Tag-Archive for ◊ religious system ◊

09 Jan 2023 Mark (Program #9)

Mark (Program #9) – The Ways the Slave-Savior Carried Out His Gospel Service (4)

By the time Jesus was ready to begin His earthly ministry, a well established God ordained religious system was firmly entrenched in the land of Palestine.  But as the very God Himself who was the fulfillment and reality of all of the components of that established religion you would think that He would had taken a great care to approach the leaders of that religion and to bring them into His ministry.

But the record of the New Testament reveals quite the opposite.  The gospels, in particularly the gospel of Mark revealed that Jesus showed no interest in maintaining the old religion with its’ traditions and rituals.  Even those were among the ones that God had originally instituted such as the Sabbath.

Rather, Jesus  offended the religious community to the uttermost by breaking the Sabbath regulation repeatedly and revealing that as the Lord of the Sabbath He was well within His authority to use the Sabbath to care for His people instead of as a  religious fetter to bind them and even to kill them.

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13 May 2022 James (Program #10)

James (Program #10) – A Life Not Fully According to and for God’s New Testament Economy (1)

In Acts chapter 2, the apostle Peter spoke boldly to his Jewish kinsman, “be saved from this crooked generation.”   Some time later, the apostle  Paul reminded the Jewish believers that God had rescued them out of the present evil age.  The context of both passages makes it clear that these strong words, “the crooked generation” and “the present evil age” both refer to the religious system that had become modern Judaism at the time when God was ushering the New Testament economy.

Peter and Paul made it very clear God was calling people out of that religious system.  Yet in other New Testament passages, it is equally clear that the apostle  James was not only comfortable receiving the Jews into the fellowship of believers, he was even willing to accommodate the major practices of Judaism into the church.  Well what lessons can we glean from this confused situation today?

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