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Nuggets from Occult Invasion—Oral Roberts and the City of Faith

Dave Hunt

Pat Robertson claimed that God had chosen him to usher in the coming of His Son and thereby persuaded his supporters to send in money to finance that incredible project. Oral Roberts claimed that Jesus appeared to him and told him God had chosen him to find the cure for cancer. This “revelation” came during a “seven-hour-long conversation” between Jesus and himself with “a 900-foot-tall Jesus…who told him [Oral] to ask his hundreds of thousands of ‘prayer partners’ to send in $240 each to complete the [medical] center [a 60-story diagnostic clinic and 30-story hospital] so researchers there can find cures for cancer and ‘other dread diseases.’” Oral’s “prayer partners” funded the more than 200-million-dollar project.

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Pop Cultural Evolutionism

TBC Staff

Creation scientists (and science writers) normally spend most of their time engaging with the ‘hard science’ of the day—or at least whatever is passing as such at the moment. In my opinion, however, it has never been the hard science that has packed the biggest punch in the everyday life of the average person. Instead, it is the popular retelling which filters down to us from every direction: television, books, movies, video games, and so forth. None of these references need be particularly accurate; the important thing is, they instill in the minds of average people that evolution is a given. It’s beyond question since it gets repeated so often. In other words, it acts as a form of subtle brainwashing.

What makes this ‘pop culture evolution’ so particularly damaging to society is that it is essentially immune to correction, since few people bother criticizing media on their science, when they are not scientific media. Even if they did complain, the damage has already been done. The movie has been made and cannot be changed. I’d wager nobody walked out of the theater in disgust when watching Jurassic World just because a scientist drops the line, “…the [dinosaur] soft tissue is preserved because the iron in the dinosaur’s blood generates free radicals, and those are highly reactive. So, the proteins and the cell membranes get all mixed up, and and uh… act as a natural preservative. DNA can survive for a millennia that way.”

This is of course a discredited theory (iron has certainly not been demonstrated to be capable of preserving soft tissue for “millennia”), but no matter. In the movie, it is stated as a plain fact by a scientist. Sure, it’s ‘just fiction’, but the impression left on the audience is the same regardless. It inoculates them against one of the most powerful evidences against evolution and millions of years!

Evolutionary psychology is another very serious offender in this regard. Despite the embarrassing and tragic history of lobotomies being done on people under the false premise of an ancient ‘lizard brain’ sandwiched inside our more highly evolved human brains, the idea of the “old brain” keeps getting repeated even in more recently-produced textbooks. One textbook produced in 2010 reads,

“The innermost structures of the brain — the parts nearest the spinal cord — are the oldest part of the brain, and these areas carry out the same functions they did for our distant ancestors.”

Is the above quote ‘science’? No, it’s simply an assumption being made based on an evolutionary worldview. But since students read it in a psychology textbook, they will take it for granted. Some of those students may not even be science majors! They will take this evolutionary thinking with them into whatever field they eventually wind up in. And the cycle of misinformation will continue. Maybe some of them will wind up becoming self-help tutors in the world of business, and will continue repeating this ‘old brain’ canard in their lectures…

Indeed, while lobotomies are no longer being performed, the evolutionary idea that we have a reptile brain with added parts is not going away any time soon. It cannot, in fact, since all mammals have brains, and nobody is arguing that the brain has evolved multiple times independently (convergently). At least as recently as 2015, articles were still being written comparing reptile brains to human brains, in order to draw out alleged evolutionary inferences.4 The authors rhetorically ask, “…is the reptilian brain really just a mammalian brain missing most of the parts?” But another paper from just last year answers that question with a resounding “no”!

https://creation.com/pop-culture-evolutionism

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When Cultural Appropriation and Historical Revisionism Are Acts of War

TBC Staff

[Early in March 2021], a bus filled with veteran Israeli generals from the Bithonistim, a grassroots national security organization, slowly made its way up the slopes of Mt. Ebal in Northern Samaria to visit a biblical-era site that was severely damaged by a Palestinian Authority contractor in late January.

They came to draw the public’s attention to the strategic implications of the war the Palestinians are waging against Jewish history.

The site was excavated between 1980 and 1989 by the late Professor Adam Zertal, who identified it as Joshua’s Altar as described in the Books of Deuteronomy, (27; 1-9) and Joshua (8; 30-35). The animal remains at the site contained thousands of burnt bones of year-old male, exclusively kosher, animals.

Although initially controversial, Zertal’s general finding that the site is around 3,300 years old and is a Jewish historical site, where sacrifices were carried out in keeping with biblical guidelines, has become widely accepted—although many continue to dispute the specific identification with Joshua.

In late January, the Palestinian Authority (PA) posted a video on its website of 60 meters of the ancient wall surrounding the altar being destroyed to pave a road connecting the Palestinian village of Asira ash-Shamaliya to Nablus.

Zertal was a fiercely secular son of hardcore socialists. Yet, he explained in a 2013 lecture, his scientific work compelled him to accept that the biblical narrative “from Deuteronomy through the Books of Kings was historically accurate.”

“There are people who refuse to acknowledge that the damage done here was deliberate,” Major General Gershon Hacohen explained to Newsweek. “That since it was the surrounding wall—rather than the altar itself—that was destroyed, the altar wasn’t harmed….“They also say the Palestinians weren’t trying to damage the site—they just needed stones for their road. But look at this place,” he said and waved his hand across the landscape.

The slopes of Mt. Ebal are strewn with loose rocks. “If they needed rocks for the road, all the Palestinians had to do was bring up a truck and take as many as they needed. Instead, they brought a bulldozer all the way up here and deliberately destroyed 60 meters of a 3,250-year-old wall.”

As if to prove Hacohen’s point, this week, a group of Palestinians was filmed barbecuing on the altar itself.

Just across the valley from Mt. Ebal is Tel Samaria, which contains the remains of the city of Samaria—the capital built by King Omri of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, where both Omri and King Ahab ruled.

The PA is also destroying the nearby archaeological site of Tel Aroma, a center of Jewish settlement for more than a millennium.

Since the PLO founded the PA in 1994 in the framework of its peace process with Israel, destroying and appropriating Jewish historical sites—with the enthusiastic support of international organizations like UNESCO—has been a constant effort.

Immediately after Israel transferred control over the city of Jericho to the PA in 1994, then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat directed the destruction of the ancient Shalom al Yisrael synagogue in Jericho.

But the central focus of its destructive activities has been the Temple Mount.

In 1999, the PA carried out a massive renovation project to transform ancient underground Temple Mount chambers into a new mosque, removing 9,000 tons of antiquities and debris from the complex and dumping them around Jerusalem. Alarmed archaeologists collected the debris and transferred it to Mt. Scopus, where the Temple Mount Sifting Project was inaugurated. Over the next 20 years, thousands of artifacts were discovered by volunteers who sifted through the garbage to salvage them.

UNESCO, the UN agency charged with preserving international heritage sites, has supported the Palestinian efforts, denied the Jewish ties to the Temple Mount—Judaism’s most sacred site—and declared the Cave of Machpela in Hebron—where the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs are buried—an Islamic heritage site, along with Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/when-cultural-appropriation-and-historical-caroline-glick/

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Nuggets from Occult Invasion

Dave Hunt

According to Pat, one of the eight laws ruling the secret kingdom is “The Law of Miracles.” On the one hand he admits that a miracle represents a “contravention of the natural laws” by God. Yet he claims there is another law, the Law of Miracles, that God cannot override but must obey in order for a miracle to occur. He says that the power of God is at our disposal “if we know the rules of miracles.” Says Pat, “The magnificent [CBN] center standing on that property today is eloquent testimony to the power of God and the operation of the Law of Miracles.”

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Man Must Get Out of the Righteousness Producing Business

TBC Staff

Christ’s work, though on behalf of man, was wholly His: glorious and perfect, yet to be received by man in its blessed results of eternal pardon, peace and blessing. To be received, we say, by simple Faith, unmixed with human effort. A humbling process, indeed! For man must go out of the righteousness-producing business, and rest wholly and forever on the work of Another, even Christ.

― William R. Newell (1868-1956, pastor, teacher, Bible expositor)

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Can You Become a Christian Without Identifying with Christ?

TBC Staff

In 1969, Thomas Mori, a Bengali Muslim of Afghan descent, met a Norwegian missionary in Eastern Pakistan. Over the course of weeks and months, the missionary shared the gospel with Thomas and patiently answered his questions. By God’s grace, Thomas was converted. Upon telling his family the news, however, Thomas found himself rejected and disowned because of his newfound faith in Christ. In the years that followed, Thomas struggled to find a church to assimilate into. The only other Christians belonged to a different tribe who would not welcome him. As a result, Thomas grew frustrated toward the church: “My experience with the church had been quite negative,” he explained. “Christians wanted Muslims to come to faith, but they didn’t want to fellowship with them.”

Thomas’s difficult experience of assimilating into a church as a Muslim-background believer undoubtedly explains the advice he later gave a group of six young men from a distant tribe who wanted to know how to be saved. “Go back home,” Thomas told them, “but don’t become Christians. Your parents will know very soon, because your life will be changed. When they ask you, you can tell them about Jesus.”

Thomas’s story is far from unique. Around the world when Muslims and others come to faith in Jesus Christ, they face the difficult decision of how to identify themselves and how to explain their change of identity. The question I want to address in this article is simply this: Can you become a Christian without identifying with Christ?...This is positively portrayed as a mission strategy. Can Muslim-background believers evangelize their families and neighbors if they are forced to flee because of their faith? Or worse, if they are killed?

The result is the proliferation of so-called “secret believers” who have faith in Jesus in their hearts while remaining culturally, religiously, and socially indistinguishable from the rest of their community. As one such “secret believer” in Eastern South Asia explains, “I believe 100 percent that Jesus is God, but I cannot tell this to the Muslims. If I say this, then the Muslims will open torture upon us. I am following Jesus’ example.” Being pressed about what he meant by “Jesus’ example,” he quoted Mark:1:23-25 where Jesus silences the demons since they know who he is. “This is a great teaching for us,” he explained. Jesus is saying, “It is not the time to teach that I am the Son of God.”

But is this really a viable option for new believers? Can you follow Jesus without publicly identifying with Christ, regardless of the opposition that may follow?

Jesus set the terms for discipleship in Luke:14:25-33 when he taught that “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” To unpack this Jesus gives the illustration of a man building a tower or a king going out to battle. In either case it is necessary to “count the cost” (14:28). This is no less true in the decision to follow Christ. A cost-less discipleship is a Christ-less discipleship. There simply is no other way. As Jesus concludes, “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (14:33).

Counting the cost matters because there is a pressure in missions to present following Jesus as less radical than it really is.…It’s not that we want to make it harder to follow Jesus than what the Bible teaches. It’s that we don’t want to deceive people into thinking that they’re on the road to heaven when they are really on the path to hell (Matthew:7:13-14). Muslim-background believers, like all Christians, must make the calculation: I may die for my faith, but Jesus is worthy.

https://www.radiusinternational.org/can-you-become-a-christian-without-identifying-with-christ/

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Nuggets from Occult Invasion

Dave Hunt

So God’s kingdom runs on metaphysical principles that Napoleon Hill used and will work for anyone! The Bible isn’t about theology (the knowledge of God), which is impractical, but it is about principles and laws that work for and will bring earthly success to anyone! The occult formula works!

The Bible makes it clear that one does not get an automatic response from God in this manner; but Satan will oblige. Yes, Pat talks at times about knowing and submitting to God’s will. Yet he says these metaphysical principles and laws work even for a Napoleon Hill, who doesn’t know God.

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Nuggets from Occult Invasion

Dave Hunt

Kenneth Hagin talks about God’s “law of faith.” Yonggi Cho teaches the same, admitting that the “Laws of the Fourth Dimension” will work miracles for occultists as well as for Christians. In fact, he faults the Christians for not using these laws for success, while the occultists have been doing so. Pat tells us the eight “laws of the kingdom.” As with Cho, Hagin, and others, Robertson sees these laws as applying to anyone, even the ungodly. We are back to Christian Science and its occult connection! Pat explains:

“I began to realize there are principles in the kingdom…as valid for our lives as the laws of thermodynamics or the law of gravity…. Once we perceive this secret, we realize anew that the Bible is not an impractical book of theology, but rather a practical book of life containing a system of thought and conduct that will guarantee success…. He said in effect, ‘Seek the kingdom, understand the way it works, and then, as day follows night…the evidences of earthly success will follow you….’ These were principles so universal they might better be considered as laws, in the same sense as the natural laws established by God…. Jesus…said bluntly, ‘If you do these things, this will happen.’ If applied, the principles would simply work…. Unfortunately, such people as Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich, have gleaned only a few of the truths of the kingdom of God…. Some of the metaphysical principles of the kingdom, taken by themselves, can produce fantastic temporal benefits….”

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Evolutionary Syncretism: A Critique of BioLogos

TBC Staff

BioLogos, founded in 2007 and funded with a grant from the theistic evolutionary Templeton foundation, declares on its home page that it “explores, promotes and celebrates the integration of science and Christian faith.” But by their own admission, they do not offer anything specifically Christian; their article ‘On what grounds can one claim that the Christian God is the Creator?’ says: “The creation story of BioLogos is compatible with many faith traditions. Muslims, Jews and Christians alike can align their faith with the BioLogos account of our origins, and there is no way to give a scientific proof for one monotheistic faith over another.”

Indeed, they succeed in their quest for non-specificity; on the whole site, there are very few articles that are specifically Christian, and most of those are from outside contributors. But they claim that all of their members are Christian theistic evolutionists, so in that sense they are a professing Christian group. But their embrace of evolutionary science and some of its logical effects on Christian theology is such that they, in effect, become syncretists—rather like the way the Gnostics syncretized Christianity and Greek philosophy, and the Roman Catholic Church in Galileo’s day did with Aristotelian physics.

BioLogos’s view of Scripture is probably best summed up by this quote from a paper by professing evangelical contributor Peter Enns,: “Most Christians understand that, even though the Bible assumes a certain way of looking at the cosmos, from a scientific point of view the Bible is wrong. And that is perfectly fine….Enns had previously left (or was dismissed from) Westminster Theological Seminary over his book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament which attacked biblical inerrancy.

In the case of Christ there was human parentage but the Holy Spirit overshadowed the event (Luke:1:35), ensuring a sinless Christ; in the case of the Scriptures there was human authorship but the Holy Spirit superintended the writers (2 Peter 1:21), ensuring an inerrant word.—Paul (not Peter!) Enns

And the people at BioLogos are very aware that it is not just Genesis 1–11 that is at stake. “For Paul, Adam certainly seems to be the first person created from dust, and Eve was formed from him.” I.e. creationists have been right all along about what the New Testament teaches about Genesis. But “[i]gnoring the scientific and archaeological evidence is not an option” in their mind, so Paul was simply wrong. In fact, Enns says that rejecting Christianity is a more viable option than taking the Bible’s account of creation at face value! He says that a true synthesis of Christianity and science “calls for a reorientation of what informed readers of the Bible expect from Genesis or Paul on the question of origins.”

This is not a problem for the Christian, they argue, because Scripture, like Jesus, is both human and divine. The orthodox Christian believer would agree that Jesus is human and divine, and the believer can believe much the same thing about Scripture having divine and human components, but BioLogos uses this as a sort of doublespeak—a way of ‘excusing’ Jesus’ alleged mistakes in science by implying that the human part of Him was fallible. The comparison between Christ and Scripture is right, but they draw a conclusion 180° away from the truth. l teachings. More than that, its spiritual teachings depend on the statements about history being true.

But since Biologos draws the wrong conclusions, they argue that the Bible is wrong about origins, then chalk it up to the ignorant Bronze Age culture of the time that couldn’t possibly be expected to know that the earth is actually billions of years old and that we actually evolved from ape-like ancestors who were themselves ultimately descended from the primordial ooze.

Jesus was in error!—BioLogos

’If Jesus as a finite human being erred from time to time, there is no reason at all to suppose that Moses, Paul, John wrote Scripture without error. Rather, we are wise to assume that the biblical authors expressed themselves as human beings writing from the perspectives of their own finite, broken horizons.’—Professing Evangelical Kenton Sparks, BioLogos.

But when they finally do talk about Jesus, it’s to say that if we want to avoid Docetism [Christ did not have a real or natural body during his life on earth but only an apparent or phantom one] we have to acknowledge that He didn’t have perfect knowledge; He was just a man of His time. And they have the same view of Scripture: “If Jesus as a finite human being erred from time to time, there is no reason at all to suppose that Moses, Paul, John wrote Scripture without error. Rather, we are wise to assume that the biblical authors expressed themselves as human beings writing from the perspectives of their own finite, broken horizons.”

But BioLogos makes the equal error of Ebionitism, which denied the deity of Christ; their view is essentially an Ebionite view of Scripture. Of course, Jesus was certainly fully human, but He was the unique sinless human who was also fully divine.

And therein lies the problem—Jesus said, “If I have spoken to you about earthly things and you do not believe, then how will you believe if I speak to you about heavenly things?” (John:3:12) So it’s not surprising that BioLogos criticizes biblical morality as well as biblical history. Yet Jesus commended even ‘harsh’ sections of the Law: “If there is anyone who curses his father or his mother, he shall surely be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother, his bloodguiltiness is upon him” (Leviticus:20:9). And Jesus commended many of the Old Testament teachings that skeptics love to mock

Some of the most revealing comments about BioLogos came from atheist blogs: "The real issue is that BioLogos doesn’t have a bright line stance on science versus religion, saying that science and sound and tested evidence trump religion where the two conflict. Such a position is the only consistent scientific position to take, but it puts both biblical literalists and “moderates” in the same basket, since it opposes impossible virgin births and impossible re-revivification of corpses as much as it opposes a 6,000 year-old earth. Thus, BioLogos has no actual principle to stand on when they oppose a literal reading of Genesis but support a literal reading of a story of a virgin birth.”

BioLogos shows the logical end of compromise regarding origins; ‘progressive creationists’ and theistic evolutionists should take BioLogos as a warning of where such thinking can end up.

https://creation.com/biologos-evolutionary-syncretism

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Nuggets from Occult Invasion—Charismatic Christian Science

Dave Hunt

Furthermore, Pat’s book The Secret Kingdom, in which he reveals the secret of success that built CBN, reads like an occult manual. While it contains many inspiring stories of miracles God did in people’s lives and of many who came to Christ, there are serious problems. We have noted that the occult is built upon laws governing powers allegedly innate within the universe which even the spirit world must obey. The same lie deludes charismatic leaders and their followers.

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