The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

HAROLD CAMPING SAYS HE WAS RIGHT (Friday Church News Notes, May 27, 2011, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - In responding to the question of why judgment day didn’t come on May 21 as he predicted, Harold Camping says that it did come! Speaking live on his Family Radio broadcast on May 23, Camping said, “God brought Judgment Day to the whole world. It will continue to Oct 21, 2011, and at that time the whole world will be destroyed.” He claims that his previous predictions were correct, as well, because they were fulfilled “spiritually.” On May 21, 1988, judgment came upon the churches, and on Sept. 7, 1994, judgment continued on the churches. Camping and the Global Warming prognosticators have the same win-win formula. No matter what happens, they are right! It reminds us of what the late religious quack “Reverend Ike” used to say, “You can’t lose with the stuff I use.” No doubt, when October 22 rolls around, Camping will say, “The whole world was destroyed yesterday!” The Camping fiasco is reminiscent of the date-setting fervor of William Miller in the 19th century. When his date of 1843 proved wrong, he changed the date to October 1844. Tens of thousands followed Miller’s predictions, and many diverse, unscriptural “adventist” groups sprang up within this excited religious atmosphere. After October 1844 passed uneventfully, Ellen Harmon said she had a vision in which she learned that Jesus’ return then was not to earth but to the heavenly holy of holies to begin investigating the records of human works. Ellen married James White and they founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which is still with us today with its many heresies (such as Investigative Judgment) taught by a deluded female prophetess. The normal-literal interpretation of prophecy is the protection from wild-eyed allegorical exegesis, and this method of interpretation teaches us that the Rapture of New Testament saints is imminent, judgment of the world will follow, and all of the mocking of unbelievers will not stop it. “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up” (2 Peter 3:9-10).

On May 4, 2006, Bill Gaither issued a public statement “regarding misrepresentation” about his 2002 meeting with Marsha Stevens. He calls her story “a sad one” and says it is “unfortunate” that she has publicly declared herself to be a lesbian” (“Gaither Issues Statement Regarding Misrepresentation,” SingingNews.com, May 4).

He claims that false reports of what transpired at the December 2002 concert have surfaced on various web sites and says he wants to set the record straight; but in this statement he admits practically everything that Marsha Stevens had reported.

He acknowledges that he admitted her to the backstage area where she and her partner were greeted by him and Mark Lowry.

He acknowledges that he invited the crowd to sing her song later that night and that he told them that the woman who wrote it was in the crowd.

The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

JUDGMENT DAY TOMORROW, ACCORDING TO CAMPING (Friday Church News Notes, May 20, 2011, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - According to Harold Camping, judgment day will occur on May 21. He says that while he wasn’t certain of the prediction he made for 1994, he is absolutely certain of this one (“A Conversation with Harold Camping,” Daily Intelligencer, New York, May 11, 2011). He claims that as each part of the world reaches 6 p.m. on the 21st there will be an earthquake “that’s going to make the last earthquake in Japan seem like nothing in comparison.” This shaking will progress across the world creating massive destruction, and the true believers will be caught up with Christ. As for me, I don’t know when the Lord is coming, but I do know it won’t be on May 21st, for Jesus said, “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh” (Matthew 25:13). We are to be watching for Christ’s return at all times. It is imminent. It is “at hand” (Romans 13:12; Philippians 4:5; 1 Peter 4:7; Revelation 1:3). God’s people are to be living in expectation (1 Thessalonians 1:10). Camping’s heresy and foolish date setting will provide further excuse for the world to ignore the Bible, because unbelievers cannot distinguish between a false teacher and a true one. A literal interpretation of Scripture is so essential and so important. All of the fulfilled prophecies, such as those of Christ’s first coming, were fulfilled literally, and if you don’t interpret prophecy literally, there is no way to know for sure what it means. The normal-literal approach is the wonderful “key” that opens the meaning. It doesn’t answer every question about prophecy, but it answers all of the big ones!

The following is excerpted from the book KEEPING THE KIDS: HOW TO KEEP THE CHILDREN FROM FALLING PREY TO THE WORLD, which is available in print and eBook editions from Way of Life Literature. (See complete summary at the end of this article.)

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When we think of “keeping the kids,” salvation is foundational. I was amazed at how few of the 250 responses to our questionnaire mentioned this as a factor, but it is absolutely essential.

Some who did emphasize this point wrote with great conviction. Consider the following examples:

“The biggest reason why so many ‘Christian’ youth are not present after reaching adulthood is they are not saved. I graduated in a class of 12 from a ‘respected’ Baptist Christian school in southern Virginia. From those 12, who by the way were praised as the best class from this institution in years, some were missionary kids, pastor’s kids, and deacon’s kids. After 10 years only two were still attending church, and I was the only one working in a ministry. What happened to the others? In a nutshell, drugs, sex, music, cults, and no remorse! All but one was planning upon attending a Christian College, and did, but only two graduated and the others dropped out. I have had contact with many of them, and the stories are all too redundant. They graduated and when the MAN-MADE restraints were removed they plunged into sin and have not to this date returned. All leaders can share similar stories. However, no one seems to think about their lost condition! ‘But, little Johnny prayed and accepted Christ when he was in Sunday School!’ Was his sin dealt with? Or was he just told something like this, ‘You want to go to Heaven one day, right?’ Everyone wants to go to Heaven! But not everyone wants to deal with his sin! Thus, many thousands of ‘decisions’ are made, and they are not made biblically. Child after child goes off to camp, is convicted of some sin, told to come pray about it, and talk it over. In this sequence, the child is told that he has done wrong and urged to make a decision to do right. Children make these decisions and go off in their lostness, fail, and become hardened and bitter. If the law of God is not applied so that there is personal conviction of sin, that child will never see the horrible aspect of his sin. He will be flippant about it! After all, he is going to heaven one day because he prayed a prayer, or believes in God. See how that transpired in James 2:19 and elsewhere in the New Testament. Christ and his followers sought to bring conviction of sin. Consider the Rich Young Ruler in Matthew 19. The problem is created by those teachers, pastors, parents, and leaders who do not deal with sin when salvation is approached. After the ‘prayer,’ salvation is never questioned and the child is dealt with as a fleshly or carnal Christian, even though no fruit has ever been present proving salvation. Christ is victorious, and a fruitless scenario should not take place if Christ is present (Romans 8)!”

The creation-evolution debate is too important to accept anything less than confirmed facts.

In 1922, William Jennings Bryan warned,

“It is no light matter to impeach the veracity of the Scriptures in order to accept, not a truth--not even a theory--but a mere hypothesis” (In His Image, 1922, p. 94).

Bryan was right, and nearly a century later, evolution remains “a mere hypothesis.”

The outcome of a murder trial requires evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt,” because so much is at stake, and we should require no less on the issue of creation vs. evolution, which potentially has eternal consequences.

The Bible claims to be the revelation of God to man. It claims to reveal God, man’s beginning and fall, the way of salvation, and the future. If the Bible is true, there is a heaven and a hell, man will live forever in one place or another, and salvation is only through personal faith in Jesus Christ.

This is too grave an issue to be decided on the basis of anything other than solid proof that the Bible is not to be trusted and that evolution is an absolute science.

The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

KING JAMES BIBLE CALLED “FOOLS GOLD” (Friday Church News Notes, May 13 2011, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Joel Hoffman, a supposed expert in Bible translation, says the King James Version is the “fool’s gold standard of translation” and claims that it is “monumentally inaccurate” (“Bible Scholar,” Christian Newswire, May 2, 2011). Hoffman, author of And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning, compares the KJV to an undependable ancient map and warns that “those who would navigate the Bible solely with this 400-year-old translation journey in perils.” For “fools gold” and an undependable guide, the King James Bible has enjoyed amazing success and exhibited vast spiritual power. The evidence is in the fruit. The most printed book in history, the King James Bible has shaped the English language itself and has been at the heart of countless spiritual revivals, including the Wesleyan, the Great Awakenings, the modern Baptist movement, and the missionary movement that carried the gospel to the ends of the earth. The King James Bible was the Bible of John Wesley, George Washington, George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, Isaac Watts, John Newton, William Carey, Adoniram Judson, Hudson Taylor, David Brainerd, Charles Spurgeon, John Bunyan, John Gill, Hanserd Knollys, Isaac Backus, John Gano, John Leland, John Owen, Richard Baxter, William B. Riley, G. Campbell Morgan, J. Wilbur Chapman, D. L. Moody, Gypsy Smith, Fanny Crosby, Philip Bliss, Matthew Henry, J. C. Ryle, James M. Gray, Bob Jones Sr., J. Frank Norris, Oliver B. Greene, Harold Sightler. I don’t know of any biblical revivals that have come from the modern English versions such as the New International. To the contrary, the modern versions have been at the forefront of end-times apostasy and spiritual compromise and have been the Bibles of Roman Catholicism, Unitarianism, theological Modernism, Ecumenicism, New Evangelicalism, Charismaticism, Christian rock, and the Emerging Church. Joel Hoffman says that the science of translation has improved dramatically over the past 100 years and “modern translators are better able to understand and convey the ancient languages of the Bible.” What he does not say is that the fields of modern textual criticism and biblical scholarship are deeply corrupted by theological apostasy. We have documented this extensively in the book The Modern Bible Version Hall of Shame. John Dowling, Baptist leader and author of The History of Romanism, had a wiser view of the KJV. When a Baptist Bible society proposed a new version in 1850, Dowling published “The Old-Fashioned Bible, or Ten Reasons against the Proposed Baptist Version of the New Testament.” He likened the KJV to “refined gold”: “The fact is that the common version which it is proposed to amend [the KJV], is, taken as a whole, a wonderful translation, and although it may be conceded that it is not perfect--for what human performance is so?--yet it is exceedingly doubtful, whether a translation has ever been made from any ancient book, Greek, Latin, or Oriental--which in point of faithfulness to its original can be compared with this, or which has fewer errors in proportion to the entire amount of its contents. ... to attempt to supplant it by a ‘new version,’ or to introduce any material alterations, would be like ‘gilding refined gold.’”

Updated and enlarged May 12, 2011 (first published April 29, 2008) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

From time to time people write to ask, “What exactly is an independent Baptist church?”

One reason I have never written an article on this subject is the fact that the Independent Baptist movement is not homogenous. There is a great variety of doctrine and practice among Independent Baptist churches.

I have decided, though, to answer the question, plainly acknowledging that the answer will only be my own.

It is doubtless true that if you had 100 Independent Baptist preachers write an answer to this question, you would get 100 different answers!

I would say first that the Independent Baptist movement is large. There are thousands of Independent Baptist churches. There are more in North America than anywhere else, but they are located throughout the world. Yet there is no way to know exactly how many Independent Baptist churches exist, because they have no headquarters and no centralized statistics are kept. There are loose associations of Independent Baptist churches, such as the Southwide Baptist Fellowship and various regional fellowships, and there are Independent Baptist mission boards that some of the Independent Baptist missionaries are associated with, and the churches that participate in those organizations could be counted to some degree if one were to go to the great effort that would be required to collect such statistics (though they don’t all keep statistics!). A significant percentage of Independent Baptist churches, though, do not appear on the report of any association, fellowship, mission group, or other type of organization.

On Wednesday night, May 20, 2009, Jack Schaap, pastor of First Baptist Church, Hammond, Indiana, preached on the need for fundamental Baptists to broaden their base and stop being so narrow and to not criticize anyone at all. He preached this as counsel for the Hyles Anderson College students who were departing for summer break.

“We refuse to acknowledge that there are other saved people that are O.K. Brother Hyles had a great philosophy. As he got older he preached a sermon called ‘I Copy the Young Jack Hyles.’ I have been going through his books and I have been going through sermon notes and I’ve been going through sermons of when he was a young preacher, and I’ve gone back and copied in so many ways the young Jack Hyles. The young Jack Hyles who came here when the church had over a thousand members and and that church grew from 1959 to 11 years later it was declared the largest Sunday School in the world. And I looked at the people he ran with and the people he talked about and the friends he had and the archives.

_____________________

The reason I didn't respond to your e-mail of February 22 is because you didn't ask anything. You merely demanded that I remove my post about Paul Chappell. Your e-mail was an angry, ungracious lashing out at me personally.

I am a grandfather preacher who has been in the battle for forty years and should be treated with some Christian grace regardless of what you think of me. Even when I have communicated with men that I have strongly disagreed with, I have treated them with Christian grace. You need to learn that, Clayton. It is fundamental to Christian living. "Rebuke not an elder, but entreat him as a father..." (1 Timothy 5:1).

I proved my point about Lancaster/West Coast music by analyzing specific songs that their groups have performed and that are published on YouTube. No one has to agree with me, but to say that I don't have the right to do that is ridiculous and will not stand up at the judgment seat of Christ. My analysis was extensive and substantive, and no one who has disagreed with me has dealt with that substance. The response has been straw men, personal attacks, and smoke screens.

I did not attack Paul Chappell in any personal sense. I dealt with serious issues and I wrote graciously and respectfully. I have no ill will whatsoever toward him or his ministry. The Lord is my witness.

CONFERENCE WILL BE REBROADCAST ON MAY 10th at 8PM EST
http://www.wayoflife.org/livestream/index.html

The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

JOHN PAUL II BEATIFIED (Friday Church News Notes, May 6, 2011, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Before a crowd of one million people thronging St. Peter’s Square and nearby streets the late Pope John Paul II was beatified in the last step toward Catholic sainthood. For the occasion, the pope’s coffin was brought up from beneath the basilica and displayed. It will be moved to a new location near Michelangelo’s Pieta, depicting the extra-biblical scene of Mary cradling the crucified Jesus, which is fitting for a pope who was devoted totally to Mary. The sainting commission determined that the dead pope performed an intercessory miracle in response to the prayers of French nun Marie Simon-Pierre, who was healed of Parkinson’s disease. Normally a five-year waiting period is required after the death of an individual before the process toward sainthood is even started, but John Paul II has been on the fast track since his death in 2005. Mother Teresa is also on the fast track and was beatified in 2003. The Catholic doctrine of sainthood is heretical. Nowhere in the New Testament Scripture do we find Christians in the apostolic churches praying to saints. The Bible instructs us to pray to God the Father through Jesus Christ, the one and only Mediator between God and men (1 Tim. 2:5). To pray to a mere man or woman is blasphemy. In the New Testament the term “saint” is applied to all born again Christians, not to a special class (Acts 9:13, 32, 41; 26:10, etc.). Even the carnal Christians at Corinth were called saints (2 Cor. 1:1). Born again Christians are not saints because they are sinless or unusually godly; they are saints because they have a sinless Savior and He has removed their sin before God through His once-for-all His atoning sacrifice (Rev. 1:5-6; 1 Pet. 2:9-10). In the sight of God, through Jesus Christ, the believer is “holy and unblameable and unreproveable” (Col. 1:22). This is why we can be called saints. Praise His holy name!

There is a lot of noise today among some “fundamentalists” about “conservative evangelicals,” and there is a growing association between the two groups.

Central Baptist Seminary of Minnesota, Calvary Baptist Seminary of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and Northland International University (formerly Northland Baptist Bible College) have all recently praised “evangelical conservatives” for their “vigorous commitment to and defense of the gospel.”

Northland recently invited Bruce Ware, Southern Baptist Seminary professor, in to conduct a seminar for pastors. To justify this, former Northland president Les Ollila sent out a letter in December 2010 stating:

“At Northland we have chosen to keep our focus on the highest concerns facing our generation while keeping Fundamentalism centered on the historic fundamentals of our faith that best articulate our core understanding of biblical truth.”

The following is excerpted from the BIBLE VERSION QUESTION ANSWER DATABASE, which is available in print and eBook formats from Way of Life Literature:

Question: “The New International Version is becoming popular even among some fundamentalist churches. It was produced by evangelicals rather than modernists. Why do you not support this version?”

ANSWER

1. The New International Version was first envisioned by the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Reformed Church in the early 1960s and was eventually produced by a team of 100 “evangelical scholars” who began work in about 1966.

The translators represented a wide variety of denominations, including Anglican, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Brethren, Christian Reformed, Church of Christ, Evangelical Free, Lutheran, Mennonite, Methodist, Nazarene, Presbyterian, and Wesleyan. This should sound a large warning to those who understand what has happened within evangelicalism since the late 1950s. For one thing, evangelicalism has renounced separation and has thus become deeply infected by the liberalism that is in the schools that evangelicals often attend and the books that they use.

a. In 1976, Carl Henry warned: “A GROWING VANGUARD OF YOUNG GRADUATES OF EVANGELICAL COLLEGES WHO HOLD DOCTORATES FROM NON-EVANGELICAL DIVINITY CENTERS NOW QUESTION OR DISOWN INERRANCY and the doctrine is held less consistently by evangelical faculties. … Some retain the term and reassure supportive constituencies but nonetheless stretch the term’s meaning” (Carl F.H. Henry, past senior editor of Christianity Today, “Conflict over Biblical Inerrancy,” Christianity Today, May 7, 1976).