For there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach—and that for the sake of dishonest gain. One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.”
- Titus 1:10-12
In the first part of his letter to Titus, Paul outlines the qualifications for elders—spiritual leaders who must be above reproach, self-controlled, hospitable, and firmly grounded in sound doctrine (read about that here and here). But why is such rigorous character and doctrinal stability so necessary?
Paul answers that question directly in this passage: because false teachers are already active in the churches of Crete, and their influence is devastating. Without Godly leaders who can stand firm in truth and correct error, entire households – and by extension, the health of the church itself – are at risk. This is one of the most blunt and urgent passages in the New Testament about the threat of false teaching. It is not politically correct, but it is spiritually vital.
Paul’s concern about false teachers is not isolated. He says, “There are many rebellious people” (verse 10). The problem of false teaching in Crete was widespread, not confined to one eccentric person or group. It was enough to threaten the spiritual life of multiple congregations. The Greek word for rebellious means “insubordinate,” “unruly,” or literally “not under authority.” False teachers refuse to submit to the gospel, the teaching of the apostles, or the elders of the church. They want to be their own authority.
This is often the root of all false teaching, which is a rejection of Christ’s lordship and the authority of Scripture. Instead of being humble servants of the Word, they twist it to serve their own ideas and desires.
Paul accuses them of “meaningless talk,” which means idle, fruitless discussions: words that might sound clever or sophisticated but accomplish nothing spiritually. These teachers were masters of speculation and controversy. Instead of building up believers in truth, they sowed confusion. He also calls them “deceivers.” False teachers don’t simply misinterpret by accident; they lead people astray, often knowingly. Their words look attractive but carry poison underneath. This is why theological precision matters. Even “small” errors, when left unchecked, can distort people’s understanding of God, salvation, and holy living.
Paul’s reference to “the circumcision group” likely refers to Jewish Christians or Judaizers who insisted that Gentile converts must adopt Jewish customs like circumcision, dietary laws, or ritual observances to be truly accepted by God. This was a recurring issue in the early church (Acts 15, Galatians 5). Adding human requirements to the gospel undermines grace. Paul is relentless against such teaching because it shifts trust from Christ’s finished work to human effort. Any teaching that says, “Jesus plus something else saves you,” is not the gospel.
Paul’s words in verse 11 are very strong. He doesn’t say ignore them or tolerate their differences. He says they must be silenced, literally meaning to muzzle or to stop the mouth. In other words, their influence must be shut down. This is not harshness for its own sake; it’s an act of protection. Paul, like a good shepherd, is guarding the flock from wolves. If false teaching is not confronted, it spreads like an infection. Modern churches often avoid such language out of fear of appearing intolerant. But Scripture makes clear: truth is worth defending, and false teaching must be addressed directly to protect the people of God.
In the first-century church, many gatherings took place in homes. A false teacher gaining influence in one household could sway an entire congregation meeting there. The phrase also suggests that families were being divided or spiritually damaged. False teaching is not an intellectual game; it devastates lives. It can lead believers into despair, legalism, immorality, or total abandonment of faith. Their motivation for dishonest gain exposes their hearts. These teachers weren’t primarily seeking God’s glory or the good of others. They were after money, power, or personal prestige.
In verse 12, Paul quotes a well-known saying from Epimenides, a Cretan philosopher-poet who lived around the 6th century B.C. The statement was famous in the ancient world and had become a kind of cultural proverb. By quoting one of Crete’s own authorities, Paul underscores how deeply ingrained these vices were in the local society. The cultural climate made it fertile ground for deception, corruption, and moral laxity. This cultural backdrop made the need for strong, Godly, discerning leadership even more urgent. The Cretan believers could not simply follow the norms of their environment; they needed elders who lived radically different lives and guarded the gospel from cultural distortion.
Though this passage is contextual—addressing Titus’s specific situation in Crete—it provides timeless principles for how churches must respond to false teaching.
The church should appoint qualified leaders. The primary defense against false teaching is Godly leadership that knows and holds fast to the truth. Leaders must be able both to teach sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict it. Churches that neglect biblical qualifications for elders often find themselves spiritually compromised. Leaders must be willing to address the error directly, refuse to give it a platform, and remove false teachers from positions of influence.
One of the best ways to combat false teaching is to fill the church with the truth. Leaders must feed people solid biblical teaching so that believers can discern truth from error themselves.
False teaching is just as prevalent today as it was in the first-century church, though it often wears new disguises: the prosperity gospel, moral relativism, hyper-legalism, or progressive reinterpretations that deny historic Christian truths. The church must remain vigilant, testing everything by the Scriptures
This passage shows us that false teaching is a spiritual cancer. Left unchecked, it destroys lives, damages families, divides churches, and dishonors Christ. Paul loved the Cretan believers too much to ignore this danger. He loved the gospel too much to let it be distorted. And he charged Titus, and the Church through all the ages, to take up the same vigilant, courageous task.
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It is difficult to be around me and not hear my talk about Genesis in some way, shape, or form before long. I have a reason for that: Genesis is the target for this generation’s assault on Scripture, and that assault is to cut off the need for Jesus. Satan knows the Bible well, and it doesn’t take long in Jesus’ ministry to see that Jesus held a supreme authority, and it wasn’t merely His Father’s voice. It was Scripture. Jesus memorized Scripture as a boy, knew the prophets, knew the history of Israel, and not just the statements, as all the Pharisees and scribes did. He knew the purpose and meaning behind it because He knew the original Author, His Father, and He had the same Holy Spirit who came upon those authors in Him.
There are multiple occasions in which Jesus goes back to Genesis, and He treats each moment with the very same authority and clarity as He claimed to have. Jesus was challenged on the topic of divorce, so He went to Genesis to get the definition of marriage and its purpose. Jesus was lambasting the Pharisees and cited the bookend martyrs of the Old Testament: Abel and Zechariah, son of Jehoiada (take note that for Jesus, the Old Testament ended with 2 Chronicles, and though Isaiah was martyred after Zachariah was, that was not recorded in Scripture). Jesus warned about the end times being like Noah’s day and like Sodom and Gomorrah – people living their sinful lives without any care for God before sudden judgment.
Jesus’ audience was Jewish, and they all grew up knowing Scripture and its history. He did not need to reinforce the things everyone already knew and practiced. Jesus hardly ever talked about Creation because it was never challenged by the Jews. Neither was homosexuality directly. It was an abomination to the Jews, so it did not need to be brought up. But in every instance where there was an issue, where the scribes would “interpret” passages to go well beyond what they actually said, Jesus would go straight to the plain reading of the text of Scripture and explain the true meaning and intention of it.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus took two of the Ten Commandments against murder and adultery and pointed out that it wasn’t enough to not do the physical deed, but that the issue was whether the desire to do the deed was in the heart. Jesus wasn’t concerned if you actually killed someone, but by some will of the flesh, you refrained. He was more concerned if the very thought of murder was in the heart. Because if you got to the point that there were no consequences for the deed, sin would show up, and you would do it. Jesus did this with any reference to Scripture. He showcased the point and purpose of the passage, and it was often something they weren’t getting at “church.”
In this snapshot of Jesus, I want to emphasize two things: first, the false teacher is always going to make things confusing by removing clarity and adding things totally not intended, even with good motivations. The regulations the Pharisees had added were no different than what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. God said, “Do not eat of the Tree.” But Eve added, “Do not touch it.” That wasn’t what God said, and that was how the Serpent got her. She didn’t stand on what God actually said. Another part of the deception of a false teacher is that God’s Word truly wasn’t that clear and didn’t mean what it said. This is far more rampant today. So many in the Church want to be seen as believers, but they always seek to muddy the waters and make Scripture unclear so their opinions can be allowed to stand. It’s a terrible form of logic. If Scripture is not clear about something, we have no right to speculate and hold it to ANY value other than speculation. But the false teacher is going to make his speculations both equal to Scripture and often superior to Scripture, often purposefully making very clear passages unclear and with fancy words, arguing over technical definitions, and trying to sound smart, making it sound like they know more than you do. Don’t listen to that. Any teacher who actively promotes “old earth creation” models does this. They always seek to add their opinions about nature, always from a worldly, naturalistic perspective, to creation and make sure that Genesis could not mean creation was in 6 days, with only a few thousand years of history, and especially not describe a global flood.
Instead, look to Jesus and those who walk after Him. Jesus’ model was to provide clarity. A true teacher will bring clarity and confirm the message that has always been. We see this in the Councils in the 300s AD regarding the deity of Christ, in the Reformation with salvation being of grace and not of works, and we are seeing it today regarding origins and what is called “young earth creation.” All three of these movements were not new teachings but a return to original teachings and an emphasis on the clarity of Scripture and the original purpose of its message.
Jesus brought clarity, and unfortunately for most, that is what they did not like. They loved His works, His miracles, His kindness, and His compassion, but they did not like His words. They did not like His drawing the line in the sand with, “This is what God says and requires.” In every instance, Jesus took the clear reading of Scripture, stated its true purpose, and raised the stakes from what the people understood. Those stakes include intentions, not just actions. And when Jesus noticed the difference between the claims of belief and the motivation behind them, He did not hold back. He told people who professed to believe in Him that they were actually trying to murder Him. Instead of directly answering how, He just hit the point harder as though He was trying to drive them away.
Jesus didn’t want fake followers. He didn’t want crowds who made a lot of noise but had nothing real to show. He spoke the raw truth, as intended, and let those who wanted it stay and let those who didn’t want it to walk away. Jesus held Scripture as His authority. While He absolutely listened to the Father through the Holy Spirit, it was Scripture that was His anchor, and He held it as the authority from Genesis forward. That is my authority over anything else as well.
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One of the greatest problems in the church today is the embracing of the cultural practice of “tolerance.” We are not talking about the tolerance of “I disagree with you but will fight to allow you to have and say your opinion,” but a tolerance of “How dare you question me from doing what I do?” And the acceptance of every form of deviancy but completely intolerant of those who actually believe in morality and integrity. When it comes to spiritual warfare, this form of tolerance has allowed two types of people into the church: Diotrephes and Absalom. I am indebted to John MacArthur for pointing out Diotrephes to me, and I am indebted to Eric Ludy regarding Absalom. In both cases, the goal and intention of those who carry this spirit are to divide, conquer, control, and silence any voice that could expose them or rule in their place.
In 2 John, we learn of an “elect lady” who was a dear member of the church of Ephesus that John had been pastoring. This elect lady was known for hospitality and loving those in her church. However, word got to John about her unknowingly hosting a false teacher, and he warned her that there are people we are NOT to entertain or even give a welcome. Yes, the command is that severe. When someone brings in teachings that are contrary to the Gospel, we may have a friendship with them for the purpose of evangelism, but we are to give them no acceptance of any form other than being a lost soul on the way to Hell who needs to be saved. We especially are not to give them a platform through which they can give their teachings.
In this case, John did not identify the culprit, likely for the reason that the principle mattered more than the specific person. However, in 3 John, a letter to a man named Gaius, we do see a false teacher called out by name: Diotrephes. In calling Diotrephes by name, it is clear that Gaius and Diotrephes knew each other, or at least Gaius was very familiar with him. Diotrephes was a man who sought preeminence. He wanted positions of influence and power. He was very likely an elder or at least a deacon and had a big sway in the church. Diotrephes was called out for seeking to subvert the Gospel and prevent good people, including the Apostle John himself, from preaching there, lest they find out about him and expose him.
Absalom was King David’s son who had some serious problems. What brought them out was when his older brother Amnon raped Absalom’s sister Tamar. David did nothing that we know of or in the timing that Absalom wanted, and so Absalom set up a party and assassinated Amnon. This made Absalom go into self-exile because he feared David’s retaliation. Then he used Job, David’s general, to get him to come back to the capital. While there, Absalom spent three years at the gates of the palace, interacting with the people and telling them that David could not deal with their problems, but he would if he were king instead. He used this to build up the trust of the people and then prepared for the coup to overthrow David, which nearly succeeded.
Both of these people are in the churches today. An illustration of a Diotrephes is given in Frank Peretti’s Piercing the Darkness. In the book, a church is under attack and the pastor, who is also a principal at a Christian school, is arrested on child abuse charges. During the battle, the church has a prayer chain (because back in the 1980s they didn’t have group chats), and one of the women early in the prayer chain would gossip, all in the name of prayer, and make accusations that kept putting the pastor in a bad light. We don’t get to find out who she is until later.
In the real world, I have seen and heard first-hand stories of dealing with Diotrephes. One of the clearest examples is what happened to a Young Earth evangelist whom I will not mention by name. He told me how he had been sharing what he was doing at his church, had a huge and successful event with people getting saved and so the pastor wanted to have a meeting with him to find out more. Both he and his wife were brought up to sit in a love seat and then for over an hour, the pastor and the elders grilled him over his creation stance. Every time he answered both scientifically and Scripturally, both the pastor and one of the lead elders glared at him with an evil hatred. THAT is Diotrephes. Needless to say, the evangelist left that church. But he has told me directly that the range of 90%+ of churches will not allow him to speak at their events, thus blocking life-saving truth from the youth who are departing at a rate of at least 90%, often over the topic of origins. There is a Diotrephes whom the church leadership knows if you cross that line, you cross that person. This person is often one of the biggest donors to the church and one whom with a word can pull away a large chunk of the congregation away too, even to the point of pulling an Absalom and throwing a coup to drive that pastor out if they dared speak the truth on that particular topic. Yes, they are in there. Diotrephes is the type of a tare that Jesus warned about.
While Diotrephes seeks to have the dominant say in what goes on in the church, Absalom seeks to actually be the ruling voice. Diotrephes may try to pull strings and hide in shadows at the time, but Absalom wants the title and the throne. Absalom shows up in an influential voice who intentionally steals the hearts of the people and seeks to tear down and overthrow the pastor. I have seen this, too. I have seen people who through teaching “studies” seek to undermine the authority and the integrity of the pastor and the leadership and seek to get people to follow them instead. They may seek to get votes from congregants to override the church leadership and eventually remove them and install themselves.
We have to be very careful about always looking “out there” for these people, because sometimes, this spirit can creep up in ourselves. Looking back, I can see times when I had moments where an Absalom spirit started to rise in me at my previous church because some of the things I was seeing did not agree with where I was as a believer in my faith, and some of it was more serious than others. I had to watch myself because I would realize that if I went down that route, it would cause a church fight. Church fights are ugly, and behind them is a Diotrephes or an Absalom.
That spirit can show up with any of us, including those who are active defenders of the faith. This is one of the reasons why Scripture says we must respect those in leadership, especially when we are not. Their job is NOT easy and yes, chances are you have some ideas that could make things run better, but if you are not in charge, you need to honor and respect the authorities who might know more than you do. There is a time for addressing error and there is a way to do that, but Diotrephes and Absalom are not the way to do it. If you reach a point where you will not be able to reconcile where your faith is going and where the church is, then it is better you move on somewhere else in a respectful manner.
What should we do if we see such spirits? Do we uproot them? Jesus said we will always have tares among the wheat until Judgment Day, but at the same time, both Paul and John removed sinful people lest they affect the whole congregation. It’s a case-by-case situation, but in all cases, the Matthew 18 method of discipline should be the primary guideline. Sometimes, church leadership needs to go straight to ex-communication depending on the severity of the crimes, but sometimes you can also nip the Diotrephes and Absalom spirits in the bud and prevent them from blossoming, and hopefully restore such a person quickly. But we must be on guard because it does not matter what church you go to, the enemy is always going to seek to get one of these two spirits in your church. If you are not careful, it might be you. Don’t go looking around for them, but I write this so when you see it, you can recognize it. We must always be on guard.
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I have two more topics to hit before addressing freedom from slavery: teachings and demons. Even more than drugs, drinking, or pornography, slavery to false teachings is perhaps the strongest form of slavery, rivaled only by slavery to demons. The two really go hand in hand, so I am going to address them together.
I deal with origins debates quite often, and one thing I have learned in such debates is how strong of a grip that certain teachings have on people. Now there are certain teachings we truly have to have a firm grip on because that is how we survive, so do not hear what I am not saying. However, when a false teaching has a grip of someone, it will not let it go without a hard fight. There are prominent speakers out there where if they are questioned, it is like insulting their guru and prophet. Man has so idolized celebrity preachers and speakers that we make the quarrels of Corinth in which they debated over Peter, Apollos, or Paul look like child’s play. While there is great wisdom that can be learned from those who have gone before us, we need to remember that they are all fallible and every one of them, and yes that includes me, is going to get something wrong.
The New Testament letters speak about being watchful and discerning true and false doctrines/teachers more than any other single topic. Entire letters have been written on this very issue, including both Paul’s and Peter’s last messages before their executions – 2 Timothy and 2 Peter. These were their last message, their last words, and when you know you are dying, you speak about the most important things. For them, the most important thing was doctrine and to stand on and believe Scripture above and beyond anything else. Paul describes Scripture as being God-breathed and useful and sufficient for every good work. Peter describes Scripture as being not from human origins, but from God, and that it was even more sure than the very things they had eye-witnessed as though they were yesterday. Both of those points are to be the ground that their readers are to stand on when they face the false teachings that come from within their own congregations or from outside.
Some false teachings have such a grip on people that you cannot reason with them with logic, nor are you able to showcase the absurdity of them. There may be a few you can get through to, but they are rare. Scripture says that they are blinded by the “god of this age.” They literally cannot see the truth, and the only way to save them is with supernatural weapons to remove the blinders and break the chains. Most of these people cannot see that they are in chains to false teachings, are bound to them, and have been convinced that this is actually freedom. It’s not. And it is worth noting that when people coming out of false teachings, they tend to describe their experience in terms of deliverance, freedom, or a fog being lifted. Those who go into such false teaching tend to describe their conversion in terms of “education” or “enlightenment.” And you can almost see it; you can almost see a fog coming over them, a spirit of deception entering into them by their professors or spiritual mentors.
These teachings are doctrines of demons, and they are far more active than we can possibly imagine. They are not responsible for everything, but when it comes to teachings, they are. Satan and his very well-structured organization of demons do not care what we believe as long as it is not the truth. And if you look at history, you can see all the false teachings like throwing darts at a target at random. Some hit well and some don’t. Satan is not omniscient, and when a false teaching does not hold, he discards it. But when one does, he holds it as long as he can; if it is eventually rejected, he simply repackages it with new cosmetics. He has a limited playbook, but he plays his cards frequently in many shapes or forms.
It is not just teachings the demonic play with; it’s also minds and bodies. When the serial killer does his deeds, some have admitted that a spirit comes upon them and drives them to do it. There was a case of a man who invaded a home in Idaho and killed the parents and eldest son before kidnapping the younger boy and girl. During the ordeal, the kidnapper/killer took the boy to a cabin and raped and tortured him for about four hours. He made this statement: “The little demon didn’t want to do this, but now the Devil is here.” The boy would later be killed, and the girl survived. In another case, two teenage girls lured a friend to the woods where they killed her to appease the “Slender Man,” a fictional character; but it is clear it was a demon posing as one. In another case, an elderly man kidnapped several women and forced them into multiple sex acts on film because people were watching him and were making him do that. Again, that sounds demonic to me.
Read the testimonies of David Wilkerson and Nicky Cruz. It is clear that the demonic is a real thing. Here in El Paso, the occult is a notorious and major sin issue only behind drinking/drugs and the sex industry. Frankly, I think all three are heavily intertwined. Demons don’t just mess with minds, they can control bodies. And I’m not merely talking about “Emily Rose” types of things. There are many physical and psychological cases that we have given labels but in actuality are demonic oppressions and possessions. Jesus healed a woman who was bent over and could not walk erect. Surely there was a physical issue there, but the source was a demon. When Jesus drove out the demon, the physical ailment was healed. This is not a blanket statement as there are cases where there simply is a genuine physical ailment that is purely physical due to the breakdown of the genome due to sin. But that should not make us rule out the demonic as being a factor as well. Let’s not look behind every bush for a demon, but let’s not ignore them either.
There is only way to escape from these false teachings and from the demons: the preaching of the Gospel and the battle with spiritual weapons against the forces of darkness. Over the next few weeks, we will look at how we become free from such things and move from serving a bad master to serving the Good Master.
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We live in a post-modern culture where truth cannot be known and that all things are up to one’s own understanding, thinking, and preferences. The very concepts of right and wrong are blurred. This mindset has not merely crept into the church but nearly completely overtaken it. It has become increasingly difficult to find a church where the preacher actually says, “Thus says the Lord” and preaches straight from Scripture, rightly dividing it, correctly interpreting it, and then applying that truth to our lives. Instead, most of what is out there is one man’s opinion, often in direct violation of what God actually said. Then when someone calls them out on it and says what God actually said, the reply is, “I don’t reject what God said; I reject your interpretation of it.” One of the main jobs of a prophet, a priest, or a preacher is to declare what God said and to draw the line between what is holy and what is unholy. There is so much mixture today that few actually believe that such a line can be drawn.
Leviticus 10 is the account of Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu giving strange fire before the Lord and being killed on the spot for not being obedient to God’s commands. Nadab was in line to be the next high priest and had seen the presence of God while he was with Moses and Aaron at times when God showed Himself. Yet for some reason, both he and his brother thought they could do things their own way, and it cost them their lives. In this fierce rebuke, God tells Moses and Aaron to not mourn their deaths because of their disobedience, but that the job of the priest was to teach the people how to distinguish the clean from the unclean, the holy from the unholy.
It is very hard to find people out there who are willing to draw the line and say, “This is of God and that is not, and here is where God shows us what is what.” Anything that comes from God is good and true. Anything that does not have its origin in God, even what appears good, is corrupt and skeptic at best. Many will argue, “How do we know if its from God or not?” The simple answer is to read the Bible. One pastor I know gives this guideline: “If you want to know what the will of God is, take a look at what the world is doing and do the opposite. You will be pretty close.” One big clue about what is clean and holy versus unclean and unholy is whether it is something the world’s system promotes and teaches.
In the days of the Old Testament, the world’s culture was marked by the surrounding nations, particularly their idolatrous practices. Over and over again, God told Israel to destroy their idols and to destroy all the high places where idols were worshiped. God knew what would happen if those cultures remained around, and yet Israel never did fully chase them out and destroy them all. As a result, they kept turning back to idolatry so they could be like the nations around them. The question lingers: why did they keep turning back?
The answer is rather simple: the priests were not teaching how to distinguish the holy and unholy. It was a command for a king to make a physical copy of the Law by hand so he would know what God commanded of them. Yet there is no record of any king do such a thing. The only ones I can think who might have would be David, Solomon, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and maybe Josiah after he found the book of the Law. Even then, these kings struggled to follow it even if they did make the copies. We do know that there were feasts held in Nehemiah’s day that hadn’t been kept since leaving Egypt. We know Judah went into captivity for 70 years to give 490 years their sabbath rest. That went back before David. The priests weren’t doing their job, and God had a severe message for them.
In Ezekiel 22, God calls out the false priests who refused to distinguish the holy from the unholy. He called them conspirators against God and ravenous wolves, devouring the people instead of equipping them and arming them. The only reason they lived that long was because God chose to intercede upon His own wrath to save them. There was no intercessor, no one like Moses to plead before God to save those wicked, idolatrous sinners. God sent Jesus to be that Intercessor. God chose to send Jesus to be the one who would teach things correctly. Jesus would then pass to us the Holy Spirit. One of the Spirit’s primary jobs is to convict the world of its sin. If we don’t know what is holy and unholy, we simply are not listening to God. And more than likely, if we are thinking that way, we are probably trying to harbor an idol the Holy Spirit is telling us to tear down.
But God has also allowed false teachers to remain present. It’s not merely because they are tares among the wheat and to pluck them out would pluck out the good wheat. It is also to test and prove the true and false believer. God told Moses that false prophets would regularly come, and they were to be tested by whether what they said would turn out to be true. Those that did not were to be put to death. This was rarely carried out except by true prophets like Elijah after the Mt Carmel incident. Why? Because the people didn’t carry out this command to test the prophets and stay true to God’s word.
You cannot take anything that the world and the God-hating system has created and redeem it. God has already judged it. It will burn. While God can take a sinful soul and redeem it, He is not going to redeem anything that the world has created. There is no amount of decorating anything the world gives us in Christianese to make it salvageable. Our own righteousness is as filthy rags before God; that is something good corrupted by sin. But this is worse. Instead of a good thing tarnished by evil, this is an evil thing that we attempt to make good, and that will never happen. You cannot make the unholy to be holy. Only God can make something holy, and He has already set the limits for where that line is to be drawn. Our job is to believe that line and declare it.
Teaching the difference between the holy and the unholy is one thing, but living it out is another matter. I’ll address that next week.
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God is not the author of confusion. He only says one thing, one message, and His message does not change. While He may change His mind to give mercy over judgment, that is consistent with His character. However, we live in days where there is a lot of confusion about what God said. It seems nearly everyone is looking everywhere else except at themselves about where that confusion is coming from. We know ultimately it comes from Satan, however, when we first believed the lie. When we have our own sin to deal with, we are just as easily culpable of rejecting what God said and then blaming God or other Christians for it being “confusing.”
I have written about an absolutely vital doctrine called the perspicuity of Scripture. This is the teaching that the Bible is simple, clear, not confusing, and straight to the point. God said what He said, and He meant what He meant. He gave everything we need for life and godliness, which includes every aspect of our lives. However, there are some things that God left in the seed form and didn’t have full “codification” if you can call it that. The Councils and Reformation were among the movements and courts that sought to bring clarity to certain doctrines because they were under siege. I will address two of them briefly here.
In early church history, false teachers came in and attacked the deity of Christ directly, namely via a man named Arius. While Christ’s deity was clearly taught by the Apostles and in Scripture, because it was under siege, Athanasius and others would codify who Jesus was as fully God and fully man at the same time, giving birth to the Nicene Creed. Later, by the 1500s, the Roman Catholic Church went full apostate and began selling indulgences so sinners could “buy” their way into heaven. Martin Luther and others realized that Scripture taught salvation by grace alone and not by works, so they began the Protestant Reformation. A big part of that was going back to what Scripture taught on the topic at hand to bring clarity and confirmation of what had always been taught.
But before these two events, there was another church conflict that Paul himself needed to address regarding speaking in tongues. Charismatics teach this is angelic language that requires a full interpretation for us to understand. Cessationists teach that this is regarding different known languages. I won’t deal with that here. Regardless of the interpretation, what Paul emphasized in 1 Corinthians 14 was order and clarity. If anything is from God, it brings clarity and it has order. It may be strange and different than what we are used to, but there is order and structure.
Several years ago, John MacArthur hosted the infamous Strange Fire Conference. He took on the Charismatic/Word of Faith Movements and put them to the test. In his sermon during the conference, he made this point in testing any movement. This would be a good test for any “revival” such as the Asbury Revival earlier this year. MacArthur’s test is, does this movement or this teaching bring clarity to Scripture? Where there is confusion, does what someone brings give us any clarity on the matter? God does not leave things in confusion for long unless man wants to stay confused. MacArthur claimed that the Charismatic Movement has brought nothing beneficial to the body of Christ. It was totally extraneous and did very little to actually build the body of Christ, to lead her towards holiness and purity and righteousness. What it has offered instead is personal interpretations, giving “new revelation,” a lowering of Scripture as the authority, and the lust/desire for earthly things to be the goal and purpose of the faith. While there are Charismatics who are genuinely saved, MacArthur claims that the teachings of the Charismatics have not benefited anyone spiritually.
There are numerous other teachings along this line. In origins, the teachings of “millions of years” have benefited no one Biblically. These old earth ideas have brought no one closer to Christ, no one to a holier lifestyle, no one more separated from the world. While there are some who have done such things, it is always despite those teachings not because of them. If you listen to the arguments, they bring nothing out of Scripture to support their position. They always have to muddy the waters so they can insert their teachings. Many people say, “I can be a Christian and still believe in millions of years.” No one ever says, “I can be a Christian and still believe in the virgin birth” or “I can be a Christian and still believe the earth is young.” Why not? Because those actually are what the Bible teaches. Ideas outside the Bible are the ones that get this treatment. This argument alone is evidence that “old earth” is unbiblical; it’s evidence that people want to be religious and keep their idols, too. Critical Race Theory, Progressive Christianity, LGBT ideology, Christian Nationalism, ecumenical approaches, etc. are also in this camp. In all these teachings, you won’t find the seeking of clarity, structure, and order for the church. Instead, you will find confusion, the lowering of Scripture, and the elevation of man’s opinions.
Throughout church history, there are only two directions people go: towards Scripture or away from Scripture. They either elevate Scripture and lower man’s opinions, or vice versa. Now, because we are fallible people, even in our seeking of clarity, we can still get things wrong. The Reformation didn’t solve all the issues they were facing. One of the reasons why I am a young earth creationist and give none of the other models any space is on this issue of clarity. From the non-YEC arguments I hear, not one of them goes along the lines of “This is what Scripture is saying and here is where I am getting my position from.” There is no, “The Bible doesn’t teach that there, it actually teaches this, this and that because of this word, phrase, and context.” The best I have heard is “It doesn’t necessarily say ‘x’.” I never get a straight answer when I ask in response, “So what does it say?”
Test what you hear. One analogy I have heard is with music. Every teaching makes a sound. If the sound fits the whole piece, then we have music. But if each sound does its own thing, then it is just noise. The teachings that bring clarity have the vision of the whole and understand the whole piece. The teachings that want self’s opinions and to give man a say in how reality operates will never harmonize with each other, let alone Scripture. This is also why we need to have a Gospel worldview, not just a Biblical worldview. If we truly understand and believe the Gospel, then we’ll align all our teachings to give rise and support to all the images and logical conclusions of the Gospel, and it will make our readings of Scripture clearer.
Seek clarity, not confusion. That will often require you to put your understanding of things aside and let God speak clearly to you. You can still use your head, but even your brain and thinking need to be submitted to the will of God, otherwise you will only have confusion and no idea what is going on. Trust the Lord; He makes great music if you listen.
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Jesus lambasted the Pharisees for their hypocrisy and false teachings that not only showcased their own problems but made their followers the two-fold sons of Hell than they were. The Pharisees were bad enough, but their students were even worse. Why? Because when a sinful person sees someone deemed a righteous man open the door for liberalism and some sin, that person will take that door and open it even further.
This will be my final post on the deadly consequences of getting sin wrong before I return to the true definition of sin and go into the proper response to sin. I am going to make a bold and seemingly harsh statement: ANY PERSON who does not have a Biblical understanding of sin – knowing full well what it is, how severe it is, what it does, and what the consequences are – has absolutely no business being in any form of ministry. The results of any kind of ministry that does not understand nor take sin as the Bible describes it lead to utter failure and destruction. Jesus warned anyone against leading the youth astray and James said anyone in any teaching position is going to be held to a higher standard. That standard means they will be held responsible for anyone who listens to what they say and follows them. This is why Paul said to “imitate me just as I imitate Christ” but that also gives a hint that we are not to imitate him in any other way. If I am not pointing towards Christ, I don’t want people following me.
I understand that no one has a perfect understanding of sin, but anyone who has a remote working knowledge of the Bible should know enough to know what sin is. They also should know to have warnings go off anytime someone attempts to excuse sin, cover it up, or to literally re-define it to mean something else. I just spent blog posts #6-11 of this series going over examples so you would know the flavors of this we are currently dealing with.
Ultimately, the situation is like this: people have a deadly disease with only one possible cure. Doctors know what the cure is supposed to be, and because they know people won’t like the diagnosis or the medicine, they soften the diagnosis and tell them it is actually something else. Then to make it worse, they give medicine that fits the new diagnosis instead of what fits the actual disease. Now, sin is NOT a disease that one simply contracts, but the analogy works here for this purpose. We have preachers, missionaries, and evangelists who tell people how great they are and how much God loves them but never actually addresses their malady and what is wrong with life. And that person will hear the message, thinking they are safe, but will continue to go through life without ever getting a real solution. And to make it worse, those people will become hardened to any real presentation because the last “Christian” who spoke to them told them a flat out lie.
When we get sin wrong, we get evangelism wrong. But let’s get more practical here on earth too. What about counseling? What about identity politics? Why are states trying to ban churches and pastors from sex conversion therapies? The answer is because the root of every one of these problems is sin, and the answer to every one of these problems is the cross. So if we get sin wrong, we get the root of the problem wrong, and thus any attempt to solve the problem will only be a band aid at best.
People who hear false teachings and are impressed by the opinions of this world will ask: “How will you get the experts to listen to you when you know they reject your secondary teachings?” Usually this question is asked about origins. How can we possibly evangelize the scientific community when they believe that a 6-day creation and a 6000-year history is utterly impossible? My answer is, “If they are going to reject creation, what makes you think they are going to accept the cross? And why are we worried about what they think? They are sinners and they are LOST. Why are you taking counsel from a lost person?” Frankly, those people are ashamed of the Gospel and of Christ before men. I seriously ask them, if that is their approach, why bother believing the rest of what the Bible says that “modern science” doesn’t agree with either? That’s in academics. What about in practical life?
A marriage starts to fall apart, and the world is only going to offer trivial solutions if not break it apart. A friend of Worldview Warriors president Jason DeZurik was a musician in a Christian band who came out as a homosexual and abandoned his wife and kids to go public about it. As bad as that is, I had an indignation rise up in me like I rarely get when I found out that two pastors (one was a Progressive Christian) encouraged him and advised him to do this instead of dealing with his real issue – sin. They had a false view of sin and did not consider homosexuality to be a sinful lifestyle, so they gave him bad counsel which led that young man into further sin.
While I don’t want to boast about myself, but my book Biblical Foundations has already saved a marriage and I didn’t even write about marriage. How did I do that? I didn’t do anything but write about what being a Christian really entails and what it means to have your foundation in Scripture. This couple read my book, got their lives back in order with God, and out of that their marriage was saved. That was not me; that was God who used me because I was not ashamed of the Gospel and not ashamed to speak of what sin is and what the solution to sin is.
It is the Gospel that is the power of God unto salvation. How was the thief on the cross saved? By recognizing his own sin and also recognizing that Jesus, being without sin, was the Savior. He didn’t use theological language, but he realized his need for a savior even in death. The Gospel’s power lies in correctly identifying sin as being sin and that the hope from that sin is found only in Christ Jesus. I believe I speak for all of us at Worldview Warriors when I say that we are not ashamed of the Gospel. We are not ashamed of the message that Christianity teaches, and we will speak that message no matter what it may cost us. We love the truth, and we love people enough that we will tell them the truth no matter what they may think of it. And that means that we have to tell people what their sin truly is and what it is like. That is what I will do next week. I will go back to what sin truly is and how utterly and completely wicked it is; only when we understand that can we have a proper response to it.
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This will be the last aspect of false teachers and the consequences of getting sin wrong that I’ll write on in this series. This is one I’ve mentioned a number of times in passing, but I didn’t know enough to really dig into it. Yet while at the 2022 Shepherd’s Conference, the ideas of Liberation Theology and its sister Critical Race Theory have come into the church enough to warrant their attention. The central theme of the conference was “Unashamed,” but the primary false teaching that was addressed in dealing with being unashamed is this very wicked and evil theology. While John MacArthur hit it from several different angles, it was Voddie Baucham who really cemented what we are confronting in concrete terms. So for this post, I credit most of this knowledge to him.
First, we need to define a few terms here. Liberation Theology is the idea that Jesus came to this earth to save the “oppressed” from the “oppressor.” This idea has been around a while, but it hit the Roman Catholics in the 1960s and got a firm hold there before coming in through the liberal Protestants and now is fully imbibed in the conservative Protestants. Critical Race Theory is basically the social implementation of this idea. I cannot emphasize these terms “oppressed” and “oppressor” enough because these terms are selectively chosen to apply to ANY group that those who are teaching this theology does not like. It is applied to economics first and foremost. So, the “oppressed” would include blacks and people of color who are specifically in a “poor” economic situation, as opposed to the “oppressors” who are pictured as your standard American white population and CEOs, but not the politicians. As Baucham clearly points out, this is not a general statement because this theory does not identify Asians who are often wealthier than whites, nor Nigerian immigrants who are wealthier than. It is explicitly Marxist, and its purpose is to divide. Socially, if you are a white, conservative Christian, you are an “oppressor,” and if you are a street-smart black kid, you are among the “oppressed,” and there is no hope for escaping this classification, much like the caste system of Hindi India.
The philosophy is total Marxism: take from the rich (those who have money and power that those who hold these ideals do not like, because they never talk like this to each other) and give to the poor. Baucham retells the Parable of the Talents from this philosophy. The story goes exactly as it does in Scripture except in the end, the master takes five from the servant who had five and gained five. He gives one to the servant who had two and gained two, and he gives four to the servant who had one and did nothing. All three have five talents in the end. This is not Robin Hood; this is Marxism – rewarding the lazy while punishing the workers. The way the parable actually ends is where the servant with five ended up with eleven, the servant with two got four, and the lazy servant with one lost even his one. This is not a parable about the proper economic system, yet many people try to make it so.
These ideas take what initially sounds good on paper (let the wealthy help support the poor) and make it a religion that entirely opposes the Gospel and Christianity. But there is a far greater sinister side to it, and that’s the issue of sin. The authors and bloggers pushing these ideas are quoted by describing the American Slave Trade as our “original sin” (compare with Genesis 3). That is what the 1619 Project is about. That is the year that slaves were first brought to the American colonies and THAT is what they say “America is about.” Not our Constitution or our Declaration of Independence, but slavery. They never mention that whites were enslaved too during this time and that blacks also owned their own slaves.
When Baucham pointed out that they think this is America’s “original sin,” I was ready to get up in arms. Why? Because these anti-American and anti-Christian (those two are not synonymous here; they are just against both institutions) writers are stealing God’s description of sin to describe THIS kind of “racism” (which for the record is no longer defined as “animosity due to color of skin” but as “economic and social inequity”) as so endemic that white people who have nothing to do with these kind of things have to bow before this ideology and apologize for what their ancestors did. Just by being white, we are labeled as guilty merely by association. And they define all the terms in such away that ultimately, the white conservative Christian is irredeemable in their eyes, no matter what they do. Even if a white person were to try to make amends, he is seen as just trying to protect his white privilege, and if he denies being involved in that, it is called “white fragility.” No matter what, the average white American in this ideology is so steeped in the “sin of racism” that he cannot be saved.
This thinking has had the power that some of those whom we thought were our allies just a couple years ago have bought into this lie and apologized in public to these false teachings and lies. Keep in mind here: these ideologies have absolutely no intention of actually helping anyone. They want the “oppressed” people to stay oppressed, so they keep with a victim mentality, but then they direct that offense against those who actually have nothing to do with it. You will never see the people promoting these ideas actually stepping down so someone less fortunate than them can take their place. They always insist on someone else doing it. The goal of this is to keep these groups of people fighting each other, when the real source of the problem is found in those ideals. Go back to what I wrote about the Hegelian Dialectic; this is literally that methodology.
There are consequences for how anyone preaches the Gospel from this mentality. First, there are two groups of people – the “oppressed” and the “oppressors” – and only the “oppressors” are the sinners who must “repent” by doing “good works” to bow before the “oppressed.” Then the “oppressed” need to stick their chests out and declare themselves “victims” and therefore everything they want is “owed” to them. Both are works-based, so this is a theological issue, too. These people who claim to be Christians think that Jesus came to settle the economic and social injustice and imbalance. (Hint: Jesus never once addressed that and neither did the Apostles. In fact, Jesus said the poor would always be with us when Judas suggested they sell the perfume to “give to the poor”.) And the gospel of this message is achieved when all people have equity (the same economic power and resources; but the people will be poor while the teachers of these ideals rake in the cash). This also requires a different “gospel message,” one for the “oppressed” and one for the “oppressor.” And neither of them has Jesus at the center.
In Liberation Theology, we see almost the opposite side of the same coin of the Prosperity Gospel heresies. In both cases, the ultimate of reality is defined by financial and social success. In one they seek God for their wealth; in the other they seek the wealth of others. In one, sin is defined as blocking your way to money; in the other sin is defined as having more than others. Both corrupt and distort the image of Jesus to cater to those ideals. None of them look to self as the problem and self’s sin against God being the primary issue. Neither of them has Jesus as the answer to man’s malady. Next week, I will showcase how all these false teachings will destroy any effects of evangelism we try, then I’ll come back to the proper and true understanding of sin, and from there I’ll examine the proper response to sin.
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Getting sin wrong has devastating consequences, not just for eternity but for our lives now and for all those around us. Last week, I addressed how having the wrong idea of origins produces a wrong view of sin and thus a wrong view of the cross. Two other groups I will address today are the Prosperity Gospel people and the Progressive Christianity people. As these groups comprise numbers comparable to the Roman Catholic Church worldwide (500 million if not more), we can’t just consider this a side issue. A few weeks ago, I looked at how these different teachings get sin wrong in general, but now I’m going to zoom in and showcase what this means.
Changing the definition of sin is very common in the Prosperity Gospel and “Word of Faith” teachings. Rarely do they use that term, but when they do, they use it in an entirely different context than what the Bible uses. Sin is not “high treason against a thrice holy God” (thanks to Justin Peters for this description), but rather just a “barrier to your blessings.” This one is tricky, because it has just enough orthodoxy to make you want to accept it, but just like rat poison it is 95% good and 5% deadly poison. Sin is defined as being “wrong,” things that God does not like, but they portray sin as nothing more than a mountain to climb or a canyon to cross, and all doable by man’s own efforts. Do you have cancer? Your sin may be a barrier to receive your healing miracle. What is that sin? Usually “not enough faith,” even citing Romans 14:23 to support them. And while not a blanket statement, there are many of these people who use your financial contributions to them as the evidence of your level of faith. This is what Justin Peters, who has cerebral palsy, experienced while at one of the “events” by Word of Faith preachers. By “screening” him from going up to the stage, they instead asked what their contributions to “God” (by that meaning to them) were like.
The consequences of having such a view of sin, in which the end goal of dealing with sin is to get health, wealth, and prosperity in this life, are devastating. Many think that these teachings only work in a nation where there are already high levels of prosperity (the U.S., for now). But one of the great evils of these teachings is showcased by many of the “preachers” of these ideals going to third world countries (like in Africa or to the Philippines) and effectively milking those very poor people dry, promising physical and temporal relief from their physical problems, by giving the tiny bit of money they had to the preachers. This is highway robbery, and these teachers are going home laughing as they soak in the money they were just “given.”
But it’s worse than that. Because of their false views of sin, where it is a barrier between you and your blessings, the theory showcases that if you are more healthy, more wealthy, and are having more business success, you are more righteous than those who are not. And it is absolutely crippling of any who do not end up on the top of the Ponzi scheme. It’s a slavery system, and most people don’t even know it. Another aspect of this self-righteousness is that those who promote this message will declare that they are “spokespersons” of God or even declare that they ARE “God” (known as the little gods doctrine). Daring to speak against them is speaking against God Himself, citing 1 Samuel 26:9 to “not touch the Lord’s anointed.”
So, if we take these teachings to their logical conclusion, if you believe that your righteousness will yield heath, wealth, and prosperity, and that if you don’t have it, it is because you have sin in your life, that means that unless you are extremely wealthy, you not only have sin in your life but are going to Hell. This is part of why Job’s friends were dead wrong. Job suffered not because he sinned but because he was righteous. So by these teachings, only a select few will “get in,” and even more so, how many purely pagan people are rich without appealing to those teachings? They get in, too, because they meet the qualification that the Prosperity Gospel teaches.
The Prosperity Gospel is not the only teaching that gets sin wrong. So do the Progressive Christian teachers, and they are growing to the point where a documentary “American Gospel: Christ Crucified” needed to be made to confront these teachings. These teachings are a combination of post-modernism in which there are no absolute truths, everything is relative to the teacher/listener, and also New Age mysticism. I do believe this is the primary approach that will be used to incorporate Christianity into the “one world religion” that we see being built.
In his book Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell describes the doctrines of Christianity as bricks in a wall that keep people who don’t promote the doctrines of the faith out, and he mocks it as “Brickianity.” He taught that instead of our doctrines being bricks, they should be treated more like springs on a trampoline, and they stretch depending on the weight or importance of the person. We should all just get on the trampoline and jump and have fun. The problems of this line of thinking are frightening. Bell is suggesting we toss out all the concrete ideas and moorings that define reality and replace them without own ideas. The very title of his book describes the repainting of an Elvis doll to “restore” it. Except nothing in his book does what this title suggests. The title calls for a repainting so we get a brand-new looking doll that looks like the original. What he did in this book, however, is to completely redefine all the terms and phrases so they can’t even be recognizable to the original. What does this have to do with sin? Bell describes that in a book he wrote several years later: Love Wins.
Love Wins (which I have not read but have watched the book trailer) is about universalism. It’s about Jesus’ death on the cross, emptying Hell, and that it doesn’t matter what you believe or what your morals are, you get to go to heaven. In other words, sin becomes an utterly meaningless idea. It does nothing and causes nothing since it is now completely done away with. The vile abuser gets the same prize as the holy man. Since Rob Bell in this book believes that any road leads to heaven, why should he claim Christianity as his faith, considering Jesus explicitly said, “No man comes to the Father except through Me”? It’s a legit question and since the writing of that book, he’s fallen from the spotlight. Yet when I picked up Velvet Elvis about 12 years after it was written, it was still #84 of ALL TIME on Amazon books (it’s much lower now, but it’s still high up there in the rankings). So whether Bell is still popular or not, his books have not gone away.
Bell is not the only one promoting this. William Paul Young wrote The Shack in which he defines sin as a “sickness” that needs to be cured in this fictional novel. While I applaud the attempt to deal with the grief of a father who lost his daughter to a rapist and murderer, the writing was extremely poor, and the doctrines taught to help Mack heal were simply atrocious. In this book, sin never draws God’s wrath, but simply is “its own punishment.” Young also showcases “the Father” (Papa, portrayed as a fat black woman) dancing sexually to rebellious rap music. He has God “loving” rebellion and defiance.
In both of these cases, sin is either avoided entirely or treated as powerless, weak things that don’t mean anything anyway. As a result of this, what is the point of the cross? What becomes of the Gospel? It becomes moot and pointless as well. Both groups define sin wrongly because they define God wrongly. They try to define God by their own likings, and that will always excuse the self from being in need of a Savior. I only touched on the surface of this, but this series is depressing enough. I have to keep this in such a depressing mode for one or two more weeks before we can delve into the proper response to sin. Next week, I’ll deal with an issue that has now become hot that the 2022 Shepherd’s Conference had to confront it as a theme: Liberation Theology and Critical Race Theory. Then I’ll return to going back to what God said sin is and what it truly does and from there we can see what our responses to sin must be.
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When we mess around with what sin is and try to take it lightly, the logical conclusion leads to explicitly false views of the cross. Sin IS a gospel issue, and I would argue that it very well should be considered a salvation issue. If we do not understand the severity of sin, what that means, and who we have sinned again, what part of the “essential doctrines” are we actually believing as the Bible actually teaches? Now to be clear, not all those who have fallen for these false teachings actually believe what these false teachings declare; however, we must warn people of these teachings and what path they take. Why? Because whether the person does it or not, someone is going to take the small step of liberalism and go the distance. Paul said a little leaven leavens the whole loaf and today, I am going to showcase what happens when people take sin too lightly.
Around 15 years ago, Keith Getty and Stuart Townend wrote perhaps is one of my favorite modern “hymns”: “In Christ Alone.” I first heard it at an Intervarsity Chapter Camp around 2008 or 2009. There is a line in the second verse that reads: “While on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” Several churches contacted the Getty and Townend to see if they could change the life from “wrath of God was satisfied” to “the love of God was magnified.” Why would they do this? Because they don’t view God’s wrath as being an actual part of God’s character. Why would they think that? They reject the Bible’s teaching on sin. These are the same people that suggest that John Newton’s line in “Amazing Grace” of “That saved a wretch like me” is misguided. What does this train of thought do? It destroys what the work of the cross was all about, and it is an affront to the character of God. When we take away the seriousness of sin AND God’s holiness, you no longer have the Gospel of Christ; you are only left with a feel-good story.
The Progressive Christians have brought back another false teaching from ages past called universalism. This is the idea that it doesn’t matter what anyone believes, everyone goes to Heaven. The way they go about this is to say that God’s love for ALL of mankind is so great that He sent Jesus to die on the cross, and that would empty Hell. Rob Bell wrote a book called Love Wins in which this is his premise. William Paul Young wrote a fictional book titled The Shack in which this doctrine is taught. I came across a Christian Scientist who believed every path leads to God. All these, whether they directly say it or not, teach that not only is Jesus NOT the only way to the Father (calling Jesus a liar as per John 14:6), but they ALSO admit their own ideology has no weight either. When the Christian Scientists who think that every road leads to God were evangelizing and promoting their events, I wanted to ask them, “Why I should go to this event? If my path gets to God and your path gets to God, why should I change anything I am doing? Why should I go with you?” That is what the post-modernism philosophies have done. They have sought to deny any road of being able to stand on absolute fact, and such a position denies their own position of having any ground to stand on, too. But this nullifies the cross and ultimately denies Jesus of His job and the work He did.
Steven Furtick of Elevation Church got himself into a lot of trouble several years ago when in one of his sermons, he denied the Gospel and assaulted God’s character in the same breath. He proclaimed that the Law did not have enough “leverage” to save people (that never was its intention or purpose), and so in order to save people God had to “break the law” for the sake of love. His example of that was a parent driving over the speed limit to rush an injured child to a hospital. His argument is that you will break the law (of the speed limit) for the sake of love. He failed to see that no one would speed in that situation due to love; it’s rather due to fear. If the parent knew the severity of the wound and what the outcome would be (as God does) there would be no fear and no need to rush. But another problem is that Furtick unintentionally charges God as being a lawbreaker, who breaks His own law, and thus says that God sinned. Furtick holds the Law of God (based on God’s character) as being breakable, and that it really doesn’t matter what we do. God’s love will overcome it all. Again, this is all due to a reduced view of sin, a reduced view of the holiness and righteousness of God, and a too high view of self that “we are too special” for God to send any of us to Hell.
There are some who argue that Jesus only died to give us a moral example of what we should do. This is actually a common false view of the Gospel, that the Gospel is merely Jesus’ moral teachings. So Jesus went to the cross to just give us a visual demonstration of sacrificial love and to fight for causes greater than ourselves? Is that all He did that for? Again, this line of thought comes out of a low view of sin and a low view of the holiness and righteousness of God.
There is another one that keeps showing itself indirectly. It’s the Gnostic teaching that when we have “gained enough knowledge,” we, who were once part of the essence of God, will be rejoined with God and thus become part of the true God, thus becoming gods ourselves. The Gnostics did not teach that sin was rebellion against God, but rather that it was at best a “lack of knowledge,” so we need to pursue knowledge to correct our “sins” rather than need a Savior. Kenneth Copeland appears to believe that if he had enough knowledge, he could have died for ours sins just as Jesus did. Not only does this teaching reduce Jesus to a mere man but elevates man to the “savior” status. Copeland is claiming to be a “Christ” or a “messiah”-type figure. That’s a literal fulfillment of Jesus’ warning against false christs.
We are to have nothing to do with such men and such teachings. Their whole goal is to diminish and change the definition of sin, so that they do not have to be held accountable to the Sovereign God who reigns over all, and so they do not have to depend upon Jesus being their Savior. Any time sin is given this treatment, we have a false teaching on the Gospel, the kinds of false teachings that made Paul so mad he wished any who taught such things to “go to Hell.”
We need to stop taking sin lightly, and we need to stop listening to ANY voice that in any way reduces or marginalizes the nature of sin, the weight of sin, and with that, the price of sin. All such teachings are a direct or indirect assault on Christ and the work of the cross. They may proclaim all the doctrines, but it’s clear from their teachings that said doctrines have no weight, and the only thing we are to do with such people is to rebuke them. Otherwise, have nothing to do with them and give them no place for said doctrines. Next week, we’ll recap what sin really is and what it does.
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As I continue this study on sin, I need to continue to showcase what happens when we take what sin is too lightly. It is absolutely clear that sin has consequences, but when sin doesn’t mean what it means, the consequences of sin follow. This is a gospel issue, and any model or idea or theology that takes ANY ASPECT of sin any differently than how the Bible treats it is a heretical position. Last week, I described several different false teachings and how they define sin, but I only scratched the surface of what that means if taken seriously. This week, I’ll showcase the consequences of such ideas.
If sin is just a mistake or imperfection, not the intentional, treasonous defiance against God, then there are several things that must follow through. First, it means there really is no absolute, perfect standard by which man is to be held accountable. This is a strike against the holiness, righteousness, and perfection of God. While there is foolishness that comes as a result of youthfulness and the sinful nature, this is not what is being addressed here. If your mom told you to clean your room and you chose not to do that, you cannot pass that off as a mistake. That is deliberate disobedience. A mistake can be a typo or a calculation error, but it cannot be intentional refusal to do what you need to do, or intentional doing what you are not supposed to do.
This view doesn’t just marginalize what the action is; this also puts the blame on God for making us bad. I hear this all the time from evolutionists: “If God created the universe, He made it bad.” This is a charge that God is an incompetent creator, and it’s the same argument that Adam used to blame Eve for his sin. He blamed God for giving Eve to him to begin with: “God, it’s your fault.” Another variation of this is, “The devil made me do it.” It appeals to the brokenness of the world as being inherent to creation from the start and to require no fault nor responsibility upon man for that which was wrong. This is an inherently severe error of every Old Earth creation model. When any person treats sin as a mere mistake or imperfection, said person is not only deflect blame off self, but they are also, intentionally or unintentionally, blaming God for making them “imperfect.” How arrogant for the pot to make demands of the potter on how he was created! Yet, when one messes with origins, this is one of the conclusions that one will make.
When sin is merely treated as a barrier between you and your blessings, sin simply becomes a mountain to climb or a task to defeat. The real challenge here is that this doctrine partly true. Sin IS a barrier between us and what comes with God. But it is a half-truth, because it makes the “blessings” the primary, not God through whom the blessing comes. In the Prosperity Gospel/Word of Faith circles, the purpose of faith is health, wealth, and prosperity – all things that make life comfortable in the here and now, and all things that are the primary categories of temptation in which this world has to offer, what Eve saw in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and what Jesus was tempted with in the wilderness. Sin is just a barrier between man and these blessings. This makes sin really undefinable, and even more so, it makes the faith a works-based religion. Take notice that when you don’t receive your “miracle;” according to these teachings, it is because YOU lacked enough faith. You didn’t please God enough or give enough or trust God enough. It’s YOUR fault. This is devastating to so many people who have lost loved ones to sickness and disease. This is a result of not taking sin correctly and realizing we all live in a broken world and only Jesus Christ can save it.
Similar to the “mistake” or “imperfection” teachings is the Progressive Christian teachings that recoil at the notion that man is a sinner, a wretch, a worm, evil-minded, rebellious, treasonous, and anything and everything but good. So, to lighten the sting of such descriptions, the Progressives say we might be “misguided” among other things. This again puts the blame on God for the system He set up, rather than acknowledging that man is the problem. While the Old Earth Creationists don’t go as far as to declare it outright, the Progressives actually think that sin never actually separates the bond between God and man, therefore they do not and will not understand the necessity of the cross. They accuse God of “cosmic child abuse” because the Father had the Son go to the cross. They do not understand and refuse to understand the severity of sin. So, because they reject the nature of sin and the due punishment of sin, their solution is the same as the Gnostics: get more knowledge.
There are immoral people who say that sexual immorality is perfectly fine for Christians to engage in. After all, “it’s how God made them.” Therefore, for us to deny them who they were made to be, we are fighting against God. This is blasphemous. God did not make us sinful. We are sinful because we are in Adam and because we have chosen to sin. This again blames God for their choices and seeks to deny responsibility for their lifestyle. Nobody suggests that a thief is a thief by birth, nor suggests a murderer is a murderer by birth, but somehow, we think it is fine to suggest that a sexual pervert is one by birth. It’s “part of their nature.” That’s a direct result of evolutionary teachings, that man is an animal, and we act on instinct rather than morality. But it’s also true: they are “born that way” as having a sinful nature, which is why we need to be born again. This is another reason why we cannot mess around with origins. The Old Earth creationists usually don’t go to this point, but they have let THESE people in the door to the church. I hold them responsible for it. Because according to their position, whether they recognize it or not, they have no argument against this sexual perversion movement because they have rejected God’s account of creation as written.
There were others I addressed last week, but I think we get the point. It doesn’t matter who does it, what angle they use, or what argument they use; any teaching that diminishes the nature of sin also diminishes the weight of sin. By diminishing the weight of sin, there is a denial of the necessity and the work of the cross. Jude tells us there are two primary types of false teachers: those who teach an immoral thing as being moral; and those who deny our Lord Jesus Christ. If we unpack these for all they contain, anyone who teaches ANYTHING that God commands against as being “good” is on this list. Anyone who denies ANY aspect of Christ Jesus, not just who He is but what He did, is on this list that Jude says are false teachers. What does that mean? It means the pastor who says that God created via Evolution or any form of Deep Time is also teaching that death and corruption existed PRIOR to Adam (contradicting Romans 5:12) and thus the problems with this world are on God, not man. That means that man is not responsible for sin, God is, and that means that the cross does nothing, and Jesus’ death meant nothing. This is not a “secondary” issue. That’s just analyzing ONE of these false teachings regarding sin. The rest are pretty obvious, or they should be.
We cannot mess around with sin, because if we do that, we mess around with Christ, and our message and our faith are completely worthless, making us the most pitiful of all men. I’ve mentioned the cross multiple times in this post, and so we need to take this one step further and showcase how these false views of sin and false views of the weight of sin, also produces a false view of the cross and the ultimate day of judgment.
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Wherever God goes to showcase the weight of sin and the price of sin, the enemy comes along to corrupt it and to diminish the weight and the severity of sin. In this post, I’m going to address several of the ways that the doctrine of sin is being diminished in our culture today.
The most common way I have seen sin being diminished in many evangelical churches is to not call “sin” to be rebellious treason against God, but merely “mistakes” or “imperfections.” This notion treats sin as an “oops,” not as treason against a thrice-holy God. This approach does not describe sin as what it is but rather treats it as, “We just aren’t perfect, but we mean well.” It’s a very common trend; the idea is to soften the sting so that people will receive the message without being so readily offended. But this is not the Gospel. Jesus did not come to die because some of us are “imperfect.” He died for something far more serious than that. I brought this up when Hugh Ross took this approach in his One-Minute Gospel presentation. A defender of Hugh Ross told me I was just being petty on definitions, though in another discussion, this same person said that definitions matter in defense of his position. I don’t care if you use the specific words I am using or not; I care about the image and message being given, because God does, too. If we are sloppy with our wording, we are being sloppy with our duty as God’s ambassadors here on earth and that is not something we want to be doing.
The Prosperity Gospel preachers rarely use the word “sin” in any of their messages. Joel Osteen is infamous for never preaching against sin, and he even boasts about not preaching against sin. But anytime he does mention sin, it is never in a Biblical context of violation of God’s commands. Rather, sin is viewed as a mere “blocking of your blessings” that God intends to give you. This is selfishness. It proclaims that God is merely a means to an end – an end to serving self. Sin does not “block you from your blessings” as a primary. That’s only a side effect. The primary issue is much deeper – it separates you from God.
The “Progressive Christian” movement has gone as far as describing the sinful nature as mere “misguidance” and that it may damage our relationship with God but doesn’t actually sever our relationship. Many of these speakers even go on to say that we have inherent “goodness” or “deity” within ourselves. This is a Gnostic teaching resurfacing that teaches that even though we are corrupted, we still have an inherent “divine spark” as part of our being. As a result, sin is reduced to mere moral deeds, but never vertical against God. This is blasphemy because it puts man on the level of God. It is the root of the “little gods” doctrine that we see very frequently among the Word of Faith teachings.
Matthew Vines, who I wrote about several years ago, and many LGBT+ “Christians” attempt to justify sexual sin (namely homosexuality) by making it part of their nature, that they were born that way. This again takes the responsibility off the person for their lusts and puts it on God for making them that way. The severity of this teaching is too much to unpack here, but to put it simply, they are accusing God of being an immoral monster Himself in an attempt to justify themselves. It is all about trying to justify sin while claiming a spot in the Christian community. Jude warns against such people as those who take the grace of God for a license to sin.
A cult name that I did not learn about until very recently is the Sandemanians. While the name will not be familiar to most, the teachings they give should be. When my pastor was alerted to them, he realized how dangerously close my church was to going in that direction. I, too, recognized the symptoms of these teachings in those around me and in myself. The Sandemanians completely disavowed any emotional connection to salvation and the Gospel, and they taught that the whole thing is only intellectual, giving little more than mental ascent. While there MUST be the intellectual aspect, there is a tendency to diminish the weight of sin because it’s merely treated as “theoretical” and “out there,” but when this line of thought is carried out, it diminishes our understanding of the weight of sin. We will not take the issue of sin seriously when it is just intellectual and hypothetical. There has to be an emotional component to this that will make us want to do something about it.
A final one I’ll deal with here is a total denial of sin. This is similar to the one the Progressive Christians used above. In the latter case, the Progressive Christians do acknowledge there is a thing called “sin” and that the world is actually broken. They diminish it, just call it “corruption” or “misguidance,” but they do acknowledge to some degree that it is there. But some people flat out teach that man is good and that people are not broken.
During spring break, I went to the Shepherds’ Conference. When we had time to kill the day we arrived, my group decided to visit the Walk of Hollywood. Unlike the videos I have seen of these very famous blocks, all I could see was total depravity. I saw the idolatry of man and even beyond that, I saw and smelled the decadence of drunkenness, drugs, and all sorts of stores you’d expect in a “red light district.” My spirit was provoked. But in our walk, we passed by two buildings of the Christian Scientologists (the cult that Tom Cruise is part of). A friend of mine began to witness to one of them as they passed out fliers. In the discussion, this young man, who was from Ukraine, shared how every road leads to God, there is no need for “salvation” because people are not broken, etc. His thinking was totally post-modernist. He couldn’t even process the Russian invasion of Ukraine as being evidence of the world being broken. He could not see his sin, let alone general sin.
Let me be clear: man in his sinful, unregenerate self loves sin and despises anyone pointing out that they are wrong. And even for those of who are saved, we all have some of the sinful, old self that simply isn’t dying away anytime soon. Some of you may say, “You don’t know my heart.” My response to that is: “Actually I do know your heart. It’s the same as mine: deceitful, wicked, and hopelessly perverted.” That’s not me speaking; that’s God through the prophet Jeremiah. It is so wicked that only God understands how utterly depraved it is. We don’t understand our own hearts. I don’t have any special insight; I’m only declaring what God said, and He DOES know your heart and it’s not a good report. So, no matter what circle you are in, no one is immune to attempting to diminish and marginalize the weight of sin. And when you mess with the nature of sin as the teachings I exposed here do, you mess with the consequences of sin, and that changes the solution to sin. We’ll explore that more next week.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
