A very prominent preacher, Andy Stanley, has recently told his church, and the whole world, that Christians need to ‘unhitch’ their faith from the “Old Testament.”
God is saying to those who would hear, “Come out of her, My people.”
Peter said it, and Paul said it. John said it. They each said that in the last days people would turn away from sound teaching. When Peter described the last days, he said they would forget the Creation and the Flood. Evolution does exactly that. Then he gave believers a staunch warning about those teachers to those who might deign to follow them:
17You therefore, my beloved, seeing that you know these things beforehand [that the wicked will be punished], beware, lest you follow the error of those without Torah, and fall from your own steadfastness. [2 Peter 3]
In the King James, the bold text simply says “the wicked”. But the greek is more in line with the Aramaic, which does say exactly that, “without Torah“. The greek is athesmos, and means “one who breaks through the restraint of law to feed his passions”. It is God’s law about which Peter is concerned.
That preacher would have us believe that Peter, Paul, John, and all the apostles, abandoned the Jewish Scriptures, what he errantly calls the ‘Old Testament’. The ones Yeshua sent into the world were all Jewish, and lived their lives as Torah-observant Jews, for the rest of their lives. It is bad enough that we who are trying to help people see how better to obey their Lord have to deal with the false notion that God hates the Biblical Sabbath, much less now to deal with the notion that the very books themselves are worthless.
Peter was actually warning people about teachers within circles of christian faith twisting the SCRIPTURES:
14Therefore, my beloved, while you look for these things, be diligent that you may be found by Him in shalom, without spot, and blameless. 15And consider that the longsuffering of Our Master is for Salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, 16as also in all his letters he speaks concerning these matters, in which there are certain things so hard to be understood that those who are ignorant and unstable twist their meaning, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction. [2 Peter 3]
That preacher’s excuse to finally absolutely divorce God’s people from His Word is that the Body of Messiah is divided; and he thinks it is divided because of the “Old Testament”. NO! It is divided precisely because of the situation that has been for nearly 1700 years, which he is trying to make worse! It is divided because The Catholic Church’s founder, Constantine, divorced his religion from Judaism, forbade anyone in his realm to keep the Sabbath any longer, or to keep the Passover any longer, and changed it to Ishtar, and changed the day of worship to Sun-Day, the “Glorious Day of Sol Invictus“, the pagan deities he worshipped for the rest of his life. That was the beginning of the mess in the realm of faith in Yeshua.
Constantine’s followers then told the whole realm that the Scriptures that the congregations had been studying for 200+ years were not relevant to the ‘Universal Church’ any longer; they were ‘old’; the God of the Jews was a mean and angry God, and the new God of christianity was loving and forgiving. They made a division in the Word of God that is not there, per Peter’s own words above. They cut the WORD of God down the middle. [and whom did they harm in so doing?] And they began to kill and torture anyone that would not comply.
It was not until people began to read the Bible for themselves [think ‘printing press’, Tyndale, Wycliffe, Luther, Geneva] that they saw the relevance of the Scriptures they had been told were “old”. Later, these ‘protestants’ in America loved those ‘old’ scriptures so much, they plastered them all over the buildings they built, taught them to their kids, wove them into the fabric of our laws and into the public mind. But over the last fifty + years, the christian public has capitulated to the ever-worsening culture of anti-God, anti-Creation, and anti-Righteous behavior, which they are bringing into their sanctuaries, and it has become necessary to throw away the foundational side of the book.
Wonder why crime is going up in our country? It is precisely because the public has already unofficially turned a blind eye to God’s law. Now, christian leaders want to make it official, and sever the tie altogether, utterly teaching people NOT to read HIS WORD.
What most people call the “Old Testament” is actually the BEDROCK of scripture, and Paul said so:
18Through Him we both [JEWS AND GENTILES] are able to draw near, by one Spirit, to The Father. 19Thus from henceforth you are neither strangers nor foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the holy ones, and children of The House of God; 20and you are built upon the foundations of the Apostles and THE PROPHETS [“Old Testament”] Yeshua The Messiah Himself being the cornerstone of the building: 21and through Him the whole building [Apostles, Prophets, Messiah embodying both sets of writings] is fashioned and grows into a Holy Sanctuary in יהוה , you22 also are built up by Him for a Dwelling Place of God through The Spirit.
People, it truly is the last of the last days. Wake up to the lies you are being force-fed.