Bad Doctrine During the Summer Marching Season in Northern Ireland

"And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1)

"Because the carnal mind is enmity against God" (Romans 8:7)

I was unable to get through this year's marching season in Northern Ireland without the obligatory Arminian assault directed at every attendee with a pulse.

And of course, amidst the crypto-Romish fare was the standard "sinner's prayer" (bad capitalisation replicated verbatim):

Dear Reader, as you ready to prepare for Heaven? If you are, then pray the Sinner's prayer and from your heart cry out to God - "God be merciful to me, a Sinner. I repent now of all my sins and turn from them and I place my trust alone in the Lord Jesus Christ for Salvation. Make me a new creation in Christ Jesus and give me power in my life to life for Thee and serve Thee. In Jesus Name I pray. Amen."

Yes, they actually believe that you can recite that formula and Jesus will save you.

(And worse, I saw another one that has the sinner bypassing Jesus entirely and praying directly to the Father for salvation!)

This "sinner's prayer" as quoted above is doctrinally awful on multiple points, but chiefly because it gets two things fatally wrong:

1. It presents repentance as something we can perform of ourselves, overlooking the fact that the natural man is a spiritual corpse, "dead in trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1) and that "the carnal mind is enmity against God" (Romans 8:7), and therefore incapable of evangelical repentance absent a sovereign transformation of the heart by the Spirit of God.
2. It inverts or reverses the process of becoming a new creature in Christ; we do not become born again because we ask Jesus to work it in us; rather, we come to Him for mercy and forgiveness because He first enables us to do so in the process outlined in #1 above; in other words, He makes us born again first so that we can then come to Him for forgiveness; this rebirth cannot be forced, coerced, persuaded; rather, it is a sovereign act of God, and is like the wind when it blows, almost indiscernible in its origin and ultimate track (John 3:16).

Under this classic Arminian / Counter-Reformational / Jesuitic / Pelagian model, repentance is weakly defined and appears to amount to little more than ceasing from the inconvenience that is habitual sin, which belies a misunderstanding not just of repentance, but of sin also.

In reality, sin begins with the absence of any selfless love for God and accordingly, repentance consists of a change of the fundamental nature of the sinner so that he loves God selflessly (or "disinterestedly" as the old writers put it) for the first time in his life.

The problem, though, for Arminian outreach, is that this makes genuine conversion to Christ a rare thing, just as Jesus said it would be (until, obviously, the glorious Philadelphian church age, which we are very close to now, begins), because it can only happen when the Spirit quickens the sinner through the foolishness of the correct preaching, of the kind that Paul - as Apostle to us Gentiles - did not shy away from in Romans 8-9 and other passages.

Better by far would it have been for our tract-makers to tell it like it is: you cannot repent, you cannot believe, you cannot "simply trust", and you cannot come to Christ for mercy, absent a work of grace in your heart begun and finished by the Lord in what has only ever been a unilateral, God-working-alone, monergist redemptive framework, from righteous Adam unto the last elect sinner is converted before Christ returns, and so the alarmed sinner should attend the means of grace (i.e. "the foolishness of preaching" by Reformed pastors) and hope that God will move upon him), rather than relying on worthless "sinner's prayers", "receiving Jesus", etc.; this means he must continually examine his own heart to see if he yet be in the faith (2 Corinthians 13:5).

Distressing though this may be, and devoid of instant assurance it almost always is, it is nonetheless the only remedy for the madness of doctrinally dark tracts pushed by do-gooders sold on a Rome-crafted parallel Protestantism.

At the crux of the matter is the fact that today's Arminian evangelicals present a synergistic model that was always, always, always designed to undermine and undo the Reformation by aligning previously monergist Protestantism with Rome in readiness for future re-assimilation.

That is why the Counter-Reformational Jesuits referred to Arminianism as "the sovereign drug Arminianism" (as famously reported by Augustus Toplady in Arminianism: The Road to Rome) and it is why the Lord calls Pelagianism (Arminianism's prototype) Wormwood, polluting the doctrinal waters, in Revelation 8:11, causing many to die (i.e. eternally).

But this July's Arminian tract merchants weren't just selling a counterfeit Protestant soteriology.

No, no, no!

They were also flogging bad eschatology:

"Jesus is Coming Soon"

This tract is the standard futurist eschatology (invented by the Jesuits Ribera and Manuel de Lacunza to quench the fire set against the Papacy by the Reformational historicist model), wresting Matthew 24's "wars and rumours of wars", etc., (much of which was fulfilled in the Roman invasion of Palestine in AD 70) as a sign of Christ's imminent return and completely ignoring Daniel 2, Daniel 7, Romans 11, etc., and the promised return of the house of Jacob to the Messianic fold and the great blessedness that life-bringing development will bring upon the "dead" Gentile church (Romans 11:15, Revelation 3:1 and Revelation 11:11).

In other words, it is full of the standard sloppy scholarship and addiction to an interpretation of prophecy specifically devised by Rome to derail Protestantism!

All of this highlights the fact that the present Sardian church age has been whittled down to just "the things which remain, that are ready to die" (Revelation 3:2), so devastated by the Arminian assault has the erstwhile Reformed faith become; certainly, that which calls itself Protestant today would not be recognised as such by Luther, Calvin, Knox, Beza, Zwingli or any of the other Reformers; rather, to them it would appear distinctly anti-Protestant and pro-Romanist due to its presentation of man's will and the fallen nature, a situation that stands as a chilling testament to the fact that the deadly wound the Reformation dealt to the Papacy in Revelation 13:3 has not just healed, but has also been countered by an even deadlier wound in return against the Reformation, delivered by Romish agents through the Trojan Horses of Arminianism and futurism.

For you Arminians, therefore, Protestantism did not begin in 1517 when Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg cathedral door.

No, for you it began in 1588 during the Counter-Reformation when the Spanish Jesuit, Luis de Molina, articulated in writing that form of doctrine espoused and promoted a few decades later by Jacobus Arminius (though, if fact, the prototype of it was the Pelagianism of the late-era Roman empire, when the serpent sent a flood of heresies after the Woman (Revelation 12:15) - see my article, Arminianism and the Star That Fell From Heaven.)

With a Jesuit as your "Luther", you have no business whatsoever, plainly, in calling yourselves Protestant at all; rather, you are Anti-Protestant, addicted to another gospel and another Jesus that were concocted by the Antichurch of Rome specifically to defeat the Reformation.

"But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him." (2 Corinthians 11:3-4)

And you have fallen for it hook, line and sinker!

And so Christ's message to you who today call yourselves Protestant, yet whose gospel is subtly aligned with Rome's, is set out plainly in Revelation 3's address to the present Sardis church age (to see why we are not in Laodicea but still in Sardis, see my article, Why the Age of Missionaries was NOT the Philadelphian Church Era.)

"Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard [i.e. the Reformation, which occurred at the opening of Sardis], and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief [in afflictive judgment], and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee." (Revelation 3:3)

Therefore brace yourselves for bitter eschatological disappointments and severe afflictive judgments in the very near future... Things are about to get biblical.