Broken shards

Potter's House, a controversial, to put it politely, Christian sect, has made national headlines amidst reports of alleged spiritual abuse of its members. The reader is encouraged to read the full article. I wish to take issue with their teachings on marriage. Ex members report pressure from leaders to get married young.  

One of them reported: 

“If you are single, your pastor will tell you if someone is a good choice to marry. And they firmly believe in marrying them young. If you are not married by 25, something is wrong.”

I once bumped into some Potter's House members in a suburban shopping strip. They asked me how old I was, and if I was married. I told them my age, and that I was single. They tried to tell me that being single was a sin. It appears that this is what they teach their members, and cause a lot of damage to peoples' lives as a consequence. 

At the time, I was too polite to challenge their rebuking of me. I can only speculate that they take the Adamic procreation mandate, initially given to Adam, and later reiterated to Noah, Ishmael, Jacob, and Jacob's sons, as a binding Christian command. (See Genesis 1:28, 9:1, 7, 17:20, 28:3, 35:11, and 48:4). 

This takes some very creative hermeneutics, to say the least. No Christian member of the clergy should teach such nonsense. While the Bible teaches that marriage is a good thing, as the apostle Paul taught in his first letter to the Corinthians, marriage and singleness are choices. Regardless of their situation, faithful obedience to God is commanded.

It would be a good thing if news stories like this cause people to leave Potter's House. It is disheartening to think about all the people whose lives they have negatively influenced. 
 

https://www.news.com.au/national/former-pastor-linked-to-the-potters-house-breaks-silence-they-believe-in-marrying-them-young/news-story/ce85706b7f9e2546a051cf7b4265e819

Fair dinkum

The Dalai Lama

I spent a portion of the weekend clearing my backlog of sermon podcasts to listen to. Among others, I often listen to Phil Fernandes, who once served in the United States Marine Corps, and is the long serving pastor of Trinity Bible Fellowship in Seattle in the United States.

He often speaks on the classical Christian doctrine of the Messiahship of Jesus Christ. My takeaway from these sermons is that the fact of Jesus being the Messiah is so well attested by scripture that it should be beyond dispute. Anyone who studies these passages should be left with little doubt that these verses describe Jesus and not somebody else. 

To know the real, you have to know the counterfeit. Just as bank tellers are trained to detect counterfeit currency, Christians need to train themselves to detect spiritual counterfeits. The early Christians had to take close heed to Christ's warning about "false Christs" (Matthew 24:24, Mark 13:22).  These warnings were echoed by the apostles in their writings (1 John 2:18, 22, 4:3, 2 John 1:7). The early Christians were not immune to spiritual deception. 

Neither are we, their contemporaries. These days Christians need to be more discerning than ever. Who are some modern false Christs? Fernandes mentioned cult leaders Sai Baba (1926-2011), Bhagwan Shreee Rajneesh (1931-1990), David Koresh (1959-1993) and Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama is addressed as "Your Holiness." It is offensive for any mere human being to carry such a title. Holiness connotes the idea of being pious, pure, and saintly. Jesus is the only sinless man who ever lived (2 Corinthians 5:21, Hebrews 4:15, 1 Peter 2:22, 1 John 3:25). Because of this, only through believing and trusting in Jesus can any sinful, fallen human being have reconciliation with God.

As for the Dalai Lama, his teachings lead people astray and away from Jesus. He denies that Jesus is God in human form, instead asserting that Jesus had lived previous lives, and that his purpose was to preach a message of tolerance and compassion, and to help people become better human beings. Since he offers a distorted version of what Jesus taught and who he was, he meets the biblical definition of an anti-Christ.

Years ago some friends of mine went to hear the Dalai Lama speak at one of his public meetings in Melbourne. They reported that most of what he said consisted of feel good generalities. There was no notion of human sin, the need for repentance, and accountability to God. He might tickle your ear with inspiring sounding words, but I definitely would not entrust him with my eternal destiny. He might be charismatic, charming and affable, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, but he is still an ordinary man in need of salvation.

http://www.gotquestions.org/Dalai-Lama.html

http://instituteofbiblicaldefense.com

Please explain

Lately, at least partially in reaction to my recent encounter with a Jehovah's Witness, I've been listening to a series of podcasts from the Institute of Biblical Defense on the deity of Jesus Christ. The Institute is an apologetics ministry based in Washington state in the United States. If you're a Christian who wants to learn more about the key doctrines of your faith, then these podcasts are a great resource. If you can get past the bad sound quality, you'll find some meaty teaching there.

The deity of Jesus Christ is one of the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. Believing that God became a man and lived among humanity, ultimately sacrificing his life to break the curse of sin, which made it possible for humanity to reconcile with God, is what makes a Christian a Christian. Without it, Christianity is useless and has nothing to offer anybody.

In theology, you cannot feasibly build a doctrine around a single verse of Scripture. Christ's death and resurrection is an essential part of how he proved that he was God, and there are numerous passages that provide satisfactory proof to the diligent reader that this actually happened, for example, John 20: 24-28.

The section of the gospel of John tells us of how Thomas, one of the disciples, responded when the other disciples came to him with the news that Jesus was alive. Thomas was a broken man. He had spent three years of his life following Jesus, and it had cost him everything. He mourned deeply over the loss of his friend, and wanted to be alone. The other disciples came to him saying, "We have seen the Lord."

Thomas replied, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my fingers where the nails were, and put my hands into his side, I will not believe it."

Imagine his astonishment when Jesus came to Thomas and invited him to touch his wounds. He suddenly realized that it was true. Jesus had risen from the dead, just as he said he would. Overcome with emotion at this awesome miracle, he cried out to Jesus, "My Lord and my God!" You can find similar confessions elsewhere in John's gospel in John 1:34, 1:49, 4:42, 9:33, 35-38, 11:27, and 16:30.

What does Thomas's confession mean? My friends in the Watchtower Society try to explain this away as Thomas expressing astonishment, but this is not consistent with the text, and it is unlikely that as a devout Jew, Thomas would speak like that, taking God's name in vain. Clearly he is making a statement of faith in Jesus as his Lord and God; one of the most powerful affirmations that an apostle made of Jesus as God. Since this gospel was originally written in Greek, John uses the titles Kurios and Theos. These are equivalent to the Hebrew names Yahweh and Elohim, which in the Jewish mindset are understood to be names and titles of God.

>As John explains a few verses later (20:30), he wants all of his readers to confess Jesus as their Lord and God in the same way that Jesus did. As John makes clear in the prologue of his gospel (1:1, 14, 18), his purpose in writing was to show that Jesus is Messiah and God. If you want to deny these facts, you have the formidable task of explaining away reams of Bible passages, and beliefs that Christians have held since the beginnings of the church in the first century AD.

Glorious to behold

I was prompted to write this post by a painful visit (2 Corinthians 2:1) to my home by one of my good friends (sarcasm is difficult to convey in the written word) from the local Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall. Amongst other things, they believe that they are the only true church and that all other denominations are apostate, that the doctrine of the Trinity is a heresy, and that Jesus was a created being.

Theologians have written thousands of pages on the divinity of Christ, and it doesn't take that much effort to find a theological dictionary that catalogues every verse of the Bible that either directly refers to or alludes to this as well.

Throughout the Old Testament there are numerous instances where the preincarnate Christ appears on earth, or is seen and described in prophetic visions. Here are a couple of examples of these visions.

The prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:24-28) describes a heavenly vision of a man, whose appearance gives off a brilliant light. He responds by falling on his face. The opening verses of Isaiah chapter 6 describe a similar vision. By cross-referencing this passage's description of a glorified king, and chapter 53's description of a suffering servant, the gospel of John (John 12:38-41) draws both of these together to show that Isaiah's vision was of the glorified Christ.

Continuing into the New Testament writings, the gospels of Matthew (17:1-2), Mark (9:2-3), Luke (9:28-29) all give accounts of Christ's transfiguration atop Mount Tabor. Although the description they give is not as detailed as that in the prophetic writings, it is clear that the apostles saw a vision of the future glorified Christ as he would appear in heaven (2 Peter 1:16-18). Furthermore, this is the same vision that the apostle Paul saw when Jesus appeared to him in blinding light on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-5), and by an elderly apostle John in exile on the island of Patmos in Revelation 1:9-17.

The Old Testament prophets, the gospel writers, and the apostles Paul, Peter, and John all saw the same vision. They were left awestruck, and often fell down in reverence.When I read about these visions for the first time, courtesy of a devotional authored by Selwyn Hughes (1928-2006), I was both moved and amazed. It's things like these that deepen your reverence for Jesus, and help you to understand how scripture shows that Jesus is both Messiah and God. 

Go away

I've recently signed up to Twitter. Today I received an email notification that read as follows:

"Raelian Movement (RaelianMovement) is now following your tweets on Twitter."

Almost immediately I accessed my Twitter account and clicked on the block button on my profile. The Raelian movement isn't the sort of organisation I want to be associated with, either in person or in the digital realm. I resent any suggestion that they would consider me so naive as to not see through their thinly veiled attempt at using Twitter as a recruiting tool. For those of you who don't know, the Raelians are one of those bizzare UFO cults that believe that all life on Earth was planted here thousands of years ago by extraterrestrial beings known as the Elohim. The movement was founded by the French con artist Claude Vorilhon, who also uses the pseudonym Rael, in 1974. He fabricated a story about meeting extraterrestrials, who conveniently for Vorilhon spoke French, and his harshest critics assert that his only motive in starting this cult was to enrich himself by fleecing the naive and gullible, which despite the lack of celebrity Raelian adherents, is sadly an all too familiar story. Occasionally they appear in news reports concerning their alleged experiments in human cloning.

I've never had any direct contact with Raelians. Years ago I was in the habit of visiting the Mind Body Spirit festival in Melbourne. One year the Raelian movement had a stand at the festival. I vaguely remember that there was a table with some Raelian literature and a model of a spacecraft. One of these attendants was an odd looking young man with a vacant, spaced out expression, which was very offputting. Needless to say this was one of the less popular stands that year. I overheard another stall attendant deep in conversation with some festival visitors about some no doubt fabricated prophecies which he seemed convinced were true. Out of interest I picked up some Raelian literature. It turned out that this spacecraft model was actually a scale model of an embassy that when completed, will allegedly be used to receive the Elohim when they return to Earth at some undetermined time in the future, ushering in a golden age for humanity. Make of all this what you will.