James Malm is acting just like Rod Meredith and Dave Pack. Both of these fools believe they have committed no major sin since they were baptized.
Malm assumes that once a person is baptized and IF they do not sin then his god will be pleased with them. There is no IF in the factor. If you are a Christian you will sin, there is no way around it. The difference between a person tied to the Old Testament laws and a new covenant Christan is that righteousness is already imputed upon us. That is the entire point of justification by faith.
We are told in the scriptures that those who the Father calls to the Son, may enter a New Covenant through wholehearted repentance form sin [rebelling against the word of God] and a baptismal washing away of past sin and a commitment to sin no more.
If we have been Called Out by the Father and have responded positively to that call with sincere repentance of breaking the word of God and if we commit to sin no more in baptism; then the Eternal will write his law on our hearts and in our minds.
The Father has indeed been Calling Out many over the past six thousand years, and will yet extend this New Covenant to all Israel and to all flesh by grafting all flesh into a spiritual Israel.
Uh... excuse me: What's a MAJOR sin? I only know of one Armstrongist minister who was a major in the military, so what's this major part?
ReplyDeleteI don't suppose being a false prophet being under the death penalty would count, would it?
These brazen people have absolutely NO fear.
Are absolutely certain they aren't atheists (not there's anything wrong with most of the atheists I know, but it seems so hypocritical to be a 'Christian' minister atheist)?
Yes, in case you missed it, I'm mocking you (narcissists can be so dense sometimes).
"Malm assumes that once a person is baptized and IF they do not sin then his god will be pleased with them."
ReplyDeleteProof that armstrongism is a mental disorder.
He forgot John 3:16, or the passages in Paul's epistles that state that God loved us when we were yet sinners, or the others that state that nothing can separate the Christian from God.
ReplyDeleteJust imagine being part of a church that made you wake up every morning wondering if this would be the day that somehow you would lose your salvation!
Hey, Malm. We can't even respond to this with a "How spiritual!" You make it all about the physical as if that were the real deal.
BB
If you were to read the whole bible as though it were the inerrant word of James Malm's God, which I'm pretty sure James Malm does, there's a curious thing. The bible says that all men have sinned. Right from the start, however, it also shows god going to whomever he chooses.
ReplyDeleteNoah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, the Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Saul, David, the prophets (especially Jonah), the apostles, Paul on the road to Damascus--so the story goes, none of them seemed to be holier-than-thou pharisees (except for Paul, which didn't seem to be the reason why he was chosen--quite the opposite), no indication of whether most of them were "baptized" or not--so the story goes, they were seemingly authentic regular guys minding their business and god just went to them and said, I've got a job for you. Regardless of how they responded, that was that, and if you didn't want the job, tough.
It's nothing like the pharisaical, "you've gotta be a super human überman, or else you're a subhuman üntermensch, with no middle ground and no possibility of just being an authentic regular guy. Apparently, when god created Adam, he said everything he made was very good, but he was wrong. But with enough of your own effort, you can recreate yourself in god's image, and make up for where god fell short and got it wrong? This is the message of Armstrongism. Authenticity certainly gets short shrift. According to these guys, you can get somewhere with god by sucking up and brownnosing him.
This has been the message of Armstrongism since Herbert Armstrong first darkened the airwaves with his pharisaical theology. This has been the message of Rod Meredith in particular, one of Armstrong's most devoted acolytes ever, who only got in trouble for copying his master a little too closely while his master was yet still alive. And as Rod Meredith was every minister's boss during some of the most influential years, Rod Meredith's theology has, in turn, shaped the theology of every Armstrongite minister in every splinter cult down to this day.
James Malm thinks he's new and different, but he's not. Not in any way. He's got more bells and tassels than Herbert Armstrong or Rod Meredith, and he thinks that makes him superior, that much is really obvious. But he doesn't have as many as the Pharisees of old had, or the Hasidic Jews today have. James Malm hates what he perceives to be the faults of Herbert Armstrong and Rod Meredith, but he seems to be blind to how deeply and completely he and his ideas have been shaped by those two. So where does that leave him? It leaves him as the quasi-Jewish bastard child of two pharisees he thinks he hates.