Standing in support of Israel, Jews, and believers in all the nations, in the name of Jesus (Yeshua). Sharing biblical truth, encouragement, news and prophecy.
Catholic Chapel in Magdala, Israel -Walk With Me and see.
Steve Martin, Love For His People Ministry
Catholic Chapel in Migdal, Israel -Walk With Me and see, Steve Martin, Love For His People Ministry. Named after Mary Magdela
April 25, 2023 in Magdala, Israel near Tiberias, Israel
Videos filmed and shared by Steve Martin, Founder, Love For His People Ministry in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable
in Your sight,
O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer.” (Psalms 19:14 NASU)
Have you ever caught yourself thinking about something,
and then wonder how you got to that point in your mind? Day dreaming about
tomorrow? Pondering over a situation that has nothing to do with what you are
doing now?
If you then catch yourself doing that, and next try
to walk back to how you got there in your thinking, it can be as a maze in your
mind. It is probably due to the fact that our minds have collected so much information
over the years. No wonder we wander.
In years gone by I would memorize Scripture, to help
my mind be disciplined. I would meditate on good things. The shepherd David
learned this lesson, as he sat watching over the sheep grazing. I can imagine
that gave him plenty of time to consider what he allowed in his mind, and he
made sure it was good.
How often do we surround ourselves with the radio
blaring continually, the TV turned on with meaningless content, or the
overflowing noise of life which distracts us from the Lord? Far too often I am
sure. How can we meditate on His Words if all else consumes our minds?
Many times we avoid having it quiet. It is like we
can’t allow “nothing” in the airwaves around us. We have become so accustomed
to noise that if there isn’t any we look to have something turned on to make it.
Ever walk into a hotel room and immediately turn on the TV? (Guilty!)
It is almost like we fear having a quiet time.
Something has to be going all the time, or we tend to get paranoid. Does that
describe you?
There was a song written decades ago with the lyrics
“silence is golden.”* Do you believe that?
The Lord isn’t calling us to be as hermits living in
a secluded cave in the desert land of some far away country. Nor are most of us
supposed to join the monastery to live as a monk, or nun, where talk is
prohibited 23 hours a day. But I do think He is asking us to allow His Holy
Spirit to have time to speak to us, when we are able to hear Him. Most of the
time He will be that “still, small voice” which can only be heard when nothing
else is filling our ears, or minds.
Elijah was given a lesson in listening. Scripture
records this about him.
“Then He said, "Go out, and stand on the
mountain before the Lord." And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and
strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the
Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but
the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the
Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.
“So it was, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped
his face in his mantle and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave.
Suddenly a voice came to him, and said, "What are you doing here,
Elijah?" And he said, "I have been very zealous for the Lord God of
hosts; because the children of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down
Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left; and they
seek to take my life."
Then the Lord said to him: "Go, return on your
way to the Wilderness of Damascus; and when you arrive, anoint Hazael as king
over Syria. Also you shall anoint Jehu the son of Nimshi as king over Israel.
And Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel Meholah you shall anoint as prophet in
your place. It shall be that whoever escapes the sword of Hazael, Jehu will
kill; and whoever escapes the sword of Jehu, Elisha will kill. Yet I have
reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal, and
every mouth that has not kissed him." (1 Kings 19:11-18, NKJV)
It is amazing what we can hear when we give the Lord
the opportunity to speak. For Elijah, that meant receiving instruction to go
and anoint the next king of Syria. And Israel. And also the next prophet who
would take his place. Wow!
Are you afraid of what the Lord will tell you today,
if you give Him time to speak a word to you during a quiet time? Personally, I
long to hear the Lord speak. My life history tells me it will be for good, as I
have learned it to be. His next word just may change my life’s direction, or simply
give me the next step on the path I need to walk on. That could be the same for
you today too.
Seek the Lord and He will be found. Call upon His
Name and He will answer you. Both promises that will eternally hold true. Even
now.
A blessed person will make it a priority each day to
give time for the Lord and His Spirit to speak.
P.S.I would be
most grateful if you'd share this encouraging word with your family and
friends. They might need it. You can easily use the social media icons below.
Thanks! Steve
We are blessed when the ministry receives gifts to support
the families that we do, primarily in Israel, India, Pakistan and the hurting
ones here in the USA. You also can share out of the abundance you have been
given.
Love For His People, Inc. is a charitable, not-for-profit USA humanitarian
organization started in 2010 to share the love of the Father in the nations.
If these messages minister to you, please consider
sending a charitable gift of $5-$25 today, and maybe each month, to help us
bless families we know in Israel, whom we consistently help through our
humanitarian ministry. Your tax deductible contributions receive a receipt
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Now Think On This - In the New Year of our Lord 03.19.16 -
#251 –“Silence is Golden” – Saturday
at 8:30 am
All previous editions of Now Think On This can
be found on this Blog, and on the website: Now Think On This
Again, I would be most grateful if you'd share this
encouraging word with your family and friends. You can easily use the social
media icons below. Thanks! Steve
It is commonly repeated by Palestinians that there were never any Jews in the Holy Land before the 19th century and that the first and second Jewish Temples never stood in Jerusalem. Not only do these claims fly in the face of over a century of archaeological work and the records of Greek, Roman and other historians in antiquity, they flatly contradict and annul the texts of both the Old and New Testaments. By their own rejection of Jewish rights in Israel, Christians unwittingly repudiate their own rights and history.
Christians in St Thomas Church did not once criticize or deplore the Palestinian glorification of violence, this delight at the murders of children, this dancing in the streets when innocent throats are cut.
Is it the Christian thing to demand that hospitals and doctors across the globe should refuse to use Israeli medicines or surgical devices or advanced medical equipment? Would Christians who work with bodies like Christian Aid call on countries damaged by natural and man-made calamities to ban Israeli aid teams?
Abandoning Israel will not soothe the hearts of the Palestinian people or make the Christians less vulnerable — as we are now seeing from the throat-slittings and mass displacements throughout the Middle East, done not by Jews but by Muslim fanatics.
Christians make up only some 1.5% of the Palestinian population. They live in an overwhelmingly Muslim atmosphere and are, given the threats they face from Muslim extremists, naturally loath to express a Christian narrative that differs from the dominant Palestinian narrative, which openly rejects many fundamental Christian beliefs. It is commonplace for Palestinians to express denials of history. Thus, it is repeated that there were never any Jews in the Holy Land before the 19th century and that the first and second Jewish Temples never stood in Jerusalem. Not only do these claims fly in the face of over a century of archaeological work and the records of Greek, Roman and other historians in antiquity, they flatly contradict and annul the texts of both the Old and New Testaments.
Jesus, it would seem, was not a Jewish teacher but a Palestinian Arab who never set foot in Herod’s Temple because it did not exist, and there were never any Jews in the Holy Land. Mitri Raheb, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, has actually argued that there is no DNA connection between Jews (ancient or modern) and Jesus, but that he himself, as a Palestinian, has such a link. By associating themselves closely with this Palestinian historical fabrication and never asserting the Biblical record (as to do so might be regarded as supportive of the Jewish right to a homeland), many Palestinian Christians are in danger of supporting by omission the Qur’anic claims that the Torah and Gospels have been falsified by rabbis and priests.
By denying that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people and claiming that Jews have no right to return there after two millennia, Muslims give no space at all to the history of the Christians with regard to the Jews, and their more modern relationship. Christian churches have inflicted lasting harm on Jews through pogroms, inquisitions, and ghettoization. Many Christians came to the rescue of Jews during the dark days of the Holocaust. Others stood by in silence. The creation of Israel in 1948 and the return of Jews, including Holocaust survivors, to the Holy Land was, in some degree, reparation for centuries of persecution and contumely. But today, the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas (now in the eleventh year of a four-year term) repeatedly and openly declares that not a single Israeli will be allowed to live in a future State of Palestine. It must be assumed that by Israelis he means Jews, as Arab-Israelis would be considered Palestinians by default.
Recently, at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Abbas rejected Israel’s right to exist in any borders: “For how long will this protracted Israeli occupation of our land last? After 67 years, how long?” In other words, the “occupation,” according to him, really began 67 years prior, in 1948, when the State of Israel declared its independence within the terms of UN Resolution 181. Many Palestinians and their supporters, including Christian supporters, have also for decades been declaring: “Palestine will be free from the river [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] sea,” signaling that a future Palestine will ideally be free of any Jewish inhabitants.
Last September, during the World Week for Peace in Palestine Israel — an initiative of the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF) of the World Council of Churches, St Thomas The Martyr Church in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, hosted an event titled “Walls Will Fall”. The event featured deeply one-sided presentations and literature, denying Jewish rights in Israel.
By their own rejection of Jewish rights in Israel, Christians not only unwittingly repudiate their own rights and history, they also defy all the love and striving for forgiveness that has characterized the endeavor of bringing justice to the Jews in recompense for the suffering kings and churches had caused them.
Many Christians claim that they work for peace and justice in the Holy Land. The truth is that those taking part in events such as “Walls Will Fall” do not. They present a viciously biased condemnation against only one side, Israel, and its main inhabitants, the Jews, while refusing to mention unremitting Arab, Muslim and Palestinian violence from the 1920s on. There is no mention of the five Arab armies that attacked the tiny Jewish state on the day of Israel’s birth in 1948, while openly boasting of an imminent genocide of all the Jews.
There is no mention of the Arab coalition of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq that mustered to attack Israel in 1967, again boasting of an imminent slaughter of all the Jews. There is never any mention of the 1973 invasion of Israel by Egypt and Syria, supported by nine Arab states and Cuba, and preceded by threats by Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, who said he was willing to sacrifice a million soldiers to destroy Israel. No mention of thousands of terrorist attacks. No mention of the Arab policy of “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” Not a single mention of Hamas and its 1988 Charter, in which it is stated “there is no solution to the Palestinian question except through jihad,” and which declares peace talks, international efforts for peace, and any compromise as “a waste of time,” and that calls for the slaughter of all Jews in the world.
On October 1, 2015, Palestinian gunmen shot and killed a young Jewish couple, Rabbi Eitam Henkin and his wife Naama, who were driving home through the West Bank with their four children. Mahmoud Al-Aloul, a member of the Fatah Central Committee (an institution that is part of the Palestinian Authority) posted on its official Facebook Page that Fatah was responsible for the shootings: “The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement Fatah, accepted responsibility for the Itamar operation [murder of Eitam and Naama Henkin], carried out against settlers, leading to their deaths.”
Leading members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, ‘Azzam al-Ahmad and General Sultan Abu’l-Einen, praised the attack. General Al-Einen, who serves as Abbas’s adviser on NGOs, called for more attacks on Israelis. There were celebrations across the West Bank. The festivities included the launching of fireworks and the waving of flags in the streets. Such celebrations take place every time Jews are killed in the area.
Two days later, on October 3, a Palestinian man stabbed to death two Jewish rabbis and injured the wife and two-year-old child of one of the rabbis. The widow reported from hospital that she attempted to escape from the terrorist after the stabbing began. “I ran for dozens of meters with a knife in my shoulder, bleeding. Arabs in the area who saw this horrible scene clapped and laughed, and told that they hoped for my quick death…. I felt I was about to faint,” she said. “I tried to hold on to someone who passed by, and they just… shook me off and kicked me, and said ‘die.'”
Since then, deadly attacks have become a daily feature of Israeli life. Knives are the weapon of choice. It is, on a small scale as yet, a third intifada, known now as the Knife Intifada. Even children are going out with knives, in order to kill.
The Israeli government, as any government, has no choice but to protect its citizens, as it has had to so many times in the past. This response may mean tightening security and more restrictive actions. More checkpoints may have to go up. The security fence may have to be strengthened. Palestinians will suffer. Those who work in Israel may lose their jobs or experience greater inconvenience. Yet Kairos and other Christian organizations apparently express approval when they exonerate the Palestinians of all blame and focus their wrath on Israel and the Jews alone.
Israeli Jews do not go out onto their streets to celebrate the deaths of even the most vicious murderers — terrorists who have killed twenty, thirty or more people in an attack. No one sent up fireworks or handed out sweets when Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, was hanged in 1962 — the only person ever executed in Israeli history — in the Israeli city of Ramla. People may be pleased when they hear of the death of a terrorist, just as we are: innocent lives may have been saved.
St Thomas Church chose to say nothing about such Palestinian killings, or else preferred to blame them on the so-called “occupation” or Israel’s clearly needed security measures.
Palestinian authorities name schools, sports grounds and teams, parks and streets after mass murderers, and put their faces on large posters to decorate walls and schoolrooms, acclaiming them as role models. They teach their children in schools and summer camps to admire terrorists as heroes and heroines, and to aspire to become killers and martyrs themselves. There is nothing remotely like this in Israeli schools or youth clubs. Instead, the walls of Jerusalem’s Holocaust research institute, Yad Vashem, are covered with the photographic images of individual Jews and entire Jewish families shot and gassed and starved to death in the death camps or by the einsatzgruppen squads. And there is also a garden filled with names next to flowers to commemorate the righteous Christians who risked their lives to save Jews.
Yet Christians in St Thomas Church did not once criticize or deplore the Palestinian glorification of violence, this delight at the murders of children, this dancing in the streets when innocent throats are cut (as in the massacre of the Fogel family in 2011), this elevation of killers to the ranks of saints. Instead, they cast bitter criticisms of the slightest Israeli misdemeanour, and censure Israel even when it behaves in entirely legal and moral ways — the same way they would expect of their own government if their people were being targeted by rockets, run over or stabbed.
In Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian religious and political leaders preach their longing for the extermination of a democratic and tolerant state, and prophesy the coming genocide of men and women and children whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents perished in the concentration and death camps of Nazi-controlled Europe. The Israeli government and people have for over 67 years prayed and called for a peaceful two-state solution and for co-existence with their neighbors. The Jews have never agitated for the elimination of a Palestinian state or the killing of its citizens.
Yet Christians in St Thomas Church chose to say not a word about Palestinian, Arab, and wider Islamic incitement. They chose instead to describe Israel as an imperialist, colonial, and apartheid state – in flagrant contradiction to historical facts and Israel’s record in repeatedly pulling out of territory — the Sinai, Lebanon, and Gaza — in a concrete and irreversible search for peace. Apartheid exists nowhere in Israeli law or daily life, and claims of its existence ignore the growing status of Israeli Arabs, who serve as full members of Israel’s parliament, as judges (including on the Supreme Court), as professors in the universities, diplomats, as hospital administrators and chief physicians, in the media and entertainment, in the police, the army, the air force and elsewhere, with exactly the same rights as Jews.
This deliberately twisted view of Israel is wrong; it is morally wrong and it is ethically wrong. It is bearing false witness against thy neighbour: It is a sin. It is wrong from the perspective of Christian ethics, wrong in the context of peacemaking and justice, an affront to honesty. It is not simple one-sidedness; it is gross moral blindness.
Hatred for Israel and the Jewish people — who have only one country in the world in which to take refuge in a time of need — will not bring peace. Abandoning Israel will not soothe the hearts of the Palestinian people or make the Christians less vulnerable — as we are now seeing from the throat-slittings and mass displacements throughout the Middle East, done not by Jews but by Muslim fanatics.
Obstruction of Israeli security measures will not bring safety. Support of Palestinian rejection of the peace process and refusal to compromise will not bring security to either side. On September 30 this year, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared before the General Assembly of the United Nations that he has abandoned the Oslo Accords, the basis on which the peace process takes place. Describing terrorists as freedom fighters will not bring justice to their victims, or to their families, or to the four little children who saw their parents gunned down and buried.
What one could read and hear during Walls Will Fall was a wholesale denial that Israel had any genuine security risks, a totally ahistorical claim that terror attacks must be blamed on a spurious “occupation”, and a fatuous assertion that the “occupation” and Jewish settlements are illegal in international law, which they are not.[1]
There is no question that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank suffer greatly and that it is a Christian duty to care for them and work to alleviate their suffering. It is also the case that many actions, legal rulings, and displays of force by Israel and the Israel Defense Forces have been wrong-headed and harmful to Palestinians. These are all things that are open to discussion and that must be part of any Christian work for peace and justice in the Holy Land.
But it must be self-evident that to take the side of one party, while expressing hostility for the other, is not the way to a resolution of the problem and sadly exposes to question much about the decency and integrity of the people crying hatred aloud. Christians who claim that Israel is an “apartheid state”, for example — a charge made in some of the literature displayed on the stalls in St Thomas Church — have adopted a singular falsehood and taken it as fact, even while seeing for themselves the reality that not a single apartheid law or practice exists in the country. Not only that, but, disquietingly, there is never a murmur about the truly apartheid policies of Saudi Arabia, where even the display of a Bible is illegal, where non-Muslim laborers can be beaten and treated as sub-human, and where non-Muslims are not even allowed to enter the city Mecca, and may enter Medina only as a visitor.
This argument has been recently advanced by a South African MP Kenneth Meshoe, president of the Christian Democrat Party, who has argued against the claims of the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement. “There are many Christians that support Israel, but they don’t come out,” he has said.
“Those who know what real apartheid is, as I know, know that there is nothing in Israel that looks like apartheid. … The view that Israel is an apartheid state, is an empty political statement that does not hold truth. You see people of different colors, backgrounds, and religions [coexisting in Israel]. The BDS movement is a real pain… to us in South Africa who love the truth. [The] BDS movement is not a democratic movement; they are a movement of intimidation, a movement that performs hatred. People who don’t believe in hatred should not allow the BDS movement to stop them from doing the right thing.”
Yet the economic, academic, and cultural squeeze of boycotts, divestment and sanctions was praised and recommended strongly throughout the Kairos workshop at St Thomas Church. No alternative approach was suggested, no questions were asked, no explanation of the real dangers of the BDS movement to cultural, academic, scientific, medical, or commercial life was even hinted at. Although the work of BDS — ostensibly to drive out Israeli settlements from the West Bank, but actually to try to destroy Israel by crushing it economically — is hailed as support for the Palestinians. It has, in fact, severely harmed them. When the Israeli company Soda Stream moved out of its West Bank factory last year, some 500 Arab workers lost their jobs. They also lost salaries of four to five times the standard rate for the area. Those who were able to find jobs in the new factory in the south of Israel have to travel for hours each day. Now, SodaStream has offered jobs to 1,000 Syrian refugees. This is the true impact of BDS on Palestinians who used to work side by side with their Jewish colleagues under identical conditions. BDS creates apartheid where there was none. Is that something Christians should support?
Perhaps this may be best illustrated by a local example. Retinal detachment and macular degeneration are two serious medical conditions that lead to complete blindness. They are often incurable. Researchers at Newcastle University’s medical school (one of the UK’s leading medical research centers) are working on a film that may replace retinas and restore a large measure of sight to the blind. They are working alongside teams from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, combining semiconductor nanorods and carbon nanotubes to create a wireless, light-sensitive, flexible film that could potentially act in the place of a damaged retina. But BDS activists will insist that Newcastle University should break off this relationship with two Israel universities, in accordance with the principles of their academic boycott.
When a Kairos leader spoke at St Thomas church, she spent a lot of time on support for the BDS movement. It must be asked whether a Christian should endorse, let us say, a boycott of a research enterprise that promises so much to blind people. And it is essential to add that Israel is a world leader, next only to the United States, in science, technology and medicine. Its drugs and medical devices have saved lives and improved life for the sick and disabled. Is it the Christian thing to demand that hospitals and doctors across the globe should refuse to use Israeli medicines or surgical devices or advanced medical equipment?
Israel is a world leader in the management of water resources and has taken the lead in many Third World countries, especially in Africa, to end drought. Should Christians call on those countries to boycott Israeli water treatment and agricultural advances? Israel is always among the first countries to respond by sending aid teams, field hospitals, equipment and supplies to foreign countries in times of disaster. Would Christians who work with bodies like Christian Aid call on countries damaged by natural and man-made calamities to ban Israeli aid teams? Surely BDS is, in all respects, an un-Christian policy that plays into a bigoted and inhumane narrative.
St Thomas The Martyr Church in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (left) recently hosted an event in which a Kairos leader advocated a boycott of Israel. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
It is clear that much of the pro-Palestinian work carried out within Christian churches is inspired by aspects of Liberation Theology. Undoubtedly, the concern of liberation theologians and others with the poor, the oppressed, the sick and the persecuted is a valid expression of Christ’s message, and we have no complaints whatever about that approach while it remains within the religious sphere. But Liberation Theology was inspired by materialist Marxist theory and praxis, and then strayed into the political realm.
The Soviet Union was responsible for the spread of the view that oppression can be attributed largely to economics and materialism, or to imperialism and colonialism, and to a fixation on Israel as the chief bearer of that original sin. The application of such terms to Israel is historically and conceptually incorrect: Israel has no colonies, is not the seat of an empire, and has from its inception advocated a two-state arrangement as predicated in the 1947 UN partition plan. But many Christians now view Israel through a false and distorted lens. This view is simply a matter of political bias, a bias exacerbated (as elsewhere), not only by a refusal to admit Israel’s stunning human rights record for women, religious minorities, ethnic communities, and LGBT citizens, but also by a notable failure to hold sessions on regimes that genuinely oppress, persecute, torture and deny full rights to their citizens.
Why, for example, do Christians animated by zeal for the oppressed never hold meetings to uphold the rights of Iran’s large Baha’i community, whose members are hanged, tortured, imprisoned, and denied all civil rights and access to higher education, and whose holy places and cemeteries have been bulldozed in an ISIS-style desecration? Why do they meet only to condemn Israel, the only country in the Middle East to celebrate the Baha’i presence and to protect the important Baha’i World Center in Haifa and the two most important Baha’i shrines, visited by pilgrims from around the world? Surely this obsession with an open and democratic country, alongside their apparent indifference to the human rights abuses of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, North Korea and others, is a clear distortion of the Christian vision and the underlying ideals of a non-politicized gospel of liberation.
I once heard a Jewish believer make this sobering statement: “Jews don’t need a Christian Christ. Christians need a Jewish Jesus.” Hmmm, I thought, he has a point.
Many Christians are shocked to learn that Jesus, the one they consider the founder of Christianity, was born a Jew, died a Jew, arose a Jew, is seated in Heaven a Jew and will return as a Jew on steroids – “the lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the root of David” (Rev. 5:5). But their eyes really start to cross when they learn Jesus would have never thought himself a Christian. Or called himself one.
The term "Christian" did not come into existence until decades later when unbelievers in Antioch started calling his followers that name (Acts 11:26). And as many historians believe, it was not a compliment. But a mockery.
But what’s truly rattling the stained-glass windows of Christendom these days is the discovery by more and more believers that Yeshua never started, much less converted to, the religion of Christianity. That he came, not to start a new religion, but to fulfill the types and shadows of the only religion God has ever given His people. Or ever will. Namely, the Mosaic Law. And Yeshua’s arrival signaled that even that divine religion had fulfilled its purpose. “Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Messiah, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor” (Gal. 3:24,25).
Christianity did not begin to organize into a religion until almost a hundred years after Yeshua’s ascension. It reached full religious status under Constantine, who after severing the faith from its Jewish roots, made it the chief religion of the Roman Empire. And himself, as pontifex maximus, its chief priest. In the process, the simple gospel message that we could now come boldly into God’s presence through faith in Yeshua was nullified. It was replaced by a glitzy, full-blown, ecclesiastical approach to God through a robed priesthood unsanctioned by Scripture. A religion given theological support by a handful of influential writers, rightly called “the Fathers of the Church.”
These Church scribes, unlike the Jewish writers of the NT who grew up with the Scriptures, had little knowledge of, or interest in, God’s promises to Israel. Converted from pagan backgrounds, they preferred the “wisdom” of the Greek philosophers, especially Plato. And their leavened teachings soon pushed God’s ecclesia off the bedrock of Scripture onto the shifting sand of man’s thoughts.
And that’s where we’ve been ever since – even after the Reformation! In retrospect, have we been any less blind to the gospel than the Jews in thinking Yeshua gave us a new religion called Christianity to practice?
But today is a new day. And God’s Spirit beckons. “Come, let us return to the Lord. For He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day that we may live before Him” (Hosea 6:1,2).
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