David Pawson on Church History Part 10 - The Church in the Future

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Thoughtful Thoughts 16.5.25 by John Dunning.

The Christian Story Pt. 10; Reasons for the “Reformation”; Part 1

INTRODUCTION…

Have you wondered what Jesus meant when He warned us to “beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” in Matthew 16:6-12. 

The disciples questioned what Jesus meant by that, and many still do, so today’s study asking what was wrong with the teaching of the church, needing reformers to be whistleblowers, is still relevant now…

Just as “leaven” gets added to a “flour-mix” for making bread, so the religious leaders added their own teaching on top of what the Bible said. So the “leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” referred to the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees as they added their own man-made theologies when they taught the Scriptures. 

A). THE “LEAVEN” BEING TAUGHT AT THAT TIME, BACK THEN…

Jesus warned us to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. 

Examples of the kind of “leven” being taught back then were;-

1). The Sadducees taught that there was no life after death - (ie death was the end.) The only upside for them was the rewards in this life of obedience to God’s law. 

2). The Pharisees added a huge extra burden of extra rules and regulations. As they controlled the Temple, it meant that they controlled Jews, because a Jew needed the Temple to make sacrifices to God. The extra rules  were so onerous that many Jews gave up because of the impossibility of it all. The Jews who gave up then were nicknamed “sinners” by the religious leaders. 

Now, as Jesus did not obey the Pharisees' own extra additions to God’s law, they accused Jesus of not keeping the sabbath law, for example. 

We are told in John 9:16; ‘Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” But others asked, “How can a sinner perform such signs?” So they were divided.’

So Jesus was warning His hearers to beware of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees;- the religious teaching… 

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B). THE “LEAVEN” BEING TAUGHT NOW…

Examples of the “leaven” today can be shown;-

i). With Jews

I stayed at a hotel in Jerusalem whilst on a David Pawson tour;-

a). Where the hotel lifts worked automatically… not out of courtesy to guests, but because in order to be acceptable to Orthodox Jews, the hotel lifts must not require the pushing of a lift button on the Sabbath, as Orthodox Jews called that  “work”!

A Messianic Jew told me that if Orthodox Jews get caught out, they even wait for a Gentile to get into the lift, so that THEY push the button on the Sabbath. Today, Orthodox Jews would call Jews who pushed the button on the Sabbath, a “sinner”, as they broke the teaching of the Rabbis by doing that! That was the kind of thing that attracted the nickname “sinner”.

b). Another example from that hotel was where dairy products were not even allowed to be prepared on the same days of the week as meat products, just in order to be acceptable to the Orthodox Jews. 

ii). Now the “leaven” in the Gentile church

Having explained what the “leaven” was that Jesus meant, we  now arrive at the real reason for this study. Why did reformers protest and gain the nickname “protestants”. As they brought “reform”, that time was called the “Reformation”. 

We are told by Paul to study the Bible like the Bereans, so how was the church contradicting the Bible? After all, that was why the “Reformation” was necessary.

C). THE “MASS”

1. WHAT IS IT?

The Catholic Church claims that their priests are able to re-sacrifice Jesus’s body at every Mass. They say they convert wine into the blood of Jesus and the bread into His body. As the bread went off, they invented wafers. As for the wine which they claimed they could convert into Jesus’ blood, they only allowed priests to drink it. 

So what is this “Mass”?

The Mass is the religious ceremony where churchgoers are told that if they eat the bread (or “wafer”) after the priest reads set Catholic words over it, having been told by the church it changes into the body of Jesus Christ, and all the sins will be wiped away of the person eating the wafer (or bread). This process they decided to call “transubstantiation”. (The priest also performs the same over the wine, but only he is allowed to drink it.) 

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2. WHAT DOES THE BIBLE TEACH?

This is what the Bible teaches, which is ignored by those perpetuating the Mass.

a). Hebrews 7:27 “Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins ONCE AND FOR ALL when he offered himself”.

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b). Hebrews 9:28 “…so Christ was sacrificed ONCE to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.”

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c). Hebrews 10:10 “And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ ONCE AND FOR ALL.”

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d). Hebrews 10:12 “But when this priest had offered for all time ONE sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,…”

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e). Heb. 10:14 “…For by ONE sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy…”

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3. EXPLAINING 

a). Re-sacrificing Jesus

Firstly, the idea is that priests can forgive sins, by pulling off a Tommy Cooper magic trick of turning wine and wafers into Jesus’ literal flesh and then claim that they were re-sacrificing Jesus every time, is in violation of the teaching in the book of Hebrews, in the New Testament, which teaches that Jesus' body cannot be re-sacrificed. 

The Catholic Church teaches that “tradition” comes before the Bible, and teaches that the Mass re- sacrifices Jesus’ body and blood, so wafers and wine leftover from the Mass are put into a box with a red light in front, which churchgoers bow to if they walk past, as if Jesus’ body was in that box! (Although the priest is sanctioned to eat and drink them.) 

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b). Forgiving sins

Their idea is that sins are forgiven by eating wafers/bread after a priest had rung their bell over it.

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c). Then the Catholic church found it could make a lot more money by holding a Mass for the dead. This led on to selling forgiveness for the sins of the dead, called indulgencies.

Jesus taught that after death, there can be no further adjustment to what happens to us, so based on Jesus’ teaching, a Mass for the dead violates Jesus’ teaching.

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There is not space available this time to start moving on into Anglican church doctrine, but it copied over as a “job lot” a lot of Catholic dogma.  Its clergy generally fall into three categories… High Church, Liberal, and “Evangelical”. Not all of them agree with the idea of converting the bread into the flesh of Jesus and the wine into His blood, but they all use the wording in the prayer book which is written ambiguously, and is therefore all things to all men.

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EPILOGUE;- Overview…

Jesus warned against religious leaders who add their own teachings as if they are Scriptural. The Bible tells us to be like the Bereans and check up on church teachings by using the Bible. Richard Tice who wrote most of “Christianity Explored” resigned from the Anglicans recently for that reason, saying that the highest authority in the church refused to state the need for repentance, so he joined another denomination. That explains its absence in the third lesson of the Alpha course when discussing forgiveness. 

We will discuss more theological reasons next time on why the church desperately needed reforming… Meantime, the responsibility remains with us to take responsibility to be like the Bereans by sticking with God’s Word. An example can be found in Acts 2:38… where Peter states that in order to start on our journey of salvation, we must a). Repent, b). Be immersed, c). And receive the Holy Spirit. Read Acts 2:38, Pray about Acts 2:38, Act on Acts 2:38…

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This is John Dunning signing off from “Thoughtful Thoughts” for another week.

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