Dear Stephen;
When I was a senior in High School my
Uncle Jim invited me to come to Northwest Missouri State University
where he was head librarian. He said he could get me in-state tuition
and I could live in his basement with it's own bathroom and exit out the
rear of the house. His home was within walking distance of the
university. I'd heard that the art department at ENMU in Portales was in
a mess with infighting and a few key professors leaving. I didn't want
to live in Clovis any more--I wanted to get away from my parents. It was
depressing to think of living at home and going to school at ENMU. I
asked the Lord what I should do and He said I should go to ENMU. I
didn't want to do it, so I disobeyed. I took the Greyhound bus to Kansas
City where my uncle picked me up. He helped me get enrolled at NWMSU
and introduced me to a girl he thought I'd like who worked in the
library.
I'd opened the door to the force of deception because
I'd believed my own lie that I could disobey God and be fine. I thought I
would be sitting on the fence rather than disobeying Him because I
wanted to live by Christian principles and go to church etc. while in
Missouri. Once deception is given place, it seeks to take more ground
until it runs its course. Deception is not a spirit, per se, it's a
force like Faith or Hope. (Love is not a force, Love is a Person.) The
girl he introduced me to became jealous of me. I don't remember why, or
if I ever really knew. I think it was a combination of factors, her
friends found me interesting--New Mexico is practically a foreign place
to some people--and I can be quite the comedian in the right
circumstances. Anyway, this girl plotted her revenge. She invited me to
her church. When I got there she ignored me and then she gathered her
friends around her and pointed at me and started talking about me. I was
in the back of a large group trying to get to her, but everybody was
outside milling around and it was difficult. By the time I got to her,
the group closed ranks and wouldn't let me in or even speak to me. They
gave me nasty looks and turned their backs on me. My uncle was in church
himself and wouldn't be coming to pick me up until after his service
was over. This girl's church was on the outskirts of town--too far in
the humid heat to walk, especially when I wasn't certain how to get back
to my uncle's house. I went into the worship service, sat by myself by
people who acted like I had leprosy and endured until my uncle came to
retrieve me.
My family attended Central Baptist
Church in Clovis from the time I started elementary school. Baptists
teach that the wine Jesus drank and served was not alcoholic. My Uncle
Jim proved to me from the Bible and from historical evidence that it was
alcoholic. By this time I had come to believe that God had abandoned
me. Now I thought God had lied to me. I don't remember what more my
uncle told me about the Bible, but it was negative. He was a product of
the criticism movement that questioned the validity of every book of the
Bible. I decided I'd look for God somewhere besides in the Bible.
Years
later, when I was in a pit of hell married to a wife-beater who was
addicted to marijuana, pornography and amphetamines, with 3 children and
a mortgage and a husband who only worked sporadically, God reached out
to me. Philip's aunt gave me a book titled, "Strike the Original Match,"
a book about godly marriage. It made sense to me. That was the
beginning of my journey into God.
In fairness to
myself--I wasn't a rebellious person as a teen. I stood up to a date who
wanted me to drink whiskey with him, even when he pulled a knife and
held it to my throat. I refused a boy I liked very much (Philip's
father) when he wanted to go to far on dates. I went door to door with a
friend witnessing for Jesus and was a regular in youth group.
After
WWII my father became a hard-driving man. He determined he would pay
off the debts from the Woodburn Ranch bankruptcy. He worked like a dog
into the dark almost every day. He demanded we work hard also. He must
have dealt with issues of self-esteem and he carried a lot of
bitterness. His brothers all took bankruptcy and had already diversified
into other areas of life. My Uncle Horace had plant nurseries in Clovis
and Las Cruces. My Uncle Ace had become a school teacher and later
superintendent of schools in places like Alamogordo and Grants. My Uncle
Al became an Ag teacher and later a County Agent in Chaves County. My
Aunts, Stella and Jean, were school teachers. My Dad was the only one
who ended up actually working full time on the ranch. Uncle Al was
speculating in cattle futures and guiding that end of it and the other
brothers funneled money in for investment. My Dad built a feedlot so
large it got attention for its design and ambition and was written up in
magazines and newspapers. He also managed the farm which produced the
hay and grain needed to feed the animals. Uncle Al had prophesied that
cattle prices were rising and would continue to rise and the cattle in
the feedlot were timed to be ready at the peak of the climb. Trucks were
on the way, but were prevented from collecting the cattle when a huge
snowstorm socked the region in. The cattle lost weight, the prices
dropped, the ranch was bankrupt.
When my first
boyfriend broke up with me, I was devastated. The devastation to my
heart was on par with Phil's death a few months before Philip's birth. I
really loved that boy and we had talked about eloping. But his mother
had listened to his sister's silly, malicious gossip and demanded he
break up with me.
My Dad must have been having a
rough time--the nursery business by definition is rough since nobody
wants to buy plants in the winter, it's boom and bust every year and
couple that with my Dad's chosen mountain of debt you can see he was
under a lot of pressure. At just the right moment, when my heart was
broken, he took his agony out on me and told me I was "good for
nothing." These words lodged in my heart like the wrong kind of Cupid's
arrow. I believed him. I suppose this was the first deception that
ensnared me. The double-minded person can expect nothing good. My head
would insist I wasn't good for nothing, but my heart didn't believe it.
It has taken me most of my life to get free of this particular lie.
This
is the background from which I come. My first principle is this: the
Bible is the only document that a person can base her life on. Not
Baptist doctrine, not Presbyterian doctrine, not the Westminster
Confession. Any deviation from the Bible is an opening for deception.
Having examined the Presbyterian doctrine of predestination for as long
as we attended First Pres. in Dexter, I've concluded that the Calvinist
or Westminster Confession interpretation of predestination is a lie
straight out of the pit of hell. This is a rather extreme assertion, I
know. Perhaps your feelings are hurt, but don't be hurt. You too much
operate according to the light you have--that's all any of us can
do--and if you have reconciled it to yourself, then it's not my affair.
My aim here is to explain myself. It is not my place to change your
mind--though I have tried to influence you in the past. I assume lots of
people try to influence you now and then and in your kindness, you
never hold it against them--which I appreciate vastly. I am not
attacking you. You operate in the environment where you are placed to
the best of your ability--that's all any of us can do--and you do it
better than most! This isn't about you, it's about Presbyterian
doctrine. If it were only about you, we'd still be attending church
where you are the Pastor.
There was a time in
church history when the doctrine of predestination, as presented in the
Westminster Confession, had gained such a hold in people's mindsets that
church members did not take care of the poor or evangelize anybody.
They viewed the poor and the lost has having been predestined to their
miserable state. Predestination (henceforth meaning Westminster
Confession's definition of predestination) puts the responsibility for
each person's salvation totally on God with no human participation
needed. God chooses who will be saved and who will not and a person is
powerless to object. What can a mere mortal do to possibly help matters?
Every person is utterly depraved and incapable of anything good until
God plucks them from their damnation and compels them to be different.
This also absolves a person of believing he can do anything about
his/her behavior. God makes us the way we are and we're stuck there
until He makes us different. This doctrine plays out in First
Pres. congregation where efforts are made to educate our own children in
the basics and give them opportunities for service as chosen by the
leadership, who represent God in this case, and tells them to do it as
part of the youth group membership requirements. Once the obligation to
serve in youth group is complete, most youth see no further need to
serve anywhere by their own choosing--they will serve as compelled or
requested by leadership. Nobody has left our youth group and started a
soup kitchen somewhere that I know of (except maybe Briana). Though, I
know you intend to disciple the kids, your efforts are defeated because
of predestination. Even though Jesus commanded believers to heal the
sick, raise the dead and disciple nations, predestination defeats His
command. That is why it is a lie straight out of the pit of hell.
Like
me as a wounded teen, nobody can go beyond what they believe in their
hearts. If you believe that every person is predestined by God to the
fate they now live in, then you cannot do anything to disciple
anybody--except your own children, who you hope, like yourself, are also
predestined, but they might not be, so there you are. Maybe they'll be
in Heaven with you, maybe not. My Aunt Jean, wife of an Episcopalian
minister, expressed the view that she would find out if God had chosen
her for Heaven when she died. I pitied her in that moment, but she was a
great lady and formidable intellect in virtually every other way. What
one believes in the heart becomes the paradigm of one's life. I answered
questions on AllExperts.com from a young man suffering from Asperger's
Syndrome. This form of autism is generally one that permits a person to
interact fairly well with other humans, however, like all forms of
autism he was subject to grasping a concept and thinking it through to
the bitter conclusion. I spent years discussing predestination with him
and the Biblical basis against the Westminster definition of it to no
avail. He ended up going mad and I had to sever all contact with him. If
one follows the doctrine of predestination out to all of its logical
conclusions, that God has chosen who will be saved and who will not from
the foundation of the world, then how can one avoid going mad? This
means that Jesus' suffering before, during and after the cross, were
mere formalities and not just sadism in the most extreme, horrible
degree, but masochism as well. A sado/masochistic God has made earth a
prison planet where He can fire His cosmic ray gun at the sinner at
will--hurricanes against sinful cities, earthquakes to torment the
wicked, sickness and disease all to torture us before we are either
plucked from this miserable place into Heaven to sing endless praises
(by compulsion) to God, because we have no other choice, or go to hell
where our torment will continue. Dan pointed out the other side of this,
the man who became a Unitarian because he could not accept that God
would choose anyone for hell.
The truth respecting predestination is somewhere else--not in the Westminster Confession.
The
baptism of infants increasingly became an agony for me--especially when
you encourage the congregation to "remember your baptism." How can they
remember that moment when a preacher daubed their infant heads with
water? I found myself mourning for the infants, so cute in your arms, so
calm in your capable hands. They'll never have the small terror of
being dunked by a person, not a family member, over their heads in
water. It gives the person being baptized a taste of dying--dying to
self. It gives the person a taste of trusting someone outside one's self
with one's life. And then coming out of the water to emerge on the
other side of the baptism pool, raised to new life, the old life behind.
How sad those Presbyterian children will never experience that! I mourn
their loss.
The prayer of confession which typically
contains some list of wrongs done during the week and the assertion God
forgives was another moment of grief for me. I am a person who already
has the kernel in my heart that I am good for nothing, the prayer of
confession wasn't a chance to be forgiven, but a chance to have the
belief reinforced. Jesus said, it is with the heart a man believes and
from the heart comes the man's deeds. If a man believes he is a sinner,
how can he stop? Rather than confessing, "As He is, so are we in this
world," I John 4:17, we are confessing, "We are not as He is, we are
other than He is." And ultimately we're saying His Blood isn't
sufficient except for one week's worth of sin abatement. We were saying
even God cannot transform us, we cannot be as He is. We are not the
righteousness of Christ, Romans 3:22.
Finally, the
model of the pastor who carries the church on his back is one that I
prophesy will disappear in the coming years. God never intended such a
model to exist. Jesus said YOU go to all the earth and heal the sick,
raise the dead and make disciples of all nations. That command wasn't
just for the eleven, it wasn't just for the thousands who received Jesus
as Lord at Pentecost, it is a command for all believers. Is there a
church in the Roswell area that believes that the common Christian can
fulfill this command? I don't know. I'm going to find out. But I do know
that in the next era of time, God is moving people away from the
mainline denominations and the old doctrines into something new. And
that new thing will look a lot more like Jesus' prayers answered than
anything that has come before. We shall do works greater than the ones
He did, John 14:12, and it can only come about by a shift in the
paradigms people hold in their hearts--of which predestination is a
doctrine which hampers and hinders John 14:12 and has done so long
enough. I want to be in the middle of that wave, that move of God, where
ever it is. He has made me the righteousness of Christ, He has seated
me in Heavenly placed IN Christ--IN Christ there is no condemnation, but
righteousness, peace and joy! I am IN Christ and IN Him there is no
sin, sickness or death. That is my confession and one that brought me
through to this point in time and I cannot have any hindrances against
that confession and hope to be all that He has called me to be.
Love
Marilyn
