We posed this question in our last blog but failed to answer it. We live in a dangerous time. ISIS is a growing threat in the middle east and they threaten to raise their flag over the White House. Our president seems inept and unable to calculate the danger they represent just as Clinton and Bush failed to recognize the threat from Osama. Osama Bin Laden declared war on America years before he attacked the world towers. Our southern border is unprotected and millions of emigrants are crossing unimpeded. Who knows what groups of people have already invaded our nation without our knowledge? Some of these emigrants bring new and old sicknesses and disease as they come. Entero virus was an unknown pathogen just one year ago and Ebola while it has ravaged west Africa is a recent threat to our population. These are just two. The CDC seems to have no idea how the disease is spread and the protocols are changing hourly. Our governments intrusion into our freedom seems to be a daily onslaught and threatens our way of life. Drones fly overhead and the government and private companies listen to our phone calls and read our emails. If there has ever been a time in history when we need God, this is it. Yet, where is He?
It is being reported by our news media that hundreds of Christians are being killed by the forces of ISIS in the middle east. It appears as though the god of the Muslim is greater than the God of the Christian. In our own country, the Church cannot slow the onslaught of godlessness. The march of abortion and gay rights marches right over the Church unhindered. The courts are removing the name of God in all forms throughout society and all public prayers in Jesus' name are prohibited. These things are not happening in small corners of our society. They are universal to the whole country. The AFLCIO has the Church on the ropes and she is about to fall. Gay people are not being given civil unions. Their marriages are being pronounced in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. California has just mandated that all Christian health insurance cover birth control and abortions. Not only is the god of the Muslim greater than the god of the Christian, classic humanism is greater as well. Why is there no push back from the Christian God? No wonder the world thinks God is dead!
There were times in Jewish history when the exact same thing happened and luckily for us, these times were recorded in our Bibles. Each time the Jewish Nation found itself being overrun by another nation the cause could be directly attributed to their lack of respect for the God they claimed to serve. One would be hard pressed not to think that we are in a similar predicament, but what sin is the Church committing that is grievous enough to make the Lord hide His face from us?
First of all, our Lord and Savior paid a high price to redeem the Church from the old covenant law. He did so by fulfilling the requirements of the law. This was extremely costly for the Lord of all the earth, from coming to earth as a helpless babe and embracing all the embarrassments of infancy, childhood, and adulthood, not to mention the rigorous costs of the cross, yet the Church insists on living under some form of the old covenant. They pick and choose which laws to obey, each denomination chooses a different set, but Paul states that any man who chooses to obey one law of the old covenant will be held accountable to all the blessings and curses of he old covenant (Gal.). The fact that the Church, in all forms, seeks to live under the old covenant after Jesus paid such a high price to deliver her from it is a huge travesty of justice. Jesus paid an exorbitant price to redeem the Church from the old covenant yet the Church insists on taking its members back under its authority.
Secondly, the new covenant is avoided as if it were the plague. Sure, believers are taught to clothe themselves with Jesus' righteousness through belief in the Saviour, yet even in that there is confusion. Did Jesus take our sins in His body on the tree, wiping our slate clean for all time, or does Jesus' blood wash us from each individual sin we commit? Are we saved by faith through grace or are we saved through the work of presenting each perceived sin to Jesus for washing? I would dare say most Christians have no idea what the new covenant entails, much less how to live within it. The Church teaches the keeping of certain laws contained in the old covenant and using the blood of Jesus to cover transgressions. This thinking is nothing more than extending the old covenant just past Jesus' death so that the blood of Jesus can be used as a sacrificial offering for sin. This is old covenant teaching. Where is the teaching on the new covenant?
The fact that not all of the old covenant law is adhered to is a moot point for again, Paul states that the old covenant was a schoolmaster for the Jews. A schoolmaster has authority to enforce rules and whether you seek to keep all of the old covenant law or not, the schoolmaster will hold you accountable to each and every one, making the escape of the curses of the old covenant impossible. This, after Jesus redeemed Christians from the curse of the law. By fulfilling the old covenant requirements for righteousness, Jesus took the old covenant out of the way and established a new covenant, yet the new covenant is avoided and Christians are taught to return to the old covenant. All of the laws given prior to Jesus' death are carefully kept, those given after Jesus' death are carefully ignored. To say that they are ignored is not quite accurate, for in truth, the one law Jesus gave with all the authority of heaven and earth, the one law He gave the Church, the one law associated with the new covenant, is disdained and ridiculed.
Would you like to know why God has hid His face from us? It is because we have rejected the God who suffered and died on the cross to redeem us from sin and are worshiping and serving a god of our own making. We carefully combine parts of the old and new covenants, keeping neither. We pick and choose what laws to obey and which to ignore, but Christianity is not a buffet where we can pick and choose for ourselves. Jesus did not go to all the trouble to draft and ratify a new covenant with man just to have man reject the covenant and create his own by combining certain elements of covenants old and new.
The creation of this great nation, America, was God's attempt to reset the Church on the authority of the new covenant. Over and over again He has sent revival after revival in an effort to reset the Church on its original course. Each time the Church settled back down to its chosen idolatry. The Lord will try once more to reset the Church on the new covenant. This time it will not be with a revival, this time the Church is reaping the harvest of the seeds it has been sowing. This time it will reap the results of its actions. This time will not be pretty or exciting. Woe to those who are seeking God's glory, for they will experience God's consuming fire. Jesus' death on the cross opened the door for mankind to receive a great deal of good will from God to man but we have just about used that all up.
The call for repentance has already been sounded, but repentance of what? The commandments of the new covenant were interpreted to have been fulfilled eons ago. The Church knows nothing but the old covenant and to repent of sins defined by old covenant law is sinning against the new covenant. Therefore, even in its repentance, the Church only deepens its sinfulness. The Church is blind to the commandments of the new covenant by its continued disobedience and disdain of and for them. It would seem to be common sense that obedience to commandments issued after the establishment of the Church would be more important to the Christian than obedience to commandments issued under old covenant law, yet there seems to be no common sense left in the Church. The Church rigidly holds to its wisdom, casting God's aside. If the same criteria used on the commandments of Acts 1 were used on the rest of the commandments of the scripture, none would be obeyed, for they have all been fulfilled.
Therefore, it is obvious that somewhere a long the way mankind made a conscious effort to usurp God's authority over the Church and insert its own. The sin of the Church is too blatant, too brazen, to be otherwise. Moreover, the fact that the Church stubbornly refuses to repent of disobedience of the only commandment given to it by Jesus in the face of its destruction supports this idea that this disobedience is not a sin of omission. The Church has chosen this path with reckless abandon.