Among all the religious bodies in the world, Christianity absolutely stands out. It stands out scientific, historical, physical and in all other social forms. The membership of this religion is more than a quarter of the total population of the world (more than two billion people profess Christianity as their official religion). But many are unaware of most of the bad practices that were integrated into the church after the first 100 years of Church History. This article isn’t perfect, but it’s the best I can give you after basically 3-5 years of dodging it with people and having various types of Christian conversations. The seven great evils that your pastor never told you about Church History are systematically divided as follows:
1. I’m pretty sure your pastor never told you how we got to the Christianity we have today. Well, Christianity as we know it today was invented by Constantine around 330 AD; when he organized some bishops and many prominent men regardless of their cultural or religious beliefs, and they called a general council inviting by letter all the bishops to meet at Nicaea, in Bithynia. He provided them with all the means of transportation, a large number of them – about 300 – met for more than three months and voted which books were to be in the Bible. Constantine made daily provisions for the food and lodging of this numerous body, in order to buy its conscience.
2. Some of the issues resolved at that historic gathering at Nicea include the issue regarding the observance of Passover. Easter day was set to the Sunday immediately after the new moon, which was the closest after the spring equinox (March 21). That is approximately fourteen days after March 21. Many pagan holidays, including Christmas (the Saturnalia) and Easter (the feast of Ishtar) point to the worship of the day of the Sun, and were celebrated throughout the Roman Empire long before Christ. The early Church simply adopted them in practice and imposed them on all citizens of the empire through the government of Constantine. Interestingly, the first to enforce the Easter celebration was not a church leader, but Constantine, an emperor of Rome.
3. Did your pastors tell you about the “early church fathers”? I think it is one of the most important concepts in the history of the church. They were a group of people who were the main lights in the early church organized by Constantine. Some were ordained priests, bishops, and popes and later forbidden to marry. The bishops were inclined to pass an ecclesiastical law that required that those who had been admitted to the holy offices abstain from living with their wives, so they were forbidden to marry. this was the first time that the ancient marriage tradition, through the fulfillment of Constantine, had deviated. Marriage is a union between two people. There is no reason given in Scripture for prohibiting it or that the practice of marrying the elder of any church is wrong.
4. It was also decreed that the Twenty Nicene Creed and the Seven Sacraments of the Church can dispense the grace of God. It seems they put the cart before the horse. No spiritual grace comes from any sacramental ritual, but the power of the Holy Spirit is given to those who listen to God and obey Him. Basically, Jesus became this Image of God and Humanity, and then His worship was institutionalized as Christianity as it is today. The sacrament of the Eucharist should be a memorial and a reminder of the broken body of Christ and the blood shed for us. There is nowhere in Scripture that says we must offer the true body of Christ on the altar every day or that the bread and wine actually become the body of Jesus, and by putting these items in your stomach, you will receive it. in your body and you will get grace from it.
5. Much of what the apparitions attributed to Mary say parallels the pagan teachings of the new age and the doctrine of demons. Those who are in marialogy like to reduce the God of the Universe to a child in the breast of Mary, but He is a consuming fire and the only mediator between God and man. Many times the true reasons for the memory prayer are not even addressed in the prayer itself. Imagine someone who needs a breakthrough in certain areas of their life saying “Hail Mary” ten or more times.
6. A few decades ago, most charismatic Christians divided into four camps. One camp remained with true biblical Christianity, the other camp shifted to experience-based belief and has gone into an increasingly downward spiral of more and more errors and even doctrines of demons. The third camp calls itself “Churches of the Word” and has embraced the theology of “name it and claim it”. The fourth camp are those who have bought into the Kingdom Now / Reconstruction / Dominion theology which removes pre-millennium beliefs and the literal reading of unfulfilled prophetic scriptures and replaces them with the theology that the Church will rule on earth before Jesus. I am back. In some of these churches, the fields overlap and it becomes really difficult to classify them all, and they all teach different doctrines, leading to further religious confusion. But is Christ then the author of confusion?
7. Remember, Sunday is commonly known as “the Lord’s day.” Whereas the true Day of the Lord of the Bible is actually the Day of the Lord, the Day of His wrath. But why? Many believe that Jesus rose from the grave on Sunday. If Sunday can be established as the day Jesus was resurrected, neither can it be established to replace God’s true Sabbath. Sabbath keeping is the fourth commandment! Saturday has always been the seventh day of the week and God never authorized Sunday, the first day of the week. God sanctified the Sabbath at creation, Jesus kept it, so did Paul, and so did the early New Testament Church. God has always said, “Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.” He has never said: “Remember Sunday to keep it holy.” When people celebrate Sunday as the Sabbath, they unknowingly celebrate the same wrath that God will pour out on them for keeping this pagan custom in place of their Sabbath! Amazing, but true.
I really enjoy hearing some pastors talk about all the blah blah blah stories in the Bible, since very few take the time to discuss the history of their religion. And even if they did, most pastors won’t tell you about the seven great evils of church history, at least not in this way. However, this was all really interesting to me, and I realized that there have been hardly any new facts about the history of the Church in at least 500 years.