Today we'll examine what constitutes faith and sin, and apply this lesson to our personal experience, and our stand on the greatest revelation of all - the supreme Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Too many church people imagine God is an easy-come, easy-go sort of Guy Who loves us so much, He's not too fussed how we understand Him, or whether our lives reflect the Word or the world. According to the Bible, He's a God of His Word, a strict God, Who from the beginning made it clear He requires man to live by His Word, and every One. We need to be earnest in our desire to understand His requirements, and to work-out our own salvation with fear and trembling.
Jesus commanded His Church to "Walk in the Light He's in and keep watching for more light to unfold." Spiritual light is revelation of the Word or will of God. Unless our lives are manifesting the Word God's fulfilling in this age, we're not "under the blood of Christ," and not born again. God can't make "written epistles" today of Word He fulfilled yesterday, or in the days of Luther, Wesley, and even the Pentecostals (so-called), any more than the press can sell yesterday's news (I John 1:7.)
Few Bible readers have any conception of God's Bible promises for today. Its later than most dare imagine. The faith God required of father or grandpa won't put us into the Body of Christ today. This is another age, God's fulfilling a different part of His Word. We can't be born-again by impersonating the Light of a day gone by, and must search the Scriptures, to ensure our lives are reflecting what His Word promised He'd do now.
Let's cast our thoughts back to that first "Good Friday." As they had for 1,500 years, those Jewish ministers offered to God the morning sacrifice and oblation, speaking of Messiah. I imagine God smiled down upon them and thought, "That's My People, faithfully fulfilling the Commandments and ordinances delivered by Moses, My prophet." But in the evening time, at the end of that Message, when they offered another lamb, God's anger rose in His nostrils. He rejected the ministers with their offering, and all who offered a lamb thereafter were blotted from the Book of Life (Ps. 69:28).
Those people were sincere, their ministers would be stoned for not obeying the ordinances to the letter. How could God refuse them? His reason for rejecting their sincere worship is the same as His reason for rejecting sincere worship today. Their sincere worship was in vain, because they were sincerely wrong (Revelation 3:17; Matthew 15:9). Without faith, they were not walking in the Light as He was in It, they were impersonators, and they were not His people (I John 1:7; John 10:5.)
What was Life and virtue in the morning, became sin that evening.
They failed to recognize the Light of the hour: God was doing a new thing. They were walking with their hand in the hand of their minister, trusting their denomination, instead of knowing God by faith in His Word.
Israel are the most religious people. They love the One true God, they read His Word, obey the Law, they worship, some would die for the Law. But they failed to keep walking in the Light, and are impersonating a bygone age and have been apostate for 2,000 years.
These things are our example and a warning, that God also ends the Gentile churches in apostasy. Like Israel, they fail to recognize their day and its Message. Don't expect the revivals predicted by today's blind leaders of the blind. Look for apostasy! The only revival is in the heart of the Bride. "For when they say, 'Peace and safety;' then sudden destruction comes on them, as travail on a pregnant woman; and they won't escape" (I Thessalonians 4:13 - 5:14; Romans 11:32). So let's examine ourselves, whether we're in the faith, or impersonating an age gone by.
During the Church Ages the Bible was sealed with Seven Seals. As Mediator, Christ interceded for the saints' ignorance of the faith which was lost when the Church was martyred, leading to the Dark Ages. God overlooked their errors as the Protestant Reformation of the Roman system of worship progressed to greater Light.
In order to receive the new birth, the saints of each Age had to walk in all the Light revealed to their Age: justification by grace through faith in the Age of Luther; sanctification added to it in Wesley's Age; and the restoration of the Gifts or Baptism of the Spirit added to them, in Laodicea or Pentecost.
After these Moves of God, denominations organized, to preserve and foster the Light revealed to the Reformers. But faith and the Holy Spirit can't be organized. Without exception the man-made systems refused the further Light God revealed in succeeding ages.
Like their predecessors who protested, "We're Moses' disciples," all denominations love the historical Jesus. But they hate Christ the revealed Word of the hour - because It condemns them; and to refuse revealed Truth is sin. In the Church Ages Christ interceded for ignorance of the faith that had been lost, not for iniquity, apathy, and unbelief in the revealed word.
-oOo-
The "Reformation" was not the promised restoration. The reformers sought only a return to the church system organized at the First Nicea Council in AD325. This was outlined in a Creed written over 200 years after the death of the Apostles. These teachings can not be found in your Bible! God's Church is built upon the doctrine of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ being the chief corner stone. God's original Church with the original faith was founded at Pentecost, and is the only pattern God can restore.
The Protestants all came out of Rome. They're her daughters as the Bible says. They're called "Protestant" because historically they protested the teachings of Rome. Today they protest nothing, and are hand-in-glove with mother Rome.
All seven Church Ages were over when the Seven Seals were revealed and "the mystery of God was finished." Denominations rejected the Fullness of the Word. Denominations cannot be restored and are not under the blood. They're naked, wretched, miserable, and blind: apostate, and don't know it (I Corinthians 13:10; Revelation 3:14-20; 4&5; 10:1-7; 18:1-4.)
Christ is the Mystery of God revealed. The Church is the Mystery of Christ revealed. Jesus is the beginning of the creation of God. The Church is a continuation of the same Creation, as Eve was a continuation of Adam. God just put Adam to sleep, took out a rib, and formed the by-product. Eve wasn't another creation, but part of the same creation. And the Church isn't another creation. It's made-up of the Holy Spirit that came from Jesus' side when God put Him to sleep on the cross. The glory of a Adam was his wife. And the glory of Christ is His Church.
Few people seem to understand that the Bible is the story of God, changing His form, or unfolding Himself, from the Eternal Spirit alone with His thoughts. And expressing those thoughts as spoken Word, which transforms Itself by faith into the flesh of His glorified Family. In other words, Its the story of God the Creator unfolding Himself into Creation. Jesus was the beginning of the creation of God, less than 2,000 years ago.
Before there was any time, before there were atoms or molecules, planets or stars; light, dark, angels or beings of any description - before God was God. Sounds strange, but the word "god" means "object of worship". Before creation, there was nothing to worship Him. He was just the Eternal Spirit alone with His thoughts.
God's thoughts are not like your thoughts or my thoughts. We may have great plans for tomorrow, but if we forget about them until the day after, they were pure fantasy. God's thoughts are Eternal. They are real, and will come to pass, in their designated, decreed season and time. Unlike man, God is not now thinking or even taking counsel with Himself. His ideas he has always had and being omniscient, He cannot add to His knowledge, and will never have a new idea. That's straight Bible truth isn't it?
A Christian needs to understand these things ... There is only one Eternal - the great Creator God. As His thoughts are Eternal and real, God is His thoughts, they're the attributes of what He is.
In Him were attributes to be a Father, but how could it ever be known until He had His first son, Adam? In God were attributes to be a Savior, but He could not display these attributes until first there was a "fall" and a people requiring salvation.
His attribute of justice would not allow Him to cause His children to fall, or force them like puppets to obey His Will, so He placed them in the Garden on free moral agency to make their own choices: to reflect His attributes of love and trust by holding to His Word by faith, or to mix that Word with Lucifer's reasoning.
In God were attributes to be healer, but He couldn't display them until there was sickness and hurt. How God loves to display His attributes to us, and through us, to His own glory!
Like Adam and Eve, we're to reflect the Nature and Character of God by identifying with His attributes. True worship is a life lived under pre-eminence to the Word. He gathers glory to Himself when His beautiful attributes are reproduced in the lives of His Children. Like Father, like son, a chip off the old Block.
No one's born with character. Character is a victory, won only by overcoming in the trials of this world, by faith in the Word of God and prayer. Our goal in this life is to gain a Christ-like character through trials. No matter how successful we are here, the only thing we can take with us is our character. Death in the flesh only changes our geography. The type of person you are here is the type of person you'll be over "There". Or over ..."there."
Have you ever considered that one of the most marked differences between man and animals, is our ability to reason and communicate our thoughts through language. Any word is a thought expressed. Before I can pronounce the word "cat" I must first think of the animal. We have fellowship and know one another chiefly through expressing our thoughts in WORD form. Without communication there is no meaningful relationship.
Because His thoughts are eternal and cannot change or fail, God's known as "the Word," or "Logos," which in Greek, means: "thought in speech," or concept.
God expresses His will, and the attributes of His character to man in Word form, by vision, dream, or inspired understanding of the Word we read and hear preached from the Bible. We only experience relationship with God as we understand His Word. No true believer is any stronger and Spiritually healthy and alive than their knowledge of, and adherence to the pure Word of God.
A Word is a thought expressed, and Jesus of Nazareth is the Word, God with us, manifest in flesh as was prophesied (I Timothy 3:16; Isaiah 7:14). Good people frequently misinterpret John 1:1, 14. They think it reads, "In the beginning was Jesus of Nazareth, and Jesus was with God and Jesus was God, and Jesus was made flesh..."
But it says, "In the beginning was the WORD".
God had finished all of his thinking before "time" began". A Word is first a completed thought. His thoughts are Eternal. They're unchanging. So "In the beginning, the Word or Logos" was perfect and complete - "It was with God and It was God" when He was ready to commence "time", by expressing Himself in Creation. Jesus was one of those thoughts. I was another.
"And the Word was with God and the Word was God," ie. "the Word, Logos, or concept was always "with" God in the form of His eternal thoughts. His thoughts, are Word in another Form, which is what He is." John 6:63 says "My Word is Spirit, It is Life" - Word and Spirit are the same thing in two different forms.
"And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us". Before the Word was made flesh It was just another thought. "Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness, for the Logos was manifest in the form of the flesh of Jesus, our Kinsman Redeemer, Who is the beginning of God creating Himself, less than 2,000 years ago, when He physically dwelt among the early disciples" (I Timothy 3:16; Revelation 3:14).
In Jesus, the fullness of God's nature and character, the perfect balance of His attributes of love, patience, justice, judgment, righteousness, anger, etc., were expressed in one Man, Who is the beginning of the creation of God (Revelation 3:14.) He's not the beginning of God's creation - which would make Him less than God. God's creation is His handiwork, the sun, moon, stars, rivers, trees, etc. Jesus is the beginning of God's hands, of God changing His Form, through the Word or expression of His thoughts, into the material Form of His glorified Family.
The New Testament saints are the continuation of the same Creation. Jesus is the Word made flesh; the true or Elect Church is the flesh becoming Word. In the new heavens and new earth, the saved will worship God through eternity, in the Form of His Family - Jesus of Nazareth and His Brothers and Sisters, the New Testament saints. When they're glorified, all of them is God manifest in flesh. Like our natural parents, God's purpose was to reproduce Himself in His Family.
Three is the number of perfection, and God fulfills His purpose in a three-fold manner. The Fullness of HIS Life was reproduced in Jesus Christ. The Fullness of Christ is being reproduced in His Bride. Together, they'll return to a restored Eden in the fullness of perfect joy and purity.
Jesus prayed for oneness through faith or agreement in the Word, for eternal fellowship (John 17:20-26; Amos 3:3.) Once God was alone with His thoughts ... He'll never be lonely any more.
How's God bringing His purpose to pass? Through faith, which is communion with Him by receiving His thoughts or Word. Communion is an exchange of talk and requires agreement between two parties.
The Lord's Supper symbolizes the communicant is born-again and consequently in oneness with the Word through the Spiritual Marriage Union. We must discern whether we're truly married, or just flirting with God. That's why Paul said it's death to observe the Lord's Supper falsely and it's death not to take it. Often our communion with God is one way - prayer - we do all the talking. With Faith, we also listen and understand what God's saying. Faith is a clear understanding of the revealed Word of God.
-oOo-
Do you believe what our leaders and the media tell us? Or are we being deceived by a conspiracy? Listen to this.
Reader's Digest reported that a Rockefeller once said, "pollution might bring the planet together".
It's now vehemently claimed that this report was simply a "hoax". But as Henry Ford said, "It sure explains what's going on..."
On September 1, 1961, the Christian Science Monitor noted that the Council on Foreign Relations building was across the way from the Soviet Embassy to the UN. They described it, as "probably one of the most influential semi-public organizations in the field of foreign policy."
The people behind the Council on Foreign Relations financed the Allies and the Axis powers. Is it any wonder they advise both Russia and America? This way they offend nobody.
The Christian Science Monitor has been edited by a member of the American Round Table, (a subsidiary of the British Round Table set up by Chatham House and the political successors of Cecil Rhodes). Elite control is extensive in publishing: "Through publishing houses controlled by this same financial elite, Unwelcome books have been squashed, and useful books promoted; fortunately publishing has few barriers to entry, and is almost atomistically competitive. Through control of a dozen or so major newspapers, run by editors who think alike, public information can be orchestrated almost at will. Yesterday, the space program; today, an energy crisis, or a campaign for ecology; tomorrow, a war in the middle east, or some other manufactured 'crisis.'
Early in 1963 the exact form of the Iron Mountain 15-member peace study was worked out at a time when "big changes in military spending...were planned...plants being closed, relocations, and so forth." [Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace xviii (1967).]
Iron Mountain is located near the town of Hudson. It's "an underground nuclear hideout for hundreds of large American corporations...(and) includes such firms as Standard Oil of New Jersey (Rockefellers), Manufacturers Hanover Trust (Morgans), and Shell (House of Orange)." [Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace ix (1967); A. Ralph Epperson, The Unseen Hand 252 (1985)].
On September 30, 1966, the letter of transmittal was signed for the Special Study Group. [Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace 5 (1967)].
The report termed environmental pollution "promising" as an "apparent" species threat: "But from present indications it will be a generation to a generation and a half before environmental pollution, however severe, will be sufficiently menacing, on a global scale, to offer a possible basis for a solution." A program of deliberate environmental poisoning was considered politically unacceptable. [Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace 67 (1967)].
A first step to enslavement was some form of universal military service: "It is entirely possible that the development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world of peace." [Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace 70 (1967)].
Limiting procreation "to the products of artificial insemination" was discussed, to allow direct eugenic management. [Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace 73 (1967)].
An anti-reproduction "pill" to be added to water supplies or essential foodstuffs was "already under development." [Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace 73 (1967)].
Proposed replacements for war included: a comprehensive social-welfare program, an open-ended space program aimed at unreachable targets, a permanent inspection program for disarmament, an international police force, an extraterrestrial threat, massive global pollution, fictitious alternative enemies, enslavement programs, derived from the peace corps model, new religious and other mythologies, socially oriented blood games, and a program of eugenics. [Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace 84 (1967)].
In 1967, Report from Iron Mountain, said to be the anonymous work of John Kenneth Galbraith, stated: "It may be...that gross pollution of the environment can eventually replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the principal apparent threat to the survival of the species." [Winston's Journal, No. 1, Vol. 1 at 2 (November 1991)].
(Galbraith has been Warburg Professor of economics at Harvard since 1949. Warburg founded the Federal Reserve. There is a contention that Galbraith was involved in the betrayal of Tibet to Red China. CIA?)
Later, John Kenneth Galbraith said he was "a member of the conspiracy" that produced the book [London Times January 5, 1968].
"The book is now said to have been manufactured out of thin air as a joke. Arnold Toynbee once said: "I do feel that some minimum of global government to abolish war, to cope with pollution, is absolutely necessary." [Benjamin B. Ferencz and Ken Keyes, Jr., Planethood 90 (Undated)].
After being organized in New York by a small group concerned with pollution and smog, the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970. Activities around the country included car "funerals," traffic blockades and clean-up programs. [Kathy A. Zahler & Diane Zahler, Test Your Countercultural Literacy 174 (1989)].
[The man who organized Earth Day later became a world fugitive when the body of his girlfriend, was found locked in a closet at his house. The French let him go just last week. Earth Day is held on the birthday of Lenin].
In 1976, Taylor Caldwell summarized the Iron Mountain Report: "There will be no peace in the tormented world, only a programmed and systematic series of wars and calamities - until the plotters have gained their objective: an exhausted world, willing to submit to a planned Marxist economy, and total and meek enslavement - in the name of peace." [Taylor Caldwell, Ceremony of the Innocent 289 (Fawcett Books 1976)]. radio097.htm