For years now, I’ve had people tell me they’ve been turned off on Christianity by guys like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who go on TV and act as if they represent God when they’re really self-righteous phonies.

I even had a friend explain to me that after 9/11, when a “window of opportunity” opened for her to start to have faith in the God of the Bible, it was quickly closed by Jerry Falwell who, on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, blamed the 9/11 hijackings on gays, abortionists and others who’ve “thrown God out of the public square."

In the interview, Falwell warned a nodding Robertson that America’s secular and anti-Christian environment left God “open” to allowing our enemies “to give us probably what we deserve.”

The reality is Falwell deserves shame for this unscriptural, vitriolic rhetoric that makes him a horrible national spokesperson for the Christian faith.

As for Robertson, he consistently promotes false doctrine. Look at this blasphemous commentary from his official website:

“If the United States, and I want you to hear me very clearly, if the United States takes a role in ripping half of Jerusalem away from Israel and giving it to Yasser Arafat and a group of terrorists, we are going to see the wrath of God fall on this nation that will make tornadoes look like a Sunday school picnic. We have not begun to see how bad it's going to get if we are leading an attempt to do that.”

For one thing, even the most cursory reading of Paul’s writings in the New Testament makes it clear we are currently living in a “dispensation of grace” in which God is holding BACK His wrath. God is currently extending grace in hopes that more and more people will see the truth of His Word. It is only after the Rapture (described in I Thess. 4: 13-18) and the beginning of the Tribulation Period that God’s wrath will be demonstrated.

The sad truth today is there are very few professed Christians in the public spotlight who understand or adhere to this grace program (defined by Paul in the books Romans through Philemon). Instead, they incorrectly follow Jesus Christ’s ministry to Israel (written up in the Four Gospels), trotting out verses and passages from all over the Bible to back up a completely confused—and confusing--assessment of what God’s doing.

Just the other weekend, Attorney General John Ashcroft, as part of heading up the 50^th General Council of the Assemblies of God, reaffirmed his belief in the practice of “speaking in tongues.”

If you’ve ever witnessed so-called “speaking in tongues” on TV or in a church service, it often consists of certain preachers and/or congregation members suddenly blurting out unintelligible gibberish in an ecstatic pitch, acting as if they’ve been “filled with the Spirit.” The whole thing is fake and in violation of God’s Word.

“God today is not speaking by extra-biblical revelation and for a man or a woman to stand up in church and claim when they speak it’s God speaking is nothing short of blasphemy,” says my pastor. “Paul’s message, the ‘revelation of the mystery’ (Romans 16: 25) that was ‘hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints’ (Col. 1:26) completes and brings to an end the Bible. While tongues were once used to communicate revelation from God, today that revelation is complete. God has finished His Word and for a person to claim God is speaking through them is a blanket denial of the complete and final authority of the written Word of God.”

In the Old Testament, speaking in tongues, or the sudden ability of an individual to speak in different languages they’ve never studied, was one of many “signs and wonders” shown Israel to serve as proof of a revelation from God. Moses, for example, was given by God the “signs” of healing and serpent-handling to prove he had been commissioned to deliver Israel from Egypt. (Exodus 4)

Of course, no Jew performed more “signs and wonders” than Jesus Christ and He used them precisely to prove the truth of the gospel. The Bible makes it clear that Christ’s miracles—including raising the dead, making the blind to see, instantly healing lepers, feeding five thousand with two fish, turning water into wine, stopping the waves of the sea and walking on water—were always done in the presence of competent witnesses to assure their legitimacy.

In John 5:36, Christ Himself explained that His miracles were to serve as evidence He was the prophesied Messiah: “…the same works that I do, bear witness of me, that the Father hath sent me.” In John 4:48, Christ told some Jewish noblemen, “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.”

After Jesus Christ was crucified and raised Himself from the dead in front of witnesses, Jews still refused to believe in Him as their Messiah or His message that He had come to fulfill God’s promise of a Kingdom of peace and prosperity.

Hence, the Twelve Apostles went about performing more “signs and wonders”--everything from John healing a lame man to Peter raising a man from the dead—to lend evidence. Nothing worked, though, and Israel sat in its unbelief.

Even when Peter told Israel that if they repented and accepted God’s offer of forgiveness He would bring Jesus Christ back to them and set up the Kingdom as planned (Acts 3: 19-21), Israel balked.

God responded to this sinful conduct--that included the stoning death of the apostle Stephen by the leaders of Israel--by “casting away” the nation for a time (Romans 11:15), instead going to “visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name.” (Acts 15:14)

To lead this new administration, God made Paul, a Jew who admits to formerly persecuting the church of God “beyond measure,” to be the official Apostle to the Gentiles.

Upon taking office, Paul performed miracles among Gentiles as well as Jews to provide proof to both peoples of his divine calling. Other Believers at the time were given “sign gifts,” including speaking in tongues (Acts 2:4), to try and convince the unbelieving Jew that, as Paul had testified, God set aside Israel to focus on Gentiles for awhile.

In his letter to the early church at Corinth, Paul explains that because “Jews require a sign” (I Cor. 1:22), speaking in an “unknown tongue” was a way to testify to an unbelieving Jew: “Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not…” (I Cor. 14:22)

Paul explains in I Cor. 13:8 that the “sign gift” program was being phased out—“whether there be tongues, they shall cease”--as a result of his Apostleship and the ability for people to listen to his message, given to him by Jesus Christ, for complete revelation.

If you look at Pat Robertson’s website, he, like Ashcroft, incorrectly subscribes not only to “tongues,” but the other out-of-season “sign gifts” of healing and prophesying. Indeed, “sign gifts” are the calling cards of the Pentecostal movement, of which the Assemblies of God denomination now boasts 2.5 million members.

With sound Bible doctrine now lost on an increasing number of mainstream Christians, misguided attempts to realize God on an experiential level, “handling the word of God deceitfully (II Cor. 4:2)” in the process, can be expected to grow.

As my pastor explains, “Speaking in tongues is the most dangerous error of the Charismatic Movement not because of its excesses or emotional focus but because it is in its most basic form the cultic doctrine of continuing inspiration—a doctrine that strikes at the very heart of the written Word of God.”