Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
The Error of Replacement Theology
April 15, 2011
The sadness of the term “Replacement Theology” is the fact that it stirs up a multitude of hates and resentments on the part of those who hate the concept the most. Unfortunately, the haters are the same ones who, unwittingly, apply replacement theology to their own thinking.
They are the very ones who have replaced truth with religion and, hence, have replaced God’s book of truth, from beginning to end, with the religious apostasy of Judaism and Christianity, two religious systems never once endorsed by God, nor by Jesus Christ. I am compelled to ask the same question over and over, “When did Jesus ever introduce or establish Christianity as the bedrock of His church?” The answer is “Never!”
The Father and the Son were one in their hatred of religion. The last prophet of old was the first of the New Testament. His name was John the Baptist – denouncing the Judaic priesthood, calling Israel to make straight the way of the Lord. He was referring to what Jesus called the leaven of the Pharisees. In the book of Exodus, chapter 12, at the time of the first Passover Feast, God mentions ten times that there was to be no leaven mixed with the bread. In prophecy, He is saying that truth must not be defiled by religion, if you are going to cross over at the cross from the broad road to the narrow way of the kingdom.
Religion is the error of rebellion and witchcraft, which began in the Garden with the rejection of God’s truth for the lies of a belief system apart from the truth. Man crossed over the line at that point going from a son of God in life, truth and the light of understanding, to a son of the beast in death, lies and the darkness where there is no understanding. He became a spiritually, blind, little beast of religion who, by his own choice, became a son of his father, the devil. Because of this rebellion, religion and liberalism from God’s truth took ruler-ship over the world under Satan.
Jesus never minced His words to please the religious enemy of His day. He openly, and to their faces, declared the religious leaders of Judaism to be sons of their father, the devil, which made them blind, deaf and dumb little beasts unable to speak truth without having understanding. The entire nation of Israel came into agreement with them in its lack of understanding concerning who Jesus was as the Son of Man and the Son of God.
So, He went to a woman whom the religious Judaizers saw as nothing short of dirt under their feet because of her religious affiliation with what they considered to be the gentile world. It was to this woman Jesus explained that both she and the Judaizers had it wrong, and mistakenly were trying to worship God, each in their own style of religion.
He assured her that not for a minute would either of their religions stand in the day when His church, to which He referred as “we”, would worship in spirit and in truth. Jesus told her that the Father was seeking such who worship Him without the taint of religion, to which He referred here as being a mountain, taking us back in type to the religious works of Babel. He told the woman that she worshiped what she did not know, as did the Judaizers and, as would the Christians who would come after her.
Jesus again pointed to Himself and His followers when He said, “We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews (John 4:22).” He was literally stating that it is only His apostolic church, which will get it right, because He had washed her clean, with no leaven being left in her. Judas departed with the last ties of the twelve to the Judaic religion, only to find his way to the hanging tree.
This statement tells it all! And the great sadness is that true Christian replacement theology wants to reverse Paul’s statement to say the true Jew is of the nation Israel. It states that Christianity is the church of Jesus Christ, rather than just another form of religion, which began at the whim of a Roman Emperor, called Constantine. The Judaizers replaced truth with their religious writings of the Talmud, much of which came from the religion of Babylon, brought back with the Israelites when they returned to the Land from their captivity there. They simply incorporated the Talmud into Scripture, to be treated as though coming from the Holy Spirit instead of from man.
The Scribes and Pharisees chose to ignore the prophecy of Scripture, which pointed to Jesus long before there was Abraham. Jesus was from the beginning, from everlasting. No religion can recreate Him in its image; religion simply replaces the truth of Scripture (the Word became the flesh of Jesus according to John 1:14) with theology. This is the sadness of the real replacement of God’s truth with a multitude of religious theologies of Christianity, which, like Judaism, had no part with the person of Jesus.
True replacement theology is the religious façade that covers over truth. It masquerades as the truth, exactly like its father, the devil, who masquerades as the light because he wants to replace Jesus in the lives of those who live in the Spirit of life, to take them captive in the spiritual darkness of death. Satan wants them ruled by religion, excluding all truth.
Hence, you will discover that the empire-building governments always are tied to a state religion, with wars being fought in the name of religion, seeking to ultimately destroy that which is unconquerable – the truth. Light and truth are one and can never be separated, though Satan tries every trick in the book to accomplish his purpose for separation of the two.
He set about to destroy Israel and succeeded. He is trying his best to destroy America and he is succeeding. But he will make no inroads today against the revived apostolic church, for it will stand only on truth rejecting all religion, which leads to failure. For Jesus declared it, and so it shall be, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against His church.
He never named His church Christianity; the name came out of Rome under the ruler-ship of Constantine, when he applied the mocking term of Christian to it, after it had first been used for the church by the Greeks in Antioch. The church was taken captive by the Christian religious system and has remained so for centuries. Was Jesus dismayed and unable to deal with this? Of course not! He simply used Christianity, as did God use the sin of the brothers against Joseph for good. They provided Israel’s gateway into Egypt so that Israel could grow there and become strong, right under the ruler-ship of Pharaoh.
But the time came for the exodus of Israel from Egypt, just as the time has come for the exodus of the Lord’s apostolic church of the true Jews, from her religious tomb of Christianity and back into the light, before the judgment, when the entire religious system will all come tumbling down.
God made a covenant with Abraham to bring forth his descendants as the inheritors of the house of Israel, the sons and daughters God would call His own, a people of faith and obedience like their father Abraham. He was a simple religious gentile, born of the blood of Adam doomed to die without the Lord’s intervention. But he proved to be a man of faith and obedience, as was Moses after him, who would be called to father and guide the nation Israel out of Egypt.
The bride, a woman of faith and obedience, will make the last call to God’s people to come out of the religious system, before the judgment falls. Each one must first make his/her personal exit out of the religion of the gentiles, in order to move into the inheritance of God. Only the Word can purify the bride, and the Lord will have no other kind.
God chose Abraham because of his faith and obedience. His inheritance would come through a spiritual line running the distance of Israel’s history, but only for those who would choose to be faithful and obedient like Abraham, Joseph, Moses, the spies and David. The line led directly to Jesus who would eventually establish God’s kingdom on earth with the faithful and obedient sons of Abraham.
The crossover blessing of the covenant with Abraham was a case of the inheritance of the firstborn crossing over to go to the second born. It never crossed back to go to the firstborn, ever again. Whereas Ishmael, like Isaac, had no choice in the matter; the second son, Jacob, symbolic of the church versus the nation, did have a choice. Jacob clearly established that the blessing through his son, Joseph, representing Jesus, would be a crossover blessing going from the nation, represented by Manasseh, to the spiritual nation, represented by Ephraim. This was the true crossover plan of God.
Please note that the witnesses from the spiritual tribes of Israel in Revelation, chapter seven, do not include any witnesses from the tribe of Ephraim, per se, for all the witnesses of Israel in Revelation belong to the pure apostolic church, the bride, called to witness as the true Jews in Spirit, the faithful and true sons of Abraham, in the line of Jesus. They all are of Ephraim, the crossover blessing within Israel, an apostolic blessing upon the faithful witnessing stones of the church, back on their apostolic foundation of truth with none of the leaven of religion to defile them. Was this replacement, or was it written into Genesis, long before Abraham was?
It was not replacement of the sort found in the religious theologies of Judaism and Christianity; this is the Way of truth lost a long time ago and replaced with religion, when man crossed over to the religious side of the Garden to come under the ruler-ship of Satan, leaving the truth of God behind him.
God, in His mercy, established a way back to Him, through the nation of Israel, which was called to be a light to the rest of the gentile world of the liberty found only under God’s government. He required faith and obedience from His people but God loved Jacob and hated Esau who never valued his privileged inheritance in truth. Esau instead succumbed to the lures of the flesh, like Adam and Eve before him, by marrying the Canaanite women bringing religion back into God’s separated nation.
These women had no place in the Israel of God, who was establishing a pure and undefiled people, separated in every way from the religious gentiles. Yet, the nation chose to return to the broad road of destruction, which the gentiles traveled. Because of this the nation was returned to the gentile nations from which God had taken Abraham.
The blessing would cross over once again at the cross, to go to the sons and daughters of truth, the apostolic church traveling along the Way to the kingdom, lost to man long ago back in the Garden of creation. A pattern of crossover permeates the history of Israel; it is a legitimate form of replacement initiated by God, Himself. We have reached the time for the bride of the Lord, to be returned to her rightful place in a marriage bed that was made in heaven, only to have been replaced with a religious bed straight from the pit of hell.
God is not, and never was, threatened by replacement; He simply uses it for good, in the same manner that He used the dastardly deed against Joseph by his brothers of the tribes of Israel who wanted to kill him, just as they would want to kill Jesus, centuries later. Joseph saved his brothers from severe judgment, but it would not be they who would receive the greater blessing of Israel. It would go to Joseph’s brother of the love relationship of Jacob with his bride, Rachel who bore Benjamin, who, in turn, represents the bride of the church, the sister and spouse of Jesus. She will rule and reign with Him forever more as His bride of heaven and a daughter of truth, adopted by the Father who is the God of truth.
So, the fools continue to speak of replacement in derogatory tones but they know not that of which they speak. God has used replacement throughout history to finally establish His Son and His church, as His house of Israel. Together, they will rule here on earth in a kingdom such as that found in heaven; there will be no religion ever again.
Will the Judaic nation Israel have any place in the kingdom? It was always planned for them from the earliest of days, but there is only one way for the nation to enter the kingdom and that way is Jesus. Unless they dispense with Judaism, believe on Him and are born again of the water and the Spirit, they will never inherit the kingdom of God.
Truth will replace religion in every way so that the covenant with Abraham shall prevail through the crossover of the cross from a world ruled by Satan and the lies of religion to a world ruled by Jesus and the truth of God. When this happens, Christianity and Judaism will go the way of the beast. Like the Titanic going down into the sea, in the same way the sea covered over Pharaoh’s army, the religious world of the empires will be seen no more, forever. Henceforth, the world will worship in spirit and in truth.
In so far as the covenant with Abraham shall prevail, so too shall the true apostolic church of Jesus Christ prevail. There is only the one Way of Jesus Christ with its crossover path through history. And so man will cross back over the same line he crossed over in the Garden. Through Jesus, God will enable the old death sentence to be replaced with new life in the Spirit and a crossover from death to the resurrected life. The old will be new again with new life coming out of the old stump of a tree that was once cut down.
But it is not that the word of God has taken no effect. For they are not all Israel who are of Israel, nor are they all children because they are the seed of Abraham; but, “In Isaac your seed shall be called.” That is, those who are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God; but the children of the promise are counted as the seed (Romans 9:6-8).
And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:29).