Sunday, September 21, 2014

The Church Epistles, Our Own Letters

To the poor people instructed by the corporate churches, Bible reading can be confusing for many Christians. I mean who are we? Are we Gentiles? Are we Jews following the Law of Moses? Which portions of Scripture apply to us?

Despite what we are continuously taught, the Gospels contain nothing of the church except by promise. Even in the Acts of the Apostles we are still struggling to become free of Judaism. But with the letters to the churches, we are reading actual letters to us. Finally, we have our own mail, sent through the Roman postal system, to real churches.

Yet under Church Replacement Theology, the whole Bible applies to us. I'm jealous. I want my own mail, my own letters. And starting with the Book of Romans, that is what we have. Of course, the entire Word of God is instructive to the church. Let me be so bold as to say that only the church understands the whole Bible.

But, despite the claims of the would-be elite, Moses was not a Lutheran. He was not even a Presbyterian! When God spoke to Moses, Moses was a circumcised Jew.

The church is separate and we have our own portion of the Bible, dedicated just to us. Perhaps if an Aaronic priest led a lamb to the so-called altar of a church and cut its throat, people would catch on?

I know that as a child, how confused I was to hear continuously of Jesus as a soft-spoken carpenter teaching in the temple. Such wonderful lessons indeed, but I did not hear of our risen Lord, now in heaven, and certainly never ever of His immanent return.

Many churches are stuck in the Gospels. To them, the church epistles are unfamiliar territory, except as devotional guides. They teach the Sunday sabbath as binding because it is in the ten commandments, even though the letters to the church tell us we are under no such restriction. Some call this attitude "Saved by grace, kept by the law".

Almost two thousand years after the formation of the church and the writing of the church epistles, we may wonder, will we ever be free of the Judaizers? The legalists are doing an amazing job of keeping us ignorant. And no wonder, we pay them to do so.

But how wonderful it is to realize that there is now no distinction between the varied peoples of the Earth. We are the church, and God has written love letters just to us.

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