The Gospel in Prison and Dog Poop in the Fudge Brownies. 

     Countries need to have borders, they may even need a wall, example, the wall around Jerusalem to keep out invading armies, however, the Gospel was never meant to have walls and a ceiling imprisoning it.  May I remind you all that in AD 70, the temple was destroyed. GOD did that, GOD wanted his church to expand beyond one building, beyond one people, beyond one nation. So, what do we do? We built little temples again and called them "The House of the LORD."  Just like in the Old Testament days, (I hate using those words, Old Testament, as if it's obsolete, it isn't).  They built high places, that's what GOD called them.  Instead of going to Jerusalem like they were commanded, they built their own little temples and called them high places, because it was more convenient and closer to them.  How many of us search for a church close to us, because it's convenient.  I'm guilty as charged, we did.  Now, there's nothing close by that won't take seven hours for me to travel to go to, hence, PRAISE God for the Internet. I would love to go to a Hebrew Roots assembly, but there's none near here.  I can't eat brownies with dog poop, and I can't go to a Christian church.  

  The Christians' motto is "You need to go to church." Jesus never said, "Go to temple," he said, be the temple. If you ask anyone why do you go to church, you'll get one of two answers. They'll say either, "The Bible says never give up meeting together, whilst they use that Hebrews verse out of context,  or they'll say, "To get fed spiritually." You know what? That's like saying, I go to the grocery store to eat, and I eat it there, only.  The Hebrews 10:25 passage is translated by most church people as, "Go to church, sit as a spectator for 90 minutes, sing a few praise songs, (that's called the worship part of the service), and then be spoon-fed by the CEO of the corporation that operates under the tax-exempt status called evangelism. Believe what he says and do not disrespect your church elder by questioning him, especially if it has to do with the Old Testament.    As you can see, I'm not a fan of incorporated churches. I wrote about that in other blog posts.  

     Never give up meeting together means just that. There are many ways to meet these days and the plandemic devised to divide and conquer us has proven that to us.  We have Zoom, digital meetings, meetings and Bible Studies on any social media, and we actually can develop some very fulfilling and uplifting friendships there with authentic people.  I myself have a few that have helped me keep going over the years.  If you ask me, this plandemic and the persecution of the church was the best thing that could have happened to the church.  The church had gotten way to lazy, way too ignorant, and turned itself into sheeple instead of sheep.  (A term we patriots use as people who believe everything they hear on TV or in mainstream media news.)

     There is a serious problem in Christianity today, and I believe that GOD is going to do something about it. The people want to be spoon-fed the Bible once a week or so. We have a church filled with the Biblically illiterate. The research suggest that 90% of church attendees know only 10% of the Bible in context.  The church has been dumbed down. God is not going to fix the church, because the church cannot be fixed. The church doesn't want to be fixed, either. GOD never tried to fix his people who had given themselves over to man-made idols or mixed the world in with their religion. What GOD did was pull out a remnant and start over. Case in point, Noah, then Abram, then Moses, then Samuel who led Saul, until Saul turned back to the world's way of doing things. Then GOD entrusted his people under the care of David. Now that was a messed up king, but whose heart was fully devoted to the LORD. After David, Solomon led the people astray and the kingdom was divided. As time went on, His people delineated as they usually do.

     GOD pulled out a remnant again with Zerubbabel and Ezra and Nehemiah, and started all over again. Then Jesus and his disciples. Four hundred years ago, He pulled out another remnant and shipped them off to the New World. Well, it's time for a new remnant, and I do believe GOD is going to do it again. Luther's Reformation still had too much of the world mixed in with faith in GOD. How is GOD going to do it? Well, I have a pretty good idea, but I'll leave that up to GOD to show His remnant. I will tell you this one thing, His remnant will have a new kind of faith, a faith that is pure as gold refined.  I have this strange kind of faith that most people do not understand. I believe in GOD's ABSOLUTE Sovereignty over every human being. Yes, we have free will, but our free will does not "trump" GOD's sovereignty over His world and His plan for it. (The earth is the LORD's and everything on it and all who dwell in it. Psalm 24:1) GOD wants a pure faith, not one that mixes the world in it. He wants complete trust in Him in all we do in all our decisions, and to not mix the world's philosophies or practices in with our life with Him.

     A perfect example of mixing the world in with the purity of the Gospel is the hit sensation, "The Chosen."  It is a series written and produced by the son of Jerry Jenkins of the "Left Behind" series of books, a huge hit with the contemporary church in the 90's.  I myself was taken in by those books, also.  I'm not here to take them apart, but I wish I had used better discernment, but I was still a baby, being bottle-fed the Gospel back then.  A decade or two of life in the fiery furnace of affliction has given me a college education in discernment and serious Bible Study.  For example, I watched the new "Chosen" series all the way up to the second season.  When I had enough fudge brownies, I realized that maybe it wasn't all pure chocolate in this dessert-type in dramatic form.  The part that lost me and when I decided to never watch it again was in  episode 3 of season 2, where Jesus is "rehearsing" his Sermon on the Mount speech, walking around, anxiously pacing throughout the night before he was to give it, as if he was nervous or applying for a job as a senior pastor.   It showed him walking around at night practicing and trying to decide what to say. I'm sorry, but Jesus didn't rehearse, nor did he have to take an entire evening before trying to decide what to include and what to edit out of his sermon the next day. 

     The Spirit spoke through Jesus off cuff because GOD doesn't "rehearse." This series makes Jesus way too human and way too less Divine. He almost has some faults in the series. It's a fictional account of the disciples life walking with Yeshua, because that is what they called him, but it takes poetic license to a whole new level of offense. That's my humble opinion. The thing that really got me to stand up and take notice was its popularity among the mainstream media and Hollywood types.  People, if the Atlantic Journal loves something, you know it's time to maybe take a second look with exegetical eyes on a particular Bible series.  Like most, I was captured by my curiosity and the drama between Mary and Yeshua when he delivered her of her demons and quoted her long past deceased father, dropping her to her knees. Who doesn't love a good tear-jerker, I know, right? So, I continued to watch. It was entertaining at first, but isn't that how the devil gets us with the counterfeit? Just enough chocolate fudge to make the brownies with dog poop baked in them to look edible?

     In other words, people, the church today, for the most part, mixes dirt in with the brownie mix, (the devil adds the dog poop), bakes it and then tells us to eat it. God wants to give us fudge covered brownies, nothing but pure chocolate, the sweetened mixed in with the unsweetened kind, because people, life is hard and some times it ain't that sweet.  I've gone KETO, and instead of giving up chocolate, I'm required to eat special dark chocolate, no less than 85%.  Isn't that ironic? No milk chocolate for me drowning in sugar and fake stuff.  The Bible is like that, it's unsweetened, the bitter and the good.   The Bible itself is dramatic enough, the Gospel is powerful enough with enough healing in it by the power of the GOD, that we don't need to take 1st century innocent and ignorant fisherman, and make them 21st century comedic actors.