On the Dispiriting Doctrines of Fairbanks

πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος καὶ ὠφέλιμος πρὸς διδασκαλίαν πρὸς ἔλεγχον, πρὸς ἐπανόρθωσιν πρὸς παιδείαν τὴν ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ, ἵνα ἄρτιος ᾖ ὁ τοῦ θεοῦ ἄνθρωπος πρὸς πᾶν ἔργον ἀγαθὸν ἐξηρτισμένος.

2 Timothy 3:17

Last Sunday marked the 6th church service I've attended here in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I'm having a real hard time coming up with a reason to attend a 7th.

My wife Sandy and I are just moving into the third month of our ten-month stay here in America’s Last Frontier, the magnificent state of Alaska. We’re living in Fairbanks, the Golden Heart City, the largest city in the interior, second largest in the state (behind Anchorage). Fairbanks is home to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the US Army’s Fort Wainwright, two Fred Meyer stores (including the only one in the country that sells firearms), and Carlile Transportation Systems of Ice Road Truckers fame—last August the company put on a meet-the-drivers event in the Airport Way Fred Meyer’s.

Fairbanks is also home to at least 130 different houses of worship. We saw these looking in the paper for a place to fellowship. That online list at the link is duplicated in the dead-tree version of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Christians are certainly in the majority here, but two of the three largest “church” groups are Mormons and Roman Catholics, neither of which can be said to be truly Christian, given the Catholics' non-Sola Scriptura stance and the Mormons founding upon "another gospel". Baptists make up the largest denomination by far, with most of these being affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. It was among these that Sandy and I searched for a "church home-away-from-home".

In the next couple of posts, I'll describe the disappointing services we found and unpack my reasons for believing they are the result of faulty, unscriptural notions produced by poorly founded doctrines. Is the "great falling-away", the ἀποστασία of 2 Thessalonians 2:3, well and truly under way in Fairbanks?

Holocaust-ing

Here's a really thought-provoking film of Ray Comfort talking to (mostly) young people on the streets of the U.S. (CA, Maybe?). He starts out paralleling the Holocaust with the American abortion epidemic, then ends up evangelizing. It's fascinating watching these kids get tied up in the loose-ends of their own moral relativism [hat-tip to Jeff Riddle at the Stylos blog):

(BTW, as a Greek Geek, I have to explain that the word "holocaust" is from the Greek compound ὁλόκαυστον, which means "completely burned". A noun form of this word, ὁλοκαύτωμα [holokautoma], is found in Mark 12:33, Heb 10:6,8. The KJV translates it as "whole burnt offering".)







Personally, I don't subscribe to Comfort's Free Will doctrine, nor do I agree with his politicizing the Gospel, but I do support his positing moral dilemmas from a Christian perspective to our dumbed-down, philosophically-lazy, theologically-ignorant youth.

God is a Heretic

The more I listen to Jim Brown, the more I like him. If you're one of God's Elect, you'll find this a breath of fresh air:




How long did you last...?


Repent,
μαρτυς

Jobs is Dead

For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence.

1 Corinthians 1:26-29

The oh-no's and you'll-be-missed's are streaming in from around the world as more and more people hear the news of Steve Jobs' sudden death from pancreatic cancer. Jobs, the brilliant wunderkind behind the Apple colossus, is being rapidly canonized by an ungodly public eager to find exceptional men to venerate and revere. What does it say about the dearth of erudition, insight and personal revelation of the U.S. public when the most profound expression of condolence most people can muster is to wish the pagan Jobs (he became a Buddhist way back in 1974) "godspeed" sans destination? To where exactly should Jobs be sped by the God he didn't believe in? Zombie Cupertino?

I'd be interested to know where Jobs thought he would end up. He knew his time was short; evidenced by his departure from Apple last August. If he considered himself a good Buddhist, with heaps of stored up positive karma, I guess he expected to be reborn into a rich fami--oh, wait, he was already very wealthy, he'd have to be rewarded with something greater than that. Hmmm? Maybe he figured he'd be the next Dali Lama or something.

Well, regardless of where he and his co-religionists imagined he'd go, let me tell you where he actually ended up. Having never been given the gift of belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, the proof of which would've been his proclaiming the Gospel, it is clear that Jobs was not a child of the living God, not a spiritual Jew with a circumcised heart, not an inheritor of eternal life. So, despite the many disturbingly misinformed Christians praying for his soul (how horribly Catholic is that nonsense?), we are assured by the Word of God that Mr Jobs' soul has just begun his eternal torment in Hell.

A finer example of someone gaining the whole world but losing his soul (Mark 8:36) is scarcely to be found today.


In Christ,
μαρτυς