Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. – Psalm 73:9

Today’s Scripture Reading (June 29, 2019): Psalm 73

I recently read an article centered on the primacy of the Catholic Church. According to the report, there is only one Christian Church that follows the will of God. Protestantism, the movement to which I belong, are pretenders and are suffering from the sin of vanity in that we think that we know better than Roman Catholicism, the church that descended from the Apostle Peter, what God desires from us. There are so many problems with the assertion. First, the fact that Roman Catholicism descended from Peter employs a bit of historical revisionism. They have claimed the early church movement as theirs when history is not all that clear. Roman Catholicism started centuries after Peter, but they extended their history back to him. And the Protestant break was an attempt to repent from some very unbiblical practices that were, then, intricately connected with the Catholic Church and return to the teachings of Peter than the other apostles.

Protestantism is also a break from the Roman Catholic motto “Deus Vult” or “God Wills it.” In our contemporary culture, “Deus Vult” seems to be more of a radical Islamic doctrine, but we (and this is part of my history as well because it occurred before the Catholic/Protestant break) were the first ones to use the motto. It was the cry of the Crusades because God wills us to go to battle against his creation. Over the past millennium, many evils have been committed under the motto of “Deus Vult.” But my reading of the Scripture reveals that what God wills is that we would go and love our neighbor, who Jesus defines as anyone who comes across our paths.

I recently also met with a gentleman in my office who wanted to convince me that the current Roman Catholic church was a tool of Satan. According to him, the Roman Catholic Church and any kind of loose reunification or peace between the Protestant Churches and the Roman Catholic Church was a sign of the end times. He stopped just short of calling the Roman Catholic Church “the Beast” described in Revelation.

Both sides of the argument bother me. But the current Roman Catholic Church is not the same Roman Catholic Church from which the Protestants reluctantly broke centuries ago. In the same way, the Protestant Church is not the same. And both groups are much closer in beliefs today than they were centuries ago.  

The Psalmist argues that the wicked lay claims to heaven while their tongues take possession of the earth. Maybe we should take this as one of the definitions of what the wicked do. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church and their Protestant descendants, both have been guilty of this sin in the past. We have committed acts or taught doctrines arguing that “God wills it” when the truth is that God has done no such thing.  We have forgotten the words of Jesus spoken in the very common prayer that he taught to us. “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” God, what we want is what you want. And as long as that is our prayer, then we are part of his church, no matter what the sign reads in front of our places of worship.  

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 75 & 76