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Pastor HJ Sean Moon’s reminder to the faithful, and a broadside aimed at the confused among the scholarly and pastoral ranks of modern-day Christianity, is that the Bible teaches in both the Old and New Testaments that, “God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.” Sadly much of modern Christendom promotes the opposite, he says, and follows the long reach of the two-thousand-year-old, “Maricon heresy.”
Begun in the 1st Century AD, this early Christian heresy, with its origin in the Gnostic Gospels, promoted a spiritualized conception of Jesus as the Son of God based on its claim that he never existed in the flesh. Yet, in spite of the vast treasure trove of evidence to the contrary, most recently among the Dead Sea Scrolls, today’s Marcion Gnostics conclude that all is myth and misunderstanding, beginning in the Old Testament. And in spite of the early Christian Church testimonials of Jesus’ life in the New Testament documenting that Jesus was born to Mary and Joseph, walked the earth, gathered disciples, preached his Sermon on Mount, worked miracles, was tried by Pontius Pilate and died on the cross, later appearing to the early apostles, including Paul, and many others, they hold on to their heresy.
Countering this myth-making attempt at redefining the life of Jesus, Pastor Moon urges that Christians need to maintain a focus on God’s unchanging words and principles even when they may be hard to understand in some places, like the killing of the Canaanites upon entering the “Promised Land” or the seeming contradictions between Paul’s letters and New Testament teachings.
This book is not for the casual reader. It will take the truth seeker and scholar within you to plow these pages and harvest its fruit, but it will be well worth it. So, let’s take a deeper look.
It begins in Part One by identifying the “First Heretic,” Marcion, and looks at how Marcion and the “Gnostic Gospels” spread the Marcion Heresy widely throughout the Roman Empire, even as the Gospel of Jesus Christ was being preached by the Apostles across Judea and around the Mediterranean.
Next, in Part Two, the Old Testament is reexamined, beginning with Moses and the ‘Stone Tablets,’ and proceeding to God’s Laws as written in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. God’s covenant with His people who will be much blessed and richly rewarded by obeying them will, alternatively, pay a price for disobedience from a just Creator. Here is written: the justification for the death penalty and God’s directing the Israelites to eradicate the Canaanite culture and all complicit in it, because it was infested with temple prostitution, pedophilia and child sacrifice; the meaning of holy or just war; the roots of natural law; and the shocking acceptance of rampant sexual perversion and pedophilia even in the religious orders of the early Israelites.
Part Three of Pastor Moon’s study examines the secular attack on God’s law and His word led by the “Gospel of Darwin.” Promoted as ‘science,’ Darwin’s unproven theory of evolution, which is today touted as the truth about our human origin in most of our public schools and its textbooks, higher education, and integrated into much of mainline Christianity and Christian theology, as well as, the secular culture. These believers’ in Darwin’s theory of evolution from random mutation and natural selection continue to adhere to the “apes to men” origin of the species mythology (see, ‘Icons of Evolution,’ J. Wells) that we are descended from animals, and are thus, merely higher-level mammals. Such beliefs persist in spite of growing mountains of scientific evidence refuting Darwin’s claims, which clearly show there is no fossil record of “missing links” demonstrating a change of species. Indeed, all ten of Darwin’s arguments supporting his theory of evolution have fallen under the weight of critical examination by respected scientists. Yet, what in fact is a debunked theory, is still taught to our youth in elementary, secondary and higher education, and even informs assumptions behind public policy.
The final section of Pastor Moon’s call for believers to return to the God of the Old and New Testaments ends with the quest for a clear and true Biblical understanding of Jesus separated from both Marcion spiritualists and Darwinian materialists. These revisionists would cast the Gospels as either ‘reflecting pools’ through which “New Age” Marcionite pastors can verify their own ideology, or the materialist Darwinian Christians can recast the whole human experience in terms of liberation theology. By this view, Jesus becomes the militant advocate for justice based on a leftist interpretation of the New Testament. However, the book argues, this interpretation does not match the historical record left behind from the letters of James and Paul, archaeological documents (Dead Sea Scrolls, the Rylands Fragment and the Magdalen Manuscript), the established historicity of the Gospels of Matthew and John as eyewitnesses, and the life and death faith of the early Christian martyrs, which all provide overwhelming historical evidence of Jesus’ life, work and the resurrection experience.
These together reveal with clarity that Jesus preached about a Kingdom, and that this Kingdom must be defended on earth, Pastor Moon concludes. As Jesus is reported as saying in the Gospels, “he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one” (Luke 22:36); and as John the Revelator reveals in both Rev 2:16 and Rev 19:15 that when Christ returns, he will be the judge and King who will “make war with them with the sword of my mouth,” “rule them with a rod of iron.”
Christians, as stated in the Lord’s Prayer, are likewise called to defend the communities they are tasked by God through Jesus to build on earth. ¬¬¬ Despite the imposition of post-Christian Gnostic beliefs and practices upon the population through secular culture and laws as well as the rise of religious indifferentism driven by the popular notion that religious conviction should not be tied to morality, Pastor Moon proclaims that “Christians are called to build vibrant communities of faith with one hand . . . “ and be prepared to defend them with the other. “It is time for the followers of Christ to be brave again.” (p. 304)
This work has the potential of becoming a classic in Christian Apologetics. Its reach is bold in encompassing both the Old and New Testament Biblical record, supplemented by scientific research. Chapters are arranged topically allowing readers to pursue their own interests. Even contemporary issues like gender confusion and reassignment are connected in the chapter on “Natural Law,” and the abortion issue in the chapter on the “Sanctity of Life.” We are all called to love and honor our fathers and our mothers in our common Judeo-Christian tradition and Holy Books. This work reminds us that we are likewise called to love and honor our Creator and Father, the one God who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
