The Gospel According to Oprah — Erwin Lutzer

Contemporary Teachers of Humanity's Divinity

In order to expose this lie, I'm using two people who have recently received a lot of exposure on the Oprah Winfrey program. I'm thinking, for example, of Hector, Eckhart, I should say, Eckhart Tolle, and also Marianne Williamson.

A Course in Miracles and Automatic Writing

Eckhart, whose book I read last week, his book is entitled The New Earth. Marianne Williamson has written a commentary on a book that I read many years ago, at least read parts of it, entitled A Course in Miracles.

That book, which I again checked out of the library a week ago, must be at least 600 or maybe even 1 ,000 pages. That book was actually written by what is known as automatic writing. In the preface, the author, Helen Schuchman, says that she was not the author of this book, she was simply the scribe.

Automatic writing is this. What happens is you write things that actually bypass your consciousness. They are not things that you are thinking about or thinking up, but rather a spirit guide comes along and actually dictates to you through your writing what you are to put down.

This is common in occult circles. Now she says it wasn't automatic writing in the sense that she had to write. Theoretically, she could have stopped writing, and her book was actually written over a long period of time, and then after she wrote, she began to contemplate what she was writing.

But the book itself was written by automatic writing, and the same can be true of Neil Walsh's book, Conversations with God. The very same thing, a spirit came along, a spirit guide, and he began to write the dictation that the spirit gave him.

Satan's Lie in the Garden of Eden

Now with that introduction, what I want us to do is to understand the lie. And like so many things, it all begins in the Garden of Eden, where Satan has a series of lies, actually four, but one of them is the lie, and all of the others have to become a part of it.

And so if you have your Bibles, please turn to Genesis chapter 3. Genesis chapter 3 is a passage that I have preached on many times before. Some of this I've pointed out to you, but it needs to be retaught, particularly in light of the new dynamics and the new exposure to the lie.

The serpent, of course, comes to Adam and Eve, and he comes in a disguise. He does not come as the devil. He comes as a serpent, which in those days before the fall, evidently, was a being that elicited no fear whatever.

If Satan were to come down the aisle of a church and say, I am the devil and I am here to deceive you, we'd be frightened out of our wits and we would run. But if he comes in a business suit, if he comes in a nice book, I was on the radio this week with someone who's a professor who said that he goes from church to church and people are using these books even in evangelical churches to see the wonderful depths that are in them.

If he comes that way, nobody is afraid. Why should you be? Because what he has to say does not appear to be deceptive at all. It seems in some sense to be reasonable. So he comes as the serpent and he comes with four lies and in verses four and five, actually, those four phrases are four lies.

The Promise to Be Like God

And I'm going to jump right into the very first one, which is really the lie. Satan comes to Adam and Eve and says, you shall not surely die. He says, God knows that in the day that you eat of the forbidden fruit, your eyes shall be opened.

And now here is the first lie. You shall be like God. You shall be like God. Now, if you're Adam and Eve standing there, in what sense can you be like God? Can you be like God in the sense that you're the creator of the sun, the moon, the stars?

No, that's impossible and almost unthinkable. But if you say that everything is God, as pantheism does and future generations, we're going to say, if you say that everything is God, nature is God, and God is all and all is God.

Well, then there's a sense in which you can say that you are God as well. And in that sense, we are all God. And we're reminded of Shirley MacLaine running onto Malibu Beach. I'm God, I'm God, I'm God.

Eckhart Tolle's Higher Consciousness

And so the lie was born. The divinity of man is the lie. Eckhart Tolle, in his book, says this, just so that you grasp what all the buzz is about. He says that in this world of consciousness, in this world, we have all of these hurts and all of these regrets and all of this pain.

But if we are able to go into another dimension, a dimension of human consciousness, it would be almost, and this is my illustration, not his, like being able to switch on a television set. First of all, you're on channel five, and then you use the zapper and you can switch into channel seven.

And in that other realm, that parallel universe that you can connect to, you can live in a different dimension. And if you live in the now, that was one of the titles of his first book, The Power of Now.

If you live in the now, you can transcend all of this pain and you can be at peace. And that's what he teaches. So what is this higher form of consciousness that he and others talk about? The higher form of consciousness really is the realm of spirit.

And it is there that you are in contact, not with the living God of the Bible. Well, by no means you are in contact with other beings, with other beings, with other gods or with the consciousness, however it might be defined.

In the process, what happens is this, in this literature, statements that are made about God that we would affirm are made about God. Those statements are actually attributed to us now as human beings because we are God.

I'll quote directly from Tully's book, page 71. The truth, truth is capitalized. The truth is inseparable from who you are. Yes, you are the truth. If you look for it elsewhere, you will be deceived every time.

The very being, being is capitalized, that you are is truth. Jesus tried to convey that when he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. These words uttered by Jesus are one of the most profound and direct pointers to the truth.

If understood correctly, if misinterpreted, they could become a great obstacle. What he's saying is, if you interpret it like we do, that Jesus is unique. That's a great obstacle. Jesus speaks of the innermost.

I am capitalized the essence and identity of every man, woman and every life form. In fact, every one of us. So there you have it. You see statements that we would say Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.

Self-Worship and the False Kingdom of God

Those statements are attributed to us as human beings. We shall be like God. Same thing happens in the book on miracles. I have many quotes that I don't even have time to give you. But Terry Cole Whitaker, who's in the same genre, though I'm not speaking about her today, said these words and she said them very clearly.

You are God. I am God. Together we are God. And together with our consciousness, awakening and choice, we create the kingdom of God. Worship yourself. You are the light. So there you have it. The first lie.

The Biblical God Versus Human Divinity

You shall be like God. The self-worship. You are God. Believe me, the God that we're talking about when we read the word God in these books is not the God of the Bible. He is not personal. He is not outside of you.

He's not transcendent. He is within you. He is not personal. He is a gestalt. He is a force. He is not sovereign and absolutely he is not holy, except in the sense that all of us are. And so these books talk about that all of us are holy and all of us are sacred and all of us are perfect.

So you see, the God that we plug into is really just a bigger one of us, this undefined consciousness that is the lie, the divinity of man.