This is the ending of the chapter, “The Apostasy of the Body of Christ” in Pastor John’s new book The Iron Kingdom. He wanted everybody to see it.
A Matter of Time
Most believers outside of Jerusalem and Antioch would never have seen a copy of the letter which the apostles and elders at the Jerusalem Council sent to the Assembly in Antioch, and rumors of the letter would have borne insufficient weight for believers to be persuaded of it. So, in spite of the Council’s decision, Paul had to spend much of his strength afterward laboring to save his Gentile converts from adding ceremonial works to the Faith. The zeal of the false teachers took them everywhere, it seems, to undo Paul’s influence, and the body of Christ, in a relatively short time, fell into apostasy despite Paul’s herculean efforts. Unable to be everywhere at once, Paul could not put out the multitude of fires that burned the truth out of the hearts of his converts, and after those first-century Gentiles rejected Paul’s gospel in favor of Peter’s, it was only a matter of time before the body of Christ degenerated into just another worldly institution. Just as Moses had foreseen the results of Israel’s apostasy, Paul foresaw what would happen to the apostate body of Christ. Seeing what he saw would come upon the saints, Paul could have quoted some of Moses’ last words to Israel (Dt. 31:29): “I know that after my death, you will utterly corrupt yourselves and turn aside from the way that I have commanded you, and that evil will befall you in the latter days because you will have done evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger by the work of your hands.”
As believers drifted from Paul’s gospel of the reliance solely upon the Spirit, they grew more worldly-wise, and the more worldly-wise they grew, the more ceremonial form they added to the Faith. Thus began the apostate body of Christ’s journey toward acceptance by the world. And after several centuries of trial-and-error doctrinal and ceremonial development, the fallen body of Christ was so finely adorned with worldly beauty that she would attract the favorable attention of the world’s master, apostate Rome.