“Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur”
Another posting by the cult “United Church of God”
An excerpt:
Origins: The United Church of God is an offshoot of the Worldwide Church of God. They claim to trace their origins back to the “Church that Jesus founded in the early first century.”2 How this is done is not explained.
Practices: Worship on Saturday
Analysis: The United Church of God is a non-Christian cult that denies the Trinity, the true divinity of Christ, and requires both baptism and obedience to the commandments to be saved. It teaches that there is a “God family” of which we can become members through keeping the Law. Jesus is one of two divine beings, the Father being the other. The Holy Spirit is a force, a power, and is not the 3rd person of the Trinity, and it is received only through the laying on of hands by their church members. It also teaches that their members are obligated to keep the Sabbath and must observe seven festivals. They cannot eat unclean meat. This is a false religious system that teaches a false God, false Christ, and false gospel. Stay away from it.
Acts 16:30* And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? 31* And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.
Believe. Not believe+works. Simply believer.
Trying to “guess the devil” will always be a resounding failure, for a simple reason: people are just not that capable.
St. Thomas Aquinas imagined Satan as a fallen Cherub.
Cherubim means “the fulness of knowledge, and these most sublime hosts are thus called, because they are filled with a knowledge which is the more perfect as they are allowed to behold the glory of God more closely”.
However, Lucifer’s big sin, by which we can have any understanding of Satan at all, is vanity, in the truest, Ten Commandments, sense. It is not just Satan’s sin, but that of mankind as well.
In this case, both Lucifer, and mankind, just cannot resist imagining themselves as the center of the universe. In the case of Lucifer, this ended with him cast out of Heaven. In the case of mankind, it resulted in the great flood, and the Tower of Babel being destroyed, among other things.
God finally gave the definitive philosophical basis for this when Moses asked His name, in that His response to this, while terse, has immense implications.
Philosophically, it gave people a tremendous paradox, if God is everything and does everything, how do people do anything? This paradox existed to modern times, until philosophers eventually decided that only through atheism could man continue to pretend that he ruled the universe.
That is, “I AM THAT I AM”, was countered with Descartes “I think, therefore I am”. Foolish, flawed and wrong, people didn’t care, because they could once again become vain in earnest.
Since that time, there has been a steady progression to mankind thinking it has the power of God, and this process is accelerating with the philosophy of socialism.
Importantly, it really doesn’t matter if this is a reflection of the hand of Satan, or that we are doing it ourselves, the effects, and the possible consequences of this arrogance are the same.
With nuclear weapons, many have convinced themselves that humans can annihilate the world. Now men are asserting that mankind can control the weather, by somehow manipulating our trace contribution to a trace gas. More and more, mankind seeks to make itself uniform, with the idea of eliminating the knowledge of good and evil among mankind, thus giving ourselves immortality in anonymity.
I am inclined to this man is responsible for his own sin, as were this the work of Satan, it would not be done in anonymity, but with braggadocio. Satan would want us to do so in his honor, not our own egotism.