Blessed is the Man Who Does Not Listen to Falling Stars Following After Damnable Heresies

“Then I fell at his feet to worship him. But he said to me, “Do not do that; I am a fellow servant of yours and your brethren who hold the testimony of Jesus; worship God. For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” (Rev. 19:10) 

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22).

“And the fifth angel sounded the trumpet, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and there was given to him the key of the bottomless pit.” (Rev. 9:1)

While most commentators identify the falling star as Satan, in his Concise Commentary Matthew Henry provides a second, human identity.  Human falling stars are tepid, indecisive, weak or apostate clergy who have ceased to be a minister of Christ, thus,

“… he who is represented by this star becomes the minister of the devil; and lets loose the powers of hell against the churches of Christ. On the opening of the bottomless pit, there arose a great smoke.  The devil carries on his designs by blinding the eyes of men…putting out light and knowledge, and promoting ignorance and error. Out of this smoke there came a swarm of locusts, emblems of the devil’s agents, who promote superstition, idolatry, error, and cruelty…the true believers…should be untouched (but) a secret poison and infection in the soul, should rob many others of purity, and….peace.  The locusts had no power to hurt those who had the seal of God.  God’s all-powerful, distinguishing grace will keep his people from total and final apostacy.” (Commentary on Revelation 9: 1-12)

John identifies antichrists, in this case clergy who serve the devil rather than Christ, sequentially. First, like Bultmann, Teilhard de Chardin, Robert Funk, Paul Tillich, and John Shelby Spong, for example, they specifically deny the living, personal Holy Trinity by negation of the literal and historical elements of the Genesis account in favor of Gnostic pagan, immanent or Eastern pantheist evolutionary conceptions. Though the personal Triune God upholds the souls of men and maintains life and creation, His substance is not within nature (space-time dimension) as pagan and pantheist evolutionary and progressive creation speculators subtly imply but outside of it. Sinful men live within nature and are burdened by time and mortality.  The Lord our God  neither lives within the space-time dimension He created nor is burdened by time and mortality.

Second, the specific denial of the Father who spoke creation into existence ex nihilo in six days logically negates Jesus Christ, the Word who was in the beginning (John 1), was with God, and is God from the creation of all things (1 John 1). 

In a pre-incarnate theophany, Jesus is the Angel who spoke “mouth to mouth” to Moses (Num. 12:6-9; John 9:20) and at sundry times and in many ways “spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all…” (Hebrews 1:1) Jesus the Christ is the incarnate Son of God, the life and light of men, the perfect fulfillment of law and prophecy (Rev. 19:10) who by His shed blood on the Cross died for the remission of all sins and bestowed the privilege of adoption on all who put their faith in Him. Therefore, to deny the Holy Father through denial of creation ex nihilo is to logically deny the deity of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, hence,

“…every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist . . . and even now already is it in the world” (1 John 4:3).

According to Peter (2 Peter 2:1), human falling stars will work among the faithful, teaching damnable heresies that deny the Lord, cause the fall of men into unbelief, and bring destruction upon themselves:

“The natural parents of modern unbelief turn out to have been the guardians of belief.” Many thinking people came at last “to realize that it was religion, not science or social change that gave birth to unbelief. Having made God more and more like man – intellectually, morally, emotionally – the shapers of religion made it feasible to abandon God, to believe simply in man.” (James Turner of the University of Michigan in “American Babylon,” Richard John Neuhaus, p. 95)

Falling Stars and Damnable Heresy

Almost thirty years ago, two well-respected social science scholars, William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark found themselves alarmed by what they saw as a rising tide of irrationalism, superstition and occultism – channeling cults, spirit familiars, necromancers, Wiccans, Satanists, Luciferians, goddess worshippers, ‘gay’ shamans, Hermetic magicians and other occult madness at every level of society, particularly within the most influential level– Hollywood, academia and the highest corridors of political power.

Like many scientists, they were equally concerned by Christian opposition to naturalistic evolution. As is common in the science community, they assumed the cause of these social pathologies was somehow due to fundamentalism, their term for faithful, orthodox Christian theism as opposed to progressive and/or liberalized Christianity and evolutionary theism. 

But to their credit, the research they undertook to discover the cause of the madness and occultism was conducted both scientifically and with great integrity. What they found was so startling it caused them to re-evaluate their attitude toward authentic Christian theism. Their findings led them to say:

“It would be a mistake to conclude that fundamentalists oppose all science (when in reality they but oppose) a single theory (that) directly contradicts the bible. But it would be an equally great mistake to conclude that religious liberals and the irreligious possess superior minds of great rationality, to see them as modern personalities who have no need of the supernatural or any propensity to believe unscientific superstitions. On the contrary…they are much more likely to accept the new superstitions. It is the fundamentalists who appear most virtuous according to scientific standards when we examine the cults and pseudo-sciences proliferating in our society today.” (“Superstitions, Old and New,” The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. IV, No. 4; summer, 1980)

In more detail they observed that authentic ‘born again’ (spiritually regenerated) Christians are far less likely to accept cults and pseudoscientific beliefs while the irreligious and liberalized Christians (i.e., evolutionary and progressive creation theists, progressive Catholics, Protestant emergent, NAR, word faith, prosperity gospel) are open to unscientific notions. In fact, these two groups are most disposed toward occultism.

As Bainbridge and Stark admitted, evolutionary science directly contradicts the Bible, beginning with the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo. This means that evolutionary science is the antithesis of the Genesis account. For this reason, discerning Christians refuse to submit to the evolutionary thinking that has swept Western and American society. Nor do they accept the evolutionary theism and progressive creation brought into the whole body of the Church by weak, tepid, indecisive, or apostate clergy.

Over eighty years ago, Rev. C. Leopold Clarke wrote that priests who embrace evolution are apostates from the ‘Truth as it is in Jesus.’ (1 John2:2) Rev. Clarke, a lecturer at a London Bible college, discerned that evolution is the antithesis to the Revelation of God in the Deity of Jesus Christ, thus it is the greatest and most active agent of moral and spiritual disintegration:

“It is a battering-ram of unbelief – a sapping and mining operation that intends to blow Religion sky-high. The one thing which the human mind demands in its conception of God, is that, being Almighty, He works sovereignly and miraculously – and this is the thing with which Evolution dispenses….Already a tremendous effect, on a wide scale has been produced by the impact of this teaching – an effect which can only be likened to the…collapse of foundations…” (Evolution and the Break-Up of Christendom, Philip Bell, creation.com, Nov. 27, 2012)

The faith of the Christian Church and of the average Christian has had, and still has, its foundation as much in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis, the book of beginnings revealed ‘mouth to mouth’ by the Angel to Moses, as in that of the person and deity of Jesus Christ. But how horrible a travesty of the sacred office of the Christian Ministry to see church leaders more eager to be abreast of the times than earnestly contending for the Faith once delivered unto the saints (Jude 1:3). It is high time, said Rev. Clarke, that the Church,

“…. separated herself from the humiliating entanglement attending her desire to be thought up to date…What, after all, have custodians of Divine Revelation to do making terms with speculative Biology, which has….no message of comfort or help to the soul?” (ibid)

The primary tactic employed by priests eager to accommodate themselves and the Christian Church to modern science and evolutionary thinking is predictable. It is the argument that evolution is entirely compatible with the Bible when we see Genesis, especially the first three chapters, in a non-literal, non-historical context. This is the argument embraced and advanced by Pope Francis, Hugh Ross and mega-church pastor Timothy J. Keller.

With a position paper Keller published with the evolutionary organization Bio Logos he joined the ranks of falling stars (Catholic and Protestant priests) stretching back to the Renaissance. Their slippery-slide into apostasy began when they gave into the temptation to embrace a non-literal, non-historical view of Genesis. (A response to Timothy Keller’s ‘Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople,” Lita Cosner, Sept. 9, 2010, creation.com)

This is not a heresy unique to modern times. The early Church Fathers dealt with this damnable heresy as well, counting it among the heretical tendencies of the Origenists. Fourth-century Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Basil the Great and Ephraim the Syrian, all of whom wrote commentaries on Genesis, specifically warned against treating Genesis as an unhistorical myth or allegory. John Chrysostom strongly warned against paying heed to these heretics,

“…let us stop up our hearing against them, and let us believe the Divine Scripture, and following what is written in it, let us strive to preserve in our souls sound dogmas.” (Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 31)

As St. Cyril of Alexandria wrote, higher theological, spiritual meaning and by extension, spiritual regeneration is founded upon humble, simple faith in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis and one cannot apprehend rightly the Scriptures without believing in the historical reality of the events and people they describe. (ibid, Seraphim Rose, p. 40)

In the integral worldview teachings of the Fathers, neither the literal nor historical meaning of the Revelations of the pre-incarnate Jesus, the Angel who spoke to Moses, can be regarded as expendable. There are at least four critically important reasons why. First, to reduce the Revelation of God to allegory and myth is to contradict and usurp the authority of God, ultimately deny the deity of Jesus Christ; twist, distort, add to and subtract from the entire Bible and finally, to imperil the salvation of believers.

Scenarios commonly proposed by modern Origenists posit a cleverly disguised pantheist/immanent or deist nature deity subject to the space-time dimension and forces of evolution. But as noted previously, it is sinful man who carries the burden of time, not God. This is a crucial point, for when evolutionary theists add millions and billions of zeros (time) to God they have transferred their own limitations onto Him. They have ‘limited’ God and made Him over in their own image. This is not only idolatrous but satanic.

Additionally, evolution inverts creation. In place of God’s good creation from which men fell there is an evolutionary escalator starting at the bottom, in hell, with a quantum fluctuation, an exploding Cosmic Egg (Big Bang), matter (Sagan’s star stuff) pregnant with life and an eternally expanding cosmos.  Emergent life somehow evolves out of star stuff, then up and through the life and death of millions of evolved creatures that preceded humans by millions of years until at long last an apish humanoid or pair of humanoids (mythical Adam and Eve) emerge into which a deity shaped and controlled by man and always in a state of becoming (evolving) places a soul. 

This upside-down view leads to a philosophy of nihilism (meaninglessness).  Nihilism results because if men were once something else, a genderless blob of matter, then later on lizards, and later still some kind of ape-like creature, then not only are we going to become something else, maybe divine supermen, super robots or cosmic beings, but nothing can be said about transgender, ‘gay,’ and lesbianism since all life forms ascended from a genderless blob of matter.  

Moreover, with regard to soul, if life arose from chemicals or a blob of matter and then billions of years later man evolved from lower life-forms, then his rational nature, his soul, differs not qualitatively but only quantitatively from the beasts.  Like beasts, man is not a person created in the spiritual-image of the One God in Three Persons but rather a creature of the earth.  Like them he has no spirit—will, higher mental faculties, and conscience.  Thus he is a fleshy androgynous robot or hominid whose brain is organized by the genome and the genome shaped by natural selection. 

Evolution is an abomination of desolation that conceptually unmakes and renders meaningless the Word of God, thereby opening the door to further abominations such as the Swedish lesbian bishop who wants to remove crosses from the church and mark the direction of Mecca to make it more inviting for Muslims (1).  

As the atheist Frank Zindler enthusiastically makes clear, evolution makes Jesus Christ unnecessary:

“The most devastating thing that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a saviour. And I submit that puts Jesus…into the ranks of the unemployed. I think evolution absolutely is the death knell of Christianity.” (“Atheism vs. Christianity,” 1996, Lita Cosner, creation.com, June 13, 2013)

In response to the presence of false teachers, apostates and abominations infecting the Body of Christ our Lord answered:

“Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”   Matthew 15:13-14

Falling stars following after damnable heresies are blind guides of the blind.  Thus blessed is the man who does not place his trust in blind guides who stray after heresies and abominations of desolation such as evolution (Psalm 40: 4-5) and exalt the works of their fallen imaginations against the knowledge of God. (2 Cor. 10:5) 

Do not throw away your confidence in the Lord:

“it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.”  (Hebrews 10:35-36)

@Linda Kimball

1. Swedish bishop wants to remove crosses from church and mark direction of Mecca to make it more inviting for Muslims, Robert Spencer, jihadwatch.org, Oct. 4, 2015