Satan was a rebel against God’s crown and glory and a fallen creature before God created man. Matthew Henry wrote that Satan “…knew he could not destroy man but by debauching him. The game therefore which Satan had to play was to draw our first parents to sin, and so to separate them and their God. The whole race of mankind had here, as it were, but one neck, and at that Satan struck.”[1] The strike would be through man’s freewill. One of the deceptions Satan crafted through the ages was spiritual humanism to which man’s freewill was particularly susceptible. As Satan had once diverted Eve’s gaze from God to self, so Satan continues to divert man from God and His plan of redemption to self by substituting spiritual humanism’s counterfeit solutions drawn from pantheistic religions, ancient traditions, pagan cultures, and modern-day psychology (see Chapter 16).

The New Age in Christian clothing

To make spiritual humanism culturally relevant in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Satan painted a modern face on it, dressed it new clothes to fit the modern spirit of the age, and called it the New Age. But spiritual humanism’s beliefs, objectives, deceptions, […] Continue Reading…

There were three major voices that stoked the fires that led to the reemergence of American evangelicalism in the late 1940s and 1950s. Two were of the preaching-revivalist tradition and principally concerned with the eternal destination of their listeners: Baptist evangelist Billy Graham and Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen. The third was Norman Vincent Peale. Although he called himself an evangelist that adhered to evangelism’s implicit call for conversion, Peale’s educational and theological development eventually led him to embrace a “new Christian emphasis.” In later years he called it practical Christian living which was “…attuned to the inner life…[and] was presumed to be a better solution to the needs of modern Americans.”[1] Out of Peale’s theology centered on practical Christian living arose the therapeutic gospel that was adopted by many evangelical ministers and churches over the last half of the twentieth century and dominates American evangelicalism in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Peale occupied a unique position on America’s religious landscape during the two decades following World War II. Peale was politically conservative and therefore perpetually at odds with the liberal establishment, both political and theological. Yet, by […] Continue Reading…

Positive confession and prosperity gospel

Since the middle of the twentieth century a great many Eastern religions and New Age practices and beliefs have been absorbed into Western society. Almost simultaneously, preaching and teaching that emphasizes health, prosperity, and happiness are available to all Christians have infiltrated many evangelical churches. These churches are usually found under the banner of the Word of Faith movement and tend to be independent or have a loose affiliation with other churches with a similar message. The closeness to which individuals and churches adhere to the doctrines and practices of the positive confession movement (or prosperity gospel as some have called it) spans a broad spectrum ranging from those with marginal associations with the movement to those who fully embrace and center their lives on the Word of Faith message and its tenets. Therefore, one must use care and look beneath the Word of Faith label to determine the biblical soundness of their respective teachings and practices. Many preach a faith message that is doctrinally sound.

The acknowledged founder of the Word of Faith movement was Kenneth Hagin who had a spiritual vision during the 1950s that he described […] Continue Reading…

The great contest between God and Satan is for the allegiance of men and women. At stake are their eternal relationships with God. Mankind is fallen and lives in a fallen world. In order to restore a right relationship with God and live eternally with Him, man must accept the atoning sacrifice made by God’s Son on the cross at Calvary. But Satan does not sit idly by and let that happen. The earth is Satan’s lair and reflects his spirit. The spirit of the world has plagued mankind since Satan tempted Eve in the Garden. It has been Satan’s tool of choice by which he attempts to prevent or destroy man’s relationship with God. In Chapter 1 it was said that the spirit of the world is Satan’s chameleon—always refining its outward allure to match the demands and desires of the present culture, but however it transforms itself to please man, it remains unchangeably corrupt within. Whatever the outward manifestations of the spirit of the world are in any age, at its core we find humanism—the ultimate deception by which Satan attempts to displace God in the heart of […] Continue Reading…

In the 1920s the fundamentalists abandoned the culture to the modernists and humanist secularizers, and they also lost control of the large mainline churches in the 1930s. The mainline modernist Protestant establishment had won the war with the fundamentalists to be the church’s voice, but they were in the twilight years of their power to set the tone for American culture. The liberal churches’ triumph coincided with the advent of the Great Depression, and they assisted in setting the political course for the nation in those troubled times. In 1908, the highly humanistic and socialistic tenets of the liberal churches’ defunct social gospel movement had been codified in the Social Creed of the Churches by the Federal Council of Churches in Christ in America.[1] Many of these recommendations were resurrected and implemented as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. However, the America over which the triumphant humanists, secularizers, and liberal churches presided remained in turmoil through 1945 and beyond.

As end of World War II approached, there were momentary feelings of euphoria, goodwill, and hope for a more cooperative world order among the soon to be victorious allied nations. […] Continue Reading…