Back when I was a christian, I had no doubt that christianity was the absolute truth. In all my years as a christian—growing up in the “church,” going to a christian high school and university, and then working in the “church” and traveling to “churches” all over the country for many years, there was no way anybody could ever convince me that the entire belief system is a counterfeit. Or, so I thought.
It was one simple debate several years ago with someone I thought was a complete nutwhack—some loon telling me that christmas was completely false and an annual act of rebellion against the one I called “God” (I didn’t even know His name, and thought a title was His name—it had never even dawned on me just how strange it was that my god’s name was “God”).
But, in researching everything I could find to prove the heretic wrong, I learned that he was actually right. And, of course, once I learned that something I had believed wholeheartedly was really a lie, I then wondered what else I had been taught that was false. Just sharing that one truth with other christians proved relationally perilous, and I was even told I was “spreading hate” by speaking that truth. I have learned that truth is hatred only to those who cling to lies.
As it turned out, most of what I had believed in that system, which was so much of part of who I was, was nothing but a man-made counterfeit of the true Gospel of Yahoshua the Messiah.
Of course, that illumination in my heart and mind did not happen instantly; it took several years of learning and seeing the Holy Spirit’s actual meanings in His scriptures for me to come to the final conclusion that christianity does not merely contain some false doctrines, it is rather an entire counterfeit system that just has some threads of truth running through it, as all religions do.
And, it wasn’t until I came face to face with that reality that the Holy Spirit revealed in my heart and mind that what I had thought was salvation my entire life was also a counterfeit that christianity had invented—a false sense of eternal security based wholly on man’s decision and “confirmed” by written words in a translation of the scriptures, as if an English translation of the scriptures replaced the role and authority of the Holy Spirit at some point in history.
So, the Holy Spirit now compels me to share His truths, focusing both on the true doctrines of salvation (as opposed to the false decision-based “salvation” of christianity), and the Father’s traditions, including the sign of family identification He gave to His children—His Sabbaths.
I am reminded daily of just how deceived I was by christianity when I converse with so many people who vehemently defend the counterfeit and openly reject the truth. There are 2.5 billion of them on the planet right now.
Messiah Yahoshua said of life in Him, “ . . . and few there be who find it.” My daily conversations with christians always remind me of just how true His words about the “few” really are.
For more information: Why I Am No Longer a Christian