Chapter 4 - It Was a Set-Up
It was a set-up....
Jesus planted the seed of the Gospel at the Cross - the seed of Truth, from which grew a new tree of knowledge. How would men tend to His garden ? Time would tell. Just like the garden, the Lord entrusted the care-taking of His Church to us. Have we been good stewards ? Did we get it right ? If you were to appear before the Lord today, and your entrance to Heaven depended on an honest answer, would you tell the Lord of Heaven, yup, we have fulfilled all Your promises and realized all Your dreams ?
This is one of the great epiphanies Holy Spirit gave me as we wrote this book together. Keep reading until the end, this is only one of many. The Lord showed me how He always proceeds by Revelation, pulling back more and more of the veil obscuring His Face and the splendor of heaven. Though we know God's promises, we still do not yet see what we will be, except that it will be glorious. So we must walk forward in continuous discovery.
I understood this - that God takes advantage of the fact that we don't have all the keys unlocking all the mysteries. Thus, God not only reveals His Greatness and His Victory over time, but He also executes a strategy to entrap the forces of darkness. God allows time to reveal the co-existence of good and evil, light and dark. Like the garden in which both the wheat and the tares grow up together, we don't know until the end of the harvest, whether the work on earth is rooted in the devil, or in God.
Don't believe me ? Can't you see, God is the master set-up artist ? He put a forbidden tree in the garden, to lure the snake out of hiding. He established a Law through Moses to reveal our inability to attain righteousness on our own. Jesus allowed Israel and Rome to conspire together to put Him to death on a Cross, so that He could save His children and condemn the devil to eternal damnation. And ... He entrusted the Church of the New Covenant to short-sighted and frail men ...
.... so that it would one day fall apart.
Much like the seed that has to die and fall away, so that the budding plant can push through the soil and reach the skies as it grows up in the sunlight, our modern church is dying. It will give way to the real church. Jesus knew all along, that we couldn't build a church.
This does present a challenge to us modern readers of the Bible, because the apostles, including Paul, laid down prescriptions and ordinances that we must follow - but have we interpreted them correctly ? Do all the different denominations of Christianity agree unanimously on one Creed ?
We find the Orthodox church splitting up into different groups as much as the Catholic church has, and let's not even begin to count the number of evangelical denominations that exist today. It looks to me like the seed which Jesus planted is splitting open, and we will soon see His Church break through the soil and reach the light of day. I was shocked to realize it´s taken so long.
As I already pointed out, the priesthood is a vocation that displays the unworthiness of any person, man included, to save the human race. We are but vessels, extraordinary ones of course, because we contain the Holy Spirit. Could it be then, that the modern form of Church has just misinterpreted the role of women, and incorrectly denied them a God-given right to be ordained priests ?
