Calling Out Every False Religion By Name | John MacArthur

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Millions of people around the world today are being deceived by false religions that distort and destroy the true saving gospel of Jesus Christ.

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Let's look at eight of them. Starting at number eight we have Islam, which, interestingly,

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Andrew Tate recently converted to. I was born in a Christian country, I was raised as a

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Christian, and I've always been very respectful of Islam. And it's become more and more obvious to me and more and more pertinent that Islam is the last religion on the planet.

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When I talk about Islam, because I'm new to it, I'm a little bit careful, right? Because I'm new to it, I'm certainly not a scholar, there's so much

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I need to learn. I know I'm on a learning journey. I'm not here to sit here and talk scripture. I don't know those things yet.

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I'm here to learn. And we're here at your assistance. Thank you, bro. Thank you. Thank you. But it's just for me, it feels like the last religion on earth.

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I feel like there's no other religion. People say to me, why did you convert? And I said, I don't really feel it as a conversion. It's almost like I knew

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God was real and now I've become religious. And they say, oh, you were religious before. I was like, religious before how? Christian? What does

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Christian mean? Like, who's not a Christian? You go to Christian nations and everyone says they're a Christian. Look how they live their lives.

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Go into the average church. Is anyone actually fearful of God? Anybody? No. The girls are out on Saturday night drinking and they turn up to church because their parents made them.

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There's no substance to the religion. Tate's comparison of Islam and Christianity is actually very interesting.

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And we would actually agree that an enormous number of people who call themselves Christian are not actually true

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Christians. But the solution is to recover true Christianity, not to leave

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Christianity for Islam, which has enormous problems of its own. One of the most significant problems with Islam is its false view of Jesus.

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The Muslims have two sources of authoritative truth. In their system, they have

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Jesus. Jesus was a man. He was not God. He did not die.

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He went to heaven like Elijah. He did not die. Therefore, he did not rise. He did not die.

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Therefore, he did not provide an atonement for anyone because no one can provide an atonement for anyone else.

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He is a man. He is a prophet. He is nothing more. He went to heaven like Elijah. And he's in heaven right now standing alongside

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Allah, waiting for Allah to send him back. In their system...

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A popular response to this from Muslims is that Jesus never claimed to be God. He didn't say,

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I'm going to send to myself, and I am your God, and I am your father. He never said it. Here, here's what Jesus, what do you need more from this man to tell you that he's telling you he's not

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God? What more do you need? He's telling you here, I'm going to send to my God and your God.

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However, this argument against Jesus' deity completely fails. In John 20, 28, you can't say that Thomas said those words to Jesus.

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Yes, you can. The exact words in the original language, without any question, you have to simply overthrow the text itself, are that Thomas answered,

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Ka -i -pen -al -to, and said to him, Ka -ku -re -as -mu, Ka -ha -fe -as -mu, my

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Lord and my God. Those words are addressed to Jesus. And if you can't prove that that was said to Jesus, then language cannot communicate anything.

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And we are simply playing games here this evening, because nothing can happen. Many Christians have been deceived into believing that Muslims worship the same

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God of Abraham that Christians worship. But nothing can be further from the truth. The simple truth is that Christians worship

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Jesus as a member of the Trinitarian Godhead, and Muslims do not. At number seven, we have the

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Black Hebrew Israelites. And it seems that Kanye West's supposed Christianity has morphed into a version of what

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Black Hebrew Israelites believe. With the darker Jews, the 12 lost tribes of Israel, who we are, because we're

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Jewish also, we're from Africa also, we're the blood of Christ. As an African -American, as a blood of Christ, as a

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Hebrew, as a... See, I'm telling y 'all what it is, right? My mom was born into a drinking fountain.

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They told her what fountain she could drink out of. Now, we born into a vote.

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They literally call it the Black vote. And by the way, we blood of Christ. We blood of Moses.

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We're not just a color and a crayon box. And if we knew that, who we really were, we'd treat each other differently. We'd treat ourselves differently.

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The Black Hebrew Israelites believe that African -Americans are the direct descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, and that they are the true

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Hebrews. And while there are certainly many problems with what Black Hebrew Israelites believe, again, one of the most fundamental problems is its rejection of Jesus as God.

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Listen to what Elder Ra -Cha Shia said in a discussion with James White. But the bottom line is, to worship

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Christ as a deity is evil. That's linking directly with the Roman Catholic Church, who did what?

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Came in through deception and merged Christianity with paganism. And now Christ has been trumped by the deities of Rome and Greece.

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Now listen to James White's simple response. Okay, so when you say that it's evil to worship

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Jesus, then in Revelation... I didn't say it was evil to worship Jesus. You said that. Okay, then I thought you just said a moment ago that it's an evil thing to worship

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Jesus as a deity. Did I misunderstand you? That's what I said. That is what you said. Okay. If that's the case, then when

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Jesus is worshipped by every created thing in the book of Revelation, chapter 5, verses 13 and 14, was that evil taking place in heaven?

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The deity of Jesus Christ and the doctrines of the Trinity as non -negotiable doctrines, because if Jesus was not

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God, then he could not truly save his people from their sins. Speaking of false religions that do not view

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Jesus as God, we get to number six, oneness Pentecostalism, which

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T .D. Jakes used to be a member of, but now it's not so clear. Jake says he's moved away from the oneness view of the

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Trinity, but listen to his refusal to embrace Trinitarian language and his insistence on maintaining oneness language to at least some degree.

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For you, you know, the issue between Trinitarianism and modalism at its essence is one

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God manifesting himself successively in three ways or one God, three persons simultaneously existing eternally.

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So your best understanding now, and I understand there is some mystery for sure. Would you say it's one

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God manifesting himself in three ways or one God in three persons? I believe that neither one of them totally get it from me, but I think the latter one is where I stand today.

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One God, three persons? No, one God, three persons. One God, three persons. And here is why

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I am there. I'm not crazy about the word persons. Most people who know me know that that is really, my doctrinal statement is no different from yours except for the injection of manifestation to manifest instead of persons, which you describe as modalist and I describe as Pauline.

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It seems like Jakes is trying to please both sides of the Trinity debate, but there isn't really a middle ground.

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Either you see Jesus as a distinct person of God or you do not. And if you do not, then you can't properly be called a

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Christian who believes in the true God of the Bible. Worldwide, there are 24 million charismatics who belong to a group that can be called oneness

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Pentecostal. What is oneness Pentecostalism? Sometimes you see it as Jesus only.

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It denies the Trinity. 24 million, they deny the Trinity. About one out of every four in America.

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What do they believe? They believe in what is called modalism, that there's one God and he appears in three different modes.

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Sometimes he's the father, sometimes he's the son, and sometimes he's the spirit, but he's never all three at the same time.

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He has these three modes in which he can appear. A little bit of trouble with that at the baptism of Jesus, right?

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I mean, he's changing hats really fast. Make no mistake, oneness Pentecostalism is a false religion that is deceiving millions with a false

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God and a false gospel. At number five, we have Scientology. And Tom Cruise is the most visible figure within Scientology.

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I think it's a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist, and it's something that you have to earn. And because a

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Scientologist does, he or she has the ability to create new and better realities and improve conditions.

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If what Cruise just said here sounds a little familiar, you might be thinking of things like the law of attraction and word of faith theology, which are pretty much exactly the same thing

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Scientologists believe. There is a surprising similarity between what Cruise said about creating new realities and what

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Joel Osteen teaches as a supposedly Christian pastor. You are where you are today in part because of what you've been saying about yourself.

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Words are like seeds. When you speak something out, you give life to what you're saying.

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If you continue to say it, eventually that can become a reality. Whether you realize it or not, you are prophesying your future.

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And this is great when we're saying things like, I'm blessed, I'm strong, I will accomplish my dreams,

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I'm coming out of debt. That's not just being positive. You are prophesying victory. Of course, this philosophy that puts this kind of power within human minds, thoughts, and words is not at all biblical.

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So faith is the real power. Faith in yourself, in believing you can create your own reality.

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Know what you want, believe you will get it, visualize the very experience of fulfillment as if you have it, and then speak out loud.

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And you will then at that point have released enough power to attract this reality to you.

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But Cruise's Scientology and Osteen's Word of Faith theology are lies from hell because they point people towards themselves rather than to dependence upon and submission to God.

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He is a mouthpiece for Satan. He's an agent for Satan. How do I know that? Because he offers all the things that the unregenerate heart already wants.

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1 John 2 says, Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life is of the world and is passing away.

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That's Satan's strategy. At number four, we have Christian Science, which is a terrible name because it is neither

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Christian nor scientific. You've probably heard of Christian Science. Christian Science is very poorly named, by the way, because Christian Science is not

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Christian and it's not scientific. But Mary Baker Eddy claimed that she was physically healed by Phineas Quimby.

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She really wasn't, but she thought that she was. And she took his doctrines and developed them a bit further and from that formed what is today known as Christian Science.

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And there are a lot of Christian Science overtones in the modern Word of Faith, one of which is the denial of physical symptoms when it comes to sickness and disease.

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If you have a friend or a family member who is involved in this movement to one degree or another, you might notice that when they get sick, they deny that they're sick.

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Maybe they have a cold, their eyes are watering, their nose is running, they're congested, they're sneezing.

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You know, the whole nine yards you can tell that they're sick, but you ask them, well, how are you doing? Oh, I'm fine.

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You know, they don't admit it. They don't want to confess that because they might confess it into existence.

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Well, this is Christian Science and New Thought. This health and wealth prosperity gospel is not

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Christian, dear friends. It is cultic theology that has been wrapped in some Christianese, wrapped in some

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Christian lingo to make it appear to be Christian, but it really is not. You may have noticed that there are some interesting similarities between Scientology and Christian Science, namely the teaching that people have the power to create their own reality through their words, beliefs, and attitudes.

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The reason why these religions are cults and not Christian at all is that adherents of these religions give themselves power that only belongs to God.

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At number three, we have the Nation of Islam, and the most well -known figure within this religion is probably

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Louis Farrakhan. The Nation of Islam has a lot of Christian elements within it, but make no mistake, it is not

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Christian at all. But the Nation of Islam cosmology, what they believe about the created world, is a mixture of science fiction and the misinterpretation of key texts in the

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Bible and the Koran. First, the movement offers a fascinating account of creation. Quote, in the beginning there was blackness, a triple blackness of space, water, and divinity.

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The one supreme God came into existence at the origin of the universe 76 trillion years ago.

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He willed himself into being in the form of a black man, cell by cell, in a process that took 6 trillion years.

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The first supreme one was a warrior who, in order to combat darkness and shed light, created the sun, which represents freedom and creativity, out of his fire, which is truth.

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He imbued the planets with life, and had them submit to the sun, and called it the solar system.

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The story includes life on other planets, an explosion that separated the earth and the moon, and not just any kind of explosion, this was an explosion of TNT.

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It was an explosion of TNT. It wasn't even a nuclear explosion. An explosion of TNT that separated the earth and the moon.

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The God of the world at that time was actually trying to destroy the world because of evil, obviously, of the white race, but he failed in destroying the world, and instead the explosion just separated a part of the earth off that became the moon.

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If this sounds absolutely ridiculous to you, that's because it absolutely is ridiculous and not true at all.

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At number two we have Mormonism, which many Christians falsely believe falls within the realm of Christianity.

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If you believe that Jesus died for your sins, then you know the gospel. That's the gospel.

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Don't be telling me Mormons got an extra book and Catholics do this. It's simple. Christians, we be making it too hard for people to come and be involved in this.

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In South Carolina they're going to have a vote for the Republican nominee for president. The leading candidate is a

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Mormon, Governor Romney. Tell me how you see Mormonism, his religion, and how you define it within the

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Christian community. Well, you know, what I see about Governor Romney is that he says, I believe

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Jesus Christ is the son of God, he's raised from the dead, and, you know, he's my savior. I see him as being a believer in Christ like me.

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And that's enough for you? Yeah, that's enough for me. I mean, there's differences in all religion. I realize Mormonism is different from Christianity, but you know what, he's a man of faith and values, and to me that's strong.

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It's absolutely shocking to hear Christians be so ignorant about Mormonism because the official teachings of Mormonism are extremely different from what

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Christianity teaches. One of the more prominent ones currently is Mormonism, which is making an all -out effort to be accepted as a form of Christianity.

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You need to understand this, nothing is more explicitly pagan than Mormonism. It is more like Hinduism than it is like Christianity.

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Christianity has one God, the Mormons have millions. That should be enough. They believe in millions of gods, they believe they become gods.

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They believe some god created the god who created the world, and the god who created the world had some kind of spiritual sex with the mother god and produced

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Jesus. Mormons absolutely do not believe in the same Jesus as Christians, and Mormonism does not teach the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

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Finally, at number one, we have Jehovah's Witnesses, which, you can probably guess, also has a heretical view of the deity of Jesus Christ.

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The missionaries they send a witness to people in their homes are oftentimes very prepared to make the case for why

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Jesus is not God. If you're dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, they will frequently raise original language argumentation.

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Almost no Jehovah's Witnesses I've ever encountered were actually fluent in any sense or trained in any sense in Koine Greek, but a lot of them have done some reading, and so they will at least allow you to think they are, even if they are not.

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However, the truth is that their arguments ultimately collapse under any real scrutiny.

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But I was meeting with some Jehovah's Witnesses, and the lady, as far as I could tell, a housewife, there wasn't anything special about her in the sense of her making any claims to scholarship or training or anything like that, but she went through the standard pre -memorized speech on John 1 .1

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because the New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses renders that particular text, and the word was a god.

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And she was talking about definite articles and indefinite articles and pre -verbal, anarthorous nouns and all the rest of this type of stuff.

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And I had my, back then, Nestle Alland 26th edition. It's the 28th.

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That's how long ago it was. And it has no English in it. And so when she got done with her little speech,

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I handed it across to her. And I said, could you show me a definite article? And she didn't even know which way to hold the text.

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She couldn't even tell which way was up with it. So it was a pre -memorized speech. She didn't know whether it was right or wrong.

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There was no way she could verify it one way. But give her credit that she had taken the time to pre -memorize it.

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As attractive as it might be to present Christianity as a religion that is broad and inclusive, we need to remember that Jesus himself said that the path to salvation is narrow and few find it.

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It is not loving to allow people who believe in false religions to continue down their path to hell because they believe in a false

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Jesus and a false gospel. Rather, it is loving, not condemning, to tell people the truth about the true

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Jesus and the true gospel of Jesus Christ. Not just talk about the gospel or around the gospel, but we must communicate the content of the gospel.

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You know what's amazing? There's a whole lot of gospel talk going on right now, and that's a good thing. But what I notice is that oftentimes with all the gospel talk, there's not a whole lot of gospel.

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Amen. We must communicate the gospel. We must communicate to men that they are lost in their sins because of the fall of our first parent,

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Adam. They need to know that. You are ruined. You don't just need to be improved. You need to be made over.

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You can't get there from here. You're a sinner. They need to know that. They need to hear that. God is just and righteous, and not only does he judge theoretically, he's going to judge you because of your sin, because of what you thought and said and did.

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You should have died in your sleep last night, but God gave you another day. You need to beg him for forgiveness because you're ruined apart from Christ, and here's what you need to know.

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He died for the sins that you committed, not for his own, but by his passive and active obedience.

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He purchased full and complete righteousness that he might impute it to you, and then took upon himself all of the guilt that was necessary as a propitiation to a righteous

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God whose wrath must be poured out on sin, and it is only when you acknowledge your sin, turn from your sin, and call on this

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Christ who died, and apply that to yourself, that you have any hope of being saved.

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Thank you so much for watching until the end. If you like this video, hitting the subscribe button helps this channel reach more people with the truth.