Cedric,
The Trinity is a pagan concept older than Christianity. It was one of the things they took from paganism when they merged. Growing up SDA when I heard people like Sizzla talk about the sabbath it made me happy because we were always taught that was the thing that distinguished us from the other Christians, not wanting to say they were under the influence of the devil but implying exactly that. But as I grew up I started questioning this doctrine because I couldn't understand how, only in our minds, did it exist in the OT. In reality it was an invention of Christianity and they had many different interpretations of the divinity of "Jesus" because they could not understand the concept of HUMAN beings being divine.
In other words, my dear brotha, they didn't understand the very concept of Haile Selassie. To them, for a man to be divine, he had to have the same PHYSICAL nature... as God. In other words, he had to be the same species. However, the bible does not assign God to a species and never deals with God in these physical terms. This is where the misunderstanding comes in. When God is called the Father it doesn't mean a physical father. It is spiritual. Not carnal. So when we understand Haile Selassie we also must understand him in the spiritual sense, not a carnal sense.
In the carnal sense, we know who Haile Selassie's parents were. We know he was a king. We know how he fought for his people.
What Christians don't generally understand from the OT (because they don't read it like that) is that David was "worshiped" because he was the king. They don't understand that kings were often called "your worship" and "your highness" because people revered them for their power and authority. So when Haile Selassie is in the same lineage... then he too takes on the same majesty and worship. But Christians don't understand. From their perspective, if you are worshipped then people must have thought you were a god because only God, to them, can be worshiped. But they misunderstand because they changed the culture. They were using a European/Roman cultural perspective, not a Hebrew/Israelite perspective. Big difference.
Christians assume that they were the first followers of Yeshua and his disciples. We know this is false. Yeshua and his disciples were first sent to the "lost sheep" of the house of Yisrael. It was only later that they were commanded to preach the gospel to all the world. But they did not do this as a new religion or under the name Christianity. The NT tells us that "they" were first called Christians at Antioch. Who was "they"? And who was it that did the calling? It was the people of the city that did the calling, using their own native tongue. The Hebrews did not naturally speak Greek which is why Paul surprised people when they saw that he could speak it. So why would Yeshua and his disciples call themselves a word from a foreign language? It's nonsense.
I doubt that Yeshua would even name his people using the word "messianic". Yes it is the Hebrew version which carries the same meaning as Christ, but messiah (mashiach) was basically simply an alternative word for king because all the kings of Yisrael were "anointed". That never before changed the name of their followers. Their followers were simply all the members of that NATIONALITY. It would be like if Barack Obama called his supporters "presidents". No, they were called Americans because he wanted to be the president of America.
By the same token, Yeshua wasn't looking to be a religious cult leader but rather KING of Yisrael. People miss this because they transplant "messiah", using the Greco-Roman, into a purely RELIGIOUS context.
And so it is in this national to religious switch... that's where all these changes took place; including the culture and nationality of the people claiming to be God's people.
In 70AD the zealots finally succeeded in getting all the Hebrews they could to fight Rome and they lost. Were they aided by their Christian brethren? There is a huge span of time in which the Hellenized pagan believers acted like they had no Hebrew teachers. But in this same span of time they (the Hebrews) were being persecuted and driven under ground. They were food for lions in the coliseum. But recall how Paul was treated. He got special treatment because he was a Roman citizen. He helped the crossover by educated the Greeks without holding them to the same standards of righteousness. To this day you can argue with Christians who will tell you that they don't have to keep the sabbath and other commands because those commands were given to the Israelites, not them. And while James was head of the congregation of Yeshua's followers, the disciples of Yeshua didn't trust Paul and had beef with him that played out in the NT. There is little evidence to think those 2 groups ever really merged.
By 325AD... by the time Constantine was on the scene, Christians had been able to take over and use, post mortem, the authority of the disciples because they were dead an unable to defend their names or offer correction. So Christianity was like a teenager whose parents had died in a plane crash. And they want you to think they have an unbroken line of succession from the disciples, creating continuity.
IT IS A LIE. They never had continuity. Their power didn't manifest until the disciples were all dead and they didn't have power until they (the whore) got on the back of the beast (Rome). I don't think the Revelator predicted this as much as he actually saw the beginnings of it and attempted to warn people of how it would progress. And don't forget, the catholic church, which is what came out of this whoredom with Rome, at first kept the book of Revelation out of their canon; their version of the bible.
I don't think I can make this point enough.
Yisrael was a nation and it was about culture. But when Christianity took over they replaced the nation of Yisrael with the religion of Christianity and used ROME as their nation.
So just like the priests and prophets of Yisrael would naturally go to their king... KING OF YISRAEL.... Christians used the power and authority of their king... ROMAN EMPEROR. And with that power they created a standard of righteousness and compliance, similar to what Moses did. But in their Christian purity test, enforced by the Inquisitions, was the first thing that the bishops under Constantine agreed upon when Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea. And why did they agree? Why did Constantine want them to agree?
This is important. This was the research that separated me from my parents even though my father understood and even provided me with evidence I didn't have yet. He showed me a book that had the pre-trinity beliefs. They don't teach this stuff in Christianity, not in churches, because they want people to think their doctrines are above question. But the pre-trinity beliefs (which anyone can google) show and prove that there was NOT an agreement before the Trinity. Each group which had their own view was like a separate denomination. But Constantine wanted to unite them because unity is where you get power from. United countries under one banner is what an empire is all about. So Constantine's motives were clear. More power. More authority. By bringing them all together he didn't have to be the ruler of a fractured and divided "church". And so even though there was a serious disagreement with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitarianism_in_the_Church_Fathers#:~:text=Trinitarians%20sometimes%20refer%20to%20Christian,%2C%20partially%20Trinitarian'%2C%20etc.
Notice that these church fathers have Greco-Roman names because that's who they were. We're not in Kansas anymore. This is now a Greco-Roman religion. That's why when it was taught to us we were slaves learning Christianity from European slavers and slave masters.
quote: This is most clearly pointed out by the Apostle Paul, when demonstrating that the power of the Trinity is one and the same, in the words, "There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit; there are diversities of administrations, but the same Lord; and there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God who worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit: withal." From which it most clearly follows that there is no difference in the Trinity, but that which is called the gift of the Spirit is made known through the Son, and operated by God the Father.[35]
1 Corinthians 8:6 - But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.
Ephesians 4:6 - One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.
Notice that Paul feels the need to say this to the inhabitants of Corinth and Ephesus. Why? Because he's not the apostle to the Hebrews. He is a missionary sent (himself) to the Greeks. Christians may wonder why this isn't said more in the bible but it depends on where you look. Paul says it all the time when he opens his letters.
For example: 1 Timothy 1:1, 2 Timothy 1:1, Colossians 1:1, 1 Thessalonians 1:1... it was Paul's culture and common practice to identify God as "the Father" and call Yeshua "Christ" or messiah which really means king. And he makes this distinction. However, they don't really get it because they didn't grow up with Deuteronomy 6:4 like the Hebrews did. They had to repeat it 3 times a day.
This is important because Christianity used the power of Rome to judge people according to whether or not they accepted the Trinity doctrine. It was a Christian purity test. Remember that the Sanhedrin couldn't legally put Yeshua to death even though they opposed him. They could influence the people to stone him for blasphemy but they couldn't force them to do it. Ultimately, when they put him into a formal trial they had to send him to the Romans because they didn't have a king. They were under Roman occupation. So this is where we to see that eventually, Christians, using the power of Rome, judged the Jews for not believing in the Trinity. Why? Because there was no such thing in their doctrine. There is no such thing in Hebrew thought. Even if you say 3... there is only one God in Hebrew culture. Christianity's trinity is 3 gods in 1. Hebrew's God was one who was a spirit and a spirit could be in all. And so the NT talks about the spirit of God being given without measure to Yeshua. And we can say, of H.I.M, that the spirit was there without measure. But He was raised in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church where the trinity is known as sə;llasé, Ge'ez. This church maintained a degree of separation for Roman Catholicism and deserves credit for that. It legitimized Martin Luther's protestant movement. Roman Catholicism had a brief rule in Ethiopia but it was mostly and eventually resisted. But you can see that Roman Catholicism was trying to use religion to, and I quote, "secure the king's adherence to Rome". It was all about power.
And my point is that people don't know church history and so they look for ways that the pope could have power now and don't understand that the papacy already fulfilled any prophetic description of power because Christianity was literally the state religion of an empire! And that desire to unite the Christian factions was also indicative of a desire, by the same, to unite Christians and Pagans. Paul trusted them and could not have known that they would kill 60 millions Jews and Muslims. But that's what happened when they used the power of the state and so this is the bloodiness spoken of in Revelation.
I don't have a problem with Haile Selassie I being the power of the Trinity. This understanding of H.I.M is part of a Christian influence and, in my humble opinion, doesn't really matter much because he isn't understood in the same context that Trinitarian Christians misunderstood Yeshua who was never an actual king. Even the term "god" can be applied to Haile Selassie I because in Hebrew this word simply means power and it could also be applied to people in positions of authority. But again, Trinitarian Christians don't get that because they're too busy taking everything literally.
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