God says in our times "Israel has sinned" but this Israel is not meaning the country we call the State of Israel but rather the people everywhere who are covenanted to God, especially those who are brought to God through Jesus Christ. I was awakened to this sinful state of those covenanted to God and alerted to it in the mid and late 1990s. It was a time when churches were starting to be influenced by liberal church thinkers, authors and leaders who politicised the gospel and downplayed traditional doctrines. Many started to leave these liberal churches and yet the liberalisation continued and we started to see the introduction of the neo-liberal concepts such as gay marriage and ordination of openly gay clergy. The Bible was being reinterpreted along the lines of the previous century when people were claiming that scientific analysis could be applied to scriptures to 'discover' things previous church generations would have regarded as heresy, such as a notion that the scriptures were heavily edited to combine various strands which never originally said what these combined texts ended up saying and are passed down to us today. Now we see countries in Christendom such as Russia starting to reject this excessive departure from tradition and a turning back to traditions such as those concerning the family and leadership. What went wrong? It is good to use our intellect to examine what we are taught and 'kick the tyres' so-to-speak. Yes, Jesus taught his followers to know all the scriptures available in those times, not just the five books of Moses upheld by the Sadducees. Yet there is a limit. The morals we hold dear are a compass and a guide in our search for truth, not a hindrance to be set aside. The second Psalm tells of the folly of the nations saying "Let us throw off their shackles" when talking about the faithful of God. The sin has now been done and cannot be undone and we might be heading to a third world war over it. But if we start to hold to teachings given by God and teach these to our children we might just escape the worst of it.
