Posted on 04/11/2013 11:16:18 PM PDT by DouglasKC
Speaking of counterfeits ...
4 posted on 4/12/2013 12:20:28 AM by Springfield Reformer (Winston Churchill: No Peace Till Victory!)
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To: Springfield Reformer; All
I would recommend everyone read this link by CARM before getting too involved with this thread. You may even want to look up the UCG’s website.
Evidently, they teach that God the Son and God the Father are two separate gods, who are “one God” by being in the “Family of God.” Human beings can partake of divinity by joining the “family of God,” thus becoming God by their definition.
They claim the Holy Spirit is not a Person, but is a force. And this force they possess, which they only possess, because of their keeping the dietary, festival and other Old Testament ordinances. In order to even receive the Holy Spirit, you must have someone from the UCG lay hands and pray over you. Thus, no Christian has the Holy Spirit, since He is in the sole possession of the true church of God on Earth (the UCG).
They also claim there is salvation after death, and deny the eternal torment of the damned.
I’m sure it gets worse, but that’s just a quick overview.
No, aramaic was at no time a spoken language in Judea.
Your position as a part of Mystery Babylon from being a catholic must be impeding your understanding.
Yeshua has called you out of that “church,” and into his.
Perhaps we operate in different realities.
Peace be with you
From the website:
The United Church of God is a non-Christian cult that denies the Trinity, the true divinity of Christ, and requires both baptism and obedience to the commandments to be saved. It teaches that there is a "God family" of which we can become members through keeping the Law.
The United Church of God is a non-Christian cult
They start off with a lie (non-Christian) and a pejorative use of "cult". If they wanted to be honest they could have said "non-traditional" or "unorthodox" Christian.
that denies the Trinity, the true divinity of Christ,
UCG doesn't embrace the trinity doctrine because the trinity doctrine is not biblical...it's an evolved doctrine that didn't become an official part of church teaching until 3 centuries after the death of Christ. The second part implies that UCG denies the true divinity of Christ. This is either a deliberate lie or an error of massive proportion. UCG believes completely and fully in the true divinity of Christ.
and requires both baptism and obedience to the commandments to be saved.
A lie or half truth at best. The only thing "required" to be saved is the grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Salvation is a free gift but obedience is expected in return.
Heb 5:8 though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.
Heb 5:9 And having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.
It teaches that there is a "God family" of which we can become members through keeping the Law.
Again, a deliberate lie or outright misrepresentation. We are children of God...God family is a way of describing our relationship with our father in heaven. We don't become children by "keeping the law". We become children through the grace of God through Christ...but again obedience to the Lord is expected of his people.
In short, this analysis seems to take the position of the counterfeit church described in the article. The main thrust of this false church is that the law of God is somehow "bad" and to be avoided and that obedience to the Lord is something that Christians shouldn't practice.
Thanks for giving me the chance to set the record straight. Some Christians would repudiate liars even if they agree with the sentiment of the lies. Others will condone them.
If anyone likes the content of this article there are plenty of free booklets available for download in a variety of formats. Downloading requires no names, addresses or other information.
For fundamental beliefs read:
Also see: This is United Church of God
......”It’s all entertainment to me.. ....
Seems to be like Punch and Judy.. good clean fun”.......
There are participants... and then there are spectators when peoples very life are at stake... you’ve made your position quite clear.
......”fully examine the beliefs and teachings”....
One doesn’t have to ‘fully examine’ a counterfeit when they are well familiar with the truth.
Like Santa Claus? :-)
*
I believe the topic was ‘counterfeit Christianity....not Santa Clause.
The question, I believe, was about truth. My point was that Santa Claus is intricately linked with Christmas. There is no truth in Santa Claus yet within Christianity millions embrace and teach Santa Claus to their kids. That is part of the counterfeit.
UK: Leading black Pentecostal pastor backs equal marriage for same-sex couples
Presbyterian Church (USA) Uses Islamists for 'Interfaith' Study
That is a great selling point for sola scriptura
. It can be use to invent a wide variety of religions.
I completely agree.
But, it's all based on the Bible. Oh dear; what is to be done?
Well...For eons ‘counterfeit’ religions, such as (Jehovah Witness and others) have attempted to ‘bait and switch’ people by using various distractions, ( such as santa clause), to “soften up” individuals by causing them to question and doubt what they believe and celebrate as Holidays, an attempt ‘to create false guilt’ ....it's a well known tactic...just exactly as satan did in the Garden.
It's well known that Christmas is a celebration of Christ's birth throughout the season, regardless of the “game” played of Santa Clause, Flying Reindeer etc. So of course there's a link....fairy tales engage children at this time of year...fun for all! Yet Children sing of the “Baby Jesus” , role play on stages throughout our country his birth. It's a wonderful season for all...
So the Santa Clause issue is mute.....knit picking about it is a waste of time and effort for the truth of Christmas as Christ's Birth remains central for Christians.
Christ is central to Christmas and why the Holiday is Celebrated by Christians...
Not really. Large chunks of the Bible have to be systematically ignored to produce the void necessary to insert the Armstrongisms. Keep in mind that every one of these -isms came into being through some strong central authority figure, a mini-pope if you will. It is my experience that apart from Jesus Himself, every such group has the capacity to distort the faith once delivered to the saints. God is infallible, but humans aren't. Just the way it is. And I know this raises a whole set of challenges, and I don't really want to go over what has been gone over so many times before, by better people than me. I just think that in the end its a waste of time in theological debates to get caught up in any fallible human authority, as if either side of this debate had a monopoly on the weaknesses of being human in a fallen world. Peace, SR
Pulease. Error was creeping into the church right away in Paul’s day. The wheats and the tares have always been in close proximity to each other. That’s why the angels were forbidden from uprooting the tares, to avoid damaging the true wheat.
Even the churches you mention in those links may still have some little wheat remaining, but the leadership is gone on a tare. :) They have long since substituted human authority for Scriptural authority, systematically displacing clear Biblical teaching for impulses issuing from the wickedness of the human heart. They are not at all representative of what traditional Biblical Christianity produces.
In the specific case of the Presbyterians you mentioned, the battle over biblical authority was lost way back in the early 1900’s. See Gary North’s book “Crossed Fingers,” on how the denominaltional leadership was taken over by deceitful seminarians who swore fidelity to the Scriptures and confessions of faith but who were later found to be false. Yet they ended up with the name of the church, and the property, and the influence.
But the faithful were pushed out, and had to start over again elsewhere. A repeating pattern, BTW, and clearly the work of Satan to assault the faithful. Yet God always finds a home for these faithful ones, because his purpose in building His church cannot be defeated, though the life of the church may at times be hidden from those who are wise in their own eyes.
“But, it’s all based on the Bible. Oh dear; what is to be done?”
Are you of their cult? There’s not one thing in their heresy that is based on the Bible. That’s why he wasn’t able to reply to my post when I defined his doctrine and responded to it. You’re more than welcome to pick up his cause, of course. In fact, I’d really like it if you did. Perhaps after you’re reduced to a quivering mass of jelly, you’ll hear the effectual call of God and repent of your sins.
Correct.There is ample evidence that traces this back even further
Courtesy Of UPENN Professor Robert Kraft/ Kurt Treu
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rak/publics/notrak/Treu.htm
Excerpts...
We can trace most fully the situation which the rabbinic efforts encountered, and the way in which these efforts developed, in the inscriptions of the Jewish catacombs in Rome and Italy. Identifying such inscriptions as Jewish is much easier than with the papyri. The catacombs as a whole are Jewish, and consequently so is each individual grave stone, without needing to show characteristically Jewish elements. Moreover, Jewish symbols help to confirm the identification, even when the text itself is neutral. Of 205 Jewish epitaphs from the catacomb of Monteverde in Rome, 161 are Greek, 38 Latin, 5 Hebrew-Aramaic. The Catacombs of Randanini and Torlonia have nothing at all in Hebrew. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the imperial period, we see a situation in which the traditional Greek, which the Jewish migrants brought with them, was still clearly predominant, but the native Latin was beginning to gain ground....From this point things develop in two directions. Latin gains strength at the expense of Greek, and Hebrew presses on. The inscriptions from Venosa, already now in the 6th/7th centuries CE, mark a clear stage; here Latin and Greek still predominate, but, alongside the formulae, whole texts are also found in Hebrew.
More.... From Palestine we have Qumran Cave 7, Nr. 1. containing Exodus, and Nr. 2 containing the Epistle of Jeremiah, both papyrus scrolls from the period around 100 BCE, in addition to further unidentified fragments\65a/; from Cave 4 three texts: one from a leather scroll of Numbers, and two from scrolls of Leviticus, leather and papyrus respectively; finally the parchment scroll of the Minor Prophets from Murabba'at [actually, Nahal Hever], the latest of these manuscripts, from the middle of the first century CE [at latest].
\65a/ Compared to the other Qumran caves, 7Q has a special distinction, since only Greek fragments have been found there. The attempt by J. O'Callaghan to identify New Testament fragments among them does not appears to me to have succeeded.
Two points concerning these manuscripts should be noted: 1) With regard to text, deviations from the LXX move in the direction of the Hebrew text. 2) In orthography, the name of God is represented [in Greek letters] by ΙΑΩ in 4QLev\b, by the tetragrammaton in the Hebrew square script in P.Fuad and [in paleo-Hebrew letters in two different hands in] the scroll of the Minor Prophets. At the same time, in both instances the script used is unfamiliar to the copyists. The two copyists of the Minor Prophets scroll created letters which are described as imaginative and distorted. In P.Fuad, the copyist first left some free space, and thus showed no confidence in his ability to make the letters. But the second hand also, who inserted them, appears completely unskilled, and in any event inexperienced with the Hebrew. This is an important witness for the predominance of Greek. For the seven [now 10 or 11] scrolls, their Jewish origin is directly established by their antiquity.
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