How God Protects His Revelation- Part I

Even a little knowledge of conditions in the world today and of history, combined with prayerful thought, shows how obvious is the need for God to protect His Revelation from the pollution of errors introduced by people.  A study of the subject also quickly reveals the need to recognize that there are limitations in that protection.  I believe a few examples will aid you in recognizing the details of these two truths.

For instance, how many professed Christians recognize that the pro-abortionist battle cry:  “My body, my choice” is a distortion of a fundamental doctrine at the core of the Christian Faith: the fact that we have free will?  The vital key to understanding how the defect works lies in recognizing how the statement is misused.   We need to recognize the context in which these women utter this vital Christian truth has distorted the truth with the unvoiced but overriding atheists’ claim that any choice made has no consequences because there is no God.  Sirach 15: 14-17 is the simplest and plainest refutation of that error, achieved by explicitly replacing the error with a statement from God’s revealed truth that clearly and simply identifies God’s fundamental purpose: When God, in the beginning, created man, he left him in the power of his own free choice. 

If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice it is loyalty to do his will.  There are set before you fire and water; to whichever you choose, stretch forth your hand.  Before man is life and death, whichever he chooses shall be given to him.

Scripture’s first lessons in Genesis 2:15-17 and 3: 1-19 are powerful examples of this truth. The book of Sirach itself is also an example of the need for God’s protection of His revelation; for where is the God-given authority that can say with certainty that Sirach is or is not part of Scripture?  Comparing Deuteronomy 30: 15-20 to Sirach 15: 14-17 is an eye-opener because of how these two passages substantively say almost the same thing, but from an importantly different viewpoint, focus, and emphasis.

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.  If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.  But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.  I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

One morning, on the Patrick Madrid show [6 AM to 9 AM Pacific time on Relevant Radio], a man who discarded the Catholic faith to be a  Protestant expressed a key opinion and doctrine of his new and contrary faith:

You Catholics always say ‘Faith and …’, but Jesus never said ‘Faith and ….’

This man’s incredible error derived from either his ignorance of or a disregard of the truth that Jesus stated in Mark 16: 15-16:

And he [I.e., Jesus] said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.  The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned”.

Not only does this statement of Jesus refute the errors of “Justified by Faith Alone” and “Saved by Grace Alone”, that Martin Luther embedded in the heart of Protestantism, it explicitly expresses Christ’s identification of the crucial importance of baptism right beside Faith itself.  Indeed, faith in the efficacy and need for baptism is an integral and inseparable detail of faith in Christ.  Though I am here pointing out Scripture’s affirmation of this truth, it is the Church, which is the [extended] body of Christ still present on earth, that authoritatively never wavered from insisting upon the vital importance of baptism.  (See Eph 5: 23, 1 Cor 12: 27, Eph 4: 4, Eph 4: 12, Col 1: 24, and the first conversion stories in Acts for related Scriptural lessons that confirm the importance of the Church and of baptism.)

James 2: 1-26, provides further relevant and vital information which directly, explicitly, and without ambiguity explains in detail the destructive flaw in the “Justified by faith alone” error of the “Reformers”.  Incidentally, when I did a computer search for occurrences of all four of the words:  “justified”, “faith”, “works”, and “alone” in close proximity; James 2: 20-24 was the only Scripture passage that I found.   I quote only the statement of James 2:  20-24, in order to emphasize the incredible and explicit lessons that these Inspired words of God’s written Revelation present and also because this is the Scriptural lesson that should have long ago corrected the “faith alone” and “grace alone” errors:

Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is barren?  Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. Thus the scripture was fufilled tht says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

May I add, that the Scripture prophecy that James identifies as being fulfilled in verse 23 is found in Genesis 15: 6, which is erroneously thought by many to be a trivial statement of immediate fact rather than a prophecy concerning Abraham’s awesome act of faith in the distant future.  What Abraham actually believed that so pleased God, and also when it occurred, is described in Hebrews 11: 17-19.  The vital meaning for us in this Scriptural lesson is that Abraham believed God would keep His promise of heirs through Isaac despite his choice to obey God by offering Isaac as a sacrifice.  The incidental fact that Abraham erred about how God would keep His promise wasn’t a crucial detail of Abraham’s Faith, but it is an important lesson for us.

Before buying into or remaining in the opinion of those who dismiss the plain explicit meaning of James 2: 1-26, and especially 2: 20-24, do prayerfully notice and contemplate everything that it states!

I urge all who fully and prayerfully accept this quoted Revelation from Scripture, to very carefully read Genesis 22: 1-18 for the many lessons it provides.  Here again, I quote only verses 16-18 of that passage to focus attention upon and to emphasize the incredibly vital lesson that these words explicitly reveal.

because you acted as you did in not withholding from me your son, your only one, I will bless you and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore; your descendants will take possession of the gates of their enemies, and in your descendants all the nations of the earth will find blessing, because you obeyed my command (Genesis 22:16–18).

Another lesson that may fit in here is Mark 9: 7.  Most translations  report the voice from the cloud as stating only: ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ The Amplified New Testament” explicitly includes the obvious -be “constantly listening to him and constantly obeying him.” It cites Wuest for these words

But those committed to error ignore and discard James’s explicit and correct teaching in order to cling to the “Justified by faith alone” opinion of Luther and the other mislabeled  “Reformers”.  In fact, the “Reformers” distorted the teaching of St. Paul in Romans 3: 28 “that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.  (I.e.,  Salvation for Christians does not require circumcision or following the rest of the Jewish law.)  The fact that observance of the Jewish Law is not a mandatory obligation for a Christian was definitively settled by the First Council of the Church, which is described in Acts 15.  That Council was needed to resolve the issue for those first Christians, despite the many repetitions of this truth that Paul wrote on the issue.  Notice this Scriptural lesson that many who accepted Christ, did not accept Paul’s teaching until the Church confirmed it in that first Council.

I go back to James 2: 5 here to emphasize its vital bit of information.

Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him.

This quote identifies the underlying truth of Salvation and provides the lesson that should have cleared up any errors.

The fact is rather than the “faith alone” and “grace alone”, opinion of the Protestant “Reformers”; in 1 Corinthians 13: 1-3, Paul also confirms, explains, and affirms the absolute necessity of the love that James affirmed in verse 5 of Chapter 2.  Jesus Himself described this need this way:

They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them (John 14: 21).

The “Reformers” were in fact “Revolutionaries” who used the moral failings of men as their justification for rejecting both the historic Christian faith and also, “the [extended] body of Christ” itself, from which they had received God’s revelation.  They replaced both of these gifts from God with their own new and fallible opinions and communities.

Do note the error of placing greater reliance and trust in the opinions of fallible men than in the recognized source of God’s unpolluted revelation is a defect found in every faith group.  If you look, you will see it is found in members of all faith groups: Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, etc.  To my own embarrassment, it took me years to fully recognize and understand how this single truth, despite its many examples, contributes to the divisions among those who profess faith in Jesus Christ.

The Protestant “Re-formation” undeniably rejected the existing historical Christian Church and the continuity of Faith that was present in it with their claim that this “body of Christ” had fallen away from God’s Revelation – as that Faith is presented in the Bible.  In their fallible opinion, the existing Church was teaching many errors.  That’s what those who left the existing and historical Christian Faith claimed, after 14 centuries of that Faith’s continuous existence.  Evidence of their error is in the multitude of divisions they quickly  produced and their claim contradicts what Jesus said in Matthew 16: 17-19 and in other quotes:

And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.  And I tell you, you are Peter [Cephas], and on this rock [cephas] I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.  I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven’ (Matt 16:17–19) .

Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me me (Luke 10:16).

Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me  (Matt 10: 40).

Do read the full context of the statements by Jesus in Luke 10: 10-16 and Matthew 10: 37 – 11:1.  The reason I quote specific verses of Scripture is to leave no uncertainty or ambiguity about the lesson from Scripture that I intend to draw to your attention.  The full context of any Scriptural passage is always important and often vital.  For example, note to whom Jesus was giving the commands in Matthew 11: 1!