Faithfullyliven:the podcast
Do you want to learn how to study the Bible? Do you wish you could understand the Bible better? Do you want to know how you can remain faithful to historic Christianity in our contemporary society? Let's take a journey to explore and learn how to be a faithful follower of Christ. Faithfullyliven, the podcast is here to uplift your soul and encourage you to live a life honoring to God
Faithfullyliven:the podcast
Discerning false teachings, cults and false religions with Don Veinot Jr
Grapple with the intricacies of religious teachings and uncover the truth beneath layers of doctrine. I, your host Dwan, offer an enlightening journey through the maze of cults, false teachings, and the authentic Gospel, challenging listeners to question and verify their beliefs with the rigor of the Bereans from Acts 17:11. This episode promises an intellectual deep-dive into the theological disputes that have long divided scholars and laymen alike, particularly the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ, and the mysterious concept of the Trinity.
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Welcome to Fatefully Living, the Podcast, where we learn how to live for Christ in our daily lives. I am Dwan, your host, and I would like to invite you on a journey with me to explore and learn how to be a faithful follower of Christ. Hey everyone, welcome to Fatefully Living the Podcast, where we strive to encourage you to live for Christ's Fatefully by offering guidance on studying the Bible, how to understand the Bible better and how to remain faithful to historic Christianity in a contemporary society. In today's episode it's a replay of a conversation that I had with Dwan Vino. We discussed false teachings, cults and false religions. So you know, as believers, it's important for us to study God's Word, and studying and understanding God's Word helps us to be discerning, to know what is false and what is true. There are a number of false teachings, cults and religions in our world today and it's good for us to be aware of them. Acts 1711 tells us and the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica and they listened eagerly to Paul's message. They searched the scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth. So you can see the example in Acts where the people of Berea they were open-minded, but they also went back and studied the scriptures for themselves. So when we read and study God's Word, we have the Holy Spirit that is going to guide us and give us discernment in knowing what is false and what is true. Alright, so here is my conversation with Mr Vino. In this video, I am honored to have a conversation with Don Vino about learning to discern false teachers, cults and false religions. But before we get into the conversation, let me share a little bit of a bio about Mr Vino.
Speaker 1:Don Vino is co-founder and president of Midwest Christian Outreach Inc. A National Apologetics Ministry in Mission to New Religious Movement, based in Wanderlake, illinois, with a branch office in Quincy, illinois and Cape Coral, florida. He, along with his wife of 51 years in joy, have been involved in the discernment ministry as missionaries to cults and new religious movements since 1987. He is a frequent guest on various radio and television broadcasts, including the John Ankerberg show, as well as being a staff researcher and writer for the Midwest Outreach Journal. He is co-author of Richard War and the Indian Gram Secret in Matter of Basic Principles, bill Gother and the Christian Life.
Speaker 1:Contributing author of Preserving Evangelical Unity Welcoming Diversity in Non-Essentials, as well as articles in the CRI Journal, pfo Quarterly Journal, campus Life Magazine, journal of the International Society of Christian Apologetics, midwest Journal of Theology, the Christian Post and other periodicals. He is also co-host of the weekly, unknown webcast on the Midwest Christian Outreach Inc YouTube channel. He was ordained to the ministry by West Suburban Community Church of Lombard, illinois, at the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, israel, in March of 1997. Don is a charter member of the International Society of Christian Apologetics and is also the current president of Evangelical missions to non-Christian religions, a consortium of countercults, last apologetic ministries and missions to non-Christians. Alright, here is my conversation with Don. Hi, mr Vito, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:It's good to be with you.
Speaker 1:Alright, so this show. We are going to be talking about false teachings, cults and then false religions. But before we get into our topic, tell us how you became a follower of Christ.
Speaker 2:Well, it goes back to a young lady that I ended up marrying. Actually, I met Joy when I was the ripe old age of 15. I was not a believer. I had grown up as an atheist. She had grown up in the church and I had become a Christian when she was now 12, but was not walking closely with the Lord at the time Still believed, but not walking closely or she wouldn't have dated me. I'm glad she did. Her parents were praying for me, both faithful believers, and they accepted me in spite of kind of who I was.
Speaker 2:As a teenager, her grandfather started praying for me. This is the fun part of the story. I didn't know this, you know. I started praying for me. He was from Denmark. He started praying for me not only that I would become a believer, but that I would become a pastor and to that end, as he prayed, he also started buying Bibles and commentaries and other materials that pastors would need. Never knew this, did not know this.
Speaker 2:We married three years after we met. Three years after that we had our son, and Joy woke up in the hospital with two big questions. The first was are they really going to send this child home with me? I don't know anything about raising children. The second was what am I going to teach him? And so she kind of challenged God to reveal himself to her, and he did in some interesting ways. So she recommitted her life to Christ and then came to me and asked me if I would read some books that she had gotten from her sister. My inclination was to go no. But one thing I had learned after being with her. We dated for three years, we were married for three years. We'd been together six years. What I learned pretty early on is she wanted something. Badly enough. I was better off just giving in early, because she's going to get it anyway. And so I said, yes, I'll read it. And I did not think that it would persuade me, because I, frankly, had my Christians who could give a reasonable defense, for the faith Didn't mean they're not Christians, they just, it seemed to me, they believed what they believed because their pastor said it, because their parents said it or whatever.
Speaker 2:To my surprise, as I read the material, I started coming to some conclusions. One is I couldn't be honest and be an atheist, because atheism is a claim to know something that I actually can't know. I can't know if God doesn't exist. I can't know that. Maybe he did exist and doesn't exist now, or maybe he doesn't exist now but will exist in the future. In other words, I couldn't with any confidence know anything about God other than I chose not to believe. So with that I thought I could be an agnostic. It's not a claim to know anything, it's just saying I don't know. You can be an ordinary agnostic or an ordinary agnostic. An ordinary agnostic says I don't know if God exists and you don't either, so leave me alone. An ordinary agnostic would go I don't know if God exists, but I'm open to information, and so I transitioned through each of those.
Speaker 2:In the process, I had to come to terms with certain questions. Is the Bible fundamentally reliable? Because there's a lot of material out there by a lot of different religions? So what makes the Bible difference in, say, the Upanishads in Hinduism, or the Quran for Islam, or the Book of Mormon, for you know the Mormon Church? And so as I looked at that, I came to discover that the Bible we have in our hands is 99.9% accurate to what was originally penned. Now, that doesn't mean inspired, it just means accurate. So I had to take some next steps then. Okay, it's accurate. But a phone book is accurate and it's initial printing. So that doesn't mean inspired, it doesn't mean an error, it doesn't mean it really tells us that Christianity is true. So how would I get to that next step?
Speaker 2:And the next up came as I looked into the person, jesus Christ. He made some pretty interesting claims. A claimed that he would be killed and that he would raise himself from the dead. So not only killed. A lot of people could make that claim and all of us eventually are going to die. So what makes him different? Well, he predicted he would raise himself from the dead. And then you have a fairly a good amount of evidence that Backs up his claim to having been resurrected. So if he predicted his death and he predicted his resurrection, I have a high degree of confidence that he knows what he's talking about.
Speaker 2:In addition to which, throughout his ministry, what you find him doing continually is, when someone asks him what he's doing, he always pointed back to the Hebrew scriptures. He never just gave you his opinion and he even equated his word to be equal with the Hebrew scriptures in Matthew 5, for example, when he Says you have heard it said that shall not come at adultery. Well, he's, of course, quoting the Hebrew scriptures. Moses Not shown actually adultery. So they heard it from Moses, who got it from God, or at least that's how the story goes.
Speaker 2:And Jesus believed that. He said but I say so, now he's put his word on a level with the word that was given to Moses. I say, if you look at it when one plus in your eye, you've committed the act. And for that reason he was Accused of being blasphemous, because he placed his word, his teaching, his views on a part with God. So he was claiming to be God and and okay, so he fulfilled prophecy. He predicted his death. He said he would raise himself from the dead and did raise himself from the dead and then demonstrated he believed in the inspiration and anerosy of scripture by pointing back to him continually. So I came to the conclusion that that guy knows what he's talking about. I would be better off Believing him and in him than believing someone else who denies it, who can hardly do their taxes. So that's how I became a Christian.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, that's a great story there, how you have to reason through. You know the scriptures and what Jesus said to come to your conclusion.
Speaker 2:Well, I do, and I have since come to the realization. I mean they Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment. This is kind of funny because the greatest commandment is not listed as one of the commandments and as I've done research on, I have discovered really what's going on here. He said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and Love your neighbor is yourself. There's a second verse commandment and if you look back, what you find is in history this is a contractual agreement, the Ten Commandments and everything that follows it, between the greater power, called the Sousa reign, and the lesser power, the one who is now conquered, that would be Israel, and in that you have kind of the title of the article, which would be, or the title of the contract, which would be the greatest commandment, and then you have subsets. You have the first four of the Ten Commandments, which are how do you love the Lord, your God, and then you have the next six was how do you love your neighbor as yourself, and then everything else that follows. It is how you carry out those ten, so all of the laws are tied to. It's a really interesting kind of a thing.
Speaker 2:So Jesus was concerned about that and he pointed back to that. Continually Believe the inspiration of Scripture, prophecies pointed to him. I Accepted the Lord, I became a believer, and the next family gathering, joys grandfather showed up with a box full of bibles and commentaries and yeah, ready for the next step and his prayers being answered. But joy said she's not gonna be a pastor's wife. She said Now, some may not understand this, but if you go back to the church of the 1960s and 70s you will. She said I don't do flannel graph and I don't play piano. So so that brings us maybe to the next Part of my life and how we got involved with Midwest Christian outreach.
Speaker 1:So how that minute she's? Trying?
Speaker 2:yeah. Well, it is the second answer to her grandfather's prayer. Ultimately, I'm not a pastor really, and and after I became a believer I thought, okay, I will, because I was in construction, I will become a rich general contractor and support missionaries. I never envisioned being one. That wasn't my goal, but I have always liked. I want to know why things work. That helped me in construction. It's helped me in everything I do pretty much, including this ministry. And so one day, joy join. I were avid bowlers. We both four nights a week before we had kids. We love bowling. Well, she joined a women's bowling league, a scratch league. They called it the hot tomatoes and.
Speaker 2:She has a. She had like a 190 something average. She's very good bowler, and so she joined this bowling league and some job was witnesses joined the bowling league. Oh, unusual. This is a time after the watch, our bottom track society, had done their final prediction for the end of the world and the varmigan for 1975 didn't happen. And so the watchtower opened the doors a little bit to let your people get socially active, because they were losing so many people. They lost a million people over the next few years.
Speaker 2:And so these women joined his bowling league and joy met him and she loved them. They were funny, they were good mothers, they were. She just liked being with them. And so she came home she said I heard what they believe is a little weird and so I need to figure it out. Will you help me now? Remember, if joy wants something really badly, it's easier to give it early. She's gonna get it anyway, right? So I said okay. So we went to our pastor and told him what our dilemma was, and he didn't know any much all his witnesses and so he brought out a little track that he gave to us. He had a bunch of bible verses on it. Didn't tell us why they're important. So it was not really that helpful. So joy Went looking for books.
Speaker 2:There were not very many at the time and the ones that were there were helpful but mean spirited or from former jw's who were angry former jw's largely and uh, and then one day, as we're watching something called the john anchorberg show, we still around, but Uh, he had four jw's women on there, former jw's women. It was called 100 and 110 years of was our service, I think, uh, and so we had the jones sent. Now we had a couple of anointed we had and we were fascinated by their story. And it turned out they had an annual conference in new wring, old Pennsylvania, every year of xjw's. And so we went. It was Fabulous is the only word I can really use, because you walked into a setting of Denominationalism, just dropped a lot of theological Arguments that we get into over, you know, tongs not tongs, baptism not baptism. All that just dropped it to door. Everything focused on one person, jesus Christ. And how do we relate to these? Who are here, who he is and why that's important. So it was. There was a central theme throughout and so we went home.
Speaker 2:We were very encouraged and we had learned about something called a telephone ministry. So what you did is you would get a telephone line. You never answered the phone. You would record a message just back in a days when your Voice smell was actually a cassette tape. You'd record your message on and, and so joy, would write a script every week and she record the message and then we'd start it Every Saturday would be the new message and we'd advertise it. And over time there were others around the country they're doing the same thing and so we all became connected.
Speaker 2:After a while of doing that, we realized if they are because we're not answering the phone, most of your calls come in after 10 o'clock at night. The reason most your calls come after 10 o'clock at night is that Jehovah's Witnesses are afraid. The watch our has spies checking on them and Tricking them, and then they will get to fellowship. So they wait until everybody's in bed before they sneak down and make the call. Amazing. So After a while we thought you know what, if they want to talk to somebody right now, they've listened to the message. Now what? So we talked to several of the others who were doing that. We said you know what? We'll make ours a live line and you all can refer to our line at the end and if they want to talk to somebody we'll answer it 24 7.
Speaker 2:We got a lot of phone calls at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning from all over the country. It was really quite interesting. And one of them, if I, joy, was up, it's about 3 in the morning. She's talking to the Jehovah's Witness in New York and I'm running around getting her their was, our Bible, their different materials. They can talk to her. And at one point the lady said what are you doing for Jehovah? I've never seen you come to my door. And joy says well, I've never seen you come to my door either, and I'm up talking to you at 3 in the morning. And she said yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2:And so Midwest Christian outreach kind of grew out of that help when we started getting calls about other groups and joy said I'll do Jehovah's Witnesses, you do everybody else.
Speaker 2:And we founded Midwest Christian outreach in can 1995. If we was, we thought, just going to be a local ministry in the Chicago area has become an international ministry. At this point it was to be mostly Jehovah's Witnesses and maybe Mormons. Now we kind of Deal with anything that comes along, because what we've discovered and that's something we'll talk about a little later on probably is Whatever group you're dealing with, they fundamentally Believe the same things. They make your mistakes in the same place as almost every time, and so if you know two or three Bible based cults, pretty well you can talk to about anybody. If you know kind of Eastern mystical religions pretty well, you can pretty much talk to anybody, and so we focus on here's the essentials of the faith. Learn those well, learn how other people distort them, because they make your mistakes usually at the same places, and Then you'll be pretty well geared up to talk to virtually anybody.
Speaker 1:All right, so what we can kind of get into. You know our topics for today learning how, to you know, discern false teachings, cults and false religions. So let's look at false teachings first, so what would be characterized, kind of like, as a false teaching?
Speaker 2:well, there's several, and they usually revolve around the essentials of the faith. One is who is Jesus? In fact, we did our blog this week who do you say Jesus is? And we kind of deal with that question and what you discover is virtually every religion not all religious, but virtually every religion Attaches Jesus to their belief system in some way.
Speaker 2:Okay, and it usually comes to the point in the discussion of His humanity and his deity. It almost always that's where it breaks down. So, for example, if you have a Jehovah's Witness you're talking to, they think that Understanding God is something that we can logically do and explain. And so if we can logically explain it and understand it in rational ways, in Concepts that we can understand, that is God. I Can't understand why God would incarnate in the flesh, number one or how. So it's the how and why questions, always a how and why questions. So what they do is they get to this point of the divinity of Christ and the humanity of Christ and they go. I Can't explain it, therefore. It isn't true. So they go for his humanity. He's just a man.
Speaker 2:Right now you start having problems of that right and and you see this happen in every false teaching is Once you deny a fundamental doctrine of biblical faith, you have to start fixing that doctrine somewhere down the road. So he's just a man, he's not God. Next thing, he doesn't have a soul. Because we are a soul, okay, but here's the problem. If you don't have a soul, then what happens when you die? Oh, you cease to exist. Okay. But if you cease to exist, all right, you just have a body, you, everything that you are, everything you think, every aspect of you that exist Exists in your physical body and in your brain and in your blood. You cease to exist now because you die.
Speaker 2:How do you do a resurrection? That's a problem. What's gonna be raised up? Because there's nothing left. The you is gone. So they say oh well, that's easy. God just creates a replica that looks like you. He has a copy of your memories stored used to be on a phonograph record, I think. Now it's in the cloud somewhere and he makes it a copy of his copy because the original memories are gone and he puts them into the newly created being and calls it you.
Speaker 2:That's what they teach and that's how they go about trying to fix this issue of resurrection and we have talked in fact we talked about this in the blog this week. I'll have to send you the link to that. You can add it in Because and we've done that one we also did one called the in the beginning Michael, because part of this whole teaching of theirs is that Jesus didn't create everything. Michael created everything. God created Michael. Michael created the cosmos. Michael then ceased to exist. God created Jesus as a human on earth, who then was crucified, not resurrected. He's dead, forever dead, but God recreated Michael. So you have Michael 1.0, jesus Michael 2.0 that replaced the previous two. Who's now reigning in heaven? They call him Jesus, but he's not, he's Michael. Oh.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:That's what they teach.
Speaker 1:All right, so who Jesus is. And then will we another like doctrine that people would start.
Speaker 2:Well, okay, another doctrine. Well, the Trinity would be another one, because they kind of go hand in hand, right? I can't understand the Trinity. Therefore, the Trinity can't be true, or they'll go another way and they'll try to create something. It's Trinity like that's where the Mormons go, because the Mormons, they get to the point of Jesus, humanity and deity and they Want to affirm something that sounds biblical, and so they go.
Speaker 2:Okay, jesus was born on another planet, near the star base Colab. He was a spirit being, and we're all spirit beings and we're all born on this planet. And then he came to earth, where he got a physical body, where he then could go and earn his godhood, as all gods and goddesses have done before him. And so the Trinity is the father and the son and the Holy Spirit, all of which are Physical beings that were born on other planets, that became gods as well, and they are kind of the gods of this planet, and so we too could become gods or goddesses on our planet. So they distort the Trinity, they distort the deity and humanity of Christ and then make us gods like all gods before us.
Speaker 1:That's more confusing than trying to understand the Trinity itself. You know all of that.
Speaker 2:It is, it can be, and the question I almost always ask when people go for the how and why questions is this Do you believe that God parted the Red Sea and the water stood up on edge? I Believe that. How do you do that? I don't know. He didn't tell me.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:Do you believe God created everything from nothing. He spoke and it existed. Do you believe you did that? Yeah, I do too. He didn't tell me how he did it. Right, there are a lot of things that we don't know about God that he just didn't bother to tell us True.
Speaker 2:Yes and even if he tried, would we understand it? It's so, it seems to me. It's. It's the distance between us really understanding God and being able to explain it is is a Bigger Canyon between us and God than it would be if I tried to explain to a six-month-old quantum physics, right? Yeah, it's just beyond our comprehension, it's outside of our realm of experience. We don't know anything like God, so we almost have to just take what he does reveal to us about him which is understandable, and go from there. So DD of Christ is always the problem, humanity of Christ, those two issues.
Speaker 2:If you go into Eastern mysticism of some kind, hinduism, for example, if you ask them if Jesus is God, they go yes, of course. But what do they mean? Well, now we get into something that dr Peter Jones calls one is versus two ism, and hopefully this is Makes it simpler. One ism is that everything is God, and so God is part of creation. The trees are God, the rocks are God, your God, I'm God Versus to wisdom, which is that God is separate from creation. He created everything and interacts with it, but he is not the creation itself.
Speaker 2:Right, two different views. Now, what I when I talk with those who hold this view. Most new ages hold this view as well. I want to go through and say now help me understand, just so we're both talking the same language. Everything is God the Table we're sitting at? Is God the book you have in your hand? Is God the Shells behind you? Is God the rocks? Are God the trees of God? Yes, yes, yes. And what my cat left in litter box this morning, is God? So sort of raising ourselves and says some godhood, some grandiose idea? Aren't we really lowering everything that exists to the lowest common denominator? What my cat left in litter box this morning? Now, they don't really like that, but that's what they're doing ultimately.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, right, all right. So we talked about false teachings. Now let's kind of move into cults. What would be compare to a six of them in a cult?
Speaker 2:Well, we did an article and again, if you like, I can send a link to this. It's about Gwen Shamblin. She was a false teacher who had infiltrated the church. She was in 60, in 30,000 churches across 60 denominations. She denied to Deeter Christ. She died in salvation by graceful and through faithful and Christ alone. She basically taught that God hates fat people and so you're only get to have it if you lose enough weight.
Speaker 2:And no one seemed to catch it until someone one day called me and said did Gwen Shamblin change her doctrinal statement? And I said who is Gwen Shamblin? Because we're a call driven ministry. If you don't call, if we don't know they're out there, we don't know to look for them. And so I looked at a website and I thought, well, maybe she just made a mistake, maybe it's just a layperson who made a mistake in writing this out. And so I I called her, at which point I discovered no, she meant every word, the way it was written, and that she considered me the false prophet for believing in that Trinity or the deed of Christ, and so forth.
Speaker 2:So we did an article called wait on workshop a cult question mark, and we laid out seven characteristics of a Cult. Some groups might have one or two, or not, might not be a cult, but if you have most of them, you probably are in a cult. The first one will say is the big cheese. You have an authoritarian rule. You have one person or a small group of people, or the only ones through whom God communicates, and everybody else has to listen to what they say. Because you can't understand the Bible on your own. The watch, our Bible track society, for example, is very clear. The Bible was not written to you, dwan. The Bible was only written to the anointed class, 144,000 elite. You can't understand it, so you have to read the watchtower to understand what God wants you to know. And If you read something in the Bible that conflicts with the watchtower, that's because you're reading material that you can't understand. You got to talk to your elder to get it cleared up. Wow, can't make your own decisions. Authoritarian rule don't question them. In fact, for the watchtower, your salvation is to pen solely, solely, on how you treat the anointed class, not dependent on your faith at all.
Speaker 2:Hmm, number two false prophets, prophetic speculation and false teachings. So this I'm going to go to a passage of scripture before I explain it, because you said you wanted to talk about how to study the Bible. Well, here's a key, and we'll give you some more toward the end when you Want to do that. In Matthew 7, 15, jesus says the following Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. Almost everyone knows that passage, but they don't ask about the context. There's a context.
Speaker 2:There are two definitions to a false prophet. They are found in the book of Deuteronomy, deuteronomy 13 and Deuteronomy 18. In one, a false prophet may give true predictions but give you a false view of who God is. In other words, he may be prophetically accurate but he's teaching falsely on core things. The second one, in Deuteronomy 18, is Someone who claims to be a prophet and gives just one prophecy that fails. One prophecy, one strike, you're out. Jesus says give him a tea or give him enough. So that's your two criteria, that's your definitions.
Speaker 2:The Jews understood that because they had most of the Torah memorized, and so when he said that, it goes click. They know what he's talking about. Then he says you will know them by their fruits. Now here's the question. I'm not gonna let you answer it because they don't want you to potentially be embarrassed.
Speaker 2:What are the fruits? Almost everybody says well, it's our good works. Every cult says we have the very best works. We are feeding the poor, we are doing whatever. We're going house to house To help us witnesses. We go door to door you don't go to. We have the best work.
Speaker 2:No, that's not what he's talking about. The fruits come from the tree. What is the tree? The tree is a false prophet. So what are the fruits of a false prophet? It is their false prophecies and their false teachings, not their good works. And he further clarifies that when he says by their fruits She'll know them. He talks about the different kinds of fruits that might come, and Then he says Many will come to me in that day and say but Lord, didn't we, in your name, cast out demons, do marvelous works? And he will say to them depart from me, you workers of iniquity, for I never knew you. So the entire passage has to do with the teachings and and claims of a false prophet, not whether they came to your door carrying a Bible. There's nothing to do with it right.
Speaker 2:So if they made a prophecy that was false, or a false prophet in a case of the wash, our own truck society, they have made many of them. They predicted the end of the world for 1914, 1915, 1916, 1918, 1925, 1942, 1975 and before the anointing class passed away, and they failed on every single one of them. Yeah, they're false. Proper organization Three we're the bad guys attack the Christian church Universally. When you look across all of the cults, every one of them attack the Christian church, usually the Roman Catholic Church, because they're the biggest target and there's certainly problems with the Roman Catholic Church, but they set themselves up as this way. These groups are false Teachers. They're the bad guys and you can tell that because they're not teaching what we're teaching. Well, maybe they're not teaching what you're teaching because what you're teaching is wrong, right, but their followers don't really get that. So the church is the bad guys. Now the problem with this is for us, in this kind of a ministry, is If you have somebody who's what we call a walkout say they were a Mormon or they were in the unification church or In the Eurantia book or something like that Then when they leave since they both have been taught and believe that this was the only true organization. They leave, either because they don't believe they can conform or because they think it's false. But they've already come to believe there's nothing outside of this organization. It's true, and so there's no place to go. All right, that's the problem.
Speaker 2:Christian doctrine number four is Unreasonable. They have to have a religion that makes sense. I have to be able to explain how God exists. I have to be able to explain how God does stuff. If I can't understand it with my brain, then it must be not true. Therefore, god has to be reduced to some explainable, understandable Concept, and you even have that in false teachers within the church word faith teachers. Now you may decide to edit this out, but I have never been shy about naming false teachers in the church Because they're a travesty to the church. In addition to Richard Rohr, for example, in the Enneagram I know you had Marsha on about that oh, kenneth Copeland. Kenneth Copeland is a false teacher of the highest priority. For him to have God and Adam be exact duplicates of each other, so that you can't tell one another apart, and God dependent on our giving him permission to work in the earth that is a false teacher.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, I didn't know. He said that I don't listen to Kenneth Copeland, so yeah, you're fortunate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, faith is a force in words, of the containers, of the force, he says. And so if you speak faith-filled words, god is obligated to give you what it is that you have commanded to happen. Now, this is actually witchcraft, using Christian terminology. Now some people get irritated when they say this, but think about it for a second. Witchcraft is causing the universe to conform to your will by spoken spell and incantation. Word faith teachers are causing the universe to conform to their will by spoken spell and incantation. It is the same thing, just different language, but it's the same thing.
Speaker 2:Twisting the scriptures, making black white and white black. Some have called it a cult cocktail. Scripture with a twist. Oh, they take it out of context and distort it to make it sound like it might be credible, but then when you look at it in context, it doesn't follow. What they have said is false. They have distorted it to their own, as in. Peter writes about that, how that they distort. Paul's writing says yeah, some things are alright, so difficult to understand, but those who are unlearned and deceived distort it to their own destruction. Scripture twisting has always happened.
Speaker 2:Characteristic six look at our work salvation by our own efforts. Every cult group has a plan of salvation that is based primarily on your ability to do all of the things that the cult leader had told you God requires. It's different for different groups, but it also comes down to your ability to do the right thing. There is a group within the church called Dick, not a cult per se, a matter of basic principles. Bill Gothart in the Christian Life is a book we wrote about this guy, bill Gothart, very popular.
Speaker 2:Two and a half million people go through his seminars in the 60s and 70s, early 80s, and he teaches that grace is God giving you the power and ability to do his will joyfully. Now, grace is God's unmerited favor. That's shorthand. A longer version is God's is a kindly attitude toward the undeserving. We're the undeserving. God has a kindly attitude toward us anyway. How cool is that? He changes that to be God giving you the power and ability to do his will joyfully. And then what happens is, as you do his will, your quantity of grace runs out, and so you go back then and get a refill of grace to do more of his will joyfully. That's Roman Catholicism. That is really what that is Okay salvation by our own efforts.
Speaker 2:Last one is don't tell me you're saved. There's no assurance of salvation. Your salvation is dependent on you procuring it and keeping it. You did nothing to become saved. You can do nothing to stay saved, so I don't, I don't know. I don't know if you're married and have children. So I'm gonna ask you my question a different way when you were born whenever that was what did you contribute to being born?
Speaker 1:Nothing.
Speaker 2:You didn't do anything, not a thing. That's true, your mother did that. Your father participated a little bit in advance, but your mother did the bulk of the work. Right, you were born. Completely nothing you did. What can you do to become unborn? I guess I could kill myself, that's all. That would just mean you're dead, you're not unborn, you can't do anything. I can't be born.
Speaker 1:I can't be unborn.
Speaker 2:You can't be born or unborn on your own. You can't do that. So if that's true, with that earthly mother giving birth to an earthly child, how much more God brings us a new birth. We are born again. Our born again does not depend on our ability to be born. We contribute nothing and because we are born again through Him, we can do nothing to become unborn again. We can't lose our salvation. It was an hour to begin with.
Speaker 1:Yeah right.
Speaker 2:Cults miss that every time. Legalistic groups in a church miss that as well. But if you get out of these seven, if you get four or five, you're probably in a cult.
Speaker 1:Right, so just kind of thinking about it. We talked about false teachings, so what would be kind of like the difference between someone who holds false teachings in a cult Would they be like the cult contains false teachings or not? All false teachings are a cult. I think you went over them.
Speaker 2:Right. Not all who hold false teachings are in a cult or are a cult there are some false teachers operating within the church.
Speaker 2:They're not a cult, they're just false teachers and pastors. Their task is really to guard the flock against false teachers. Too many do not do that. You might have a teaching that is a false teaching, but you're really good on the most of the essentials but, let's say, confused on some areas. That happens. Does that mean you're not a Christian? No, it doesn't mean that. Does that mean that you have imbibed on some false teachings somewhere along the way and now you're invested in holding on to it? Perhaps that's the case. So that's why, for us at least, we make a separation.
Speaker 2:We talk about cults which are cultic in behavior and in teaching, versus those who may be cultic. They may be like a cult in behavior but solid on the essentials of the faith. There are certain churches that are just very legalistic. So they're cultic in behavior but they're Christians. You have others that may not be cultic in behavior but have false teaching. So, yeah, they have a problem with their teaching, but they're not a cult. So for us you have to have both. You have to have cultic behavior and false teachings, and together that's a cult.
Speaker 1:And then you did give some examples of some cults.
Speaker 2:Today we did Jehovah's Witnesses Mormons. You have Gwen Shamblin Wade on workshop. She's recently passed away but the group is still there. Once we made a public announcement, they went from. They had over a million followers and they went down to like 700. In weeks it was pretty interesting to watch.
Speaker 2:There's over 5,000 cults around the country right now, so some as far as 12 or 10, you know the good, the bad and the small we call them, and so you have some small ones and large ones. Mormons, for example. They're a big one. The your rancher book is one few have heard of. It's a pretty popular among very, very intelligent people because it's kind of very techno savvy and so, and yet, yeah, they don't really have a church but they have reading groups, so they read the your range of book together. And Jesus for this planet, your rancher is the planet earth. Jesus for this planet is one of 176,000 Jesus's throughout the cosmos, and so it's another kind of an odd group they have a lot of. David Koresh was one. Waco, texas, his group, jim Jones, of course, was the cult and we saw how that went out. So there's a big variety of groups out there.
Speaker 1:And then let's. I guess we might have always Always talked about a little bit false religions. So would false religion be like? What would characterize a false religion? Would they be like way holding to know local doctrines at all?
Speaker 2:Well, you're gonna have a variety Again. You have a variety of things going on. Let's say Hebrew roots movement, for example. Hebrew roots movement goes all the way from really solid evangelicals, let's say a deliceological seminary or myself. I think if you don't understand the Hebrew Aspects of scripture, you're probably going to misunderstand large portions of the text, for example the book of Acts. Predominantly. You have zero Gentiles. In the first nine chapters of the book of Acts it is all Jewish, about Jews and Jewish stuff and fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, right. So if you understand that now you can understand what's going on. You can start applying it into your church life all the way to the other end of the spectrum of the Hebrew roots movement is that we have to, as Gentiles, change our name to Jewish sounding names or keeping the Sabbath and the 10 commandments, and live like Jews. They don't regard Paul as anything other than a usurper and salvation is by our own works. So In that sense you have a large group that would be a cult group or another religion. Really it's another religion, it's not just a cultist, another religion On the far end of the spectrum. So they just sort who Jesus is sort of back to that question. Same with the Hinduism or boot Buddhism.
Speaker 2:They are other world religions that are false world religions that thrive on your ability to make yourself better and Become one with the all, because in those religions the creation is God Right, and so you'll go through several incarnations working your way up to Nirvana in some way. And so in these false religions you have a number of different kind of beliefs that go with that. For example, and and I do I like this one because it helps me explain some other kinds of things someone might argue that morality changes from culture to culture and time to time, and so their idea by saying that is, morals are not absolute. Now we're talking about other world religions here, and I'm going to demonstrate two things by talking about other world religions. That is this what we discover is we really all have the same moral values. Doesn't matter when you live or where you live. What happens is that we work them out in different ways. So in America we like beef. I mean McDonald's. Under cause truth, trus, zillion soul, right, we are in love with our beef.
Speaker 2:In parts of India they don't eat beef. Jane is them. For example, they were gauze on their mouth. They sweep as they walk. They don't step on a bug or a hail a bug, and they don't eat beef. Now, and for them, that's a moral decision. For us it's not a moral decision. Beef is right. Here's where it comes into play, where false religions break down and when we understand that morality comes from God and all of us have the same basic set of moral values, regardless of where you live. And it was this. Here's the reason why don't James eat cows, because for them, the cow is grandma reincarnated and.
Speaker 2:In America we don't eat grandma and in India they don't eat grandma. So we both agree that it's morally wrong to eat grandma. We actually agree on the moral value and just works itself out differently because they have a false view of God, a false view of humans and a false view of what happens after you die. So by having a false religion, you still have the same moral values. You just worked about differently. I.
Speaker 1:Like how you put it, we all have it. You know the same basic morals, right, but we look net. Things are different are Fawks?
Speaker 2:how we, how we work it out is different, and what is false. And one goes on. We Treat grandma a certain way because of the Imago day. We believe she was created a God's image. Right and because she's a creation of God, we treat her as a creation of God rather than Believing that everything is God and we don't eat grandma we don't eat the cow because it's grandma on her reincarnation up Through the point of Nirvana, reaching Nirvana.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah, so they just they have different views than More. Okay, well, to kind of, unless you just anything else you want to add about false religions.
Speaker 2:Well, we could go on all day about them because there's so many of them, but ultimately they really come down to the same kind of thing. What do they say about who Jesus is? What do they say about who man is? What do they say about the cosmos? What do they say about how we, as man, interact with the cosmos and God? Once you get through that, then you have other ways to talk to them and you know, I'll be honest, I am able to talk to virtually anybody, usually because I don't have to attack their views directly. I Can always talk about that group over there and Everybody's interested in that group over there. They don't want to talk about their group because they're invested in their group, but they're really willing to talk about that group over there, and so I try to talk about things that they believe, without citing their Authorities and sources, but rather this other group over here.
Speaker 1:Well, Mr Vino, thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 2:And it's totally my pleasure.
Speaker 1:I hope this conversation was helpful to you. Hopefully in later episodes we can get into specific aspects of the different religions and false teachings that are in the world today. Until next time, remember God is always good and he's always faithful. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Do my favorite by following the podcast and leaving a review to help spread the word. I look forward to hearing from you. I.
