Sad Religious Acceptance of Untruths

Richard Hollerman

We know that popular religion so often departs from God’s Word and leads us down the road to acceptance of numerous unbiblical additions. This is what happened today.

This day as I examined my mail, as I always do, the author (a leading 5-point Calvinist who is generally known for his “conservative” stances) told about a responder to his program who was now a regular listener. In fact, much of his promotional letter was devoted to this man’s change of thinking and his now-agreement with the program’s contents.

There is much I could say in response to this letter, but I did notice several items of interest. He says that he was divorced (presumably for non-Biblical reasons, page 1), then he said that he left his wicked wife (page 2), and finally, “he eventually married a Christian woman” (page 2). I wondered, with all of this divorcing and separating, was there any Biblical grounds for divorce?

Further, in this letter I noticed that the man said, “I begged God to forgive me” and eventually “committed himself to pursuing full-time ministry.” The question I would have about this is that if this is all there was, can we find this as a real Biblical salvation experience? It is good to “beg” God for His forgiveness, but where is true conversion here and where is genuine Biblical baptism here? Is this more of an “easy believiem” experience that seeks forgiveness on our terms rather than God’s terms? Do we find this sort of conversion described in Scripture?

We thought it best to point out these two issues (multiple “marriages” and “easy believism”) so that the reader might be able to discern truth from error.

This particular speaker (whom we quoted, not the letter-writer) is a well-known Calvinistic writer, speaker, author, and college and seminary president whom millions follow and adore. And we assume that many of these think that his every word should be accepted at face-value and truth. But is this really the way it is? We ask you to consider this and examine the Word of God to determine His truth.

Be like the noble-minded Bereans who “received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11).