Well, son two came back to Dunedin last night. School is starting: his older brother had his first assembly yesterday and next week the teaching year starts at work. The last thing that the son did in his holiday was volunteer with his mother at Parachute, and he was full of news: he enjoyed Hillsong leading worship.

And he said that the main speaker was the author of the Shack, that book of syncretic heresy. There was leaven in the loaf. In the search for deeper things, the evangelical church has moved beyond the veneration and respect for the saints who have gone before — as the Anglicans and Orthodox practice — to neo-pagan crap.

We forget that God will redeem us from Babylon. It will not be us. We are tempted too much by the fashions of doctrine. And the teaching he gives us is more than sufficient for life.

Isaiah 48:12-22

¹²  Listen to me, O Jacob, and Israel, whom I called: I am He; I am the first, and I am the last.
¹³  My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they stand at attention.

¹⁴  Assemble, all of you, and hear! Who among them has declared these things? The LORD loves him; he shall perform his purpose on Babylon, and his arm shall be against the Chaldeans.
¹⁵  I, even I, have spoken and called him, I have brought him, and he will prosper in his way.
¹⁶   Draw near to me, hear this! From the beginning I have not spoken in secret, from the time it came to be I have been there. And now the Lord GOD has sent me and his spirit.

¹⁷  Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I am the LORD your God,
who teaches you for your own good, who leads you in the way you should go.
¹⁸  O that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your prosperity would have been like a river, and your success like the waves of the sea;
¹⁹  your offspring would have been like the sand, and your descendants like its grains; their name would never be cut off or destroyed from before me.

²⁰  Go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea, declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it, send it forth to the end of the earth; say, “The LORD has redeemed his servant Jacob!”
²¹  They did not thirst when he led them through the deserts; he made water flow for them from the rock; he split open the rock and the water gushed out.

²²  “There is no peace,” says the LORD, “for the wicked.”

We need to be careful here. The return from Babylon the prophet predicts is in the form of a second exodus — by the provision of God (he is referring to an incident where Moses drew water from the rock). Babylon or Chaldea is the home of much mysticism and occultic practices: divination and witchcraft (the belief that you can manipulate the spiritual beings by formula or ritual). The danger is that in our awareness of spiritual warfare we will move from that we are equipped with into using the weapons of the enemy.

For the wicked will not rest. They will actively do evil. And if we use the tools of evil, they will twist in our hands: the end does not justify the means of attaining that goal, but instead the methods we use determine the end we reach.

When your state becomes corrupt and will neither accept correction nor allow you to worship — flee. And when the congregation accepts syncretic teaching and will not reform itself — again, flee. We have to continually reform our congregations and ourselves.

But do not live in the nest of wickedness.
—-
Note: within the four current streams of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic, Confessional Protestant and Pentecostal) there are congregations that have fallen into liberalism and/or syncretism and are dead though alive. And there are congregations where the spirit of the God works. The trick is not to be in the zombie congregation.