Prominent secular conservative voices repudiated British singer-songwriter Harry Styles for appearing on the cover in Vogue magazine in a dress.  Both Candace Owens (also here and here) and Ben Shapiro confronted his masculinity.  MSNBC defended Styles with the exact or identical argument used by evangelicals and fundamentalists for unisex apparel:  “Jesus wore dresses.”   That I have seen, only secularists have renounced this fashion.  Zero of what we call the Christian public intellectuals say anything about it.  I don’t hear any public Christian voices.  A very low percentage of professing Christians mount any defense of designed gender distinction.  Very little makes evangelicals and even most fundamentalists more angry than a Christian who stands for unique female and unique male items of clothing.

Last week going door-to-door, I rounded a corner to visit some duplexes, and a man was standing outside, who seemed 65 plus, short and heavy.  I approached him with the intent of preaching the gospel.  The first thing he said was, can you help me get into my house, I locked myself out?  I followed him to his condo.  He needed to get over his back fence to get in, which was about six foot high.  I lifted him up to where his behind was on my right shoulder, and then I shoved him up with both hands in that same anatomical area to slide over to the other side of the fence.  He got in his house and invited me to come in and sit down.  I thought, “Wow, this is going to be a great opportunity to preach the gospel to this man!”

I sat down on his couch and his little dog Marlie walked over to me for me to pet.  And the man said, “He’s friendly. . . if you’re a good person.”  Marlie was friendly.  A sign.  Then I sat and listened to this man espouse his hatred of biblical Christianity, much different than how I thought it was going to go.  He would not let me talk at all.  I sat and listened and listened. . . . and listened.  I just looked at the man, hearing the falsities proceed from his mouth in rapid fashion one after another, waiting for a pause to refute in as nice a way as possible.

From his story, I heard from the man that he had several heart attacks in the last few years until he went in for surgery to have a stint put in a major artery.  He had considered just dying of the heart attack, but Marlie, the dog, gave him reason to live.  I didn’t want him to die of a heart attack after sharing my thoughts with him, but it didn’t matter.  He wouldn’t let me talk, despite the fact that he said that the Hebrew language behind the Old Testament came from two different species of space aliens.  I tried to remove a disapproving look from my face, because even when my countenance showed even the slightest show of disagreement, he would turn red and his voice would raise in anger.  He hated Leviticus, because in that book the God of the Bible said to destroy other people (my brain said Leviticus was the priesthood and sacrificial system).  That wasn’t God, he said.  After fifteen minutes, I rose from my seat, said goodbye, and walked out.

At one point, the man said that he had deeply studied twelve or so religions and that he found that they all were the same.   In other words, all religions taught the same teachings.  Through my entire adult life, I’ve heard this same belief and exponentially more today.  Now I hear that school of thought all the time.   This false doctrine or religion has a name now:  perennialism.

In its most developed representation, perennialism says that religions are just iterations of a singular spiritual comprehension, that is the deeper reality.  It would say that embracing the deeper reality should be the goal of the religion.  Many perennialists would explain the religions as providing a variation of archetypes, essentially the same characters known by different names.  In Christianity, Jesus is one of them.

The perennialist looks at a religious person with the condescension that religion is an expression for a simpler mind.  He can grasp this, so if it works for him all the better, just as long as he doesn’t take it further than what it really is.  When he starts condemning others that take a different viewpoint, that is taking the religion further than he should.  As along as it results in helping others and giving him the strength to deal with his own difficulties and overcome obstacles, then it’s good.  Perennialism isn’t saying there is a god any more than conventional wisdom, something tried and true through many years for which the religion provides understanding or enlightenment.

Perennialism provides grounds for toleration.  None of these religions has a unique corner on the truth.  The truth weaves its way through all of them.  The key for perennialism is to receive the ultimate enlightenment from the religion that will bring the optimal personal and societal wellness.

Even if professing evangelical churches do not claim perennialism, in greater numbers they embrace the popularity of perennialism.   Christianity works better as a philosophy of life that helps its adherents thrive and succeed in a worldly sense.  It allows them both to be a Christian and then to fit into this world.  Millennials especially are drawn to the elimination of dogmatic belief and practice.  They can still call themselves a Christian and say they believe in Jesus Christ, while not rejecting the religion of other people.  Professing Christians and other religions coexist.

Professing evangelicals might argue that more non-Christians will be drawn to a perennialistic style of Christianity.  The tolerance they mislabel love means they are loving non-Christians.  This favorable acceptance will draw non-Christians to Christianity, bring them in, and the church will grow.  They will believe in Jesus, because this Jesus matches their deeper understanding of Jesus.

What does someone do with perennialism?

As I said, I’ve encountered perennialism my entire adult life without having a name for it.  When someone says that all the religions are the same, he has reduced all the religions down to where they seem to agree to him.  The so-called “golden rule” is major.  What I’ve noticed is that the do unto others is mainly do unto me.  The golden rule means I’ll get treated like I want to be treated.  The attraction to the golden rule is what it does for me personally.  Self-wellness is the actual religion, which contradicts the rudimentary teaching to deny self and follow Christ.

The apparent agreement between religions is agreement on what Jesus calls the second great commandment, love thy neighbor as thyself.  I hear this from forms of perennialism and I point out that love thy neighbor is the second commandment.  You can’t keep the second without keeping the first, love God.  To love God, He must be God, as God has revealed Himself, which He does in great detail in the Bible.  It also must be love, which God lays out in His commandments.

I tell people that whatever similarity there is between religions is because false religion counterfeits the truth.  Sure there will similarities because that is the nature of the counterfeit.  That’s how the counterfeit deceives, is by imitating certain aspects of the truth.

Maybe the person feels good about his perennialist religion.   God doesn’t accept it.  He’s sinning against God by disobeying what God said.  He’s a sinner in trouble with God.  He needs Jesus Christ, not for a more comfortable life on earth, but to save Him from God’s just wrath against His sin.  God is going to punish Him for sinning.  He needs to know about this.  That is the biggest threat to his well-being, because it effects him through all eternity.  It is also true.

Perennialism is an attack on the truth.  It contradicts numbers of biblical teachings.  I am sad that so many Christians have taken up the cause of perennialism.  The allure is a 2 Peter 2 one:  lust.  They like a Christianity that continues to walk according to lust.

The word “bowels” is used in the King James Version of the Bible, translating the Greek word, splankna, which is used eleven times in the New Testament.  Here are related ones (9 of the 11):

2 Corinthians 6:12, Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own bowels.

2 Corinthians 7:15 And his inward affection is more abundant toward you, whilst he remembereth the obedience of you all, how with fear and trembling ye received him.

Philippians 1:8 For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.

Philippians 2:1 If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies,

Colossians 3:12 Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;

Philemon 1:7 For we have great joy and consolation in thy love, because the bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee, brother.

Philemon 1:12 Whom I have sent again: thou therefore receive him, that is, mine own bowels:

Philemon 1:20 Yea, brother, let me have joy of thee in the Lord: refresh my bowels in the Lord.

1 John 3:17 But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?

A modern reader is not usually familiar with that concept, bowels or affections, in scripture.  The reason is it is a premodern conception.  You can read it in writings from the pre-New Testament and New Testament era.  Predmodern theologians, like Jonathan Edwards, talked and wrote about it.  From the above usage, it is common, not remote.  It is also authoritative, a divine understanding, not just a cultural one, as some moderns might think or report.

The New Testament contrasts splankna with the word, “belly,” the Greek word koilia, which is used twenty-two times in the New Testament.  Here are the related ones (4 of these):

Mark 7:19 Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?

Romans 16:18 For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.

1 Corinthians 6:13 Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.

Philippians 3:19 Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.)

At all times I have a much bigger picture in mind than a four or eight year snap shot of the history of the United States.  I always think of the kingdom of God first and especially today.  If where I lived was of the greatest significance, my wife and I would not have moved in a U-Haul truck to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1987.  Very often I say, it’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there, but I still lived there 33 years.  We didn’t move there because to us it was a superior place to live.  We went to do the work of the kingdom.  I thought of it as being a missionary to France.

In the run-up to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, you know that God would have preserved them if there were at least ten righteous souls there.  You don’t get ten righteous souls by voting in a new president.  You get those through evangelism.  That doesn’t mean you would have succeeded, because they may not have listened, probably wouldn’t.  We do, however, have well over ten righteous souls at Bethel Baptist Church in El Sobrante, just north of Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I don’t like what Joe Biden and the Democrat party represents.  I think they’ll hurt the country if they get power as most people are predicting.  What am I going to do about it?  The same thing I did while Donald Trump was president — preach the gospel to every creature.  You don’t really care about the solution if you put too much more than a fraction of effort into politics compared to preaching.  It is a serious error that the affections of professing Christians are stirred more by politics and for political issues than for Jesus Christ.

I’m not against it, but I’ve never given a donation to a political cause.  I think it is right to do, but I’ve never done it.  I’ve never been involved in a political campaign, except twice.  I held a sign for a man in our church to be a county supervisor and passed out flyers one afternoon for my father-in-law to be a school board member.  In both cases, it was more to encourage and support those men. They both lost.  I’ve written blog posts here.  I talk about how to vote for every election in my church.

What I’m doing now is trying to go out preaching the gospel six days a week.  I spend many hours a week doing that.  Then I have evangelistic and discipleship studies. I train others to preach the gospel every week.  I follow-up with people to whom I’ve already preached the gospel.  I think you know that a few posts about Trump don’t mean that I think he is the solution.

When at some future date, the United States has fallen, and I’m alive to comment, I won’t say it was because of how people voted in a presidential election.  That is a mere symptom.  Scripture behooves to instruct people on how to think and act regarding the government.  That’s part of observing all things whatsoever God commanded us and teaching the whole counsel of God.  The country will have fallen because it did not believe the gospel.  When Jesus went to Israel, He dealt with the souls of the nation, not its politics.

I believe I’ve got good reasons to think I’ll have better and more opportunities to preach the gospel if Donald Trump wins today.  It is less likely, I believe, that my religious freedom will be taken away.  I see new powers hindering and stopping this activity.  I see more persecution ahead if Trump loses.  Freedom to obey scripture will be taken away.  I expect that.  It saddens me to think of that occurring.

My kingdom is not of this world.  I have no continuing city here.  I have a thousand year reign of Jesus Christ and an eternal state to look forward to.  I want people in those.  I’m an ambassador of Jesus Christ.  Since I’m an ambassador, I’m saying I’m not a citizen here.  My citizenship is in heaven.  Let Jesus Christ be praised.

Businesses in Washington DC and across the nation are boarding up their windows in anticipation of the election on Tuesday (read here, here, here, here, here, and here).  The first link toward articles substantiating that activity provides the headline, “It’s Absolutely Heartbreaking to Watch Washington Boarding Up for an Election.”  I’ve read various reports with such sentences as this:  “Election violence feared.”  Here’s another jewel:  “Don’t loot in Chicago.”

So, some simple questions.  Who is going to break these windows?  Who is going to loot?  From whom are we expecting violence?  It won’t be Trump voters.  Washington DC is not getting ready to have its windows broken by Trump voters.  Everyone reading this knows that this new investment in plywood comes in anticipation of a Trump win (why do they anticipate that if the polls are correct?  Um.).

If Biden were to win, Trump voters will not break windows and loot and do violence.  They might parade and rally, but they don’t riot.  They don’t destroy property.  They don’t hurt people because of whom they voted for.  You, my readers, know that.  Some of you don’t care because you think some eggs need to be broken to make an omelet.  You’re happy to see teeth missing in the mouths of Trump voters.  It’s worth it for you for very superficial “reasons.”

Biden is claiming to bring in light against darkness.  He’s everybody’s president and all that, unless he isn’t.  Then, well, your windows will be gone.  Some are writing and he is advertising that he will unite the nation.  A party that threatens violence unless it gets its way is not a unifying force.  Biden himself won’t even disavow antifa or BLM for their violence.  They “condemn all violence,” but no one in particular, especially their people.  “Condemning violence” is symbolic language to them, their own dog whistle, that says, use violence because we won’t say anything.

Many professing Christian voters are saying they must vote for Biden for the sake of the body politic, cleansing it, and so on and so forth.  Trump is a cancer, etc.  The chemotherapy is the threat of a lug wrench and a baseball bat.

Violence is threatened only for a Trump win.  The threat of violence for a Trump win has at least two effects.  One, Trump voters know they are being threatened.  This is what they are going to get if they vote for Trump.  They don’t like being threatened with violence.  For them, this has an opposite effect.  They want to vote for him more than ever, because of this threat.

Two, the best outcome for Biden and Harris from the threat of violence of his supporters would be that the chaos will effect a vote for them.  It’s like the burning of the Reichstag.  They blame on Trump the chaos and confusion and danger they cause.  People just want to end it all and they believe it will end if they vote for Biden.  They are right in a way.   The violence will greatly diminish if Biden wins, because his supporters will be happy.  This is violent extortion.  The threat of a criminal act elicits a reaction.  Without Trump, we can go back to the status quo.  This especially works for people not that concerned for religious freedom or being censored for unacceptable political speech.

Boards on windows are being nailed for Biden and Harris supporters.  They threaten the violence.  The police know this.  Major cities know this.  You know this.  You can’t let Biden and Harris win.  You must vote Trump.  You know I’m telling you the truth.  If you vote for Biden and even for someone else besides Trump, you are aiding and abetting this kind of society.

***************

Paragraph from Washington Examiner explaining the quiet or hidden Trump vote:

“There are a lot of people who are too afraid to put up a sign [for Trump],” he said, explaining that his neighborhood, more than an hour away, was mixed between Trump and Biden voters, and black and white voters. During the protests that followed the death of George Floyd, he said, “I pulled the Trump magnet off my Jeep. Everybody took their signs down. People don’t want to be a target.”

Someone put a large Trump sign in a field next to a road we drive every day.  It was torn down twice, all the other banners remaining up.  Everyone knows this.  The threat against freedom of religion and political speech comes from the left.  They’re already planning it.

“Love” is one of the most misused and corrupted words in the English vocabulary.  Very often when I am evangelizing, I have to give the correct definitions to whole host of words, including the word, gospel.  The word “love” in English vocabulary originates from the Bible.  It is used now in the English language, but it is pulled directly from God’s Word.  Changing the meaning of words is a way to corrupt the teaching of scripture, but it is also a main strategy of postmodernism and critical theory, that says there is power in vocabulary.

The Bible itself talks about changing the meaning of words, done to fool people.  It is evil, done by evil people.  Many words are being changed today that buttress faith in scripture and obedience to the Word of God.  “Changed” is actually a soft word to describe what people do.  They are despicably corrupt, twisting, and perverting scripture through the changing of the meaning of words.  Isaiah 5:20 says, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

In the Garden of Eden, God said one thing, and Satan immediately said something different that made Eve feel like Satan loved her more than God did.  God said, Thou shalt surely die. Satan said, Ye shall not surely die.  They couldn’t both be right.  Which do you think is more popular?

Satan then ripped on God to talk about how unloving He was:  “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”  God is just ripping you off, trying to bring you down, Eve.  Doesn’t Satan sound loving to Eve?  Why don’t you all send a comment to Eve on her instagram feed.  She’s been attacked by God so why not join Satan and let her know how much you love her at this time of personal attack.  Today she would get hundreds of likes and dozens of supportive comments.  It’s no wonder that Noah and his family got only eight people to be together on the ark, even after over a hundred years of preaching.

Scripture says, God is love (1 John 4:8, 16).  Love is an attribute of God, so love is who God is.  That also means God defines love.  When Romans 3:23 says “all. . . . fall short of the glory of God,” it means that all fall short of the perfections of God’s attributes, which is what His glory is.  People fall short of love.

Love is obviously important in scripture, because it is the first and second great commandments of God, (1) love God, and (2) love your neighbor.  The entire law of God, we know, is wrapped up or summarized in those two commandments of God.

Before I go further on what love is, so that I can answer the question in the title of this post, let me explore that briefly.  I’ve heard people through the years say that such and such a person is the most loving person they know.  How would someone know that?  What would characterize the most loving person someone knows?  He would go to scripture to make that assessment, because God is love.  God defines love.  If someone uses his own definition, like Satan did with Eve, then he’s just a deceiver, using the term for his own purposes.

Today, words that define the way the world uses love, that conflicts with what scripture says, are toleration, feelings, niceness, fun, and lust.  These words all easily conform to the world system.  Two weeks or so ago, I wrote about the values sign, you’ll see that comes from the hard left in this country, and one of its epithets is, “love is love.”  Love does not define love, so what’s happening with that?  This is a removal of God out of the definition and changing the definition based on the perspective of the subject, or in other words, a subjective definition.  This is just rebellious, calling good evil and evil good, but it is postmodern too.  That “love is love” bromide justifies sodomy.  Love is love, even if it is two men loving each other, is the lie.

The corruption of love relates to a perversion of values that ignores the true God of scripture.  New values, contradicting scripture, are wellness, self-love, or self-care.  Someone is doing wrong, violating scripture, sinning, rebelling against God, or transgressing God’s law, let’s say with transgenderism, and someone disapproves.  He or she states the disapproval.  Loving people come to the rescue of the transgender.  Disapproval brings self-loathing, depression, and suicidal thoughts.  It causes a loss of endorphins, which brings severe headaches.  This person is now in pain and in need of healing.  Loving people come to the rescue from the community to lift this person up.  He can now happily go his/her/its merry way in his sin with the full support of others.

Actually the grief the “transgender” feels from disapproval is the right feeling.  He needs to abhor his sin. This is what David felt when he committed adultery.  The pangs of conscience are good.  It’s like the pain someone feels when he touches a hot stove, telling him not to do that.  The conscience is an internal warning device.  “Coming to the aid” of someone who is hurting over disapproval of a righteous confrontation just shuts down the properly working conscience.  This person is learning not to listen.  He or she is not swift to hear.  In other word, the person is being truly hurt, hurt in an actual way, harmed eternally, and this is not love.  This is not love.  It is hatred.  The people being given credit for love are hateful people.  What I’m writing here is very important.  This is some of the worst kind of deceit that there is in the world.

Children disobedient to their parents, not honoring their parents, need to feel very, very bad about that.  If a young lady is dressed like a prostitute, or as the King James says, the attire of a harlot, she should be discouraged in that.  That is the strange woman in Proverbs 6-8.  The fellow millennials or highly deceived middle aged and older people, who tell them that self-care is more important, and they need to feel liberation instead, are Satanic liars.  They are bringing destruction on this person and disintegrating his or her biblical discernment or wisdom.  The wisdom of this world, that does not descend from above, is earthly, sensual, and devilish (James 3:16).

Alright, so let me come back to the definition of love.  I said God defines it and what do we see again and again in scripture.  Consider these verses, read them all:

1 John 5:1-3, “1 Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him. 2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments. 3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments:: and his commandments are not grievous.”

John 14:15, 21, “If ye love me, keep my commandments. . . . He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.”

John 15:10, “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.”

I’m guessing that some of you reading this don’t like what God says about love.  You don’t like His definition.  You would rather stick with yours.  In the end though, you don’t love God or others when you are sinning without repentance.  Someone may say that you are, but don’t listen to that person.  He is lying to you, like Satan lied to Eve.

God is love.  Whatever contradicts God’s Word is not love.  It will bring the worst possible circumstances to your life, even if you think that things are better for you in the short term, just like Eve did.  Just because you feel something that you think is love, that isn’t love.

To answer the question, the most loving people are the ones who keep God’s commandments.  Of course, someone can’t do that without faith in Christ.  Love is fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22).  It is produced by God internally in a person, but it still always looks the same.  It does not accept sin. Like Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, it rejoices not in iniquity.

Someone may feed you a bromide, platitude, and epithet, that will get approval from the world, and especially unsaved people, but do not believe the lies.  Turn to God.  God is love.  Someone is not the most loving person in the world, who is in a constant state of sinning against God and is not keeping what He said.  The loving person is the person who does the will of God and tells you what you need to hear.  Listen to that.

Something being authentic sounds great.  Authentic leather, not naugahyde.  You go to the National Archives in Washington, DC to see the authentic Declaration of Independence, not a cheap copy.  That was the meaning of authentic for the early years of my life, what I would have thought the word, authentic, meant.  If you buy an authentic Babe Ruth bat, you don’t want it to have been mass produced in China.  Some external, verifiable means must be made to show the Babe had his fat fingers around that bat handle.  I took a mission trip to Mexico in high school and in the market, a man selling watches would pull one out to sell, declaring, “Only one of its kind!”  He sold it for a low price and then immediately pulled out an identical watch, saying again, “Only one of its kind!”  He sold watches that were not authentic.

The word “authentic” is now being used in an inauthentic way.   Now it is a commonly used word to justify bad beliefs and behavior from adherents.  They call what they’re doing authentic, but it is now a postmodern technical term.  Don’t think they mean “authentic” when they say it.  Now, however, young people especially like “authentic” better than authentic.  They aren’t authentic Christians.  They are “authentic” Christians.  They get more approval for being “authentic,” than authentic, but when they stand before God, He will inform them that they are naugahyde.  They are not the real thing.  They will be judged, not upon their own feelings or impressions, what they like, but based upon what God says.

Before I dig into the lie of “authenticity,” you should consider too that the word “alternative” today relates to authentic.  When I was in my teens and twenties, we started hearing about someone with an “alternative lifestyle.”  It seemed like a joke at the time.  A sad one.   Alternative is a big tent word to describe something “authentic to the subject” or “authentic to the person.”  It has mainly related to arts, but this is also where postmodernism got its beachhead.  Art was the first casualty of postmodernism, but it also, like a virus, started superspreading to other realms of reality.  It still uses art to spread, like the coronavirus attacks the respiratory system, postmodernism latches hold of art easier and then spreads from there.

If you see a weird avant-garde photograph or painting, maybe a toilet seat hanging from the wall with graffiti on it, you might think, ugly.  Others call it alternative and then authentic.  Someone is an authentic person if he does what you tell a toddler is scribble-scrabble.  Apparently it takes more ability to do it as an adult.  I was going to say, skill, but I couldn’t write that word for what they do.  Actual art takes skill.

Some “authentics” or “alternatives” do have some ability, but they make their niche, find their audience by pushing something new or different, that rings true and good and beautiful to themselves.  Their audience feels smart accepting their edgy, gritty alternative production, because it is authentic.  They acknowledge that they “get it.”  There is nothing to get.  There was nothing to get when Andy Warhol reproduced his Campbell’s Soup can, except to be authentic to himself, embrace his inner Warhol.

To give the impression that they are playing three dimensional chess, “authentic” is too called “next level.”  Someone has reached another level, like he’s taken the elevator up to a floor not yet built.  Why be held back by an actual building?  Let your mind go somewhere different. This is in the “next level” like Steve Jobs talked about when he said he used LSD in the days just before starting Apple in order to “think different.”  It is having a personal experience, going somewhere in one’s own imagination, that pushes into something no one has done before.  Sometimes, even often, there are good reasons why someone has never done something.  A person’s strange thoughts or impulses, arising from a heart deceitful and desperately wicked, do not correlate to objective beauty, lacking in the symmetry, order, and proportion of God’s creation.

I recently saw someone pushing the photography of an “artist,” who looked like a recent or present meth addict, taking photos of young alternative musicians in variations of neon light, leaving the appearance of diverse states of darkness and odd colors.  Some of his photos, like some of my bad ones through the years, were blurry, except on purpose.  They were not real.  They were not what a person really looks like.  And that’s why they are “authentic.”  They take the point of view, even if demented, of the subject, and by approving of it, you are accepting this different point of view, the alternative point of view, like the acceptance of an alternative lifestyle.

Here’s a man with a wife and children.  They look normal.  Here’s a man with another man.  One of the two appears a little different, more like a woman.  This is an alternative lifestyle.  In reality, it is a perversion of what is good.  On the leftist value list, it is, “love is love.”  It’s love to him.  It’s authentic to him.  Authentic never had this meaning before.  This is good evil and evil good.  This is beauty in the eye of the beholder.  They want to make the alternative normal and authentic by changing the word.  Language is power in postmodern philosophy.  They change the perspective.  This is again part of critical theory.

Let me clue you in.  What I’m describing in truth is just rebellion.  They are people who want to do what they want to do and be accepted for it.  They don’t want to be judged by objective standards.   There’s something very interesting to this, because these same proponents don’t live in that world.  It is not a world that really exists.  It is made up by them.  For example, they don’t want an avante-garde maid with an authentic view of “clean.”  Clean is still clean, just like the coronavirus is indifferent to authenticity.  They don’t want to fly in an “authentic” airplane, work in an “authentic” skyscraper, or cross an “authentic” bridge.  They don’t want planes built with arbitrary standards, beautiful to the beholder, but instead still according to musty old laws and standards.  They don’t, however, want that reality in their judgment of themselves, because then they can get away with what they want.  When you approve of them or just play along with them, this is not three dimensional chess, but a fool or a group of fools or at least scorners.

The English word “genuine” comes from genu, the Latin for knee, and it originated with reference to a custom of a father acknowledging paternity of a newborn child by placing it on his knee.  It really was his child.  His feelings didn’t matter.  There really was a reproductive act followed by conception and birth of a child.  Now someone is “genuine” if he acts however he wants.  His natural hair color is brown, but he’s not being true to himself if he doesn’t dye it light blue.

When Jesus said the truth would set you free, He wasn’t talking about being true to yourself.  People are judging you, you know, and instead of just caving to those around you, like parents, go off and do what you want, chase your dream, and be true to yourself.  That is now being genuine, the real mccoy.  No, truth was actual truth, the Word of God, and paying attention to and following what God said would set you free, free from sin (John 8:32-36).  There is an actual objective standard, one that doesn’t relate to your feelings or what you want, but to what God says, that is true.

In the spirit of language being power within postmodern philosophy and the more narrow critical theory, changing the meaning of the word authentic brings so-called “power” to the proponent of such progressivism.  God’s Word says, don’t do what you want to do, but do what God wants you to do — “he that doeth the will of God abideth forever” (1 John 2:17).  The new authenticity exalts the legitimacy of one’s own desires and then acts on them.  For a young person, he might add, I’m going to stop trying to please my parents and do whatever I want to do.  I’ll set up “boundaries,” again not with the normal meaning of the word, but with a meaning that I get zero counsel, intervention, or actual truth from my parents.  If the parents cross those arbitrary boundaries, they violate personal space like a trespasser, like a breaking and entering crime.

The power of changing the definition of authenticity brings faux liberation to the one using the term.  It isn’t really liberation, because it is bondage to sin and depraved self and the world system.  It makes a virtue out of the quixotic pursuit of being true to yourself.  If you are not “true to yourself,” then you are a fake.  Where does this stop?  You want to fornicate with multiple women, and if you don’t, then you are just being a fake.  Someone tells you this is wrong, but that’s just wrong to the speaker.  Even by listening to this person, you are just pandering to them.  That’s not authentic, it’s fake, not real.

The “authenticity,” which isn’t authentic, that I’m describing in this piece, has come into the worship of a church.  Professing Christians want to give something real to God, something they really feel, and that is whatever they feel.  What they feel is gritty and urban and sensual.  The judgment on this comes from the view of the subject.  Worship, however, is based on the view of the one worshiped.  What does God want?  Looking at reality only or primarily from the perspective of the subject, especially on worship, misrepresents reality.  God is not pleased.  Very God is not really pleased.  You may comprehend in this lifetime how much He dislikes it, but you will in eternity.  It really is not worth the risk of waiting to find out.

Part of “authenticity” revolves around being free to be who you are.  It isn’t “who you are.”  It’s just what you want.  God defines who we are, not ourselves.  He is the Creator, the Designer.  Another aspect of this is that for someone to be free to make the choice, he must be able to make the choice he wants, which means not condemning that choice.  Whoever condemns the choice is taking away freedom, because he brings “psychological damages.”  The guilt-riddenness might result in suicide, because of the rejection of the choice.  The accusation here is the power of language to murder the one, who committed suicide.  Especially young people are buying into this to bring liberation. 

At one time, what is now called “authenticity” would have been recognized as hedonism.  Leaders reward the impulsiveness that Paul called on Timothy to flee.  Holiness and piety are labeled prudery and transparently fake.  Those supporting objective truth or transcendent goodness and beauty are mere whitened sepulchers, painting on their religion from the outside with their externals.  What is missed, however, is that they purvey their own left-wing legalism, a new standard mandated around personal freedom.  Without allowing for authenticity of spontaneity and originality, the freedom constantly invent, and opportunity to dress and perform as one wants, they won’t stay.  They’ll cancel.  This threat weighs heavy on decision making, providing a totalitarian loss of freedom to anyone who sees it differently.

If people will not feel guilty or regret in this lifetime, except for not “chasing their dreams,” they will face God, nevertheless.  This effects their entire eternity.  At the root of human flourishing is the eternal kind.  This sacrifices the permanent on the altar of the immediate.  I hope they fail at doing what they want to do.  Failure in the short term has a better opportunity for long term success.

Churches don’t want to lose their young people.  A majority of evangelical churches and to varying degrees even fundamentalist churches pander to authenticity themselves.  They justify the changes by marginalizing them as cultural issues.  They are doctrinal conservatives and cultural relativists.  They haven’t given up on justification by faith, they would say, but they want to keep the next generation, so they accommodate this lie.

The Hunter Biden laptop story from the New York Post manifests the mainstream reality of misinformation and disinformation.  I would call it micro-disinformation within the greater macro-disinformation.  We live in a world of lies, represented by 2 Corinthians 4:4, “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not.”  Satan is the “prince of this world” (John 12:31) and in that role “there is no truth in him, . . . he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).  The lies are foisted upon easily deceived minds in many various ways.

Macro-disinformation underlies the true view of the world, what the world really is.  I call these the “big lies,” and these are the more important lies, like the naturalism lie, that everything got here by accident and not by design.  The big lies allow someone to go through his entire life and not deal with God.  They mask the immense and deep trouble for every person because of sin.  They send people in the direction of false solutions to the problems of the world, giving men the lie that they are solved through assorted human means:  education, philosophy, psychology, government, or economics.  Another big lie is the goodness of men, convincing them that they are good, that they are or will be fine like they are.

The Biden laptop story is simple.  For whatever reason, Hunter Biden left his laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop, which had an abundance of incriminating evidence on it against his dad, who’s running for president of the United States.  In a way, I hate writing this, because it so patently obvious. No one should have to write on it, but numerous counter stories have been written with masses of lies and deceptions to cloak or deflect from the truth. There have been many of these types of true revelations in the last four years, or even many more years, blockbuster types, that are lost in the fog of macro-disinformation.  They are micro-disinformation.

Within the universe of macro-disinformation falls postmodern thought that so blurs both the foreground and the background to leave people, especially younger ones completely befuddled.  They don’t believe they can judge the nose on their face.  Even the truth cannot be judged to be the truth, because what appears to be the truth is an operation of power and oppression.  A party leader could come out and say, it’s Russian disinformation, and people will now believe it.  A news source can show the very emails and the chain of evidence for the laptop, and a majority will doubt the story.  There is no proof of Russian involvement.  It’s very straightforward.

The laptop undoes the Trump impeachment, giving credibility to the question Trump asked the Ukrainian president.  He should have asked the question of him, but the email evidence says that Trump was right.  The laptop says that the Biden family enriched itself through the influence of Joe Biden’s office.  It was quid pro quo upon quid pro quo.  Many countries, including China, got access to the executive branch of the United States by giving Joe Biden and his family money.  That’s what it shows.  It is easy to see.  Will it matter in the race?  It might not, because the truth really isn’t the truth.  No truth is the truth, because the truth isn’t determined by the plain means.  Every person can take the regular means, the right means of discerning truth, and be justified in ignoring it with the new paradigm, related even to critical theory.

Everyone looks out at the world and knows it’s not an accident.  An accident though is till a feasible explanation.  It counts.  It’s demonstrably false, but it still counts as truth.  It is what is taught in the public school.  Out of that macro-distinformation proceeds micro-distinformation.  This is the world of lies over which Satan rules and deceives.

I often say that the world isn’t credible, but it is alluring.  This is what Jonah called, “lying vanities.”  Someone isn’t an American Indian, but she is to get a scholarship or a tenured professor position.  The truth then is whatever furthers one’s lust (cf. 2 Peter 2).  The conscience may still warn against the lie according to a true standard that remains in the heart, but personal desire extinguishes or deadens the warning.  The truth becomes the most convenient story, the most useful one.  In that sense, some might call it “authentic,” which has also changed in meaning.

The laptop of Biden was authentic.  It could be traced to Biden.  It had Biden’s material on it.  It came with Biden’s signature.  Biden tried to retrieve it later.  That’s the real or true meaning of authentic, but now authentic is whatever is most authentic to the subject.  What’s authentic is that it isn’t his laptop, because that doesn’t fit what I want to happen.  What is authentic is that a Russian dropped it off and forged the name of Biden.  This sounds like tradecraft out of spy fiction.  Why not have that be your truth?

Someone may have zero skill at drawing or painting, but he is authentic.  What went on to the canvas was true to him.  Someone’s music is true to him.  It might be alternative.  It isn’t Southern.  It isn’t gospel.  It is something original, something that no one has heard before, but it is authentic to a particular person.  Maybe others will like it too.  You see this today with fashion, art, and music.  Anyone can say it’s true, because it’s true to the subject, which is the meaning of subjective.

You know this.  There might be a truth.  Trump calls Fauci an idiot.  That’s true.  He actually said:

People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.

It’s not exactly, “Fauci is an idiot.”  No, but by making it the headline and misquoting it, it is a kind of disinformation.  The disinformation comes also with an unappealing picture of the president, mouth wide open and veins protruding from his neck.  Someone can turn a story with how he portrays it, turning it into a bit of micro-disinformation in a world of lies.  So a lyric of Hillsong and Bethel is the truth, but does that make it true if the music is worldly and fleshly?  It’s like an angry photo next to even an innocent statement.  It changes the meaning.

The ultimate macro-disinformation is the elimination of God and His Word in whatever fashion necessary.  There is no standard.  Jesus said, Thy Word is truth.  Jesus said, the greatest in His kingdom will keep the least of His commandments.  When that doesn’t fit the will of the hearer, he shapes that into something that accommodates what he does want.  The Bible is still there, like Hunter Biden’s laptop, but it means whatever you want it to mean, so it means nothing.  This is the present norm in American culture.

I know some people are suspect of disinformation and would say they want the truth.  I know of very little of it.  Even for those who accept truth, it’s a percentage.  They aren’t taking it all. They are negotiating a percentage. This itself is an adjustment to the present norm in American culture.

This week going door to door evangelizing, I was talking to an about thirty year old young man, and he wasn’t interested, he said, because of “science,” something I’ve written about here a few times.  I wanted him to understand the Bible was science, history, and a true story.  I related fulfilled prophecy and mathematical probability, because God does that in Isaiah 40-48, and that no other book does that, containing thirty percent prophecy, because the Bible is the Word of God.  He needed the gospel and he was in trouble if he didn’t receive it.  While I had that brief conversation, someone behind me was shouting at me, another about thirty year old young man with what are called “stretched earlobes.”

The man yelled, “Proselytizing should be illegal!  You should be arrested for proselytizing!”  I felt right at home.  This might be something I got in the San Francisco Bay Area, although it was also something new to hear.  He kept coming at me, and the first man ended that talk, so I stepped back and asked the second man, the one yelling, if he was against the first amendment, that he didn’t think I should have freedom of speech or freedom of religion?

The man went off on a long jeremiad of how that Christians were coming with certainty when there was no proof and then taking advantage of people, especially mentioning that Billy Graham — he said his name — was stealing money from suffering elderly women.  He also said that Christianity had been disproved numerous times, vociferating that there were numerous claims of virgin births in Egypt and many other places.  He was most troubled, he said, by the certainty of proselytizing Christians.  Then he finally let me talk.  The man stood there about thirty feet away, stopping on his way to his car.

I knew that I didn’t have much time to defend all of Christianity with the man, but I thought the best approach was to ask him, “Are you sure, are you certain, that I’m wrong?  Do you know that I’m wrong?”  He wouldn’t say.  He looked confused.  I said, “You have a problem with certainty, you’re extolling doubt, so do you know that you’re right and that I’m wrong?  Aren’t you being certain yourself?”  He still couldn’t answer.  “So,” I asked, “why not just say that you don’t like what I’m doing?  Or, it’s just your opinion?  Then it wouldn’t be illegal, since it’s just an opinion.”

I was working from presuppositionalism with the man. He wasn’t neutral.  He was presupposing his own knowledge, his own certainty.  He just didn’t like what I was saying.  I said, “You should admit that you’re wrong too, because even though you speak like you have certainty about how wrong I am, you don’t know that Billy Graham has already been dead for a few years.”  He also was confusing Billy Graham with Charismatic televangelists.  Billy Graham may have had his problems, but his work didn’t take advantage of elderly women to get into their savings accounts.  Billy Graham didn’t promote prosperity theology.

The young man told me he had to go to give a ride to his girlfriend, but he liked the way that I had come back at him.  He stated that he liked that I didn’t attempt to run away from him.  He began to tell me his story, how that his life was messed up, that he grew up Roman Catholic, but he had to go.  He wanted me to leave a paper on his door.  I left my email address.  He hasn’t written me, but I also didn’t get to his door, so I’m probably going back anyway.

I can’t speak with authority if I’m not telling the truth.  There is no authority if there is no truth.  I am not out in the world to bring uncertainty or doubt.  I am there to tell people what I know is the truth.  Biblical Christianity is the truth.  God’s Word is Truth.

The young man didn’t want elderly women to be taken advantage of.  I told him I didn’t want to see that happen either, that I was right with him on that.  He was confused, perhaps because no one has ever given him the gospel.  I think it is likely that he has never heard a true gospel presentation.  Even though this area where we live has a lot of Calvary Chapel style evangelicals, a large majority do not know or understand the gospel.

Let’s get out there.