As stated earlier, the Bible–God’s holy will in print–is the most maligned, twisted, distorted, misrepresented and lied about printed material in the history of mankind.  Its message has been “spun” in hundreds of ways in order to scratch the individual ears of the billions of people who have read it, cherry-picked its message and discarded the other 90% of God’s “light.”  As a result the world, including the church world, lives in darkness, all the while “knowing” that they are walking hand-in-hand with God.

The ultimate question for those who claim to be God’s people is: Why do you reject His Word?  The ultimate answer to the question is found in the Apostle’s Paul’s second letter to Timothy the evangelist (3:15-17).  Here he tells his young protégé that every word in God’s Scriptures (the Old Testament at that point in time) was spoken by Him and sent by way of His Holy Spirit to His prophets who spoke His Words and recorded them.  His Words were designed to 1) teach His doctrines to those desiring to know them, 2) to reprove them for the errors in their theology, 3) to correct those errors and to 4) train them in the (only) way of righteousness which must be obeyed in order to be saved.

Satan has convinced their spiritual descendants that God’s Word is not to be taken at face value, that it must be interpreted using man’s experience as the final arbiter of truth.  As one pastor said, he and his congregation were “… stepping outside the Bible ….” in their search for truth.  Their experience had shown them that the Biblical way was not necessarily the right way.  Another pastor agreed, saying that church people must be aware that “God has changed” since writing the Bible.  He now considers man’s views which reflect a more up-to-date version of truth.  I have heard that “Human experience proves that (a Biblical statement) is simply not true.”  With the exception of God’s “little flock,” the entire world agrees with those self-proclaimed “ministers of righteousness” who have been placed in the Counterfeit Church by the “angel of light” (1 Cor. 11:13-15).

Man, especially religious man, rejects God’s Word when formulating church doctrine.  His pride prevents him from accepting His Word when reproved for maligning it.  He refuses to be corrected by that Word so that he can walk the path of righteousness which would take him to the Kingdom of God.  Religious man rejects God’s Word because it exposes the darkness which dominates his spiritual life.  Instead of acknowledging his errors, he justifies them by pointing to the doctrines of his particular cult.  It has been my experience that, when confronted with God’s Truth, church people openly and angrily choose to believe what God calls lies.  This is not a new phenomenon as He tells us in 2 Timothy 4:3-4 and Isaiah 30:8-11.  In 2 Timothy God warns through Paul that the time would come when church people will no longer accept sound doctrine, but because they have itching ears and desire to have them scratched, they will hire for themselves teachers who will turn them away from the Truth and to Satan’s fables.  Isaiah faced the same attitude among the people of his day.  God told him to write His Words of warning on a tablet and on a scroll so that His message would last forever (for us).  He wrote that, “This is a rebellious people, lying children who do not want to hear the Law of the Lord,” who tell their prophets not to prophesy right things, but to prophesy “smooth things and deceits.”  They wanted Isaiah to get God out of the way, to stop placing Him in front of them.  In verse 12 God says that they “despise this Word” and place their trust in a perverted word.  This is the same warning Paul wrote to the churches of Galatia who had very quickly turned away from God’s pure gospel to a perverted version (1:6-9).  Paul wrote this letter to the churches in approximately 53 A.D.  The church had only been in existence some 20 years or so and Satan’s false prophets were in place and turning the people away from God.  Nothing has changed.  The devil’s “ministers of righteousness” occupy 99.99% of all church pulpits today.  They help their master–“the god of this age” to blind church people to God’s Truth (2 Cor. 4:4) while they pervert that Truth.  Just as light eliminates darkness, God’s Truth eliminates Satan’s lies.  We must turn on His “light” in order to eliminate Satan’s darkness that permeates the whole of Catholicism/Protestantism.  We must, as God commands, “come out of her (the false church) and be separate, and touch not that unclean thing.”  Only then, He tells us, will He be our God and we will be His people (2 Cor. 6:14-7:1).  Only by living by these Words in this life will we qualify to live with Him throughout eternity. L.J.