Old Testament Israel and New Testament Church Histories: An Embarrassing and Humbling Parallel!

Old Testament Israel and New Testament Church Histories:

An Embarrassing and Humbling Parallel!

 

Both Israel and His Church were called into being by God Himself. The span of time from Abraham TO Jesus is the same as that FROM Jesus to us. He has been the LORD of their history AND of ours! And we both seem to have treated Him in a similar way.

 

The following understanding described below desperately needs to be acknowledged by those two eastern and western ecclesiastical systems that each boast of being the only “TRUE church of Jesus Christ,” each claiming that the other broke away from THEM. They both have harsh judgments – often accurate – for those who broke away from the Roman church during the Protestant Reformation as being the source of the many thousands of denominations that litter the landscape of Christendom. Yet they are too obsessed with their own unique version of “trueness” to acknowledge that, in essence, THEY are the ones who created the first “denominations” which started that denomination disease that they claim to condemn among others! The Christ for whom they claim to exercise sole representation will reveal HIS opinion of how faithfully they have passed on His original commands for making His true disciples!

 

Israel’s history:

Initially, their victories over the forces of this world were stories of being guided and protected by GOD, whether escaping from Egypt, or bringing down the walls of Jericho.

They never thought of  being ruled by a hereditary human king. They were led only by men – prophets (Abraham and Moses) and Judges – whom GOD raised up as HE saw fit.

Eventually they settled down and wanted to live in what they thought of as the “REAL world” and insisted to Samuel that, “we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:19). God allowed them to have what they sinfully wanted, but informed Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them” (8:7).

As time went by, the great majority of these man-made leaders, led the people into apostacy from God’s clear and easily understood Torah. Their insistence upon leaving the supernatural world of God and making their home in “the world,” whose “ruler” and “god” is the one who got them banished from His holy Garden, started to undo the miraculous works of God that had bound them together:

• Solomon exalted himself, leading to the splitting of His people into Judah and Israel each with its own king, creating two mutually hostile nations where there had only been one.
• Those kings regularly sought help from other foreign worldly kings rather than God, nations like Egypt and Assyria, who actually worshipped God’s enemy!
• God raised up pagan enemies against them. Because the Northern kingdom was more godless and idolatrous than Judah, the Lord decided that they should be the first to be visited with Judgment and brought the Assyrians down upon them. Later, He brought the Babylonians to crush scatter His people in the southern kingdom!
• Are you beginning to see some similarities?

 

 

His Church’s history:

• He established His holy people to be led by a team of Pentecostally anointed Elders [“presbyters”], deacons, teachers, and Spirit-gifted Prophets (see Acts 11:30, 14:23 [“elderS for them in every congregation”], 15:2, 15:6ff, 20:17 [“elderS of the congregation]; 1 Timothy 4:14, 5:17;Titus 1:5 [elderS in every town]; James 5:14;1 Peter 5:5]. Disciples were commanded to submit to those teams presbyterS (later “nicknamed” into “priests”), but only after they had come to a “common mind” created by the Pentecostal Spirit who had led them into that common mind decision (as seen in Acts 15)!
• But eventually, they yielded to the same satanically inspired carnal human instinct that had captured their covenant predecessors: “we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations!” Listen to the testimony of the eminent early scholar, Jerome, one of the four official “Latin Church Fathers” (the following is taken from my “Blueprint for a Revolution: Building Upon ALL of the New Testament, Volume 2, Page 45):“Even after the churches had adopted the so-called monarchical episcopate [modern day “Bishops”], the knowledge of the original plurality apparently continued for some time, at least in some circles. An amazing example is provided by the uniquely learned and very widely travelled Jerome (c. 345-420) who was commissioned by Pope Damasus to translate the Bible into Latin and whom even Augustine considered his superior in knowledge. In one of his Biblical commentaries, he wrote:

“… a presbyter is the same as a bishop, and before ambition came into religion by the prompting of the devil, and people began to say, ‘I belong to Paul; I to Apollo; I to Cephas,’ the churches were governed by the direction of the presbyters acting as a body. But when each presbyter began to suppose that those whom he had baptized belonged to him, rather than to Christ, it was decreed in the whole church that one of the presbyters would be chosen to preside over the others, and that the whole responsibility for the church should devolve on him, so that the seeds of schism should be removed.” [NOTE 1]

 

“While we cannot find any trace of such a “decree” for the whole church and must regard Jerome’s account of it as his speculation, we have his clear testimony that the extra-congregational exercise of authority by bishops and popes was rooted in the failure to have the mind of Christ and was not original. Thus, a man-made source of unity came to take the place of the unity of the Spirit expressed through the Spirit-created common mind of the leaders. But instead of seeing this failure as a failure, and then repenting so as to return to the Spirit’s anointing and the leadership pattern that the Holy Spirit and apostles had established, the churches took the same “solution” that the ancient Israelites had taken: turn what was a failure of faith into a normative institution (1 Samuel 8:4-9). Eventually, Diotrephes became the norm (3 John 9-10)!” Among the apostles and earliest congregations, that experienced Spiritual anointing combined with the team of presbyters coming to a common mind allowed the Holy Spirit to FUNCTIONALLY lead His people!

• But WHERE were those holy prophets now that God’s Spirit had originally restored who could have called these “bishop-ruled” churches back to the mind of Christ? Even in the middle of the third century, Origen was commenting about the Spirit’s gifts that only “… traces of them are still preserved among those who regulate their lives by the precepts of the Gospel.” (Contra Celsus 1:2, 1:46).And that hierarchical “infection” did not stop at the congregational level: new levels of hierarchical control were invented: bishops over larger Roman “county” sized areas, called “dioceses,” and archbishops, patriarchs, and – in the west – one of them in Rome claiming to be some papal “emperor” ruling over ALL the other ecclesiastical “kings” – NONE of which had any godly right to exist!
• And once again like ancient Israel, these new “kings” in the church eventually agreed to accept an alliance for protection with worldly MEN outside of the covenant people, instead of trusting any protection that their heretofore divine Lord would choose to offer them. The Roman Emperor Constantine was inspired by the “god” and “ruler” of this world to form an organic union with them (a truly FUNCTIONAL union, despite any more clever terms that they usually choose to use to describe it!). At the 325 A.D. Council of Nicaea, Constantine sat in the middle of them as a sort of “coordinator” but openly regarded himself as the “bishop to those outside the of church.” In honor of him coming to their rescue as a “new Moses” (according to Eusebius) the eastern church even gave him the almost sacreligious official title of “Equal-to-the-Apostles” (Greek: “Isapostolos”/ “ισαποστολος”); and in both of the developing eastern and western ecclesiastical systems he has been honored officially as “saint Constantine” – a man who had his second wife and son executed. This was the beginning of the double standard of two kinds of Christian “ways” – the old one for mere “lay” Christians, and an unofficially relaxed one for their supposedly Christian “brothers” who ruled these new “Christian” kingdoms! No matter what clever “Jesuitical” reasoning is now used to justify that double standard, one will easily note that there is not the slightest hint that Jesus or His apostles ever taught or even remotely implied that God will “cut some slack” for those who claim that they are not bound by ALL of His commands.
• Once the Church was in formal alliance/partnership with the empire then any enemies of the empire automatically became implicit enemies of the Christians and their church, which is to be expected for all institutions that are now joined to “THIS world”! Just as what happened to our first parents who listened to the “common sense” of the garden’s serpent, when we break faith with God, we get “joined at the hip” with Satan, who now has legal access to us!
• This ecclesiastical alliance and degree of merger with the Roman Empire led directly to the butchering of the Christians in the Persian empire next door, who had largely been largely left alone during the previous centuries. And that Persian persecution was worse than anything Rome had done (The following is taken from my “Blueprint for a Revolution,” Volume 2, p. 203.“This is best described by the historian and missionary Samuel Hugh Moffett, the author of a very enlightening book, A History Of Christianity in Asia [NOTE 3]. There may well have been much rejoicing among Christians in the Roman Empire because of the cessation of their suffering, but …

‘Beyond Edessa to the east, across the Persian border there was no such rejoicing. For two hundred-and fifty-years, Persia had been a refuge for Christians from Roman persecution. The Parthians were too religiously tolerant to persecute. And their less tolerant Sassanian successors on the throne were too busy fighting Romans…  Moreover, as long as Roman emperors considered Christians to be enemies of Rome, Persian emperors were inclined to regard them as friends of Persia.

 

‘It was about 315 A.D. that an ill-advised letter from the Christian emperor Constantine to his Persian counterpart Shapur II probably triggered the beginnings of an ominous change in the Persian attitude toward Christians. Constantine believed he was writing to help his fellow believers in Persia but succeeded only in exposing them. He wrote to the young shah,

‘I rejoice to hear that the fairest provinces in Persia are adorned with … Christians … Since you are so powerful and pious, I commend them to your care and leave them in your protection.’ [NOTE 4]

 

“It was enough to make any Persian ruler conditioned by three hundred years of war with Rome suspicious of the emergence of a potential fifth column. Any lingering doubts must have been dispelled when about twenty years later Constantine began to gather his forces for war in the East. Eusebius records that Roman bishops were prepared to accompany their emperor ‘to battle with him and for him by prayers to God from whom all victory proceeds.’  And across the border in Persian territory the forthright Persian preacher Aphrahat recklessly predicted on the basis of his reading of Old Testament prophecy that Rome would defeat Persia.”

 

‘Faced with what seemed a double threat, a threat not only to national security but to the national religion, Persia’s priests and rulers cemented their alliance of state and religion in a series of periods of terror that have been called the most massive persecution of Christians in history, “unequalled in its duration, its ferocity and the number of martyrs”.’ [NOTE 5]

“The Persian Christians had to reap what the Roman Christians had sown! And furthermore, by having over time grown further and further away from the promises, commands and actual experience of the Pentecostal filling, guidance and gifts of the Holy Spirit, the prophetic ministries had so greatly  diminished or disappeared by the time of Constantine, that there were (apparently) no prophetic warnings to warn them about the satanic, Trojan Horse “gift” contained within the friendly proposals of the world system’s emperor. And, unfortunately, the deceptions we see within the ancient Gibeonites’ friendly proposal to Israel did not seem to come to the mind of the Christian leaders when Constantine arrived with his probably genuinely friendly, but deceived alliance. [NOTE 5]

• Consequently, after centuries of giving them time to repent and return to their holy apostolic foundation, God treated them as He had treated the people of His first covenant and decided to punish them with enemies raised up and called from afar.The Eastern church was much more organically bound together with the worldly imperial system (usually called “caesaropapism”), and in the seventh century the Lord over History raised up to their east a similar Satanically inspired movement to threaten and eventually conquer them, a similar system in which world and “church” are bound together into an organic unity: the theocracy of ISLAM! Islamic warriors started conquering the Byzantine-controlled eastern Mediterranean in 630 A.D. and finally totally destroyed the Byzantine Empire in 1453 A.D.

  The western churches, under the increasingly aggressive control of the Roman papal church were less subservient to the kings of this world. The same Lord over History brought against their “Romanized” version of cultural Christianity the Germanic invasions that led to the sacking of Rome in 455 A.D. by the Germanic Vandals, as well as by the aggressively expanding Muslim empire throughout northern Africa and Spain (early 700’s A.D.). And in the sixteenth century, through the Protestants and their worldly anti-papal nationalistic allies, He tore away from them most of northern Europe.

  But before God’s Reformation judgment on the western church had happened came the equivalence of the destruction of the unity between Judah and Israel. The growing departure of each of these eastern and western worldly forms of Christianity from the both the Spirit and the “spirit” inspired by Jesus eventually led to their hostility toward each other, and to the eventual excommunications of each of their western and eastern “emperor bishops” against the other. This marked the institutional beginning of “Eastern Orthodoxy” versus “Roman Catholicism” in 1054 A.D. These two groups that love to berate the even more fragmented denominations of Protestantism were actually the creators of the first two fragmented “denominations” of Christianity!

One can probably find more similarities in the history of these two disappointing representative groups of the New Covenant “people of God.” But this is as far as we need to go to make EVERY ONE of us who bears the name “Christian” to become deeply ashamed, humiliated and grieved at the scandal we have brought upon the name of Jesus in the eyes of  worldly human prisoners of this world’s “ruler” and “god” – AND what we have done to that holy and God-created movement that USED to be an incarnation of the Kingdom of Heaven on planet Earth!

But instead of that shame and grief, what I instead see is a continuation of the boasting of each of these two tragic fragments of His holy movement about how THEIR fragment is better than ALL the others! And among Protestants I find a hard-hearted assumption that denominations are either “sadly necessary until Christ returns,” or something that is rather natural in an America where competition among businesses is “as American as apple pie!” Have you all no SHAME?

 

“When I refused to confess my sin, my whole body wasted away, while I groaned in pain all day long. For day and night, you tormented me; you tried to destroy me in the intense heat of summer. Then I confessed my sin; I no longer covered up my wrongdoing. I said, ‘I will confess my rebellious acts to the LORD.’ And THEN you forgave my sins. For this reason, every one of your faithful followers should pray to you WHILE there is a window of opportunity…” (Psalm 32:3-6).

“… will God not bring about justice for His elect who cry out to Him day and night, and will He delay long for them? I tell you that He WILL bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, WILL He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:7-8).

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NOTES:

1. “Commentary on the Epistle of Titus,” 1:1,5. Quoted by Henry Bettenson, The Later Christian Fathers (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 189.
2. A History Of Christianity in Asia, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 1998.
3. “Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History,”24. “Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History gives an inaccurate summary of the same letter and dates it wrongly.” (This and the next three footnotes are from Moffett’s book)
4. C. Casartelli, ‘Sassanians,’ Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics 11:203”
5. Joshua 9:1ff. The Constantinian Christian leaders, like those among the Israelites, looked only at the apparently welcome circumstances, and thus did not feel any need to seek the revealed guidance of God. Where were those holy prophets that God had raised up within His church‽