Liberia Bible Conference
God’s grace always provides the hearers, and in this case the hearers varied greatly in their understanding of basic biblical truths. About 50 people, including many young men and women, consistently attended for all five days. The group included pastors, church administrators, and congregation members whom the pastors had invited. The pastors were so steeped in false teaching that they initially had difficulty accepting the truth. But by day three, most were beginning to see the light. We had a few holdouts, but even they came all five days and listened. You could see from the expressions on their faces that they were deliberating, considering, and pondering it all. On day three of the conference, one of the pastors commented to our host, “I pray that God will forgive me for teaching falsely all these years.”
In general, the false teaching is the same as what Pastor Bobby has been teaching about the Judaizers in the Philippian church. Instead of layering in Judaism, these pastors are adding in West African beliefs and culture. They find a line in a verse that supports their apostasy, take it out of context, and then dogmatically, with great eloquence, serve it up as truth to their congregations. Cyprian believes that the spread of the charismatic movement back in the 60s and 70s paved the way for much of the false teaching in Africa today.
Here is a sampling of the false teachings and the Scripture verses taken out of context to support them. These are just some of the dominant ones; there were others. The great deceiver has a strong foothold with believers in Africa.
- Loss of salvation due to certain sins because it says those who do those things “shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:19–21). This question came up on day one after spending two hours teaching eternal security and repeatedly making the point that there are no contradictions or inconsistencies in Scripture.
- “Decree and declare” comes from Job 22:28. This verse is distorted to mean the believer can decree anything for himself and God will provide it. Cyprian shredded the false teachers on this one, pointing out that those were not God’s words to Job but rather Eliphaz, who judged Job as being under divine discipline. God Himself set the record straight in Job 42:7 when He judged Eliphaz for “not speaking what is right.”
- False teaching on healing, including not only man as a healing agent of God but also the idea of having a serious health issue and refusing medical attention because of your own ability through faith to will yourself back to health. Joel 3:10b is taken out of context: “Let the weak say, I am strong (a mighty man).”
Our original goal with this group was to teach eternal security, the basics of the Christian life, and then provide axioms for the correct interpretation of Scripture. We ended up focused on eternal security for the entire conference due to the many false teaching attacks on it. We did cover 1 John 1:9 in all five sessions.
One morning at breakfast, we noticed the hotel restaurant employees were huddled together and the manager, David, was talking to them about God’s Word. We heard him go over 1 John 1:9. Later we were able to have a conversation with him. His entire team are believers. He was very interested in getting more Bible teaching, and we were able to give him many of Pastor Bobby’s Bible lessons on a thumb drive.
