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Embracing An Unstoppable Advantage For Guaranteed Longstanding Victory (Part Four)
The War Waged Against the Soul
Storming the Gates or Something Clandestine
Fleshly lusts war against the soul of believers (1 Peter 2:11) by invading each soul as a conquering army would . The army storms the gates, enters in a more clandestine manner, or sieges its target of battle. It depends on whatever the most successful art of war.
As an example, consider the “evil communications” (homiloi krakai) of 1 Corinthians 15:33. These evil communications, Paul says, corrupt good manners. The corruption related to the doctrine of bodily resurrection, starting with the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The evil communications invaded the souls of professing Corinthian believers. Paul starts that sentence with the command, “be not deceived.”
The deceit that fooled on the truth about bodily resurrection seemed to enter in a clandestine manner through corrupting good manners. The purveyors of evil Egyptian culture tried to deceive Moses with enjoyment of the pleasures of sin for a season (Hebrews 11:25). Someone need not assert a statement of doctrine to corrupt someone’s doctrine. Instead, he allures someone through the pleasures of sin.
Favoring Lasciviousness
The false doctrine of Corinth influenced through lasciviousness. It could be humor, music, enthusiastic acceptance, entertainment, or drink. These accompanied a perverted view of the body. Libertines denied bodily resurrection, which favored their licentious manner of conduct.
Also, to retain employment in Greek society, employers required Christian employees to ally with their Greek philosophies. Rather than start with your doctrine, they start with acceptability of lifestyle and then the false doctrine follows by conforming to the behavior.
The accompanying false doctrine might sound like the following: “You don’t have to believe in bodily resurrection. You could just believe in a spiritual resurrection, couldn’t you? Isn’t that just a divisive and unnecessary scruple?” By hanging on to this exactness in doctrine, someone could lose his job or the pleasures of Greek society.
The War Against the Entrepreneur’s Soul
People want what they want. This lust wars against the soul, but it doesn’t seem like it wars against success in a business. Someone entrepreneurial sees through his eyegate the success of capitulating to lust. People line up for something that makes them feel good. Using the attraction or allure of the lust is just good business. It must destroy people, because it wars against their souls, as God says, but it helps in the bottom line for business. God wants us to succeed, doesn’t He?
Longstanding victory is not the short term victory of keeping a job in Corinth or succeeding in business. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 9:25:
And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.
Everyone must struggle against the corruptible. This is Solomon saying in Ecclesiastes in essence, “Ditch the temporal for the eternal, because the former is vanity and vexation of spirit.” Struggling against the lusts of the flesh is good. Any person’s struggle does not justify lust. It’s a struggle. It’s a fight not to acquiesce to the lust of the flesh.
The crown or success for the short term is what Paul calls, “a corruptible crown.” Someone can succeed and receive the corruptible crown, if that’s what he’s shooting for. He can use fleshly lust to obtain it, which still wars against his soul and that of his adherents or audience. It brings failure and destruction, posing as an award or reward. It looks motivated and ambitious, but it promotes the worst ultimate failure.
The War Against Incorruptible Gain
Someone might call the spoils of fleshly lust a market. Like James says in chapter four of his epistle, he goes, buys, sells, and gets gain. He doesn’t say, “If the Lord wills, I will do this or that.” Does how you get the gain matter? Yes. And it also considers, “Is this really gain?” Is it gain if it is short-term gain that receives the corruptible short term gain? In fact, it’s not gain at all, because, again, it wars against the soul. When the soul takes a hit, everything is taking a hit.
Perhaps you’ve heard the terminology, “Gainfully employed.” Is a casino operator, “gainfully employed”? He’s bringing money home from work, putting it in the bank, and taking care of his family. The United States Mail in part because of the “success” of Amazon, sends drivers delivering packages all day Sunday. That is also “gainful employment” for delivery drivers. What crown would you receive, the temporal one or the eternal one?
It’s easy to confuse the distinctions between liberty and lust. Someone does not have liberty to war against the soul just because a verse doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not own a casino.” I’m just using that as an illustration.
College students and their coaches and staff travel all over the country on Sundays for basketball and their future bright shining moment. The bright shining moment is when the confetti falls in a basketball arena, not at the Bema seat of Jesus Christ (this might represent one shining moment as good as anything). One should consider the incongruity of these two crowns, just like Paul did, and judge whether the lust for short term earthly gain wars against the eternal value to the soul.
More to Come
Embracing An Unstoppable Advantage For Guaranteed Longstanding Victory
Supply Chains and Tripping Hazards
Something I never heard before 2020 were the two words, “supply chain.” I looked into those two words and didn’t find them used together before the last half of the twentieth century. Google books gives just one page of examples for the whole century and none in the nineteenth century. Examples explode in the last twenty years.
Now that people use “supply chain,” historians provide supply chain advantage as the primary reason for victory in World War Two. It was easier for the United States to get its supplies in Europe than for Germany to get theirs. The Americans, over two thousand miles from home, had more and better supplies than the Germans, only hundreds of miles away.
The success of the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War were short supply chains, essentially tunnels, jungle trails, and near limitless volunteers. Among an assortment of lesser causes, this led to their victory over a superior foe.
To achieve success in life requires eliminating as many possible factors that impede that success. Next week Monday, I’m supposed to have a hip replacement. The booklet to prepare for it explains certain fundamentals like removing threats of tripping from the walking surface of your floors. As you read that, it seems a bit of a “duh” moment. And yet, people leave tripping hazards all over their lives.
Supply Chain Dysfunction
Life became more difficult for many people beginning in 2020 because of “supply chain” dysfunction. The price of homes increased because it’s harder to get the supplies. It’s also more difficult to find the people to build the homes.
God in scripture points out factors comparable to a broken supply chain and a tripping hazard. Peter expresses one in 1 Peter 2:11:
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
Paul begs and commands those traversing their life’s path on earth, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.” He didn’t say, “Stop sinning.” Saying “stop sinning” is like saying, “Win the war.” You want to win the war, but more basic than that is “build and sustain a supply chain.” Remove tripping hazards.
Professing Christianity today acts like an industrial complex for fleshly lusts. It isn’t abstaining. It riddles the floor with tripping hazards. If the goal is winning the war, not abstaining is a losing strategy. It creates a disadvantage so large that it guarantees failure. Fleshly lusts destroy the supply chain.
Winning the War
People might say they want to win the war. They might publish multitudes of magnificent war victory posters. Until they want to abstain from fleshly lusts and then abstain, they won’t. In fact, professing Christianity today campaigns for feeding fleshly lusts. It thinks its worst enemy is the command. Professing Christianity reacts most harsh to the threat of abstaining from fleshly lusts than the fleshly lusts.
A popular phrase, reaching cliche status, I will still use because of its appropriateness. Professing Christians shoot themselves in the foot when they do not abstain from fleshly lusts. They might not like the idea, but they are in a war, a war they should desire to win. Instead, they provide the way for their own defeat. They have multiple bullet holes in both feet. I think we should say that they want to lose. Losing must in fact be their goal. They are going to get tired of losing, they’ll lose so much.
“Dearly beloved” or “strangers and pilgrims” in this world find their interests in the world to come, not this one. They instead plan their lives around a future kingdom and a heavenly city. They invest for eternity.
Still, 1 Peter 2:11 expresses a command to believers, an unpopular mode of communication. True Christians still participate in fleshly lusts, so Peter commands them to abstain from them. Commands are not options. He also provides the consequence of not abstaining. Psychological problems, soul problems, are the worst ones people have. They obliterate people and families like Sherman’s march tore through the South at the end of the Civil War.
Fleshly Lusts and True Christianity
Fleshly lusts cannot characterize true Christianity. If fleshly lusts do, it isn’t Christianity. It’s something else, not Christianity. Someone who laps up fleshly lusts is not a Christian.
Biblical Christianity, true Christianity, is more than just a series of things someone doesn’t get to do that he might want to do. It is wanting to do what Christ wants Him to do and liking it. Loving it.
The soul that will operate in a godly manner will unhitch itself from fleshly lusts. A soul that continues in its pursuit of worldly pleasure is not “converted” or “restored” (Psalms 19:7, 23:3). God does not possess that soul. It remains in the realm of the wicked one. This is not a person who has lost his life (psuche, his soul) for Christ’s sake. He still loves the world and the love of the Father is not in Him.
More to Come
Mark Ward: KJVO “Sinful Anger,” the “Evasion” of the Confessional Bibliologians, and Success
Mark Ward wrote, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, which I read. He’s taken on a goal of dissuading people from the King James Version to use a modern version of the Bible. He also has a podcast to which someone alerted me when he mentioned Thomas Ross and me. I checked back again there this last week and he did one called, “Is My Work Working?” In it, he said he received three types of reactions to his work.
KJV “SINFUL ANGER”
Ward said he received more than 100 times praise than anything else. The next most reaction he said was “sinful anger” from KJV Onlyists. Last, he received the least, helpful criticism from opposition.
Critical text proponents very often use KJVO behavior as an argument. It does not add or take away from Ward’s position. Ward reads his examples of “sinful anger,” and well more than half didn’t sound angry to me. They disagreed with him.
My observation is that critical text advocates do not have better conduct. They disagree in a harsh manner and with ridicule. Ward himself uses more subtle mockery, sometimes in sarcastic tones. It just shouldn’t come as a point of argument. Many in the comment section of his podcast use sinful anger. Ward does not correct them or point out their sinful anger. It seems like Ward likes it when it points the other direction.
In these moments, Ward talks about his own anger. He finds it difficult not to be angry with these men. Why even mention it? Just don’t talk about it at all. Deal with the issue at hand. I’m not justifying actions of Ruckmanite types. They’re wrong too. Both sides are wrong. This is an actual argument though of critical text supporters — how they are treated. It comes up again and again, because they bring it up.
“EVASION” OF THE CONFESSIONAL BIBLIOLOGIANS
Ward says that few to almost none answer a main argument of his book, which he’s developed further since it’s publication. They don’t concede to his “false friends” with appropriate seriousness. He says they don’t think about false friends. He provides now 50 examples of these that appear many times in the King James Version. He includes the confessional bibliologians in this, which would be someone who believes in the superiority of the Textus Receptus of the New Testament. Their position might be perfect preservationism, Textus Receptus, confessional bibliology, or ecclesiastical text. He used the confessional title, referring to men like Jeff Riddle.
I’ve answered him in depth. Ward is just wrong. Hopefully calling him wrong isn’t considered sinful anger. “He said I was wrong!!” King James Version supporters all over buy Bible For Today’s Defined King James Version. It provides the meaning of those words in the margin. Lists of these from King James Version proponents are all over the internet, and books have been written by KJV authors (the one linked published in 1994) on the subject.
Ward says that every time he brings that up to Textus Receptus men, they sweep it away like it doesn’t matter, then turn the conversation to textual criticism. That’s a very simplistic way of himself swatting away the Textus Receptus advocate. They turn to textual criticism because the critical text and the Textus Receptus are 7% different. Many words differ. That matters more. It also denies the biblical doctrine of preservation.
The members of churches where men preach the KJV hear words explained. Sure, some KJV churches rarely preach the Bible. Talk about that. Where men preach expositional sermons from the KJV, relying on study of the original languages, they explain words to their people. They care. I have been one of those and the KJV doesn’t hurt our church in any way. Personally I read the KJV Bible twice last year and this year I’m on pace for one Old Testament and two New Testament.
SUCCESS
Is success how much praise one receives for what he does? Is that the measurement? That is a very dangerous standard of success. That is what Ward uses as his standard in his video. In Jeremiah 45:5, God told Baruch: “And seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not.” We don’t succeed when we receive praise. We succeed when we are faithful to what God said, whether we’re praised or not. Seeking for praise is discouraged in scripture. Many faithful Bible preachers received far more harsh treatment than Ward. It’s not even close.
True success is finding what God says and doing it. It’s not success to turn a church away from the King James Version to a modern version, even if Ward supports that outcome.
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