Like Israel, the Church has refused the covering of her true husband and has wandered off into deception, worldliness and carnality; the doctrines of men, worldly philosophy and the spirit of the age have brought her down. But God allows false teachers and false prophets; it is His judgement on our idolatry and unfaithfulness as Israel discovered;
“Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died” (Numbers 21:6).
While to come to Christ you must first of all turn away from the world, in another sense, to enter in to Christ and to be His, you must also turn away from Christianity. Many turn away from the world to come to Christ but too many find themselves, instead, in Christianity. In this place what is lying in wait for them are the doctrines of men, the tradition of the elders and religious deception.
Now what they have to do is to turn away from Christianity and come to the living Christ. All Christians embrace Christ as the propitiatory sacrifice for their sins but very few embrace Him as the example and model of sonship to the Father that they are to follow faithfully if they are to inherit the “spiritual blessings in heavenly places that are in Christ Jesus” – and which are found nowhere else. These spiritual blessings cannot be found in Christianity, but only in Christ; Christianity cannot save, but only Christ.
To most Christians, the supreme purpose of Christ in redemption is to save us from hell, which is the deserved destination for our sins, but that is to miss the point. Redemption has as its fundamental intention the restoration of man to the image of God, in which he was created; everything else is secondary. Restoration has always been God’s intention, desire and hope;
But this is a people plundered and looted; they are all of them trapped in holes and hidden in prisons; they have become plunder with none to rescue, spoil with none to say, “Restore!” (Isaiah 42:22).
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