The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 8 – 1
After all these lessons, you’re no doubt eager for me to finally reveal where the one true Church is; the place you can go, the place you can learn the truth, keep the Sabbath, and have fellowship with believers. And I’m finally ready to tell you the cold, hard truth:
There is no such thing as “Church”.
I mean it. The Church, as you understand the term, does not exist. It never has. The idea of church that you’ve been raised to believe in is, beyond all argument, the greatest lie the devil ever pulled off.
Even when compared with the Trinity, Sunday, heaven, hell, and all the other blatant and deadly subversions invented by the enemies of God, “Church” stands out, head and shoulders above all other deceptions as the single most deadly lie ever taught.
Let me ask you this; would Christmas be observed today without a herd of “believers” viciously defending it not because they have evidence, but because that’s what their church-herd believes? Would Sunday persist, if every generation chose for itself what the Bible said, and didn’t just accept the traditional beliefs of their church?
THE NEED FOR CHURCHES
When you learned the truth about the Sabbath, your heart said to you “but if I start keeping this my church will kick me out! Who will I be, if I’m not Fred the Baptist?? I can’t just be Fred, because Fred is nothing!”
Most people threw the lessons away as soon as their heart realized that this would threaten their relationship with their herd. And most, the more skittish beasts, did so at the first whiff of what they call heresy in the first lesson, when I quoted, without any real comment, John 3:13. Just the fact I quoted that scripture drove Church-lovers away.
Yet you’re still here, so your soul was able to choose the truth over the herd. That herd, that time. Maybe you hoped you could hang on to your relationship with them, maybe you hoped you could change them. But you didn’t, did you?
And when you lost that herd, you immediately set out to find a replacement herd as fast as possible. “I have to find a herd Church that keeps the Sabbath, so I can belong somewhere!” And yet soon this new herd confronted you with the same problem, over a different doctrine.
So you had to again deal with the dark prospect of having no herd to defend and support you. Because your spirit knows – and it’s not wrong – that a beast without a herd cannot defend itself. Think about that.
When I tell you to subject your beast to cold showers and fasting, your various herds will tell you “That’s dangerous!”, “Don’t do that, that’s just pagan philosophy!”, “You don’t need to rule your beast, you’re already a good person!” and you can walk away comforted that your beast doesn’t have to obey your soul.
But when you stand alone, you have no trusted herd to support you. You’re forced to process the evidence, and your soul is forced to make a conclusion on the merits of the argument. And when someone like me tries to convince your soul to rule your beast, we might just get you to do it!
Because without a herd, beasts are easier to kill… and easier to tame!
PROTECTING THE BEAST
Beasts know this, and that is why they gather together into teams, unions, nations, and churches – for safety. For protection from their enemies. And the greatest enemy of your selfish heart is God (Genesis 6:5-7, Ezekiel 11:17-21). Sensing this, the heart gathers together into a herd just like all beasts do! And they call that herd a church!
We can see this happening in the Bible in 1 Corinthians 3:1-9. Now if you look at that, you see he called them beasts in verse 4 (“are you yet carnal”, or “are you still obeying your heart”), because they were factionalizing; they were assembling themselves into herds just like the world – they were forming churches under different leaders, just like the beasts!
These herds (call them cliques, factions, sects, or whatever) were forming around who baptized whom; over who ate meats offered to idols and who didn’t (1 Corinthians 8), over trivial interpretations of prophecy, over who believed certain ideas some member had, who practiced which doctrines and who understood Revelation a certain way (1 Corinthians 14:26). In short, all the things you will encounter in any church, anywhere, any when!
The world believes that people go to church to find God; but God is not in church (Acts 7:48), and looking for Him in one will be a waste of time (Romans 10:6-8). Read Ezekiel 34, the entire chapter sums up how God feels about churches – flocks, in this symbol, which is just another word for herds.
Now that you understand what “beasts” are, verses like Ezekiel 34:5, Ezekiel 34:8-25 Ezekiel 34:28 have a great deal more meaning! This flock – which God calls HIS flock, a church built to worship God – has not only not followed God, but they have made the truth so cloudy that someone who actually wants the truth can’t find it! (Ezekiel 34:17-19).
So where does the sincere Christian wind up, after looking for God in a church? Ezekiel 34:21. Are the people who God cares about in one flock, in one place? Ezekiel 34:5,6. There were shepherds ( Ezekiel 34:2), but not true Shepherds. Just arrogant spirits, lording it over beasts, helping them all to hide from God ( Ezekiel 34:4).
The great secret is that most people go to churches not to find God, but to hide from Him! They go there, not to learn Truth, but to defend the traditions and assumptions they already have, and to find weekly reassurance that their religion, their corporate self, is the best.
They seek a herd who will reassure them every week that God loves them as they are. And they seek that so that, come judgment day, they can say “but God, everyone else said that’s what You wanted!” So that, by saying that, they can hide among their herd from the death angel who would kill their unclean beast and break their herd’s spirit!
HERDS
Every person ruled by the lusts and fears of the flesh – which is pretty much every person, hence the mess the world is in – naturally assembles into herds, so that the collective spirit of the herd (their mother/Church) can protect it from the anger of their father (the soul/God).
All of the sports teams, lodges, nations, militaries, alumni gatherings, aligning with political parties, being a rabid fan of one fictional character or another, all of these things function as protecting herds; the more people believe your crazy theory about UFOs, the better you can feel about it.
The larger your church, the more they seem to be “good people”, the better you can hide behind them, blend in with the crowd, and most importantly… the better you can avoid dealing with the real problem God wants you to be thinking about!
Because God doesn’t care about any of those things. Not even a little bit. What does God care about? Isaiah 66:2. Someone who sidles up to you at church to whisper about the dirty secret that Eve and Satan had a… y’know… is not trembling at God’s word, and is not ruling his beast!
So all of their doctrines, even if they’re the true doctrines, and all of their rituals, even if they’re the true rituals… are meaningless if your beast isn’t broken! ( Isaiah 66:3-4). And in fact, they use these things to protect their beast from ever BEING broken in the first place!
No true Christian belongs in such a herd, and if you do rule your beast, you won’t be welcome in one ( Isaiah 66:5). Because their beast will fear that, once your own heart is conquered, you’ll turn on theirs… and maybe give their soul “bad” ideas that might lead it to break free and rule over them!
That’s why the saints will be made up of people who have proven they are loyal to no herd and no church and no one, loyal only to the righteousness of the 1-2-10 law, in all its internal and external, positive and negative aspects.
So if your own mother (metaphorical or literal) sins, she is as worthy of rebuke as your greatest enemy. And if she won’t repent, you should be the first in line to push her off into the lake of fire. Because God is trying to create souls who can judge righteously, with or without His supervision… and with or without His herd.
And as long as you’re loyal to anyone or anything, you cannot do that. As long as what your herd says matters to you, God can’t trust you to make the decision your soul knows is right because your spirit will desire to please the herd and protect your beast within it.
There will be no wars in the world to come because the people in charge of it will have killed their beasts; there will be no reason to join a herd, because there will be no beast to protect (Ezekiel 36:26). There will be no loyalty, no teams, no churches, for the rulers of that world will have broken their spirits.
And that’s why, when the government of the universe is committed into their hands, there will be no more war (Micah 4:3). Because wars require herds –and herds won’t exist. Because all beasts and spirits will be ruled by their souls.
CHURCH THAT ISN’T CHURCH
I want to make this absolutely clear… I’m not just saying that false churches are bad. Of course they are, everyone knows that. No, I’m saying the very idea of church is bad. That there is no such thing as a true church, nor did God ever intend for such a thing to have existed. And that the yearning for one is the cause of most of the problems in the world.
Surely, by now you’re objecting that the NT is full of “church”, almost always in a positive light. But the fact is, the word “church” does not appear in the New Testament at all. Not in a form you would recognize, anyway.
Oh, I know, the English word “church” appears in your English Bible. And the English word “church” does indeed mean what you think it means – “a house of God”, where people assemble with their peers. So that much is true.
Our word church comes from the Old English Circe, possibly tracing back to the name of the Celtic goddess Circe, the namesake for the English word “circle”, the shape her worshipers gathered in for their pagan rites; and think about it, what shape do Christians form when they hold hands to pray together? A prayer circle in a church!
Another more popular theory is that our word Church comes from the Greek kuriakon which meant temple or house of a deity. Regardless, the word means a house/place where the God(ess) dwells and his/her worshipers gather to worship him/her.
So, this is what the English word Church means –“house of the Lord”. And yet that is not what the original Greek word translated as “church” means! When you see the English word “church” in your Bible, it does not come from the Greek word Kuriakon, as you might think; instead, it is grossly mistranslated from a different Greek word: Ekklesia!
This word does not mean “house of God”; no, ekklesia has a very different meaning: “a calling out”; This is a simple Greek noun, and has no particular connection with anything holy or religious. It just means “the people who were called”!
And just like the English word “call”, it does NOT mean “church”! Anyone who is called by anyone to do anything is part of an Ekklesia; but that doesn’t make them a church, a house of God!
God does indeed have a “house of the Lord”… yet a church is not that house! (Acts 17:24), for God does not dwell in a church, neither literally or figuratively!
So when you read “church” in your New Testament, it doesn’t imply saints, true Christians, a church building, or a house of God. It is a simple Greek verb which refers to people who were called out.
THE SIMPLE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE
That begs the obvious question: what were these people called out of? John 15:19. Are you a part of the world anymore? John 17:16. Now that is a very clear and simple meaning; in the Biblical sense, ekklesia is every person Jesus calls. No more, no less.
Now if I told you “Hey, I called some people over for dinner”, are they a church? Are they a house of God? Of course not. They’re just people I, y’know… called. Why can’t people just treat God’s words as simply as that?
God did not write the Bible to scholars. The words He used were, for the most part, simple verbs and nouns that anyone could understand – it was written, after all, to the foolish and poorly educated (1 Corinthians 1:17-29), so that even children could understand (Luke 10:21)… often when the adults couldn’t (Mark 10:15).
I say this, because most of the disagreements and misunderstandings in Christianity today are because people took a simple Greek or Hebrew word, stirred their dogma into it and gave it a special, pseudo-sacred meaning it did not have when it was written!
Remember how “cross” used to just mean “instrument of torture” until the false Christians starting teaching Jesus died on the pagan sun-cross? They so thoroughly obscured the original meaning of the word, that today “cross” has no other meaning than, well, a cross… when, to the writers of the NT, it meant no such thing!
Well, that’s exactly what has happened with the word “Church”. I want you to think about that when you read 1 Corinthians 1:2. Try very hard not to think of the word “church” as a “church”, because it isn’t a building, it isn’t a temple, it isn’t a group of men with shared beliefs under a certain leader.
It isn’t a corporate structure of any kind. It isn’t a group of people who believe the same thing, or worship the same God. It isn’t a congregation that meets on Saturday, it isn’t a flock of believers, it isn’t a group of people at all, necessarily! For the church is composed of all the individual people, everywhere, whom God ever called – as it plainly says in that same verse!
The ekklesia is all people whom God has called. That is the only, single, solitary thing they have in common. Not location, faith, leaders, quality, nothing but the fact that Jesus said to them “come”.
UNLEARNING “CHURCH”
So the church is not a building; not a temple; not a group of men; all of these things are the false religion’s imitation of what a true church is! They are the herds formed by the world to defend their hearts from God’s judgment!
But the true church is none of those things! God calls us out of the world; at that point, we become part of the ekklesia – not a church herd, which is what we just left! That’s what He called us out of!!
And if we never meet another member of that ekklesia, if we never meet someone to gather together with on the Sabbath day or to pick us up when we fall, we still were, and are, part of God’s ekklesia. But NOT God’s church, for God has no church on this Earth! …Again, not as you understood the term.
Now try and read Matthew 16:18 without projecting meaning onto the word that isn’t there. Try to imagine hearing this in Greek, with no preconceptions about ekklesia, when it still simply meant “called out people”. If you do that, what Jesus actually said was “I will build my called-out ones”.
If you had read this in Greek in the first century, you would not have imagined a church with a cross on top, or a group of people on Earth who share beliefs or follow a certain man! Because all Jesus said was that He would call people out of the world to be His, and that the grave would not be able to hold them, just as it couldn’t hold Him! (Acts 2:24).
This requires a dramatic revision in the way you look at every single mention of the word “church” in the Bible, for they are all mistranslated. And that is so damaging because the word conveys the idea to us, today, of a herd of believers. And there is no such thing! There never has been!
Herds protect the women and children and the sickly. And they’re a fine thing – for women (spirits), children (hearts), and the sickly (weak souls). But herds destroy souls. They weaken them and keep them weak; they drown them in their collective spirit and actively discourage them from making independent decisions.
And that is why God’s church is not a herd. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite – for God calls you OUT of the herd, out of ALL herds, to follow Him alone!
So the great irony is…
…that what you think a church is…
…not only is it not that, but what you think a church is…
…is precisely what God calls you OUT OF to make you a part of the ekklesia!
THE CHURCH OF THE NARROW WAY
When Jesus said “I will build my ekklesia”, men with twisted spirits said “Right! You’ll build a temple that we can worship at!” But that’s not what Jesus said!
Remember, He had already had Moses, and then Solomon, build Him a temple, and it hadn’t made the people who visited it perfect! Does it make sense to build a house for God? Acts 7:44-50. So He was doing something different this time.
He wasn’t building a new kuriakon, He was building an ekklesia! Not a group of people to live among, but a large number of individuals who would follow Him wherever He went! (Revelation 14:4). A building made of stone cannot do that… but a building made of FLESH can! (Ezekiel 11:19-20, 1 Peter 2:5).
And these people who follow Christ –(NOT “these church members”) will all be “gathered together in one” (John 11:51-52)… but not all in one PLACE! Certainly not into one church! Rather, all gathered on the straight and narrow way behind the same Jesus wherever they may be!
Think that metaphor through… the way to life is to walk in Jesus’ footsteps (1 Peter 2:21). And it is on a narrow path (Matthew 7:14). After Series 6, you know this means to make judgments as Jesus’ soul did, and to walk as He walked –ruling, then convincing, your heart and spirit in the process.
But let’s dive into this parable… remember, “the scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). So imagine this “narrow way” we must walk along, hemmed in by thick jungle or sheer drop-offs on each side. It is on this trail that Jesus’ “true church” walks.
Now imagine fitting a large group of people on such a trail… how would that work? They’d jostle each other, and all would fall off! Which is exactly what happens when men form a church! Because you can’t fit a CHURCH onto a narrow path!
The only way to walk with a CHURCH is to walk on the only path that can FIT a herd of people… the wide and broad road! Only a long row of independent people walking in the single pair of footprints that Jesus left can fit on that path!
Does that mean you’re destined to walk alone? Absolutely not. Remember: think the metaphor through. It’s perfect. God didn’t miss a single aspect of it, so if you truly understand the parable, all the answers you need are contained in it.
Let’s say you’re walking along this narrow trail along the edge of a cliff; you can’t fit a church there, but you can, maybe, fit a couple of people there. In particular, you can see the person in front of you, and the person behind you.
I will greatly expand on this metaphor in the future, so I’ll let it slide for now… but if you really think about it, I just told you everything I’m going to spend the rest of this series telling you.
THE GREEK ASSEMBLY
Paul often addressed letters to groups like the “church at Corinth” (1 Corinthians 1:2, Acts 8:1, Romans 16:1, etc.). If we read that for what God actually said, it means the letter was addressed to the called out ones who happen to be in Corinth, or Asia, or Rome, etc.
These are not different churches, each with their own set of beliefs, leaders, and buildings; rather, they are individual souls who were called by God out of the herds of the world, and out of their spirit’s dungeon, who happen to be located in a single region, and thus share common problems!
What men erroneously call a church is actually a herd of beasts, brought together by fear and loneliness, some few of whom might someday find salvation. Usually mixed with a much larger proportion of people who long ago decided they’d done enough and stopped growing… along with a dash of tares whom Satan deliberately put there to lead them astray (Matthew 13:24-30).
So when you read Philippians 3:6, instead of imagining Paul persecuting a church, with an apostle, deacons, board of elders, bank account, building, statement of beliefs, and so on, read this the simpler way, as any Greek would have: “concerning zeal, persecuting the people God called”.
There is no reason we need to project our idea of a church on that verse; anywhere, and everywhere, that Paul found people preaching Jesus, Paul persecuted them! Calling them “the church” has a meaning to us that it simply didn’t have to God and wasn’t what the inspired Greek word meant!
Now, if you show all this to an educated church-goer, or do some research on your own, you’ll find that people know the word ekklesia doesn’t mean church. But they will defend it, saying that the Greeks used the word to refer to an assembly of people – thus, “why not apply it to the weekly worship at church?”, they’ll say.
And this is true, the Greeks did use this word to refer to gatherings – for it is natural to associate the word meaning “a calling out” with a group of people thus called. The Greeks had done this in Acts 19:25-41; in this chapter, the word “assembly” is actually from ekklesia – a gathering, done after they were called in verse 25.
Surely this isn’t a church in the modern sense – it was a lawless mob, gathered together by rumor and selfishness and powered by fear and superstition. You know, now that I think about it, this is a church in the modern sense!
Just kidding. Well, not really. Anyway, they’re exactly right: those who are called by Christ are gathered together in an assembly… but church is that not that assembly! Nor are they all gathered weekly, on the Sabbath day!
When is Christ’s ekklesia gathered together? John 6:37-45. In case Jesus didn’t mention it often enough, “the last day” is when that happens. Not every day, nor every week; they are gathered at His return, when all those among the ekklesia who were capable of walking in His footsteps finally arrive at their destination and become an ekklesia… an assembly… in HEAVEN!
Where is God’s true church? Hebrews 12:23. Your church is not that assembly. Moses being read in a synagogue on the Sabbath was not that assembly. Jesus speaking on the mount wasn’t even that assembly!
No, the true ekklesia of the firstborn is every single person who has ever lived who has their name written in the book of life in heaven! And the first time in HISTORY that they will EVER be gathered together into one place is when they finally arrive at the event THEY WERE CALLED TO ATTEND! The wedding supper in heaven! (Matthew 22:1-14, Revelation 19:6-9).
HOUSE OF GOD
No, of course it’s not forbidden to gather together with people who are also seeking the truth… but nor is it commanded for the NC ekklesia. Sure, there’s a time and place for it, and sure it can be a good thing (Malachi 3:16). And sure, doing it on the Sabbath makes sense, since you can’t work then.
No, that’s all fine… the great deception comes when you label such gatherings churches, houses of God, bodies of Christ – for as I said… there is no such thing as a church of God on this Earth, as you had understood the term.
And yet… God does indeed have a church on this Earth: you (1 Corinthians 6:19). Not your church! Not the collective “you” of the herd of semi-believers the world calls a house of God! You, individually, yourself, YOU are the “church” of God.
You are not merely the ekklesia… for if you are called by God, you are the actual meaning of the English word “church”: you are the temple of God, the house of God (1 Corinthians 6:15-20). A passage which, if you’d just read and believed it, would have made this lesson moot.
Your congregation is not a house of God. Because “house of God” means, roughly, “container in which God dwells”. And your congregation does not have the holy spirit living in it because no congregation today does!
MOSES’ congregation did (Exodus 25:8). Because Moses’ congregation was Old Covenant! But today there is no temple where God dwells, no holy place within each congregation where God sits to judge the people because He doesn’t need to – He sits in your mind, in the only true CHURCH, the only true house of God… your own body!
The temple of God today is not your church, not your group, not your congregation, it’s you. For God no longer dwells in the midst of a herd of unbroken spirits where beasts can hide from Him and souls need not develop.
The world, Sabbath-keeping and otherwise, accuses me of not going to church, as they will you. And they’re absolutely right. You and I don’t go to church. We don’t need to… because you and I ARE the church!
Not collectively, as they believe they are; but separately. You and I are each, individually, potential houses for God’s spirit. Unfinished houses, to be sure… but we need not visit a temple where God dwells for two hours each week, for God dwells in us DAILY.
So you can see why God would be offended when you go seeking another house where He supposedly dwells, desperately searching for a herd that supposedly has His spirit dwelling among them… when He’s already trying to dwell inside of you!
Why isn’t that enough? Why would you need a different, VASTLY inferior, human… church? Why isn’t knowing that your own soul was called by God, the knowledge that you are the ekklesia… enough?
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
God said He would build His church, His ekklesia, and He has done just that – He has gathered together a following called out of all nations. But if you’re looking for a building or a group called “God’s true church”, you won’t find it because it isn’t here!
You will find groups on Earth today that might have a true member of the true church of God IN it… but the ekklesia is composed of every single person on this Earth who has ever been called by Christ! And the first time they will EVER be in one place is when Jesus returns! (Revelation 14:1-4).
But even that church composed of all humans everywhere who follow Christ is not His Body! Not yet! Even if you somehow found and gathered together all the best men who ever walked the Earth, they would not form the body of Christ, because no physical beings could! (1 Corinthians 15:50).
The terms of the NC are written on the heart, and that is something that no abstract group of people has! So the only way they can be a “house of God” is for God to dwell in an ark in their midst; among their corporate body, yet OUTSIDE their individual bodies. Which is the defining characteristic of the Old Covenant! (John 14:17).
So God does not, cannot, make the New Covenant with any corporate group of people! So any group that identifies itself as a church is automatically Old Covenant! There may be individuals within such a group who have chosen the NC; just as Joshua and Caleb had chosen it even though the “church in the wilderness” (Acts 7:38) kicked God out of their bodies in Exodus 20:19.
But a covenant made with any assembly of beings is OC, at best. It’s all it can be, because it can only be judged externally. And yet that’s exactly the challenge Jesus set for Himself: Make the NC with an assembly of beings!
As I said, the problem is that no corporate body has a heart. But worse, the substitute for the heart that it does have – the Ark of the covenant – cannot be in constant contact with every individual in the group; so sin will, invariably, slip through the cracks.
Do you, yourself, know what is going on in cell #725456853 in your left toe? Is it dying, is it cancerous and turning its neighbors cancerous along with it? Until something starts hurting or turning colors, you just can’t keep track of everything, even in your own body.
Remember: We are made in the image of God. What goes on in our own cells is precisely what will be happening in the symbol of the body of Christ – for the scripture cannot be broken. And just as cells in your own body fail, die, and deceive others, so did cells in His OC body.
Look at your own body; your soul uses your spirit to rule over billions of individual cells which live, work, divide, and die like all of us do. But sometimes, your cells do a good job and sometimes they don’t.
Jesus’ body has always developed cancer or leprosy in the past because He tried to make a pact with their leader, or with them as a group; not with individuals. So sooner or later, the leader dies and the group splinters and does whatever they feel like doing.
But this time, Jesus is doing it the right way; the slow way; the hard way; one cell at a time. He is entering into the New Covenant with one cell at a time. One of US at a time; that way, every single cell in that body will have a heart in their nucleus with the law of God written on it!
The bride of Christ won’t be a group of codependent humans from a church herd; it will be composed of hundreds of thousands of individual cells, all of which have the law of God written inside of them, all of which function in harmony unified by a single spirit under the guidance of the soul in the head of the body!
No cell will ever have to go back to the temple to be reminded how to do its job; no cell will ever turn its neighbors against the spirit or the soul of the body, for all the cells will have chosen, independently and collectively, to be a part of THIS body, and to follow THIS spirit and THIS soul!
Those in the true ekklesia of God will have to prove that their soul loves what He loves… and that it is capable of convincing its own cell’s heart and spirit to love it too. They can’t do that in a church! Because the whole POINT of church is to protect their heart and spirit from their soul’s meddling!
Even Jesus died alone, to prove that He could die alone (Matthew 27:46). He died to lay the cornerstone, with His resurrection the birth of the first cell that would become the new body’s head. And like Him, we must live and die as an “I”, not a “We”.
It is right and good to learn from other men (Romans 10:14); to associate with people (1 Corinthians 5:4), even to follow them as they follow Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1). It is good to bear the yoke of other men’s spirits (Lamentations 3:27)… in your youth.
There will be much more on this in coming lessons; but at some point, a decade or two down the road perhaps, but at some point, you will have to grow up, and stop being a “we” and start being an “I”.
And it is the choices you make then that tell Jesus whether or not you are qualified to be an immortal cell in His body, which He can trust never to turn cancerous like the body Moses prepared for Him did.
Only then can He trust you to be one of the individual living stones in the house of God, which He can rely on to never turn leprous (Leviticus 14:33-48).
But only after you die as a just soul can you properly be said to be a part of the body of Christ, the chaste virgin of symbolism, whose every perfect, immortal cell has the law written within it.