1 JOHN EXPOSES THE PAPACY AS DENYING THE FLESH OF CHRIST
Many Christians have understood the Pope to be the Antichrist spoke of in the
Bible.
Some Roman Catholics deny that the pope could be the Antichrist for 1 John 2:22
says that he who denies that Jesus has come in the flesh is an Antichrist and 1
John 4:3 says that denial of the fleshy existence of Jesus is of the spirit of
the Antichrist while the pope believes that Jesus did live among as a man. But
all the epistle is saying is that the Antichrist influences the heresy and makes
it progress by his black magic. It does not say it will be the only heresy he
will do this for. When he comes he might find no need to deny that Jesus had a
body but to manipulate others into doing it. He will promote whatever heresy
suits him in the war against Christ.
What is more important is why the Antichrist would deny that Jesus has a body.
The reason is to stop people having the beliefs about Jesus that they need for
salvation. If the gospel of the pope is incompatible with these beliefs then the
pope is definitely an Antichrist if not the Antichrist.
Reason says that if Jesus saves, it does not matter what you believe as long as
you are open to the influence of this saving supernatural being. That way Jesus
could still work in you though your beliefs about him are completely wrong. The
reason it matters not as that as long as you develop virtues it does not matter
if your religious beliefs are wrong. What would matter is your belief about
virtue for it affects how you behave and live. The apostle John condemning those
who denied Jesus was the Christ and had come in the flesh is just showing his
own bigotry and ignorance. Anyway a true Christian holds that dogma does matter
though it does not.
John says that the Antichrist is coming but many Antichrists have come which
indicates that it is the last hour (1 John 2:18). There must have been a huge
number of them and they must have been putting the Church in real danger of
losing the faith meaning Jesus would soon have to bring about the last day
before the Church would be annihilated for he promised there would always be
true believers. The pope then is the only possible candidate for he has been
corrupting the faith since the early centuries of the Church. John says the
Antichrist is nigh which is why he used the expression hour and not year or week
to accentuate that his coming was a short time and other scriptures say that the
Antichrist will be around when Jesus comes. There is nobody else. This is
sufficient to convict the papacy of being condemned by its own scriptures as the
Antichrist and as occultic meaning it uses hidden forces to do its evil while
presenting a respectable face to the world. The popes are all the Antichrist for
they share the one evil spirit that manifests through them. They are many men
with one satanic soul, a soul that is a demon from the pit.
Even if John said that the Antichrist will definitely deny that Jesus came in
the flesh and was the Christ the papacy denies both doctrines not verbally but
the way denying it counts – in action. The pope has set himself and the Church
up as the interpretators of Jesus. So Jesus can’t have his own say and they do
the talking for him meaning that Jesus is not being followed but the pope and
the Church are being followed and they trick you to think that it is Jesus you
serve. Denying outright that Jesus came in the flesh would not be as dangerous
as doing it without anybody noticing. The Catholic Church then is as lethal as
the Antichrist meaning it must belong to him for nobody could surpass him in
opposing Christ and damaging the Church of God. The Jesus and God of Rome are
mental idols. When the real Jesus is replaced by an imaginary one it is obvious
that the real one is being denied and opposed and is being accused of not being
the Christ. The imaginary Jesus is the real one to the Church so it denies that
Jesus came in the flesh. If I imagine a Jesus like the one of the gospels and
worship him I do not worship the Jesus of the gospels.
Following an interpretation of Jesus Christ is following an interpretation not
Jesus. The Catholic Church offers a Jesus who is another Jesus in the eyes of
the apostle Paul (Galatians 1). This is worse than the ghostly Jesus of the
Docetists. He is as unreal as any abstraction.
John said that we must test the spirits and we must do it by asking the spirit
if it believes that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. If it says he has, then it
is from God (1 John 4:1-3). Had there been a pope sent by God in those days he
would have told us to check what the spirit says alongside the statements of the
pope. That would be a more reliable and thorough test if the claims of the pope
to be the source of divine truth along with the Church (since 1870 he no longer
needs the consent of the Church to give infallible revelations so he is
potentially the ONLY source) is true. A spirit could tell you that Jesus came in
the flesh and was the Christ and still lead you astray. My belief is that John
would have replied that because there was no evidence for the existence of Jesus
Christ apart from a few men claiming visions of him that no demon would say
Jesus existed. That is the only way to make sense of John here. Demons would not
support the belief that Jesus Christ came in the flesh for knowing that doctrine
was necessary for salvation. That means that if they could get you to believe in
another Jesus this doctrine would be no good. Rome gets you to believe in
another Jesus for its Eucharist is the Jesus it gives you to save you. In
addition, the pope controls how you see Jesus so that you don’t get to the real
Jesus for salvation. The Church of Rome denies the coming of Jesus in the flesh
in the sense that it directs you to a wafer and gets you to ignore Jesus the
flesh man.
Some Protestants believe that the denial that Jesus came in the flesh really
refers to the Roman Catholic denial that Jesus was born of a sinful mother. The
flesh stands for what is inclined in us to turn away from God. They say Jesus
had this kind of flesh but he did not allow it to cause him to sin. They say
that Jesus earned our salvation by chiefly by refusing to sin despite his
inclinations to sin which he managed to triumph over and to undermine this
doctrine by saying he was born of a sinless mother who couldn’t pass on sinful
inclinations to him is to adopt a heresy that prevents salvation. But if Jesus
could be sinless and yet be in danger of committing it so could Mary his mother.
I reject this interpretation of the Roman Catholic denial on the basis that
there is no need for it and there were people who held that Jesus’ flesh was not
real. But those who accept the interpretation argue that since the pope says
Jesus was born of a sinless mother he was not born with flesh like ours in every
respect so the pope is the antichrist for he denies the coming of Jesus in the
flesh. It is correct in the respect that if Jesus was born of a sinless mother
he was not like us in all things but sin. He had to feel temptation and be in
danger of succumbing to it like the rest of us so he needed to be born of a
woman who was flawed and who tried to put bad influences his way. The whole
point of insisting that Jesus had to be fully human was that in his rejection of
sin he did good for us in our place and had to be one of us to atone for us. The
pope then in a sense denies the coming of Jesus in the flesh which means his
doctrine of Jesus cannot save.
The Protestants point out that the Bible says God told the serpent who tempted
Adam and Eve to sin that the seed of the woman would crush his head and it would
bruise his heel (Genesis 3:15). If Jesus didn’t have a sinful nature he didn’t
have a full humanity and so he didn’t come in the flesh they say. He wouldn’t be
the seed of the sinful woman. What was said to Eve was said to all women with
her as representative because the curses put on her affect all women. If Mary
was sinless she would not have been included and so she couldn’t have been the
mother of Jesus. God said he would put enmity between the woman’s seed and the
serpent – the both would have a terrible dislike for each other. If Jesus was
stronger than Satan there would no point in this bad feeling, he would only be
hurting himself. The dislike was necessary for the seed needed it to fight him.
So in this light the Protestants seem to be right. The Catholic Church denies
the proper humanity of Christ and so it is the antichrist.
Some of the heretics condemned by the John writings believed there was indeed a
flesh and blood man but he was taken over and possessed by Jesus, a spirit being
from God or God himself, at the baptism in the Jordan and which left him on the
cross leading him to cry that he was forsaken by God. They denied that the man
was saviour or the Son of God or the Christ. What was these things or some of
them was the being that possessed him.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that bread can be turned into Jesus without
any perceptible physical change taking place. It is no longer bread but Jesus.
This change takes place in the Mass by the power of the priest. The Church says
that what makes bread bread turns into whatever it is that makes Jesus Jesus. So
the taste and appearance and weight etc of the bread remain but whatever makes
it bread is turned into whatever it is that makes it Jesus. Whatever makes bread
bread and whatever makes Jesus Jesus is something non-physical or immaterial.
This is clearly turning Jesus into a spirit not a real body. It is as good as
calling a non-change a change. Rome says Jesus can exist as a man without having
his eyes, ears, smell, sense of touch and taste. The real Jesus, his substance,
his nature, have nothing to do with these senses. He cannot look at you from the
communion wafer he turns into. This doctrine is even more non-Christian than the
notion that the heretics had that Jesus had senses but was not a man but a
ghostly being or was a spirit with senses possessing a man.
So the doctrine of bread and wine changing into Jesus in the Mass implies that
the real and essential Jesus is not a material being.
The presence of Jesus's body and blood in the Eucharist is said to be like how
my soul is in every part of my body. Just as my soul is totally and equally in
every bit of my body so Jesus is totally and equally present in each part of the
Eucharist. Thus Jesus is not broken or divided when communion wafers are
divided.
The two are not the same. Jesus' presence in the Eucharist is a presence in what
is no longer alive. My soul is in my living body. My soul is not there because
my body has been transubstantiated.
A soul is not a body. So the Catholics speak of Jesus's body being present
everywhere in the wafer or wine. Really what the Catholics are doing is saying
the bread and wine get a soul - Jesus'.
The human soul is seen as an immaterial reality - it is real but consists of no
material thing. The soul is outside of space. Thus talk of it being everywhere
in the body is rubbish. And few philosophers today think that the notion of
having a soul makes any sense.
If bread gets Jesus' soul then it follows that Jesus has become bread! To
worship the Eucharist as Catholics do is to worship bread and wine!
The Mass then has people worshipping bread and wine and pretending that it is
the non-material body of Jesus and his blood. It is both idolatry and the denail
of Jesus having come in the flesh.
The Bible symbolises grace as food. Grace means help from God that makes us holy
and good. God helps the soul change from one kind of person to a better one. The
Church says the body and blood of Jesus in communion are spiritual food and
drink. They feed us with grace. But that makes no sense. We would not need the
body and blood of Jesus if we only need grace. If we need the body and blood,
then they are not body and blood anymore but turned into grace. But grace is not
a thing. It is an effect. Again the need to eat and drink Jesus implies his body
and blood are not real.
Many scholars believe that the condemnation of those who deny the coming of
Jesus Christ in the flesh refers to those who think Jesus rose not physically
but spiritually from the dead. They think the coming does not mean Jesus' being
born into this world but his coming back from the dead in the resurrection. In
other words, he was a ghost. If so, then the Catholic Church is antichrist. It
teaches that Jesus was a man but after his resurrection his body and blood were
glorified and changed radically. It says that without this radical change we
would not be able to believe that bread and wine could become his body and
blood.
Whatever Jesus meant when he reportedly said we must gnaw his flesh as food it
certainly was not anything like the Catholic doctrine which claims that bread
turns into Jesus' flesh but doesn't claim it in any meaningful sense or in a way
that makes any sense. An eye sees. If the eye disappears and is turned into a
marble in the way the Catholic Church says it can happen it is not an eye
anymore. End of. And if the eye is like Jesus and doesn't disappear but a marble
is turned into it there is no difference. What happened to the eye's power to
see which was part of itself? Gone. An eye is for seeing and a marble can never
be an eye. If it cannot see anymore it is not an eye for a marble cannot see.
The Jesus of Catholicism that it worships in the form of the wafer is not Jesus.
We all at least subconsciously know that a marble which has been
transubstantiated into an eye is not an eye and it makes no sense to say it is.
Catholic worship of the wafer is really just worship of a wafer and on some
level they know it.
Rome says that the risen supernatural body of Jesus is what is present in the
Eucharist. It says there were would be problems with the doctrine were it the
ordinary normal body of Jesus that were present. This is a case of solving a
contradiction or absurdity by claiming that a miracle can explain it. It is no
different from saying that it is a problem believing that the puddle at the top
of the stairs appeared naturally so it appeared supernaturally and that solves
it! The Eucharist opposes reason and undermines anything history says even if it
says there was a man called Jesus.
According to Roman Catholicism, Jesus supposedly turned bread and wine into his
body and blood before the crucifixion. If he could do that then he already had
the magical body though it appeared otherwise. Thus the Docetists were right
that Jesus was not a proper body but a magical apparition that could behave like
a body. Thus if the Docetists were antichrists then so is the Roman Church.
Roman Catholicism is antichrist according to the scriptures.