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| Apostle Dr. Gabriel Sanchez Velazquez preraching |
Throughout the centuries of Christianity a legacy has been sewn of great
thinkers within the Christian churches. They have formed two very related
fields of knowledge. The Patristics and the Patrology. One talks about the
content of the writings of the great Christian thinkers, and the other of the
lives and cultural context of the writers.
In some measure, it is regretful that a great section of evangelical
pastors never take the trouble to learn about these writers, frequently they
overlook that the GOD of the Bible is the God of history. You say: “Well I
have this Bible in my hands and I am saved, the rest doesn’t interest me.” Thank God that you have your Bible and you
are saved, but have you asked how the Bible came about until our days? How can
we observe the providence of God so that the Gospel would have reached us in
this generation?
From there it is good to know the formation of Christian thinking.
However, in my judgment and the judgment of many evangelical theologians, the
Roman-Catholic hierarchy:
1. Studies more the Patristics and the Patrology
than the Bible itself.
2. Gives more authority to the opinions of the
past leaders than to the Sacred Scriptures.
3. They keep and accept as dogmas the
interpretations that these men made in the past, without taking the
trouble to go to the original text of the Bible and seek the
revelation of God to understand what God wants us to understand
of the same text.
Therefore, here we need to find the right balance. We have the Bible on
the right hand as supreme authority in issues of faith and practice, but we
extend the left hand to inquire the opinion of our fathers of the faith. Just
as I Thessalonians 5:21 establishes: “Test all things, hold fast what is
good.”
I had the privilege of writing the first edition of this book in 1988,
and when I was able to do the second edition of the same book in 1991, in Mexico
The mentioned book attacks the NEO-PENTACOSTAL CHURCHES ignoring that
these are the churches that show more vitality in the evangelical church around
the world. It is said in this book that the churches in restoration maintain a
propaganda “pseudo-Christian” that after having turned upside down the faith of
many evangelicals now we have put into question the validity of the celebration
of Christmas.
It is interesting to see how this author defends the Christmas
celebration. Let’s see some of his points of view:
1. Those groups (the churches in restoration)
oppose the celebration of the birth of the Lord as an idolatrous
event, only because it is celebrated on the date of the day of the
sun that the Roman pagan observed before the triumph of
Christianity.
This book would have us believe that the establishment of the
Roman-Catholic religion in ancient Rome Vatican is in Rome
2. This referenced work
would have us believe that the authentic Christians are those who faithfully follow
the tradition of celebrating Christmas, but those of us who
have left such an observance are not really Christians. For the author, saying that on the 25th of December: "That night
the Savior was born" is a small lie without
importance. And anyways it is a
necessary lie in order to be Christians without any doubts.
Those of us with Christian maturity and revelation from the Holy Spirit
have cast aside all vestiges of the Babylonian religion, we don't want to mix
the message of he that has affirmed in John 14:6: "I AM THE
TRUTH" with small lies.
3. That work says that since the tree that
represented the Babylonian god Tammuz, stopped being displayed about
1117 years ago (the book being referred to was written in
1990), now one can put a tree up in their house without any
spiritual problem.
That is to say, time has erased the idolatrous symbol. But in the light of the Word of God we know
that an idol is an idol. And the Christmas tree as was already explained in the
previous chapter, is an idol that represents the Babylonian god Tammuz. Not all
trees are idols, but particularly when one cuts down a pine tree and takes it
to their house, and adorns it with spheres and lights during the Christmas
season, it constitutes an idol. Have you read what I Corinthians 1:19-20 says: “What
am I saying then? That an idol is anything, or what is offered to idols is
anything? Rather, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice
to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to have fellowship with
demons.”
4. The same author cites Deuteronomy 16:21 that
says: “You shall not plant for yourself any tree, as a
wooden image, near the altar which you build for yourself to the Lord
your God.” And he argues that
TREES SHOULD NOT BE FOR IDOLS.
But this author doesn't understand that when someone repeats a thousand
year old rite, like placing a Christmas tree in their house or church, they are
spiritually binding themselves to the idols, that have a legal right over those
who invoke or worship them. It is truly important that a recently converted
Christian, in a conscious and voluntary way renounces the religious spirit and
the idolatry, so that they are capable to worship in spirit and truth.
But now we arrive at the heart of the matter that justifies the title of
this present chapter. In the same book, An Answer to the Christmas Tree, the
author says:
5. “We seriously take into
account that Dr. Martin Luther in the days of Reformation in the XVI Century took a
fir, and adorned it in a beautiful way and used it to celebrate
Christmas.”
Martin Luther is a champion of the faith. God gave him Romans 1:17 where
it says: “ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith;
as it is written, 'The just shall live by faith'", the rhema word
for his preaching. Martin Luther is undeniably one of the most important links
in the process of restoring the Church. Today there is not an evangelical
church in the world that doesn’t hoist the four principal cardinals of the
Lutheran Reformation: Only faith, by grace, only the Bible, and the universal
priesthood of the believers.
However, Martin Luther was far from knowing the glory of the Gospel,
that by the mercy of God the most modest believer in the Christian churches
knows today. Luther knew nothing of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Luther didn’t
know the importance of removing the religious images and the full-length robes
of the church, Luther didn’t even arrive to the conviction of salvation as a
present experience. Luther continued baptizing babies with a little water on
the head, as Romanism practices it and as the same Lutheran church does to this
day. Martin Luther reestablished the worship of the crucifix and the image of
the Virgin Mary in Wittenberg , when his
disciples guided by the Scriptures had arrived at the conviction to which John
Calvin arrived to in Geneva
From the previous information, nothing makes us conclude that all the
Christians in the world have the moral duty to put a fir in our house during
the Christmas season “because the great Martin Luther” did it that way with
much devotion.
Yes we go back to our statements at the beginning of this chapter.
History must be studied, the best that has arrived to us must be taken from the
great thinkers of Christianity, but we never compromise our faithfulness to the
Holy Scripture in favor of a custom, a human doctrine, any religious rite, or a
theological current contrary to the revelation of the Bible. Judas 3 says, “Beloved,
while I was very diligent to write you concerning our common salvation, I found
it necessary to write you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith
which was once for all delivered to the saints.”
Do you want to please God? Make a determination to submit yourself to
the revelation of the Scriptures above your denominational traditions. And God
will honor you.
