Lillback's Messiah

https://georgewashingtonbible.com/pages/foreword-dr-peter-a-lillback

While perusing the nationalist idolatry and filth being promoted on some other Evangelical sites, I encountered this gem from PCA pastor Peter Lillback, who is also president of Westminster Seminary - to that institution's discredit and shame. Lillback has been known to me for many years as he is a leading champion of the syncretism I refer to as Christo-Americanism. This forward from the 'George Washington Bible' testifies to this.

Washington may have promoted the Brown's Self-Interpreting Bible, but it's clear enough that Washington did not understand the Christian faith. In fact, I regret to say it could be an argument against simple lay interpretation, or more likely an indictment of Common Sense Realism, the dominant epistemology of the period. Washington rejected New Testament teachings and ethics. He was a man of blood and rebellion, an Enlightened man that did not root his thought in Scripture. Further he was deeply involved in the idolatry and false religion of Freemasonry. Unfortunately the Church has been plagued for generations by false teachers, revisionist historians, and whitewashers like Lillback who deceive the Church and teach it to emulate this wayward Christ-rejecting man and to esteem him because he was the leading general in a rebellion which led to the creation of this idolatrous Christ-rejecting nation - which in short order began to evolve into the evil empire it is today.

Bible reading and Biblical literacy are fine things but when the Scriptures are read through a distorted lens or when the text is subsumed under other guiding epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical commitments - which in the case of Washington was Enlightenment philosophy, it does little good. We see this so painfully today in the degradation that is American Evangelicalism.

Sure he took his oath on the Bible - it was the Bible from the local Masonic lodge. That's rather telling I think and Lillback here not only obfuscates the nature of Washington's faith but he justifies his sin. It's as if since (according to Lillback) America is by definition good, therefore any amount of sinful rebellion and bloodshed required to create it is therefore justified. God help those who study under this man's preaching, teaching, and interpretations of history. God help them.

Lillback celebrates Washington's own contradictions and self-condemnation:

For example, on April 30, 1789, the new president said in his First Inaugural Address,“Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

The American rebels disregarded the eternal rules of order and right ordained by Heaven. Their uprising was in direct contradiction to the commands of Romans 13. There is no Biblical basis for Democratic Republican government - despite the revisionist myths of Os Guinness and other false teachers who promote this lie. The Scriptures do not teach a social contract. The reasons for their rebellion as laid out in the Declaration have no basis in Scripture. At the end of the day, they didn't like paying their taxes and how they were governed. And so they believed it gave them the right to rise up and kill. Had this occurred in the context of Britain itself it would have resulted in the addition of ecclesiastical upheaval and the death of the king - as it did in 1649 and France in 1793.

The fact that we're supposed to be impressed with this Bible because it was promoted by Washington is itself telling. I'm reminded of Christian homes I've been in where the fathers read Washington's maxims at the dinner table. This man is not to be revered. He is an interesting historical figure but so are Napoleon, Hitler, and Genghis Khan. We study them, marvel at them, but we do not admire or emulate them. The fact that Washington's name is associated with a Bible (as opposed to the other examples) is not to his credit. It simply condemns him all the more and reveals his life is no paragon but rather a sobering curiosity to be studied with trembling as we consider the nature and scope of self-deception and how such myth-making (still championed by the likes of Lillback) can work to deceive the Church.

Lillback borrows the 'Sacred Fire' line from the quote in the title of his biography of Washington. Let's be very clear - this is blasphemy and when sectors of the American Church that are considered the most conservative and Biblically faithful are promoting blasphemy, we have a serious problem. And until the Church (broadly speaking) realizes this, there's not a lot of hope of reform. We are in a Dark Age and it is growing darker by the hour. Lillback is but one of thousands of false teachers playing their role in spreading this darkness, agents of the Adversary labouring diligently to undermine and destroy Christ's Kingdom and the testimony of the gospel.

If Washington was a curator of the 'sacred fire' then he was a prophetic or messianic figure. There's a theology to those words. Unfortunately it is born of heresy and must be rejected by conscientious students of Scripture. To call the rebellion 'sacred' is to turn Scripture on its head and the sentiment effectively puts Washington's supposedly holy task above that of Christ. Or at the very least he supersedes or replaces it. This is not an exaggeration. This is the extent of this error represented by Lillback, a snake oil salesman who had no qualms about appearing on the charlatan Glenn Beck's programme in 2010. He did rather well by it, his book instantly selling out. This episode was celebrated by large sections of the Reformed community at the time - a sure sign of growing power and influence in American society, which is their real passion and goal. It was and is a case of glorying in their shame.

I was walking about the campus of Westminster last year - my first visit in over two decades. I was thinking about Lillback and John Murray and their corrupted views of nationhood, civic duty and virtue. I thought again of Princeton and how the school represented a defeated remnant - not of Biblical Christianity but of a Presbyterianism once deeply wed to the corridors of power and sections of the Establishment. This is their narrative. They can have it.