I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word…

Thus says the Lord: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’” (Psalm 138:2; Jeremiah 6:16)

The Truth Of God Is As Living And Active As God Himself Is

For online apologetics and discernment works like Apprising Ministries it’s quite common today to hear those caught up in the fickle fantasies of man-centered evangelicalism and the neo-liberal cult within the Emerging Church ask us things like, “Why do you constantly quote dead men?” Well, the answer is really quite simple: These men are more alive now than the “dead” men currently being followed by so many today on the long and broad road to nowhere.

The fact is that there are so many leaders within what is passing for Christianity today such as Purpose Driven Pope Rick Warren and/or Living Spiritual Teacher and EC guru Brian McLaren, one of the unholy Emergent Church trinity of apostates along with universalist Emerging Church pastor Doug Pagitt, and his friend Tony Jones—the progressive “theologian in residence” at Pagitt’s Emergent Solomon’s Porch, who put far more emphasis on what other men are now saying than they do upon what the LORD God Almighty Himself has already said.

But this was not so with men such as Charles Spurgeon, who is the author of the short devotion to follow. Godly men like Spurgeon lived out the absolute Truth of the texts of Scripture with which I opened this piece. God has said He has magnified His Word—contained in the inerrant and infallible texts of the Bible—to a place equal to His glorious and majestic and great and mighty Name. Study it out for yourself and you will quickly find that the great Greek scholar A.T. Robertson is correct when he says:

The “name” (onoma) of God expresses the character of God. ( John 1:12; 5:43; 17:11 )
(Online source)

Let me point out a couple of things here, which I think will help you deal with people foolish enough to say what this lay “minister” whined to me the other day in the tweet below. His ire’s aroused toward me because, through His grace, I love Jesus and the LGBT people for whom He died enough to tell the truth that God’s Word in the Bible condemns the deviant and sinful lifestyle of having sexual relations with another of the same sex, i.e homosexuality, as a sin of sexual immorality:

(Online source)

However, no one credible worships “the Bible as if it were God.” No, we revere the Word of God—the Bible—because 1) the Lord has clearly told us in no uncertain terms, e.g. in our opening text above, that God has — exalted above all things your name and your word. Secondly, as we remember that God’s Name means Who He is, i.e. His matchless character, power and completely sovereign authority, we see that it is the Lord Himself Who has equated His written Word with Himself; and of course Jesus is the living Word of God.

With this in mind then, Christ Jesus our Lord has told us we are to walk in the ancient way; the good way, but evangelicalism—lusting as it is for the world’s acceptance in arrogant America—is now essentially insisting, “We will not walk in it.” In her review of New Evangelicalism: The New World Order by Paul Smith researcher Sarah Leslie of the fine work Herescope points out a very familiar major player in fueling this growing apostasy within the visible church, which has all but abandoned the all-sufficiency of Holy Scripture:

Fuller Theological Seminary played a key role in abandoning the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, and this opened the floodgates for every sort of new doctrine and practice. (Online source)

It’s important at this point that you come to understand how mainstream evangelicalism is rapidly moving even further away from the proper Christian spirituality of sola Scriptura in favor of its current fad of highly subjective Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism(CSM). Under the guise of so-called Spiritual Formation key mentors of the Emerging Church, Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster, along with his spiritual twin SBC minister Dallas Willard, laid the foundation for enemy forces to swallow up of the younger sectors of evangelicalism through this spurious CSM rooted in apostate Roman Catholicism.

You best know this in the Lord, the mainstream of the church visible is only just now beginning to pay the price for this turning away from the certainty of God’s Word to the subjectivity of our hopelessly corrupt human heart. Sadly, all who persist in CSM and its crown jewel  of Contemplative/Centering Prayer, which is a form of meditation in an altered state of consciousness, end up neo-Gnostic mystics who jettison reason in order to create their own synthetic version of reality. This is not Christianity; it’s actually spiritual suicide.

O how tragic it is that the Christian Church we see would rather settle instead for these pedantic peddlers of second-rate self-help books on “leadership” and the love of man than to follow our generous and merciful Christ. Just look at them running to conference after conference to have their ears tickled by people who were at another ingathering lead by others trained at an earlier assemblage put on by people who came from messed up musters held by “leaders” instructed by those who attended corrupt convocations originating with other furturists who devoured books from people that once read some of the Bible.

But this kind of foolishness will never change the Truth that each morning the storm clouds grow darker over this pagan postmodern world and that—contra the universal dreamer Rob Bell and his empty Love Wins mythology (cf. 2 Timothy 4:3-4) — God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day (Psalm 7:11). And in spite of this glut of Purpose Driven and Emergent dreamers whom God did not send, what Charles Spurgeon said below is just as true today as it was when he first preached it so many years ago:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. (Galatians 6:7-8, KJV)

And now we delare that the God of Holy Scripture is a God of inflexible justice; He is not the god whom some of you adore. You adore a god who calls your crimes peccadilloes [small mistakes] and little faults.

Some of you worship a god who does not punish sin but who is so weakly merciful, and mercilessly weak, that he passes by transgressions and iniquity and never enacts punishment.

You believe in a god who, if a man sins, does not demand punishment for his offense. You think that a few good works of your own will pacify him, that he is so weak a ruler that a few good words uttered before him in prayer will win sufficient merit to reverse the sentence if indeed you think he ever passes a sentence at all.

Your god is no God; he is as much a false god as the god of the Greeks or of ancient Nineveh. The God of Scripture is One Who is inflexibly severe in justice and will by no means clear the guilty. “The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked” (Nahum 1:3, KJV).

The God of Scripture is a Ruler Who, when His subjects rebel, marks their crime and never forgives them until He has punished it, either upon them or upon their Substitute.[1]

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Endnotes:

[1] Charles Spurgeon, At the Master’s Feet [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005], January 20.

See also:

POSTMODERN LIBERALISM PITS JESUS AGAINST THE BIBLE

THE GREATEST EXPERT ON THE SCRIPTURES AND HIS VIEW OF THE BIBLE

RECLAIMING THE BIBLE AS THE WORD OF GOD