What Is Heresy?

I made it a New Year’s resolution to attempt YouTube this year… So far, I seem to only be getting negative responses in regard to comments. I’ve been called a false teacher, one who hates his brethren, sowing discord in the Body, and then “blessed” that I might be an “exemplary tribulation saint” (which, if you know anything about the pre-trib rapture theory is about the lowest thing you can say to someone…).

So, what does the “heresy” word even mean?

It is by far the most thrown out insult in the Christian dictionary. It has become a cheap and glib way of kicking someone below the belt. What are the requirements of heresy, and if we’re calling someone a heretic, just how severe is it?

Heresy demands that the person speaking is not saved. What they teach is so far against anything the Bible holds true that they are antichrist through and through. They have denied the faith, spurned God’s love, mocked His means of redemption, and have offered others a vehicle of “redemption” apart from the one true God. Heresy demands that the teacher is so corrupt in their doctrine that there is absolutely no way in which we can even possibly call their teaching “Christian”.

When you claim that someone is a heretic, you are claiming that their teaching is so abominable that God will only damn them in response to it. Theories about the end times, atonement theories, questions regarding evolution or creation, and other sorts of things cannot cross these bounds. For something to be so anathema that hellfire is the only possible response, it must deny Christ in all possible ways, and in His place erect a false religion.

Galatians can be a good example of this.

By what means are you saved? This isn’t to question in what way Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection atones, but to question something much more foundational. Are you saved on the basis of your own merit, or is it only by grace that you are saved? Can you gain eternal life through Mohammad, or Buddha, or Confucius, or Talmud, or must salvation only come through Jesus Christ? The Galatians were being taught that in order to be saved, they had to do so according to the regulations of Moses. It bypassed Christ, undercutting the work of the cross and the Gospel of the living God, in order to maintain that there are pre-requisites and “works” by which you can enter the Kingdom of God.

I’ll say this:
If your theory of the end times crosses the bounds of Biblical doctrine, and this is really true for all categories in Scripture, then I would call you a false teacher. To then go the next step, as the Preterist or Covenant Theologian, and claim that all Bible prophecy is fulfilled, there will be no physical second coming of Christ, no bodily resurrection of the saints, no physical new heaven and new earth, and we are currently living in the new heaven and new earth, you have crossed the bounds into heresy. I don’t personally see how you can reason that covenant means spiritual life, and therefore all that the Bible discusses is “spiritual life” and “spiritual death” (therefore meaning that if you are in Christ you are “spiritually alive”, and within the new heaven and new earth).

Does this help?

I don’t usually get upset or offended when people call me names. In fact, recently I got a good laugh at an insult that was thrown at me, simply because they “insulted” me by saying the very thing that I hope to do and achieve. Such a thought of denying myself unto death was so foreign to them that they thought by “cursing” me unto martyrdom I would get offended. In this, I rejoice, because God has granted me a heart that desires Him to be glorified, and not myself. If I shall be judged, and therefore endure the Tribulation, then may God be glorified in it, and if at the end of it all I still receive hellfire, then even from there I shall cry with all my soul that God shall get the glory.