Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
No, to me the text is clear: "I (Christ) will sing praises to You (the Father) in the midst of the 'ekklesia'". As soon as we think of "deputy" God we're already taken from safety. The collective has been taken over by the wrong individual. The 'leader' is no more Christ but a usurper.
Now, lest our readers think that I'm some radical bomb-throwing anarchist wanting to burn down 2,000 year of Christian history, I remind them of Jesus' words: love one another. The individual is freed from self by 1) taking Jesus Christ as his/her person, and 2) by loving the individual next to you. Notice that Christ never teaches, "Love God with your whole soul and strength, and love the church". No, he teaches, "love the individual person next to you." This is the balance that frees one from loving some mythical pie-in-the-sky "Christ" while despising all else.
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Great Points! And I'll add that whenever the Bible speaks of "
one body with many members," (
See e.g. Paul's letter First Corinthians) it's all about respecting the local gathering and loving the member next to you. Read the Bible! It was never about "
being one with the ministry" or some global collective of LC's sans the rest of God's children.
And just the very thought of some intermediate "
Deputy God" takes us back to the Babylonian Nimrod of Genesis 10 and his church age reincarnation as "The Pope," the supposed "Vicar" of Christ. That fake title can be changed, rebranded, and marketed to the Christian public as "new and improved," but the corrupted reality behind the curtain never changes. The Recovery MOTA in principle is no different from the Roman Pope, the Exclusive Brethren Oracle, the Mormon Prophet, etc.
Apostle Paul made it perfectly clear in Acts 20.30 that there will always be those who lust to be first, speaking distorted things, and drawing God's children, not to His Son, but to themselves. Their perverted teachings must never be construed as God's Word.