This is your weekly Bible lesson.
3 So he carried me away in the Spirit to a wilderness, and there I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. 4 Now the woman was dressed in purple and scarlet clothing, and adorned with gold, precious stones, and pearls. She held in her hand a golden cup filled with detestable things and unclean things from her sexual immorality. 5 On her forehead was written a name, a mystery: “Babylon the Great, the Mother of prostitutes and of the detestable things of the earth.” 6 I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of those who testified to Jesus. I was greatly astounded when I saw her. (Revelation 17 NET)
Most readers recognize that, while John recorded here a parable of Rome as the Beast and religion as the Harlot, the image applies throughout human history, at least after Christ walked the earth. The expression “the Harlot Church” is recognized even among non-believers.
Lately I’ve been asked why I object to the various manifestations of Eastern Orthodoxy. For me, it’s the same question as to why I reject Catholicism and Protestantism. Rather than load you down with a detailed list of features, the answer is rather simple: They all keep asking and answering the wrong questions.
I often say that the fundamental issue here is reclaiming Biblical Mysticism. That mysticism is actually quite practical. The only biblical question is: What does God require of me? What do I need to know to understand His glory? How often must we remind ourselves that the Hebrew mind did not speculate on what was beyond the visible horizon? The Apostles were fully aware of the western obsession with visualizing things not present, and they contended against the tendency to ask a jillion detailed questions about the mechanism of divine power, when Scripture repeatedly says that we cannot understand it. We don’t need to know in order to be faithful.
Orthodoxy was born of dispute over questions that were wrong in the first place. Catholicism arose from seeking to sate human fleshly desires for control over things Christ did not place in our hands. Protestantism was born from political disputes over Catholic abuses. All of them are wrong because they are rooted in non-faith issues.
How easily we forget what “faith” means! It does not refer to intellectual content nor practices. It is another word for feudal submission to God. Trying to settle intellectual and procedural questions outside of what is revealed in Scripture is a fool’s errand. Speculation about the details of who Christ is — which is the bulk of early church controversies — is a sin in itself. Restoring the Hebraic context means adopting the Hebraic approach to such issues: Don’t approach them at all. That’s what it means to obey Christ.
The Harlot Church today is every religious organization that clings to the sinful human speculations that no Hebrew would have dared to ask. Seeking to nail things down intellectually is how humans do things when ignoring God’s revelation. That’s why we see the Harlot riding the Beast of human government. It is adultery and idolatry, and leads to the bloodshed of the Elect.
From this you can understand that the Lord periodically destroys some portions of human civilization. It’s an act of mercy to destroy systemic lies that herd humanity so far from God’s Word that they can no longer find their way back. The only reason I write so much is because there is too much to say against the lies of our world. Anyone can look around and see that we have arrived at that place yet again, and God is already at work destroying what blinds humans to faith.
