I recently wrote a writer of World Net Daily, the conservative news outlet that has written many articles of great interest to informed American on many topics. One topic of great interest to me is the one written by Bob Unruh, titled Critics Book Cover Mimics Best-selling 'Harbinger.' Below I include the letter that I wrote to him on the growing battles within Evangelical Christianity that are being enjoined between many so-called "discernment ministries" who are now targeting other Christian ministries with whom they have doctrinal disagreements.
A very big target of theirs is the New York Times Best-selling novel by Pastor and Messianic Rabbi Jonathan Cahn titled The Harbinger. But now in recent months, it's not just the book they have attacked, but also the man, his mnistry, and even the legitimacy of his calling by G-d. Their use of the disparaging impersonal "Cahn" rather than using the proper titled Rabbi or Pastor is one example, but there are others. They have also employed the " " when using his proper title of Rabbi and the use of the lower case r, all in efforts to de-legitimize him by subtle marginalization. There is much more, much, much more from these people, and I have been tracking as much of it as is possible, because it has been almost a barrage of incessant attacks that are not characteristic behavior between Christian ministries.
Beloww I cite others with my letter to Mr. Unruh. The spiritual warfare is among US, and the battle lines have been drawn. I said that the outcome of this spiritual war will be determined by the behavior of those enjoined in it. You will know them by their fruits, and at first the wheat and the tares may look and sound the same, but with time, it will become evident to everyone where the wheet is and where the tares are, as time and many other factors will make it evident.
And now, my letter to Mr. Unruh:
Dear Bob, Joseph, and staff @ World Net Daily,
Greetings. You hit the nail the proverbial head with your article on how deceptive these people who published a polemic against The Harbinger only to make it look as much as they legally can make it look like The Harbinger. Their disingenuous answer to your question whether it was intentional on their part to do this, reminds me of the Scripture that says: Every man’s way is right in his own eyes, But the Lord weighs the hearts. (Proverbs 21:2)
These people can claim one thing all they want, but their actions speak louder than their words. Like James has written in the inspiration of the Spirit of God, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” (James 2:18b) This is another way, the Scriptural way of the old cliché’, “Actions speak louder than words.” This is precisely why the Apostle John in the Holy Spirit writes in his Gospel the following:
Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name, observing His signs which He was doing. But Jesus, on His part, was not entrusting Himself to them, for He knew all men, and because He did not need anyone to testify concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man.
(John 2:23-25)
These people may claim that it was not their intention to deceive anyone by almost copying The Harbinger’s cover, but the fact that they had to make certain changes to the cover of the first edition of their book, and then publish a second edition of it, speaks for itself much louder than any claims against it. When pressed by WND on this, David James’ claim that, “They chose different elements,” and other claim that, “There is some similarity, but there are some significant differences,” rings very hollow indeed.
Moreover, The Harbinger’s main detractor – David James – who has written this book which is published by the Berean Call under T.A. McMahon’s leadership; claim that his book, The Harbinger: Fact or Fiction? clearly demonstrated that ‘The Harbinger ‘falls far short of meeting the biblical requirements for such a message from God, being based on the mishandling of Scripture, faulty theology, misleading statements, the selective use of historical facts and unsupported speculation.” Itself does not hold up to scrutiny. The claims he makes in his book point by point do not in fact “clearly demonstrate, as he claims, that The Harbinger falls far short of meeting biblical use of historical facts and unsupported speculation.”
Mr. James attaches meanings to words used in The Harbinger which its author Pastor and Messianic Rabbi Jonathan Cahn never intended, and works hard at splitting hairs regarding Mr. James’ own doctrinal disagreements as a Cessationist over words such as “mystery,” “sign,” “revelation,” and other terms used throughout the book denoting specific facts about each harbinger that Mr. James disagrees doctrinally because of his Cessationist/Hyper-Dispensationalist views with its rigid and dead scholastic approach to theology. The Holy Bible is not a textbook that we should treat it as such and God is not a concept but our Maker and Judge, the Supreme Being to whom we all must account to for our statements and behavior in this life.
There were some other changes made to the second edition of David James’ book, due to an Internet blogger’s Faith’s Corner website’s pointing out certain inaccuracies in it. But this is the problem with James’ treatment of The Harbinger. He splits hairs over semantical questions about certain phrases and his personal interpretation of them, and attempts to project those meanings on to the narrative of Rabbi Cahn’s book by using clever arguments to press his points which lead nowhere but where David James believes in his own mind.
David James belongs to a tightly knit group of various so-called “discernment ministries” that in recent months have taken upon themselves to attack The Harbinger. When they began, they first attacked the book, then as time progressed, they expanded their attacks to include some of Jonathan Cahn’s teachings on posted on You Tube. Now about a year later, they’ve included attacks against his ministry, Hope of the World, and the Arise and Shine Academy, making all sorts of outrageous claims.
One of them, the host of the DiscernIt website, has written the following complete fabrication, I quote:
“Not having thought about this book (The Harbinger) for some time, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the Arise and Shine Academy. There was not much information on the Beth Israel website about the source or content of the teachings, but I did notice a series on marriage. There is a book being used by Gary Thomas who wrote “Sacred Pathway.”
“ZIP – Up goes the red flag. Read the list of people promoted by ”Sacred Pathway”. Richard Foster, Thomas Merton, Brother Lawrence, Basil Pennington, Henri Nouwen, Bonhoeffer, St. Francis of Assisi, and Mother Teresa.
Source HERE
“Why is Beth Israel, led by Jonathon(sic) Cahn, allowing a course on marriage using a book with catholic contemplatives? It is because it is deeply steeped in mysticism and esoteric teachings which is more gnostic in nature than biblical.”
This woman is attempting to tie Hope of the World Ministries with “Catholic Contemplatives” because it has used the book by well-known author Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage, What if God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? If Beth Israel has taught Catholic Contemplatives, no one there certainly knows about it. And if this book has anything resembling what this lady claims, no one who’s used it has knowingly been teaching Catholic Contemplatives from it. In fact, they all say that they cannot find anything of the sort within its pages. But this lady connects this book (and Beth Israel) to the Occult New Age Movement called Sacred Pathways. We are looking into the matter, and I am examining this book to verify if the book has anything that in any way remotely or directly ties it to the Sacred Pathways Occult or to Catholic Contemplatives.
When I personally took the blogger of the DiscernIt web site to task on this - because she wrote against my personal testimony, and has written against Rabbi Cahn and the Arise and Shine Academy; she removed what she had written about me, but kept her lies about the Arise and Shine Academy, and her criticism against it because she claims that Rabbi Cahn and his ministry promote Catholic Contemplatives, when in fact I know that he does not. This lady is so reckless in her attacks against other Christians that she confused a personal testimony of mine on the Holy Spirit gift of the word of knowledge that the with the Occult practice of Remote Reading! Her ad homonym attacks is an extreme example of discernment gone awry, but this is how far off the rails these people are in their constant attacks against Jonathan Cahn, a genuine true servant of Christ.
Because my wife and I have been active members of Beth Israel for years now, and we personally know Rabbi Cahn for ten years, having attended service since 1998, and have heard all of the messages on which The Harbinger is based, we know that all of these so-called “discernment ministries” and self-appointed “watchdog groups” have completely misunderstood the message because they have read into it things that are not there. The blogger to the website Faith’s Corner mirrors what I have often said and blogged on my own site The Pepster’s Post: A Voice in Cyberspace about these people:
“Discernment ministries usually work to identify serious failures of Christian doctrine, such as a denial of the Deity of Christ, which is the essential problem with denial of the Trinity; or advocacy of extrabiblical revelation (anything that is taken as authoritative outside the Bible, such as the traditions of Catholicism or the Book of Mormon), prophecies that contradict scripture, imputation of works of the flesh or the devil to the Holy Spirit and vice versa.
So it's rather strange to see these ministries going after Jonathan Cahn's Harbinger with such zeal, considering that they can't identify any such violations of the orthodox faith without indulging in tortuous reasoning.”
(Faith’s Corner, How the deck is stacked against The Harbinger --updated Tuesday, August 21, 2012)
And this is precisely what I have noticed in David James’ book The Harbinger: Fact or Fiction? and in his criticisms of it on the web. It is much to do about nothing. This man and his colleagues at the Berean Call (TA McMahon), Worldview Weekend (Brannon Howse), David James’ own website the Alliance for Biblical Integrity, Pre-Trib Research Center (Thomas Ice), Challies.Dot.Com (Tim Challies), a website I was banned from after writing a lengthy correction and rebuttal of what it had posted against The Harbinger, Fighting for the Faith (Chris Rosebrough of Pirate Christian Radio), and a few others.
These people have one thing in common; they take great pains at splitting hairs over semantical questions, and indulge in all sorts of rhetorical gymnastics as whether this was done correctly according to their standards which they claim are the true biblical standards, or whether something was missing or not said, and indulge in what the Apostle Paul warns against to solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers. (2Timothy 2:14)
There was a time when these ministries served a legitimate function in the body of Christ in calling out the errors of the cults and Occult, and they did a superlative work outlining the differences between the fundamental core teachings of Christianity versus those the Watchtower Society of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), Herbert W. Armstrong Worldwide Church of God, and his son’s Garner Ted Armstrong’s aberrant teachings, the cult known as The Way International and their informal Twig Fellowships where they taught to deny the deity of Christ, and other fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. Ministries such as the Berean Call when it was directed by Dave Hunt did a fabulous job in this, and they built up a well-deserved reputation around it in their labors.
But in recent years, these so-called “discernment ministries” have turned their focus inward towards and against other Christian ministries with whom they disagree on topical, or doctrinal matters, or in methods of biblical hermeneutics about exegetical questions of various types. We see them now attacking Dr. James Dobson, Billy Graham, Dr. James MacDonald, Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, Pat Robertson, Pat Boone, Joseph Farrah, and many other mainline Evangelicals just for sitting next to someone who they claim is a heretic according to “their” standards. Now I am not claiming that they may be wrong about that other person, but my God man; are Christians now to do what was done against our Lord Jesus Christ when he sat and ate with people who in His day were shunned by the religious community!?
Is it possible for a born again Christian to be a religious bigot? It is possible for anyone to be a religious bigot if they forget who they are, what it took Christ to get them to where they are, and lack the empathy, the understanding, the humility, and the compassion and mercy, to refrain from doing what comes very natural to them – to criticize, to condemn, to speak against another, even before gathering all the facts – and yes, even David James’ many hours of research as he claims only yielded him the grossest inaccuracies largely based upon misunderstandings of fictional book based on facts contained in a topical series of teachings that Rabbi Cahn wrote into a fictitious literary work – a novel called The Harbinger – treating this novel as though it were an encyclopedia of theology; by reading into what Rabbi Cahn has written a good many things he did not write, and redefining them in his book to mean what was never intended. (I will present these, Lord willing, in a book I am working on at this time.)
This is a form of false witness. Very likely unintentional, but it is bearing a false witness against another, and misusing God’s Word to do it, because what is being presented against that person is both inaccurate and untrue. This is a very serious thing for one to do as a teacher of God’s Word, because the Word of God says that teachers will incur a harsher judgment in the manner they handle His Sacred and inspired Word. (James 3:1) Anybody can be a critic, the world is full of critics. We see them all the time, hear them on our radios, and now have their deskbound criticisms hurled at us without cause and without provocation by people whom we do not know, haven’t even met, who know nothing about us.
In closing, with regards to many of the critics of The Harbinger – as is with all religious bigots who split hairs over the letter of God’s Word in their attacks of other people with whom they disagree with. They do all of this, while forgetting the essence, or spirit and intent of what the Word of God teaches, and often do it resulting in the very confusion they claim they are attempting to clarify others to and warn others about. Oftentimes, they create more chaos in such situations than they intended, and the result of what they do is to foment divisions, altercations, and disputations between Christians themselves, while an unbelieving and unregenerate world looks on.
Yours in Christ’s service for God,
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