In this episode, Joel sits down with returning guest Justin Peters to discuss three reasons why you should stop using Bethel and Hillsong music in your church. 1. They re cults. 2. By using these songs, you re subjecting weaker members of your body to heresy. 3. They are not theologically robust enough to combat the idolatry and heresy that already exist in our sinful hearts.
00:00:45.480And so for this part one, we're just going to tackle that first reason.
00:00:50.540Bethel and Hillsong are not true churches.
00:00:52.800And we're going to do this by explaining precisely why they're not true churches and providing a biblical criteria for what constitutes a true church according to God.
00:01:03.780Applying God's word to every aspect of life.
00:02:05.120Well, I've technically written two books, but only one of them is available in English.
00:02:10.040And the one that's available in English is entitled Do Not Hinder Them, a Biblical Examination of Childhood Conversion.
00:02:17.840How to know when conversion has really taken place in the life of your child before you rush them off into the baptistry, just because they've made intellectual ascent to a few basic gospel facts.
00:02:28.740So, yeah, so I deal with a number of other issues.
00:03:43.360They certainly have church in their name, but they are not churches by the biblical definition of a church,
00:03:49.100because both Bethel and Hillsong are cults.
00:03:54.120And a lot of people chafe when I say that, but I stand by it.
00:03:58.800They do not have a biblical leadership structure.
00:04:01.840They do not practice church discipline.
00:04:04.860the first command, actually, that Jesus gave to his church, Matthew chapter 18. They don't do that.
00:04:11.320And they are both committed to word of faith theology, word faith slash new apostolic
00:04:17.760reformation, the very subject matter for which I'm most well known, that which I teach against
00:04:24.160all over the world. The belief that it is always God's will to be healed. It is always God's will
00:04:30.420to be wealthy. You can have physical healing and monetary prosperity as long as you have enough
00:04:36.300faith. They hold the word faith theology, little God's doctrine, positive confession, speak things
00:04:42.660into existence, all of these things. And an argument could certainly be made that Bethel,
00:04:48.900pastored by Bill Johnson, is certainly more heretical from a purely doctrinal standpoint.
00:04:54.380I mean, they they are they are more heretical, but they are they're cut from the same basic cloth.
00:05:04.620And in fact, when you look at Hillsong's conferences, you see a lot of cross pollination between Hillsong, Brian Houston and Bethel, Bill Johnson.
00:05:16.620They speak at each other's conferences. They're very friendly with each other.
00:05:20.900They're simpatico. They endorse one another. And so, yeah, so they're both cults.
00:05:28.900Yeah, I totally agree. And in my observation, it seems like they both have the foundation, the foundational doctrinal tenets, false doctrines.
00:05:37.820The real difference isn't doctrinal. It's more so like a philosophy of ministry.
00:05:42.240Hillsong is a little bit more of the seeker sensitive, lighthearted.0.92
00:11:55.740So so they have to knock him down to elevate us to be on the on the same plane as he is.
00:12:05.160And specifically with the supernatural, with the gifts of the spirit, like Jesus, the most normal.
00:12:10.220So so what they don't want to happen in that ultra charismatic kind of, you know, word of faith movement, what they don't want to happen is they don't want you to look at Jesus and say, well, that's Jesus.
00:12:21.920which you and I would say frequently, we would say, well, that's Jesus. But that's what they
00:12:28.320don't want to happen. They don't want people in their mind, they would be thinking, you know,
00:12:34.200if anyone who's saying, well, that was Jesus is making in their mind an excuse. And so when they
00:12:38.880say the most normal life, that's really intentional language Bill Johnson is using. So what he's
00:12:44.920saying is rather than seeing Jesus as the God-man exception to all of humanity, far and above,
00:12:54.240rather we look at him as the normative. And yes, it's true. We view Christ as the standard
00:13:02.900in terms of his holiness, his doctrine, what he preached, what he taught, what he did, how he
00:13:07.980lived. We look at him as the standard, but there's a difference in saying Christ is the standard
00:13:12.000versus saying Christ is the norm. And when you say Christ is the norm, what you're ultimately
00:13:16.580trying to accomplish is anybody who's not going around doing miracles a dozen times a day,
00:13:22.780that's abnormal. That's abnormal. And so it's a way of creating a culture where
00:13:29.880not only is the miraculous permissible or emphasized, but you're actually now ostracized
00:13:38.240and even demonized if you're not thinking about talking about and attempting whatever that looks
00:13:44.980like the miraculous on on a daily basis because that's been set as as the um not the standard
00:13:52.740of holiness but the standard of of what's normative and so anything outside and so it's a
00:13:57.540way of just kind of trying trying to you know say you know i i've heard bill johnson say before um
00:14:03.340he has a, what does he call it? I have a Jesus theology or a theology of Jesus, you know,
00:14:10.240anything that, how does he say that, Justin? You know what I'm talking about?
00:14:14.280Yeah, various iterations of that, but his basic error is that he believes that, for example,
00:14:23.060when Jesus gave us the model prayer, our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom
00:14:29.740come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Bill Johnson extrapolates from that,
00:14:36.480that on earth as it is in heaven, that whatever heaven is like, we should have here on earth.
00:14:41.840And that's kind of like the foundation for his theology on healing. He says there, in fact,
00:14:47.840I have this in my seminar. He said, there's no cancer in heaven. There should be no cancer here
00:14:51.720on earth, even though his own wife has cancer. I don't know the status of it. Yeah. Benny Johnson
00:14:58.140and was diagnosed with cancer several years ago.
00:15:01.580I don't know what the status of it is now.
00:22:29.860And when Jesus utters the words, I am, they fall back.
00:22:32.640And Jesus has to help them arrest him.
00:22:35.700Otherwise, they were never going to get it done.
00:22:37.340So Jesus very much had maintained his divinity at every point and maintained it on earth.
00:22:43.520But it was often concealed from being perceived by the minds and hearts and eyes and ears of men, including the disciples.
00:22:53.440There are many, many moments where Jesus, you know, he even has to ask him, who do you think I am?
00:22:57.580Who does man say that I am? Who do you think I am?
00:22:59.440And Peter gets it right, but only because the fathers revealed it to him, because Jesus wasn't walking around on earth with a glowing light above his head, like some Jesus movies would kind of portray him.
00:23:10.020But that's not because he lost his divinity or paused his divinity or laid it aside or emptied.
00:23:16.360It's because his divinity was thoroughly concealed, present always, but concealed by flesh.
00:23:24.820But we know it was there because there are multiple occasions where Jesus reminds his disciples and reminds us through the witness of Scripture that there's not a moment that he stopped being the fully divine son of God.
00:23:39.520Would you agree with that, Justin? Anything you want to add to that?
00:23:43.200I do agree with that. And no, I mean, you pretty much covered all the bases there.
00:23:48.720Okay. I just want to make sure I didn't say anything that you wouldn't agree with there.
00:23:53.440But yeah, so that's the problem. When you have a little Jesus theology, he divested himself of his divinity.
00:24:59.800That's a bad view of the Trinity. That's a bad view of the hypostatic union of the divine nature and the human nature of Christ.
00:25:07.100It misunderstands the incarnation. It misunderstands the essence of God.
00:25:11.920It's just bad theology. And it's not just bad theology. It is heretical theology.
00:25:20.300So anyway, could you name maybe one other doctrine that we would say, yeah, this is a heretical doctrine that's coming out of these institutions?
00:25:28.760Well, related to that is the little gods doctrine.
00:25:34.280Chris Vallotton has taught that recently within the last couple of years.
00:25:39.560Little gods theology, of course, the kenosis, belief that we can speak things into existence,
00:25:46.300belief that we can perform greater works than Jesus did.0.78
00:25:50.640And also, I mean, the false prophecies, you know, that in and of themselves marks them as outside of Orthodox Christianity because they all claim regularly that God speaks to them and they hear God speak to them constantly.
00:26:12.200God seems to speak to these folks more than he ever did to Moses, and they're always, you know, it is, you probably could barely listen to 10 minutes of a sermon out of Bethel and not hear the phrase, God told me, you know, I heard God say, God said this and God said that.
00:26:29.980I mean, it's just constant. It's just, it flows out of them. It uses out of their pores. And so
00:26:37.240the charismatic movement really does not believe it to be a serious thing to put words in God's
00:26:43.940mouth that he did not say. And yet the Bible marks such people as false prophets. And they do this
00:26:51.340all the time, all the time. I mean, it's, and you listen to their sermons. It's not about exegesis.
00:26:57.280you don't hear exposition of the text. You'll,
00:27:01.240you hear stories and personal experiences. Well, God did this, God did that.
00:27:05.660You know, I saw this, this happened over here.
00:27:07.560And they'll throw in a verse here or two just to kind of sprinkle it in to,
00:27:11.520you know, just to make it appear to be preaching, but that there's no exposition
00:27:16.000there. There's no inductive study of scripture.
00:27:21.300It's all about stories, feelings, personal experiences and false prophecies.
00:27:26.300And they do that literally all the time.