096 All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Can you blame anyone for refusing to subscribe to Christianity these days? With some of the biggest culprits & perpetrators of evil posing as Christians, including some of the greatest dorks this world has ever seen running entire superpowers, and the majority of believers falling for their scheme & voting for them... I can't.

On the other hand, what are you really buying into when you join an average Christian church, these days? Does it even remotely resemble the life-style of Christendom's Founder and His original followers, or is it just some artificial mock-up of the real thing, just as you get a made-in-America mock-up of nearly everything else on the planet?

No, I'm not blasting Christianity, I'm just trying to make you aware that there is a counterfeit version of the Real Thing around that everyone's buying into, that's poisonous. Not all that glitters is gold.

I've written before about how I perceive some outstanding Muslims or Hindus to have been greater saints or even better "Christians" than the majority of their officially pious & cross-flaunting counterparts, but I'm coming across more and more situations in real life that seem to confirm my theory that God doesn't judge you by your tag.

Of course, we Christians have the excuse that the Devil's on our trail and works a lot harder at stopping us from being good than perhaps the average Joe who has no reputation or standard to defend. But then it seems like an awful lot of us Christian soldiers aren't very much of a bunch of fighters. We have big mouths & think we're the greatest, sort of like the U.S. Army in little tiny 3rd World countries. But when it comes to really fighting a real foe we turn chicken & run, deserting our friends who bought into our "We'll defend you from the bad guys" lines, when all we were interested in was their resources & 30 pieces of silver.

No wonder the Chinese are laughing at the elections in America, just as they're probably laughing at the Western plastic version of Christianity. They've seen real Christians refusing to deny their faith for decades in their own prisons, and they can tell the difference between real fighters and a bunch of big-mouthed pussies (in the sense of little kittens - no offense!)...


As long as Christians in the world are at large more selfish and materialistic than their Hindu counterparts, more idolatrous in the worship of the things made or bought by their own hands than any Muslim, and greater opponents and obstacles to peace than the Buddhist population of the world, faith in Christ will never be an attractive alternative to members of other religions.
As long as Christians, in their actions are living a lie that brings death to the world, we'll have a hard time convincing them that Jesus is indeed the "Way, the truth and the life."

059 The Leaven of the Pharisees

If you type "leaven of the Pharisees" in your google bar, you'll come up with nearly as many results and definitions of the term, as there are denominations and churches. For the fundamentalist hardliners, the Pharisees of today are represented by the catholic church, whose members, again, have their own definitions.

I find the leaven of the Scribes and Pharisees to be much closer to home than the other side, the other denomination. The leaven of the Pharisees is a sin we have all committed, especially the most righteous among us. It is the sin that nailed our Savior to the cross: Self-righteousness.

It's the audacity of thinking we have the right to judge another, blatantly defing Jesus' own commandment He gave us to "judge not that ye be not judged" (Matth.7:1). But we go ahead and do it anyway. We go around and call others "fornicators" and "adulterers" because they live together "in sin" without a marriage license.

We go around and tell others the Satanic lie that they can lose their Salvation if they don't watch out and stop sinning, quoting the only verse most Christians ever memorize on Salvation (Phil.2:12): "Work out thine own Salvation in fear and trembling" (Ahhh, it feels so good to cause others to feeeaaaar and trrrremmmmble, doesn't it? - So who's the pervert here?).... Of course, totally ignoring the dozens of Scriptures that make it quite plain that Salvation is a gift of grace, only to be obtained through faith, and without works whatseoever. What Paul was referring to in the verse above, is what we make out of our Salvation in this life, and what kind of a life we build on the foundation of the new life in Christ. But our eternal Salvation is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:8,9), and if God is Love (1John 4:8), then He won't jerk that gift away from His child everytime he sins.

Besides, sinning is something we all do a lot more often than we like to admit. Those self-righteous Scribes and Pharisees of today are just trying to make it easier on themselves by re-defining sin: you are a sinner because you're not married, and I'm not, because I go to church on Sundays and have a marriage license. According to Jesus, everyone who even so much as looks at a woman and desires her in his heart, has already committed adultery (Mt.5:28). Now, the only sort of (male) people I know of who can withstand that natural urge God built into a healthy man's system, are homosexuals.

The leaven of the Scribes and Pharisees is the audacity to put oneself above another and say, "I am good and you are bad, because I go to the right kind of church, and my belief system is the right one." Jesus certainly didn't fit into the belief system of the Scribes and Pharisees, and likewise He could walk past any of those supposed followers of His today, who claim to be so much better than everyone else, and they wouldn't even recognize Him. They'd be the first to accuse, resist, persecute and judge Him again.

The leaven of the Pharisees is the audacity of anyone (even indirectly) saying to any "illigitemate" child, "The world would have been better off without you, because you were born in 'sin'."

It is the audacity of self-righteous church Christians all over the world who refuse to accept divorcees in their midst.

They are totally out of touch with God. They are Paulites, not Christians, and at the same time ignoring Paul's own warnings not to become followers of his, nor of Apollos, nor of Peter, but of Christ. And, of course, at the same time, blatantly ignoring the gist of Paul's epistles, which is to make clear that Salvation is by grace, and that "the fruit of the spirit is LOVE... against such there IS no law!" (Gal.5:22,23).

They miss the point of the whole story, starting with Cain (who thought he could win God's favor through his own works) and Abel (the prototype of the victims of the do-it-yourself religionists of all ages).

No matter how much those self-righteous little Scribes and Pharisees of today try to make life impossible for their fellowmen, "there IS no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1), as much as they're trying to prove the opposite!

They're only heaping up greater condemnation upon themselves (James 3:1). It's that kind of people who make Christianity a grim and bitter choice for those who would like to enjoy life a little bit.

No wonder there are so many Satanists and witches. With so many modern Scribes and Pharisees around with an attitude of, "If you don't accept my religion and live according to my rules, you're going to burn in the fires of hell forever and ever," they probably figure, "Okay, so I'm going to burn in Hell then, as long as I don't have to be a self-righteous prig like you!"

Just as the Scribes and Pharisees of Jesus' day relied on Moses, and called themselves Moses' disciples (John9:28), entirely missing the whole point, as Jesus pointed out when he said, "Had ye believed Moses, then you would also believe Me, because he spoke of Me" (John5:46), so the modern day Pharisees rely on Paul, utterly oblivious to the point Paul was trying to make, and becoming the very people of whom Paul prophesied: "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you" (Romans 2:24), referring to precisely the type of people who dare to judge others (2:1).

No wonder Jesus warned us of that kind of poison. It's the very stuff that turns hundreds of people against the true God by the hour, landing more people in hell - thanks to those "dedicated Christians" - than Satan could achieve by any other means.

No wonder Rick Joyner saw Satan's armies riding on the back of Christians. They're his greatest tools, and they certainly deserve his gratitude.

As far as Jesus goes, they should remember that the very way they treat even the least of His brethren is the way they're treating Him.

I can see a lot of red faces in the not too distant future. Red with shame.

Selected Scriptures About the Pharisees:

Watch "Overcoming the Religious Spirit" by Patricia King & Faisal Malick

046 A New Covenant

I'm coming to the conclusion - not without the usual, probably considered highly heretical input from above - that another monumental change is happening in our era, similar to when Christ walked on earth 2000 years ago in order to establish a new covenant between God and men.
The old covenant (testament) had been between Him and the physical descendants of one man, Abraham, more specifically, the branch of the descendants of his son Isaac, also called the Jews. That covenant also roughly lasted 2000 years, until that race proved to be unworthy of the right to the title "the people of God," or His exclusive representatives.
After Christ died - simultaneously with the passover lambs that were being prepared by every pious Jew around the world, and embodying the very symbolism of each one of them, yet without most of them recognizing this fact, and the temple veil was supernatural rent in two to reveal to the world that the arc of the covenant wasn't there anymore (by the way, you can stop looking for it; the Bible tells us where it is in Rev.), the old covenant was dead. In order to become a child of God from henceforth, all one had to do was not just have the luck to be born of a special, chosen race, but to accept the sacrifice God made in offering up Jesus, His "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev.13:8).
So, for 2000 years, the people of God had a new name. They called themselves Christians. I'm coming to the point, though, where I see that the new people of God, the Christians, are erring just as much from the true basis of their faith, and are straying just as much from God, no matter how vehemently they claim to be God's people nominally, as their ancient predecessors did, and God must be looking around for anybody, from any faith or religion, to do the job the Christians refuse to do, and be living samples of the truth the Christians refuse - to either accept, or to live and obey. One of those men of God, for instance was the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi, who probably lived a better and truer sample of what a Christian was supposed to be like than each and every other Christian on earth during his life-time, put together.
That doesn't mean I'm promoting Hinduism. It just means that God can use anyone, even a Hindu, to promote the true meaning and essence of Christianity, if He can't get any of the Christians to do it. I'm coming to the conclusion that Christ is exclusively for the Christians no more than He was exclusively for the Jews.
Of course, most Christians will probably want to stone me now, just as the Jews stoned Stephen, one of the early Christians - from the time when a Christian was still a follower of Christ, not Mammon - who proved that the rug of God's anointing had been pulled out from under Jewish feet and given to true believers in Christ.
Back then, it cost something to be a believer in Christ: you had to pay the price of persecution for it, of being an outcast. A Christian was a member of a minority group, a small, perecuted and highly controversial sect. Those Christians have long since moved from the arenas of the Roman colosseums into the grandstands. They're no longer martyrs, but they make martyrs of others: fellow Christians, Muslims, Hindus, whoever stands in their way.
No wonder most honest people in the world are disgusted by the term "Christian." It has become a term that stands for anything but what Christ stood for: exploitation and supression of the poor, domination of anybody too weak to defend themselves by the "Christian," Western "civilization."
Those dear Christian brethren simply haven't realized that they've been infiltrated and taken over by the other side, and the spiritual stench of their house has become so bad that God had to move out, run and hide elsewhere, anywhere He would find shelter among humans, in the hearts of the humble, whether Christan or not, the true People of God.
The People of God are the People of Love (see John 13:35). If they don't happen to call themselves Christians, I won't blame them. Can you?

God's mind on the matter:

vv