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| Sodom and Gomorrah |
by NTEB News Desk
Laodicean Pastor Rob Bell Plunges Further Into Apostasy
Controversial faith leader Rob Bell spoke over the weekend at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Calif., where the former pastor openly endorsed gay marriage. When asked about the controversial issue by The Very Rev. Dr. Jane Shaw, who was moderating the event, he offered up a clear and concise response – one that will serve as a surprise to many conservative evangelicals.
“Yes, I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love,” he said, going on to get more specific. “Whether it’s a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man — and I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs to just — this is the world we’re living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.”
Bell also addressed the political association that is generally attached to American Christians. Rather than embracing the notion that most believers are conservative in nature, he said that dynamic no longer holds true.
“I think we are witnessing the death of a particular subculture that doesn’t work. I think there is a very narrow, politically intertwined, culturally ghettoized, Evangelical subculture that was told ‘we’re gonna change the thin’ and they haven’t,” Bell said. “And they actually have turned away lots of people. And I think that when you’re in a part of a subculture that is dying, you make a lot more noise because it’s very painful. You sort of die or you adapt.”
The pastor and author went on to say that some of the methods that Christians have used to discuss God have not been inclusive and have done little to bring people into the fold. He even called some policies that Christians have embraced “destructive” and he called for believers to “repent.”
News of Bell’s gay marriage endorsement was reported on Greg Carey’s HuffPo blog. Carey is a professor of New Testament studies at Lancaster Theological Seminary. In writing about Bell’s shocking claim, he said,
“To my knowledge, Bell’s interview marks the first time that he has openly supported marriage equality and perhaps the first time he has definitively separated himself from politically conservative evangelicalism.”
This won’t be the first time that the pastor makes headlines, though. In March 2011, we reported Bell’s questioning of hell. In September of that same year, Bell announced that he was stepping down from his pastoral position at Mars Hill Church in Grandville, Mich.
The announcement about Bell’s gay marriage views comes as Hillary Clinton made a similar public proclamation on Monday. In January, Steve Chalke, senior pastor at Oasis Church in the UK, also endorsed same-sex marriage, sending shock-waves through the evangelical community. source - The Blaze
WHY I AM NOT A DISPENSATIONALIST John Nelson Darby is recognized as the father of dispensationalism later made popular in the United States by Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible. Charles Henry Mackintosh, 1820–1896, with his popular style spread Darby's teachings to humbler elements in society and may be regarded as the journalist of the Brethren Movement. CHM popularised Darby more than any other Brethren author. As there was no Christian teaching of a “rapture” before Darby began preaching about it in the 1830s, he is sometimes credited with originating the "secret rapture" theory wherein Christ will suddenly remove His bride, the Church, from this world before the judgments of the tribulation. Dispensationalist beliefs about the fate of the Jews and the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel put dispensationalists at the forefront of Christian Zionism, because "God is able to graft them in again," and they believe that in His grace he will do so according to their understanding of Old Testament prophecy. They believe that, while the methodologies of God may change, His purposes to bless Israel will never be forgotten, just as He has shown unmerited favour to the Church, He will do so to a remnant of Israel to fulfill all the promises made to the genetic seed of Abraham. I am not a dispensationalist; it is unbiblical.
Stealing your faith
The bible says this about people living in the end times, our time – “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away [their] ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.” 2 Timothy 4:3,4.
That day, foreseen by the Lord and given to Paul to teach as a prophecy of the future apostasy of the church, has arrived. Who needs “sound teaching” anyway? You get a whole lot more people to fill the pews when you tell them what they want to hear, rather than what the revealed word of God clearly teaches. Pastors like Joel Osteen of the Lakewood Church in Texas have built up a weekly audience of over 15,000 people by telling them that God “wants you to be rich.”
Similarly, Pastor Rob Bell of the Mars Hill church has gained an audience of over 7,000 a week by teaching them “another gospel”. He has just written a book called “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.” The theme of this runaway bestseller? That maybe there is no actual Hell, maybe the bible was only using it to scare us, and that in the end everyone, including Hitler, and pedophiles and Al Capone, all get “reconciled to God”, and no one actually spends eternity in Hell. SPOILER ALERT: If Rod Bell is correct then Jesus is a liar and the bible is a useless book not fit for much of anything.
The rich man didn’t think there was a real Hell, either
The bible is a funny Book, God gives you all the space you want to BELIEVE what He wrote, or to reinterpret His words to suit your own level of disbelief. It’s up to you. But the bible also says that because people refused to believe the Truth, that God would send them a “stong delusion” so that they might “believe a lie”. Jesus taught about the reality of Hell, and warned against it greatly. Listen to the fate of the rich man in Luke 16 who died believing in what Rob Bell teaches.
“And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.” Luke 16.
Ok, so someone is lying about Hell then. Either the bible is deceiving you, or Rob Bell is. Which is it?
Jesus said repeatedly that Hell is real, Rob Bell says otherwise. Who do YOU believe?
Time magazine makes Rob Bell it’s cover story.
“The standard Christian view of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is summed up in the Gospel of John, which promises “eternal life” to “whosoever believeth in Him.”
Traditionally, the key is the acknowledgment that Jesus is the Son of God, who, in the words of the ancient creed, “for us and for our salvation came down from heaven … and was made man.” In the Evangelical ethos, one either accepts this and goes to heaven or refuses and goes to hell. Bell, a tall, 40-year-old son of a Michigan federal judge, begs to differ.
The traditionalist reaction is understandable, for Bell’s arguments about heaven and hell raise doubts about the core of the Evangelical worldview, changing the common understanding of salvation so much that Christianity becomes more of an ethical habit of mind than a faith based on divine revelation.
“When you adopt universalism and erase the distinction between the church and the world,” says Mohler, “then you don’t need the church, and you don’t need Christ, and you don’t need the cross. This is the tragedy of nonjudgmental mainline liberalism, and it’s Rob Bell’s tragedy in this book too.”
Particularly galling to conservative Christian critics is that Love Wins is not an attack from outside the walls of the Evangelical city but a mutiny from within — a rebellion led by a charismatic, popular and savvy pastor with a following.
Is Bell’s Christianity — less judgmental, more fluid, open to questioning the most ancient of assumptions — on an inexorable rise? “I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian,” Bell says. “Something new is in the air.” source – Time
Something new indeed
The Time magazine article ends with Pastor Bell, having dismissed the bible doctrine of Hell, smugly retorts that “something new is in the air”. Actually, Mr. Bell, it’s not something new, it’s something as old as the Devil himself. And you do his work when you teach lies and false doctrine, such as you have done with your book, “Love Wins”.
As we said at the start of this article, if Hell is not real, then Jesus is a bald-faced liar. Period. End of story. Now granted, you may not like the idea of a literal, burning Hell, Mr Bell. But your dislike of it does not remove it’s presence.
Indeed, there will be many in your church who, taught there is no Hell, will then rightly conclude on that basis that perhaps there is no literal Heaven, either. And having done that, Jesus Himself becomes a fairy tale. Why would a person like that ever feel the need to get saved? So they can be washed clean of their figurative sins?
No, Mr. Bell, when you remove the doctrine of Hell, you remove the doctrine of Heaven as well. Make no mistake, there will be Hell to pay for the lies you are teaching.
WHY I AM NOT A DISPENSATIONALIST John Nelson Darby is recognized as the father of dispensationalism later made popular in the United States by Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible. Charles Henry Mackintosh, 1820–1896, with his popular style spread Darby's teachings to humbler elements in society and may be regarded as the journalist of the Brethren Movement. CHM popularised Darby more than any other Brethren author. As there was no Christian teaching of a “rapture” before Darby began preaching about it in the 1830s, he is sometimes credited with originating the "secret rapture" theory wherein Christ will suddenly remove His bride, the Church, from this world before the judgments of the tribulation. Dispensationalist beliefs about the fate of the Jews and the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel put dispensationalists at the forefront of Christian Zionism, because "God is able to graft them in again," and they believe that in His grace he will do so according to their understanding of Old Testament prophecy. They believe that, while the methodologies of God may change, His purposes to bless Israel will never be forgotten, just as He has shown unmerited favour to the Church, He will do so to a remnant of Israel to fulfill all the promises made to the genetic seed of Abraham. I am not a dispensationalist; it is unbiblical.
“To my knowledge, Bell’s interview marks the first time that he has openly supported marriage equality and perhaps the first time he has definitively separated himself from politically conservative evangelicalism.”
