Truth Magazine

By Donald Townsley

It is my conviction that there are several sins that are committed more frequently during the summer sea-son than at any other time of the year. In this article we will look at some of these sins.

Immodest Dress

The problem of immodest dress grows worse by the year! Dressing immodestly (by either women or men) is contrary to the law of Christ. Christians are not to be lascivious (Gal. 5:19). Lasciviousness is conduct that is shameless and shocking to public decency. Thayer says it means “unbridled lust, excess, licentiousness, shamelessness, insolence.” W.E. Vine says it “denotes excess, licentiousness, absence of restraint, indecency, wantonness.” Clark says it means “all lewdness.” These definitions show that a Christian must always show restraint in conduct, be de-cent in dress, and never be lewd in any sense.

The definitions above would rule out the wearing of skin-tight jeans or pants on the part of male or female; the wearing of shorts; dresses that are cut too low, too short, or too tight, and dresses that have a slit which shows the leg half-way up the thigh (giving a “strip-tease” view of the leg which is very sensual and lust-enticing to the male). Paul said to the women: “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, pearls, or costly array; but (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works” (1 Tim. 2:9-10). Paul told the older women to teach the younger women “to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed” (Tit. 2:5).

The nakedness of a woman’s body excites lust in men. From his roof-top David saw Bathsheba washing herself and she was “very beautiful to look upon” (2 Sam. 11:2). David looked, lusted, then sent for her and committed the overt act of adultery with her (2 Sam. 11:4). The same thing happens over and over today: women ex-pose their nearly nude bodies to neighbors and friends of the opposite sex; lust is kindled, then it is not over until that neighbor or friend “goeth in to his neighbor’s wife” (Prov. 6:32-35)! Trust is destroyed! Hearts and homes are broken! And it all began with a woman indecently exposing her-self!

A woman who displays her body before men, or conducts her-self in such a way that she causes them to lust has become a stumbling-block (Matt. 18:6-7). No godly woman is going to be displaying her nude (or nearly nude) body before the eyes of a lustful world which has “eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin” (2 Pet. 2:14). A godly woman knows what is modest (in apparel and in conduct) and lives accordingly. She also teaches her children and sets the proper example of modesty before them. The writer of Proverbs said of the evil woman, “Lust not after her beauty in thine heart” (Prov. 6:25). Jesus said that “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matt. 5:28).

Mixed Swimming

Mixed swimming is another summer sin that falls in the same category as that discussed above. True Christians will not expose their bodies to one another and to the people of the world by going to the public swimming pools and beaches. There is also physical contact involved in mixed swimming that is lust-enticing, Christians are to abstain from every form of evil (1 Thess. 5:22).

Godless Vacations

Many Christians not only take a vacation from work, they also take a vacation from God, Christ and the church! Many rob God in order to take their vacations  some drastically reduce their contribution, and others just eliminate it altogether! We all need to understand that the Lord’s work must go on: vacation or no vacation, duty to God must come first! Then, many go to places where there is no church. They have given no thought as to where they will worship on the Lord’s day (Acts 20:7; Heb. 10:25)! What if the Lord should come during this time when you have given no thought to ensure that his work goes on at home, and have made no preparation to worship him while you are away from home?

We all need to learn that Christianity is not a seasonal religion, nor is it circumstantial in nature. The practice of Christianity does not depend upon place  we must be Christians wherever we are; neither does the practice of Christianity depend on time  we are to be Christians regardless of the day or the hour! The “seasonal Christian” is good at church services and in the presence of the brethren, but many times he becomes a reprobate when he gets away from the brethren and the preacher and goes on vacation! He seems to forget that God sees him all of the time (Heb. 4:13). Brethren, we must be true Christians, in every sense of the word, in order to be pleasing to God.

Guardian of Truth XXXVIII: 15, p. 1
August 4, 1994

By Isaac Errett

Far more widespread is the mischief arising from the intensely secular spirit of the age. The second mentioned evil is one that is realized by thinkers and students; but the mass of people do not think or study closely on these subjects. Without much thought or study they drink in the spirit of the age, which is grossly material and worldly. It is an age of material interests. Even science is subsidized by materialism, and has its chief value in ministering to the advancement of material interests. Education no longer proposes intellectual and moral enlargement and elevation as an end. Its end now is to fit us for the successful pursuit of wealth. Money is more than intellect, and intellect more than heart, these days. We are willing to wear the long ears of Midas, if only everything we touch may turn to gold. This insane thirst for riches, and the absorbing interest in the worldly pursuits which it necessarily engenders, puts every spiritual interest in peril. Not only are the devotees of wealth impervious to all at-tacks made by the gospel on heart and conscience, but the church is unnerved for the at-tack that ought to be made. This secular spirit is eating up the piety of heart and home and church. The closet is forsaken; the family altar crumbles. The Bible is no longer the book of the household. The daily papers, saturated with worldliness and reeking with vice and crime, and the weekly or monthly journal of literature and fashion, utterly Christless, if not positively infidel in its tendencies, form the reading of the family. Beyond this, if books are read, they are apt to be frothy fictions, written to minister to sentimentalism, and leaving the reader with hot blood and prurient desires. Our children go from these almost godless homes to secular schools, from which everything moral and religious is being most diligently rooted out, in obedience to the atheistic demands of a foreign population, who are not con-tent to enjoy in this land the liberty which Christianity has given them, but seek to establish in our country the same atheistic principles that have already sapped the foundations of morals in Europe, and made France the helpless, pitiable spectacle she is today. And our churches are invaded by the same secular spirit. The simplicity and spirituality of the church of God are sacrificed to pride and fashion. The crashing thunders of truth against all sin and wrong are exchanged for dulcet notes of rhetorical elegance, or for the sky-rockets of a sensational oratory. A false and hollow liberalism succeeds to the stern old bigotry that used to reign in the pulpit. Very short prayers and ten-minute sermons are the rage now. For the rest, the house of God must be made a place of refined amusement, so as to draw. Either delicious music or startling oratory must be had to draw. And when our children go from such homes into such schools, and from such schools into such churches, what sort of a generation are we training for the work of God? I tremble when I think of it. I am no foe to refinement or to oratory, and certainly no advocate of boorishness or of Ishmaelitish aggressiveness in the pulpit; but I would a thousand times rather see our pulpits filled with hairy Elijahs that could call down fire from heaven and send terror and slaughter among the foes of Israel, than with the most accomplished trimmers and slaves of the hour.

It is this worldliness, so wide-spread and so insinuating, that more than anything else paralyzes our missionary efforts. We are so intoxicated with the spirit of the times that we can not be brought to sympathize with a world that is rushing down to death. And we grow so selfish and ambitious in the midst of our earthly prosperities that we have no heart to give as we ought to give to the missionary work. There is ever an increasing selfishness, attending our growth in wealth, which very few escape. We have less sympathy with the world, and more anxiety for our own interests. And this operates in regard to our religious giving as in all other things. We lose our sympathy with the world of mankind. We learn to sneer at Foreign Missions, and figure on it to ascertain how much it costs to convert a soul in Africa or in India.

(Quoted from “Opportunity and Opposition,” New Testament Christianity I:76-79).

Guardian of Truth XXXVIII: 15, p. 5
August 4, 1994

By Tim Mize

I see that “the Jesus Seminar” has made the news again. As you may know, this seminar is actually a group of 78 biblical scholars (read: “professors of religion at various liberal seminaries and secular universities”) who have set out to uncover the true Jesus, especially the things that the true Jesus said. This they thought to do by first pulling up every saying of Jesus that they could find, and throwing them all into a big mix. Then they could meet to pull out each piece one at a time and argue about whether it is something that Jesus actually said.

According to the news, they have finally finished. As it turns out, the purpose of all this labor was the publication of a book, now available for your purchase, called The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? Now all we modern, progressive people out here in the public have something to buy that will give us the very trendiest education on the subject.

Lucky for us, we are now let in on the truth about Jesus. They alone were able to attain to these things, up there in their ivory towers, but they have looked down on us with compassion. As they tell it, things had gotten so bad, with all those “fundamentalists” and “literalists” and “televangelists” about to take control of our religious life, as to require them to sell us this volume. We all know what a genuine threat that is, especially among the sort of people who would be buying it.

A Fifth Gospel

They call it The Five Gospels. They speak of five Gospels because, falling in with the latest scholarly fad, they have put a work called “The Gospel of Thomas” alongside (actually, above) the four Gospels of the Bible. It would be better, though, to entitle it The Fifth Gospel, for a fifth Gospel is exactly what they are trying to create. They have found fault with our four biblical Gospels and have taken upon themselves, at this late date, to construct a better one. This fifth, supplanting Gospel they like to refer to as “the historical Jesus.”

This sort of thing is nothing new. An element of religious intellectuals has been trying to do this on and off for two centuries now, with widely varying results. Just lately, we’ve been subjected to a spate of these “historical Jesus” books (I saw a cartoon the other day of a preacher getting an offer to join “the Historical Jesus of the Month Club”).

A prominent member of the Jesus Seminar named John Dominic Crossan has written the most recent thorough-going one. It is called The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. The cover bills it as “the first comprehensive determination of who Jesus was, what he did, what he said.” They could have billed it better as “the latest of a 200-year long string of books that try to rescue the real Jesus from the Bible.”

Now don’t mistake me. There is much to be gained by viewing Jesus or the Bible through the historian’s eye. The truth has nothing to fear from any honest investigation.

In fact, I have read Prof. Crossan’s book. He has some very helpful information about the socio-economic, political and religious setting in which the story of Christ was played out. But I find myself unimpressed when somebody sets out to explain Jesus entirely from this “background” information  laboriously dug out, as it happens, in some professor’s office at such-and-such university  while casting aside the Lord’s disciples’ own testimony to him. And I find myself a bit suspicious when after it’s all sweated out and written down Jesus comes out looking a little too much like a twentieth century egalitarian activist liberal.

Unreasonable Skepticism

Whenever you hear about the Jesus Seminar or see books like Crossan’s, understand where these people are coming from and what they are up to. Their work is ruled by several tired old assumptions that have circulated for years within the liberal academic community.

The main one is this: “The Gospels are not `historical reports’ about Jesus; they are the professions of early Christians of what they believed about Jesus.” Now, there is some truth to that statement, but it goes on from there to this: “Therefore, nothing they reported about Jesus can be trusted just as it stands.” If it is found in the Bible, it is just “faith” and not “history.” Such skepticism is excessive and uncalled for.

Their notion is that the early church could have invented and probably did invent a great part of what is written about Jesus. Never mind the short time between the life of Christ and the composition of the Gospels; never mind the scandalous offensiveness of what they believed and pro-claimed; never mind that the people who preached and believed these things gave their all and even their lives for them  most any bit of it could have been and probably was the product of somebody’s pious creative imagination. The bottom line is, that if you are going to say that anything told in the Gospels actually happened, then you’re going to have to prove it.

This “proving” was what the Jesus Seminar and Crossan in his book were up to. It was demanded of each story or saying of Jesus that it be proved that it actually happened. We’ll not go into what they thought of as “proof,” but this was the approach: If a lot of proof could be found, then it most likely happened. If only some proof could be found, then maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. If there is no proof available, then it never happened.

At the roots of all this lie an outright rejection of the apostolic testimony to Jesus  that he was the Christ, the incarnate Son, who arose from the dead and truly lives on. If you are open to that, then there is nothing implausible in the Gospels. If you rule that out from the start, though, then every other thing in the Gospels will be baffling or incredible to you.

Surely it is unreasonable to rule out what the Gospels are trying to show you before you even go through them. But this is what they’ve done. Nothing else explains their excessive skepticism.

Finding Jesus or Dodging Jesus?

In all fairness, these scholars do believe that they are helping the faith. They see themselves as offering a purified Christianity to a modern, secular culture that can no longer accept Christ as the Bible gives him. The enlightened, less credulous intellect of today cannot believe what those premodern evangelists wrote about Jesus, nor should they be expected to. Fortunately, we can see now that those early Christians presented Jesus creatively, in order to make a case for him that would be persuasive within their particular cultural setting. That case, as it turns out, is no longer persuasive in our cultural setting, but not to fear  we can do as they did, and once again present a Jesus that is persuasive and relevant to our times.

What they actually do, however, is provide our ever more secularized, humanistic world just what it is looking for  an educated alternative to the scandalous Christ of orthodox, biblical faith (with a clever put down of those embarrassing “literalists” and “fundamentalists” who faith-fully expose its sins thrown in besides). Jesus cannot be ignored, but he can be reduced to something more manage-able to the mind, more edifying to the self-esteem, less disruptive to the lifestyle. This reduced Jesus is just what they’ve been handed, and by the “liberal Christian community” at that. It is no surprise that those who have drunk most deeply of the spirit of our age so quickly welcome and recommend books such as these.

It is wrong to assume that the Christ of the Gospels was any less offensive to his premodern, original audience than he is to our contemporary, modern one. Christ has always been offensive just as he stands. The fact of his crucifixion demonstrates that beyond words. The original Christians were at peace with this offensiveness. After all, they went all over the world preaching an accursed Messiah and a crucified God-incarnate. In the face of that, there was little that they could do to “doctor up” Jesus to make him easier to swallow, and we can be sure that they were not inclined to do so. We cannot say the same, however, of our modern enlightened “Jesus scholars.”

Truly, it is arrogant and perverse to stand ourselves and our culture over the Bible and think that we must bring it up to our level. It is for us to stand ourselves and our world under the Bible so as to be challenged by it, and to be all of us brought up to it. We will never truly understand the Bible, and that includes the Jesus whom it preaches, unless we are willing to stand under it.

It all comes down to an elaborate dodging of the offensiveness of Christ, and getting around confronting him just as the apostles and the early church preached him. The Bible doesn’t ask you to “check your brains in at the door” and hear it like a gullible fool, but it does ask you to face its message squarely as it stands. One way that people deflect the challenge that is put to them by the text  especially the challenge as to who Christ is  is to turn the tables and make the text be challenged instead. It’s as if one would say to it, “I will challenge you first; I will make you prove yourself.” I like what Thomas Oden said in his book The Word of Life:

One can sit comfortably in an easy chair and ask historical questions without any commitment or moral response. With the historian’s hat on, one can play at the puzzle of trying to understand the sequence of events by which Jesus came to be called Christ, the Son of God. It is possible to raise fine and intriguing historical questions without ever being required to make any personal decision about them.

The irony is that when we meet the Jesus of the text, he is constantly calling us to a decision about him (p. 206).

Mr. Oden, by the way, is a former liberal who knows just what it means to play at the arm chair historicism of which he speaks.

Back to the Bible

We don’t need somebody in some ivory tower to mediate Jesus, the Bible, or Christianity to us. We are able to understand the Bible without them, if we are willing to stand under it and hear it openly, letting its challenge be continually met and humbly answered. Nor do we need to mediate the Lord to the world by passing him through the filter of cultural standards and beliefs. Let them meet him just as he stands.

The Five Gospels now takes its place alongside all the other “historical Jesus” books that have come down the pike. Like the others, it will wind up a museum piece, exemplifying the secular age it tried to impress. But the word of God, “quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword,” will endure forever (Heb. 4:12; 1 Pet. 1:24-25).

Guardian of Truth XXXVIII: 15, p. 6-7
August 4, 1994

By Lewis Willis

Did you hear about the new way we are now to speak of certain things? For instance, the new way to refer to a “doorman,” is to call him “an access controller.” Because a cow does not “give” milk  it is taken from her  a “milkman” is “a stolen, non-human product distributor.” A man is no longer “bald.” He is now “hair disadvantaged.” Stop telling people they are “old.” They are now referred to as “chronologically gifted.”

I suspect, like me, you think the above to be a bit funny. However, when people start fooling around with religion, in the same way that they have done with these words, the humor quickly abandons the effort.

Sometime ago, the Akron Beacon Journal (5-14-92), carried a front-page article announcing that the United Methodist Church “has a new Book of Worship, with new ways of referring to God.” The new book was approved by an overwhelming majority of the delegates to the denomination’s General Conference. It contains prayers for all kinds of things which confront people today: adoption, homecoming, various holidays, engagement, getting a new job, unemployment, a new home, or divorce. I wonder if they have a special prayer for abortion? If we are to believe the press, most religious organizations condone the practice.

“Many optional prayers offer fresh, novel names” in the new Worship Book. The names for “God” are especially interesting. They will now offer prayers to “God, our Father and Mother.” Or, they might say “our Parent .. . both Father and Mother.” One prayer says God is “like a Baker woman” who brings “the leaven that causes our hopes to rise.” God is also called, “Grandfather, Great Spirit.” Is this not wonderful? These smart folks have really helped us learn to address God, haven’t they?

Would you be interested in knowing how Jesus referred to God? He told his disciples to pray, “Our Father which art in heaven” (Matt. 6:9; Lk. 11:2). Note Luke 10:21: “In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, 0 Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight.” When he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, he said, ” Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” From the Cross, at the time of his death, Luke records: “And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.” Matthew states that he said, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46)

You know, I did not notice a single time when the Savior referred to God in feminine terms. Nothing he said suggests that he perceived God to be his Mother! According to the Scriptures, He did not even think that God was anything like a “Baker woman” or a “Grandfather.” As a matter of fact, there is not a single reference to God in all of the Scriptures that refer to him as a woman! Now, with some people, that means absolutely nothing. They could care less what the Scriptures say. But, since we “speak where the Bible speaks, and are silent where it is silent,” we do not go beyond what it says and devise for ourselves such books of Worship that speak of God unscripturally (1 Pet. 4:11; Matt. 15:9; 2 Jn. 9; Rev. 22:18-19).

When Paul spoke of the sins of the Gentiles, among other things, he said that they “changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man” (Rom. 1:23). Moses had warned Israel not to corrupt themselves “and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female” (Deut. 4:16). That which is precisely forbidden by the Scriptures has been practiced by the United Methodists! They are not content with the way God presents himself, so they re-make him in their own image. The Feminists among them definitely insist that some references be made to him as “a woman.” There is an obvious lack of courage and conviction in the leadership of this 9-million member denomination because they simply “caved in” to this Feminist demand. Are these leaders serving God, or the Feminist Movement? Paul said, “If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ” (Gal. 1:10). The evidence is in and the United Methodists are pleasing the women instead of Christ.

Not only is there evidence of Feminism in this new Book of Worship, there is also a strong pagan influence. In the days when the Scriptures were being written, the Greeks had given to the world a plurality of “gods” to worship. Many of them were female gods. At Ephesus there was a temple to the goddess Diana (Acts 19). Ashtoreth was a Canaanite goddess with a temple at Sidon (1 Kgs. 11:5). At Corinth there was a Shrine to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. These were all false “deities” which were fashioned according to the imaginations of men. The “god” which the United Methodists have invented is no different than these pagan gods.

One thing which has been overlooked is that “God is a Spirit” (Jn. 4:24). Jesus said, “A spirit hath not flesh and bones” (Lk. 24:39). To attempt to envision God as we would a man or woman will cause us totally to lose sight of the magnificence of his being. Let us never do or say anything which would turn God into that which is common. c.

Guardian of Truth XXXVIII: 14, p. 13
July 21, 1994