The "Great" Pretenders

Wow!! The following blog post is so good, I wanted to share it here:

They Do Not Profit This People

Excerpt:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you.’”

The twenty-third chapter of Jeremiah falls near the halfway point of the book, in the midst of a section where the prophet is foretelling the end of the Davidic dynasty and the coming captivity of God’s people. In this particular chapter, Jeremiah pronounces judgments against the false prophets who had become a plague within the nation. While these words were spoken some 600 years before Christ and in a particular context, his words ring as true today as they did then. “They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you’” (16, 17).

How can these words fail to remind us of the false prophets who plague the church even in the twenty-first century? So many men and women today speak visions of their own minds, and teach what has so evidently not come from the mouth of the Lord. So many say that it shall be well with people who in reality are destined to suffer eternal torment for their hatred of God. They seek to show from Scripture that Christ will save those even who have never heard His Word, and who have never humbled themselves before the Lord. They say, “It shall be well with you” to those who sit in the pews but have never had their hearts of ice melted by the Lord. They speak lies and blasphemies, all the while pretending to the speak for the Lord.

The next verse, verse eighteen, teaches us how to choose good and noble teachers of the Word. If only we could master this simple piece of wisdom the church would be revitalized!

Amen to that!!

The great pretenders. That's what we have out there in Christendom today. From the Emergent movement, to the Seeker-Sensitive movement, to the homosexual "christian" movement to those who follow "The Message"; the need for true biblical exegesis and steadfast discernment is entirely necessary today.

My message board friend Sothenes (a.k.a. Sosthenes), has been quite busy posting lots of important information about The Message Bible by Eugene Peterson.

Here's a copy of his first post in that thread link (above):

The Message Bible by Eugene Peterson
By Sosthenes 1-20-2008

Eugene Peterson is responsible for "The Message" and it is a loose paraphrase of the Bible. This is what Eugene Peterson thinks about the Bible:

Quote:
Eugene Peterson:

Even now, in all of my courses, students read poetry and novels. In my course in spirituality they write reviews of the book Middlemarch, The Power and the Glory, and Walter Wangerin's Book of the Dun Cow. The importance of poetry and novels is that the Christian life involves the use of the imagination, after all, we are dealing with the invisible. And, imagination is our training in dealing with the invisible, making connections, looking for plot and character. I don't want to do away with or denigrate theology or exegesis, but our primary allies in this business are the artists. I want literature to be on par with those other things. They need to be brought in as full partners in this whole business. The arts reflect where we live, we live in narrative, we live in story. We don't live as exegetes.

Quote:
EP:

I think it's partly our sin. One of the Devil's finest pieces of work is getting people to spend three nights a week in Bible studies.

MH

I'm sure that's going to surprise a lot of readers!

Eugene Peterson:

Well, why do people spend so much time studying the Bible? How much do you need to know? We invest all this time in understanding the text which has a separate life of it's own and we think we're being more pious and spiritual when we're doing it. But it's all to be lived. It was given to us so we could live it. But most Christians know far more of the Bible than they're living. They should be studying it less, not more. You just need enough to pay attention to God.

Eugene Peterson:

I think I would want to say it a different way. We treat the text as if it is in a separate world of its own, apart from our lives. This text reveals God lovingly at work in the world. And the intent of the text is to draw us into that world of God's action. Study is normally an over intellectualized process. It takes us out of relationships. And so I guess I'm just not at all pleased with all the emphasis on Bible study as if it's some kind of special thing that Christians do, and the more they do the better. It needs to be integrated into something more whole.

Leadership U.com

So when Paul says,"Study to show thyself approved" and Jesus says to "..abide in my word" then Eugene Peterson thinks it is the devils works because he said,"One of the Devil's finest pieces of work is getting people to spend three nights a week in Bible studies.

"To attribute studying the Bible to the devil is close to calling Jesus accursed:1 Cor. 12:3

Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and [that] no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.

I'm also studying this website which has some interesting information on Eugene Peterson and I have to question his credentials and those who would support his work: Seek God

The Message Doctrine & Gnostic or New Age Terms and Concepts May 13, 2006

The Message Doctrine & Gnostic or New Age Terms and Concepts Cont. May 13, 2006

Go to the message board link to read much, much more on this!

HT: Challies.com
Sothenes
Leadership U.com