Frank Peretti: There's only two religions in the world. Either God is God or man is God. It all boils down to one of those two categories. That is also a reflection of two attitudes. Either you're going to have an attitude like Jesus Christ had, or you're going to have an attitude like Lucifer has, like Satan has. That's what it really boils down to. Let's look at the two attitudes. Philippians chapter 2 verse 5, alright? Those of you who do not have a Bible, if you did not bring a Bible just read my lips as we read silently, these verses together.
I'll read it out loud. This is the New International Version. "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus." That's what I'm really harping on tonight. "Who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant. Being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the father. Amen."
Now. Would you please bear in mind the Jesus who was and is God humbled Himself and became a man. That was very nice of Him to do that considering that most people today are trying to become God, the perfect opposite. See, you got two attitudes there, but what's this other attitude? Where does it come from? What's it like? Well, let's go to Isaiah 14. Isaiah 14 verse 12 this is one of those passages that talks about the fall of Satan. "How you have fallen from heaven, oh, morning star, son of the dawn. You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations. You said in your heart," now, before we get into this, when we pray the Lord's prayer, what do we pray? We say, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Good attitude. What does Lucifer say? "I will ascend to heaven. I'm going to be the head honcho of heaven." The HHH.
I would imagine he even got past God's first secretary you know, "Hey there. I'm the HHH now." He got found out ... down to the earth he went. Now he's moping. He's pouting. Stomping around the earth, "Boy, that God. What a sour person he is. Kicks me out of heaven just because I want to be God. I mean, who does God think he is? God? I'm going to get God, I'm going to get Him. I'm going to get Him." Then he's probably walking around in the Garden of Eden, you know, and he hears this voice, "Oh, Adam. Suppertime."
Makes his way through the garden and he looks upon the apple of God's eye, the joy of God's creation, the center of God's purpose. He looks upon mankind. "You've seen two, you've seen them all. There they are. I have a plan. You know, God, being totally just, had to kick me out of his presence when I rebelled, when I wanted to do my own thing, when I wanted to be God. If I can get mankind to buy into that same line, if I can get mankind to assert himself and try to be God and be rebellious, God, being perfectly just, will have to kick him out of his presence and kick man out of the Garden of Eden. It's a beautiful plan." And he goes to his closet. He's got to have just the right outfit. "Oh, wolf in sheep's clothing. Ah, snake."
Genesis chapter 3. We go now to the conversation between Eve and the serpent now in progress. "Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, 'Did God really say, "You must not eat from any tree in the garden?"'" I mean, really, let's be open minded about this. Let's think this through. Did he really say that? How do you know what God really said? I mean, after all, it's been translated so many times. It can't possibly be accurate anymore. Let's shed doubt on God's word alright? Well Eve, I don't know if she'd been to Sunday School or something. She had it down. "The woman said to the serpent, 'We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, "you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden and you must not touch it or you will die."' 'You will not surely die,' the serpent said to the woman, 'for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing good and evil.'"
In other words, "Eve, if you eat that fruit, your eyes will be opened. You will have an altered higher state of consciousness. You will see things you've never seen before. You'll have truth in reality you've never experienced before. You'll be able to make your own universe, call your own shots, make your own rules. You'll be able to judge for yourself what is right and what is wrong. You will be the ultimate arbiter of all truth and all morality. Oh, what a package. All you've got to do is eat the fruit." So Eve thought about it, "well, okay."
And she ate the fruit. It's not the fruit, it's the fact that they ate the fruit. The fact that at a heart level they decided, "I want to go for that, I want to do my own thing, have my own way, call my own shots, make my own rules. I want to be God." Who can pass that up? Well, none of us ever did. You know? It's kind of, it's called sin. The Bible says, as in Adam, all die. You know, we all inherited that. You know, the humanists tried to tell us that, "Actually man is perfect. He is pure, he is born a clean slate. It's only society and poverty and ignorance and social injustice that makes him bad. We all know that. We all have to teach our kids how to be selfish. We have to teach our kids how to be rebellious. You know, "Son, son, you're obeying me again. Listen, you know what. Don't obey me so much."
Oh, it's that basic attitude and we've all kind of inherited that. It's part of being human. We have it in our hearts. Me, me, me. I want to do it, I want to do it ... Some of us never grow out of that. Instead of growing out of it, we turn it into a religion and we spiritualize it. And that's kind of what we see happening in a very obvious way in our society today. You see, look at 1 Samuel 15:23 it's a profound statement by Samuel. You know, there's a whole context here of how King Saul disobeyed the Lord and so forth and the prophet Samuel is scolding him. You can read the whole thing to get the context. But this one key element here that Samuel says is very important for any society to remember. In 1 Samuel 15:23 he says, "For rebellion is like the sin of divination." Some of your Bibles probably say witchcraft. "And arrogance, like the evil of idolatry."
Rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft. Samuel is telling Saul, "Saul, you feel like you're so holy, don't think you're any better than all those witches that you've driven out of the land. Because at a heart level, you're no better than they are. You have rebelled against God. You've asserted your own will over that of God, and you are expressing a rebellion against God that is the same stuff that the witches are into because witchcraft is ultimately a rebellion against God, and asserting of your own power and authority over creation."
That's really interesting. Let me draw a line for you. This will kind of clarify it a little more for you. I call this the line of rebellion. There. There's a line. There's five points on the line, five kind of steps toward that. You start at this end of the line. Let's start with the basic rebellion. Let's start with the idea that there is no God. I'm not going to have God running my life and telling me what to do. I want to do my own thing. You know what that is? That's humanism. Humanism is the basic idea that man is the center and the measure of all things. There is no God, no. Man is the final arbiter of all truth. Man is the one who's going to decide what's right, what's wrong, what's good and what's evil, what's true, what's false. He may have caused some of his problems, but he has within himself the capacity to solve his problems. There are no absolutes. It's only what man thinks. That feels so sweet for a while. You're going along. You're saying, "There's no God. It's me, just me, just me in this universe. I'm all alone in this universe." And then it begins to sneak up on you. "Ooh, I'm all alone in this universe." And you start to wonder, "What am I even doing in this universe? Why am I here? Where am I going? Who cares?"
Oh, we work on that real hard as a society, we raise our kids that way. "Kids. Welcome to biology 101. We're going to learn about bugs and slugs and grass and flowers and we're going to cut up frogs. Do all kinds of fun things in this class. But first and foremost, before we learn anything else, kids, the first thing you need to learn is that you are an accident. You're a totally meaningless conglomeration of molecules that came together purely by chance millions and millions of years ago.
"The dust and the gas of the universe kind of floated around and finally bumped into each other. And then it said, 'I know. Let's be organic.' 'Okay!' And so it became organic. And they kind of came together and they formed little gooey things, and little gooey things floated around in the primordial soup for a couple of million years and they grew little flippers and fins and they kind of grew legs and crawled up on the land. And then they started getting fur and feathers and started eating bugs and all this other stuff and they kind of became bigger creatures and started rolling around and they'd kind of started walking upright, became a monkey and then they kind of became an ape and then the ape decided to shave and so he shaved. They became, you know, an evolutionist is what they became. It's kind of like 'from goo to you by way of the zoo.' As such, kids, as such kids you, you're really an accident. You have absolutely no reason for being here. Your life is meaningless. It is without purpose. The universe couldn't care less that you're here and when you leave you're only so much compost. So oh, class dismissed. Okay, well head on down the hall now, kids, to that new class. They're starting this week, that class all about self-esteem."
Yeah. Our society has a way of shooting itself in the foot sometimes. We work so hard to take away our kids' ultimate sense of meaning and purpose. Value. I don't really have any reasons for being here. I'm an accident. I'm meaningless. Second notch on the line is the idea. "I'm going to find more to myself." There's all kinds of different ways to do it. You can go to India and contemplate your navel and things like that. You can enroll in a motivational course at the company where you work or you can get into all kinds of other stuff. You get into this. There's all this hidden potential inside me. "We only use 10% of our brains anyway." "I didn't know that." "That's true." "Who says?" "I don't know. I just heard it somewhere. I don't know, but we only use 10% of our brains and if we could just tap into that untapped 90% oh, there's nothing we can't do. What man can conceive, he can achieve. Limits exist only in the mind. You're a winner. You're on your way to the top." You can you get involved in all that stuff?
But you know when you really get into this human potential, "I'm going to find it somewhere," you end up over here in new age occultism. That's where that human potential that is so neat to look for actually becomes something more than just cells or the 90% of your brain. It becomes something spiritual. The idea, "yes, we're actually divine!" You know, the new agers will tell you that. "Our problem is ignorance. We're all God. We just forgot that we were God." That's some kind of God that forgets that he's God. And what good is that going to do? You remember you're God if you forget it again? But no, "We're actually all divine. There's this divine potential in every one of us, we just have to discover our higher selves." And so they get into the crystals and the Tarot cards and the higher selves and the meditation. They do all that stuff because they were looking after trying to find that potential that is actually something spiritual.
But when you get into real heavy new age, occultism, you're actually dealing with spiritual beings out there. You know, they're into channeling and so forth. This channeler goes into some trance and then this spirit enters their body, speaks through them, begins to tell them all kinds of neat… You're getting into an area over here where you're actually starting to mess around with demonic spirits. Now you're into witchcraft. Witchcraft. What is witchcraft? Witchcraft is seeking after power. The goal of witchcraft is power. White magic, black magic. It doesn't matter. You're after power. Power over other people. Power over your situation. Power to manipulate reality, power to be, as it were, God.
So you tap into the natural forces, you tap into the spiritual forces through spells, potions, incantations, lighting candles, doing all these different things. You get yourself a few familiar spirits, these spirit guides that come and help you out or manipulate you or use you until you get into such bondage that you cannot escape it. And then you end up over here at the last step on the line. And that's what we hear so much about today. And that is Satanism.
Satanism. Well, that's naturally the way we're going. We're wanting to do what Satan wanted to do in the very beginning. "I wanna run my own show, do my own thing," and now Satan is coming along and saying, "I'll help you. I'll give you all the power you need." And look, here we go. This is where man ends up. This is where our young people are ending up. We started over here by telling them, young person, you're nothing but an accident. There are no absolutes. There are no absolute morals. No one has any right to tell you what to believe or what to do. So go ahead, do whatever you want. Boom. This is where they're ending up, because rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.
And when we as a society decided that we were going to throw out the God and whom we're supposed to trust, we basically signed up for a whole lot of trouble as our whole society began to slip down this line. It's red flags time now. In 1 Timothy chapter 4, let's see, turn to that. 1 Timothy chapter 4, the scripture says, the Spirit clearly says that "in later times, some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons." Now, in the original language, that means deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.
Well, we used to kind of slough over that a little bit. You know, doctrines of demons. Yeah, sure, you always called some things weird guys coming up [inaudible 00:17:59] No. These are doctrines that are actually taught by real personal demons who are speaking to people today who are talking through them, who are manipulating Ouija boards and crystals and Tarot cards who are actually causing doctrines to be taught all around this planet.
Now, the big religion of course is that man is God. "Come on. Do your own thing; have your own way…" There are five doctrines that can lead you to that conclusion. I'll give them to you. Number one. The first doctrine is truth is relative. Truth is relative. Oh, what does that mean? Well, that means that there is no ultimate truth. Whatever you want to believe, that's true. We're going to be real relativistic. We're going to be tolerant. We're going to be, we are the world. We are her children. We're all going to get along because nobody really knows anything for sure. So believe whatever you want, and it's right for you. You see, we've got an opinion oriented society. Now we used to say, well, everyone's entitled to their own opinion. That's true, but that doesn't mean that everybody's opinion is just as good as everybody else's. It is possible to be wrong.
But we don't seem to like ... we don't go for that in our society anymore. We don't want to say anybody's wrong, you know? Well, let me tell you, you're going to be a relativist. The relativist believes three things. Number one, you have to believe that nothing is true. It's true! The second thing you need to believe is that nothing is knowable. In other words, you can't know anything for sure. Nothing. I'm sure of that! The third thing, you have to believe that nothing matters. I don't care what it is, it don't matter. Well, think about it. Imagine that I'm raising my kid. I say, "Kid, nothing is true and I don't know anything and neither do you and neither one of us ever will. Oh yeah, we can make up something. Go ahead and make up something. Your opinion is just as good as mine. So what are you left with? Really, ultimately when you get to the end of it, you're left with ... So go out there into that meaningless, pointless, chaotic universe and try to make the best of your life. Maybe you can come up with some reality that will make you feel good, but I haven't got anything to offer you." Those kids are in big trouble, aren't they?
When you know the Lord, when you know the transcendent personal loving God, you've got something that you can carry with you and pass on to your children. Something they can sure of, solid ground that they can walk on.
Roger Marsh: Well, that is a challenging point upon which to end this entertaining message from author and speaker Frank Peretti here on Family Talk. As parents, we must be constantly aware of the dangerous ideologies that threaten the hearts and minds of our children. Now, this was an encouraging program, so be sure to join us again for the remainder of this presentation on tomorrow's Family Talk broadcast. In the meantime, you can learn more about Frank Peretti by visiting our broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org. While you're online with us, be sure you also check out the Dobson digital library. That URL, as we like to say, is dobsonlibrary.com. Now, this is our comprehensive catalog of Dr. Dobson's work over the past 40 plus years. We have gathered all of his articles, blogs, newsletters, and past radio programs as resources for you all in one place. You can also search under the categories of marriage, faith, parenting, and culture. Just click on any of those tabs when you go to dobsonlibrary.com and you'll find what you need. Tap into Dr. Dobson's years of knowledge today. Go now to dobsonlibrary.com. That's dobsonlibrary.com.
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Well, we've run out of time for today's broadcast, so be sure to join us again tomorrow for the conclusion of Frank Peretti's engaging message. He'll continue addressing the beliefs that endanger our faith and pollute the minds of young people in particular. That's all coming up next time. Right here on Dr. James Dobson's family talk. I'm Roger Marsh. Thanks for listening.
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