Apprising Ministries is doing what we can to draw attention to the New Downgrade No-Controversy happening within evangelicalism and growing syncretism as spiritual blindness and apostasy increase.

Unfortunately, at a time when the church visible could desperately use one, I’m afraid there doesn’t appear to be a Charles Spurgeon arising. If anything mainstream Christendom seems to heading away from Spurgeon.

In fact, it’s becoming so bad that today we see evangelical leaders are even hedging on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), which has long ago correctly been labeled a non-Christian cult.

For example, I told you in Jerry Falwell, Jr.: Liberty University has “No Official Position” On The Cult Of Mormonism about a mini-flap when it was announced that Mitt Romney was to address Liberty University (LU) .

You might remember that Romney, a devout member of the LDS Church, spoke to LU graduates at the 2012 Commencement ceremony. An even bigger issue emerged when Falwell, Jr. told CNN’s Kyra Phillps:

Liberty has no official position on Mormonism. Our statement does not define Mormonism as a cult. There are hundreds of professors here and I’m sure you could find someone like the professor who authored that course that you just mentioned. I’m sure there are some that believe it is a cult. That’s not part of our doctrinal position and not our official position. (source)

This is a problem because Liberty University is reputed to be “the world’s largest” evangelical Christian university “in the world.” Against this backdrop I bring you a piece by David Badash at The New Civil Rights Movement.

Yesterday in Breaking: Billy Graham Endorses Romney Then Scrubs Site Calling Mormonism A ‘Cult’ Badash tells us:

Billy Graham last night endorsed Mitt Romney for president, and shortly thereafter, his website was scrubbed of a statement Graham or his organization made calling Mormonism a “cult.”

“It was an honor to meet and host Governor Romney in my home today, especially since I knew his late father former Michigan Governor George Romney, whom I considered a friend,” the 93-year old Christian Evangelist Southern Baptist minister said via a statement.

”I have followed Mitt Romney’s career in business, the Olympic Games, as governor of Massachusetts and, of course, as a candidate for president of the United States. It was a privilege to pray with Governor Romney—for his family and our country.” (source)

Leaving aside the BGEA website being “scrubbed” of the cult reference, which is of real concern, let me focus on another key issue. Note carefully what Billy Graham tells us concerning the faithful Mormon Mitt Romney:

It was a privilege to pray with Governor Romney. (source)

Privilege; no, it was a violation of God’s Word (cf. 2 Corinthians 6:14-18) for Graham to pray with Romney. Biblically, the truth is, Romney is a pagan idolator who worships demons:

I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. (1 Corinthians 10:20)

You need to understand here that this isn’t Paul’s personal opinion; it’s not a simply a suggestion, it is the Word of the LORD God Almighty Himself. God does not want His children joining in religious endeavors with idolators.

Now of course I can pray for Mitt Romney, but I have no basis to pray with him. Right now Romney is condemned by God and under His wrath (cf. John 3:18. 36); because I love him for Christ’s sake, I do pray for his salvation.

In closing this, for now, we return to the issue of BGEA removing the webpage where Mormonism was labeled a cult. In the aforementioned article above David Badash points out:

As of June 5, 2010, if not much earlier, Billy Graham’s website stated:

A cult is any group which teaches doctrines or beliefs that deviate from the biblical message of the Christian faith. It is very important that we recognize cults and avoid any involvement with them. Cults often teach some Christian truth mixed with error, which may be difficult to detect.

There are some features common to most cults:

• They do not adhere solely to the sixty-six books of the Bible as the inspired Word of God. They add their “special revelations” to the Bible and view them as equally authoritative.

• They do not accept that our relationship to Jesus Christ is a reality “by grace through faith” alone, but promote instead a salvation by works.

• They do not give Jesus Christ, the divine Son of God, full recognition as the second Person of the Trinity, composed of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Some of these groups are Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, the Unification Church, Unitarians, Spiritists, Scientologists, and others. (source)

Notice that the page specifically asked the question What is a cult? under the subheading Looking For Answers:

(source)

However, as of today when we look for that page we see:

(source)

The truth is BGEA is not doing the Christian community, and certainly not unbelievers, a service by removing a webpage that tells people the truth. Stealth evangelism simply doesn’t work. Let me give you a recent example.

In her ‘I Have Aha Moment Exhaustion!’ My Afternoon With Oprah and Pastor Rick Warren yesterday Muslim writer Wardah Khalid gives us her take of Rick Warren on Oprah Winfrey’s Lifeclass. She tells us:

I have always been a big fan of Oprah Winfrey. Growing up, I remember faithfully watching her show every day after school… So when the opportunity came to attend a taping of her “Lifeclass” show in Houston, I snagged it. The icing on the cake? Pastor Rick Warren was her guest.

Yes, I realize that Pastor Rick is Christian, and well, I am not, but I was familiar enough with his work to know that much of the spiritual advice he gave his Christian followers resonated with Muslims as well. (source)

She provides a number of quotes from Warren with which she agreed. An honest reading of her piece reveals that she was impressed with Rick Warren’s trite human potential movement statements a la Robert Schuller.

This woman, enslaved to the idolatry of Islam, didn’t hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ; rather, she went home affirmed in her sin because arguably the most visible Southern Baptist pastor in the world never defined his terms.

Anyone who believes in “God” could affirm what Rick Warren says in public; that’s a large reason for his “success” in the world. As far as Mitt Romney himself, from LDS sources, I’ll leave you with the god he believes in.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been in the ministry fields of apologetics, Comparative Religion, and counter-cult evangelicism for nearly 25 years; and lived in a heavily Mormon area of southwestern Wyoming for 10 of them.

The fact is the LDS god is an exalted man and Mormonism teaches that you can become a god yourself. What I’m going to show you now is precisely what the Mormon Church, which Mitt Romney is with, teaches about God.

We begin with the below from the Gospel Library Gospel Topics section of the LDS website itself. Under God the Father the Mormon Church teaches us that:

God the Father is the Supreme Being in whom we believe and whom we worship. He is the ultimate Creator, Ruler, and Preserver of all things. He is perfect, has all power, and knows all things. He “has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (D&C 130:22). (Online source)

The “D&C 130:22” above refers to Doctrine And Covenants, which is one of four books considered Scripture by the LDS Church; the others being the King James Version of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Pearl of Great Price. D&C contains alleged, “Revelations Given To Joseph Smith, The Prophet, With Some Additions By His Siccessors In The Presidency Of The Church.”

We’re then told that section 130 features, “Items of instruction given by Joseph Smith the Prophet, at Ramus, Illinois, April 2, 1843.” So the following, D&C 130:22, is from the founder of the LDS Church himself. Telling us that he was the “prophet” chosen to “restore the church” Joseph Smith says God revealed to him that:

The ^aFather has a ^bbody of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of ^cSpirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not ^ddwell in us. (Online source)

It’s important to keep in mind here that in Mormonism the Trinity has also been redefined. Instead of, within the nature of the one God there are three co-eternal, co-equal Persons Who are the one God, the LDS Church teaches that Heavenly Father (Elohim), Jesus (Jehovah), and the Holy Ghost, are three separate gods—among a pantheon of gods—working together with one purpose.

Then from the LDS publication Gospel Principles I mentioned earlier, which Mormons use for Sunday School, under Our Father in Heaven we’re informed:

Because we are made in his image (see Moses 6:9), we know that God has a body that looks like ours. His eternal spirit is housed in a tangible body of flesh and bones (see D&C 130:22). God’s body, however, is perfected and glorified, with a glory beyond all description.
(Online source)

Now here’s Joseph Smith on the nature of God from “one of the classics of [the LDS] Church literature,” which is known as The King Follet Discourse:

God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by His power, was to make himself visible—I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man;…

I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see… It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character of God, and to know that we may converse with Him as one man converses with another, and that He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ Himself did;…

Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power…

In the beginning, the head of the Gods called a council of the Gods; and they came together and concocted [prepared] a plan to create the world and people it… (Online source)

We’ve now been told by the founder/prophet of Mormonism that God was once human as we are; in addition, there are other gods, and we also must “learn how to be gods as well.” And then under Godhead from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism there’s the following concerning Smith’s twisted theology:

On June 16, 1844, in his last Sunday sermon before his martyrdom, Joseph Smith declared that “in all congregations” he had taught “the plurality of Gods” for fifteen years: “I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and that the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit: and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods” (TPJS, p. 370)…

Although the three members of the Godhead are distinct personages, their Godhead is “one” in that all three are united in their thoughts, actions, and purpose, with each having a fulness of knowledge, truth, and power. Each is a God. (Online source)

In beginning to close this, for now, it’s an incontrovertible fact that Mormonism is polytheistic (many gods cf.Abraham 4:1), whereas Christianity is monotheistic (one God cf. Isaiah 43:10). We’ve seen that the LDS Heavenly Father—whose name is Elohim—has a body. However, the eyewitness testimony of the Apostle John in his Gospel deposition quotes the real Jesus telling us that the one true and living God of the Bible — is spirit (John 4:24).

Further our Creator, Christ Jesus of Nazareth, further informs us that — ”a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). So Bill McKeever of the leading Christian work Mormonism Research Ministry is proven correct in his God the Father According to Mormonism when he tells us:

The Mormon doctrine of God is not the same as the historic Christian view. It holds that God and man are essentially of the same species, and that God the Father has a body of flesh and bones. He is not uniquely self-existent, transcendent, or eternal…

The traditional Mormon view of God is summed up by the famous Lorenzo Snow couplet, “As man is God once was, as God is man may be.” The historic understanding of this strongly implies that God the Father was once a sinner, and that we ourselves may model our mortal experience unto godhood after the mortal experience he once participated in.” (Online source)

But since the god taught by the LDS Church, which Mitt Romney believes in, is clearly not the God of the Bible; then according to God’s Word the Mormon god doesn’t even exist:

Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. Who is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and set it before me, since I appointed an ancient people.

Let them declare what is to come, and what will happen. Fear not, nor be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you are my witnesses! Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any.”(Isaiah 44:6-8)

With Billy Graham, we have yet another example of a prominent Southern Baptist with a compromised witness…

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Further reading

• BILLY GRAHAM’S APOSTASY IS OLDER THAN YOU THINK
• SOUTHERN BAPTISTS ASSIST THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH TO INFILTRATE EVANGELICALISM
• SBC’S RICHARD LAND SAYS MORMONISM FOURTH ABRAHAMIC FAITH