When I was a young naval officer my parents
gave me A Sailor’s Reader,
copyrighted 1943, which contains a literary assortment. My parents echoed the
author’s sentiments in his frontispiece at right. And as much as I appreciate
the book my parents gave me, it wasn’t until I had devoured God’s Book that the
meaning of the frontispiece blossomed. That sentiment is behind my hope and
prayer that The Age of Reason will
help you grow into the kind of man who appreciates the whole new life God’s
Book can give you.
If you are a true, humble, and committed Bible believer,
and if you have the kind of
love for the Lord Jesus Christ that gives you the strength necessary to
actually follow Him in accordance with what Scripture says, then yes, The Age of Reason is for you. If the
above description fits you, you have the spiritual qualities and
characteristics necessary to deal with the fact that coming out of modern
apostasy will make you different from most Christians, different from those who
will continue to follow religious, social, and moral traditions that are
contrary to the word of God. If you really do love the Lord and want the Bible
to be your sole authority in all matters of faith and practice, then yes, you
should study The AOR – but,
understanding that most Christians will not
be able to handle learning what real apostasy is, you should first humbly
and fearfully gird your loins by going to the Lord in prayer.
You must also understand this Bible study is unique in two ways:
first, it is for mature Christians;
and second, it really does reveal the apostasy that afflicts the modern church.
There are going to be things in this book that will offend you at first (as our brother says here). Those
things will cause immature Christians to quit because they don’t yet have the
faith, love, and strength to trust God and His word without the comforting
reassurance and social support of the modern church system. But mature
Christians will take the hard sayings in stride because their purpose isn’t to find a Bible study they don’t
need because they already know and agree with everything in it, their
purpose is to find a meaty Bible study that will help them understand the big
picture about Biblical Christianity. Therefore, the constant feeding they get
from their studies will sustain them through any rough patches they may
encounter. Learning is a growth process, and those who stay the course will
gradually understand why I put some of the hard sayings in AOR, and will eventually – as other things in the Bible begin to
fall into place – be glad I didn’t leave them out.
Many of you have heard about this Bible-preaching website and
have come here because 1) you want to know and
understand the Bible, and your church – as great, as comforting, and
as reassuring as it is – hasn’t given you the type of confidence in your
Christian service that is essential to walking in the light in these dark days
of modern sophisticated Christian denominations, and 2) there are things in
modern Christianity that make you wonder if the church is as spiritually and
doctrinally healthy as most people think it is. You sometimes think there is
something wrong with a church that has so many Biblically-ignorant Christians
in its pews every week. And instead of requiring them to properly master the
Bible, much money and effort is spent coddling and entertaining them in order
to persuade these doctrinally inept sloths that because they are members of an
“exciting” evangelical church they are exemplary frontline Christian soldiers.
You quietly think that type of compromising/coddling is more characteristic of
a modern timid politician hoping to remain popular than it is of the fearless
and straight-talking Christ who always strove to correct centuries of harmful
traditions. Over the years you’ve probably seen well-intentioned preachers try
different things to get more people actively involved: You’ve participated in
Bible study programs (that failed to engender genuine and lasting interest in
mastering the Bible), support groups, youth groups, athletic activities,
fund-raising drives, social functions, community involvement, political
activism, missions support drives, etc. And in spite of overly-enthusiastic
feedback from some of the active church members, you still wonder if something
is missing that, if added, would remove your doubts and give you the type of
confidence, clarity, and courage the apostles and prophets had when they
carried out the will of God by fighting the rampant apostasy among God’s
people. I say again for emphasis: All of God’s prophets in every era, and all
saints whose salt had not been diluted by religious tradition, had to war
against the apostasy that leavened the vast majority of preachers and pewsters
of their own church! That’s why I
often say,
to be affiliated with any denomination is
to be linked with apostasy.
Most Bible
study curriculums fail to impart a proper understanding of Christianity.
They’re like most high school and
college
history texts: They are full of facts and figures that only seem relevant and
valuable until you finish the course and realize you still don’t have a confident understanding of history; it still seems like a mass of confusing
facts, dates, and events – because your teachers and texts never enabled you to
see and understand the big picture. For example, a Christian in his 50s who’d
been active in his church for decades told me he didn’t feel doctrinally mature
enough to handle The AOR, so he put
it off until he completed a one-year Bible study curriculum recommended by his
church that would (he thought) make him better grounded in the word and in
doctrine. It didn’t; instead the course left him feeling more insecure because
he wondered if maybe he “just didn’t get it.” Christians who have endured those
kinds of “ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth”
Bible studies are impressed when they study The
Age of Reason; it enables them to see the big picture and confidently
understand God, world history, the Bible, and Christianity...as our sister
attests above.
When
Christians reflect on what they’ve learned from AOR they realize why
other Bible study curriculums were so confusing and unsatisfying – they were
written by well-intentioned men who couldn’t properly, completely, and clearly
teach a subject they didn’t fully
understand. Theologians, professors, and preachers who do not properly
understand the Bible don’t realize most of the stuff they teach is a waste of
your time and money. For these reasons, and after a lengthy period of
evaluation, AOR was selected by a
Bible institute as a teaching text for both students and instructors.
The Age of Reason is not a quick fix,
but it is a complete Bible study that will
enable you to see from the Scriptures that Satan has been very effective
over the last several thousand years in his efforts to deceive the church. The AOR will help you find out if the
Bible really has been your sole authority in all matters of faith and practice.
When studying The AOR you are going
to find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: either I am correct and Scriptural
in my book about how and why the church has used Reason to become blindly mired
in tradition and apostasy, or the system you’ve been a part of is correct,
Scriptural, and pleasing in the eyes of God.
Preachers often appreciate the
message of AOR more quickly than pewsters because
preachers generally have a broader understanding of the Bible. But my book is
usually more difficult for preachers to accept for the simple reason that
repenting from apostasy is a threat to their incomes. In fact, some preachers
who browse through AOR put it down and
walk away as soon as they realize its
purpose is to expose modern apostasy! They don’t know if AOR is true and if it really will reveal
them to be Pharisees in need of repentance – and they don’t want to know! Yes, Biblical Christianity
really is a matter of the heart: For the word of God is quick, and
powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword…and is
a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart (Heb 4:12). When we
think we love the Lord, but we aren’t basing our doctrines on what His word says,
we’re just fooling ourselves. If you search the Scriptures and find The Age of Reason is not in
accordance with God’s written truth, simply trash it and continue the search
for Biblical knowledge, understanding, and wisdom that brought you here in the
first place. If you find The AOR to
be correct, however, thank God for answering your prayers, and ask Him to help
you gird your loins as you begin serving Him by submitting to His Bible.
You will find The Age of
Reason to be well written, well organized, chronological, and very
readable…with two caveats.
First, I am told by all hands that it is pithy. That is, it is packed
with relevant information that will help you grasp the big picture. Students
often have to go back and read sentences and paragraphs again in order to
digest them. That takes some discipline for Christians who have grown
accustomed to quickly skimming the lightweight publications (that are 90%
filler) put out by our modern churches; they will find their brains need to
start paying attention: The Age of Reason
is neither light nor fast reading, but neither does it waste time beating
around the bush. I usually tell you right up front where I’m going with a
subject. The risk of that directness is you might be so offended by my position
or so sure the Scriptures will prove me wrong that you’ll stop there and trash
the book without bothering to read my explanations and look up the referenced
Scriptures (which is why this Bible study has QuikLinks)
in order to learn the Bible doesn’t teach what tradition told you it does. But
the payoff of my directness is you’ll know exactly what I’m doing. You may
think I’m wrong at first, but at least you’ll know I’m not trying to hide
anything from you or to manipulate you. How you ultimately react to my book and
to the Bible isn’t my business; that is between you and the Lord.
Second, there will be things in my book that offend you, that
scare you, and that you think (at first) are Scripturally incorrect. In
other words, you are going to come face-to-face with real apostasy. That means
my book is going to affect you deep inside where you live. You are going to
experience what it feels like to find out that traditions accumulated over
centuries really have made the word of God of none effect in your life.
That means you are going to have to stay very close to the Lord via His
Scriptures as you study your way through The
Age of Reason. As you study keep in mind that any and all doctrines that
have ever been taught in churches and Bible schools were supposed to have come
solely and exclusively from the Bible. I’ll say that again: Any doctrine – no
matter how popular and widespread – that is not supported by the written word
of God is unscriptural.
Some Christians have benefited from my book even though they
haven’t yet been able to come to terms with a few of its many points. That’s
normal; it’s the way we all learn and grow. My book isn’t an attempt to
force-feed anybody; it’s an attempt to help my fellow servants.
While you are going through this Bible study you’ll realize you
really are being fed. And you’ll see
why I say it’s for mature Christians. But later, after years have combined with
knowledge and experience to produce wisdom, you’ll understand with a touch of
sadness that AOR actually covers basic
fundamentals of Christianity…that
AOR only seemed to cover advanced material because you were viewing it from
the type of blindness, immaturity, and apostasy that afflicts the modern
church. If you’re an older Christian you’ll feel a sense of helpless sorrow as
you realize you should have been taught the fundamentals in AOR when you were young so you
could have the time to think, do, and learn…so you could grow into the kind of
mature wisdom that is the gradual result of building on a proper foundation. If
you are a younger Christian the Lord, by the time your righteousness is crowned
with a hoary head (Proverbs 16:31), may have given you the kind of knowledge
and wisdom that can be used to truly feed His sheep and turn them into
spiritual warriors.
The wife of one preacher (in one of the cults I mention in the Introduction) who
was helped by The Age of Reason when
it made all of his years of Bible studying fall into place and make sense (thus
exposing the false doctrines of his church), told me her husband stayed up late
at night wrestling with my book. He’d rant about me and angrily fling my book
onto the sofa. But he determined to keep going because my Scripture references
were valid and he really was learning. The historical section wasn’t
particularly new to him because he was already widely read in history. But he
said almost every time he turned a page in the doctrinal section he found
another challenge to his understanding of Christianity. He submitted to the
Scriptures, repented, and eventually began a series of sermons designed to help
his church wake up. He also wrote to the authorities in his denomination. They
never answered him, the church board banned him from the pulpit, he quit
the cult when he realized the Bible wasn’t its real authority, moved to
another state, and is happily and confidently serving the Lord in accordance
with His word. He turned out to be more than a man of the cloth; he turned out
to be a man of God.
I’m not telling you this because I’m trying to scare you off.
I’m telling you this out of respect because the fact that you are on this web
page is an indication that you are a sincere Bible believer who just wants to
find out if my book can help you or not. You’d also like to know if I really do
go by the Bible, and if my book really does reveal Reason to be the fundamental source of
apostasy in the church...or if I’m just another pet-peeve-oriented nitpicker
who can’t see the forest for the trees. You cannot know for sure unless you
open your Bible and study The Age of
Reason.
May God bless you in these dark last days.
2 Timothy 2:15 Study to shew thyself
approved
unto God, a workman that needeth not to be
ashamed,
rightly dividing the word of truth.
Promoting Bible study over
theology
because of the truth, the
authority,
and the necessity of the
Bible.
Faith, belief, and humility lead to Bible study. Reason, doubt, and pride lead to theology. |