We cannot promote conspiracies and still be prepared to speak of the one who is Truth.

 

Grief keeps following me—it seems that the past keeps unraveling—but God surely knows—His ways are not in darkness.

I have written before about a time, when working in apologetics and new religions ministry I watched various apologetics groups around me fall into troubling ways of doing ministry. One group, in Berkeley, started using conspiracy theories even anti-Semitic theories. Jesus chased the money lenders out of the temple and they went out and became the international bankers they wrote. Another apologetic group tried to solve heresy problems by attempting to cast demons out of Christians a heresy itself. The Holy Spirit does not dwell where demons dwell and one is not a Christian without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Now I am grieving over another ministry group as I watch them go down the broken road of conspiracies and radical ideas. This is a ministry I have loved and respected. I had taught workshops alongside them and used the materials they sent about worldviews,  but now …. The head of their ministry, Rich Poll, wrote in an e-mail sent August 12, “My wife Pam and I began the ministry of Apologia in 1995. Since then, our work has had a growing focus of tracking the worldview/ideology/human rights connection. It began with worldview alone, but lately the rest has become ever more urgent.” But what is the rest?

There are three items in the e-mail and two are very troubling. Poll quoted an e-mail his wife had sent out, “I've been researching election fraud since last Nov and what I've discovered is that, according to physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, and cyber security experts, the voting machines used in the USA are totally unsecured and easily hacked. Several of these experts have proven the machines are controlled by algorithms and hackers.” She goes on to write about an event which will supposedly prove the truth of election fraud. She writes:

There's a big event happening this week called a Cyber Symposium which will be streaming all day and night this Tues Wed and Thursday on www.frankspeech.com. A group of white hat hackers recorded the Packet Captures for the entire Nov 2020 election which means they can prove what exactly happened in the voting machines — if they were hacked and if votes were changed. [If you click on any of the links in the e-mail you will reach “Frank” a new platform promoted by Mike Lindell. You have to join to hear anything. I have not joined.]

This is about Mike Lindell’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen by China. If you are interested in the truth about Packet Captures and Lindell’s films there is an excellent article on The Dispatch site, Fact Checking ‘Absolutely 9-0,’ the Latest Documentary From Mike Lindell. However you also need to subscribe to The Dispatch to read the information. There is a great deal of detail in the article but I will try to cover a few points here.

The article simply details the impossibility of Lindell being able to see what he claims to see. Khava Himmelman, author of the article writes:

 Kevin Skoglund, president and chief technologist of Citizens for Better Elections, a nonpartisan nonprofit described as being “dedicated to promoting election security and efficiency in Pennsylvania,” explained in an interview with The Dispatch Fact Check that PCAP, or packet capture, is a standard networking way that you can view traffic over the internet. “Traffic over the internet is sent as packets of information,” he said. “They aren’t encrypted, necessarily, but they are encoded, because they don’t need to be human-readable while they’re in transit.”

Further into the article Himmelman quotes “Douglas Jones, an associate professor of computer science” writing:

Jones also noted why it would be so difficult to access this information. Jones mentioned that Lindell is claiming that his PCAPs show exactly how many votes were stolen through these internet transactions, but his evidence doesn’t hold up. “The only way to capture packets addressed to and from all those different election offices around the country would be to have the resources of the NSA [the National Security Agency],” he said. “That is, if his data is real and not entirely fictional, the only source would be someone inside the NSA providing it. This would be a felony violation of U.S. law—actually a compound felony.”

Himmelman continues:

Jones also pointed out a number of flaws with Lindell’s supposed PCAP evidence. “He claims to not only know who sent and who received the packets, but also what those packets meant,” said Jones. “That means that his source has decrypted the traffic. Modern cryptography is really strong. The NSA and the FBI have a very hard time breaking codes used routinely for such things as encrypted email and web service.”

Additionally, as Jones points out, Lindell says that in certain cases, PCAPs show evidence of specific numbers of votes stolen. “That requires understanding the mechanism of vote theft,” he said. “It's very hard for me to imagine a message, in a single packet, saying ‘steal 10 votes from Trump.’

There is reference to another film, The Deep Rig produced by Patrick Byrne, also insisting the election was fraudulent.

The other item in the e-mail that troubled me was connected to the pandemic we are all experiencing. Once again Pam Poll is quoted:

I believe this authoritarian control is the ultimate goal of the perpetrators of the Covid virus. Vaccine passports are now required to function in Israel. Even though the vaccines have failed to protect people from the latest mutation (driven by the vaccines), they are still forcing people to get injected regardless of millions of adverse reactions worldwide including death. Hard to understand such evil would take place an (sic) a country that was founded by Nazi survivors. Pray we can resist Vaccine Passports here.

Clearly there are several problems here including the assumption that there were perpetrators who sought authoritarian control, we don’t yet know how COVID-19 occurred, we may never know. The other problems—the idea that the vaccines have failed to protect from the latest mutations—that the latest mutation was driven by the vaccines—that there are “millions” of adverse reactions caused by the vaccines—that vaccine passports are evil.  There can of course be differences of opinion on the vaccine passports but when the opinion is based on conspiracies that is another matter. And this leads to my overall concerns.

The biblical picture of God and His rule is kindness, compassion, justice and truth. And those attributes go together. In fact, Jesus Christ, very God of very God, is Truth, is Life, is the Way. When I was still in the PCUSA our presbytery leader, upset at some words I had written on my blog, asked me to read I Corinthians 13 as part of our worship service and read it twice. I was fairly certain that he asked me to do the reading because he felt I needed to know more about love but before the day came he called and suggested I should probably only read it once. I told him no I would read it twice. Here is the reason why. The chapter explaining what love is and does states in verse six “Does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.”

We were concerned at the time with voting to retain the biblical view of marriage which is biblically between one man and one woman. We failed and many of us are no longer PCUSA. But now, for me, and hopefully for other Christians the issue is the Lordship of Jesus. We cannot promote conspiracies and still be prepared to speak of the one who is Truth. We cannot major in our own particular ideology over the truth of the triune God of the Bible. Our urgency, if we are faithful, whether apologist or simply follower of Jesus, must be to clear away the rubbish of false doctrine which includes conspiracies. It is to make the path clear so that others can freely rejoice in Truth as they submit to the Lordship of Christ.

 

Clay Clark, Michael Flynn and Scott McKay: the Wolf cometh

 

The Wolf cometh….

I have written in the past about Paul Schneider the first Protestant pastor to die at the hands of the Nazis. One of his many objections to the Nazis was their war against true Christianity, which included their paganism. In an earlier article I wrote, “Paul Schneider: A Chestnut Tree and the Confessing Church,” I began with:

Pastor Paul Schneider at the funeral of a child “denounced the web of pagan mythology that for political reasons was being superimposed upon the Christian concept of the hereafter.” He, like other members of the Confessing Churches had denounced the attempt by various groups and people in Germany to de-Christianize the churches.

I wrote that article with the progressive mainline churches in mind as the “German Christians” were both liberal and nationalist, fighting for the superiority of the Germanic race while attempting to reinterpret the Scriptures.  Now, thirteen years later, I am writing this with a far-right movement in mind. There are people who profess Christianity and yet cling to many of QAnon’s conspiracies without understanding the horrible faithlessness to Christ their commitment to QAnon entails. They are seemingly unaware of the true ideology many QAnon leaders hold.

I listened to a video of two of these leaders, Scott McKay and Michael Jaco, who were discussing their religious views while suggesting that the churches of today would be destroyed as their new utopia world is revealed. One of them begins the conversation by stating, “We determine what we want; our conscious thoughts create what we want.”

In the continuing conversation Scott McKay says:

Getting to the religious order Mike … here’s the thing what most people don’t understand is that a satanic order has had a massive influence on the Bible itself stripping out many books out of the Bible taking many things that are actually indicative of this realm of human consciousness, the Christ’s consciousness, God’s consciousness that you and I understand. A lot of people don’t. There was a time when I didn’t either … The satanic order has made our existence as spiritual beings, have muddied it so much that when this all comes down and the people are going to learn the truth of a lot of things they’ve thought about from the religious aspects of their lives this entire institution of religion which Christ was never a proponent of, neither is our Creator.

McKay adds, “We who have this consciousness of light rising …now that we know there’s going to be a hayside taken to the religious order to get them out of the way to learn the truth.”

Scott McKay is one of the fellows I have written about who is anti-Semitic since he imagines, what he calls the khazarian elite bankers, the khazarian Jews, as those who are controlling world events. As I pointed out in another article, McKay is attempting to portray the Jews of Europe, those who lost 6 million members to the Holocaust, those who were at the forefront of establishing the State of Israel, as fake Jews and evil conspirators.   

Now McKay’s thoughts and speech have and are being allowed at huge gatherings promoting conspiracies about the 2020 election and COVID. General Michael Flynn and Clay Clark, who endorses extreme conspiracies, are involved in what they are calling “The Reawaken America Tour.” McKay, who several months ago interviewed Clay Clark on his own Patriot Street Fighter YouTube video, is among the many speakers including Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Lin Wood, Mike Lindell, Clay Clark and several pastors. McKay’s speech is extremely troubling:

 Holding up the Tomahawk he sells and carries he states, “so for those we have to work on, because of my native heritage this tomahawk represents what we are going to offer these scumbags and these criminals, these politicians, these corrupt people. This is a peace pipe, this truly is a functional peace pipe and I’m going to get to the point, no we never smoked anything out of it yet—this is what we offer them if they put down their corrupt ways, leave power, leave office, and move on and give us our country back this is what they get. However if they chose to continue the corrupt ways the only thing left for them is the blade of war of we the people and that’s coming.” [The tomahawk comes apart and one end is a peace pipe.]

McKay begins talking about his internet programs and combines it with what he calls “spiritual ascension and human consciousness” and aims it at those he calls scumbags. Then he turns to the preachers. He harangues them:

You know what the problem is? We need the preachers and the pastors in the country to come on this battlefield, with my attitude, all over the country. I assure you if these guys came into the public forum of conversation with my attitude this thing would end fast believe me! Believe me, you have the pastors coming out in the country like it is the revolutionary war putting the Bible down, grabbing the musket heading out into the hills, packing gunpowder in that thing and start going into the fight, taking human life. If they would come at it from that perspective this thing collapses quickly, most of you know I attack the religious order every chance I get. Why? Because if they worked, if what they were doing was efficient, if that message was working this world wouldn’t have ascended into the satanic world it is.  

During McKay’s speech he refers to the small children who are supposedly being abused and their blood used as a restorative potion. This is the new blood libel not unlike the one told about the Jews in the medieval years, but now it is the Democrats, Hollywood, etc.    

 Paul Schneider, the first Protestant Martyr under the Nazis was beaten and then poisoned to death because he would not comply with Nazi ideals. Last night I watched the movie, A Hidden Life, about the Austrian Catholic farmer, Franz Jägerstättar, who was imprisoned, beaten and then beheaded simply because he would not take the vow to serve Hitler. Neither of these men were considered great in their communities. One a pastor the other a farmer, both husbands and fathers of several children, they understood both obedience to the ultimate authority, His word and their own conscience. They would not accept the lies and distortions of the Christian faith. They would not accept the slanders prevalent at the time, the slanders that cut away the humanity of innocent people. Their faith was centered absolutely in the cross, not guns or swords, no not even tomahawks. Their glory was the cross.

The one conference video I watched was filled with people cheering McKay on in his speech. Many of the speakers listed for that and other conferences are considered Christians, most undoubtedly charismatic and many part of what is called positive Christianity or “name it and claim it” Christianity. They have forgotten the cross, their calling.

The efficient work, the efficient message of the pastor, the preacher, the elder, is Jesus Christ crucified. Lord lead us back to the cross—make the cross central to our lives—it is our true calling.

Khazarian Mafia- the final conspiracy theory that opens the door to hell

 

If the darkness of conspiracy telling had ended with the 2020 election truth might have better entered the broken corners of America.  But there are thousands of listeners on YouTube, and the more radical places on the internet, being led on a bizarre journey which is troubling, frightening and evil. Led by numerous so called warriors, prophets, political celebrities and the odd military retiree, with stories about the illuminati, tunnels six miles under the United States where children are tortured and their blood drained, aliens from other worlds and supposed top military personnel busy arresting Democrats and others—and then above all there are the Jewish people, the scapegoats of history. Yes, too many are descending into that deep abyss—Anti-Semitism. And they are taking thousands with them by twisting the truth.

One of the more popular personalities among these “warrior patriots” is Scott McKay[1]. In one video, joined by Mike Jaco & David Nino Rodriguez, McKay speaking of the cabal, a group QAnon adherents believes is controlling the world, states:

This Cabal is in a death spiral regardless of what people think because as you know I often for over a year now have been hammering away on this khazarian mafia. No one…in the past wants to come right out and name exactly what they are, the khazarian elite bankers, the khazarian Jews who aren’t even Jewish at all they’re Judaic by adoption of a religion but these people have never lost power [for] 1400 years and then what happens they lose power when Donald Trump is elected[2]

In another video McKay calls the Khazars, Satanist murders who “infiltrated every country,” continued “satanic ritual abuse murder,” infiltrated European banks and killed all of the royal families. inferring that the Windsor family of Britain are Khazars. In other words what McKay is implying is that the Jews who eventually found their homes in Europe, Britain, and eventually the United States, are not really Jews.[3] And remember these are the Jews who died in the Holocaust. They are mostly the Ashkenazim.

Scott McKay is not the only one touting the view that the Khazars have been ruling and manipulating the world through banks, politicians and governments. Many of his guests both on his show and on their own agree. But who are the Khazars and how are they connected to the Jewish people?

Harry Ostrer in his book Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, writes of the Khazars, “The Chozars (or Khazars) were a people of Central Asian Turkic origin who ruled a Jewish state between the Caucasus Mountains and the Volga River.” He goes on to explain:

In the middle of the eighth century, the Khazar king and aristocracy embraced Judaism. Ordinary Khazars retained their traditional beliefs and were eventually converted to Islam or Christianity. Around 965 c.e. the Russians overcame the Khazars destroying their capital and other cities.[4]

David B. Goldstein a professor of molecular genetics at Duke University, who with another genetics professor traced the genetic background of the Jewish name Cohen, which means priest, close to the time of Solomon’s temple, is interested in the Khazars and the possibility that they have contributed to the DNA of the Ashkenazim Jews.[5] That there once existed a kingdom that converted to Judaism is a point of pride to the Jewish people but so far this has not been proven genetically.  And although Goldstein sees at the moment no genetic link he and others see the possibility of linguistic links.

Kevin Alan Brook in his 2006 edition of The Jews of Khazaria, writing about the new revelations he has found since his first edition, states in his introduction:

… it has become clear that the Khazar ancestral component in Ashkenazic Jewry is not as large as we might have once imagined. Nevertheless the basic theory that I proposed in the first edition—that East European Jews descend from a mixture of Khazars, Slavs, Middle Eastern Jews, German Jews and Czech Jews—remains in accord with the known evidence, and we still see the East Slavic-speaking Jews who inhabited Kievan Rus’ and Lithuanian Grand Duchy as the missing link between the Turkic-speaking Khazars of the early medieval era and the Yiddish-speaking Jews of later times. We will also encounter confirmation that Ashkenazic Jews are closely related to Sephardic Jews, Italian Jews, Mountain Jews, and several other Jewish populations.[6]

What can be seem from all of these scholars is that the accounts of the Khazars and the Jews given by McKay and other anti-Semites is not historical. While there are links between the Khazars and the Jewish people there is no proof that the Jews of Europe became the manipulative “Khazarian Mafia” as McKay calls them. But his followers need to know that when he calls a group of people the Khazarian Mafia he is actually referring to a group of the Jewish people. And because he places them in Europe and then in Israel he is referring to those Jews who lost whole families in the Holocaust. To follow McKay is to follow a copy of an image from the Nazi era.

And to enlarge the image, make it stronger, most QAnon leaders sell things like hats and t-shirts and McKay does also but he also sells hatchets. Yes, real hatchets—ones with what he says is a peace pipe on the end—so offer peace but if not then the hatchet.[7]

How to put it plainly—the Jews are the Jews, all of them—they are God’s chosen people. Contrary to what some QAnon leaders say the “Kazarian Mafia” has not put false words in the Holy Bible. All of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, speaks of God’s redemption coming through the Jews. Jesus told the Samarian woman:

“You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. (John 4:22)

 To continue days on end listening to these false prophets is to follow darkness into spiritual death. These wolves are attempting to point others toward their version of a utopia after supposedly top military officials will arrest all evil doers and jail or execute them.  Gone is any vision of a redeemed world—and a redeemed people. Instead laid out before their followers is hell.

---

[1] While in the midst of this I saw his face appear in an NBC news story about how social media is dividing Americans. While I am sure they know he is QAnon I do not think they know everything he is teaching his listeners.

[2] Patriot Streetfighter 5/3/21 ROUNDTABLE with Michael Jaco & David Nino Rodriguez, Patriot Streetfighter 5/3/21 ROUNDTABLE with Michael Jaco & David Nino Rodriguez - YouTube

[3] PATRIOT STREETFIGHTERS 5/4/21 EXCLUSIVE TRUMP NEWS BREAKING - YouTube

 

[4] Harry Ostrer, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, (New York: Oxford University Press 2012) 24-27.

[5] David B. Goldstein, Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History, (New Haven & London, Yale University Press 2008) Chapter 1 & 71-74.

[6] Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria, second edition, ((Lanham, UK: Rowman & Littlefield 2006) Intro. Xii.

[7] Patriot Streetfighter Tomahawk - Q Army Shop (qgear.us)

What angels long to look into

 

“It was not always so. Once we knew the Oyarsa of your world—he was brighter and greater than I—and then we did not call it Thulcandra. It is the longest of all stories and the bitterest. He became bent. That was before any life came on your world. Those were the Bent Years of which we still speak in the heavens, when he was not yet bound to Thulcandra but free like us. It was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own.  He smote your moon with his left hand and with his right he brought the cold death on my harandra before its time; if by my arm Maleldil had not opened the handramits and let out the hot springs, my world would have been unpeopled. We did not leave him at large for long. There was Great War, and we drove him back out of the heavens and bound him in the air of his own world as Maleldil taught us. There doubtless he lies to this hour, and we know no more of that planet: it is silent. We think that Maleldil would not give up utterly to the Bent One, and there are stories among us that He has taken strange counsel and dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra. But of this we know less than you; it is a thing we desire to look into.” Out of the Silent Planet C.S. Lewis

“It was revealed to them [the prophets] that they were not serving themselves , but you, in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—things into which angels long to look.” (1 Peter 1: 12)

The music below is from the great Welsh revival- Here is Love—words first in Welsh and then English. It is into the death and resurrection of Jesus that the angels long to look and surely do look. But only sinful humanity can truly understand. 

Restoring the Church? New Revelations? the Problem

 

Over thirty years ago I researched and wrote on a movement called “Restoration.” It was a movement that contained both reasonably orthodox believers and wildly heretical teachers and preachers. Even among those who were orthodox there existed some very peculiar beliefs. And it was troubling that out of this movement some extreme doctrines had formed. I actually began my research when exploring another movement “The Manifest Sons of God.” They were a group of teachers and preachers, with many connections to Restoration, they taught that within the Church is a group of people who will overcome death, before the second coming of Christ, and supposedly save the Church during the tribulation. At the very edge of this latter movement I discovered the “Christian Identity Movement,” a group believing that the Anglo-Saxons are the only true Jews—the tribulation battle that would come would be a race war. This is the road map of declining truth as it moves into utter falseness and evil.

Recently I read an article In the Religious News Service about Sean Feucht, the man who has been going around the United States holding outdoor worship services. The article, “There’s a theology driving Sean Feucht’s worship music protests — and it’s a popular one,” written by Adam Perez. The author to my surprise points to the Restoration Movement.  Perez writing of the kind of worship and theology Feucht uses states:

The core of this theology is that praise and worship manifests God’s presence. Liturgical historian Lester Ruth has traced this theology back to a Pentecostal preacher named Reg Layzell in 1946 who popularized the idea that “God inhabits praise,” based on Psalm 22:3, which, in the KJV translation, reads: “But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.”

By the late 1970s, a rich and diverse biblical theology had developed around this and other teachings as they related to a present-day restoration of musical worship modeled after the liturgical patterns instituted in the tabernacle of King David (1 Chronicles 15).

So in this posting I am going to renew my Restoration article. However since I have recently discovered groups of house churches, they call themselves the Ekklesia, rather than church, who are part of both Restoration and Manifest Sons of God and QAnon, I will at the end be adding more to the past article. Much of the beginning of the Restoration movement is loosely connected to teachers and religious organizations that no longer exist or are not so important to the contemporary movement, but the scriptural misunderstandings still exists and in some cases has evolved.

The Revival Churches, a name they also used, or Restoration churches as they are usually called, began around 1947-1948, as a part of the “Latter Rain” movement. Leaving behind the centers of the 70’s and the particular books and booklets they published they all will prescribe to at least one or more of the doctrines I will touch on and they all will agree that the Church must reach some greater measure of unity, perfection and power before Christ can return.

The Dying Church: History Misread

The name Restoration was given to these churches because of their unique view of church history. According to their scenario, the Church is seen as losing almost all of her authentic spiritual experience soon after the death of John the Apostle. According to the movement the Church was weakened almost to death until Martin Luther began “the restoration” with his teaching on justification by faith. Within this simplistic view of Church history, the Church loses all and then is slowly restored back to proper doctrine until she excels the early Church and brings back the King.

One Restoration writer states,”180 A.D. - By this time the Spirit had very little control over the lives of individuals.”[1] He implies in his church history that few believers after 100 A.D. walked in the Spirit, yet for those first three hundred years, the Church was victorious in the midst of terrible persecution. Without the comfort, guidance and control of the Holy Spirit that victory would have been impossible. A more authentic view of church history is fluctuating decline and revival throughout her two thousand years.

The Restoration view fails to hold on to the completed revelations and teaching of the word of God and attempts to add more and more supposed new revelations to the Church’s tenets. 

The Beginning of Revelations:

One of the first revelations taught by this movement was that the gifts and ministries of an individual were to be predicted and received by the laying on of hands. The introduction of this new revelation is found in The Sharon Star, August 1, 1949, in an article entitled “How This Revival Began.” A preacher named Hawtin writes, “I shall never forget the morning that God moved in our midst in this strange manner…The Lord spoke to one of the brethren. ‘Go and lay hands upon a certain student and pray for him. “… He went in obedience and a revelation was given concerning the student’s life and future ministry.” As this teaching developed, the presbytery ministered to the body in this manner, and by prophecy informed individuals of their ministry. 

The Restoration movement’s early beginning appears very biblical, however using one small portion of scripture to support subjective revelation tends to produce teaching which fails to include the complete instruction and reproof of scripture on any given subject.  For instance in I Timothy 4:4, Paul tells Timothy not to neglect the spiritual gift within him which was bestowed upon him through prophetic utterance and the laying on of hands. This text is taken as a proof-text that a ministry, gift, or calling is always received in this manner. Yet this verse says nothing about a set pattern for calling believers into service. For example, in Acts 6, the apostles asked the congregation to choose seven men to serve tables and afterwards they laid hands on them. Prophecy had nothing to do with the choosing.

From this early beginning, a pattern was set: revelation comes first and is then checked by scripture; moreover since the only scripture texts that are sought tend to confirm revelation, not all scriptures on the subject are studied. The believer’s personal life-choices as well as church doctrine then is guided by subjective revelation.

The Hand or Five-Fold Ministry:

The “five-fold ministry” and/or “Hand Ministry” was a teaching that was supposedly restored to the Church at this time. Ephesians 4:11-15, the ministry of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, is the basis for this teaching but is misapplied. The early Restoration leaders considered the apostle and prophet restored in a foundational sense, i.e., with the ability to give new revealed truth. In contrast the Bible teaches that the Church is being built upon the foundation laid by the Apostles and Prophets of the Old and New Testaments. This foundation, having already been given cannot be added to or changed.

The foundational Apostles laid foundational truth, the New Testament. This was possible because they were eyewitnesses to the resurrected Christ, and he chose them for this ministry. In fact, Paul refers to himself as “one untimely born” (1Cor. 15:8) because last of all Jesus appeared to him. Also see Acts 1:21-26 for the biblical requirements for an Apostle. Those that we might refer to today as apostles are, according to the N.T., merely “sent ones.”

The Restoration churches began to accumulate “restored doctrine” on the return of Christ. Restoration teachers often insist Jesus will not return until the church is mature and perfect. As I will show at the end of this piece the outer fringe of these teachers, the Manifest Sons of God, will use this idea of a perfect and mature church to build an elaborate and extremely heretical teaching on the  second coming. But one important point is according to Restoration teaching the second coming of Christ is contingent upon the new revelations of these restoration apostles and prophets.

David’s House:

One of the new doctrines concerns what is referred to as “The Tabernacle of David.” The Old Testament tells of David the King bringing up the Ark of the Lord, and rather than placing it in a tent of meeting at Gideon, he placed it in a tent he had prepared for it in Jerusalem. (2 Chron 1:4) most in the Restoration movement believe David did this at the bidding of the Lord. They believe that God established a manner of worship in David’s tent different from that of the tabernacle of Moses. This new style of worship was a more spiritual style, and is, they believe, a picture of the type of worship the Church is to perform.

 Restoration teachers are thus concerned with worshiping God in a certain way: Not only prayer, praise, kneeling, and standing, but dancing (altogether), clapping, lifting up hands, and shouting. It must be understood that this is not biblically wrong, the error is in the idea that this is restored doctrine and the only correct way to worship God. Their flawed assumption is that God will then inhabit the praises of his people, and as God is praised, the congregation is more spiritually empowered to restore the Church and raise it to perfection.

The biblical texts corrects this view. Two important texts concerning this doctrine are Amos 9:11-12 and Acts 15:14-17. Vines’ Repository Dictionary of New Testament gives the meaning of tabernacle in Acts 15-16 as “tent, booth, tabernacle … (f) the house of David, i.e., metaphorically of his people.” Obviously this refers to David’s family line which culminated in Jesus.

In Acts 15 Peter is speaking to the Church concerning the gentiles in the Church and whether they needed to be circumcised. The question here concerns grace or law; must the gentiles worship in a certain manner (by being circumcised and observing the order of the temple) in order to be acceptable to God? Peter reminds the elders that the gentile’s hearts are cleansed by faith alone (verse 9) and that they themselves, “are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus.” The issue is not animal sacrifice and circumcision versus dancing, clapping, shouting, etc. in order to please God but, rather, are the gentiles saved by faith or works?

Then James, in agreement with Peter, began to speak and quoted from the Prophets, in particular Amos, addressing the rebuilding of the tabernacle of David. James quoted from Amos and then explained that the House of David which God had promised to establish forever (1 Chron. 17:11-14) found its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the descendent of David. The coming of Jesus Christ established the house or tabernacle of David, and His death on the cross and exaltation established the Church, God’s true house forever.

The Perfect Church:

The Bible verse, “That He might present to Himself the Church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and blameless.” (Eph. 5:27) is used by Restoration churches to prove that the last generation must come to maturity and perfection before Christ can come. They falsely teach that this refers only to a last days Church and is something Christ has been waiting for throughout the entire church age. They conclude that those who do not receive their restored truths will not come into maturity and, by implication are also hindering the Church and Christ’s return.

Eph. 5:27 is actually set at the end of a chapter describing the love Christ has for the whole Church as an example of the love a husband should have for his wife. Verse 27 gives the ultimate reason Jesus died for the Church as well as the outcome of the sanctifying work of Jesus within the Church and within the believer. The Bible speaks of the Holy Trinity being the one who sanctifies: God (1 Thess. 5:23), Jesus (Heb. 2:11), and the Holy Spirit (1 Pet. 1:2). The word of God (John 17:17, 19), and the blood of Christ (Heb. 9:14) are the means of sanctification. Scripture teaches that God sanctifies the believer as she submits to God. It is a progressive process and it is never separated from the atonement and is always concerned with the entire Bible taken in its proper context.

Each believer goes through this process of sanctification; it is individual as well as corporate. This process clearly includes the whole Church from the beginning of the church age to the end, not an elite end-time church. In John 17, Jesus prays for the sanctification of his disciples and all those who would believe in Him through their testimony; that again includes the whole church age. God is not waiting for any particular part of the Church to grow up. He is waiting in patience for all who will come and be saved (2 Peter 3:9).

Indeed though Christians are cleansed from sin by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and are progressively made holy in their growth in the Lord, they are not altogether without a sinful fallen nature until the return of Christ.

The Church as the Body of Christ:

Another teaching within the Restoration churches concerns the biblical understanding of the Church as the body of Christ. As a biblical teaching it is beautiful, but the Restoration movement pushes the metaphor to an extreme. The description of the Church as the body of Christ is meant to show the relationship of Christ to the Church and of individual members to one another. Christ is the head of the body, meaning both that He is the ultimate authority and the very source of life to her. (Col. 2:19; 3:4) The members of the Church are in need of one another and cannot function alone.

In the context of Restoration teaching, the body (the Church) becomes Christ’s only way of functioning, just as people need their bodies in order to accomplish any earthly task. As one Restoration teacher explains, “But the enforcement of Calvary’s victory was placed in the hands of the Church, Christ’s corporate Body upon earth. The body with hands and feet is the vehicle which carries out the commands of the Head. If the Body fails to respond, the will of the Head becomes a dead letter.”[2]

The difference between creature and Creator is blurred and on earth the Church becomes indistinguishable from Christ. This eventually leads into the doctrines of the Manifest Sons of God, since it is they who teach that the Church is the ongoing incarnation. Concerning this, theologian Richard C. Lucas points out that:

 It is this egregious error that has caused misunderstanding and grief again and again in Church history. For example when the Church is regarded in literal terms, ‘as an extension of the incarnation,’ the claim is made that Christ is so joined to His church on earth that its teaching becomes His teaching, and its traditions an expression of His mind.[3]

In this context the prophet and apostle of the Restoration churches become the voice of God to the individual, and the door is opened for tyranny within the Church.

Also, within this misunderstanding of what it means for the Church to be the body of Christ, Restoration teaches that the Church is required to do all that Christ did and be all that Christ is. The Church, seen as the literal body of Christ, and possessing the true feet of Christ, is to destroy all the enemies of Christ. One early Restoration teacher wrote, “Now we are the body of Christ, and we, too, are to have all things in subjection to us. At the present time we don’t see this reality with the natural eye. But the day is coming when we will be full partakers of Christ’s dominion (Heb 2 6-16). God is waiting until all the enemies of Christ are put under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. There will be a generation of people created in the last days who will break their appointment with death (Psalms 102:18)”[4] (Emphasis mine) Here, already in 1975 the Manifest Sons of God teaching is promoted within the Restoration movement itself.

Restoration, Manifest Sons of God and QAnon: [Since January 6, the time of the insurrection, the Home Congregations have changed most of their pages totally removing all of their QAnon information and links to some of the weirder preachers. While I am not sure what this means the information given below is what they advocated for before Jan. 6.] 

I have discovered that some QAnon followers, who are also Restoration, now hold to the teachings of the Manifest Sons of God. Besides adhering to such teachings as “the fivefold ministry” and continuing revelations they are extremely political and have mixed their very bizarre ideology with their commitment to former president Donald Trump.

 They have combined all of their bizarre ideology so as to fluctuate between a strong commitment to Israel and the Jewish people while at the same time linking to QAnon videos that are extremely anti-Semitic. The videos they are linked to attempt to show that those, who are in reality Ashkenazim Jews, are not Jews but are part of a secret group controlling the world.  Merging the Masons and Illuminati with the Ashkenazim Jews they portray them as those in charge of the “Deep State,” the Democrats, and Hollywood. The videos raise the old blood libel insisting that all of these groups in thrall to their masters are kidnapping children for sex and drinking their blood for its life energy.

The Home Congregations, call themselves Ekklesia rather than Church believing the Church has failed in its calling and commitment. Added to this are links to supposed Bible studies written by Eric J. Ellis an obvious Manifest Sons of God teacher. Ellis believes there are two sons birthed: Jesus by Mary and the “overcomers.” By following an elaborate scheme using a great deal of scripture which Ellis turns into symbolic steps, the “remnant” come out of the supposedly old Church order and birth Christ within themselves  becoming the overcomers or the second son. [5] This doctrine of overcomers or manifest sons of God has its roots in Romans 8:18-23:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present times are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. (18-19)

The whole text concerns the resurrection of the whole Church and what that means for the rest of creation. It has nothing to do with an elite group moving out of the Church and experiencing the resurrection in order to do Christ’s work for Him. Both the Restoration churches and definitely the Manifest Sons of God have begun to add works to their view of what it means to be saved. I wrote in a much earlier paper:

The gift of God includes redemption, justification, sanctification, and glorification of our bodies at the visible coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is nothing more that could be added that we should want. God’s gift is complete and belongs to all of His Church, and it is His all His work and not ours. “For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13).” “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:6).”

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[1] Dick Iverson and Bill Scheidler, Present Day Truths, (Portland: Bible Press, 1975), p23.

[2] Paul E. Billheimer, Destined to Overcome (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, n.d.) p 33.

[3] R.C. Lucas, The Message of Colossians and Philemon, p138.

[4] Dick Iverson and Bill Scheidler, Present Day Truths (Portland: Bible Press, 1975) p 132

[5] See The Eight Milestones to Maturity - Bible Concepts and The Three-Days Journey - Bible Concepts.

 

Facing the future as a Christian

 

When President Trump lost the election for a second term and I in frustration unfriended some friends on Facebook I felt a certain freedom. But it was the kind of freedom the Israelites must have felt walking on dry ground with towering waves on both sides. Only faith in a sovereign Lord would keep you going step after step.

To be clear I unfriended some friends because after pushing and pushing into the realm of awful conspiracies in order to make it okay to tell others they weren’t true Christians or they had blood on their hands, the friends then insisted it was not trumpers who invaded the United States Capitol but Black Lives Matter and/or Antifa. I also unfriended them because I realized they were making all others enemies. It wasn’t that some Democrats were left leaning and some desiring a socialist government, but they consider all Democrats communists/Marxists. How many times have I seen a picture of President Biden with the communist flag draped under his face?

I still love them, still pray for them, but they have headed so far into the darkness that prayer and silence on my part is probably the only way. (I was becoming a troll.) And in the clarity of the moment I have some thoughts about the future of orthodox Christianity in the United States.

First are some very personal thoughts which entail my own walk with Christ. In sorting
through all of the reading material on Twitter and Facebook I have discovered that some pro-life sites are lifting up some of the same conspiracy theories as my Facebook friends. So I am busy scouting out groups that are truly pro-life. That is, they are pro-life from the womb to the tomb. And they include anti-racism and the needs of the poor and immigrants in their concerns. I recently posted two videos on Facebook from sites that embrace that fullness of Christian compassion. See Pro-Life and Civil Rights: Loving Our Unborn Neighbors - Karen Ellis and “What Does it Mean to be Pro-life?”

But still I see the problems that are entangled within the progressive movement which are unbiblical and as deadly as the conspiracies of the far right. That is why I see this particular time for orthodox Christians as a time of walking on dry land with towering walls of water on both sides. Already it is clear that both abortion and unrestrained sexual desires will plague the future but the biggest concern for orthodox Christians will be, and must be, fidelity to the Lord Jesus Christ.

That fidelity means not embracing the lies and immorality of the far right which includes generous doses of anti-Semitism, paganism, materialism and idolatry and not embracing the immorality and lies of the left which include lies about the worthiness of human life in all of its stages and relationships. Christians cannot embrace the murder of the unborn, the tearing apart of immigrant families, the hatred of the other, the mutilation of childhood’s innocence, the redefinition of marriage, the blood libels against Jews and others.

It isn’t an easy road ahead but we have the promises of God. I love the way that Karl Barth put it in his little book Theological Existence Today, written as the Confessing Church was forming during the early Nazi years:

Within the Church it is agreed that God “upholds all things by the Word of His power” (Hebrews i. 3): that He supplies answer to every question, that He allows righteousness to experience all anxieties, that He sustains all that he has made, and leads it to its truest end, that no thing can subsist and flourish without His Word.

So the Church, Christ’s disciples, the orthodox Christians in the United States have the word of God, have the good Shepherd leading and caring for them, yes in the midst of anxieties and even perplexities. We will persevere and flourish in His care.   

But you, beloved building yourselves upon your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life.

And have mercy on some, who are doubting;

Save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh.  (Jude 20-23)

Christian don’t walk down that road, not even in its shadow: QAnon and anti-Semitism

 

Picture taken by Ethan McHenry

After writing an article for Christian Research Journal on an anti-Semitic and racist movement called “Christian Identity” I told a friend that I wasn’t going to major on that topic because I found their literature  so ugly. I had no desire to delve into that kind of material anymore. But of course God doesn’t always agree with our personal plans. Just a few years later as an evangelical in the Presbyterian Church (USA) I found myself constantly writing about a group in the denomination who were both progressive and extremely anti-Semitic. The Israel/Palestine Mission Network even published glossy booklets with such ideas as most of the people in Israel are not ancestors of ancient Israel but descendants of an Eastern European tribe.

And now, out of the PCUSA and belonging to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, I see once again, but in a greater way, an anti-Semitic movement growing across the United States. It is part of the QAnon movement I have already written about in, Q and the cross of Jesus. In that article I do mention that there is potential for the movement to become anti-Semitic. But now after exploring some videos that, “Home Congregations,” a QAnon site, has recently linked to, I see that their anti-Semitism is equal to the Nazis of Germany.[1]

The first video, authored by Janet Ossebaard, a Dutch conspiracy theorist, attempts to go back in history and show where those who are supposedly controlling history originated. The narrator of this weird story eventually points to the, Ashkenazim, those Jewish groups who eventually immigrated to Germany as well as other parts of Europe. The narrator instead of connecting them to Abraham, like the PCUSA group mentioned above, connects them to an Eastern European group the Khazars. The Khazars, in reality first converted to Judaism and then to Greek Orthodoxy and are not genetically linked to the Jewish people.  But this is one of the bigger lies of many anti-Semites, that the people who died in the Holocaust and settled the modern State of Israel are not really Jews. Rather the anti-Semite insists they are a group of people who infiltrated nations with their greed and desire to control the world.

But these videos get weirder because the narrator using every
conspiracy theory possible connects the Jesuits to the Free Masons after having connected them to the Knights Templers. And somehow in all of that the Illuminati also gets connected to all of them—they all merge together. And then comes the forth video that begins with the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which is allegedly a group of Jewish elders getting together and planning how to conquer the world.

All of this undergirds the lies about Jews controlling the nations, financing wars, turning Russia into a communist empire, causing the great depression, manipulating political parties, and encouraging the Nazis. (Hitler is said, by the anti-Semite, to actually be a Rothschild.) And today, connected to QAnon these same lies are about how this group, the merged Ashkenazim, mason, Illuminati, are in charge of the “Deep State,” the Democrats, Hollywood, and the old blood libel that all of these groups in thrall to their masters are kidnapping children for sex and drinking their blood for its life energy.

Christian don’t walk down that road, not even in its shadow.

Don’t become attached to any of the lies, the conspiracy theories, not even the election conspiracies. Darkness and evil are behind all of it. If you embrace one lie, you will be guilty of abetting anti-Semites. The father of lies must be laughing at the Church in the United States. We have forgotten our Lord and because of it souls are being lost, human lives are being lost, truth is being trampled on the ground. Remember when such lies were told in the 1920’s and 30’s the end was the horrible deaths of six million Jews plus many, many others. Let’s not walk this awful bloody road again.

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[1] Here is the page the links are on: The Great Awakening – Home Congregations- Worldwide, and here is the site where the videos are: THE SEQUEL TO THE FALL OF THE CABAL - PART 1 (bitchute.com)