Part One 

A true reason for faithfulness to gather with the congregation of the Lord is to join the congregation in singing to the Lord.  Recent government actions target singing in particular, seeing it as non-essential.  Some churches have argued it is essential.  Why is it essential though?  What would be the argument for singing being essential in a church?  Some of what I’ve seen in either evangelical, fundamentalist, or even separatist churches doesn’t seem essential.  Representing what’s happened, the Sacramento Bee said at one point this summer:

The mandate, issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom and state health officials a week ago on July 1, seemed destined to be combated by churches, especially those that consider singing particularly essential to worship.

On the other hand, an online magazine, The Conversation, defends continuation of singing in church:

When people sing, sound runs through the body, giving rise to emotion and facilitating transformation. It acts as a natural antidepressant by releasing endorphins, the feel-good chemical. Studies have also linked singing with improved mental alertness, memory and concentration through increased oxygenated blood to the brain. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg found that changes in the brain during worship make people “nicer, more forgiving, and trustful.”

This sounds like what many churches think they’re doing today with their singing.  It’s not scriptural, but it is typically self-centered.  Later the same article said:

Those with praise teams and bands that lead the congregation in song found it easier to provide music in online services – with fewer people, social distancing was easier to maintain. As a result, they continued to rehearse and perform in livestreamed or prerecorded services.

The crucial text here is that these teams and bands “provide music.”  They are providing music for an online audience, not God.  Nowhere does scripture say that church leaders should provide music for its members.  Members provide music for God.

Consequence of a Change In Direction or Audience

Worship is vertical.  That’s the direction — up.  It goes to God.  It’s like incense from the altar of incense, going upward into the nostrils of God.  Because of that, the question is whether God will accept it.  It must be, as Romans 12:1 says, “holy, acceptable unto God.”  When Nadab and Abihu, two priests, messed with the incense recipe, God killed them.  That’s how serious He is about what goes up and into His nostrils.

When the music sung or played clashes with the nature of God, because it isn’t being offered unto God, but unto an audience of men, it changes God in the imagination of the people involved.  They imagine a god who would find it acceptable, but if it isn’t acceptable to God, then it is the wrong God.  This turns into idolatry, worship of a false god.

Worshiping the wrong god arises out of worshiping the wrong way.  To start, it isn’t really worship, because it is centered on the people.  So think of it.  The people are the object of the worship.  They are the false god.  This is worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator, a Romans 1 violation.

People then imagine a god that is more like people.  Guess what?  Their false god receives regular sensual and fleshly offerings, all about desire.  This church music that is “essential” isn’t even accepted by God.  It is “essential” to gratify the lust of the singers and the true audience, themselves and their fellow worshipers of self.

The nature of music in churches has changed drastically in the last century.  It has a considerable impact.  God doesn’t get worshiped.  The people don’t understand God.  I believe it alters a true understanding or imagination of God more than a doctrinal statement.  It results in the acceptation of many other bad practices.

Churches don’t even like what God likes.  If they had to offer it to Him, they would be so upset that they would quit.  They can’t worship Him. They can’t sacrifice their own feelings.  It’s about them and not God.  Church leaders very often know that, so they just relent to keep their crowd for even worse reasons.

Today, feelings are choreographed or orchestrated by the music.  They are feelings that do not match up with the God of the Bible.  The “worshipers” very often think that feeling is the Holy Spirit.  Since they got that feeling, they think or better feel they are aligned with the Holy Spirit.  This changes their understanding of true spirituality.  Even though they aren’t spiritual, they think they are.  They go along either without the Holy Spirit or not controlled by the Holy Spirit, and yet they are deceived into thinking they possess the Holy Spirit or are controlled by Him.  They are very far more prey to deceit of all kinds.

Sensuality becomes a value to those using it.  They feel justified then in being sensual.  They’ve been using it in church, so “it must be fine too in their everyday lives.”  I’m saying, their values change.

Values relate to God.  He is of the highest value.  All that is true in value proceeds from the right assessment of God.  Without God as a true value, the values of a person change.  This changes his practice.

The consequences I’ve described have completely mutated the church into something of a different nature than what God wants it to be.  God isn’t being worshiped.  That’s very bad.  It’s bad enough.  However, that won’t get fixed because the church doesn’t consider the effect.

Churches are more like the world.  The world is fleshly and sensual.  This allure to the flesh is a characteristic of apostasy in 2 Peter 2.  Read that chapter.  False teachers use these allurements to deceive.  Instead of turning the world upside down, the world has turned the church upside down.  John wrote that the love of God does not abide in those who love the world.  James wrote that friendship with the world is enmity with God.  Rather than being a true, pure relationship with God, it is spiritual adultery, where the church prostitutes itself with the world.

It is no wonder that the world gets worse and worse.  The church isn’t salt or light.  If the church is going to be superficial, banal, trite, and crude, then why wouldn’t the world become that much worse?  The world is exponentially more ugly than ever in my lifetime.  Churches pave the way.

The church isn’t centering on the one and true God in its singing and playing today.  Why is it singing?  It isn’t for a good reason or in a good way.

Congregational and church choir singing has been in the news recently with state governments regulating churches to sing both as a congregation and with choirs only with masks.   That’s in the news and it gets our attention.  However, I want to talk about why churches sing at all when they gather.  Does it matter whether the state stops churches or not?

Let’s talk about the inspiration of scripture.  Consider this sentence:

There is simply no statement in the Bible telling me to expect a perfect set of sixty-six books in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

Gotcha!  The Bible doesn’t have anything to say about that!  Of course, it does say, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God,” but is that the same thing as saying, “There was a perfect set of sixty-six books in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts”?

People who do believe what scripture says about inspiration do, you know, jump to the application of a perfect set of sixty-six books in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.  They are willing to make that application even from something as simple as “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”  2 Timothy 3:16-17 and 2 Peter 1:20-21 just don’t make those exact types of statements, and yet believers through church history have taken assurance from them that there was a perfect set of sixty-six books in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

We have a record of a faithful willingness to apply the Bible to its own inspiration.  The saints have been able to break down the minimal passages on this doctrine and come to perfect originals.  Every word was perfect, all sixty six books.  No verse says exactly those words, but the saints of God still believed that truth.

The original manuscripts are convenient for making, shall we say, tough applications of scripture.  No one has them, those papyrus, parchments, or tablets. Since we don’t have them, it’s easy to say they’re perfect.  No one can say we’re wrong.  No one can prove we’re wrong.  That’s not all though.

Without inspiration, all of the doctrines we take from scripture, all the Bible teachings, can fall like a house of cards (an overused metaphor that I lazily borrow).  Many people like justification by faith, for instance, and heaven that’s at the end of that, purpose in life and all that.  They’d like doctrines like those to stay intact.  Inspiration of the original manuscripts, all the words of the sixty-six books being perfect, that sustains all the teachings for theologians from which they make a living.  And that application of the inspiration passages is easy to grab on to, even though we don’t have “scientific proof” of it.

Then we get to the preservation of scripture.  Consider this statement:

There simply is no statement in the Bible telling me to expect a perfect set of Hebrew or Greek biblical manuscripts.

As much as scripture says, “all scripture is given by inspiration of God,” it says a lot more about its own preservation.  It’s much easier, if what we’re depending upon for our doctrine is scripture, to expect perfect preservation of scripture, that is, to expect God’s perfect words in our hands.  That sounds like it could be a book title:  God’s Perfect Words In Our Hands.

The last above quote is verbatim from Mark Ward in a recent post he wrote, entitled:  “Answering a Question I Get All the Time: The Places to Start in Studying New Testament Textual Criticism”.  In that post, he wrote this paragraph:

I have indeed purposefully avoided the textual debate on my YouTube channel and in direct conversation with my KJV-Only brothers. I’ve done this because the Bible (it seems to me) is far clearer on the principle that “edification requires intelligibility” (1 Cor 14) than it is on the textual debate (I lay out portions of that case here). I want to lay importance on what the Bible says rather than speculating about matters I’ve (sic) convinced it doesn’t address. There simply is no statement in the Bible telling me to expect a perfect set of Hebrew or Greek biblical manuscripts.

I can appreciate Ward saying that he wants to lay importance on what the Bible says, since it says nothing about textual criticism, the subject of his post.  The one thing he will say that the Bible says is “edification requires intelligibility” (1 Cor 14), because that works for his argument against the King James Version of the Bible — straight line between 1 Corinthians 14 and rejection of the King James Version for him.  Ward is willing to make that application.  It’s apparently all he’s got from the Bible to apply to this issue.  I’m not going to call that faithful, even if that’s “pugilistic.” 

Mark Ward has his just one biblical point.  I don’t think it is a legitimate application of the Bible.  People really didn’t know a foreign language in 1 Corinthians 14, so tongues, unknown languages or mere gibberish, were legitimately unintelligible.  His application isn’t a historical one, like inspiration and preservation.  I’ve written before that I think he’s just making it up.  English speaking people know the King James.  The vast number of English speakers, who use the KJV, find it intelligible, not like a foreign language or gibberish.

Ward’s other biblical point, albeit what he says is absent  from the Bible, is that last sentence, the one I quoted above.  He won’t say that the Bible doesn’t promise its own preservation.  He won’t say that the Bible doesn’t promise perfect preservation.  He doesn’t say that the Bible doesn’t preserve every word perfectly.  What he says is a straw man.

Mark Ward writes:  “There is simply no statement in the Bible telling me to expect a perfect set of Hebrew or Greek manuscripts.”  This is an unfaithful unwillingness to apply the Bible to its own preservation.  It’s a dodge.  It’s a kind of Jesuit casuistry.  Someone calls me and asks if my dad is home.  I say, “He isn’t here,” and I point at my table.  My dad isn’t on the table.  It’s true he isn’t here.  I didn’t lie.  I’m telling the “truth.”

Let’s break the statement down.  The Bible doesn’t tell Mark Ward personally anything (“me”).  The Bible doesn’t tell someone to “expect” something.  The Bible doesn’t talk about a “set” of something.  The Bible doesn’t mention Hebrew and Greek.  The Bible doesn’t use the word “manuscripts.”  Of course the Bible doesn’t tell us those things.  To get the doctrine of scripture, we’ve got to apply scripture.  Men have, and through history men have declared, the doctrine of the perfect preservation of scripture.

The Bible teaches its own preservation.  God inspired every Word.  God preserved every Word to be available for every believer in every generation since its inspiration.  That’s what preservation is:  preservation.  Preservation isn’t partial spoilage.  You get the doctrine of preservation by a faithful, willing application of the Bible to its own preservation.  You take the combined multitude of verses about its own preservation and apply them to have a doctrine of preservation.  Mark Ward among many others now is unwilling to do that.

Those who support drinking alcohol, including professing Christians, might point out apparent benefits of moderate drinking, both compared either to drunkenness or teetotaling.  Recent “studies” have debunked some of those in a significant way.  It should make sense to someone.

The simple answer is alcohol gets into the blood stream, goes to the brain, and it kills brain cells.  Aaah, but that isn’t exactly what happens.  No.  It’s more technical.  Alcohol damages some of your neurons, which send electrical and chemical messages within the brain and between it and other parts of the body.  There, that’s all.  To get even more technical, alcohol inhibits the communication between dendrites, or branching connections at the ends of neurons that send and receive information between neurons, in the cerebellum, a part of the brain involved in motor coordination.  This means that alcohol, like most know already, is mind-altering.

If you were to try to justify doing what I wrote about in the second paragraph, a good way to do it is to say that a lot of people destroy or harm or hurt their bodies in a lot of different ways, including the brain, so to be consistent, it is permissible to do it with alcohol too.  I’m not going to go further with it, but scientific studies have been done recently that show that even moderate drinking of alcohol damages the brain, results in obesity, and affects your immune system in a bad way.  The latter isn’t good news for future possible coronavirus exposure.

What I have for you below is a bit of a one stop shop with recent articles and studies for the affects of moderate drinking of alcohol for those who believe moderate drinking is acceptable and even helpful.  Of course, I believe the Bible prohibits the drinking of any alcohol.  No one has to do it.  No one should do it.

Physicians Weekly

European Association for the Study of Obesity

Alcohol and the Brain

This Is Your Brain On Alcohol

5 Scary Ways Alcohol Damages the Brain

Moderate alcohol use is associated with decreased brain volume in early middle age in both sexes

Consumption of alcohol even in small amounts can result in obesity and metabolic syndrome, suggests study

Moderate Drinking May Shrink Your Brain by a Percent. Is It Worth It?

How Alcohol Can Affect Your Immune System

 As of about a week ago, the Democrat party started admitting riots had occurred as what seemed to be only for the purpose of deniability.  Vice President Biden said a few days ago in a speech in Pittsburgh:

Rioting is not protesting.  Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change. It will only bring destruction. It’s wrong in every way. It divides instead of unites, destroys businesses, only hurts the working families that serve the community. It makes things worse across the board, not better.

He assigned no blame to those who actually did it, which again allows for deniability.  “I never said it was BLM or antifa.”  Using the fire metaphor, actually lit by his own supporters, the former Vice President said that President Trump had fanned the flames.  Will people believe that President Trump is the cause of BLM, antifa, and other revolutionaries occupying and destroying American inner cities?  In the same speech, he said:

The common threat, the incumbent president who makes things worse, not better, an incumbent president who sows chaos rather than providing order. . . .  Trump has sought to remake this nation in his image. Selfish, angry, dark, and divisive. This is not who we are.

In answer to his speech, which you could read the transcript here, President Trump tweeted:

Just watched what Biden had to say. To me, he’s blaming the Police far more than he’s blaming the Rioters, Anarchists, Agitators, and Looters, which he could never blame or he would lose the Radical Left Bernie supports!

The situation of blaming the fires on President Trump reminds me of how Adolph Hitler came into power in Germany, when he set fire the Reichstag and then successfully blamed it on the Communists.  That was a different era, and one wouldn’t think that the same strategy could work today.  However, I would like to explore the ideas of division, chaos, agitation, and their relationship to one another.  Two sides often point at one another and claim that the other is the one causing division.  Trump is causing division.

In more recent history of American Republican presidents, they have attempted to get along with the other side through compromise.  It’s worth asking:  how did that go?  The left has a philosophy of Hegelian dialectics that takes a thesis and antithesis to form a synthesis.  The synthesis becomes the new thesis, which is left of the former thesis.  Their antithesis keeps moving leftward, not based upon absolute truth, but on postmodern deconstruction of all Western values.  Every new synthesis is left of what it was until everything loses meaning and nothing is sacred anymore.  It is an attack on absolute truth, where fornication or same sex is love, neither man or woman is man or woman, murder is choice, no property is private, and God doesn’t exist.  This is all at the bottom of wokeness.

To combat the so-called progress, from the above described dialectic, division must occur.  It can’t be a weak divide.  It must throw down a strong, impenetrable barrier of truth across which nothing can pass.  This is more important than getting along.  Without some kind of stand at this point, we’ve reached a juncture, if we haven’t already, of no return.  We’ve got to stand now, or we will for sure be at a place of never coming back, even if we haven’t already reached that. 

The chaos could be said to be caused by the one who will not just put up with the opposition.  Someone tries to give a speech and he can’t keep talking because people are screaming, shouting him down.  A young person tries to lead in the state university and bring in a speaker who isn’t deconstructing but declaring the original meaning of the words of a founding document.  He is threatened.  He continues along his path and chaos occurs.  The more people refuse to be canceled, the more strife, division, and chaos occurs.  The call to end chaos is the call to capitulation, to give up, to cede position and even territory, to relinquish freedom.

During Jesus’ earthly ministry, more demonic activity was seen than at any point in history.  I said, “seen.”  Demonic activity is always occurring, but with Jesus there in person, the demons were flushed out into the open and defeated at record pace.  An outward observer might say that Jesus caused more demonic activity.  If he wasn’t around, the demons would not have been seen.  Everyone could have gone along their sweet way without this kind of agitation.

In recent days at multiple homes, I’ve watched extreme revolts of children against parents, screaming and yelling and opposing.  The parents relent.  Everything becomes a negotiation.  To get a handle on this kind of chaos, really solve it, authority must be used, punishment must be meted out.  Pain will be involved.  This will be criticized.  This will be fought.  It will be messy.  Most are too afraid or unwilling to face this anymore.  It doesn’t look like unity.  It looks like division, chaos, and agitation.  All of that is a necessity, and you reader know this.

If we will not prepare ourselves for division, like Jesus did, we are giving up in a fight.  This is the fight for God, for truth, and for good.  We will be called divisive.  Understand that.  Chaos will ensue, somewhat like you might read in The Red Badge of Courage.  War is ugly.  People have called it hell.  Hell isn’t the right word, but it isn’t easy. Henry Fleming fled from the field of battle in Stephen Crane’s classic novel. Anyone would understand someone doing this.  It’s scary.  We need those who will stay in the fight and not give in.  We can’t be afraid.  So much is at stake.

When the world talks about “the science,” they are distinguishing that from faith, and true faith doesn’t contrast with science.  I pastored in the San Francisco Bay Area, and this was a regular type of person I encountered, that was, you know, more of a scientist, as a reason not to listen to scripture.  If you dig not very deep, you find that these scientists don’t want to be challenged.  They don’t have science.  We have obvious points on this.

When Darwin looked at a cell, it was at the most a blob to him.  He didn’t see what was in a cell.  If he could see that, he would have seen irreducible complexity.   For one cell to survive, all the necessary parts of it needed to exist at one time.  The cell could not have evolved.  Then since Darwin, we know about DNA in a cell, that exceedingly complicated evidence of design exists there in that strings of characters need to be arranged in a very precise way in order to perform a function.  The amount of information is so vast that an accurate sequence could not have happened by chance.

There is no evidence that man evolved.  So called scientists point to microevolution, a bacteria adapting and changing to survive, which in the end is still bacteria.  Then they dishonestly project that occurrence to macroevolution without either seeing it or finding it in the fossil record.  There would be bounteous presence of transitional forms of evolution between such as invertebrates and the vertebrates.  We don’t see these links.  They are missing links.

Furthermore, science says life begins before birth in the mother’s womb.  Science shows no evidence of the “gay gene.”  Science shows distinct differences between men and women.  They are not equal.  Science shows someone has incentive to work harder for something he wants that he knows he is allowed to keep.  All of these are also biblical.

What about “the science” of climate change?  With all the other science denial of the scientists, it’s hard to trust their science without obvious proof and without context.  The Bible is science and it provides a different future and ending than the climate scientists give.

I turn to “the history.”  The story of Jesus is just as well attested as Julius Caesar.  The difference would be that there are many more ancient copies accounting for Jesus and sources close to when he lived than there is for Caesar.  In other words, Jesus is more greatly witnessed and even by more people than Julius Caesar.  I’m not doubting the existence of Caesar.

The problem with the story of Jesus for historians is not the amount of evidence, but the nature of what it says.  A bias exists against the history of Jesus because of the supernatural.  That is the same with creation origin in science.  They suppress the truth in unrighteousness.  Where is the science?  Where is the history?

Schools can’t teach science or history.  The news media doesn’t report science or history.  They leave out everything that is in the Bible that is science and history.  They replace it with much that is not science or history.  As a result, it’s all a big lie.

Wrong ideas, falsehoods, are held up by lies.  What people call the science and the history are not true.  The same people who tell these lies are also the main sources for news today.  They are the people that require churches not to meet or sing and shut down places of business and schools.  They tell us that the police are brutal and uniquely so to racial minorities.  They say that looters, rioters, and vandals are mere protesters.

When the federal government moves to stop the crime, the liars call for states rights.  As the criminals wreak havoc, the same liars complain about no federal intervention.  The liars are silent during record employment.  The liars are loud in declaring record loss of jobs especially from their own state shelter-in-place and economic shut downs.  A small percentage of the death toll represents those who died only from the virus.  What of any death tolls kept in any place in the world are accurate in telling the true story?  I don’t know of any.

I suggest to anyone reading this — get back to the Word of God.  God’s Word is truth.  It is true science in a world of speculation and lies.

The New Testament uses “the Spirit,” “the Holy Spirit,” “the Spirit of God,” and “the Spirit of Christ.”  I want to focus mainly on “the Spirit of Christ.”  Is “the Spirit of Christ” Jesus Christ Himself?  What do you think?

Romans 8:9, But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.

1 Peter 1:11, Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.

I confess that he is called the “Spirit of Christ” because he was promised by him, sent by him, and that was to make effectual and accomplish his work towards the church. But he could not be this, unless he had antecedently been the Spirit of the Son by his proceeding from him also: for the order of the dispensation of the divine persons towards us, arises from the order of their own subsistence in the same divine essence. . . . It will be said, perhaps, that he is called the “Spirit of Christ” because he is promised, given, and poured out by him. . . . On this supposition, I will grant as before, that he may consequently be called the “Spirit of Christ,” because he was promised and sent by Christ, doing Christ’s work, and communicating Christ’s grace, image, and likeness to the elect.