At Odds with the Word of God

 

 

 

 Are we, the modern American Christian, that claim to be the light bearer of the truth of God's holy scriptures, actually at odds with the word that we proclaim?  Are we following the true Jesus, the biblical Jesus, or simply an imagined Jesus that we prefer to follow?

The modern, American church in no way resembles the church that Christ founded in the First Century.  We have gone completely off the map.  We have essentially closed the Bible, the only real source of truth and we are off in another corner of the shelf scrounging around for for anything that is new and exciting and tickles our eyes and ears.

We want to know how to "Live Our Best Life Now," how to be healthy, wealthy, and prosperous and still make it to Heaven.  I hate to burst your little bubble, but that is not biblical Christianity.  That is not the Christianity that the early believers gave their lives for, that the reformers died for. In fact, the word that is preached from many pulpits today is the polar opposite of the word that Paul and the other apostles preached.

For roughly the first 300 years of church history, Christians faced severe, unrelenting persecution...the modern American Christian knows nothing of persecution.  Christianity was actually illegal in the Roman Empire.  Don't get the wrong idea. it was tolerated  for a time.  Most of the persecution came from the Jews.  But, as the church grew, the empire began to see it as a threat and it was deemed illegal.  

In 313 AD, Empower Constantine came along and enacted the Edict of Milan which for all intents and purposes, made Christianity legal and for a time Christians were able to worship and live in relative peace.  There was still pockets of persecution in the outer fringes of the empire, however for the most part, Christians were free and safe. This was the worst thing that could have happened to Christianity.  

History proves, that the Church grows and flourishes through persecution and adversity. When the church is able to live at peace with the world, it begins to compromise and rot from the inside.

The Edict of Milan had an uninterested consequence, it essentially gave birth to the Roman Catholkic Church that we know today.  Not a church, but a government within itself, a ruling monarchy.  The Papacy was invented, idol worship and mystical spiritualism became the norm and Christianity was cast into the dark ages. 

The wealthy, greedy, tyrannical Popes, bishops, and priests of the Roman Catholic church ruled the middle ages with a heavy hand.  They kept the word of God to themselves, they alone held the authority to  interpret scripture to their liking.  The common man had no access to the Bible so they had to rely on the Popes and priests to administer Gods word. 

Then in the mid 1300's a man named John Wycliffe came along and translated the Bible into the common language which made him a wanted man by the Catholic church. After Wycliffe followed men like Luther, Tyndale, Hus, Calvin, and many other reformers that risked their very lives to shine the light of God's word into the darkness and bring a reformation to the church, to restore the early teachings of the apostles.  The church of the middle ages was in desperate need of the light.

John Calvin, one of the great reformers coined a phrase that became the mantle, the rallying call, if you will, of the Reformation, Post tenebras lux...After Darkness, light. 

Another of the great reformers was a man named Ulrich Zwingli, a man with a true passion for Jesus Christ and the truth.

“For God’s sake, do not put yourself at odds with the Word of God. For truly it will persist as surely as the Rhine follows its course. One can perhaps dam it up for a while, but it is impossible to stop it.”

Ulrich Zwingli, the city chaplain, stood before the Zurich City Council in January 1523. The winds of reform had made their way over the Alps from Luther’s Germany, and Zwingli was arguing 67 theses, beginning with “All who say that the gospel is invalid without the confirmation of the church err and slander God.” Though 28 shy of Luther’s 95 Theses, published some six years earlier, Zwingli’s arguments were more persuasive: authorities gave him permission to continue his preaching, which emphasized Christ first and the church second (“Christ is the only mediator between God and ourselves,” said another of Zwingli’s theses). The Reformation in Switzerland was now well on its way, and Zwingli would play the key role in the early years.

Zwingli was born to a successful farmer in the Toggaburg Valley of the eastern lower Alps. Here Zwingli developed a deep love for his homeland. Later he translated one line of Psalm 23, “In the beautiful Alps, he tends me,” and he used the Rhine River as an illustration of a key theme of his preaching: “For God’s sake, do not put yourself at odds with the Word of God. For truly it will persist as surely as the Rhine follows its course. One can perhaps dam it up for awhile, but it is impossible to stop it.”

But it took Zwingli years to discover the power of this Word. After graduating from the University of Basel in 1506, he became a parish priest in Glarus. From the beginning, he took his priestly duties seriously. He later wrote, “Though I was young, ecclesiastical duties inspired in me more fear than joy, because I knew, and remain convinced that I would give an account of the blood of the sheep which would perish as a consequence of my carelessness.”

The feeling of responsibility for his charge (rather than, like Luther, a personal search for salvation) motivated Zwingli’s increasing interest in the Bible. In an age when priests were often unfamiliar with the Scriptures, Zwingli became enamored with it, first after purchasing a copy of Erasmus’s New Testament Latin translation. He began teaching himself Greek, bought a copy of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, and started memorizing long passages. In 1519 he began preaching from the New Testament regularly.

Privately Zwingli also started challenging the customs of medieval Christendom he thought unbiblical. He had struggled with clerical celibacy for some time (and even admitted that as a young priest, he’d had an affair). In 1522 he secretly married. That same year, he broke the traditional Lenten fast (by eating sausages in public) and wrote against fasting.

By 1523 he was ready to take his ideas to a larger audience, and in January he did just that before the Zurich City Council at what is now called the First Disputation. The Second Disputation came in October, and with further approval from the council, more reforms were carried out: images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints were removed from the churches; the Bible was to have preeminence.

Things moved rapidly after that. In 1524 he wedded his wife publicly, insisting that pastors had the right to marry. In 1525 he and others convinced the city to abolish the Mass, with its emphasis on the miracle of transubstantiation, and replace it with a simple service that included the Lord’s Supper but only as a symbolic memorial.

Today, the church is once again in need of a reformation.  The modern church is experiencing a sort of darkness, not because of a lack of God's word, it is readily available to everyone, everywhere and that may be part of the problem.  We have dozens and dozens of translation, hundreds of denominations that vary in belief and practice very mild to ridiculous.  The truth of scripture that was taught in the early church and the reformation has been twisted and stretched in every direction possible.  It is peddled and prostituted for money and fame and drug through the mud by scoffers while so-called believers sit idly by in their soft comfortable pews, sing a few songs, listen to a brief, sometimes entertaining sermon and then go out and behave like a child of Satan for the next 6 days.

We are once again at odds with God's word and we are in desperate need of both a reformation and a revival.  

Is there any hope for the modern church?  That depends on whether real believers will be willing to pull their heads out of the sand long enough to see what's going on in their communities and around the world.  If men and women of God will stop their cowardly, wicked ways and repent before God and stand up and speak up for the truth, there may still be some hope.