With all our technology available to the average Joe, you'd think educated teachers, college universities, pastors, speakers, and publishers would do a little homework before signing on the dotted line to hire or be hired for a job. If myriads of unknown stay-at-home women, non-academic men, etc. can find the info, then they should too...and should be the first to smoke out any frauds. So what's with the on-going applause of liars called authors?
But alas, that is not the case. This matters simply because all of these folks both on the writing/speaking end we well as the publishing/filming end all claim to be Christians. Yet they are perpetrating falsehoods.
God says He hates liars (Ps. 5:5) and that liars will go to Hell (1 Tim. 1:10; Rev. 21:8). He is, after all, the God of Truth (Ps. 31:5; Is. 65:16) and it is impossible for God to lie (Heb. 6:18). Jesus is the Truth (John 1:14;14:6). The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth (John 16:13), and the Gospel and Scripture are the Word of Truth (John 17:17).
So why lie? It's maligning the HOLY HOLY HOLY name of the God of Scripture and He will not allow this to continue. Those who are His are to strive to reflect Him as we grow in the grace and knowledge of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. After all, we have a new heart, a new spirit, and have the Holy Spirit indwelling us, conforming us to the image of Christ. We who are justified by the thrice Holy God have been gifted with the love of the Truth and so can not work against it (Rom. 5:1,5; 2Thes. 2:10). We have to answer to the Living God Who sees all things.
Examples of such cases:
Don Piper who claimed to have died and went to Heaven for 90 minutes and wrote a book about it, changed his story from not seeing Jesus in Heaven (p. 33) to claiming he did in fact see Jesus in Heaven (yes he told this tale on TBN seven years later). Here is the info, and the video where they discuss this and show Piper re-telling his story at time mark 13:13.
"Tony Anthony" who published a book by UK "Christian" publisher Authentic Media (how ironic), turned out to be a total fraud both in name and claim. Slaughtering the Sheep reports on it here.
Mark Driscoll and Tyndale House have such a good thing going in selling his books, that they totally ignored his plagerism even after Janet Meffered gave the evidence by showing side by side photos of Driscoll's work with Peter Jone's published work. Here's the evidence. Instead of taking it seriously, Meffered was some how "threatened" into not only silence but removing the evidence from her own website (but was preserved over at Slaughtering the Sheep, thankfully). Tyndale, with a lot of money at stake "cleared" Driscoll except for one thing which was "changed" but no apology was given publicly to Meffered as far as I know, for slamming her for merely calling attention to Driscoll's theft (while he holds on tightly to his copyright materials with threat of legal action---yup the hypocrit).
Ergun Caner lied about his testimony/resume while a dean at Liberty University. He stayed employed there and then eventually got two more subsequent jobs at two different colleges within the last three years. Here is an article about it.
Rick Warren's claim on his Purpose Driven Life website (and at an appearance at Davos in 2008), that his PDL books was the biggest selling hardback of all history according to Publishers Weekly. While repeated in several places and asked by James Sundquist for confirmation from various sources (Publishers Weekly president said no such claim exists in their records nor do they usually use the terms"hardback".) trying to track down the origination of the false claim, he found it here.
Mike Warnke who also faked his "testimony" of coming out of a satanic cult (of comedy and "Selling Satan" infamy). "Christian" magazine Cornerstone did a full expose on his claims and found him to be a fraud. Here is the series but the links are broken, although some info is still there on the home page. Therefore the summation with footnotes and the info can be found here. Here is one article however I did manage to find by the same authors, on why the dates don't work which Warnke used in his testimony/book.
Nora Lam's testimony ("China's Cry") was also called into question (older but still poses a problem).
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