the capacity to yield more and more ideas that are offensive and dis-
graceful to God, until Isaiah’s prophecy comes to pass:
The priest and the prophet have gone astray because of beer; they stag-
ger in their judgment. All the tables are full of the vomit they cast
forth. (Isaiah 28 : 7 , 8 )
This idea of God and redemption has turned the entire theology 133
from something spiritual into something earthly of the lowest kind.
This is because mere earthly characteristics have been attributed to
God. Yet everything about the church hinges on its concept of God and
its view of redemption (which is the same as its view of salvation). The
concept of God and redemption is like a head: every part of the body is
connected to it. When the concept is spiritual, everything about the
church becomes spiritual; when it is earthly, everything about the
church becomes earthly. Because the church’s concept of God and
redemption became merely earthly (meaning that it was down on the
level of our bodies and senses), all the dogmatic ideas expressed since
then by the church’s heads and members have been merely earthly. Fur-
ther ideas that hatch from these ideas will inevitably be false, because
our earthly self constantly opposes our spiritual self; our earthly self
sees spiritual things as phantoms and apparitions in the air.
This materialistic idea of redemption and of God has allowed thieves
and robbers, so to speak (John 10 : 1 , 8 , 9 ), to take over the roads that lead
in the direction of heaven and the Lord God the Savior. The main doors
have been torn off the churches and now dragons, screech owls, wild
beasts of the desert, and jackals have come in and are singing together
out of tune.
This idea of redemption and God has been injected into the modern-
day belief about prayer, as we know. We are supposed to ask God the Father
to forgive our offenses for the sake of the cross and his Son’s blood; we are
supposed to ask God the Son to pray and intercede for us; and we are sup-
posed to ask God the Holy Spirit to justify us and sanctify us. Is this any
different from praying to three gods, one after the other? Under this sys-
tem, what differentiates divine governance from an aristocratic or hierarchi-
cal government? Or even the triumvirate that once occurred in Rome?
Instead of a “triumvirate,” this should be called a “triumpersonate.”
Under this belief, it would be easy for the Devil to “divide and con-
quer,” as the saying goes—that is, to cause a division of minds and incite
§133 the lord the redeemer & redemption 185