[aron]

A warning. Anything that distracts us from seeing Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, crucified and raised to glory, should be rejected as a stumbling to our path.

Revelation 20:8 And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.

Zechariah 12:3 On that day, when all the nations of the earth are gathered against her, I will make Jerusalem an immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves.

Matthew 21:44 "He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed."

This revelation of Jesus as Christ, who willingly entered into death on our behalf, and rose as Saviour of the world, King of kings and Lord of all is obviously a stumbling to many. But it's our rock. On this rock our ekklesia's founded and grows, and this rock supports all our subsequent fellowship with one another.

Don't you think that "the gods of the nations" would be upset at the revelation of Jesus as Christ? If they couldn't oppose him with persecution, they would co-opt him by melding their own fallen devious schemes. Witness Lee made fun of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and rightly so. But shouldn't he get called out for his Eastern ways? Nigel Tomes wrote an article on Lee's 1980s-era version of the Great Leap Forward, how many close parallels there were to Mao's. Lee didn't stop being a Chinese when he became Christian. And Teresa Zimmerman-Liu at UCSD has also noted this. Human culture, and its influence, doesn't disappear when we say "Lord, Jesus". If we don't recognise what it is and what it can do, it can really derail our journey. It becomes a lens, or prism, through which we examine scripture to determine what is "normal" and desirable.