Posted on 11/14/2017 2:24:54 PM PST by nickcarraway
Robert Jeffress spent Wednesday with Donald Trump, supporting the president during his fundraising visit to the Belo Mansion in downtown Dallas. On Thursday, the First Baptist Dallas pastor and Trump's biggest evangelical supporter had to do something a lot less fun — take to the Fox News airwaves to defend himself from charges that he is anti-Catholic.
Word of Jeffress' potentially anti-Catholic views bubbled to the surface this week when a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about her boss's continued praise for the Dallas demagogue, given Jeffress' controversial statements about the Catholic church. Sanders said that she wasn't "aware of Robert Jeffress being anti-Catholic" and that she knew that he worked with Texas Catholics on events like the anti-abortion rights demonstration March for Life.
On Fox News, Jeffress repeated Sanders' line, confirming that he works with Catholics against abortion, and said that the characterization of his thoughts about Catholicism was inaccurate.
"What they did was they went back and recycled old quotes from years ago that were either completely manufactured at the time or ripped out of context," Jeffress said.
The Observer believes that Jeffress deserves a fair hearing about whether he was taken out of context, so we've taken the liberty of transcribing, in their entirety, Jeffress' comments about Catholicism and the Roman Catholic Church from a 2010 segment on his radio show Pathway to Victory.
"This is the Babylonian mystery religion that spread like a cult throughout the entire world. The high priests of that fake religion, that false religion, the high priests of that religion would wear crowns that resemble the heads of fish, that was in order to worship the fish god Dagon, and on those crowns were written the words, ‘Keeper of the Bridge,’ the bridge between Satan and man.
"That phrase, Keeper of the Bridge — the Roman equivalent of it is Pontifex Maximus. It was a title that was first carried by the Caesars and then the emperors and finally by the Bishop of the Rome, Pontifex Maximus, the Keeper of the Bridge.
"You can see where we’re going with this. It is that Babylonian mystery religion that infected the early church. One of the churches it infected was the church of Pergamos, which is one of the recipients of the Book of Revelation. And the early church was corrupted by this Babylonian mystery religion, and today the Roman Catholic Church is the result of that corruption.
"Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word; it comes from that cultlike, pagan religion. Now you say, ‘Pastor, how can you say such a thing? That is such an indictment of the Catholic Church. After all, the Catholic Church talks about God and the Bible and Jesus and the blood of Christ and salvation.’
"Isn’t that the genius of Satan? If you want to counterfeit a dollar bill, you don’t do it with purple paper and red ink. You’re not going to fool anybody with that. But if you want to counterfeit money, what you do is make it look closely related to the real thing as possible.
"And that’s what Satan does with counterfeit religion. He uses, he steals, he appropriates all of the symbols of true biblical Christianity, and he changes it just enough in order to cause people to miss eternal life."
Basically, Jeffress believes that Catholicism is a counterfeit of genuine Christianity, descended from a Babylonian fish-worshiping cult. Its resemblance to the real article shows Satan's genius, Jeffress says. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the faith practiced by 70 million Americans.
And it is revealing that some who do not believe in contending about doctrine will contend for their doctrine that one should not contend about doctrine.
It is also revealing that some who do not believe in contending about doctrine will not contend for their doctrine that one should not contend about doctrine, thus indicating that they have not real sustaining basis for it.
I cited the text in which we are exhorted to emulate God, who blesses both the righteous and the unrighteous. Now it’s your turn to cite a passage commanding us to hate sinners.
While you search, here’s another text. Don’t bother quibbling about the meaning of, ‘brother.’ Jesus addressed that issue in the parable of the Good Samaritan (among other places).
1 John 4:20
If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.
If God hates sinners, why did the Holy Spirit inspire Peter to write this?
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.
What a wonderful and inspiring story—thanks for posting it!
Sound doctrine is important but it’s not supremely important. As I noted in a previous post, what is of supreme importance is loving others. We know this is true because that is the metric by which Jesus will eternally divide the saved from the lost. He does not say, in the latter half of Matthew 25, ‘You earnestly contended for sound doctrine—enter into your eternal reward.’
Neither does Jesus say, ‘You failed to earnestly contend for sound doctrine—depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire.’
Rather, the metric is those who actively showed love, ‘to the least among us,’ vs those who turned a blind eye toward people in need.
When we stand before Jesus to hear our eternal fate, it will come down to whether our earthly priorities aligned with His or not. Jesus’ greatest priority is not arguing doctrine. It is just as He revealed in Matthew 25: caring for people in need.
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
But which argument itself, even if motivated by love, is doctrinal, and to present love as supreme as opposed to doctrine being critical is a logical fallacy. For while it is true that the Lord will judge and recompense souls based upon what they did, everything you do is a result of what you really believe, at least at the moment.
If those goats in Mt. 25 really believed in the doctrinal commands to love God with all your being and your neighbor as yourself, then they would have evidenced that they were sheep (not that the weight of their works saved them).
And doctrinally the command to love God with all your being comes before the 2nd great commandment, for we can only correctly love our neighbor insofar as we are in line with what God says we should have done to ourselves. Thus the 2nd commandment presupposes a moral framework, which is something many who quote the "Golden Rule" are ignorant of.
And thus one can sin even though their motive was noble, as was Paul in zealously persecuting the "heretical" sect of the Nazarene.
A more tragic example is Andrea Yates, who loved her children so much that she drowned them rather than let the go to Hell "The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell." In reality the subtle serpent used what in itself was good, that of belief in Hell and love for others, to seduce a women (with postpartum depression) to commit murder in order to save those she loved.
Atheists quote the golden Rule but some believe the loving thing to do would be to place the kids of evangelicals in the care of the secular evolutionist State.
The point is that rather than the importance of doctrine vs love being a issue, doctrine directs us to love and instructs us how while love is doctrine in action, and the two must go together.
What your objection should be is to making assent to correct theological doctrine the prime importance without how that translates to the heart, including horizontally.
A church that is all about assent to formulated correct theological beliefs but is without the heart is like a body that is all bones, while a church that is all about warm and fuzzy social love is like a body without bones. Like faith and works , the too much go together. Thanks be to God.
And this whole debate is one about doctrine, hopefully being love in action. Which is what doctrine means in application.
Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee. (1 Timothy 4:16)
If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness; He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, (1 Timothy 6:3-4)
Exactly. There are few things more tragic than seeing a Christian trying to win—or actually winning—an argument at the expense of treating a brother or sister with kindness. We are to be patient, kind, gentle and loving (among other things) to those around us. Whenever an argument proceeds in the absence of these fruits of the Spirit, it does more harm than good.
An unversed but analytical person visiting the RL would receive an entirely false view of Christianity. They would think it is a belief system that demands its adherents argue doctrine day in and day out. They would not depart with the impression that it is our love for one another that most distinguishes us as disciples of Christ.
John 13:34-35
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
The Golden Rule is obsolete. Jesus superceded it with a New Commandment. The New Commandment is to love others as Christ loved us. The ultimate measure of Jesus’ love for us is the cross. Any time Christians treat each other with similarly supreme, sacrificial love, it witnesses to the world.
By contrast, if what the world sees is people engaging in relentless arguments, they have no reason to imagine that being a Christian is anything special. It doesn’t take a spiritual transformation to create an argumentative person; the unredeemed world churns them out at a dime a dozen.
metmom: Still waiting for the Scripture that states that God hates sinners. (Post #100)
daniel1212: Because God hates sinners then Israel was marked for destruction. But because He yet loved them,. (Post #108)
There are some incidents we ought not to forget, while formulating our list of what God hates, For instance:
o The Flood
Gen 6:3
And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh:
yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
Gen 6:5-7 AV:
And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the
earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his
heart was only evil continually.
And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth,
and it grieved him at his heart.
And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created
from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the
creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth
me that I have made them.
>> God so regretted the world, that He destroyed every land animal, including man, save enough creatures to repopulate it including only eight humans of faith in Him. Didn't He hate the obstinately oppositionally defiant human subjects enough to destroy them all? <<
o Esau versus Jacob, before they even were born:
Mal 1:2-4
I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast
thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the
LORD: yet I loved Jacob,
And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage
waste for the dragons of the wilderness.
Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return
and build the desolate places; thus saith the LORD of
hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they
shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people
against whom the LORD hath indignation for ever.
Rom 9:13
As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.
Hebrews 12:14-17
Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no
man shall see the Lord:
Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God;
lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and
thereby many be defiled;
Lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau,
who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright.
For ye know how that afterward, when he would have
inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no
place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.
>> Esau and his descendants of Edom became The Jews' enemy perpetually to this day because Jacob received the great blessing of Isaac that went from generation to generation, and the heritage of the Messiah, the Savior with it. The hatred of The God has followed the Edomites ever since. <<
o Regarding Ephraim, who was designated as the head of the Northern Kingdom of ten tribes of Israel that separated from Rehoboam/Judah and became the bitter enemy of Judah(Christ):
Hos 9:11-17:
As for Ephraim, their glory shall fly away like a bird,
from the birth, and from the womb, and from the conception.
Though they bring up their children, yet will I bereave
them, that there shall not be a man left: yea, woe also to
them when I depart from them!
Ephraim, as I saw Tyrus, is planted in a pleasant place:
but Ephraim shall bring forth his children to the murderer.
Give them, O LORD: what wilt thou give? give them a
miscarrying womb and dry breasts.
All their wickedness is in Gilgal: for there I hated them:
for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of
mine house, I will love them no more: all their princes are
revolters.
Ephraim is smitten, their root is dried up, they shall bear
no fruit: yea, though they bring forth, yet will I slay
even the beloved fruit of their womb.
My God will cast them away, because they did not hearken
unto him: and they shall be wanderers among the nations.
>> Where are those ten tribes now, which earned God's hatred for all the time until the great tribulation? Dan is not mentioned even among the twelve tribes of the 144,000 mentioned in Rev. 7:4-8 (the tribe of Ephraim through primogeniture was finally restored and reconstituted as "the tribe of Joseph.") <<
o The Revolt of Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and their conspirators:
Numbers 16
I am not going to copy all this in, but here is one selection:
Num 16:27,31-33
So they gat up from the tabernacle of Korah, Dathan, and
Abiram, on every side: and Dathan and Abiram came out, and
stood in the door of their tents, and their wives, and
their sons, and their little children.
. . .
And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all
these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them:
And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and
their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah,
and all their goods.
They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive
into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they
perished from among the congregation.
>> Korah and his associates tainted the whole congregation, and not only they and their families, but thousands more of their adherents died for their sinfulness because Jehovah hated what they were doing, and them. Remember, they were already under condemnation, and the consequences were being staved off by close obedience to the ordinances of the Law, which they trid to lay aside. <<
*********
There's more (Ananias & Sapphira, Simon the magician, etc.) but I don't want to waste more of your and my time to prove the point. God hates all sin, as well as some deliberate practitioners of it who in His ability looking into the future, were not going to change in their passive or active aggressiveness against His sovereignty.
One proper definition of the meaning of agape (translated as love or charity) is this:
"Agape love is the sovereign preference of one, above self and others."
And if I may apply that to the hate that proceeds out of God's righteousness, perhaps this might be expressed as:
"God's miseo hatred is the sovereign detestation of those who unceasingly without end prefer self and sin above righteousness."
Apart from The Christ, that is us. So to cap it off, all you need for an example of how much God hates Sin, sinfulness, and the inherently committed practitioners of it, is the picture of the human personification of one who bore our sins in His Body, hanging on the tree of torture, who cried out in agony of separation from and rejection of His Father God, "Eli, Eli! Lama sabachthani!" as the Might God increased the pressure to full bore.
Our Redeemer received there all the celestial fury of God's righteous wrath that we rightly and fully deserve. He paid the price for all creatures that they might be saved.
But now look at this: For those who refuse to accept that free-to-them gift of the complete remission of sins through faith in his blood, the price that He paid on the Cross will be exacted from them in the Lake of Fire, in my truly humble opinion.
So, don't overdo the compassion thing when chastening is fit. A sugary compassion won't be respected or accepted as genuine. Jesus bore The Mighty God's vengeance that was due me, for which I do not know how to be grateful enough. But I am His, and He is mine. When He comes back for good, He's going to clean house, if I understand the Apocalypse correctly. Upsetting money-changers' tables will be the least of the sanitizing project. Actually, blood will flow. Not His then.
I hope this satisfies your wait on this topic.
=========
Christ Liveth In Me
1.
Once far from God and dead in sin,
No light my heart could see;
But in God's Word the light I found,
Now Christ liveth in me.
Chorus:
Christ liveth in me,
Christ liveth in me,
Oh! what a salvation this,
That Christ liveth in me.
2.
As rays of light from yonder sun,
The flow'rs of earth set free,
So life and light and love came forth
From Christ living in me.
3.
As lives the flow'r within the seed,
As in the cone the tree,
So, praise the God of truth and grace,
His Spirit dwelleth in me.
4.
With longing all my heart is filled,
That like Him I may be,
As on the wondrous tho't I dwell
That Christ liveth in me!
-----
(Maj.) Daniel W. Whittle
1840 - 1901
The ingrained, deliberate habitual wrong-doer who, after hearing the proclamation of the gospel, refuses to believe it and continues the life-style of rejecting the power over sin that submission to Christ brings--is not my brother.
Crickets........
Ok, does this passage refer to God’s permissive will (boulomai) or is it His determined, non-negotiable will (thelema)? That is, does He permit you to have a choice as to whether you are going to repent, or not?
Without a doctrinal basis of what is right and what is wrong, you do not know whether you are seeing to someone else’s best interests, or just acting as a codependent by withholding appropriate corrective measures. Without some kind of grasp of Biblical doctrine, one is woefully immature in both the spiritual and the natural spheres, a spiritual and intellectual infant. But there is a way out, and that is finding an effective mentor (as I suggested before upthread).
You will find very little "shouting" from me. But where people are scripturally incorrect, then it is important that we challenge each other on our views. I have had several people on this site challenge me on mine views and I can say, I was in error and appreciated the correction. Dr. Eckleburg who I reference in my tag line was a tremendous help to me personally though many failed to understand the great contributions she made.
The question each of us should ask is if we are really interested in knowing God as He truly is in scripture or are we interested in furthering church activities? God has revealed Himself through His word and we each have a bit of understanding. There is a lot of false teaching out there and it is important that we have a right view of God.
Nope. He merely added to what was already there, because no disciples like these had ever before existewd.
The New Commandment is to love others as Christ loved us.
Not just any others This commandment only deals with the relationships between truly new-born disciples, members of His genuine churches. This kind of love cannot be exercised between unsaved spiritually dead worldlings or between a hybrid pair one of whom is regenerated and the other not. I hope you are willing to seek counsel on this opinion of yours.
Romans 9:13 Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."
Proverbs 16-19
16 There are six things the LORD hates, yes, seven are an abomination to him;
17 Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood,
18A heart that plots wicked schemes, feet that are quick to run to evil,
19The false witness who utters lies, and the one who sows discord among kindred.
Psalm 11:5, "The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and the one who loves violence His soul hates."
Lev. 20:23, "Moreover, you shall not follow the customs of the nation which I shall drive out before you, for they did all these things, and thereforeI have abhorred them."
Hosea 9:15, "All their evil is at Gilgal; indeed, I came to hate them there! Because of the wickedness of their deeds I will drive them out of My house! I will love them no more; All their princes are rebels."
Psalm 90:10
Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
I guess I’m over the limit now. Not too long to go. I’m brushing up on my Greek and English grammar, and still struggling with the Hebrew alphabet. There’s going to be a lot of Bible study in Heaven, and I want to be prepared.
Hope you keep having happy birthdays for a while, and in good health.
Cheers!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.