Ep 26: Heresies Against God

Welcome back to the Read, Do, & Tell podcast!

In episodes 23 and 24, we began the discussion of heresies in the church.

We need to remember that heresy is a SERIOUS matter to the church AND to God! Heretical teaching is teaching that intentionally distort or contradict God or the pure gospel as revealed in Scripture. Those who teach heresies are "heretics."

In episode 24, we discussed that Christians can hold different beliefs about some things, and it isn't considered heretical. Teachings that distort or contradict the nature and character of God ARE, however, heretical.

Today, Amy and I tackle the topic of heresies against God. We will briefly go through four of the early councils and creeds of the church fathers to show you these heretical teachings are nothing new.

We'll also talk about some modern-day heretical teachings around the nature of God and the Trinity, so buckle up!

Join our Podcast+ Membership or login to your membership to download the transcripts, guided notes, Bible reading plans, and study tools from our podcast. Becoming a member also supports our work as we read, do, and tell the Word of the Lord!

Resources Mentioned:

• Episode 23: False Teaching & False Teachers
• Episode 24: What is Heresy?
• The Doctrines That Divide by Erwin Lutzer 
• Know the Creeds and Councils by Justin S. Holcomb 

Let's Connect!

• Read, Do, & Tell Podcast
• My Website: Raising Rooted Disciples
• Instagram: @raisingrooteddisciples
• Email: becky@raisingrooteddisciples.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hey, this is Amy. Thanks for joining us again. And this is Becky. We want to have a quick reminder for you about our Podcast Plus membership, which we created for anyone who desires to teach the next generation about the importance of biblical literacy. If you're a parent, a grandparent, a Sunday school teacher, at $5 a month, you have access to the Bible reading plans. One goes out every month, the guided study notes, and the charts and other visual resources, which once we transition to a video format, which we hope to do in August.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

I'm super excited. I have been working on the podcast studio here in my basement. It's not a creepy basement, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

No, it's absolutely beautiful. So those visual tools you won't be able to see in a PowerPoint slide podcast, but we will reference them when we do our video formats.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

So the last couple of episodes, we've talked about false teaching, false teachers, and we have defined false teaching as an intentional teaching that distorts or contradicts God or the pure gospel that's been revealed through Scripture.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

So today we'll we will be focusing on the teachings that um push a false God, a false Jesus. So not relating to what the Bible teaches about who God is and who Jesus is. So before we start, we will reference what scripture says, which is what we always should do. In John 1, Becky referenced in the previous podcast about false teaching. It starts, verse 1, in the beginning was the word. The word was with God, the word was God. Then in verse 2, it says, He, he being the word. He was with God in the beginning. So what we're doing right now is going through scripture to help you see who Jesus is, and that Jesus is God. In verse 14, it says, the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only. That's very important because the one and only is the Son of God. He is the begotten of the Father. So the one and only who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. And then if we skip forward to verse 18, it says, No one has ever seen God but God, the one and only. Thus we have Jesus as God.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

When we talk about false teaching and false teachers, there's some terms, and we talked about a couple of these in our last episode on false teaching, but heresy is one of those terms you'll hear. And when we did the road analogy with the signs, heresy is where you're getting off the road. You're it's not an essential, it's it's against the essentials of Christianity, but a non-essential, for example, in-time prophecies, Christians can believe different things about those. So if I believe one thing and you believe something different, it's not necessarily a heresy. Heresy would be you're completely off the road. Heretical teaching would be that teaching of the heresy. Another term you may hear is orthodox or orthodoxy. I know when you listen to Bible scholars, they'll throw that term out there and you're like, what does that even mean? Really, what it means literally is right belief. So what is the right belief about God or Jesus? So one of the things we need to remember when we talk about heresy, heretical teaching, orthodox, orthodoxy, is that there really truly is, like Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun. I like how Elisa Childers put it in her book. It's the same candy, but just in a different wrapper. A lot of these heretical teachings we even see today were things that the early church fathers, and really it wasn't too early, it was 300 years after, or you know, it was not, it was not like right after Jesus, but still we call them early church fathers. They were dealing with heretical things. Even in the book of 1 John, you see John already dealing with heretical things. Heresy is nothing new. And so we want to kind of go through the we're gonna give you a smattering, a tasting of some of the early church councils that the men would gather together to talk about orthodox teaching. One of the things that Erwin Lutzer says in his book, The Doctrines That Divide, he says the early church councils were convened to clarify doctrine, so that's your teaching, to pinpoint heresy, and to give a rationale for Christian beliefs.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Uh, in that same book, um, Lutzer talks about how one of the reasons there's so much division related to the doctrines today is because we don't teach them in the church. In many churches, we teach something that's topical. For example, how to be the best you, or um, maybe not that it's wrong to teach the character of God, but you're not going verse by verse in the scripture. And so the doctrines are not the heavy part of what's being taught. So it's good to know that when they discussed these things together, they didn't just talk about what they felt was right, they based it on what does scripture say? And I think that's good for us as well to remember. So we have the Nicene Creed here, and the Nicene Creed was created in the Council of Nicaea. Is that how you say that? Okay, so the question that was addressed was Is Jesus God? You have Arius who was teaching that Jesus was created by God the Father. And so they came together and they discussed what does Scripture say? And there was a man named Athena Athanasius, I believe is how you say it. He stood firm on the fact that scripture taught who Christ was in the sense that God in the Old Testament said he was the only one that could forgive sin. And in the New Testament, Jesus is the one who forgives sin. And there he confirms Jesus is God and he uses scripture to do it. Another thing that he referenced in scripture was that God was the only one to be prayed to. He was the only one to be worshipped in the Old Testament. And in the New Testament, he brought together what Jesus taught in the sense that you prayed to him. He was your intermediary between you and the Father. You prayed to him and he was worshipped. People bowed down to him, and you did not see a correction in scripture like you did with the angels, where they said, No, I'm a servant just like you, don't bow down to me. Jesus did not correct them when they bowed down in worship.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

I wasn't there, so I don't really know. I can't confirm this, but Saint Nicholas, from my understanding, was at this council and he he punched Arias. So I like to say Santa Claus punched Arius. So then we have another creed, and this again, this is just a sampling of them. We have the Apostles' Creed. This was 350 AD. And the question here that they were answering was, was Jesus human? The heresy they were trying to dissolve, or whatever word I'm trying to think of, would be Gnosticism. And they were saying Jesus only appeared to be a human, because in Gnosticism, things that are in the flesh, the physical realm is evil, and the spiritual realm is good and divine. So of course, Jesus would not have been in the flesh because that would have been evil. You even see this being actually starting during the New Testament, because in 1 John, you see John say in verses 2 through 3, this is how you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God. And he continues to talk about those that don't confess. But you can see here, he's already seeing this heresy developing in the church, and he's already addressing it in 1 John.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Then we have the Chalcedon Creed, which was created around 451 AD. The question they were addressing was what is the relationship between Jesus as God and Jesus as man? So the heresy that was being pushed around, and it was um, there's many different perspectives per se of this heresy or how they defined that Jesus couldn't have been fully God and he couldn't have been fully man. So they would say that you had the physical, which was the man Jesus, and you had the spiritual, which would have been the word. So that you couldn't have had the God man. It couldn't have been one in and of the same. But in this creed, they were very clear to say that he is not to be parted or divided, it is but one, and it is the same son, only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ. So that was the agreement that they came to here. You did not have just the physical aspect of a man who inside was spiritually a divine being. He is fully God, he is fully man, and today he still is fully God and fully man. So Erwin Lutzer in his book, The Doctrines That Divide, he says that at this at this council, they did not attempt to explain precisely how the two natures were united in the one person. For the delegates knew they were on the precipice of mystery. And I like that. It's where scripture is clear, it's clear. And what is above our ability to understand, we need to trust in his sovereignty.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Absolutely. And really, if you can explain God away, he's not the God of the Bible. Yeah. Then we have the Athanasian Creed. This was in the late 400s, early 500 AD. The question they were trying to answer, actually, it's two questions, I should say, questions, is what is the nature of Christ? Again, going back to what you talked about, and what is the Trinity? So here is where we begin to see the early church really had to wrestle with who we do with Christ. What do we do with God? What do we believe? They had to wrestle with those things because of the heresies that were out there. So again, you've got nothing new under the sun. You've got these heresies coming back up from the Chalcyan Creed. Is that how you say Chalcedon? Chalcedon. Um, and you've got some coming up from the Apostles' Creed. These heresies are still lingering around, they're still being passed around, and they're still trying to address these. In the Athanasian Creed, it's not believed that he wrote it, but in the Athenian Athanasian Creed, we have this about the Trinity. We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity. I like that. And there's more to that. But they also go into the nature of Christ, talking about how he was fully God and fully man. They're addressing that issue again.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

So you had mentioned that Lutzer had given a picture of a bridge and how he has to be how did you say that?

SPEAKER_01 12:10

If he's not fully God, that end of the bridge, the fully God end, doesn't reach the shore. And so your bridge fails. And if he's not fully man, that end of the bridge. So if he's fully God but not fully man, the bridge doesn't work. And if he's the other way around, whatever I just said, the other way doesn't work. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

The heresies we see today are nothing new, as Becky has said. There's nothing new under the sun, as King Solomon said in Ecclesiastes. We deal with these same things today as they did then. And it shouldn't be a surprise to us because Satan is the father of lies, and he has always tried to destroy, to steal the truth, to kill our souls and not allow us to know who Jesus is. So it shouldn't shock us that even today we see the heresy of Jesus not being God. So there is this organization called World's Last Chance, and they have billboards that they are putting up to create confusion. So there's one billboard that I believe was seen in Southern California. And if you're watching the podcast, you can see this is from their website. It says Jesus is not God. Scripture says, dot, dot, dot, Jesus did not pre-exist in heaven. I'd like to know where scripture says that. Well, I don't understand why they have dot dot dot. I'm lost on the scripture says. Like maybe they don't know what scripture says either. So if the church's response to this is that these billboards are dangerous, the proper way to um confront this would be: are we ready as the church or as an individual believer to speak to what the Bible says about this? Because the ultimate goal of these organizations or these different groups that want to come against God is to create confusion, right? How did you say it, Becky?

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Great question. You said that they do it's not that they are creating doctrines and orthodoxy, they are creating confusion.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Yes. So they want to instill confusion in the church. That's what they want to do. And we need to know what scripture says. So if we go back to the beginning of the podcast, do we know John 1? Do we know that the Word was in the beginning and that the Word was with God and that the Word was God and that the Word became man and that he dwelled among us? Do we know who the one and only is, that the one and only is the begotten, that the begotten is the Son of God? If we know these things, then we because many times we try to create an answer off of one verse in the Bible. And scripture has the answer spread throughout all of it. Because in your testimony, Becky, you were saying that your daddy asked you a question and you were looking for it in one spot. That's right. And then as you began to search and study, you were like, wait a second, it's not a prophecy, it's the prophecies. So who Jesus is and what his purpose for coming was and that he is God isn't in one scripture. It's going to be all throughout the Bible.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

Old Testament and New. And that's why it's important to be biblically literate. Amen. We should just have an altar call right now. Okay, so one of the other teachings, God is not, he doesn't fit in a box. And I love that in the book, know the creeds and counsels, and I will make sure I put a link to that. It says, It's sometimes said that you cannot describe the Trinity without committing some sort of heresy. The reason for this is that to speak about God, to speak about the Trinity is different from speaking about any other thing. God is categorically separate from all other subjects. God is God and nothing else. Amen. And I love that. I do have a diagram here, though, that I think can be helpful to help our minds think about this a little more. God is God the Father, God is God the Son, God is God the Holy Spirit. It's one God with three distinct persons. They coexist, they're co-eternal, and they are co-equal. In today's time, really, modalism's been around since the third century, probably even before that, because I'm sure Satan was thinking of it before then. But it was made popular by this guy named Sebalius, if I'm saying or Sebalius, I don't even know how you say his name, but he doesn't matter because he was wrong. Um modalism teaches it this way: there is one God, and he manifests himself or expresses himself, or he changes modes. He is God the Father. Then God the Father, when Jesus came to earth, became God the Son. When God the Son ascended into heaven, he became God the Holy Spirit. So it's not that they're co-existing at the same time, they transition from one to another. There are some modern day people who teach this heresy. T.D. Jakes would be one. He likes to say God manifested himself in three different people. Stephen Furtick, I've listened and was listening to one of his sermons, said that Jesus changed forms. So when he went from earth and he ascended to heaven, then he changed, basically changed forms into the Holy Spirit and came to indwell believers. Michael Todd talks about how God is expressed in three different forms. So this is really a heresy. It's a teaching against who God is as revealed revealed in scripture. It's a false God. It's an important heresy we need to understand because it's it's still going on today. It's like, I don't know if you said this during while we were recording or before, but even though these are heresies that were addressed a long time ago, these are still being promoted today by really enthusiastic speakers who have large followings online and they're, I hesitate to say churches sometimes, but in these movements, um, it's really scary. We it's but you know, you go back to what you said, you need to know the word. You do.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Because it's kind of funny that form of understanding of who God is exists. Because how would scripture then make sense? Because there's would be so many parts in scripture where the trinity is mentioned, not the word trinity, but the concept of the trinity. Like when you pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes on your behalf, and Jesus takes, right? Like you have the Holy Spirit there, who then um it it transfers over to Jesus, who's at the right hand of the Father. And how can Jesus be at the right hand of the father if he's only Jesus at one time? And it's it's really weird.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

And how would Jesus even pray to God while he was in the garden if the father's not there? He's it's just it's very whack. How would you baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit if only one of them is around now? Right? It just doesn't make it doesn't work. It doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

In 1 John chapter 4, verses 13 through 15, it says, This is how we know that we remain in him and he is in us. He has given us his spirit. And we have seen and we testify that the Father has sent his son as the world's savior. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him, and he in God. And if you can take this scripture and you combine it with what we read in John 1, we can see that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

So let's be determined as Ezra to read, do and tell the word of the Lord. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Wait, uh, mm-hmm, got it. Go. That's how you say it. Okay. So these heresies of old are not old. They are old. So these heresies of old, so the heresies of today, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

The heresies we see today. Welcome to the podcast. And that sounds stupid.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Yo, yo, yo, welcome back. This is Becky here speaking. I got Amy on my left. Yes, you're on my left. Okay, go for it, Becky.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Thank you again for thanks for joining us. No.