About 16 years ago my life fell apart as the Lord sought to chastise me. I had spent my entire Christian life in the modern Anabaptist movement where we sought to separate ourselves from the excesses of fundamentalism. In the aftermath of my chastening, I began to attend Fundamental Baptist Churches and I discovered a few disconcerting things.
One of those was that IFB preachers gave lip service to the King James Bible but preached from commentaries which were rife with NIV thinking. They would lightly and often make reference to the original languages when expositing a verse, and when I would track down the change it usually came from a Unitarian heretic like James Strong, or was patterned after the NIV. The other disconcerting observation that I made was that Fundamental Baptist preachers build churches with other people's converts.
They talk soul winning all the time, but there is no evidence of it in their pews. Imagine a man describing his tremendous farming and fishing techniques, but when you look in his larder, everything is from Walmart. Or, imagine a man that talked of his wife's fertility and who bragged about his honeymoon zest for her, but when you go to his home you discover that all of his children are foster children. Such is the average Fundamental Baptist Church today.
I have determined that the two problems are interrelated. A man who seeks to get people to trust Jesus Christ, but criticizes his word while doing so is like a man who seeks to procreate, but slips his wife birth control pills. The true infrastructure of American uniqueness, church holiness, and the general goodness of our early public life was predicated on the Word of God. In the 20th century the Education system, the courts and Bible colleges all chipped away at the public's trust of the Bible itself. The education system called the Bible a lie, the courts called unfit for public discourse and foolish preachers taught people it was truth in many different versions.
The threefold attack on the Word of God in public life successfully took the Bible out of American consciousness. Today we are under the judgement of Romans 1:21, Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. It is hard to get people to trust the Word of God today. A pastor's first obligation should be to get a person to trust the Word of God itself. Until men trust what they hear, what good are the promises they hear? That conundrum and that alone, is the main reason that we see hundreds of professions but very few true possessions. Fundamental pastors are assuming that their prey believes the Bible, whereas very few people believe the Bible.
My first impulse was to tackle the Bible issue first. I believe that King James Bible is the inspired Word of God. Further Thoughts on the Word God was written to bolster those of us who instinctively know that they have a perfect Bible, but often are cowed by an educated clergy who mock such thinking. Today the book is out of print (except the Vietnamese Version), but I am getting queries from interested parties. There are two books that I hope to reprint, Further Thoughts on the Word of God and Who Moved the Goal Posts? The latter book being an expose on the foolish soul winning techniques that have destroyed the Western World.
If I have any readers of this blog who would like to help with their reprint, please contact me at asquithjm@gmail.com or through this site. I can get 500 copies of Further Thoughts printed for $1321.00. I am in negotiations now about Who Moved the Goal Posts? The publisher would like some for their own sales and I want to use proceeds from Amazon purchases to help the Hephzibah House in Indiana. Currently, Who Moved the Goal Posts can be purchased on Kindle, but there is no ebook for Further Thoughts.