Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Fruit of Iron-Clad Predestination Doctrines?

In the meta @ PyroDan's latest post on preaching the gospel, the question rightly was raised about how to balance out recent Pyro advice to "stick it out @ your church" regardless (Frank Turk's view) vs. Dan's question, "If people were to start flooding out of such churches, leaving behind clear statements of the reason for their departure..." One commenter opined, "Just keep praying and acknowledging that God is sovereign, and somehow is causing all this for His glory and our good."

What a recipe for doing nothing about anything! (Should you not flee a decaying church the way you'd flee a rotting, septicimia-causing carcass out in a field?) But then, with the constant harping on sign-on-the-dotted-line church "membership" and "submit to your elders!!!!!" and what seems like almost a concept that the individual believer is married to the particular fellowship where they regularly worship, I guess this kind of absurd fatalism should come as no surprise.

I mean, hey, Elijah should've simply continued trying to work from within the fellowship that followed Baal; and Moses, when he came down from the mtn., he should've simply worked around the golden calf. And Jeremiah, what were you doing, scalding those Israelites with your jeremiads? You shoulda just stuck it out. After all, "Just keep praying and acknowledging that God is sovereign, and somehow is causing all this for His glory and our good."

Never mind Scriptures that seem to teach just the opposite (after all, they're in the O.T., and some are just proverbs, besides):

"Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding."
"Leave the presence of a fool, for there you do not meet words of knowledge."

"Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord..."