De-con-
Struction
a clarion call to defending
the faith once delivered to the saints
-2-
Over the last 30 or so years, I’ve made an observation that I haven’t been able to put into words, until recently. It is this; the Church has made much of calling The Lord Jesus Christ, The Great Physician, but has instead made even more of treating Him as if He were The Great Plastic Surgeon. I’m reminded of words from the book of Job; ‘Lo, mine eye hath seen all this, mine ear hath heard and understood it. What ye know, the same do I know also: I am not inferior unto you. Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God. But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value. Oh that ye would altogether hold your peace! And it should be your wisdom.’. (Job 13:1-5). As the dust of the chaotic 60s, 70s, 80s & 90s began to settle, Charismatics sat themselves in an easy chair & readied themselves for something of a makeover, with modernising nips & tucks here, there & everywhere. The Church had a pedicure & slipped into its silky socks & snug, handcrafted shoes that were so well made they skilfully avoided treading on any toes whatsoever. Then, The Church had a manicure, after which it was so much easier to wear its custom made kid gloves. Afterall, the Gospel shouldn’t hurt people’s feelings or threaten their misguided sensibilities, right? Finally, The Church treated itself to liposuction in order to remove all of its unsightly doctrinal weight & proceeded to dress itself extremely well, in tailor made designer robes of its own righteousness. All of this was done in an effort to attract numbers, notoriety, fame, infamy, money & for some, a spot on the list of best-selling books produced by a certain newspaper, in New York. Whatever innovations were utilised for this particular drive had worked; The Church was turning heads & loving it. There was a spring in The Church’s step & this new image & confidence brought a desire to be perceived differently. It was out with the old & in with the new. If The Church looked fashionable; sounded contemporary; became modern & acted with audacity; it might become more desirable. But to whom?
Traditional Pentecostals were still busy trying to make it over that one last mountain they had to climb. Reformers were happily singing ‘que sera sera, whatever’s predestined to be, will be’. Charismatics were propagating something akin to a marriage between organised crime & an aptly dressed, but badly rehearsed, circus act. Others were working elsewhere however, feverishly creating their own version of The Church. Eventually, this new & unexciting development in proceedings would grow & come to overshadow its effervescent counterpart. However, this was nothing new & it had been a long time coming.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die…Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons (Genesis 2:16-17 & 3:1-7).
The current state of affairs within The Church is much like the remake of an old & tired, but much loved classic black & white film. The title & basic plot remain the same, but technological advances in production techniques, a stellar cast & an generous budget, make it possible for a new & improved version of a definitive work to be brought to life for new audiences. In this, we see much of what has happened to The Church at large.
Right before our eyes & under our very noses, the faith once delivered to the saints is being reorganised, repackaged & redistributed as a consumer item that is acceptable & palatable for all & sundry. There are younger & bolder leading lights coming to the fore in fields of Christian endeavour. The latest & greatest of these new kids on the block are photogenic, articulate, consummate professionals who are hand-picked, sent straight to wardrobe & groomed for the task ahead. They dutifully learn their lines from a new script, adlibbing where necessary & shooting series after series of their carefully crafted programming, filled with special effects, captured in glorious technicolour & recorded in perfect digital sound. It’s quite a thing.
Gone are the dusty, grainy pictures & crackle of yesteryear. The Church ventured out onto very thin ice, but unfortunately, The Church is not very good at skating.
The Charismatic Movement has succeeded in producing sophisticated believers, who know exactly how to do it. They have cannibalised our faith’s history for the best bits, the pieces they like & the parts that are convenient for them. However, even though they’re tempted to think that they’re super saints, constructed of the strongest possible spiritual materials known to God & man, the truth is that they are but dust. Each popular & historic move of God that they claim to have seen & that they have carefully documented for themselves, have become organ donors for other so called moves. In an uncharacteristic effort to be fair, I have to admit that it isn’t only Charismatics who are guilty of the particular aforementioned. They are however, majority offenders of what follows.
Instead of allowing The Lord to be The Great Physician, performing necessary surgery on us in order to conform us to His image, we have turned Him into The Great Plastic Surgeon Whose sole purpose is to make us look good. We want the whitened teeth, but don’t want Him to control our tongues. We want Him to give us bulging muscles & flattened stomachs, but we’ll never embrace the discipline of discipleship. We want to do things in our own strength. Make us look the part Lord, but please don’t expect us to play the part. This is a rebellion of the highest order.
Without realising it, successive generations of Charismatic leadership have slowly but surely turned the body of Christ into a caricature; a Frankenstein’s Monster. Bolts & all. Formed of incompatible attachments. Initially, the body rejected the introduction of these new parts & rightly so; they were utterly false. Nevertheless, these mad men persisted in putting together a creation that they wanted. There was a bit of Mind Science here & New Age there. Some Centring, Contemplative Prayer, a dash of Buddhism, a sprinkling of New Thought & copious amounts of subjective Atheism dressed up as objective Agnosticism. The thing could hardly walk due to its lack of balance & direction. However, generous doses of the new anointing animated it enough to make it appear to be alive.
We will see that the foundational truths of the faith once delivered to the saints have been systematically chipped away. They’ve been de-con-structed in order that they might be re-constituted later & replaced with cheaper materials, otherwise known as error & false doctrine. Our foreparents in the garden suffered the same sales pitch …& it did not end well. When we view this conversation in the Genesis narrative it becomes abundantly clear that part of The Church has swallowed the same deceptive rhetoric as the first woman Eve & entered into wholesale apostasy, just like the first man Adam.
This set of circumstances reveals much to us about the way in which deceivers deceive & believers believe. Man wasn’t given a general principle, he received a specific command from The Lord & His commandments are not grievous (1st John 5:3). Adam was commanded not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good & evil. There were consequences. He obviously informed Eve of this commandment because when she was approached & questioned by the serpent, she answered based on what she had been told. She wasn’t present when Adam received the commandment. However, as we will see, the archetypal progenitor of false doctrine always uses the same mode of subtilty to whisper his chief lies.
The very first thing that we see, is an irrelevant over-statement disguised as a simple & innocent question. This is the opening gambit of all deception. ‘..Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’. (Genesis 3:1). The serpent asks a question that doesn’t need to be asked, in order to solicit an answer that casually draws away from a genuine doctrinal position or issue at hand. In this way, any objections can be handled as mere misunderstandings, but if an individual is caught off guard, if they are unprepared or if they are gullible, the results can quite literally be deadly.
The short answer to the question presented to the woman by the serpent was ‘..no, that’s not what The Lord said, so get on your bike.’, but instead of responding emphatically, Eve says ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.’. (Genesis 3:2-3). Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The response of the unlearned to something God hasn’t said, is very often something else He hasn’t said. He didn’t say the fruit couldn’t be touched. Of course, the logic in Eve’s answer presents itself in the fact that in order to eat the fruit it would have to be touched. But touching the fruit wasn’t in the equation. This is the original & proverbial fence law. You’re better safe, than sorry. The serpent’s question stank, as all red herrings do.
As well as this, Eve failed to be specific in her answer. She refers to ‘..the tree which is in the midst of the garden..’ (Genesis 3:3), but there were two trees there. The tree of life & the tree of the knowledge of good & evil. To which of these trees was she referring? A lack of familiarity with God’s Word will always leave victims of deception vulnerable & unprotected, led out of their depth into uncharted waters, where they may easily drown. The serpent knew this, as all deceivers do. The serpent continues, but changes the tactics, moving quickly from asking a subtle question, to making a statement & offering his relative interpretation. ‘..Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ (Genesis 3:4-5).
Of course, as with all sin, the temptation is packaged in such a way that it has to be practiced. It directly confronts whatever we receive as the truth & openly invites us to question God. An objective truth is always challenged by a subjective experience. ‘And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked;’ (Genesis 3:6-7).
At this point it’s obvious that the serpent only appears to know something our foreparents didn’t. But he then fills that gap with untruths. ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil’ (Genesis 2:8-9). There were already trees that bore the same qualities as the tree of the knowledge of good & evil, except, the ability to deliver a sure death. It was this quality that the serpent dressed up in his chief lie; ye shall be as gods.
With these things in mind, as we look at The Church at large today, we can see the same pattern of a believer’s ignorant entertainment of falsehoods & a minister’s willing participation in prescribed deception for personal gain, recognition & or advancement. This decline isn’t a full frontal attack bearing false teaching & outright lies. It begins subtly, reasonably & rationally. It begins in a most civilised manner, with a conversation. Although this is nothing new, the enemy no longer comes to us as a serpent.
It’s important to point out that the movement now independently identified as The Emergent Church had its main root within The Charismatic Movement. Although the two entities bear little or no real resemblance to each other now, they share a common model. We will discuss that model & the separate emergent movement within The Church at a later date.
While some Pentecostals & Charismatics were busy either rolling in the aisles of their churches or pampering themselves with their newly acquired prosperity, they created a vacuum into which The New Age & Metaphysics were sucked. These forces became standardised sources for the movement’s teaching & eventually, easily interchangeable philosophical & psychological principles soon replaced sound doctrine. This first step was relatively easy to execute because of the over popularised trend for clichés & pseudo aphorisms within some Pentecostal & Charismatic rhetoric. Confession brings possession. If you have a need, then sow a seed. Name it & claim it. Fake it until you make it. Repeat these phrases & of men you will have praises. Ok, I made that last one up. But I trust you get the picture.
The sliced bread of orthodox Church history was perceived as having become stale & the best thing since sliced bread, was becoming stale too. At this point, post-modernity stirred, yawned, stretched & reared its ugly head, posing questions that seemed important, but were not. Despite the apparent invalid nature of the questions being raised to The Church, its responses to them were equally & woefully inadequate. No one had any idea what they were talking about. The Church was in the midst of a doctrinal free for all. This was & is a breeding ground for doubt, deception & eventually an inevitable apostasy. What did The Church do in the face of it all? What did the elders do? What did the leadership do? What did seasoned believers do? I’ll tell you exactly what they did. They did exactly the same thing that Adam did in Eden when Eve was tempted; They did absolutely nothing whatsoever! Why should they risk their salaries, pensions & property? This particular brand of cowardice is all too common.
Deep errors within The Charismatic Movement & Pentecostalism respectively, spawned a generation of youth that were very thin on doctrine but rich in experience. It was to this younger generation that post-modernism appealed & just like Eve, they entertained questions that their predecessors either could not or would not answer. Previously, there had been a valid questioning of denominational practises & the traditions of men. However, the foundational, orthodox doctrines of the faith had remained out of bounds & sacred. When the waters were appeased over issues concerning modes of dress, jewellery, make-up, head covering & styles of worship, everyone assumed that the worse was over, but it was this assumption that was to become The Church’s undoing.
Somewhere in the historic fracas, one generation thought that it was diligently teaching God’s Word & the other generation were not listening or paying any dedicated attention to anything that it was being taught. Therefore, when the serpent came to offer a dialogue, he was listened to. The questions he asked were not about whether women could wear trousers, whether drums were acceptable in worship, or whether they were post, mid, or pre-trib. The enemy went for the jugular. He questioned their beliefs in the fundamentals of the faith & they listened to him.
Like Eve, the new, younger generation were not as well versed in doctrinal orthodoxy as the one before them. They may very well have gotten the gist of what they were taught about Salvation, The Trinity or the inerrancy of Scripture et cetera, but there was little or no conviction in their breast about it. Like Adam, the previous generation was right there & said nothing of any consequence to put a stop to the seduction of The Church that was taking place right under their noses. This never happens overnight, neither does it happen by accident. But again, this had been a long time coming.
The Apostle Paul said, ‘For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.’ (Romans 15:4). Again, writing to The Church in Corinth he states, ‘Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted…. Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.’ (1st Corinthians 10:6 & 11-12).
It would seem that The Church has forgotten its Apostolic exhortation. A return to fundamental Doctrine is a must. We have to go back, but we have to go further back, much further back than our forebears & their traditions, which are nothing more than the inventions of men. We have to go much further back than their Church splits & disputes. We have to go much further back than the past moves of The Holy Spirit we’re so proud of. We need to return to Apostolic Doctrine; the Doctrine of Christ.
The more popular teachers within the Charismatic
Movement claimed that they were restoring revelation knowledge that The Church
had lost sight of during its painful meandering into the dark ages, but had
this been a genuine restoration of truths, the emphases would most definitely
have been that of precious Doctrine instead of cheap
principle. Charismania systematically set about redefining The
Church’s fundamental beliefs concerning God’s Word, The Deity of Christ, The
Holy Spirit, Eschatology, Eternal Punishment & Redemption to name but a
few. This onslaught went on relatively unchecked because when the question was
asked ‘Yea, hath God said?’,
like Eve, we answered their arrogance with our ignorance
& eventually we were sold the very same lie that was offered to our
foreparents in Eden; we can become as gods. If we are not careful, we may find
ourselves naked.
