A LEGACY OF ERROR, Part I

What is it you want to be remembered for? What do you want your legacy to be? Do you want to be remembered like Hymenaeus and Philetus? (2Ti 2:17) Or Ananias and Sapphira? (Acts 5:1) Of course not, right? Better yet, do you want to get to the Judgment Seat of Christ only to find out that what you believed your entire Christian life and taught others as well, was wrong? No, you don’t want that either. But, this is in fact the legacy a great many Christians will leave, including some of the most notable names there are.

Jesus taught his disciples to pray in Mt 6:10 ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.’

This prayer has gone unanswered to this day. The Kingdom has not come and God’s will is not being done on earth as it is in heaven, yet most Christians behave, act and teach as if it it is here already. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most obvious is the division of Bibles into the Old and New Testament, or Old and New Covenants. Since to Old Covenant is still in place, there can’t be a new one, yet.

Heb 8:8-12
8 For finding fault with them, He says,

“Behold, days are coming, says the Lord,
When I WILL effect a new covenant
With the house of Israel and with the house of Judah;
9 Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers
On the day when I took them by the hand
To lead them out of the land of Egypt;
For they did not continue in My covenant,
And I did not care for them, says the Lord.
10 “For this is the covenant that I WILL make with the house of Israel
After those days (THE DAYS OF VENGEANCE), says the Lord:
I will put My laws into their minds,
And I will write them upon their hearts.
And I will be their God,
And they shall be My people.
11 “And they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen,
And everyone his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’
For all shall know Me,
From the least to the greatest of them.
12 “For I will be merciful to their iniquities,
And I will remember their sins no more.”
NASB

All these “I WILL’s” are future and they are with Israel and Judah, not the Church of the Body of Christ. Now let’s look at Hebrews 8:13: When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear. NASB Becoming, growing and ready are active, ongoing; they are not something of the past.

Just like capitalization and punctuation are not “written in stone,” neither is how the Word of God is divided. The Book of Acts should serve as the Fulcrum between the Hebrew Prophets and the Christian Prophets. Jesus verily preached the the Kingdom was at hand, because he didn’t know about the Secret God kept hidden from the Hebrew Prophets (Ro. 16:25, Eph. 3:3).

placement of the gospels of Mt, Mk, Lk and Jn in the New Testament, when they should have been placed in the Old.

Here are some examples of what Jesus did not know about the coming kingdom::

Matt 16:28

 “Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who shall not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”

Matt 26:64
Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

Mark 14:61-62
But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? 62 And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

Even though Jesus, the monogenetic Son of God, said these things, all the people to whom he said it, died, without them seeing what he said they would see. How can this be? How can you not have questions about it?

Preterists believe and teach that it did come to pass, just as Jesus said it would, but that Jesus’ return in the clouds was spiritual, not physical (hence no one really saw it). They also believe that all the prophecies in the Book of Revelation came to pass around 70 A.D. with the destruction of the temple; that that book is merely historical. I’ve only met one person who believed that and they are currently teaching it in England. Preterists also believe that the 1,000 year reign of Christ is not literal, but means a very long time. If that were the case, which it is not, then we very well could be living in the kingdom of God.

Everyone who says and believes that they are “kingdom” builders or that what it is they do, is for the “kingdom,” is in error. Jesus is not currently the king in the kingdom of God, because the kingdom does not yet exist. Jesus is currently our Lord, kurios, the owner of a thing, Master.  We are also Jesus’s brothers and sisters.

Rom 8:16-17
The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:

17 And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.
KJV

Don’t think or believe for a minute that we are living in the kingdom of God and that our Lord Jesus, the coming and future king, has anything to do with the mess the world is in today. Laying the condition of this age at the feet of Jesus, is not something I would want to be a part of; nor should you.

(In Part II we will be looking at “If you believe_____________then you must also believe__________.)