Among those who claim to be God’s people, the question: “Who are the elect?” has been a subject of debate for almost 2000 years. The prevailing belief is that the Elect are those who have either joined the Catholic Church or are involved in one of the Protestant Churches that sprang up following Martin Luther’s rejection of Catholicism. In other words, the Elect consist of the billions of parishioners that make up the hundreds of organizations known globally as “the church.” The number of such self-designated “churches” continues to grow as more “Bible scholars,” having received “new revelations from God,” periodically come up with better versions of so-called “Christianity” than the one prescribed by Him in His Holy Bible. Each new “tweeking” of God’s inspired Word, which Jesus called “Truth” in John 17:17, creates a new organization as the tweeker draws followers to him/herself, proclaims a new and improved path to salvation, attaches God’s name to the organization, then announces that the only “true church” has received God’s commission to take her gospel to the world.

The deadly game of revolving truths has been going on since the time of the original apostles. Only 22 years after the establishment of the New Testament Church on the Day of Pentecost A.D. 31 we find the Apostle Paul lamenting to the churches of Galatia that they had already embraced a “perverted gospel” (1:6-9). Because no one seeks the new if one is satisfied with the old, the church’s new, Satan-generated gospel was obviously seen as an improvement over the old, God-commissioned gospel that Jesus preached and commanded His apostles to preach until His return (Mat. 24:14). Since the time of His earthly tenure His gospel has been tweeked to the point that today there are literally hundreds of versions of it. These are called “denominations.” God condemns (1 Cor. 1:10) such divisions in the Body of Christ because, Christ being the Head of the Body (the church), to divide–denominationalize–her is to divide Christ, which He forbids (1 Cor. 1:13).

Over time church creations and divisions have produce the conflicting, competing, convoluted religious morass today known as “the church,” the names of which fill an entire page in some phone books. Those within these religious bodies are believed to comprise the Elect which is mentioned four times in the Old Testament and 23 times in the New Testament. However, the two billion plus parishioners found in Catholicism/Protestantism today are quick to declare that not every congregation found within “the church” is part of the Elect. It seems that only one group can lay claim to that status. Ask any church member and he/she will note that only the  _______________ church is the true Elect. To no one’s surprise, the true Elect is the church to which the speaker belongs. All others are merely pretenders. L.J.