Gospel Truth or Pagan Lies: Can You Tell the Difference - Softcover

Having just returned from eighteen years in France, where it was impolite to talk religion in public, I was faced with an America I had never seen before. I knew America has always been spiritual, but in 1993 in Chicago, I saw a new kind of spirituality that joined all the religions of the world.

We have never lived in a more spiritual time.

People are waking up to their spiritual potential. Gurus propose techniques for prayer and meditation that they claim will bring us into communion with our higher selves and the god within. Today witches, chiropractors, yoga instructors--even cereal manufacturers--all claim to be spiritual.

Christians find themselves confused. No longer faced with a takeover by atheistic Communists, they are not sure if they have an enemy. Enemies are not in vogue in a society of tolerance. Aren't all people of faith on the same side? The cold war is over; democracy and material ease are spreading to cover most of the globe. Hope of a new dawn for humanity hovers in the air of a new millennium. Atheists are a thing of the past. Ninety-seven per cent of Americans believe in God. Ninety per cent of these believe God loves them. With all this spirituality, one would expect social harmony and moral excellence. Strangely, the very opposite is the case!

Since the Sixties, spiritual America has become a world leader in pornography, juvenile crime, abortion, divorce, cohabitation, adultery, family breakdown, radical feminism and militant homosexuality. If so many people believe in God, why such social and personal disintegration? What kind of God condones such selfish and immoral behavior?

We have never lived in a more spiritually confusing time.

TimeLIFE Books promotes The American Indians, with the following invitation: Come to a place where spirits are real. The Bible calls us to spiritual discernment. We are not to believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God (1 John 4:1). We need to wake up. Anti-Christian but very spiritual paganism is flooding our land.

Two thousand women from mainline churches met in Minneapolis in 1993 to re-imagine their Christian faith. They mocked the God of the Bible and worshiped the goddesses of ancient paganism.

Every Fall, tens of thousands of normal Americans meet at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert to worship Papa Satan.

You might argue that only oddballs or the intellectual elite believe in this kind of spirituality. But if your mall is like the one near me, you can walk into Hot Topic, where my thirteen year old thinks the clothes are rad, and discover an entire bookshelf on witchcraft, or buy badges declaring, I love eternal damnation, and I am God. Do you sense the dark waters rising? We will drown if we do not realize what is happening. As our ship of state sails straight for an iceberg, are we on deck playing shuffleboard?

A recent book appeared with the title, The Changing of the Gods. Its title describes what has happened in one generation. Many still believe in God, but they no longer believe in the God of the Bible. America is now One nation under many gods.

The Bible calls a warning to us. There are only two kinds of spirituality--Christian or pagan. The two systems have nothing in common, and are as different as the truth and the lie. James, the brother of Jesus, speaks about a wisdom [that] does not come down from heaven, but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil (James 3:15).

But the pagan lie loves to disguise itself in Christian clothes. It tells us that Christianity is part of a global unity, and that paganism is the true expression of what Jesus taught. Don't believe it. To step into the pagan circle, you have to set Christian thinking aside.

This book deals in ground zero thinking. It explains:

1. How the spirituality around us is often pagan and anti-Christian, and how the seemingly unrelated radical agenda are, underneath, aspects of this pagan way of looking at the world;

2. How Christian spirituality differs in every respect from pagan spirituality, though the pagan sometimes dresses in Christian clothes.

If you are a Christian, I hope what I write here will help you to avoid being blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming (Eph. 4:14). Paganism comes in many forms. Some are clearly anti-Christian. Others claim to be Christian. We need a clear grasp of biblical truth and of the system that falsely claims to be the truth.

If you are not a Christian, I respect your search for true spirituality and your willingness to read this book. I encourage you to open your mind to the God who made you and calls you to love him. I pray that what I write will provoke you to search for the Christ of the Bible, and to realize that any spirituality which fails to proclaim Jesus (born, crucified and raised) is no spirituality at all.

So as you read this book, keep asking yourself this simple question: Gospel truth, pagan lies--can I tell the difference?