Vanity is Confusion (tohuw)

Lighthouse Trails Research has put up a review of emerging church pastor Dan Kimball's new book, They Like Jesus But Not the Church, which they cleverly retitled They Like (Another) Jesus But Not the Church, the Bible, Morality, or the Truth.

The book's premise:

Kimball insists (p. 19) that "those who are rejecting faith in Jesus" do so because of their views of Christians and the church. But he makes it clear throughout the book that these distorted views are not the fault of the unbeliever but are the fault of Christians, but not all Christians, just those fundamentalist ones who take the Bible literally, believe that homosexuality is a sin and think certain things are wrong and harmful to society...and actually speak up about these things.

The Bible says (in Psalms 14):

² The LORD looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God.
³ All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.

Kimball's argument is not new, nor is it meant to be; it merely continues the sustained attack from inside (and outside) the church on two major areas of God's established order: sexuality and epistemology. The Western church's vain acquiescence to the world and acceptance of half-truths on behalf of "nice people who mean well" is evidence of hardened hearts. The postmodern repackaging of "Hath God said?" — the Devil's rhetoric from the Garden of Eden — is confusing and enervating Christians in the West.

As in past eras of the church, this is a time of judgment and testing. Christians and Christian leaders who do not take up the armor of God and attempt to "go it alone" on intellect, experience, and earthly wisdom and approbation will find themselves in a sea of confusion.

The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1:

²¹ For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
²² Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools
²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Encouraging News

Here's a news story not likely to be picked up by the mainstream media as it challenges the liberal myth that Islamic hegemony in the Middle East is cultural rather than compulsory.

From ASSIST News Service: Iranian Imam Receives Christ Via Satellite TV, Escapes Country

One of the top Islamic leaders in Iran accepted Christ and left the country after facing death threats and imprisonment, according to an Iranian pastor living in the U.S.

“This man has been watching Christian TV programs for the past two years,” said Pastor Elnathan Baghestani, founder of Iran for Christ Ministries. Pastor Baghestani and his wife provide Christian programming to the Mohabat Network satellite, which broadcasts 24/7 into Iran and other Middle Eastern countries...

While it is illegal to own satellite dishes in Iran, many hide them on their roofs or other locations on their property. “They arrest people for having satellite dishes because they know the Christian programming is effective,” Baghestani noted.

Read more here.

Faster Than You Might Think

Secular humanist propaganda, for decades aided and abetted by the mainstream media and public education, is successfully turning the Christian church against itself. Jesus described a time when "many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved." (Matthew 24:10-13) That time seems to be arriving with surprising swiftness.

Consider this excerpt from a two-year-old N.Y. Times article highlighted today by the conservative MRC/NewsBusters.org blog:

All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values," would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count. This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote "positive" Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah's voice.

The writer of that article, Chris Hedges, is set to publish a book in January '07 titled American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America — add one more book to the mushrooming genre of "theophobic" lit (as dubbed by Dan at WithChrist.org) appearing on bookstore shelves these days. For commentary on and a comprehensive list of those books, check out the October 17th entry of the WithChrist blog.

The ecumenical Christian leaders and nominal Christians seduced by this kind of rhetoric identify more with the tenets of Rousseau than plain Scripture. They equate born-again Christians to the radical Muslims "hijacking" their religion. To mollify their secular counterparts, the Christian humanists will do whatever is necessary to survive.

Lost and Found

Last Thursday, a construction engineer digging up a bog in the Irish Midlands uncovered an ancient Psalter dated to AD 800-1000. Hailed as a "miracle find" by the National Museum of Ireland, the 20-page vellum manuscript was found opened to Psalm 83.

Authorship of Psalm 83 is attributed to Asaph, a Levite and choir leader who lived during the time of David (1 Chronicles 15:16-17). In Psalm 83, Asaph describes Judah's neighbors conspiring against her and beseeches the Lord to stop these enemies:

³ With cunning they conspire against your people; they plot against those you cherish.
⁴ "Come," they say, "let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more."
⁵ With one mind they plot together; they form an alliance against you —
⁶ the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, of Moab and the Hagrites,
⁷ Gebal, Ammon and Amalek, Philistia, with the people of Tyre.
⁸ Even Assyria has joined them to lend strength to the descendants of Lot. Selah

The locations of those neighboring tribes can be found today in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, as well as southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Bible scholars believe the confederacy described by Asaph did not exist in antiquity and remains an unfulfilled prophecy. Islam, the single most plausible unifying force for such a coalition, did not come along until the 7th century, some 1,500 years after Asaph's time. As the fighting in Lebanon prepares to enter its third week, any existing tolerance for Israel in the Middle East (e.g. the recent split in the Arab League) will diminish badly.

Update: The National Museum of Ireland clarified Thursday that Psalm 83 of this Latin Psalter corresponds to Psalm 84 in today's Bible translations. Certainly less dramatic, yes. However, worldwide exposure of Psalm 83 in light of current events is the real story here.

Trial Balloon

While the world community publicly recoils at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's stated desire to push Israel into the sea, secular humanists are nodding their heads with discreet approbation....

The worst-kept secret in the West is the growing anti-Israelism and/or anti-Semitism among the ranks of academics, media, and other assorted intellectual elite. Usually couched in terms of "measured concern for the stability of the Middle East (i.e. Israel is the real problem)," the rhetoric got a little less subtle this past week when Richard Cohen of the Washington Post dropped this trial balloon in his column:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

Many capable counterpoints have been made to Cohen's assertions, including Eric Rosenman's response at CAMERA.org (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East reporting in America). Obviously, the secular media has found in Richard Cohen a perfect spokesperson for criticizing Israel without appearing anti-Semitic. In this case, Cohen pulls it off. But the fact remains, secularists still can't see beyond their materialistic worldview. Religions (and especially their spiritual underpinnings) are still a puzzling mystery to them.

Cohen was surely echoing the water-cooler chatter of like-minded colleagues. Was it newsworthy? Not really. This kind of pandering to moral equivalency and the Islamic Middle East is very much unsurprising these days.

The worst part is, these kinds of sentiments are heard more and more in Christian circles. Watch out.

Upside Down

For the most part, the secular Western media's been relatively silent on the sickening genocide (tens of thousands dead in three years) taking place in Darfur, Sudan. They took notice when George Clooney and Angelina Jolie — two big Hollywood stars with decidedly globalist, leftist agendas — recently made separate tours of the war-torn region. Even then, the media focused on the victims, relief efforts, Western politicking, and everything but the perpetrators of the genocide.

That's because said perpetrators — the Sudanese government and its proxy militia the Janjaweed — are Arab and Muslim, and the genocide is most definitely about race (the victims are black Africans) and religion (Islamic jihad). The thing is, these killers aren't white, European, and Christian (or Jewish, for that matter).

Speaking Wednesday to The New York Times, the secular left's de facto mouthpiece, UN human rights commissioner Louise Arbour implied that Israel is committing war crimes as it fights Hezbollah along the Lebanese border: “The scale of killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control."

The Arab Muslim government in Khartoum has repeatedly rejected calls for UN peacekeeping forces to intervene in Darfur as the genocide there continues. Meanwhile, the secular media pummels Israel's "disproportionate" retaliation against Hezbollah, an Islamic terrorist organization which, not unlike the criminals in Khartoum, views human life (i.e. non-combatants) as fodder for the advancement of its religious ideology. (This same media would like us to believe such "religious imperialism" also describes current U.S. foreign policy. Hence their confusion.)

In National Review Online this week, conservative commentator Lawrence Kudlow wrote: "When the dust clears the world will applaud Israel for its courage." If the world hasn't gone completely insane.

See also Samaritan's Purse Sudan page.

Checking In

Back in March, Dan at With Christ wrote, "It's hard to know what to write about. Too many choices! The world, while never 'stable,' seems to have come really unhinged." Four months later, these words couldn't be truer.

"Rumors of wars" reached a fevered pitch this past week as the Israel Defense Force (IDF) struck back at the terrorist group Hezbollah. By killing eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two on July 12, Hezbollah and Iran appear to have rolled the dice and gotten the predictable responses they were hoping for: an all-out Israeli retaliation followed by a supportive American (and British) response and then European/Russian handwringing. Their objective? Accelerate increasingly negative world opinion against Israel and prick U.S. resolve concerning Israel and the Middle East. Hezbollah and Iran stand to lose a few thousand outmoded rockets and maybe a few square miles of strategic real estate while gaining serious leverage in the (appeasement-minded) court of world opinion. Western media reinforces the Islamist meme by referring to Hezbollah terrorists as "militants," "guerrillas," or "Lebanese resistance."

For the mainstream media, the "story within the story" is the United States' supposedly delayed response to American evacuees in Beirut. Facile comparisons to last year's Hurricane Katrina disaster ignore the logistics, threat level, and simple insurance nightmare (these days) of extracting thousands of civilians from a war zone. Reporters filed stories on complaining Americans — largely ignoring the grateful ones — which, depending on your political point of view, reinforced the prevailing attitude that a) the current U.S. administration is callous/inept, or b) Americans today are just really spoiled.