What the Bible says about light and seed

The True Light "In him, (the Lord Jesus) was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world,…the world didn’t recognize him." John 1:4,9.

The Good Seed and the Weeds “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seeds in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. Matthew 13:24,25.
Showing posts with label Biblical Qs & As. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biblical Qs & As. Show all posts

Monday, February 14, 2022

Qs and As by Dave Hunt

Question (composite of several): You say that the need for self-esteem and self-love are not taught in the Bible but that we naturally esteem and love ourselves too much. Yet Jesus Christ said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” How can we obey that command if we hate ourselves? Yes, I’ve heard people sincerely say, “I hate myself!” Dr. Dobson and other Christian psychologists aren’t the only ones who emphasize the need to acquire a positive self-worth, self-esteem, self-love, and self-image. Many preachers teach the same, such as Josh McDowell, Chuck Swindoll, Charles Stanley, and others. Who are you to disagree with them?

Answer: Any Berean comparing such teaching with God’s Word will find that it doesn’t pass the test. For example, Philippians 2:3 says, “…in lowliness of mind let each esteem other[s] better than themselves.” Romans 12:3 warns us not to think of ourselves “more highly than [we] ought to think.” Nowhere does the Bible warn us against thinking too poorly of ourselves. Human beings don’t have that problem. For example, Samuel Yochelson, a psychiatrist, and Stanton Samenow, a clinical psychologist, spent six and one-half years investigating hundreds of hardened criminals and could not find one who did not think highly of himself even when plotting a crime.
 
No wonder the Bible frequently reminds us that we are sinners and unprofitable to God in and of ourselves. How reluctant we are to admit that truth! As Horatius Bonar wrote in his classic, God’s Way of Peace , 150 years ago, “It takes a great deal to destroy a man’s good opinion of himself…[and] even after he has lost his good opinion of his works, he retains a good opinion of his heart….” Note the difference between what Christians used to believe, based upon the Bible, and today’s opinions, influenced by humanistic psychology!
 
Yes, there are people who sob, “I hate myself!” Common sense, however, tells us it isn’t true. They may hate their status, stature, physique, ineptness, looks, job, salary, academic record, or the way people treat them, but they don’t hate themselves. If they did hate themselves they would be glad they were unattractive, poorly paid, abused etc. 
 
Psychology has convinced millions of a lie. The Bible tells the truth: “For no man ever yet hated his own flesh [i.e., himself]…” (Ephesians 5:29).
When Christ said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” He wasn’t telling us we hate ourselves and need therapy or seminars to teach us to love ourselves. If so, He was saying, “Love your neighbor as you inadequately love or even hate yourself,” which makes no sense. Christ was correcting the obsession with self that is our natural bent. He was saying, “Give some of the love and attention and care to your neighbor that you give to yourself!” And who of us does not need to heed that exhortation?
 
You mention Josh McDowell. He has devoted two entire books to helping Christians develop their self-image, self-esteem, and self-worth: Building Your Self-Image , Tyndale, 1978 and His Image, My Image, Here’s Life (Campus Crusade for Christ), 1984. Josh is a magna cum laude graduate of Talbot Theological Seminary and the author of some excellent books on apologetics; yet his ready acceptance of psychology has caused him to embrace unbiblical beliefs and even to try to use Scripture to support them.
 
In His Image , he presents three psychological essentials for a normal person:
1) a sense of belonging (acceptance by others);
2) a sense of worthiness (feeling good about oneself); and
3) a sense of competence (confidence in oneself).
 
He didn’t learn these ideas from the Bible but from humanistic psychology. In fact, most if not all of the heroes and heroines in the Bible lacked all that Josh says we need. Moses, for example, was rejected by his own people and considered himself to be both unworthy and incompetent. If there was ever a man with an abysmal self-image and self-esteem—and one who, by today’s views desperately needed help from Christian psychology—it was Moses. Instead of prescribing months of Christian psychological counseling to raise his self-image, however, God said, “I will be with you!” Millions are being robbed of the presence and power of God in their lives by being turned to self: self-love, self-image, self-acceptance, self-worth, etc.
 
Look at Paul. Hated by the Jewish community and rejected by most of the church (“no man stood with me” – 2 Timothy 4:16; “all they in Asia be turned away from me” – 2 Timothy 1:15), he considered himself the chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15) and “less than the least of all saints” (Ephesians 3:8). Did God seek to build up his self-image and self-esteem? On the contrary, Christ declared that His strength was made perfect in Paul’s weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). Try to reconcile Paul’s self-evaluation, “when I am weak, then am I strong” (v 10) and “in me dwelleth no good thing” (Romans 7:18), with psychology’s three essentials!
 
Josh supports psychology’s self-esteem, self-worth, and self-acceptance with a blasphemous paraphrase from the Living Bible: “I want you to realize that God has been made rich because we who are Christ’s have been given to Him” (Ephesians 1:18, LB). Elaborating on this erroneous interpretation, Josh says we should feel good about ourselves because God was enriched through gaining us as His children. The context, however, is all about the blessing we receive from God. Clearly, the riches of his inheritance in the saints” refers to what God has given the saints, not to an inheritance they have bequeathed Him. Nowhere in the Bible is God enriched by man. It is man who is always benefited by God. Common sense makes that clear. God, being infinitely rich and needing nothing, cannot be enriched by anyone or anything.
 
Christian psychology has promoted the lie that God loves us because of some value He sees in us; and even that Christ’s death proves we are of infinite value to God. In fact, He died for our sins.
 
Spurgeon said it well:
Jesus…did not come to save us because we were worth saving, but because we were utterly worthless, ruined, and undone…[nor] out of any reason that was in us, but solely and only because of reasons which He took from the depths of His own divine love. In due time He died for those whom He describes…as ungodly , applying to them as hopeless an adjective as He could.
 
Tozer likewise wrote, “Until we believe that we are as bad as God says we are, we can never believe that He will do for us what He says He will do. Right here is where popular religion breaks down.” Such has been the unanimous opinion of Christians for 19 centuries. It is only since psychology entered the church that the selfisms of today became popular. Let us get back to the Bible!

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Qs and As - Dave Hunt

Question:
You have said, “obviously Paul had taught the Thessalonians that the Rapture came first,” that is, before “the Day of Christ.” It is not at all obvious....What is obvious is that the Rapture of verse 1 is included in the “day of the Lord” of verse 2, and that the two items of verse 3 must come first....The evil person, the opponent of God in verse 4, will be destroyed by the “appearance” of the coming of Christ in verse 8. It must be, therefore, that the “lawless one” will appear before the Rapture.

Answer:
 I believe it is obvious that to be told the Day of the Lord had come would not distress those believing in a prewrath, midtrib or post-trib rapture, or amillenialists. Only those believing in a pretrib rapture would be disturbed, because if the Day of the Lord had already come and they were still on earth, either Paul had lied or they had been left behind. Since Paul was concerned that the Thessalonians would be distressed by such a report, it does follow logically that he had taught them a pretrib rapture.

As for verse 8, it refers to the Second Coming, an event distinct from the Rapture. There must be two events because what Christ says about His coming cannot occur in one event or in one time-frame. For example, He says that on the basis of all the signs having been manifest, those waiting will “know that it [His coming] is near, even at the doors” (Mt 24:33). Yet in verse 44 He says that His coming will be an unexpected surprise. Christ is either contradicting Himself, or He is referring to two comings: the Rapture, and the Second Coming.

He plainly tells us (Mt 24:37-38; Lk 17:26- 30) that His coming will be at a time of peace, prosperity, thriving business and pleasure. Yet we know the Second Coming occurs in the midst of Armageddon when famine, pestilence and numerous disasters have already ravaged the earth and the most horrible war in history is underway. Again, He is either contradicting Himself, or is referring to two events.

Both Jude 14 and Zechariah 14:4-5 tell us that when Christ returns to the Mount of Olives He brings “all the saints” from heaven with Him. Thus, prior to the Second Coming He must have taken the saints into heaven. That could only have occurred at the Rapture, a prior and separate event.

As for the Day of the Lord, 2 Thessalonians 2:3 says that the apostasy must come first. It does not say that the Antichrist must be revealed first. It is not straining the text to interpret it as saying that the Day of the Lord will not come without the Antichrist being revealed in that day. This fits with Paul’s statement that someone is preventing the Antichrist from being revealed. The One preventing could only be the Holy Spirit indwelling the believers, and that special presence of God could only be removed by catching away the church in the Rapture.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Qs and As: Dave Hunt on The Lost Years of Jesus

From Dave Hunt´s Facebook page. 

Question : The Gospels are silent about the approximately eighteen years between the last time we hear of Jesus in the temple as a boy of twelve (Luke 2:41- 52) and the beginning of His ministry at about thirty years of age (Luke 3:23). I have come across the report a number of times, not only in The Aquarian Gospel , but in newspapers as well, that during these missing years Jesus was in India studying under the gurus. The wisdom He acquired there supposedly became the basis for His ministry. Why not?

Answer: The most widely circulated report involved an alleged Nicholas Notovitch who claimed that while traveling in Tibet in the late 1800s he was told by Tibetan lamas that a record reporting the visit of Jesus existed in a Himalayan monastery. In the early 1900s another visitor to Tibet was allegedly told the same thing. However, no one capable of reading and translating such “records” ever saw them, no copy was brought to the West for examination, and now the story is that the “records” have been destroyed.

If the Bible were based upon no better evidence than that, the critics would have justifiably dismissed it long ago. Yet such speculative claims are instantly given credence by those who demand proof for anything the Bible says. That double standard betrays an undeniable bias on the part of skeptics who claim to be interested only in the truth.

First of all, there is not a particle of historical or archaeological evidence that Jesus ever visited India, much less studied there. Moreover, this theory is refuted by everything that Jesus said and did during His ministry. The teachings that Jesus brought to the Jews were in agreement with all of their Scriptures (which he frequently quoted as authoritative) and without the slightest taint of either Hinduism or Buddhism. Had He studied under the Masters of India or Tibet, He would have been obligated to uphold their teaching and to honor His guru. In fact, His teachings were the very antithesis of Eastern mysticism.

Furthermore, the New Testament account, which holds together consistently, is not compatible with Jesus ever having made such extensive travels. The people in His hometown of Nazareth knew Him as “the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon” (Mark 6:3). The implication certainly is that He was a familiar hometown personality who had grown up and continued in the local community, not that He was a Jewish Marco Polo who had traveled to distant and exotic places.

Friends and acquaintances were astonished when Jesus suddenly began to travel about Galilee and preach to great crowds. To family and neighbors it was a scandal for Jesus to pose as a religious teacher. They treated Him with a contempt born of familiarity, not with the awe they surely would have given one who had traveled widely and studied in such far-off lands as India and Tibet.
Every guru who comes to the West lauds and honors his Master, for every Hindu, including the gurus themselves, must follow his own guru. Yet the alleged “Guru Jesus” never referred to His guru or quoted any religious writings except the Jewish Scriptures. He claimed to have been sent not by some “Master” in the east, but by His “Father in heaven” (John 5:23,30,36, etc.), a term unknown to the gurus and hated by the rabbis.

The gurus claim to be men who, through yoga and ascetic practices, have attained to the mystical “realization” that “Atman [individual soul] is identical with Brahman [universal soul]” and have thereby become “self-realized” gods. Had Jesus studied under them, He would have taught the same delusion. Yet in complete contradiction to that impossible dream, and far from claiming to be a man struggling upward to godhood, Jesus presented Himself as the very I AM (Jahweh) of the Old Testament, the God of Israel who had stooped down to become a man: “...if ye believe not that I AM, ye shall die in your sins....Before Abraham was, I AM....Now I tell you [this] before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I AM....A little while, and ye shall not see me...because I go to the Father.....I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father..... I and my Father are one ” (John 8:24,58; 13:19; 16:16,27-28; 10:30). (Emphasis added)

The gurus deny the existence of sin or of any absolute moral standards. Each person’s dharma is different and an individual matter to be discovered on the mystical journey of union with Brahman. In complete contrast, Christ claimed to be the “light of the world” (Jn:8:12) whose very life exposed the evil in mankind. 
Moreover, He promised to send the Holy Spirit to convince the world of “sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (Jn:16:8). Jesus announced that He had come to call sinners to repentance (Mk 2:17) and to save them from eternal judgment by His sacrifice of Himself for the sins of the whole world.

Christ’s life and teachings stand in the fullest contradiction to the Hinduism He would have learned in India had He studied there and which He surely would have practiced and taught to the Jews when He returned to Israel. This theory finds absolutely no support in the New Testament record given to us by eyewitnesses.

The gurus teach a continuing cycle of death and reincarnation, whereas Jesus was resurrected as He said He would be, and He promised the same deliverance from death to His followers. Reincarnation and resurrection are opposites; one cannot believe in both. The gurus teach a continual returning to this earth in life after life to work out one’s supposed karma , while Jesus taught forgiveness of sins by grace, thus fitting one for heaven. To the gurus, heaven is a mystical state of oneness with the Absolute. Jesus, on the other hand, taught that being in heaven is to dwell forever in His Father’s house of “many mansions” (John 14:1-4). The gurus are all vegetarians. Jesus ate the passover lamb, fed the multitudes with fish, and even after His resurrection ate fish as a demonstration to His doubting disciples that He was bodily resurrected and not a “ghost” as they supposed.

There have been thousands of gurus, but Jesus claimed to be the one and only Son of God, the only Savior of sinners. The gurus teach that there are many ways to God. Jesus declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Everything Jesus said and did opposes the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism and disproves the false claim that He studied in India or Tibet.

This fraudulent theory demonstrates once again how impossible it would be to invent a fictitious history of Jesus and to make it fit into actual events on this earth. The erroneous theory that Jesus studied in India under the gurus simply won’t fit into the New Testament record at all—and if it did, the New Testament would be incompatible with the Old, instead of being its fulfillment, as it had to be. Nor would either the Old or New Testament records fit into the history of the world unless both were true. The perfect harmony of Scripture with established history is revealed by any careful and honest study of both.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Hearing His Voice

Thanks for being a blessing to many! Jesus said my sheep hear my voice. So this statement implies that only God’s people hear His voice. I have been trying to seek His direction in life and I’m eager to hear Him speak. However, so far I haven’t gotten any response. Does it mean I am not His sheep? Does it even mean that I do not have salvation ?
 
A. You’re referring to John 10:27. “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”
The Lord’s “voice” in our life is the guidance provided by the Holy Spirit, who the Father sent to us in the name of the Son (John 14:26). He is an “inner voice” who gives us advice on what to do.

We have to learn how to listen for His voice because it involves waiting quietly, something most of us don’t do naturally. But by learning to listen, we gain valuable insight into the Lord’s will for our life (Romans 12:2).

In all this we have to remember that we’re responsible for the choices we make. The Holy Spirit is a counselor who will only advise us. We have to choose to yield our will to His in order to follow Him.

When we disregard His guidance and go ahead on our own, He will stand aside and let us. If our actions cause us to sin, He will convict us and prompt us to seek God’s forgiveness.
Once in a great while we may actually hear the audible voice of the Lord. If that happens, it it’s wise to pay attention because it means the Lord is giving us very important instruction.
Jesus said, “If you remain in Me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). He was talking about learning to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit.