Subject: Christians before Jesus came |
Bible Note: Chesed The problem is your ignoring the teaching, work, study, revelation and thoughts of many excellent teachers. You cite Luther as an example of how orthodoxy could be wrong. What you miss, is he was fighting a fairly new practice known as indulgences that was being brought into the church and corrupted by sinful men. Men that directly gained from the corrupt teaching that they were perpetuating. What I’m talking about is the work done by men looking for not other gain or reward than that received in heaven. Many of these men sat directly under the teaching of one of 12 Apostles or under a man that had been discipled by a man that sat under an Apostle. What we are talking about here is age-old theology. Done by men that sought nothing but the truth. May I suggest you pick up a book on systematic theology, there are many excellent works out there. Two of my favorites are studies done by Dr Geisler and the other by Dr. Stanley Horton. Meyer Pearlman also has an excellent work. We have to be very careful God warned that there would be cases where our ideas would seem right but were in fact tainted. While I agree with that many of the verses we now see at pointing to the Messiah could easily been overlooked by the Jews. There was still enough teaching on righteousness, holiness, sin, salvation and the Messiah that true student of the Jewish religion certainly knew of the need for a Messiah and their inability to gain full righteousness apart from that Messiah. These are the men and women that died looking for the promise, trusting in the promise and these that were sanctified by faith in the Messiah. EdB |