When the Twelve Tribes spread out through what is now Israel, they were ruled by Judges. As they forgot that God had had led them into freedom from government oppression, their vanity prompted them to ask for a king.
God warned that a king would do more harm than good. They didn’t care. They wanted a king.
God gave them one. A thousand years later, their kings were reduced to Roman puppets.
Then, Jesus came. The Only Church He Founded began when He said: “Thou art Peter and on this rock I build My Church . . .” The Roman Catholic Church spread throughout Europe. Within a few centuries, the Ten Northern Tribes, who’d taken over much of Europe in the preceding thousand years, as they would later do in North America, were increasingly Roman Catholic.
For fifteen hundred years, much of Europe was monarchical and Catholic. Then, vanity led some to decide: “We don’t want kings. We want to be free to govern ourselves. We want our own churches, too.”
God gave them what they wanted. Kings were either overthrown or reduced to increasingly ceremonial status. The new churches relaxed the rules on clerical celibacy, poverty, and obedience.
Committees, Democracies, Republics, and pretenses came into legislative being. So did many new churches, often helped by the new governments that wanted to “get rid of hidebound traditions and old-fashioned rules and regulations.”
Self-rule let more people collect smaller bribes from those who wanted special favors. A few thousand dollars here and there still helps those who want government protection legislated to benefit them. The new churches let more people do what they wanted. Many wanted even more denominations so more people could “find themselves”.
Huge fortunes were accumulated in the new governments. A few people took control of the media that formed public opinions. They had the money to elect and maintain friendly legislators. Many didn’t mind hurting others if they made money. Gambling, pornography, divorce, birth control, and abortion became more widely available. In the last half of the 1900s, such social and family destructive activities went from being illegal to being subsidized.
Democracy became a tool of evil. So did the vanity that broke Christianity into ever tinier pieces.
For several centuries, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist Protestants held true to most Catholic moral teachings. In the 1930s, the once-respectable Protestant moral positions began to be eroded. By the end of the 1900s, the traditional Protestant denominations had been splintered. Divorce, birth control, and abortion had become common practice. Christianity was too weakened by division to protect lives, families,and traditional values.
The fragmentation of pro-life, traditional Christian groups made it impossible to protect neighbors, especially the helpless unborn, from life-destroyers. Competing schisms, “The Forest of the Forty Thousand Ladders to Heaven” simply could not, and never can, coalesce around the defense of life. Many are unwilling to admit being part of the problem. They fell into: The devil’s trap: “I believe so I am saved.”
This sort of Christian tended to cherry-pick various passages, like “I believe so I am saved.” from The Bible to justify being in some ineffectual, man-invented schism or another. That keeps them distracted from taking meaningful action on the only solution: Unless Pro-Life people reunite as Catholics, the destruction of the unborn will continue.
How do many of them respond? Many still fall into The devil’s trap: “I believe, so I am saved.” Some become proud of the independence that allows evils to triumph. They become so proud of their own vanity they cannot see the harm it does. Nor do they understand that “The Garden is self-weeding.”
The devil’s trap: “I believe, so I am saved.” Innocent blood is on the hands of those who prefer denominational vanities to The Only Church Jesus Founded. That vanity is the real cause of evils.
