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Liberals and the Kingdom of God

 
Why did Jesus Christ not succeed thus far in moving the world to do what He has said?...I come with a practical plan to perform His purposes.” –Woodrow Wilson, 1918
 

We thank President Wilson for stating the liberal view of the kingdom. Jesus Christ is a failure and His promises cannot be trusted. The state is here to implement a ‘practical’ plan to bring in the kingdom of God on earth. Obamaism and the social gospel is nothing new.

Liberals like Wilson and Obama neglect the priority of the kingdom. In their view of man his problem is not sin; man has no need of righteousness. They think man can be perfected by meeting his physical and educational needs, and they can do it better than the church.

Where does such errors originate? Christ told Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world. He told His people to ‘seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness…’ [Matthew 6:33]. The apostle tells us plainly that the ‘kingdom is…righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ [Romans 14:17].

When liberals say they want separation of church and state, they do not mean a free church and a free state as the Founders meant. They want to separate the church from its legitimate role of benevolence and take it on themselves. They presume to know the purposes of God and have a ‘practical’ plan to perform them.

Would to God that liberals leave the roles of God and church to their rightful owners.
 
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America is Home of Liberty


[Our Founders and men like them] are the men who chose their own pastors and soon claimed to choose their governors, and the self-ruled congregation became the self-governed municipality…self-government spread until all men could be free. [Will Durant on the Reformation from his History of Civilization]

There was a consensus among the people of the necessity of a limited federal government to secure their God given rights to life, liberty and property. Today this consensus is gone.

There is a new ideology opposed to constitutional government that empowers the people. There is no concept of personal liberty under limited government because there is no basis for self-government. The priority is not to secure the right of men to equality under law, but to establish social and economic equality by an intrusive and expanding state. In the new America the Constitution limits the power of the people rather than the federal government.

Colonial Americans engaged in rebellion against a tyrannical government. The new Americans refuse to see that socialism is the road to tyranny. The original Americans risked everything for the advance of liberty. The socialist Americans line up to give away their liberty.

The originals believed that Biblical Christianity is essential for men to learn self denial and to be self-governing. The socialists reject their religious heritage and prove the colonials are right by advocating state sponsored coercion rather than liberty.

Liberty apart from Biblical Christianity is not sustainable as taught by the history of the French Revolution and the history in the making of the modern West. What would men like Patrick Henry say of their country today? Where are the men who would sacrifice all for liberty?
 
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No Other Foundation

 
The OT nation of Israel was built on truth and blessed of God. In Jeremiah’s day it had turned away from truth, and he began to see the judgment of God prophesied by Moses in Deuteronomy 28. For example…

The alien who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower.He shall lend to you, but you shall not lend to him; he shall be the head, and you shall be the tail. Moreover all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you, until you are destroyed…’ [Deuteronomy 28:43-45].

In that respect we deserve a greater condemnation than Israel because we have seen greater things and more evidence of the salvation of God than they did in their deliverance from Egypt. The types and shadows of Christ have come to full light in the NT revelation.

America’s founding generation understood that liberty must have a sure foundation for no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ; “if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.”
 
The Protestant churches today have little in common with the Reformed churches that were the backbone of colonial America and that influenced the writing of the founding documents and the state constitutions.

Now if the apostle commended the Bereans for searching the Scriptures to prove his preaching, then surely we ought to test our own pastors and teachers. ‘Test all things; hold fast what is good.’ Our authority is not men or church, but the Bible alone.

The Bible says to ‘study to show thyself approved unto God.’ Will you begin a study of the Great Awakening? Will you start by reading a sermon by Jonathan Edwards? If you will, then consider that he was preaching to his colonial American congregation, not to an assembly of masters of theology. This will demonstrate to you the level of degeneracy that has infected the Protestant churches. By that we mean that the emphasis is no longer on the teaching ministry and preparing the saints for the work of ministry.

http://www.apuritansmind.com/JonathanEdwards/JonathanEdwards-Sermons.htm


My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water…Stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; then you will find rest for your souls…” [Jeremiah 2:13; 6:16]
 
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Porno and the Enlightened Progressives

 
Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge’ [Hebrews 13:4].
 

The Law says to be faithful to our spouse, but the depravity of men will prevent him from the joy of the legitimate expression of his sexuality.

The progressives advocate anything that is contrary to the Law. Porno, sodomy, pedophilia, bestiality mark the progression into sexual perversion of men given over to reprobation.

What is porno except an aid in committing adultery in the heart?

The Founders were unenlightened as to the fruits of the reprobate. As reasonable and sane men they saw these things as abominations and an offense to nature and to nature’s God. Seeing these things as enlightened and progressive requires adherence to a false religion like radical naturalism.

Nations have walked this path before…

      ‘I brought you into a bountiful country,
      To eat its fruit and its goodness.
      But when you entered, you defiled My land
      And made My heritage an abomination.
       The priests did not say, ‘Where is the LORD?’
      And those who handle the law did not know Me;
      The rulers also transgressed against Me;
      The prophets prophesied by Baal,
      And walked after things that do not profit’
[Jeremiah 2:7-8].
 
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Man of Faith vs Autonomous Man

 
‘If "God" is indeed real, I wish he'd make himself known…Man is the only power that can save and redeem.’ –TH classic
 

This is the view of autonomous man. Blinded to the revelations of God and full of pride, his depravity has come to full bloom.

God is revealed in the creation of all things that exists, but this man has suppressed the truth and exchanged it for radical naturalism. All that exists is not created because that would require a Creator.

God has revealed Himself in the person and work of Jesus Christ, but He was crucified by men who were unable to recognize Him. It is no different today. He is rejected by men because they are blinded by the prince of darkness to do his will.

Now this blindness is deceitful for the blind man boasts as if he could see what is unseen. It escapes his notice that his life is but a vapor. All he has and treasures will soon be gone including his body. The memory of him will perish. The unseen reality of the eternal will soon overwhelm him.

Men like Tony Snow, who are given to see the unseen as through a glass dimly, now realize the reality that they lived by faith…

‘…though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal’ [2 Corinthians 4:16-18].
 
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Sin and the Arraignment of Error


Not satisfied with the Biblical testimony of a Genesis Flood, the darwinites have come up with another explanation for the fossil record.

Rather than a record of the rapid and mass destruction of contemporary life forms, they say that the fossil record shows the gradual development of life from the simple to the complex.

Which theory best fits the data? Are there different and distinct life forms as in the created kinds that reproduce after their kind? Or is there a continuum of transitions and indistinguishable divisions between the different life forms?

Now ask the darwinites why their theory supports the Genesis Flood model. Can they offer an explanation that will not bring both laughter and sadness to the unbelievers; laughter in its sophistry and sadness that men could believe such nonsense?

Why does the whole world so easily turn away from truth to believe a lie? The Biblical view of man is lost as well as the Gospel that constrains his depravity.

John divides all that is in the world into the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life [1 John 2:16]. All men may be classified into these three ranks: some are proud and ambitious; some are worldly and covetous; and some are profane and voluptuous. It will stand with the ends of the profane man to broach errors so that he may more securely sin. Truth will not prevail with him to leave sin, and therefore his sin prevails with him to leave the truth. While he entertained the truth, it would not suffer him to live quietly in his sins; it was ever checking and reproving him. He could not sin without disturbance, and therefore he must either forego the truth or his sin; but his sin he cannot part with, and he now takes up such an opinion as allows him to keep his sin without disturbance and let him sin without trouble. [Bolton, Arraignment of Error]
 
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Who Will Return to Liberty?

 
‘…how would you go about establishing a new nation predicated on the beliefs and wisdom of our Founding Fathers?’ – Douglas MacKinnon

 
Suppose we start with the first things. What are the beliefs and wisdom of our forefathers that resulted in the liberty we cherish? There is no agreement among conservatives here.

Will we acknowledge that Reformed Christianity (Calvinism) established the theological foundation on which the nation was built?

Will we acknowledge that rule of law is preferable to the rule of kings and that God’s law is preferable to man made law?

If we acknowledge these things are true and essential for liberty under limited government, how many would want to return to the founding principles?

The American Revolution against a tyrannical king was predicated on the Great Awakening. This revival of Biblical Christianity held that all men including king and governments of men were subject to law. The law they were referring to was English Common Law that was based on the Law of God given to men in the Bible.

Without this understanding of law there will be no revolution. When the people of God allow the state to sanction lawlessness like abortion and sodomy, then what do you think will stir them now? To paraphrase Mr. Schaeffer, our post-Christian culture is characterized by personal peace and affluence and as long as we can have that we will succumb to tyranny.
 
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Reason and Revelation

 
At the time of the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution there was essential agreement with the philosophers the Founders referenced and the theologians; reason and revelation were in agreement. What has happened since is that reason has departed from revelation and led the philosophers to the point of despair in their failure to arrive at truth.

Autonomous reason leads to naturalism and the absurd notion that everything that exists is here by natural process, even though natural law says that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed by natural process. The conservation of energy and the increase of entropy testify of a supernatural beginning as in Genesis 1 and 2. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done...

Our hope is that God will raise up a new generation of men who reject this nonsense and return to the Scriptures wherein are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge revealed in Jesus Christ. [Colossians 2]
 
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Beware of the Pharisees and their Sins

 

Vatican Adds Seven New Deadly Sins Including Damaging Environment and Drug Dealing

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

By Richard Owen

 

ROME —  Drug pushers, the obscenely rich, environmental polluters and “manipulative” genetic scientists beware — you may be in danger of losing your mortal soul unless you repent.

After 1,500 years the Vatican has brought the seven deadly sins up to date by adding seven new ones for the age of globalization. The list, published yesterday in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, came as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “secularized world” and the falling numbers of Roman Catholics going to confession.

The new deadly sins include polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice.

The Catholic Church divides sins into venial, or less serious, sins and mortal sins, which threaten the soul with eternal damnation unless absolved before death through confession and penitence.

It holds mortal sins to be “grave violations of the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes,” including murder, contraception, abortion, perjury, adultery and lust.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell.”

Although there is no definitive list of mortal sins, many believers accept the broad seven deadly sins or capital vices laid down in the 6th century by Pope Gregory the Great and popularized in the Middle Ages by Dante in "The Inferno": lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.

Christians are exhorted instead to adhere to the seven holy virtues: chastity, abstinence, temperance, diligence, patience, kindness and humility.

Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, said after a week-long Lenten seminar for priests that surveys showed 60 percent of Catholics in Italy no longer went to confession.

He said that priests must take account of “new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.” Whereas sin in the past was thought of as being an individual matter, it now has “social resonance.”

“You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos,” he said.

Bishop Girotti said that mortal sins also included taking or dealing in drugs, and social injustice which caused poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few.”

He said that two mortal sins which continued to preoccupy the Vatican were abortion, which offended “the dignity and rights of women,” and pedophilia, which had even infected the clergy itself and so had exposed the “human and institutional fragility of the Church.”

The mass media had “blown up” the issue “to discredit the Church,” but the Church itself was taking steps to deal with it, according to Girotti.
 
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In Defense of the Reformation

 
Without the rediscovery of the Gospel in the Reformation there would be no America with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.

For a thousand years the church had lost the message of the Gospel. Men looked inside themselves for the graces that merited salvation rather than a righteousness wholly outside of themselves. It is to Christ that one must look for salvation, said Dr. Luther, not inside oneself. Once the religious subjectivism of the medieval church was eliminated among the Reformation countries, the energy consumed by desperately seeking and ‘earning’ salvation was turned outward, and a thousand years of intellectual, political, social, economic, and religious stagnation ended.

The Reformation gave us the Scriptures in the common tongues. The Bible was the written constitution of the church. It limited the power and authority of church leadership and made them accountable to the membership. The people could now read for themselves the proper role of the clergy and the church.

The death and resurrection of Christ had guaranteed free access of all believers to God. Justification came only by grace through faith, not through baptism, nor through the mass, nor any other sacrament, and certainly not through good works. The Reformation rebirthed the idea of the priesthood of all believers, and it became the foundation for modern political democracy; that is, the equality of all men before God and the law.

The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers destroyed the ecclesiastical monarchy and aristocracy and with them went the theological basis for civil monarchy and aristocracy. We the people under Christ became the foundation of liberty.
 
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A Comparison of the Covenants

 
That which was kept under guard by the law in the Old Covenant unfolds in the coming of Christ into great New Covenant liberty…


What purpose then does the law serve? It was added because of transgressions, till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made…Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not! For if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law…But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the law, kept for the faith which would afterward be revealed. Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor’ [Galatians 3:19-25].

Now the Christian can begin to understand the surpassing greatness of the liberty where in Christ has made us free. The regenerating power of the Spirit opens the heart and applies the redemption accomplished at the cross. Grace has set us free. Because we are raised up with Christ, sin is on longer our master that we must obey. Its power over us is broken as is the power of the grave…
 

If you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to regulations—“Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle,” which all concern things which perish with the using—according to the commandments and doctrines of men? These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of NO VALUE AGAINST THE INDULGENCE OF THE FLESH’ [Colossians 2:20-23].

Because sin originates in the heart, a renewed heart is free and no longer a slave to the corrupting power of sin. We who were dead in sin are now dead to sin. Those things that God has given for our enjoyment can be freely enjoyed because righteousness is of the heart, not in outward appearances.
 
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Purpose of Death and Suffering


It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation’ [Hebrews 9:27-28].
 
In that day the gospel of Christ will be most precious, for ‘what will a man give in exchange for his soul?’ And the authority of His word will be manifest…
 
He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him—the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day” [John 12:48].

The wisdom of men says that death is the natural order leading to advancement of life. Death and suffering deny the existence of a good and loving God.

The wisdom of God says that death is our great enemy; the result of the rebellion of man and his fall into sin. Death and suffering are the constant reminder of our need of redemption for body and soul.

Herein are the foolish and the wise made evident…

We do not grieve as those who have no hope’ for our hope is in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Scriptures; conqueror of sin and death and the source of eternal life who has released us from the bondage of the fear of death [Hebrews 2:14-16].

Though our body dies and returns to dust, yet the promise remains that in Christ that which was sown in corruption will rise again incorruptible. What is sown in dishonor, is raised in glory; what is sown in weakness, is raised in power. [1 Corinthians 15:42-43]
 
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Arraignment of Error


by Samuel Bolton 1606-1654

It has perplexed many throughout the centuries why if there is one truth, it is so difficult to determine. Protestants believe in an infallible Bible, but who interprets it with final authority? Roman Catholics believe in an infallible church that is the infallible interpreter of the Scripture.

How do we determine who is right? Why does God allow errors in His Church? Do we accept the opinions of learned men as if their learning makes them right? Are we to believe that the number of people who hold to a doctrine correlates to its truthfulness?

Bolton gives us six special operations that truth has upon the soul. By these we may be able to evidence whether the opinions we have entertained are truth or error.

The revelation of God is called the truth according to godliness [Titus 1:1]. Bolton’s premise is that a doctrine can be judged by its fruit. Truth affects the heart and will result in sanctification.
 
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Hyper-darwinism at the door


Spanish parliament to extend [human] rights to apes

By Martin Roberts

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL256586320080625?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews&rpc=22&sp=true

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.

Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans.

"This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity," said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project.

[Yes, a historic day in the struggle to lower man to the level of apes.]

They exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…’ [Romans 1:25]
 
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