The Defense against False Teachers, No. 3 - Jude 17

JD13-01

We looked last time at the facets of the soul. We found that our souls have a mentality. This mentality has a perceptive function through which we learn doctrine. It also has a directive function through which we make decisions that guide our actions. We also found that we have volition which makes choices. These choices will either be made by our minds, or the choices can also be made under the control and direction of our emotions. The order of the Word of God is that our mentality should control our wills. Then there are emotions or feelings.

Emotions

If you still have some kooky notion that the instruction that you have been receiving is speaking against the practice of emoting you are wrong. The emotions of the soul are a legitimate facet of the soul because they were created by God, and God intended you to use your emotions. However, God again placed an order within the soul. Our souls are not based upon an anarchy condition. Our souls are based like everything else in God's creation, upon an orderly arrangement and a line of authority. Within your soul, there is one chief executive, and that is your mind. Your mind is the authority of your soul. For that reason, your mind tells your will what to do, and your mind also tells your emotions what to do. It is comparable to a right man and the right woman. In God's order, the right man is to be related as the aggressor to his right woman. The right woman is to be the responder to her particular man. This is the condition within our souls. The mind is to be the aggressor and the emotions the responder.

When you do this, things are in the proper order. You must remember that your emotions are empty. There is nothing in your emotions. There is no content whatsoever to emotions, and that's why we say that when the emotions dominate the soul you are inviting trouble. Your emotions cannot be taught anything. There is nothing to be stored in your emotions. Your emotions are absolutely empty. They are just there ready to function and ready to be manipulated. The issue is whether they are given an anarchic condition to manipulate themselves or whether you have an authoritative condition in your soul that your mind, by the information in it, directs the emotions into their action.

Anybody who has a soul whose emotions are not tempered by truth in the mind has emotions which run amuck. People who go psychotic and neurotic are people whose emotions have gone amuck. They are people whose minds can no longer control their feelings. When your mind cannot control your feelings, you have distorted your soul. The feelings are legitimate. They are there. The Bible is full of people who had such deep feelings about right things that they were even moved to tears. You may get up and explain something that the Lord has done for you, and you may cry all over the carpet. That may be perfectly legitimate for you to do. This is what led the apostle Paul sometimes to have tears because he was moved in behalf of people who needed the Lord, and who were rejecting Him. So we have emotions. An apostate is always dominated by his emotions in his soul. His feelings are independent of any divine viewpoint in the mind.

The Old Sin Nature

We found that the origin of the soul was the act of God in creating man in the image and likeness of God. We pointed out that the word "image" referred to a shadow reflection of God's personality. Man is in the image of God. It's not that he is like the image on a coin--an exact reproduction or a photograph--but he is in the image of God as a shadow is reflected in that man has a mind, a will, and emotions which constitute personality which God also has. However, we were also made in the likeness of God. This meant that in the Trinity there are three Persons, each of whom has the identical essence, and yet they are three distinct individuals. So all the mass of humanity has been made in this likeness such that all of us have the same kind of soul, men and women equally alike. We have the same kind of soul, yet we are each distinctive individuals.

God made man's body from the earth which he had previously created, and then he created the human soul and human spirit by breathing them into man's body. We were looking at Ephesians 4 in order to trace in the Word of God what happens to a Christian. And notice that we are talking about Christians. What happens to a Christian when he rejects the Word of God? Jude says, "Believe, receive, and remember what the apostles have taught us;" that is, the doctrine of the apostles. In Ephesians, Paul tells us what happens when we refuse to remember and to obey that. We will look at Ephesians 4:17.

We pointed out that negative volition to Bible doctrine creates a condition which the Scripture here calls "emptiness." This emptiness in the mind means that at the point that we reject any point of truth that we are taught by God the Holy Spirit, all further divine guidance is shut off. At that point, no further information flows into our mind, and consequently, there is created a low pressure area--a vacuum condition, and this vacuum condition then results in drawing into our thinking all kinds of false doctrines including doctrines of demons and human viewpoint information. This false information creates a darkness. This darkness blacks out our perceptive minds to any divine viewpoint. At this point, a person becomes insensitive to God's views and to God's will, but he becomes very receptive to what Satan thinks and to what Satan wants him to do. His capacity for love is hindered. His capacity to control himself is hindered. His capacity to govern the details of his life is hindered. His old sin nature lust patterns run rampant, and he is gradually, more and more, coming to a condition where he is darkened in his mind.

This all begins with a simple little act of rejecting what God has said. You may do that for any number of reasons. You may do that because some other Christian has told you something and you believe that Christian. This is something that is the most fantastic thing to me. I never can get over that. Many Christians will absolutely treat other Christians as being the most authoritative sources of information in the world. Some Christian will come along and tell you something they heard or they think or they saw or they know, and you'll believe them. You'll never for a moment look at that Christian and say, "How do I know you're trustworthy. How do I know you're telling me this in such a way that you're not coloring it for some personal purpose? How do I know that you're not trying to convey to me something that may be the facts, but the implication you're giving me is not true?"

For whatever the reasons there may be within yourself--that there may be some willful sin--you refuse to give up. There's some cause that happens to have been a wrong cause, or a position that happened not to have been well-taken, but you took your stand, and you're going to hang on to it now. So anything that suggests that that is not the mind of God, you resist it. Whatever the reason is, once you say, "No," there is set in motion within your soul a certain condition. That's what we're trying to outline for you. This happens to anybody. I don't care how long you've been a Christian. I don't care how devoted you are to the Lord, nor how much you know about the Word of God. Each of us faces this condition once we set it into motion. Such a mind then, because it is blacked out, will attach itself to pseudo persons and to pseudo causes, and it will desert its true objects of affection and its true objects of loyalty. This is one thing you will always notice about apostates. They attach themselves to false causes.

This is true politically on our national scene. We see the apostasy of the nation being expressed in such a way that our leaders are attached to false causes and to false conceptions and to false conclusions. When it comes to the matter of love, when a person is in an apostate condition, he will give his love to the wrong person. He will give his love to the wrong friends. He will have an affection and a promotion of wrong causes. There's just an inevitability that once you start going negative, this action runs its course within your soul. You cannot help yourself but be attached to the wrong thing.

When you come to your senses, as the prodigal son did, you'll stand back and you'll look at yourself and you'll say, "My God, how could I have ever done this? How could I have found myself preferring pigs and pig food to what my father had for me back home? You won't be able to believe how far down you came, and it all started with going negative until your mind was darkened and you didn't know what you were doing. When you don't know what you're doing and you don't understand what you're doing, you inevitably go to pseudo affections and pseudo loyalties, and you will make moves that are propelled by pure satanic influence. I'm talking about Christians. That's all we're talking about. Paul in Ephesians is talking to "brethren" (to believers) and he's telling them not to be like unbelievers in a certain respect.

So in any area of life: economic concepts; religion; social matters; education; or, whatever it is, an apostate mind attaches itself to false loyalties. I find it very fascinating to talk to some of our college students who attend state universities. It is even hard for me to believe, though I expect this, when they report to me what they're hearing in history classes and in sociology classes. They hear the absolute downgrading and the belittling of the American free enterprise system; the contempt for the American way of life; and, the contempt for our institutions.

Do you know how they do it? Like we learned earlier in this book, you remember that apostates badmouth leaders. This is what they do. I wouldn't even presume to tell you some of the things that I've heard from college students who say, "Do you know what my professor got up and said this week about this American patriot or this American patriot?" If you look far enough in American patriots, you can all always discovered that they had old sin natures. Abraham Lincoln had an old sin nature. Now don't break up and cry. That's true. George Washington had an old sin nature. Now don't say that I disillusioned you. It's time you recognized that. But so what?

What about that professor who is standing up there and degrading and badmouthing and pointing out the frailties and the weaknesses of the men who made this nation great. Is he any better in his old sin nature? Does he have something virtuous to contribute by that? Not in the least. Yet, what he's asking students to do is to attach themselves to false personalities. He wants that student to admire Marx; to admire the Black Panthers; to admire the Jane Fondas; and, to admire all of this insanity that is moving our society today. That's what we are to admire because an apostate wants you to attach yourself to false objects.

I can almost guarantee what will happen if you make choices in your life when your mind is blackened out. If you're going to get married, for example, if your mind is blackened out because of what happens through negative volition as we're going to spell it out here, I can almost guarantee that you'll choose the wrong woman or the wrong man. But you have no sensitivity to recognizing signals. You also won't recognize bad signals that are warning you that this is not right. Because you are disoriented, you will bypass them and you'll excuse them. You'll be choosing the false pastor-teacher. I wouldn't say that the pastor-teacher is a false man. He may teach the best doctrine in the world, but he may be the false pastor-teacher for you because he doesn't get through to you. You can sit there and say, "That was nice. That was nice." Yet your soul has not been confronted with what the old sin nature within it is really doing. That's a false teacher for you.

You attach yourself to the false church; its concepts; its motivation; what it tolerates from people; the way it treats people; what it pursues; and, how it minds other people's business and other churches' business instead of its own. All of this signals that it is out of line with God's plan. You will choose false friends, false goals, and false values. I must caution you that all of this is going to be done in the utmost sincerity. You will choose these pseudo objects in the firm conviction that you have what pleases God. You will sound off to other people with the firmest sincerity that anybody could ever be capable of. You will express your opinions. Your negative opinions will be just as convincing as anybody could have a conviction on anything. You won't realize that God is up there shaking His head and saying, "There goes another one. There goes another one. He has blackness and darkness upon the mind."

Some of the very people who are running around giving their testimony and having a lot to say for the Lord are those who are covering up the fact that they have attached themselves to pseudo causes, pseudo people, and pseudo ideas. They have lost touch with what is pleasing in the mind of God. They have their own ideas as to what's pleasing. So this Christian is really no more than a nice reformed unbeliever. You get an unbeliever who's got some moral fiber to him, and you clean up his life a little bit, and he'll look really good. He'll look a lot better than a lot of Christians that you and I know.

Alienation

Once in a while, you'll get an opportunity to check out some phase of your commitment to God's point of view. For example, the next time you have the experience of walking into a store and handing a clerk a ten dollar bill, and she starts counting out change for a twenty dollar bill, you will have a crisis condition to check yourself out. In that moment you will very quickly have two choices. "Ma'am, I gave you a ten. You gave me $10 too much." Or you will be able to say, "Five, ten, fifteen, twenty." That's right. Thank you." You're not looking for it. That happened to me just the other day. I handed the clerk a $10 bill and got a $20 bill back. I got as far as the door, and I said, "No, I just can't keep it." No, I didn't really do that. But right away, I could just feel, "Here it is. I'm going to make $10. They'll never miss it."

Right then, in that split moment, you have to make the decision. How will you make it? You'll make it on the basis of your true commitment to doctrine. All of a sudden, in a moment like that, you might discover that you're not really committed to those concepts at all. You have made a pseudo commitment. Many a person has discovered that a line of immorality, against which he had much to say, was easily entered once the opportunity presented itself. Then he was not as convinced as he thought he was, nor as dedicated to God's views on those matters.

The effect of a darkened mind is that we are really alienated from God, and we don't in time even realize how alienated we are from Him. The word "alienated" here means "estranged." We are estranged from the ultimate source of our souls--the plan of God. The perfect tense here means it began sometime in the past at that point when we went negative to what we were being taught, and then it continues right on to the present, as long as we do not confess it. Passive means that your soul will automatically suffer this consequence. When you are resistant and a rejecter of God's Word, you will automatically passively receive this effect upon your soul. Your mind will become estranged from God, and you will find you are not as devoted to Him as you believed that you were.

This is the picture of a believer. Imagine a believer who is so calloused that he is estranged from his heavenly Father. It says that we are "alienated from the life of God." The word "life" here is the Greek word "zoe." "Zoe" refers to life as a principle to all that a Christian possesses in God. This is not viewing life in its expression. There is a different word for that. This is life as a principal--viewing life as we receive it in Christ at salvation. The life of God is best reflected in that spiritual maturity structure of the soul--that Pentagon with those various facets that pretty well cover what spiritual maturity is, and which reflect the life of God: grace orientation; a relaxed mental attitude; mastery of the details of life; capacity to love; and, an inner happiness. We can have a millennium on the inside when there is a storm raging on the outside.

This refers to life as a principle. This life is to sustain the believer in the midst of the angelic warfare today. This is the kind of life that will orient you to the grace of God. It will give you that mastery of the details of life. It will provide you with a capacity to love. It will maintain your relaxed mental attitude and free you of bitterness, and it will supply the inner happiness. The alienation from the life of God, as represented in this spiritual maturity, leads to very great subjectivity. Once you are alienated from the life in God, because you have rejected the Word of God, you will now start doing things through your own eyes. You can't view them through the eyes of God anymore. You have estranged yourself from your heavenly Father. Therefore you cannot look at things His way. The only other way you can look at things is your way. So you're now restricted to human viewpoint.

Subjectivity

You can just sit there and really be carried away over the communicator, especially when he steps on your sacred cows, and he says the things that are very important to you, and he makes cracks about it. Most of the time, he does this innocently. Some of you sit there and your cows have been kicked, and you start a little bit, and you don't sit there calm and easy. But most of the time, it's inadvertent. But once he kicks your sacred cow, then you can't listen anymore unless you are really an objective believer. When you become mature spiritually, you will be objective.

The ways and the personality of the communicator of the Word are not the issue. When you go to church, it's none of your business. The ways and the personality of the communicator are only his business and God's problem. It's just like your ways and your personality are no one else's business, but are God's problem and God's business. The only thing that concerns you is the message. When the message is reflecting the Word of God, you should be objective enough to receive the Word, period. Actually, most of the preachers that people find themselves drawn to and that they find acceptable are pastors and teachers that they don't know anything about. They are distantly enough removed from them that they don't have any direct contact. They don't know anything about them, so consequently they look really good to them. If they got a little close, they would find something else.

Also, the speech of these people is easy to take because they talk in loopholes. As long as you talk in loopholes, it makes them a lot more comfortable for the old sin nature to listen to it. No communicator of the Word of God is a worthy person. However, his message, as it reflects true doctrine, is worthy of esteem. There are no celebrities in the Christian life except the Lord Jesus Christ.

The subjective Christian therefore depends on how he feels about things--his experience. His emotions move in and make decisions for him. He views his own experience as being a greater guide than the Word of God. He pursues an orgy of stimulating his own emotions, and he calls it a blessing and spiritual development. Christians can become absolutely grotesque in what we think God approves, and what we think God wants us to do. They can become absolutely grotesque. There has to be a reason for this. Christians who have been around for a long time can't become grotesque in decisions they make without there being a reason for this. There must be a reason that outstrips their own capacity to deal with it. The very person who is in this condition will be very self-righteous. He will be very pleased to review for you his abilities, his dedication, and his service. However, this person has a great yearning for a happiness that eludes him.

Because he is frustrated, and because he's searching, and because he's trying out different things because he's so unhappy, he is driven to some of these grotesque actions. That's what's behind what he's doing. He's making a move to see, "Can I get happy if I do this. Here I am miserable. Here I am frustrated. If I go and make this move, can I be happy? If I move to another job, if I go across the country and I start in a new society and I start in a new neighborhood, can I be happy? If I get a new set of friends, can I be happy?" You have this frustrated frantic yearning for happiness. Why? Because right here--he's "apollotrioo." He is estranged from the life of God to which he has been called. When you are estranged from the life of God, nothing will satisfy. You will chase; you will look; and, you will be miserable. Everything you do will isolate you more from the Word of God.

Why is this alienation here from the life of God? It says that this alienation is through "the ignorance" (the "agnoia"). The word "agnoia" means a lack of knowledge. "A" in the Greek is a negative. "Gnoia" comes from the word "gnosis"--to know. So "agnosis" means "no knowledge." Why is this person in a state of being estranged from his Father? It's because in his mind there is ignorance. There is lack of knowledge. At some point in his experience, he did something and he closed off the valve. He may still be attending church. He may still be moving in Christian service. However, the valve has been closed at a certain point, and there is a vacuum condition in his mind, and there is nothing being fed into it. He is lacking the knowledge of God.

The result of this is ignorance of God's will. The ignorance is in them because of the blindness of their heart. Here is where it all comes back to. This is where it starts. The word "blindness" is not "blindness" in the Greek. It's "porosis." "Porosis" means "hardening," or "a callous." Notice what it says: "Through the ignorance that is in them (the lack of information), because of the hardness of their heart." The word heart here refers to the mentality of the soul (1 Chronicles 29:18). This is the blackout of the mind because there is a hardness toward God. Spiritual ignorance comes from callouses which have been built up on the soul toward God from negative volition.

We all have a mind, volition, and emotion. The mind is capable of expressing itself toward God. It is capable of expressing itself toward people. The expression of that contact with God has gradually developed a callous upon those avenues of communication. You have become hardened toward God in your mind, and gradually your mind has darkened. You have become estranged from your Father's way of thinking. You have picked up a way of thinking that you are quite confident is what God thinks, and it's no such thing.

Here's the chain reaction. This is the thing that's important. How does it all begin? It all begins, first of all, where you hear doctrine. You hear the Word of God taught. When you hear the Word of God taught, you go negative to it. Then you enter a state of carnality. You become a carnal Christian because God the Holy Spirit has been grieved. At that point, the flow of information of divine viewpoint is cut off. Your mind develops an emptiness--a vacuum condition. Now you're in a condition where you're ready to draw in false viewpoint. On your soul there develops callouses. Remember, it's just a little layer. It develops one little piece at a time. You're not even aware of the fact that something has happened within your soul relative to these facets toward God and toward other people. But there's a little hardness that has begun to set in.

These callouses then cause false viewpoint to enter the mind because they have gradually shut off your avenue to correct viewpoint. Now your mind becomes dark and the thinking becomes clouded. The final result then is that you are alienated from the life of God in the spiritual maturity structure of your soul. It all begins with negative volition action toward doctrine. When you hear the Word taught, and you reject it, the Word of God says that you set up a carnal condition; you shut off the flow of divine viewpoint to your mind; you create an empty vacuum condition; a hardness begins to develop on all the facets of your soul; and, this starts sucking in false viewpoints--satanic viewpoint.

The result is that darkness descends upon your thinking, and you become so spiritually disoriented that while you're giving your great testimony for the Lord, you don't know what's up from down. That's the reason you're running around serving Him. That's the reason you're standing up there giving your testimony. That's the reason you have so much to say about how things should be. You have now come to such a hardened condition that the life of God cannot be expressed through you. God the Holy Spirit can in no way make the life of Christ shine in your functioning and in your acting.

This is a very vital bit of information in the training of our young people. A young person is not going to be led into moral purity because we give him speeches about avoiding illicit sex. As you tell him that, society says, "Your parents are wrong. They are out of touch." The only protection for a young person is to have his mind saturated with God's viewpoint through doctrine. The only way his mind is going to be saturated is if he does not set up this condition that clogs off his learning of the Word of God.

It's very subtle in a young person if he has not been warned. Kids won't come up to you (even to their parents) and say, "No, I don't believe you. I don't agree with you." Certainly, when we take them out on this campout, we give them a lot of things that counter what some of them do and don't do, and think and don't think, and what they hear. They're not going to stand up there and argue with us. Very rarely will somebody say, "Oh, I don't think that's right. I think that's okay to do." He keeps his peace. He keeps his counsel. That's why your children have to be warned and taught that when they resist you as their parents as you instruct them in the Word of God, they are setting up within themselves this condition. They will gradually callous themselves to the point where they won't be able to respond to God. Everything you teach them will seem wrong to them. You will seem to be out of touch when you are really well in touch with God.

So they will make decisions of life not knowing that they have a blackened darkened mentality, and because of that condition, they will make pseudo decisions. They will have pseudo loyalties and pseudo affections. When it runs its course, they'll bring tragedies into their lives. Beware of a church that has a youth program that is not built on solid doctrinal instruction and warnings against building calluses upon the soul through any single bit of resistance to what you are taught out of the Word of God. Any program that does not combine solid doctrine with warning against callouses is a fun and delusion program that has no place in the Lord's work. It is the young person who is negative to the Word of God who is a prime candidate for illicit sex. If you want to protect him against that, then the way to do it is to teach him what happens to him when he goes negative and the calluses build up.

Well, to tie this up, Paul in Ephesians tells us what happens to these callouses. It has this effect. Ephesians 4:19: "Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness." "Being past feelings" is the Greek word "apalgeo." This is a perfect active participle. This is a condition in the past. It's perfect. Callouses have developed in the past and they have continued to the future. It's active. This means that that individual is responsible. He did this by choice. Each of us builds our own callouses. Nobody builds them for you. Furthermore, nobody else can remove those callouses. Only you can start peeling them off. Each Christian has to act as his own priest. You may be a very nice Christian in building your own calluses and waiting for somebody to come along and remove them. That's the person who's running around wanting someone else to make him happy.

The result, we're told, is that once these callouses have built up, this Christian is past feeling, just like any natural callous removes the feeling. So he is past feeling. It says that they "have given themselves over unto lasciviousness." The word "have given themselves over" is "paradidomi." This word means "betrayed." They have betrayed themselves. It is aorist active indicative. Aorist means that at some point in the past when they were negative to the Word, they betrayed themselves. They actively did this. Indicative is a statement of fact. They betrayed themselves to what? They betrayed themselves to "aselegia." This is the word lasciviousness. This is not the normal word for adultery and fornication, but it is the word, in general, that refers to illicit sex. It's the word that refers primarily to perverted sex. The Christian whose calloused soul is darkened toward God comes to the place where he is past feeling toward anything that God has to say to him. He is this because he has betrayed himself through his negative attitudes to the point where he is now ready to give himself unto the condition of lasciviousness--sensual indulgence, and he becomes promiscuous.

This is what is disastrous--promiscuity. The result is that you build callouses by the carload. Then you come along in life and you find the true person that God has for you, and you cannot even respond. The man and the woman--it is true in both cases--who is sexually promiscuous will come to the point where they cannot even physically respond. When they can't do that, then they go off finding happiness through something else. They start drinking. They turn to drugs. They turn to social action things. They try to sublimate in some way. If you push an illicit sex relationship far enough, and you will in time bear the bitter truth that you cannot respond toward your true object. As an apostate, you are responding toward a false object. There is no fun missed in your life as a young person in maintaining sexual purity. Those who don't, in the long run, are prone to become the suicides; the potheads; the lushes; and, the people who are bored.

This comes about by self-betrayal because of callouses built upon the soul. The true order of marriage, we have told you many times, is to first find that fellow or that girl with whom you become a friend. The first thing you do with that friend is develop spiritual intimacy. The world says for you to develop physical intimacy--just as soon as you can, on your dates, start getting physically cozy. This is the most important piece of information you've ever had if you're not married. Dating is to develop spiritual intimacy. I can almost guarantee you that you'll never marry the wrong person if you develop spiritual intimacy, and you keep hands off, and you pursue this first of all. This is the smartest thing you can do. Girls who can learn this are girls who are going to find husbands that they are going to be glad they marry 20 years later.

The second step is soul intimacy. That comes when you're engaged. That's the time to pursue the comradery of the elements of your soul. This is why, when you find mental conflicts; emotional conflicts; or, volitional conflicts, that's a time to cool it. If you're headed for marriage and you find conflicts in the elements of your soul, that's the time to start putting the brakes on, and give it some further thought.

Then, number three in God's order is body intimacy, and that comes in marriage. If you follow that order, you will find yourself creating an exotic marriage union. However, a person who's been negative toward the Word of God has a mind that's blanked out to all of this. Consequently, there is no way that this person can enter into these things.

There's one more big question that has to be answered. We have to answer the question, how do I remove the callous? Everybody, sooner or later, has to know the divine technique for doing this, and we will take that up next time.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1973

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