Part 1 of this series provided a foundation and overview. Part 2 outlines the essential elements of mysticism in faith. Part 3 warns about the incompatibilities of faith with mainstream Christian religion.
I’m not suggesting church people do not have faith. Rather, they don’t understand faith and how it works. They suffer from faith that is saturated with a cultural milieu that they aren’t ready to leave behind in pursuit of the Great Commission. This is not the place to trace down a detailed history of how we got to this mess, but you probably realize that most of the current American evangelical religion comes from the influence of the Enlightenment.
That’s not to say there was no flaw in the Reformation or the Roman Church before that. The Reformation and Enlightenment were each a reaction to what came before, but the Roman Church simply left behind the Hebrew roots of New Testament faith. The traits of the Roman Church came from the Hellenization of Christian religion, and this was partly due to the success of the Judaizers in leading Christians astray.
But evangelical religion is now morphing yet again under the influence of the “Seeker Sensitive” crap. In the 1970s-1980s there had been a very good movement to empower church members to be more active, but twenty years later it was squelched by a handful of “thinkers” who reversed it under the guise of books like The Purpose Driven Life, which was just a cover for dumbing-down the pew-sitters. It was the globalist agenda infiltrated into religion. This stuff has become second nature to Millennials and X-Gen believers, blended with the entrepreneurial church polity. The latest wave of Christian religion is just another kind of entertainment franchise with corporate leadership.
Since the last Apostle died, every step along this convoluted path has been just one brand or another of worshiping the religious institution instead of the Lord. Throughout Church History, both West and East, it’s one kind of institution partially displacing its predecessor and winning a new audience that reflects the times. Most of them are still hanging around as institutions dominated by people who can’t distinguish the institution from the living Son of God. The leaders of each institution keep insisting that serving the Lord means serving the institution (and obeying their leadership).
Does anybody notice how this looks and sounds exactly like the Deep State controlling the secular institution of government? How are these religious institutional leaders any morally better than clearly evil government? I’m not saying figures like the Pope are all knowingly serving Satan. They might be, but that they are so completely lost from the rather simple gospel message of Jesus and His friends that they don’t really understand the harm they do. The institution is their god.
This is the same thing Jesus confronted in the Jewish leadership, the Pharisees in particular. They had completely left the Hebrew mystical frame of mind. Instead, they had embraced the Hellenistic assumptions about reality. Suddenly, the words of the Law of Moses were more important than the very well established intent of Moses. The latter got lost; Jesus said that many times. Their “Law” became their rationalistic analysis of the words of the written Torah, and they created a whole new “oral Torah” that was flatly contrary to what God wanted. They worshiped their “oral Torah” as a mask for worshiping their own cleverness and intelligence.
It’s the same basic sin for both Pharisees (Judaism is simply Pharisaism) and the historic church leadership since Jesus’ day.
Yet, knowing this, I would also warn that it is impossible to recover some golden age of New Testament Christian religion. This is a case of learning what it isn’t, and discovering what it is for you, but there is no standard “what it should be” that fits every need. Some portion of what they had in the early years in Jerusalem cannot be ours. It’s important that you sense that.
Instead, we must understand that it’s not necessary to throw out everything we’ve learned in our varied church experiences. While I might avoid some songs for blatantly bad doctrine, I still sing from my old Baptist Hymnal, among other things. I still sing the worship songs that moved me back in the day. I still use some of the academic terminology I learned from that Baptist college.
But a very major difference is that I no longer accept the notion that the gospel message is about getting a passport to Heaven. There is nothing at all we can do about that as humans, nor can we even understand. Rather, the gospel message is about seeking peace with God according to His Covenant while we are here. American evangelical churches are filled with people who only think they are “saved” and going to Heaven, because they have been talked into something that has no bearing on the matter.
The whole point of being here in this world is not that we secure our election, but that we demonstrate an election that tagged us before we were born. Do you recall that God said He meant for Israel to be a nation of priests between Him and the world? That’s our mission now. Instead of a national political covenant, we now have a moral covenant of individuals. We still have a covenant manifested partly in words that look and sound like law, but the soul of the Covenant of Christ is still our feudal surrender and commitment to serve Him and His glory.
There is no bright clear line separating the New Covenant from the Old. Some parts are clearly different. But there are bits and pieces of each that are exactly the same, because it is a covenant and our God has always been feudal. He does have an expressed will written for the sake of those who need a boost to get started into manifesting the spiritual truth of divine election.
We are elected (predestined) unto lives of good work for the Kingdom. The gospel is about the boundaries and privileges of our election while we live here as His testimony. I want you to leave behind the man-made bondage of false religion and find peace with God. Nobody has to ape my way peace with God. I am perfectly content to let you all discover what that demands of you individually.
