One Apostolic Church Undivided by Religion
Written by Elinor Montgomery – emontgomery@cogeco.ca
April 22, 2015
Did Jesus establish two churches? If you believe that the answer is “Yes”, then where is the biblical evidence for it? Search the Scriptures to find any place where they suggest Jesus identified His church with a religious system of any kind.
Where do the Scriptures reveal Him to be a High Priest (Lord of lords) sharing His role with any religious high priest, or bowing to such? Where do they show Him, as King of kings, bowing to any government official such as Pilate or Caesar? Where do they tell us that He bowed to the economic world system found right within the temple in Jerusalem?
Could He have been the Son of God and still have taken the mark of the beast whose number is the number of man – 666? If He had done so, there could have been no resurrection of a perfect Man. He would have had the same problem as Adam had before Him; He would have compromised good with evil, and would have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
There is one church, and one church standing alone, as the apostolic church entrusted into the hands of the apostles. “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18).”
With these words, Jesus identified the building plan of His church as being made up of human stones and not of any building of tooled stone, brick or wood. They are the apostles to whom Jesus gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven and not to the temple priests, all of whom were excluded from this select group of human temples of stone.
Whatever they should bind on earth would be bound in heaven, and whatever they should loose on earth would be loosed in heaven. The fact of the matter is that the truth of the gospels separates the believer from the unbeliever, and he who has the truth has salvation in his hand. All others are facing the beckoning, open gates of Hades, but with none of the protection, which the gospels have to offer. Do not think for a minute that these gates do not beckon one and all in the wilderness of this world’s testing ground!
Only the apostolic church was given the gospels of the truth of God with which to withstand the fiery darts of Satan. The apostles were the ones trained by Jesus to share them with all nations in order to enlarge the apostolic church, holding the keys to the kingdom in their hands for the future generations to come. It was by the Spirit that they were connected to Jesus, in order to receive their instructions from the only High Priest and Cornerstone of the church, and not from a religious priesthood.
Saul/Paul is the great example of this among those called to apostolic leadership, by revealing through him the necessity for all apostles to make a complete break from the religious system. He was a bloodthirsty, religious priest who believed of himself that he was rightfully serving God, in his religious role.
About 600 years prior to Saul’s meeting with Jesus on the road to Damascus, the nation of Judah had been shut down when she was taken off to Babylon. She no longer possessed her inheritance in the Promised Land, due to her sinful nature and lack of obedience to the Commandments of God. We are speaking here particularly of the southern half of the whole nation of Israel, reserved for the special inheritance of the Davidic throne.
Some of the people returned, but they were a tainted, rag-a-muffin bunch of ex-patriots, which included many who had never seen the Promised Land. While in captivity in Babylon, the Israelites had absorbed the religion of the empire. In the process, they created their own, new religion, called Judaism, which would serve to bring death to the nation in its compromised state of both a good and evil mix of the law –a little of God’s laws and a whole lot of man’s laws– a bit of the good of God’s plan and a whole lot of the evil of Satan’s plan. Truth was all mixed in with the belief systems of Satan, known as the lies of religion, leading to the liberalism of apartness from God.
God assured Adam that such a compromise would most certainly lead to death. Just as Adam and Eve became sick and dying in the sin of the flesh, the nation Israel became a sick and dying nation in the religion of Judaism. She would have to make her exodus from the religious state she had embraced while in Babylon, by eating no spiritual leaven of religion, just as the tribes of Israel had to make their exodus from the empire of Egypt, by eating absolutely no leaven before they came safely through the water judgment. At the same time, the Egyptians went down to their deaths, trapped in their religious belief system.
Jesus identified leaven, in His time, as being the religious food of the Pharisees, who were the religious leaders and the priesthood of Judaism. He also identified their father as being the devil who has no truth in him as the father of lies (see John 8:44).
Saul, the Pharisee, while breathing fire upon the church of Jesus, was confronted by the Light of creation, Jesus, on the road to Damascus, where Saul was heading to round up the believers of the Way in Jesus for death’s row. Of course he was blinded, for the light brought out the serpent’s scales, which represent the religious lies responsible for having covered over his spiritual sight and for having blinded him from the understanding of the truth.
Jesus worked a miracle by healing his spiritual blindness and his spiritual lameness, causing him to be born anew of the Spirit with new sight and understanding, and a walk that would no longer lead him onto the broad road of destruction. He would now be taught to speak in a manner committed to gospel truth and not to religion, once he received his spiritual, apostolic training, which only Jesus, the Author of truth, could give to him.
Saul, the Pharisee of Pharisees, religious to the core, became Paul the apostle of apostles, driven to the core to spread the truth of the gospels. His heart was set on converting the gentiles, and ultimately, the Emperor Caesar, with his evangelical destination being Rome, the seat of the Empire. But it was not meant to be. Caesar went on to change the nature and the heart of the apostolic church, which has remained changed over the many centuries that have followed the demise of the Caesars.
He was Constantine who gave the new religious status and name of Christianity to the church, which had previously been known as the Way, after Jesus, Himself, had simply called it His ‘church’. There was no false church, for He had established the only church of the apostles, who were the stones, against which the gates of Hades could not prevail, as they would prevail against the religious systems.
The Roman Empire had successfully created its new religion by the fourth century, using the mocking term for the followers of Jesus, one introduced by the people of Antioch, where the believers were known as ‘the Christian bunch’, which translates into ‘the Messianic bunch’. Jesus knew what lay ahead for the church, and He commanded His disciples to not tell anyone that He was Jesus, the Christ (see Matthew 16:20).
The church of the apostles walked straight into the open tomb of religion, which would hold her captive for about 18 centuries as a sleeping remnant of the true church, which would have to be revived in a ‘snow-white’, pure condition again, by a kiss from her Prince. He will lead His spiritual Israel in her own exodus from religion, by teaching her the pure truth of the Word, which only He can teach. When it is time to end the church age captivity to religion, it will be at the same time as that of the fullness of the gentiles. It will also be the time of the coming fire judgment of God’s wrath, known as the Day of the Lord.
The boil will come to a head as a One World Order of the economic system, the government system and, most importantly of all, the religious system. There will be no room for a church, which recognizes that Jesus is the truth and the only way to eternal life. All the tolerant religions will tolerate most things but Jesus who, like Israel, must be wiped from the face of the earth in readiness for the Antichrist, or new Caesar who will reclaim his throne of the Revived Roman Empire and his reign in an antichrist spirit.
The interesting, but tragic, thing is that the world no longer knows the difference between truth and religion, between fact and fiction. With the tool of Political Correctness, Satan has counterfeited the coming New World Order under the rule of Jesus with his own coming One World Religious Order, under his rule. He has caused the world to believe that the Bible is a book of religion, which cannot be tolerated because of its bigotry, a word used to describe God’s stance of zero tolerance for sin.
However, God is not sleeping or caught unaware by what is happening. He is about to vent His wrath on a world that has rejected Him and His truth. The time has come for the true church to no longer fence-sit with regard to making her choice between listening to God and living and listening to Satan and dying. Millions, yes, even billions, are going to go down in the judgment because they were misled into believing religious Christianity and the apostolic church of Jesus are one and the same thing.
One of the last warnings of Revelation is about being a part of that mother of all harlots, Babylon the Great. Christianity most definitely was born of the Roman Empire and remains as the glue holding the early Roman Empire together with the revived, latter-day, Roman Empire, both part of Babylon the Great. These are the two, divided legs of the statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in the book of Daniel, which depicted the empires to come in the remaining years of history with man captive to the Babylonian system, so aptly described spiritually by the Euphrates River in Genesis, chapter two.
Apostolic church of Jesus, “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues (Revelation 18:4).”!
As the Roman Empire revives by way of the Roman, religious system with the release of the four angels of the Euphrates being held back until this time of spiritual upheaval, so too, will the true, apostolic church be revived. It will constitute the remnant of 144,000 who will witness only to truth, and not to religion, as did the apostles whom Jesus commanded to spread the gospel of truth to all nations.
Jesus rode the mother donkey, symbolic of the early, mother church, pregnant with her colt, into Jerusalem, as described in the book of Matthew, like a woman in labor sent out from the city to spread the gospel of the truth about the King of kings, and Lord of lords. In the book of Luke, written from the perspective of the church returning to Jerusalem, He will ride the colt, which represents the young, revived church. It had always been the plan of God for the church to have two branches, which, upon coming together, become the true sons and daughters of Israel, and of God.
The true daughters must be heard as the equal and comparable partners of the sons, and the last, prophetic voice of God’s prophets, being the voice for the laboring woman of man, called the church and bride of Jesus. She, like Mary, will birth in the Spirit, unlike Eve who was the mother of all living, birthing in the sin of harlotry, after she had believed the first, religious lies of Satan.
The bride of the church will be saved by the open tomb from the judgment, and in her removal from this world, the light of the Bridegroom and the bride will be seen no more, and the voices for truth will be heard no more. Without the light, the sun, moon and stars will be darkened, as darkness covers the entire earth, before the wrath of God causes the fire of judgment to fall on wicked men and nations.
Those who thought they knew what global warming was about will have their eyes opened, which had been closed by the deceptive lies of Satan. They will see the real global warming coming from the same God who created the globe. The temperatures will rise so that the burning oven will reach its ‘seven-times’ fullness, allowing only those who walk with one like the Son of God to emerge from the fire unscathed by its heat, and without even the smell of fire upon them (see Daniel 3:19-30). The three friends of Daniel represent the prophets, the apostles and the bride, all of whom have walked the Way with Jesus witnessing only to the truth. As such they are those who overcome the lures of the devil.
At this time, the merchants of the Babylonian system, the money traders and the money exchangers, are the great men of the earth. They are also the sorcerers who, by their sorcery, deceived all the nations of the coming One World Order into believing the lies of Political Correctness when they stubbornly refused to believe the truth. They will hate the truth as much as they hated Jesus (see Revelation 18:23-24).
They are reminiscent of the giants of Genesis six, when there was also a time of violence and terror, just as we are having today with our own mighty men and religious sorcerers of our time. Only those saved in the ark of Noah survived, to begin anew. Only those of the church, saved in the ark of the New Covenant, will survive to go the last distance of the Way from Garden to Kingdom, as God’s kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven.
The gates on the east side of the Garden will open again as they lift up their heads to allow the King of glory to enter in, and all may eat once more of the tree of life, as He reigns for ever and ever more. Amen.