Banjo
Senior Member
Man...this is good....I probably should have placed the entire article in red...
The Keystone Of Christianity
Why We Lost The War
By Al Cronkrite
The Covenant News ~ January 28, 2009
This week I listened to a televised sermon from the pastor of one of the largest churches in our town. The title of the sermon was "Sin". Sin is seldom spoken about from United States pulpits so the title gained my immediate attention. When half-an-hour had elapsed and the sermon was complete the audience learned that sin robs Christians of joy and should be confessed to God so that one’s joy can be restored (Humanism). The subtitle of the sermon was "The Joy Factor". Sin was never specifically defined although it was given indirect attention by offhand references to stealing, rebellion, unfair practices, and doubt. It was never directly connected to behavior and the audience was left with a vague idea that sin is a nonspecific wrong. Nothing was said about obedience, the Will of God or of blessing and cursing. God’s Law was studiously avoided as was the vast chasm left by its absence.
Law for the secularist is quite different than Law for the Christian. Secular thinkers believe the purpose of law is to govern behavior between two or more individuals and that a single individual could do whatever he wanted and would not need law. For the Christian the Word of God is Law and would be so if only one person lived on earth. Selected as an individual, Abraham responded to God’s Word and became the father of a new nation. He and the new nation were chosen by God.
God’s Law was given to Moses, the Decalogue on Mt. Sinai and the civil and social law prior to the entrance into the Promised Land. The Law was given as a blessing. Obedience would produce peace and prosperity. Although similar legal standards had been used in other societies, this Law was not devised in a sinful human mind but came directly from God’s perfect, infinite Wisdom. Obedience will bring blessing and disobedience will bring cursing. Law is the keystone of the Christian religion. Without Law, Christianity is an effete, pietistic humanism unable to please God or to bring His dominion over His creation.
Dr. Rousas Rushdoony established several characteristics of law. All law is religious, its source is the god of the society, any change is a change in religion, religion can be changed but never eradicated, and legal tolerance always creates a new intolerance.
Few citizens understand why the inexorable deterioration of our society continues. When the Supreme Court finds in our Constitution a phantom right to abortion which plainly does not exist or when a state court creates the aberrant right of same sex couples to marry, the courts are imposing a new religion! Since the source of these new laws is an arm of the government, the government is the new god. Christians cannot live a Christian life under a secular legal system and a Christian legal system cannot exist under a secular government!
As the humanistic system becomes more pervasive, conflict with God’s Law becomes more common and the intolerance Dr. Rushdoony insightfully predicted increases. Public prayer and worship of the Lord Jesus Christ is now either illegal or severely frowned upon. Efforts to force Christianity behind the walls of churches are now being supplemented by "hate speech" laws which will enter the sanctuary and become increasingly more onerous.
Flawed theology has defeated Christianity in the United States. The sound doctrines brought to the New World by the Puritans and Pilgrims were quickly eradicated by the Enlightenment that swept over Europe and infected our leaders. Christianity began to center its attention on the creature and ignore the intentions of the Creator. Conversion eclipsed obedience and the commandments of The One True God were dissolved in a sea of pietism.
John Wesley's Arminian Methodist Movement was a well organized pragmatic endeavor that resulted in mass humanistic conversions with too much attention to personal behavior and not enough on the extension of God's Kingdom. Christian converts suckled milk but were never able to digest meat. Charles Finney was a maverick Christian who devised a system to create conversions. He disliked Calvinism and formed his own theological opinions. Both Wesley and Finney along with several other Christian leaders and evangelists introduced anti-Biblical, debilitating humanism into Christian theology that encroached on the sovereignty of The Living God.
Efforts to stem the tide of debauchery have been useless. The Christian church has failed to recognize that the battle is between two different legal systems. Secularism is being legally imposed on a naïve Christian culture that is helplessly resisting laws that are already in place. They are fighting a defensive battle when the only effective defense is a righteous offense. Every Christian pulpit in the United States should have defined the battle and supplied a Godly offense. Patrick Henry was correct in fighting ratification of a secular Constitution; our pulpits should have provided unanimous support.
Getting our children out of government schools, resisting abortion and homosexuality, denouncing the United Nations, and complaining about the government officials we have elected are all commendable actions. They are commendable but they are also useless! We are living in a secular society that is imposing secular laws. It is impossible to live a Christian life under heathen laws. Humanists will always legislate against Christian principles. The Pilgrims knew this and left a hospitable society in Holland as a result. Christians living in Twenty-First Century United States have two choices: One, compromise obedience to God by accommodating the state; or, two, go to jail for disobeying the law.
We have wasted energy trying to claim the Christian roots of our nation extended into the Constitutional convention when the sound theological base brought by the Puritans and Pilgrims eroded within a couple of generations. Our Constitution is a secular document and since its ratification the Gospel of Jesus Christ has never been a significant part of our government. Bogus revivals finally lead to the Dispensational heresy; Satan's final blow to God's church. Dispensationalism not only pushed Christianity into supporting the evil minions of Zionism but robbed us of God's Law which is the prime weapon against the Evil One. When God's Law became anachronistic the door to secularism was flung open. It has never been shut.
Without law there is no sound platform for Christian behavior. Intolerance for Christians is being implemented by law. When laws are passed making it a crime to denounce homosexuality, Christians will be legally bound to accept that grievous sin. It is impossible to live a Christian life under a secular government!
The Bible tells us that God writes His Law on the hearts of Christian converts. Every Christian must remember that the heart on which God writes His Commandments is changed but still desperately evil and without the written Law it quickly pursues it own agenda.
The shadow of messianic world government has begun to fall over the freedom we once enjoyed and we are beginning to reap the harvest we planted when we began to ignore God's Commandments. The new world order is a juggernaut that will allow Satan to ride high on the earth. It is a wicked attempt by men to create peace at the point of a gun. Walter Cronkite, grand old newsman and traitor to his country, spoke of it this way, "...if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophe of world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations, as the first step towards world government... we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order."
Cronkite's faith is in government, not in God!
Law is surreptitiously advancing world government. The term "international law" is relatively new though it harkens back to Roman Fetial law. Hannis Taylor in a "Treatise on International Public Law" provides this definition, "International law may be defined to be the aggregate of rules regulating the intercourse of states, which have been gradually evolved out of the moral and intellectual convictions of the civilized world as the necessity for their existence has been demonstrated by experience."
"A global consciousness is for the first time beginning to manifest itself... we are witnessing the emergence of transnational elites... composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries; their perspectives are not confined by national traditions.and their interests are more functional than national." Zbigniew Brezinski key advisor to President Obama.
Messianic governments discard absolutes. Righteousness and sin lose their meaning. Good and Bad are defined from the center of power. The elite cadre Brezinski refers to is the wealthy and powerful apparatchiks of the new world order who anticipate securing positions of authority in the new globalism. What begins as an oligarchy will over time become a monarchy as power flows to the leader. In the Soviet Union law was vested in the whims of Premier Stalin. If he ordered the murder of several thousand dissidents (which he often did) the act became legal. If he ordered the death of an equal number of innocents (which he sometimes did) that act became legal. Stalin was the temporal god of the Soviet Union.
Samuel Rutherford was a Seventeenth Century theologian and one of the Westminster Divines who risked his life by admonishing the king to succumb to God's Law. Our churches no longer emphasize the efforts of Samuel Rutherford. Kings in Rutherford's day and world government conspirators in our day seek Rex Lex, the king is law, while the God of the Bible seeks Lex Rex, the Law is King.
Someone recently admonished me to read Laurence Vance's book "The Other Side of Calvinism". While I admire Laurence Vance and agree with many of his essays, I will not read "The Other Side of Calvinism" because comparing the musings of Laurence Vance (who is a very smart man) to the consideration of 121 Puritan clergymen, the best and smartest of their day, who were Calvinists and who spent several years writing the Westminster Confessions is like comparing ants to elephants. Hubris reigns supreme when latter day Christians disdain the product of such a magnificent work.
We are living in a day when evil and righteousness are severely distorted. It is less than sensational to speak about the horrendous evil involved in killing millions of innocent civilians with guns, bombs, tanks, and airplanes. Many Christians actually believe the massive killing of innocent Iraqi citizens is a fair price for installing a puppet government and a democracy that can be manipulated from Washington, D.C. (Read an excellent description here.) They feel no guilt for the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Indians who living on our land before they were slain by our ancestors, or for the thousands of innocent Japanese that died under our purposely cruel atomic bombs at the end of WWII, or for the 600 thousand that perished during a useless Civil War, or the millions of young men, women, and children who died prematurely in several needless wars in which the United States was a major player. No, these impersonal killings evade our concern but discussion of the wisdom of theonomy always ends in horror at the prospect of the miniscule number of justified killings initially involved in the enforcement of God's Law. Many Christians are silent on the half million children that died as result of our actions in Iraq but would immediately buckle when confronted with supporting a single death for chronic rebellion, striking a parent, homosexual behavior, or incest.
The majority of our Christian population really believes they are smarter and more merciful than God. They do not want to live by His mandates but seek their own sin-distorted version. They have little knowledge and no respect for the Bible or the studious considerations of their predecessors in the Faith preferring instead to nibble away at the forbidden tree by picking, choosing, and devising their own theology. Christianity can not be advanced under those conditions. The judgment of God has now begun to fill the sky and we will soon begin to experience the fruit of our folly.
"Once our laws are flouted and orders of our courts treated with contempt the whole fabric of our freedom is destroyed. We can then only revert to conditions of the dark ages when the only law recognized was that of might. One law broken and the breach thereof ignored, is but an invitation to ignore further laws and this, if continued, can only result in the breakdown of the freedom under the law which we so greatly prize." Judge Wood from Canada.
http://www.covenantnews.com/cronkrite090128.htm
Published originally at EtherZone.com
Al Cronkrite is a free-lance writer from Florida.
He can be reached at fmsinfla@hotmail.com
The Keystone Of Christianity
Why We Lost The War
By Al Cronkrite
The Covenant News ~ January 28, 2009
This week I listened to a televised sermon from the pastor of one of the largest churches in our town. The title of the sermon was "Sin". Sin is seldom spoken about from United States pulpits so the title gained my immediate attention. When half-an-hour had elapsed and the sermon was complete the audience learned that sin robs Christians of joy and should be confessed to God so that one’s joy can be restored (Humanism). The subtitle of the sermon was "The Joy Factor". Sin was never specifically defined although it was given indirect attention by offhand references to stealing, rebellion, unfair practices, and doubt. It was never directly connected to behavior and the audience was left with a vague idea that sin is a nonspecific wrong. Nothing was said about obedience, the Will of God or of blessing and cursing. God’s Law was studiously avoided as was the vast chasm left by its absence.
Law for the secularist is quite different than Law for the Christian. Secular thinkers believe the purpose of law is to govern behavior between two or more individuals and that a single individual could do whatever he wanted and would not need law. For the Christian the Word of God is Law and would be so if only one person lived on earth. Selected as an individual, Abraham responded to God’s Word and became the father of a new nation. He and the new nation were chosen by God.
God’s Law was given to Moses, the Decalogue on Mt. Sinai and the civil and social law prior to the entrance into the Promised Land. The Law was given as a blessing. Obedience would produce peace and prosperity. Although similar legal standards had been used in other societies, this Law was not devised in a sinful human mind but came directly from God’s perfect, infinite Wisdom. Obedience will bring blessing and disobedience will bring cursing. Law is the keystone of the Christian religion. Without Law, Christianity is an effete, pietistic humanism unable to please God or to bring His dominion over His creation.
Dr. Rousas Rushdoony established several characteristics of law. All law is religious, its source is the god of the society, any change is a change in religion, religion can be changed but never eradicated, and legal tolerance always creates a new intolerance.
Few citizens understand why the inexorable deterioration of our society continues. When the Supreme Court finds in our Constitution a phantom right to abortion which plainly does not exist or when a state court creates the aberrant right of same sex couples to marry, the courts are imposing a new religion! Since the source of these new laws is an arm of the government, the government is the new god. Christians cannot live a Christian life under a secular legal system and a Christian legal system cannot exist under a secular government!
As the humanistic system becomes more pervasive, conflict with God’s Law becomes more common and the intolerance Dr. Rushdoony insightfully predicted increases. Public prayer and worship of the Lord Jesus Christ is now either illegal or severely frowned upon. Efforts to force Christianity behind the walls of churches are now being supplemented by "hate speech" laws which will enter the sanctuary and become increasingly more onerous.
Flawed theology has defeated Christianity in the United States. The sound doctrines brought to the New World by the Puritans and Pilgrims were quickly eradicated by the Enlightenment that swept over Europe and infected our leaders. Christianity began to center its attention on the creature and ignore the intentions of the Creator. Conversion eclipsed obedience and the commandments of The One True God were dissolved in a sea of pietism.
John Wesley's Arminian Methodist Movement was a well organized pragmatic endeavor that resulted in mass humanistic conversions with too much attention to personal behavior and not enough on the extension of God's Kingdom. Christian converts suckled milk but were never able to digest meat. Charles Finney was a maverick Christian who devised a system to create conversions. He disliked Calvinism and formed his own theological opinions. Both Wesley and Finney along with several other Christian leaders and evangelists introduced anti-Biblical, debilitating humanism into Christian theology that encroached on the sovereignty of The Living God.
Efforts to stem the tide of debauchery have been useless. The Christian church has failed to recognize that the battle is between two different legal systems. Secularism is being legally imposed on a naïve Christian culture that is helplessly resisting laws that are already in place. They are fighting a defensive battle when the only effective defense is a righteous offense. Every Christian pulpit in the United States should have defined the battle and supplied a Godly offense. Patrick Henry was correct in fighting ratification of a secular Constitution; our pulpits should have provided unanimous support.
Getting our children out of government schools, resisting abortion and homosexuality, denouncing the United Nations, and complaining about the government officials we have elected are all commendable actions. They are commendable but they are also useless! We are living in a secular society that is imposing secular laws. It is impossible to live a Christian life under heathen laws. Humanists will always legislate against Christian principles. The Pilgrims knew this and left a hospitable society in Holland as a result. Christians living in Twenty-First Century United States have two choices: One, compromise obedience to God by accommodating the state; or, two, go to jail for disobeying the law.
We have wasted energy trying to claim the Christian roots of our nation extended into the Constitutional convention when the sound theological base brought by the Puritans and Pilgrims eroded within a couple of generations. Our Constitution is a secular document and since its ratification the Gospel of Jesus Christ has never been a significant part of our government. Bogus revivals finally lead to the Dispensational heresy; Satan's final blow to God's church. Dispensationalism not only pushed Christianity into supporting the evil minions of Zionism but robbed us of God's Law which is the prime weapon against the Evil One. When God's Law became anachronistic the door to secularism was flung open. It has never been shut.
Without law there is no sound platform for Christian behavior. Intolerance for Christians is being implemented by law. When laws are passed making it a crime to denounce homosexuality, Christians will be legally bound to accept that grievous sin. It is impossible to live a Christian life under a secular government!
The Bible tells us that God writes His Law on the hearts of Christian converts. Every Christian must remember that the heart on which God writes His Commandments is changed but still desperately evil and without the written Law it quickly pursues it own agenda.
The shadow of messianic world government has begun to fall over the freedom we once enjoyed and we are beginning to reap the harvest we planted when we began to ignore God's Commandments. The new world order is a juggernaut that will allow Satan to ride high on the earth. It is a wicked attempt by men to create peace at the point of a gun. Walter Cronkite, grand old newsman and traitor to his country, spoke of it this way, "...if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophe of world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations, as the first step towards world government... we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order."
Cronkite's faith is in government, not in God!
Law is surreptitiously advancing world government. The term "international law" is relatively new though it harkens back to Roman Fetial law. Hannis Taylor in a "Treatise on International Public Law" provides this definition, "International law may be defined to be the aggregate of rules regulating the intercourse of states, which have been gradually evolved out of the moral and intellectual convictions of the civilized world as the necessity for their existence has been demonstrated by experience."
"A global consciousness is for the first time beginning to manifest itself... we are witnessing the emergence of transnational elites... composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries; their perspectives are not confined by national traditions.and their interests are more functional than national." Zbigniew Brezinski key advisor to President Obama.
Messianic governments discard absolutes. Righteousness and sin lose their meaning. Good and Bad are defined from the center of power. The elite cadre Brezinski refers to is the wealthy and powerful apparatchiks of the new world order who anticipate securing positions of authority in the new globalism. What begins as an oligarchy will over time become a monarchy as power flows to the leader. In the Soviet Union law was vested in the whims of Premier Stalin. If he ordered the murder of several thousand dissidents (which he often did) the act became legal. If he ordered the death of an equal number of innocents (which he sometimes did) that act became legal. Stalin was the temporal god of the Soviet Union.
Samuel Rutherford was a Seventeenth Century theologian and one of the Westminster Divines who risked his life by admonishing the king to succumb to God's Law. Our churches no longer emphasize the efforts of Samuel Rutherford. Kings in Rutherford's day and world government conspirators in our day seek Rex Lex, the king is law, while the God of the Bible seeks Lex Rex, the Law is King.
Someone recently admonished me to read Laurence Vance's book "The Other Side of Calvinism". While I admire Laurence Vance and agree with many of his essays, I will not read "The Other Side of Calvinism" because comparing the musings of Laurence Vance (who is a very smart man) to the consideration of 121 Puritan clergymen, the best and smartest of their day, who were Calvinists and who spent several years writing the Westminster Confessions is like comparing ants to elephants. Hubris reigns supreme when latter day Christians disdain the product of such a magnificent work.
We are living in a day when evil and righteousness are severely distorted. It is less than sensational to speak about the horrendous evil involved in killing millions of innocent civilians with guns, bombs, tanks, and airplanes. Many Christians actually believe the massive killing of innocent Iraqi citizens is a fair price for installing a puppet government and a democracy that can be manipulated from Washington, D.C. (Read an excellent description here.) They feel no guilt for the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Indians who living on our land before they were slain by our ancestors, or for the thousands of innocent Japanese that died under our purposely cruel atomic bombs at the end of WWII, or for the 600 thousand that perished during a useless Civil War, or the millions of young men, women, and children who died prematurely in several needless wars in which the United States was a major player. No, these impersonal killings evade our concern but discussion of the wisdom of theonomy always ends in horror at the prospect of the miniscule number of justified killings initially involved in the enforcement of God's Law. Many Christians are silent on the half million children that died as result of our actions in Iraq but would immediately buckle when confronted with supporting a single death for chronic rebellion, striking a parent, homosexual behavior, or incest.
The majority of our Christian population really believes they are smarter and more merciful than God. They do not want to live by His mandates but seek their own sin-distorted version. They have little knowledge and no respect for the Bible or the studious considerations of their predecessors in the Faith preferring instead to nibble away at the forbidden tree by picking, choosing, and devising their own theology. Christianity can not be advanced under those conditions. The judgment of God has now begun to fill the sky and we will soon begin to experience the fruit of our folly.
"Once our laws are flouted and orders of our courts treated with contempt the whole fabric of our freedom is destroyed. We can then only revert to conditions of the dark ages when the only law recognized was that of might. One law broken and the breach thereof ignored, is but an invitation to ignore further laws and this, if continued, can only result in the breakdown of the freedom under the law which we so greatly prize." Judge Wood from Canada.
http://www.covenantnews.com/cronkrite090128.htm
Published originally at EtherZone.com
Al Cronkrite is a free-lance writer from Florida.
He can be reached at fmsinfla@hotmail.com
