Prophecy Redefined

In episode 215 of Ask Pastor John, Dr. Piper gets to the crux of the cessationist-continuationist debate. In his view, modern prophecy is not “infallible, Scripture-level, authoritative speaking,” but rather “something that God spontaneously brings to mind in the moment, and—because we are fallible in the way we perceive it, and the way we think about it, and the way we speak it—it does not carry that same level of infallible, Scripture-level authority.” He claims three texts of Scripture to provide “exegetical reasons” for his view.

John’s view is also Wayne Grudem’s view, and represents a radical departure from the historic position of the Christian church. More to the point, it is a direct contradiction of 2 Peter 1:21:  “No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” What God gave to His prophets was not diminished one iota by human fallibility. The Holy Spirit so superintended the speaking (and writing) of every single word such that what God wanted to say was spoken, and it was spoken unequivocally. Piper’s and Grudem’s novel view departs from the biblical, historic view of the gift of prophecy and dangerously tampers with divine integrity and authority.

From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible demonstrates four foundational characteristics of true prophecy. First, true prophecy is always verbal, the very words of God. It’s never an impulse or an impression; it’s never a feeling that needs interpretation. Rather, true prophecy is a precise message.   Continue at John MacArthur

The Dead Snake Handler and the Dead Poet’s Society

On February 15, Jamie Coots, pastor of Full Gospel Tabernacle in Middlesboro, Kentucky, and co-star of National Geographic’s reality show Snake Salvation, died from a snakebite to the hand. Christianity Today has the story. It was his ninth bite in twenty years. The previous eight made him very ill. Once he even lost a finger.

Snake handling as a form of worship is practiced by a small number of churches mostly in the rural southeastern United States. It started 100 years ago with an illiterate Pentecostal preacher in Tennessee who interpreted Mark 16:18 as a commandment from God.

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. (Mark 16:18, KJV)

Coots had stated that he viewed this commandment on the same level as the Ten Commandments.    Continue at Jon Bloom

Why Is the Prosperity Gospel Attractive?

“Being poor is a sin” (Robert Tilton).

“If we please God we will be rich” (Jerry Savelle).

“God wants his children to wear the best clothes…drive the best cars and have the best of everything; just ask for what we need” (Kenneth Hagin, Sr.).

These are some bewildering but common statements from “prosperity gospel” preachers. Their god is a sort of cosmic entrepreneur who can be used, by tithing and offering, to attain what really matters: a prosperous life in merely earthly terms.

“FROM SUCH PEOPLE TURN AWAY”

Paul compels us to stay away from “men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth, who suppose that godliness is a means of gain” (1 Tim. 6:5). And in his second letter to Timothy he warns his son in the faith “that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, boasters, proud... lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!” (2 Tim. 3:1-5).   Continue at Sugel Michelén

The Demons of African Pentecostalism

At the end of December the New York Times and Foreign Policy published pieces on African Pentecostalism, deliverance, and the demonic. Co-authoring the Foreign Policy article, Jill Filipovic and Ty McCormick focused on the relationship between Pentecostalism, witchcraft, and traditional African religion in the small country of Malawi. For her part, Tanya Luhrmann offered some observations on the role of demons and deliverance in Ghanaian charismatic churches and attempted to compare it with general observations about evangelicalism derived from her study of the Vineyard Churches. Both articles discuss the role of the demonic among African Pentecostals.

What are we to make of the role of demons in African Pentecostalism?

In Africa the Pentecostal understanding of salvation as deliverance from sin, death, and the devil has become intensified in light of traditional African religion coupled with the influence of British and American charismatic teaching. Traditional African ideas about the spirit world or various gods became Christianized by mapping them onto Christian ideas about the devil and demons. Birgit Meyer has described this as “translating the devil” by which she means the way in which African Pentecostals have re-described the African world of spirits in terms of the Christian world of demons.   Continue at Dale M. Coulter

Do You Know What Your Missionaries Actually Teach?

Stop sending prosperity-preaching missionaries to the jungles of Peru. They’re killing the villages here. Your missionaries are spending tens of thousands of dollars, traveling across land and sea, invading and settling into new cultures, and it’s all for nothing. They’re doing more harm than good.

Your short-term and long-term missionaries are bringing death to Peru in the form of the prosperity gospel and word of faith teachings. Men and women are coming down here and telling these people that they’re poor because of sin and doubt. They’re telling the people to speak positive and claim success and health. These missionaries are telling people that they can be rich and live like the patriarchs of the Bible, blessed by the hand of God because of their faith and unshakable holiness.   Continue at Sean DeMars

 

The Prosperity Gospel and Biblical Theology

Psalm 23 is the most loved passage in the Bible and therefore perhaps the most cherished piece of writing of all time. Its promises and encouragements are so clear that it hardly needs interpretation. At most, Bible teachers have had to remind believers that the shepherd Lord spoken of by the psalm is the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus laid down his life for his sheep and makes it possible for the psalm’s promises to be fulfilled.

However, in the hands of those who teach the Bible for selfish gain, the opening verse promises that no believer should ever want for anything at all: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

On their interpretation, believers have access to the treasures of God, freeing them to have whatever they want. So name it and claim it!

TO GET, GIVE…ESPECIALLY TO THE TEACHER

But these teachers go further. Again misinterpreting Scripture, they explain that this promised abundance requires certain conditions to be realized. God’s abundant sharing is based on the person’s own generous giving, usually to the teacher! And here Scripture after Scripture is used:

Give generously to him [the poor in the land] and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. (Deut. 15:10)

Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine. (Prov. 3:9-10)   Continue at

Cessationism and Strange Fire

Andrew Wilson‘s excellent reponse to the “Strange Fire” conference:

It’s good to face robust challenges to what you believe, every now and then. The more deeply held a belief is, the harder it is to think it through afresh, and the more possibility there is that you will become hardened in a wrong position. To that extent, I’m grateful for John MacArthur and co for putting on “Strange Fire”, an anti-charismatic conference which is nothing if not robust, even if I remain convinced that the tone in which MacArthur in particular has spoken of hundreds of millions of Christians has not been especially helpful. Wrestling with the content of the sessions has been sharpening and illuminating, although admittedly difficult and painful in places.

In this post I want to respond specifically to one of the more measured messages to emerge from the conference: Tom Pennington’s admirably clear case for cessationism.    Continue at Peter Cockrell

Cessationism, Revelation & Prophecy

From Voice, Nov/Dec 2012. Used by permission.

Despite the fact that the majority of conservative evangelical Christians since the Reformation have held to a cessationist position with regard to divine revelation, true cessationists are rapidly disappearing. In the articles and books I have written nothing has evoked as much criticism and anger as my position that God is speaking to His people today exclusively through Scripture. Due to the influence of a multitude of popular authors, theologians and conference speakers, cessationism is barely treading water, even within the most biblically solid churches and organizations.

As a matter of fact, among those who claim to be evangelicals there are five identifiable views prevalent today on the matter of revelation:

Pentecostal/Charismatic/Thirdwave

All miraculous gifts exist today, including the gift of prophecy. God speaks through prophets and to His people both audibly (through dreams, visions, words of knowledge), and inwardly (inaudibly in the mind or heart). Representatives of this position are Jack Deere, John Wimber, the Kansas City Prophets, the Assemblies of God and the Word of Faith movement. Charismatic author Tommy Tenney, in his popular book The God Chasers, writes,

God chasers…are not interested in camping out on some dusty truth known to everyone. They are after the fresh presence of the Almighty… A true God chaser is not happy with just past truth; he must have present truth. God chasers don’t want to just study the moldy pages of what God has done; they are anxious to see what God is doing.¹

Classical Mysticism/Spiritual Formation

 

Through the use of various disciplines and spiritual exercises, God will speak to us both audibly and inaudibly. Dallas Willard and Richard Foster are two such examples. Willard, a leader within the Spiritual Formation Movement, recently updated a previous book renaming it Hearing God, Developing a Conversational Relationship with God. The thrust of his book is that we can live “the kind of life where hearing God is not an uncommon occurrence, [for] hearing God is but one dimension of a richly interactive relationship and obtaining guidance is but one facet of hearing God.”² In other words, the maturing Christian should expect to hear the voice of God on a regular basis, independent from Scripture, and that voice will reveal God’s individual, specific will for his life. Such personal communication from the Lord, we are told, is absolutely essential because without it there can be no intimate walk with God.³ And it is those who are hearing from God today, in this way, who will redefine “Christian spirituality for our time.”⁴

 

Evangelical Mysticism

God is speaking to Christians regularly, mostly inaudibly through inner voices, hunches, promptings, feelings and circumstances (examples: Henry Blackaby and Beth Moore). Southern Baptists ministers Henry and Richard Blackaby wrote Hearing God’s Voice to “teach God’s people not only to recognize his voice but also immediately to obey his voice when they heard it.”⁵ They promise that “as you spend time with Jesus, you will gradually come to recognize his voice more readily than you did at first…You won’t be fooled by other voices because you know your Lord’s voice so well.”⁶ And, once you have figured out when God is speaking to you, “write it down in a journal so you can refer back to it as you follow him.”⁷

In this category could be placed the New Calvinists or Calvinistic Charismatics such as John Piper, Wayne Grudem, Mark Driscoll and C. J. Mahaney. Their followers are sometimes called the young, restless, and Reformed.   Continue at Gary Gilley

Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the Gift of Prophecy

Was Martyn Lloyd-Jones a continuationist?

 

“Although charismatics and Pentecostals have both claimed him as an advocate of their views, a careful reading of ML-J establishes that they have misunderstood him.” So states Dr. Eryl Davies in his Themelios article entitled, Dr D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: An Introduction.

Davies substantiates his statement (in part) by pointing to a section of Lloyd-Jones’s Christian Unity in which the Doctor (as he is often called) elaborates on the nature of New Testament prophecy.

Here’s what Lloyd-Jones said:

A prophet was a person to whom truth was imparted by the Holy Spirit.  . . .  A revelation or message or some insight into truth came to them, and, filled with the Spirit, they were able to make utterances which were of benefit and profit to the Church. Surely it is clear that this again was temporary, and for this good reason, that in those early days of the Church there were no New Testament Scriptures, the Truth had not yet been expounded in written words. 

Try to imagine our position if we did not possess these New Testament Epistles, but the Old Testament only. That was the position of the early Church. Truth was imparted to it primarily by the teaching and preaching of the apostles, but that was supplemented by the teaching of the prophets to whom truth was given and also the ability to speak it with clarity and power in the demonstration and authority of the Spirit.

But once these New Testament documents were written the office of a prophet was no longer necessary. Hence in the Pastoral Epistles which apply to a later stage in the history of the Church, when things had become more settled and fixed, there is no mention of the prophets. It is clear that even by then the office of the prophet was no longer necessary, and the call was for teachers and pastors and others to expound the Scriptures and to convey the knowledge of the truth.    Continue at Nathan Busenitz

Suing the Spirit?

The Holy Spirit gets blamed for a lot of bizarre human behavior within the broader Pentecostal and Charismatic movements — barking, jumping, dipping, rolling, laughing, and of course, falling over during church services.

I was reminded of that sad reality recently when I came across this article from ABC News, explaining that a charismatic church was being sued because a bystander got hurt when a church member was slain in the Spirit.

Here’s how that article began:

A parishioner at the Disciple Fellowship Christian Church in East St. Louis, Ill., claims the spirit moved another worshiper so much during service that she caused others to tumble over backwards into her, causing injuries. Now she’s suing the church for damages.

The report goes on to explain that, because of the spiritual nature of “being touched” by the Holy Spirit, lawyers are going to have a tough time proving negligence on the part of the slain church member. Yet, the plaintiff is undeterred. She wants the church to pay for her medical bills. 

Of course, if this church had not promoted such an unbiblical practice in the first place, all of this nonsense would have simply been avoided.

So, what are we to think about being slain in the Spirit? Since ABC News brought the practice to my attention this week, I thought it might be helpful to share a few thoughts.  Continue at Nathan Busenitz

Clarification and Warning (John MacArthur)

HT: Reformed Voices