WHAT IS TRUE RELIGION?

WHAT IS TRUE RELIGION?

WHAT IS TRUE RELIGION?
Antonio Ochoa
(Former Roman Catholic Priest)

It is said that the Communist countries are behind the “iron curtain” and that it is one of the greatest problems for the people to come across such a curtain unless there is some positive help, political or diplomatic.

I should say also that in different circumstances, those people who actually are under the control of any totalitarian rieligion, such as the Roman Church, find before their faces two dark curtains—the Roman curtain and the Protestant curtain. The Roman curtain is like a dark road leading to destruction and the Protestant curtain with its 260 denominations is just like many streets of opinions which sooner or later lead people to Rome as the refrain says: “All streets lead to Rome.” But thanks to God there is a book, called the Holy Bible, which is for all people of good will. It is the lamp unto our feet and a light unto our paths to help us to go across those two curtains if we read it and digest it, not as the word of men but as the word of God which effectually works in those who believe. Yes, my dear brethren, the Bible leads us to the knowledge of the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent to give us eternal life. The Holy Bible is the only book bearing witness of the truth, the Eternal truth which makes us free. In other words, the Holy scriptures of the Bible are the only books we can trust and where we can know the true God, and the only way to true worship and pure religion. As the apostle James says: “Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep ourselves unspotted from the world” (James 1:27). Jesus Christ explained the characteristics of pure religion to the Samaritan woman by the well saying to her: “Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father.... But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth for such doth the Father seek to be his worshippers” (John 4:21; John 4:23). Therefore, without real knowledge of the true religion, every man gropes blindly and erects an altar to an “Unknown God” because the God of the Bible is not the God of philosophers. How right the brother of the Lord Jesus was when he wrote: “It is needful for me to write unto you and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered to the saints.” For many years I was like the blind man of the gospel of John, a follower of a religious system, the so-called Roman Catholic Church, until God, our Father, in his mysterious providence met me in the person of Jesus Christ, who told me through his word to go out and wash my soul from spiritual blindness, from religious prejudices and erroneous misconceptions I had had from my birth. I went to clean my spirit as well as I could with the understanding I then had. I looked around in the streets of so many sys- terms of Religion, and then, little by little, my spirit became free from errors, darkness and superstitions. But still I felt like the blind man in that I knew not Jesus Christ as he really is, and so I continued learning of him through the Holy Scriptures, confessing him as a great prophet, fighting with the religionist; and even with my family who did not confess Christ as I testified to them because they feared to be excommunicated from the synagogue of Roman religion. I continued learning about Jesus Christ from the scriptures until I became free from denominational- ism. ... As Jesus says, “Know the truth and you shall be free.” When Jesus Christ knew that my whole life was self-excommunicated from religious systems, he met me again in the person of one of his disciples by the name of Ernest Sumerlin and he asked me: “Do you believe in the Son of God?” I answered, “Yes, Lord, I believe. I want to be buried with Jesus Christ by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, so even T also should walk in newness of life.”

So, a Christian is a spiritual free man and a new creature, and therefore no Christian can be a member of any religious system but of the true religion, the Biblical Church, the community of all believers who continue steadfastly in the Apostles teachings, in breaking of bread and in prayer. When we are able to know what it is to become a Bible Christian through a Biblical faith, then we will be able to answer that true religion must be thoroughly Biblical. In other words, if we find what is the true Bible Christian through Biblical faith, we find also what is the true Biblical church and true religion. Then the Bible is our starting point. This book and the historical facts which it records are accessible to every man but its essential content is not that which becomes stronger the closer we come to it as which becomes stranger the closer we come to it as the Apostle Paul says, The Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Jesus Christ crucified unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto Gentiles foolishness. For the work of the cross is to them that perish foolishness but unto us who are saved it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:22-23; 1 Corinthians 1:18). The mercies of our heavenly Father call all men unto salvation by repentance and baptism at the foot of the cross. This is a narrow gate and those who kneel down and die through repentance and are buried through baptism are the only ones to be raised up in newness of life. On the other hand we find at the foot of the Cross the starting point of so many denominations because the foolishness of the cross is a stumbling block to them. Organized religions or the denominations have tried to solve this problem of the folly and scandal of the Christian revelation by several solutions. For example rationalism came along to rationalize the problem by turning the supernatural into natural, thet Son of God, Jesus Christ, into a mere perfect man, the truth of God into human truth and the folly and the scandal of the Christian revelation were eliminated in opposition to that which is revealed in the Scriptures.

Another attempt was made by fundamentalism. By fundamentalism the individual reader of the Bible believes that he can be saved so long as he has the Bible and reads it, ignoring the fellowship of the church, and feels that he does not need fellowship, save the invisible bonds which unite all who believe in Christ, forgetting what Jesus Christ said to the fundaxnentalist Pharisees: “You search the Scriptures thinking that in them you may have eternal life and you don’t come to me that you may have life” ( John 5:39-40). In opposition to this Jewish fundamentalism, we have another attempt called “ecclesiastical traditionalism” which takes the place of the Scriptures and guarantees its trutn. Whereas, fundamentalism eliminates the Biblical Church as the supreme witness of the truth, binding the individual solely to the contrary enslaves the individual directly to the totalitarian Church or religion and the slavery is absolute. Fundamentalism, therefore, kills authority and ecclesiasticism kills spiritual freedom, and therefore both preach atheism, the corner stone of communism, the begotten son of all religious systems. As a consequence of this, shall I say that we, as Christians, face this terrible dilemma: We preach and worship the only true God of the Bible and Jesus Christ whom he sent, or we preach and worship “atheism” in all its forms. So the problem of the folly and scandal of the cross is the central cause of so many systems. The problem of how to remove this stumbling block and how to unite this gulf between God and man is the central problem of the Christian faith.

Christian faith or Biblical faith is not faith in a closed Bible but in an open Bible. It is that faith founded upon our relation to God, manifested in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ who speaks to us from the pages of the Scriptures as our Lord and our Redeemer, as the Apostle Paul says, “No man can call Jesus, Lord, save through the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). When we are able to call Jesus, Lord, and Saviour, the foolishness of the cross ceases to be folly and a stumbling-block. Then, as the prodigal son and the little man Zacchaeus, we start to walk by faith with Jesus Christ from the place where we were feeding swine unto our Father’s home, the divine fellowship of the church in a Biblical sense. Here faith and repentance are one. Here we perceive that we are sinners, that for our sake Jesus Christ died on the tree, and awaking from our sinful independr ence, we see the lowliness of the crucified one in his divine glory as the Apostle Paul expresses it when he says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me; and that life which I now live in the flesh, I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). Only when we come in contact with the self-relation of God in Christ is the personality of the unbeliever changed. Faith of this kind is Biblical faith.

Now what the Holy Spirit does in relation to the word of the Scriptures, he also does in relation to the word of the Church in a Biblical sense. But the fact that the Biblical church is the necessary organ of the Holy Spirit, as the Body of Christ, does not mean that the Biblical church is herself the supreme authority, because the Biblical church, like the Holy Scripture, is the bearer of that which alone has authority the word of God made flesh, which is no other than Jesus Christ, as the living Lord of all believers. So the Biblical church exists only where the word of God is preached and believed. The church as the Body of Christ is the fellowship of those who, having been conquered by the Word of God, have become believers or Christians, not as individuals but as members of the Body, as it is written by Paul, “For as in one body we have many members and all the members do not have the same functions, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another’’ (Romans 12:4). This was God’s plan for the church in the beginning and where this spirit is not present, the Biblical church does not exist even though it may bear this name. The Biblical church is not only a community of believers but also the mother of new believers. The Word of God is not only given to the Body of believers as a gift, but it is also a commission. Christians are not only to be disciples, but also make disciples as it is written in the gospel of Matthew, “Go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Then the Biblical church is not an institution like the state. It is not a sacred ecclesiastical body. It is not a legal corporation like the State; because the community of believers has the authority and the commission to proclaim the Word of God in so far as it possesses the word of God and insofar as it possesses the Biblical faith, because “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.” Therefore, no ecclesiastical ordination can impart divine authority and the ministers must pray and strive for it because all Christians are ministers but not all ministers are Christians. No legal arrangement of this world can give the authority to preach the Word of God. Only the Holy Spirit gives us the power to become “children of God” or to be born again of water and of the Spirit, for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they they are the sons of God, and therefore the ambassadors of Christ. The Holy Spirit is not bound to any ecclesiastical law because he breathes wherever he wills, as Jesus says, “The wind blows wherever it wills and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). For example, I was sprinkled when I was born, confirmed when I was seven years of age, ordained priest when I was thirty- one years old and sent to preach as minister of the Roman Church, but as I well remember, I did not have the power to preach the Word of God which is the power of God unto sa1 vat ion for every one that believes.

Brethren, “without faith it is impossible to please God, but faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God” (Romans 10:17). But how can people have “Biblical faith” if they don’t hear the Word of God? And how can people hear the Word of God if there is no religious freedom to plant the seed of the word in the hearts of man? Brethren, religious freedom is the means to spiritual freedom, and spiritual freedom is the only ground of our Christian faith and human liberties. In vain we claim for religious freedom, and in vain we claim for justice and lasting peace if religious freedom is the only end of our claims, as it happens to our Protestant neighbors in the United States and in the Central and Southland of the Latin American countries. In Central and South American countries, even though there is a written law establishing religious freedom of the country, there is practically no religious freedom for the people to hear the truth which makes them free from their sins. The family, religion, politics and society in the State religion or Roman Catholic Church ties and blinds the people and prevents them from hearing or studying the truth.

Among the Spanish-speaking people there are thousands of people of good will who obtain religious freedom in their minds by coming to the United States for business or for educational purposes, and many others through contacts with religious organizations. For example, there are one million Spanish-speaking people in New York City, and many of them have organized themselves into about 150 different independent religious groups. It is our hope that we can get some of them to understand the pure gospel and use them as workers to reach others from the same country they are from.

Unfortunately, the totalitarian religion of Rome is now trying, by any means, to kill “religious freedom” of the country through the School System and by establishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican; as was foretold by one of our greatest leaders of freedom, Abraham Lincoln, when he said, “I see in the horizon a dark cloud which threatens to envelop our civilization and that cloud comes from Rome.” Therefore, spiritual freedom is the only perfect end of religious freedom, and without which, it is like building a house upon the sand.

Because of this, Protestantism has failed in Europe and is going to fail in America for taking our religious freedom as the end and not as the means to the end; as Jesus Christ said to the different religious leaders of the Jewish sects in his day, “You search the scripture, for in them you think you have eternal life and there are they which bear witness of me, and you will not come to me that you might have life” (John 5:39-40).

We also have religious freedom to search the scriptures. We have religious freedom to know the truth, but we forget that the only end of religious freedom is to seek spiritual freedom—spiritual freedom from our sins and the only one who can give us that freedom is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as he said if the Son makes you free you shall be free mdeed. This spiritual freedom is the life of the new creature coming out from the water of baptism as the Apostle Paul says in Colossians 2:12 : “Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.” “Wherefore, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away, behold, they are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Therefore, brethren, how shall the people of New York City believe in Jesus, who makes them free from their sins? How shall these Spanish-speaking people heai about Jesus without a preacher? And how shall they preach except they be sent? So brethren, if we are the chosen generation, the peculiar people, the children of the free woman, let us live as such; preaching spiritual freedom in all the land and not religious freedom only; praying fervently to our heavenly Father that the message of Jesus Christ cease to be a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense; and that the Word of God may have that piercing quality for all who will receive it, not as the word of men but as the Word of God which effectually works in us that believe.