5.1 The Greatest Horror
In the Parable of the Tares, Jesus told us exactly what would happen in church history, that the enemy would plant tares among the wheat. Tares look just like wheat until the harvest. But at harvest time, as the sheaves of wheat bow to one another, the tares refuse. We have certainly known those who draw near, but who, in the press of walking together refuse to say, “I was wrong, please forgive me.” Their hearts are not yet won by Jesus.
Yet Jesus’ parable also describes what happened to our Bibles and then to all Christian thinking, things not true growing together with the truth of the Gospel so that God’s people do not know which is which. Rather, they call some Truths to be false, and some lies to be Truth.
Did the Serpent Speak the Truth? This is the golden cup John saw in his vision, a cup of mixture. And that is what throws people off. A cup of mixture must be FILLED with the Truth of the Gospel, yet equally filled with lies. Truth and lies are all mixed together in a distorted and disorganized way.
Out from the history of the first centuries of Christianity, one thing only could rule the thinking of Christians until now, and that is the first translation of the Bible into Latin, done by one man, Jerome, in the late AD 300’s. Jerome was a Latin theologian who participated in the merging of paganism with Christianity, and who held Christians in deep contempt. With others of his time, Jerome assumed that the serpent spoke the truth in the garden.
Lying about God. Satan’s words were not for Adam, but for Eve and for the Church, and thus the second greatest crime in human history was committed, this time against God our Father, the horrific, even terrifying accusation that God KNOWS evil. A tare seed is very small; it took only one to permeate everything in Christian thought with insidious roots of evil.
Consider the words God spoke in Genesis 3:22, “Now man has become as one who knows good and evil.” But if the devil had spoken the Truth, then man had just become “like God.” And so most every translator of Genesis 3:22 has blatantly lied about God with the insertion of two little words, “one of Us,” words that are NOT in the Hebrew.
A Tiny Little Bit of Leaven. A little leaven is enough to leaven the whole lump (1 Corinthians 5:6). – The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened (Matthew 13:33).
Two little words inserted into Genesis 3:22, two words NOT in the Hebrew, is all it took to fill the entirety of Christian thought with the accusation that God knows evil. The belief that “God knows evil” penetrates into and permeates every Christian thought concerning the Salvation of God, beyond comprehension. You can be sure of this, that little bit of leaven has utterly infected our minds as well. Two more little words needed to be altered to their opposites in the translation, however, for the leavening to be complete.
Establishing EVIL! It was clear to the Latin Christians that Jesus was NOT here, that He had vacated the premises. But that is NOT what the New Testament says. Over and over, the Gospel writers said, “Jesus already come now, Jesus present with us, God in us and we in God, inside the presence of God now.” All that was needed was to turn “present here now,” parousia, into – coming someday! And Jesus is driven far away, making DEATH to be the one that takes you to Him.
But if the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the only actual representation of the being and nature of God, then God and the universe must be evil and good forever. All that was needed was to turn a season of time, aeon, into “eternal – forever and ever.” – And evil endures forever.
A Greater Horror. Who says these things? God knows evil. Jesus is far away from you right now. Die, sinner, die. Salvation is only tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. BUT – evil is now and forever. A little leaven turned the entire carcass into putrid rot.
The horror of Adam’s cold rebellion in the garden is hard enough for us, but this “little” lie inside Christian thought, with its deep and penetrating roots, is a far greater horror. There is nothing more terrible than the Christian accusation that God “knows evil,” for what God “knows,” He must be. As Jesus said, “They hated Me without a cause.”
This is what they actually say! – “If you want to be like ‘God,’ then you’ll become like the devil.” And they mean it!!!
Lonely and Afraid. Let’s use one of the most critical passages of the Gospel as an example of how unbelief threw all Christians into such loss, Hebrews 10:19-22, or even the entire chapter.
I lived much of my Christian life frightened out of my wits, convinced that I “had to get it right,” convinced that I was “in trouble with God,” running back and forth between “sin in the flesh” and “Christ in me,” lonely and afraid. I loved the good side of God, but I was transfixed by His “evil side.” By my early thirties, my theology had coalesced into what I thought was my only hope, according to Hebrews 10:19, I must “enter into” God. Yet sin produced in me an unbelief that always kept me out. The great “struggle against sin” became the cross I could not carry until I fell face down in the cold darkness, without hope.
The Anger of God. By the spring of 2015, I had been writing about the ruling verses of the Bible for several years, yet I had not looked at the actual words and phrases, nor the actual Greek words that Paul, John, and the writer of Hebrews had used. When I looked at the Greek words of Hebrews 10:19-22, I saw that they did not agree with the English words I had known, yet I could not comprehend what the passage actually says.
In the spring of 2018, I began the exercise of translating the JSV, entirely as an amateur, using primarily Strong’s dictionary of the Greek words. I worked with Galatians first, and then Hebrews. When I did the first rough translation of Hebrews 10-13 from the actual Greek words, I became angry. My anger continues to this day, and it is the anger of God.
Mutilation. The Calvinist translators could NOT believe the words of the Gospel in Hebrews 10:1-23. Nowhere in the Bible did they alter the words away from the Gospel more than in these last chapters of Hebrews. This is why the Reformation gave the promise of life, but took everyone only into death – into the utterly false and anti-Gospel “struggle against sin.” Yes, they translated “hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience,” but even that was clouded. Then they twisted the words before it into “you must enter” (but you have not), and they twisted many words after into the EVIL consciousness of a “Christian struggle against sin,” back and forth without hope.
This mutilation of God’s words is the most distressing horror of wickedness I have known in my life.
They Lied to Me. Here is the essence of the lie. – “God has bound you to sin, Christian, and it’s your fault.” And this LIE has been wrapped by preachers and theologians into every Gospel truth.
Not long after Jesus had sealed me into knowing only God inside of me and I inside of God, I wrote the following words, with sobbing cries of anguish. – “They lied to me. They lied to me. When they told me that You were far away from me in my distress, when they told me that my mistakes meant I was in trouble with You, they lied to me. And all those years of heartache came from something NOT TRUE. You are so close; You are my life and my breath. You are bound to me in perfect Covenant Bond forever. We walk together in all ways as one.”
Breaking the Covenant. The things the serpent said to Eve in Genesis 3:1-5 were complete and utter nonsense, thought up on the spot, and containing no iota of reality. The greatest and most destructive tare inside Christianity is using Satan’s “definition” of God as if it is “the truth.” Thus seeing God through the devil is placed alongside of seeing God through Jesus, resulting in Christians spending their entire lives inside of utter confusion, though carried by Jesus.
Yet this tare, that God knows evil, sends out a second, even more awful root, a root that breaks the BLOOD Covenant God entered into with us. – You CANNOT be like Jesus here and now, for that would be the sin of Adam, a presumptuous reach for the “arrogant superiority” that is “God.”
Inside the Blood of Jesus. To be like God is to Love as God loves, that is, God Himself moving through us into the knowledge of all. Being just like the Lord Jesus Christ in all ways, of Truth, is our present Salvation, the wonder and Joy of our lives.
And what is the Way by which Jesus has already carried us into this full knowledge of God, into Complete Devotion? – Inside the Blood of Jesus consecrating for us a newly sacrificed as well as a living way through the veil, that is, through His flesh. – We possess now a bold proclamation of entrance already accomplished, with hearts already sprinkled from all consciousness of good versus evil and with our entire humanity washed utterly clean.