When a supposed Christian purposely preaches to you a false Gospel and you as a Christian ignore the word of God to embrace the word of the false teacher, where do you expect to end up?
I'll give you two hints: you're going to end up with that false teacher, and you're not going to end up in the presence of God.
Don't blame the false teacher if you find yourself embracing heresy or blasphemy, the bible gives plenty of warning that these antichrists will abound to fool and deceive us. In fact the bible shows what to do when you hear someone claiming to preach God's word.
Acts 17:11gives us a perfect example of how to listen to a man of God: get into the scripture, double check his message, take nothing for granted. Be a Berean - isn't your eternal soul worth the effort of double checking the preachers word? in
1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 we're ordered to test everything and to hold on to what is good.
2 Corinthians 13:5 also tells you to test yourself, and if you're testing yourself you have none to blame but yourself if you allow the heresy of an antichrist to become your Gospel.
I tell you that to tell you this: Rob Bell is back and he's not empty handed, he's brought his new book.
3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, 4 and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. 2 Timothy 4:3-4
Yep, our buddy Rob, the ol' ear tickler himself, has a new book called "What We Talk About When We Talk About God" and when he talks about God you can just hear the gates of Hell slamming wide open. Keep in mind that Rob Bell doesn't believe in hell, which is fine, as far as I'm concerned he can walk around not believing in furniture too, but come moving day he's going to find out that his friends at Allied Van Lines themselves believe highly in furniture. Unfortunately for Rob, he's also going to find out that both God and Satan believe in Hell and all his protests are going to be just as ineffective as they were for the guys with the moving van and bills to pay. So when Rob arrives at his eternal 'reward' he's not going to be alone, he's taking a lot of goats with him
Rob actually has a new video on YouTube promoting his book, (I've embedded it below). The spokesman for the publisher Harper One (printers of fine heresy for over 30 years) starts out talking about an old Oldsmobile Delta 88 and how it used to be so awesome - the gas cap is behind the license plate!!! (Some folks are so easily impressed, wait until he finds out that they were also available in front wheel drive!!!) But the spokesman tells of how the car eventually starts to fall apart. Then one of the biggest pieces of blasphemy I've ever heard comes across the screen:
"For a growing number of people in our modern world, God is a bit like Oldsmobiles."
You can almost hear Will Smith assisting Rob Bell with his newest form of blasphemy:
God = Old and Busted
Rob Bell = New Hotness
Their argument is that God, the creator of time itself, is incapable of keeping up with the times. That while technology improves, God is old fashioned and static, incapable of reaching out to his people and that makes him (in the words of Rob Bell) "appear more and more small and narrow and irrelevant, and in some case just plain mean, and other times Not. That. Intelligent."
You gotta admit, it takes a lot of guts or an equal amount of stupid to call the Creator Of Everything "Not That Intelligent". Of course Rob Bell uses a lot of weasel words like "it seems like..." or "it appears that..." but does Rob Bell actually think he's fooling God with this 8th grade parsing? It appears that all the proof we need to show that God is a Loving God is that Rob Bell hasn't been crushed like a bug. (See what I did there?)
Which brings us to Cathy. From the video:
Like my friend Cathy, who was at this event recently, where she heard an influential Christian leader say he doesn’t think women should be allowed to teach and lead in faith communities. Cathy, who has two masters degrees sat there stunned!
First of all, I'm glad to know than a friend of Rob Bell actually goes to see an Influential Christian Leader that knows his scripture. However I am stunned that Cathy, friend of the pastor who founded Mars Hill church (Rob Bell), Cathy who has two masters degrees and is listening to an influential Christian leader, has never read
1 Timothy 2:11-14, I'm stunned that Rob Bell chose not to lean over and whisper in her ear "yeah, it says that right there in the bible". Maybe if Rob Bell had been witnessing to his friend properly she wouldn't have had such a shock. Then there's his friend Gary who went to church on Easter and found out that unrepentant sinners are going to go to hell. Here's an example of another friend who Rob failed to witness to properly had to find out from someone else the proper Word of God. And yet
anotherfriend of Rob, Michael, had to find out on the street that if you disbelieve one portion of the bible you might as well ignore the rest.
My question to you, the potential reader, is why bother to buy this book? If Rob Bell can't witness to his friends what's he going to tell you, the people he doesn't know and cares little about? As Rob Bell himself emphasizes in this video "This is a problem". So when, in this video, he mentions he was a minister for over 20 years, keep in mind that he was thrown out of the church he himself founded because of blasphemous nonsense like this. And believe me, it's really really rare to get kicked out of a super-emergent church for blasphemy, it's a large part of their curriculum.
I'll let John MacArthur tell you why not to buy his book:
[Rob Bell] scoffs at the idea that divine justice requires endless punishment for unrepentant sinners. In direct opposition to what Jesus Himself taught in Matthew 25:46, Bell insinuates that it would be a gross, cosmic atrocity if the doom of the reprobate is everlasting in the same sense that heaven’s blessings for the redeemed are everlasting.
Bell’s notion of sin seems to be that its main evil consists in the hurt it causes to the sinner rather than the offense it causes to a righteous and almighty God. His concept of “justice” makes the punishment of sin wholly optional. His idea of mercy falsely holds forth a false promise of automatic leniency and a second chance after death to people already inclined to take divine clemency for granted anyway.Rob Bell’s god is clearly no one to be feared.
That all stands in direct and deliberate contradiction to everything Jesus ever taught about sin, righteousness, and judgment.
By thus pitting his own ideas against Jesus’ message, Bell makes it inescapably clear that he “advocates a different doctrine and does not agree with sound words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ” (cf. 1 Timothy 6:3). He is wrong—seriously wrong—heretically wrong—to question the justice of God and to hold out false hope to unbelievers. He is, as we have seen from the start of this series, a textbook example of the false teacher who secretly introduces destructive heresies (2 Peter 2:1). (source)
Rob ends his video on a bit of an up-note stating that God is ahead of us and calling us, and it's true, He is. The problem here is Rob Bell has ignores the call which is written down and available in hard back and paper back, it's given to potential GI's as they head off to boot camp, it's air dropped in North Korea where there's a death penalty to possess it. It's called the Bible and Rob Bell is making a living at pulling people away from God's word and replacing it with Rob's word which is based on his selfish desire to rise above God. He tells us there's a better way to talk to God and Rob Bell can teach you the way.
Instead, why not just open the bible and find out from God how God wants you to talk to God