Thoughts From Ephesians 2 - Part 5

  Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. Eph. 2:19-20

         I was playing Jenga with my three-year-old grandson today and surprisingly it was lasting 4 moves apiece until he made it fall. At one point I tried making it 4 blocks wide but quickly found out that the width of the block would only allow 3 wide. You see, the shape of the tower was determined by the first block I laid, or the cornerstone, so there could be only three on the bottom - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit if you will allow me to extrapolate. Every level had to mimic the first level and be directly on top and in line. Any deviation would make for a wobbly tower and eventually, as the layers or generations went on, the tower would topple.

      I've been making the analogy as I've been going, but the Church or the bride of Christ is built on Jesus. His words, His example, His life are to be what we copy our life to be like with the enabling of the Holy Spirit. The word "Christians" meant "little Christs" and was meant to be derogatory but actually we are supposed to look just like Him. The Church is to follow His words, and it is easy to slowly drift off mainline and pass that on to the next generation. Gradually we could drift so off the base that the Church could crumble into damnable heresy.

      My Dad was raised in the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland and years later after moving to America, being saved, joining an evangelical church, he would occasionally attend a Dutch Reformed Church with relatives. His takeaway was "they don't even know what it means to be saved." Even though they had a strong base, built on Christ and the apostles with the Heidelberg Confession trying to keep them doctrinally sound, they had drifted.

     Today doctrines like Penal Substitutionary Atonement are being challenged and the doctrines of the Catholic Church are gradually being accepted just because Catholics are our biggest allies against worldliness. That's just to name a couple beliefs trying to make us more "wobbly" but this is why I'm so hard headed about things like a complementarian's view of the sexes, Creation vs. Evolution, that Genesis 1-11 isn't just a poem, that male and female should wed before sex and any variation from that pattern is rebellion against God's plan, the scripture both Old and New Testament are inerrant and profitable and relevant, and other dogmatic views. Yes, you can adopt some hybrid views but are those going to pull us further from the foundation with each subsequent generation adopting those as standards and drifting from those standards until when Christ comes back, will He even find faith on this Earth?