Buildings, Systems, and Communities – Finding Authentic Faith – Purity 760

Buildings, Systems, and Communities – Finding Authentic Faith
– Purity 760

Purity 760 06/17/2022 Purity 760 Podcast

Good morning,

Today’s photo of a sunset just over the horizon under a canopy
of clouds comes to us from a friend who captured this scene from their rural
home near in Saugerties, New York. 

You know even though I was raised in a small town that was
more urban and suburban than rural I have learned to appreciate the reason why
so many people have chosen to live away from cities and the nearby suburbs, it’s
peaceful and pretty out in the country.  
Not only is there the natural beauty of the landscape and wildlife,
there is also the beauty of what is not there, the noise and problems that come
from our fellow man.   

So as much as I may gripe about the lack of optimal technological
conditions at my countryside home, I often remind myself when I walk with my
canine companion, Harley, down Waite Rd that the country sure is peaceful and
the views of the “big sky” out there bring things into their proper
perspective.  The problems and dramas we
face in life can consume our thoughts and emotions but there is a great big
world all around us that was made by a Great God who has more for us to see
then just what is right before us. 

The heavens, the setting sun, and nature declare there is a
God and when we look to them we can find peace and realize there are other
things to consider other than our immediate pressing problems. There is a big
picture and if we are focusing on our immediate concerns too much we might not
see it and be blinded to its wonder and beauty. 

Last night, one of the participants in the Freedom in Christ
course commented on the difficulty he had coming in to live out his faith in
Jesus Christ because of all the various systems, denominations, and expressions
of Christianity that are out there.  He also
said that he noticed that often the members of the different systems of
Christianity would deride other groups for having differing practices or
traditions or would make claims to be the one true faith system of the Christian
faith.  In his search for truth, this man
wondered how people who all claimed to be followers of Jesus Christ could all
have such different beliefs and practices and be so divided if they were all
representing the same Lord.   

In my long search for truth and a personal relationship with
my Lord, I encountered many of the same concerns and issues. When I came to
faith in Christ in 2010, the ;last thing I wanted to do in my new life in
Christ was to make a mistake and be led astray by an apostate church system, or
false teacher.  I knew I was really saved
by faith in Christ and now had a deep desire to be a “real” Christian and so I
was very concerned of not being “blind” in my new found faith. 

Like this man, I was confused about which church I should go
to and what I should make of all the different views on different points of
doctrine. 

Thankfully, the Lord was with me and I credit the indwelling
presence of the Holy Spirit for giving me a deep desire to read God’s word, to
read the Bible to know the truth about the Christian faith.  I wasn’t content to “just believe” or to “take
it on faith” that a church system or pastor could be blindly obeyed or trusted
without my knowing what they said, taught, and performed was right according to
the Bible.  

I had seen “sketchy” people who quoted Bible verses or
claimed religion but their faith didn’t give them a compassionate disposition
or didn’t seem to change the way they lived. So I wanted to be able to discern
if what people were preaching or teaching was consistent with God’s will. And the
only way to spot a counterfeit was to know the real article.  The only way to spot a lie was to be familiar
with the Truth.   

While I listened to tons of sermons and Christian teaching
from various pastors and Christian teachers to learn about my Christian faith,
I read the word of God for myself so I would be able to spot a phony or be able
to see that the word of God was being twisted to support a particular view or
buttress someone else’s personal agenda. 
Arthur Cincotti, that one was for you. Buttress!

So to be safe and to not be led astray, I encourage everyone who
are seeking a close relationship with God to read His word so they can know
what they believe and why they believe it. Do your research. 

Choosing a church shouldn’t be a blind decision because the
idea behind a local church is that you will worship and serve the Lord in that
community.  We aren’t  looking for a system or a building. We are
looking for a body of believers that respect God’s word and attempt to live by
it. We want to be part of a community that seeks to do the Lord’s will and to
represent Him on the earth. 

And we should be discerning in what church we decide to go
to. We don’t have to give them all a chance. Some are based in error. Some churches
support a modern view of what is acceptable or allowable for a Christian that
contradicts what the Bible says. Some so called churches don’t revere the Bible
as the only source of truth for our faith. They don’t consider the Bible to be
God’s infallible, inerrant, word,  or
they put the views of men or “church tradition” on equal footing with the Holy
Scriptures which basically says that “only these divinely anointed servants”
can interpret what the Bible really means and that “laymen” need not concern
themselves with reading the Bible, and that reading the Bible could be
dangerous in some way because these “laymen” may “be deceived” and develop an
interpretation of the Bible’s content that differs from what the “church father’s”  have determined to be true.  

This is a problem.  God
comes to us personally to show us the truth of who Christ is and  He wants us to come to Him personally.

So be wise and discerning when you decide to follow a system
of faith, a group, or a person to make sure that the path you are taking is
based on God’s word and will for your life.   

The best way to do that is to worship the Lord in spirit and
in truth by reading His word and by applying what it says to your life.

And don’t worry about making mistakes. We are forgiven by God
through our faith in Jesus Christ.  When
we pursue the Lord through His word we will know the truth and the truth will
set us free and lead us to experience the fruit of the Spirit as we walk and
talk with God. 

We can run into trouble when we are lazy in our responsibility
to be authentic in our faith and decide to trust a system, a group, or a person
without question and without confirming what they say, and how they say it,
against the letter and the principles established in God’s word.  

With that said, we also have to be humble. The people serving
in churches have dedicated their lives to the work of ministry and should be
given our trust and service.  If we are
going to be “real” in our faith, we have to also be real in our support of the
good work that Christians are doing by joining their efforts.  

So rather than a building, a system, or charismatic leader,
seek to join a community of believers that are seeking to bring more people
into God’s kingdom, who believe in and practice what the Bible teaches, and who
are concerned with serving others and who are attempting to help one another
grow in their relationship with God.   

It is my prayer that all my friends find a community of
Christians where they can grow and find their purpose in Christ.  

So keep walking and talking with God. He will show the way to
go. So trust and follow where He leads you to worship. And when you get there,
worship and serve the Lord with your whole heart, mind, spirit, and body.

______________________________________________________________

Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible Promise Book
for Men”.

This morning’s meditation verse is:

1 John 4:19
(NLT2)
¹⁹
 We
love each other because he loved us first.

Today’s
Bible verse indicates that we are given the capability to love because of the Lord.  

As
Creator, God loved us enough to make us fearfully and wonderfully made.  In our bodies, we have the capability to do
so many things to affect change and to accomplish tasks.  In our minds, God gave us the capability of
imagining new things to create solutions to problems or just to inspire us with
creative works of beauty.   In our
hearts, He gave us the capacity to love.   

So
God first loved us by creating us. 

But
because of the free will God gave us, we could also choose to not fulfill our
purpose in life by rejecting God and His ways for us.   Adam’s decision to disobey caused mankind to
fall into sin and to be cursed with death as the consequence of sin.  

But
God loved us enough to make a way to restore us, through Jesus Christ.  

So
God oved us again to save us.  And when are
redeemed, we realize our value and are given eternal life with God.  And now as brothers and sisters in Christ we
can also love in the deepest sense of the word.   We can love others by sharing the truth of
the gospel that will bring them from death to life.  We love because God first loved us, through
creating us and saving us.   

So
love the Lord with all your heart, mind, and soul and share that love the we
received by loving others as yourself.

 

 

As
always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I always share insights from
prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and
sisters in Christ with their walk. 

Today
we continue sharing from Clinton E. Arnold’s “Powers of Darkness”

As always, I share this
information for educational purposes and encourage all to purchase Clinton
Arnold’s books for your own private study and to support his
work.  This resource is available on many websites for less than $20.00.

The Classical Mystery: The Rape of Kore by
Hades

Fourteen
miles west of Athens on the road to Corinth, the city of Eleusis was situated
in a fertile agricultural area. For hundreds of years before the time of
Christ, mystery rites were performed annually in the city celebrating the
reunion of a mother goddess with her daughter, who had been abducted for three
months by Hades, god of the underworld. According to the informing myth,
Demeter, the distraught mother, wandered for days and ended the search for her
daughter, Kore (also known as Persephone), in the city of Eleusis. While
Demeter was at Eleusis, the supreme god Zeus finally intervened and promised to
reunite Kore with her mother for eight months of every year. It turns out that
Zeus had also consented for Hades (the Roman god Pluto) to take Kore as his
wife. This compromise was struck between the mother and the daughter’s
prospective husband.

In Eleusis mystery rites were held
every year, involving a ritual enactment of many parts of this mythical drama.
The “Lesser Mysteries,” held in honor of Kore, were conducted in the early
spring; the “Greater Mysteries,” in honor of Demeter, were performed at the
beginning of autumn. The mystery rites symbolized a happy afterlife in the
other world, but they were also closely connected with raising a good corn crop
in the area each year. The following two themes are very important in this
respect.

First, after another deity informed
Demeter (also known as the “corn maiden”) of the abduction of her daughter,
Demeter caused a severe blight on the earth, which effectively twisted the arm
of Zeus to intervene. This blight, induced by divine cosmic disharmony,
devastated agricultural production. Part of the “Greater Mysteries” celebrate
the cosmic harmony that ultimately occurred among the heavens (Zeus), the earth
(Demeter) and the underworld (Hades). This harmony was essential to insure
continued agricultural stability.

Second, the local interpretation of
Kore’s annual journey back and forth from the underworld was thought to be
related to the seed corn used in the local agriculture. Just as Kore spent four
months of the year with Hades and eight months of the year with Demeter, the
seed corn at Eleusis was preserved in underground silos for four months of the
year and was then sown, cultivated and harvested during the rest of the year.
The activities of these gods was believed to be closely intertwined with the
local agricultural economy. It was therefore important to please the gods through
the annual performance of these mystery rites.

It is difficult to know precisely the
deeper spiritual significance given to the mystery rites at Eleusis during the
time of Paul. These rites were variously interpreted according to the religious
needs of every age. Although Hades was not a symbol of evil to the Greeks, he
is often represented as “grim, unpitying, [and] a severe punisher of
wrongdoers.” Possibly the mystery rites symbolized protection from the harmful
influences of Hades. The desire for protection is probably why the dramatic
enactment of descent to the underworld is important in connection with the
Plutonion, an opening to the underworld, located next to the temple at Eleusis.
It is also likely that at the height of the mystery initiation, the new
devotees were the awed recipients of an epiphany of the goddess Demeter
herself, who would bring them happiness and the hope of a pleasant afterlife in
the underworld. Paul and all of his readers in Greece, no doubt, would have
been quite familiar with this famous mystery religion.

Taurobolium:
Initiation into Cybele

Across
the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor where numerous Christian churches were coming into
existence, a popular oriental cult observed annual mysteries in honor of the
mother-goddess Cybele (pronounced ku-be’le).
This Asian female deity, also known as the “Great Mother” and “Mother of the
Gods,” came to be worshiped in Greece and even Rome before the beginning of the
New Testament period.

The best-known part of her mystery
rite is an event called the taurobolium.
In this rite the initiate descends into an underground pit, which is partially
covered with a series of wooden lattices. Walking out onto the latticework, the
priests of Cybele would slaughter a young bull and allow its blood to pour
through the openings of the wood, drenching the initiate in the pit below. The
Latin Christian writer Prudentius vividly describes the rite:

Through
the thousand crevices in the wood, the bloody dew runs down into the pit. The
neophyte [initiate] receives the falling drops on his head, clothes and body.
He leans backward to have his cheeks, his ears, his lips and his nostrils
wetted; he pours the liquid over his eyes, and does not even spare his palate,
for he moistens his tongue with blood and drinks it eagerly.

For
the devotees of Cybele this gruesome rite was filled with deep spiritual
significance. The bloody “baptism” was thought to purify the initiates from
their faults. Franz Cumont contends that there was even a materialistic concept
of a transfer of strength to the initiate. He comments: “by moistening his body
with the blood of the slaughtered steer, the neophyte believed that he was
transfusing the strength of the formidable beast into his own limbs.” As with
other mysteries, the initiation probably also signified some mystical union
with the deity.

The initiate could now live in greater
security and peace. The taurobolium satisfied a spiritual yearning and brought
the person closer to the deity. The new access to this deity’s cosmic power,
symbolized by the blood of the bull, provided benefits, such as coping with
malevolent hostile influences and assuring of immortality.

Asdepius: God of
Healing

The
best way to understand other religions during the time of the New Testament is
to look carefully at a few. I have chosen three deities who were popular for
different reasons during the time of Paul. Without a doubt many of Paul’s
converts in Ephesus, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth and elsewhere were devoted
to these gods before turning to the gospel. The portraits of these three
deities will give us some insight into the pre-Christian background of a large
segment of Paul’s readership.

Often praised as a “savior,” the god
Asclepius was one of the most popular deities among the masses during the New
Testament era. Asclepius was honored throughout the Mediterranean world for his
power to heal the sick and afflicted. His symbol was the staff with a snake
coiled around it, similar to that of physicians today. He was perceived as a
benevolent god, concerned with people’s needs. He identified with the feelings
of the afflicted because he was believed to be a god-man. Many, in fact,
believed Asclepius was half-human and half-divine. Because of these and other
similarities to Christ, the cult of Asclepius proved to be a formidable
opponent to Christianity.

Pergamum and Epidaurus were two major
centers of the worship of Asclepius and were near Ephesus and Corinth,
strategic centers of Paul’s missionary activities. While Paul never mentioned
Asclepius (or any pagan deity) in his letters, he would undoubtedly have had a
substantial number of converts who had some contact with the cult of Asclepius.

From all over the Hellenistic world,
the sick and ailing flocked to Asclepian centers to seek healing from their
diseases. Many reportedly received the divine healing intervention of Asclepius
during the rite of “incubation,” sleeping in the precincts of the temple in
order to receive a visionary epiphany from the god. When Asclepius appeared to
the sick person, his healing powers were imparted and the person was healed.
This appearance and the apparent healing constituted the essence of initiation
into the divine mystery of Asclepius. Before sleeping in the temple, the
afflicted individual needed to perform certain purification rites and offer
sacrifices to Asclepius. After experiencing the healing powers of this god, it
was then important to offer appropriate and acceptable thanksgiving. This rite
would often take the form of a thank-offering, which the initiate commonly
consumed while the god was in his temple. One writer has observed: “In the
Asclepius cult the ancient concept of the sacrifice as a communion between god
and man was upheld tenaciously.” This description illustrates a distinctive
trait of the New Testament era in which the concept of a close personal
relationship with a deity was common.

The cured were also encouraged to
publicize to others what Asclepius had accomplished for them. We consequently
have a number of accounts of people rendering praise to Asclepius for healing
them of their illnesses. One papyrus text appears to be the introduction to a
much longer document in which a man praises Asclepius because he had been
healed of a terrible internal disorder during the incubation rite. Just before
the text breaks off, the writer states his intention: “I now purpose to recount
his miraculous manifestations, the greatness of his power, the gifts of his
benefits. The history is this …”

Many of the early Christians did not
dispute the evidence for supernatural events happening in connection with the
cult of Asclepius. Rather, they attributed the source of the healing powers to
Satan and his demons and pointed to its grave dangers. Among the church
fathers, Eusebius regarded Asclepius as an evil spirit “who does not cure souls
but destroys them” while Lactantius termed Asclepius an “archdemon.”

Hekate: Goddess of
Witchcraft and Sorcery

The
goddess Hekate (sometimes spelled Hecate)
has much significance for our investigation into the powers of darkness. More
than any other Hellenistic deity, Hekate was popularly known for her close
connection with evil spirits, strange apparitions and things of danger. Long
before the New Testament period, she was widely regarded as the mistress of
evil spirits (or demons). Alois Kehl remarks, “In the common belief of
Greco-Roman civilization, Hekate appeared above all as the ruler of darkness,
of terror, of the dead, of demons, and of magic.”¹⁴ Because she was
believed to be the ruler of the demons, she was frequently invoked in sorcery
and magic; because she controlled the evil spirits, she gave magic its
effective power. Because Hekate dispatched demons to carry out the magician’s
wishes, her name appears repeatedly throughout the magical texts.

She was widely believed to be an
underworld goddess; that is, she wielded control over the place of the dead or
the disembodied souls. Her power over the various spirits of the underworld was
represented by her title “key bearer,” meaning she possessed the keys to the
fortress of Hades. Because she controlled the passageway to the underworld, she
could enable people to communicate with the dead. Her custodianship of Hades
also enabled her to control the apparitions or souls who ascend to do the
magician’s bidding.¹⁷

Her power was not only limited to the
underworld. As with so many other deities of the period, she was viewed as
having cosmic power. Her rule extended over heaven, earth and sea. Some texts
point to her connection with the lunar element, in which she becomes associated
with the moon-goddess, Selene. A few ancient writers even emphasize her role as
a cosmic soul.

People worshiped her and made
offerings to her for protection from evil. She was called the “goddess of the
crossroads.” In popular superstition, the intersection of two roads was viewed
as haunted. A statue of Hekate was commonly erected at crossroads. Her function
as an averter of evil influences reflects her popular title, “protector of the
gate.”

While Hekate was worshiped throughout
the Roman Empire, she was especially at home in Asia Minor, where she is
thought to have originated Her primary cult center was at Lagina, not far from
Ephesus. Hekate is closely connected with the Ephesian Artemis, so much so that
distinctions between the two female goddesses become blurred in many respects.

During his travels throughout the
empire, the apostle Paul probably encountered her image along Roman roads
countless times. His converts would have found it difficult to completely
forsake honoring her since she was perceived to be a primary source of
protection from evil spirits in daily life. Her promise of protection from the
underworld would also have posed a significant challenge to the Christian
gospel’s promise of life after death.^[1]

—————————more
tomorrow————————

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Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship