| Whatsoever
Things are True
by Pastor Dan Coburn It utterly fascinates me when a group of people (sometimes I use the term loosely) endeavors to tell us what God is saying, or worse yet, claims to be the exclusive “voice of God”. Whether it is someone from the first century, Joseph Smith, or these folks we hear about on the news from time to time. You know the ones; they come un-invited to funerals of our service men and wave signs saying “your son deserved to die” or “God hates your son” or “God loves IEDs”. I can’t imagine anyone coming to my sons funeral to say anything like that. I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind wanting to. I can’t imagine what I might do to them. This is on my mind because they recently were in the news again, threatening to attend (un-invited) the funeral of those Amish girls who were murdered this last week. In their interview, they said it was good the little girls were murdered because they were certainly bound for hell anyway, and now they wouldn’t be able to rack up such a sin litany. Therefore, it might be easier on them. WHAT? Let’s turn the Spiritual Switch before I blow a gasket. First of all, God does Not need me to defend Him. He does not need Anyone to do any additions, corrections, deletions to His written Word. In fact, there are many warnings against doing so; my favorite just happens to be Galatians 1:6-9 where the Apostle Paul scolds the church for following new and strange doctrine (teaching) and says this: “if we, or an angel from heaven, or any man should preach to you any other gospel than that which you have already received, let him be accursed”. Your Bible may say “eternally dammed” instead of accursed; either way, you get the picture. Secondly, the Bible already holds more treasure and truth than we can fully comprehend at this time, so why would we need more? If we did need more, wouldn’t an omniscient God put it in there? Thirdly, this teaching goes against the principals of scripture. There are two schools of thought concerning God and his judgement. The first says that God just loves everybody, and since He is love, if we just do our best, we’ll be OK. Or even worse, that a loving God wouldn’t send anyone to hell. Both of these are partially true. The second is that God is a white haired giant on a marble throne with a lightening bolt in each hand, watching and waiting for you to mess up so He can let fly. So does God hate? Yes He does. He hates sin. But He loves the person. “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is long suffering to us-ward, not wanting that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance”– 2nd Peter 3:9. God uses conviction to bring about reconciliation. Satan uses condemnation to bring about separation. I only had to listen to these women for about a minute and a half to decide which camp they are from. Is that judgmental? I guess it is; pray for me. |
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