7.3 Sons of Perdition
© 2019 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
In His prayer in John 17, Jesus called Judas Iscariot a “son of perdition,” “perdition” meaning loss, confusion, and ruin.
It is no light thing to call anyone a “son of perdition,” and in doing so, we continue to see God’s final judgment of all humans and angels as expressed by Paul, that all will yield their hearts to the kindness and humility of the Lord Jesus. Yet what else can we say of those who deliberately altered the words written by the apostles in order to force their own guilt-stricken and pagan ideas upon those words? And what can we say of translators of the Bible today, following this same path, who so alter the words by these required but horrific definitions, that for us to believe what God actually says is considered “heresy?”
God All inside of All. The early church including the first “church fathers” into the AD 200’s, believed that a world of life would swallow up the world of death brought upon all things by Adam. They understood that the New Testament term, “hades,” meant that God had provided a place of cleansing for a period of time, after which Paul’s clear end of all things – God as all inside of all, would become the reality known by all. They understood that every knee would bow, and every tongue speak Christ as Lord, not in forced pretending, but out of a genuine response of thanksgiving that God is true and good.
But through the decades, even while the church was growing rapidly because of outpoured love from the Jesus of their hearts, persecution and death continued to wreak havoc on Christian thinking.
The Triumph of Guilt. And in the Latin west, Roman leaders of the church, coming out of a non-Jewish, non-Greek world view, began to assert a different way of thinking into “Christian theology.”
When you read the writings of church leaders such as Tertullian, Jerome, and even Augustine, it is evident that they neither understood Paul’s gospel of Christ our life, nor did they even recognize the power and reach of the Atonement. Some of these men were so wracked with guilt over the sins of their youth, even decades after they had become “Christians,” that the fires of their refusal to accept one sacrifice for sins forever twisted their entire conception of God. These men placed their human feelings and judgments above the word God speaks, exalting the flesh against a “faraway” Savior.
A Forever “Death.” Responding as to a siren’s call, these men harkened back to the words of the serpent in the garden and, out from their mixed pagan/Christian mindset, embraced the conviction that the serpent spoke the truth, that God knows good and evil and that any human wanting to be like God was “in rebellion.” Except, a “God” who knows good and evil is an arrogant “God,” one who thinks more highly of himself than of anyone else. And a “God” who knows good and evil must have brought forth a universe that is defined entirely by good versus evil and will be split forever between all-good and all-evil.
They turned Adam’s world of death into that which would continue forever, just as God had warned against at the end of Genesis 3 – a death that “lives forever.”
Five Men. We are looking at five men, then, across the span of this darkest of centuries, from AD 311 to 410, Constantine, Athanasius, “Pope” Damasus I, Jerome, and Augustine, five men who changed the definitions of everything inside of the Christian mind, effectively blocking all Christians from Christ here and now, Personal inside of us.
But of these five, Augustine, the one who did the most to turn the way before God into the wrong direction from then until now, was truly born again, a man who knew and loved Jesus, a true brother in the Lord – that’s why his turning has been so effective. We can say with some certainty, however, that neither Constantine nor Damasus nor Jerome ever knew the Lord or were even born again. Yet you will find their poison inside Christian’s mind keeping him from knowing Jesus as He is.
Horrific Changes. Constantine changed the definition of the cross of Christ from our entrance into all the joy of our Salvation and our protection from all sin and death – into – a death that never ends, a barrier keeping us out of the knowledge of God.
Athanasius gave Constantine the definition of “Christ” that he needed to command the entire church, an unreachable super-“Christ” far above mankind, who, though called “God,” was nonetheless cast as an irrelevant humanoid demigod in the imagination, looking far more like Constantine's radiance than a Man on His face in the mud under a cross He cannot carry.
Damasus, after murdering his opponent to become “Pope,” then took all Egyptian and Roman paganism and merged it with “Christianity” to become Roman Catholicism. The “steeple” of Egyptian paganism over the entrance of every church signifies this marriage continuing in Christian’s mind.
Imposing Paganism. In order to understand the opposition against the Lord Jesus Christ going on inside of Christian’s mind, however, we must understand more fully the thread and weave of mental anguish cast by two men in particular, Jerome and Augustine.
Jerome translated the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament into Latin, giving us “the Bible” as would be known from then until now. Jerome was a bitter man who despised all those other “fleshy” Christians, a man wracked with guilt, a man who exalted his own flesh as “the great enemy,” keeping himself “faraway” from God. And in translating the Bible into Latin, Jerome imposed his own Latin pagan images upon the Hebrew and Greek imagery in which the Bible was written. Jerome imposed a “God” of good and evil upon the very words of the Bible.
A False Forever. The crazy thing is that he found that corrupting the words of the Bible was a fairly easy thing to do, all he had to do was change the meanings of just a handful of words. Jerome began his treachery by inserting “of Us” into Genesis 3:22, man has become like one OF US, knowing good and evil, two words that are not in the Hebrew. By that one sleight of hand, all students of the Bible from then until now have assumed as absolute that the serpent spoke the truth, that everything must be defined first by the serpent’s words.
But how could he turn the Salvation of God into a universe of death continuing forever in the minds of all Christians? Jerome took one Greek word, aeon, meaning a period of time or an “age,” and falsely translated it into the Latin eternal, meaning forever and ever.
Pagan Punishment. In the minds of New Testament Christians, God as a consuming fire meant that God-Love would swallow up all death into a universe of life forever. By mistranslating one obscure Greek word, Jerome was able to impose his own image of guilt and anguish over unresolved sin, the torments of pagan “punishment” upon God-fire, turning Love into cruelty forever and ever.
Jerome was obsessed with the poet Virgil’s expressions of pagan guilt and torment above any knowledge of the love and life of God. And his motivation was to impose his own contempt for God’s people as the definition of the universe “forever.” In this way, John’s cryptic vision, unknown to anyone in the first century church, as it has been falsely construed, became the rule that cast down Paul’s gospel in the Christian mind.
Driving Jesus Away. But more was needed. It was essential to the serpent to ensure that any idea of a Jesus here and now, of a God who lives inside of us and we inside of Him was obscured and masked over even in the words of the Bible. And especially, the dangerous declarations of Hebrews 10, of one sacrifice for sins forever resulting in our bold entrance into all the fullness of God with no consciousness of sins, must be covered over with a false translation turning the Christian life into an unending Jerome-like “struggle against sin.”
All that was needed to effect this horrific outrage against the Jesus who reigns in our hearts was to alter one other little Greek word, parousia, the presence of Jesus now with us, into a faraway Jesus “coming” someday.
False Rules of Translation. We cannot blame Luther and Tyndale, the first to bring the Bible into the common tongues of the people, because they did not actually know New Testament Greek and thus relied too heavily on Jerome’s Latin translation.
When you look at the definitions imposed on New Testament words by modern translators, however, you find a continuing violation of all rules of translation. Typically, a translator defines any word according to the author’s meaning by considering context clues. Bible translators do not do that, however. Rather, they use Nicene definitions, based on the serpent’s words in the garden, to impose a pre-conceived “orthodox” definition onto every word in the Bible, even against what God actually says or against the clear meaning of the context.
Before You Read the Bible! And the man responsible for that continuing twist in the minds of all Christians from then until now, as they read their Bibles, is Augustine. Augustine took the first four words of the serpent in the garden, “Did God indeed say,” and made that definition to be the meaning of “every word God speaks.”
From AD 400 until around 1700, Augustine was the most frequently read author in the Christian world. If you were to peruse his text, On Christian Doctrine, you would find the foundational thinking so familiar to all Christians from Eastern Orthodox to deeper truth and everything in-between. But Augustine, knowing the outrage and excessiveness of Paul’s gospel, erected an absolute barrier before every Bible reader.
Nicene Theology First. In his opening lines, Augustine made the law of Bible reading clear for every future Bible reader, a law that none could violate without going mad.
He began his approach to the Bible by stating that we must have a pre-understanding before we can know what God means by what He says. Of course, we know this is true. Before reading any word God speaks, we must know that Jesus IS every word God speaks, that the words of Jesus are Spirit and Life, and that we receive every word God speaks through “Let it be to me.”
That is NOT what Augustine said. “Here is Nicene theology,” he said in so many words, “and you will not read one word in the Bible before having this way of thinking clamped upon your intellect. God’s word is only ideas for your mind.”
The Tares with the Wheat. “Did God indeed say?” Let’s have the correct mental ideas before we allow any word God speaks entrance into us.
And so it has been from then until now in all Bible reading and translation. Correct ideas first – the word God speaks a distant second – Jesus Himself faraway, definitely not the all-speaking of God, sustaining us by every Word that He is. From then until now Christians have read the ten most important verses in the Bible without even noticing their existence.
As Jesus warned, inside His field, the Christian church through the centuries, the tares of serpent thinking would grow side by side with the wheat of His good speaking, a false “Christ” of the intellect alongside the Jesus of our hearts.