The Unfettered Gospel of Jesus the Messiah

What is the Church?
Does it make any difference which one I join?
How has the “simplicity of Christ” become corrupted?
What is the gospel?

 

By Christopher J. Patton

When does diversity become confusion? The sheer number of denominations and ministerial organizations promulgating their teachings about the gospel – about Jesus Christ and what He stands for is itself a source of confusion to the unbeliever. In fact it is often a source of confusion for those who consider themselves Christian, too. In this article I suggest that the Bible is far more comprehensible, inspiring and powerful when we let the Creator God of Israel speak for Himself through its pages. After all, faith comes from hearing (and reading) the Word of God. Perhaps too much theology can be harmful to your faith!

Freedom of speech is a wonderful blessing. It is akin to honesty because if one can speak freely, then he or she is more likely to be honest in expression. God can work with honesty – even if it is sinful. He cannot work with an incorrigible liar like Satan. That is why that twisted angel is forever damned. God cannot work with the proud either. The Bible states that God resists the proud and rewards the humble, for those poor in the spirit of this age are more open to being rich in the spirit of the kingdom to come. When we subordinate our personally generated concepts of what is right, just and fair and choose the standards of biblical teaching, we “die to self” so that a new face and set of hands of God’s Holy Spirit may be born in the fleshly temples of our bodies. By default this process of salvation creates a holy life suitable of witness and an identity in Christ worthy of being born into an individually unique spiritual body of eternity that is concurrently an organic part of the collective Body of Messiah, a spiritual stone in Heaven’s Temple.

But what about the “Church” on earth today? For many the question is, “What is the Church? Does it make any difference which one I join? Why do they disagree so much if they all claim the same Bible, the same Jesus and the same God or Holy Spirit?”

Whenever I peruse the public religious media, I confess my own dismay and amazement at what passes for the “Christian” religion. While I can philosophically understand how human traditions about religion have grown and changed over time to become unique– especially during most of the course of human history when communications between distances and cultures were not so easy, I am still torn between the wish to experience a fulfilled fellowship in the body of Christ and the necessity to live according to biblical truths as I understand them. Though I do not judge the salvation of any person, I cannot avoid my responsibility and ultimate certainty to answer directly to Jesus/Yeshua for how I lived my life and what I taught on that day He calls my name.

Over the years a number of Christians have expressed similar frustrations to me in their own words. I also perceive that many are confused about what Jesus taught – both in the Church and without. The best explanation for this confusion lies not with God, who is One, but with people who are many. Peter encourages believers to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. He also admits that Paul’s writings are difficult to understand at times. The Bible seems to intimidate many people so that they do not read it regularly, and, for whatever reason, this lack of Bible reading is confirmed by many polls. I propose that the behavioral source of the confusion about what Jesus taught and what the Bible says mainly lies in this lack of Bible reading.

There is another source to these connected phenomena. The fallen prince of demons, Satan (the Destroyer, Adversary and Enemy of each person and humanity in general) is a powerful source of spiritual confusion that is not well understood, which unfortunately means that he gets to operate freely and successfully with little opposition. The Bible calls him “the god of this world” who reigns over this age’s global civilization through the execution of his powers as the “prince of the power of the air.” Jesus said that He had nothing in Satan and that came to destroy the works of the Devil. The latter is a work in process that will soon climax in a crescendo combining the natural consequences of collective and personal human sin, a demonic frenzy of global deceit and destruction defeated by the promised Godly intervention of judgment and deliverance known popularly as the Apocalypse or “End of the World” (this age). The conclusion of hope will be the glorious reign of Jesus over the Jewish people and all the nations of humanity.

Bible Reading and the Protestant Reformation

Admittedly, the Bible is not the simplest book to master, but I think that our human nature and social habits make the task more complicated than it needs to be. In other words, people do not read the Bible regularly and take it for what it says. While ultimate understanding of the Bible’s spiritual content is dependant on the written Word being mixed with the Holy Spirit given to those who believe and obey what they read, most people do not even persist in seeking God in the Bible’s pages. Instead reading what the Bible says and applying it to daily life, most seek easier, more appealing answers elsewhere in the maze of advertised spiritualities and religions spawned by our modern mass media culture that caters to many flavors of personal fulfillment. Why?

Four to five hundred years ago the Protestant Reformation came about because people had begun to read the Bible and live by it in opposition to established religious teachings and traditions. They separated themselves from oppressive ecclesiastical bureaucracies that both violated the plain morality of God’s Word in their behavior or lifestyle as well as promulgating a theology so complexly different from the simplicity of Christ. The reformed believers began a journey towards holiness and dedication to the gospel that eventually led thousands to the shores of North America in search of religious liberty.

Indeed, there were also economic and political considerations in the European colonization of the Americas, but no small number of these material considerations derived from the experience of religious persecution. The literature of those times clearly evidences the spiritual motivations of the Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers and others who settled the Anglo-American colonies. In general these early settlers eschewed materialism as well as the practices of the corrupted churches they left behind. Yes, given some passage of time, history documents that almost every church organization ever born in the spirit of altruistic dedication to God suffers from the natural corrupting influences of wealth and political power. This is a hard fact, but a true one that is more easily understood within the context of God’s overall plan for humanity, which includes the sly lies and tactics of Satan, the false god of this material age of time and space.

The Simplicity of Christ

The power of God’s truth lies in its simplicity. For example, God is omnipotent because there is no limit to His capacity to love and forgive people who truly repent of their sins. God inhabits eternity. He is the fullness of joy, peace, justice and truth. He knows that the only way to live forever in a heavenly manner is to be like Him. He defines what true love is. He character is the standard of right and wrong. If any person wants to live forever, he or she must conform to God’s nature, which is impossible to discover on our own or to execute on our own power.

This is why He gave humanity the Bible through the tribes of Israel and His Holy Spirit through His Son born to a young Jewish woman, Yeshua (Jesus) the Messiah. (Luke 1:35) Jesus was the pure fullness of Holy Spirit conscious and revealed in life lived in bodily flesh. He was fully human, yet fully God as foreshadowed when the Holy Shekinah glory of God filled Jerusalem’s Temple of stone at Solomon’s dedication (2Chronicles 7) Anyone who believes the promises of the Bible as fulfilled in Jesus becomes a “stone” in the spiritual Temple of God being built in heaven. (1Peter 2:5-11)

Modern “churchianity” (as some call it) has bound the simplicity of Christ with the heavy chains of doctrinal dogmas, traditions and alliances with the mammonous economic and political powers of this present age. It makes no difference if an organization’s track record goes back hundreds of years or merely decades, this omnipresent danger to a living and honest faith in the gospel of Jesus presses itself upon us more effectively than ever before possible. The growing regional, national and international sociocultural webs of interdependency and political conformity have transformed most religious organizations into spiritual entertainment and social clubs dependant upon mass media, mass marketing and mass psychology. Count your blessings if your experience is different, and be wary of the false spiritual chains that seem so comfortably right to wear. Satan is testing the leadership of every Christian organization not yet under his appealing but corrupting influence and control. Revelation 3:15-19 warns that the materially compromised, feel-good gospel typified by the Church at Laodicea will predominate in these last days.

The Power of the Prince of the Air

As the god of this age, Satan has power that he uses to deceive and enslave humanity to unwittingly perform his goals of mass destruction even as most of us just think we are trying to take care of business or try to survive the stark conditions of an uncaring world. (2Corinthians 4:4) A principle part of this fallen angel’s program is to confuse us spiritually. He does this by lying skillfully. Remember, lies are only effective if they are introduced by truth and then periodically spiced with half truths. It is a mixture of truth and lies, good and evil that always yields the fruit of empty despair and death.

Briefly, there are two spiritual forces in our material universe. They were represented in the Garden of Eden by the two trees. The Tree of Life represents the eternally defined life omnipotence of the Creator God, which is pure love that is also undefiled truth and justice, or holy righteousness. The Tree of the Knowledge or Experience of Good and Evil represents the life force of the universe’s material existence as bounded by time according to God’s plan for humanity. In Genesis it is called the “Breath of Life,” and it empowers both humans and animals. As breath, it is air. In the sustenance of biological life, air functions as a materially perceivable parallel analog or substance for the spiritual power that operates beyond the bounds of physical science.

The driving impact of this temporal and material spirit, or life force, is its ultimate and inevitable balancing act that ends in death. In eastern cultures this characteristic is illustrated by the yin-yang. Hebrews 2:14 calls it the fear of death that enslaves people to the devil through self-preservation, a holding onto a self-defined material identity crafted out of fleshly wisdom and desires called human nature. Its natural goal is the sustenance of biological life. This often applies to an individual and more often to the survival of a group or a social or species whole of some kind. It naturally runs contrary in part to God. The tricky aspect of human nature is the “in part.” We deceive ourselves with what we hold that is good and blind ourselves to the inherent evil within us that disqualifies us from eternal life. God alone knows how to live eternally in love and happiness, and He will not tolerate any deviation from this holy prescription because He loves people too much to see them suffer forever due to living any other way than His own proven one.

Thus, the Bible describes this “power of the air” as “working in the sons of disobedience” in a manner that encourages the lusts of the flesh and the evil execution of power over another to the advantage of the stronger. (Ephesians 2:1-7) This natural spiritual power or life force can be managed by skill. Some of that management comes in the form of natural healing and some of it in occult practice or spiritually enlightened wisdom. It is the false spirit, another spirit, the spirit of antichrist and power source behind false miracles such as those prophesied in 2Thessalonians 2:7-12 and Revelation 13:11-18 . It is a decoy spirituality that Satan uses to distract humanity from the true omnipotence of God’s Holy Spirit. The lie of the last days is that we all worship the same god and access the same spiritual power. Perhaps most do and/or will, but the god worshipped is of this world and so is the spiritual power exercised by the deceived devotees.

This false spirit is real power that can be at least partially or initially directed to achieve a person’s desires for good or evil, but it does so at a cost. It must come from somewhere in the material universe, and there are only two sources: from within a person’s own life force or from stealing the life force from another person or animal. Unlike God’s true Holy Spirit, this false spirit always has limits and equalizes out to death: one person’s power comes at the expense of something else. It is never satisfied. It is an endless void that eventually consumes and destroys its apprentices and anyone in their sphere of influence.

The Unfettered and Transcendent Gospel

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus is bodily alive, risen from the dead. (1Corinthians 15:1-11) By faith the true disciple of Jesus is freed from death and empowered to live a life of increasing conformity with God. (Galatians 2:20; Romans 12:1-18) Each believer creatively responds to God’s presence within by the Holy Spirit to uniquely express the Creator’s love and care of others and His creation, and so we are enabled to live today according to the reality of faith: the omnipotent Creator God is real.

Through Messiah, the God of Israel lovingly forgives our sins, transforms our thoughts and being, so that He may diligently reward those who seek Him according to His purpose. Part of His purpose is dedicated to our own maximum potential, but the full focus is on the re-establishment of peace and justice in the universe. Jesus comes soon to overthrow the corrupt governments of this age and replace them with the Kingdom of God. This political change is not something that the biblical disciple tries to force physically. It will be a sovereign and direct act of heaven without the need for human agreement or military action to help make it happen. (Revelation 19:11-21; Isaiah 11:1-9)

The core teaching of Yeshua/Jesus is to love God with all of one’s heart, mind and soul and his/her fellow human being as he would himself. This duty results in a level of citizenship higher than the one we know on earth. The disciple is a citizen of heaven and an ambassador for the kingdom to come. (Philippians 3:20; 2Corinthians 5:20) As residents and/or citizens of the various nations and communities we live in, we are commanded to behave appropriately for each social context that does not violate holiness. This pre-requisite perspective is essential to being able to read and apply the Bible to our lives. This being a bit too broad, I will give you some specific examples of my own comprehension of the unfettered gospel evidences itself in the following phrases and concepts:

The events of Bible prophecies that precede Jesus’ return have already begun to unfold. The time of God’s judgment of our global societies’ systemic sins is rushing towards us. The consequences will surprise most of the world because we humans are naturally focused on survival or the pursuits of happiness if one is relatively wealthy. A growing preoccupation with general busy-ness, making money and/or mass media entertainment keeps us from noticing the increasing pace in world events towards the ultimate fulfillment of all Bible prophecy.

I take no pleasure in proclaiming that prior to the most famous events predicted in the books of Daniel and Revelation, our proud nation of the United States will probably suffer an economic collapse that will lead to a quick political and military decline. Churchianity’s increasingly enmeshed participation in our modern and corrupt Babylonian civilization will probably contribute to a growing popular avoidance of the Bible and biblical “fundamentalists” – however that may come to be defined. This is Satan’s objective to weaken and neutralize the liberating truths of the gospel that must be proclaimed in these last days before Jesus returns. With each passing day it seems to becomes increasing necessary to “flee Babylon” in order to be free to serve God. That topic is covered elsewhere.

But come Messiah will, because Jesus has promised to return and overthrow the spiritual, political, economic and social institutions and governments of Satan. He will establish justice and peace for all peoples beginning at Jerusalem. No more will the environment by trashed and manipulated to fulfill the insatiable desires of human greed. No more will peoples be oppressed that the rich can become wealthier. Spiritual confusion will be eliminated, but the challenge of human nature will remain for every person seeking to live in the fullness of love forever.

Yes, many evils are yet to come before that glorious day. Do not be the agent of that evil. Read the Bible. Repent and change to do according to its promises and commandments in faith. God is ever more faithful that any human or organization of humans can be.

He said to His disciples, "It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come!

"It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble.

"Be on your guard! If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him.

"And if he sins against you seven times a day, and returns to you seven times, saying, 'I repent,' forgive him."

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" (Luke 17:1-5)

 

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