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Lessons from the Rich Fool

“But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” (Luke:12:20But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?
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This sobering verse gives in a nutshell God’s evaluation of people whose dominating concern is the accumulation of material possessions. Such a person is, by the Lord’s own testimony, a fool.

But before the man in this parable became a covetous fool, he first became a self-centered clod, interested only in his own desires. In the verses comprising his monologue (Luke:12:17-19 [17] And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? [18] And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. [19] And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
See All...), he used the personal pronouns “I” and “my” no less than 11 times and then even addressed himself using the pronoun “thou” or “thine” twice more.

Satan was the first to be covetous and proud: “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God:...I will be like the most High” (Isaiah:14:13-14 [13] For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: [14] I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
See All...). Lucifer’s primeval, self-seeking covetousness brought rebellion and sin into the angelic host and then into the human family. Ever since his fall, he has used this deadly sin of self-centeredness to keep men away from God and to lead them into all kinds of other overpowering sins.

In the case of the rich man, his pampering of self had led him into a life of such greed and covetousness that he was still concerned only with his own personal comfort (“eating and drinking”) right up to the day of his death. He “thought within himself” (Luke:12:17And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?
See All...), giving no thought whatever to God’s will or the fact that all his possessions really belonged to God. Multitudes over the ages have been overtaken by this same sin of self-centered covetousness, perhaps never more pervasively than in modern America, even among American Christians. To anyone of such covetous spirit, the day may soon come when the Lord will say, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.”

https://www.icr.org/article/the-rich-fool/

When chased with a volley of facts, evolutionists attempt to hide behind “billions of years,” which, if taken in tiny enough steps, they imagine to be long enough for anything to have happened, no matter how impossible. Having accepted these long periods of time for the origin of the universe, the world, and life, some scientists who otherwise accept the Genesis creation account have been forced to postulate what they call “progressive creation.” Other Christians have tried to reconcile the Bible and the pseudo-science of evolution by adopting what has euphemistically become known as “theistic evolution.” We will deal with both of these aberrant theologies in later chapters. The truth is that billions of years are not long enough.

Recently there has been an accelerated ‘wave’ of UFO hysteria sweeping the globe, and many supporters have contacted us asking for comments.

Belief in extraterrestrial life has effectively become a new religion for many, replacing traditional belief. For example, the sociologist Gerald Eberlein stated: Mundane objects like these lenticular clouds above Skaftafell glacier in Iceland are mistaken as flying saucers due to our cultural conditioning to believe in such things.

“…research has shown that people who are not affiliated with any church, but who claim that they are religious, are particularly susceptible to the possible existence of extraterrestrials. For them, UFOlogy is a substitute religion.”1

A close examination of the phenomenon shows that it also provides a perfect substitute ‘replacement theology’ for the big picture Creation > Fall > Redemption > Restoration aspects of Christianity. Much of the UFO literature seeks to:

Replace the Creator God with aliens, even claiming the Bible is actually referring to these ETs and not God.

Substitute the Fall for an environmentalist catastrophe or message. I.e. the aliens will not allow us to destroy ourselves and ‘mother earth’ as we are allegedly doing.

The ETs will be the saviours of mankind and will rescue the earth in the process. They even have rapture-type events predicted for the future.

There will be a restoration of the Earth or the ‘true (UFO) believers’ will be transported to a new Edenic or Nirvana type planet that has not yet been corrupted.

Note that many of the UFO stories have been received and channelled by contactees who claim to be receiving special revelation from our ‘space brothers’. This is an occult activity that masquerades as an enlightened practice. (We recommend the DVD Alien Abductions and UFOs Exposed! or the AI bookfor more on this.

“There must be life out there!”

Not that long ago the idea that older (on the evolutionary scale), more technologically advanced (than humans), wiser and benevolent extraterrestrials have visited or are currently visiting the Earth would have seen you carted off to the local psych ward. But not anymore. Popular polls have even suggested that up to 20 million Americans have seen a UFO and that 4 million claim to have been abducted by aliens (see The Fourth Kind our review of the infamous alien abduction movie of the same name). Such ideas have become very mainstream and children in particular are very susceptible and are openly targeted. Many seemingly credible scientists now believe that life on Earth originated from outer space via either directed or undirected panspermia (‘seeds from space’—from the Greek words pas/pan [all] and sperma [seed]). Some very famous scientists have even suggested that our DNA may contain revelation from our alien creators once we are smart enough (like them) to decipher it. Ironically, this makes many of them ‘creationists’ (sort of). It appears that they just don’t want the God of the Bible to be responsible.

[TBC: For the full article and footnotes, please see:]

https://creation.com/the-aliens-are-coming

On our website: https://www.thebereancall.org/content/question-did-constellations-correspond-tribes-israel
More question and answer: https://www.thebereancall.org/questionanswer

Question: During the past Sunday evening Bible study, the following was presented: Some [astrological] constellations corresponded with the tribes of Israel: Judah—Leo; Dan—Scorpio; Benjamin—Gemini. Further, the tribes in the wilderness were arranged around the Tabernacle according to the “mirror reflection” of where their corresponding constellation was located in the heavens. How does one research whether or not these things are true?

Response: First of all, is this idea anywhere taught in Scripture? Certainly not! Secondly, it has been pointed out numerous times that the “Signs of the Zodiac correspond to the position of the sun relative to constellations as they appeared more than 2,200 years ago” (https://bit.ly/3CsoGxi). However, practitioners of Astrology, and in particular those who make their living on it, would say (without any evidence) that this makes no difference. Further, their argument is in direct conflict with verifiable science as much as it is with the Word of God.

Indeed, the Lord says in Jeremiah:10:2Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.
See All..., “Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.”

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Having seen some 35 methods of scripture twisting which cults frequently use to pervert God’s truth, we will now review numerous logical fallacies which are easily made, yielding misinterpretations. 

[TBC: Here is the link to the entire article along with the list of the 35 false arguments often used by cults or cultic groups.

https://blog.lifeassuranceministries.org/2025/02/06/logical-fallacies-in-biblical-interpretation/

Here is one example:]

Witness Leading: This is often a complaint in a court, where a lawyer leads a witness to make the conclusion [which] he wants the witness to make, instead of his own from the objective facts at hand. Ministers may do this at the expense of their hearers or readers, e. g., SDA’s George Vandeman’s book Planet in Rebellion where he composes and carries on a dialogue with you his reader, by using lines like “‘But how’, you ask, ‘will it all come about?’” (p. 319); then the obvious fallacy “you can readily see that” (p. 320); “let me take you” and “for instance we read that” (ibid.); then assuming control over you in the conversation he dictates “Now listen” (p. 321) and asks “Is that clear?” (p. 322); and he stuffs more words in your mouth “‘Oh’, you say, ‘it came from _ and you are right’”. In this manner he leads you, his reader in stately ‘pied-piper’ fashion down into the sea of Seventh-day Adventism!

—Dr. Verle Streifling (raised in a devout Adventist family, graduated from Adventist schools, born again at age 26; intensive Bible study and the Holy Spirit led him out of Adventism. Retired Pastor and Theologian, He and his wife have retired into full-time ministry in the Philippines).

A story of origins? Evolution has nothing to say about origins, neither the origin of energy, nor of the cosmos, nor of the first cell, nor of the first species, nor of life.

Not unresolvable?! That is like saying that there is no real conflict between atheism and theism, between evolution and creation. Words have lost their meaning. There can be no meaningful discussion if the total contradiction of the two views is denied as though it did not exist.

On November 5, 2025 voters sent the message that they’re sick of high gas prices, government diktats about what kind of cars they have to drive, billions in subsidies to “green renewable” energy industries, and EVs, and hectoring virtue-signaling from snooty elites about “settled science” and climate change “deniers.” The winds of change have set the “green” paradigm tottering.

What happened? Recently the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim wrote,  “The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.” But this statement begs the question that the more accurate name for “climate change,” ––Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming (ACGW)–– reflects true science, which has “gone wildly amiss” because of “groupthink and “self-flattery” and other human frailties.

In fact, the real problem is the claim that, as the honest name above says, CO2 emissions from humans will eventually heat the atmosphere to the point that it becomes uninhabitable. But this is not a scientific fact established by the empirically based scientific method, but a dicey hypothesis. We simply do not have a thorough enough understanding of the complexity of global climate over time and space. For example, we don’t know precisely how water vapor in the atmosphere, the biggest greenhouse gas, interacts with CO2, or how it contributes to cyclic cooling and warming.

These gaps in our models and computer simulations have been exposed by many physicists, to whom we should listen rather than “climate scientists.” For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer, wrote  in 2021, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.”

The weakness of the “science,” then, makes not just “groupthink” and “self-flattery” possible, but also politicization, the fear-mongering of apocalyptic scenarios, and old-fashioned greed fed by government subsidies, tax breaks, and grants. Worse are the mandates to eliminate carbon-based energy and replace it with intermittent energy from windmills and solar panels, even though the infrastructure needed to store and deliver electricity to cover down times, is many decades from becoming a reality. This is a huge problem for the warmists, since those “clean, renewable” but intermittent energy sources require back-up reserves of electricity generated by natural gas and coal.

So how did ACGW gain such traction given its lack of any scientific bona fides? As with any issue that relies on claims of science, the lack of familiarity with how science works has increased among our students over the postwar decades, who leave K-12 schooling with globally pathetic levels of proficiency in science and mathematics.

Take the popular claim that ACGW is “settled science.” Such a statement violates the protocols of the scientific method, which physicist Richard Feynman defines as “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards.  For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.”

Or as the theorist of the scientific method Karl Popper put it more bluntly, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.” Yet those doing just that regarding the claims of ACGW are met with epithets like “denier,” a sly slur borrowed from “holocaust denier,” and professional ostracizing and “cancellation.” There’s nothing “scientific” about such responses to challenges.

But it’s not just bad science or scientism that explains the “green” energy cult, itself an offshoot of romantic environmentalism. Ancient myths that have been part of Western culture for millennia also have influenced the way we think about the natural world and our place in it. One, the myth of the Golden Age, has been especially pervasive. This explanation of the human condition posits a simpler time in the past during which humans lived in harmony with nature, which like a benevolent mother provided us all we need to survive and flourish. People lived communally, without law, class distinctions, rulers, technology, wealth, or private property, which are all the seeds of war, slavery, conquest, greed, and suffering.

Today these mythic motifs and ideals saturate modern environmentalism, including hypotheses like ACGW, and policies like the protection of animal species threatened with extinction, even at the expense of human well-being. Popular culture has been filled with these ideas, from Disney cartoons to movies that feature American Indians as Noble Savages and peaceful environmentalists, contrary to their actual history. Other exotic ethnicities likewise are labeled by this same Western cliché.

Moreover, as historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin writes, these mythic residues like the Noble Savage have political uses: “The notion that somewhere whether in a real or imagined sociey, man dwells in his natural state, is at the heart of primitivist theories; it is found in various guises in every anarchist and popramme of the last hundred years, and has deeply affected Marxism and the vast variety of youth movements with radical or revolutionary goals.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-paradigm-is-shifting-fast/

Atheists get excited about using “evolution” to reorganize the DNA in various bacterium.15 But that is not evolution, although Dawkins and others continually call it that. Kenneth R. Miller’s enthusiasm is almost unbounded when it comes to origins. He bluntly declares that

“. . . evolution is, by definition, a story of origins. This means . . . it really does supersede another creation story—in particular, the creation story at the very core of the Judeo-Christian narrative. The conflict between these two versions of our history is real, and . . . needs to be addressed. [But] I do not believe that the conflict is unresolvable.”

Hitchens refers to “the unarguable facts of evolution” but gives us none of them. Like other atheists and evolutionists, he is referring to modifications within a species—even within a bacterium. We’re still waiting for an example of genuine evolution from one species to another. The abundant variety of dogs is not evidence of evolution from one kind, as defined in Genesis 1, to another kind. Clearly “kind” is still a division that cannot be crossed. Let us have just one example of evolution changing a dog into something other than a dog. No such examples are offered. As we showed in chapter 2, Colin Patterson confessed that he couldn’t think of even one!