FRIDAY MORNING MANNA
Biblical Numerology: NUMBER THREE- Part XXVII
What is a Confederacy?
“For the Lord thus spake to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of the people, saying, Say ye not, a Confederacy [“conspiracy,” NKJV], to all them to whom this people shall say, a Confederacy; neither fear ye their fear, not be afraid. Sanctify the Lord of hosts Himself; and let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread…..To the law and the testimony, if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.’ Isaiah 8: 11-13, 20, KJV.
“The question has been asked, What do mean by a Confederacy? Who have formed confederacies? You know that a confederacy is? —a union of men in a work that does not bear the stamp of pure, straightforward, unswerving integrity/” – Ellen G. White, Manuscript 29, 1911/4BC 1142.
What are God’s specific counsels given through His messenger for these last days regarding joining confederacies, including trade, labor unions, and secret societies. Why, in particular?
“No Confederacy with those Opposing the Truth. – Let the watchmen on the walls of Zion [the true commandment-keeping church] not join with those who are making of none-effect the truth as it is in Christ. Let them not join with the confederacy of infidelity, Popery and Protestantism in exalting tradition over Scriptures, reason above revelation, and human talent above the divine influence and the vital power of godliness.” – Ibid, Review & Herald, Mar. 24, 1896/4BC 1141.
“The world is not our criterion. Let the Lord work, let the Lord’s voice be heard. Those employed in any department of the work whereby the world may be transformed, must not enter into alliance with those who know not the truth. The world knows not the Father or the Son, and they have no spiritual discernment as to the character of our work, as to what we shall do or shall not do.
We must obey the orders that come from above. We are not to hear the counsel or follow the plans suggested by the unbelievers. Suggestions made by those that know not the work that God is doing for this time [finishing up Christ’s closing work of atonement as our High Priest during this antitypical Day of Atonement and pre-advent judgment in the most holy in heaven, simultaneous to having His people on earth proclaim earth’s final merciful warning of the three angels’ messages of Revelation 14 that started in 1840-44] will be such as to weaken the power of the instrumentalities of God. By accepting such suggestions, the counsel of God is set at naught.” – Ibid,Life Sketches, Chap. XLVIII, “Danger in Adopting Worldly Policy in the Work of God,” p. 322.
“ ‘Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.’ 2 Corinthians 6: 17. The wicked are being bound in bundles, bound in trusts, in unions, in confederacies. Let us have nothing to do with these organizations. God is our Ruler, our Governor, and He calls us to come out of the world and be separate.’”- Ibid, Manuscript 71, 1903/ 4BC 1142.
The World Council of Churches. – The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Marxism, Socialism, and Communism” by J. Wilzynski, Ph.D., S. Sc., published by De Gruyter, Berlin, New York, p. 647, says this of the WCC: ( I received true copies of these from a friend who sent them to me back in 1993-1994):
“An international organization with pro-Communist sympathies for the cooperation among all churches of religious studies and missionary work. It was founded in Amsterdam in 1948 and its secretariat based in Geneva. With it are affiliated 286 in over 100 countries—both capitalist (including Canada, France, the FR of Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and U.S.A.) and socialist (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia).
The World Council of Churches has been accused in the West, especially since the early 1970s of (1) giving the Marxist Movement a Christian justification (2) revolutionary pro-Communist and anti-western politics (3) supporting left-wing terrorists against former colonial powers (especially in Africa): and spreading a fraudulent gospel in general.” This Encylopedic Dictionary has similar background information for the World Confederation of Labor and the World Confederation of Democratic Youth!
“Our work is to proclaim to the world the first, the second and third angels’ message [of Revelation 14]. In the discharge of our duties, we are neither to despise nor fear our enemies. To bind ourselves up by contracts with those not of our faith is not the order of God….We are to treat with kindness and courtesy those who refuse to be loyal to God, but we are to never, never to unite with them in counsel regarding the vital interests of His work, for this is not the way of the Lord….The line of demarcation between those who keep the commandments of God and those who do not is to be revealed with unmistakable clearness. We are to consciously to honor God, diligently using very means in keeping with covenant relation with Him, that we may receive His blessings—the blessings so essential for the people who are to so severely tried.” – Ellen G. White, Letter 182, July 6, 1902/TDG 299.
Two Different Luthers: Two Different Movements
Dr. Martin Luther, the God-fearing German papist, seminal figure of the 16th century Protestant Reformation, tireless writer of tracts and songs, composer of one of my favorite hymns, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” was once widely known and respected but now not as appreciated (in fact, erroneously portrayed and discredited) as is Dr. Marin Luther King, Jr., the black American Baptist minister and social activist who led the Civil Rights Movement in America from the mid 1950s to his death by assassination in 1968. His famous historic march to Washington and speech on Aug. 23, 1963, “I have a Dream” was his signature moment and that of the Black Civil Rights movement. A year later, 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
But the former’s signature moment was not a march and a speech but a piece of paper—where he made a bold theological stand by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the castle-church at Wittenberg on Oct. 31, 1517. It was truly “a moment in history ripe for religious reformation,” marking this bold action and its author as the foremost of the great Protestant Reformers by exposing, for the first time, in Germany and rapidly spread throughout Christendom world the monstrous doctrines of Indulgence, and with it, Purgatory. It brought to the fore the gross abuses, self-indulgence, immorality, abominations, and crimes humanity it granted to its purchasers and its church-credentialed peddlers, prominent of which were the Dominican monk Johann Tetzel in Germany and Benhardin Samson, the Tetzel of Switzerland.
Samson was a Franciscan monk, who crossed the St. Gotthard to Switzerland in August, 1518, as apostolicgeneral commissioner [what a shameful title!] for the sale of Indulgences. He equaled Tetzel in the audacious profanation of holy things by turning the forgiveness of sins and the release from purgatorial punishment into merchandise. He gave preference to the rich who were willing to buy letters of Indulgence on parchment for a crown [any of several coins, originally one bearing a crown, esp. a British silver coin worth 5 shillings].
To the poor he sold the same article on common paper for a few coppers. In Berne he absolved the souls of all departed Bernese of the pains of purgatory. In Bremgarten he excommunicated Dean Bullinger (father of Henry) for opposing the traffic [a hundred times worse than drug trafficking for it trafficked the forgiving grace of God in Christ! The Bible calls it “turning the grace of God into lasciviousness.” Jude 4, KJV]. But in Zurich he was stopped at his career—by Huldrych (Uldrich) Zwingli, leader of the Swiss Protestant Reformation. See “History of the Christian Church, Vol.VIII: Modern Christianity. The Swiss Reformation.” (www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc8.iv.iii.iii.html_
There were two central beliefs in Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses: (1) that the Bible is the central and final religious authority, not church creeds or decretals (2) forgiveness or pardon full and complete, Biblical justification and ultimate salvation is obtained alone by faith in Christ’s perfect atoning sacrifice, not by one’s works. He helped to prepare the historic Augsburg Confession by the German Princes.
He, of course, did not receive all the light of truth that had yet to be given to the world in its appointed prophetic time, which would follow in 1840-1844 in the proclamation of the first, second, and third angels’ messages of Revelation 14. Thus, while he stands foremost of the greatest reformers, we are not to make him or any of the moral heroes of the Bible, men or women, including Mary the human mother of Jesus, our criterion but Jesus Christ alone, even as Luther himself and the true apostles and disciples following declared, preached, wrote, and witnessed to with their lives.
Faced with these secular and religious historical damning facts papal apologists have been attempting to distance themselves from Tetzel and the friars who sold “absolution of sins” by purchasing them with currencies (ducats, crowns) and other material valuables such gold, silver, and real estate, invented works and penances including joining crusades against the Moors but really against the hated Protestants—the Roman Church’s version of the Islam jihad to fund the construction and lavish embellishment of Saint Peter’s Basilica and to sustain their antichristian life-styles, crafting justifications that will never fool any serious Bible student or rational and honest minds. One example of such attempts to discredit Luther, thus the whole Protestant Reformation Movement is the booklet, “New Light on Martin Luther” by M.S,C., S.T.D. Leslie Rumble. (http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7260
Only eternity and the judgment of God will reveal the enormity and magnitude of delusion, wretchedness, abominations, sufferings, and loss of lives and souls caused by this doctrine so closely intertwined with the doctrine of Purgatory!
What an execrable doctrine that contradicts everything about God of unimaginable love He willingly gave His only begotten Son, who willingly offered Himself to die in the place of the lost sinner that when one dies “unsaved,” i.e., according to the different churches’ own perverted “way of salvation,” that one’s “soul” either immediately goes to an eternally-burning hell, or to Purgatory—also to be “burned and tortured” in order to be purified and qualified to enter Paradise and enjoy its “bliss.”
I gave it just one thought process when I became serious about my faith: “How can weightless souls, ghosts that pass through solid walls and zip through space unaffected by gravity, shuttling back and forth either from Paradise (after “40 days”), “hell,” “purgatory” and earth—(these places have to be very close to one another!)—depending on where they allegedly winged to at moment of death, having left behind their bodies either in the grave, cremated, or blasted into unrecognizable smithereens by bombs, or eaten by wild animals and cannibals, thus without the organs and faculties responsible for sensations and feelings—be “burned”?
What element in them is torched or tortured? What, if any, is the difference of the level of feelings of a disembodied soul without flesh, blood, and organs and an intact, living soul? How do souls in Paradise look like? Young? Old? With make-up or au naturel? when they were dead and embalmed? Get it?
Martin Luther King, Jr., though a doctor of theology and ordained Baptist minister, was a civil rights reformer. He died by assassination on April 4, 1968. He was 39 years old. In contrast, the former, a man of the cloth and Dr. of Theology was preeminently a religious rights reformer. He fought for the right of the common people to have access to the Bible by translating it into a language they could understand and be freed from religious chicanery.
He did not die by assassination or by any of the wretched forms of persecution invented by the Office of Inquisition such burning at the stake (employed by the ISIS today), a fate of thousands before and after him, although efforts by both Charles V and the Pope Leo X were attempted to eliminate him by declaring him an enemy of the state and a heretic of the Roman Church, respectively. Rather, Luther fell sick and died Feb. 18, 1546 at Eislebem, the town of his birth. He was 63 years old. (See unknown facts about Pope Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici) on One-Evil.org/content/people_16c_leo_x.html. (Continued next week)