Liberty University and Mormons Together
May 21, 2014
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
The Bible warns, “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Cor. 15:33).
Men like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell are deceived, because they think they can mess around with error and not be hurt. It is this deception that is feeding the end-time, one-world “church” from the “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” side.
The truth of 1 Corinthians 15:33 cannot be disputed. The evidence is everywhere to be seen.
Paul warned of doctrines of devils (1 Timothy 4:1), and no doctrines are more demonic than those of Mormonism, yet Liberty University is in happy spiritual fellowship with the most prominent Mormon alive.
On April 25, Glenn Beck, Mormon political activist and conservative talk show host, spoke at Liberty University’s final convocation of the semester. It was not a political address. It was a rousing, tear-drenched sermon about God and the Bible, a sermon in which Beck exalted Joseph Smith and cited Mormon theology, and it was received with frequent cheers and applause and a standing ovation at the end.
Shame on Liberty University and Jerry Falwell, Jr., for giving this likable, personable deceiver a forum for his heresies.
(Beck spoke at Liberty University’s graduation service in 2010 when he was given an honorary doctorate of humanities, and the Sounds of Liberty music group and Jerry Falwell, Jr., participated in Beck’s Restoring Honor event in Washington, D.C., that year.)
Jerry Falwell, Jr., gave a glowing introduction to Beck and received from him a $50,000 check as a gift to the school. This is in direct and blatant disobedience to God’s Word.
“Look to yourselves, that we lose not those things which we have wrought, but that we receive a full reward. Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son. If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds” (2 John 8-11).
The Falwells need to learn a lesson from the early preachers and teachers in the churches.
“Because that for his name's sake they went forth, TAKING NOTHING OF THE GENTILES” (3 John 1:7).
You are so tempted to compromise when you are content with God’s provision and aren’t spending heaps of money that you don’t have and aren’t pursuing accreditation from the world and when you don’t build mega-institutions that have no biblical support.
Speaking before a large banner bearing the school’s motto, “Training Champions for Christ,” the Mormon’s message was filled with spiritual deception.
He started off with the following amazing statement:
“I am a Mormon, but I share your faith in the atonement of the Savior Jesus Christ.”
This is a horrible deception. Mormons so not share the faith of Bible-believing Christians. They believe in a false christ, a false gospel, and a false spirit, all of which the apostle Paul warned of so fervently and condemned so plainly in his epistles.
“Would to God ye could bear with me a little in my folly: and indeed bear with me. For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him” (2 Corinthians 11:1-4).
The Mormon Jesus as taught by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young is the firstborn spirit of Elohim and the brother of Lucifer, the second-born. He became God through obedience and was born into this world as the product of the physical union of Elohim and Mary.
The Mormon gospel is salvation through faith, repentance, baptism, and obedience (Basic Beliefs of the LDS Church, a Mormon publication I received on a visit to the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City). The saved go to one of three Mormon heavens. Mormons are taught four secret handshakes in the temple ceremonies so that they can gain entrance into the third heaven by thus shaking God’s hand (Bob Witte and Gordon Fraser, What’s Going on in There: An Exposing of the Secret Mormon Temple Rituals).
Mormon leaders have been more honest about their theology than Glenn Beck.
In 1977, Mormon Apostle Bernard Brockbank said, “It is true that many of the Christian churches worship a different Jesus Christ than is worshipped by the Mormons or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (The Ensign, May 1977, p. 26).
And in 1998, Mormon President Hinckley said, “The traditional Christ of whom they [non-Mormons] speak is not the Christ of whom I speak. For the Christ of whom I speak has been revealed in this the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times. He together with His Father, appeared to the boy Joseph Smith in the year 1820, and when Joseph left the grove that day, he knew more of the nature of God than all the learned ministers of the gospel of the ages” (LDS Church News, week ending June 20, 1998, p. 7).
Beck held up a Bible during his message at Liberty University and pretended to believe it and to uphold it as his authority, but he failed to acknowledge that his real authority as a Mormon is The Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants.
Beck whitewashed Mormon history by claiming that Joseph Smith was a great man, a man of honesty, a man who died as a peace-loving martyr for Christ.
The following reply to this is by Ed Decker, a former Mormon:
“He ignored the historical fact that Smith wasn’t quite as innocent as Beck claimed. He was in jail for leading his militia into town and destroying a newspaper press and burning the place down. He didn’t like what the paper had said about his many, well-known adulteries. It was probably his thirteenth run-in with the law. Earlier charges included bank fraud, glass-looking, treason, conspiracy to commit murder, fornication and adultery.
“Joseph Smith was in the unlocked upstairs of Carthage Jail with several of his leaders, arriving there with a small, armed group of his private militia, most whom went home after he assured them all was well. He was armed with a six shot pistol. Beck told the gathering that Smith told his followers in a note to lay down their arms and act in peace. He forgot to mention Smith’s loaded pistol or the gunfight. Smith was eating and drinking wine with his friends when a small group of Masons and anti-Mormons gathered outside. As several came up the stairs firing into the room, Smith discharged the pistol into them, killing two, wounding a third. He ran to the open window, cried out the Masonic Distress call, O Lord, my God, Is there no help for the Widow’s son? Apparently, not that day. He was shot and fell dead through the window.
“I have to believe Beck is smart enough to have known exactly how the founder of his religion died and the circumstances surrounding the death. Either Beck is a brain dead heliograph controlled and operated through mirrors or an arch deceiver. I suspect the latter” (Ed Decker, “Brain Dead or Arch Deceiver? Glenn Beck Visits Liberty University,” May 3, 2014, saintsalive.com).
Decker mentions that Joseph Smith was charged with “glass-looking.” Indeed, on March 20, 1826, Smith was tried and found guilty of deceiving people in New York by claiming he could find hidden treasure through a peek-stone. He was convicted by Justice Albert Neely in Bainbridge, New York. This was first published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1873, but the Mormon church for years claimed that it was not true. In 1971, Wesley P. Walters located the original court records in the basement of a government building in Norwich, New York. These documents prove beyond doubt that Smith was a convicted “glass looker.” The court ascertained “That at Palmyra he [Smith] pretended to tell by looking at this stone where coined money was buried in Pennsylvania, and while at Palmyra had frequently ascertained in that way where lost property was of various kinds…”
Returning to Beck’s sermon at Liberty University, Beck called upon Liberty faculty and students to heed the voice of “the spirit,” to be sensitive to the feeling imparted by “the spirit.”
Don’t Jerry Falwell, Jr., and the teachers at Liberty University know that Beck’s “spirit” is not a the Spirit of God, the third member of the Trinity, the Spirit of truth?
Again we quote from Ed Decker:
“When I joined the Mormon Church those many years ago, I was told to pray about its truthfulness; that I would know it was true through a burning in my bosom.
“‘But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right’ (Doctrine and Covenants 9:8).
“I did as they said and I did receive a very real burning in my bosom. It took me 20 years to get that fire out. The Bible, God’s actual Word, never tells us to test a spiritual thing that way. We are told to test all things through the Scripture. Not through any subjective experience” (Ed Decker, “Brain Dead or Arch Deceiver? Glenn Beck Visits Liberty University,” May 3, 2014).
The Jews at Berea are called noble in God’s Word because they tested everything by the Scripture.
“These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11).
The Jews at Berea were more noble than those at Thessalonica, and they are are more noble than those at Liberty University.
Beck used Christian and Bible terminology to hide his Mormon theology. Following are a couple of other examples:
“Beck praised his god as his true father, his dad who brought him and each of us to earth for a special purpose. He spoke of the great council above, from where we were sent to earth. Beck was talking Mormon-speak here. He was speaking of Kolob, where the Mormon god of this world met with the head of all the gods and other notable gods and concocted the plan for earth.
“He forgot to talk about his heavenly mother who gave birth to us as spirit beings there before we were sent to earth. Mormons are told that they are a special people, chosen by God for such a time as this. Beck offered that same word to his audience” (Ed Decker, “Brain Dead or Arch Deceiver? Glenn Beck Visits Liberty University,” May 3, 2014).
Liberty University is at the end of the slippery slide of compromise, a slide that began under Jerry Falwell’s direction.
The university recently justified its hiring of a homosexual advocate to teach students choreography for a presentation of Mary Poppins. And a homosexual named Brandon Ambrosino was allowed to enroll as a graduate in Liberty’s seminary program.
Liberty has “explanations” for all of this, but there are no explanations of such things that will stand before God or that will stop the corruption that comes from “evil communications.”
For more about this see “Jerry Falwell: The Billy Graham of Independent Baptists,” www.wayoflife.org.
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