First Century Christianity
First Century Christianity
Symbols
You shall not make to yourselves any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them. For I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation of those that hate me, and showing mercy to thousands of those that love Me and keep My commandments.
(Exodus 20: 4-6)
Let’s get something completely straight. Nobody today knows what Jesus looked like. Even if we did, the commandment is pretty clear and we should not make images of Him. By making our kids think we do know what Jesus looks like, it provides an avenue for the anti-Christ and his ilk to manipulate and deceive.
Another thing that has bothered me since as long as I can remember, going back way before I started studying the scriptures, is the cross. Why on God’s green earth people decided to memorialize Jesus Christ by hoisting the actual implement used in His execution up onto a high place in front of a congregation of people who profess to love the Lord is beyond me. Could you imagine the outrage if we memorialized Abraham Lincoln with a pistol? How’s about JFK or MLK with a rifle? Of course, that would be considered incredibly crude and in the poorest of taste. Now, I could understand if we all put empty caves with rolled away stones in our yards or our churches, but noooo, we put up a big wooden cross. Some churches actually put up a crucifix - a cross with the phony image of Jesus hanging from it. I find this repulsive.
Maybe, just maybe, I could understand the cross if Jesus was the only guy to have ever been put to death on one, but tens of thousands of people were put to death in this manner, and if memory serves, 3000 were put down on crosses in one day.
A little known fact is that the cross pre-dates Christianity by a few hundred years. The fact of the matter is that the cross is a sign of a sun-god named Tammuz (actually this god has a bunch of names depending on time and geography, see Ezekiel 8:14). This is another little bit of trivia about putting Jesus to death on a cross, because it is essentially hanging the real God on a sign of a false god - the ultimate insult. I believe this is why the sun went dark when Jesus died. I believe it was to show that Jesus created the sun, not the other way around.
The fish symbol is another of interest. It is actually the sign of a fish-god named Dagon (see 1Samuel 5 and others). Yes, that’s right, somewhere in history people actually worshipped a fish. I can’t help but grin when I see a fish with a cross inside of it on the back of someone’s car. Pagan god cannibalism.
As for me, I’m with these Colossians, I worship the invisible God:
For He has delivered us from the power of darkness and has translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son; in whom we have redemption through His blood, the remission of sins. who is the image of the invisible God, the First-born of all creation.
(Colossians 1: 13-15)
For more in depth on this topic, please read the three blog entries on Symbols starting here.