HAVE WE THROWN THE BABY OUT?

HAVE WE THROWN THE BABY OUT?

                Christianity, in a wildly reactive swing away from legalism, has come to the place where they think any form of obedience to God is legalism. In a sense, we have made Him our Savior, but we have fired Him as our Lord. Who is the King of our lives? Who else qualifies and deserves to be both Savior and King?

                We never stop to think things through. We don’t want to think. We don’t want to reason. We would rather repeat our worn out slogans and put a quick end to every meaningful thought. Christianity has become Me-centered and not truly Christ centered. We rely on our own opinions rather than the council of the Word of God.

                For example: Any effort to understand the prophetic events we see happening around us in real time, is abruptly ended by someone who caps all conversation with “No one knows the day or the hour.” What a cop out against studying the Word of God. What blatant disrespect, to think that God was just wasting 2/3s of the Bible on unimportant stuff.

                Another example of our trite thinking is that other empty slogan. “You can’t earn salvation by keeping the law… we are saved by grace.” Of course we can’t earn a salvation that has already been paid for by the blood and sacrifice of Jesus once for all.” But now that this is settled, are you going to obey Him or ignore Him? Jesus said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments. Who is your King?

                What makes obedience to God legalistic, while obedience to Satan is not legalistic? Are you saying that if I keep pagan holidays I am not legalistic, but if I keep God’s appointed feasts I am now legalistic?

                “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death, in order that the Law might be fulfilled in us who walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh. It is not the Law that is done away here… it is the flesh. Jesus, walking in me, will fulfill the law.

                When people say that the law was done away I have to ask if it is now okay to lie, or steal, or commit murder or adultery. They say, ”Well… no, we can’t do those things.”  So I ask them if we can now worship idols, or take God’s name in vain. The answer again is “no.” So then I ask if it is better to keep the pagan Sunday rather than the Sabbath which is God’s appointed day, and they say, “Oh, we are no longer under law, but under grace.” Hmmmmm. Why is it then that only one of the Ten Commandments is done away? Why pick on that one?

                Please, I am not harping about the Sabbath here. I am only pointing out how that Christianity has sort of gone nuts with its circular reasoning and they are using worn out slogans to justify themselves before God.

                The Feast Days are coming into play right now for a very good reason. The Feast Days are both the foundation and the framework for all end time prophecy and we literally can’t understand last day events apart from these Feasts. We need to understand how Jesus fulfilled the Spring Feasts and how He will yet fulfill the Fall Feasts.

                                In the book of Genesis at the creation of the sun, moon and stars God said, “And let them be for signs (Moeds… appointed times… feasts) and for seasons and for days and years.” Gen 1:14. In other words, the creation of the sun, moon and stars is directly connected to the Moeds, the Feast days of the Lord. God planted every detail of history in His time clock of the universe and He did so, so that all significant events in history would be marked by His appointed feasts. We need to understand these Feasts as we close in on the end of the age.

                Today, much of Christianity has literally kicked out the Old Testament in spite of the fact that it was the only Bible the early church had. In spite of the fact that Jesus began with the law and the prophets and showed them all things concerning Himself in all of the (Old Testament) Scriptures.

                Today we have a Gospel that no longer sits on the foundation that God built for it. And consequently, many are now doing away, even with the New Testament foundations of repentance and the blood of Jesus and the cross of Jesus. We no longer become disciples. We no longer take up our cross and follow Him. Now we just do our own thing and attach Jesus’ name to it… and that, my friends, is not being born again.

                A.W. Tozer said: “The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. Nothing less than the whole Bible can make a whole Christian.”

                Jesus is going to marry a chaste Bride who has made herself ready. “In biblical types and shadows, garments always represent one’s walk with God. The Bride of Christ’s garments will not be tattered, stained, or torn through abuse, sin, and false doctrine. The Remnant must labor to repair the damage Babylon has caused to our personal faith and our families and we will once again understand how to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” Dr. Michael Lake from his book “The Shinar Directive.”

                As Christians, it is time to come clean. Again in his book The Shinar Directive, Dr. Lake traces the roots of paganism from Nimrod all the way through history. He shows how it hijacked the church around the time of Constantine and how it is bearing its final fruit in the church today. God’s call out of Babylon in the book of Revelation is not an empty invitation. It is a call to shed all paganism from our lives and beliefs and to return to pure doctrine and saving faith.

                “As we have already seen throughout this book, God encoded much of what the enemy was going to do in the last days in the first five books of the Bible. Five is the biblical number of grace, and God was giving us His grace in what He anointed Moses to write.” The Shinar Directive.”

                We really need to understand just how we have been infiltrated by the enemy.  It is precisely why the final harvest is going to include a call out of Babylon. In the new birth, we are supposed to die to the land of Babylon and to be born again into the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and that is what the true new birth accomplishes. But even as the Israelites were delivered out of Egypt in one day, it is also true that Egypt had not come out of them. It is the same with us.

                Let us consider that the Feast of Passover is a one day event. When we receive Jesus as our Savior, we are saved. We are given a new Spirit. We have become a new creature. However, all of us know that even though we have come out of the world, the world has not yet come out of us and that part of the process takes a lifetime. Hence, the feast of unleavened bread lasts for 7 days and 7 is a complete number indication that sanctification is the work of a lifetime. Getting the world out of us requires dying daily and walking in the Word, the whole Word of God and obeying it by faith as we walk out of Egypt ourselves.

                What I am saying here is that there is a form of grace floating around in Christian circles today that will not prepare us for the marriage supper of the Lamb. It will only make foolish virgins and Laodicean carnal Christians.

                I am not in any way promoting legalism as a way to earn our way to heaven, but we had better start thinking before we toss around our cover- all slogans. We may be selling ourselves short of the Gospel of the Kingdom. We may have tossed the baby out with the bathwater.

                 The first thing Jesus taught was to repent and the second was to take up our cross and follow Him. We are saved by the blood and cross of Jesus, but we are also called to follow Him. There is no part of the new birth in which we are told to do our own thing. We have been bought with a price. We no longer belong to ourselves. Therefore we are taking every though captive to the obedience of Christ. (2 Cor. 10:5b.) Think on these things.