Cults 101 (part 3)

I've just asked for some help from someone to pass out a couple of things, if someone could assist, please.

And gentlemen, if there aren't enough copies, there should be. If there aren't, feel free to make some additional copies.

Now while these get passed out, I know I'm going to lose probably 90 % of you as you start looking through them. So take a moment if you want to take a look.

It's just some material for you, really. It's kind of a takeaway, if we have some time at the end of class, we can talk a little bit about some of these items, if you have questions or anything else.

But this talks about some of the terminology differences, and again, I've tried to put the two, Mormonism and Jehovah's Witness, along with what the

Bible has to say. And I do want to put a caveat, you'll see at the bottom here, there's a footnote, this is not my material, so I just want to reference, this is actually from the

Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, it's also called CARM, C -A -R -M. And they often do research in various things regarding different religions, and they've got a whole section.

And the third page, so this is a two -sided page that you guys will have, the third page is just a quick chart.

Again, this is not full of all the different cults out there in the world by any means.

This just talks about some of the areas, again, this is not my doing, this also comes from the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry.

It's interesting because there isn't a lot of detail on cults out there such as this, so it's hard to find this type of material.

There are some that will happily sell you some of the material and so forth, but these guys do a good job at some of it.

So this is just an overview, so if you have an understanding or need to understand what some of these cults hold to, that's what that's provided for.

And then while you kind of scan through that and get going here, and I get myself going here a little bit just because I was not ready myself.

So some of you may be aware, MIT just recently released this new technology to kind of scan through and look through documents and pull together, some of you may know something called big data or metadata if you're in the computer industry.

And they actually have a kind of an interesting thing, if you haven't seen this in the news or haven't gone to their site and seen it, it's pretty neat, but they actually have the, just to warm you guys all up, the 10 most famous people in the last 6 ,000 years.

Guess who number one is? Who? No. No.

Who? No. Not even Darwin. No. No. Wow, you guys are all over the place, but good, good.

Let me give you the first one, Aristotle. Kind of interesting. Now what this data is pulled from, just to let you know, because I'll give you a little bit of details, but the data is actually pulled from records across both the internet and published works.

They kind of scan through it and they find where various people's names come up. So Aristotle is over the 6 ,000 years of materials that they have,

Aristotle's number one. Who's number two, do you think? Nope. Nope.

We'll get to Joseph Smith. No. Nope. Not even on the top 10.

Plato. Plato. Number two. Plato, number two. Who's number three?

Come on. Jesus. Jesus. There we go. See, that's what you wanted to say, right? Third? Yeah, that's exactly what you were saying, third.

So Jesus Christ, not just Jesus, but Jesus Christ, is the third most famous person in the last 6 ,000 years.

Pretty interesting, I thought. Then we have Socrates or Socrates, as some people will say, Alexander the

Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Confucius, Julius Caesar, Homer, and Pythagoras.

Kind of interesting. So Jesus Christ, which is kind of, when they pull this data all together, a lot of it comes also out of Wikipedia and views and other types of things, so it's not solely

Wikipedia. But what's kind of interesting, I thought, out of all the page views for Jesus Christ since 2008, 60 ,299 ,092.

Here, give or take a few, I'm sure. So pretty popular, and English page views, only about 25 ,000, so less than a quarter of those were, or a little over a quarter of those were

English compared to non -English at 34 ,000, which was kind of interesting, even more non -English people viewing the word

Jesus Christ. So with that said, they do have a means of being able to look up the top religious figures over 6 ,000 years.

Guess who number one is? Religious figures. Jesus Christ, yeah.

So that, I would say, all right, good job. Ranked number one, Jesus Christ. Number two was

Moses. Guess who's the number three? Jesus, Moses, Muhammad.

Where did I see that? I'm sorry. Where did the boys come from? Wow, way back there, Bruce. Muhammad, yes. Muhammad. Then we have

Abraham. Then we have Martin Luther. Then we have Paul of Tarshish.

Then we have Solomon. We have Mary as number eight. We have

Saint Peter. And then John the Baptist is number 10, ranking out the top 10. John the

Baptist is the 10th. So out of these rankings, Joseph Smith, where do you think they rank?

We have a total out of this 514 entries. Where do you think Joseph Smith is? Any guesses?

11? No, not that good. Joseph Smith is actually 427th.

Billy Graham, 482. Brigham Young from Brigham Young University, 488.

And out of the 514 top, Sung Yong Moon, 500.

So we're way down there. So those are just some of the various leaders, cult leaders. I wouldn't say

Billy Graham is a cult leader, so don't get me wrong there. I just wanted to kind of reference it with some others, where he fell within this chain of most religious figures over the past 6 ,000 years.

But Jesus Christ, number one. So that's just to warm you up since you were all looking at your other sheets here and not paying attention to me anyways for the first part of class.

Someone else had mentioned to me today, they just wanted to know again what the book, some of the materials come from. This, again,

I had mentioned this the first week I was teaching. This is what the cults believe. This is

Ivan Robinson. This is his expanded edition. This is by Moody Press. This is a really good book in the way that it's a fairly simple read.

It's not a very academic book per se. He goes through it. It actually was published first in 1983. This is updated,

I believe, in 92. So it's ancient in book days. But what they do is they talk about, you know, he does some main things, main reasons why cults are what they are.

And then he kind of breaks them down into Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, Sun Yung Moon, Worldwide Church of God, The Way International, Hinduism -based movement,

New Age movement, Scientology, Christian Science, Spiritualism. We all hear that one, right?

I'm not religious. I'm spiritual. Spiritualism. And then the current movement, he goes into various areas, the

Unified School of Christianity, the I Am Movement, Baha 'iism, Swedenborganism, the

Church of the New Jerusalem, and a few others. So it's actually a pretty good book. If you're interested in reading it, it's, again, more of a light read.

It's a decent book to go through. So what the cults believe. So I also was told last week, and I didn't realize why

Steve was hurrying me up, that the clock was broken and I was really close to the time that I was supposed to have ended about 10 minutes earlier.

So if I keep looking at the clock today, you'll know I don't have to go somewhere. I just want to make sure

I'm on time. So I don't want to get yelled at again. All right.

So some overview. So we talked a little bit about what cults were in the past two sessions. We talked about what

Christianity was, number one, last week, really to get a baseline. And the sheet that you have, as you'll see, and, again,

I'm going to take your attention off, but the sheet that you have here at the very top line is Christianity. And this is the true baseline that we here are measuring all these other cults and anything else that we discuss against.

So this is a pretty good diagram in dealing with that. So when we talk about cults, cults specifically go around from a

Christian perspective. Now, there was some discussion earlier, and a couple of you will come up to me in the past, give a little bit of a story here regarding Rome.

And a few other people had mentioned, what about Rome? You haven't talked about Rome. You talk about, you know, Mormonism.

You talk about Baha 'ism. You talk about some of those. What about Rome? Isn't Rome a cult? And I would say, based on the definition both in Ivan Robinson's book here and in the

Kingdom of the Cults book, and by just about any other definition of cults, from a

Christian perspective, Rome would be considered a cult. Based on their theology, their doctrines, what they hold to, what they adhere to,

Rome would be considered a cult to Orthodox Christianity. So just to adhere,

I'm not skirting the issue. It's not the strength of what we're talking about here.

Most of the material, again, talks about more Jehovah's Witness, Mormonism, and other areas like that.

I will tell you that when I was in school studying this, and our cult teacher, I spoke to some of you about this before, when

I took the class on cults, we had to go to two different groups, two different cults, and sit in in their worship services.

And we were to bring another brother or two with us, and I'm kind of glad we did. But I went to a

Jehovah's Witness kingdom, and it was a unique experience. It matched a lot of what

I had expected based on the reading materials. But then kind of as a stab to my instructor, I said, well, can

I just go to the Catholic church? Because I actually grew up Catholic, for those who weren't aware of that.

So I knew what mass was, and he said, well, everybody knows what a mass is. Why don't you go to somewhere a little bit different?

So he didn't say it wasn't a cult, but at the same time, he kind of said, we all know what mass is.

So again, based on definition, Rome would be considered a cult, if we look at it from a theological perspective.

So we talked a little bit about where I ended quickly. I just want to make sure I had my notes here.

We talked about doctrines. We talked about beliefs. We talked about a lot of the current movement today, both

Mormonism and even Jehovah's Witness in some ways, not as much as Mormonism, are trying to be seen as mainstream

Orthodox Christian. And yet their doctrines, as we read a little bit last week, are very, very different.

And in most cases, or in all cases between Mormonism and Jehovah's Witness, their doctrines and even Rome says that the other churches are apostate.

And the teachings are apostate. So what we say is, in essence, if you're going to try to hold to such things, at least stick to your own doctrines.

Don't try to merge and blend and get in and work with others and try to befriend everyone so they'll come into.

At least stick with your doctrines. Understand what your doctrines say. And there was someone who had a pretty good quote before.

I like sharing it because I think it's pretty funny. They said it's similar to someone who goes to a pita meeting with a fresh steak that they're eating.

If you're going to believe something, believe in it all the way. Be in it wholeheartedly. Understand the doctrine and everything else.

You can't be a hypocrite like a person eating meat at a pita meeting would be.

You need to adhere to the doctrines. So we just say, if you're Mormon, adhere to the

Mormon doctrines. And we'll get into the theological side. So don't get me wrong. I'm not saying go and enjoy being a

Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness or wherever else it might be. We talked about quickly, because, again, time was running out, areas around cults and how we're to deal with them.

And the book laid out eight different ways. And I'm just going to quickly name these again. This is just all overview.

You're not to argue with a cult member. Again, most of these members that come knocking on your door and you open the door, they believe what they're teaching you.

They're not trying to be deceptive. Most of the time it's the leadership where deception occurs and they're teaching people what they want to, what they believe in essence.

So what we want to ensure is we're not arguing with the individual. We don't want to put up the walls, the barriers as we look to evangelize people who come knocking on our doors.

The second thing is we don't want to ridicule the cultists. And I think it's not a difficult thing for us as a group of believers here at BBC because if we really understand what we believe or what we deserve and what

God has granted us, why would we want to ridicule someone who we know where they had been at one time we were the same?

We don't want to degrade the cult leader. And it makes sense. If someone were to tell you and make fun of or degrade

Jesus Christ, immediately you're probably going to put up a barrier. You're going to put up a wall. You're going to stop. You're not going to want to listen to them.

And it's offensive in most cases. So degrading the cult leader is not a way to win your friends.

And, again, we're not saying that's what we're intending to do. Fourth, he talks about using the word of God. Again, I would have put that a little bit higher but pull out the word of God.

And in most cases, as we go digging through some of this, you'll see they have their own translations. And they'll say our translations are flawed.

If you have a great interlinear type of Bible or if you've got a Greek Bible or a Hebrew Bible or various translations that you can show, it actually is one good way of showing them where their

Bible may be incorrect or where it may have been worded incorrectly. Give your own testimony. Again, the cults often will use this too.

It is give your own testimony. Because how can someone argue with something felt right or it was right in my heart or something else?

But oftentimes when they talk about giving your own testimony here, again, as we talked last week briefly, is not a testimony about how great

I am, but it's how great Christ is for saving me. It's sharing the gospel and it's your ability to be able to preach and teach to these people who have come to your door.

Exalt Jesus Christ, as I talked about, is number six here. Depend upon the Holy Spirit is number seven.

And then number eight is know what the cults believe. And that's one of the reasons I just kind of printed up these materials for you so you can get a quick overview there.

And then apart from the two, what do they believe about the Bible? What do they believe about salvation? What do they believe about heaven?

And again, as we talked about before, this is a terminology difference. So what this is trying to show is when you talk to a

Mormon about salvation, this is what they believe salvation is. When you talk to a

Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness about the Holy Ghost, this is what they believe compared to what the Scripture says.

So there is a very big difference in terminology. So if you just start talking and you talk, you know, well,

Holy Spirit and Jesus and grace and so forth, they may be shaking their head.

Yeah, I believe that. Sure, I believe that. Sure. So, again, definition of terms is pretty critical.

So I was talking to someone else also as I was walking out last week, and they said, you know, so what are we supposed to do?

What do we do, right? We've got these eight steps. What are we supposed to do? And, you know, I want to lay it out and say, well, what does

Scripture tell us to do? So here's where we're going to get into some Scripture. So have your Bibles out. Anyone who has these guys, you know, in their hand, put them down and listen and grab your

Bibles. Who wants to read for me 2 Corinthians 11, 3 through 4?

2 Corinthians 11, 3 through 4. Anyone?

All right, Bob, please. 3 through 4, 11, 3 through 4, yes.

Okay? So what is this verse telling us? Not how does it make you feel. What is this verse telling us?

If we look at context, what is this verse telling us? Wow, we've got a sleepy group today.

Anybody? Yeah, Bob. Yeah, and what are we supposed to do with the true

Jesus, the true spirit, and the true gospel? What are we striving?

So we understand that these are there. There are people out here preaching these other areas, and yet we're to defend the faith.

We are to defend what the Bible says. Let me just see.

I had Matthew. Who wants to read Matthew 7, 15 through 20? Matthew 7, 15 through 20.

Matthew 7, 1, everybody knows. Judge not lest ye be judged. But how about Matthew 7, 15 through 20?

Who wants to read that quick? Yes. 7, 15 through 20,

Matthew. Matthew, please. So what's Matthew talking about here in the very first part,

Matthew 7, 15? Beware of what? So why was it important to beware of false prophets in that time, even our time?

What was important about false prophets? There were lots of them, and what were they doing?

They were deceiving, right? In what way? How were they deceiving people? Bad doctrine, preaching a different gospel, right?

Galatians talks about that even, Galatians 1. Even if an angel comes and preaches a different gospel, right? Which is kind of interesting because Joseph Smith got the tablets from who?

From an angel, right? He got them from an angel. So that one you can always pull out when you have them.

I'm just kidding. We have Jude that talks about defending the faith.

And it doesn't talk about defending faiths, plural. It talks about the faith, right? Jude 3 through 4 talks about that.

We have in Acts 20, 28 through 32, talks about paying attention to the flock.

This is actually in the church even. They're talking about be aware that there are going to be wheats and tares within the body itself.

So with some of that, what are the main reasons or why do we even have a problem with cults? Why don't we just let them do what they're going to do?

Yes, sir. Okay.

I would agree with that. Anything else? They're damning people to hell, right?

With deception. And it truly is the case. So they may be out there doing good.

They may be trying to do good. And so, again, some of these people who are in these cults, again, don't understand what they're even in at most cases.

So they're leading people astray through their missions. One source says this, cult missionaries can be found in virtually every country where evangelicals are ministering.

In those countries where Christianity is not the dominant religion, indigenous populations are often unable to distinguish legitimate

Christian witness and the outreach of cultists because the later often claims to be

Christian and invokes the Bible as their source of authority. Now, if you take a look at your sheet, again, that I provided you, and you can even look at the very first one here, under the terminology

Christianity, the Bible is the sole reason or the sole material that we leverage, right?

So the Scriptura. And yet Mormonism and Jehovah's Witness have their own other materials added.

And it's hard because when people say, again, we hold the Bible as our source of an authority per se for the cults, most people who are uneducated don't even understand what that means.

It's also said that there are more missionaries from these cult groups being sent out today than those of the

Christian faith, and I mentioned that briefly last time. Let me give you just a little bit of statistics.

I'm a numbers guy, if you couldn't tell from my earlier introduction. But an estimated 5 to 7 million

Americans have been involved in cults or cult -like groups. The total number of these ranges from 3 ,000 to 5 ,000 number of groups, cult -like groups, 3 ,000 to 5 ,000 cult -like groups.

And it's hard to get a precise number on cult as they change their names frequently, they splinter off into other groups, they shut down in one area and open up in another area.

It says that there are approximately 180 ,000 new cult recruits every year.

Now those statistics are about 10 years old, so I would have to say that's actually growing quite a bit more than what that even states there.

There was another quote here from a source that says that there are over 3 ,000 destructive cults in the

U .S. with approximately 4 million members. Now a destructive cult, as we talked about a little bit last week, a destructive cult is more focused on, you think of like the

David Koreshes, you think of the

Jonestown, yeah I said Jamestown last time, that's not correct.

Heaven's Gate was the other one, yeah. So those are more what are called destructive cults. So there are over 3 ,000 destructive cults being tracked, and this is through the

CIA's information as to what they track from groups of people and so forth. And I'm sure they have more data on that now.

One Mormon source stated this, there are 53 ,000 young missionaries currently combing the world today, including 170 of those covering parts of Virginia alone.

These are missionaries, Mormon missionaries. Individual Jehovah's Witness missionaries on average dedicate over 120 hours a month to evangelizing for their cause, 120 hours a month.

So how many hours a month do you put in evangelizing the Christian faith? Let me give a couple other quick numbers here.

Again, these are a little bit old because the statistics have not been updated. This is based on demographic data, so from the

U .S. census. Catholic Church, census data, and again this is low.

It actually has increased over a 10 -year period by 11%, and it is currently at, again these numbers are about 10 years old, currently at 74 ,796 ,000.

Mormons at 3 .8 million, Church of Christ 3 .6

million, and Jehovah's Witness 1 .8 million. So why are these cults so successful?

Why are they successful? Why aren't people beating down the doors here to hear the gospel?

Why are these cults so successful? Yes. Okay. And not many people want the gospel, right?

Gospel is offensive to those who are unsaved. Not many people want to hear the gospel.

Okay, that's good. I think that's good. Any other reasons why people would want to? Yeah. You had a key word there too.

You know what the key word was? Earn, right? Do. Do, do, do.

And again, you've probably heard this many, many times, but do, do, do in Christianity is the only religion of done, right?

Yeah, it's done. We don't have to do anything. What we do is out of our passion for what

Christ has already done on our behalf, right? So number one, a lot of these cults are playing with the emotions of people, which is a key area.

People in need, as we talked about. People who are hurting. Soup kitchens, areas of shelters, women's shelters, and so forth.

A lot of these are being run today by various, quote -unquote, religious groups or cult groups.

That's one way that they're able to get a lot of members involved.

So we looked a little bit about what the Bible says about cults. False teachers are here.

They will come. They'll continue to exist. So no matter what we do, even if we try to squash them out or, you know, whatever we could do to get rid of cults,

Scripture says that there will be false teachers, false prophets, all the way through to the end of time.

Fruits will be apparent. What are some of these fruits, do you think, that would be apparent? Cults.

Promotion of themselves. Promotion usually of the individual, if it's more of a personality cult. So versing

God's glory. So putting the focus on themselves or on the group. Bruce, was there a hand up back there?

Yes. And we'll talk a little bit about that as we get in a little bit deeper. We'll talk about some of that. Let's see if I've got a lot of different verses.

Let's see. Okay. Let's get into this section instead.

How are we doing time -wise here? I don't want to get yelled at. So what are the hard issues dealing with the cults?

What are the hard issues with the cults? We talked a little bit about this. Who knows what are the hard issues with the cults?

Some of it, I'll give you a hint, is in this material. Yeah, they are very indoctrinated, and you will find that, especially the missionaries when they do come knocking on your door.

They're told they cannot take anything from you. They cannot listen to you. Even if you say, well, you know, you come in and I'll give the gospel.

I'll listen to your message and so forth. They're not allowed to do that. And that's one way that they'll usually leave.

But for this sheet here, what is this sheet dealing with here, the very first sheet, and even the second? Yeah. Terms of the same definitions are different.

So the language barrier, what words mean, and as I have it marked here on my notes, playing the semantic game.

It's all around semantic. Because, again, when you talk about Jesus Christ, so on your second page here, when

I talk about Jesus Christ, you'll see the Mormon looks at it very differently, the person of Jesus Christ, spirit brother of Satan.

He is a God in the Godhead. He is not the God. He is Jehovah of the

Old Testament compared. Let's see, where was it here? Well, let's go Jehovah's Witness.

Jesus is not God, but Michael the archangel who became a man and stopped being a man and became an angel again.

So when you talk about Jesus, those are some of the differences from a termist perspective, right? Pre -existence, what even the gospel message means.

So the language barrier is very big. It's a big issue that needs to be addressed. The second item, not only the language barrier, the second item, who remembers what

Eric preached, I want to say, two weeks ago? Anyone here from Sunday school two weeks ago, Eric Johanson?

What did he preach? What? Context. Context.

Context, right? Context, context, context. Oftentimes what you'll find are the cults are taking things out of context.

So even though they may say, well, yeah, here's our Bible. Let's look and let's read, you know, John 1, 1.

When they open up their Bibles to John 1, 1 and they start reading it, you're going to find out that context is a big issue.

And oftentimes when they're quoting verses, have them go back and read it in context and make sure what they're reading is in context, what it truly is being said.

So context is the number one rule of hermeneutics. And I'm not going to take away Eric's class.

Hermeneutics is key. Context, context, context. Question, yes?

No, I didn't see you at first. I'm sorry. Yeah, please. It's a combination of the two.

So oftentimes, and I have a whole section on that, oftentimes what it ends up being is they have a prescribed notion of where they want to go with their doctrines.

And to match their doctrines, Scripture does not often do that. So they have to modify either the interpretation of how they interpret those verses and or add to the text.

And we'll see that Jehovah's Witness do that in John 1, 1, where they put the word a God instead of Jesus as God.

They put Jesus a God. So that's nowhere in Greek. That's nowhere in Hebrew, right?

There's no text that has that, but their translation has it. And they say that they can get that out of the

Greek. And so it's a mixed area, but oftentimes it's bad hermeneutics.

And I have a notion or an agenda that I want to achieve in my religious doctrine, and I'll make sure the text meets that.

And if not, I'll add additional texts which deal with that. Correct.

Yeah, we talked two, three weeks ago, whatever it was. Yeah, we kind of had the argument is, you know, in essence, if it's not

Christianity, if it's not God -driven and God -focused, it is satanic in nature. It's not that we're worshipping, you know, that they're worshipping demons and things of that sort.

But in essence, they're not worshipping the one true God, so the only other worship they have is doctrines of demons, right?

So good question, because it does. It is definitely a mix, and it really depends on the groups that you study.

The personality cults, it's just a mess of interpretation for those, because, again, it's all about the personality.

Jim Jones is, David Koresh is in those types. You've got the others like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses.

If I remember right, the Jehovah's Witnesses, their translation of this Bible was done from a paraphrase by one man who then did some reinterpretation.

So there was no accountability in their translation as to how this text came about, where something like the

ESV or the NASB or any of our modern -day translations, right, there's a staff of people that are involved in the interpretation of Scripture to ensure that it's correct.

You've got one man interpreting. He's got an agenda. He's going to read into the text, and we'll talk about that. So there's a difference between eisegesis, taking out of the text, and exegesis and eisegesis, which is applying what your beliefs are to the text.

Okay? Bob? Yeah? They were indeed.

They were indeed. Blacks were blacks because of sin. They were a sinful group. Yeah, you don't get a lot of members nowadays with the doctrines that they were holding, so they modify it, man's religion, they modify it to a point that it's more palatable, at least in our society.

Yes. Agreed. Agreed.

Yeah. Yeah. Without looking at all the others because you see there isn't all that happy, friendly, everything else that goes on in the

Mormon church a lot of times. All right. How are we looking at time?

So we talked about redefinition of words. I'm sorry. Did that answer your question back there too? Okay. Yes. Boy, you're going to get me in trouble now, aren't you, up here?

So, you know, in some ways you could by definition claim that.

I mean, then you get into heresy, heretic, bad teacher. You know, it's hard to say only for the fact that, and I don't want to water this down.

I'm just trying to think of the best way to respond. I would say yes if he's truly trying to do it as a means of deception to the followers.

I think most of the followers of Olsteen are not mature or are not Christians.

And they want, right, he tickles their ears with what they want to hear. Apart from some heretics, you know, he doesn't preach the true gospel.

He doesn't even preach the gospel. So, I'll go on record saying, in essence, he would be like a personality cult or a personality cult, if you wanted to define it that way.

Yes. Yeah. Would you agree? Disagree? Put you on the spot.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, he will say that he adheres to specific doctrines.

Again, I think his preaching is extremely weak. I don't think that he's looking to preach the gospel.

He knows that if he did, he would lose a bunch of his people that follow him. So, that's a tough one.

And, you know, I'm not here to poke at anybody again. But, yeah,

I would say so. Do I have another hand over there? Yes. Yeah, and that's where, so I look at it from a personality cult.

He is not a controlling figure, right? He has influence. He's very charismatic.

So, I think people follow him for that purpose. But I don't think he's trying. And as we define a little bit more, if I have five more minutes, what you'll find in a personality cult, it's going to be a little more specific from a controlling perspective, where they're controlling everything.

And I'll get to that in just a second, where you'll see. And, you know, these people have free will to either go and listen to him or not listen to him, like anyone else, right?

You can turn on TBN if you want to. I wouldn't recommend it. But you can turn it on if you want to and watch it, right?

So, it's not a controlling thing that way. If I want to be silly enough to send people money or something to that extent, you know, bad on me for that purpose.

But let me define a little bit more, and maybe that will answer your question for you. Was there another question over here? Yeah. Sure. Heterodox instead of orthodox.

And I'm just saying it again so people can hear you. Yes. Yes.

Correct. And their leader is like almost the Pope of Rome, in essence. The leader of the

Mormon Church is the say on any doctrine. So, if a doctrine needs to be changed, all he has to do is say,

God said it and it's true, as in it's been changed. So, there is the means of the

Mormon Church easily and quickly changing doctrines for what needs to be done.

There was a section on extra -biblical materials.

And I had just a quote here. So, as you look through some of the cults and other areas, they have extra -biblical materials. They have materials outside of the

Bible. And the question I had here that some others have asked, well, does that mean that I can't use a commentary?

Does that mean I can't use a Bible dictionary? Because that's all extra -biblical material. Should we only be studying the

Scripture as the Scripture says? And the answer would be, okay.

Correct. And I think that's the key, right? The authority to Scripture. We do have extra -biblical materials, right? Anyone who's preached has studied through commentaries,

Bible dictionaries, historical materials and so forth. But again, the authority comes down to the

Scripture itself where a cult is going to take the authority is usually Scripture and then we'll put the

Pearl of Great Price on top of that. And they will pile on top and Scripture is on the bottom, right?

So that's kind of a difference. So I just wanted to clear it up in case someone says, well, we use extra -biblical material.

Again, that's not what we're talking about. So I want to just quickly touch on a couple of things from a psychological perspective.

And again, we're not a church around psychology at all, but I did want to kind of look at it, just take a step out from the

Christian perspective as to cults. And this may answer your question around Olsteen a little bit better.

They use a definition of terms. They use an acronym called BITE, B -I -T -E.

And BITE, when something bites you, you usually don't like it, or I don't. So BITE is a secular, non -Christian model that's often referred to when they want to categorize cults.

The first letter in the word BITE is behavior control. How do they control one's behaviors?

How are you influencing people and their behaviors? Church of Scientology is a key one in this area.

Unification Church is another one. Christian Science is another one. Very, very controlling of one's behavior.

Very, very focused on what you can and cannot do from a behavior perspective. I, in BITE, what do you think that is?

Behavior. What else are you going to control? Close.

Pull that out just a little bit. Close again.

Information. So information is the second thing that they're going to often control.

Information, that would be things such as newspaper, TV, what they can watch, what they can't watch.

This helps in the use of deception. Books, articles, movies, paper, magazines.

I don't know how many magazines and newspapers still exist. But those things, radio, TV, all the critical information is being controlled.

T in BITE is thought control. So you're going to control one's behavior.

You're going to control the information they get. Then you're going to give them control over what they can think, what they can do.

And this is, again, I have just a note here, maps to reality. So how they map to reality. What truth is.

These are things that are being taught. There's only black and white thinking. And then the last one is

E. And E is emotional control. This is manipulation.

Narrowing the range of a person's feelings. Excessive use of guilt. And you'll find if you study the cults in any detail, guilt is a key area.

And yet Christianity, we know up front we have guilt. And then we see that Jesus Christ is forgiven it.

The weight is off. And yet the cults often will use guilt, fear, extreme emotional highs and lows.

Again, you'll see this with the personality cults more than anything else. Phobia indoctrinations. Rituals and public confessions of sin often.

Excessive use of fear. Loss of family. Loss of job. Outside world.

What's going on? So, again, I don't want to go into a bunch of areas from a psychology area, but bite is a pretty good solution that the external world, the non -Christian world has leveraged when it looks at various cults.

There were four signs also. So not only in bite, but there's four signs that they kind of classify with cults, and this may help answer your question, is closed -mindedness is number one.

Most cults will have closed -mindedness. They actually will have a personal level of Christian antagonism.

They are antagonistic to Christians. Why would anyone want to be antagonistic to Christians? Because it's the truth.

People don't want to hear the truth, right? They don't want to hear what is true out there.

We're intolerant. We're bigots. Dogmatism and intolerance of others' beliefs.

So that's often a case that we see in even the cults. A lot of them will be very dogmatic about their own beliefs.

And the fourth, which is kind of key, and you see this with a lot of the personality cults more than anything else, is isolation, isolate.

And you see it also with oftentimes Mormonism and even some of the more recent cults, Mormonism, not recent, but more modern -day cults that we think of today, where isolation is you can only associate with those in your own group.

And we see that here. We just have the body of believers, right? We get together. We love talking about Jesus Christ and what he's done.

So it makes sense, yet most of these groups want to isolate you from everything else, isolate you from your friends that are nonbelievers in their cult, isolate you from family that are nonbelievers in that cult, and so forth.

So there's this isolation. We instead say, no, you can still fellowship with them, even bring them here if you want, but we would not see that form of isolation.

Am I doing it on time? All right, I'm running low on time here. I didn't even get to the theological issues around cults.

Any questions, comments? Not from the corner over there since they're hard ones. Any easy comments or questions?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

And if that's all a person is feeding on, right, it can match into that area where it is very similar to a cult.

Yet there is freedom where you'll find with a personality cult, someone that's very focused personality cult, again, David Koresh's and things like that, you don't escape the cult, right?

You are a part of it. It is you, and if you try to escape, bad things can happen sometimes where someone like Olsteen or whatever else, you have the option to leave.

You may not want to, again, because of your own immaturity, one, but your own understanding of what Christianity is.

You have the option to turn it off. You may like it because it's all you know, right? That's what you want to feed on.

Yeah. He's got real white teeth.

Dress is really nice too. Yeah, and if you've ever seen some of these, you can go on YouTube, I think, and even type in like Joel Olsteen.

I wouldn't say watch his stuff, but you can watch where people will be outside and evangelize. They stand outside of the conferences and they're handing out tracts to the people who are coming.

You know, the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, are coming out of the stadiums where he preaches to give them the

Word of God because they understand that they're not saved in most cases, right? They're there to be entertained.

Charlie? Three, two, five out of seven, right?

How would you guys like that? We call you every day? Yeah. Yeah, and you'll find,

I mean, again, I have it in some of my notes if we ever go further, but where telling on others inside the cult is a huge issue, right?

And yet the Scripture talks about gossip and other areas, and yet that's what these cults are wanting to do because they want to squash any of these types of things that may go in.

You know, the people that are talking or speaking or whatever else or wanting to leave or, you know, it's the fear that they want to control these people, and it's behavior control in most cases, right?

Any other questions? I thought I saw something over here. Yes? Seventh Day at Venice? Depends on who you talk to.

Everything I've read, Seventh Day at Venice would be considered a cult based on their doctrine, based on where their doctrine came from.

Now, you will see that there are Seventh Day at Venice that are changing their doctrine. I haven't read anything that talks about that they've split where you've got, like, an

Orthodox Seventh Day at Venice and a traditional Seventh Day at Venice. Traditional, I mean, standard

Seventh Day at Venice, their doctrine, again, they don't hold Scripture solely to the authority, right?

They're Sabbatarians. There's other issues in their doctrine that they run into, but they've been classified as a cult for a long, long time.

I think they're trying to change that doctrinally. Not like the Mormons are. I think they're actually trying to change their doctrine to be more

Orthodox in cases that I've seen, at least. But that's as much as I know from the group.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think they're definitely trying to get away from that doctrine and move away and try to go towards Scripture, but it is more of a splintering type of thing,

I think, than anything else. Becky, was there something over here? Did you have? Oh. Yes. Yeah, when we talked about various sects or denominations, there are groups that have gone either liberal or completely heretical from Christian Orthodoxy.

They've completely slid the other direction. A lot of times, again, that's because people want to have their ears tickled rather than hear the gospel.

We're running low. Unless there's one other question? Okay. Let me go ahead and we'll pray, and we'll pray for all those people involved in cults.

Lord Jesus, we want to thank you now for this opportunity that we've been able to talk amongst ourselves and to learn a little bit more about the various cults.

Lord, we pray that as we know again what our standing was prior to you coming down and saving us,

Lord, we would have been just as lost as many of these who are seeking to be involved or who are currently involved in cults.

And we would pray that you would be with them, that you would give them the strength, touch them with your own grace and your mercy.

Lord, we thank you for your patience in allowing them to come to the knowledge, Lord, if that be your will, that they would be taken from these various cult groups.

And Lord, we just understand from your scripture that cults will be around for as long as time will be.

Lord, we just need to know how to understand them and how to deal with them. Most of all, Lord, when they do come knocking on the door, that we would be bold to give the scripture and the gospel message as these people who are involved in these various groups, that is what they need to hear more than anything else.

And we want to thank you and we want to praise you for all those here today that were listening. And we ask this now in your holy and precious name.