Ravi Zacharias: Fallen Hero?

Ravi Zacharias, the famous apologist, died recently.

He was world famous, at least in Christian circles.

But since his death allegations of sexual impropriety have emerged.

This has caused panic in some of his followers. Should they reject everything he said?

Now I don't know if he is  guilty of these charges or not . But I would not be surprised if he were. However I do not know and the question of  His guilt or innocent is not my purpose here 

John 4:42 is i think the best answer for the question of what to do if you follow a fallen preacher. Or even, I submit if your hero was not fallen

I invite you to look it up.

It is the story of Jesus at the well where he met the Samaritan woman. After this encounter she told her friends and they, the women of Sychar said to her, "it is not because of what you said that we believe Him. we now believe because WE HAVE HEARD FOR OURSELVES"

Have you heard from Ravi Z or others? Good!!

Have you moved from them to the Holy Spirit of Christ and heard from Him FOR YOURSELVES? This is after all what a living relationship with Christ is . Without this we are idolators and our allegiance is to the preacher/teacher/apologist not to Christ 40 years ago when a new convert I idolized Francis Schaeffer and C S Lewis. And despair resulted It was no less than a one on one dialogue in personal relationship direct with the Holy Spirit who talked me out of my madness. I must add that my despair, from unbedlief, legalism fear, trust in men and pride did drive me mad. This recovery was by means of repentance of sin led by the Spirit as part of this conversation. He is after all Wonderful Counselor and receiving His one on one counsel direct is my testimony. I never could persuade myself, but He can and does if you let him. This is what grace is. Grace is not the magical power that we presume has come when we "have faith"''

But part of this dialogue is to be persuaded to honestly admit our own real but heretical belief, namely what we really believe rather than the doctrines we have committed oursevles to, for commitment to doctrines is not thesame as believing them

This too is my testimony

So to me it really does not matter if Ravi were fallen in adultery or not. it might impact his salvation but not mine.

My own thoughts on Zacharias are that he was a highly intelligent mind who never met a question he was stumped by.

His manner never indicated that he had ever been knocked to speechlessness by the tremendous mystery of God Almighty, for it is written, though apologists do not show that they believe this, that His thoughts are not ours. This is so for He is high and holy and we are carnal minded, finite, and sinners.

The Bible also says let he who would be wise become a fool. (I Cor 3:18) This is not to embrace folly, but it is to admit that as carnal minded people we already are fools. It is only when the Holy Spirit has led us to honstly realize this that, and only then, are we really teachable.

I never saw any sign that Ravi Zacharias ever came to the Lord as a child, or was ever convicted of the sins of intellectual pride.

And believe me, as an intellectual myelf, I am well aware of sins of intellectual pride, for it is also written Knowlege puffs up but love edifies.

Oh, a proud man can be polished and elegant, even polite, but this does not indicate loving as Christ does.

This is why i would not be surprised if he were guilty of these sexual sins he is accused of, for such pride as i see in him or even all of us show we are backslidden so not immune to any temptation.

But of course accusations are never enough.

I do know that if i were rash enough to put myself out as a teacher of the Word sexual temptation would be my vulnerable point. I do know that I have such idolatry in me (lust is covetous therefore is idolatry) therefore I am not spiritually qualified to preach or teach in any kind of serious ministry.

For Ravi Zacharias' sake I hope he is saved. But his fate does not impact mine. I hope his followers and admirers actually have found Christ as a person known in one on one relationship. I say this as anything less is to reduce the gospel of Christ to an ideology. Moreover reducing the gospel to an ideology is a serious error and those who live in a mere ideology are as lost as they ever were beforehand

Covid-19 and the politicization of science

This lady says it all.

There never was any good faith behind the covid lockdowns.

The "science" was junk and has been proven so time and time again.

In a culture so debased that science is deemed to be the infallible pronouncements of men in white coats  to be followed by all the rest of us, taken  as  pig ignorant yokels  by theself styled cognoscenti  it stands to reason that in its debasement it has become politicized,

time and time again the Left has simply got it wrong, from the Y2K panic to global warming, and now to the mindless hysterias of panic over a virus that only kills those with pre existing conditions.'

I am no friend of the right but the left has simply thrown away even the pretense of sense. I dont like it but this is the way it is.

After all where is the sense in claiming that covid is deadly then agreeing with so called
Black Lives Matter protests where thousands cram into streets, shoulder to shoulder to rant scream, and loot?

If we bend over and simply take the pronouncements  of those who demonize debate we have rejected science, for debate whereby arguments are won with evidence data and repeatable demonstration is the very essence of science

I knew before the lockdown that covid 19 was a minor thing, that more people die of the flu most years, that there were worse outbreaks, as in 1968 and the Sars outbreak of 2003, and all the evidence i got, not of course from  politicized mouthpieces of power, the main stream media,  has proven me right.

we are not a scientific culture for all our achievements.

we are a deeply religious one, but the religion is in part the cult of scientism.

And if we do not learn to distinguish science from scientism we deserve all the calamity that our ignorance will  lead us to

On therapy, conversion or otherwise, briefly

What is the solution to "feelings" one does not like? to admit them to be sin before a holy but loving God and then be led to repent of them. but this requires what most do not have, a real personal relationship with God. I am against therapy and conversion is a work of the Holy Spirit if it is worth anything. So i reject "conversion therapy" outright.

Conversion therapy in this instance is the notion that a homosexual can be led by another person to "convert" to Jesus Christ whereby their homosexual inclination ceases to exist.

When the gay communities complains that the person subjected to such is being forced to ilive a lie and repress their own nature I can only agree with them.

For the Holy Spirit is not a domestic pet who can be ordered to perform when we ask for it. There are sins in my life that have stubbornly resisted all efforts of mine to move them. The effort has only stirred them up and inflamed them, as St Paul said in the 7th chapter ofhis letter to the Romans.

As an aside I believeI can account for this difficulty but i regard it as beyond thescopre of this post

To continue, then. We repent led by the grace of God - ie his direct and merciful personal intervention - under the New Covenant or we perish

and He acts in His own sovereign timing. This cannot be jollied along by some therapist, even by my own will power. Indeed such blundering interferance by the will of the flesh will delay the Lord's work and complicate the matter of sin in our lives, regardless of what sin it is, enormously I say we for it it does not matter what the ungodly feeling is. for me it is despair and hetero lust. no one has the right to probe as deeply into a person's soul as all therapists presume to do because no one has the ability to do sot without wreaking utter havoc. No one that is but the Holy Spirit ALL therapists usurp the prerogative of God Himself for only God can heal the soul, for sin and sin alone is the affliction that troubles the soul this is my testimony. i repented of the sins that comprise what they called "schizophrenia" and have had no dealings with psychiatrists or other therapists for over 30 years. you do the math.

Other sins I still await the mercy of God to have me repent of in the manner whereby the repentance means \nything at all and the sin is gone.

For this is newness of life. Not total perfection, of course, for he who claims it is a liar as scripture says,

but a progressionh from glory to glory as theApostle put it

I do not reject "Conversion therapyfor the chief reason the gay community say so, namely that such is not a sin. Homosexuality is a sin andi cwill change thisfor no man.

But it is presumkptuous as it usurps the prerogative of the HolySpirit and will likely destroy the faith of the gay person subjected to this bullying as well as the bully who does it,.

and of r such bullying the Holy and Terrible will demand a high price.

Such a notion also misunderstands conversion. conversion, which Evangelicals have always idolized, itnot the end, buytthebarfest beginning. on conversoin we immediately become carnal christians.

None of us were so wise and humble as to repent all atonce of all our sins on conversion.

Such a work is the nature of sanctification which God leads us to as a process, and before those who claim that my invoking a process implies I i am invoking works salvatokini will say it is a process of His grace

His continuing Grace.

Let us not get too excited

yes, a literal genesis is crucial to the logic of the christian faith. without it IMO the whole thing crumbles. but i know Christians of good faith who do not think so. we agree to differ.

But even if i and the rest of the Young Earth Creationists are right about this let us not get too excited about it. After all the Pharisees did believe in the literal genesis also. This can be see by how Jesus argued with them.

However they were pharisees, they were legalists and we are told that our righteousness must be greater than theirs to enter the Kingdom.

Believing that God exists is not enough, for James said that even Satan believes that God exists ,and trembles

True, let us establish the logical basis of faith in a literal genesis, then move on. if we get over excited about this we become pharisees and even worse polemicists who use Genesis as a stick to beat evolutionists with - and i have seen this done, not only repeatedly but with monotonous regularity from sites who trumpet their conservative biblical credentials and then ignore what scripture says about conduct in defending the faith.

what i am saying is that though i hold this matter to be essential, others who I firmly hold to be christians do not, and even ifit is essential it is not sufficient, and the arrogance and combativeness of too many creationists shows that they really do think that Young Earth Creationism it is sufficient. when it is no such thing

Last time Ilooked it was faith in Jesus Christ which saved us, not rigid stance on the Age of the Earth

Very Briefly on the US riots

To distill down to something as brief as an aphorism as regards the riots over the death of George Floyd

Those who care will seek a reason to protest

But those who hate will only  grab the flimsiest of excuses  to riot

Once Saved Always Saved??

 

Some say that eternal security  means that  "Once Saved Always Saved" or OSAS for short  is true for that is what  eternal security is. I contend and hope to demonstrate that on the contrary  OSAS is a counterfeit based on a doctrinal plank rather than a relationship with a Person.  The difference between a doctrinal plank and a relationship, any doctrinal plank, mark you, I contend to be absolutely crucial. It determines whether one is being led by the Holy Spirit or not.  As for the issue at hand, look at Hebrews 6:4-8. It warns that those who have been enlightened (can any but the born again be enlightened?), if they fall away cannot be renewed to repentance, thus there is a dire warning that if even the Born Again wander too far away from the Person who is Christ, known through His Holy Spirit  they will be lost.



As for the tree bearing  no fruit which is cut out and burned Jesus said ABIDE IN ME. Who was he saying that to?  Not to us? OF course he was saying it to his disciples, ALL of us.  He said it to us. THIS IS THE CONTEXT.  However  this abiding is not hard for his yoke is easy his burden is light and his commandments are not  burdensome. Trying to abide in him by forced works of legalism is to fall away from him, for Paul rebuked the Galatians, the oh, so devout and serious Galatians as having forsaken Christ for the Law.  Thus I hope to make it clear that denying Once Saved Always Saved is not to advocate legalism, rather it is to. highlight the deadly nature of legalism 

Staying with Christ (abiding in him) is not the same thing as believing a doctrine. It is a relationship, and the depth and reality of it  shows by our fruit, so if we know and love the lord we will show good fruit. After all  it says in I John, "how can you love God who you have not seen when you do not love your brother who you do see"  and  "he who says he loves God but loves not his brother is a liar"

 And if our relationship does not matter (that is what you are saying when you say fruit does not matter and that is what you are saying when you assert OSAS because you reduce faith to mere assent to a doctrine), why are we constantly warned to quench not the Spirit? Why does scripture say TO CHRISTIANS ( read Hebrews  a letter addressed to Jewish Christians who were in danger of falling away back to the Law) "TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE HARDEN NOT YOUR HEART"?  And why did Paul call the Galatians FOOLS because they had forsaken  Christ for the Law? If Once Saved Always Saved is true and fruit have no bearing on our relationship with God, their legalism simply did not matter, so again I ask why did Paul the Apostle rebuke them.

The need for fruit does not require forced works to earn anything, but they do show that we have continued to receive the Free gifts that the Spirit bestows to those who abide in , or in modern terms stayed with,   Him

I recently heard a christian, the late Dave Hunt refute OSAS . To him i would say

If Hebrews 6:4ff does not mean a believer can fall away to be damned what does the burning of verse 8 mean? after all such a person has tasted of the heavenly gift has been enlightened and been a partaker of the Spirit. So they MUST have been born again. But then what is the burning if they fall away to such a degree that repentance is impossible ? Purgatory? if he thinks that staying a christian, if Once Save Always Saved is false, is a work he could boast about (whereby he rejects any denial of OSAS) , why should his becoming a christian, of his own free choice not be a work to boast of either? if he chose because he could then perhaps he should boast of it i could not choose. i still cant- except the lord persuade me to change my mind on any matter, one step at a time, and i repent. Nothing to boast of here.

My will is free for i am responsible, but as i sinner my will is busily choosing evil because i am evil. The solution is that my Wonderful Counsellor speak to me one on one and persuade me to change my mind.

This is living experiential one on one personal relationship; and everything in the Christian life comes down to this. It is in fact the sine qua non

If I refuse this, if I refuse to have it out with the Lord the Spirit, my Counsellor and Healer and therefore harden my heart to his voice them i will eventually fall away to be lost, and this because there is no purgatory so the burning of Hebrews 6:8 speaks of hell and nothing else.

This is a warning not a threat. The solution is to cry out to the Lord in prayer and to hear from him direct, by His Spirit

OSAS is false OSAS is dangerous, because it offers a false security, that of a doctrinal plank and not a personal relationship. go to Christ the living person - as opposed to the doctrinal plank - and stay with Him, chiefly in prayer. Did MR Hunt not know the difference between these two?

I submit that the difference between faith and presumption is relationship with Christ. Without it my assurance that I am saved, if I have any, and many do not) is presumption.

Stay with Christ. Stay with him today as long as it is today, and by doing so you are resting in the true eternal security, which is a direct personal relationship with Christ Himself by His Spirit

"Climate Change" is junk science 1

There is an enormous bulk of rational scientific refutations of the theory that global warming is caused by man, and that CO2 is the control knob for the climate

In fact there is so much information out there that the warmists, who refuse to even look at it, can only show their intrinsic dishonesty.

They would tax you back to the stone age, have you die of cold in the winters  because they boast that energy prices will and should go sky high. and they think that reducing CO2 emissions  to zero would have any more effect than to reduce  the temperature by .001 of a degree

But then i hold the greens to be agrarian fantasists who never cared to understand that life in agrarian economies was usually nasty brutish and short. and in politics any fantasist is a dangerous fanatic

This  is merely  one of the many videos i have seen on this matter.

CO is plant food. To call it a pollutant only shows gross ignorance of basic science


https://youtu.be/GXBBNcAvCsU.

but my case, though i am gratified to know that science properly done confirms my case, was not based on science.

I am a history buff,

I knew from my own reading that there was a medieval warm period which was warmer than  today.

Greenland was called green because it was when discovered by Viking explorers, .and they settled the place for several centuries, but it was abandoned when the little ice age which was at its deepest in 1700 made  settlement there impossible.

in fact they grew barley there. in a land where the settlement is now under permafrost.

Ergo the world was warmer then than now.

Why, I ask, did Michael Mann and his ilk have to tell lies about human history which is attested to by written records?

The lie was to remove the Medieval warm period from  history, to ignore the Little ice age in order to get the flat line required for  allegedly dramatic temperature rise required the hockey stick.

I hold this against them. I reject their claims and can do so for this alone. they are liars

there is so much more to write.

They used to call it global warming until the globe stopped  warming. Then they changed to name to "Climate Change". This is a deceitful trick, for climate always changes, and Man's influence on it is negligible.

But falsifying of the past is the arsenal of the warmists and their data tampering.

Tony Heller, also on youtube  has pointed out that the 1930's were hotter than now, and that the trend  is that  days over 100 degrees F is in fact declining. no one has dropped dead in a heat wave this year. but they did by the hundreds  back in the 1930's

On sin, spiritual warfare and Pilgrims Progress

I wrote the following  in reply to a post about sin, spiritual warfare and Pilgrims Progress, a work i now reject as heresy.

But i disagreed strongly with the author of the post as I do with John Bunyan

Here it is

I have been a christian now for 40 years and have never experienced Satan.All those filthy thoughts that filled my head when i was trying to pray were ME. And all those things that went bump in the night were my superstition

As I acknowledge this and realize i would rather fantasize lustfully (nuff said) than pray, well I repented of it. No demons involved.

and as prayer is a conversation not a monologue prayer has been no problem when the Being Who answers me back in one on one conversation is wise wonderful and above all, HOLY.

As I am in fact protected by the power of God, some thing those who obsess about being afflicted by Satan will deny, even to my face, I have not encountered Satan.
And why?

Firstly i doubt any of us could last more than 5 seconds in the presence of the Usurper. And secondly, and most importantly, God will not allow any of us the excuse that "The Devil made me do it." and the Bible says we are tempted by our own lust. no demons required

Let none of us think that we are so mature in Christ as to be qualified to go out and battle real demons. There are cranks who will battle the imaginary, and as an ex charismatic i know that type well. But we are mewling and puking babes not fit for real spiritual warfare. let us look at our fruit and see this is so .

Also, to overdo the seriousness of sin - yes it can be overdone, is to make obedience a huge and terrifying ordeal. this is to forsake Christ for the Law, something i did.

As for Pilgrim's Progress, someone wrote that puritans were inveterate self dramatizers, That book is full of it. it is also riddled with Pelagian heresy, endless invocations to willpower. This is the very essence of the sin of legalism

and the cruellest thing in the book is the dictum, the bitter must come before the sweet,

so I forsook the sweet with which Christ introduced Himself to me and lived in bitterness for nearly 40 years.

legalism is the MOST dangerous of all the heresies for it masquerades as the holiest and most perfect obedience. But it is in fact backsliding if not outright apostasy

and it destroys people, either through smug self satisfaction or, for those with consciences, utter despair