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We have to come to grips today with the claims that Gail Riplinger is making.

I want to read to you one of her claims from Hazardous Materials, page 42, in which she says, “No knowledge of Greek or Hebrew is required to read this book. ... I have done all of the Greek work for the reader.”

You don’t need to do your own work. She will tell you what it says.

But she had to admit in a May 1994 interview with Dr. Wayne House that she can’t read Greek or Hebrew. But she will tell you what it says. What kind of role would that give her in your life?
How about this on page 40:

“All questions have been anticipated and are explained somewhere and in detail.”

Isn’t that amazing. She anticipated every single question anyone could have about this subject and answered them in detail. Have you ever heard anyone make a claim like that for a book they had written?

I want to suggest to you that there is something important here that we have to come to grips with. It is not just the debate over whether the King James Bible is inspired. It is whether or not Gail Riplinger is inspired.

This statement comes from an interview she gave to the End Times Victorious Living Prophecy Newsletter, January-February 1994. She is describing how her first book New Age Bible Versions was written.

“Daily during the six years needed for this investigation, the Lord miraculously brought the needed materials and resources, much like the ravens fed Elijah. Each discovery was not the result of effort on my part, but of the direct hand of God, so much so that I hesitated to even put my name on the book. Consequently I used G. A. Riplinger, God as Author and Riplinger as secretary.”

A number of her fans have said that was hyperbole, that she didn’t mean it literally. It is just like when you say, “God lead me to do this.” But that seemed like a pretty specific statement. But if that was not specific enough, let me read this quote to you from an interview that Mrs. Riplinger gave and that was recorded and that as of this morning she was still selling on her website. She is talking about her account of going through six years of pain and difficulty while writing New Age Bible Versions.

“The Lord showed me over a period of years that it wasn’t going to me and research and library; it was going to be the Holy Spirit showing me things. And he was going to take me aside just like he did Ezekiel. ... And this was going to be His book, and it wasn’t going to be my book and a research type of thing. It was going to be something that He was going to do. ... I would lay in bed all day, in so much pain. It was fifty on the Richter scale with pain. ... He would say to me at about 10 o’clock at night, ‘Get up and work on the book.’ I’d say, “No, I’m too sick.’ We fought for 15 minutes every night for six years. He’d say, ‘Get up and work on the book.’ So I would always say, ‘I’m a woman and I don’t think a woman should do this.’ And He goes, ‘Get up and work on the book.’ So he goes, ‘Women make fine secretaries; that’s all we need here.’ So I’d get up and work on the book, in so much pain. Then the devil whispered in my ear and he would tell me, ‘If you will throw away what you found, I will leave you alone and take away all your pain.’ And I said, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan, we are going forward with this thing.’

Let’s be crystal clear. Here she is claiming to be inspired of God in the production of her first book.

Now, people in the Lord’s work have to deal with people making supernatural claims all the time. [Examples are the claims of Ellen G. White of Seventh-day Adventism, Mary Baker Eddy of Christian Science, Charles T. Russell, founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Joseph Smith of the Mormons.]

We know that God did not speak to these people, because their teaching is contrary to God’s Word, so there are three possibilities. Demons spoke to them or influenced them; they were crazy; or they were lying.

Her claims are not consistent with Baptist doctrine. The first definition is that we believe the Bible is the sole authority for faith and practice. If somebody else is getting divine revelation for us today, we need to admit that we have been wrong.

The specifics of her qualifications don’t sound as impressive as you might think. Her B.A. is in interior design. Her M.A. is in home economics. Her Master of Fine Arts is in art. As for her college textbooks, the titles are Restaurants: A Guide for Architects, Designers and Developers; Plants and Interiors; Design Process; Form and Space Function; Visual Merchandising and Store Design; Offices: A Guide for Designers.

On the program Action 60 in Florida she claimed to be a linguistic expert because of the fact that she taught English for three years to foreigners. She said, “Of course, I became a linguistics expert after three years of doing that.”

Do you know how many people teach English as a second language in Chicago where I’m from? I have more than one in my church who have more experience teaching English as a second language than she does, and not one of them would think of calling themselves a linguistic expert.

Someone says, “But she was listed in Who’s Who.”

Do you know what a scam Who’s Who is? Anybody can be listed in Who’s Who if they have enough money. It’s a phony credential.

Someone says, “But she was selected for President Reagan’s Ambassador program.”

There is a company that does this with every president, and they offer to send academics overseas to teach as long as you can pay for the entire trip yourself, and it is offered to virtually any academic.

Someone says, “But what about her extensive documentation?”

I confess that there are some areas in some of her books where she has done some impressive research and is actually helpful, but you can tell pretty quickly in some other places when she is quoting people she quotes whatever she feels like they were really saying. You can tell, because she will have a quotation and it will be two sentences, but there will be three pages from different parts of a book cited in the quotation. That means that she took a little here, and a little here, and a little there, and the reason is that she did it that way is because there was nowhere that said what she wanted it to say. Her books are filled with phony quotations with multiple page sources.

No, she really has only one claim to back up her material, and that was that she was given it by God, just like Ezekiel. No wonder that she repeatedly compares herself to Deborah the prophetess. ...........

We did not catch and expose this woman in a timely fashion. David Cloud did. Sixteen years ago he told us exactly what we were facing. And I, for one, didn’t listen. I have apologized to him for that, and I apologize to the cause of Christ for it. We would not be where we are now had we been careful 16 years ago when we had every chance and opportunity to do so.