good church test

The cross of the Cross:  The “Good Church” Test

“His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry” (Mt.19:10).

“Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will condemn” (Heb. 13:4).

“Whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery” (Mt. 5:32).

 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither…adulterers” (1 Cor. 6:9).

“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Prov. 14:12).

“Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to the gravity of the rupture: the remarried spouse is then in a situation of public and permanent adultery:  If a husband, separated from his wife, approaches another woman, he is an adulterer because he makes that woman commit adultery, and the woman who lives with him is an adulteress, because she has drawn another's husband to herself (Vatican Catechism).

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I have yet to meet a single divorced man who was willing to go back to his wife.  No, they have the right to start over with a "godly wife."  Which means they all suffer from Philip of Hesse Syndrome: they cannot live within the bounds of marriage.  The multitude will brave the Lake of Fire to gratify their lusts,  certain that God cannot condemn everyone.  And God is not the God of misery, but the God of second-chances.  Besides, what's done is done, and a Christian is not under Law but under grace.  Why would the 7th Commandment be any different? Why would a Christian not also be free from the Jewish 7th Commandment, which was given under the dispensation of "salvation by good works?"  Jesus came because the Law turned out to be useless, the greatest flop in history, because no one could keep it, and since "the dispensation of grace," no one has to.  "Sin all the more boldly, then," Luther cried.  Just keep looking to Jesus to save you "in" your sins.  All else is self righteous hypocrisy.  And nothing is more hypocritical and Cross-denying than the pretense of "taking up the cross."  As long as Sodom keeps shouting "by faith alone" they are saved "in" their sins, with or without repentance, for repentance is but the latest hypocrisy of self righteousness, all of which are but "filthy rags."  Calvin would come out at the same end by writing Sodomites a thousand and one "exceptions" to keep his seat at Herod's table, "the nursing father" of the Temple,  a pious magistrate of their Lord's Political whom God ordained to protect the Church against Antichrist.  

“You have to come to our church (Apostolic Lutheran),” he demanded of me. “Our preachers are all chosen men, drafted to preach,” he boasted.  In other words, no hirelings.   “Does your church excommunicate adulterers," I asked?  “What!” he cried in indignation.  “What kind of church does not excommunicate adulterers?” “You don’t have any divorced-remarried in your church then,” I said.  His countenance fell,  and he said in a dull voice,  “We do,  but God has forgiven them.”  “Of what,” I asked?  “Of adultery, when did they commit adultery, did they commit adultery once, and when did they no longer commit adultery?”  “I have to go,”  he cried.  That was the end of “the Good Church.” 

But these Good Churches are everywhere.  They all hate divorce.  And no one hates divorce more vehemently than their preacher.  “I hate putting away, God said.  That’s what he always says.  Hates it, simply hates it. So how can you say that he is not against divorce?"  But then you watch them get together with divorced-remarrieds and it's “Jesus this and Jesus that.”  Divorce will visit them in their children and grandchildren.  But they would shudder to get together with real adulterers.  The children look on, and, with unbelievers, think, "The trumpet has an uncertain sound." "The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." “Are they committing adultery,” you ask?  “So you’re looking for the perfect church,” they usually cry.  In other words,  adulterers need not be excommunicated.  “No,” they reply, “adulterers must be excommunicated.”  Which means that they think Jesus uttered the most reckless and irresponsible statement in History when he put the wronged remarried woman in the same condemnation as Hugh Hefner.  This is the black eye of the Gospels.  Its cruelty and impossibility makes the Law of Moses look tame and doable.  For this “can never be tried.”  Until Luther and Calvin you had no choice,  because the only door out opened straight into Hell, “for whoremongers and adulterers God will condemn.”    But they secretly tell themselves that Jesus could not possibly have meant "adultery" here,  for it would turn the entire doctrine of justification by faith upside down, and put remarrieds into the same boat as Hugh Hefner--but this is what the Apostles thought they heard.  And Jesus confirmed their worst nightmares.  It stands as the biggest contradiction in all of Scripture, and has mired the Church in quicksand ever since Luther and Calvin tunneled through and under it to make sense of it.  Worse, Jesus utters the sentence even as He says her husband "causeth her to commit adultery."  "Causeth?"  She was forced into something against her will? And yet she is made to stand next to Hugh Hefner on Judgment Day.  This is what makes the Apostles tear their hair out.  For 1500 years Christians tore their hair out, because they understood Jesus to say that the only door out of unbearable marriage opens into Hell.  

Why did he become afraid so suddenly?  Read above.  That's what he heard in the background.  The war zone of marriage carnage.  He went from “Good Church” to “Joshua, get off your face.  There is sin in the camp.”  “Leave your gift at the altar,” Jesus told the sinner, “and go first….”  Imagine what he would have said about an adulterer.  But this Apostolic Lutheran (they boast of  being The One True Church in a sea of apostasy) now came face to face with adultery in his church.   Before, he was aghast at the notion of praying and fellowshipping with adulterers.  Now he was agitated by the appearance of self-deception and hypocrisy.  He knows that pagans know what Jesus said about adultery,  and understood that his testimony would wilt under pagan scrutiny:  obviously, he doesn’t practice what Jesus preached.  Which means he believes that Jesus misspoke, or that He made the most reckless and consequential error of judgment in History.    The notion that the wronged woman should now receive the same judgment as Hugh Hefner could not be true. Jesus made a serious error of judgment here,  and the Church is left to flounder to the end of time because of it.  The Apostolic Lutheran would not tell you that God has forgiven the adulterer in his church who keeps showing up with his mistresses.  That, now, is adultery.  The Hugh Hefner type.  But how could this be adultery?  She got remarried in order not to commit adultery.  And how could the innocent man she married now be accused of  7th Commandment adultery?  Couldn't Jesus have dealt with this by putting it into an understandable category?  "You did wrong in remarrying,  confess that and go on?"  But adultery?  

Marriage is not just another human act to be done, undone, improvised,  or simply ignored.  It's all that stands between adultery and Hell.  The Apostles understood this.  What they quarreled with was that marriage could not be expanded to accommodate those that "don't work out"--and second chances.  Herod and Hefner would "second chance" every week.  Look long and hard at the Ten Commandments,  God says, because you'll see them again on Judgment Day,  "for whoremongers and adulterers God will judge." Herod was willing to barter half his kingdom to gratify his lusts,  and Herodias even more when she chose instead the head of the preacher.  If men kill to commit adultery, they will also redefine marriage and adultery until they are one and the same.  It's what you see around you.  Divorce-remarriage has become a rite of passage.  It carries no stigma whatsoever.  So what's left of marriage?  It's what's left of the 7th Commandment. Luther and Calvin thought they but opened  the door a crack.  They created a galactic hole.  This is why God hung the damnation of Hell over the 7th Commandment, knowing that Herod, Hefner, and Philip of Hesse would sell their souls to gratify their lusts.  If there is a scare tactic in the Bible, here it is.   Jesus reiterates the 7th Commandment in all its severity.  This remarried woman was not Hugh Hefner.  Yet because she remains married to the person who divorced her, her remarriage makes her an adulteress.  If He cannot not make an exception of an innocent woman who was "caused to commit adultery," then "it is better not to marry," the  Apostles shuddered.    Look at the marriage carnage around you, the handiwork of Luther and Calvin's tunneling in and through this "impossible" teaching of Christ.  Jesus saw doctors mutilating children on the horizon, for Sodom hitched a ride on the back of Luther-Calvin adultery.  The shortsighted Apostles saw only the temporary afflictions of the flesh.  They were still dreaming of a Utopia which Christ will usher in.  Why this needless "taking up of the cross?"  But for 1500 years,  the Church held her ground:  the only way out of unbearable marriage is into Hell.  "For whoremongers and adulterers, God will condemn,"  

It’s not hard to see how you could get to “remarried adultery” if someone uses divorce-remarriage-divorce-remarriage-divorce-remarriage as a way to escape the severity of the 7th Commandment and social stigma: adultery kept legal and socially acceptable with Pharisaical tricks.  But this woman did not want divorce, and, once divorced, would have fallen upon certain hardship by herself.  How then can Jesus put her in the same lot as a lecher like Hugh Hefner?  What if she has children to support? And once remarried,  she is the furthest removed from someone like Hugh Hefner.  And yet there she stands on the Day of Judgment: right next to Hugh Hefner.  This is what the Apostles thought they heard,  and were confirmed in their worst nightmare. This is dire.  But look at  the landscape around you and you’ll see the handiwork of Luther and Calvin: the mutilation of children is but the latest of what was once marriage until Luther and Calvin adjusted it to accommodate the filth of their politicians. The Apostles saw miserable marriage.  Jesus  saw these mutilated children.  They are the handiwork of Luther and Cavin.  Sodom merely hitched a ride on the back of Protestant adultery.  The parents sowed to the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind in this Molech.     

Pagans are not interested in tapes, books, and apologetics.  They understand hucksterism when they hear it.  “Did Jesus misspeak,” they ask?  Everyone has heard of Luther's reply to Philip of Hesse.  If you find the Straitgate too narrow, grace allows you to waltz into heaven on Broadway.  Pagans (wink, wink) know what this is.  All religions do this.  As the Liberals used to say,  "Luther didn’t reject the Pope to make the Bible into a paper pope.  To say the Bible has no errors is to deify it: idolatry."  Would it matter if Jesus misspoke?  Look at the marriage carnage around you.  Testimony that the Protestant church thinks Jesus misspoke.  In 500 years, they have not found one divorce-remarriage that they called adultery.  But they all vehemently hate divorce.  Hate it, simply hate it.  They hate it as much as they hate violence, because  the 2nd Amendment is the only Commandment they have left.  

The Disciples thought they heard Jesus misspeak when He sharpened the 7th Commandment to include remarriage, and in so doing put the wronged remarried woman in Matthew 5 in the same category as Hugh Hefner.  Jesus doubles down and confirms the Apostles' worst fears when He sharpens His doctrine.  There is only one way out of a nightmare marriage–into the Lake of Fire.  This was the conclusion of the Church until Luther and Calvin, in their pact with Caesar, destroyed the 7th Commandment to once again make room for the political bedroom in the Church.  Until Luther and Calvin’s pact with Cain-Caesar, the only way out of marriage was into Hell.  Marriage,  grounded in Creation, underwritten by the 7th Commandment,  was restored to the Creation original by Jesus, and fortified further by the prohibition of remarriage.   For the Apostles this was jumping from the frying pan into the fire.  How could there be no way out of what people universally understood to be worse than a death sentence: the endless misery of unbearable marriage.  The record of history is full of them.  Here’s one: “Daniels (British writer) has said that he never heard a single word pass between his parents in his presence during the 18 years he lived in their household and that the only exchange he ever heard at all was his mother’s late-night exclamation, ‘You’re a wicked, wicked man.’” Neither of them committed adultery. They stayed together for his sake. Before Luther and Calvin you stayed married because Hell was the only way out. This was crystal clear to everyone until the Luther-Calvin pact with Cain-Caesar.  “You have nothing to fear,” Luther told Philip of Hesse.  “You’re not saved by enduring a miserable marriage.  That would be work’s salvation.  Sin boldly to prove to the world that you believe in salvation by faith alone.”  Pagans like Hugh Hefner commit adultery because they are idolaters like the Papists.  You worship the true God because you have the right doctrine, and believe that God came to bring you the Good News.  The Good News is that Jesus accepts Sodom as it is,  if they will but confess that they have been saved "in" their sins.  You are not saved by staying in a miserable marriage, so what’s the point of staying in it?  

Jesus’ words scared the Apostles out of their wits: He slammed the door shut on remarriage by calling it adultery.  So? Jesus did away with the Law, and adultery is the 7th Commandment.  But a Christian is not under any of the Commandments.  In fact Jesus came to free sinners from the Law.  So why would the notion of “remarried adultery” cause such a reaction?  Why did Jesus put the remarried woman under the Law again? Who cares, as long as she is saved?  And what if there are children as in the days of Ezra.  Rest assured,  the Apostles saw nothing but nightmares on the horizon.  But their reaction is as puzzling as Jesus's draconian interpretation of the 7th Commandment.  Why such a reaction when Jesus was merely warning against "easy divorce?"  Take any year since Luther and Calvin and see if anything they taught about divorce would cause the Apostles to raise as much as an eyebrow. How would you account for the difference between now and then?  The reaction today is entirely in the opposite direction.  You will get the response of Herodias,  for this is the rawest nerve in all of Christiandom.  Until it is dealt with,  the heavens will remain as brass.  "Joshua get off your face, there is sin in the camp."    

Until Luther and Calvin, if on Judgment Day God draws you up on the 7th Commandment, they will, as with Haman, “cover your face.”  This is what’s behind the Catholic doctrine of Extreme Unction: you must not die with unrepented sin.  All that becomes rubbish under the new formulas:  Jesus did not come to impose a new Law,  Jesus saves you in your sins, “taking up the cross” is half-Christian-half Jew Book of James rubbish, repentance is optional, to even speak of “good works'' is to deny grace, etc.  To even speak of repentance is to add something to faith: work’s religion.  Jesus’ teaching on marriage thus becomes optional like all other good works. To say that you could forfeit heaven by remarrying would mean that “not remarrying” helped save you.  How then can you pretend to believe that you are saved by faith alone?  In short, Jesus' “taking up the cross” was seen as a direct contradiction of “salvation by the Cross.”  Jesus should have left the explaining to Paul.  He, alone, got it right.  

A thousand years earlier, Augustine told the Emperor to move against the “believers only” church of the Donatists in North Africa.  These Christians saw what happened when Constantine turned pagan temples into churches, and required pagans to become members.  The Donatists rejected the “smooth” preachers of the imperial court.  You can’t allow this, Augustine told the Emperor, because the Church is One.  What are they saying, that they are the true church and the church of the Emperor is not? Is the Emperor then a pagan?  Augustine came to see the Holy Roman empire as the Kingdom of God on earth.  But the Donatist zeal for purity would reduce the Church to a sectarian remnant, leaving the Devil with the lion’s share.  This, in his view, amounted to a triumph of the Devil over God.  No, the Holy Roman Empire was now the Church.  God must have the lion's share.  The Devil must not possess Broadway.  Let his share be no more than a remnant of humanity 

Luther and Calvin were of the same opinion.  Why would God settle for a small sect when He could have Broadway?  They too now had a seat at the king’s table.  What were the Anabaptists saying, “That the king was not a Christian?”  But this was treason.  They would excommunicate the king himself?  And how do you do that? How do you kick Herod of of the Herodian Temple without ending up like John the Baptist?  

Luther and Calvin were not about to become John the Baptists.  They enjoyed life among the 1 Percent.  And they would have suffered the same fate as Jacob Hutter had they not made a pact with Protestant princes.   The Pope was ready to move against heretics with the Holy Inquisition founded on Augustine. Without political protection,  this would have meant certain death for Luther and Calvin.  They would have ended up burned at the stake like Jacob Hutter, who had only the patronage of Abel: God. They saw no need to become martyrs.  They solved the problem of Abel by putting themselves under the umbrella of Cain-Caesar.  The price was high:  The had to pimp marriage, and promote war, filling the Church with adultery and the centuries with rivers of blood (the blood of their children which they had to offer as cannon fodder). For “not knowing the time of their visitation,” when they killed the peacemakers, they became the architects of the foulest crimes in the history of mankind:  slavery (Scottish Presbyterian), the Holocaust (Lutheran), and Apartheid (Dutch Reformed) are the offspring of the followers of Luther and Calvin.  This is why there is no "back to Luther and Calvin" movement among imploding Protestantism.  Their leaders have become as toxic as the statues of Generals Lee and Jackson, who they will now join on the dunghills of history.  

Finally:

1. See if you can come up with a clear answer of what the sin of remarriage adultery is: when does the adultery occur,  when does it end?

2. Is remarried adultery the same as Hugh Hefner 7th Commandment law breaking?

3. Can remarried adulterers be saved as long as they continue in remarried adultery?  How? Can Hugh Hefner be saved as long as he continues in adultery.  What's the difference?

4. Can you "break bread" with a remarried adulterer?  Is there such a thing as a remarried adulterer?  How would you tell him to repent?  Does he even need to repent?  What would he have to do to become a member of the church?

5.  Can remarried adulterers be "forgiven" (Apostolic Lutheran) so that they can remain members of the church.  What process would you have them go through to be forgiven.  Again what precisely is the sin for which they need forgiveness? Can you say precisely what the sin is here?  Or is it a combination of sins?  When does it become what Jesus calls adultery,  and when does it cease to be what Jesus calls adultery?  Again is this "adultery", 7th Commandment breaking adultery?  When does it cease to be such?  Upon a confession?  What would they have to confess?  What is the sin here?  For where no sin is there need be no confession.  At which point can you again break bread with those Jesus calls adulterers?  What would they have to do?  Can an adulterer be saved?  How?  Now look at the "Good Churches" around you and ask if the remarried are really what Jesus calls adulterers.

6. If you can come up with an answer that would give relief to the Apostles' worst nightmare, you would become world famous overnight.  German Catholics would make you a billionaire, if you so wished.  All you have to do is get up in front of the church and say with the Apostolic Lutheran "you are forgiven" in your adulterous remarriage.  Note that no matter how hard you press the Apostolic Lutherans, they refuse to say that their remarried adultery is no longer not remarried adultery.  But you would have to say that to the Germans. Tens of thousands of them are afraid to take communion because of what you read above.  The Pope says they're "in a continuing and perpetual state of adultery."  They have cried to the Pope endlessly to change the doctrine and give them relief (he thinks Jesus was but a good man and that there is no Hell), to no avail.  The Vatican will make you a billionaire if you can provide an answer with conviction.  The Baptist would fly you from church to church on a private jet if you could remove "the black eye" of the Gospel, which has the Church hopelessly mired in quicksand.  All you need do is to take away the Apostles' fear.  You need to show from the Scripture that what Jesus calls adultery can now be turned into non-adultery.  "Are the forgiven still committing adultery," I asked the Apostolic Lutheran?  "I have to go," he cried with a loudcry voice.  And off he went.  This will give Catholics in Germany no relief.  Baptists try not to think about it.  Unbelievers make sure  they do.

7.  What matters is that they are saved.  They will suffer loss when Jesus hands out rewards, and they cannot be church elders or deacons. Or they were not saved when they divorced-remarried.  Or as someone said to me, "I'm frustrated,  I need to get married and the Bible says I can't."  Divorce-remarriage doesn't seem wrong.  The collapse of marriage into remarriage is so pervasive that God will have no choice but accept the reality.  If enough people do it, He will have to cut His losses lest the Devil end up with the lion's chare, etc., etc.  

(Shofholtn on stubble today--my favorite time of the year--see pic below).   Raw northwestern winds, so I'm sitting in my trusty 1989 Nissan.  I'll post pic of what's left of soybean field once combine is done.  Sheep pick up every bean left on the ground, and with 40% protein, they are rib fattening-one here, one there, they add up.  I have to be with them here constantly as this are is infested with coyotes, who have no fear even in the daytime.  So I let them feed for two0 hours in the morning and two in the evening.  Free food.  Blessing upon the kind neighbor who lets me graze the "corners of the field" which God ordained for the poor.  Many small farmers here who are hemmed in by big farmers who would sooner burn "the corners" then let their poor neighbors "glean" them.  Out of sheer malice and envy.  Every time I hear of that I ask God to "rise up  to the judgment which Thou hast ordained."  God ordained "the corners" for the poor, and they who hoard even what they themselves cannot use are bringing the wrath of God upon themselves.