"If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget it's fighting skill, and let my tongue become inept in my ashen mouth - for I have renounced the source of my life and joy". Psalm 137: 5 & 6.
Sometimes, our analysis of where we are has to become brutally blunt.
When God's people found themselves entirely submissive to the will and the mockery of those who viewed their entire veneration of the most high as nothing, they knew to entertain their sentiments to ridicule and to parade such mockery openly was not a life to be accepted - the cry was for liberation from a culture which viewed godliness as irrelevant.
How deep has the captivity of the present become for the contemporary church?
Perhaps a historical parallel will jolt our thinking.
THE "TEMPLE"
In 1517, Leo X devised to finance a new age of grandeur for the old tombs of the Vatican by issuing a global financing program through the issuing of a new offer of indulgences to the population at large. This would be zealously carried out by priests of the new schedule visiting every town and city and informing those that would gather that they could ease the purgatorial trials of themselves and granny if they merely gave their coinage to the grand scheme of raising their saving institution to heights that would be the envy of heaven.
This quickly became married in many places to the other 'device' this vital institution employed to escape some measure of terror after death - the custom of visiting supposedly sacred relics, the viewing and veneration of which was believed to provide all manner of reliefs, depending on how 'holy' the item was.
The release from all this religious industry would come when an Augustinian Monk exposed these fabricated myths to the searing light of the scriptures, and found all of it to be ridiculous folly - hence, the Great Reformation, but Luther was all to aware of just how quickly the vain imaginings of men would arise and begin to bury that radiance - the error of the legalists is quick to find common ground with the machinations of fallen works religion!
Which brings us to the 2020's...
THE DARK TOWER
In March of 2020, much of the world found itself placed under a new 'edict' of control and restraint, which would only be lifted when certain 'indulgences' were in place and appropriately implemented to everyone. In spite of universal health guidelines that stated that such an action would be ineffective, the constraint was imposed anyway, and the world found itself prisoned to a new dogma of control by a 'papacy' of leaders who would rigorously prosecute any deviation or questioning of their policy.
The first 'remedy' provided to those so constrained by such powers was their rendition of relics - a remedy that, it was promised, would ease the suffering of the day by wholesale trust in the 'magic' it would provide - remedy from the plague and sure means of preventing transmission of the virus. The people succumbed in droves to the myths of the 'priests' of the hour, not granted any mainstream opportunity to hear the voices of those who urged caution in respect to such certain calls of 'peace and safety'.
This remedy was soon followed by another - the indulgence of owning a 'passport' which would identify you as one of the 'pure'; fully inoculated, you would be 'free' (under the new and continually changing stipulations) to do some - few - of those privileged things you had done before, whilst those who had refused such strictures would now become deemed the damned of society, restricted to only do those menial things which were absolutely necessary, and only when allowed to do so.
The poison of all this has now, in small measure, been broken by the reality that has set in - the 'magic' has miserably failed, and the consequences are now beginning to come home, but the question painfully remains, why did so many who, supposedly, would view themselves as the 'children' of the Reformation succumb to such brutality?
THE HIDEOUS TRUTH
The reality we face is akin to that witnessed when the Judaisers worked amongst the new churches planted by Paul and others. Seeding a message which rigorously required adherence to a 'law' which, it was taught, superseded any adherence to the very singular work of justifying grace, they spread a poison which left believers uncoupled from God's grace and the life that comes through this.
We have evidenced such a thing today.
We have left behind God's singular health in Christ and adhered to a foul scheme which has emptied us of what is vital.
That is what happened when the church as a whole chose to, without question, relent wholesale to the social requirements of closure and 'hygienic' control in 2020.
It has been in captivity ever since.
The world is currently beginning to wake up to the vast cost of the error it has accepted in respect to all of this.
Will the church do the same?
All the evidence to date is that it will not, and that its captivity will therefore continue, as will it's 'service' without life.
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