The Lie that Exists in Contemporary Christianity: Part One

This will be a series of four pieces. This is the first, we can call it a preface. It will show how society has changed; the rest of the pieces will show how the church and Christianity has changed with it.

The time is passing amazingly fast but maybe thirty years ago they started to invite women to be elders in the Pentecostal churches in Sweden, there was no discussion about it, it just happened. They said that they had had intense discussions in the congregations and the denomination, of course, that is what they always say. In Sweden, the congregation is a democratic institution, and I am starting to see how horrible wrong this is; the congregation should be under the rule of godly elders.

Today, all of this seems to be repeated when they are discussing the LGBTQ+ community and the church. You know beforehand where it will end, it seems inevitable. To jump back to the question of elders in the church; divorced and remarried people were also becoming elders, fallen pastors had to pause for a couple of days, it seemed like, then they were restored. And we have seen so many examples of sexual immorality in the so-called Christian denominations the last couple of years. First all the scandals in the Catholic Church, in Hillsong, and now the in the Southern Baptist Convention (May 2022) with countless victims and destroyed lives; it is not only the destroyed life, but the church is also trying to cover up its sins, they do not care for the victims; these people are sinners, they are not transformed, they are not sanctified, they are not born of God.

There is no end to sin and depravity, even in the church. The divorce rate in Sweden is rampant, even in the church. I do not believe that anyone thinks that a divorce is a good thing and there is much suffering, especially for the children, but at the same time is the jump to divorce all too easy, the Bible state this:

The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder (Matt. 19:3-6).

In the order of creation is a marriage between a man and a woman God’s design for us. He made us male and female from the beginning, these are the sexes that exist, there exist no other sexes, either your sex is male or female, and for the cause of that God has made us thus are we to leave our parents and cleave to our wife; in marriage are a man and woman becoming one flesh, which truly say something about the sexuality (and their complete union) that God has given us in the realm of marriage, and only there, because our sexuality can only be blessed in the covenant of marriage, that is where God has blessed it.[1] And since they no more are two but one, joined together by God as one flesh, may no man put that which God has joined asunder. But divorce is rampant in Swedish Christianity. No one is even talking about it anymore.

There are a few things that I believe have brought all of this forth. One thing is, of course, the church’s disdain and contempt for the Word of God. They do not take it seriously anymore in that they do not teach it to the church, there is too much of a make feel-good message, so there is no teaching about biblical doctrines, about God’s will for the Christian, there is no church discipline, cohabitation is allowed, no one is talking about God’s design for sexuality and marriage, and if they do they do it clumsily, no one seems to view God’s Word as true and inerrant and infallible in everything, or as authoritative for every man. They say that you should read it as it says except… This exception has been crawling into the consciousness of everyone. The Bible says this… But. This but is also so fallacious, it is perfect to grab when you read something you do not like. Not that many people read the Bible anyway. Every year goes Bible reading down, many have no concept at all of what the OT says, the pastor does not exposit the Bible, it is only themes and topics that are being preached, and all these themes seem to be very man centered. God is there to love us and to give us all that we want, then is he in a way spent. Outside his love and giving of gifts he has no meaning for the modern Christian man.

The Swedish Christianity consists of the Lutheran Church, which is since many years apostate, ruled by unbelieving politicians being before a state church, beside the Lutheran Church you have what is called free churches, Baptists, Pentecostals, and others, all of whom is governed by a democratic rule; in this you will also find Word of Faith congregations, but nearly no reformed. Once in time the Swedish Church was true to its Lutheran legacy and true to the Word of God, which was a long time ago. And none of these churches have this high view of Scripture, like the reformed, they believe that the Spirit in a way has made Scripture obsolete. They have revelations outside of Scripture, and they seem to think that such is wholly normal. They do not understand that the revelation of God is finished with the book of Revelation. Furthermore, they all confess that the Bible is the Word of God, but they do not live or teach according to their confession. If they believed in the Word of God, we would have nothing of what we see today. We would have a biblical view of marriage, elders, women’s role in the church, cohabitation, sexuality, LGBTQ+, revelation, God, and his attributes, Jesus and the atonement, the Holy Spirit and regeneration, conversion, repentance, sanctification, heaven and hell, and sin.

It is like two thousand years of church history of biblical understanding, and teaching of Scripture is destroyed, not worth anything. For two thousand years have all who lived before us understood the Scripture in a wrong way, taught everyone before us lies and everyone before us must all be in hell because they never understood the gospel, they never knew our Lord and savior. They do not say that, but that is the conclusion. But I forgot, hell does not exist anymore in the contemporary Christianity, so they are all in heaven anyway, whether they lived transformed lives saved by the blood of Jesus Christ and in saving faith or if they only were good enough, and if they were not good enough, they will either be saved anyway after some form of cleansing and judgment or annihilated. Because it would be unfair if God sent some to hell, and some other to heaven, they state that they cannot believe in a God that send anyone to hell, because such a God is not worthy of them; they have misunderstood who is worthy, and unto whom praise, and unto whom glory belong and are due: unto the Almighty and everlasting God. They seem to believe that the Creator of the heavens and the earth would care if his creation found it abhorrent that he does what he wants with his own creation; he does not. That is how they perform exegesis on Scripture, by their feelings, by the wisdom of this world, by the meaninglessness of their empty minds tuned to the bareness of this world’s void. What does the psalmist say about that, does it profit them in any way?

Why do the heathen rage, And the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, And cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: The Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, And vex them in his sore displeasure (Ps. 2:1–5).

Upon all this we have our children in a woke school from the age of 18 months until they became 19 years old, and this society has all the power over them teaching them the wisdom of the world and the love of the world: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world” (1 John 1:16). It is so obvious that Christendom today is so influenced by this world. Even older people that I have known for 40 years are showing signs of being worldly in a way I deemed impossible when younger. This influence is a true danger to everyone. And to be influenced by such an early age day in and day out, and after school are they being influenced by both the media and social media, and in the church, they receive the message that if you only are good enough then all is well.

This is not the way to raise up witnesses for the kingdom of God. No one seems to even care. It has become increasingly clear that the grip our woke school system has on our children is a real threat, because it is not the parents, it is not the church that is influencing or forming them, it is the society that denies our Lord and his true Word, and they do it from such an early age, this is a true hazard.

It was different when I was growing up in the 1970s, the society was more stable in a way. The nuclear family was still the norm, my mother was always home when coming home from school, there was very seldom any violence in school, no one stole your bike, our teachers did not have a woke agenda, they wanted us to learn something in school, to grow up to be productive members of the society, TV had two channels and was no important thing at home, we could not see what we wanted but only what our parents allowed, no computers, no cell phones, no social media, no internet. It was a much simpler life. It must be extremely hard to be young today. The church therefore must be something else than the society they all must live in, to help them navigate in this deceptive maze.

Then we have the problem with the destroyed nuclear family and absent fathers. There are four restraints built-in in our society, all given by the Creator: 1) the knowledge of God, 2) the conscience given by God, 3) the nuclear family, 4) and the government or the police. God is removed from the society, we are secular and God is dead; believe in God and you are more or less seen as dumb and ignorant, and since God is removed the conscience given by him is misinformed and misdirected, the nuclear family is being consciously destroyed by many forces in society, and cannot therefore function in a restraining way, the police is not functioning well either, because of political decisions or lack of political will.[2] It was very prominent in the riots in Sweden Easter 2022.

Many seem to understand that a family without a father is detrimental to the children, but you have so many feminists, LGBTQ+, the left, and other people who want to destroy the nuclear family, it is very evil what they do. For their own gain and agenda, they are prepared to destroy the lives of countless people. In Sweden, you also have a government who loves to govern in things they have nothing to do with, for example how to take care of the children, they want every child to be enrolled into their woke preschools and punish families that do not want to have the government upbringing their children. The government wants both parents to work full time, so there is no time left for the family to spend together, anyone that question this, mostly mothers, is being ridiculed by the left and feminists and are being called one invective after another. The taxes are so high in Sweden so both parents must work anyway, and still does not the welfare system work. Society has changed dramatically in the last forty years.

These three pillars are being destroyed: the family, the school, the society. All of this is influencing the church and the members of the church. When you hear about how you must have laws, like in Florida, that forbid teachers to share with very young children about their sexual orientation or gender confusion; why anyone would feel the need to share such a thing is beyond me; Disney, on the other hand, says that they cannot accept this law but want to share their queer theories with children, and they deny that sexes even exist. WHO in their new guidelines does not recognize the child as a life worth protecting, they want to remove all-time limits on abortions. They do not understand what the sanctity of life means.

Pornography seems rampant everywhere, even in the church, destroying the mind of anyone watching it. The society has been so individualistic, all social media platforms feed this behavior; parents stare into their cell phones at all times, one wonder how many minutes a day the child can look into the eyes of its parents, but this behavior to stare into the phone is something most of us do, from the young to the old, everywhere. So the conscience of man is being destroyed, burnt away, we have too few fathers being role models for the young men, we have a destroyed nuclear family, a school with an agenda to destroy the minds of the young, and a society where drugs, violence, narcissism, pornography, coldness, crimes are widespread, the society has no idea how to handle all of this, and there is no law and order. We see it in far too many countries where the government and police have given up, yielded to the criminals. And the Bible is quite clear, this will continue to the end.

The Bible is also clear about that salvation is a gift from God, that it is a monergistic work by the triune God in man, that is by faith alone and by grace alone and by Christ alone, that true salvation always means transformation, that we are a new creation in Christ, and that we are called to sanctification, to holiness, that God already has preordained for us to walk in his good works. God is completely sovereign in our salvation. This is usually very hard for many in the Christian church to acknowledge that we have nothing to be proud of, or to boast about, all is from our almighty and everlasting God. That is clear in the Word of God and that is what I want to show you, the reader.

So, to recapitulate: The society has changed in ways no one ever could imagine, and it has changed the people that are in the church in a way no one ever could imagine. In a way I have great worry for the children born in the last decades, they seem lost in so many ways, nowhere has they an anchor, some place safe. Let the church be that haven that teaches who God is and to be a place where God is transforming and saving them being the workmanship of God.

Notes

[1] I prefer to use the concept of sex and not gender. This talk about gender is only confusing people, it leads nowhere, only to confusion and err. Wikipedia states: “Later, in 2011, the FDA reversed its position and began using sex as the biological classification and gender as “a person’s self-representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual’s gender presentation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender#:~:text=This%20change%20in%20the%20meaning%20of%20gender%20can,%28FDA%29%20started%20to%20use%20gender%20instead%20of%20sex.

To conclude: you are created by God either male or female, you cannot change that, you cannot change God’s purpose.

[2] I took these for restraints from an interview with John MacArthur on Fox News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_SGknX3zp8.