Proud to belong to the False Jesus Church

Some things get my head to working.

Around the corner from us, opposite the local supermarket is a church which calls itself the “True Jesus” Church. The implication is that whatever church the rest of us go to must, by process of deduction, be the “False Jesus” church. Now, I actually don't know what they believe; I've never met them and I have no right to comment on anything about them - but the name of the church started my brain cells percolating.

I started thinking about how remarkable it is how all of us seem to want to be right and often to be able to define that “rightness” by the “wrongness” of others. 

If we want, we could do a cruise around local churches and we would certainly find that many define themselves by words such as “Bible believing” or “Spirit filled” – the implication being that these qualities differentiate them from those who disbelieve the Bible and are empty of the Spirit.

This type of thing has been going on for millennia, not just in the Christian church but in every religion and in almost every aspect of life. We all want to be more right than the other guy. The gnostic religions had secret knowledge that others didn’t have and only through the possession of the secrets could one achieve entry into the inner sanctum of holiness. “Prophets” who interpret signs to give the dates of end times; who find the secret lost (or new) scriptures (Mr. J. Smith) – all these hold out the promise of belonging to the best club, of letting us become one of the 144,000 if we join the group of correct believers.

Doesn’t this all sound just like what God would do – God who so loved the world? He’d like it if the numbers who could get really close to him were very, very few, because He’s picky and a bit mean.  And that’s the message of Jesus, right? You know – the guy who seemed to think that Samaritans had a right to be accepted in God’s sight; the bloke who chatted to the social outcasts, the lepers and those that had been told over and over that they didn’t belong to the Kingdom of God.