And Satan Knows It Best
Christianity is split largely between the Catholics and the Protestants, though there are so many splits among the Protestants that it is hard to tell denomination from denomination without some kind of score card. But, the Catholics don't get off so easily either. Catholics have abandoned their faith in droves, some surfacing with our Protestant brothers and sisters, but many just lapsing into nowhere land.
Somehow, many Catholics think they can earn their way into heaven, though that is not a Catholic exclusive. Many mainline Protestants are of the same opinion. Just a thought!! If you could earn your way into heaven, why did Jesus come to earth? What a terrible waste of time that was, and besides that it hurt a HELL of a lot. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you can't do it on your own, and He did win the right for you to go to heaven all by himself.
The brain wave that led people to believe that they could beat down the gates of heaven by their innate goodness did not come from the bible, nor from any preaching of the Word by any Catholic priest or evangelist worth his or her salt. We are to cooperate with Christ in His mission to set sinners free by living lives of holiness, goodness if you will, but it is cooperation, not salvation.
But, when it comes to using the Bible as a tool for d-evangelization no one does it better than our Protestant brothers and sisters, who call themselves "bible believers." "Bible believers" is a pejorative term, meant to differentiate them from those who they claim do not believe the Bible - read Catholics, if you will. Somehow, they have an exclusive lock on the truths of the bible. Although there are over 1,000 different denominations of bible believers, each of which believes something different from the bible, they do seem to have a common enemy, the Catholics.
That ought to give a clue as to how led by the Bible they actually are. But, fear not Catholics, we put them up to it in the first place, so this is only giving us what we are due to a certain extent.
Pause for a moment. About one thing Catholics and Protestants are unanimously in agreement, or should be, if they believe the basics of their faith. The Bible is inerrant - ie. It does not contradict itself, nor have one teensy weensy little error in it. It is therefor TRUE, and strictly so.
So, let's take one little bit of scripture for example. Jesus said: "This IS My Body," that Passover night when He gave the early Church the Eucharist. The early Church believed that He said it IS His Body, wrote about it, celebrated it, even though they could not grasp it with their own minds, but had to take it on faith. The canon of scripture followed along after, and in that scripture are references to this Eucharist and the celebration of it by believers.
This faith tradition has existed since the death of Our Saviour, and continues to this day in the Catholic Church, with no breaks.
So, about 500 years ago, the leadership of the Church was in turmoil and disobedience. Serious sin had weaseled its way in to the hierarchy as lust in general and lust for power reared its ugly head. Martin Luther and others rightly stood against the abundant sin. However, they compounded that sin with their own pride, and decided to REFORM the Church, ie. form again, the Church that Christ had created.
The devil had tempted Church leaders, and they fell to that temptation, creating an untenable situation. But, pendulums swing both ways, and so in attempting to correct errors, the baby and the bath water both hit the curb, and the free for all began. Sola scriptura, with its now over 1,000 variations crept in like a bad weed, and people calling themselves followers of Christ are now free to believe whatever they want the Bible to say and to mean, because they can find a similarly minded group out there proclaiming the Word of God in just the right flavour.
So, if the Word of God cannot be in error, and yet there are over 1,000 competing interpretations, who do you think might be behind it? IMHO "Satan Knows It Best." Oh, and he is LHAO about it.
Why are we prepared to give Slewfoot an upper hand in our faith? Whose voice are we going to listen to?
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