Open Our Eyes And Minds to Truth- Part I

How God Protects His Revelation

Even a little knowledge of conditions in the world today and throughout history, combined with prayerful thought, shows how the obvious need for God to protect His Revelation from the distortion and pollution of errors introduced by men and women. A more serious study of the subject and of history also reveals the need to recognize that there are limitations in that protection. I believe a few examples will aid those who love God 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 God created us with free will? The vital key to understanding how the defect in the statement works lies in recognizing how the statement is misused.  We need to recognize that the context in which these women utter this vital Christian truth has distorted that truth with the unvoiced but overriding atheists’ claim that any choice that is 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 in creating mankind:

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 are life and death, whichever he chooses shall be given 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 become 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 ….’” [I.e., this is a variant of the Protestant core denial of the historic Christian Faith with the new doctrine of “justified by faith alone” introduced by Martin Luther].

This man’s incredible error is derived from either his ignorance of or his disregard for 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 directly and explicitly 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 that 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”; James 2: 14-26 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 fulfilled that 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 the natural effect of 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 clinging to the opinion of those who fallibly dismiss the plain explicit meaning of James 2: 1-26, and especially 2: 20-24, do prayerfully notice and contemplate everything that James states in this passage!

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).

The “justified by faith alone” error persists because so many ignore Christ’s warning in the parable of the seed, where He explains that

When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path (Matthew 13: 19).

Many other examples of widely held beliefs that directly contradict Scriptural statements and lessons are available. But this is an explicit example of the choice between professing Scripture’s “Faith and” or clinging to the widespread and deeply embedded error of assuming that Scripture teaches  “Faith Alone”. The “Faith alone” opinion is a direct contradiction of Scripture’s plain explicit teaching in several places in both the Hebrew and the Christian Testaments.

May all remember, understand, and heed Christ’s answer to the Scribes, when they claimed that He was an agent of Beelzebul:  “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.”         (Please, do read  Mark 3: 22-30)

A significant contribution to the “Faith alone” error is the failure to realize the fact of being given a free gift. i.e., that the gift is not in any sense earned; does not mean that the “free gift” is free of conditions!  The conditions that God has included with the “free gifts” He has showered upon us are abundantly recorded throughout Scripture.

However, those committed to error ignore and discard James’s explicit and correct teaching in order to cling to the “Justified by faith alone apart from works” 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.)  This truth, 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 this teaching by Paul, 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.

Jesus Himself described that underlying truth 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).

When John expands upon this statement by Jesus, with his detailed explanation and emphasis on its importance in 1 John 2: 3–6;  he also inherently confirms the central importance to our salvation of the explicit teaching of James 2.

Now by this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his commandments. Whoever says, ‘I have come to know him,’ but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says, ‘I abide in him,’ ought to walk just as he walked.

The truth is that contrary to the “faith alone” opinion of Luther and the other Protestant “Re-formers of the Christian Faith”; in 1 Corinthians 13: 2, Paul emphatically affirms the essential necessity of that love identified in James 2: 5, a love that is expressed through grace aided works. Christ’s warning in Matt 7: 21 – 23 adds further light.

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 rejected and replaced both of these “free gifts” from God with their own new and fallible opinions and communities. The huge multitude of errors that the Protestant “Re-formers of Christianity” introduced in the fifteenth century is their version of repeating the disobedience of Adam and Eve.

Do note that this 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. Those who look will see that it is found in members of all faith groups: Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, etc. To my own embarrassment, it took me years to really see, recognize, and understand, despite its many examples, how this single truth contributes to the divisions among those who profess faith in Jesus Christ. While this human defect is present in all faith groups, only the “faith group” being built by Christ through His commission to Peter and the Apostles has His promise of Divine protection.

It is John again who explicitly states the fundamental truth that is the unsolvable problem of those who created the multitude of Protestant faiths, and also Scripture’s lesson for those who would continue to follow their fallible opinions:

 They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us (1 John 2: 19).

Despite their novel claim that this historic “body of Christ” had fallen away from God’s Revelation – as that Faith is presented in the Bible – the Protestant “revisions” of the Christian Faith undeniably rejected the Faith of the existing historical Christian Church and the unbroken continuity of Faith that was present in it. In their fallible opinion, the existing Church was teaching many errors. And that’s what those who left the existing and historical Christian Faith claimed, after 14 centuries of that Faith’s existence – with no previously identifiable break in the continuity of its Faith. Further evidence of their error is in the multitude of divisions they quickly produced and in the fact that their claim explicitly contradicts what Jesus revealed in Matthew 16: 17-19. Their claims also contradict many things that Jesus taught in this next and other quotes. Specifically:

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][5] I will build my church, and the gates of Hades 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.’ (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 that I quote specific verses of Scripture is to leave no uncertainty or ambiguity about the lesson from Scripture that I intend to draw to the attention of those who love God. 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.

Read Part II