Why We Fight 2
I absolutely love researching stuff. Especially Israel and Bible prophecy.
From the beginning, God just put a love for the Jewish people in my heart. To paraphrase Will Rogers, “I never met a Jew I didn’t like.”
That’s the truth.
I have many Israeli and Jewish friends around the world. I literally like all of them.
I also greatly benefitted from Godly parents and grandparents. Both sides. A huge blessing.
My father taught me that critics of the Bible are really the emperor with no clothes. Their “arguments” are in reality philosophical musings and hatred. After that, and seeing it in person, I never worried about critics again. The truly great Bible scholar and apologist, Robert Dick Wilson said that he understood the heart of the matter:
“I have come now to the conviction that no man knows enough to assail the truthfulness of the Old Testament. Whenever there is sufficient documentary evidence to make an investigation, the statements of the Bible in the original texts have stood the test” (Wilson, Is the Higher Criticism Scholarly? p. 10).
Another great defender, and a man that heavily influenced me was Paul Smith. The brother of Calvary Chapel founder Chuck Smith, Paul at the end of his life produced a book so important, I wish everyone would read it. New Evangelicalism is full of evidence of false teachers in the American Church—where they came from and what their motivations were.
Much of this speaks to the erosion of support for Israel and the Jewish people, in what now passes for Church in America. As always, I refer really to the overall model of the Church Growth Movement, which was and is an intentional effort to destroy real Bible teaching in this country. It incubated for a long time. Many of the modern proponents were young men when Bible teachers reigned, men like Oswald Allis, Walter Martin, and J. Vernon McGee. The men who would replace them in leadership have contempt for real Bible teachers.
Many of them have barely concealed contempt for Jews. Again, if you can get a copy of Paul’s book, you’ll learn much. By the way, it is shameful how Christian Media has treated his book. Even those that should have been advocates quietly quashed it. At the same time, crap was stocked in Christian book markets. Junk and drivel. The meat of the Word is held in low regard today. Paul Smith had the receipts. His research explains much about why Bible prophecy and pro-Israel fervor has largely left the building. Read it!
“Today postmodernists dismiss the idea of absolute truth; epistemology, the study of knowledge, is still a hot button issue. Why do some postmodernists stand in the pulpits of Christian churches as ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ? They are pretenders with invisible garments; they are as naked as the proverbial emperor!”
And Paul did all the research, much of it literally hated by evangelicalism. Do you think guys like Russell Moore like real Bible study? Not for a second. He isn’t mentioned in Paul Smith’s book, but only because he arrived in the last dozen years, to prominence.
Want to find out who Rick Warren really is? Read Chapter 9 of Paul’s book. Warren’s association with evolutionary business consultant Peter Drucker is quite enlightening. (It must be remembered at all times that not all the modern deceivers started out that way. Some genuinely wanted to grow the Church. But when that wasn’t possible without theological compromise, they couldn’t stand up under that pressure. They quietly made league with men like Peter Drucker by telling themselves they would simply use the tools to reach as many people with the Gospel that they could. That the true Gospel was despised by these influencers was seemingly not relevant.
“The Purpose Driven model originated from some radical philosophies about the nature of man and societies. This model is bent on transforming the nature of man and society. It was reduced to its lowest common denominator in order to carry out the most widespread worldwide appeal. The Warren message remains uniform and prefabricated to the point where Saddleback Church reports that thousands of pastors weekly download Warren’s canned Purpose Driven sermons from his website to preach and promote their church growth hopes. This is preceded by the protégé pastors having every member of their church buy and read The Purpose Driven Church, accompanied by a congregation-wide forty-day march through the Warren philosophy for church growth.
“What lies behind the Purpose Driven philosophy? It is primarily fueled by what Warren learned from Drucker and Fuller Seminary. The new evangelical seminary trains men and women to take a traditional church and mold it into a postmodern accommodating mindset that will reach a postmodern culture.”
We once had men like Noah Hutchings, who championed Bible prophecy and true Bible study. Warren targeted men like this, then waited them out.
Finally, for now, Paul Smith remembers another key association:
“Chuck Fromm arranged for me to spend three days at the Hilton Hotel in Ontario, California in the mid-eighties, where Peter Drucker addressed a group of church leaders and seminary professors. Bob Buford sponsored the meeting. At that meeting Buford explained to us that leadership communities are small groups of innovators and thought leaders pursuing a common ministry outcome, sharing ideas, developing strategy, and benchmarking measurements in the context of authentic relationships. Leadership Network discovers Emerging ministry initiatives and carefully invites strategic leaders into these communities of peers who are seeking to improve their personal and organizational performance in the focused outcome areas.
“Drucker and Buford mentored my nephews, Chuck Smith Jr. and Chuck Fromm. They have become leading change agents in the Emergent Movement and they have drawn particularly close to Rick Warren. Both have spent hours in consultation with Drucker and Warren. Chuck Fromm claims to have assisted Buford with his book, Halftime. Chuck Smith Jr. wrote The End of the World…As We know It: Clear Direction for Bold and Innovative Ministry in a Postmodern World. He claims to have received counsel from Drucker while writing the book.”
Among many other dreadful outcomes, support for Israel has eroded in this country because bad men have infiltrated the Church Visible. That community has suffered catastrophic losses in terms of real Bible study. These men do not revere Scripture, at all.
I believe the situation is indeed catastrophic. There are many, many millions of our people that do not know the Word of God at all. Apostasy rules. What I believe we have on our hands is a rescue mission, not a sweeping revival. Negative, yes, but I believe realistic.
Dismissal of the Bible as our final authority is why we see and hear weird things coming from the Church concerning Israel and the Jews. It is why people like Eric Holmberg appear to rely on the Bible for their views, but when it comes to the Jews, they ignore the hundreds of verses telling us that the Jews own a specific section of land…physical land. The people that reject the Jews, some are clever, but ultimately they come to their views from outside the Bible. Often I find that they have had a bad experience with Jewish people, or they resent the state of Israel for some reason. Most have not been there and therefore do not really understand things.
This is why we fight.
Jesus tells us to endure to the end. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
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