For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. -2 Timothy 4:3
I am not into boycotts, nor do I use the pulpit as a tool to browbeat all those who disagree with me or the church. I think I can say that confidently, and I trust that all of you would agree about that as well. I believe the pulpit (preaching) is a means by which God declares the gospel to each generation. It is certainly not the only means, but it is a powerful and important means. Therefore, I do not belabor politics, or social issues, or even current events on Sundays. Most of you graciously give me your ears for 35-45 minutes every Sunday. I want to use that time to speak about God, the gospel, and truths relevant to our lives directly from the Scriptures.
With that as a backdrop, I now delve into my topic for this Jym Shorts article. There is much excitement right now revolving around The Shack, a movie currently in theaters based on the bestselling novel by Wm. Paul Young. I read the novel some years ago for the same reason I have read other books that did not really interest me, like Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz and Rob Bell’s Love Wins. I read them not because they are helpful in teaching me truths about the faith, but because many other Christians were reading them and claiming that they teach biblical truths. I want to know for myself, and be able to converse with people about them without relying on hearsay. So I read The Shack. I found it well written, even gripping in places, with many strong emotional moments. I also found it to be woefully poor at teaching biblical theology, something Young was clearly trying to accomplish in novel form. The god he portrays – Papa, Son the carpenter, and the Holy Spirit in the guise of a vivacious servant woman – are gods made in our image, who say soothing things we humans love to hear and find so true about ourselves and our experiences. But the god of The Shack is not the God of the Bible.
The reason for my addressing this issue is not to ask you to boycott the movie. Do what you want with your time and your dollars. That is, as always, between you and the Lord. I write this because Young is now capitalizing on the movie’s release with a follow up book, this one not a novel. It is entitled Lies We Believe About God. In this work, Young is no longer sharing a story with us; he is sharing his doctrine of God. Let me be blunt about this; his doctrine is not only unbiblical, it is what his title declares – lies about God. I will include three book reviews on this work at the end of this article, because space here does not allow me to go into detail, but about this I must be clear. Although false teaching about God is sustained throughout The Shack, it is nevertheless somewhat subtle. Young is, however, shouting it from the rooftops in Lies.
One of the great difficulties in discerning false teaching is that the false teachers rarely believe that they are teaching false concepts. When the unsound teaching is pointed out, they quickly retort that it is their accuser who is actually the false teacher. Young is no exception. According to Young, it turns out that the false teaching to which we have all been subjected has come down to us in almost 2,000 years of lies, starting with the early church Fathers and morphing into all the bad things “religion” has taught us in the name of Jesus, including the institutional church, the Reformers of the 16th century, all the way to me, your lead pastor. We have all missed what Jesus has been trying to say, because we are all stuck like fuddy duddies in the Bible. Thank God enlightened people like Young, and others, have come to save the day (I am employing irony and sarcasm here, in case you can’t pick it up without a tone of voice behind it).
As I have said many times before, we cannot determine false teaching based on what the person teaching it says about themselves, and that includes me. Nobody says, “And now what follows will be a steady dose of false teaching…” How, for goodness sake, are we to know? It is relatively simple. Know the truth, and lies show themselves to be lies. In this case, know the word of God, and compare all that you hear - in books, movies, music, and preaching, to the real thing. That includes, of course, what you will see and hear, most likely acted out wonderfully, in The Shack, if you should choose to spend your time and money on that.
http://www.challies.com/book-reviews/what-does-the-shack-really-teach-read-lies-we-believe-about-god
https://baldreformer.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/unshackled-the-god-of-wm-paul-young/
http://www.albertmohler.com/2017/03/06/shack-missing-art-evangelical-discernment/
Grace and peace,
Pastor Jym