Several years after reading the article that prompted this series I began to hear God’s voice coming out of His Holy Scriptures with much more clarity and depth than ever before. I had been, as the saying goes, “born in the church.” As soon as I learned to read I developed an insatiable love for the printed word. Fortunately, we could not afford newspapers, magazines and books and lived miles from the nearest library. The only printed item available to me was a Bible which I read regularly. I cannot speak for all people, but I know with certainty that God planned for me to be poor, to love to read and to have no other source of printed materials available to me.  This combination of factors produced a young boy who read the Bible and believed it. Because the Lord had early on instilled within my heart a deep faith in His Word I never doubted what I read therein, even though I did not understand some of it.

Because of my God-given faith in His Word, I eventually came face-to-face with “The Problem.” I found that what I was being told in church was not what was written in the Bible. In most cases, it was diametrically opposed to what God says. It did not take long for me to realize several truths about the so-called “Christian life:” Ministers do not want their congregations to study the Holy Scriptures; their congregants refuse to study the Holy Scriptures; neither ministers nor their congregations appreciate those who study the Holy Scriptures; ministers and their congregations hate the Holy Scriptures; all within Catholicism/Protestantism prefer the “truths” taught them by their god–Satan–“the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4), which includes the worldly church. For this reason the Institutional Church has never heard God’s Truth, do not want to hear His Truth and summarily reject it when they are exposed to it. Truly, “Satan has deceived the whole world” (Rev. 12:9).

Following my exit from professing Christendom I entered into a years-long, intensive session of Truth-seeking Bible study. What I learned over those years contradicted most of what I had been taught by the Satan’s false prophets whom the Lord warns us about in Matthew 7:15; 2 Corinthians 11:15 and Galatians 1:6-9. Eventually He revealed to me that the article I had earlier read about the new, tiny cult was not new on the scene at that time and was not tiny. In fact, it was part of a much larger religious organization Satan had been using, and continues to use, to lure masses of salvation seekers into his religious web. The cultic priest interviewed by the reporter had let slip the devil’s secret master plan to the world. The religious organization he spoke about is alive and well today and, since the Garden of Eden, has been hiding in plain sight under the title: “Christianity.”

As the Lord led me ever deeper into His Word I realized that, years earlier while reading that obscure article, He had begun to prepare me to one day preach and teach a number of Bible Truths that would be rejected by the whole of professing Christendom. First and foremost was the subject of sin. As I looked back on God’s dealing with me, which began early in my life, I realized that the first Satanic lie I had recognized and, through God’s power, rejected, was the theological principle that had come to be known as doctrine of “Original Sin.” This lie, which every church person “knows” to be the Lord’s truth, proclaims that every human being inherits Adam’s sin at conception, that sin is as much a part of our lives as is our eye color and height, and that we remain sinners until death and that those in “the church” are no different from all other sinners except that they are “saved by grace.” Is this true? Does man have no a choice when it comes to sin? What does God say? L.J.