When Paul spoke to the churches in Thessalonica, Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Galatia, Philippi, and Colosse, he was not speaking to a building but instead a people. Those people who were young and fledgling members of the believers of Jesus Christ. The oldest of Christian documents, they were written to a group of people who lived within each city. These letters were written before the gospels and they are guidelines of Christian faith and doctrine.
When these letter were put into the Bible as we know it, they were simply organized by group vs. individual and also by the length of the letter. So first we find Romans because it was the longest letter written to a church group. Next you find I Corinthians because it was the next to longest letter written to a church group. And so forth. After all the church letters, then you find the personal letters, the first one is I Timothy simply because it is the longest letter Paul wrote to an individual. The order in the bible is not chronological but instead ordered for other reasons as length and addressee.
In the 27th and 28th chapter of Acts, Paul was imprisoned in Rome. It was during this time that Paul sat and wrote many of his letters to the churches of the various cities found in the bible.
Paul wrote to "all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (I Cor. 1:2). His instructions were not directed primarily to theologians, pastors, or priests. He wrote to the whole church – to regular Christians, like you and me – about the daily challenges that we confront in our walk with Christ. Paul is very clear—the gospel message of salvation is simple, straightforward and available to all who come in faith. They weren't to a building or to an organization that prosyletized doctrine and dogma. They were to people and persons. Christians.
There are 21 letters in the New Testament of the Bible. About half of them are signed by Paul, who was one of the first leaders of the Christian church. Paul never met Jesus in person, but had a profound vision of him while he was on a journey. Ironically, the purpose of the journey had been to arrest Christians. The vision persuaded Paul that Jesus was the Messiah (the leader whom the Jews had anticipated for many years). He retreated to present-day Turkey where he made an in-depth study of the Old Testament.
While he was researching, an unexpected development took place in the Christian church. Gentiles (people who were not Jewish) were beginning to worship Jesus as God. In view of his dramatic change of belief, Paul was seen as the ideal person to manage the colossal transformation that would be involved in incorporating these new Christians. Paul prepared the church to become international, and made a series of journeys around the Mediterranean explaining the claims of Jesus and founding churches when people responded in faith.
Most of the letters that are now in the Bible were written by Paul to these new churches and their leaders after he had moved on. He explained the significance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and its place in the eternal plans of God. And he described the difference that this should make to the everyday behaviour of believers.
During the winter of57–58 A.D., Paul was in the Greek city of Corinth. From Corinth, he wrote the longest single letter in the New Testament, which he addressed to “God’s beloved in Rome” (1:7). Like most New Testament letters, this letter is known by the name of the recipients, the Romans. Paul’s letters tended to be written in response to specific crises. For instance, 1 Corinthians was written to reprove the Christian community in Corinth for its internal divisions and for its immoral sexual practices. But Romans is remarkably devoid of this kind of specificity, addressing broad questions of theology rather than specific questions of contemporary practice. Whereas other Pauline letters—2 Corinthians, for instance—are full of impassioned rhetoric and personal pleas, Romans is written in a solemn and restrained tone. Perhaps this solemnity can be explained by timing: Romans was the last written of the seven New Testament letters that modern scholars attribute to Paul, and has been seen as a summary of Paul’s thought, composed as his career moved toward its conclusion. But it is also true that, as opposed to the Corinthian church, the Roman church was not founded by Paul himself. At the time when he wrote Romans, Paul had never visited Rome, although Chapter 16 of Romans does indicate that he had acquaintances there. Writing to a community largely composed of strangers, then, Paul may have felt compelled to use the restrained and magisterial declarations of Roman style, rather than the impassioned pleas and parental sternness that permeate his letters to the churches at Corinth.
The period during which Paul wrote his letters was traumatic for the new church. Christianity had not yet evolved into a distinct religion with a hierarchy of authority and a defined dogma. Christianity, in its earliest years, was an offshoot of Judaism. Believers in Jesus, including all of the Twelve Apostles, were generally born Jewish and identified themselves as Jews who believed that the Old Testament prophecies had reached their fulfillment in Jesus. Indeed, the term “Christians” did not appear until Paul’s ministry at Antioch, decades after Jesus’s crucifixion. The church was not a single, unified body governed by a central authority, but, rather, a conglomeration of individual communities, often separated by large distances, which depended for spiritual authority on local preachers or traveling missionaries, like Paul. Christians in the decades after Jesus lived in constant fear of persecution and constant expectation of the second coming, Jesus’s triumphant return to Earth during which he would save the faithful.
So today we must look at the church as Paul did. Not in the way of councils and districts or dogma and ritual. We must attempt as individual Christians to strip it down to a personal relationship with God and Christ. The church prospered and grew upon the actions and faith of the individual who sought out others of like mind in order to earn more of Christ and carry on his will. Yes, the bible is indeed divine and created to give the reader the opportunity to know and love God so he may be saved in spirit sans the spirit. Where as he Vatican had deployed Priests, Bishops, and Cardinals to express the interpretation of the Pope to the masses, Gutenberg and his bible gave the individual Christian the chance to know Christ theirself. Martin Luther sensed the manipulation the Vatican was using to gain riches and maintain its own kingdom and through his own actions created a protestant church that thought on it's own and eschewed the demands of humans in order to gain their own relationship with Christ.
It was the organizational dogma and non-Christian acts of the "Church" that brought about the reformation initiated by John Calvin and Martin Luther. The selling of indulgences by the Pope in order to gain forgiveness of sins was one manipulation of the ignorant to enrich the Vatican.
It is not by any means the instruction or interpretation by man that should guide the individual on his walk with Christ. It is indeed the unadulterated word of God and the gathering of pure and nonagenda driven individuals that draws out the truth. The church is not a building or organization but instead a gathering of like minded individuals seeking to honestly know God.
The worst thing to happen to the scriptual manipulator is a literate and open minded believer who is blessed by God with independent thought. The slave owners of early colonial America used the illiteracy of the african to justify the plight they found themselves in by inaccurate dipictions and descriptions of the story of Noah and his son Ham.
The story goes, "Genesis 9:1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
Canaan cursed by Noah
Genesis 9:20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.
24 ¶ And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant."
Canaan being described as Africa and Ham being the Patriarch of all Africans, the slaveholders found justification in their holding of their fellow humans as slaves. This kind of manipulation can be found through out time and within many other faiths for reasons involving a number of atrocities. This is all the more reason for man and woman to not garner their knowledge of God and his purpose for our lives from others exclusively but instead to see ourselves as the true church. The individual Christian. You and I. Not to believe what we are told to believe but to grow as Christians through our own developing faith and at our own spirits pace as it sees fit.
Some individuals manipulate Scripture for their own personal benefit. An authoritarian husband might demand that his wife submit to him as the head of the house and quoteEphesians 5:22(“Wives, submit to your husbands”). But that same man might purposefully overlook verse 26, which says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Instead of taking the bits of Scripture he approves of and using them to lord it over his family, he would do well to read1 Corinthians 13and practice the type of love that is patient, kind, protects, trust and perseveres, etc.
A characteristic of spiritually abusive systems is that a misplaced sense of loyalty is fostered and even demanded. This is not about loyalty to Christ, but about loyalty to an organization, church or leader. Because authority is assumed or legislated, following that authority must also be legislated. This is accomplished is by setting up a system where disloyalty or disagreement with the leadership is construed as disobeying God. Questioning leaders is not allowed. After all, the leader is the authority, and authority is always right. Such spiritual manipulation denies the truth ofEphesians 1:22, which says that Christ is the Head of the church. Our loyalty is due Him.
All Christians need to be alert to spiritual manipulation and follow this example fromActs 17:11: “Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Did the apostle Paul take offense when theBereansresearched to ensure that his preaching was based on Scripture? Of course not, because Paul knew his preaching would stand up under exhaustive scrutiny. Likewise with all teaching and preaching – we must hold it up to the light of God’s Word before we accept it. Any religious group that prevents its members from doing independent research, or from challenging what the leadership says, must have something to fear.
Jesus told His disciples they would be like sheep among wolves and instructed them to be “shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). The Master’s yoke is easy, and His burden is light. He gives us rest and is gentle and humble in heart (Matthew 11:28-29). That is the Christlike example all who shepherd Jesus’ flock must exemplify.
So develope yourself as a Christian individually so you are not tied to the manipulation of others but instead guided by your own walk and understanding with God. There are many who seek to twist our minds for their own benefit. We must be as the Christians of the young church were, Believers with a desire to live as Christ and exemplify his life here on earth. There are verses provided through Paul and the gospels to help us gain discernment.
Paul states in Galatians 5:7-12 what he thinks of manipulators.
Galatians 5:7-12
New International Version (NIV)
7 You were running a good race. Who cut in on you to keep you from obeying the truth? 8 That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. 9 “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.” 10 I am confident in the Lord that you will take no other view. The one who is throwing you into confusion, whoever that may be, will have to pay the penalty. 11 Brothers and sisters, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished. 12 As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!
Jesus says to “beware of the false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing” (Matthew 7:15). The false teacher never comes to us with a cardboard sign around his neck saying, “I’m a false teacher.” The false teacher comes to us in the guise of Christianity. He has the form of godliness while denying its power (2 Tim. 3:5). If the false teacher looks and sounds like a Christian, then how are we to know if he is a false teacher? Jesus tells us how we know, “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). In other words, what they do will often reveal far more about who they are than what they say.
The thing for all of us to know is that our walk is our own and we must be aware of the people who gain our trust. We must learn what God desires from us as followers and believers of Christ and we must be able to discern when we are being used for greed and power. Above all, God is love and as Paul wrote for all to see is there are no laws against love, peace, self control, forgiveness, and faithfulness.
