NKJVers suffer heart problem

In Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary, the word “peddle” is defined, 1. To travel about the country and retail goods. He peddles for a living. PED'DLE, verb transitive To sell or retail, usually by traveling about the country.

Yesterday, in a sermon about “bible agnostics” who prefer the New King James Version over the King James Bible and see both bibles as equally good translations of the same bible texts, Jordan reminded the congregation about how the NJKV changes the word “corrupt” in II Corinthians 2:17 to the word “peddle.”

The King James Bible reads, “For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ.”

The NKJV, as wells as the New International Version and the New American Standard Bible, reads, “For we are not, as so many, PEDDLING the word of God..."

Isn’t it ironic that the word “peddle,” not a negative word, means to hawk or sell for a profit (think of the Yankee Peddler), which is precisely the intent behind the “modern version” of the KJB. The marketing idea was and is, “Make it newer and they will buy anew.”

******

A January, 2007 issue of the Berean Searchlight, a publication of the Berean Bible Society, Germantown, Wis., emphasizes in italics this passage from a reprinted old article by Bible scholar C.R. Stam:

“Sinaiticus and Vaticanus have by now been thoroughly exposed as two of the most corrupt manuscripts in existence.”

Now the last time I checked, the Berean Bible Society supports ministries of various men (including Pastor Dennis Kiszonas in New York City) who not only preach and teach out of corrupt modern bible versions (derived from Sinaiticus and Vaticanus), but encourage their flock not to be “duped” into a “King James Only” mentality.

I actually attended Kiszonas’ Brooklyn congregation for a brief period in 2003 but was quickly turned off by his preferred usage of the New King James Version.

I also attended a women’s bible study at the church in which versions being read from around the table included the King James, the New King James, the New International Version and the Life Application Bible.

One of the things that really struck me is that when Kiszonas gave an introductory study on dispensationalism in a Saturday class he purposely got out his King James Bible to read this very famous verse:  “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (II Tim. 2:15)

Of course, no other version outside of the King James uses the word “study.” The New King James says, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

The New International verse reads, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.”

*****

In expressing my concern to Kiszonas over his endorsement of corrupt Bibles, he told me the King James Bible had mistakes in it that related even to a person’s salvation and pointed me to I Cor. 9:27. In this verse, Paul writes, “But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”

Kiszonas argued that the “incorrect” usage of the word “castaway” made the verse say a person could be damned, losing their salvation. In the New King James, the verse reads, “But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.”

As Jordan explains, “If you’re knee-high to a grasshopper to an old codger, you know what a castaway is because you’re familiar with the seven stranded castaways there on Gilligan’s Isle. A castaway is someone who is still alive; they’re not dead, they’re not lost—they’ve simply made ‘shipwreck of the faith.’ (I Tim. 1:19)

“When you make ‘shipwreck of the faith’ you can either be drowned, as in I Tim. 6:9 where some people were caught in snares, or you can be shipwrecked.

 

"That is, you’ll be like the Captain, Gilligan, Ginger, Maryanne, the professor and Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III and all that business. You can still be alive but you’re just stranded out there, out of commission and useless—out of circulation. Of no value to anyone in life.

*****

“People talk about how, ‘Well, the King James Bible is hard to understand.’ Aghh, it’s not hard to understand! People find it hard to understand because they don’t want to understand it. They’ve got some ulterior motive where they want to do something else.”

"By Paul’s reference to 'nor by letter as from us,' we know there were people sending bogus epistles to the Thessalonians pretending they came from Paul.

“That’s how you corrupt the Bible. You produce versions and texts that claim to be the Word of God and aren’t. If you insert into the Bible, what did you do? You corrupted it.”

*****

Kiszonas, by his own admission, follows a neo-orthodoxy-style line of reasoning that says it’s the message that matters, not the exact words on the page.

Jordan says, “Do you understand you can call the Bible the Word of God but what’s the Word made up of? Words. And when you say words, you’re talking about the individual words on the page that make up the message.

“So there’s more than just the message; it’s the means of communicating the message. The words. John 12:48 says, ‘He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.’

“Notice the contrast? The word; that’s the Book with all of them in it. That’s the singular thing: ‘Here’s the Word of God.’ But what’s the Word of God made of? Words.

“So when we’re talking about what doesn’t pass away (Jesus Christ says in Matt. 24:35, ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’), it isn’t simply enough to say the message doesn’t pass away.

“After the Millennial Kingdom, the earth is going to be dissolved and done away and reconstituted but ‘my words shall not pass away.’ That’s a great verse on what we call the ‘preservation of the Bible.’ You see it doesn’t say my word singular, it says my words plural?

“What is generally assumed (by theologians) is that what Christ’s saying is, ‘The message I’m preaching—the truth I’m proclaiming—won’t pass away.’ These are the people who believe that that’s what preservation of the Word of God is; it’s that the message God proclaims, and the Good News God preaches, won’t ever pass away.

“If it said my word singular you might have a case, but when it says my words plural, that’s more than the message; those are the vehicles communicating the message.

*****

Jordan continues, “There’s a lot of different ways to understand inspiration. One of the popular ways in the last century is what’s called neo-orthodoxy. It used to be you had the modernists who believed the Bible was full of errors and was never right, and then you had the fundamentalists who believed it was the inerrant Word of God.

“Then, in the late 1800s-early 1900s, the fundamentalists got fighting with the modernists and made a big mistake: They abandoned the statement of faith that had carried the Protestant church for 400 years; they abandoned the issue of preservation and went to a doctrinal statement that said something like this—‘The Word of God is inerrant and infallible in the original manuscripts.’

“Now, if you don’t have the original manuscripts, which you don’t, and that’s the only place you believe the Bible’s inerrant, so what? If that inerrancy doesn’t exist anymore, why would you argue about it?

“And it’s interesting, because the fundamentalists (the modernists mocked them, calling them ‘funnymentalists’), in order to avoid the stigma of being less ‘intelligized’ than the elitists, they made a couple of real concessions that have frankly been the downfall and ruin of fundamentalism.

“One of them is this idea, ‘Well, it’s only in the originals.’ So, I don’t know why anybody would want to argue about the point if that’s all there was. Just concede it and go on because what you have now isn’t the original, so you’re acknowledging that it’s impossible to have the Word of God in its inerrancy today.

“If you believe it isn’t inerrant and has errors in it, who cares what you believe about one you don’t have? So, what the fundamentalists did is they maintained an orthodox statement, but in practice weren’t any different than the Catholics and the modernists and so forth.”

*****

What should be common knowledge anymore, especially with books like Gail Riplinger’s exhaustive expose in 1993, New Age Bible Versions, is that the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts used for the modern versions represent the corrupted copies of the Bible known as the Alexandrian Manuscripts.

Riplinger writes, “The Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Old Testament, is used today by textual critics, in many instances, to determine the wording of new versions. It appears that Origen was the author of this A.D. document. The NIV translators admit they use the O.T. text which was ‘standardized early in the third century by Origen. . .

“Origen has provided through his Septuagint Old Testament and New Testament documents, a vehicle for the propagation of the ‘East meets West’ religion for the ‘New’ Age. . . This corrupt ‘tree of knowledge’ is rooted in Platonism and branched out to reach Philo, then Clement and finally Origen. Its twisted branches cast a century’s long shadow over today’s new versions and ‘New’ Age Movement.”

As an article posted to the website Chick.com (entitled “Where Did the King James Bible Come From?” and adapted from the book Let’s Weigh the Evidence by Barry Burton) accurately reports, “The Sinaiticus is a manuscript that was found in 1844 in a trash pile in St.Catherine’s Monastery near Mt. Sinai, by a man named Tischendorf. It contains nearly all of the New Testament plus it adds the ‘Shepherd of Hermes’ and the ‘Epistle of Barnabas’ to the New Testament.

“The Sinaiticus is extremely unreliable, proven by examining the manuscript itself. John Burgeon spent years examining every available manuscript of the New Testament. He writes about the Sinaiticus:

“ ‘On many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40 words are dropped through carelessness. Letters, words or even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled; while that gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.’ ”

*****

Acts 8:37, which reads, “And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God,” is purposely left out of every modern bible translation on the market today.

As Jordan says, “They either leave it out completely or they put it in brackets, meaning they don’t think it ought to be there but they don’t have the courage of their convictions, so they put it in with brackets around it just to make sure you know they don’t think it ought to really be there! The verse is attacked simply on the basis of the fact that the faith of the man (in the passage) was generated by a copy of Scripture; he was reading a copy of the book of Isaiah.”

*****

In Acts 8, there are actually two different instances of a copy of Isaiah being used.

“Go to Acts 8:26 and you see this bird’s got another copy of Isaiah,” says Jordan. “What’d he do, go up to Nazareth and steal one from up there?! You know better than that; he had his own copy of the thing. That’s at least two copies. There’s one in Nazareth and then this guy’s got one.”

From verse 29, we even see that the Holy Spirit, talking about a copy of Isaiah, calls it Scripture.

Jordan says, “Obviously the accuracy and authority of the Bible extends far past the originals but goes into generations of copies. Christ could hold it and call it Scripture.

“When Jesus said, ‘It is written that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” that expression ‘it is written,’ if you want to learn something from the Greek language, that’s in the perfect tense, which is a tense that means it’s accomplished in the past but the results continue on into the present. He’s saying, ‘It stands written right this minute! What God wrote down in the past continues to exist into the very present!’

*****

II Timothy 3:15 reads, “And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

The word holy means “set apart”; in other words, the Scriptures God has set apart for Himself. Obviously, Timothy knew them by a copy of the Bible!

Jordan says, “God says in Psalm 60 that ‘these are the words I have spoken in my holiness.’ That’s why you call it a Holy Bible! They’re the holy words of God and these Scriptures God has set apart for Himself!

When II Timothy 3:16 says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God,” we know simply by the context it’s a reference to copies and not the original manuscripts.

Jordan reasons, “That’s a rough verse, folks, if you’ve got an unscriptural definition of inspiration or preservation! You can’t believe what that verse says! If you believe inspiration is just what happens to the writer when he writes some things down, and you don’t understand that inspiration has to do with the w-o-r-d-s God puts on a page . . .that’s the whole issue in inspiration, isn’t it?!

“The scholars and all the commentaries say the Septuagint (the corrupt translation used for the modern versions) is written in 250 A.D. and that Christ, Peter, Philip, Paul and Timothy—that everybody was not using a Hebrew Bible; they were using a Greek translation. So, if that’s true, that makes (II Tim. 3) even worse because there you’ve got a translation called Scripture! And they get mad at you if you say you believe your English translation is inspired!

“There, by their own standards, they have Paul saying that Timothy’s Greek translation is inspired! See, if a fellow will tell you he believes that’s a Septuagint, then you’ve really got him over a barrel! The Septuagint is a hoax and not a reliable thing to trust in, but if a man thought it was, you’d really have him!

*****

All down through the ages, religious-types have wanted people to believe that unless they can read and understand Greek they can’t study the Bible. Theology schools have routinely taught this same hooey.

“The idea is if I can read it and you can’t, but you really want to know what it says, where do you have to go? You have to come to me, don'tcha?” says Jordan. “Isn’t that what Rome’s been saying for 1,500 years? So, it’s really just another sneaky Protestant popery idea but it isn’t what the Scripture gives you to understand.

“When Moses wrote down Exodus 5:1 in Hebrew, reporting, ‘I told Pharaoh to let my people go,’ you know he said that in Egyptian even though he wrote it in Hebrew, so you call that a translation.

“From these types of passages, I know you can translate from one language to another and it still be God’s Word. Now, that’s considered heresy if you say it that way, but I’m saying it that way because I’m reading a verse (that proves it)!

“So my faith isn’t in the ability to understand the language limitations and the linguistic techniques of making the transfer. I understand the difficulty of all that. I’ve studied Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish. I studied Latin.

“I freely confess I’m not a linguist, but I am familiar with some of what it takes to transfer from one language to another—the difficulties and so forth of all that. But I can also read my Bible, and my Bible tells me that when something is properly translated from one language to another, God considers it still His Word.”

*****

As Psalm 12:6-7 verifies, “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.”

Jordan explains, “If it’s pure it means it’s clean; it doesn’t have mistakes, doesn’t have errors, doesn’t have deficiencies in it.

“Not only did He make them and give them pure, clean, right, true and sure but then He says, ‘I’m going to preserve them.’ You see it isn’t enough to say, ‘God wrote a book over there and we’re over here.’ I need it now! So, God didn’t just write His Book and forget about it. He preserved that word so that you can have in your hands a final authority that you can depend on because it’s God’s Word.

“If God says His Word is perfect (Psalm 19:7) and He’s going to preserve it, what does He have to preserve it as? He’s got to preserve it as perfect. Because when He’s preserved it, if it isn’t what He started out with, then it isn’t the same thing!

“It can’t be almost perfect, almost pure, almost sure, almost clean. . .  It either is or it isn’t. If you believe in an ‘almost bible’ then you can only almost trust in it. And you’re in trouble because you don’t have an absolute, final authority.”

“God’s design is to preserve His Word through a multiplicity of accurate, reliable copies that are available to all Believers and which are as authoritative as the originals. Therefore, you don’t have to go out and restore the original manuscripts; you don’t need the textual critics and their philosophy—their human viewpoint—of restoration.”

*****

Here’s a great passage from grace preacher D. Kuepper, taken from a study he gave at Shorewood Bible Church’s 1999 summer conference:

“What people do today, and what they’ll do in the last days of prophecy, is express ridicule and mockery in a language of contempt. Notice as we saw in II Timothy, though, it’s done in the midst of a ‘form of godliness.’ In the form of religion.

“Religious people will be the most guilty as to what’s happening here. And that’s why as we look at the perils of the times of the last days described in II Timothy 3, we need to remember that the Apostle Paul’s inspired words—you notice they don’t refer to economic problems, or riots, or war or even natural disasters?

“As we look at this passage dealing with the last days of the mystery—literally our last days of the Body of Christ as we wait for the Rapture—the real peril here is not inflation, it’s not depression, it’s not a third world war, it’s not an earthquake or hurricane…the real peril lies in the heart  of man.”

Borders, language, culture

Jordan explains, “You ever heard anybody talk about the ‘mark of Cain’? That’s supposed to be where black people came from? That’s about as stupid as it can get because if that’s where it came from, how did they get through the Flood? The ‘mark of Cain’ wasn’t a skin color anyway.

“People say the black race was the curse on Ham? Did you ever notice in Genesis 9 that God didn’t curse Ham? That’s another non-starter. But obviously in Genesis 10 there is Shem, Ham and Japeth as descendants and they have different ethnic identities to them.

“By the way, when God changes people’s skin color and He wants to curse them, you know what color He changes them to? White. Absolutely. When Miriam rebels against Moses what did God do? He smote her with leprosy? What color is that? White.

“Adam wasn’t white or black; he was reddish brown, made out of the clay in Palestine.

*****

“My own personal guesswork is that the physical ethnic qualities of humans took place at Babel.

“But if you’re going to go out from Babel and produce a nation, first you’d have to find everybody who can speak the same language. And then you notice they kind of begin to look a little bit alike.

“These people hook up and it takes time. It took Peleg 30 years before he had a kid. He was slow getting started but then he lived 239 years. Over that period of time, there was a division in the earth that took place. But that would be more than just the language or ethnic change.

“The idea is often put forward that the Genesis 11 passage wasn’t just when God divided the languages but that this is where the continental drift comes in and there’s a lot of speculation about the continental drift. Now, I don’t know that that’s what it is or not.

“If there was, for 239 years the one earth had to divide up into where it is, which means it would have had to move about 10-12 miles a year. People argue the science about that; I don’t know.

“I know in the text it tends to say there was something that happened one day, boom, and the earth is divided. We’re going to discuss in Amos about the earthquakes and when we do, I’ll have to remember to come back and show you these things.

*****

“Many people say the change in the topography of the earth all took place AT the Flood. If you’re going to believe in continental drift, though, you’re going to have to say it took place about 250 years after the Flood and the time of Peleg.

“But the idea there is that when God divides it, He divides it out into distinct geographic areas. Deuteronomy says He divided men their inheritance when He divided up their name.  My point is, the continental configuration of the way the planet looks today is designed to facilitate this issue.

“By the way, if Peleg lived 239 years, he lived within a decade or two of the time of the birth of Abraham. So when Abraham is born, this stuff is freshly happening.

“Sometimes we think of that stuff as thousands of years and Abraham just showed up, but that’s not what happened. This stuff is in the mix and the nations have rejected God, defied Him. He separated them out to compartmentalize the violence that came from rejecting Him.

“Then He chose one man out who was one of them, an Assyrian ready to perish; an idol-worshipper who believed God, and He made of him a great nation.

******

“At the time of the judgment of Babel and the confusion of the languages, God came in and miraculously, supernaturally, scrambled their brain like eggs.

“Many of you people who speak 3-4 different languages know that you think differently in each language.

“God literally reprogrammed their thinking processes where all of a sudden they couldn’t communicate with one another but there was more to it than that.

“In Genesis 10, God describes the migration of Noah’s descendants. Verse 1 says, ‘Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.’ Verse 5 says, ‘By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.’

*****

“They’re divided by their lands, their tongues and by their families in their nations. So what it takes to make a nation is an identity of geographic territory that has a government that enforces its borders.

“We say ‘borders, language and culture.’ That’s what that is right there in Genesis 10. Listen, if you don’t have identifiable borders that you can enforce, you don’t have a country. That’s why people are screaming about our borders.

“You have to have a common language so that you can communicate. And then families. You have a head that you come from and that’s the ethnic division.

“Now, the ethnicity is not just a racial issue. It’s really the culture that comes from that ethnic identity. What does Jesus Christ do? He comes into any culture, any family and lives His own life. He sanctifies that culture. He purifies it, saying, ‘This is how I live in that culture.’ It doesn’t denigrate it; it honors it. It demonstrates the LIFE.

*****

“Genesis 10:25 says, ‘And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother's name was Joktan.’

“Look at verse 20: ‘These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations.’

“Verse 31: ‘These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.’

“This chapter is talking to you about God establishing national entities that are made up of geographic identifiable boundaries with a government that enforces it, language groups and then ethnicity.

*****

“In Daniel 3, when God set the nation Israel aside politically with the captivity, putting them off into Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar is the first head of the Gentile nations that replaced Israel in the earth temporarily.

“Seven times in the Book of Daniel it talks about ‘people, nations and languages.’ So when God looks up and divides humanity, He divvies it all up by people, nations and languages.

*****

“The name Peleg means divided, torn apart. And his daddy named him that for in his days was the earth divided.

“Genesis 11: 16-19 reads:

1. [16] And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg:
2. [17] And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters.
3. [18] And Peleg lived thirty years, and begat Reu:
4. [19] And Peleg lived after he begat Reu two hundred and nine years, and begat sons and daughters.

“Peleg lived 30 years and begat Reu. If he was 30 years old when he had his first kid and then he lived 209 years after that, how long did he live? He lived 239 years. And during that time the earth was divided.

“Obviously the earth was divided at the Tower of Babel. How long did it take for God to scramble the brains and change the language? That also is the moment and place in time that . . . Not only did they wake up the next morning and their brains were rewired to speak differently, their bodies had been changed--ethnic changes, skin color, expression changes. You say, ‘Can God do that?!’ Sure He can. He made you to start with." 

(new article tomorrow)

 

Knowing is the gold

Romans 6: 22-23 says, “But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.

[23] For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Jordan explains, “That verse bothers people because they say, ‘Well, I don’t get eternal life until the end?!’ That’s because you think of eternal life as dying and going to heaven and living with God in heaven forever. There’s not a verse in the Bible that defines eternal life that way.

“Jesus Christ defines eternal life in John 17:2-3: ‘As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.
[3] And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’

“Eternal life isn’t just dying and going to heaven and dancing it up around New Jerusalem or kicking up gold dust. Eternal life is to know the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ. Eternal life is to have a personal, intimate, fruit-bearing knowledge of the Father. In the end, the gold of it is that you know the Father in a personal, intimate, everlasting way.

“It’s coming to KNOW the Father, understanding what the Father’s plan is, what the Father’s will is, why did He create the universe, what is the purpose behind it, what is His goal, why did He put man in the earth, why did He form the Body of Christ.

“You don’t just understand it, you say, ‘Woo-hoo, I got it! I got the picture! I LIKE it! I think I’ll just join in and do this! I’ll let the zeal of the Lord of host, the thing that thrills Him, thrill me!

“It’s your faith resting in the truth of God’s Word, and when your faith rests in God’s grace, who God has made you in Christ, it will bring forth fruit unto God, righteousness unto holiness.

“Holiness is talking about your character. Talking about who you are. You’re someone who is set apart for the purpose for which God created you. You’re able now by the grace of God to bear fruit unto holiness. You’re able to bear activity and growth that represents who God created you in Jesus Christ.

“The word ‘holy’ and the word ‘sanctification’ means to be set apart for the purpose for which it’s created. His character begins to express itself through you and the end is eternal life.

“Look at Jeremiah 9. I try to drill this home to our folks in Chicago all the time. The passage reads, ‘Thus saith the LORD, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches:
[24] But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the LORD.’

“Glory in the fact that you understand the Lord and that you have an intimate personal knowledge of Him. You understand what He’s about, what He thinks, how He reacts, what He’s planning, and you understand to the point it brings forth fruit in your life. If you’re going to rejoice in something, rejoice in that!

“That thing about ‘exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight’—the key to knowing the Lord, and to knowing God, is to understand what He delights in! What is it that thrills His heart? What He’s doing in His Son! If you ask the Father, ‘What is it that thrills you?’ He’ll say, ‘There He is at my right hand.’

Psalm 40:7-8 is quoted in Hebrews 10 as being a reference to Jesus Christ, but I want you to see how it says it in Psalms: ‘Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me,
[8] I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart.’

“When the Lord Jesus Christ came, He says to the Father, ‘I delight in what you delight in. I delight in your will! I know what you delight in, Father, and you know what, that thrills my heart too and I’m ALL IN for what you delight in!’

“Paul says, ‘Let that mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus.’ He gives you the privilege of thoroughly, completely understanding what the Father’s thinking is, what He delights in, what thrills His heart, and He says, ‘Come on and delight in that too.’ You come delight in it. Get as thrilled about it as He is. In the Bible, that’s called ‘God likeness, godliness.’ Godliness isn’t just doing what God does; it’s DELIGHTING in it, buying into it. It’s being all into it like He is.”

Looking IN

To be filled with the Spirit is to be filled with the Word and have your thinking and actions controlled by the Word of God. Jordan says I Thess. 2:13 is one of his favorite verses: “There’s a lot of things to get from that verse. It’s the Word of God that effectually works in people that believe. When you by faith take the Word of God and step out upon what God says, God the Holy Spirit takes His Word . . .

“God the Holy Spirit today works indirectly in your life through the instrumentality of the Word of God as you by faith rest upon it. I don’t know how to say that any clearer than that. If I did, I’d say it another way.

The way God’s going to work in your life, it isn’t you sitting down and saying, ‘Lord, I want you to take away this problem out of my life,’ and God’s just going to zap you and it’s going to be gone. That isn’t how that happens.

“As you objectively take your thinking processes, your actions and your attitude and bring them under the control and authority of the Word of God . . . As you begin to think in your own heart and mind the way God says He thinks in His Word, that is God the Holy Spirit working in you both to will and to do His good pleasure.

“So rather than looking out there, we look in here. Rather than asking God to move and do out there, it’s His Word that WORKS and He’s in us, living His life out through our mortal bodies as we walk by faith in what He says in His Word.

“If something is effectual that means it WORKS. It’s effective; it gets the job done. It’s not a misfire. It works effectually IN you. That’s where God’s working starts. It’s in you that believe! That’s the catalyst of it.

“Col. 1:9. There’s that word again! Let the Word of Christ DWELL in you! Let it come and fill up your life and be at home in you and live there! I pray that you might be filled with the knowledge of His will.

“What should be the result of you having a daily and a weekly intake of sound doctrine into your life? That you might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.

“The first thing God is interested in you understanding about Jesus Christ is not His earthly life and ministry. That’s what religion wants you to know about.

“When you look back to Calvary and watch all the things that happen there, then the Lord speaks seven times. Now, you can only see into the heart of a person when the words come out of their mouth. You can’t watch the actions of a person and tell exactly what’s inside of them. They can be fooling you.

“But you listen to the words that come out a person’s mouth and the Lord says that’s where the Spirit’s revealed. That’s where your inner man comes out.”

Seventh day all day long

After God worked for six days and finished Creation, He didn’t stop because He was tired; He rested because the work was done.

“People like to argue about evolution; I tell people I’m a six-day evolutionist,” says Jordan. “When God, in Genesis 1, created in those six days, He had a plan. He did this first, and then based on that, He did that.

“He says, ‘I worked for six days so I could get to this day; this seventh day is the reason I created all this stuff—to get to right here. This is the day of my rest. I got nothing else; I don’t need to do anymore. This is what I was doing it all for—I’ve arrived!’

*****

“Psalm 132:13-14 will nail the board down for you, or tie the rag on the bush: ‘For the LORD hath chosen Zion; he hath desired it for his habitation. This is my rest for ever: here will I dwell; for I have desired it.’

“In Job 38, God calls it ‘my decreed place; the place I’ve decreed I’m going to inhabit.’ He says, ‘This is my rest forever. Here will I dwell for I have desired it. I’ve got a plan. I’ve got a desire. I’ve got something I’m doing.’ And on that seventh day, He said, ‘I’m there!’

“So what was it that He set the seventh day apart for? For a day of rest. What does that mean? That’s the day He’s going to dwell on the earth. The purpose of Creation was so God could rest in it, and the resting in it is that He would dwell in it on a certain piece of real estate.”

*****

"God didn’t create the universe just as a sandbox for us to play in, or a showplace to watch and see what we decide to do—He created the universe as place for Him to live; for Him to allow us to enjoy fellowship with Him. For Him to dwell among us. That’s what that word Immanuel means: ‘God with us.’

“When Christ says He goes to prepare a place for you, He’s not saying, ‘I’m going to heaven to build a bunch of houses for you.’

“We sing that hillbilly song, ‘Just give me a cabin in the corner of glory land,’ and somebody says, ‘No, I want a mansion over the hilltop!’ which is from another hillbilly song. One of my favorite old gospel songs says, ‘And I shall go to dwell on Zion’s hill.’

“But there’s a lot of stuff in the hymn book that isn’t good doctrine. When He says, ‘I go to prepare a place for you,’ He’s not talking about going to heaven and working for 2,000 years on building you a house to live in, like another song goes. I know that’s sentimentalism, but it’s unscriptural stuff that turns into superstition.

“Think about how foolish that. The second person of the godhead could step out on the platform of nothing, speak a word and a universe is created. Why would He need two thousand years to create a home for you?! The sentimentalism is just kind of foolish. People argue, ‘Yeah but, He’s designing an intricate . . . ’

“How could He design anything more intricate than the creation you live in? Study the atom; study the science of our creation. The deeper scientists are able to dig into creation, or biologists into biology creation, the more complicated it becomes. It doesn’t get simpler. And there’s that creative complexity that’s designed in creation.”

(new article tomorrow)

Satan's enticement: 'Join the initiated'

People say science has advanced us so far. So how come you can read about an evolutionist 700 years before the time of Christ?

In a passage directed at the unbeliever, Jeremiah 2:27 says, “Saying to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth: for they have turned their back unto me, and not their face: but in the time of their trouble they will say, Arise, and save us.”

Jordan explains, “Here are people who think their father is a piece of nature that the earth produced; they think they evolved out of plant life and stone life.

“You see, evolution is really a religion that is an ancient religion trying to tell you that where you came from is nature and not God, and they’ve worked themselves into this religious frenzy of attributing their source and origin to nature.

“So evolution in our day is simply the application of ‘science falsely so-called’ to the philosophy of pagans that Jeremiah warned Israel about and has existed since Genesis 11.

“The saying, ‘There’s nothing really new under the sun,’ is really a truth and if you ever talked to someone who is an evolutionist or someone who says science disproves the Bible, you’re dealing with those people back there.

“You’re dealing exactly with what they dealt with. It’s a spiritual problem, and I look at the world around us and I say, ‘Look at the mess we’re in!’ and when you see it, you say, ‘Where did it come from?’ And folks, that’s where it comes from. It comes from a spiritual issue.

*****

"Psalm 2 says, '[1] Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
[2] The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,
[3] Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.'

“There’s a conspiracy, there’s a force in the world, a secret, behind-the-scenes spiritual movement that’s against the God of the Bible, against the Lord Jesus Christ, against the Word of God, against the Holy Spirit and against you.

“Its purpose is to destroy your life, your family, this church, WHATEVER that stands for what God’s doing. And they take counsel together. And there’s an evil, wicked force out there doing it.

*****

“You see what the heathen in Psalm 2:3: ‘Let us break their bands asunder.’ When someone asked me what I thought of the gay marriage ruling, that was the first verse that came to mind. What do you call you marriage ring? A wedding band.

“Gay marriage is designed to try to break the band, but you know what the band is? The band is not that little ring on your finger. Your marriage has a standard for it. The standard for marriage in the Bible is the marriage of the Lord Jesus Christ to the Believer. Your marriage is to reflect that.

“What they’re striking at is the very heart of the reality of our oneness with Christ. Now that doesn’t even show up in the average evangelical discussion of the matter, but that’s what’s underneath.

*****

“There’s a conspiracy for wickedness and it has a name. As Revelation 17:5 says, 5] And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

“Revelation 17 says, [1] And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:
[2] With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. [3] So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.

“Notice she’s been around for a long time. She’s destroyed many kingdoms in the earth. She goes all the way back to Genesis 11, so this is not a new character in the earth.

“She’s in the wilderness and that’s where you’re going to find this woman. She’s going to be obsessed with pulling people in with drunkenness and fornication. That’s not a physical wine; that’s getting them intoxicated with a spiritual enticement that produces a spiritual adultery.

“She’s out there in the wilderness; to find her you’ve got to go way far away from the springs of living water. You have to go way far away, be alone, with no bread. That’s what happens in the wilderness. You see, she’s going to be every place that Book isn’t.

*****

“You go find a church today where that Book isn’t preached and taught, and especially taught rightly divided, you’re going to find her. And when you get where you learn how to spot her, it’s going to scare you to death to see her everywhere you go. But knowledge of what’s going on allows you to have wisdom about how to handle it.

“By the way, if you look at Verse 6, it says, ‘And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.’

“You know how they martyred the saints in the Book of the Revelation? Go to chapter 6 and you see they were ‘beheaded under that fifth seal.’

“You watch in our day bloodthirsty people beheading. Where does the wickedness that would cause you to take children and teach them to cut people’s heads off? They are ‘without natural affection,’ where you cut children in two and teach children to cut other people’s heads off.

“Listen, there is a genetically designed implanted understanding in every person that it’s wrong to kill. God put it there. Romans 2 tells you that. Every culture knows that.

“But there’s a spirit of evil and wickedness. By the way, that crowd over there in the Middle East that calls themselves Isis, did you know that’s the name of an Egyptian fertility goddess who was married to Osiris, the Sun God, and she was the Moon God. Her symbol was a crescent moon.

*****

"In the quote Satan gives to Eve, 'For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,' there are 46 words and the word “eyes” represents the 33^rd word in the quote.

“He’s saying, ‘God’s got a secret knowledge out here, Eve, and He’s not telling you about it, but if you’re one of the initiated you’ll know it. Thirty-three in the Bible is a number associated with illumination, knowing things.

“Have you ever read in the occult, or heard in religion about 'the third eye'? You have two eyes and then they say you have a third eye. You ever seen people go around with a little red dot on top of their forehead; a little jewel up there? In some religions that’s called ‘the third eye’ and it’s an eye of perception that you get in the middle of your forehead.

“This is the ability to see into something and have knowledge that you couldn’t have any other way. It’s secret knowledge that you can only have IF you are in the initiated. Where you got to go to get that?

 

"Satan’s offering Eve the initiation: ‘I know something God doesn’t want you to know, and that you can’t know unless you become one with me. You know this and you’ll really know what’s going on.’

*****

“Ultimately, when the Antichrist is manifested and the system that brings him to the fore and puts him into power is manifested, it’s that mystery.

“There is a secret purpose, this idea of secret wisdom, understanding and the GAIN that you can get if you get it that’s associated with Satan all the way through the Bible. It’s associated with his LIE program.

“What do you say about a lie? It can be 98% truth but it’s the 2% that isn’t that kills you. You see, it’s hidden among . . . the ‘tares are hidden with the wheat’ kind of thing and the lie program is all this good, good, good, but there’s that secret thing in it.

*****

“Isaiah 33 is a passage dealing prophetically with the nation Israel in the last days. Isaiah 33: 6 is a verse of scripture I used to keep posted on my wall. It says, [6] And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation: the fear of the LORD is his treasure.

“Eve didn’t have the basic knowledge even straight in her thinking, so that when Satan came along and offered her this secret knowledge, she couldn’t say, ‘NO, I know what the truth is!’ She’s over here dreaming up stuff, leaving stuff out, adding stuff.

“Where did she ever get that, ‘I can’t touch it’? She just thought, ‘Well, if I can’t eat it, it must mean I can’t touch it either.’ She made that up in her imagination. She didn’t have the knowledge. That’s where stability is, in knowing.

*****

“God, talking to Moses in Deuteronomy 29:29, says, ‘The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.’

“Notice, everything you need to know to do everything God has for them to do, He revealed to them. If there’s something they don’t know . . . wasn’t that what Eve was told? ‘There’s something you don’t know, Eve, that God knows, and if you knew it, you wouldn’t let him get away with this.’ And then her imagination starts going.

“Moses says to Israel, ‘If there’s a secret that God hasn’t told you, that’s His business; you don’t have to worry about it. You just worry about what he told you. Don’t worry about the secret stuff; worry about what He revealed to you, because what He revealed to you is what He wants you to know.’

“You understand God knows things you don’t know? If God took everything He knows and put it into your little noodle, your brain would be on the wall.

*****

“The word ‘occult’ means something you can’t know unless you’re initiated. You know what Eve was invited to become a part of? The occult. A secret society of knowledge that you can’t get unless you’re an initiated person.

“Most of this traffics in the religious, spiritual background and it’s hidden in their symbols and their allegories and their hidden meanings behind things. They come along and try to draw you in. They invite you to follow the secretness of it. All the cults of secrecy. I don’t just mean nobody knows it; I’m talking about you have to be illuminated to get in.

“God already revealed His will. God already gave Eve clear instructions about it. Satan says, ‘I know something He doesn’t want you to know,’ and you know what that does? It entices you.”

'War on Women' says God must be destroyed

Hillary Clinton’s “war on women” narrative has its roots with the renowned 1970s radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin, an ardent supporter of Neopaganism and lesbianism who actually developed the term.

In Dworkin’s books on the “systematic oppression of women” by America’s male-dominated culture, she argues that “everything that exists must be destroyed” for the feminist revolution in which there is a “plane­tary movement to restructure community forms and human consciousness so that people have power over their own lives, participate fully in community, live in dignity and freedom.”

Dworkin summarizes in her book “Woman Hating,” for example,  that the “commitment to ending male dominance as the fundamental psychological, political, and cultural real­ity of earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment.

“It is a commitment to transformation of the self and transformation of the social reality on every level . . . The discovery is, of course, that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both . . .

“I have defined heterosexuality as the ritualized behavior built on polar role definition. Intercourse with men as we know them is increasingly impossible. It requires an aborting of creativity and strength, a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death.

“It means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect. It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity which are central to it. Unambiguous conventional heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity. . . .”

******

When actress Jane Fonda was asked in a Q & A with Ms. Magazine about the exploding number of feminists today actively involved with Wicca and Neo-paganism, she responded:

“Of course, if we’re told for 2,000 years God is a male, we’ll believe it. But the sacred Goddess was worshipped for thousands of years before that!

“Some early Christians viewed divinity as a mother/father dyad. I think that’s what feminism is really about: reclaiming the divine balance. We need to reach beyond the false idol of an earlier consciousness—God as male—to the true incarnation in each of us: our creative potential.

“I’m now reading ‘The Gospel of Thomas,’ purportedly 114 sayings of Jesus. One is: ‘When man becomes woman and woman becomes man, and there is neither man nor woman, you will enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Some may ponder, ‘What does that mean?’ We know what that means!”

*****

In the Ms. Magazine article, the interviewer expresses admiration of Fonda’s “painfully candid” memoir, to which Fonda, who identifies herself as a “born-again Christian,” replies, “There were interviewers assuming I’d had a ghostwriter. When they learned I wrote it, they said, ‘How could you have been so honest?’ ”

One of the many tip-offs Fonda is self-deluded and deceiving herself, is found in what she had to say about her failed attempt at taking the Bible literally when she attended Bible study with the Christian friend who introduced her to Christ:

“It was like someone drilled a hole in me,” Fonda testifies. “I could feel the reverence seeping out, my soul deflating. I thought, ‘This is not working, it’s a big mistake.’ I felt surprisingly bereft.

“All I know is that when I began to talk to people from the core of my being—admittedly, hard as it was at first, that I’m a Christian, but then defining what that means, personally, to me—I can feel a shift, hearts opening. We’re not doing that enough as a movement, so the Right co-opts those feelings, pollutes them.”

*****

In a Mother’s Day sermon, Jordan said the growing movement today to de-genderize and neutralize the deity of the godhead with “father-god” and “mother-god” stuff represents our culture’s descent into pagan darkness.

“In the Bible, every time you see God presented as a woman, it’s a bad deal,” he informed. “Jeremiah 44:18 says they ‘left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven.’ You read that and you say, ‘How’d she get in there?!’

“It’s an ancient pagan goddess and it isn’t anything brand-new or especially compelling. In fact, the concept of God as mother is an ancient tradition in many religions. In Hinduism, they call her Kali.”

Kali is said to embody all fear, is defined by blackness and destruction, and feeds on death and required blood sacrifices. The severed head she holds in idol representations is said to hold the fate of all the living. Her garland of skulls is meant to show the inseparableness of life and death.

*****

Any peripheral examination of goddesses in Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Nordic mythology, instantly shows their intrinsic connection to the demonic influence of Satan.

A passage from a Barnes & Noble-published educational guide on mythology, called “Greek and Roman Myth,” says, “Ancient legend told how Isis (Egyptian goddess whose cult spread across the Mediterranean) scoured Egypt to collect the pieces of her brother Osiris’s body after he had been dismembered by their evil brother Seth. Magically restored and revived, Osiris descended into the Underworld to rule the kingdom of the dead.

“The Greeks knew of the legend as early as the fifth century BC. They saw parallels between the story and that of their nature goddess Demeter, who could not rest until her daughter Persephone was rescued from the Underworld, after she was kidnapped by Hades, its god, who wanted her for a wife.”

Hades, regarded as king of the Underworld, is said to have had as his companion the popular goddess Hecate, who was associated with ghosts, black magic and crossroads.

Another book passage tells of the goddess Night who “gave birth to many of the evils that cloud the lives of gods and humans, including Doom, Death, Misery, Resentment, Deceit and Strife; Strife herself went on to give birth to further afflictions, such as Murder, Carnage, Battle and Lawlessness.”

Indeed, Homer, the Greek epic poet credited with writing the Iliad, has in his account of creation how a goddess, taking the form of a dove, lays a huge egg fertilized by her partner, a giant serpent. “Everything in the universe hatched from this primal egg," Homer explains. As we all well-know, Satan appears as a serpent to deceive Eve in the Garden of Eden.

*****

The staging of the original Olympic Games was actually “centered on a grove once sacred to the venerable Earth goddess Gaia that at some unknown period had become a cult center for Zeus, chief of the Olympian deities,” says the Barnes & Noble book.

Gaia is the one who married her son Uranus—something considered a sacred marriage bringing together Earth and Heavens.

“The union between Gaia and Uranus was not viewed as improper in any way, despite the fact that Gaia was Uranus’ mother,” reports the mythology book. “Two of their children would also marry each other, as would two of their grandchildren. With these marriages began a tradition that gods could break the taboo of incest, which for humans was inviolable. . . Later Gaia, on her own or by various lovers, bore many other children. Most of those were also monsters, but not all. For example, one of her daughters was the lovely wood nymph Daphne.”