10 Judaism and Paganism brought in

Judaism and paganism brought in The Alexandrian reformers did not remake the church; they could not remake the church. The Lord promised, “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell (in this case the Academy at Alexandria) shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). The reformers were not able to remake the church-but they were able to produce their substitute for the church. In every day and age, the adversary has had his alternative to the Lord’s prescribed way of worshiping him. Abel brought his offering of “the firstlings of the flock.” It prefigured the Lamb of God, which should suffer and die to put away our sins. Cain followed an alternate path, and the Lord rejected his offering. It did not matter that he brought an offering, and it did not matter that he brought it at the right time, and to the right place. It was not the offering God required, and God would not accept it. At God’s instruction, Moses threw his staff on the ground and it turned to a serpent. The Egyptian sorcerers had their own response. Later, God sent out his prophets, and the false prophets were right behind them. The adversary has always had his alternative to God’s ministry, God’s church, God’s way.

There had always been those who would pervert the church if they could. “And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage,” (Galatians 2:4). The false brethren at Alexandria followed in the footsteps of the false brethren in Galatia of over one hundred years before. They were not satisfied with the church the way the Lord set it up, and they would remake it in their own image. They would produce their own anti-church. It would have enough characteristics of the true church to deceive the unwary, and many a humble and sincere child of God would be taken in. But, at heart, it would be the exact opposite of the church.

Hassell writes, “As the woman divinely clothed with the sun, and having the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars, and persecuted by the Dragon (Revelation 12:1-17.), represents the true church, so the woman humanly arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, and sitting upon the scarlet-colored beast, and having upon her forehead the name Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth, and drunken with the blood of the saints, represents the false or apostate church with her daughters-whether Roman, Greek or Protestant-not loving Christ, the heavenly Bridegroom, but giving its affections to worldly idols - corrupted by tradition and wealth.” (pg 256).

It is a source of grief that so many humble, God-fearing, children of God are caught up in those assemblies. Many of them are as sincere, and as honest as any person who ever lived. To them the Lord says, “Come out of her my people that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues” (Revelation 18:4). In these comments we pray that God will give us the grace to avoid saying anything that would injure the tender feelings of those precious children of God.

Hassell continues his account of the Academy. “Religion was gradually blended with and superceded by philosophy. Judaism and paganism were kindly brought in; and a broad, liberal, eclectic system, adapted to accommodate and reconcile all parties was devised” (pg 365) In those seven words we have the key to the perversion of the Christian religion: “Judaism and paganism were kindly brought in.” The Academy at Alexandria finally accomplished what the Judaizers had been trying to do for generations. They combined this eclectic combination of Judaism and paganism with their idea of the Christian religion. Eclectic just means you take a little from here and a little from there, depending on what suits your fancy. With that combination of Judaism, paganism, and some Bible doctrine they put together the framework of what, over the centuries, developed into the Roman Catholic Church. That is exactly what Catholicism is, a combination of those three systems. In order to understand what the Academy accomplished we need to first know what Pharisaism/Judaism taught. Keep in mind that when we refer to Judaism we are not talking about the Law of Moses. Sometimes even the best of writers talk about those who added the Law of Moses to the gospel, when it was not the Law they added at all; it was Judaism. The two are not the same. The Law of Moses had long since ceased to be practiced by the Jews when John the Baptist appeared on the scene. When Paul refers to his own life prior to his Damascus Road experience, he does not refer to his service under the Law. He says, “For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jew’s religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it: And profited in the Jew’s religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers,” (Galatians 1:13-14). Notice that he says nothing about the Law of Moses; he was not serving under the Law. He calls it the Jews’ religion. In the original language the word is judaismo-Judaism. He repeats it twice in two verses, so we will not miss it. The Jews had forsaken the Law and replaced it with Judaism-the Jews’ religion.

Judaism is a parody-almost a mockery-of the Law of Moses. It does teach much that was contained in the Law, but its primary purpose has always been to explain away the Law and set it aside. It is their way of justifying themselves in violating the Law. They replaced the doctrine of God with “the commandments of men.” That is the way the Lord explained it.

“Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoreth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:8-9). To understand something of what happened, we need to look at some basic doctrines of Judaism. Those doctrines are not all that is involved in Judaism, not by any means; but they are five of the most distinctive features of the system. They are the doctrines it is most necessary to understand, if we would understand what Judaism is all about.

We will see later that those five doctrines-borrowed from Judaism-set the course for Catholicism and Protestantism for the last 1600 years. There is no way to understand Catholicism and Protestantism without viewing them from the vantage point of Judaism. But before we get to those five doctrines, we need to look at another of the doctrines of the Pharisees. One of the most fundamental doctrines of the Pharisees, and the doctrine most basic to their entire system, was fatalism. Granted, what one writer affirms, another denies. Every false doctrine is like that; no false doctrine is ever consistent with itself. But most Pharisees were convinced that God predes-tinated everything that would ever be done by men or devils. The Pharisees’ brand of fatalism was like the Absolutism of our day. Alfred Edersheim records, “But the Pharisees carried their accentuation of the Divine to the verge of fatalism. Even the idea that God had created man with two impulses, the one to good, the other to evil; and that the latter was absolutely necessary for the continuance of this world, would in some measure trace the causation of moral evil to the Divine Being. The absolute and unalterable pre-ordination of every event, to its minutest details, is frequently insisted upon. Adam had been shown all the generations that were to spring from him. Every incident in the history of Israel had been foreordained, and the actors in it-for good or for evil-were only instruments for carrying out the Divine Will” (The Life and Times of the Messiah, pg 317).

He goes on, “But there is another aspect of this question also. While the Pharisees thus held the doctrine of absolute preordination, side by side with it they were anxious to insist on man’s freedom of choice, his personal respon-sibility, and moral obligation....It was, indeed, true that God had created the evil impulse in us; but he had also given the remedy in the Law” (ppg 318,319). This absolutism, this notion that God gave man a law, forced him to break it, and held him responsible for doing what he was forced to do, is only one of the doctrines held in common by the Pharisees, by Augustine, and by John Calvin.