I was the cook again this week at the elderly house, meaning I was also the one in charge of answering the phone, getting to the doorbell and sorting the mail.

As soon as I saw the cover story of this week’s Time Magazine, fresh-delivered for one of our male residents, I just knew Rick Warren would be named among “The Time 100: The World’s Most Influential People.”

Sure enough, there was his glowing write-up on p. 112 in the “Activist” section, next to a full-page painted portrait designed to make him look like a Catholic saint complete with the uplifted right hand and outstretched fingers in the Baal symbol.

The article confirmed there are “thousands of pastors whom Warren trains and millions of seekers who follow his every word. Which means he is right where he wants to be.”

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Of course, this is all to be expected in a post-Bible world where it’s men who tell you how to be a “man of God,” not God. And with Warren, all you get is New Age-inspired hooey.

In a Q & A he conducted last month with the popular New Age website Beliefnet, Warren admitted, “I'm actually having a Passover Seder tomorrow night. People never need to doubt why I do what I do, even when associating with people gets me in all kinds of hot water.”

He then bragged about how he had “webbed feet” from dunking a record 800 people in his baptismal pool at Saddleback Church in a five-hour period.

Warren said, “It had to be a record. You know, it says in Acts that at the day of Pentecost, 3,000 were baptized and added to the church that day. We had 2,400 added to the church that day. The world belongs to Saddleback. When we started Saddleback, it was a white suburban church. We speak 65 different languages. It's the United Nations. I baptized an Egyptian General; I baptized probably 50 or 60 nationalities.”

Most revealing of all, when asked the question, “But as long as you're working with groups of other faiths, where do you draw the line?”, Warren answered, in part: “You're probably not going to convince a Muslim to change his views, and he's probably not going to convince you to change your views about Christ. I am interested in interfaith projects. Can we work together on issues that apply to humanity like caring for the sick, assisting the poor, educating the next generation, ending corruption, and promoting reconciliation? I don't have to agree with you and you don't have to agree with me on everything, but I'm not insisting that you compromise your beliefs.”

Of course, Warren’s “convictions” represent perfectly the historical definition of the philosophy of apostasy: “Can’t we all just get along?!”

As author R. Dawson Barlow so aptly puts it in his 2005 book The Apostasy of the Christian Church, “The buzz word of this growing number of people is, ‘Well, you have to do whatever is right for you.’ The conclusion is that nothing is really right or wrong, but what is right and and wrong for me. This is nothing but a denial of any absolute truths.”

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Just as untold thousands upon thousands of so-called “Christian leaders” today follow Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life as their authority for all-things-ministry, Israel’s religious leaders during the time of Christ did the same thing with their Rabbi-concocted Talmud (designated as “the literary reservoir of Rabbinic Judaism” and added to the Sacred Literature of Israel during the Hellenistic Age--250-200 BC--in Jewish history).

Barlow explains, “The ‘religion’ of our Lord Jesus Christ was that of Judaism, a faith whose ONLY foundation was the Word of God, which was called the Torah. In contrast to that, the religious leaders of our Lord’s day belonged to another (though it adamantly claimed to be the same) religion that was based on the Talmud, which was man’s addition to the Word of God.

“I am perfectly aware that these words will cause an uproar. It will not be as seemingly caustic as the reaction that will come with the exact same charge will be laid at the feet of Christendom. I reiterate, Christianity is a faith in the Word of God only—Christendom is a totally different ‘religion’ than that and it rests upon the tenants of paganism, philosophy and augmentations to the Bible.”

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Barlow continues, “After the Talmud was added to the Torah, the religious leaders began to put the emphasis on the Talmud. Little time passed before the true test of orthodoxy was one’s views on the Talmud, not the Torah. . .

“This then is the reason for the caustic and acrimonious relationship between the Lord Jesus and the religious leaders of His day! It is then abundantly clear that our Lord and the Pharisees were completely polarized in their theological stance, and that they did not, in fact, believe the same doctrines . . .

“Our Lord, in the Sermon on the Mount and throughout his earthly ministry, was most certainly not speaking out against Mosaic Judaism. Rather, He was castigating the apostate ‘Jew’s religion’ which had replaced the Word of God with the thoughts, traditions and philosophies of men . . .

“Christ and the Pharisees were indeed at irreconcilable odds with each other. The issue that separated them allowed for no common ground between them because they believed in two different authorities . . . The Jewish religious leaders, while giving lip service to, and expressing belief in the Torah, actually, and practically believed in the supremacy of the Talmud. . .

“To those ‘Christians’ of our day who would reply, ‘All this doesn’t really matter,’ we reply, with great passion, it mattered a great deal to our Lord Jesus, who refused to budge or compromise on this truth.

“He knew it was blasphemous—while anemic philosophers of our day, with wispy-eyed

Countenances still reply—‘I just do not see the point.’ That irreconcilable, philosophical gap caused the avowed enemies of our Lord to blindly reject Him and that was the reason they formulated their plan to murder Him. It mattered then, and it matters now with no less intensity.”

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When John the Baptist came on the scene he had to tell the people, “I’m not the Messiah,” precisely because they had gotten so far away from the Torah as to not have the ability to recognize who the Messiah was or wasn’t. John was forced to remind them, ‘I come to bear witness to the light.’

Jordan explains, “What was going on in Israel is what goes on in religion. They had mistaken the leaders of the nation and had made gods out of them. They’d put them in the position of being deified—making them the supreme authority in their life and John is reminding them what they missed.

“The world didn’t recognize its Creator. It didn’t know Him. That’s the unspeakable tragedy where they can’t even recognize their own Creator. That’s where the world was! By the way, that’s the condition of the Gentile world all through Israel’s history.”

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In Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas were actually mistaken for the popular gods Mercury and Jupiter after they came on the scene and Paul healed a man who hadn’t been able to walk since birth.

The passage reads, “And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.
[12] And they called Barnabas, Jupiter; and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker.
[13] Then the priest of Jupiter, which was before their city, brought oxen and garlands unto the gates, and would have done sacrifice with the people.
[14] Which when the apostles, Barnabas and Paul, heard of, they rent their clothes, and ran in among the people, crying out,
[15] And saying, Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein.”

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Jordan explains, “Paul’s telling these heathen exactly what John had to tell Israel. Now, in Acts 17:22, Paul’s speaking to some pagans who were of the intellectual crowd and he just calls them they’re a bunch of superstitious, religious ignoramuses.”

The passage reads, “(For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.)
[22] Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.
[23] For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.”

Jordan says, “They’re at Athens up on Mars Hill and the Athenians were the great philosophers of the world. If you go into any university to the English lit and humanities department, you’ll see that the reputation of these people Paul’s talking to here was that they were the brightest, greatest brains humanity’s ever produced.

“And Western civilization, in large measure, since the days of the philosophers of Greece, have simply just taken the ideas of these people, which by the way, were largely plagiarized.

“You’ve heard of Aristotle’s Golden Mean? With Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the quest was for the ‘sunum bono’—the supreme good. And Socrates said, ‘Well, you don’t want to be excessive in either good or bad. You want to have that level balanced life in it.’ You know where he got that? He stole that out of the Book of Ecclesiastes? Socrates literally paraphrased what Solomon said but never gave Solomon credit for it.

“Every major philosophy of the world has its roots in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. Looking at verse 18, if you take the disciples of Epicures and disciples of Zeno (which is where Stoicism comes from) the Epicureans—that’s the Hugh Heffner’s of the ancient world, it’s, ‘Let’s eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.’ The Stoics were the stiff upper-lippers—you know the, ‘Well, you endeavor to preserve,’ to quote the Indian in the Clint Eastwood movie.

“Hundreds and hundreds of years before these guys were born that information had been studied, examined, put on the record and found to be worthless. But these guys picked it up and made a career out of it.”