Oh, you can say that again!
Growing up in ‘church’ environment of doing or saying what everyone was claiming to be as a christian, was just normal. I guess it was the right of passage of being in the ‘church’ , you just continue on with what has been going on for generations, except with some minor modifications. But that is all. Same old things,said over and over,done over and over. But Why?
Until I finally asked myself ‘Why’ this and ‘Why’ that, what is the ‘church’ trying to do, what is christianity trying to be? How did we get here as the building of Christ believers?
It’s always good to start at the point of where you have been to ‘know’ where you are now. So the logical point of starting from is to look at how things have evolved in christianity, the good, bad, and yes there’s the ugly. Following christian beginnings is a rough and messy picture to cipher, but it does get us to the point of seeing of where we interrupted our beginnings to see if we got off on a good foot.
Christian beginnings were very thinly disguised from the start of the first century, there was no defining markers of ‘identity’ as was let’s say the Judaism sect was. Paul,Peter,James, and John were of different minds and of boundary markers of this ‘new way’. What was being emphasized was the ‘title’ that someone had given you, who you ate with, or what you believed in from your God.
This, to say the least is a picture of breaking glass of the real picture of what God was designing the perfect picture. This broad synopsis of what God’s people, God’s Temple, and who God was, never really comes into focus until around the 1000 ad when Constantine set up shop for the christians in the buildings of choice and with any interference from anyone. This model then collides with Peter’s model a few hundred years down the road that just creates the ‘ugly’ as we have talked about.
My overall synopsis of where we have gotten confused and more so, just plain, not ‘seeing’ or ‘hearing’ what God thru the scriptures is telling us. It is getting past the words of scripture and ‘seeing’ what God is doing in this narrative collection of books and letters. This mistake has got to get us to re-look at the whole narrative of the bible in what the whole picture tells us.
Studying Paul of the N.T. has shed some light on the subject that we are on, that we might start our focus on. Paul was given the ‘spotlight’ for a reason in his walk to Damascus. It was a revelation of why Messiah was put into the scriptures, It was to bring back to Him the World of his creation. His after the fact of Jesus walk on the earth that he was proclaiming to make the world right to Him. His conquering of all the things that were making the world a captive of evil were now gone that the world may now be His.
Paul’s insight of the Jewish Old Covenant of what then God was doing with ‘a people'(His) was being carried over to the New Covenant but with the bindings off of his people that would make the real difference! The two covenants are really one, with the latter being freedom from man’s identity to God’s identity, where it was in the beginning.
The Eternal Purpose 