LIBERAL: Not restricted to the literal meaning.  PROGRESSIVE: Favoring a departure from the traditional.  Liberal progressivism has worked its way into the spiritual and social life of first world countries around the globe.  Having begun many centuries ago, the trend shows no sign of abating in either the religious or the social realms of mankind’s world.

As I have stated before, as goes the church, so goes the society.  Two terms that have become favored catch-words within the Western World are “liberal” and “progressive.”  Both terms can be positive when applied to the social realm in which the subject is human-to-human interaction.  In areas such as freedom, rights, fairness, etc., any straight-thinking person would want such things for himself and his fellow man.  “Liberal” and “progressive” are positive in the sense that if something man is doing is indeed wrong, then it needs to be changed.  In this sense most people would consider themselves liberal and progressive at heart.  Good examples of such thinking and acting are found in the abolition of slavery, the establishment of child labor laws and the awarding of the right to vote to females.

However, serious problems arise when the liberal progressive ideology is applied to the spiritual realm.  The problems are on the life and death level of seriousness because they concern Almighty God, His will and His rules of engagement–His Law.  Liberal progressivism is a lure that works on those who choose to live outside the realm of Biblical Truth while claiming the benefits promised to those who obey that Truth.  False Christians are unaware of the problems that arise when that which God has declared unchangeable is changed, or when God’s Truth is declared to be untrue.  Religious liberal progressives show no fear of God when they declare as optional what God wrote in stone, thereby rebelling against the God of the universe.  In John 17:17 Jesus, in prayer to the God Who told Jesus every Word He uttered (Jn. 12:40-50), said: “Your Word is Truth.”  He did not say that God’s Word contained the Truth, or some of the Truth, but was in fact THE (only spiritual) TRUTH.  Nor did He say that religious man had, or would ever have, the authority to change THE TRUTH or any part of it.

Jesus, knowing that man would do exactly that, stated in Matthew 5:18 that not one jot or tittle would be changed in the Law until it was fulfilled (Gr–“ginomai), in the heart of man.  He declared that as long as heaven and earth remained, no change could be made in it.  Both still remain.   Jesus had noted in verse 17 that He had not come to destroy the Law (nail it to a cross), but to fulfill (Gr-“pleroo”) it–to make it of full force in the lives of all mankind, to complete its purpose of making His people holy.  Liberal progressives claim that the word “fulfill” means to bring something to an end.  However, in Matthew 3:15 Jesus used the word pleroo when stating that He and John must FULFILL ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS.  That did not mean that they had to bring all righteousness to an end.  In the Scriptures the gospel writers used “pleroo” when commanding those in God’s church to “fulfill the LAW OF CHRIST” (Gal. 6:2)/ to “fulfill the WORD OF GOD” (Col 1:25)/ to fulfill “the MINISTRY you (Archippus) have received from the Lord” (Col. 4:17) and to “fulfill GOD’S GOOD PLEASURE” (2 Thes. 1:11).  The message was not to do away with the “Law of Christ,” the “Word of God,” a God-given ministry and the Father’s good pleasure.”  Relative to the Law, it is written in Isaiah 42:21 that in His (God’s Servant–Jesus) righteousness He would come to earth to “MAGNIFY THE LAW AND MAKE IT HONORABLE.”  In verses 18-20 God declares that those who do not see and hear those Truths are spiritually blind and deaf.  This describes those who “nail the Law to the cross.”  What He nailed to the cross was the “handwriting of ordinances” (Col. 2:14) which were written on plaster-covered stones that has been carried out of the Jordan River.  On those stones Moses wrote the ordinances given to him by the Lord to be observed by a sinful nation which refused to obey His Ten Commandments–the summary of His Genesis-Revelation Law.  These ordinances Moses had written in a book and placed beside the ark.  This book of ordinances, known as the “law of Moses,” was indeed “nailed to the cross” because they–the ordinances written in the book–“were against us.”  At the Last Supper Jesus told the disciples that His flesh and Blood would replace Moses’ hand-written ordinances which commanded the sacrifice of animals.

The purpose of this posting, actually this entire series, was to reveal how liberal, progressive churchman has taken it upon himself to edit the written-in-stone Law of God that He, Himself declared could not be altered in any way.  To do so is sin, as 1 John 3:4 declares.  In James 2:10 we are told that to transgress (alter in any way) one of the commandments is to reject all ten of them, making one a worker of iniquity (Lawlessness) whom Jesus will reject upon His return to earth (Matthew 7:23).

Yet the lure of being able to not merely change God’s Law, but to do away with it entirely is simply too much for salvation seeking man to resist.  God’s Law is the instrument by which He governs His people.  In doing away with that Law man has become a law unto himself–he has become his own god.  Indeed, “Every man does what is right in his own eyes” by doing what Adam and Eve did.  Professing Christendom has become the glove on Satan’s hand.  A glove does only what the hand within it does.  By dangling his liberal progressivism lure before the people of the world, Satan has won the hearts of 99% of them.  L.J.