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

New Links & Blogs

I just added two new links and two new blogs to my link & blog rolls...

Advent of Messiah is the blog of David M. Cook, whose thoughts I first encountered on the Rosh Pina Project site. His blog's "About" page opens with the following:

This blog is about the arrival of the promised Messiah.  These posts are by David M. Cook the author of the book Advent of Messiah, the astonishing account of the arrival of the promised Messiah and the early years of His life on earth.  This book brings in history from the Jewish nation, the Roman Empire and the Gospel accounts of Saint Matthew and Luke to provide a vital and full spectrum of the advent of the Christ Child.

[NOTE 03/04/12: The links to both Advent of Messiah and Rosh Pina Project have been removed]

Grace and Truth Ministries is Jim Brown's website. Jim is a very unorthodox preacher, as I said on another site:

Jim’s teaching style is a bit screechy and aggressive at times—an unorthodox mix of edgy brilliance and Southern-fried iconoclasm—but if you can stand the heat, you’ll come to love the kitchen. A major proponent of “define, define, define”, Jim is a no-nonsense, serious-as-cancer Expositor of the Word of God.

Those words were from the new link My Bible Study Course, How To Study with the Greek NT. I ran the course over 10 Sundays at Paihia Baptist Church in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Each lesson covered a general principle for studying the Bible. All the Lesson notes are available there and I have no problem emailing any documents or handouts to anyone that wants them. I'm also more than happy to explain or clarify any of the teachings there.

PBC Greek Class was a first year Koine Greek course that I ran at Paihia Baptist Church. There were 20 lessons on that course which covered 32 weeks! As with the course above, the Lesson Notes are available on the site and I'd be delighted to send any of the other documents to whomever wants them. 


T'sollfernow,
μαρτυς

Back to Hebrew

Took a 6 month hiatus from studying Hebrew--well, beginning to study Hebrew; hadn't really got that far--but now I'm back at it and going very well. Things are a bit more complicated this time around though. I feel certian the Lord wants me to learn modern, conversational Hebrew as well as OT Hebrew. So, needless to say, I am very busy. I'd love to have more time to do nothing but study, but it's just not gonna happen. Still have to earn a crust and run my Sunday Bible Study class--at least till my wife and I jet off to Alaska in two month's time (a long story, but basically she'll be teaching for a year and I'll get to hang around and watch the Northern Lights).

A quick Praise Report re:Hebrew: My prayers before going to sleep last Monday included a request/acknowledgement that the Hebrew Lexicon I'm now sorely in need of would materialize. The very next day, my wife was on a mission wholly unrelated to the buying of foreign language tomes. She happened to stop into a place called "The Jerusalem Cafe" (or, as that other language would have it: ירשלים קפה) for a take-out falafel. While waiting for it, she decided to go into the second-hand (pre-loved?) bookstore across the mall from the Cafe. A year ago I bought a Hebrew Bible (both the תנ"ך & the ברית החדשה) there for only $14! So she happened to remember my prayer the evening before and asked the man at the counter if he had a Hebrew dictionary. He said he didn't, but he did have a "Hebrew Lexicon"...

It's a beautiful, mint condition Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew English Lexicon and she got it for a song. Isn't HaShem the Best!

ברך הבא בשם יהוה ישוע המשח המלך העולם

Just found out this morning that my Beall and Banks Old Testament Parsing Guides are keyed to my new BDB Lexicon, too!


Lehitraot,
μαρτυς

Cast Out Even a Little Leaven

In the study of Another Gospel, we learned that the sin in our “outer man” is removed through suffering in the flesh for Christ’s sake and that we are thereby perfected and made righteous—pleasing and acceptable—to God. We are purified by the fiery trials; as it says in 1 Peter 4:12-15:

¹² Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: ¹³ But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy. ¹⁴ If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you. On their part he is evil spoken of, but on your part he is glorified. ¹⁵ If any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.

And we must understand that the phrase “for His sake” has two senses: One, directly, as when we preach and confess Christ (the Truth) and are persecuted for it; and, two, indirectly, meaning “the opposite of our own sake”—denying our selves (E.g. “turning the other cheek”).

By the way, we see a great example of this process in 1 Corinthians 5, where the Apostle Paul is telling the Corinthian Church what to do with the member who is committing “such fornication that is not so much as named among the Gentiles”. From verse 5:5, we read:

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

So even this heinous sin can be removed through suffering in the flesh. In verse 7, Paul chastises the Corinthians for keeping the man in their midst:

Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened.

As we know from Jesus in Matthew 16:11-12, “leaven” is “pride or self-serving doctrine”:

¹¹ How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees? ¹² Then understood they how that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

This man’s self-serving doctrine convinced him that it was okay to fellowship even while living in unrepentant sin. Paul tells them to “purge out” (“purge out” is one Greek word meaning to “clean out” or “prune”) this “old leaven” so the Church would be “unleavened”—clean.

We have here an analogy of the individual human body with the Church. As sin must be purged out of our flesh to cleanse it, so too must corrupt doctrine be purged from the Bride of Christ to cleanse her; both involve suffering, “mortifying the members”.

By the way, this story of grievous sin in the Corinthian Church might possibly have had a happy ending. If we look at the 2^nd Chapter of Paul’s next letter to the Corinthians, we read from Verse 4 on:

⁴ For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you. ⁵ But if any have caused grief, he hath not grieved me, but in part: that I may not overcharge you all. ⁶ Sufficient to such a man is this punishment, which was inflicted of many. ⁷ So that contrariwise ye ought rather to forgive him, and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. ⁸ Wherefore I beseech you that ye would confirm your love toward him.

If the person Paul is speaking of here is the same man—and there was certainly no one else Paul wrote about in 1 Corinthians who was to receive a “punishment” “inflicted of many”—then it would appear that the fellow repented sufficiently to move Paul to instruct the Corinthians to let the poor wretch back into the fellowship.