RELIGION DISTORTS THE TRUTH ABOUT GOD

Religion always distorts the truth about God. When Jesus walked on the Earth, He was Truth Incarnate. He came to reveal more about God’s character and will. The Jews did not accept Jesus as the Christ, the Promised One, nor did they believe His testimony for at least two reasons: Jesus said, 

"This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." (John 3:19-20) Second, Jesus told the Jews, "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me." (John 5:46)

The first text is self-explanatory, but the second text reveals something about human beings, religion and prophets. The Jews in Christ’s day had exalted Moses to the place of God. They loved and thought they understood the teachings of Moses.

Of course, they would have denied that they worshiped Moses, for such a statement would be blasphemous, however, their actions revealed their concept of truth. God, taking the form of Jesus, stood right before them, but they did not recognize Him or the truth He presented.

The Jews had taken the writings of Moses, shrouded them with false ideas, which caused a false sense of righteousness and further closed their minds to the truth Jesus was trying to reveal. A terrible duo.

Truth is always larger than any one prophet. Truth is larger than all the prophets combined, because God and His truth are infinite. God has not yet revealed all of the truth – His truth is marching on. When God anoints the 144,000, He will reveal all the truth necessary for salvation during the catastrophic end-time events. You can be sure of two things: First, new truth from God will be consistent with His moral law.

Second, like the prophets of old, the 144,000 will suffer greatly – the consequences for revealing more light to the people of the world will be costly. To be sure, God’s people will suffer intensely for saying things contrary to the beliefs of religious people. Understand that their peers always regard inspired people as mere human beings. No one exalts prophets until people kill them or they die. (Even then, the world has forgotten many.)

Prophets suffer much because a big difference exists between God’s truth and what people call truth, and this distinction often makes people very angry.

God is constantly unfolding truth and knowledge. "New and improved" are words that eternally describe the ongoing actions of God. Look around. Have you noticed the rapid release of technology in the past twenty years. I don’t believe there is any aspect of life that hasn’t be made better with advancements in knowledge within the past twenty years except religion.

Why is God releasing such expansive knowledge to man and at the same time, the only good religion is the "old-time religion." Why is this? Why is religion so hard to change? In a word, it’s this: tradition. People inherently like tradition, there’s just something secure about saying, "we’ve just always done it this way…."

The problem though is that God and tradition stand in opposition to each other. God is not traditional! (Think about this: If Heaven were bound by traditions, what would life be like after 40 million years of tradition?) Make no mistake about this, in terms of moral virtues, God changes not. In terms of new creations, God never stops.

There are characteristics of God that never change. God is righteous and He loves righteousness. When God created man, He defined righteousness for us by giving us His Ten Commandments.

Bear in mind though, that loving righteousness is different than just doing right. Being legally right is not enough. God wants His children to love righteousness because the government of Heaven is based on righteousness. Because He is righteous, everything He does is good, purposeful and beneficial for His creatures even though they may not understand His actions until a period of time passes. Because "new and improved" is ever God’s way, His creatures can never limit Him.

He has ten thousand ways of doing things we know nothing of. So, we have to trust Him even though we shall never understand all there is to know about Him. He has proven beyond question that He can be trusted without question.

I have studied the Bible for a few years and have come to the following conclusions:

1. Everything man needs to know about God’s love and offer of salvation is contained in the 66 books we call the Bible. God closed the Bible in A.D. 350 because everything necessary for salvation had been written by that date. (This isn’t to say that God stopped inspiring people by A.D. 350, rather, since A.D. 350 the 66 books of the Bible and the Bible alone has spiritual authority. There is no other spiritual authority.)

2. Many times throughout the history of the Bible, God has demonstrated that He is negotiable, patient and long-suffering. This means that whenever men fail, God starts over. He hasn’t given up on mankind. The important point here is that when God starts over, He changes or adapts His plans and He reveals the changes and/or adaptations through inspiration to His servants, the prophets. Thus, later inspiration proves that God has either redefined or changed earlier plans. In essence, this means that some New Testament doctrines make some Old Testament doctrines obsolete.

3. God reveals more and more about Himself and His plans as time passes. Thus, each generation has to review and renew their understanding of God. Failure to do this leads to a gross misrepresentation of God and His ways.

Jill Soto