The Christian life requires the engagement of the whole human heart and mind—in prayer, meditation, and the study of God’s Word. The Holy Scriptures are the product of God’s covenant with ancient Israel. Through Moses and other biblical prophets, God wanted to turn Israel into a witness of truth to the pagan nations of the world.
The great gift of ancient Israel to the world was the Holy Scriptures—carefully, painstakingly copied and preserved to this day. The Old Testament Law and Prophets were and are the measure of righteousness and truth. Jesus lived out the Scriptures. He magnified the Law and kept it perfectly. His sacrificial death offers us forgiveness and full acceptance, despite our rebellion against the kingdom of heaven.
At the death of Christ, God’s covenant with the nation of Israel came to an end. The veil in the Temple was mysteriously torn from top to bottom, demonstrating the end of the ceremonial system established through Moses (see Matt. 27:51). The new Israel, the Church, with Jesus as the head, began to understand that the Old Testament Scriptures foreshadowed Jesus as the Christ, or Messiah, who was to come.
The rehearsal of this history is key for God’s people today. We must understand that the Bible, first the Old Testament, then the added books of the New Testament, is the foundation of the Christian faith. Jesus told the woman at the well, “Salvation is of the Jews” (John 4: 22). Any teaching contrary to the Bible is false.
At the time of the end, the people of God must know the truth as it is presented in the Bible, or they will be deceived by error. The evil one hates the Word and seeks any method to destroy its influence and authority. And the devil is succeeding to a large degree. Deadly falsehoods, rooted in paganism, plague the Church, making her liable to deception. And here’s how:
God called Abraham out of paganism to become the father of the faithful, both Jew and Gentile. The purpose of Israel was always clear, to reach the whole world with the truth about God in opposition to the false gods worshiped by the nations. This purpose is best illustrated by the faithful reign of King Solomon. He built the First Temple. His wealth, fame, and wisdom, his deep knowledge of many branches of science, attracted the nations of the Earth to his feet. All these blessings came as gifts from God, conditioned on the close adherence of the nation to God’s commands. Disobedience would lead to ruin, and eventually, it did.
Without Solomon’s later apostasy into paganism, the world would have been filled with light. The darkness would have been pushed back. Unfortunately, most kings who followed Solomon also rejected the law of God and embraced paganism, and Israel became as evil as the nations they displaced.
Israel’s mission as a corporate people ended in failure. However, that mission remains. Paul taught that all people, Jews and Gentiles, were of Israel if they had the faith of Abraham, who was justified before his circumcision (see Galatians 3).
The gospel, the one foretold by the Old Testament, was proclaimed by Jesus in the New Testament, then spread by the apostles around the world in their day. This same gospel is to be preached to the whole world in the last days, and then the end will come.
The people of God have always, since the creation of the world, been objects of scorn—rejected, persecuted, and killed. And such experience is to continue right to the end. The true Church is a persecuted Church. The true Church is never in power. It is in the world, but not of the world. All this comes from adherence to the will of God as expressed in His law.
Ancient paganism had numerous variations and forms, but one principle unified them all: mysticism. When humanity rejected the God of heaven, they fell into the worship of nature. The cycles of nature became objects of intense focus. Solstices and equinoxes, sowing and reaping, were all celebrated because pagan gods were in nature, not above nature.
These gods held sway over fertility, war, and death. Since natural cycles and the basic phenomena of nature are the same for all people, gods could be easily merged and shared by different nations. In this way, the heavenly realm–the moon, stars, and planets–became highly significant.
The heavenly bodies demonstrated order and time, complexity and mystery, power and glory. The deification of the sun, moon, and stars led to the acceptance of astrology, omens, and magic as means of understanding, controlling, and predicting human events. As gods multiplied, pantheons and hierarchies developed.
Ritual sacrifice, no doubt modeled after the sacrificial system founded by God after sin, turned into a means of pleasing and placating the merciless forces of nature. Festivals, ecstatic rites, and sensual celebrations were a way of life for thousands of years.
Paganism gave birth to mystery cults in which truth was an inner light, not an external fact. By the end of the Roman Empire in A.D. 476, a pagan synthesis emerged.
This synthesis was to have a profound impact on the Church. The Roman emperor Constantine, who ruled from A.D. 306-A.D. 337, tolerated Christianity in A.D. 313. Persecution ended, compromise began.
Constantine decreed Sunday rest in A.D. 321. Constantine was a Christianized pagan, and he perceived the political value of the faith.
Sunday was already regarded as sacred by the Romans because they worshiped the Sun, a common pagan practice. It made political sense for Constantine to support Christianity as the one true faith, but to achieve this, he needed to attract the pagans to the Church. By A.D. 380 Christianity had become the official state religion.
Eventually, observers of the biblical Sabbath became heretics. Sabbath observance was forbidden at the Council of Laodicea in A.D. 363-364. Why? Because faithful Christians were still observing the biblical Sabbath long after the time of Christ and the apostles. Generally speaking, resistance to the encroachment of paganism in the Church was seen as an attack on the Church.
For millennia, biblical prophets and seers experienced incredibly close relationships with God. They saw visions and performed miracles, even raising the dead. Moses demonstrated that the God of heaven was more powerful than the magicians of Egypt through the performance of signs and wonders. He had seen God in the burning bush and had heard God’s voice audibly.
But the Old Testament prophets were not mystics.
The word mysticism has a wide variety of meanings, but there are commonalities. Mysticism aims at absorption into God and apprehension of knowledge beyond the intellect. Mysticism embraces indistinct, vague beliefs. It is characterized by the acceptance of the supernatural on a purely personal level, with few limitations by formal belief systems.
Mystic knowledge is hidden, secret knowledge disconnected from reason or science. Mysticism is unteachable, beyond the rational, and without knowable content.
This means that mysticism cannot be an authentic form of Christian faith. Yet mysticism runs through Catholicism and many forms of Protestantism. The adoration of Mary and the Saints is highly mystical. Catholicism is also dominated by ritual, pomp, extravagant clothing and vestments, incense, holy water, choral chants, and idols, all elements of paganism.
Even conservative forms of Protestantism are now emphasizing experience and feeling over study of the Scriptures. This characteristic lies close to Pentecostalism, which practices ecstatic dance, speaking in tongues, and messages from “prophets” and “apostles” who are self-proclaimed and self-authenticating. Loud music with repetitive lyrics and overwhelming rhythms plays a key role in setting the mood for worship. Spectacle is in. Solemn worship is out.
Strange to say, but mysticism is, in reality, a form of moral relativism. If I decide what my truth is through my own experience, I’m a moral relativist. If I accept an institution’s belief system that is not founded on Scripture, I am a moral relativist. If I accept the beliefs of a false prophet, I’m a moral relativist. Moral relativism is anti-Christian.
Christ sought to share ideas in understandable forms, in human language, using human vocabulary and human grammar to be understood by the human mind. And whatever he said was established by Scripture. Jesus received his words from his Father and shared them orally at first, and then through the New Testament writers. We can read and understand those words today.
We must resist the rejection of Scripture so rife in the Christian world today. Many Christians proclaim love for the Bible, but they ignore its teachings. The Apostle Paul said to Timothy in I Tim. 3:16: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (NKJV).
Beware. Great deception lies ahead. Know the Word of God. Search its pages from front to back. Compare Scripture with Scripture. Ask God for guidance into biblical truth. With the right foundation, you will be secure in the coming storm.