Spiritual Warfare in the Church over the Word

Gary has been talking about spiritual warfare in the church. One of the issues we have today is that preachers, teachers and church-goers no longer consider the Word of God that Last word on matters of faith and practice.  Martin Luther broke with the Catholic Church over the authority of the Word of God in the Scriptures. He found 95 reasons that the church had put the traditions of men above the Word of God.  This situation is similar to what Jesus had to deal with in the 1st C.

He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If anyone tells his father or his mother, “What you would have gained from me is given to God,” he need not honor his father.’ So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: “ ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’" (Matthew 15:3–9, ESV)

But today, many consider God's Word to be a good suggestion but outdated. We are free to reinterpret to make it fit our current day.  So what God said was wrong back then, isn't necessarily wrong today.  This is the problem within the church.

In the unchurched culture, the problem is a bit different. They don't believe there is any truth, much less one truth. The universe is a product of evolution by accident and there is no ultimate purpose or plan to life.  No God who controls destiny or gives life meaning.

I remember reading an article back in the 1980's in Wired magazine where this woman was talking about avatars.  The word Avatar comes from a noun meaning:

1  a manifestation of a deity or released soul in bodily form on earth; an incarnate divine teacher; an incarnation, embodiment, or manifestation of a person or idea.

2  an icon or figure representing a particular person in video games, Internet forums, etc.

Her point was more like the second, where people adopt characters to play games, but she was applying it to all of human life.

Her point was that identity is plastic. There is no ultimate purpose to gender or identity, so we can create our own. If there is no GOD, there is no ultimate truth, there is no right or wrong, no reason we can't decide to change our gender, no morals, no real reason that life or death matters.  So religion is just an illusion or an opinion, with no basis in fact, and can safely be ignored.

We call this philosophy Relativism. All truth is just a subjective perspective. Anything goes. Do your own thing.

And church leaders who have yielded to this philosophy in the culture in order to be "hip" or current, have abandoned any pretense that the Bible is true. They do not believe in any fixed form of truth, but truth has evolved as we have become more "Enlightened" and more "tolerant." We now have "science" which tells us that the old morals of the bible are wrong. They have proclaimed "tolerance" as the highest form of love and the good, and in so doing, they have implied that because of their compassion, they are more tolerant and loving than God.

On a national level, we have pastors and priests who indulge sin with a false form of grace that confuses license with love. And so have endorsed sin as if the Liberty of Christ is a license for all kinds of behaviors, and if permissiveness was actually helping rather than bringing harm.

Why does God give us the Law? The law of God is there to protect us, not to punish us or bring us harm. If I put up  a sign that says the bridge is out up ahead, and you ignore it and speed on, the signpost didn't judge your or punish you. You were punished by your own actions.

Just so, the leaders who ignore the law and encourage sin in the name of "tolerance" are n