How often, in its history, has the church not been a collaborating church? Sailing under the Christian flag, there was an endless amount of cargo, dead weight that was covered by that flag but which had nothing to do with true Christianity. There are more than enough examples of that in church-history, as for instance in the Roman Catholic Church during the times when the Pope and the bishops had worldly power and even maintained an army, and when the Inquisition tortured and killed countless numbers of believers in the Name of God. And we saw in Hitler’s Germany what it meant when believers did not stand firm and did not rise up when they did not adopt an Elijah-attitude, but rather an Eli-attitude. The guilt and sins of the church, both the Evangelical-Lutheran Church and the Roman Catholic Church in Germany was great during the rise and the tyranny of the Nazis. Their more or less cooperative attitude created more and more opportunities for a satanic tyranny that cost millions of Jews and other people their lives. Rivers of blood flowed during this mega-catastrophe.
We saw how the officially recognised churches in the Soviet Union made an ill-fated pact with Communism in the days of atheistic Communism. The result: life of the brave free groups, political dissidents and the underground Church was made extremely difficult. We also saw how the World Council of Churches remained silent in those days, when countless brothers and sisters disappeared in the Russian concentration camps, in the ‘Gulag’. The blood of true Christian believers and of Jews will flow when the official churches goes hand in glove with the ideologies and political systems of the world. The official rulers are then able to say to the Christians who resist that there is freedom of religion because there is an official church and official religious services that are accepted while the rest is illegal and considered to be a danger to the state. And then the political powers will try to eliminate that resisting remnant – tooth and nail. Let there be no doubt that the more the anti-Christian powers gain ground, the more they will also disguise themselves and infiltrate the leadership of the churches and of Christianity. From there, they will lead a process of secularisation and syncretism, merging religion and worldly ideologies and philosophies together. And anyone not aware of the fact that there is a separation between the ‘Court of the Gentiles’ and ‘the Temple with the altar’ will be sucked in and absorbed. The true worshippers are looked at as old-fashioned wretches who will one day hopefully become so ‘modern’ and ‘broad’ that they will learn to throw off the close-fitting ‘straightjacket’ of their orthodoxy and Bible-believing faith that they were taught (‘indoctrinated’ they will be told) during their upbringing by their faithful Christian parents. The Christians in China under communism in the time of the Cultural Revolution under Mao Tse-tung were killed or sent to ‘rehabilitation camps’ to undergo intellectual and spiritual brainwashing in order to be in line and ‘synchronised’ with the general way of thinking of the time. The attacks come from without, but also always from within by wolves in sheep’s clothing1—the false teachers and false prophets.2 Yet the Lord will always keep the prophetic witness alive and the blood of the martyrs becomes the seed of the Church. In in the future, when the spirit of the ‘anti-Christ’ will shortly seem to be all-powerful and to prevail against anything and everything, those who stand firm to the end will be saved.3
• The word for “standard” is canon. The word canonical is derived from this. This is how all the books of the Bible, which are considered to be the authoritative Word of God, are referred to. They are a measure, a standard, a check for true faith, because they are inspired by the Holy Spirit. True believers will consider the Bible as the ultimate check and balance for their faith and lifestyle.
• The list of 66 books that belong to the canon is first mentioned in a celebratory letter from Athanasius in 366 AD. The Councils of Hippo Regius (393), and Carthage (397) confessed these books to be canonical—invested with divine authority. They did not declare these books to be divinely inspired, but recognised them to be given by God through the Holy Spirit, and thus canonical.
• Of course, true believers in the true Church had already known that for a long time. They did not need that official declaration by the official Church to accept these 66 Bible-books were the work of the Holy Spirit.
• The ‘Gulag Archipelago’ is a three-volume, non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, followed by an English translation the following year. It covers life in the ‘Gulag’, the Communist Soviet forced labour camp system. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published, and since 2009, is mandatory reading as part of the Russian school curriculum.
Bible References:
1.Matthew 10:16; Acts 20:29; Luke 10:3; John 10:12 2.2 Peter 2:1–22; Jude 3–16 3.Matthew 24:13
