Aug, 30
2017
Apologetics, In the News

Eclipses, False Prophets, and Intelligent Design

I would be remiss if I did not mention today (August 21, 2017) being the quintessential day with respect to the solar system. The United States experiences this perfect solar eclipse that is visible from Oregon to South Carolina. It is like a seventy-mile-wide belt hugging the nation’s midriff. What I find interesting about this is a lot of things, but I have seen modern-day prophecy pundit using this as some kind of a portent, some kind of an omen, a stellar event to be imposed on a biblical passage. Listen — this is not about exegesis; it is about eisegesis. It is about taking something and imposing it on Scripture. I often talk about this as the this-is-that fallacy. This in the stellar universe is that in the Scripture.

You know it is always the secular news agencies that have to call us to account and, in the process, rightly marginalize Christianity or at least a caricature of Christianity. Newsweek, for example, observed “various evangelical groups in the U.S.” viewing Monday’s eclipse “as a link to something biblical.” What is that something biblical? It is Joel 2:31. Remember that famous passage in Joel? “The sun will be turned to darkness…before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (NIV).

Well, obviously the New Testament writers — we always put the magnifying glass in the hands of those writers — they make plain that Joel 2:31 was fulfilled during Pentecost (Acts 2:20; cf. v. 1). This is apocalyptic language. Judgment language ultimately having nothing whatsoever to do with astronomical events in the skies. The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky, the heavenly bodies will be shaken, the sky will roll up like a scroll. This is all judgment language. How do we know this? We know that by reading Scripture in light of Scripture.

My point is precisely this: the prophecy pundits seem to be helping Christianity in reverse. Instead of showcasing the Grand Designer in today’s total eclipse of the sun, what they are doing is marginalizing Christianity through their sophistry, their sensationalism, and their Scriptorture.

The real message in today’s solar eclipse is one of Intelligent Design. Think about it. Imagine the probability of a sun four-hundred times the size of the moon, and four-hundred times further away such that it can be perfectly eclipsed by the moon. Now, there are certainly some like Bill Nye the Science Guy who think this to be a function of pure chance, and render Earth a mere insignificant speck of soil adrift in a meaningless universe. I have that sort of imbedded in my psyche. I could not believe what he was saying. He went through this whole thing, “Everything is meaningless,” and as a result, he comes to the conclusion, “I suck.” “I” being Bill Nye. He was talking about himself. “I suck.” I am not going to debate him on that point.

The fact is, the truth we ought to be communicating is that Earth is a singularly privileged planet that is designed for discovery. Why not remember that the Earth is situated between two arms in a flattened spiral galaxy — I’m talking about the Milky Way — it is not too close to the core to be exposed to lethal radiation, or comet collisions, or light pollution that would obscure observation. Not only that, but the atmosphere of our privileged planet is both oxygen rich for survival, and transparent for discovery.

Here you have a moon the perfect size and distance from Earth to stabilize rotation and to facilitate human habitability. Not only that but the moon and the sun’s relative size and distances from the Earth provide perfect solar eclipses. By the way, they happen all the time; we just do not see them. This plays a vital role in the development of modern science. For example, perfect solar eclipses played an essential role in the determination of the nature of stars and, interestingly enough, confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. To understand more on this, check out The Privileged Planet DVD. This is the perfect time to get it because now people are talking about stellar events and often in the Christian context improperly. So, this is the perfect time to watch The Privileged Planet. When you do, you will come away with a new appreciation for the universe in which we live and the one who spoke and the universe leaped into existence.

The bottom line: “The more we learn and see about the universe, the more we come to realize,” as Guy Gardner once put it, “that the most ideally suited place for life within the entire solar system is the planet we call home.” If you think about the temperatures on this planet: closer to the sun, we fry; farther away, we freeze. Think about ocean tides; they are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, and they play a crucial role in our survival. If you have a moon that is significantly larger with a stronger gravitational pull, you have devastating tidal waves that would submerge large areas of land. Conversely, if the moon is smaller, tidal motion would cease, and then the oceans would stagnate then die. If you look at the temperatures and the tides, or even tap water, the Earth becomes testimony to the one who spoke, the uncaused first cause, who has revealed Himself in time and space through the Incarnation.

We never take Handel’s Messiah or Da Vinci’s Last Supper and pawn them off as the result of blind evolutionary processes. If that is true, we should never, ever do that with the planet we call home.

One of the most astonishing discoveries of the twentieth century is that the universe is fined tuned to support intelligent life. It is balanced, as it were, on the fine edge of a razor. Just think about gravity for a moment. If it were stronger or weaker, the universe would not and could not support intelligent life. Again, this cannot be attributed to chance because of the infinitesimally small range of values that are involved. Chance is infinitely more likely to a life prohibiting universe than a life-sustaining universe. The only plausible source of the fine tuning of the universe is an external transcendent incalculably powerful intelligent personal mind. That mind we call God. He is the uncaused first cause.

The more we learn about our universe, the more we say with David, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world” (Psalm 19:1–4).

Why this point on this program today? It is simply because we as Christians have an opportunity to point to a privileged planet as a way of pointing directly to God. Instead, we are doing the inverse, at least the people who have the biggest megaphones in the Christian world today. I am talking about the this-is-that fallacy. Who calls them to account? Well, it happens to be the secular world who is convinced that we have Christians who are mining the subjunctive, cultivating the seed of threat buried in each unrealized instance such that they can say, “Look, this portends to be the end of the world” or “This portends to be judgment of God.”

Well, would God judge those who are disobedient? Yes, but we are not the ones calling the shots, nor are we the ones that can say how and when God’s judgment falls. The Old Testament prophets could do that. You know what is interesting about the Old Testament prophets? They used to do that pointing the finger at the false prophets. The false prophets “who prophesy lies in my name” says the Lord. The false prophets “who wag their own tongues and yet declare, ‘The Lord declares.’” The false prophets “who prophesy false dreams” (Jer. 23:25, 31, 32 NIV). The false prophets who, well, essentially want to sell their books to an unsuspecting, gullible public. Then there are those who are on the fence about ready to consider the claims of Christianity and then they realize, “Wow, this is just a bunch of nonsense.” They kind of fall out the back doors of the auditoriums where they were seekers, and they write off the Christian faith or as Jeremiah speaking for the Lord says they “‘lead my people astray with their reckless lies, yet I did not send or appoint them. They do not benefit these people in the least,’ declares the Lord” (Jer. 23:32 NIV).

We have an opportunity to use a stellar event as a witness. Let us not tarnish it by Scriptorture, sophistry, and sloppy journalism. We have an opportunity to use an event that everyone is talking about as a springboard or an opportunity to share the fact that God created the universe, that we are the crowning jewels of His creation, and that we have been created for something more, a universe restored, our bodies restored, and a new heaven and new earth where indwells righteousness. All of this is not a trivial matter, because we will be held to account on Judgment Day. We will be held to account by the very one who knit us together in our mother’s womb. Instead of just passing time, let us make time. Let us not just be men of our time; let us be men that make our time.

— Hank Hanegraaff

This blog is adapted from the August 21, 2017, Bible Answer Man broadcast.

August 30th, 2017 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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Aug, 24
2017
Apologetics

On Racism, Protest, and Civil Destruction

There is something that is rattling around in my mind. I have been thinking about this since about 5:00 a.m. You have no doubt seen the images yourself. They have been played and replayed a thousand times. Maybe a million times. The image of Takiyah Thompson as she climbs a ladder in Durham, North Carolina, puts a noose around the neck of the Confederate soldier statue — by the way, a soldier who symbolized service at the pleasure of the Democratic Party — the statue was toppled, and then spitting and stomping egged on by Takiyah commenced.

I was wondering, Who is this Takiyah Thompson? I did a little research. She is a member of the Workers World Party, a Marxist-Leninist group formed in 1959. She is a supporter of the North Korean totalitarian regime. She is an anti-authority agitator fond of equating the police with the Ku Klux Klan. She is anti-Christian. She is pro-Muslim. I think more than that, she is emblematic of a radical leftist movement that rightly regales in the condemnation of white supremacists but utters nary a word against Islamic supremacists — Islamic supremacists who consider non-Muslims to be but dhimmis.

To those who may wonder why the fragile fabric of our democratic republic is fraying, I think a short review of history can be very, very helpful. An apropos place to start is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). He sowed the seeds of what eventually blossomed into the French Revolution. In his view, secure property rights were to be abolished at all cost. He was the father of the very communist thought espoused today in America by people like Takiyah.

Rousseau, of course, left his mark on Karl Marx (1818–1883). Karl Marx believed that “the history of all existing society is the history of class struggle.” In his view, with the proletariat in charge and the bourgeoisie vanquished, we would have a godless heaven that would magically appear on Earth, sort of like John Lennon’s song, “Imagine there’s no heaven….” Well, a hundred million or more deaths later, people like Takiyah should know better, but that is precisely the problem with people who are ignorant of history.

You know, Rosseau marked Marx, but Marx marked Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). Like Marx, Lenin was not constrained by morality. His dictum was revolution. Revolution after revolution history moves closer and closer toward the utopian paradise of communism and farther and farther away from the moral constraints of Christian capitalism, i.e., the idea of responsibility associated with wealth.

I have personally witnessed the skulls and bones of those murdered by socialist experiments just last year in Cambodia. Similar happenings occurred in places like China, in Cuba, with Communist fascism all over Eastern Europe and now exacting unspeakable horrors daily in North Korea. Think about Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book along with the Little Red Book of Pol Pot; they are both enduring reminders that ideas spell consequences. In this case, consequences in the red blood of tortured masses.

For Takiyah, Marxist mayhem must become part and parcel of a great American revolution. One thing you will not find in her protesting, her pillaging, or her pulling down is the bust of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) or, for that matter, the bust of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC), who was the real evolutionist, the first evolutionist. Why? Because Takiyah believes in evolution and in those like Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) who took Darwin’s eugenic epic and enshrined it an idea as American as apple pie. Eugenic engineering was not tacked onto Darwin by the Gestapo; it was a core value of his evolutionary premise. One wonders why Takiyah is not outraged at Planned Parenthood, which is in full neo-Nazi neo-eugenic frenzy today? Eugenics has been all over the news with the elimination of Down syndrome babies, which is now considered to be enlightened.

Darwin’s emphasis, of course, was on survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence, but Fredrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) went beyond survival. He championed the will to power of the fittest. He was fully committed to the destruction of Christianity because the Christ of Christianity cared for the poor and the downtrodden, and of course evolution is all about survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence. Again, ideas have consequences. One only needs to think of how Nietzsche died. A mad man repeating, like a hideous drum, “I am dead because I am stupid, I am stupid because I am dead, I am dead because I am stupid, I am stupid because I am dead,” over and over again, as he embraced his insanity.

As the apostle of atheism, Nietzsche heralded the darkest century the world has ever known. That is, until perhaps the twenty-first century, a century in which people have forgotten history and applaud Takiyah Thompson and people like her. She is now the quintessential poster girl of a robust neo-Marxist-Leninist revival and that in America.

White supremacy is self-evidently evil, but what of the liberal liberals who destroy Down syndrome babies made in the image and likeness of God? By the way, I think we ought to remember that Dr. John Langdon Down (1828–1896) labeled Down syndrome as Mongoloid idiocy. Why? Because he thought it represented a throwback to the Mongolian stage in human evolution, and that is the evolutionary idea.

You know, Darwin was very, very clear. People often times talk about The Origin of Species, but Darwin was most clear in The Descent of Man. People ought to read that. These books should not be banned. Read it. Then you will see evolution in its stark racist perspective. Darwin said it was the Caucasian that would beat the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Then he said at no very distant date, an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by higher civilized races throughout the world. He was very, very clear when he talked about the races themselves. In Darwin’s perspective, the whites were on top, the Australians were somewhere in the middle, but blacks were on the bottom, and in his eugenic fervor, he believed that Jews and blacks were feeble minded. Evolution is an idea with distinct consequences. Again, white supremacy is self-evidently evil, but what of the liberal liberals who are now using the evolutionary paradigm? They contend Down syndrome babies are unfit; they affect the gene pool and thus affect the process of evolution.

What of global Islamic Jihadism? Just to show how wacky things can get, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer wondered yesterday on television if perhaps the crimes in Barcelona were a copycat of the white supremacist murder in Charlottesville, Virginia. After all, in both cases, the weapon of choice was automotive.

What agitators like Takiyah are really after is the destruction of the nuclear family, the elimination of borders and boundaries, the subversion of states committed to the rule of law, or whatever utilitarian means produce results. It does not matter if it is liberal liberalism, fabricated news, or Islamic terror. Barcelona and Brussels are just a prelude to what is to come.

We are reaping the results of our own settled choices. Only a Christian community willing to do for the truth what Takiyah and those like her are willing to do for a lie can stem the tide of a civilization in chaos. Make no mistake, we are fracturing from within. A liberal liberalism at the root. (An oxymoron, by the way.) We are being pounded from without. Terror being only the wave the undertow being far more insidious. Perhaps the greatest problem is Christians who are not salt and light. If Christians were doing for the truth what Islam is doing for a lie, we could as yet redeem our culture.

— Hank Hanegraaff

For further related reading, please access the following:

The Original “Fight Club:” Understanding the Philosophy of Karl Marx (C. Wayne Mayhall)

You Say You Want a Revolution (Bob Perry)

Margaret Sanger: “No Gods, No Masters” (Bob Perry)

Identity: A “Christian” Religion for White Racists (Viola Larson)

Was Ayn Rand Right? Capitalism and Greed (Jay Richards)

The Myths Christians Believe about Wealth and Poverty (Jay Richards)

Jihad, Jizya, and Just War (David Wood)

Ideas Have Consequences (C. Wayne Mayhall)

This blog is adapted from the August 18, 2017, Bible Answer Man broadcast. Information on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Charles Darwin, Margaret Sanger, and Fredrich Nietzsche drawn from Benjamin Wiker, 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn’t Help (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008).

August 24th, 2017 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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Aug, 16
2017
Apologetics, Uncategorized

Christian Cultural Shapers

I am particularly excited about a book that I want to put into your hands. We are talking about it all this month. It is by John Stonestreet and Brett Kunkle, entitled A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World. I want to start with something written in this book, which has to do with changing culture. It goes all the way back to World War II and the statement that “Somebody…had to make a start.” In other words, someone had to make a start with respect to changing the culture instead of being simply an imitator of the culture.

There was a girl named Sophie Scholl. She was just twenty-one years old. She spoke those words, “Somebody…had to make a start.” She said them “to the chief justice of the People’s Court of the Greater German Reich shortly before he ordered her execution.” That was back on February 22, 1943. Sophie and her brother Hans (my dad’s name) and their friend Christoph Probst were convicted of treason in a kangaroo court and sent to the guillotine. Stonestreet and Kunkle write,

Hans Scholl led the underground resistance movement known as the White Rose. From June 1942 until their arrest, Hans, Sophie, and several other University of Munich students covertly authored anti-Nazi pamphlets and distributed them on campus and to nearby communities. Retribution for their crimes was swift. Within four days, they were detained, accused, tried, convicted, and executed. Within weeks other members of the White Rose were rooted out and faced similar fates.

Raised in a nominally religious German home, the Scholl siblings came to a real personal faith in Christ while at the university.

Imagine that! The conversions of the Scroll siblings motivated their actions. In The Fabric of Faithfulness Stephen Garber writes,

Brother and sister began to find a place to stand. Reading the Scriptures in light of the challenges presented by their culture, having conversations with friends about the world and their place in it, meeting older, wiser people who offered them their time and their books — together they molded a vision about what was real and true and right.

Stonestreet and Kunkle observe,

Many Germans, including Christians, chose to remain silent and do nothing to resist Hitler and the Nazi regime. Others embraced the evil Nazi ideology. But the Scholl siblings’ faith that drove them from the sidelines into what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the tempest of the living.” Hans was supposed to meet Bonhoeffer, perhaps the most famous figure of the German resistance, but never did. Instead, Hans was executed the very day the meeting was scheduled to take place.

Hans and Sophie shared more with Bonhoeffer than antipathy toward the führer. Whether they knew it or not, they also shared Bonhoeffer’s theological vision for culture, which might be summarized this way: “We are Christians, and we are Germans; therefore we are responsible for Germany.”

That was their view, and therefore they wanted to make a difference. This begs the question: “What is cultural success?” Well, it is “a life lived like Hans and Sophie Scholl.” A life “deeply engaging the moment in which God has placed us and courageously navigating the threatening currents, knowing that we serve a cause, and a God, far greater than ourselves.” Think about that from A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World.

Cultural success is recognizing that God has placed us here at this moment in history. He did not — like Hans and Sophie, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and C. S. Lewis — place us at the time of World War II. He placed us at this time in history. This particular time in history. Therefore, at this particular time in history, we cannot simply look back to what others did, although we should and we just did with the anecdote and example of Hans and Sophie, and we cannot look forward to other generations and what they may do. God has placed us here, right now, for a purpose, and to make a difference while there is yet time.

I think about the smoke of the crematoriums wafting over the steeples in the German countryside, and I so often wonder why at that time were German pastor and parishioners strangely silent. Yet, as I wonder about that, I can stop wondering immediately when I look at the present-day church capitulating to the culture. Well-known Christian leaders (I am not going to name them; you know who they are) are strangely silent about the epic waves that are threatening to submerge the Christian church. For some, it is a matter of self-preservation. In the case of World War II, a lot of people tried to justify their apathy by blaming Jews for the Great War. Others believed that Jews were fatalistically destined to face wrath of antichrist; therefore, they did nothing. Then you had people like Hans and Sophie or Dietrich Bonhoeffer who said, “If we claim to be Christians, there is no room for expediency.” Thus, he was willing to denounce a Nazi regime that had turned its führer into an idol and a god. But, not just that — he was willing to denounce a confessional church more concerned with its own survival than with the sin of anti-Semitism and slavery. Bonhoeffer famously said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” That is precisely what happened on April 9, 1945. Bonhoeffer was just thirty-nine years old at that time, and he experienced the ultimate cost of discipleship by special order of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Bonhoeffer was hanged at the concentration camp at Flossenbürg. He is a man who was willing to shape culture and today is still remembered when we talk about the culture wars.

— Hank Hanegraaff

August 16th, 2017 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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Aug, 09
2017
Apologetics

Canaanite DNA and the Reliability of the Bible

According to an ABC affiliate in Omaha, Nebraska, “Ancient Canaanites survived biblical wrath, DNA evidence shows,” and “you may even know somebody who derives their ancestry from the group of people.” In other words, the ABC affiliate is saying the ancient Canaanites survived biblical wrath, DNA evidence shows this, and so as a result of that the Bible has to be wrong.

This is fairly tame, of course, when you start looking at what else has been written in this regard. This is a question that has been asked over and over again, and this question is a question that has arisen as a result of what has been written, most of which is very sensationalistic. For example, “Study disproves the Bible’s suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out” — The Telegraph. “The Bible got it wrong: Ancient Canaanites survived and their DNA lives in modern-day Lebanese” — Pulse Headlines. “DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites” — Cosmos. Then there is the Washington Post; “Now a study of Canaanite DNA…rules out the biblical idea that an ancient war wiped out the group.”

What is the message here? The message is that the Bible cannot be trusted. The Bible is fraught with error. These stories often cite Deuteronomy 20 as proof. The research study says that “DNA retrieved from roughly 3,700-year-old skeletons at an excavation site in Lebanon that was formerly a major Canaanite city-state shows that ‘present-day Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age.’” Levant being the epicenter of the Middle East.

The bottom line: if all of this holds up, as further research is done, modern-day Lebanese people are descendants of the ancient Canaanites. But, even if that research holds up — it may or may not, but even if it does — the research does not disprove the Bible. It does something very, very different from disproving the Bible. Instead, this new genetic study is simply one more confirmation of the biblical account. All you have to do again is to learn to read in the sense in which it is intended. The Book of Judges explains that the Israelites never drove Canaanites out completely. In fact, if you read the text, there are passages that say the Canaanites will become “thorns in your sides and their gods will be a snare to you” (Judges 2:3 NIV). The dominant biblical language of driving out indicates that extermination passages are not to be taken in a wooden literalistic sense. Driving out or dispossessing is different from wiping out or destroying. You cannot both drive out and destroy at the same time. The point here is that God’s commands to destroy the nations inhabiting the promise land of Canaan should never be interpreted in isolation from their immediate context. The command to destroy them totally, as we see in Deuteronomy 7, is contextualized by the words, “Do not intermarry with them…for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods” (vv. 3–4 NIV). The aim of God’s command was not the obliteration of the wicked but the obliteration of wickedness.

Furthermore, let me say this: God’s martial instructions are qualified by His moral intent to spare the repentant. No greater example of that can be given than Rahab. Remember Rahab was a Canaanite. She was also a prostitute. Probably more well known for being a prostitute than a Canaanite, but Rahab and her whole family were allowed to live among the Israelites (Josh. 2:1–24; 6:1–26). Not only that, but Rahab the prostitute came to hold a privileged position in the lineage of Jesus Christ (Matt. 1:1–17; cf. v. 5), which underscores a very significant point, not only that God unequivocally commanded Israel to treat the aliens living among them with respect and equality (Deut. 24:14–15; 17–18) but that there are blessings for those who repent. Of course, the concern for foreigners clearly demonstrates that the mercy shown to those who by faith repented of their idolatry and were therefore grafted into true Israel is a maxim. It is a principle. Blessing for those who follow and cursing for those who rebel (Deut. 16:1–19; 27:19).

This idea that the Bible has been disproven comes as a direct of result of people not being able to read the Bible in the sense in which it is intended. Here is why I wrote my book Has God Spoken: Proof of the Bible’s Divine Inspiration. In the first half of that book, what I do is demonstrate that the Bible is divinely inspired. It is a trustworthy authority. But, in the second half of the book, I teach people the art and science of biblical interpretation so that these kinds of passages are not used to discredit the Bible but when they are you have an answer. This is one of the things that I lay out in some detail in Has God Spoken.

— Hank Hanegraaff

For further related study, please access the following:

How Can Christians Legitimize a God Who Orders the Genocide of Entire Nations? (Hank Hanegraaff)

Killing the Canaanites: A Response to the New Atheism’s “Divine Genocide” Claims (Clay Jones)

Was Israel Commanded to Commit Genocide? (Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan)

Also consult the following books:

Has God Spoken: Proofs of the Bible’s Divine Inspiration by Hank Hanegraaff

Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God by Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan

Is God a Moral Monster? by Paul Copan

August 9th, 2017 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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Aug, 01
2017
Apologetics

The Multifaceted Effects of Sin

I recently heard that when we do something wrong to another person, it is not only a sin against God but also a sin against the other person. Is this correct? Can we also sin against another man or woman?

That, I think, is a profound question. That is the kind of question I like to take on the Bible Answer Man broadcast. This is a profound question. When a man steals from another man in violation of the eighth Commandment (Exod. 20:15), we know from Scripture that he clearly sins against God. But, the answer to the question is he also sins against the individual in taking what does not belong to him. It is a sin against God. It is also a sin against humankind. This is why the Lord taught us to pray, “Forgive us of our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us” (Matt. 6:12).

If you read Matthew 18 — the parable of the unforgiving servant — Peter comes to Jesus and asks, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Remember what Jesus said? “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:21–22 NKJV). In other words, you always forgive. If you have been forgiven a debt that cannot be quantified, we should never consider withholding from those who sin against us. How many times shall I forgive? It implies that we do forgive our bother and our sister. Ephesians 4:32 is also, I think, a passage that underscores this point. “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.” There are many other passages.

We are told by the apostle Paul we ought to forgive because our sin is not only against humanity but also a sin against Christ. A sin against Christ is a sin against the body; a sin against the body is a sin against Christ. I think even more interesting in answer to a very interesting question is 1 Corinthians 6. You can sin against your own body. You think about humanity, it includes you. For example, “He who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit;” therefore, we are to “flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” (1 Cor. 6:17–20 NIV). This adds a whole new dimension to it. He who sins sexually sins against his own body.

The answer to your question is multifaceted. It is a great question. You also sin against a person when you sin against God. In short, you can sin against another man or another woman. You can sin against your body. You have the body of Christ, your own body, and you have Christ, who is the head of the body.

We daily ask God to forgive us of your sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). One of the reasons I think this is a particularly important question is that today we have all kinds of popular preachers who are telling you that when you sin, do not ever ask for forgiveness, because asking for forgiveness is tantamount to spitting in the face of God, so, please, please never ask for forgiveness. But, I have been absolutely astounded at how rapidly that perversion has become part of the ethic of the body of Christ, how quickly people have embraced that kind of spiritual cyanide. Well, what is the antidote? The antidote is to learn discernment skills. When someone says something like that, you do not look at the power of their radio or television platform; you test what they say in light of Scripture, and hold fast to that which is good (1 Thess. 5:21; 2 Tim. 3:16–17; Acts 17:10–12).

— Hank Hanegraaff

This blog is adapted from the July 20, 2017, Bible Answer Man broadcast.

August 1st, 2017 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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