Examining "A More Christlike Word"
by Brad Jersak
Day 97
“For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.” (Paul’s concern from 2 Corinthians 11:4)
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The False Filter |
The Biblical Filter |
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The word OR the Word |
The Word THROUGH the word |
On the
other hand, after concluding this book, I can say with utmost confidence that
the author was “unauthorized” to make the hit! The glaring difference between
his attempt at authority, and the Bible’s revelation of authority, should help
the “few” stay on the straight and narrow. And, by the end of the book, it was also
very clear that the author totally missed his mark and the word of God is very
much alive (or, “living and active” as Hebrews says) after all.
Because Brad Jersak has acted like he is an authority on the things of
which he speaks, I began including this summary warning in some of my daily
Journaling:
The purpose of
the BJs’ writings is to demoralize people’s faith in the authority of Scripture
as the breathed-out words of God. They continue the serpent’s question in the
garden, “Did God actually say…?” to replace what God said with what the “evil
people and imposters” are peddling for unjust gain.
In
this part of my conclusion, I want to summarize what the author claimed about
authority in reference to Scripture, how he acted as if he had the authority to
diss what the breathed-out-by-God Scriptures say, and then show how clearly the
Scriptures reveal themselves to be authoritative over the church without in
any way challenging the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ as head of the
church. Why? Because we are submitting to HIS authority by obeying the Bible as
the manual he gave his church to govern us until his return.
The
Garden Path of a Skewed Authority
It is
quite different writing a summary about what I learned travelling along Brad
Jersak’s garden path than what it was like to make the journey and contend with
all the obstacles and stumbling stones he had strewn across the trail. In a
sense, it was easy to read a statement of falsehood and see how to correct it.
Sometimes the lies were glaring, and other times it was a subtle fork in the
road of our thoughts to keep us heading in the wrong direction.
What I
realized as I turned the page on the end of the last chapter was that Brad
Jersak writes like he is the authority. As much as he claimed that there is
“another Jesus” outside of Scripture than the one in Scripture, it was all
talk. He did not present a Jesus to us, but only what he said about him. The
only reason I had for why I should agree with anything he said is that he said
it. That’s it. I’m supposed to believe his “word” is “more Christlike” than my
“word” because he tells me it is.
But
the glaring reality is that in 100% of the scenarios where Brad Jersak
presented a Scripture as a proof text for his viewpoint, he misrepresented what
it said. Not one Scripture he used to convince me why I should look outside our
Scriptures to know what Yahweh and Yasous “really” are like was presented with
integrity. He used half-Scriptures to say what he wanted but the whole
Scripture contradicted him. He used a cherry-picked translation of a Scripture as a proof text
for what that verse meant when the original (usually the Hebrew of the Old
Testament) and the real translations disagreed with his claims.
This
is why I began using the “Emperor’s New Clothes” analogy.[1] In fact, if you read it in the footnote, you will see exactly what I
have felt like looking to see where this Jesus Brad Jersak was talking about
actually appeared. Alas, he was just as invisible as the Emperor’s new
wardrobe, and just as “nothing at all” as the train his entourage pretended to
hold. And I fear that many of his readers have agreed that they could see this
Jesus for themselves simply so they would not appear to be simpletons in the
eyes of the masquerading experts.
The
”Final Authority” Bogusness
Brad
Jersak wants (needs) people to believe this lie: if we have a statement of
faith in our church or ministry group that says anything like, “We believe the
Bible is the final authority on all matters of faith and practice,” we are
saying that the Bible is a greater authority than Jesus Christ, the Word. I
picture his lie something like this:
In
fact, as I begin writing these notes, I have just started travelling through
Matthew 24 where we transition from Jesus' last visit to the temple where he
pronounced his woes on the scribes and Pharisees, to Jesus telling his
disciples that the temple would be destroyed because Jerusalem rejected their
Messiah. The very next scene is Jesus and his band of disciples meeting with
him in private on the Mount of Olives and asking him questions about what was
going to happen.
My
point is that we can’t do that! There is no place we can go together to meet
with Jesus and ask him our questions. Jesus’ promise of “behold, I am with you
always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20) is fulfilled in the coming of
the Holy Spirit. But there is no physical presence of Jesus available to anyone
in the church so we can just hang out with him and get his authoritative answer
to our conflicts and disputes.
Instead, we have “the word” as now gathered into the Bible, and “the
Spirit”, the presence of God in the church. That means that we are joining God
in seeking worshipers who worship “in spirit and truth”. We want to be like the
early church where the people “were all filled with the Holy Spirit and
continued to speak the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31). We believe that
Jesus gave apostles to the church to teach us “in words not taught by human
wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are
spiritual” (I Corinthians 2:13). We believe that “when you heard the word of
truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the
promised Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 1:13), and that is why we “take the helmet of
salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians
6:17).
How
did Paul know that the Thessalonians were “loved by God,” and that God “has
chosen you”? Answer, “because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also
in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.” Paul saw how the
word and the Spirit were operating in these believers. The effect of the word
and the Spirit on these Christians was, “And you became imitators of us and of
the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the
Holy Spirit”. How these believers received “the word” and how they rejoiced in
“the Holy Spirit” were synonymous. The thoughts rhymed. And the result was, “so
that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia” (I
Thessalonians 1:4-7).
My
point is that you will not find Paul ever talking about there being some way
for a church to have Jesus sit with them in person as he did with the disciples
on the Mount of Olives where they could just ask him their questions and all
hear his answers together. Instead, we have “the word” and we have “the
Spirit”.
This
morning (at the time I first wrote this part) as I have been spending time with
God in his word, I see Matthew 24 unfolding into that amazing teaching time
regarding the disciples’ question, “Tell us, when will these things be, and
what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matthew
24:3). And the first thing Jesus says in his answer was, “See that no one leads
you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they
will lead many astray” (vss 4-5).
So
look at how Paul speaks to the Thessalonians in his second letter, “Now
concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together
to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed,
either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the
effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way”
(II Thessalonians 2:1-3). Notice that Paul’s concern is that the church would
be “quickly shaken in mind or alarmed” because they had been told about “a
spirit or a spoken word” that was different than what they had been taught by
the apostles. Because “the Spirit” and “the word” are so central to the life of
the church until Jesus’ return, we must watch for Satan’s work of sending
churches “another Jesus”, “a different spirit”, and “a different gospel” (a
different “word” about Jesus).
The
Bible is the “living and active” “word”
One of
BJ’s lies in his book was to quote Hebrews 4:12 as though it referred to Jesus
as “the Word” instead of to Scripture as “the word”. But the book of Hebrews is
one of the most saturated with “the word” books of the Bible, constantly
quoting Scripture to tell us what to think of Jesus (and to give a glimpse into
the kinds of things Jesus would have told the two men on the Road to Emmaus),
and so this reference is to the word of God, the message of God, which we now
have collected into the Bible.
So,
when the biblical author writes, “For the word of God is living and active,
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of
spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of
the heart”, he is telling us what the Scriptures are like. It also tells us why
Satan is constantly getting hold of men like Brad Jersak and sending “a spirit
or a spoken word” that is different from what is in the Bible. If he can get
people to “receive a different spirit from the one you received”, or he can get
people to entertain “a different gospel from the one you accepted,” it will
switch people’s faith from Jesus Christ as Lord to the teacher with his
different Jesus.
Jesus
would sometimes tell parables in which he pictured the kingdom of heaven like a
master who was away from his servants. In one case he left his servants with
various sums of money to invest in his business while he was gone. Another
exposed the way his servants treated each other while the master was away. This
is one facet of the kingdom of heaven as we have it right now, that our Master
is away. Jesus has gone to prepare a home for us. We don’t have him.
Instead, what we have is his word, and since it is HIS word, we treat it
as the ultimate authority over his
servants as we wait for his return. We can picture it like this:
Now
imagine an ambassador from your country going to another country to look after
the affairs of your people in that place. Whatever documents are used to lay
out the rights, privileges, and obligations of the ambassador would be
authoritative over his or her dealings with everyone. It wouldn’t be a greater
authority than the government of your country, but it would be the guide that
would authorize what is or is not done in another nation.
So
too, the Bible is not the most authoritative part of the kingdom of God. God
is. But he is the one who gave us the Scriptures as his breathed-out words.
They are now collected into the Bible. And that means they are the most
authoritative thing we have to guide every church through every remaining
generation. No matter what comes up (even the false teachings of Brad Jersak’s
unChristlike book), everything is tested with the Scriptures by people seeking
to be filled with the Holy Spirit in doing so.
The
Authoritativeness of Biblical Authority
In the
author’s focus on the authority of Scripture, he pointed out two things that
were necessary to treat a document as authoritative. The first quality was that
it had to contain evidence that it was claiming authority. The second quality
was that it had to be recognized as an authority.
The
astounding thing (another facet of the Emperor’s New Clothes) was that even
though the whole Bible comes with a sense that it is claiming to be the
authoritative word of God, and even though there is ample evidence that the
Scriptures were recognized to be authoritative, the author continued his claim
that they are nothing more than a God/man hybrid that is too messed up by God’s
little boys that it can’t be trusted to be what God tried to say. Instead (only
according to the author), the authority is now in the community of people who
read the Scriptures and subjectively conclude a consensus on what they think
God is saying to them. This justifies churches completely contradicting what is
written in Scripture because Brad Jersak declares that the Scriptures cannot be
trusted as authoritative but a consensus of a group of people who can’t
understand Scripture can be trusted as authoritative because (again, only what
the author claims) THAT is where divine inspiration happens (even though that
is not what the apostles wrote in the Scriptures!)
What I
hope is that whoever reads my rebuttals to Brad Jersak’s false teachings will
see that it is the Scriptures that are authoritative, and they thoroughly
denounce all the BJs as the false teachers Jesus and the apostles warned about.
So let’s look at some of the ways the Bible claims to be authoritative over God’s
people from beginning to end.
Authoritative
Declarations of Authority
I can’t possibly put every verse that declares God’s authority in Scripture. Instead, I will share the kinds of ways that authority is expressed, and, if possible, point out how many times certain phrases are used (if I can do so with a www.biblegateway.com search).
1. The first declaration of authority in the Scriptures is in the very first verse of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The Bible begins by declaring God’s authority over all the material creation by claiming it as his. The rest of the Bible consistently affirms that the God of the Bible is the God of creation. Brad Jersak has dissed the idea of Genesis describing the literal work of God in creating everything over the six days of that first week. However, when he tried to show how Jesus as “the Word” was in conflict with Scripture as “the word”, he was right smack dab in the middle of John declaring that Jesus himself IS our Creator. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:1-5). So, while Brad Jersak disses the idea of creation as described in Scripture (because he honors Darwinists as a greater authority), Jesus is presented AS the creator that is described in Genesis 1-2. Paul witnesses to this with his testimony, “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17). It is just as true that Jesus created all things with his Father as it is that he holds things together with his Father. The Bible’s claim in its very first verse is that Yahweh and Yasous have ultimate authority for they are our Creator, and their Book declares itself authoritative in that very first sentence of Scripture.
2. The emphasis of the creation account in Genesis 1 is on “And God said… and there was…”. This begins with the creation of light (vs 3ff), it continues with the creation of the “expanse” (vs 6ff), it repeats in the separation of the water from dry land (vs 9ff), into the plants (vs 11ff), the lights in the heavens (vs 14ff), the creatures of the sea and air (vs 20ff), the living creatures on the land (vs 24ff), and finally in the creation of man (vs 26ff). Each time there was an expression of “And God said…” followed by what was created. In the first chapter of the Bible, we are shown the power of God’s authority from the very beginning. And to show how significant this is, the apostle Paul used this authority to show an even greater manifestation of his authority when he wrote, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (II Corinthians 4:6). We absolutely rely on the authority of God in creation to be assured of the glorious gift of what he did in our salvation!
3. An easy one to look up is the expression “Thus says the LORD”, which means “Thus says Yahweh”. The English translations that replace “Yahweh” (the divine name) with “the LORD” are minimizing the significance that God is really giving his NAME in direct challenge against all the false gods of the nations. This is huge because when we are told about doing anything in God’s “name”, or Jesus’ “name”, it helps to realize that every time in the Old Testament that we see the word “LORD” in all-caps, it indicates that it is the divine name “Yahweh”. I have discovered that the Legacy Standard Bible is a new translation that is taking the step of maintaining translation integrity by translating “Yahweh”. However, my point is that whenever this phrase is used in the Old Testament, it is declaring that whatever is stated is directly from Yahweh. And there are (drum roll please)… 415 such expressions! Brad Jersak claims that ALL of those are false claims because he says the Scriptures are a God/man hybrid that must not be treated as authoritative since God’s boys messed things up. But that means that all 415 times the Old Testament uses that phrase (in 18 OT books), the writers are giving false testimony about Yahweh. And if they are giving false testimony about Yahweh, that means Jesus would have treated them as false prophets who should have been stoned to death! And since Jesus did not even once declare that any of the prophets misrepresented his Father, we can conclude that it is Brad Jersak who is doing all the misrepresenting and that HE is the false prophet who would have been stoned to death if he had tried this evil thing back in the day! Just sayin’! So remember this, 415 times the Bible uses that phrase, “Thus says Yahweh”, and that gives it an authority that not even the BJs can deny (try as they may)!
4. Just for fun, I tried some other variations of people in the Bible quoting God. “And God said” came up 18 times in the OT, "the LORD said" was 274 times, "God spoke" was 8 times, “the LORD spoke” 106 times. Interestingly, the expression “the LORD”, meaning “Yahweh”, came up 6,003 times! Folks, the Bible is about God. It is about Yahweh. Yahweh is clearly spoken of throughout the whole Bible. Jesus is the Lord. Everything speaks of the authority of God the Father in the Hebrew Scriptures speaking to us through his Son in the New Testament Scriptures so that the book oozes the feel of authority as the breathed-out words of God. As much as Brad Jersak tried to act like the authority over the word of God, he is under the authority of the Scriptures that declare him a traitor to the people of God in dissing Yahweh, discrediting the Scriptures, and replacing the true Lord Jesus Christ with his “another Jesus”, replacing the Holy Spirit with his “different Spirit”, and replacing the “good news of great joy” with his “different gospel”.
5. Brad Jersak absolutely requires the New Testament to present Yahweh of the Old Testament in a “Jesus-correcting-Yahweh-and-the-Hebrew-Scriptures” kind of way. He can’t even present ONE example of this happening. So what do we have instead? We have the New Testament quoting the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative so many times that we have ample witnesses that Jesus and the apostles viewed those Scriptures as the authoritative word of God, and that the New Testament writings were already being recognized as authoritative Scripture as well. I will leave you with this article from the Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology entitled, “The Old Testament in the New Testament”.[2] It shows how the Scriptures were viewed as authoritative through-and-through.
6. The last chapter of the book of Revelation presents itself with such authority that it gives a warning to anyone who would dare tamper with it: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book” (Revelation 22:18-19). The point is that it is a warning about how the book is handled, it says the book is a prophecy, and it calls the book “this BOOK”. It declares that the words in the book are so from God that God himself will treat people according to how they treat the book, even to the judgment of missing out on our return to the tree of life. John then adds, “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (vs 20), continuing the pattern of biblical writers attributing authority to God. It is Jesus who testifies to the things John wrote (because John was carried along by the Holy Spirit to write down the breathed-out words of God); it is Jesus who says he is coming soon, and we give our “Amen” by agreeing “Come, Lord Jesus!” We are calling on Jesus Christ as the Creator spoken of in Genesis 1 to come as our Lord and Savior to complete the final step of our salvation. And we have the authority of the whole Bible, the whole word of God, the whole of Scripture, to call us to trust in God’s word and work from beginning to end.
The Agreed Authority of Two Testaments
For
all my decades of reading the Bible, with more than half of those with a
specific focus on how God speaks through his word, I have often marveled at the
cohesiveness of the whole Bible. The more familiar I have
become with the Scriptures, the more I hear the New Testament referring to the Old.
The
conclusion is that we have men who were declared to be prophets in their day
and affirmed to be prophets throughout the Scriptures. We have the prophecies
about Jesus declaring what he would do, we have Jesus in the gospels showing
those very things (not all of them, for some are still to come), we have the
apostles of the New Testament using the Scriptures of the Old Testament both in
their gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry and in their explanation of the gospel
as it is to be lived out in the church.
The
point is simple: The Bible claims to be authoritative. It claims to be the word
of God. The Scriptures that were in use at the time of Christ (our Old
Testament), were constantly treated like Scripture by Jesus Christ our Lord. We
have the one document in the whole wide world that constantly affirms in so
many ways that it truly did come from God, and that is why Satan sends his BJs to
diss and discredit God’s word without even needing any evidence to do so. A good
ol’ Emperor’s New Clothes story and people buy into the claim that they have
found some new outfit for the Bible when any honest person can see they
presented nothing at all!
One of
the most significant aspects of this is to realize how often I have heard the
Old Testament quoted in the New Testament simply from reading my Bible in my
daily time with God and listening to it during my exercise mornings. This is
huge since Brad Jersak’s peddling-money is bet on people believing Yahweh in
the Old Testament Scriptures is mistakenly described as a violent monster. Each
of his trilogy of books requires readers to believe that the author has not
only invented a way to see Yahweh as needing to be more Christlike, but his
word is not Christlike enough either, and the Way of salvation needs a
Christlike boost as well.
But Jesus
consistently quotes or alludes to the Old Testament Scriptures, including the
ones Brad Jersak hates the most. And, the author had to outright lie about Jesus
correcting those Scriptures in their view of Yahweh even though he presented
not one case of Jesus doing so! What he claimed to be the case was a gross
misrepresentation of what Jesus was talking about that wasn’t even addressing
the Old Testament Scriptures, but the teaching of the religious elite.
I simply
want to bear witness to reading the Old and New Testaments myself, praying
through them, listening to what the Spirit is saying to the churches, and the
Scriptures radiate the authority of the God who breathed out these words.
Personal
Testimonies of the Authority of God’s Word
One
thing I have tried to do all through my Journal Journey in this book is show
how God ministers to me through his word each day. This is true of others who
do this as well and share what we are learning. Because I am writing these
conclusions over a few days or more, it is fascinating what Scriptures we cover
along the way, and what things are shared about them.
One
day someone shared from Zechariah 11 about God’s judgment on his people, and
when God spoke of annulling his covenant “with all the peoples” (vs 10), the
next verse says, “So it was annulled on that day, and the sheep traders, who
were watching me, knew that it was the word of the LORD” (vs 11). It was
so amazing to me how that was stated so that we could see how God spoke through
his prophet so that the people knew it was Yahweh speaking to them. That is the
way we ought to be towards the Bible, that God has spoken to us through men
carried along by the Holy Spirit, and Jesus’ sheep hear that it is HIS word in
the breathed-out words of God.
As I
have been listening to the Bible being read to me during my exercise mornings,
it has also been clear that I am constantly hearing dialogues with God and his
people. The people knew God was speaking to them. They knew when they had
turned away from Yahweh to serve other gods. It was clear and plain. I have
already shared many of these in my rebuttals to specific pages of the book, but
here is how God has been doing this for me as I try to write this section of my
conclusion.
I have
been in Matthew 24 for a week or so, prayer-journaling my way through Jesus’
talking to his disciples about their question, “Tell us, when will these things
be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (vs
3). Because of my focus on Brad Jersak’s false teachings for so many months, it
really stood out that the very first thing Jesus addressed to his disciples was
a warning, “See that no one leads you astray” (vs 4). He continues to speak of “false
prophets” (vs 9), and gives all kinds of descriptions of the things that will
unfold in the decades and centuries ahead (although the disciples did not know
the timeframe).
But
just this morning I came to this:
“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:36-39).
This is huge. Brad Jersak claims that any
part of the Bible he doesn’t like is figurative. He denies creation, the fall
into sin, and the worldwide flood even though they are all described in
historical terms in the Scriptures.
So, do we find Jesus joining him in treating
history as figurative? No, not in the least. Jesus speaks of the worldwide
flood of Noah’s day as history and equates that history from the past with the
future history of his return. He presents that the judgment that “came” then
was just as real as the “coming” that will come soon. Not only did Jesus NOT
correct Yahweh, or correct the history of the Old Testament, but he affirmed
it! And he rested the trustworthiness of his return on the trustworthiness of
the historical event of the flood.
Added to this is what I heard in God’s word
yesterday morning during my exercise time. I am always delighted to see how
much of the Bible I am “reading” while I exercise. I highly recommend it! I am
presently traveling through I Samuel, one of the books BJ especially dissed.
The first thing that stood out was the way
Samuel recited the history of God’s deliverance and care of his people as real
history, not allegory or figurative stories. Real people were involved. Real
people of one generation trusted, while real people of the next generation
turned to idols. It is all stated as real life.
There were some very affirming Scriptures
relating to personal experiences in the ensuing chapters, but when I got to
chapter 21, I found myself listening to something that Jesus had spoken of as
history. It is the scenario where David and his men were given the “bread of
the Presence” to eat. Did Jesus treat this as figurative, or as history?
At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.” (Matthew 12:1-8).
Jesus turned the men to what they had “read”,
meaning they had read out loud in the synagogues. He spoke of what happened
with David as real history. And he declared himself to be Lord of the Sabbath,
not to break it, but to live it as intended.
Again, just by reading Scripture, it becomes
so clear that Brad Jersak’s sniper attacks on the word of God are bogus, he has
missed his mark, and the Scriptures stand “living and active” as the
breathed-out words of God. JESUS SAID SO!
And one
last example: It stood out in Matthew 24:35 that Jesus said, “Heaven and earth
will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” These are the words we have
in Scripture, they are Jesus’ words, and they will not pass away. This fully
agrees with Yahweh his Father of whom it is said, “The grass withers, the
flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (Isaiah 40:8). Again,
Jesus did not correct his Father, but united with him in giving us the
breathed-out words that every generation of the church can live by.
The
Brad Jersak Boast of Bogusness
I’m
going to conclude this part of my conclusion on Brad Jersak’s “Unauthorized
Authority Assassinations” with a reminder of something the author shared about
himself in a bluff. I say a bluff because it is presented in black and white as
a statement about him, but in a way that he hoped no one would see was exactly
what his books are doing. When the author was making his false equivocation of
the “veil” Paul was speaking about in II Corinthians having to do with reading
the Scriptures (it really is speaking of what happens to us in salvation), he
spoke of Irenaeus presenting four stages the false teachers would follow:
1. The
false teachers would begin by gathering ideas from sources other than the
Scriptures.
2. From
these ideas, they would weave what he called “ropes of sand,” anchored to
nothing but fantasies.
3. To
make their ideas seem more probable, they would adapt scattered sayings from
the prophets, Christ’s parables, and the apostles to affirm their opinions.
4. And
thus, they would dismember the Scriptures and reassemble them according to
their deception (pp. 75-76).
After reading
through this whole debacle of a book, I can say by personal testimony,
eye-witness if you will, that Brad Jersak has done all four of these before our
very eyes in the “Emperor’s New Clothes” conspiracy to dupe God’s sheep into
following a wolf in sheep’s clothing. His sources are all from outside
Scripture. His ideas are “anchored to nothing but fantasies.” He picked “scattered
sayings from the prophets,” cherry-picked references to “Christ’s parables”,
and selected references from “the apostles” (misrepresented as they were) to
affirm his opinions. The result? That he has a trilogy of books that “dismember
the Scriptures and reassemble them according to their deception” (“their”
meaning the whole gang of BJs in their peddling of their false teachings).
Well,
that is enough for tonight. I do feel a righteous disdain for the evil way Brad
Jersak has dissed the Scriptures, dissed Yahweh, dissed Jesus Christ our Lord,
dissed the holy way of salvation, and succeeded to lead so many down the Emperor’s
garden path as Jesus said would happen. I hope that my thoroughness in speaking
of the integrity of Scripture as the “final authority” FROM Jesus Christ our
Lord encourages the “few” who have known all along that Brad Jersak’s books
stink with uncleanness to get back onto the straight and narrow and continue
living by every word that comes from the mouth of God as we now have those
words collected into the glorious Book called, “The Bible”.
© 2024
Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the
English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text
Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of
Good News Publishers.)
A More Christlike Word © 2021 by Bradley Jersak Whitaker House 1030 Hunt
Valley Circle • New Kensington, PA 15068 www.whitakerhouse.com
Jersak, Bradley. A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the
Emmaus Way. Whitaker House. Kindle Edition.
Definitions from the Bible Sense Lexicon (BSL) in Logos Bible Systems
[1]
The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen
https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes/
[2]
Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology. Edited by Walter A. Elwell
Copyright © 1996 by Walter A. Elwell. Published by
Baker Books, a division of
Baker Book House Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan USA.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Amen
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