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The Important Quality of Loyalty
Trump Cabinet Picks
This last week President Trump started announcing his cabinet picks and what appears to be their most significant quality is loyalty. The average Trump voter, I would assess, agrees with the strategy. Choose loyal people. Definitely don’t select disloyal ones.
What about Abraham Lincoln? Didn’t he pick a team of rivals? Loyalty doesn’t mean pushover or doormat. It does mean among other things keeping the questions and challenges inside the room. Someone working for Trump knows his position. He should not join to undermine or cause factions.
Factiousness and Heresy
The Apostle Paul in his epistles deals harshly with factiousness. The word in the King James Version is “heretic,” which transliterates a Greek term, that speaks of a factious or divisive person. For a church, heresy diverts off the path of truth as established by the congregation; its doctrine. The New Testament warns against division again and again. This doesn’t mean challenges can’t be made, but loyalty is necessary.
When someone defects in the Bible, that defector left the group. The group coalesced around a particular belief and practice and a person ejects from the group. 1 John 2:19 describes someone who goes out from the assembly, because he was not of the assembly. He would have continued with the assembly if he was of it. By going out, he showed he never was of it.
The usages of heretic or heresy in the New Testament indicate a divisive person. He breaks with leadership just to break with leadership. The person is a trouble maker. He never joined with the idea that he would try to get along.
Whose Agenda
People are drawn in magnetic fashion to the power of the federal government. Booker T. Washington talked about this from his first visit to Washington, DC from Tuskegee, recorded in his biography, Up From Slavery. The White House is a blazing hot center of the political power of the United States of America. People want to burrow their way into this honey pot like ants at a picnic. They aren’t necessarily and probably there to serve the President and with him. They want to use this as an opportunity for their own agenda. That is not the idea of a team of rivals.
Donald Trump was clear about his agenda. He ran on it. The people saying they want to join him know good-well what he said and what he’s trying to accomplish. He is right to pick only those who will be loyal to him and his agenda.
For instance, Trump will bring up ideas that maybe have little merit. He suggests them and perhaps they are stupid ideas or thoughts. But he wants the freedom to talk about those, what sometimes people call “brainstorming.” Those around him tell him what they think. They say they don’t like it and it won’t work, giving their best arguments. Trump wants that. What he doesn’t want is to read about that episode in the paper or hear it in the national news on television that night or the next day.
Trump employees join especially in this present administration with full knowledge of what and who he is. None should expect to leave and write a tell all book for bookoo bucks. They are serving at his pleasure. If they join and find out that they don’t like it, that doesn’t mean leaving to undermine his agenda.
Disloyalty
In the recent campaign, the media and the Democrats used the statements of former Trump team members. They spoke against Trump themselves. John Kelly gave a personal story in which he claimed that Trump said that Hitler’s generals would have obeyed him. Kelly used that to harm his former boss. Mike Pence did the same on different occasions. In order to justify themselves, these men hit Trump. Maybe their feelings were hurt. They should have stayed loyal. If they were not going to remain loyal, then they shouldn’t have joined Trump in the first place.
When I use Kelly and Pence, as examples, and I don’ think they are equal (Kelly was worse), this is not saying they couldn’t disagree. Pence said he couldn’t employ a particular application of the U. S. Constitution. Fine. Do what you’ve got to do. But leave it there at least. I’m living 20 minutes from Columbus, Indiana, Pence’s hometown. Most are not happy with Pence there. It is the issue of loyalty.
Just as a related topic, what about the loyalty of Donald Trump? Maybe Trump himself isn’t loyal either. It’s not something I’ve seen, based on what I’m writing here. Trump follows his own principles of loyalty. He isn’t loyal to those who are disloyal to and remain disloyal to him. For his business and his goals, I understand it. How can you give a presidential job to a disloyal person? The disloyal people are poison to the administration. I get it.
The Same Thing for Church and Friends
As I did a search on my blog here, I didn’t find one post on loyalty. Someone couldn’t say that it is a pet subject for me. However, I believe in it. It’s a good trait for someone to have.
What I’m talking about with the new Trump administration, I would say the same of a church and those who are your friends. True friends will show loyalty. I can say that I’ve had several who called themselves my friend through my life who were disloyal to a great magnitude. Again, I’m not talking about remaining silent without saying anything. That’s not loyalty. What I do mean is someone who treats someone like a friend. That person will not then trash his “friend” to others, even many others. He won’t join in with others who will do the same.
A real friend, a loyal one, is someone who will be there for you when you’re down. What I’m describing goes along with what I’m saying about Donald Trump. I’ve had a few loyal friends through the years. Not many, but I have some and I’m thankful for them. I’m planting that flag of loyalty in the ground too. Above all of course, I want to be loyal to God and His Word.
Peter Ruckman, KJV Only Blasphemer
Peter Ruckman, the notorious King James Only advocate, is a blasphemer.
Why do I say this? I have never read a book by Peter Ruckman from cover to cover. I tried reading one years ago but it was too vitriolic for me; I felt defiled reading it, so I stopped. Now recently I had the privilege of debating evangelical apologist James White on the topic of whether the King James Version and the Textus Receptus are superior to the Legacy Standard Bible and the Textus Rejectus. In James White’s King James Only Controversy he painted the moderate mainstream of KJV-Onlyism with such astonishing inaccuracy. James White makes arguments such as (speaking about the translation Lucifer for Satan in Isaiah 14:12): “The term Lucifer, which came into the biblical tradition through the translation of Jerome’s Vulgate, has become … entrenched … [y]et a person who stops for a moment of calm reflection might ask, ‘Why should I believe Jerome was inspired to insert this term at this point? Do I have a good reason for believing this?’”[1] Dr. White argues: “Anyone who believes the TR to be infallible must believe that Erasmus, and the other men who later edited the same text in their own editions (Stephanus and Beza), were somehow ‘inspired.’”[2] Of course, White provides no sources at all for any King James Only advocate who has ever claimed that Jerome, Stephanus, Beza, or Erasmus were inspired, since no such sources exist. As I pointed out in the debate, Dr. White makes bonkers claims like that KJV-only people think Abraham and Moses actually spoke English (again, of course, totally without any documentation of such people even existing).
Thus, James White’s astonishing inaccuracies made me wonder if he is even representing Peter Ruckman accurately. I have no sympathy for Peter Ruckman’s peculiar doctrines—as the godly, non-nutty, serious thinker and KJV Only advocate David Cloud has explained in his good book What About Ruckman?, Peter Ruckman is a heretic. I am 100% opposed to Ruckman’s heretical, gospel-corrupting teaching that salvation was by works in the Old Testament and will be by works in the Millennium. It makes me wonder if Ruckman was truly converted, or if he was an example of what was often warned about in the First Great Awakening by George Whitfield and others, namely, “The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry.” I am 100% opposed to Ruckman’s disgraceful lifestyle that led him to be disqualified to pastor. I am 100% opposed to his ungodly language, to his wicked racism, to his wacky conspiracy theories, and to his unbiblical extremism on the English of the KJV. At the same time, however opposed I am to him, as a Christian I am still duty-bound to attempt to represent his position accurately. The way Dr. White badly misrepresented the large moderate majority of KJV-Onlyism made me wonder if James also misrepresented Dr. Ruckman.
As a result, I acquired a copy of Ruckman’s response to James White’s King James Only Controversy, a book called The Scholarship Only Controversy: Can You Trust the Professional Liars? (Pensacola, FL: Bible Baptist Bookstore, 2000). The title page claims: “This book exposes the most cockeyed piece of amateur scholarship that ever came out of Howash University.” Based on the title, it was already evident that I would be in for a quite painful and dreary time going through the book, but God is a God of truth, and nobody, not even Peter Ruckman, should be misrepresented by a Christian. Christians must be truthful like their God, who cannot lie (Titus 1:2).
While Christians should not misrepresent anyone, I found it hard to cut through the slander and hyperbole and bloviations in Ruckman’s book as I attempted to get to something substantial. Ruckman can say things such as: “Irenaeus quotes the AV one time and the NASV one time. … Eusebius (later) quotes the King James Bible four times and the NASV once” (pg. 117). Peter Ruckman has an earned Ph. D. from Bob Jones University. He knows that the NASV and the KJV/AV did not exist when Irenaeus and Eusebius lived. He knows that the English language did not yet exist. (I wonder if James White’s completely undocumented affirmation in his King James Only Controversy—which he also declined to prove any support for at all in our debate—that some KJV-only advocates believe that Abraham and Moses spoke English derives from a misunderstanding some Nestle-Aland advocate had with a Ruckmanite who followed his leader in making outlandish verbal statements, and those outlandish verbal statements became, in James White’s mind, a real group of people who actually thought that the Old Testament prophets spoke English, although he has no evidence such a group ever existed, somewhat comparable to Ruckman saying that Irenaeus and Eusebius quoted the Authorized Version and the New American Standard Version.) Of course, at this point I am speculating on something that I should not have to speculate upon, since James White has had decades to provide real documentation of these KJV-only groups who allegedly think English was the language spoken in ancient Israel, but he has not done so.
I did discover something that made me wonder if the statement White quotes about Ruckman and advanced revelation in English were similar exaggerations. Note the following from Ruckman’s book, on the first two pages:
“Scholarship Onlyism” is much easier to define than the mysterious “King James Onlyism.” For example, while “using” (a standard Alexandrian cliche) the Authorized Version (1611), I recommend Tyndale’s version (1534), The Great Bible (1539), The Geneva Bible (1560), Valera’s Spanish version (1596), Martin Luther’s German version (1534), and a number of others. Here at Pensacola Bible Institute, our students “use” (the old Alexandrian cliche) from twenty-eight to thirty- two English versions, including the RV, RSV, NRSV, ASV, NASV, Today’s English Version [TEV], New English Bible [NEB], New World Translation, [NWT], NIV, and NKJV. Our brand of “King James Onlyism” is not the kind that it is reported to be. We believe that the Authorized Version of the English Protestant Reformation is the “Scriptures” in English, and as such, it is inerrant until the alleged “errors” in it have been proved “beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt” to be errors. Until such a time, we assume that it is a perfect translation. No sane person, who was not criminally minded, would take any other position. In a court of law, the “accused” is “innocent until proven guilty” (i.e., O. J. Simpson) … Since not one apostate Fundamentalist (or Conservative) in one hundred and fifty years has yet been able to prove one error in the Book we hold in our hands (which happens to be written in the universal language of the end time), we assume it is the last Bible God intends to give mankind before the Second Advent. God has graciously preserved its authority and infallibility in spite of “godly, qualified, recognized scholars” in the Laodicean period of apostasy (1900-1990), so we consider it to be the final authority in “all matters of faith and practice.” We go a little beyond this, and believe it to be the final authority in all matters of Scholarship. That is what “bugs the tar” (Koine, American) and “beats the fire” (Koine, American) out of the Scholarship Only advocates who are in love with their own intellects.[3]
Notice that Ruckman himself “recommends” Bibles other than the KJV, such as the Tyndale, Geneva, and Textus Receptus based foreign language Bibles. At least in this quotation, he does not say God re-inspired the Bible in 1611, but he says that the translation should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, as is proper in a court of law. That is a much more moderate position than James White attributes to him.
So is it possible that the extreme statements James White quotes on pg. 27 of The King James Only Controversy are hyperbole on Ruckman’s part? (Ruckman has plenty of hyperbole—even in the quotation above, I cut out a weird statement he made about David Koresh.) I cannot prove that James White was deliberately misrepresenting Ruckman—Ruckman’s style is too bizarre for one to easily determine what he actually means (another of many, many reasons why I cannot and do not recommend that you read any of his books). However, from this statement we can see that if one wishes to prove that Ruckman actually believes something it is important to be very careful, as he not only makes large numbers of uncharitable and nutty attacks on others, but many hyperbolic statements.
Unfortunately, as years ago I was not able to finish a Ruckman book because it was bursting with carnality, so this time I was not able to finish Ruckman’s critique of James White’s King James Only Controversy because it was not just carnal, but blasphemous. On page 81 Ruckman takes God’s name in vain, reprinting the common curse phrase “Oh my G—” in his book. A search of its electronic text uncovers that Ruckman blasphemes again on page 269, 308, 312, 452 & 460. He could do so elsewhere as well, but those statements are enough, and I am not excited about searching for and discovering blasphemy. The Bible says: “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me. A froward heart shall depart from me: I will not know a wicked person.” (Psalm 101:3-4). If we were living in the Old Testament theocracy, Peter Ruckman would be stoned to death for blasphemy. We are not in the Old Testament theocracy, but His blasphemous language is still disgusting, abominable, and wicked in the sight of the holy God. That someone who claimed to be a Christian preacher would write such wickedness is even more disgusting. Ruckman was a “Baptist” the way Judas or Diotrephes or Jezebel was a Baptist. He would be subject to church discipline if he snuck in unawares and became a member of our church.
So did James White misrepresent Peter Ruckman? White’s representation of the non-wacko large majority of KJV-onlyism was far from accurate, so I wondered if he even got Ruckman right. From what I read of Ruckman’s book before Ruckman started to blaspheme, I thought it was possible that James White did not even get Ruckman right, although with Ruckman’s pages bursting with carnality and total weirdness I could see why getting Ruckman wrong would be easy to do. I am unable to determine definitively one way or the other whether James White was accurate on Peter Ruckman’s position (or if Ruckman himself was even consistent in explaining himself) since I am not going to read a book by someone who breaks the Third Commandment while claiming to be a Baptist preacher. That is disgusting to me, and ineffably more disgusting to the holy, holy, holy God. Ruckman’s critique of James White’s book deserves to go in the trash, where its filthy language belongs.
I do not recommend James White’s King James Only Controversy because it does not base itself on God’s revealed promises of preservation and because of its many inaccuracies. I do not recommend Peter Ruckman’s critique of James White’s King James Only Controvesy because it is not only weird and carnal, but repeatedly blasphemous. Certainly for a new Christian, and possibly for a mature one, the recycle bin could well be the best place for both volumes.
–TDR
[1] James R. White, The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2009), 180–181.
[2] James R. White, The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2009), 96.
[3] Peter Ruckman, The Scholarship Only Controversy: Can You Trust the Professional Liars? (Pensacola, FL: Bible Baptist Bookstore, 2000), 1-2.
The Gospel In the Stars and the Gospel in the Bible
The Gospel in the Stars!
The gospel is in the stars! So say a number of books, such as the Lutheran minister Joseph A. Seiss’s The Gospel in the Stars and the Anglican ultradispensationalist soul-sleep advocate and flat-earther E. W. Bullinger’s The Witness of the Stars, following Ms. Frances Rolleston’s book Mazzaroth: the Constellations. (Amazon affiliate links). These advocates have been copied in modern times by people like the Presbyterian evangelical D. James Kennedy and Institute for Creation Research leader Henry Morris.
Baptists, however, have traditionally held with conservative Protestants that general revelation in creation is not saving. It reveals God’s power and glory (Romans 1), but the gospel is only revealed through His special revelation in Scripture. The “heavens declare the glory of God,” but only through special revelation does salvation come: “the law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul” (Psalm 19:1, 7).
It is clear that the Baptists are wrong and the Lutherans, ultradispensationlists, and women Bible teachers are correct. After all, just look at the picture above. You can just look at it and understand that Jesus Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, became Man, died a sacrifical death for the sins of the world, and then rose victoriously from the grave, so that you could receive eternal life by repentant faith alone in Him (1 John 5:7; John 1:1-18; 1 Corinthians 15:1-4; Romans 3:23-28).
Right?
Or maybe not?
The picture above is from the constellation called The Southern Cross. Without my telling you that–in words–would you have even known that there is supposed to be cross in that picture?
Let’s say you could see that some of the stars there have the shape of a cross if you squint just the right way. Would that mean that you understand the gospel? How many Catholics that worship before a crucifix understand the gospel? Would anyone understand the gospel by simply looking at the picture of a cross, or would someone need to explain to him in words what the cross means? Have people understood the gospel by looking at a cross on a church building?
How many people do you know have been truly born again by looking in the sky and understanding the “gospel in the stars”? How many heathen have rejected their idols and astrology and false gods because of the “gospel in the stars”? What if the number is “zero”?
Let’s say another group of stars in the sky forms a circle, so someone decides that it looks like the fat belly of an idol of Buddha. Does that mean “the gospel of Buddha” is written in the stars? What is another group of stars looks like the letter “Q.” Is that predicting the Quran? One can draw lines between stars that look like anything.
The Gospel in the Bible!
Does the Bible tell us that the gospel is in the stars as well as in Scripture? The word “gospel” appears 104 times in 98 verses in the Bible: Matt. 4:23; 9:35; 11:5; 24:14; 26:13; Mark 1:1, 14–15; 8:35; 10:29; 13:10; 14:9; 16:15; Luke 4:18; 7:22; 9:6; 20:1; Acts 8:25; 14:7, 21; 15:7; 16:10; 20:24; Rom. 1:1, 9, 15–16; 2:16; 10:15–16; 11:28; 15:16, 19–20, 29; 16:25; 1 Cor. 1:17; 4:15; 9:12, 14, 16–18, 23; 15:1; 2 Cor. 2:12; 4:3–4; 8:18; 9:13; 10:14, 16; 11:4, 7; Gal. 1:6–9, 11; 2:2, 5, 7, 14; 3:8; 4:13; Eph. 1:13; 3:6; 6:15, 19; Phil. 1:5, 7, 12, 17, 27; 2:22; 4:3, 15; Col. 1:5, 23; 1 Th. 1:5; 2:2, 4, 8–9; 3:2; 2 Th. 1:8; 2:14; 1 Tim. 1:11; 2 Tim. 1:8, 10; 2:8; Philem. 1:13; Heb. 4:2; 1 Pet. 1:12, 25; 4:6, 17; Rev. 14:6.
I have listed below all the references where the word “gospel” is associated with looking at the constellations in the sky:
If you didn’t get it, here is that complete list again, in bigger font:
The gospel is not in the stars. The books at the beginning of this post do cite Scripture sometimes, but they take it totally out of context when they attempt to prove that the gospel is in the stars. The gospel is not in general revelation–it is in special revelation. General revelation condemns; it cannot save. The idea that the gospel is in the stars is unbiblical and false. If you have picked it up somewhere, reject it, along with the other evil teachings of those promoting the gospel in the stars, such as Lutheranism, ultradispensationalism and soul-sleep. Be thankful for Henry Morris’ defense of creation, but reject his false idea that the gospel is in the stars, as well as his willingness to work with the Seventh-Day Adventist cult and anyone else who accepts creation and rejects evolution, pretty much no matter what heresies they believed in on other matters.
If you don’t understand the gospel, click here to find out what it is in the Bible. Search the Scriptures to understand the gospel–it is there, very clearly, all over the place. Thank God for His wisdom and power when you look at the stars, but do not expect to find the gospel where He has not revealed it.
The following are some additional resources on the claims of the Gospel in the Stars:
Dave Hunt, The Gospel in the Stars
Danny Faulkner, The Gospel Message: Written in the Stars?
Charles Strohmer, Is There a Christian Zodiac, A Gospel in the Stars?
–TDR
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