Churches of Ten in an
Epidemiocracy
Fred Marshall
April 2, 2020
Before God destroyed Sodom &
Gomorrah (Genesis
19:24-25), in chapter 18,
verses 20ff Abraham pleads with
Him to spare the inhabitants thereof for the sake of the righteous there. Abraham starts out at fifty as the number of
righteous people God would stay His judgment for, but steadily reduces that
number, first by fives, and when he gets to forty, by tens.
God patiently listens to Abraham
until he finally reaches ten; if there
are ten righteous in the city, He would relent from destroying it. (See Ezekiel 16:49-50
for the other reasons God destroyed them.)
Ten is a significant number in
Jewish tradition as it is the minimum number of men to form a synagogue.
In the seeming epidemiocracy we
find ourselves in, having our lives dictated by edicts from officials at the
Centers for Disease Control (and Prevention) and the World Health Organization,
we are also told to limit our gatherings to groups of no more than ten.
While this is an affront to the
First Amendment guarantee of freedom of assembly, the justification is to limit
the spread of the virus. This divides
people into two camps; those who will blindly obey any order given by government
(or quasi-government) officials, and those who, under the spirit of Acts 5:29,
obey God rather than men.
In a more direct attack on the
God-given freedom of religion, long before our brilliant forefathers codified
it in the Constitution, the disciples were told not to preach Jesus to the
people. Had they obeyed this command,
Christianity would have lasted only a few decades.
The house church movement is not
a recent development, though its popularity has grown in recent years for
various reasons, ranging from a desire to depart from what many see as
"organized religion", to full-blown persecution, driving born again
Christians underground.
Just as an online search for the
word epidemiocracy produced no results (because it is a word I recently
coined), a search for "churches of ten" likewise yielded no results.
It is more important that the
concept of churches of ten receive consideration and attention than my new
word. Many Sunday school classes (or
Life Groups, as they are now commonly called) could be incubators for churches
of ten, enabling Christians to follow Hebrews 10:25 and still not run afoul of
state mandates for gatherings.
This is a supplement to, not a
replacement for our current denominational churches, with the idea that we may
have to abandon the latter and adopt the former in times of more blatant
persecution.
We are living in the last days,
the end times. If there is one more
revival that could happen in America (and around the world), perhaps churches
of ten could be a starting point.
In Christ,
Fred Marshall
Copyright April 2020 - All rights
reserved - wide distribution is encouraged and expected - please share!!
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