Hold Together, Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Christians

I appreciate the spirit of this (and the Spirit of it also!)…

The next months will challenge us. And the challenge, no matter what side of the aisle you sit on, will be a challenge of self-control. Will we allow bitterness to rule our hearts? Or will we walk in the Spirit, in love and joy despite our significant differences over the vaccine?

Like lots of other differences, these differences really shouldn’t exist. But they do, so the challenge is to keep the problem from interfering with genuine Christian living and ministry.

This passage comes to mind:

And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. (1 Th 5:14)

My wife is from New Brunswick and she just left the province a few days ago. The churches are struggling with this mandate. In her church many are vaccinated, but the pastoral staff is not. What has become an even bigger burden is that the unvaccinated pastoral staff cannot visit individuals in the hospital, or some other necessary places. Her church met last Wednesday and had a big discussion around it, and they decided to meet at the 50% level and not check vaccination records. The problem is that come Sunday, while they held to some of the rules, the did not social distance, many did not wear masks…..

I appreciate the tone of the article and I agree with it. In my opinion though, the vaccine is not creating a divide, it is revealing a divide that has lurked hidden in the churches for quite some time. We are aware from Scripture that the devil seeks to tear apart a church from within. And we have stayed vigilant on some things, but I am afraid we have left the back door open for too long and he has decided to take advantage of it. Instead of the church rising up in this challenge, I feel like we are becoming a shining light to the world on how not to handle ourselves. We are an embarrassment in many ways. Instead of sowing truth, we are becoming some of the biggest purveyors of disinformation, so much so that the secular world has to silence us. This will do nothing but discredit our ability to share the Gospel in the darkness.

He…”does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies”.

It is in this way that Satan seeks to destroy the church. While he will not ultimately prevail, the damage he is doing is significant today, and it hid itself.

There is mounting evidence that what we are witnessing with the whole Covid pandemic, and particularly through the mandatory vaccination push, is just the latest manifestation of pagan Rome. The idols change; the idolatry doesn’t. In the end it is still “Ceasar is lord”. The idols don’t look like Zeus,Mars, Artemas, or whoever but are no less the “instruments and inventions of idolatry”. And the pollutions of idols (Acts 15 & 20; I Cor. 8-10) that normalize that idolatry to society and proselytize non-practitioners into acceptance and identification with it may no longer be “meat” but could well be vaccines, masks, or whatever.

The scripture is quite clear about the matter: “flee from idolatry [I Cor. 10] “; “guard yourselves from idols [I Jn. 5]; “abstain from pollutions of idols [Acts 15] “.

As much as I would love to think that this whole vaccine brouhaha is a non-issue that has become unnecessarily divisive, that there are sinister forces at work on an unprecedented scale to bring false worship into the body of Christ is hardly in doubt.

When the purity of the Church of Christ is at stake is no time to dis-regard the potential of catastrophic idolatrous inclusion into the assembly under the guise of health, unity, or any other masquerade. We ought to be praying for God to raise up those with a true Holy Spirit gift of discernment within the assembly and then listen to them.

God hates idolatry.