Hi Brian,
We found your DVD, The God Who Wasn’t There, at the library. In one respect at least, you have an accurate title for your “documentary.” Though He is everywhere in one sense, He is (and was) not at “Village Christian Schools” in the sense that He is real and personal to anyone there. If He is known by anyone there, it is not long before that one must leave, according to the injunction:
“And what agreement does a temple of God have with idols? For you are the temple of the living God, as God has said, ‘I will dwell in them and walk among them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.’ Therefore come out from among them and be separated, says the Lord, and do not touch the unclean thing. And I will receive you and I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty” (2 Corinthians 6:16-18).
That goes for all formal religious organizations, of whatever persuasion. You may be interested in reading The True Marks of a Cult. Then again, you may not. It may add fuel to your fire but it will also burn you right where you stand.
I will address you on a statement you made in The God Who Wasn’t There. You said you were “born again” perhaps three times. I expect that was “tongue-in-cheek.” It certainly is not true, any more than you were born physically three times. You were never born again, at least not from above.
There are two things essentially wrong with your performance:
One, it is perfectly obvious that you have never met God. It was not going to happen through the agency of Village Christian Schools because there was nobody there who met God through Jesus Christ either, unless they forsook Him and stayed there, in which case, they died, or live very stagnant spiritual lives, in which case they are as bad as dead. But back to you, it is reasonable to judge that you have no knowledge or authority to judge Jesus Christ or His existence if you have never met Him. You speak out of bitterness, cynicism, crude and vulgar intellectualism, but you have no use for honesty or truth.
Two, it is riddled with false assumptions, false conclusions, unfounded speculations (read these words…they are not ravings, but deliberately chosen) and foolish reasonings. It is a dog’s breakfast of a mixture of misinformation and confusion.
You did make Sipus look foolish, as well as those at the Billy Graham meeting. That is because those people, as you demonstrated in your evil ways, do not have the reality of that which they profess to believe. It is very true that they do not have substance. This is also true of every other person you interviewed as well, including the fellow who writes “rapture letters” (Scott Butcher), Sam Harris, Richard Carrier, Robert Price, Alan Dundes and the other self-important, “intelligent” or “educated” ignoramuses. They are all fools, interviewed by a rabid fool, and all glorying in it as fools. What a circus!
It is true, Brian, that the doctrine of eternal torment is a lie. There are many lies being taught in nominal Christendom, and you have rightly mocked their foolishness. You have taken the false, attacked it, made it look foolish, and “tossed the baby out with the bathwater.” You have denied the true because of the false. Foolish man!
You end the production with “denying the Holy Spirit.” There is no “unforgivable sin” that remains unforgivable forever and ever. The Bible does not teach it. However, I cannot help but expect nothing good for you as you go in impudent rebellion and scorn toward God even as you scorn the fools themselves because some have misrepresented Him. Your foundation is not one of integrity or stability, your spirit is vindictive, and your motivation selfish and cynical. People do perish that way, one way or another, sooner or later. You are one bitter, hurting individual, Brian.
Billy Graham is not a believer and neither is Ronald Sipus. Your atheistic and intellectual friends do you no justice nor you them. We know the truth. We know the Lord Jesus Christ personally. Deny Him all you will because of all the lies told in His Name, but we know Him.
You are quite right in saying, “And God simply isn’t there.” He is here, now. All those in your production, professors of faith or otherwise, did not know it any more than you do. We are quite able in Him, if He is willing, to set the record straight, though you will not believe it because it appears you are only interested in lies to feed your hatred and bitterness. You go to Our Testimonies and there, God willing, you will find that there are real Christians in this world after all, not very many (very few in fact), but they do exist. Not that it matters whether there are many or few. It is all about Him and not us.
Any questions, ask away. You won’t be making fools of us. The God Who is here, now, is not willing. We speak to you by Him.
Contending earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints, not moved in the least by those who are wise in their foolishness and ignorance,
Victor Hafichuk
Brian, Paul Cohen here. In Our Testimonies, you can read about my relationship to Victor and how God sent him to me in Israel in 1979. There is one for you to ponder: The resurrection of a country after 2,000 years, in the midst of virulent enemies, all foretold in the Bible. And you call that accidental? The people to whom God first came and formed a nation for Himself beginning with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were scattered to the four winds and brought back to the very place God promised them. Here we are, thousands of years later, witnessing and talking about it, the world’s eyes set on Jerusalem. Accidental? Right!
Now, here is the point I had in mind to make: This world can never acknowledge or see Jesus Christ until it is prepared to lose its life. To see Him is death. When He first called me to Himself, as you may read about, it brought separation from this world. That is not a figment of imagination! You have no idea what you are talking about. For you to say that Jesus Christ does not exist is stating the obvious for how you, in your past and present life, along with the religious with whom you have had to do, behave. It is a confession of your selfishness, whilst you complain of the self-serving hypocrisy of others. We see you by your fruits, and not by your words only. Men are not to be believed by what they say.
What makes you think that those who remained unrepentant would record anything about the One by Whom they are judged and found wanting? That is against nature. The world will speak of its own, but not about the saints of God, except for those who will eulogize them and protest that they would not have persecuted and killed them if they were present in their day, by which they prove themselves to be the children of those who killed the prophets, as Jesus said.
Nevertheless you should know that the Jews, by whom Jesus came, though they denied Him as Messiah, do not at all deny that He existed. So we have those who most vehemently denied His authority and position, not at all denying that He lived and died on earth as a man. They only deny He was resurrected, as they did from the beginning, even paying the Romans soldiers to spread the rumor that the Jewish believers had stolen His body. If they could have denied He had even lived they certainly would have, but that was not at all possible, except now, thousands of years later, by the willingly ignorant such as you and your advisors, who claim to see clearly with your heads in the sand.
The only reason we have the Bible, a record of God’s acts with man, leading to the appearing of Christ and His putting away of sin once and for all, is because dead men wrote it. That is right, dead men. Every one of those men who recorded these things laid his life on the line to do so. It is the testimony of those who lost their lives because believing God, by which testimony this wicked world is judged.
Now, there are three choices for man. One is to believe God’s testimony and die to self, thereafter being raised to the life from above in Christ, Who rose from the dead for this purpose. That is what we have been granted. The second is to deny Him and His testimony openly, which is what you are doing now. And the third, which you previously tried with others doing the same, is to pay lip service to God, but to keep the life without committing the heart to Him. “The fool has said in his heart that there is no God.” Which brings us to your movie; a fool condemning other fools, hypocrites all.
You have no right to condemn your tormentors, since you are no different than they are. Jesus said on behalf of you all, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The answer is not vengeance, but repentance and forgiveness. You need to look in the mirror to see the worst offender. You are destroying yourself in your bitterness.