EXIT THE MATRIX
20/02/22 17:55
My daughter is studying theology at Ridley College in Melbourne. An Adventist acquaintance asked why she did not study at Avondale. Most Adventists do not realise that Adventism is a distorted theology and a warped gospel.
PAUL’S NOT GOSPEL AT ALL
If confronted with the truth that what we have believed is the Gospel of Jesus is ‘no gospel at all’ and that is indeed a warped gospel, it is difficult to accept if our parents have given their lives to its advancement and we have been socialised into this mindset from the year dot. We can cling to our socially constructed identity and group think in the face of scriptural evidence to the contrary and the evidence of historical lying and fraud. Why? Without it we be nothing.
PART OR WHOLE
It’s not so hard to off-load doctrinal baggage when such items are only a small part of a truthful belief system. Much harder when it appears our entire religion is a mistake and substantially a lie. This is because our beliefs and our religion have become who we are, so we fight resolutely if not viciously to avoid losing ourselves.
PASSION FOR JESUS
If we are people who have pursued Christ because we have a passion for His life, we will have done this under the influence of His Spirit who has a passion for us – a passion for us to become sons more than sons in name but sons in spirit and truth. Sons and daughters who become the kind of companions that the trinity had in mind in creating us in the first place.
Living in the unconditional pursuit of truth because it is life our knowledge of God, of His Christ and ourselves, will have evolved and developed throughout our journey as we lay at the cross beliefs about the gospel that are anti-christ and anti-us. At The Great Exchange we will have taken up truths that have been hidden from our view or never fully grasped. One of these was righteousness by faith at the Reformation. The present revelation is the knowledge of the incarnation and it importance for the new creation taking hold in the present chaos.
A COVID ERROR
So people can be immunised against the truth and can get dismayed and angry when their most precious assumptions are exposed as the lies they are. Many immunise themselves over their life-time by accumulating fictions like a fence that they add to every time a piece of truth assaults their closed mind. Quite intelligent but socially brainwashed people are adept at denial and rationalisation disguised as sound thinking. But all they are doing is going in to bat for the spiritual coma to which they have accommodated themselves.
FALSE REALITY ADDICTS
Richard Rohr in his, The Wisdom Pattern .. helps explain the human addiction to false facts and distorted realities. “Many people have given their lives for their tribe, their country, their religious group. It is one step removed from true transcendence, so it often becomes an easy substitute for God… People try to find identity in a group, an institutional affiliation, a nation, a public cause (1) [ or a denomination, loyalty to which they see as loyalty to God].
“We, like all groups, were comfortable inside our own, self-assured universe..It becomes a nonrational frame of reference that is hard to shake. I will meet people with PhDs who come to me with the most infantile sense of God or of evil, but that is their childhood myth. (2)
“All bowing toward Mecca at the same time [or keeping a sabbath] is a magnificent cultural practice. It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form. (3)” And even if much of it is way short of an actual relationship with God.
By rejecting false gospels, you will not be left high and dry like a fish on the sand from which the water has entirely withdrawn due to climate change. Not if Christ is your life. Not if you have learned to live in Him and His Gospel rather than your accrued but malformed assumptions. Even now it’s not too late to start to live.
(1) Rohr, Richard . The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Chaos, Reorder (p. 103). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.
(2) Ibid.P 105.
(3) Ibid P 106