurs (part man and part horse), Dryads (tree-women), and Naiads (well-women). All of these creatures are depicted as serving Aslan. Lewis presents the deeply heretical idea of good magic. He calls Aslan’s power “Deep Magic” and Aslan’s father’s power as “Emperor’s Magic.” He introduces the vile pagan god Bacchus and his orgies as a desirable thing that was part of Narnia’s past before the White Witch worked her spell. He presents the myth of “Father Christmas” as if it were innocent and wholesome. He teaches that Adam’s first wife was not Eve but rather a woman named Lilith and that she was a witch. As for Aslan’s resurrection, Lewis calls it “more magic.”
As for the heart of the story, which is the death and resurrection of the lion Aslan, at best it is a corrupt depiction of Christ’s salvation. Aslan dies and sheds his blood not to satisfy God’s law but to satisfy the “Deep Power” and the White Witch.
This confusion is a reflection of Lewis’s heretical stand on the atonement. He said, “The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has SOMEHOW put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. … Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all of this are, in my view, quite secondary…” (Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco edition, 2001, pp. 54, 55, 56). This is heresy.
God has revealed exactly what Christ did and what the atonement means. It is not a matter of theorizing or believing one “formula” over against another. The Bible says our salvation is a matter of a propitiation, a ransom, whereby our sins were washed away by Christ’s bloody death, which was offered as a payment to satisfy God’s holy Law.
|
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG – www.avg.com
Version: 10.0.1204 / Virus Database: 1435/3418 – Release Date: 02/02/11
|
I have read and re read the passage in Matthew 4 and noticed that Satan used the same strategy when tempting both the first Adam, and the second Adam – Christ.
Gen 3: 1-6 1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” 4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. By questioning the literal word of God and offering Eve spiritual benefits that she could attain, in effect, I think we see Satan here, originating the allegorical approach as a way to understand what God really said! Likewise, when Satan tempted our Lord, he questioned the literal word of God, and then proceeded to allegorize and offer spiritual and physical blessings. Mathew 4 1-41 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted[a]by the devil. 2 After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” 4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’[b]” I have looked at many proponents of the allegorical/ spiritualizing approach, all the way from Augustine, Origen, and down through Piper, Sproul, Robertson, Keller and Doriani. However, at this point in my life, I see compelling evidence in the scripture to use the literal interpretation method for all genres of the word, as the safest, and best method to avoid the introduction of heresy. Jesus summed it up well: Mathew 4:4 4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’[b |
. During an analysis of “Paradise Lost” by John Milton, this question came up. Here is a summary of my reply:What we have in Genesis is the only eye-witness account of creation, Genesis 1:1 to 2:3. It is not allegory. There’s nothing in the Hebrew text or in the English text, for that matter, to indicate that this is a fanciful story, that this is some kind of an allegorical picture. There’s nothing here to indicate that this is some kind of mystical poetry, that this is some kind of lyrical literary style that is something other than actual God breathed history. To put it to you, this is purely expressed history from God, written down by Moses. The creator Himself gave Moses this accurate account of history. And I accept the Scripture as inspired of God and inerrant and there’s nothing in this text to indicate that it’s anything other than plain history.The Bible opens with a monumental statement, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And with that statement the Word of God, Holy Scripture, affirms the existence of the universe and everything in it as the product of God’s created act. It’s a very important statement. We are here shown in this verse that evolution, the dominant theory of science, is not true. What exists, exists not because it evolved but because God created it.Evolution is not scientific. Evolution is not reasonable. Evolution is impossible and irrational. There has never been one shred of evidence that matter on any level chemically can, or will, can or will organize itself, all by itself.It was over a hundred years ago that Louis Pasteur proved that spontaneous biogenesis cannot occur. A cell cannot increase its complexity. A cell cannot add information necessary in its DNA, or its genetic code, to take itself to a higher level. That is impossible. It has never been done, it has never been seen.Nothing mutates upward. Inevitably they die at the cellular level. Natural selection then is only downward, not upward, and natural selection actually prevents evolution from taking place. No species is capable of moving up. It can decrease itself by a decrease in its information by some enotropic event that sends it into disorganization, but it cannot increase what it is, because it cannot come across new information.Evolution with the advent of DNA is now so preposterous and so impossible, and so scientifically inaccurate that no honest person could believe it. Evolution is a violation of all that modern science knows to be true.But my students persisted since this is a very popular view today…but, “Couldn’t God have used evolution after creating the original matter? Couldn’t God have used evolution in the sense of theistic evolution?” No, God couldn’t have used evolution because evolution is impossible. Evolution assumes that matter can organize itself upward by itself.Now, starting in verse 2, the first chapter of the Bible expands on verse 1. Verse 1 says that God created the heavens and the earth, and starting in verse 2 we find out how.“And the earth was formless and void and darkness was over the face of the deep, or the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness and God called the light day and the darkness He called night, and there was evening and there was morning, one day. “Then God said, ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters,’ and God made the expanse and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse and it was so.Now there is the accurate eye-witness account of the creation of the universe. The creation account is laid out from Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3 1:1 to 2:3, starting in 2:4 and then you start to follow the history of man all the way to the end of creation.Behind the creation of everything in the universe stands the living God who had eternally existed as God but had not always been creator. But here He becomes creator and He creates everything…absolutely everything.Hebrews 11:3 says, “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”The things that we see in the created universe were not made from something else. They were made from nothing, ex nihilo, without pre-existing material. It’s a way of saying everything around us, all came into existence instantaneously out of no pre-existing material. It didn’t come from things that do appear, it came from nothing. And Genesis is the only record of creation. It is the only source of creation information.How did God do this? What was His method? He spoke…He spoke…He spoke it into existence out of nothing. This is…this is God.Psalm 33:6 and 9, “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth for He spoke and it was done, He commanded and it was established.” That is the psalmist’s affirmation of the Genesis account of creation. God said, “Let there be…let there be…let there be…” and every time He said it there was. This is what we call fiat creation, He willed it and spoke it into existence. Psalm 148:5 says, “He spoke and they were created.”This is where everything came from. It didn’t exist. God willed it to exist. He spoke and it came into existence. That is the divine account of creation. In Mark 13:19 it talks about the beginning of the creation which God created…just in case somebody might question. And you have that all through the New Testament, the emphasis on the fact that God created.Matthew 19:4, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female?” Again and again the Scripture makes reference to God as creator.Romans 1 says it’s so evident that God is the creator that if you don’t see it you’re without excuse.Colossians, that great first chapter, verse 16 where it says, “By Him all things were created both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created by Him and for Him.” That sums it up. That is always the biblical, the New Testament and Old Testament, affirmation of God as creator.Hebrews 1:10, “And Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the works of Thy hands.” I mean, Scripture just continually affirms God as the creator and He created simply by willing it and then speaking it into existence.Listen to Romans 4:17, this is another testimony. It says, “As it is written, a father of many nations have I made you, in the sight of Him of whom he believed, even God…and here is the definition of God…God who gives life to the dead…listen to this…and calls into being that which does not exist.” That’s Romans 4:17. Creation is God calling into existence what does not exist. There’s no room in that for evolution. Evolution is something appearing that has mutated from something else. That’s not creation.John 1:3, “All things came into being by Him and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” There isn’t anything that exists that God didn’t create.There was no pre-existing material. And nothing is in existence that God didn’t create. That’s a very, very clear Scripture.God created everything in six days. There’s no evolution in that chapter. There’s not a hint of evolution anywhere in this chapter. There’s no place for an evolutionary theory because you havedays. Verse 31, “And God saw all that He made and behold, it was very good.” Now God finished His creation, six days, and He said it’s very good. Then what does that mean? Nothing was bad. Nothing was bad would mean nothing was inferior. Nothing didn’t survive. Nothing sort of, you know, like the plants you plant, nothing died out. You know why? There was no death..there was no death.You see, when God finished His creation He looked at all of it…in fact it says several times He saw that it was good. And He looked it all over in verse 31 and saw that it was very good, nothing was inferior, nothing didn’t survive, nothing had died out or been killed in the struggle for the survival of the fittest. If creation had involved some evolutionary process, then God would have had to said, “Well, the good made it to the end.” He didn’t say that. And how could there have been billions and billions of evolving years, billions of years of struggle and death and survival in a world where there was no curse? In a world where there was no death? You don’t even have death till Genesis chapter 3.The Apostle Paul makes it absolutely explicit in the book of Romans that it was through sin that death entered the world. There was no sin in that perfect creation. There was no sin, there couldn’t have been death. So there’s no place for plants and animals to die…no Fall no sin, no sin no death, no death no evolution. The Fall came and introduced death, death introduced the law of thermodynamics, entropy, the disintegration and disorder. At this point no such thing existed.So there’s no way that you can inject evolution legitimately into this text. And just another thing, when God made everything He made everything full grown. You know, the old, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” You want the answer, you know the answer? – The Chicken -God didn’t just throw seeds in every direction and unborn life species, He created an absolutely and completely full-grown, fully matured creation that was capable then of reproducing itself, sustaining its life and that’s why He said it’s very good.So how did God create? He spoke it in to existence and He did it in six days. “Well what about the word ‘day,’ can’t it mean something else?” It’s the plain old Hebrew word yom, it means day. It’s used in the Bible to indicate a 24-hour normal solar day or sometimes to refer to the daylight portion of a day.When yoms modified by a number, universally, without exception, in Scripture it refers to a normal solar day. Now sometimes “day” is used in Scripture to refer to some period of time not precisely defined. Job said, “My days are vanity.” Psalm 90 verse 9 says, “Our days are passed away.” And that’s not defined, but we understand what that means, a period of time. But even at that, day still means some finite succession of normal days, not some vast age of millennial years, or millions of years.And I think maybe the strongest affirmation, and I need to do this because you can ask the question about, you know, why God took six days, why didn’t He do it in six minutes or six seconds? Well, the answer is He took six days because He wanted to establish a pattern. In Exodus chapter 20 He gives us the pattern. “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, six days you shall labor, do all your work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, your male or your female servant, or your cattle, or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” God wanted to establish a pattern for mankind. And that pattern was, you work six days and you have one day when you set it aside to rest and replenish your body and focus on worshiping God.My prayer is that this will help you see that God did not lie to us in Genesis, but just gave us a plain eyewitness account of what he did, and how he did it.
Brian -Sola Scriptura –
\t�-$� ��DC�c��L��M8�D<�