Hello, this is Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Manbroadcast, as well as the Hank Unplugged podcast.
I mention that at the outset of what I want to talk to you about because both of those outreaches continue to have a very significant impact around the world. Of course, if you go to equip.org, you can see a plethora of resources so that you will be built up in the faith once for all delivered to the saints. But that’s not what I want to primarily talk to you about today.
Today, I want to talk about the end of another fiscal year. We have a calendar year, but we also have a fiscal year, and our fiscal year ends June 30. Every single year at this time, I am reminded of how transcendentally critical your support is in the task of global missions. I am also reminded that I ought to be deeply grateful for people like you, who make an eternal difference through your support. You are touching the lives of people that you will likely never see until you commune with them for all eternity in the presence of God.
It’s been well said that there is a direct connection between the oneness of Christians in the image of the Holy Trinity and the missionary mandate of the church. The church, after all, is a mystery of mutual Trinitarian love, and the church is true to itself only when that circle of love is continually expanded—only when you and I are dedicated to the Great Commission given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ just prior to His ascending to His Father in heaven.
Now, it’s obvious that not all of us can go to mission fields around the world, but all can facilitate the commission that Christ gave us through their support and through their prayers. All can have a part. All can participate in bringing the gospel to those who have not yet heard the name of Jesus Christ. Tragically, the unreached are measured not merely in thousands, but in multiplied millions of souls.
As I speak, I am likewise reminded of the reality that the ever-growing kingdom of the cults—aptly described as the unpaid bills of the church—continues to expand all over the world. They proliferate in part by subduing people who have not yet been rooted and grounded in the faith.
I was just recently in China doing a primary-source research project with respect to an insidious cult. I use that term “insidious” advisedly, because this is a cult that has literally seduced millions upon millions of people into the idea that Jesus Christ—now this may be hard for you to grasp—has been reincarnated as a female on the Chinese mainland.
Imagine this: a Chinese Christ shamelessly asserting that the words of our Lord Jesus Christ spoken during the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 apply specifically to her. In other words, that the lightning that comes out of the east and shines even to the west points prophetically to her reincarnation in the east, and to the reality that this “Eastern Lightning” will radiate to the west and then to the rest of the world.
And yet, this is precisely what is now happening worldwide—people doing for a lie what oftentimes Christians aren’t willing to do for the truth.
Like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Church of Almighty God, also known as Eastern Lightning, is using the full force of its very substantial financial and creative resources to spread pernicious dogmas to far-flung places.
An Oxford University Press publication provides at least a partial list of the countries now boasting Eastern Lightning devotees: South Korea, Taiwan, the United States of America, Canada, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Belgium (where I was born), the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Finland, Spain, and the list goes on. Other countries in which Eastern Lightning has established churches include the Philippines, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and other places worldwide.
Appallingly, in many of these countries the notion has become the prevailing narrative that the Church of Almighty God—followers of the female Christ—is just another persecuted Christian group. The narrative is no longer about the pernicious sociological and theological deviances of this cult, but instead casts it as a Christian group unjustly being persecuted.
In truth, this sociologically subversive cult induces its disciples to abandon their social and familial obligations and to commit unreservedly to spreading the culturally subversive message of the counterfeit Christ. This extends even to the tearing apart of the family unit.
This cult, in very graphic language through the words of its counterfeit Christ, exhorts devotees to leave their families and wholeheartedly commit to the mission of gaining new converts. Women leave their babies—four-year-olds or five-year-olds—and are induced to make new converts while neglecting their own families. Those who fail to do so are explicitly rendered worthless by the female Christ.
The theological travesties are equally disorienting and dangerous. They begin by denying the unique deity of Jesus Christ through the profane assertion that He has been reincarnated as a Chinese female now present on earth.
Original sin is compromised by the perverse claim that the corruption of Adam and Eve did not arise from their disobedience but originated entirely from Satan. The Holy Bible is supplanted by a blasphemous extra-biblical revelation that purports to eclipse the Ten Commandments with ten “administrative decrees,” declarations in which the female Christ warns devotees that it is her prerogative to kill anyone who violates her decrees.
The Trinity is deemed incoherent, described as a figment of a satanically corrupted imagination.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ—the capstone of the Christian faith—is likewise compromised. Eastern Lightning asserts that the female Christ is the incarnation of the first Christ, that Jesus failed to complete the work of fully gaining humanity, and that this reincarnation must now finish what Jesus did not do.
The truth that anyone in Christ is a new creation is replaced with a counterfeit doctrine of eternal estrangement from God. Even eschatology—the thread that weaves the tapestry of Scripture into a harmonious pattern—is ignominiously sullied by an incoherent Eastern Lightning charade.
Much more will be said in a special edition of the Christian Research Journal, soon to be released and translated into many languages worldwide. Along with other CRI resources, it will equip believers everywhere to recognize counterfeits instantly.
Thank you—from the core of my being—for the difference your prayers, partnership, and generosity make in standing against ideological battles we dare not lose. Thank you for being willing to do for the truth what cults like Eastern Lightning do for a lie.
Only one life, soon to be passed; only what’s done for Christ will last.
We are still on this earth, still able to lay up treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Thank you for listening.
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