Third Part of a Three-part Commentary on the Cross
Written By Elinor Montgomery
March 14, 2006
In the final analysis, all of history comes into the cross and goes out from it. Each and every man’s destiny depends upon it, regardless of what he believes about it. The cross is where truth reigns and where the King of the Jews establishes His throne. It is where the dead wood of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil can no longer influence or destroy men. For it was here that the nails were hammered by man’s wicked hands through the hands of the tree of life to superimpose it over the dead wood, setting in motion the means by which to put an end to the reign on earth of evil and death.
The cross reveals how man is unable to see through God’s eyes just what a fool he really is. Once having had the Spirit of life breathed into him, and warned by God not to touch or submit to any other spirits, like a small child, he would not listen but rather had to see for himself. In his disobedience, he got burned, in what Satan led him to believe was a simple act by which he could become smarter and wiser, like the Most High God, Himself. In point of fact, by accepting the belief system, man opened the door for the spirit of Satan to displace the Spirit of God in his life. The breath of life, which God had once breathed into him, now was nothing but a memory of what could have been if the spirit of death had not taken him over. By His very nature, God gave to man what his free will desired, and then simply removed Himself, for He could not coexist with evil.
Before Jesus died, He told His disciples that it would be better for them that He should go to the Father so that the Holy Spirit, the Great Comforter and Teacher, could come to them. This speaks of man’s second opportunity to have the breath of life breathed into him again by the very One Who died for all men that they might live. We, as God’s living beings, whom He created, did not show gratitude for the breath of life the first time, and so we chose death. We have had centuries, even millennia, to learn what a terrible mistake it has been for mankind who, because of his rejection of God’s truth, has been forced to endure a history of wars, terror, torture, and ultimately his own death. The question is whether or not the experience of humankind has taught him anything, so that he won’t make the same mistake a second time.
We all know wars are the result of man’s pride and his acceptance of the lies of religion, which come from Satan. Has there ever been a war that does not have pride or religion at the center of it? The Antichrist will have but one desire, and it is the same desire as that of the devil, which lured man, in the Garden of Creation, away from his liberty in the truth of God. He wanted to be worshiped like the Most High God, so he led man into liberalism and the first religious belief system that stated man could manage quite nicely on his own without God. It was the same belief system as the popular religion of our day, called Secular Humanism. The fullness of such religious idolatry is known as the time of the fullness of the gentiles, when Satan will have lured all men into believing the lie in order to have his One World Order of Religion. There will not be a single person left who will be pure and undefiled in the truth by refusing to have any part of Satan’s religion, with the exception of the revived apostolic church, which, like Jesus, will witness only to the truth.
What a small number this last bastion of truth, known as the bride of Christ, will be! He went to the cross so that He might have His comparable partner, in a restored marriage bed that could bring forth the good fruit, which Adam and Eve were never able to bear in their sin. When Jesus replaced Adam, as the only begotten Son of the Father, He, like Adam before Him, would give of His own body that He might bring forth a bride. It would be required of her that she should become a new creation in the water and the Spirit, in order to become an adopted child of God and sister and spouse for Jesus. Without the Spirit within her, she would never understand the difference between religion and truth. Like her Beloved she would testify only to the truth so that, in the consummation of their relationship, she could bear the good fruit of their marriage. It is only the infilling of the Spirit and not the seed of the man, which can bring her to her time of birthing.
Because her commitment will be to truth, the religious leaders today will be no different from those of yesterday. They will want it both ways. They like the compromise of knowing the Word, even loving the Word to some extent, but not enough to reject submission to man-made religious hierarchies. They will not be able to cease from depending on their own good works, in their attempt to support the completed work that Jesus did on the cross for our salvation. Jesus warned us, as clearly as possible, that we could not serve two masters. We cannot serve both the truth and religion at the same time. The leaven of the Pharisees was nothing but their religious pride and rituals, which grew and grew until it eventually filled the whole loaf of Israel with Judaism, leaving no room for the truth. We will either give ourselves in total submission to Jesus, to be wrapped and protected in His mantle, or we will be like the Roman soldiers, gambling at the foot of the cross over that worldly mantle, which their own hands had put upon Him.
That is what Romanism is all about. The Roman soldiers, spiritually speaking, are as the Roman Christian soldiers today, so named by Rome and never by Jesus. The first Christian high priest was the former pagan high priest of Rome, known then as the Pontifex Maximus, and presently known as the pope, though still called the pontiff. By remaining Christians, being tied to religion, we are choosing to take the risk of gambling over the only protective covering, which we have under our Beloved’s mantle. It is within this covering that we will become the overcomers and the victors.
It is in this covering that the lineage of David continues, making us warriors like he was, separate and apart from the Roman line of soldiers, who resemble those of Saul. Only then will we be ready to challenge the Antichrist, the giant of today, just as David challenged the giant of yesterday. We cannot afford to be gambling with His mantle and still think that we will escape God’s judgment. Either we will be in Israel, having eaten only of the Passover Lamb, appropriately prepared with the residual burned, and with the blood on the doorpost of our lives, or we will share in the fate of Egypt, with the fast- approaching time for God to deliver His people from their Babylonian captivity.
God chose Moses to lead His people out of Egypt and to be His messenger in setting the nation, Israel, free. He was God’s spokesman, to whom He gave a comparable partner to serve as his voice. The bride will be that voice today, having been given the sole authority to speak in truth for her beloved Jesus. She will not make the same mistake as that of the priest, Aaron, who joined in religious activity at the foot of the mountain where the Law originated. It was a costly mistake for the Levitical line of priesthood, which ended with John the Baptist, representing the last of the high priest line, being still clothed in animal skins, never having been set free of its beastly nature. But the bride has been set free at the cross to witness to the truth, as did her Beloved before her. She, as opposed to Aaron, will follow Jesus, like Joshua followed Moses, whether it was up the mountain in a mountaintop experience or into the tabernacle, where he could be in the presence of God in hope of hearing His voice.
Easter is not about the cross at all; it has its roots in Roman mythology and pagan worship involving rabbits and eggs. Romanism, in its religious compromise with paganism, has made this a festive time of the Lord’s blessed apostolic church. It has taken pagan Roman practices and blended them with a little truth so that, today, the Romanism of Christianity sees the believer comfortably sharing the cross with the pagan symbols of Easter eggs and Easter bunnies. We are so seared by religion that we can barely separate it from the truth.
This is how easy it is for the lie to take root. The Nicolaitans have convinced the churchgoers that they require buildings, with a priestly hierarchy to rule over them, making themselves the intermediary between God and the congregation. They make it very clear, especially in Pentecostal and always in Catholic circles, that the people must be submitted to the worldly authority of the governing priest, as opposed to being submitted to the authority of Jesus and the Word.
I attended a large traditional church for years; it was, in fact, one of the largest in Canada. I remember well spending one Easter Sunday at church, listening to a sermon on the cross. I was greeted afterward, by the same minister who had just delivered the sermon, at a coffee break where there were tables of Easter eggs being sold to raise funds for the building programs. Such pagan practices were no different from those of the temple courtyard, when Jesus overthrew the tables of the moneychangers. Some of the Easter egg money went to perpetuate the Nicolaitan system, which Jesus hated and, in this case it would serve to increase the minister’s already high salary.
Let us pray that we are the church, the voice Jesus (not Rome) called us to be, having no other names than simply His church, His voice and His witnesses to the truth. Let us never believe that going to a building, called the church, is the same thing as being the church in action. Give us, we pray, the same heart for truth, which drove the apostle Paul to turn the world upside down.
Canada needs another great shaking, and compromise with religion is not the answer, but the problem. May we be pure and wrinkle free of religion, so that we might come to the foot of the cross and cross over as the true Jew destined for the kingdom, and for the house of Israel as the family of God. Let me be my Beloved’s bride, His sister, His spouse, for whom He died.
