From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Part 7 of a 20-part series. Read part 6.

Through the centuries, counterfeit worship has been justified by suppressing the commandment against idolatry.

¹⁸ Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels, intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, ¹⁹ and not holding fast to the Head, from whom all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God.

²⁰ Therefore, if you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to regulations - ²¹ "Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle," ²² which all concern things which perish with the using - according to the commandments and doctrines of men?

²³ These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.

In our last article, we began to see that during the past two thousand years, the greatest and longest-standing champion of counterfeit worship has been the Roman Catholic church. Roman Catholicism's counterfeit worship is rooted in the same false teaching that plagued the Colossian church in the first century. The heart of the heresy is that man can bring the world's philosophies and practices into the church and put a so-called Christian label on them, and doing this will make such things acceptable to God. That is what Roman Catholicism has done for centuries.

The Roman Catholic church teaches that people must worship persons and things that God has never commanded His true church to worship - saints, relics, Mary, and popes.

As we have seen, Rome makes a Scripturally unsupportable claim about that which they are promoting. They say that it is not worship, but "veneration". Veneration, they claim, is not the same as worship. But as we have seen, when man gives the adoration and devotion to other persons and objects that is to be reserved for the one true and living God alone, it is nothing less than counterfeit worship. It is, in fact, idolatry.

A Different "Ten Commandments"

Most people - even most who would identify themselves as Evangelicals or Protestants - do not know that the Roman Catholic church uses a different set of Ten Commandments from the Ten Commandments that are used by Protestant churches. The difference is this: The Vatican's version of the Ten Commandments eliminates the Second Commandment - these words from Exodus 20:4-5 -

You shall not make for yourself a carved image - any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them.

The summary of this commandment is, "you shall not commit idolatry." The Vatican eliminates the second commandment against idolatry, and then subdivides the tenth commandment against covetousness in order to artificially keep the number of commandments at ten. The Biblically accurate version of the Ten Commandments includes the Second Commandment against idolatry.

The commandment against idolatry is clear, strong, and specific. It was principally for their flagrant, persistent violations of this commandment that God, after much longsuffering, evicted Israel and Judah from the Promised Land and sent them into captivity. Man has no right to arbitrarily remove the Second Commandment from the Decalogue.

But the Vatican maintains the fiction of its revisionist Ten Commandments in order to perpetuate Roman Catholicism's extensive idolatry. Rome commands its faithful to bow before statues and crucifixes, to light candles, to burn incense, and to pray to the dead. Rome commands veneration of the host, the wafer which it claims a priest turns into the actual body of Christ in the mass by an incantation. (The Latin words the priest uses when he does that are hoc est corpus, from which the magician's incantation hocus pocus is derived.)

In articles to follow, the Lord willing, we are going to address Rome's historic fourfold idolatry specifically, from Scripture.

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