Confusion, doubt and....false teaching.

So, then just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught...see to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ." -Colossians 2:6-8
I am currently engaged in a ongoing sermon series dealing with doubt's about the truth of Christianity and the Bible. After watching this video clip, I am reenergized about the necessity of helping seekers & believers understand the truth of God's word even more. I am not a fan of the "left behindish" flavor of the this clip, its melodramatic and painfully reminiscent of the old "Mark of the Beast" movies in the 80's. But even still, the false teaching the Oprah is presenting is alarming. Scripture warns of being led astray from Christ through men and women who reframe, reinvent, redress and repackage age old lies:
"Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. He has lost his connection with the Head (Christ)." -Colossians 2:18-19a

Saint SourPuss Lecture #2: Doomed from the Womb...?

Ah....the blessed rest of Monday morning when all the sermonic cannons have been fired with all their reverberating consequences both eternal and temporal. Ye old generals sit back, half resting after the bombardment, but still one hand on their rapier. They watch as the ministerial smoke clears and observe who is slain on the pastoral battlefield and who is charging up the great hill of opinion to run them through with their finely sharpened issues. Oh...it's so glorious.

I am currently wrestling through the theological briar patches of Romans 9-11 and boy can they get prickly. But for me personally, the study has not led to a melancholy decent into the typical hyper-Calvinistic tar pit of election, predestination issues or better put... the morbid mutations of of hyper-supralapsarianism.

I think the unfortunate proectory ends up being a narrowing discussion of who is in and who is out. Insted of, what I discover in the text; being the good news that God's choice is to include more than "natural" Israel by calling the gentiles into the "people of promise". The whole flow of the chapters before are opening us up more and more to the amazing grace of God. We are seeing the horizon clear and the light of His work is revealing a spiritual inheritance that is wider, deeper and more eternal than we have ever known. But instead of this chapter opening up our spiritual vision to a God who is at work in ways that are far more redemptive...we get ramroded into a debate about a God who supposedly is dooming people from the womb. So "Saint Sourpuss" of the hyper-calvinism pulpit, ends up pronouncing a fatalistic gospel that keeps people in their coffins; instead of a faithful and rightly divided gospel that opens the spiritually dead person's grave.

This distinction is discussed in the conversation linked to below, where the hyper-calvinist says: "The message of the Gospel is that God saves those who are His own and damns those who are not." Thus the good news about Christ's death and resurrection is supplanted by a message about election and reprobation—usually with an inordinate stress on reprobation."
You can read more here:
A Primer on Hyper-Calvinism
http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/articles/hypercal.htm

Of course there are many a "Saint Sourpuss" on the other side of the theological table as well. They brush aside any discussion about the subject with pithy statements that are more bumper sticker responses than serious studied conclusions. They get emotionally charged on the subject and have more heat than light concerning the matter. They are sure of their positions, not based on biblical work, but religious up-brining. They fire off emotional responses based on experience instead of an honest comprehensive examination of the issues from both sides. I would hope that anyone who wants to "debate" an issue would do the work of first "understanding" the issue. Doesn't that make sense?

Being a theological thinker as a Christian doesn't mean you get to forget to be biblical in how you present your case and how you deal with the person you are engaging. Remember Paul's guiding words in 2 Timothy 2:23-25 "But refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels. The Lord's bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition."

So let's not be a Saint Sourpuss but honestly engage the texts and prayerfully and graciously move towards a greater understanding of the gospel of God...God willing.

provocative quote...

But at length, O God, wilt thou not cast Death and Hell into the lake of Fire—even into thine own consuming self? Death shall then die everlastingly, and Hell itself will pass away, and leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Then indeed wilt thou be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one—O God, we trust in thee, the Consuming Fire—shall have been burnt clean and brought home. For if their moans, myriads of ages away, would turn heaven for us into hell—shall a man be more merciful than God? Shall, of all his glories, his mercy alone not be infinite? Shall a brother love a brother more than The Father loves a son?—more than The Brother Christ loves his brother? Would he not die yet again to save one brother more?

As for us, now will we come to thee, our Consuming Fire. And thou wilt not burn us more than we can bear. But thou wilt burn us. And although thou seem to slay us, yet will we trust in thee even for that which thou hast not spoken, if by any means at length we may attain unto the blessedness of those who have not seen and yet have believed.

-The Consuming Fire’ by George MacDonald