As noted in the previous posting, Catholic leadership, operating under the power of Satan, did not allow their parishioners access to God’s Word. The church hierarchy cut the people off from god in order to become their followers’ only connection to God. Having successfully done this, they dispensed their theology as if it came directly from the mouth of the true God. Operating without restraint due to the ignorance of the people, the priesthood brought in numerous heathen doctrines and customs that today form the foundation of that which calls itself “the church.” In an attempt to appease the tens of thousands of pagans who were flooding into the church out of fear of the Roman Empire, church leaders embraced their religions, incorporated them and declared them “Christian.” See the Introduction to this website. Satan continued to dominate “the church” for hundreds of years as the people, having no access to God’s Word, blindly followed those they believed were His messengers. Then something interesting happened–people began to catch on to their ploy, causing many to leave the organization as a sign of protest. This movement of people out of Catholicism in protest is called the Protestant Revolution.

The Protestant Revolution brought about a drastic change in the lives of those who had escaped Catholicism’s deadly clutches. But the transition did not go smoothly. To learn of the terrible price the protesters paid for rejecting Catholicism, see Simon of Samaria: The Legacy. Due to the printing press which eventually allowed the Bible to be made available to the masses in their different languages, Truth-seekers world-wide were able to follow the example of the “noble” Bereans who “searched the Scriptures daily” to determine if the Apostle Paul was telling them God’s Truth (Acts 17). The church-imposed scriptural ignorance problem had been solved; God-seekers could now learn for themselves what He was saying to them; Light was shining in the darkness; THE COMMON MAN COULD LEARN GOD’S TRUTH. At last, freedom was part and parcel of the Christian’s life. But not for long.

Satan was not going to allow the Truth-hungry Protestants to simply learn God’s ways and obey them. That would have spelled doom for him and his program of religious domination. Having a stranglehold on Catholicism was not sufficient. He realized that Protestantism was going to continue to grow in numbers. He could not allow all those people to escape. Before long he had infected the Protestant masses with a religious disease I call “Closet Catholicism”–the belief that parishioners need not study the Bible for themselves in order to learn God’s Truth; who has the time or the will to do that? The solution was simple; they would hire men to do their studying for them? And Satan had just the men. God labeled them “ministers of righteousness” (2 Cor.11:15) who, like the Catholic priesthood before them, pretended to labor in the Scriptures under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, then, having “heard from on high,” present their version of God’s Word to their unsuspecting congregations in sweet, flesh-messaging form. These “wolves in sheep’s clothing” (Mat. 7:15) fed their victims only those “truths” that scratched their itching ears. To expedite the process, the devil convinced the Protestants to divide themselves into hundreds of different denominations. This move served to increase the number of participants in his “any-way-you-want-it religious system. Nothing builds a religion better than to have a unit of it designed specifically for each religionist. In spite of God’s commands to 1) study His Word only, 2) believe and obey His Word only and 3) not divide His body into religious factions, the daughters (Protestants harlots), following the lead of their mother (the Catholic whore) (Rev. 17:1,5), did the exact opposite of what God commanded. To be continued. L.J.