Let’s be careful what happened to ancient Israel does not happen to the modern churches too. An ancient Israel priest’s wife named their son ‘Ichabod’ meaning ‘the glory has departed’. This happened because the ark of the covenant had been lost to the enemies of ancient Israel. Earlier in ancient Israel’s history a hero of Israel, Samson fell victim to his pagan wife allowing her countrymen to cut his sacred hair as he slept which caused God to leave him. But Samson did not know God had left him and the power of God had departed from him. So he was captured and blinded by the enemies. Eventually the God of Israel handed ancient Israel over completely to pagan enemies Assyria then endless enemies after enemies. Only a remnant survived plus a further remnant of the house of Judah. Were it not for the remnant, the entire people would have become extinct. Later in Early Church history the glory departed yet again. The fellowship with God was lost to the extent that a famous Christian writer Chrysostom around 350AD wrote on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, "This whole place is very obscure; but the obscurity is produced by our ignorance of the facts referred to and by their cessation, being such as then used to occur but now no longer take place. And why do they not happen now? Why look now, the cause too of the obscurity hath produced us again another question: namely, why did they then happen, and now do so no more?". Augustine around 400 AD wrote of the situation in a similar way, though noting there was still a glimmer of the past glory of the Holy Spirit workings in churches, yet it was rare. John the Apostle had written a warning centuries earlier: “Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.” (2 John 1:9) The fact is, Jesus had taught important truths about God about which God had sent Him to testify and the churches had replaced these with philosophies of their own making. Jesus had taught that only the Father is the One True God, and apostles of Jesus echoed this teaching. Yet centuries later the philosophically inclined Christian influencers such as Origen and Tertullian, followed by bishops under Constantine, had replaced this with a concept of a Trinity in which three persons, the Father and Son and Spirit were only together to be regarded as God, not simply the Father alone. Christian clarity of true teaching began to unravel. It continues today in most churches. Now God the Father is making clear again that He alone is the One True God and that Jesus His Son is the lord and master of believers such as myself and is very much the one begotten Son conceived by the Holy Spirit as the gospels testify yet Jesus is not to be proclaimed as God, the One True God, but rather as Lord, Lord over all, with the Father as both His Father and His God. Maybe if we turn back to Jesus’ testimony and move away from philosophical alternatives, like eventually God returned to Samson after his hair grew back, the glory of God will return to believers.
