The church service had not been running long. You are singing the first verse of a traditional four-verse hymn. Suddenly you hear a slight scuffle three or four rows behind, to your left. Curiosity at the intruding noise causes you to turn around, only to see a strikingly beautiful, curvaceous young woman, in modest dress, just arriving to settle at her seat. Perhaps with a slight tinge of frustration over her full body cover, you mentally undress her, and imagine how she would look in a bikini. Suddenly your eyes and hers meet for a fleeting moment and you immediately turn to face forward, and you sing the remainder of the hymn with a much louder tone of voice than at first.
Four different views are put forward to explain this incident, the first one positive.
The first is what the evolutionist would explain as a healthy sign for the survival of the human species. According to him, you should feel elated over your red-blooded sexual desire. After all, this was what Charles Darwin was writing about concerning Natural Selection, nature's way to ensure that mankind still have a future.
But the next two are rather less positive. If the church you are in is a Roman Catholic church, then deep inside you will be fearful, despite your loud singing. Would this sin committed be a venial sin or a mortal sin? If venial, then this would add an unspecific time to your duration in Purgatory. A few minutes? Unlikely. More likely a few years, even centuries. Nobody knows, not even the highest echelons of the clergy. But if the sin was a mortal one, according the the Catholic Catechism, it would mean eternity in Hell. Even then the clergy would not be able to tell whether that particular act was a venial or mortal sin. But the safest remedy would be to confess to a priest next time the Confessional is open, and receive the Penance, a course of specific prayers and good works to restore the grace of God in your soul. So you better pray that you won't die before the Confessional opens, or else you will be in deep trouble!
If, on the other hand, your church holds to the Arminian view of salvation, then you still have cause for fear. Such a church is Protestant, but believe that your salvation can be lost if you commit certain sins, or fail to overcome your sinful nature, or to lose faith. As with the Catholic church, no one really knows just where the line is drawn, but if you believe that you are still saved, then you better watch out, because your salvation is teetering on the brink. Otherwise you need to confess to God on how you mentally undressed that woman in order to get your salvation restored, and promise not to do it again, as in the Catholic church.
But whether you are Roman Catholic or an Arminian Protestant, despite your efforts in restoration, you know deep inside that such restoration won't last. After all, you have a strong sex drive which could ignite at any time, especially if, like this morning, you weren't expecting it to happen. Then, on the other hand, the thought of losing your libido is a very serious threat to your manhood. You actually want to remain red-blooded - it's a natural attribute to your self esteem, vital for the species to continue, according to Darwin.
So you are squeezed into a corner, with one side telling you that your sex drive is not only vital to life, but also to your self esteem. Then the other side threatening you with hellfire if you indulge in its pleasure except strictly in the confines of marriage. Little wonder that such trains of thought quickly leads to liberalism and eventually atheism. Darwinism appeals strongly to liberalism, which says that the Bible is not the authoritative Word of God but fables written by men to teach, to a certain extent, morality. Instead, Darwin explains the scientific view which sets us free from any ideas of accountability to a fickle God for our peculiar state of behaviour. Conversely, left to themselves, Roman Catholic and Arminian Sotorology has done a tremendous amount of harm over the past centuries of church history.
Just prior to writing this blog, I was browsing "Eternal Security" on Google. Right up among the top of the page was various websites linked to Daniel Corner, a radical Arminian who has spent a lot of time and effort debunking Eternal Security, or Once Saved Always Saved (OSAS) - founder and director of Evangelical Outreach as well as author of an 800+ page book, The Believer's Conditional Security. I have read about Corner before, and I mistakenly thought that his church was based in Washington DC, but further investigation showed that he leads a church in Washington, Pennsylvania - a smaller town just south of the city of Pittsburgh. There was even an article written about Corner on when he met our Methodist author and preacher David Pawson, and concluded that the two Arminians did not like each other very much due to some differences in opinion on various matters!
Daniel Corner
Dan Corner is a former Roman Catholic who has repudiated much what is taught in Rome, including veneration to Mary, the Rosary, the Seven Sacraments and other Catholic doctrines. However, it is so ironic that Corner embraced Arminianism. The irony is that Arminianism originated from none other than the Vatican, in its stand against the doctrine of Sovereign grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone. In one of my former blogs, Once Saved Always Saved - How Did This Originate? published 10th April, 2011 - I gave a full description on the history of the debate. To summarise, James Arminius, a 16th Century Dutch theologian was, as a student, brought up to believe in the Sovereign Grace of God advocated by John Calvin. But feeling uncomfortable with such doctrine, he travelled to Rome, where he became a student of Luis De Molina, a Spanish monk who was also a Jesuit. The Jesuits themselves were a society founded by a Catholic priest, Ignatus Loyola, who at first had an occult vision of the Virgin Mary telling him to fight and put out the "Babylonian whores," referring to the new Protestants formed by Martin Luther and John Calvin respectively. As a result of Jesuit Molina's teaching, Arminius wrote his own treatise, A Reconciliation of Free Choice With the Gift of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence and Reprobation. (1588)
This book became standard for many Protestant churches, particularly Methodism, the Anglican Church, the Pentecostals, the Assembly of God and others. Arminianism is the branch of Roman Catholicism which has also found a home in all other groups - the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Unitarian and even Freemasonry - despite all denying any links to the teaching of the Vatican. On a wider scale, the idea of working for an uncertain salvation prevails in all other religions - including atheism. Here lies the irony of Dan Corner repudiating Roman Catholicism, yet strongly proclaiming the arm of the Vatican used to weaken the tenets of Protestant Christianity.
So as it is fair to say that Arminianism - the teaching that a believer can lose his salvation by not holding faithful or by committing certain sins - has its roots in the Occult (Loyola's vision). So far we have not looked at the fourth conclusion of the sin committed above, a look at a few examples of Eternal Security found, yes, in the Old Testament.
Our God is eternally Omniscient. This means that there is nothing he does not know about. He cannot be taken by surprise, and everything, yes, absolutely everything, about us was known, and will be known by God long, long before we were even born. So when we believed on the Son of God, we were saved once and for evermore. There is no possibility of ever losing our salvation - or else we be denying God's omniscience - a form of blasphemy!
So what happened when you mentally undressed the other person? Did you sin? Yes. Did you lose your salvation, or was it teetering on the brink? No, of course not. Instead the sin was laid upon the Cross of Jesus Christ. We sin every day, to the greater or lesser extent. But every sin committed is laid at the Cross. It will be an ongoing thing until the end of time.
In the Old Testament, we read of the exactly the same happening, the only difference was that the sin committed was carried into the future to the Cross which was yet to happen. One good example of this was the righteousness of God imputed to Abraham. (Genesis 15:6 with Romans 4:1-3) The Cross atoned for Abraham's sins some two thousand years before the Crucifixion.
Another case, even more specific, applied to King David after committing adultery with Bathsheba along with his conspiracy to have her husband Uriah murdered. When Nathan the prophet came to confront David with his sin, the King confessed, "I have sinned against the Lord." To which Nathan replied, "The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die." (2 Samuel 12:13.) Where had God taken David's sin? To the Cross of Christ. In Psalm 51:12, David, reflecting on his grave sins, asks God to restore to him the joy of his salvation, not salvation itself.
On another instance with King David was when he had his army of fighting men numbered. God passed judgement on the king as a result (1 Chronicles 21.) In verse 15 we read that while God was about to execute the men in Jerusalem, he saw, and told the angel to stay his hand. What was it that God had seen? The Cross of Christ. Apparently, all those in Jerusalem and beyond had their sins transferred to the Cross instead of suffering the consequence of David's sin.
When Jesus died, he died on a cross. A cross has a stem and two arms. One symbol of the two arms of the cross is that they each represent time. One arm points to the past, the other to the future. The two arms can also represent Israel and the Church. However, the sins of every believer from Adam to the end of time has been put on the Cross of Jesus Christ. It was, and is, and will always be, the plan of salvation God already knew about, right down to the very last believing person, before the beginning of time.
If you are a true believer in Jesus Christ, you are eternally saved, and you will never lose your salvation. When you die, the Lord will welcome you home with open arms.
Here is the beauty of God's character, his boundless love, his unlimited glory. Eternal Security is in the very heart of God, so to speak, it is in his genes. You are a gift given to the Son from the Father as a reward for atoning for your sins. To say that you can lose your salvation is blasphemy, because it would be the same as saying that God screws up, or he does not know what is going to happen next.
Arminianism is a false gospel with its origin in the occult. It should be repudiated, for it brings no glory to God, only fear to those who believe in it.
As for the beautiful woman in the church, take your eyes off her and set them on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of you faith. For he can satisfy you in a much richer way than any human being can do.
Four different views are put forward to explain this incident, the first one positive.
The first is what the evolutionist would explain as a healthy sign for the survival of the human species. According to him, you should feel elated over your red-blooded sexual desire. After all, this was what Charles Darwin was writing about concerning Natural Selection, nature's way to ensure that mankind still have a future.
But the next two are rather less positive. If the church you are in is a Roman Catholic church, then deep inside you will be fearful, despite your loud singing. Would this sin committed be a venial sin or a mortal sin? If venial, then this would add an unspecific time to your duration in Purgatory. A few minutes? Unlikely. More likely a few years, even centuries. Nobody knows, not even the highest echelons of the clergy. But if the sin was a mortal one, according the the Catholic Catechism, it would mean eternity in Hell. Even then the clergy would not be able to tell whether that particular act was a venial or mortal sin. But the safest remedy would be to confess to a priest next time the Confessional is open, and receive the Penance, a course of specific prayers and good works to restore the grace of God in your soul. So you better pray that you won't die before the Confessional opens, or else you will be in deep trouble!
If, on the other hand, your church holds to the Arminian view of salvation, then you still have cause for fear. Such a church is Protestant, but believe that your salvation can be lost if you commit certain sins, or fail to overcome your sinful nature, or to lose faith. As with the Catholic church, no one really knows just where the line is drawn, but if you believe that you are still saved, then you better watch out, because your salvation is teetering on the brink. Otherwise you need to confess to God on how you mentally undressed that woman in order to get your salvation restored, and promise not to do it again, as in the Catholic church.
But whether you are Roman Catholic or an Arminian Protestant, despite your efforts in restoration, you know deep inside that such restoration won't last. After all, you have a strong sex drive which could ignite at any time, especially if, like this morning, you weren't expecting it to happen. Then, on the other hand, the thought of losing your libido is a very serious threat to your manhood. You actually want to remain red-blooded - it's a natural attribute to your self esteem, vital for the species to continue, according to Darwin.
So you are squeezed into a corner, with one side telling you that your sex drive is not only vital to life, but also to your self esteem. Then the other side threatening you with hellfire if you indulge in its pleasure except strictly in the confines of marriage. Little wonder that such trains of thought quickly leads to liberalism and eventually atheism. Darwinism appeals strongly to liberalism, which says that the Bible is not the authoritative Word of God but fables written by men to teach, to a certain extent, morality. Instead, Darwin explains the scientific view which sets us free from any ideas of accountability to a fickle God for our peculiar state of behaviour. Conversely, left to themselves, Roman Catholic and Arminian Sotorology has done a tremendous amount of harm over the past centuries of church history.
Just prior to writing this blog, I was browsing "Eternal Security" on Google. Right up among the top of the page was various websites linked to Daniel Corner, a radical Arminian who has spent a lot of time and effort debunking Eternal Security, or Once Saved Always Saved (OSAS) - founder and director of Evangelical Outreach as well as author of an 800+ page book, The Believer's Conditional Security. I have read about Corner before, and I mistakenly thought that his church was based in Washington DC, but further investigation showed that he leads a church in Washington, Pennsylvania - a smaller town just south of the city of Pittsburgh. There was even an article written about Corner on when he met our Methodist author and preacher David Pawson, and concluded that the two Arminians did not like each other very much due to some differences in opinion on various matters!
Dan Corner is a former Roman Catholic who has repudiated much what is taught in Rome, including veneration to Mary, the Rosary, the Seven Sacraments and other Catholic doctrines. However, it is so ironic that Corner embraced Arminianism. The irony is that Arminianism originated from none other than the Vatican, in its stand against the doctrine of Sovereign grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone. In one of my former blogs, Once Saved Always Saved - How Did This Originate? published 10th April, 2011 - I gave a full description on the history of the debate. To summarise, James Arminius, a 16th Century Dutch theologian was, as a student, brought up to believe in the Sovereign Grace of God advocated by John Calvin. But feeling uncomfortable with such doctrine, he travelled to Rome, where he became a student of Luis De Molina, a Spanish monk who was also a Jesuit. The Jesuits themselves were a society founded by a Catholic priest, Ignatus Loyola, who at first had an occult vision of the Virgin Mary telling him to fight and put out the "Babylonian whores," referring to the new Protestants formed by Martin Luther and John Calvin respectively. As a result of Jesuit Molina's teaching, Arminius wrote his own treatise, A Reconciliation of Free Choice With the Gift of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence and Reprobation. (1588)
This book became standard for many Protestant churches, particularly Methodism, the Anglican Church, the Pentecostals, the Assembly of God and others. Arminianism is the branch of Roman Catholicism which has also found a home in all other groups - the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Unitarian and even Freemasonry - despite all denying any links to the teaching of the Vatican. On a wider scale, the idea of working for an uncertain salvation prevails in all other religions - including atheism. Here lies the irony of Dan Corner repudiating Roman Catholicism, yet strongly proclaiming the arm of the Vatican used to weaken the tenets of Protestant Christianity.
So as it is fair to say that Arminianism - the teaching that a believer can lose his salvation by not holding faithful or by committing certain sins - has its roots in the Occult (Loyola's vision). So far we have not looked at the fourth conclusion of the sin committed above, a look at a few examples of Eternal Security found, yes, in the Old Testament.
Our God is eternally Omniscient. This means that there is nothing he does not know about. He cannot be taken by surprise, and everything, yes, absolutely everything, about us was known, and will be known by God long, long before we were even born. So when we believed on the Son of God, we were saved once and for evermore. There is no possibility of ever losing our salvation - or else we be denying God's omniscience - a form of blasphemy!
So what happened when you mentally undressed the other person? Did you sin? Yes. Did you lose your salvation, or was it teetering on the brink? No, of course not. Instead the sin was laid upon the Cross of Jesus Christ. We sin every day, to the greater or lesser extent. But every sin committed is laid at the Cross. It will be an ongoing thing until the end of time.
In the Old Testament, we read of the exactly the same happening, the only difference was that the sin committed was carried into the future to the Cross which was yet to happen. One good example of this was the righteousness of God imputed to Abraham. (Genesis 15:6 with Romans 4:1-3) The Cross atoned for Abraham's sins some two thousand years before the Crucifixion.
Another case, even more specific, applied to King David after committing adultery with Bathsheba along with his conspiracy to have her husband Uriah murdered. When Nathan the prophet came to confront David with his sin, the King confessed, "I have sinned against the Lord." To which Nathan replied, "The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die." (2 Samuel 12:13.) Where had God taken David's sin? To the Cross of Christ. In Psalm 51:12, David, reflecting on his grave sins, asks God to restore to him the joy of his salvation, not salvation itself.
On another instance with King David was when he had his army of fighting men numbered. God passed judgement on the king as a result (1 Chronicles 21.) In verse 15 we read that while God was about to execute the men in Jerusalem, he saw, and told the angel to stay his hand. What was it that God had seen? The Cross of Christ. Apparently, all those in Jerusalem and beyond had their sins transferred to the Cross instead of suffering the consequence of David's sin.
When Jesus died, he died on a cross. A cross has a stem and two arms. One symbol of the two arms of the cross is that they each represent time. One arm points to the past, the other to the future. The two arms can also represent Israel and the Church. However, the sins of every believer from Adam to the end of time has been put on the Cross of Jesus Christ. It was, and is, and will always be, the plan of salvation God already knew about, right down to the very last believing person, before the beginning of time.
If you are a true believer in Jesus Christ, you are eternally saved, and you will never lose your salvation. When you die, the Lord will welcome you home with open arms.
Here is the beauty of God's character, his boundless love, his unlimited glory. Eternal Security is in the very heart of God, so to speak, it is in his genes. You are a gift given to the Son from the Father as a reward for atoning for your sins. To say that you can lose your salvation is blasphemy, because it would be the same as saying that God screws up, or he does not know what is going to happen next.
Arminianism is a false gospel with its origin in the occult. It should be repudiated, for it brings no glory to God, only fear to those who believe in it.
As for the beautiful woman in the church, take your eyes off her and set them on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of you faith. For he can satisfy you in a much richer way than any human being can do.
I am so glad I Peter 1:5 tells us we are kept by the power of God. Great post.
ReplyDeleteInteresting reading, Frank. Thanks for giving me the link.
ReplyDeleteRob
Great post Frank; what we've come to expect from you.
ReplyDelete24 Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,
ReplyDelete25 To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.