Why I Am A Christian And Believe The Bible Is The Literal Inspired Word Of God

There is simply so much to contemplate in these words from the Apostle and leader of Jesus’ Disciples, St. Peter, that I urge everyone to consider:

For we were not making up clever stories when we told you about the powerful coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We saw his majestic splendor with our own eyes when he received honor and glory from God the Father. The voice from the majestic glory of God said to him, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.”  We ourselves heard that voice from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain.

Because of that experience, we have even greater confidence in the message proclaimed by the prophets. You must pay close attention to what they wrote, for their words are like a lamp shining in a dark place—until the Day dawns, and Christ the Morning Star shines in your hearts.  Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.  — 2 Peter 1:16-21

What grabs me about this passage (which I have memorized because it is so powerful to me) is the eyewitness account from a disciple how had the unique opportunity to see “the Word of God” (see John 1:1-18 to see another close disciple of Christ literally call Jesus “the Word”) alive and in Incarnate in the flesh.  Peter is zooming in on one experience related in the Gospels, when James, John and Peter himself saw Jesus transfigured into glory (Matthew 17:1–9, Mark 9:2-8, Luke 9:28–36).  And Moses, representing the Law (see John 1:17 as an example), and Elijah, representing the Prophets (Malachi 4:5 cf. Matthew 17:11-13), were sent from heaven as a witness to this glorification of Jesus before these men’s very eyes.

It sends chills down my spine.  And I have no doubt in my mind that it continued to send chills down Peter’s spine every single time he thought about that moment for the rest of his life until he himself was crucified as a martyr in testimony of his Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus, under Emperor Nero in 64 AD.

Listen to what this man who testified to his faith in his very own blood had to say: he was not making up a bunch of fables or fairy tales: he himself saw everything he writes about and he saw it in the company of other men who saw the same things alongside him.  You keep seeing the witness verbs: “We saw.”  “With our own eyes.”  “We ourselves heard that voice.”  “When we were with him.”

They saw it with their own eyes and they heard it with their own ears and they touched it with their own hands.  St. John – another Apostle and Disciple of Christ who also personally witnessed and experienced the Transfiguration of Jesus with Peter, said the following:

We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is the Word of life.  This one who is life itself was revealed to us, and we have seen him. And now we testify and proclaim to you that he is the one who is eternal life. He was with the Father, and then he was revealed to us.  We proclaim to you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.  We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy.  — 1 John 1:1-4

Again, St. John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23, 13:25, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 21:20), again and again pointed to what he had personally witnessed and experienced: “W proclaim to you the One … whom we have heard and seen.”  “We saw Him with our own eyes and touched Him with our own hands.”  “This One who is life itself was revealed to us, and we have seen Him.”

Everything that Jesus did and said was publicly witnessed, especially by His Disciples, who Jesus commissioned as His witnesses.  They were there.  They lived it.  They saw it and heard it and touched it.  John recorded that Thomas literally put his fingers in the holes that remained in Jesus’ wrists and ankles following His Resurrection (John 20:19-28).

It is a FACT of history that all of the Disciples of Jesus, save old John – who himself was tortured and suffered scrounging for existence as a slave-laborer in the mines of an island prison – sealed the truth of their testimony in their own blood.  Why was it not John’s fate to die as a martyr?  Maybe because he was the one that Jesus commissioned to take care of His mother, Mary, when he said the words, “Woman, behold your son.”  And to “the disciple whom He loved” the words, “Behold your mother” (John 19:26-27).  But it was ultimately St. John alone, the youngest of the Disciples during the public Ministry of Jesus on earth, who lived on as the final apostolic link to the unbreakable chain of the Testimony of the Church to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, from the dead, and of the New Life in Christ that was available to any who would call on the Name of the LORD Jesus so they could experience the Resurrection Life of Jesus for themselves.

We know that people can sincerely believe something that turns out not to be true.  And yes, there are even people who would be willing to die for what turns out to be a lie.  I submit that every Islamic terrorist who blows himself up so he can kill as many innocent people as possible, believing that he will go straight to Paradise and enjoy the carnal affections of seventy virgins, fall under this category.

I remember watching the theologically-liberal series, “From Jesus to Christ” on PBS.  But even the theological-liberal New Testament scholars that the series heavily relied on all unanimously acknowledged “that his disciples really and with absolute conviction saw him again afterwards.”  St. Peter continued to proclaim the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead AS A FACT THAT HE HAD WITNESSED for more than thirty years until his own death.  St. John continued to proclaim the FACT of the Resurrection THAT HE HAD PERSONALLY SEEN, HEARD AND TOUCHED for something on the order of seventy years after the Crucifixion of Jesus until his own death around 100 AD.

What makes the Disciples – who of course were also true martyrs who died as witnesses rather as than mass murderers who died killing innocent people – categorically different is the fact that they PERSONALLY saw and PERSONALLY experienced and PERSONALLY heard and PERSONALLY touched Jesus after His Resurrection from the dead.  They PERSONALLY were there to experience all the key events FIRSTHAND.

They really, sincerely, with absolute conviction believed the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And my point is that there was absolutely NO POSSIBLE WAY they could have been mistaken.

Let me get back to the Transfiguration of Jesus, for example.  Jesus took Peter, James and John with Him.  They were all there to see the Transfiguration of Jesus and experience it for themselves.  And afterward, they clearly would have been saying to one another, “Did you just see what I saw?”  And “What did YOU see?”  And they were easily able to verify that it had really, truly happened, that they were NOT having a hallucination, for the very simple reason that three people cannot have the same hallucination, the same exact departure from reality, at the same time.  Three witnesses saw the same thing.  They verified it to one another.  It happened.  It wasn’t just a “clever story.”  It was real.  Real enough to be willing to live for.  Real enough to be willing to die for after having lived your entire life completely transformed by that they each saw with their own eyes, heard with their own ears, and touched with their own hands.

Twelve ordinary, uneducated men from a conquered backwater Roman province rocked the world with “what they had heard, what they had seen with their eyes, what they beheld and their hands handled, concerning the Word of Life,” as John put it in the opening verse of his first epistle.  Think also about the key early followers of Jesus: think of James the Just, the brother of Jesus.  Not only had James not believed in Jesus or His ministry while it was popular to do so, but James had actually believed that Jesus was out of His mind.  I just ask you: what would it take for you to believe that your brother was in fact GOD?  I mean, just imagine being the parents: “Mom, my brother is saying He’s God again!”  “Stop telling James you’re God, Jesus!”  “But I Am that I Am!”  “MOM!”  Seriously: imagine what had to happen to bring James to his knees before Jesus: first of all, it required a post-Resurrection appearance, which Paul describes in what is very clearly an EARLY Christian creed found in 1 Corinthians 15 dated to within five years of the Resurrection by historians: “Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles” (vs. 7).   James had to realize upon self-reflection how Jesus had lived His entire life in moral perfection.  And James believed that his half-brother (James’ father was Joseph; Jesus’ Father was God) truly was God Incarnate.  And he believed.  James became the leader of the early church in Jerusalem.  James came to be known by the nickname “Camel Knees” because of the large calluses on his knees that he developed from spending long hours on his knees in prayer – to his Brother.  Again, imagine the personal transformation that had to occur!  James was murdered about AD 62 in a mob riot incited by the Sanhedrin.  He gave his LIFE in his faith in his Brother.  Imagine that!  Add to the mix Saul of Tarsus.  Saul was a rabid Pharisee in the very spirit of the rabid Sanhedrin that murdered James.  He went out breathing fire and hate in his desire to destroy what he viewed as a terrible, blasphemous heresy against his beloved Judaism as men and women began increasingly worshiping One named Jesus they claimed was the Messiah of Israel.  Saul went out on the Road to Damascus to hunt down Christians and put them in chains; somehow, he amazingly BECAME a Christian when he heard the very Jesus he was trying to eradicate speak to him and strike him blind until another Christian came to heal this Persecutor of the Church.  Paul, after having suffered a LIFETIME of suffering for His Lord whom he once tried to exterminate from history, died as a martyr in testimony to his absolute faith in Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and the Savior of the World.

How do you explain these men???

Now, allow me to return to 1 Peter 1:16-21 and enter into evidence the additional witness of Moses and Elijah, and what their appearance on the Mount of Transfiguration meant: as I already pointed out, Moses represented the Law, and Elijah represented the Prophets.  In other words, they represented the Scriptures, the Word of God as it had been handed down to God’s people from Adam and Eve until Jesus’ day.

Take some time, please, to just scroll down the list of the hundreds of prophecies from the Law and the Prophets that Jesus literally fulfilled in His First Advent when He came as the Suffering Servant, to die as the Lamb of God in fulfillment of the penalty in the Law for the sins of the world.

Those prophecies clearly present 456 identifying characteristics of what the Messiah would be like. And the mathematical odds of one man fulfilling just EIGHT of them is one chance in ten with seventeen zeroes after it, or less than one chance in a quadrillion.  Pretty good job for 32 men who mostly never even TALKED to one another, let alone in any way, shape or form conspired.

Over forty men who wrote over a period of over 2,000 years.  And yet it marvelously, miraculously tells one story: the story of the fall of the human race, and the story of the Creator God who ultimately became a man Himself in order to take our sins upon Himself and save us.

Let’s do some comparison for the sake of contrast: how many men wrote the Qur’an?  One.  His name was Muhammad.  How many other men could independently verify that Muhammad wasn’t making up a whole bunch of stories?  Zero.  Muhammad was alone in a cave called Hira the first time he allegedly received the dictation of the Qur’an by an angel that Muhammad had already heard about from the Jews who frequently came along the Arabian trading routes.  At no time during any of Muhammad’s revelations do we ever find that anyone else was present.

If you want to trust a sacred Book, which one should you trust?  Particularly given the fact that Muhammad clearly pirated large portions of the rival sacred Book: he couldn’t even find his own angel; he had to steal one from the Jews.  He couldn’t even invent his own patriarch, he had to pirate Abraham from the Jews and warp their account to reject Isaac and make Ishmael the hero in blatant contradiction of what the original account presented in Genesis chapters 15 through 18.  And if you read the excellent work, “The Truth About Muhammad,” you will find that, amazingly, every single time Muhammad wanted to do something to advance his own interest, he would somehow have a revelation from Allah that let him have whatever he wanted.  There were dozens of these “convenient surahs,” but the most infamous of them were the so-called “Satanic Verses” that allowed Muhammad to receive one “revelation” that allowed allies to have their own gods in order to secure their alliance against a common enemy, only to then receive a completely contradictory “revelation” when the first “revelation” became inconvenient for Muhammad.  It’s kind of like me promising I’ll give you a billion dollars if you risk your life fighting for me, and then I receive a revelation from God after you’ve fought and won my war for me declaring that I don’t have to pay you a dime.  Whenever Muhammad wanted something, he could mysteriously soon afterward have a surah “revealed” to him that justified his doing or taking or murdering or marrying whatever he wanted.

The same is true of the Book of Mormon.  One guy wrote it.  Initially, there were three so-called “witnesses” that claimed they had seen the “golden plates” that Smith said he used to write the Book of Mormon.  Such that:

The Three Witnesses were a group of three early leaders of the Latter Day Saint movement who wrote in a statement of 1830 that an angel had shown them the golden plates from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon and that they had heard God’s voice testifying that the book had been translated by the power of God

The Three Witnesses were Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer, whose joint testimony, in conjunction with a separate statement by Eight Witnesses, has been printed with nearly every edition of the Book of Mormon since its first publication in 1830. All three witnesses eventually broke with Smith and were excommunicated from the church.^[1] In 1838, Joseph Smith called Cowdery, Harris, and Whitmer “too mean to mention; and we had liked to have forgotten them.”^[2]

Some “witnesses.”

The Mormon Church still disgracefully calls them “the Three Witnesses.”  I call them “False Witnesses.” As history does to anyone who looks into their “testimony.”

You ultimately find, if you bother to do the research, that while the so-called “witnesses” (both the three and the eight) testified that they had “seen” the golden plates. But they actually only “saw” them “by faith.”

I suppose I could point out that at least Joseph Smith managed to find some so-called “witnesses” who at least initially claimed to be able to verify that Smith wasn’t full of bovine feces, which makes his book vastly superior to Muhammad’s in that regard.  And at least Joseph Smith managed to invent his own angel, rather than merely pirating one from the Bible, as Muhammad had.  The problem is that all of Joseph Smith’s primary “witnesses” were bogus and ended up being excommunicated from the church their “witness” had given birth to.  And then there is the unfortunate fact that Joseph Smith was a convicted fraud and con-man before he suddenly became a “prophet.”

That is NOT the way the Bible is.  Not at ALL.  There are layers upon layers of interlocking sources.  As examples from the Old Testament period, Ruth was written contemporaneously with Judges.  So you have writers who didn’t even know each other authenticating one another.  The Pentateuch covered the period written in Job.  During the period of 2 Samuel, David was writing his Psalms.  And we can learn more from both sources about the other from each.  As we get into the Books of Kings, we’ve got all kinds of interlocking sources: we’ve got 1 and 2 Chronicles, Song of Solomon, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Obadiah, Joel, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Jeremiah and Lamentations all during that same period.  All these different biblical writers giving us accounts that never contradict one another the way Muhammad frequently contradicted Muhammad.  Daniel and Ezekiel wrote during the same basic period of time.  Ezra, Esther, Haggai, and Zachariah were written over the same period of time.  Nehemiah and Malachi were written over the same period of time.

The same is true of the New Testament, only we have even MORE corroboration.  How many Gospels, how many accounts of the life of Jesus, how many perspectives, do we have?  We’ve got FOUR.  We’ve got St. Matthew, we’ve got St. Paul, we’ve got St. Luke, we’ve got St. Peter, we’ve got St. John, we’ve got St. James, we’ve got St. Jude, we’ve got the writer of Hebrews, all writing about the same Gospel over the same period of time.  And they NEVER contradict one another when their writings are closely studied in full context.  The deeper you get, the more the harmony.  Which is an amazing, and literally miraculous thing.

And the Bible has been called “God’s Anvil,” because it has stood the test of time as critics have tried to pound away at it for millennia.  No book has been more read.  No book has been more attacked.  The Bible has withstood everything ever hurled by hell against it.  The atheist Voltaire sneered, “In no more than one hundred years, intellects like mine will make the Bible disappear.” But within fifty years of his own death, Voltaire’s own printing press was used to churn out BIBLES for people hungry to devour the Word of God.  That is why no Book has ever changed more hearts and transformed more lives.

Again, for the sake of contrast, try that with the Qur’an.  Salmon Rushdie pointed out the sordid history of the self-refutation of Muhammad as a prophet of God, and he was rewarded with a fatwa on his life as a result.  And they recently reinstated it just to make sure we know they’re still out to murder him.  Think of the sneering liberals who mock the Bible and Christians who would NEVER DARE do the same thing to the Qur’an and Muslims – because they are cowards and because they know that Muslims would murder them whereas Christians will only pray for them.  My point is that the Bible has withstood 2,000 years of hateful, demonic attack and unrelenting criticism from unbelievers that would have long-since destroyed any book that was NOT from God.  And the Bible didn’t survive by murdering and massacring its intellectual and moral opponents the way the Qur’an has.

The New York Times Best Seller List never mentions the Bible.  That is because The Bible refutes absolutely everything liberalism stands for.  But the Bible is every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year, year-after-year, century-after-century, the best-selling Book on planet EARTH.  NOTHING ELSE even comes CLOSE to it.  More than FIVE BILLION Bibles have been sold, according to Guinness World Records.

At this point I can throw in the incredible uniqueness of Jesus.  There has NEVER been in ALL the history of the world ANYONE like Him.  Today, every major religion on earth has tried to claim Him, co-opt Him, make Jesus theirs: not only the obvious Christianity, but Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etcetera.  This is not true of ANY other religious figure from ANY other religion.  Jesus is UNIVERSAL.  And it is fitting that He would be so: because He alone is the Savior of the whole world, in fulfillment of the Scriptures and demonstrated by His Empty Tomb where every other religion has a corpse for a founder.

So let me get back to where I began, with 2 Peter 1:16-21.  Peter witnessed, along with James and John – with Moses and Elijah representing the testimony of the Law and the Prophets of the Deity and Ministry of Jesus of Nazareth – the Transfiguration of Christ.  And Peter, reflecting on that day, writes:

Because of that experience, we have even greater confidence in the message proclaimed by the prophets. You must pay close attention to what they wrote, for their words are like a lamp shining in a dark place—until the Day dawns, and Christ the Morning Star shines in your hearts.  Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.  — 2 Peter 1:19-21

Peter is pointing out what the great historian and careful researcher St. Luke pointed out in his Gospel when he wrote of two disciples experience when they unknowingly encountered the Resurrected Jesus on the Road to Emmaus.  They had been talking to one another about all of the events that had taken place since Jesus’ arrest and public execution and Jesus – His identity concealed from them – began walking with them as they walked along the road.  Jesus asked them, “What are you guys talking about?”  And they incredulously asked Jesus, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem and unaware of the things which have happened here in these days?” (Luke 24:18).  Jesus asked, “What things?”  And they told Him, culminating in this:

And some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just exactly as the women also had said: but Him [Jesus] they did not see.

And He said to them, “O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!  Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?”  And beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.  — Luke 24:24-27

And again when Jesus appeared to the eleven Disciples and Jesus ate with them and told them:

“These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”  Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and He said to them, “This it is written that the Christ should suffer and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.  You are witnesses of these things.”  — Luke 24:44-48

I’ve already provided a link to the hundreds of prophecies that Jesus would have explained to them how He fulfilled in His birth, His ministry, His sacrificial death as the Lamb of God in atonement for the sins of the world and His glorious resurrection.

That’s what Peter is describing.  He saw the prophetic Word of the Scripture come alive right before his very eyes, his very ears, his very hands.  The Scriptures are a lamp in a dark place that shine our way straight to Christ and to His salvation from sin into a new birth through regeneration and a new life through sanctification.

There are times in my mind when something occurs to me and I conclude based on my experience, based on my reasoning, based on my intuition, that something is going to happen.  That’s NOT what the prophets did.  Peter – a prophet and writer of Scripture through divine inspiration himself – specifically says that prophets DON’T write from their own understanding of what they happen to think, or from any human initiative or intuition.  NO, Peter says very plainly, these prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.

So Peter had Jesus Himself teach him about how the Scriptures prophesied His coming and precisely detail what He would do when He came.  Hundreds of prophecies fulfilled; 456 identifying characteristics described.  And Peter – who also witnessed the Resurrected Jesus after having seen His dead body – saw the prophetic Word made more sure.

More sure than anything in this world.

I am now watching with amazement the last days prophecies unerringly coming to pass.  I read the Scriptures in Ezekiel about the coming war of Gog-Magog, in which Russia and Iran lead a confederation of nations that would ultimately all become Muslim attack Israel.  I have now witnessed for the first time in history, I believe, both Russia AND Iran in Syria, RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO ISRAEL.  We are seeing the last days clock zooming toward Armageddon because of the abject demonic foolishness of the Obama presidency, make no mistake.

All the political coalitions are in place that the Bible amazingly described 2,600 years ago.  China’s way across the mighty Euphrates River has not merely been cleared, it has literally been PAVED as a network of concrete dams literally allows them to shut off one of the mightiest rivers on earth.  And not only cross the river but use it as their HIGHWAY to Armageddon.

Is the passage of Revelation 6:14, detailing the opening days of the period that will soon befall a wicked humanity when “The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up,” was that merely symbolic?  Not when you consider that that is PRECISELY what a nuclear warhead looks like when it is detonated.  And God’s Word prophetically saw that day coming 2,000 years BEFORE THE FIRST HUMAN EVEN DREAMED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF A NUCLEAR WEAPON.

Just as God’s word wasn’t merely being “allegorical” or “symbolic” when it described an army of 200 million soldiers from the east – PRECISELY WHERE SUCH A VAST ARMY WOULD COME TODAY – when at the time this prophecy was given there weren’t 200 million human beings on the entire planet.

Jesus fulfilled all the prophecies of His First Advent LITERALLY.  He wasn’t symbolically born of a virgin; He didn’t allegorically rise from the dead.  It is fools from hell who deny the literal Word of God.  And in the same way, we are watching the prophecies of the end times and the Second Advent culminating in Jesus Christ coming as King of kings and Lord of lords being fulfilled LITERALLY.  And that is made sure just as sure as the fact that Russia and Iran are not “symbolically” in Syria immediately north of Israel.

Even if you’ve got nothing else, ESPECIALLY if you’ve got nothing else in this world, you can COUNT on the Scriptures.  that is because “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8).

And you can count on Jesus, the Word whom the Word of God heralded from the first chapters of the Book of Genesis straight through the Scarlet Thread that runs through the entire Bible.

Maranatha, Lord Jesus.  How I long to see you, my dear Friend Who sticks by me closer than a brother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Being A Democrat Means Being A ‘DEMOnic bureauCRAT’ And A Rabid Despiser Of Truth. And That Means Our National Extinction.

I’ve got to begin somewhere, so let me begin by pointing out that Barack Hussein Obama stands as THE most documented liar in the entire history of the world.  There has NEVER been a human being who was seen more times by more people telling something that is absolutely provable to have been a lie than this man.  And as merely ONE of myriad examples of the liar that Obama is, here is Politifact pointing out that Obama said AT LEAST 37 TIMES something that he clearly had to know was a lie – that if you like your doctor UNDER HIS PLAN you could keep your doctor and that if you like your current health insurance UNDER HIS PLAN that you could keep your current insurance.  Obama won the coveted title of “Liar of the Year” for that one, utterly destroying his competitors such as the Ayatollah, Kim Il Sung, Vladimir Putin, etc.  And just sticking with Politifact, they go on for four solid pages listing by the dozens of things that Barack Hussein Obama has said that were completely and entirely LIES.  And I cite Politifact because there is no question that it is a very left-leaning organization (Just see here and here and here and here for documentation supporting the truth of that statement.  These are people who go after Republicans in nine out of ten cases); and so when even a leftist entity says Obama is a liar, well, HE’S A LIAR.

On that same issue of ObamaCare that Obama lied about in speech after speech at least 37 documented times, one clause from the Affordable Care Act – which is neither “affordable” or “caring” – has reared its ugly head: the meaning of the words “established by the state.”   Fully 34 states of the 50 states do NOT have their own exchanges. Only sixteen states actually qualify as having been “established by the state.”  The clear meaning of those four words guts ObamaCare because ONLY state-run exchanges would qualify and it is an inconvenient truth that This section dealing with the creation of state exchanges and the provision of subsidies states, quite crystal clearly, that subsidies are only available in exchanges “established by a State,” which the law expressly defines as the 50 states plus the District of Columbia.  In any ordinary court proceeding involving a law or a contract, the FIRST place a court looks is the clear meaning of the words.  And in this case they are QUITE clear.  to make it even more clear, in the case of many of the states, state law itself says the principle behind ObamaCare is ILLEGAL.

The ObamaCare pushers and pimps – and note that this law was entirely written BY Democrats FOR Democrats WITH Democrat approval – now argue that they did not intend the law to require that states establish their own exchanges.  They say it is frankly asinine to understand the clear meaning of the words in their obvious clear meaning.  A huge problem with that is one of the health care experts who claimed he was one of the principle architects of the law went on a self-aggrandizing tour in which he boasted that those four words WERE VERY INTENTIONAL to coerce the states to do the very thing that the people who want the law overturned therefore correctly claim the law required.  ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber boasted about having specifically worded the law to force and coerce states to set up their own exchanges or else they would be denied federal funding.  Here are Jonathan Gruber’s very words:

What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this. [emphasis added]

Here is the video of him saying it:

Jonathan Gruber said a lot of amazing things about how profoundly STUPID Democrats believed the American people to be.  We’re SHEEP to them.  We’re FARM ANIMALS who have to be steered either to our pasture or to our slaughter by a class of experts who are like gods to us.  I’ve written about some of what he’s said.

In the face of this obvious embarrassment, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claimed she didn’t even know who Gruber was. She claimed he didn’t write the Democrat’s bill.  But we have her on the record and on that record we know she was a LIAR when she made that false claim because back in 2009 – when it actually mattered – she had previously said:

PELOSI: We’re not finished getting all of our reports back from CBO, but we’ll have a side by side to compare. But our bill brings down rates. I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo versus what will happen in our bill for those who seek insurance within the exchange. And our bill takes down those costs, even some now, and much less preventing the upward spiral.

So again, we’re confident about what we set out to do in the bill: middle class affordability, security for our seniors, and accountability to our children.

We similarly have former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also specifically acknowledging Jonathan Gruber’s massive contribution to the writing and passage of ObamaCare on the very floor of the U.S. Senate.

Obama distanced himself from Gruber and all but directly claimed he’d never heard of the guy and Gruber hadn’t had anything to do with anything:

“The fact that an adviser who was never on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is not a reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama declared at a press conference

There’s a big fat giant problem with what Obama and Democrats are now saying: we now have 20,000 emails that prove that they are all LIARS:

MIT Economist Jonathan Gruber Had Bigger Role in Health Law, Emails Show
Adviser whose comments on Affordable Care Act touched off a furor worked more closely than previously known with White House
By Stephanie Armour
Updated June 21, 2015 8:00 p.m. ET

Jonathan Gruber, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist whose comments about the health-care law touched off a political furor, worked more closely than previously known with the White House and top federal officials to shape the law, previously unreleased emails show.

The emails, provided by the House Oversight Committee to The Wall Street Journal, cover messages Mr. Gruber sent from January 2009 through March 2010. Committee staffers said they worked with MIT to obtain the 20,000 pages of emails.

The committee released the information in the days before the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a lawsuit that could strike down subsidies on the federal health-care insurance exchange.

The emails show frequent consultations between Mr. Gruber and top Obama administration staffers and advisers in the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services on the Affordable Care Act. They show he informed HHS about interviews with reporters and discussions with lawmakers, and he consulted with HHS about how to publicly describe his role.

The administration has sought to distance itself from the economist in the wake of his controversial statements in a 2013 video, where he said the health law passed because of the “huge political advantage” of the legislation’s lacking transparency. He also referred to the “stupidity of the American voter.”

Republicans seized on the comments as evidence that supporters of the law purposely misled the public about its costs. Mr. Gruber received nearly $400,000 from HHS for his work focusing on health-policy computer models, according to public records.

The White House has described Mr. Gruber as having a limited role in crafting the law. President Barack Obama in 2014 said Mr. Gruber was “some adviser who never worked on our staff.” Mr. Gruber told Congress last year he disagreed with the widespread characterization of his role as the “architect” of Mr. Obama’s health-care plan.

“His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted,” said Rep.  Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), chairman of the House oversight committee. “There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said. He put up this facade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce.”

Mr. Chaffetz on Sunday sent a letter to HHS Secretary  Sylvia Mathews Burwell requesting information justifying the department’s sole-source contract with Mr. Gruber for his work on the health law.

Mr. Gruber declined to comment.

Meaghan Smith, an HHS spokeswoman, said: “As has been previously reported, Mr. Gruber was a widely used economic modeler for administrations and state governments run by both parties—both before and after the Affordable Care Act was passed. These emails only echo old news.”

An HHS official said Mr. Gruber possessed a statistically sophisticated microsimulation model to evaluate how the change in the number of individuals with health insurance coverage would affect costs to the government and the private sector. In 2010, an independent Inspector General responding to a request from Republican Senators reviewed documentation related to Mr. Gruber’s HHS contracts and found the agency met federal requirements for both contracts, according to the HHS official.

The emails show Mr. Gruber was in touch with key advisers such as  Peter Orszag, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget, an arm of the White House that oversaw federal programs.

He was also in contact with Jason Furman, an economic adviser to the president, and  Ezekiel Emanuel, who was then a special adviser for health policy at OMB.

One email indicates Mr. Gruber was invited to meet with Mr. Obama. In a July 2009 email, he wrote that Mr. Orszag had “invited me to meet with the head honcho to talk about cost control.”

“Thank you for being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment,” according to Sept. 9, 2009 email to Mr. Gruber from  Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama administration health adviser who worked at HHS and the White House. In a November 2009 email, she called Mr. Gruber “our hero.”

In an August 2009 email,  Lawrence Summers—then a top economic adviser in the administration—emailed Mr. Gruber and asked “if you were POTUS, what would u do now?” Mr. Gruber responded that Mr. Obama should hold out for enough money to do universal coverage.

Mr. Gruber also informed HHS about interviews he had with health policy reporters such as  Ezra Klein, previously of the Washington Post and now with Vox Media. In a November 2009 email, Mr. Gruber let a top HHS official know the conversation went well and the story would post soon.

In a Jan. 8, 2010 email, Mr. Gruber reached out to Ms. Lambrew after a Politico reporter asked why he didn’t disclose his contract before writing publicly about health care. Mr. Gruber ran a description of his responsibilities by Ms. Lambrew for her review before responding.

In a November 2009 email, he apprised HHS of his conversations with former Sen.  Mary Landrieu (D., La.) She had been opposed to the health law but came to support it.

In a Jan. 14, 2010 email, Mr. Furman emailed that “we got a deal with labor. Keep that very close hold.” Unions had been opposing the health law but rallied to support it.

He also in April 2009 supplied HHS with information outlining “winners and losers” if employers responded to the law by moving workers into the exchanges.

In a May 2009 email, he said there would be 3.6 million “losers” who were forced into individual coverage after the health care overhaul. “As you might suspect, this group is largely young and healthy,” he wrote. In an August 2009 email, he said 4.2 million people with employer-sponsored insurance would be dropped from having coverage, a development that hasn’t materialized.

In a Sept. 23, 2009, email, Mr. Gruber emailed Ms. Lambrew saying “pharma is going to be a huge winner from this bill—maybe $15 billion/year in incremental revenue. Any way to go after them harder for financing?”

THE most prominent Democrats are on the record as having lied OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN when it comes to this socialist takeover of THE most important sixth of the U.S. economy.

This ObamaCare law – that has NEVER had majority support by the American people in ANY poll (even the leftist Politifact is forced to acknowledge that fact) – is now more unpopular than it has EVER been.  It was passed ENTELY on lies.  It guts health care.  Overall premiums have skyrocketed in order to provide the subsidies for millions and cover what the left calls “essential health benefits” such as sex changes for transgenders; at the same time, the deductibles have similarly skyrocketed (see here and here) such that the “insurance” people get gives them no actual access to health care whatsoever because they can’t afford to actually see a doctor.  Meanwhile, the networks have shrunk as fewer and fewer doctors are willing to participate in a wicked program.  And the result is that in spite of Obama’s promises, we’ve got more people going to Emergency Rooms for their health care than EVER BEFORE.  These are all just facts.  The Supreme Court has already bailed out Obama and his wicked ObamaCare once over his outright LIES by calling something a “tax” that Obama himself said was NOT a tax but a “penalty” that had to be a tax and not a penalty for the law to be “constitutional.”  They even mocked the ObamaCare mouthpiece who said what had over and over been referred to as a “penalty and not a tax” was actually now a “tax and not a penalty.”

And then the SCOTUS blinked in the face of Obama’s terrorist threat to delegitimize the Supreme Court and turn it into a political entity if it didn’t side with him.

It’s even more clear this time.  The law is a lie that was sold on the basis of a giant deception.  It’s obvious.  This law needs to be gutted or our Constitution needs to be gutted.

But Obama isn’t just a liar about ObamaCare.  And Democrats aren’t just liars who both deceive and demand to be deceive when it comes to Obama.  There is a massive spirit of deception and ungodliness when it comes to the modern Democrat Party.  As we speak, we have overwhelming distrust in Hillary Clinton as someone who is neither honest nor trustworthy.  Even CNN acknowledges that fact.  But we just as similarly have Democrat’s overwhelming support for her.  Because they don’t CARE about honesty or truth or trustworthiness.

These people are liars who are driven by lies.  Pure and simple.

Democrats are people whose souls SWIM in LIES.

I’ve had three amazing opportunities to examine the massive spirit of deception that characterizes the American political left in just the last few days and wrote the following articles documenting and commenting on that spirit of deception:

• NAACP Liar Dolezal Proves ‘Race’ Is A Synonym For ‘Leftist’. How Many Germans Pretended To Be Jews In The Holocaust, Again?
• Guilty Even AFTER Being Proven Innocent: Liberals Talk About ‘Justice’ When COCKROACHES Are More Capable Of Justice Or Truth Than They Are
• Oft-Documented LIAR Brian Williams Going To Liberal Haven MSNBC Just Proves My Thesis: Liberals Are At HOME With Liars And Their Lies.

In the article, I made the observation in my conclusion that I inserted into the beginning of the second article above.  I’ll insert it again now to underscore my primary thesis which the ideology of progressive liberalism keeps proving to be true:

It’s really beyond amazing, now, the willingness to be deceived and to engage in self-deception the way the left is.  Everything under the sun is just an atheist-driven postmodernist and existentialist-based “social construct” with them, whether it’s the humanity of a baby in the womb or the nature of male-female relations and God’s created order or transgender identity or now even something as physically obvious as race: If Rachel Dolezal thinks of herself as black, well, she’s clearly got to be black, then.  If Bruce Jenner thinks he’s a chick, well, it would be intolerant to say he’s NOT a chick.  No matter what the hanging down parts say to the contrary because that’s only a “fact” and these people don’t give a flaming damn about facts or truth.  If I say that I’m the President of the United States, I ought to be able to kick Obama’s skinny ass out of the White House and put my feet up on the desk in the oval office, because if I think it, it’s got to be accepted as true, dontchaknow.  If I can be a woman because I say I think I’m a woman or a black woman because I say I think I’m a black woman, then why the hell shouldn’t I be the damn president because I say I think I’m the damn president???

Progressive liberalism is intrinsically fascist, and fascism is the rejection of reason.  Nazism was the rejection of reason and the embrace of raw, naked hate emotion: and that is precisely what we are seeing unleashed from the left as cities burn down and every single encounter with a black person by the police becomes the next reason to riot.  In the same manner, conservatives are persona non grata at virtually any college or university because they will be screamed down by a gauntlet of leftwing hate or worse yet banned by the universities themselves while liberal intellectuals decry the very freedom of speech itself.  And the rabid rejection of actual reality is rampant with these people: Bruce Jenner is a woman even though HE is clearly not a woman.  Rachel Dolezal is black even though anybody who isn’t blind can immediately see that she is white in spite of her black-face and her hairdresser-induced Afro.  Truth doesn’t matter; truth has nothing whatsoever to do with these people.  Progressive liberals aren’t people who listen to the truth; they are the kind of people who chant or rant or scream slogans in the faces of people who try to explain the truth to them.  Which is why the most intolerant places on earth today are the universities where leftist faculty and administrators got their foot in the door and then slammed that door shut on anyone who doesn’t think exactly like they do.

In the same way, the black leftists who are so damned fast to scream “racism” are pathologically racist themselves by their own demagoguery.  Or let me put it thus: where is the “Pan-Anglo Congress“???  Where’s the “National Association for the Advancement of Caucasian People“???  Where’s the “Congressional White Caucus“???  Where’s the “United Caucasian College Fund“???  Where are the “historically white colleges and universities” where white kids get preferential treatment for their race and receive scholarship from the aforementioned United Caucasian College Fund???  Where’s the “National White Chamber of Commerce” focused on advancing white-owned businesses???  Where are all the “historically white denominations“???  Where are all the white looters and rioters targeting black businesses for destruction as whites erupt in race riots in cities across America???  Where are the white people playing the race-game of “black bear hunting” the way black thugs do by playing their “knock-out game” of “polar bear hunting“???  If white people did what black people do on a massive scale, leftist black people would be demonizing us and slandering us and tearing their robes and pouring sackcloth and ashes over their heads as they wept and wailed in the streets.  But these same people are FINE being so racist it’s beyond unreal.

Because facts don’t matter to such people.  A demonstration and documentation of rabid hypocrisy doesn’t matter.  They are ONLY capable of seeing the speck in their brother’s eye and NEVER the giant log in their own eyes.  And every single one of these black organizations makes it official that black leftists utterly reject the teachings of Jesus and are determined to find the speck in their brother’s eye while they ignore the giant damn logs in their own.

Liberals are pathological hypocrites in so many ways that its beyond unreal.  But one of the very worst ways is their hypocrisy on free speech.  After being allowed a voice on the basis of what they claimed was an innate right to free speech, the left now demands that free speech be destroyed lest any other voice have any other right to any kind of legitimacy.

I am beyond sick at the toxic, racist and race-baiting moral filth that comes out of the pathologically hypocritical leftwing and the Democrat Party who marches to their drumbeat.

As for the third article above, on Brian Williams, the fact that liberal progressive Democrat Party propaganda machine MSNBC is actually embracing a “journalist” and “news anchor” who is now a thoroughly documented liar would be astonishing – but the very soul of the left is to be steeped in lies.  So when you really think about it, a Brian Williams in an MSNBC is a perfect fit made in hell.

I keep getting back to “truth.”  I keep going back to what Jesus said as He stood before the ultimate big government postmodernist named Governor Pontius Pilate:

Jesus answered, “My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world.”

Pilate said, “So you are a king?” Jesus responded, “You say I am a king. Actually, I was born and came into the world to testify to the truth. All who love the truth recognize that what I say is true.”

“What is truth?” Pilate asked. — John 18:36-38a

And Governor Pilate turned his back on the One who had come into the world as truth’s very living embodiment.

Liberals are self-deceived deceivers who will quote and allow to be quoted the Bible ONLY when it serves their self-serving cause to erect a massive Government that usurps God as Savior and as Lord.  A Barack Obama or a Hillary Clinton will twist the Bible and say that we ought to care about the poor and therefore somehow we ought to have a giant socialist and frankly fascist omnipotent human Government with the raw naked power to impose “economic justice” by stealing from one group of people to give to whatever people that this wicked Government decides to empower of out its own self-centered cynical political interests.  Jesus never ONCE called upon the rise of human government to help the poor.  We have the following account that demonstrates what I am saying:

Jesus saw the huge crowd as he stepped from the boat, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.  Late in the afternoon his disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late.  Send the people away so that they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.”

But Jesus said, “You feed them.”

“With what?” they asked. “We’d have to work for months to earn enough money to buy food for all these people!”

“How much bread do you have?” he asked. “Go and find out.” They came back and reported, “We have five loaves of bread and two fish.”Then Jesus told the disciples to have the people sit down in groups on the green grass.  — Mark 6:34-39

Jesus does NOT tell the disciples to go to King Herod or to Governor Pilate to create a welfare state program.  And in fact the ONLY place in the Bible where there is any direction to create such a government program is in the religious theocracy of the Old Testament that makes every Democrat begin rabidly frothing at the mouth because they HATE God and His ways and would NEVER tolerate what God actually commanded them to do.  Tell you what: you welfare system provided for in the Bible?  Fine; let’s have the theocracy that it is BASED ON, too.  And let’s begin by putting to death according to that Old Testament law every single Democrat who voted for abortion or for homosexual marriage, and every single judge or lawyer who rule or advocated for these, just for starters.  And maybe we’ll get somewhere.  Because while I’m personally FINE with the Bible, the nature of Democrats is to take the one little tiny part of it that they want out of any legitimate context and then urinate on and defecate upon the rest of it.  And their hypocrisy and false piety ought to make you sick.  The truth is that Democrats have spent $22 TRILLION of other people’s money in their cynical and euphemistically titled “war on poverty” and they have parasitically leached the overwhelming majority of it to their political advantage and to benefit their political benefactors.  That’s three times the money that has been spent on every single war in America from the Revolution to today COMBINED.  That’s nearly $70,000 for every single man, woman and child in America.  While the actual poor have benefited little or not at all from it.  Because the “war on poverty” is and has always been a Democrat Party exploitation machine by people who couldn’t give less of a flying DAMN about the poor in America.

And even within that system of biblical theocracy the Bible teaches that powerful human government is a bad thing:

5and they said to him, “Behold, you have grown old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations.” 6But the thing was displeasing in the sight of Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the LORD. 7The LORD said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in regard to all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from being king over them. 8“Like all the deeds which they have done since the day that I brought them up from Egypt even to this day—in that they have forsaken Me and served other gods—so they are doing to you also. 9“Now then, listen to their voice; however, you shall solemnly warn them and tell them of the procedure of the king who will reign over them.”

Warning concerning a King

10So Samuel spoke all the words of the LORD to the people who had asked of him a king. 11He said, “This will be the procedure of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and place them for himself in his chariots and among his horsemen and they will run before his chariots. 12“He will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and of fifties, and some to do his plowing and to reap his harvest and to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13“He will also take your daughters for perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14“He will take the best of your fields and your vineyards and your olive groves and give them to his servants. 15“He will take a tenth of your seed and of your vineyards and give to his officers and to his servants. 16“He will also take your male servants and your female servants and your best young men and your donkeys and use them for his work. 17“He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his servants. 18“Then you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”

19Nevertheless, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel, and they said, “No, but there shall be a king over us, 20that we also may be like all the nations, that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” 21Now after Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the LORD’S hearing. 22The LORD said to Samuel, “Listen to their voice and appoint them a king.” So Samuel said to the men of Israel, “Go every man to his city.” — 1 Samuel 8:5-22

And now we’ve got Obama to finish taking what hasn’t already been taken like the demonic locust king that he is.

But who or what did Jesus actually empower to help the poor?  His disciples.  And His Church that Democrats hate and rabidly despise as they have done everything they could to undermine and put down and weaken and trample upon.  Because they are evil and they hate the truth.

In the same manner, we just had another mass shooting and what did the fascist Obama immediately leap to?  Seizing all guns and banning weapons.  Jesus talked a great deal about “peace,” but JESUS NEVER ONCE SO MUCH AS SUGGESTED SEIZING ALL WEAPONS.  That spirit had NOTHING to do with the spirit of Jesus.  In fact, Jesus offered this:

Then Jesus asked them, “When I sent you out to preach the Good News and you did not have money, a traveler’s bag, or an extra pair of sandals, did you need anything?” “No,” they replied.  “But now,” he said, “take your money and a traveler’s bag. And if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one!  For the time has come for this prophecy about me to be fulfilled: ‘He was counted among the rebels.’ Yes, everything written about me by the prophets will come true.” — Luke 22:35-37

Jesus did NOT stand for enabling the wicked government to come and confiscate our weapons.  He in fact did the exact opposite!  Do you want to know whose spirit Obama is following in his desire to take away our weapons and leave us unable to defend ourselves?  It is the rabid fascist socialist spirit of Führer Adolf Hitler.  It is the rabid communist socialist dictator rule of Joseph Stalin.  THEY seized all the guns so no one could rise against their wickedness and fight back.  Our founding fathers believed exactly OPPOSITE to Hitler and Stalin and Obama.  They saw the 2nd Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny; where only the State had access to weapons and so the people were helpless before the rise of any tyrant state.  The founding fathers wanted to protect us from tyrants like Obama, who seek to impose a giant government upon us against our will, so that they would NEVER leave the people without the means to defend themselves, their families and their property from such a government.  And I believe that given what Obama has done to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” that we see the wisdom of the founding fathers from that very 2nd Amendment as we have never seen it before.

Jesus was righteous and wise the same way that Obama is wicked and a fool.  Jesus knew that criminalizing all the weapons would only ensure that criminals – and a criminal human Government – had all the weapons.  And that the nature of the world apart from Him is violence.  Jesus understood that the founding father’s vision of a nation whose government feared its people was far wiser and far more moral than the one Obama envisions in which the people must live in fear of their government.

Democrats demonize Republicans all the damn time for the gun violence.  But they should do all their most rabid screaming and finger-pointing standing in front of a mirror.  Because when Barack Obama’s stench filled the White House and while Nancy Pelosi’s stench filled the House of Representatives and Harry Reid’s stench filled the Senate and Democrats ran the ENTIRE GOVERNMENT, they did NOTHING.  Because to be a Democrat today means being the worst hypocrite on planet earth, bar none.

Democrats are a rabidly religious people, just like their very-shortly-coming future god, the Antichrist, whom the Bible describes as “honor[ing] a god of fortresses; a god unknown to his ancestors” (Daniel 11:38).  And that has DEMOCRAT written all over it.  These are people who worship the STATE that will build those fortresses.  And Democrats who want to seize your guns and abolish your God-given constitutional right to defend yourselves and your property from evil want to impose their god on you.  I say that because as Christians we want to be radically dependent upon our God, the God of the Bible.  And Democrats want the same thing; they want to be radically dependent upon THEIR god, the State.  But they are FASCISTS in their worship such that they want us ALL to be radically helpless such that all we have to pray to is their god the all-powerful State.  You cannot have the right that the God of the Bible gave you to protect yourself; NO!!!  You must bow down to THEIR god.  And everyone who has a weapon to defend themselves, their families and their property with is a blasphemer to Democrats; because they are declaring that they do not WANT to be radically dependent on the State for their salvation.

Obama lusts for more abortions on top of the sixty million his party already is coated in the blood of.  The same Democrats who weep and wail over Vietnam have murdered more than a thousand innocent babies for every single American serviceman who was killed in that war.  And they are just getting started in their hatred of the human spirit.  But read the words of Psalm 139 and see for yourself the innate vile wickedness of the party of hate that the Democrat Party has become:

Psalm 139:13-18 New Living Translation (NLT)

¹³ You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
    and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ Thank You for making me so wonderfully complex!
    Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
¹⁵ You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
    as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.
¹⁶ You saw me before I was born.
    Every day of my life was recorded in Your book.
Every moment was laid out
    before a single day had passed.

¹⁷ How precious are Your thoughts about me,^[a] O God.
    They cannot be numbered!
¹⁸ I can’t even count them;
    they outnumber the grains of sand!
And when I wake up,
    You are still with me!

Luke 1:39-41 records the following event:

A few days later Mary hurried to the hill country of Judea, to the town where Zechariah lived. She entered the house and greeted Elizabeth. At the sound of Mary’s greeting, Elizabeth’s child leaped within her, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

The monstrous Democrat Party’s “final solution” to this truth of the divine dignity of human life in the womb is the same as King Herod’s: to murder babies.  Mary was a young teenage girl when she became pregnant with the baby Jesus.  And Elizabeth’s baby John was leaping for joy in his mother’s womb.  And Democrats believe it would have been a GOOD THING for both women to murder the Savior of the human race and the herald God sent to announce Him because they come from the Party of Lucifer.

In the same way Democrats worship the perversion of marriage and the homosexuality that perverts the very foundation of God’s creative order.  And that is why as the Party of Lucifer it was their demonic-inspired will to bring the full wrath of God against the United States of America that once took pride in being “One Nation under God” before we depraved it to the “gay pride” of homosexual sodomy.  Find this truth in Romans chapter one:

Unbelief and Its Consequences

18For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

24Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. 25For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

26For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

28And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, 29being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, 30slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; 32and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them. — Romans 1:18-31

And that everything Obama has done in his socialism and his fascism and his totalitarianism and his love of abortion and his worship of homosexuality has driven the world further and further and further from the Prince of Peace.

Everything the left stands for is irredeemably wicked and evil.  EVERYTHING.  And they cynically pervert and warp even good and legitimate causes to their wicked agenda.

And that is why Democrats – which stands for “DEMOnic bureauCRATS” – want a proven liar to anchor their “news” station.  Because you can always count on a liar to lie and Democrats wouldn’t have it any other way.

A front page article from USA Today captures the crisis of the once-great-because-it -was-once-godly United States of America:

Mixing religion and politics: Do today’s ‘nones’ have it?
If Americans skew less Christian, the GOP faces challenge
Rick Hampson, USA TODAY 5:48 p.m. EDT June 17, 2015

If the U.S. population is becoming less and less Christian, why does the Republican presidential campaign sometimes feel like a revival meeting?

Last month, Jeb Bush became the latest GOP hopeful to make the pilgrimage to Liberty University, the world’s largest evangelical Christian school, where Texas Sen. Ted Cruz announced his candidacy in March.

And this week, a baker’s dozen of declared and potential Republican presidential candidates address the Faith & Freedom Coalition, which is trying to mobilize the conservative evangelical vote.

Timothy Head, the coalition director, says he didn’t even have to invite candidates to the Road to Majority Conference in Washington: “People contacted us — ‘Can I come?”’

Yet just last month the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christian has been going down a point a year, to 70.6% in 2014.

Meanwhile, those who report no religious affiliation — “nones” — are increasing their share of the body politic.

And Americans’ confidence in organized religion, which has fallen dramatically over the past four decades, hit an all-time low this year of 42%, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday. Only about half of Protestants or Roman Catholics say they have a great deal of confidence in the church and organized religion.

It’s a remarkable development in what President Harry Truman and many others (including some non-believers) have described as “a Christian nation.” […]

The article continues, but you get the idea: the more this nation turns its collectivist back on Jesus Christ and pisses on Him as Democrats demanded be taxpayer funded in the form of “Piss Christ”, the more Democrat (the modern term for “demon-possessed”) this nation becomes.  Because the Democrat Party represents the spirit of perversion and the perversion of once godly America.

It was a Democrat President (among others) who called America “a Christian nation.”  But this awful party is no longer that party.  Now it is the party in which an Obama boasts that it is a “Muslim nation.”

The United States of America is going to go down harder and more agonizingly than any nation in the history of the world.  We look at the wickedness of other countries such as Russia and China and the Islamic republics that are sending so much hate and violence out.  But these nations are described in the Bible as being present in the last days while America is NOT.  And the reason is now clear: because we were a nation that once uniquely and powerfully turned to the LORD, the God of the Bible, and now we have spat in His eye.

And our descent into hell is going to be awful as God “gives us over” to our depraved mind and its full consequences (Romans 1:24).

Barack Obama lied to us in every way imaginable.  After demonizing George W. Bush and Republicans and falsely claiming that our very attempt to fight a war on terror was the cause of the war, Obama promised the American people that he had the solution to end the war on terror.  But history proves he lied to us.  Terrorist violence SOARED in 2014.  That’s the current report.  But if you look a year ago you’ll see that the terrorism that has soared this year from last year soared last year from the year before as Obama’s policy has completely collapsed.  In fact, terrorism has skyrocketed virtually every damn YEAR under Obama’s lies and his political cowardice.  Obama claimed he was the president who ended wars [that George Bush started, of course].  But fully three out of every four dead Americans in Afghanistan was the result of none other than Barack Obama and HIS policies.  As we’ve already watched Iraq completely collapsed from the safe, stable, self-reliant Iraq that George W. Bush left Obama with to a bloodbath that has become the puppet-state of our enemy Iran.

If I might come back to end where I began, with the Supreme Court and ObamaCare, I have little confidence in the Supreme Court – its integrity or its not being a political body – because we live in the last days.  In Habakkuk 1:4, the prophet railed:

The law has become paralyzed, and there is no justice in the courts.  The wicked far outnumber the righteous, so that justice has become perverted.

And given our gay marriage rulings, “perverted” is a VERY good word to describe what “justice” has become today.

In verse five of Habakkuk chapter one, God said watch, wonder, marvel!  For He would bring about judgment to judge a nation that perversely saw itself as being good rather than evil.  And He foretold to Habakkuk that He would act by bringing the vicious Babylonians.  Just as today the same God of all Creation is bringing the SAME sort of people from the SAME part of the world who are doing the SAME things all over again as the days of the Old Testament come back to lethal life as we return to the days of judgment.

John Kerry: Scriptures Compel Us To Confront Climate Change (Good Thing Bible Never Says ANYTHING About Homosexuality Or Abortion)

Yes, the sheer hypocrisy of Democrats is beyond amazing.

The question is how can liberal progressives keep their heads from exploding due to all the mutually exclusive contradictions?  And the answer is because they’ve been practicing the art of blatant moral hypocrisy all their lives.

So one of the top Democrats, proponents of secular humanism and the separation of church and state – which has resulted in the planned separation of God and America – gives us this self-righteous presentation on global warming:

KERRY: Confronting climate change is, in the long run, one of the greatest challenges that we face, and you can see this duty or responsibility laid out in the Scriptures clearly beginning in Genesis. And Muslim majority countries are among the most vulnerable.

KERRY: Our response to this challenge ought to be rooted in a sense of stewardship of earth, and for me and for many of us here today, that responsibility comes from God.

Actually, God gives man dominion over the earth.  God tells man to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (i.e. don’t be socialists and kill your own growth as a society and don’t be homosexual and pervert marriage and stop having babies and hey while you’re at it don’t murder sixty million of your children).

John Kerry’s take is analogous to the servant who was given talents (money, but in this case representing the earth) from his master.  And instead of investing them (laissez-faire free market capitalism) he buries it in a hole (socialism).

I mean, if you’re going to argue with that last, here’s a quote to prove what I’m saying from THE most influential economist of the left:

“The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up.” — John Maynard Keynes

Et voilà.  The lazy and wicked servant who buried his talent in a hole was simply an ardent socialist.  And thus he kept burying and then digging up the same talent over and over and over again.  And of course produced NOTHING.  Which is ultimately all socialism EVER produces aside from shockingly high real unemployment and a labor participation rate that keeps getting closer and closer to zero.

In Jesus’ parable, the free market capitalist gets praised by God; the socialist is denounced.  But John Kerry has nothing whatsoever to do with God or the heart of Christ, so he perverts the parable and perverts the Bible to speak of the evils of an industrial society.

Strangely, I don’t recall the Bible ever once condemning the sin of carbon – a gas necessary for life on earth to exist.  And unlike Democrats I actually READ the Bible and believe what it tells me.

I’m not at ALL like this worthless turd who has tragically become our president:

“Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.”

Which I refute and explode here.  In short, the New Testament clearly tells us that the dietary laws are one of the things that Jesus came to fulfill and which He in fact DID fulfill PAST TENSE.  All you have to do to understand that Obama has a bogus, frankly ignorant and idiotic argument is read Acts chapter 10.  Also read Jesus’ description that He came to inaugurate a New Covenant (Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:25) and understand that the Old Testament that Obama so openly mocks also prophesied a New Covenant (Jeremiah 31:31).  But those Old Testament concepts which are picked up anew in the New Testament – such as condemnation of homosexuality and the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman and the condemnation of murdering one’s own baby – remain.

Oh, btw, Democrats have a pathological inability to separate the role of the individual from the role of government.  When Barack Obama ascribes the Sermon on the Mount to government, rather than to individuals, he makes himself a FOOL.  And he makes himself a fool HYPOCRITE to boot: otherwise, maybe Obama would take the praise of being POOR to the government and thus refuse to tax people and seize their wealth; maybe Obama would view the praise of being hungry as a call to reject the massive public welfare dole he has created.  And omigosh, maybe Obama would have paid attention to the part of the Sermon on the Mount that said –

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.  For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.  Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” — Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:17-19

– And NOT uttered the stupid and according to Jesus blasphemous remark that I quote above.

But let’s just all agree with Obama and John Kerry that what Jesus really meant on the Sermon on the Mount is “Blessed are those who seize control of government to banish God, redistribute wealth, and destroy economies so they can heal the planet.  Oh, and impose homosexual sodomy and the perversion of marriage onto culture and to murder so many tens of millions of babies that even Satan is shaking his head in amazement.”

Or this one who ran for president until it was revealed that he was a raving psychotic – which interestingly was not enough to keep him from serving as the Democratic National Committee Chairman:

Dr. Dean recently told an audience in Iowa that he prayed daily. On the plane he declined to detail his prayer ritual but described how a 2002 trip to Israel deepened his understanding of the connections between Judaism and Christianity. He named Job as his favorite New Testament book, then later corrected himself, noting that it is in the Old Testament.

For the factual record, not only is the Book of Job NOT in the New Testament, but most scholars believe that  this book is in fact the OLDEST Book of the Bible, and quite possibly even the OLDEST Book preserved in all of human history.  You don’t read the Bible and not know something like that.  At least, you don’t read the Bible and have the intellect to be a janitor, let alone run for president of the United States.

It is always a fascinating thing to watch a liberal who thinks he has the least freaking clue about what the Bible teaches or about what Jesus believed.  Because it always ends up like this.  Jesus NEVER condemned homosexuality, liberals swear.  Well, given the fact that homosexuality was nearly nonexistent in Jewish culture in Jesus’ day, making any specific condemnation irrelevant, the fact that Jesus declared that Jesus came not to abolish the Old Testament, but to fulfill it and that the Old Testament was entirely in force during Jesus’ entire ministry on earth, the fact that Jesus in Matthew 19 declared that marriage was the union between ONE MAN AND ONE WOMAN, and add the fact that Jesus in Matthew 15 categorically states that ALL sexual activity outside of marriage – which categorically rules out all homosexual activity – is sinful.

In other words, the only problem with liberalism is that it is a) completely wrong and ignorant and b) immoral and evil.

Just ponder for a moment the Democrat like Barack Obama or John Kerry hypocritically citing the Bible while they clearly urinate on God’s Word in every other respect.  Just reflect for a moment on the pathological dishonesty of a man who would do that.

Now, when it comes to taking care of the environment – biblical stewardship – I as a Christian have practiced environmentalism for YEARS.  I have been conserving water for YEARS, doing things that other people have never even considered such as putting a bucket under the shower to catch the water until it heats up enough.  I am an avid recycler and my “blue” trash container for recycling is always FULL while my trash container is always nearly empty.  I love the outdoors and have more than once reported people who dump or who vandalize to the police.

But I also understand that “global warming” is a complete and utter joke when it becomes a rhetorical tool for socialist redistribution of wealth as it has been exploited, and that we have had – as a book is titled – “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years” throughout the entire history of planet earth.  That book simply blows the doors off the man-caused global warming junk science.  I summarized that book in an article.

 

 

Liberals ‘Religion’ Is The ‘Religion’ Of Abject Hypocrisy, Cynicism And Fascism

It’s a funny thing, liberals and Jesus.

On the one hand, they loudly and shrilly denounce conservatives from talking about religion and most certainly for actually trying to make their religion part of public policy in any way, shape or form.

“How DARE you?!?!” they declare with über self-righteous indignation and moral outrage.  “The separation of church and state is the foundation of our democracy!!!”

Only that’s an outright lie, or course, as is easily proven by reading the words of our founding fathers – including our very greatest founding father who was the father of our country:

What are the foundations of America? After 45 years of public service, George Washington, our greatest patriot and the father of our country, gives his farewell address. He says, ‘We need to remember what brought us here. We need to remember what made us different from all the other nations across Europe and the rest of the world. We have to remember what our foundations are.’ It was the road map, showing us how we’d become what we were, and how to preserve it. It has long been considered the most important address ever given by any US president. President Lincoln set aside an entire day for the entire Union Army and had them read and understand it. Woodrow Wilson did the same during WWI. But we haven’t studied it in schools for over 45 years, so your lack of understanding is understandable. Washington said:

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” — George Washington, Farewell Address

If you want your politics to prosper, the two things you will not separate will be religion and morality. If you want your government to work well, if you want American exceptionalism, if you want the government to do right, if you want all this, then you won’t separate religion and morality from political life. And America’s greatest patriot gave a litmus test for patriotism. He says in the very next sentence (immediately continuing from the quote above):

“In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington

Washington says, Anyone who would try to remove religion and morality from public life, I won’t allow them to call themselves a patriot. Because they are trying to destroy the country.

I have a lengthy volume of quotes in the article I link to above proving that “separation of church and state” was not a value our founding fathers cherished.  What modern progressive liberals wanted is most clearly seen in the near-contemporaneous events of a very different worldview that emerged in the French Revolution and ended in “the Reign of Terror” as a truly ugly and tragic spirit of atheism became a toxic, murderous cancer across France.

But what is most interesting about liberals isn’t merely their hatred of the morality of religion and their determination to suppress and exterminate religion by essentially banning it from government and from culture.

It is the amazing hypocrisy that they immediately show when they believe they can twist, pervert, distort religion to their side.

As an example, let’s consider what liberals – and I mean the liberals who are most toxic in their rants against the “Christian right” – are doing to subvert Jesus into their political ideology.

I came across on the editorial page of the überleftist Los Angeles Times a cartoon by the liberal cartoonist Jimmy Margurilis one such example:

Well, I suppose I’d like to ask Jimmy Margulies – since the opinion of Jesus is clearly so important to him – who Jesus would TAX?  Who would Jesus regulate?  Who would Jesus oppress with government bureaucracy?  Who would Jesus, for that matter, sentence to prison on Margulies’ deeply flawed understanding?  If Jesus wouldn’t deport anyone, He wouldn’t imprison anyone either, would He?  He’d just forgive them and let them go scott free to torture and rape and murder and oppress the rest of us.   That’s the Jesus the left loves: the benign Jesus who morally stood for NOTHING but “tolerance.”

Here’s another liberal telling us we should be a theocracy:

“Revised Tea Party Gospel: ‘Suffer the little children come unto me. Unless they’re undocumented kids from Central America,'” tweeted King Tuesday before adding: “Much easier to be a Christian when the little children aren’t in your back yard, isn’t it?” — Stephen King

It turns out that Christian groups – the very people Stephen King is most demonizing – are doing by far and away the MOST work to help these people who are flooding across the border.  And they rightly asked the secular humanist progressive liberal turd, “What are YOU doing to help these people???”

But here Stephen King is quoting the Bible for us, quoting the Jesus who said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.  NO MAN comes to the Father except through ME.”  The same Jesus also said, “I did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.”  In fact, Jesus said, “not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.”  And oops, Stephen, that includes the parts about homosexuality being an abomination and a detestable act and the like.  And oops, that includes abortion and the systematic murder of more babies than the total number of dead – civilian and military alike on both sides alike – of the bloodiest and most murderous war in the history of the human race.

Liberals believe in the separation of church and state.  Oh, until it suits their purpose NOT to believe in the separation of church and state.  To put it more accurately, liberals believe in the separation of church and state for Republicans and conservatives.

Which is why it is always amazing to hear a liberal try to tell you that we should open our arms, surrender our borders, and allow every single “refugee” to come flooding into our country because it’s in the Bible.  Where, number one, it is NOT in the Bible, and number two, even if it WERE, it would fundamentally and profoundly contradict your precious “separation of church and state” to do it anyway.

If Stephen King and Jimmy Margulies and Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid want a Judeo-Christian theocracy, fine.  Let them say so.  Let them stand for the stoning of homosexuals and adulterers and forced worship of Christ.  But that’s not what they want, is it?  No.  They want a liberal progressive, secular humanist salad bar where THEY and ONLY THEY get to cherry pick the highly selective parts of the Bible they want to follow after splitting those parts out of their context and warping them.

See, I could actually LIVE in a world where Jesus was taken seriously and obeyed.  It’s LIBERALS who would be violently revolting.  Because liberals are people who are so toxic to Jesus that they literally put Him in a jar of urine and funded it as “art.”

I ask you, liberal, to produce for me ONE Bible verse that says it is secular government – and not the church’s and not God’s people’s – role to provide welfare.  I’m just going to state it categorically until you do, that your worldview is found NOWHERE in the Bible.

When the disciples came to Jesus because there was a crowd of 5,000 men (probably a good 15,000 people) who had nothing to eat, do you know what Jesus did NOT tell them to do?  He didn’t tell them to go to King Herod or to Governor Pilate for a government welfare program to feed the poor.  He said YOU feed them.  And after a little humming and hawing the disciples finally did the right thing: they did their best to put some food together and came to Jesus and asked HIM to bless it.

In 1 Samuel chapter 8, we find that the people, in wanting to be like all the other nations with a human king and a human big government, were rejecting GOD.  If you don’t believe me, why don’t you read 1 Samuel 8:7 for yourself?  And God warns the people, saying over and over again, when you have your big government king, HE WILL TAKE… HE WILL APPOINT FOR HIMSELF… HE WILL TAKE… HE WILL TAKE… (and redistribute them to his cronies according to 1 Samuel 8:14).   HE WILL TAKE (and redistribute them to his cronies according to 1 Samuel 8:15).  HE WILL TAKE (and exploit what he takes for his political and ideological projects according to 1 Samuel 8:16).  HE WILL TAKE … and you will become HIS servants.

And God will not answer you because you made GOVERNMENT your God and your master.

And that is exactly what liberals have done and exactly what liberals want.

Unless, that is, in their twisted and perverted way, they think they can twist and pervert Jesus into their socialist elf.

It’s actually true that the Bible tells us not to harm the sojourner in your land.

But let’s see if that’s an all-encompassing and all-inclusive edict that should apply to illegal immigrants who break our laws to enter our country and consume our resources like locusts when they arrive.  Let’s see what God had to say to Israel about how to treat the Jebusite, the Hittite, the Canaanite, the Philistine, etc:

“Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes.  But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God. — Deuteronomy 20:16-18

I wonder if liberals are going to quote that passage to me when it comes with how to deal with illegal immigrants???

Oh, wait, I DON’T wonder.  Because liberals are the worst kind of self-serving, dishonest HYPOCRITES who despise the Bible in any kind of actual, legitimate CONTEXT.

God commanded Israel to drive out or destroy these peoples because they were absolutely wicked and depraved.  God knew they would corrupt His people with their vile ways.  A little leaven leavens the whole loaf.  And history proves that Israel collapsed spiritually and morally before they collapsed politically because they failed to carry out God’s command.

God was incredibly patient with these people in their wickedness.  In Genesis 15:6, God gave Abraham the land these wicked peoples inhabited.  But first Israel would remain in Egypt for four hundred years.  Why?  God explained, ” In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”  When these peoples reached their “full measure” of wickedness, it was time for Israel to come in and take what God had given them.

And America is in a very similar situation as millions of illegal immigrants pour in who do NOT love America, who do NOT want to assimilate, who have NO love for our Constitution, our founding fathers or our ways.  And they are subverting everything this nation used to stand for just as the above “immigrants” subverted everything that God intended for Old Testament Israel to stand for.

I state for the factual record that there are a lot more verses like that one regarding “immigrants” in the Bible than there are the kind the liberals cite as categorical commands to allow illegal immigrants to come in and take over our country as Democrats exploit them to “fundamentally transform” America.

And how did Obama instruct the people the liberals demand we let in?

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

But I’m sure that leftist propagandist Jimmy Margulies would fully agree that Jesus would instruct His followers to “punish your enemies.”  And of course Jesus would use the IRS as a political weapon to harass, intimidate, dismantle and persecute – and yes, “punish” – His political opponents, wouldn’t He???

Let me assure you of something: if Hispanic illegal immigrants voted Republican, you would see the rabid, poison-dripping FANGS of Democrats come out in a spirit of rage and hate unlike nothing you’ve ever seen on the faces of Republicans as they went completely poop-flinging nuts over the invasion of our border.

I attend a church that has an English and Hispanic congregation.  And I regularly take part in ministry to Hispanics, quite a few of which are here illegally.  As a true Christian, I DON’T hate illegal immigrants.  I realize as a moral human being that if I were a poor Mexican or Central American living in a completely failed state the way these people are, I would come to America too – either legally or illegally.  I recognize that for many illegal immigrants, work is a good thing that they are grateful for.  And that they send a lot of the money they earn home to their families.  These are virtuous things.  What I rabidly despise is a cynical and dishonest liberal ideology that wants to politically benefit from these poor people’s misery and ignorance.  I blame the left for its hostility to America as they seek to cynically grab further political advantages by exploiting these people.  Liberals are like drunken braggarts in a bar, buying drinks for everyone in order to be popular and then refusing to pay the tab when the bill comes.  America cannot afford to continue living so wildly and wickedly beyond our means.  We are going to completely economically and socially collapse because of the vile wickedness of Democrats.  And then you will see suffering as you have never seen before – suffering that Democrats forced upon the America that they destroyed.

I believe, therefore, that we ought to treat the illegal immigrants who are coming here as human beings.  And that we should protect our nation, protect our borders, protect our culture, protect our way of life by controlling our borders and enforcing our laws.

And, like the Christians that Stephen King demonizes, I’ve actually put both my time and my money where my mouth is.

Liberals don’t want to follow God or His ways.  They HATE and DESPISE God and His ways.  Instead, they want to REPLACE God with their human government and they want to replace God’s ways with the ways of “political correctness” that they can shape and distort and control by first banning God from our discourse and then replacing God’s ways with their ways in the vacuum that they created with their “separation of church and state.”

If you actually follow Jesus and His Word and regard both as your moral authority, fine, you go ahead and quote Jesus and quote the Bible.  But when I know and YOU know that you really despise both Jesus and the Word of God, THEN DON’T YOU DARE DISHONOR CHRIST BY SUBVERTING HIS TEACHING WITH YOUR WICKED IDEOLOGY THAT IN EVERY WAY, SHAPE AND FORM ABANDONS HIM.

I tell you what, liberal.  Since what you really want is more big government, instead of quoting the Jesus whom you clearly don’t follow, why don’t you quote the sources that actually represent your real belief system?  Quote me fellow adherents and proponents of your monster-sized (and frankly monstrous) government system.  Quote me Chairman Mao, quote me Joseph Stalin, quote me Adolf Hitler, quote me Kim Jong-Il on illegal immigration.  But, oh, that’s right: these people EXTERMINATED immigrants they didn’t like.  You’d be completely and utterly long, but at least you’d have the virtue of integrity.

But instead what you do is falsely masquerade behind an artificial Jesus when we both damn well know you don’t follow Jesus and never will.  There’d be nearly 57 million more babies born to grow up and come to the feet of Jesus if you believed Him, just for starters.

What liberals really want isn’t Christ, but the Antichrist.  They want the ultimate big government tyrant who will viciously persecute the people of God and impose the complete socialist takeover of the world in the economic system known as the “mark of the beast” such that no one can buy or sell ANYTHING without government approval.  THAT’S the “Christ” liberals want.

Jesus told us in the last days prior to “the Democrat Jesus” – the Antichrist – coming, people would come in His name claiming to represent Him.

And in the warped, dishonest left, that’s what we’re seeing.

Which is how we can know the beast is coming.

 

 

Christ Is Risen! He Is Risen Indeed! An Easter Message On 1 Corinthians 15

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  That millennia-old paschal greeting sums up the essence of Easter.  Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, as prophesied in the Old Testament as a future event and as described in the New Testament as a historical fact, was crucified and His dead body was placed in a guarded tomb.  But on the third day, on that first Easter morning, He was raised from the dead.  And by being raised from the dead Jesus was able to offer His resurrection life to anyone who would believe in Him.  According to Romans 10:9, “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

In our modern age, the Christ of Easter has been replaced by what we can call an “Easter Bunny Jesus.”  2 Corinthians 11:4 points out that false culture, false religion and false science manufacture false Jesuses.  The Easter Bunny Jesus was a good man, a moral teacher, who was killed for preaching socialism, pacifism, and whatever other politically correct “-ism” is in vogue with the secular humanist, anti-supernaturalist, postmodernist, existentialist, moral-relativist crowd that has anointed itself the arbiters of truth.  Their Easter Bunny Jesus, of course, died and is still very much dead.  One of their favorite assertions is that the biblical accounts of Jesus are myths and fables written after the fact by people who were not eyewitnesses.

The problem with the Easter Bunny Jesus is that such a Jesus, like the Easter Bunny itself, ultimately means nothing, because he is nothing but a fabricated story with a fabricated theological meaning.  And a dead Messiah can’t do anything for anybody for the very simple reason that he is DEAD and BURIED.  And it is a doubly fabricated story because it has no connection whatsoever with the real Jesus and what the real Jesus really did on Easter.

So what really happened on the first Easter morning?

In 1 Corinthians chapter 15 we have an early Christian creed that dates to within the time of the crucifixion of Jesus that defines the meaning of the Gospel of Easter and defends the HISTORICAL REALITY of Easter.

Turn with me in your Bibles, if you have them, to 1 Corinthians 15:

   1Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

What is the meaning of the Christian Gospel of Easter?

First of all, the Easter Gospel is that by which we are saved.  According to the Bible, there are ultimately only two kinds of people: those who are saved, and those who are lost.  Jesus believed in the reality of hell.  We avoid discussing hell, because a lot of modern people find the concept very unpleasant.  But the fact is that Jesus talked more about hell than anyone else in all of Scripture.  In fact, Jesus talked about hell almost more than everyone else in Scripture COMBINED.  Jesus said in Matthew 7:23 that there will be many to whom He will say, “Depart from me.  I never knew you.”  In Matthew 8:12 Jesus spoke of a place of outer darkness, and said “in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”   According to Matthew 25:41 Jesus will say to those who are not saved, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

No Easter Bunny Jesus can save you.  Only the power of the real Resurrected Son of God can save you.

What do you have to believe to have the Easter Resurrection Life of Christ?  1 Corinthians 15:3-4 tells us: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.”  Forget the Easter Bunny Jesus; we’re talking about the REAL death and the REAL Resurrection of the REAL Christ Jesus who came in fulfillment of the Old Testament that prophesied the coming Christ.  And this real Jesus REALLY died.  The body of this real Jesus REALLY was buried.  And the body of this real Jesus was REALLY raised from the dead.

Who is Christ?  As Peter confessed to Jesus in Matt 16:16, He is the Son of the Living God.  He is God the Son.  The Gospel of John begins by teaching that Christ was with God the Father from the beginning, and ALL things came into being through Christ.  Colossians 1:16 confirms this truth about Christ Jesus, teaching that “in Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through Him and for Him.”

God the Son took on a human nature.  He created man and woman in His own image knowing that one day He would assume our image, so that He could live the perfect life in our place that we could not live, and then die the death that we could not die in our place for our sins.  And all you have to do to be saved, according to the Bible, is accept what He did for you on the cross, and believe that God raised Him from the dead with the kind of Resurrection Life that He alone can offer to YOU right here and right now as He takes your sin and gives you His righteousness.

Now comes the question: why should anyone believe this Gospel?  Why should anyone believe that this Christ came, died in our place for our sins that separate us from God, and was raised from the dead as the Lord of Life to offer that Life to us?  What evidence does St. Paul present that he’s telling the truth about the first Easter?

In verses 3 through 7 of 1 Corinthians 15, scholars identify an early Christian creed (there are SEVERAL early creeds preserved in the New Testament that were passed on from the very first Christian witnesses).  St. Paul – who began his own career as a Jewish rabbi and a Pharisee – in saying, “For what I received I passed on to you” – is actually using technical rabbinical terminology for the receiving and passing along of established oral tradition.  He’s pointing out that he received this creed from someone else and is now passing it on.    Paul points out that he had ALREADY given the Corinthians this creed on his first visit, which history confirms happened in 51 AD.  He uses the past tense: “I passed on to you.”  So we’re already within twenty years of the cross, aren’t we? But St. Paul tells us that just as HE passed the creed on, it had been previously passed to HIM, right?  So who did St. Paul receive the creed from?

It gets exciting: most scholars argue that Paul had to have received this creed when he made the trip to Jerusalem described in Galatians 1:18-19 to meet with Peter and James – the very people specifically named in the creed. That event is fixed historically: it happened in AD 38.  That’s just a few years from when Christ was crucified.

But the stylized, structured wording of this creed strongly suggests to many scholars that it predates even Paul’s visit to meet with Peter and James.   The underlying wording is clearly Aramaic rather than Greek, for example.  When the passages are re-translated into Aramaic, they possess the rhyme and rhythm that clearly reveals they were originally developed in that language.  That is why it’s “Cephas” rather than “Peter.”  And in the words of this creed, we are back right to the moments right after the Cross, to the Resurrection, as the eyewitnesses described what they saw and who saw it with them.

Let’s look again beginning with verse 5: “and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.”

For the first thousand years after the Crucifixion of Jesus, the ONLY polemic from Jews – who saw the rise of Christianity as a threat to Judaism – was that Jesus’ disciples had stolen His body from the tomb.  That was the only rival explanation that was offered.  Jesus died and stayed dead, and His disciples stole His body and started preaching a lie.  But here’s the thing: that explanation has largely been abandoned by even the most skeptical scholars today.  Do you know why?  Because in the thousand years SINCE the end of the first millennia, critics have had to contend with a brutal fact of history: that these twelve men who claimed they had seen Jesus resurrected from the dead CHANGED THE WORLD preaching about that resurrected Jesus they claimed they saw and heard and touched.  The calendar on planet earth is dated in A.D., Anno Domini, In the Year of Our Lord, BECAUSE of the testimony of the apostles about Jesus.

History records the fact that Jesus’ disciples traveled across the known world preaching about what they witnessed that Easter morning.  With the sole exception of St. John – who was himself tortured for his testimony – all of these men gave their lives as martyrs proclaiming that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, whom they had seen crucified and whom they saw raised gloriously from the dead.

Here’s the problem for skeptics and for those who prefer the Easter Bunny Jesus: these disciples were in a UNIQUE position to know whether or not they had really witnessed what they claimed they had seen and heard and touched.  While it is possible for people to be sincerely mistaken, the disciples were in a UNIQUE position to know for certain whether they saw, heard and touched what they claimed they had.

Would you be willing to die for something that you categorically KNEW was false?  Do you think you could assemble a dozen other people who would likewise all be willing to die for something that they knew was not true???  No.  Nobody dies for a lie.  Everyone pretty much agrees that the disciples clearly, sincerely believed that they had seen their Lord Jesus gloriously alive after His death by crucifixion and after having spent three days in a tomb.  There are some who want to argue that Jesus was the one who pulled off the fraud, having somehow survived being crucified, having a Roman spear shoved through His heart, waking up in a tomb and climbing out to deceive His disciples.  But the problem with that is that it makes JESUS a horrible, lying fraud and in fact the greatest villain in all of human history.  Does that work for you that the Man regarded as the greatest moral teacher who ever lived was a dishonest imposter???

So modern skeptics have devised a phenomena of mass hallucination, whereby all twelve of the disciples over and over again all thought they were seeing the same thing, hearing the same thing, even TOUCHING the same thing, but of course they had to be somehow mistaken every single time.  And when 500 people all saw and heard the same thing at the same time, well, what else could have happened except that they were suffering from a mass delusion?  A delusion so powerful most of them ultimately sacrificed their lives as martyrs for what they thought they had seen but of course hadn’t really seen.

I find it easier to simply believe that there really is a God who can do what the God of the Bible says He can do.

St. Paul provides three specific witnesses that we have to briefly discuss: Cephas (or Peter), James, and last of all, Paul adds himself to the list in verse 8.

These three men cover the panoply of possibilities and responses to Jesus: When Jesus was crucified, Peter – who had believed in and followed Jesus – was a completely broken man even before Jesus was crucified.  He had fled like a coward from the One he had previously declared he would die for.  He had denied Jesus three times that night while Jesus was on trial for His life.

Question: what would it take to make this completely broken man the boldest of the disciples who would preach until his own martyrdom by crucifixion?  What would it take to make such a man – facing his own cross of execution – ask the Romans to crucify him upside down because he did not feel worthy to die in the exact same manner as his Lord Jesus?  What would it take to restore Peter?  Only one thing: an appearance by the resurrected Lord of Life who forgave him and restored him and gave him a mission that he would doggedly pursue to the moment of his own martyrdom.

Take James, the half-brother of Jesus.  The Gospels record that James was highly skeptical of his half-brother Jesus.  John 7:5 openly declares that James didn’t believe.  Mark chapter 3 indicates that James was one of those who literally thought that Jesus had lost His mind.  Here comes the question: what would it take for you to believe that your oldest sibling was the Creator God of the Universe???  Because THAT is the point that James the brother of Jesus had to somehow arrive at.  What would it take?  How about seeing his half-brother, having been crucified, gloriously risen from the dead in proof that everything He had said about Himself was true and that He really WAS the Savior of the world???  We know that James became a believer at the worst possible time, right after his half-brother was brutally executed by Rome as a warning to anyone who would believe what Jesus had believed.

And history records that James, known as James the Just for his godly character, was murdered by a mob as a martyr for preaching, yes, that his half-brother Jesus really was Lord and God.

And we arrive at St. Paul.  Verse 8 says, “and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”  St. Paul started out as Saul, a rabid Jewish Pharisee who despised Christians and literally wanted them all either dead or in chains.  Until something knocked him off his high horse when he was on the road to Damascus to persecute more Christians and changed his mind – and more – his heart forever afterward.  And so Saul the most ardent persecutor of the Church became St. Paul, the most ardent evangelist of the Church he had tried to destroy.  What could cause such a transformation?

Paul repeatedly offered only one answer: he saw the risen Jesus and he believed what he saw and heard.

On this Easter morning, I it is my privilege to declare to you that it all really happened just as the Scriptures declare: that Jesus the Christ, the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament, really came, really lived a perfect life in your place, really took your sins upon Himself at the cross, taking the blame for what you’ve done, and really rose bodily from the dead so that you could be raised to the Resurrection Life of Easter with Him.

And all you have to do to have that eternal Easter life is believe in the Lord of Life, believe in Jesus.

Jesus, Son Of Man, Son of God (Part 2): How God Revealed Himself To Man

See Part 1 here: https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/jesus-son-of-man-son-of-god/

Much of this work is a distillation of Bruce Milne in Know the Truth: A Handbook of Christian Belief, pages 25-62.

Statement #1: “If you don’t know Jesus, then you don’t know God at all, and that’s just that.  Jesus is the only way to the Father and the only way to have peace with God.”

Statement #2: “That’s not true.  Jesus may be your way, but God has revealed Himself in lots of other ways.  My friend is into New Age religion and she says she really feels God within her.”

Discuss…. But what I want you to realize is that such divergent viewpoints are often determined by a prior discussion about the nature or grounds of religious authority.  What should our authority be?  Should we appeal to what we feel personally?  Or is there something more ultimate?  How do we decide what is correct teaching?  To what source can we appeal to resolve differences and conflicts?  What is our criterion for truth?  If you don’t know, you end up where the wind blows.

What IS “authority”?  Authority is the right or power to require obedience.  I submit that the world is experiencing a crisis of authority in culture today – and it is largely self-imposed as we have rejected the biblical authority that our ancestors assumed.

Over the centuries, various Christian sects have appealed to a variety of voices as sources of authority, such as: the historic creeds or confessions (the 39 Articles of the Reformation, the Westminster Confession); the mind of the Church (i.e. the main trend/consensus of Christian opinion); subjective Christian experience and “the inner voice” (which largely began in the 19^th century); Christian reason as the belief that truth consists in what we can demonstrate about God via logical reasoning.

All of these have some degree of validity.  But none of them are adequate to bring us to God’s mind and thus be the authoritative source of Christian truth.  The ultimate source of authority is the triune God Himself as He is made known to us through the words of the Holy Bible.  This view combines three truths: 1) God has taken the initiative.  We know of Him because of His decision to make Himself known to us and reveal His will to us (revelation).  2) God has come to us Himself in Jesus Christ, the God-Man.  As the eternal Word and Wisdom of God, Christ is the mediator of our knowledge of God (John 1:1ff; 14:6-9; 1 Cor 1:30; Col 2:3; Rev 19:13).  3) Our knowledge of God comes through His Revelation in His Scripture.  He caused it to be written and speaks to us through His eternal Words given to all generations of believers.  And as we submit ourselves to its authority we place ourselves under the Living God who is supremely revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

What is “revelation”?  Revelation means unveiling something hidden, so that it may be seen and known for what it truly is.  The principal OT word is “gala,” which comes from a root meaning “nakedness” (e.g. Exodus 20:26 cf. Isa 53:1 and 52:10 where the arm of the Lord is literally “made naked”).  In 2 Sam 7:27, the literal rendering is “You have made naked your servant’s ear.”

But how has God revealed Himself to us given that: 1) We are creatures.  There is a vast distinction between “God created” in Gen 1:1 and “God created man” in Gen 1:27.  God the Creator exists utterly apart from us, while we as creature depend utterly on God for our contingent existence.  We are literally “dust” and to dust we shall return (Gen 3:19).  That said, this distinction is NOT absolute: we are made “in the image of God” (Gen 1:27).  God communicates with us (v. 28).  Ultimately, God became a man in Jesus Christ (John 1:1-14); God the Spirit indwells Christians and brings us into personal relationship with God (Rom 8:9-17).  There is a profound correspondence between God and man; but the profound and irreducible distinction remains as a barrier that only God can overcome.  For instance, only God truly knows God and the thoughts of God.  God’s knowledge includes our self-knowledge (Ps 139:1-6), but our knowledge does not include God’s self-knowledge.  Our creaturehood requires God to reveal Himself if we are to have any adequate knowledge of Him.  2) We are sinners.  Our need to have revelation from God is immeasurably increased by our sinfulness.  The fall has affected every single aspect of our being – including especially our perception of moral and spiritual reality.  Sin leaves us spiritually blind and ignorant (Rom 1:18; 1 Cor 1:21; 2 Cor 4:4; Eph 2:1-5; 4:18).  That means there is absolutely no road from our intellectual and moral perception to be any kind of genuine knowledge of God.  The ONLY way to knowledge of God is for God to freely place Himself within range of our perception and renew our fallen understanding.  Which makes revelation from God crucial.

What is the likelihood of such a revelation from God?  Is there a reason we ought to expect God to reveal Himself?  If God is our Creator, revelation in some form becomes overwhelmingly probable because we can presume that God made us for a purpose.  And since His creatures are clearly responsive beings with inherent capacities for relationship, we may also presume that God’s purpose for creating us involved some kind of relationship and response to Himself.  Such a relationship requires revelation in some form.  Would a wise, intelligent, relational Creator leave His creatures to grope helplessly in the dark without making Himself known?  The thought is plausibly absurd.  And when we presume that God is loving, the likelihood of revelation becomes overwhelming; no loving parent would deliberately keep out of His child’s sight and range of reference so that His child would grow up ignorant of His existence.  The alternative would be a “Susan Smith” God, who gave birth to her children only to load them into a car and push the car into a lake to perish.

God has revealed Himself in Creation.  In Rom 1:18-32 Paul explains God’s judgment on the Gentile world.  God “gave them over” (1:24, 26, 28) to the self-destructive tendencies of their fallen natures because, though they knew God, (by His creation), they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him (1:21).  Instead, they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God” and “exchanged the truth of God for a lie” and “did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God (1:23, 25, 28).  This spurned knowledge of God consisted of their not recognizing “God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature [which] have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (1:20).  Therefore they are “without any excuse” (1:20).  In short, the creation of the world obliges mankind to acknowledge God and give glory and thanks to Him (1:20).  Similarly, at Lystra in Acts 14:17 Paul informs the pagan crowd that God “has not left Himself without testimony.”  And in Acts 17:26 refers to the Creator’s ordering of the affairs of individuals and of nations “so that men would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him.”  God has also revealed Himself in moral experience.  In Rom 2:14, Paul points out that “when the Gentiles, who do not have the [OT] law, do by nature things required by the law… they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.”  There is clearly some awareness of God’s moral will on the part of [even non-Christian] humanity.  The Bible confirms the fact that God has revealed Himself to all within our moral experience, which is to say that He has revealed Himself in the conscience of the NON-Jew/Christian.  Yes, sin causes a moral obtuseness which distorts all of our consciousness of God and His will, but nevertheless, all humanity has some awareness of the sense of obligation to do good and to spurn evil that reflects the image of God to whom we are all finally fully responsible.  Further, God has revealed Himself in our universal religious sense.  The instinct for worship is a universal human phenomenon.  Anthropologists have NEVER uncovered so much as a single people or group, no matter how primitive, who lacked a sense of awe before the supernatural.  I submit that John 1:9 and Psalm 139 (esp. 12-16) testify to this universal religious sense.  Which is to say that atheism is NOT “natural”; it is rather bizarre and abnormal.

By the way, it is BECAUSE of this role of God in all our hearts and in our governments that a stabilizing of human society due to the sanction of moral law – whereby good and evil are distinguished and evil is held in check – is a fruit of God’s general revelation regardless of how little it is acknowledged by sinners.  Without this Providence of God, human society would swiftly unravel into chaos, anarchy and nihilism.  Because of God’s general revelation, even in spite of the blinding effects of sin, no one can plead entire ignorance of God.  Everyone alike is confronted by God and therefore carries responsibility for the lack of a true relationship with their Creator.

Further, God’s revelation is not static like the sun’s rays or electricity; rather, it is dynamic as God sovereignly chooses upon whom He will shine His light.  We find that God repeatedly reveals Himself to mankind but that mankind repeatedly resists, obscuring and even perverting the revelation (Rom 1:21-28).  It is only in an attitude of utter submission and obedience that God’s revelation can truly be encountered.  When people refuse the revelation they have and refuse to adopt an attitude worthy of revelation, God may close the door to further revelation (Matt 25:29; Mark 6:21-28; Luke 8:18; 23:9).  And a person who repeatedly resists God’s revelation may eventually become incapable of recognizing or responding to it.  By contrast, as a person responds to the light God gives him, God will send more light/revelation such that he will be saved.

The supreme/ultimate form of God’s self-disclosure was His becoming incarnate in the Person of Jesus Christ (John 1:1-14).  In the Incarnation, God bridged the gulf separating Creator from Creature by “taking the form of a servant…being found in appearance as a man” (Phil 2:7-8).  In Jesus Christ God is present in the world in person, and His character and essential nature are “naked” to us: “He who has seen Me has seen the Father (John 14:10).  This identity of Father and Son is critical for our knowledge of God.  Jesus is not a partial or temporary image of God which needs to be complemented by anything or anyone else afterward.  He is “the exact representation of God’s being” (Heb 1:3).  In Jesus Christ we see and confront the beating heart of God.  Jesus Christ is the center/summit of all divine revelation.

Nevertheless, apart from the Twelve disciples, special revelation comes to us in and through the Bible first and foremost.  God has always communicated to His people through His written Word mediated through the lives of chosen patriarchs, prophets and apostles.  A written Word (according to Abraham Kuyper): 1) achieves durability, with errors of memory and intentional or accidental corruption being minimized compared to any other form of communication; 2) can be universally accurately disseminated through reproduction and translations; 3) has the attributes of fixedness and purity; and 4) has a finality and normativeness which all other forms of communication cannot attain.  The Bible as God’s written Word is objective and eternal, never changing as men’s subjective feelings of God change.  It is in the Bible that we learn about and meet Jesus Christ.  It is the Bible that is the basis for all Christian teaching and preaching.  And just as Jesus taught through the Bible of His day in His earthly ministry, He teaches us through His Word today.  This it is written, “The grass withers, the flower fades but the Word of our God stands forever” (Isa 40:6).

It is worth asking, ‘Why should anyone believe that God could communicate with a different order of being such as man?’  The answer is that God is well able to communicate with His own rational, verbalizing and image-bearing creatures on their own level (i.e. by human language) because He created us to be able to communicate with us.  To deny the reality of God as Communicator (as some do) is in effect to deny the reality of God as Creator.  Psalm 94:9 says, “Does He who formed the ear not hear?”  We could also say, “Does He who formed the mouth not speak?”

That having been said, the Bible is not exhaustive in giving us all knowledge of God.  We retain our human limitations, for instance.  And while the Bible is God’s Word to us, the language of the Bible remains human and therefore limited.  There is more to God than even the Bible can convey.  Scripture itself distinguishes the “secret things” which belong to God (Deut 29:29) from “the things which are revealed” which “belong to us and to our children forever” (Isa 55:8-11).  Francis Schaeffer pointed out that in His Word, God tells us truly about Himself, but not exhaustively.  Human language – particularly written human language – remains the best medium we have for communicating God’s truth to us.  And to the extent that human language is not finally completely adequate, we have the Holy Spirit.  According to John 14:15-17, Jesus sent us the “Spirit of Truth” as an advocate who will help us and be with us forever.

What was Jesus’ view of the OT?  Jesus accorded complete divine authority of the OT Scriptures.  1) He quoted the OT in a manner in which He clearly viewed it as the divine Word of God (Matt 4:4; Mark 14:27) and 2) even referred to it as “the Word of God” (Mark 7:11-13; John 10:34-36).  3) He spoke of its divine inspiration (Mark 12:36).  4) Jesus indicated His ministry was in complete accordance with the Scriptures (Luke 24:25-27, 44).  5) He accepted OT history as completely true (Matt 22:29, 32; John 8:56; Mark 12:26; Luke 11:30-31; Matt 25:35: Matt 12:3; Luke 17:26-28; John 3:14). 6)  Jesus assumed the normative character – applying to all people throughout all time – of OT ethics (Matt 5:27-48; 19:3-6; Mark 10:9).  7) Jesus rebuked those who did not believe the Scriptures (Matt 22:29-32; Luke 24:25-25; Matt 15:3).  And crucially, 8) Jesus viewed the OT Scriptures as previsioning His own unique mission (Matt 5:17,19; Luke 24:46-47; John 5:46-47).

Significantly, although as Incarnate Deity Jesus exercised the very authority of God, Jesus at no point opposed His personal authority to that of Scripture.  Even further, being persuaded that He was the long-awaited Messiah of Israel through whom God’s Kingdom was to come, Jesus modeled His Messianic role in terms of OT teaching – such as the inevitability of His rejection and suffering on the cross (Matt 26:24; Mark 8:31; Luke 22:37).  Jesus recognized that Scripture was God’s divine blueprint.  Jesus clearly believed in the complete authority of the Scripture as God’s Word, and the One who was Himself the eternal Word and wisdom of God (John 1:1-14; 8:58; 17:5; Phil 2:5-11; Col 1:15-20), and who possessed a perfect and sinless human nature(John 8:46; Heb 4:15; 1 Pet 1:19), simply could not have been wrong.

Jesus gave His apostles special authority.  Jesus deliberately chose certain men to be His disciples and gave them a special endowment of the Holy Spirit (John 20:22 cf. Acts 1:5).  He commanded them to go and teach in His name ((Matt 28:18-20; John 20:21; Acts 1:8).  And He promised the Holy Spirit would guide their teaching and their witness of Christ (John 14:26; 15:26-27; 16:13-16).

The apostles claimed direct experience of this unique authority and divine insight (1 Cor 2:9-13).  They proclaimed the gospel in the boldness and confidence that they spoke “by the Holy Sprit” (1 Pet 1:12), to whom they attributed both the content and the form of their message (1 Cor 2:13).  We also note the special concern in the Book of Acts for the apostles’ role as specially appointed witnesses (Acts 1:21-26; 2:32; 4:26,33; 5:32; 10:41-42; 13:31).  And thus they were authoritative proclaimers with the corroborative witness of the Spirit (Acts 2:32) of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  They spoke with complete assurance (Gal 1:6-8) and issued commands with authority (2 Thess 3:6, 12). In fact, a person’s claim to have the Holy Spirit was measured by whether he or she recognized this divine authority of the apostles teaching (1 Cor 14:37).  Peter actually classifies Paul’s letters as “Scripture” (2 Pet 3:16) and Paul commanded that the letter to Colossae be “read in the church” (Col 4:16).

Naysayers claim that this argument is circular (e.g., the Bible is the Word of God because the Bible calls itself the Word of God), but we need to point out a final reason for the authority of Scripture: how else could one establish a claim to ultimate authority other than by reference to that authority???  Wouldn’t any other authority to establish that ultimate authority itself become the ultimate authority?  This same approach is used in other fields of human investigation: we don’t keep having to establish the “laws of science” by appeal to other science; it is the laws that give the rest of science its foundation.  The fact of the matter is that, in the final analysis, only GOD can be the proper authority to Himself.  There can be no other.  That said, ultimately Christians escape the charge of circularity quite easily: I believe the Bible is the Word of God because Jesus believed the Bible is the Word of God – and Jesus was not only the greatest man who ever lived, but the Son of God, and thus in a unique position to know the truth.

It’s not that history and the historicity of the Bible don’t matter; nor is it that the correspondence of Scripture to logic, philosophy, psychology, science and medicine don’t matter.  But if we’re always looking to corroborate the Bible we never get to the thing that we refuse to simply BELIEVE.

I was somebody who at one key point in life needed “convincing.”  I wanted proof.  I spent many hours searching for that proof.  But here’s the thing: I found it (past tense).  I don’t walk around wondering if there’s a God anymore; I don’t walk around wondering if the Bible is His Word anymore.  I resolved those things.  I moved on to weightier stuff, such as “Now that I believe, what am I going to do about it?”  I think that’s what James is getting at in his verse, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that–and shudder” (James 2:19).

Click here to see Jesus, Son of Man, Son of God (Part 3)

Jesus, Son of Man, Son of God (Part 1): The Fool Says In His Heart There Is No God

What is this class going to be about?  It’s going to be about Jesus according to His words in John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through Me.”  This class is going to be about Jesus as the only possible fulfillment of desperate human need.

I titled this, “Jesus, Son of Man, Son of God.”  Let me try to explain why.  The Scriptures clearly teach that Jesus was fully human in every way, human in every way that it is essential to be human, and fully God.  Passages such as Philippians 2:6-8 teach “the kenosis,” the emptying of Jesus as He laid aside aspects of His deity – WHILE REMAINING IN HIS NATURE GOD – in order to become fully human and experience the essence and the angst of human limitation.  How was He able to do this?  The short and simple answer is the Virgin Birth in fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14 and 9:6.  Jesus, according to John 1:1-3, was the Word who was with God and was God.  We’re taught that ALL THINGS CAME INTO BEING BY CHRIST.  And so when we read Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” we now know that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.”  And so when we read Genesis 1:27 which says, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

God created man.  But we can be even MORE specific: The Son of God created man.  Christ created man.  Christ, who would assume human image, created that very human image that He knew He would one day assume.  How could Christ assume human image?  Because Christ created man in His image, and more precisely because Christ created man in an image that He could one day assume Himself.

There’s a beautiful, simple poem: He came to die on a cross of wood, but made the hill on which it stood.”

Consider again John 14:6.  No one comes to the Father except through Jesus.  Jesus is the unique answer to the human condition, the only antidote to the fatal disease of sin.  He is THE way, THE truth and THE life.

So the title: Jesus as the Son of Man, in His humanity, shows you what is necessary to live a life that is pleasing to God.  Jesus as a human being showed us what kind of life – THE ONLY LIFE EVER LIVED – can earn/merit/deserve the reward of heaven rather than the judgment of hell.  If anyone thinks he or she is good enough to deserve to go to heaven on their own merit, all he or she has to do is live as perfect a human life as Jesus did.  What we find in studying Jesus’ life is that if you ever had so much as a single sinful THOUGHT, let alone act, you don’t measure up to God’s standard of a righteous life.  Everything Jesus thought and said and did were in perfect alignment with the will of the Father.  YOU try living up to that.  But Jesus in His humanity, in coming to seek and to save us, lived a perfect human life on earth because He knew we could not in our fallen state live the sinless lives a perfect holy God demanded.  As the Son of Man, Jesus lived a perfect human life in our place – the same way that Adam as the first man stood in our place and represented us (but led mankind into sin).  And Jesus in His deity, Jesus as Son of God, showed us what kind of life – AGAIN THE ONLY LIFE EVER LIVED – can gain heaven for any other human being.  In His deity as the Son of God, Jesus was able as GOD ALONE IS ABLE to save the entire human race by uniting in Himself as the Son of Man and the Son of God.

But having said that by way of introduction, let’s step back and consider the alternative to Jesus as “Son of Man, Son of God.”  Let’s suppose that the human race were left to its own devices, and that we were the answer to our own salvation, as secular humanists and atheists claim.  Let’s present the alternative scenario that the human race is the byproduct of meaningless, purposeless, random evolution and take some time to see where this scenario leads mankind in the question, “Where does morality come from?”  I want to argue for God on the basis of the simple fact of moral laws and our resulting moral intuitions .

When I got out of the army my knee was ruined and I was broken more than merely physically.  I was like many who couldn’t understand why God would have allowed me to go through such an ordeal or why He hadn’t healed me.  Frankly, had I had a better grounding in the Scripture, I would have known that God never said that bad things would never happen to His people.  I would have known that God has a plan that weaves things that we consider bad at the time to create an ultimately much greater good for us.  But I was young in years and young in my faith.  And I became bitter.  I went from wondering where God was, to wondering if He cared, to wondering if He was even there at all.

It’s interesting that the Bible never really seriously addresses the objections raised by atheists, other than to say it is fools who say that there is no God.

Here’s a great quote about “intellectuals” and “fools” from George Orwell: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”  It is amazing to contemplate how utterly divorced from reality many – if not most – intellectuals are.

Basically, God is simply presented as a fact of reality in the Bible.  And if you want to know why you should believe in God, all you have to do is look around you and see the purpose and beauty and design of creation (e.g. Romans chapter one).  God is an obvious brute fact, and it is fools who entertain foolish speculations to suppress the truth in their wickedness.  They can’t believe because they won’t believe.  All the evidence in the world won’t change what amounts to a bitter, cynical, poisonous attitude.  I think this is true, and as an example I think that the field of psychology backs it up: you can’t change a heart or mind that doesn’t want to be changed. Until someone is ready to change, all the logic, all the reason, all the facts in the world simply won’t matter.  And I present myself and my weight as an example.  Until I was ready to do what I had to do, NOBODY was going to be able to argue me into doing what I had to do to lose weight and get healthy.

There’s an appropriate line of dialogue that was said many times in Three Stooges episodes: “I can’t see, I can’t see!”  “You’ve got your eyes closed.”  “oh.”  When you are finally ready to open your eyes, you can see all the light you want to.  I was NEVER an atheist, but I had been spiritually traumatized into closing my eyes to God.  And I simply couldn’t see all the reasons I had to believe because I wasn’t looking.  Now I can see so many; but atheists won’t look at all those reasons.  Their eyes are closed.  2 Cor 4:4 takes it even further, pointing out that Satan as “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel.”  Open your eyes.

Last night on my walk, it occurred to me at a certain point as I walked in the dark that I’d better check for coyotes.  Once a coyote had tried to come up from behind and ambush my dog at this point.  So I turned on my flashlight and my blood pressure shot up as I saw a coyote moving toward us.  Only it wasn’t a coyote; it was a plastic bag caught in a shrub at just the right height to fool me.  We tend to see what we expect to see, don’t we?

But let me take you to a realization that I had during my quest for light (while like a “stooge” I was wandering around with my eyes shut).  I realized something important: it occurred to me that if in fact there were no God, and if evolution were true, that there was no real, objective morality – and that I could literally do whatever I wanted no matter how “evil” society claimed it was.  Murder, rape, you name it: there is no ultimate penalty for these things if there is no God who rewards or punishes.

I knew enough about the natural world at that point to understand that it is impossible to look at nature and find any grounds apart from God or religion for morality.  As an example, many matings in the insect and even mammalian world would for us constitute acts of rape.  And in the case of praying mantises or black widows, the females often get even by killing and eating the father of their children as soon as the mating is completed.  I watched a documentary about higher primates that showed a dominant female chimpanzee’s baby dying because she couldn’t produce milk.  As dominant female, what did she do?  She seized the baby of a less-dominant female.  And what happened?  That baby died because the dominant female couldn’t produce milk.  Is that wrong?  That’s NATURE, baby.  In the world of nature, do we arrest lions for crimes: “You murdered that zebra.  We’re going to have to put you in prison for your crime.”  It would be idiotic.  Anyone who understands the nature that humans ostensibly come from according to evolution understands that nature is utterly cold, utterly cruel and utterly amoral.

You can’t give what you don’t got.  Nature can’t “evolve” morality in humans because it never had it to give to begin with.  And the entire history of the natural world screams that cold hard brutal fact.

Does morality come from nature?  Not.  Would you like to depend on the amorality of nature to save you from anything?  I sure wouldn’t.  What about “herd morality”???  Does morality depend on what society says?  When we stand before God, will he turn to an opinion poll to judge us for our sins???

Where does morality come from, then?  Does it come from human government?  We can look at THE two most totalitarian forms of human government in history – communism and fascism – and see that theory get blown apart.  Surely if morality comes from government, then the more control exercised by government the better, right?  It turns out that the more government the WORSE.  Communism is identical with “state atheism”; every officially state atheist government with the exception of the French Revolution has been communist, and every single communist regime has been officially state atheist.  And no form of government has crushed the human spirit with more brutality than communism – which is responsible for the murder of more than 100 million of its own citizens just during peacetime alone.  Communism is the closest thing humans can come to “a boot stomping on a human face – forever.”  We can also consider the Darwinian and atheist project of Nazi fascism.  One of the greatest scholars of fascism, Ernst Nolte, defined fascism as “the practical and violent resistance to transcendence.”  I.e. a transcendent God and an objective, transcendent moral law.  The great French thinker George Steiner noted that “By killing the Jews, Western culture could eradicate those who had ‘invented’ God.”

Proto-Nazi 19th century German scholars such as Julian Wellhausen and Friedrich Delitzsch began in the 19th century with the theological project to undermine God, undermine the Bible and undermine the Jews who wrote the Bible.  Proto-Nazi 19th century German philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and then Martin Heidegger, savagely undermined any grounds for God, for Christianity, or for any kind of objective moral values.

Nazism was inseparable with the “Gottglaubiger,” the Nazi Party member who declared that he had officially rejected Christianity.  The men closest to Adolf Hitler noted in their personal journals that Hitler was an atheist.  Consider Joseph Goebbels, who in a 1939 diary entry noted a conversation in which Hitler had “expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity.”  Hitler said, “Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.”  And just as Hitler wanted to solve “the Jewish problem,” we find that he also intended to solve “the Christian problem.”  In 1941 Hitler declared: “The war is going to be over. The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem. It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure.”

Adolf Hitler summed up the ultimate Darwinian philosophy, saying, “If the German Volk is not strong enough and is not sufficiently prepared to offer its own blood for its existence, it should cease to exist and be destroyed by a stronger power.”

What else is Darwinism if not the struggle for survival in which the stronger kill or replace the weaker???

Does morality flow from the power of human government?  Adolf Hitler certainly believed it did.  He said, “We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.”  Chairman Mao certainly believed that it did.  He said, “Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?” God is the State.  The State is God.  And whatever the State decides is moral is moral and whatever the State decides is immoral is immoral.  Does that work for you???

The Bible reveals a big problem with “human morality” from the LAST TIME God judged man’s sins: “The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Gen 6:5).  I see this as something that neither nature nor governance can solve.

One of my problems with morality coming from government or human culture is the way morality “evolves.”  I think of the United States and homosexuality.  On April 17, 2008, as epitomized in Barack Obama, morality was the view that: “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”  But that view is no longer “moral”: now a person holding to that view is intolerant, bigoted, narrow-minded and cruel.  Now the moral thing to believe according to our culture and recognize that homosexuals’ relationships are every bit as valid as those relationships between a man and a woman and that the moral person must respect the full and equal rights of gay citizens.

I mentioned Nazism’s project to destroy objective, transcendent morality: such morality holds that objective moral laws apply to all times, to all cultures, period.  It is wrong to torture a baby for fun.  It has always been wrong.  It has always been wrong no matter what any culture or any group of people thought about it.  And it will always be wrong even if the whole world says otherwise.  That view of morality has largely been destroyed as much in our world as it was in the world of Nazi Germany.  And it has been replaced with the secular humanist/atheist concept that morality (like everything else) “evolves.”

What makes something “right” or “wrong”?  What makes something “moral” or “immoral”???  If something isn’t moral just because Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin said so, why would it be different if Barack Obama – or ANY leader ANYWHERE – said so???  Who makes human rules for humanity?  If it’s some group of humans, just what is it that makes them so superior to the rest of us that they get to make the rules for the rest of us?  And if there is no group of humans that gets to make the rules, then where else would any true moral laws come from???

Is it human nature to merely be a herd animal, which chews its cud and does what the rest of the herd does?  That doesn’t seem to be the way we are, given all the arguing and discussion rather than all the cud-chewing and mindlessly following.

In my own case, to return to my realization as an adrift young man, if there is no God, there ARE no moral rules.  I could do anything I wanted.  No one had the right to tell me that something was right or that something was wrong.  They were merely imposing their own values on me and they didn’t have any more right to make the rules than anybody else.  The Bible described such thinking: “every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

What kind of world do we invariably end up with when it is up to human minds to decide what is right and what is wrong???  I think history has already declared that it is a very ugly world.

Is mass human death a tragedy?  Not according to the leaders of big government, who don’t care how many of their own people die as long as they have enough others to continue to do their bidding:

Chairman Mao:

“The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru, “China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China’s population.”

Chairman Mao:

LEE EDWARDS, CHAIRMAN, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION: In 1959 to 1961 was the so-called “great leap forward” which was actually a gigantic leap backwards in which he tried to collectivize and communize agriculture.

And they came to him after the first year and they said, “Chairman, five million people have died of famine.” He said, “No matter, keep going.” In the second year, they came back and they said, “Ten million Chinese have died.” He said, “No matter, continue.” The third year, 20 million Chinese have died. And he said finally, “Well, perhaps this is not the best idea that I’ve ever had.”

CHANG: When he was told that, you know, his people were dying of starvation, Mao said, “Educate the peasants to eat less. Thus they can benefit – they can fertilize the land.”

I submit to you that we’re seeing the exact same demonically ideological disregard for the lives of one’s own people in Barack Obama with his ObamaCare rollout.  There was no question that the website was not ready, that it would crash, that it was unsafe and that people who trusted its use would be subject to widespread identity theft and hacking.  Obama didn’t care; he cared only about getting the turkey to fly whether it was ready to fly or not out of pure political considerations rather than any concern for the American people.

We’re seeing pure lies pumping out of the Obama White House to justify the fact that the president of the United States lied to the American people and became, in effect due to all his exposure, the most documented liar in the history of the entire human race.  White House officials and their spinners are claiming that there’s nothing about the Affordable Care Act that is causing millions of people to lose their insurance, and they demonize the greedy insurance companies and say that Obama can’t do anything about what the insurance companies do.  That is – just like Obama’s promise ,”If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” – a complete lie.  Not only are 15 million Americans finding that out right now, but 93 million more Americans are set to learn it the hard way in January 2014.  The insurance companies are cancelling millions of Americans’ insurance policies because ObamaCare loaded up policies with required regulations that none of these plans can meet.  Again, the White House knew in 2010 that ObamaCare would FORCE insurance companies to cancel over 70% of individual insurance plans within three years of ObamaCare’s implementation.  And so we are now seeing horror stories such as a woman with severe cancer who had not “substandard insurance” but “WORLD CLASS INSURANCE” in mortal danger of losing her insurance and therefore her LIFE because of ObamaCare.

Obama: “No matter, keep going.”  And none of the catastrophe he’s created matters because like Mao Obama is a rabid ideologue who demands his “signature legislation” be implemented now matter how awful it is or how terrible its consequences will be on America and its people.

What I’m trying to tell you is that when it comes to looking to your government for morality, you can’t look at the communists and the fascists – who ought to have THE most moral governments if morality in any way, shape or form comes from government – and say, “that’s just them.”  No government is moral, and morality comes from no government.  Least of all our own as we have now nearly completely abandoned the Judeo-Christian worldview that gave the United States a chance at becoming a moral city on a hill.  No nation that has mindlessly spent itself into well over $200 trillion in unsustainable and unpayable debt has any right to call itself “moral.”

I previously told you how bloody and dark and amoral and indifferent “the world of nature” apart from God was.  Does the morality of human government seem any better?  It has been frequently pointed out that any government that can give rights can just as easily take them away.  Now we are living in a time when what was right has become wrong and what was wrong has become right.

I think of some of Jesus’ most powerful words: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).  What did He mean?  Is He referring to people that nature lost?  Is He referring to people who aren’t yet eligible for some government program to help them?  Or is He referring to a far deeper and more fundamental problem with human nature that can’t be transformed by Nature and can’t be transformed by Nurture (i.e. a government nanny state)???

The Bible reveals something that we should all know from our self-introspection:  “ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecc 3:11).  That is that we have eternal souls.  No temporary fix will work for beings that live on forever long after our bodies are dust.  The only solution is an eternal solution; and therefore the only one who can save us is an eternal God.

Nature cannot save us because amoral nature cannot give us what it never had to begin with.  Herd morality, society says morality, or government morality can’t save us because human beings are individuals and not herd animals and because governments are THE most immoral entities on earth rather than the most moral.  And human beings cannot save us because no matter how they present themselves as messiahs, the fact of the matter is that they are fallen human beings tainted by sin and they are merely liars and charlatans and demagogues.

We are a world in desperate need of salvation.  My generation was literally born into a world that had become capable of utterly destroying itself within a matter of minutes with nuclear annihilation.  And that threat continues to hang over this world that common sense assures will one day erupt into WW3.  We need a Savior.  We need a Messiah.  And no human government and no human leader can take the place of the true Savior of the world that the world needs – Jesus of Nazareth.

Click here to see Jesus, Son Of Man, Son of God (Part 2)

Click here to see Jesus, Son of Man, Son of God (Part 3)

In Passages Like John 1:1 and Colossians 1:15 Jehovah’s Witnesses And Mormons Actually Refute Their Own False Theology

I recently had a Jehovah’s Witness try to “witness” to me.  When I told him that I could not be a Jehovah’s Witness because this false religion refused to acknowledge Christ in His rightful deity, he immediately cited Colossians 1:15.

It starts off sounding a little promising for heretics who try to argue that Jesus was merely a created being, rather than the Son of God as the Scriptures, the early Church, the Church Fathers and the Seven Historic Universal Councils of the Church all state to the contrary.

Colossians 1:15 says:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

Let’s not ignore the little phrase, “He is the image of the invisible God,” which of course means that Jesus too is likewise “the invisible God.”  If you look in the mirror, is that image of you or is it somehow of a lesser being?  Or an even more literal analogy in terms of what the Greek word “image” means, if you were perfectly cloned, would your identical twin having your identical DNA be human, or would it somehow be less than human?  Hebrews 1:3 allows us to understand this term “image” better: “Christ is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature.”  But probably most informative of all is the exchange between Philip and Jesus in the Gospel of John.  In John 14:8, Philip says, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.”  And how does Jesus respond?  He says, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father.”

Whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father.  How could that in any way be true if Jesus is not Himself God?  What does the Father look like?  Aside from the fact that Christ added to His divine nature a human nature so that He could live a perfect life on earth for us and then die in our place, The Father looks exactly like Jesus.  In His character, in His goodness, in His glory, the Father looks just like Jesus.  When the Father looks in the mirror in this sense, He sees His Son.  And when the Son looks in a mirror, He sees His Father.

But if you simply ignore that first problematic phrase, as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons invariably do in their rush to get to Christ as “firstborn of all creation,” that means Christ must have been a created being, rather than God, right?

Wrong.  Let’s read that passage in its full context.  Let’s read the whole paragraph and trace the argument that St. Paul is making in this passage:

He is the image of jthe invisible God, kthe firstborn of all creation. 16 For by6 him all things were created, lin heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether mthrones or ndominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created othrough him and for him. 17 And phe is before all things, and in him all things qhold together. 18 And rhe is the head of the body, the church. He is sthe beginning, tthe firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For uin him all the vfullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and wthrough him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, xmaking peace yby the blood of his cross.

I left the links – awkward as they make the passage appear – for good reason: they provide the scriptural context in which each phrase is used.  As you click on each link, what you find is, wow, each verse that St. Paul alludes to is a direct reference to GOD.  That is not an accident.

Let me simply say it right at the outset: I can EXPLAIN the “firstborn of all creation” phrase completely logically and rationally in terms of Trinitarian orthodoxy.  However, there is no possible way that Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons or any other pseudo-Christian heretics can explain the rest of the paragraph and make any kind of logical sense.

I argue as ALL true Christians have argued since Thomas first said, “My Lord and my God!” after Jesus revealed that He had just bodily risen from the dead proving all of His claims to be the divine Messiah in complete fulfillment of the Old Testament.

So what does “firstborn of all creation” mean?

Well, part of the answer is revealed as Paul develops his argument in the very next verse.  “For by Him [Jesus Christ] all things were created.”  If Jesus created all things, as Paul categorically states in the very next verse that Jehovah’s Witnesses love to cite as their proof text, then it most certainly means that Jesus was NOT CREATED.

If “all things were created” by Jesus Christ, then how could Jesus Christ have been created???  You have two categories: God and creation.  And since Jesus created all things, Paul is clearly stating that Jesus is God rather than a created thing.  That is simple logic.  There is no escaping that logic.

Even on the Jehovah’s Witnesses incredibly flawed and demonic theology of Christ, Jesus Christ existed prior to when He appeared in Mary’s womb and was “born.”

I cite what they argue:

He was created whenever Jehovah the Almighty God began to create, he was the first to be created, he’s OF CREATION. Jehovah is not OF CREATION, because Jehovah was NOT created and did not have a BEGINNING.

Notice again that this false understanding of Christ is utterly refuted in Colossians 1:16, that “by him [Christ] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.”  If by Christ all things were created – and Paul then produces an exhaustive list of all the things that Christ created – and then we are told that “all things were created through him and for him,” then why are we not to believe that Christ is “of creation” rather than “NOT of creation”????  How is it that Jesus is “before all things”???  How is it that in Jesus ” all things hold together”???

Jesus is literally the force that prevents every single atom from flying apart, according to this passage.  Christ is literally the power holding the universe together.  That sounds like a job for God to me.

But let me get back to the point I was beginning to make, namely, if Jesus existed prior to when He was “born” – as Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves do – then there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to take “firstborn” in the sense that they demand it be taken in.  Because Jesus PRE-EXISTED His birth even on their own account!!!

The Person of Christ did not begin to exist in Mary’s womb; He pre-existed His birth by at least thousands of years.  Which means that “firstborn” means something very different from what they want it to mean as heretics who deny the deity of Christ.

So we literally all agree that “firstborn” is NOT to be intended in the literal sense.  Because Jesus was only literally, physically “born” one time – out of Mary’s womb – and even Jehovah’s Witnesses acknowledge that that birth is very clearly not what is being described.  Which means that “firstborn” is clearly intended to be a figurative statement in St. Paul’s argument.

What we are talking about here is a term used to describe supremacy or priority of rank – and very clearly NOT a statement or description of when or even IF Jesus was ever “born.”  Rather, Paul begins by basically stating in His “firstborn of all creation” metaphor that Jesus is supreme over creation, and then proceeds to describe Christ as Creator of and over all creation.

P.T. O’Brien in The Dictionary of Paul and His Letters has a fascinating and conclusive article on this subject of “firstborn.”  I shall summarize his findings in a few paragraphs.

The term “firstborn” is used in the plural in the New Testament twice:

By faith he [Moses] left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. 28 By faith he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood, so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them. — Hebrews 11:28

And:

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, 23 and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. — Hebrews 12:23

Note first of all that “firstborn” in the plural sense in the only two occasions the term is used in the plural sense is used to apply NOT TO BIRTH OR TO CREATION, but to BELIEVERS.  And then note that Christ is then mentioned separate and distinct from “the firstborn” in Hebrews 12:24.

That stated, the term “firstborn” is used three times in the New Testament – and in each use it applies to Christ who is:

1. Firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1:15)

2. Firstborn from the dead (Colossians 1:18)

3. Firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8:29)

Now, again, think of this term “firstborn” in terms of supremacy or priority of rank and it very easily fits: who is Jesus?  He is supreme over all creation by virtue of the fact that HE IS THE CREATOR.  He is supreme over the dead by virtue of the fact that HE OVERCAME DEATH by the power of His Resurrection from the dead.  And He is supreme among the many who would believe in Him by virtue of the fact that HE IS THEIR LORD AND SAVIOR.  And everything that these Christian brothers and sisters will share in they will share with Jesus Christ and BECAUSE of Jesus Christ.

You see how easy it is to sensibly understand the term “firstborn” in terms of Trinitarian orthodoxy?  You know, the theology that dominated the early Church, and which was repeatedly and conclusively stated in every single one of the first SEVEN universal councils of the Christian Church as they expressed their understanding of Christ and the one true Faith delivered once and for all to the saints that is in Him???

“Christ is firstborn of all creation” expresses Christ’s relationship to creation.  Because, as Paul IMMEDIATELY proceeds to argue in his very next words, “all things” were created by the very Christ who is “firstborn of all creation.”

Again, I demand that Jehovah’s Witnesses answer their OWN problem with the passage that they often cite: just how can Christ “create all things” and yet Himself have been created???  He would – unless He is truly God and truly pre-existent as God is truly pre-existent – have had to have created Himself.  Which is philosophically and metaphysically utterly absurd.

So what does a good Jehovah’s Witness have to do?  He has to throw down the Bible and start adding stuff.  He has to start adding words that are very definitely NOT in the Bible and therefore change and pervert both the Word of God and the argument from St. Paul that they themselves love to cite.  They have to say that “Christ created all other things after He was Himself created.

But that is very definitely NOT what the Bible teaches.  Which is to say that it is IMPOSSIBLE for Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons to understand the “firstborn of all creation” passage without perverting it to fit their deeply flawed theology.

Rather, the Bible, the Word of God, declares that Jesus Christ created ALL things.  And St. Paul goes on to categorically state how exhaustive that is:  Jesus Christ created everything in heaven.  Jesus Christ created everything on earth.  Jesus Christ created everything that is visible.  Jesus Christ created everything that is invisible.  And whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, it was Jesus Christ who created them all.

Also read John 1:1-3 to see the same line of argument:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.    All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Note again: ALL things were created through Jesus, the Word.  And in fact nothing was created that ever WAS created.  Which is to say that John 1:1 plays on Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  Only now we learn that it was God the Second Person, a.k.a. Christ, who was the Creator.

There’s a poem that says, “He came to die on a cross of wood, yet made the hill on which it stood” that beautifully and simply sums up that incredibly powerful truth.  Christ created man in His own image so that one day He could assume that image – and thus sacrificially offer Himself for the sins of a lost world that would have perished without Him.  That is the beauty of Christ that Jehovah’s Witnesses want to pervert.

What do Jehovah’s Witnesses do here to pervert the Gospel of John literally from the very first verse?  They decide that “God” is an anarthrous noun, which means that there is no article preceding the noun.  And so they declare “the Word” – Jesus Christ – to be “a god” rather than “God.”  But their rule here is so idiotic that they break it themselves even before they can get to it in the first verse of John’s Gospel.  Because, you see, “beginning” is also anarthrous, meaning there is no article there, either.  And so if their “rule” had any merit, they would have translated the verse, “In A beginning…”  And of course that is merely one of the numerous times they break the rule they created in order to pervert Jesus from God to merely “a god.”  Because you have this exact same situation 282 times, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses “translators” only follow their own “rule” on sixteen occasions – just SIX PERCENT of the time.

Consider that if the Jehovah’s Witnesses consistently followed their own rule just in the opening verses of the Book of John:

– “beginning” in verses 1 and 2 would have been translated “a beginning.”

– “life” in verse 4 would have been translated as “a life.”

– “from God” in verse 6 would have been translated as “from a god.”

– “John” in verse 6 would have been translated as “a John.”

“God” in verse 18 would have been translated as “a God.”

And yet the Jehovah’s Witnesses break their own “rule” in every single one of these instances.  The “rule” was created for one ideological purpose only: to blaspheme Jesus Christ and deny Him His rightful deity.  Which is why no baptized in good standing Jehovah’s Witness has ever been shown to have been granted a post-graduate degree in biblical Greek.  EVER.

The beauty of these three opening verses in the Book of John is enhanced by a theological understanding of what John succeeded in accomplishing.  In declaring that “The Word was with God, and the Word was God,” John’s use of the anarthrous “God” is exactly correct; because had he written “the Word was [the] God,” he would have been fomenting the heresy of Sabelianism or modalism– which held that Jesus WAS a “mode” of God, or that “God” was one Person wearing three hats: the hat of the Father, the hat of the Son and the hat of the Holy Spirit.  Which is to say that John HAD to translate “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” exactly as he did.

There is absolutely no escaping the logic of the passages that Jehovah’s Witnesses love to cite so they can fundamentally pervert and misrepresent them.

I think of the warning that St. John provides in the Book of Revelation:

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. — Revelation 22:18-19

Jehovah’s Witnesses are routinely forced to “add to the words” over and over again as they deny the reality of the deity of Jesus Christ as Lord, Savior and God.  And they are routinely forced to take away from the Book as they repeatedly take away clear ascriptions affirming the deity of Jesus Christ.  And they will one day burn in hell for their sin, just as John warned them.

You might want to view Jehovah’s Witnesses as well-meaning people, good people, decent people.  But they go door-to-door trying to lead lost soul after lost soul to the very same hell that they themselves will surely burn in.  Which makes them terrible agents of demonic wickedness.

Let me ask a question: who purchased the Church with His own Blood?  Acts 20:28 tells you if you didn’t know:

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.

Who purchased the church of God?  God did.  That shouldn’t be all that hard to figure out.

Christ is one Person with two natures: one human, one divine.  He had to be human, and fully human in absolutely every way that it is essential to be human, in order to represent the human race.  He had to be God because as the Scriptures conclusively state:

We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. — Isaiah 64:6

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. — Psalm 51:5

No one is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. — Romans 3:10

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God — Romans 3:23

For the wages of sin is death — Romans 6:23

First of all, Christ had to be completely and fully divine, God in every meaningful way, because all humanity was trapped in sin and sinful man could not save sinful man.

Could Jesus have been an angel?  Not according to the Bible, He couldn’t.

Consider the crystal clear argument of Hebrews chapter one that clearly reveals that Jesus was NOT an angel:

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, ² but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. ³ He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, ⁴ having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

⁵ For to which of the angels did God ever say,

“You are my Son,     today I have begotten you”?

Or again,

“I will be to him a father,     and he shall be to me a son”?

⁶ And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says,

“Let all God’s angels worship him.”

⁷ Of the angels he says,

“He makes his angels winds,     and his ministers a flame of fire.”

⁸ But of the Son he says,

“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever,     the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. ⁹ You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you     with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.”

¹⁰ And,

“You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning,     and the heavens are the work of your hands; ¹¹ they will perish, but you remain;     they will all wear out like a garment, ¹² like a robe you will roll them up,     like a garment they will be changed.^[a] But you are the same,     and your years will have no end.”

¹³ And to which of the angels has he ever said,

“Sit at my right hand     until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet”?

¹⁴ Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?

Based on this passage, what heretic, what FOOL would dare to claim that the Bible teaches that Jesus is merely an angel?

Let me also ask the question, where in Scripture does God give man over to any angel?  Where is it that God tells the angels that they – and not God – are Savior to mankind???  Where does the Word of God tell us that the blood of an angel delivers sinful man from his sin?  Where does it teach us that any angel has the power to save us from the wrath of God and from hell?  Nowhere, that’s where.

What in fact does God say?  This:

“You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord, “and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he.  Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.  I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no savior. — Isaiah 43:10-11

And just to add insult to injury, who is declared to BE that “Savior” in the New Testament?

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.  — Luke 2:11

If Jesus is NOT “God,” and every bit God, then Jehovah is refuted.  Because in Isaiah He boasts that there is no other Savior when in fact He was wrong and Jesus would ALSO be Savior.  ONLY if Jesus is God, as orthodox Trinitarian theology upholds, and is literally the fulfillment of this passage, is that not the case.

Well, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons claim that the Father is God (in the case of J.W.s, “Jehovah”) and that Jesus is “a god.”  Could that be (apart from the fact that that has already been refuted above?).  No.  What does God’s Word say?

Declare and present your case; let them take counsel together! Who told this long ago? Who declared it of old? Was it not I, the LORD? And there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides me. — Isaiah 45:21

But I am the LORD your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no savior.

There is no other God besides the Triune Lord God.  And God’s Word assures us that Jesus is either a member of the Trinity or that He is neither “god” NOR “savior.”  And yet God’s Word assures us that He is in fact both God AND Savior.

… waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ — Titus 2:13

Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ — 2 Peter 1:1

In the Person of Christ, the Second Person of the Triune Godhead, God purchased the Church with His own blood.  God assumed a human nature so that He could experience death through that human nature.  But being God, He couldn’t remain dead.  And so our God and Savior Jesus Christ saved us.

Let’s keep in mind that both Mormons (who assert Jesus is the “spirit-brother” of Lucifer) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (who assert that Jesus is Michael the archangel) believe that Jesus is a merely an angel.  And with that in mind, read Galatians 1:6-8:

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.  But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.”

It’s interesting that Paul refers to people who are turning others to “a different gospel” and who “distort the gospel of Christ.”  And then Paul says, “Even if an angel from heaven should preach such a gospel to you, let him be accursed.”

I ask you, “What if JESUS preached a different gospel?”  Because since Jesus is merely an angel according to both Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness theology, that has to be an obvious logical possibility on their view.  Notice Paul clearly does not say, “an angel from heaven other than Christ.”  Paul doesn’t do that because there is simply no question that JESUS IS NOT AN ANGEL as Hebrews chapter one (quoted above) clearly states.

Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are accursed according to the Word of God.  They are deceived and they seek to deceive as many others as they possibly can.

The Jesus of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormonism is a lie.  And it is a lie that has no power to save.  Because only GOD has the power to save.  And Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons explicitly deny that Jesus has such power.
Furthermore, if Jesus is NOT God, Scripture tells us that He is also not Savior.  And those who do not believe in Jesus Christ as God and Savior are still in their sins.

Please don’t allow these agents of Satan – no matter how polite they are when they come to your door – to lie to you about the true nature of the only Savior of the world.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons are false, blasphemous cults whom St. Paul described by saying “they preach a different Jesus than the one we preach” and ” a different kind of gospel” from the Gospel which saves – the Gospel of the True Jesus Christ, the divine King of kings and the divine Lord of lords.

The doctrine of the Trinity is NOT a “problem.”  It is merely the solution to the clear data provided by Scripture which reveals that while God is ontologically one in being, that there are three distinct divine Persons who are all very clearly called “God”: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  The Father, Son and Spirit are not “three gods” because they co-inhabit ONE and THE SAME divine nature or essence.  No human being this side of eternity can fully understand that, because God is ontologically superior to us in every imaginable way.  But suffice it to say that “fellowship” is at the heart of God because it is literally part of the essence of being God: the Father, the Son and the Spirit are and always have been in a state of ultimate and eternal fellowship with one another within the divine nature.

Florida Professor (And High-Ranking Member Of Palm Beach County Democrat Party) Orders Students To Literally Stomp On Jesus Christ

I have been saying it since I started writing this blog: Democrats despise Jesus Christ, despise Christianity, despise Christian morality and despise the Judeo-Christian worldview.

The Democrat Party is the Party of abject moral wickedness and depravity in America.  It is the Party that has murdered 55.7 million babies in America alone even as it has exported the culture of abortion to the rest of the world.  It is the Party of sodomy.  It is the Party of the depraved militant homosexual agenda.  It is the Party of Antichrist and the Party of the totalitarian government Mark of the Beast.

One day all of these sons of hell are going to receive the eternal destruction of their souls in hell that they have reaped in their bodies.

Take a look at the shockingly ugly demoniac face of liberalism and everything liberalism truly stands for.

Here’s the new daily dose of outrage that is the Democrat Party in God damn America.  And if you don’t think that Democrats will burn in hell, put this in your crack pipe and smoke on it:

Professor/Dem Party Official Makes Students Stomp on Jesus
by Jennifer Kabbany – Associate Editor on March 22, 2013

A Florida professor and high-ranking member of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party recently instructed his students to take out a piece of paper, write “JESUS” on it, then put it on the floor and stomp on it – and the Mormon student who refused to do so, calling the assignment morally offensive – was suspended.

“Anytime you stomp on something it shows that you believe that something has no value. So if you were to stomp on the word Jesus, it says that the word has no value,” the Florida Atlantic University student in question, Ryan Roleta, told a CBS news affiliate. “I am not going to be sitting in a class, having my religious rights desecrated.”

So Roleta – a junior at the school who is also a devout Mormon – told his professor, Dr. Deandre Poole, that he refused to do the assignment, calling it inappropriate, offensive and unprofessional – and his religious objections got him suspended from the class, CBS News’ WPEC reported.

After he complained to Poole’s supervisor, Roleta said he was suspended from the intercultural communications class and advised not to return.

“I’m being punished, and I am still waiting for an apology from somebody,” Roleta told WPEC.

In an emailed statement the university sent to CBS, campus officials stated “faculty and students at academic institutions pursue knowledge and engage in open discourse. While at times the topics discussed may be sensitive, a university environment is a venue for such dialogue and debate.”

Apparently the exercise is a suggestion in the textbook, “Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach, 5th Edition,” and the school would not say if Poole would face disciplinary action, WPEC reports.

After news of the incident spread Thursday, it came to light that Poole is not only a professor but also a high-ranking official in the region’s Democrat Party. In particular, reports BizPacReview, Poole is vice-chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party.

Poole’s bio blurb on the Palm Beach County Democratic Party website states that he is a member of Lighthouse Worship Center Church of God in Christ who “prides himself in being actively engaged in civic affairs.” It also notes Poole is a “new junior faculty member in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at FAU.”

According to his profile page on Florida Atlantic University’s website, Poole earned his PhD from Howard University and is writing a book called “Obamamania: The Rise of a Mythical Hero.”

Every single Democrat in America participated in this vile Nazi act.  These “progressives” have been progressively voting for more and more evil for the last fifty years.

It’s amazing.  Democrats love sodomy.  They love terrorist Muslims and the Muslim Brotherhood.  They love “mothers” who murder their babies.  They love everything but Jesus Christ and Christians and people having the right to defend themselves against the government fascism that Barack Obama is seeking to impose on what is left of this nation.

When Democrats haven’t been massacring babies by the tens of millions through their votes and their appointments and their policies, they have been destroying families and family values through their votes and their appointments and their policies.  Through their easy no-fault divorce, through their celebration of casual sex, through their elevation of single mothers to secular sainthood, they have destroyed as many families as they have babies.  And then in their wicked depravity they have cynically exploited the resulting tsunami of poverty they have created by destroying families by pimping welfare and a culture of dependency in exchange for votes.  Let’s take black people – the ultimate wards of the state due to the strategems of the Party that had actually enslaved them and fought an ugly Civil War to keep them in chains – and the 72% out-of-wedlock birthrate of the black community.  Let’s consider that these wards of the Democrat Party’s statism are five times more likely to kill their own babies through abortion than whites.  And let’s consider the crime and gang and homicide rates of blacks and understand that they are living out the causual-but-brutal indifference toward life that they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in.  Their poverty isn’t in spite of the efforts of Democrats; it is BECAUSE of the efforts of Democrats.

Hypocrite Democrats dishonestly and hypocritically slandered and demonized George Bush out of golfing as president while dishonestly and hypocritically celebrating Barack Obama as he played more than four times as much golf in his first four years than Bush played in eight.  It was immoral for Bush to play golf while our soldiers were perishing on the battlefield until it was right for Obama to play golf while our soldiers were perishing on the battlefield.  But would George Bush have ever taken a closed-to-the-press golf vacation with Tiger Woods after that turd had been caught red-handed committing adultery with women numbering in the scores???  I think not.  Because it takes a Democrat to endorse that kind of moral sewage.

This most recent example of Democrats’ walking all over that which is Jesus Christ is the continuation of false messiah Obama’s war on religion that he began when he declared war on anybody who didn’t want to be forced to participate in the holocaust of babies in America.

This is the poster boy for the Democrat Party.

In God damn America, people aren’t rewarded for doing the moral thing or the right thing; quite the contrary.  They are persecuted for doing what is right.  By Democrats.

In God damn America, right and wrong are turned on their heads.  Wrong is right and right is wrong.  And doing wrong merits reward and doing right merits punishment.  The one student who wasn’t so brainwashed by liberal Democrat hatred of Jesus Christ discovered that refusing to stomp on Jesus was a violation of the student code of conduct.  He received a letter stating, “You are requested to attend a Student Conduct Conference.”

Next time, when a Democrat Party professor tells you to stomp on Jesus, you’d better stomp on Jesus.  And do it with gusto, too.  Because when a Democrat asks you to stomp Jesus, you ask, “How high?”

This insane world will culminate in the Tribulation and the Mark of the Beast.  And that hell on earth when big-government liberals create mass suffering and death on a scale never before witnessed in the history of the world is coming soon.

Remember, true Christian, that you have heaven.  Democrats, aka secular humanists, have only this earth.  And while they will thrive in God damn America, the time is coming when they will reap what they have sown.

The day is coming when Democrats will stand before Jesus Christ and claim that they were Christians.  And Jesus will sadly tell them, “I was a baby in my mother’s womb and you murdered Me.  I was never able to live a perfect life on earth and die in your place for all of your vile wickedness.  Depart from Me.  I never knew you.  Especially when you were desecrating Me by placing Me in a jar of urine and calling it “art” and stomping on My name.”

Vote Democrat.  Vote to burn in hell forever.

Your time is coming.

Progressive Liberals Are The Pharisees And Sadducees Of Modernity In America

Liberals love to castigate conservatives by labels such as “fascist” and “pharisiacal.”  But in both cases, they are actually looking into a mirror when they point their finger and hurl out that label.

First, allow me to make a very important distinction between “progressive liberalism” and “classical liberalism.”

Here is classical liberalism:

Classical liberalism is a political ideology, a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties and political freedom with limited government under the rule of law and generally promotes a laissez-faire economic policy.^[1][2][3]

Classical liberalism developed in the 19th century in Europe and the United States. Although classical liberalism built on ideas that had already arisen by the end of the 18th century, it advocated a specific kind of society, government and public policy as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization.^[4] Notable individuals whose ideas have contributed to classical liberalism include John Locke,^[5] Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. It drew on the free-market economics of Adam Smith and on a belief in natural law,^[6] utilitarianism,^[7] and progress.^[8]

The term classical liberalism was applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from the newer social liberalism.^[9]

With that understanding, the fact of the matter is that conservatives are the inheritors of classical liberalism.  We are the ones who want limited government under the rule of law with a laissez-faire economic policy.  The progressive liberals who dominate today are the “social liberals” whom we can now accurately call “socialist liberals.”

Liberalism is good in the classical sense; it is truly evil in the socialist sense.

I have many times asked liberal Democrats to explain how they disavow Karl Marx’s central defining statement of economic Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  To this day I have never received a response.

But I understand that our liberals are not honest people and will not wear the label “socialist” no matter how much it applies to them and to their purpose in establishing a giant totalitarian government that increasingly centrally plans the economy.  So I’ll call them “progressive liberals” instead.

The word “progressive” helps us understand Obama’s prophecy that his administration would “fundamentally transform America.”  That’s what they want: to reshape America not in the founding fathers’ image, but in their own self-image.

I have described liberals as trying to establish “Government as God.”   It is also called “statism.”  Here’s another way to put it: Who is your Savior? Do you turn to the God of the Bible – Who actually rather specifically warned man against big government – to provide to you?  Or do you want to turn to your government to meet your needs?  Our coins say, “In God we trust,” and progressive liberals have been trying to stomp that nonsense out for decades.  Because they trust in human government, not in God.

Here let me again cite Karl Marx.  In one of his most famous statements, after first stating that man invented religion, Marx said:

“Religion is … the opium of the people.  The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”

Aside from the obvious fact that it is the Democrat Party who removed God from their party’s platform and cynically and frankly illegitimately put Him back in to a loud chorus of boos by the Democratic National Convention, aside from the fact that it is the Democrat Party that is at open war with religious freedom in America today, what did Karl Marx mean by this statement?

Basically, Marx taught that the world is divided into the economic haves and the economic have-nots – which is everywhere being shouted around us today by the Democrat Party and by progressive liberals who energize that party.  And the have-nots were being oppressed by the haves, in both Marx’s and Democrats’ understanding.  But rather than the people rising up in rage and taking what is theirs by force as Marx wanted them to, they were happy in their religion, which had been invented by the rich to keep the proletariat in bondage.  Since religion is an illusion, and materialism is all there actually is, the happiness that the people had in their Christianity was nothing more than a narcotic that kept them in bondage.  The only “real” reality is economic reality.  And therefore the solution presented by Marx was for the people to set aside their shackles of religion and rise up in a spirit of rage and take what was theirs by force.  Only then could the people have actual, “material” happiness.

And how is the Democrat Party today not arguing the same damn case that Marx made?

As we shall see, this is important.  Marx’s anti-God message has been supplanted by a cynical Democrat Party who has replaced God with a flagrantly anti-God ideology (e.g., homosexual marriage and abortion) while dishonestly refusing to acknowledge that they did so.

The message of Barack Obama and the modern Democrat Party is not the message of Jesus Christ, who most assuredly did not come to earth to either make Caesar’s government larger or to replace him with another version of big human government totalitarian tyranny.  The message of the former is that the poor should be angry and rise up to seize what is rightfully there’s either by vote or by force; the message of the latter was for the poor to be cheerful and content in the God Who watched over them and to trust in Him for His provision.

It’s interesting what does not happen when Jesus says, “Show me a coin.”  What Jesus does NOT say is that giving to Caesar (human government) is the same thing as giving to God.  Jesus makes a very clear contrast between the two.  Which do you want to empower?  Which do you want to give to?  Giant totalitarian human government, or God?  I want to give more to God; liberals want to stop me and force me instead to give more to government.

So why do I call the progressive liberals the “Pharisees and Sadducees” of modern America?

Well, first understand who the Pharisees and Sadducees were.  The Sadducees were the secular branch of Judaism.  They did not believe in a resurrection or an afterlife; they were the closest things to secular humanists or atheists in their day.  And thanks to the Romans the Sadducees largely controlled the lucrative Temple and the money and political clout that went along with it.  The Pharisees were a group who had the people behind them because they were the champions of the Law.  And yet they were no longer using the Law of Moses as their guide; they had long since turned to the Mishnah, which they considered “a hedge around the Law.”

Basically, the Pharisees piled laws on top of laws on the backs of the people that had nothing to do with the Word of God.  That’s what Jesus rails on them for in Matthew 23.  When I hear Jesus say, “They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger,” I think of Barack Obama taking away guns from parents’ while his own family will be safely protected by men with guns for their entire lives.  I think of the liberals like Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who put people in prison for not paying their taxes when he himself was a tax cheat.  I think of Jesus’ takedown of the most vile human beings in the world of His day – government-power-seeking thugs who used the law to exploit and burden the people – and I think of the Democrat Party and the stubborn ass that is its symbol.

If you broke the laws as handed down by the Pharisees and Sadducees, you were punished by the system.  With the full weight of the government backing that system.

Which is the same thing the progressive liberals who run the Temple of big government do.  They burden the people with taxes and regulations and laws and tell the people that thinking like them is the only way to be a good person.

Pharisees and Sadducees had different agendas, but John the Baptist said they were both the same in their hostility to God and called them both “a brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7).  Jesus also lumped them together (Matthew 5:17).  Both exploited the Law to get what they wanted and to burden and oppress those whom they wanted to burden and oppress.

In Jesus’ day, when you talked about “the law” it connoted the religious laws.  But our progressive liberals today talk about the law, the law the law every bit as much with every bit as much of an intent to impose their will on the people they are determined to dominate and rule over.  I can assure you that there are a LOT more laws that have been erected in the United States than there ever were in the Mishnah – as burdensome and unjust as that was.

Democrats are the Pharisees and the Sadducees of American culture today.  They are the priests of big government who demand more and more control the laws and by controlling the laws they exploit and burden the American people.  They erect more and more and more onerous and burdensome and loathsome laws and force us to abide by them or be punished.

By the way, Jesus did a lot of denouncing of the scribes, too.  Who were they?  They were the lawyers of the day.

Just look at which party the lawyers of our day support and which party has a buttload of system-manipulating lawyers, and my case is made complete.

The scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees murdered Jesus in his day.  They are murdering America in our own.