Evangelical is the New Rome
I had an eureka moment one morning as I was thinking with some frustration about the reality of “church”: go to a place to sit with other people for an hour as some fellow tells you what to think about God, the Bible, and your faith, with no opportunity permitted to question, challenge, correct, or rebuke. Sit down – stand up – sing this – pray that – hear what I’m telling you, that God told me to say and don’t question it, even when you know I’m lying.
And I realized more consciously that we suffer from Rome. The Reformers did not seek to pull away from the heretic, but to change it from within, and in their efforts only changed what they objected to: you can’t buy salvation, the fellow calling himself pope isn’t entitled to unquestioned obedience & allegiance, truth is not “the Bible plus” anything.
They promptly installed themselves as defacto popes over their own dominions, their own words as equal to the Scriptures, and compliance with their rules as necessary to being saints. They substituted themselves as the god of their revised Romanism, persecuting and destroying those who dared to expose or oppose them.
All of the protestant and most of the evangelical situations have simply branched off that same heresy, setting up different popes with different cardinals who administer the matters of the particular denomination or sub-group and obligate their participants to compliance. They implicitly claim the authority of apostles, that they not be questioned, and anyone who dares to expose or oppose them is rebuked, vilified, pursued, persecuted, and expelled if they don’t surrender, while the masses are dulled in their minds and spirits – if the latter was ever alive in the first place, since the gospel is obscured, or perverted from faith in Christ, His death for our sin, and His resurrection for our eternal life.
Friends, the 12 apostles have gone to their reward; none are raised up to replace them. Jesus Christ is the great shepherd of the sheep, and we who are His sheep hear His voice. If we have the Spirit of Christ, we are His, and His Holy Spirit lives in us to teach and guide, to correct and empower us. We can learn from one another, and if one tells us we are wrong, he should come Scripture in-hand to demonstrate from it why he believes so. But ultimately, we are responsible to Christ and fully equipped by Christ to be and do what He desires of His saints, and corporately of His church.
We have no Lord but Christ, and we have no Shepherd but Christ, and we have no obligation but to Christ, except that we bring Christ everywhere and His Word informs our thinking. The modern evangelical and protestant popes are the same as those of the Romish apostasy – usurpers of what does not belong to them. Do not give them place for so much as one moment, to pervert the Word of God in your midst.
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