Weaning Evangelicals Off the Word

[TBC: Today we return to the February 2007 issue: “Weaning Evangelicals Off the Word.”]

At a certain point in the future, there will be a total rejection of biblical Christianity, succeeded by the religion of the Antichrist; it will maintain a veneer of Christianity that will prove acceptable to all religions. This perversion of Christianity doesn’t just suddenly happen once the Antichrist appears. The deception process began long ago in the Garden of Eden with Satan’s seduction of Eve, and it is becoming more and more of a corrupting influence within Christianity as the time of the appearing of the false messiah, whom the entire world will worship (Revelation 13), draws near.Satan began his dialogue with Eve by planting seeds of doubt regarding what God had commanded: “Yea, hath God said...?” (Genesis:3:1Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
See All...). This opening line of the Adversary has been the basis ever since for his principal strategy in inducing rebellion against God. Its implications impugning the character of God and sanctioning the rationalizations of man seem endless: Why would God keep something good from you?; Is He really in charge?; Does He make the rules?; You misunderstood His commands; There are no absolutes; You need to consider what He says from your own perspective, and so forth. Eve, although reiterating God’s command for the most part, adds her own erroneous thought to what God actually said: “...neither shall ye touch it” (3:3).

This is what happens when dialogues take place regarding absolutes: the truth is either added to or subtracted from. Tragically, many Christians see nothing wrong with rewriting God’s Word. They are perfectly content with Bible versions that have done exactly that.

In response to Eve, Satan blatantly rejects God’s warning that death would result from sin: “You will not surely die.” Making God out to be a liar or dismissing Him altogether has always been Satan’s game. The Serpent then convinces Eve that obeying God’s command would rob her of enlightenment, godhood, and knowledge—and thus severely limit her potential: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (3:5).

Variations of these basic lies from the one who was a liar from the beginning (John:8:44Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
See All...) have successfully deceived humanity throughout history. “Yea, hath God said...?” (Satan’s direct attack upon God’s Word) has even led both professing and true Christians into the Apostasy.

Questioning or rejecting what God has said in the Scriptures is at the heart of instigating religious rebellion. The reasons should be obvious: 1) If the Bible cannot be trusted as God’s specific communication to mankind, then we are left with nothing more than man’s opinions and guesses about God and what He desires; 2) Finite humanity’s speculations about its infinite Creator are not only terribly erroneous—they are evil, because they are generated by man’s sinful, self-serving nature; 3) Even a true believer could be led into darkness without the light and lamp of God’s Word (Psalm:119:105(NUN.) Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
See All...).

Although the Bible has been under various attacks for centuries, the latest “Yea, hath God said...?” strategy may be the Serpent of Old’s most deadly. The process involves weaning evangelical Christians away from the knowledge of, an understanding of, and a dependence upon the Word of God. The objective is to produce biblically shallow Christians who are functionally illiterate regarding what the Bible teaches, and who therefore have no accurate basis for, or interest in, discerning biblical truth from error. By “functionally illiterate” I mean that such evangelicals know how to read, and they have Bibles (of some sort), but they rarely read them, preferring to get their biblical content from some other source.

http://www.thebereancall.org/node/2427