Red Herrings

I've been spending a lot of time over the last few months on Quora, a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. Users receive a daily digest of submitted questions in their email, and you can follow links to view whatever answers have been posted. People are free to post a response to any question they please, and people can specify their areas of interest so they receive a greater percentage of questions related to those topics.

Surprise! I chose religion.

As my Quora digest has arrived in my Gmail account on a daily basis, bristling with various questions related to God, the Bible, and religion in general (as well as a few other topics that interest me), I have noticed a pervasive atheistic undercurrent that runs deep through the bowels of Quora—and I can't say I'm shocked. Quora seems to attract a healthy number of young, liberal, progressive, anti-God types who tend to dismiss born-again believers as deluded dimwits with the arrogant sense of superiority that has become the default attitude of today's "enlightened" society in recent years.

This atheistic undercurrent, however, has given me greater insight into how Satan operates, as he carries out his relentless attacks against God, His Son, His Word, and the Church and sets about the task of blinding men's minds to the truth of the gospel. It has clearly revealed to me how Satan uses one simple technique to good advantage, and my answer to a recent Quora question sparked an exchange that showcased this tactic:

Red herrings.

Over the months I've had numerous exchanges on Quora with different types of people, ranging from bitter, arrogant atheists who viciously mock and trash every word I say and want to rip my heart out to other born-again believers who are cordial and warmly supportive to people who are on the fence and genuinely curious about God and the Bible. My answer to this one particular question, however, provoked an extremely revealing response from a gentleman whom I will refer to as JR for the purposes of this article—an exchange that laid bare this key component of Satan's strategy.

The original question as it appeared in the Quora digest was as follows:

If the biblical Rapture were to
suddenly occur, what would you do?

Of course, as an avid student of Bible prophecy and one who is 100 percent convinced of the truth of the pre-tribulation Rapture, there is absolutely no way I'm passing this baby up. As my spirit began to stir and my mouth began to water, I cranked out the following response:

Since I'll be gone, I can only speculate as to what those left behind will do.

First of all, there will almost certainly be competing explanations. New Agers will claim the people who are missing have been snapped into another dimension where they will be patiently retrained until they are able to be safely returned so they can participate in the next step up in man's spiritual evolution, something these low-vibrational snapees were woefully unprepared for due to their antiquated, superstitious beliefs in God, the Bible, Jesus Christ, etc. Tsk tsk tsk...those poor, deluded people.

Then there are the extraterrestrials. Since mankind has been thoroughly and systematically indoctrinated to accept and embrace the concept that there are advanced races of aliens "out there," some of which are apparently champing at the bit to contact us and interact with our species, another explanation will involve aliens—maybe one race that has come to protect us from another race who is out to harm us. (Oh, or maybe what's happened over the last 70 years has just been an imaginative bit of sci-fi shtick.) I personally believe this will be the prevalent explanation, or at least will figure prominently in it.

Professing believers will also weigh in. There are both saved and unsaved people among the ranks of every doctrinal persuasion in existence. There is no shortage of people who get into knock-down, drag-out fights over the doctrine of the Rapture and its timing (pre-trib vs. post-trib vs. mid-trib vs. pre-wrath vs. no-Rapture, etc.) who are not truly born again. That is, they have never been spiritually regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit by trusting Christ for their salvation. Oh, they have a nodding familiarity with the gospel, but they never let it in. It's mental acknowledgement with no heart "ack-change-ment." They apparently think that if they join a doctrinal camp and argue about end-time events, that means they must be believers.

But they are not, and the condition of their heart betrays them.

Many of these people will know enough to understand what has really happened, and will humble their hearts before God and seek Him like they have never sought Him before. God is merciful and faithful to His Word and will forgive their sin, although during the Tribulation their new-found faith may well cost them their lives. Those who do lose their lives are among the martyrs mentioned in Revelation 6 and 7, who are routinely misidentified as the Church by those who hate the pre-trib Rapture. But these people are not part of the Church (which is gone), but are still saved by grace through faith, the only way anyone is, has ever been, or ever will be saved.

On the other hand, there will be many unsaved among the various doctrinal camps who will never admit they got it wrong and will jump up and down and scream bloody murder that this was NOT the Rapture because...

• The Tribulation isn't over yet/hasn't started yet/doesn't exist.
• The English word "Rapture" isn't found in the Bible.
• All Bible prophecy was fulfilled by AD 70.
• The Pre-trib Rapture was invented by J.N. Darby in the nineteenth century.
• It came from a deranged Scottish girl named Margaret MacDonald in 1830.
• The book of Revelation is allegory that we are free to spiritualize away.
• No no no, the "kingdom" is in our hearts, don't you see.

...blah blah blah, yada yada yada, whata whata whatever.

Many of these people are likely to chime in with the world's explanation, since they are of the world anyway.

One thing people need to understand is that at the Rapture, the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of believers (a blessing unique to the Church) will be lifted, along with said believers. The Holy Spirit will not "leave" in a physical sense, but will stand down from His current Church Age ministry of indwelling believers and will revert to a ministry not unlike what existed in Old Testament days. The current ministry of the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ on earth is a restraining influence on Satan, and that will be gone after the Rapture. After the Rapture, Satan will be unrestrained in a way we have never witnessed, and will have the power to perform lying signs and wonders that he doesn't currently have.

And the world will eat it up.

Concurrent with this is the fact that the world will be given over to a strong delusion. God has an unparalleled sense of poetic justice, basically saying:

"You refuse to believe the truth? OK, fine. Have it your way—I'll let you believe a lie. In fact, I'll rub your noses in it."

The Rapture will be the first time in two thousand years God has supernaturally intervened in the affairs of mankind, and make no mistake:

It will turn the world upside down and shake it. Hard.

From the moment of the Rapture on, the world will never be the same. The unfolding of the prophetic scenario will get ramped up and shifted into a gear we cannot currently imagine. It will usher in the most terrifying time in human history with frightening rapidity, and the sad part is that untold millions of people who will be plunged into it will be kicking themselves because they casually blew off the one means of avoiding it—the gospel of Jesus Christ: responding to the conviction of the Holy Spirit, changing your mind about your sin and your need for a Savior, believing in faith that Christ is that Savior, and then asking and trusting Him to save you.

The world will knock itself out trying to convince you that the gospel is exclusive, intolerant, politically incorrect, and nothing but a bunch of foolishness based on a book that secular scholars stridently dismiss as a pile of error-riddled myths.

Similarly, the world will knock itself out trying to convince you that the Rapture is an escapist fantasy believed only by glassy-eyed imbeciles who actually take the above-mentioned pile of "error-riddled myths" seriously.

But the world is wrong—on both counts.

You can disagree and argue with me all you like. You can twist or deny Scripture all you like. You can call me all the names you like. It's OK...I'm used to it. This is too important and it's way too late in the game for me to care about stuff like that.

I just pray that if you're reading this, you won't be one who has to suffer through this time.

Although he later expressed ambivalence about it, JR seemed to come across as an atheist. He wasted no time in taking me to task over my remarks, and seemed particularly rankled by the fact that I had indicated that since I would not even be here after the Rapture, I could only "speculate" about what would ensue in its aftermath.

JR was put off by the fact that I had made it abundantly clear that I believed in the God of the Bible (thus rejecting other so-called "gods"), and that the Bible itself was the prophetically confirmed, inerrant Word of that God (thus rejecting other so-called "holy books").

In other words, it greatly annoyed him that I had the staggering audacity to presume I was in possession of any degree of truth.

And JR was determined to set me straight, by gosh. He accused me of displaying what he called "self-righteous posturing" and called it "ridiculous," and in his comment he embedded a short YouTube video, an animation created by an atheist who specializes in creating videos that attack belief in God and religion in general.

Since it is my personal policy to not embed videos in my articles, I took the time to transcribe the dialog for your consideration. The main section of the video (which ends with several minutes of commentary by the creator) is about 4:45 in length, and begins with a character who has the word "atheist" above his head speaking with a group of people who are similarly identified as theists, or people who believe in God (or at least something they consider to be God).

Atheist: God has not revealed Himself to me. Even if He did, I'm not sure how I could be confident that it wasn't just some kind of delusion reinforced by my desires or my culture.

Theist (Universalist): Oh, trust me...you'd know. God revealed Himself to me.

Theist (Catholic): Me too.

Theist (Protestant): Oh really? Pleased to meet you.

Theist (Methodist): I have felt God in my heart.

Theist (Jew): God speaks to me.

Theist (Pentecostal): I have a close personal relationship with God.

Theist (Baptist): Me too, amen.

Theist (Muslim): You see, God isn't silent.

Theist (Scientologist): He speaks to us all.

Theist (Hindu): Right. We can't all be wrong.

Theist (Pentecostal): You just need to open the door when you hear God knock.

Theist (Mormon): We all have a close personal relationship with God—and you can, too.

Theist (Protestant): Just accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

(At this first actual mention of the gospel, almost as if to distract attention from what was actually said, the words above each character that initially identified them as theists begin to change, one by one, to reveal their specific religious affiliations.)

Muslim: Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on there. Jesus (Peace Be Upon Him) was a prophet, but He was not God.

Protestant: Yes, He is. The only way to be saved is through faith in Jesus Christ.

Catholic: Well, not faith alone...faith without works is dead.

Methodist: Uh, not so fast. All of our righteous acts are like filthy rags to God.

Universalist: It doesn't matter...God loves us all. We will all go to heaven and see the truth then.

Baptist: You think even Hitler is going to heaven?

Universalist: Even Hitler!

Baptist: I'm sorry, but Hitler's gotta burn.

Protestant: Uh, not if he repented.

Baptist: Hitler's going to hell, and so is that guy who cut me off in traffic this morning. You've all been blinded by Satan!

Mormon: Jesus visited the Indians and cursed black people.

Methodist (who is depicted as black): Say what?!

Mormon: And I'm going to get my own planet after I die!

Scientologist: Not if Xenu escapes his volcano prison.

Methodist: Say what?!

(The Pentecostal begins babbling in gibberish, i.e., "speaking in tongues," and the Hindu begins chanting.)

Jew: I believe I can straighten this all out—we Jews are the Chosen People.

Muslim: Chosen for what?! To steal other people's land?!

Jew: That land was rightfully given to us by God.

Muslim: It was not!

(The Muslim picks up a rock. The Jew picks up a pistol. The Muslim picks up an AK-47. The Jew picks up a high-powered assault rifle. The Muslim picks up a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Jew picks up a fighter jet.)

Atheist: OK everyone, calm down! Put...the fighter jet...down. If God is speaking to all of you, then He appears to be telling all of you very different, contradictory things. Perhaps this rather glaring discrepancy can be explained if we examine the fact that your relationship with God seems to be precisely shaped by the culture in which you were raised and the predominant version of God you were taught to believe in. Sure there are exceptions, but typically religion obeys borders, while truth does not. In America God is Yahweh, while in India God is Vishnu. The truth does not behave this way. In America, two plus two is four, and in India two plus two also equals four. If God's message to us was so dire—so vitally important—then why wouldn't He give it to us in such a clear and precise way so that we would all be in agreement, as evident as a simple math problem in which there is universal agreement, rather than trusting His precious message to be spread by fallible, corruptible human beings? Why would almighty God allow the continuation of such widespread falsehoods in His name, which would be effortless for Him to correct, or never even need to correct in the first place, because a perfect Being would have gotten it right from the very beginning?

(During his final speech, the word above the atheist's head changes from "atheist" to "human," and as he continues speaking, one by one the words above the others' heads also change from their religious affiliations to "human." When the atheist is finished speaking, there is a dramatic pause, as if to drive home the fact that he has just delivered the crushing blow to religious beliefs of every stripe and exposed them as silly, superstitious nonsense. But then it all comes undone...)

Mormon: I can't wait to get my own planet!

(As a cacophony of bickering erupts among the theists, the words above their heads change from "human" back to their specific religious affiliations. The self-assured atheist, identified as human, strides away.)

The point of the video is pretty hard to miss:

Shake it off: Since there are so many different religions and denominations in the world today that believe strikingly divergent and often blatantly contradictory things, then it stands to reason that no religion and no god can possibly be true (specifically biblical Christianity and the God of the Bible). Thus, simple logic and common sense demand that we grow up and shake off such deluded thinking and embrace the truth that all gods and religions are nothing more than myths that we believe to suit our own desires and because our individual cultures or societal groups either subtly influence or overtly indoctrinate us to do so.

And it works like a charm. Virtually every atheist I can think of, from ordinary people on Quora and YouTube that I've had the opportunity to interact with to the heavyweight speakers and authors like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchins have espoused some variation of this basic idea with roaring success.

But why does this idea work so well, and seem so compelling to so many people around the world?

"In the beginning..."

In the literal sense, a red herring is a kippered herring, or a herring that has been cured in brine and/or heavily smoked, which gives the fish a pungent odor and a reddish hue. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people would sometimes train hunting dogs to follow a specific animal's scent by dragging a red herring at odd angles across the trail of the animal they wanted the dogs to follow. Initially the trail left by the strong-smelling fish would confuse the dogs, but eventually they would learn to ignore the scent of the kippered herring and follow the right trail. In other words, the red herring was designed to lead the dogs away from the right path.

Figuratively, a red herring does essentially the same thing. It is a seemingly plausible, though marginally relevant diversionary tactic; something that misleads or distracts people from an important or relevant issue or goal. Just as with the dogs, it is designed to lead people away from the right path.

The first red herring in the Bible comes courtesy of...guess who?

Satan led Eve off the trail of obeying God by dangling under her nose the sweet-smelling but misleading and ultimately empty promise of spiritual enlightenment. Eve took the bait, Adam followed suit, and our fate was sealed.

Before we go any further, however, it would be helpful to take a step back and consider just how we got to this juncture of history. To do that, we have to go back and start at the beginning.

First of all, a Creator exists. The evidence? Take a look around, Sherlock:

The evidence of God's existence is in the universe He created. According to the Bible, this is not something that even needs to be argued about or proved, any more than we are obliged to argue about or prove that we exist. The existence of a Creator is completely self-evident.

Note that we don't know how He created the universe. It cracks me up sometimes when scientists toss around fancy terms like "singularities," "baryogenesis," and "multiverses" and concoct exotic theories about how the universe began without the assistance of a silly old mythical God. In reality, however, God is just allowing them to gain a bit of insight into His methods.

The existence of God is self-evident, except to people who have made up their minds to deny the evidence that surrounds them. If you listen to very many atheists—and I have, you'll quickly find that the primary reason they offer for refusing to believe in God is a lack of evidence. A total, complete lack of evidence, to hear them tell it. But that's just it:

A person who insists there is no evidence for God's existence is like a fish who denies the existence of water. They are like a flea who cries "There is no dog!"

At this point, I may as well come right out and say it:

Bang this: If you can take a long, hard, unflinching look at the universe in which we live—from the estimated 1 x 10²⁴ (a septillion, give or take) stars that reside in the unimaginable expanse of the heavens to the utter miracle of DNA that resides in the genes of all living creatures—and come to the studied conclusion that all of it, including the intelligent, self-aware beings that supposedly evolved spontaneously out of inorganic slime who populate the head of this particular pin, is all one big happy cosmic accident that possesses neither intrinsic purpose nor intelligent design, then I only have one thing to say to you: Keep reading.

Oh, and just in case anyone is curious—I absolutely believe in the theory of the Big Bang. No problem at all. In fact, it mystifies me that many born-again believers revile this notion, or treat it as if it somehow contradicted the Bible or was the most affrontive species of blasphemy since The Duh Vinci Code. I really don't get it. Of course I believe the universe started with a Big Bang.

I just happen to believe this Big Bang was caused by the Big Banger.

One might say that all of creation is direct evidence of God's existence—the evidence we can see and touch and walk around on and gaze at through telescopes and squint at through microscopes. Although the universe we inhabit may be compelling evidence of a Creator's existence, it tells us essentially nothing about that Creator.

That leads us to the indirect evidence.

The Bible, unlike other so-called "holy books" associated with various religions around the world, has one unusual property that puts it in a class by itself: It describes historical events in advance and in detail. For millennia, the Bible told us what God was going to do and then He did it, and the Bible does this for a specific reason: to confirm the fact that it is precisely what it claims to be—the Word of God.

Roughly 25–30 percent of the Bible is prophecy, and literally hundreds of Old Testament prophecies have already been fulfilled with a degree of accuracy that puts to silence all but the most willfully ignorant, woefully misinformed, and rabidly biased skeptics.

Now, I can just hear some of those rabidly biased skeptics out there firing up their blustering broadsides:

"'Fulfilled prophecy'? Oh really? Well, it should be obvious to any intelligent person that some overly zealous disciples just combed through the Old Testament and found all these 'prophecies' so they could dummy up a work of fiction that was loaded to the gills with their apparent 'fulfillment' to sell their Messiah story—about a hundred years after the alleged events. And that's the smoking gun these born-again bozos always point to when they want to convince people the Bible is 'divinely inspired.' Please. The Bible is about as 'inspired' as yesterday's newspaper."

Although this smokescreen blows away under even moderate scrutiny, let's go ahead and assume someone is naive enough to buy into it. After all, it sounds pretty reasonable on the surface to people who don't know the Bible. In order to put the lie to the notion that all "fulfilled prophecy" in the Bible is merely the result of some first-century skullduggery on the part of a handful of anonymous zealots, all we have to do is take a look at today's world.

You want fulfilled prophecy? Stand by.

Old Testament prophecies two-and-a-half millennia old and older state that the Jewish people would be scattered all over the world as a judgment from God. They were, starting in AD 70. They were driven from their biblical homeland and scattered to the winds, and over the centuries they assimilated into various cultures around the world. Hebrew became a dead language, and "Palestine" became a godforsaken patch of scorched earth.

Yet other Old Testament prophecies just as old state that in the last days the Jewish people would be regathered into their land and would re-establish a nation named Israel (May 1948). They also state that Israel would be a prosperous, fruit producing, Hebrew-speaking nation, that the Jews would be regathered in unbelief in their Messiah (Jesus Christ), and that the nations of the world would be aligned against them, burden themselves with their capital Jerusalem—which would again come under Jewish control (Six Day War, 1967), and seek to divide their land (plans for a two-state solution).

Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check (that's 11 checks for the 11 specific prophecies I just mentioned). I'm sorry, is it just me, or does this sound like a sampling of news headlines from the last seven decades? I could literally spend years writing articles on the fulfillment of end-time biblical prophecy; but if you're not beginning to get the point that the Bible is no ordinary book, I really don't know what else to say to you.

Incidentally, this is where the atheist video above is light-years off base. The "theists" in the video are shown yammering about how God "spoke to them," and as the atheist correctly and astutely points out, apparently God is telling them all very different, contradictory things. Later, the atheist sagaciously observes that truth doesn't behave this way. Unlike religion, truth doesn't "obey borders."

The glaring misrepresentation, however, is that this is NOT how God normally speaks to us today (at least not to the clinically sane). Now, it's true that God spoke to the Old Testament prophets, but that's because they didn't have His written Word—that became part of His written Word. And on extremely rare occasions today God can speak directly to specific individuals for highly specific purposes.

But He doesn't just run around willy-nilly, whispering in the ear of every person who believes He exists, especially telling them things that are demonstrably false or contradictory. Thus, the entire video is based on a flimsy foundation of imaginative fluff. Listen up:

God speaks to us through His Word.

For crying out loud, that's why He gave it to us in the first place. And His Word tells us all the same thing: that He sent His Son into the world to take the judgment for our sin so that we could be forgiven and reconciled to Him by His grace through faith. This is the central message of the entire Bible, and it has never changed and it never will. The atheist in the video is absolutely right—truth doesn't obey borders. And neither does the truth of God's Word, which goes out to all of mankind with the message of God's grace for sinful men.

The bottom line is that the Bible absolutely, irrefutably confirms itself as the Word of the living God through fulfilled prophecy, and anyone who harbors any lingering doubts about this simply hasn't done (or refuses to do) their homework. So if the Bible confirms itself as God's Word, then what does the Bible tell us about God?

It tells us He is the Creator of all things.

So we see evidence of a Creator in the universe He created, and the prophetically self-confirming message He gave us backs up the fact that the Creator is the God described within its pages. In other words:

God did something only He could do, and then
told us about it in a message only He could write.

Not to be snippy or anything, but...what else do you want? Offhand, I don't see a whole lot of ways around this. Several popular efforts include bickering over the interpretation of the Bible's prophecies (which may work to a limited degree, but ultimately fails because there are far too many that are far too clear and that have been fulfilled in far too much detail).

As I mentioned, people also try to write the New Testament off as contrived fiction. This also fails because it doesn't explain some compelling historical facts, such as why a tight-knit Jewish community remained surprisingly quiet about the presumed spread of such rank falsehoods regarding spectacular events that supposedly occurred in their midst as little as 15 years earlier.

Imagine: Imagine someone publishing a book today claiming that on December 25, 2000, evangelist Billy Graham was executed by firing squad on the White House lawn. According to the author, Rev. Graham was buried in Arlington, but three days later he appeared alive and well at the Capitol Building. Even more importantly, imagine that there was never any public condemnation of the book—no public outcry over the fact that it's obviously a bunch of ridiculous nonsense that everybody knows never happened. Heck, it's still available in bookstores everywhere, and spent months on the New York Times Best Seller list. Not only that, but a group numbering in the tens of thousands regards the book as divinely inspired, and bases their faith in Rev. Graham as a Messiah figure on its contents.

OK, that's enough. I just pegged my stupidometer. Look, I admit it's a dumb example, but I hope you get the point. I mean, are you kidding?! If the disciples had invented and tried to spread such an outrageous lie, they would have been run out of town on a rail and Christianity would have died on the vine. But is that what we see? Uh, no. So, what do we see? Thousands from that same Jewish community coming to faith in Christ.

It fails to explain why 11 of the original 12 disciples went from being broken shadows of men who had just witnessed everything they believed in and lived for crushed out of existence and who were cowering behind locked doors in various locations around Jerusalem to being the boldest, most powerful evangelists the world has ever seen literally overnight.

Nor does it explain why 10 of those 11 died as martyrs (John died a natural death at a very old age) without once recanting their testimony that Jesus Christ of Nazareth was crucified and raised from the dead by the power of God for the forgiveness of sin. If you actually believe all 10 of these men spent the rest of their lives taking the gospel to the known world until they died as martyrs for doing so, all while knowing full well that it was the most outlandish lie ever dreamed up...I'd like to talk to you about a bridge I have for sale in Brooklyn. It's a real beauty.

Now, this self-confirming Word of the Creator also tells us some important things about Him and about us. It tells us He is a holy, just, loving God, who created us to love Him and spend eternity with Him in unspeakable bliss in a place to wonderful for us to imagine, and to be an eternal display of the unsearchable riches of His grace. But in order for us to love Him and genuinely respond to His grace, He had to give us free will—we had to be free to choose not to love Him and not to respond to the conviction of His Spirit. Or even acknowledge His existence, for that matter.

It tells us that in the very beginning, the first two humans were perfect, but they had the power to choose. The woman Eve was deceived by Satan—formerly Lucifer, a fallen angel who had led an unsuccessful rebellion in heaven and who now works in opposition to God, at least for the time being. After she and Adam sinned through their disobedience, all their human descendants inherited their fallen nature, which meant we would all now be spiritually separated from a God who loves us.

Another thing God's Word tells us about Him is that He is one God who exists eternally in the form of three distinct Persons, often referred to as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. His Word tells us that sin is an offense against His infinitely holy character and that its just penalty is death, and that His perfect justice demands all sin be judged with no exceptions. But He loves us, and doesn't want to be forced to carry out sin's horrifying judgment on His most precious creation. For anyone else, this would have been an intractable dilemma.

But intractable dilemmas are right up God's alley.

He had a plan to save us from the very beginning. The only way out was for God to send a part of Himself into the world to live as a man in a body of flesh. That way, that man could live a sinless life, die to satisfy the Father's perfect justice, and allow Him to judge sin once and for all.

And that's exactly what Jesus did for us two thousand years ago.

With the judgment for sin carried out and His justice satisfied, He was then free to forgive any and all who would respond to the conviction of His Spirit and repent of sin, ask for the forgiveness His grace had provided through the sacrifice of His own Son, and believe in faith in what His Son had done for us. That's all He requires, and all who so respond are forgiven of sin and eternally reconciled to Him.

That's the entire point. He wants to save us and reconcile us to Himself. He doesn't want us to be separated from Him for eternity, and this was the only way He could do it because it was the only way that didn't violate any of His attributes of holiness, justice, and love.

• Is it exclusive? Yep.
• Is it intolerant of other paths? You betcha.
• Is it offensive and politically incorrect? Right again.

But there it is, like it or not.

Meanwhile, back in the garden...

Lucifer (the Light Bearer) was the most beautiful, powerful angel in all of heaven...that is, until sin was found in him—the sin of pride. It seems Lucifer felt he was in line for a celestial promotion, but the plan went south:

The five "I Wills" show us how Lucifer thought and felt about himself and about God, and we could easily tweak this list to reflect today's attitudes:

• I will deride God and His Word as myths.
• I will believe that I am a good person who has no need of "salvation."
• I will pursue fleshly lusts and mock spiritual things I don't understand.
• I will worship earthly things and ignore the God who created them.
• I will be my own god.

From then on he became known as Satan (the Adversary), and after Adam and Eve sinned and were booted out of the Garden of Eden, he usurped the dominion over the earth God had entrusted them with. Satan legally became the god of this world, and he has every intention of hanging on to this little corner of the universe where he is free to set up shop and try to "be like the Most High." At least until something or somebody stops him.

Enter the second Adam:

When Christ was crucified, He didn't just become our sin on the cross—He became the curse of sin and death itself:

If you read Genesis 3:16–20 carefully, you will clearly see that the curse of sin and death didn't just apply to Adam and Eve and thus to all their human descendants—it also applied to the earth itself. So when Jesus was resurrected, He didn't just win our redemption from sin—He won back from Satan the right to rule over the earth, and He will begin to take possession of it during the Tribulation (Rev. 11:15–18) in preparation for His literal, physical kingdom right here on earth, which He will rule from Jerusalem.

In other words, Satan has already lost—His days as the god of this world are numbered. Yet he works tirelessly to thwart God's plan.

But why??

I mean, is he stupid, or what? Can he not see that his battle was lost two thousand years ago? It's over! What's his problem, anyway?

Couple of things about Satan. First of all, his sin was pride, and his pride is so profound that it makes him believe he can actually succeed against God. He is still consumed with the idea that he can "be like the Most High." God allows this to continue temporarily because in the end, it will give Him a chance to display His power and glory in a way that will eclipse anything the world has ever seen.

Satan may be evil, but he's definitely not stupid. Satan knows God's Word upside down and backwards, far better than any human ever will. That means he knows the following two key points:

1. He knows exactly what will trigger the Second Coming, when Jesus Christ physically returns to earth to establish His kingdom: The believing remnant of Jews who are divinely protected during the worst and final part of the Tribulation have to implore Him to return to save them (Hos. 5:15).

The Second Coming marks the end of Satan's reign as the god of this world, and that is the one thing he wants to prevent more than anything else.

Item no. 1 is the reason Satan has tried so hard and for so long to destroy the Jews. The 70-year Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC, the sacking of Jerusalem and destruction of the temple in AD 70 and the subsequent Diaspora to the nations of the world, the pograms of World War II that culminated in the Holocaust, and so on and so forth. Few people today need any history lessons to understand this one (except perhaps for the woke crowd).

Oh, by the way, this is the answer to the often innocently asked question "Why in the world does everyone seem to hate the Jews?" This is why.

Satan knows that if he can just wipe out the Jews, he wins because then they cannot ask the Lord to return to save them at the climax of the Tribulation—the Second Coming will be canceled. In the Holocaust, he got one out of three. During the Tribulation, some Bible expositors say he'll get two out of three, although the Scriptures that support this are open to other interpretations. What is clear, however, is that great numbers of Jews will perish during the Tribulation, although a believing remnant will survive.

The point is that he'll never get them all. You have God's Word on that.

2. He knows the Church will be composed of a specific number of believers, a number known only to God. When that final person comes to faith in Christ, the Church will be complete and the Rapture will take place so that God can once again focus His attention exclusively on His people Israel (Rom. 11:25–27). His focus during the Tribulation will be Israel's national redemption and the judgment of the nations that have persecuted His people and rejected His grace and mercy (neither of which has anything to do with the Church, by the way).

This is key, because it is the Rapture that will trigger the final sequence of events that will usher in the Tribulation. The gap could be a few months, maybe a few years...no one knows for sure, but few students of Bible prophecy believe it will be all that long. Thus, to borrow a football term, the Rapture essentially serves as Satan's two-minute warning.

The bottom line is that the longer the Church Age lasts, the longer Satan has to try and completely wipe out the Jews. So, in Satan's mind, anything he can do to prolong the Church Age (and as a result delay the Rapture) accomplishes one important thing:

It buys him precious time.

So, every time someone hears the gospel, responds to the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and believes in faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ, it's basically a nail in Satan's coffin. He is one step closer to losing his dominion over the earth, because the Rapture, Tribulation, and dreaded Second Coming are all one step closer.

With every single person who comes to faith in Christ during the current Church Age, Satan is getting one step closer to losing everything.

That's why Satan has worked so hard for the last two thousand years to persecute the Church, neutralize its most powerful weapon, and generally thwart its growth and erode its efficacy at every turn.

For example, speaking of the Church's most powerful weapon—Satan was certainly behind the move to apply higher literary criticism to the Bible (which essentially begins with the assumption that it is no more inspired than The Last of the Mohicans). This nineteenth century movement served as the intellectual foundation for an assault on the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible that has undermined the integrity of Scripture in Bible colleges and seminaries the world over with stunning success. Today, large numbers of such institutions effectively deny the inspiration, inerrancy, and authority of Scripture (in practice, if not always in creed), and have turned out vast legions of ministers who are cut from the same cloth.

In their view, anyone who stubbornly and naively clings to the notion that the Bible is the inerrant Word of the living God is dismissed as a "literalist" with a condescending smirk and a roll of the eyes.

The pièce de résistance

One of Satan's most successful techniques in thwarting the Church's growth, however, has been the brilliant use of the red herrings of religion.

Few things put Satan's genius on display like
the proliferation of diverse religious beliefs.

Remember what I said about the universe we live in being direct evidence of a Creator? In other words, man is born with an innate awareness of the existence of a Creator. We just don't instinctively know who He is, or that He is the God described in the Bible. That must be learned.

Since man has an inborn awareness of a Creator's existence, man has a natural tendency to seek to know that Creator—this is the primordial urge behind all religions. Contrary to the opinion of atheists, man is by nature a theist. I see no reasonable way this can be disputed. It's atheism that requires a conscious decision based on a skeptical appraisal of what has been self-evident to the vast majority of mankind since the dawn of time.

Yet atheists tend to arrogantly assume the great majority of people have merely been influenced by their culture to believe in God in one way or another, while they, on the other hand, have successfully shaken off these foolish myths by virtue of their intellectual acumen, superior reasoning faculties, and higher levels of education. In fact, it's closer to being the other way around. They are the ones who have been influenced by a modern society that is knocking itself out to eliminate every trace of God from its midst...and largely succeeding. And they have walked right into it.

The atheist video I transcribed earlier involved a total of 11 different religions or denominations. At one point, JR challenged me to pick out of this mess what I thought was the "truth" and to justify why I thought my "interpretation" was the right one in the face of all the other "interpretations." This is an excellent strategy because if you take the bait, you end up flailing about in a tangled net of fleshly reasoning with people who cannot see the flawed logic in what they are doing, nor can they appreciate the satanic sleight of hand that lies just below its surface.

This is a typical mistake (or clever stratagem, depending on your point of view) most atheists make when they dismiss all religions as myths—they fail to distinguish between belief systems that are obviously nonsensical or blatantly contradict the gospel as clearly spelled out in the Bible and denominations within biblical Christianity that all agree on the basics of the gospel, although they may have differing views on non-essential issues.

For example, in the video we have a total of seven groups that believe things that are alien to or stand in brazen contradiction to the gospel as presented in the Bible (you know, that book that confirms itself as the Word of God through fulfilled prophecy). For example, we have...

• Universalists: This group believes all people will be universally reconciled to God because of His great mercy and love and will attain eternal life.

Oops, they forgot one—His holiness, which we have all fallen short of. Oh, and His justice, which requires all sin be judged—and if you don't believe in faith that Jesus took that judgment for you, then guess who will? Ouch.

• Scientologists: It's a bit of a stretch to even call this a religion—it's more of a freaky sci-fi fantasy for the wealthy but wacky.

Scientology was invented by L. Ron Hubbard, a moderately successful science fiction writer from the 1940s to the 1970s with a documented history of psychiatric problems. I mean, what else do you need to know? OK, straight up—I don't care enough about the foolishness they believe to even waste my time copy and pasting it from Wikipedia. I've got a better idea: If you're interested, ask Tom Cruise. Better yet, check out the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster. It makes more sense—and I hear they serve great pasta.

• Muslims: Islam was invented in the seventh century by Muhammed, who came up with a god named Allah, an amalgam of 360 pagan Arabic deities. During Muhammed's lifetime (and presumably after), his followers wrote down some of the things he said and compiled it into the Qur'an.

Islam is 100 percent incompatible with biblical Christianity on many levels. Allah has no son, no plan of any kind to redeem sinful men, and no desire to have an intimate father-son spiritual relationship with man because he exists so far above us that the idea is almost offensive to Muslims.

• Jews: The Jews believe in the God of the Bible, but the notion that Jesus Christ is their promised Messiah is flatly rejected out of hand.

Jews apply First Advent prophecies to the nation of Israel itself, and then point out that Jesus failed to fulfill what are in reality Second Advent prophecies, all of which are obviously yet future! Thus, they can insist Jesus didn't fulfill a single messianic prophecy, and so can be summarily rejected.

• Mormons: The Mormons claim to believe the Bible, but also believe the Book of Mormon is divinely inspired. They believe that there is no literal hell, no Trinity, you can be baptized by proxy, the American Indians are the descendants of the Israelites, black people are cursed by God, and that God the Father was once a human being living on earth (other than Jesus)—none of which is even hinted at in the Bible, including the last item, which flatly contradicts Scripture and literally qualifies as blasphemy.

Sigh. The Book of Mormon is without a doubt one of the greatest religious hoaxes of all time. The tale goes roughly like so: In 1823, the angel Moroni directed a young Joseph Smith to a place near his home where a stack of thin gold plates were buried. Over the next several years, he used a magic stone to "telepathically translate" the gold plates. By 1829 the Book of Mormon was complete and Smith conveniently gave the gold plates back to Moroni, so nobody else ever actually, you know, saw them.

As with any first-rate con, any falsifiable loose ends are covered to the greatest extent humanly possible.

• Catholics: The Roman Catholic Church teaches that you can pray to saints, Mary is perpetually a virgin and can also help get your prayers answered, and baptism as an infant counts as salvation. They also believe you can spend a few eons in purgatory to get cleaned up until you're ready for heaven, and that people can reduce their own or someone else's time in purgatory by praying, doing good deeds, or making a generous financial contribution to the Roman Catholic Church. They believe that you must continually confess your sins to an equally sinful man (i.e., a priest) to be forgiven and remain saved. Most importantly, they teach that salvation is through faith in Christ and "works" (such as mindlessly repeating memorized prayers countless numbers of times and numerous other useless man-made rituals), because apparently the blood of Jesus doesn't quite get all the stains out—it takes a little work on your part, ya know? None of this can be supported from Scripture.

Not to mention the fact that they kept the Bible out of the hands of the common man for a thousand years so they could corrupt its teachings until they were reduced to a gaudy, flesh-centered caricature of what God intended in order to accumulate worldly power and wealth.

• Hindus: Hinduism is the primary religion of India and Nepal and it includes a broad range of philosophies and diverse beliefs, some of which are polytheistic and some of which are monotheistic. As far as I can tell, after you strip away the silk turbans and the exotic terminology, it boils down to trying to be a good person.

Hinduism is best defined by its inability to be defined. Ommm...

The point is that all of these religious systems have next to nothing to do with the truth of God's Word or the gospel of Jesus Christ. Admittedly, Roman Catholicism comes the closest, but in reality even the Roman Catholics miss it by a country mile. These are all red herrings that lead men—men who may honestly be seeking to know more about the Creator—away from the truth of God's Word and away from the salvation that is found through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

Now for the others:

• Protestants: The word "Protestant" (i.e., one who protests) is a blanket term for the branch of Christianity that broke away from the spiritual whoredom of Holy Roman Mother Church in the sixteenth century. The increased availability of Bibles in the latter half of the fifteenth century contributed to men such as Martin Luther and others seeing how badly the Roman Catholic Church had subverted the gospel for over a thousand years, and one of the focal points of the break was that salvation is through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ alone, and not dependent on good works or elaborate, man-made rituals created by the Roman Catholic Church.

After prying it from the cold, dead, morally bankrupt, power-hungry fingers of Rome, the Protestants finally got the gospel right.

Although the original Protestants got some other important things wrong (such as eschatology, the relationship between Israel and the Church, etc.) and quickly fractured into a kaleidoscope of denominations that differed on secondary doctrinal issues, as a rule they all agreed on this one rock-solid, foundational truth: that God sent His Son into the world to live a sinless life in the flesh, be crucified and resurrected to pay the penalty for our sin, and satisfy the Father's perfect justice on our behalf. Salvation is through belief in faith in the atonement Christ purchased for us with His blood, and that alone.

Salvation should result in good works, but it is not contingent on good works or our own efforts, nor is it kept or maintained through works or performing man-made religious rituals. Christ did it all and did it while we were lost in sin. Ours is but to repent of sin and believe the gospel in faith.

• Methodists and Baptists: I might as well lump these together because both are mainline Protestant denominations who, while they may differ on a few doctrinal points that are hardly worth going on about, still hold to the foundational belief that salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

• Pentecostals: "Pentecostal" isn't a denomination—it is a blanket term for any Protestant denomination that believes the supernatural sign gifts of the Holy Spirit (chiefly speaking in tongues) that were in operation in the first several decades of the Church still continue to this day. I'm not going to get into it here, but many other Protestant denominations point to clear scriptural and historical indications that Pentecostals, passionate and sincere as they may be, are simply in error. But they believe in salvation through faith in Christ alone, which is foundational to Protestant denominations almost by definition.

The point is that they agree on the stuff that matters, as do all Protestant denominations when you get right down to it. Otherwise they wouldn't be Protestant denominations. They believe and preach the gospel of salvation through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ alone, as clearly presented in New Testament Scripture.

Following the Good Shepherd

It is estimated that there are approximately 4,300 different religions and denominations in the world today. That tells me one thing:

Somebody's been a busy boy.

Satan has capitalized on mankind's innate desire to know the Creator to influence people to cultivate a pseudo-spiritual smorgasbord, stocked with gods and religions to suit every palate. And the reason is simple—it serves his primary objective:

Satan's goal is to blind men to the truth of the gospel so that they will remain lost in sin, the growth of the Church will be stunted, the Church Age will be prolonged, the Rapture will be delayed, he'll have more time to destroy the Jews, and when he does the Second Coming will be put on ice and he will get to keep his position as the god of this world. That's the plan.

And blinding men to the truth of the gospel is a key part of the plan.

What the atheist video does is devilishly clever (probably far more clever than its creator even realizes). Satan's red herrings are on full display, doing what red herrings are intended to do—lead people away from the right path.

The video takes these 11 various religions and denominations and mixes them all together into one big theistic melting pot, where the lunatic ramblings of a hack science fiction writer are placed on an equal theological footing with the teachings of a denomination that believes and preaches salvation through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ alone, straight out of God's Word.

No distinction whatsoever is made between false religions that teach that one's ancestors can reincarnate as cows, whose "holy book" orders devotees to cut the heads off those who won't submit to their madness, or were founded by an outright con man who claimed he telepathically translated some gold plates an angel supposedly led him to and groups that, again, believe and preach salvation through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ alone, straight out of God's Word.

Obviously, the intended takeaway is that all these (equally foolish) beliefs amount to nothing more than a grab bag of (equally illogical) religions and a gaggle of (equally mythical) gods. Period. And since no distinction is made between any of them in the video, this maze of red herrings has set us up for the coup de grâce:

Since most of these religious beliefs are clearly false,
logically all religious beliefs are surely just as false.

The kill shot. And people who wish to be their own god and want nothing to do with the holy, just, loving God who created them and loved them enough to sacrifice His own Son to bear His requisite judgment in their place and to whom they will one day be held accountable for rejecting His grace lap it up because it's precisely what their itching ears want to hear.

"You have no evidence! Where's your evidence?" they cry, as they walk away feeling justified in their unbelief. It enables them to view all gods and religions as a fruit salad of quaint but ridiculous myths and fairy tales that are foisted on people by their respective cultures, and summarily reject the whole mess because they believe they have attained a level of rational, intellectual enlightenment that allows them to see it all for what it really is: a bunch of culturally ingrained foolishness that should clearly be discarded in the name of science and reason.

I can think of few things any more self-inflating, self-elevating, and self-glorifying. But here's the thing:

Atheists are absolutely right! That is, except for one small detail.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater: The sad part is that atheists are absolutely spot on in their appraisal of the various gods and religions of the world as being a bunch of foolish myths, because they ARE a bunch of foolish myths! But they walk right into Satan's trap with their eyes wide open when they throw the baby out with the bathwater by including in all this foolishness the true, living God and His prophetically confirmed Word.

Jesus characterized Himself as the Good Shepherd, and believers are His sheep who know the Master's voice and follow Him:

No one will snatch them out of my hand. That means not only will He save us, but if we come across the scent of a red herring and start to wander off the trail, He is faithful and will bring us back into the fold like the Good Shepherd that He is:

Today, as the Church Age rapidly draws to a close, billions of people are searching for the truth—for the right path that will lead them to something better after this life is over. Call it heaven, call it nirvana, call it the Great Whatever. But they have been led away from the path of truth—the truth of God's revealed and prophetically confirmed Word—by any one of thousands of Satan's red herrings.

And tragically, these red herrings do nothing but lead them down false trails that bypass the God of the Bible and circumvent the cross of Christ, and ultimately lead nowhere.

Nowhere, that is, but to an eternity of being lost and forever separated from the Good Shepherd.

Greg Lauer — NOV '16

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