What kind of furniture polish do you use? Do you hang landscape art instead of portrait? What fruit variety do you add to your oatmeal? What is the thread count of your sheets? What type of allergy medication do you use? Where do you take a walk? What variety of pet do you own? What brand of car do you drive? Is your yard grass or turf? Do you like Target or Walmart more? You get what I’m talking about. However, when we either on purpose or incidentally veer into a scriptural issue, it must be what and how God says. We don’t have options there. We’ve got to do what God says. We don't have liberty on scriptural issues.
What has happened today is that scriptural issues have been shoved over into the non-scriptural category to give liberty to do what people want in scriptural issues. This is actually sinning. People are sinning, but they aren’t calling it sinning because they have shifted scriptural issues into non-scriptural ones. This is the shell game being played with God.
A shell game is a lie. It says something is there that is not. It's a con. A shell game can fool people, but it can't fool God. It doesn't and it won't. When I say it won't, I mean at the final judgment. God will announce in essence that it didn't work, and there won't be anything to say. Living by faith requires projecting one's self to that moment and understanding that God already makes that judgment. The scriptural issue stays a scriptural issue, even when the shell game is being played. God knows.
What's the point of this shell game? Someone doesn't like Christianity, the one and only Christianity -- in other words, what's taught in scripture and so the practice of historical Christianity. He's got to move the shells around and replace the real thing with something different. Scriptural issues are turned into non-scriptural issues. To do this, you've also got to pervert the meaning of scripture. You get a new Christianity, but not really, because it's just playing a shell game.
Why not leave Christianity, rather than invent a new one, that's just an empty shell? I understand how that someone could try to bridge Christianity to something incompatible with it. They know Christianity is true, that it is the right explanation for the world, but they also want fleshly lust and the world system.
Fleshly Lust
When someone is saved, he still possesses the flesh, an aspect of human fallenness that will be eliminated in the future when he is glorified. Paul refers to this as the presence of sin or the law of sin in his members or body parts. The Apostle Peter refers to "fleshly lusts" in 1 Peter 2:11, when he writes:
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul."Fleshly lusts" war against the soul. They contradict the soul of a person. They are desires of someone that war against what God ordains. These include all forms of rock music, lewd entertainment, immodest dress, alcohol, and foul language. These are what are shifted like a shell game to the non-scriptural to form an acceptable Christianity to conform to the fleshly lust. It's not true, but it is the goal of this game.
The World
John says, whoever loves the world, the love of the Father is not in Him. There is not a Christianity that conforms to the world, but the shell game Christianity does. It's a pop Christianity that accepts worldliness. Unscriptural issues are classified as non-scriptural ones to keep the world -- worldly entertainment, worldly music, worldly activities, worldly friends, an essentially worldly life.
A new Christianity that corresponds to fleshly lust and conforms to the world isn't Christianity. It's just a shell.
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