392 AD to 800 AD, The Period of Regional Church Leadership Parallels the Time of the Judges in Israel

From the year 392 A.D., when Christianity acquired the position of the state religion of the Roman Empire, till the year 800 A.D., when Charlemagne was enthroned as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a type of feudalistic system emerged in which western Europe was led by 5 different patriarchates. This time period corresponded providentially to the time of the Judges in Israel.

5 Patriarchates

Image result for map of the 12 tribes of Israel

Twelve Tribes of Israel

From the time Joshua and Caleb led the Israelites into Canaan until the time Saul became king of Israel, the Jewish people had a feudalistic system in which the different tribes had to unify. For that they had to build a temple as the unifying symbol. The different tribes had a leading figure that functioned as king, chief priest, and prophet. Joshua became the first judge. Other famous ones are Gideon and Samson. Samuel received the calling from God when he was a child. He was the last judge and the one who anointed the first king of Israel. Ongoing conflicts between the tribes and with other inhabitants of the lands marked these four centuries.

God never works by inciting division among people. He seeks to foster unity through love and peace. Human resistance to the path of love has been the cause for the wars between people. During the time of the Judges Israel should have found the way to foment relationships with the other peoples of Canaan without falling prey to their customs. Just as Jacob had won his brother over, the Israelite tribes should have guided the surrounding tribes to the knowledge of God. As they protected the women who safeguarded the Israelite spy soldiers, the Jewish people should have loved, guided and protected the other native tribes of the land. However, they could not even overcome their own individual tribes' interests and work to establish one unified nation, much less they were able to go beyond the interests to protect their own land to foment good relationships with their neighbors.

Finally God gave them a king.

Comments

Was Yiye Avila a False Prophet?

Yiye Ávila, one of the most influential preachers in Latin America, referred to by many as the Latino "Billy Graham", took on the subject of the imminent return of Jesus on the clouds and the rapture as the center of his preaching. From his pulpit at his church he would repeatedly ask his members "te va a llevar a ti?" "Is Jesus going to take you?" He had just told everyone that Jesus was coming soon. He had told everyone that Jesus was going to take him up in the rapture. He felt extremely confident that his live of total dedication to bring thousands to Jesus and to let God use him as an instrument of healing others demonstrated that his faith met the requirements for he to participate of the rapture. He wanted to urge people to reflect upon their own lives. His questioning may have sound very powerful to the ears of many Pentecostals but the reality set in one day when on June 28, 2013, Yiye Ávila died from cardiac arrest at the age...

The Symbolic Character of Prophetic Language: The Dreams and Prophetic Visions in the Book of Daniel

The Bible contains many important sections where the narrative uses symbols to convey a message in a coded or hidden manner. For instance, Joseph continuously interprets dreams by providing a meaning that eliminates the supernatural or surreal sense of the dream and transforms the dream into something that we can take practical action to prevent or realize. The most famous one is the interpretation of the Pharaoh's dreams of the seven skinny cows and the seven fat cows. Joseph's Interprets Pharaoh's Dream Distant Shores Media/Sweet Publishing [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons The discovery of Hieroglyphics recounting dreams and their interpretations validates the historical value of this story from Genesis in them stories tell of priests interpreting Pharaoh's dream. Throughout history, different cultures attributed a special meaning to dreams, believing that they convey special messages hidde...

We all Are God's Children

Jordan Feliz Beloved The beautiful and touching song by Jordan Feliz Beloved fills one with the vision of a love of God that is real and beyond any boundary our imagination, including theological presuppositions, may impose. We are essential not accidental. Christian theology, however,sees us humans not as being true children of God, at least not to the same degree that Jesus was. It says that God created us out of pity. Lol, please forgive me for using that old acronym. Others simply affirm that God did not create us because he needed us, so does gotquestions.org, which moves on to add other irrational affirmations as theology. I just don't know what to say to those believes. I will go into more detail in another post. In this one I just simply state that no parent of love has children out of pity. Far from it. In this post, I placed Feliz's song above because his song conveys a sense of a profound and real relationship with God. Recently, I had an i...

Religious Thought for the 21st Century

Search This Blog