Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
Things are not as They Appear
February 09, 2009
I was in attendance at a rather large buffet dinner last evening at which a man was asked to say the grace before we ate. Much to my delight, he did so in the name of Jesus Christ, with no apologies and without receiving adverse reaction to his words.
After the dinner was over, I decided to speak to the man and let him know how pleased I was that we had spoken words of gratitude to God for our food. My first inclination was to ask if he were a pastor or a minister. Upon doing so, he responded quite happily, by revealing that he had received theological training in Montreal where he had taken some courses at McGill University, having then gone on to become involved in prison ministry. He was retired from the Military, hence his reason, perhaps, for being located in Kingston, a center for penal and military institutions. He gave me the impression that he was very proud of his record of ‘religious service’.
So, I shared a bit with him about my writings on the prophecy of the Bible, at which point he said that he regarded the prophets as being what one could call ‘interesting people’. Something didn’t sit right with this statement, so I questioned him as to what he meant by the term ‘interesting’. He said that the prophets were, more or less of the past, belonging to the time of the Old Testament. So I persisted by stating that the entire Bible was made up of prophecy, to which he seemed to nod his head in agreement. I persisted still further by stating that, every scriptural word was of God, written under the guiding hand of the Spirit, and that the entire written Word was both prophetic and true.
Now, I had arrived at the heart of the matter, which confirmed my suspicions about this man. I was talking with a ‘religious man’, the sort with which Jesus had to deal throughout His entire ministry. Immediately, he set about to correct me by saying that men, who were subject to Satan as much as to God, wrote the Bible, and that they brought their error as humans into their writings. To state what he was saying in clear terms was that he believed men wrote the Bible under the influence of Satan as much as under the influence of the Spirit. In essence what he was saying was that the Bible is an untrustworthy piece of literature, subject to satanic spirits.
So, I asked the man if what I was hearing him say was that Jesus could not be trusted, for He claimed He was the truth. John the apostle claimed Jesus was the Word made flesh or, in other words, the Truth made flesh. He fumbled with his words, again reiterating that the Bible was written by man to which I answered, “Yes, men who were guided by the Spirit of God.”
At this point he began the process of escaping from our conversation and, with a pious smile, invited his wife to join us so he could change the subject. He informed me that he was an Anglican and as such I had a pretty good idea where the Anglican theologians had taken this man. They had made him into the image of themselves, producing another one of them, and then sending him out to produce more men and women into the same spiritual image of these misguided religious theologians who inhabit the halls of learning.
Little did this man understand that he was just another religious man like Saul was before he became Paul, an apostle for Jesus Christ, who, it is sad to say, will probably never have a road to Damascus experience where he will encounter the Light as Saul did. He will likely never understand that he is killing Jesus all over again, so to speak, by denying His truth and then going on to lead others to deny Him in the same fashion.
There is nothing quite as religious as the rituals concocted by the religious leaders of the Anglican and Roman Catholic institutions. They lay down the groundwork for opening the door to religious spirits while, at the same time, closing it to the understanding of truth. It is what the world calls religious faith, but in fact is nothing more than religious doctrines and dogmas, which have no power whatsoever to save anyone from the jaws of death.
This man was just another victim of the religious system, unable to indulge in any real discussion on the essence of God’s Word any more than he could fly to the moon. Religious tradition had shut him down as much as it had shut down Saul in his day. Yet, when the brilliance of the Light confronted Saul, he was blinded, with scales covering his eyes, to reveal to him and to us just what his condition was and the source of his blindness as a religious man without understanding of the truth.
It all goes back to the Garden of creation, beginning with the lies of the serpent covered in scales deceiving his first victim. The first lie denied the truth of God by suggesting He did not mean what He said. The devil, which had entered the serpent, offered Eve a belief system that he assured her would stand without the true words of God. He declared he had the fruit, which would make men wise like God by possessing the knowledge of both good and evil. The serpent told Eve that in the day she ate of the fruit of the forbidden tree, God would know that her eyes had been opened. It persuaded Eve that man could be like God by being liberated from Him and His truth; this was the day that religion was birthed, with liberalism becoming its closest of kin.
I had been talking, after the dinner, with a religious man who had no idea he was part of Satan’s religious camp, every bit as much as the Pharisees were, of whom Jesus said their father was the devil. Jesus healed the blind and the lame to show in the natural the need for spiritual healing from spiritual blindness and a spiritual walk that was spiritually dead, in a world ruled by Satan.
He warned that many would come in His name but would be far from Him as men to whom He would say, “I never knew you (Matthew 7:23).” The dinner grace had been given in a resoundingly impressive fashion in the name of Jesus. But just beneath the surface of this man’s facade, when once scratched, one found nothing but religion, the likes of which is filling our Christian institutions that are called by the name of church, but are not the church at all. Most of them are far from Jesus and even further away from the true apostolic church to which He gave the keys to the kingdom.
The lie about truth has always been the foundation for religion. This is the reason the true church must come out of her, Babylon the Great, lest she share in her sins and receive of her plagues (see Revelation 18:4). Spiritual Israel must make her exodus from religion every bit as much as Israel had to make her exodus from Egypt.
Do we not understand yet that Rome describes the final revived Babylonian Empire? If we remain in Romanism of any sort we will be very much attached to the Babylonian system that is going down with the beast. Protestantism has never completely broken through the barriers of Romanism. The government is on the shoulder of Jesus, the Way (see Isaiah 9:6), and only He can break the satanic government rule and control of Satan, which has the entire world in his sway, as he moves us, ever closer, to the One World Order.
The sons/daughters of God need to be set free from the religious snare, which will take them to their death, as the waters cover them over. Only the truth of Jesus can set men free; otherwise, the gates of Hades will prevail against them and they will never see the kingdom from a position of compromise.
Things are not as they appear. In all your getting, get understanding (Proverbs 4:7) so that no man can deceive you.
Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron (1Timothy 4:1-2).