The Errors and Wrong Opinions in the Churches Today: Part One

By Alexander Okenwa

Ever since the dawn of time on earth, human beings have been in the dark""spiritually, intellectually, educationally, and relationally. The only cause for these general human handicaps on earth is our general ignorance of the Bible""the only book with accurate records on nature/existence ever written and given to all human beings on earth. There is no doubt that the Bible alone holds the truths to all the lies in the world, the solutions to all the problems in the world, and the answers to all the questions that the whole world has been asking since the inception of time on earth. The hour has come for the seeming encryptions of the Bible that have resisted for ages past all human efforts toward proper understanding to be uncovered. This means then that all these lies that the world has had, which has locked itself up with these many unsolved problems and unanswered questions, will now be gone forever. Thanks be to God, who has come down to earth to explain for us, human beings, the book (the Bible) whose one and only Author is He. In that case, both the ever unsolved problems and the unanswered questions of all humanity will receive the solutions and the answers that it has longed for, as these lies""which are the errors and wrong opinions of the churches""are being discovered and corrected. Consequently, we can then live up to God's mandate of subduing with correct knowledge the earth that is presently under the sway of Satan and his spirit allies, and thus rescuing the world from the societal confusions that it is presently in today. These are the goals this book and others in the offing are meant to achieve for us henceforth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098013912

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The Errors and Wrong Opinions in the Churches Today

Part One

Alexander B. Okenwa

ISBN 978-1-0980-1390-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-0980-1391-2 (digital)

Copyright © 2019 by Alexander B. Okenwa

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

The Overall Conclusion of the Matters Discussed in this Book

About the Author

Contents

Chapter 1

The Errors and Wrong Opinions in the Churches Today

The time has come for us, Gentile believers in Jesus Christ (as this is who all believers in Jesus Christ in this era of the Gentiles—Luke 21:24 and Rom. 11:25—are called), to realize that we have been making many serious unintentional mistakes (errors and wrong opinions) in our views or beliefs about the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, and about many other points that are treated in the Bible, and yet we are unaware of these unintentional mistakes.

It is true that we all do have the idea that the Bible is the Word of God, or God's book, but we do not know how to correctly connect the dots as to how the Bible, as God's book, relates to God and to most of the other points/issues that are dealt in it.

Our mistakes have always been with the interpretations/explanations that we usually give with respect to many biblical points/core teachings, which are clear indications that we have not yet understood the Bible as we should.

The Only Major Truth in Our Doctrines Today

The only main point/truth in all our doctrines today is that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God/His kingdom (or salvation of our souls).

Other than that, we are confused and wrong on many points that relate to Jesus Christ and to who He really was and is with respect to God, to the Trinity, to creations, and to all other major doctrinal positions on the Bible. We are also wrong in many other areas of the Bible, and I shall use this forum to highlight some of them.

The Purpose of This Write Up/Book

This is not a matter of nitpicking or fault finding against any person or persons—church or churches—regarding these errors and wrong opinions that are in the churches today, since they are products of the unintentional mistakes of the past church fathers/leaders.

The truth that we (Gentile believers) should know is that the Bible is our common heritage from God, who is both our common Creator and Father, the One that has written the Bible for all of us as His human creatures/creations in the world (2 Tim. 3:16–17). The Jews acted only as the narrators of His story (events in the Bible).

And Him being the only Perfect, Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnipresent God that He is, all His doings are far more than we can know or understand. The Bible, too, is not an exception. He has written it in such a way as to defy all human reasoning, understanding, wisdom, and intelligence (1 Cor. 1:19–2:16, 3:18–20).

The circumstances surrounding the Bible are such that we, the Gentile believers, were and still are not trained to know or understand easily. This is not because He has not been willing to teach us on how we can read and understand His book, the Bible, but it is because it will require our cooperation with Him, which is subject to our backgrounds (culturally/educationally).

In fact, there are both the God and the human factors to the difficulties surrounding our ability to read and understand the Bible in such a way as to allow/enable us to interpret or explain it in the senses/meanings in which He (God) has originally intended.

And if the Jews that narrated the Bible could not understand the Bible that they narrated and wrote for us, on God's behest (as the Bible's Author—2 Tim. 3:16–17), which was the reason why they rejected Jesus Christ as their Messiah since they did not understand the details concerning Him being God's Sacrificial Lamb to them, it is certain that we (the Gentile believers) cannot, by ourselves, hence the many unintentional mistakes and wrong opinions in the churches today whose presence (or our making them) we are not even aware of.

The issue is that God cannot even use somebody/anybody that He has not trained by Himself (Gen. 17:1, 20:5; Deut. 18:13).

Usually, He trains His people with his own examples, meaning that God can never ask us to do anything that He cannot do by Himself. He uses Himself to be the first Being/Person to do those things first (Exod. 24:12, 31:18, 32:15–16; John 5:17–30, 13:12–17), and then, He turns around and uses His own actions as examples for His people to form their own patterns for their own actions/activities (Gen. 17:1 and Lev. 19:2—all His creative actions and interactions with human beings in the past are His examples for us to learn/copy our own behaviors from). Jesus Christ's washing of His disciples' feet was done in line with God's usual patterns of using His own examples to lead and show the ways to His people/children (John 13:12–17). He is a God of examples, and thus the Originator of the Concept or Principle of Examples Are Better than Precepts—or put in other words, He is the Originator and Guardian of the Principle of Leadership that says, A leader is one who knows the ways and leads in the ways so that His followers will/may learn from His examples (John 13:12–17) to do whatever He may ask them to do for Him or for themselves.

But realizing the high level of ignorance and illiteracy that characterized our Gentile church fathers, it would not be easy for Him to deliver the lessons and teachings that He would have loved to give them then; not until they had had the necessary maturity experiences that they needed on their Christian journey/faith could He afford to them the training that they were in need of then. Nobody could doubt that such experiences and training of God were not necessary for those church fathers, especially when we consider that the Bible that they were to interpret was written by another people (the Jews) and that it was written in cultural backgrounds and settings different from those of the Gentile believers.

All these were the circumstances that those people faced in their times and that negatively impacted their abilities to interpret the Bible properly, hence these many errors and wrong opinions that are imposed upon the churches today.

What is more troubling is that we, on our part, have accepted their errors and wrong opinions as the truths from the Bible, thus bringing ourselves and the future generations of ourselves into the same messes that those church fathers/leaders had faced in their times, which arose from their general ignorance and/or illiteracy. The result is that we are still thinking and behaving as if we are still living in the past like them, which is the reason why we are often looked at by the nonbelieving world as people who have lost their sensibilities or as second-class citizens in the world. Otherwise, how on earth could we in the present time/dispensation assert that the Bible consists of only two testaments, when the biblical facts show that we have more than two testaments, if it is not that we are senselessly addicted to walking in the footsteps/errors of those church fathers of the past. There are many other outlandish views/positions that are taken today in the churches that are still mere offshoots of the past church fathers'/leaders' hangovers.

Were these not what happened in the past when the people then asserted that the earth was flat and that the earth was the center of the universe?

Again, in the past, the Jews asserted that they were the only God's people on earth.

Today, all those views/assertions have been proven wrong. One common feature with all these mistakes of the past was/is that they did not last for more than two thousand years before they were/are found to be wrong and false.

We are still battling with wrong/false views and opinions on many issues and in many areas/fields of human endeavors/learning in our today's world—knowingly and/or unknowingly.

Take, for example, the issues of evolution (the concept of random chances) and the big bang/steady state scientific assumptions.

It is also a wrong/false view/opinion for anyone to think or believe or even to call the Bible or the God of the Bible a religious book or Being.

Hopefully, these present mistakes that are being made by us today (believers and nonbelievers), in whatever areas/capacities, shall be discovered and corrected as the others in the past in their two thousand years of existence since such timeline/limit seems to be God's intolerable limits for all our (man's) mistakes in the world. The only troubling concern with all these errors, whether in the past or now (in the present time), is that it is usually the ordinary people that became/become the unavoidable victims of such collateral mistakes.

Take, for instance, those people who lived on earth when Jesus Christ had not come in the flesh into the world but who, even after they heard the message of His future coming (that is, His first coming to die as God's Sacrificial Lamb), disbelieved the message and died before the event became a reality in the world. At the time of their dying, they would have believed that they were right in their disbelief, only for them to be informed by those that died after them when the event had already taken place that Jesus Christ did indeed come into the world (that is, after their death).

How seriously and horribly distraught they must be to hear such news. Unfortunately, these have always been the situations with many people that had neglected the salient warnings of God in the past generations. The same unfortunate outcomes will befall those of the present/future times that fail to heed the warnings/realities of their present/future eras if they, too, make such mistakes. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, they say (an English proverb).

All these facts/points as abovementioned are attempts to clarify the point that we are not unique in making mistakes, especially when these biblical mistakes are made unintentionally on our own sides. Therefore, these (unintentional mistakes) are not the issues of life that we should be embarrassed or should argue about. They are normal and natural with us (humans) as we embark upon our many and different journeys in this life.

What matters is what we do with our knowledge of our mistakes. Do we turn them into lesson classes for ourselves, or do we become embittered by them? It is the salient opinion of the Chinese educator/social philosopher Confucius that we should turn our mistakes into our strength when he said, Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising each time we fall (my quoting him is not an endorsement of whatever lifestyle/philosophy that he might have lived/believed in when he was alive on earth since I do not know his private or public life). One thing is certain, and that is that all truths are God's truths since all our knowledge on earth is learned or acquired from God's original/existing truths on earth before we all entered this world). Just as God has forgiven us for these unintentional mistakes, we should also not be bored down by them. Rather, we should recognize and correct them as soon as we can (Acts 3:17–23, 17:30). And this is not a matter of wrangling or making blind arguments since it is God who is calling on us to stop the long-overdue mistakes on His Word. In this case, He cannot afford to stand idly by while we continue to alter, adulterate, counterfeit, and summarily distort His inspired messages in the name of incorrigible ignorance. After all, the ignorance that remains to be forgiven is the one that is unintentional and the one that we are willing to work on upon realizing their existence, and it is only a fool that rejects knowledge and wisdom (Ps. 14:1; Prov. 24:7; Hosea 4:6).

What is not in dispute is that we have so badly misinterpreted the Bible or watered it down so badly enough (Prov. 29:1).

The fact remains that the task that He (God) gave us (the Gentile believers) to interpret His Word as accurately and clearly as we can is our collective task to prove that we all are as important and chosen (equally) as He has chosen and used the Jewish people to narrate and write His story (the Bible) for us as we have it today.

The fact that I am knowing about these errors and wrong opinions that are in the churches today is not as a result of my smartness. I was also in the same mess, of the wrong and ignorant thinking of the church fathers/leaders of the past, not until in the year two thousand (AD 2000), when God began to wake me up from my sleep and began to bring my attention to those many unintentional mistakes that have existed in our midst for the donkey's years. He then started to urge me to write the corrections to those mistakes as He started to reveal them to me since that time.

At first, I did not find them believable, which was the reason why I started to investigate the truth of what He was telling me. I read through the Bible verses and chapters that are concerned with these erroneous teachings and beliefs that I have come to know and believed as the truth of the Bible, from all the teachings that I have