The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

“HORRORCORE” RAPPER CHARGED WITH MURDER (Friday Church News Notes, September 25, 2009, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Richard McCroskey, a “horrorcore” rapper, has been charged with the first degree murder of a pastor. McCroskey, who performed under the very appropriate name of Syko Sam, sang of murder, mutilation, and mayhem to a brain-numbing backbeat. In a song called “My Dark Side,” McCroskey sang, “You’re not the first, just to let you know. I’ve killed many people and I kill them real slow. It’s the best feeling, watching their last breath. Stabbing and stabbing till there’s nothing left.” The rapper is charged with killing a Presbyterian pastor in Virginia, and authorities said he will probably be charged with the murder of three other people, including two children. Horrorcore rap music is influenced by popular but vicious movies such as Child’s Play and Halloween. It focuses on Satanism, cannibalism, murder, suicide, and rape. A 2004 BBC documentary entitled Underground USA said horrorcore rap “has a massive following across the US.” The annual horrorcore “supershow” is rightly called “Wickedstock.” In spite of the vile nature of their “art,” horrorcore promoters have the audacity to claim that it is innocent. Andres Shrim, owner of Serial Killin Records, said that people “shouldn’t judge McCroskey by what they see on his website or hear in his music” (“US Rapper Charged,” AP, Sept. 21, 2009). Sure, he is a really nice, pure-hearted guy who just happens to enjoy singing about torturing people to death. The “entertainment” industry will be held accountable by Almighty God for its vile influence on society. The genres of science fiction and horror carry the individual into fictitious worlds without God, and this is very dangerous. The mind is the great spiritual battleground. The devil is called “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2) and the ruler “of the darkness of this world” (Eph. 6:12). He is walking about seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8). The believer finds the will of God by “renewing the mind” (Romans 12:2) and “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). The Bible warns that those who do not “retain God in their knowledge” are given over to a reprobate mind (Romans 1:28), because anything that takes the place of God in man’s heart and life is an idol, and God hates idols (Exodus 20:3).

The Jesus Seminar, a seriously misnamed organization composed of some 75 “experts in religion and New Testament studies,” began meeting in March 1985 (it was first announced in 1978) with the misguided objective of discovering which words of the Gospels are authentic.

Through the Jesus Seminar, the hiss of the slithering serpent can still be heard asking, “Hath God said?”

In the 1980s, the Jesus Seminar fellows cast ballots on the authenticity of Christ’s sayings in the four Gospels using pegs or balls. After discussing a passage, the “scholars” would cast their votes. Red indicated a strong probability of authenticity; pink, a good probability; gray, a weak possibility; and black, little or no possibility. The colors therefore indicate various degrees of doubt in God’s Word.

In 1993, the Jesus Seminar published The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. This included a new translation called “The Scholar’s Translation.” The color coding was incorporated into the text to describe the degree to which the various portions of the Gospels are considered authentic.

The Seminar concluded that Christ spoke only 18 percent of the sayings attributed to Him in the Bible.

September 23, 2009 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The emerging church claims that Christians are responsible to solve the world’s poverty problem. They emphasize the need for a grand “social justice” program that will create heaven on earth, but it is a vain dream. The kingdom of God will not be established on earth until the King returns from heaven, and until then the Bible says that man will go from bad to worse.

The Bible’s recipe to reduce poverty is simple: obedience to God, honesty, thrift, diligence, and charity. Consider the following study from the Bible’s book of wisdom. This is from the Advanced Bible Studies Series course on Proverbs, published by Way of Life Literature.

Book of Proverbs: Advanced Bible Study Series (309 pages; $19.95)

Add Coil / Spiral Binding $1.00 (Allows the books to lay open flat when teaching)


Add Large Print and Coil Binding $2.00

WHAT PROVERBS SAYS ABOUT POVERTY

Proverbs 10:4, 15; 12:11; 13:18, 23; 14:20-21; 15:16-17; 17:1, 5; 18:23; 19:1, 4, 7, 17, 22; 20:13; 21:17; 22:2, 7, 16, 22-23; 23:20-21; 28:8, 11, 19, 22, 27; 29:7, 13; 30:8-9; 31:20

Billions of dollars in foreign aid have been poured into impoverished nations, but it hasn’t solved the poverty problem there, and billions of dollars in welfare money have poured into poverty relief in wealthy nations like America and England, but the poor are still poor. What foreign aid and welfare rarely if ever do is address the root problems underlying poverty. The book of Proverbs, on the other hand, goes right to the heart of the matter and does not gloss over underlying issues and human responsibility.

1. THE CAUSE OF POVERTY

a. Dealing with a slack hand results in poverty (Prov. 10:4; 20:13). This refers to being lazy, and this is certainly one of the root causes for poverty in this world. Many people loll around, avoiding work as much as possible, and if forced to get a job are not dependable or hard-working and are a frustration to their employers. The Bible says that those who do not work should not eat (2 Thess. 3:10). It is foolish and wrong to provide government support or private assistance to lazy people. It only makes them more lazy.

The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

A WARNING ABOUT BIBLE TRANSLATION WORK TODAY (Friday Church News Notes, September 18, 2009, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The amount of Bible translation work that has occurred over the past 100 years appears impressive. In 1910, the Bible in whole or in part was available in 722 languages, whereas today the number is roughly 2,500. The problem is two-fold. First, the vast majority of the new translations are based on the exceedingly corrupt critical Greek text, which omits 2,886 words from the Greek Received Text upon which the old Reformation Bibles were based. This is equivalent to omitting the entire books of 1 and 2 Peter from the Bible. These omissions include 45 entire and 185 partial verses and have significant doctrinal implications (Everett Fowler, Evaluating Versions of the New Testament). Further, the modern translation methodology itself is corrupt. Created by Eugene Nida fifty years ago, it is called “dynamic equivalency.” By this method, the translator is allowed to take frightful liberties with the infallible words of God, modifying and adapting the Scripture to “the culture.” The dynamic equivalency methodology even adopts pagan names for God. For example, the United Bible Societies and Wycliffe Bible Translators have used the following names for God: In Samba of Africa they used Nyaama (the sun); in Lame in Chad they used Yafray (mother of the heavens); in Ga in Ghana they used Ataa Naa Nyonmo (the father mother God). Philip Noss of the American Bible Society says, “God reveals himself through his word and through each culture” (“Bible Translation in History and into the Future,” Lausanne World Pulse, September 2009). (For more on this see the report “Dynamic Equivalency: Its Influence and Errors” at the Way of Life web site.)

“The emerging movement is a protest against much of evangelicalism as currently practiced. It is post-evangelical in the way that neo-evangelicalism (in the 1950s) was post-fundamentalist. It would not be unfair to call it postmodern evangelicalism” (“The Emergent Mystique,” Christianity Today, Nov. 2004).

The late Robert Webber also observed the association between the emerging church and the neo-evangelicalism of the 1940s and 1950s. He taught that the emerging church is the latest of four movements that have occurred within evangelicalism since 1946, the first being neo-evangelicalism.

“The new or neo-evangelicalism, as it was first called, broke away from its roots in the fundamentalism of the first half of the century. The new evangelicalism regarded fundamentalism as ‘anti-intellectual, anti-social action, and anti-ecumenical.’ Influential leaders called for engagement with philosophy and the intellectual ideas of the day, to the recovery of a robust involvement with social issues, and to a new form of ecumenical cooperation, especially in evangelism. ... The new evangelical theology distanced itself from fundamentalist biblicism ... They wanted to spar with the best, engage secularists and liberals on their own turf, and create institutions of higher learning that would command respect” (Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches, p. 11).

The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

DAWKINS SAYS NO REPUTABLE SCIENTIST DISPUTES EVOLUTION (Friday Church News Notes, September 11, 2009, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Richard Dawkins, the loud-mouthed anti-creationist, says in his recent book The Greatest Show in Earth, “Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. ... No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.” Thus, according to Dawkins, if you reject evolution, you are unintelligent and your sanity should be questioned, and no reputable scientist disputes it. In our report “Scientists Who Believe the Bible,” we listed about 40 Ph.D.s who believe in biblical creation. Consider A.E. Wilder-Smith (d. 1995), who had a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry from Reading University, England, a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Geneva, and a Ph.D. in pharmacological sciences from ETH, a premier science and technology university in Zurich. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Dr. Wilder-Smith was an expert on chemotherapy, pharmacology, organic chemistry, and biochemistry. Consider biophysicist Raymond Damadian, M.D., recipient of the Lemelson-MIT Achievement Award as “the man who invented the MRI scanner.” In 1989, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame, an honor he shares with Thomas Edison, Samuel Morse, and the Wright Brothers. The first MRI scanner that Dr. Damadian and his colleagues built in 1977 resides at the Smithsonian Institution. Damadian, a Bible-believing Christian who attends a Baptist church, has stated that “the highest purpose a man can find for his life is to serve the will of God.” Consider Richard Lumsden (1938-97), Ph.D., professor of parisitology and cell biology, who as dean of the graduate school at Tulane University, trained 30 Ph.D.s., published hundreds of scholarly papers, and was the winner of the highest award for parasitology. Consider Dr. Maciej Giertych, head of the Department of Genetics at the Institute of Dendrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who has published 90 papers in scientific journals, or Dr. Brian Stone, who has won a record number of awards for excellence in engineering teaching at Australian universities, or Duane Gish, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and worked for many years in pharmaceutical research at Cornell University, the University of California, and the Upjohn Company, or Dr. W. R. Thompson, world-famous biologist and former Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control of Canada, or Melvin A. Cook, Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale, winner of the Nitro Nobel Gold Medal for the invention of slurry explosives, or Dr. Walter Lammerts, geneticist and famous plant breeder, or the late Dr. J.J. Duyvene De Wit, Professor of Zoology at the University of the Orange Free State, South Africa, or James Allan, who has a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Edinburgh and was a senior lecturer in genetics at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. There are hundreds of others, but Dawkins said there is NO reputable scientist who disputes evolution, so we have already more than demonstrated his gross error, his breath-taking arrogance, his astounding ignorance, and the fact that Dawkins himself is not a reputable scientist. Of course, even if NO reputable scientist disputed evolution, this does not mean it is correct. The Bible says, “let God be true, but every man a liar” (Romans 3:4), and Jesus said, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes” (Matthew 11:25).

September 10, 2009 (Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

This brand new professionally-produced 3-DVD video presentation is packed with graphics and video clips. It also contains extensive on-site research at the locations of these ancient churches in Turkey. The viewer will gain a deeper understanding of the conditions that existed in the Roman Empire in the days of the apostles when the first churches existed: the beautiful cities with wide colonnaded boulevards, the well-stocked libraries, the public baths with hot, warm, and cold running water, the lovely fountains, the countless marble statues, the gymnasiums, the theaters and stadiums with seating for thousands, the aqueducts, the Roman roads spanning the empire, the untold luxuries, the pagan idolatry permeating everything.

September 9, 2009 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The following report is by Pastor Ralph Ovadal, Pilgrims Covenant Church, Monroe, Wisconsin, http://www.pccmonroe.org/neo-evangelicalism/2009.08.14.htm.

"And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them." 1 Kings 18:28

Less than a week ago, as I am writing this article, I, and members of our Pilgrims Covenant Church, spent over five hours "without the camp" preaching the gospel of Christ and bearing biblical witness against a carnal monstrosity called "Rock the River." This event was one of four staged in Mississippi River cities by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. As of now, approximately 90,000 young people have been "ministered" to at the three Rock the River events that have already taken place.

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The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

NEWSWEEK SAYS “WE ARE ALL HINDUS NOW” (Friday Church News Notes, September 4, 2009, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - In its August 31 issue, Newsweek magazine says, “We Are All Hindus Now.” The article reports, “[R]ecent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity. ... The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: ‘Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names.’ A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. ... Americans are no longer buying [the Jesus is the only way] doctrine. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65 percent of us believe that ‘many religions can lead to eternal life’--including 37 percent of white evangelicals ... Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, has long framed the American propensity for ‘the divine-deli-cafeteria religion’ as ‘very much in the spirit of Hinduism. ... It’s about whatever works. If going to yoga works, great--and if going to Catholic mass works, great. And if going to Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that’s great, too.’” NOTE FROM BROTHER CLOUD: In our estimation, this is a correct observation. Christianity in America is a mile wide and an inch thick. There is little biblical substance to it. At its heart is the judge not, rock & roll philosophy of live and let live, but this is covered with a thin veneer of Christianity and ill-defined “spirituality.” Typical American Christianity rejects the Bible’s absolute authority and exclusiveness. It is more akin to New Age than Bible, and in fact, New Age philosophy is essentially Hinduism.