NOTES ON A NATION’S HATRED OF THE TRUTH: LAMENTATION ON THE WILLFUL BLINDNESS OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH

SCRIPTURE. “They hate the one who reprimands [the unrighteous] in the [court held at the city] gate [regarding him as unreasonable and rejecting his reprimand], and they detest him who speaks [the truth] with integrity and honesty.” – AMOS 5:10, AMP

QUOTATION. “‘But, my friends, we must resist this evil.’ We must never be idle while it destroys lives and hope around us. If we don’t stand, who will? Everywhere, people will be choosing whether to stand up or bow to the emperor’s wishes. ‘Most will bow,’ but if we stand, we can give hope to those who may feel they’re standing alone. We will stand for what is right, and good, and true. We will protect and aid each other and all those Elôm brings into our path. We will remain faithful to Him, even when it may cost us our lives, and we will stand firm against the evil that will soon surround us. We will not back down. Each of us, right here, right now—‘We are The Resistance.’” ― JAYE L. KNIGHT, Resistance, 2014; edited

FIRST THOUGHTS

Please permit me to let you peek into one of my most frequent struggles, that ties together noble Kingdom Objectives with some rather personal and quite ignoble concerns. I have labored for eight years, the last three fulltime and intensely, to bring the Gospel Truth to an American Church that has decided, for any number of reasons, to ignore it – and yes, me and you.

The Scripture we are reviewing today was birthed out of a nearly all-night mano-a-mano Conversation – not unlike that of Job or Jeremiah or Elijah – to plaintively inquire of the Lord why I am such ‘a failure’ to convince anyone of my messages. Indeed, I have enjoyed virtually no real growth in the numbers of readers (or video viewers – ‘until recently!’) after the first few months of launching the Circuit Ride Enterprise in 2020. And if I allow myself the self-indulgent luxury to ponder it much, it tears me apart.

Then at around 3 am I heard, clear as a bell nearly audibly: “Amos 5.”

So here we are, beloved. I had originally conceived this study as another Précis, but the nature of its historic gravitas persuaded me to give it larger consideration. The Major Point that this Commentary will drive home rather forcefully is that the American Church has, I argue once again:

‘Forsaken Truth.’

What that means is this: The Church has willfully chosen Man and Mammon over Christ, Canon, and Kingdom. This in turn means millions of ‘Christians’ are going to Hellfire and will miss the Rapture.

JESUS TAUGHT:

“He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him—the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day.” – JOHN 12:48

“But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven.” – MATTHEW 10:33

“He who hears you hears Me, he who rejects you rejects Me, and he who rejects Me rejects Him who sent Me.” – LUKE 10:16

“He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.” – JOHN 14:21

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’” – MATTHEW 7:21-23

THE POINT. I have for over forty years now heard the Gospel presented to Americans something like this: “God offers you eternal life for free!” Followed by the standard sinner’s prayer, with the naïve newcomer believing that’s pretty much all there is to it. Sure, the Preacher might take time to also say: “Now read your Bible, attend church regularly, honor the tithe, and just love Jesus.”

Nothing about self-sacrifice, suffering afflictions as did Jesus, nor anything that would offend or scare off the new penitent. Thus, he sits under that truncated, half-gospel for the next ten or twenty years, and ends up voting for DONALD TRUMP because he sounds sort of like what he has heard in Church for decades! Nasty words and deeds notwithstanding the ‘godly’ charge to “Make American Great Again.”

So, here’s where this essay will take us in some, hopefully efficient depth:

How Did We Get Here?
What Do the Scriptures Teach?
What is God’s Sole Answer?

Stay with us on this one my friends, and possibly share with some others who are at least willing to listen to you. This is, inarguably, End Game Strategy to digest.

II. HOW THE CHURCH CAME TO HATE TRUTH

I realize how incendiary that Subhead above is, but penned it for that very reason: God’s House is on fire, but not by His Fire. Rather with what the Scriptures refer to as “Strange Fire.”

“And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it, and put incense on it, and offered ‘strange and unholy fire’ before the Lord, as He had not commanded them. And there came forth fire from before the Lord and killed them, and they died before the Lord.” – LEVITICUS 10:1-2, AMP

COMMENTARY. “Next to Moses and Aaron, none were more likely to be honourable in Israel than Nadab and Abihu. There is reason to think that they were puffed up with ‘pride,’ and that they were heated with ‘wine.’ While the people were prostrate before the Lord, adoring his presence and glory, they ‘rushed’ into the Tabernacle to burn incense, though not at the appointed time; both together, instead of one alone, and with fire not taken from the altar. If it had been done through ignorance, they had been allowed to bring a sin-offering. ‘But the soul that doeth presumptuously, and in contempt of God’s majesty and justice, that soul shall be cut off.’ The wages of sin is death. They died in the very act of their sin. The sin and punishment of these priests showed the imperfection of that priesthood from the very beginning, and that it could not shelter any from the Fire of God’s Wrath, otherwise than as it was typical of Christ’s priesthood.” – MATTHEW HENRY, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, 6 vols., 1708-1710; edited

Beloved, do you see it? One: They were filled with pride, likely from having earned a lofty place in the priesthood among the people. Two: They were alleged to have been knocking back some tasty wine and apparently had a good buzz going on. Three: They were in a hurry. Four: Most importantly, their overall sin was offering “strange (common, man-made) fire” in the Temple, a lesson met with instantaneous death for dishonoring and disordering holy things.

So what does all this have to do with the current American Crisis in which I and others argue that the Church has left her First Love of God in exchange for ‘Another God’? We next turn to a superb essay and analysis, again from The Atlantic (June 2022; edited) by TIM ALBERTA, whose article title shall serve as the next subhead.

HOW POLITICS POISONED THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH. This thorough and rangy essay is long and detailed, so as is my practice, I shall condense its main ideas with bullet points in the following summary.

“Before i turn to the Word,” the preacher announces, “I’m gonna do another diatribe.” “Go on!” one man yells. “Amen!” shouts a woman several pews in front of me. Between 40 minutes of praise music and 40 minutes of preaching is the strangest ritual I’ve ever witnessed inside a house of worship. PASTOR BILL BOLIN calls it his “diatribe.” The congregants at FloodGate Church, in Brighton, Michigan, call it something else: “Headline News” … For the next 15 minutes, Bolin does not mention the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, or the life everlasting. Instead, he spouts misinformation and conspiratorial nonsense, much of it related to the “radically dangerous” COVID-19 vaccines.

Listening to bolin that morning, I kept thinking about another pastor nearby, one who approached his job very differently: KEN BROWN. Brown leads his own ministry, Community Bible Church, in the Detroit suburb of Trenton … “The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment” — one’s basic ability to separate Truth from Untruth — “is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.” A stocky man with steely blue eyes and a subdued, matter-of-fact tone, Brown struck me as thoroughly disheartened. The Pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American Evangelicals who had come to value power over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong.

When Brown felt called to join the clergy, he enrolled at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. It was there that he began to question the ‘Union’ of his Politics and his Faith. The more he studied Scripture, the less confident he felt in the people he’d listened to for so long. Some of the Christian Right’s leading voices—people like PAUL WEYRICH, of the Heritage Foundation, and JAMES DOBSON, of Focus on the Family—promoted “Visions of Postmillennialism,” a controversial interpretation of Scripture that encourages amassing political power as a means of building a Kingdom in this life parallel to that in Heaven.

[Two church members], Tony and Linda, say FloodGate’s style—and Bolin’s fiery messages on topics like vaccines and voter fraud—has changed the way they view their responsibilities as Christians. “This is about good against evil. That’s the world we live in. It’s a spiritual battle, and we are right at the precipice of it,” Tony said. With the country on the brink of defeat at the hands of secularists and liberals, Tony no longer distinguishes between the political and the spiritual. ‘An attack on Donald Trump is an attack on Christians.’ He believes the 2020 election was stolen as part of a “demonic” plot against Christian America. And he’s confident that righteousness will prevail: States are going to begin decertifying the results of the last election, he says, and Trump will be returned to office. “The truth is coming out,” Tony told me.

Nestled in a wooded stretch of exurban Wilson County, Tennessee, the campus of GREG LOCKE’S Global Vision Bible Church feels more like a compound. Heaps of felled oak trees border the property, evidence of hurried expansion. A rutted gravel parking lot climbs high away from the main road. At the summit stands an enormous white tent. A sign reads ‘this is a mask free church campus.’ Inside, men wearing earpieces and camouflage pants guard the entrance. Behind them, many hundreds of people jump up and down on a floor of cedar chips. Locke salutes them as “soldiers rising up in God’s army.” Some hear this more literally than others: I spot a few folks carrying guns. Most Evangelicals don’t think of themselves as Locke’s target demographic. The Pastor has suggested that autistic children are oppressed by demons. He organized a book-burning event to destroy occult-promoting Harry Potter novels and other books and games. He has called President Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.”

Once the president of the Southern Baptist policy arm, RUSSELL MOORE quit the denomination in 2021 after enduring years of “psychological warfare” for his opposition to Trumpism and advocacy for racial reconciliation. In the time since, as he’s traveled the country and counseled pastors on the intensifying divisions within their congregations, Moore has become convinced that the problem of Political Fanaticism inside the Church poses real threats outside it.

Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how many Christians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. ‘The caricature of Evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.’ God isn’t biting his fingernails. But I sure am.

DK. If most of this chills you to the bone marrow, good! At least you have a sense of what has been percolating in the Christian Right for decades now, come full term under the renegade husbandry of Donald John Trump & Company with his insidious usurpation of the Biblical Canon by the heretical syncretism of Christian Nationalism.

The Bill Bolin’s have become The Norm in today’s churches, the Ken Brown’s the all too rare Minority, with the rest of the Gaussian “Messy Middle” remain church mouse neutral for fear of losing their sacred station. We are in a hell of a crisis, literally, beloved. If nothing else, wake up to that Reality and throw all the rose-colored lenses in the trash where they belong.

Jesus Christ wears no such things. Ever.

III. THE TEACHING

KEY TERM: “HATE.” ‘Sane’ [שָׂנֵא]: “Refers primarily to those who hate God or the persons belonging to God; ‘the Lord hates those as His enemies who love cruelty and wickedness [and fights against them];’ He also hates the worship of false gods intensely [esp. when it is done by His people]; to be hostile or loathe someone or something (for either right or wrong reasons); in its extreme form, it refers to one who ‘radiates hatred’ [and thereby commits violent, heinous acts]; also, refers to those who hate wisdom [and truth]; ‘those who are idolaters, perverse and evil, God hates.’” Selah.

COMMENTARY. “The same Almighty Power can, for repenting sinners, easily turn affliction and sorrow into prosperity and joy, and as easily turn the prosperity of daring sinners into utter darkness. Evil Times will not bear plain dealing; that is, evil men will not. And these men were evil men indeed, when wise and good men thought it in vain even to speak to them. Those who will seek and love that which is good, may help to save the land from ruin. It behoves us to plead God’s spiritual promises, to beseech Him to create in us a clean heart, and to renew a right spirit within us. The Lord is ever ready to be gracious to the souls that seek him; and then piety and every duty will be attended to. ‘But as for Sinful Israel [or Sinful Christianity], God’s Judgments had often passed by them, NOW they shall pass through them!’” – MATTHEW HENRY, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, 6 vols., 1708-1710; edited

To take that last foreboding line from Mr. Henry’s prophecy of God’s Judgments being sent to us “now,” I have some very BAD NEWS, followed by some very GOOD NEWS.

All shall depend in the Days to Come on ‘where you stand’ in relation to Jesus the Christ.

THE BAD NEWS. “For [God does not overlook sin and] the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and ‘unrighteousness of men who in their wickedness suppress and stifle the truth,’ because that which is known about God is evident within them [in their inner consciousness], for God made it evident to them.” – ROMANS 1:18-19, AMP

THE GOOD NEWS. “Son of man, what is this proverb that you have in the land of Israel, saying, ‘The days are long and every vision fails’? Therefore tell them, ‘Thus says the Lord God, I will put an end to this proverb, and they will no longer use it as a proverb in Israel.’ But say to them, ‘The days draw near as well as the fulfillment of every vision.’” – EZEKIEL 12:22-23, AMP

DK. What this means, I believe, are TWO THINGS: First, all those who are ‘not saved’ by confession and commitment to the Jewish Messiah (cf. John 14:21; Romans 10:9-10), or who ‘believe’ that they are saved but have swapped out the True Christ for an Antichrist, are bound for Hellfire. That’s pretty bad news indeed.

Second, however, for all those who are truly, fully ‘in Christ’ without reservation, unto life or unto death, and who are doing their level best to honor the King and all His truth, there awaits ‘the fulfillment of every vision and promise.’ I take this to mean the very Purpose for which God placed us here in this time, is “now” to be fully engaged. Our Last Days Mission, if you will, now soon begins!

So get ready, beloved. Shore up all your accounts, throw off all excess baggage that you no longer need, and prepare for the Real Work for which you were born.

‘It’s time.’

IV. LAST THOUGHTS

As I conclude, allow me to construct a THEOLOGICAL CALCULUS of sorts, based on what Jesus Prophesied what ‘the End of History’ would look like. I will present my thoughts in the form of a classical, Aristotelian Syllogism consisting of a Basic Premise, followed by a Second Premise, then a logical Conclusion.

FIRST PREMISE. The overwhelming nature of the Last Days will be that of ‘Deception:’ False teachers, false doctrines, and false Christ’s. Lying, subterfuge, and every kind of misrepresentation will become the norm, with Truth being suppressed virtually everywhere, even in, especially in, the Church. Thus massive Apostasy takes place, drawing the majority of those who claim to be Christians to Perdition, with persecution of the true followers of Christ.

SECOND PREMISE. By all that the Law, the Prophets, the Apostles, the Church Fathers and the Messiah Himself have spoken in the last several thousand years, and by the force of my own deep conviction borne of decades of study, I believe without a single doubt, that we are now in ‘The Last Times.’ The evidence for this second premise is so overwhelming as to become what the jurists would call, prima facie: “Sufficient to establish a fact or raise a presumption unless disproved or rebutted.”

CONCLUSION. It follows therefore that the true Remnant Christian’s most compelling witness is to ‘Resist Deception as a Beacon of Truth.’ With the American Church in utter retreat from her First Love and prime directive of the Great Commission, we are commanded to collectively offer a Blaze of Light to this Great Darkness enveloping the entire world. That means walking in the Truth of the Scriptures as never before, not giving up an inch of ground to the compromised purveyors of falsehood.

THE ANTIDOTE. “Therefore, rejecting all falsehood [whether lying, defrauding, telling half-truths, spreading rumors, any such as these], ‘speak truth each one with his neighbor,’ for we are all parts of one another [and we are all parts of the body of Christ].”– EPHESIANS 4:25, AMP

Beloved, I can hardly add another word to so concise and clear a Command from our King. To put it plain: Telling the Truth will save people; Telling lies will kill people. It is that simple. Selah.

YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/pL4YY-rZnpE?si=fzUnSZBlf6PxAAYx