The Living Dead
"Why do you seek the living among the
dead?"
I
used to be numbered among the living dead. I was alive,
inasmuch as I was breathing and moving, but I didn’t
have life. There was a movie called “The Night of
the Living Dead,” about people who had turned into
zombies incapable of rational thought even on the simplest
level, completely given over to satiating their own bizarre
desires. That was me.
There were others like me, too, and there still are —
the living, walking, dead men and women of the earth. Some
you can spot a mile away, but some are not so obvious. They
are people who have given up the good fight, surrendered
their lives to a powerful enemy they cannot see. They don’t
know that their pursuit of self-satisfaction is the very
thing holding them in death, and that there is a way out.
The enemy keeps these things hidden from them.
Two thousand years ago, John the Baptist was sent with
a message, a warning to the people in the religious system,
the Jews. He told them they were way off. Something was
wrong, and if they didn’t repent and change their
ways, they would not be heirs of the promise made to Abraham’s
offspring, even though they were his descendants. They were
told that God could raise up children of Abraham from the
stones if He wanted to. They asked, “What then
must we do?”
His reply was radical. He said, “Whoever has two
coats must share with him who has none.”
These were “God’s people.” Why did they
need to be told that? Why did a prophet have to come with
a dire warning before they were willing to give their extra
coat to someone who didn’t have one? How far from
God do you need to fall to be in that place?
He told tax collectors to only collect what they were
due, no more. He told soldiers to stop threatening and extorting
from people, and to be content with their wages. He was
teaching “God’s people” common decency.
He was saying, “You have a conscience. Listen to it!”
The people in their religion had grown dull to the instinctive
knowledge of the truth within them. This is a process. Over
time, because of a little compromise here, a little justification
there, they had steadily drifted away from the foundation
and their source of life. They had become an empty shell,
a blurry shadow of who they were supposed to be. They were
the living dead. Religion today has followed suit.
John the Baptist came to prepare the way for a new hope
— our Master Yahshua. Yahshua came as a way back,
a bridge across the gap between God and man, a gap man had
created by his drifting. Many believed His good news and
followed Him, leaving behind everything for the sake of
something greater. They responded wholeheartedly to God’s
love for them with simple, sincere devotion — together.
This would eventually lead to the day of Pentecost, the
birth of the church, which was a community.
Before long, though, the Apostle John would be echoing
the words of John the Baptist, writing to the communities,
“How does God’s love abide in anyone who has
the world’s goods and sees a brother in need and refuses
to help?” The writer of Hebrews, likewise, warned
them to pay much closer attention to what they’d heard,
lest they drift away from it. Drifting is an unconscious
process. All you have to do to drift is nothing.
When the disciples stopped loving one another with a fervent
love, they drifted away from love.
It’s simple: “The children of God and the
children of the devil are revealed in this way: all who
do not do what is right are not from God, nor are those
who do not love their brothers.” But the evil one
is crafty. He complicates, confuses, and manipulates. He
led the church astray and she drifted away and never recovered.
Now, after nineteen hundred years of steady drifting, she
bears no resemblance to her pure beginnings, but is defiled
— stained and scarred by her exploits, proud and puffed
up, shamelessly unrepentant — a child of the devil.
But the King still needs a Bride, and she is being prepared.
There used to be “the church,” but today there
are many “churches.” Most people who convene
in these buildings are unaware that they are all serving
different gods. If God is one, as the Scriptures say, then
how can two people be in communion with Him, but each have
different doctrines, conflicting lifestyles, separate goals,
and unrelated desires? Would God give one person one “truth”
and someone else another? God is one, therefore the
church is a community. When the church in the first century
was warned to repent and do the deeds they did at first,
they were being told to remember what happened after Pentecost:
“All who believed were together and shared
all things in common.” But they didn’t repent,
and their lampstand went out. Christianity today is not
the light of the world.
The belief that brought the first church to birth is the
belief our Master was talking about when He said, “Whoever
believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal
life.” There are people on the earth today with
that belief. They are together, sharing all things in common.
What one truly believes is revealed in what he does. We
believe in Him, so we’ve given up our own rotten,
stinking lives to do our part to prepare the earth for His
return. We serve Him where He is, where brothers and
sisters dwell together in unity and lay down their lives
for one another. That’s what gives us the confidence
that He hears us, and so we pray that He would grant
us the grace to do His will, not our own selfish will.
People are giving up all hope every day. Many are looking
for justice and truth, and goodness, struggling to hold
on to what they know is right in the face of great opposition.
But a man’s strength is limited, and his hope runs
out. Only in Yahshua is true love and justice found. He
is the way, the truth, and the life — the only hope
that does not disappoint.
Luke 24:5
Luke 3:8
Luke 3:10-14
Matthew 23:27
Mark 10:28; Luke 5:11, Matthew 8:22
Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-37
1 John 3:17
Hebrews 2:1
1 John 3:10
2 Corinthians 11:3
Revelation 19:7-8; Ephesians 2:10; 4:11-16
1 Corinthians 1:10
Revelation 2:5
Acts 2:44
John 3:16
John 12:26
Psalm 133:1-3
1 John 3:14,16,22
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