'Separation of Church and God' - A Review

If you've ever walked home from church with more questions than answers or feeling like you've just wasted another hour of your life, you may want to investigate Jack Heckathorne's book, "The Separation of Church and God."

If you've given up on organized religion and by association, God, you may want to check out this book.

If you've come away from every encounter with organized religion, Christian or otherwise, determined that if there is indeed a God, he is simply too hard to fathom, I encourage you to read Heckathorne's book.

For those who have found little more than contradiction and hypocrisy in the local church and who now believe that apart from church you can have no part of God, this book will give you hope.

And for those who have believed and fallen, now believing there is no way back, Heckathorne delivers a message of promised restoration directly from the Bible.

According to Heckathorne, part of the fault so rampant in today's church lies in the multiple layers of tradition that have effectively shrouded the true gospel message of Christ over the millennia. In fact, the dissatisfaction people feel may be because the hunger and thirst innate to every man has yet to be satisfied in their lives.

Heckathorne appeals to the reader to discover again or anew the unvarnished, simple truth of the gospel and to turn from false teachings and traditions as if your very life depended on it.

His carefully researched publication is broken down into easy-to-read and easy-to-understand chapters, such as "What is God?", "What is Man?", "Are you Seeking Truth?","Satan, The Great Counterfeiter" and "Can You Lose Your Salvation?"

Heckathorne contends that the false teachings that abound in organized religion today are the direct result of deceptions brought about by God's enemy, the fallen angel, Satan, whom Jesus refers to as the "father of lies." in John 8:38:44. Man is particularly susceptible to Satan's lies, as first evidenced in the Garden of Eden when Eve believed the serpent when he said, "You shall be like God." (Genesis 3:5) Satan's fall set the stage for the battle between good and evil -- a battle which is waged yet today in people's actions, thoughts, way of life and, perhaps most significantly, in their belief's about Jesus Christ.

Heckathorne also maintains that the truth of who God is, man's true relationship to him, and the whole matter of sin can be discovered only through careful reading and focused study of Scripture and Scripture alone.

In his introductory remarks Heckathorne reveals, that "... Over the next 35 years I had a desire to learn more and more about the Bible. I studied unimpeded by erroneous religious doctrines or influential denominational affiliations. Because I could see the Bible as truth, and since I could see many practices in the church which were contradictory to it, I finally realized that I had to separate the church, any church, from God in my mind.

"I came to realize that God is perfect, and the local church is not.

"As I see it, the farther away from the basic fundamentals of the Scriptures a church becomes, the more they rely on man's flawed logic and imagination, and the more corrupt they become."

There are no "sacred cows" in Heckathorne's observations. He calls to task faith healers, the worship of idols, gay marriage, the purpose of tithing as well as evolution and its negative impact on faith. He settles the issue of salvation by grace (Ephesians 2:8, 9) and yet offers evidence that a living faith is made visible only by works (James 2:18).

Published by AuthorHouse, "The Separation of Church and God" (ISBN 1-4259-0401-7 (sc)is available online at Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com