From Eliyahu

Hello friends,

About 2000 years ago a great light came into the world. He was none other than the Son of God, Y'shua our Messiah. He shined brightly during His stay as a man on earth. That stay was destined to be brief, and was destined to end with a massive backlash from the darkness. None of that was unanticipated. All of it, was, in fact, figured into the divine stratagem.

Y'shua came here, not only to save us from sin and death, but also to raise up the Kingdom of Light in the earth. In the ultimate sense there are only two kingdoms. the Kingdom of Light and the Domain of Darkness, as Scripture reveals:

Yes, being delivered out of the Domain of Darkness and into the Kingdom of the Son of His Love, the Kingdom of Light, is a gift of grace, for which all of His own should be grateful. Yet, that very gift of grace puts us at odds with the forces of darkness, in a constant state of warfare. Warfare is not a merely personal endeavor. It takes a well organized and disciplined army to win a war, even more so a spiritual one. 

While He was with us Messiah laid the structure in place for the Kingdom, organizing His people for the war against the darkness. In Mark 3 we begin to see that Kingdom structure come together, that would put Messiah's people in good stead after His return to heaven. The light that Messiah lit in the world was highly effective for that first generation of well-organized followers, bringing the battle to the enemy in victory throughout the known world.

So why don't we see believers today having the same level of victory? This is a question many wonder about.

Many blame the rise of the Catholic Church in the 4th century. In fact, Martin Luther and the reformers saw the Catholic Church as the anti-christ beast of Revelation. The Protestant break from the Catholic Church was a great step forward to be sure, but, that was 500 years ago. If the Catholic Church was the obstacle, then why has Protestant Europe all but sunk into total unbelief by this year, 2018? Why is Church attendance, even in the USA, at an all-time low, and why are 70% of young people leaving the churches with many turning to occultism? Surely, we can't blame the Catholic Church for the failure of Protestant Christianity can we? There must be a deeper problem that goes back even further than the Catholic Church of the 4th century.

The first century gave the Kingdom a great start in the world, but what happened after that? Actually, a look at the so-called "church fathers" starting with Justin Martyr of the 2nd century reveals the problem. In the 2nd century the overwhelming numbers of gentiles who had responded to the Good News didn't like the way the believing community had been organized. The family of Messiah were still overseeing the work, and they were all Jewish. The apostles had all been Jewish too, and even after the apostles died off, the leadership core continued to be Jewish. Further, the world-wide assembly of believers had always been seen by the leadership as Israel, still governed by the commandments, of Israel. In the 2nd century all things Jewish were looked down upon by the gentile world because of the Jewish wars with Rome - making life difficult for all believers, Jew and gentile alike. Justin, as a Roman, chose to distance himself from the Jewish Nazarenes, preferring to promote the Greek philosophers readily accepted by the gentiles. Justin's new gentile religion, mixing Christ with Greek philosophy, was well accepted by the gentiles and many of them joined. It was in that historical context that the "Christian Church" - the Gentile Church - was born; as gentile believers rebelled against the Hebraic authority structure that Y'shua had left in charge of the Messianic community in the world to go their own way.

The "Christian Church" [Gentile Church] claims that the Hebrew Nazarene believers were a schism of Christianity, a heresy. How is that possible, since the Nazarenes were the original believers? In truth, it was the gentiles that dissented, to form a break-away faction from the Nazarenes, divorcing themselves from the leadership first established by Messiah Himself. The 2nd century gentile faction went on to be viewed by the gentiles as "The Church", finally crystallizing into the Roman Church of the 4th century. And the rest, as they say, "is history."

Some would say that the dissent of the gentiles from the Nazarenes was a natural progression of the Church, leaving the Nazarenes to the dustbin of history. But is that what the Scriptures say? Notice this:

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