Today, I want to address my opinion on how to avoid deception, as in being involved in a false movement or a movement that false leaders and teachers have led astray. The simple answer is to know the Word. The more complete answer is to understand the Word through the worldview of Yeshua and the Apostles. Then you can align what is being taught with Scripture. If you do not see the teachings or the way the ministry is functioning in the Scriptures, then be suspect.
If a new movement is building on a past movement, then you need to do your due diligence on the past movement to see if it aligns with Scripture. An example would be Mike Bickle (IHOPKC) and Rick Joyner (Morningstar Ministries) and their reliance on Zinzendof and the Moravians. Do your own investigation. It isn’t what you were told.
Another example is the “back to basics” movement, wanting to take us back to the Reformation as our starting point. While some good came out of the Reformation, so did much bad theology. Martin Luther was Anti-Semitic. He wasn’t the only leader from this period. In 1543 he published On the Jews and Their Lies in which he says that the Jews are a “base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth.” He argues that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated. They should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and these “poisonous envenomed worms” should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time.
Today, the vast majority of Christians have a worldview influenced by 1800 plus years of Gentile Christianity. In addition, our worldview gets influenced by our family, friends, job and the churches we attend. Today, about 31% of the world’s population considers itself to be Christian. They are part of approximately 45,000 denominations worldwide, with at least 200 plus in the U.S. That doesn’t count the fact that each standalone nondenominational church often creates variations of its own worldview. Most denominations came into existence after the Protestant Reformation in 1517.
This wasn’t the worldview when the Gospels were written, or the Book of Acts, or the Apostle Paul wrote his letters. Paul and the Apostles, like Jesus, were Torah observant Jews. The New Testament was written by Jews for Jews and Gentile believers grafted into Messiah and the commonwealth of Israel. This is the key to understanding what the Lord is doing today.
The first church was a time of scattering, the last church will be a time of ingathering. The first church was a time when we, the wild branches were being grafted into Messiah, the last church is a time when the natural branches are being grafted back in. Romans 11 and Ephesians 2 & 3.
Christianity is not the religion of the New Testament Scriptures. It developed as a separate religion during the separation of Gentile and Jewish believers starting in the second century. It was codified as the religion of Rome in 325 AD.
This means Paul did not convert to Christianity on the Damascus Road. He didn’t have his name changed to Paul upon his conversion. Christians, as first called in Antioch, does not equal Christianity. When Jews accept Yeshua as Messiah, they do not convert to Christianity. Christianity does not equal Yeshua’s (Jesus) church because it does not fit the requirement for both Jewish and Gentile believers. Nor is it the religion that can usher in the coming of Messiah.
When we become born again, we are grafted into Messiah and the commonwealth of Israel. We immediately become members of Yeshua’s church universal, but then we need to find where we fit in locally. This is obviously something to give prayerful consideration.
The Lord is moving. Things are changing. Judgement has started in the house of God. Jesus is rebuilding His church.
If you want to know what Yeshua’s church looks like, reread the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters without the filter of your present worldview. You can learn their worldview without converting to Judaism. We even see this in the Gospels with the story of Jesus and the Centurion, the man of great faith, and in Acts with Peter and Cornelius and his household. Both these men were Godfearers.
As Peter says about the Apostle Paul, “just as also our dear brother Paul wrote to you, according to the wisdom that was given to him. He spoke about these things the same way in all of his letters…There are some matters that are hard to understand in his letters, which the ignorant and unstable distort, as they also do with the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”
Three times in the first two chapters of Romans, Paul uses the phrase, “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Both Jew and Gentile believers need to understand how we fit together in Messiah, so we can avoid what I believe is the next great deception coming to the body of Christ. That is the “one new man” of Ephesians 2.
It is a principle ripe for exploitation. I have seen it in a few of the streams in the Hebrew roots movement. I have seen it being done right in a few Messianic fellowships and ministries. It is coming soon to Gentile Christian leaders who need a new “in thing” because what they have been doing wrong is being exposed.
Keep the faith and remember, “Where there is no counsel, the people fall;
But in the multitude of counselors, there is safety.”
Blessings.