Religious Leaders, Hypocrisy, and False Doctrine!

Those who are not part of the Roman Catholic Church or the various Orthodox Churches may not really understand the meaning of these various churches. They just know that these religious leaders are far different from many of the smaller Protestant denominations but what do they stand for? We know the superficial characteristic that the Catholics believe in and use images in their worship, whereas the various Orthodox Churches denounce these images but are equally devoted to their “icons” or paintings of those they revere. We also know that the creeds of these leading churches differ. But what else?

We want to make it clear that we utterly denounce, reject, and even abhor the leaders these churches. We denounce them and the false doctrines they promote! Whether we are speaking about the Catholic Pope from Rome or the Patriarchs of Russia, Greece, or Serbia, we believe that all of them are very different from what God wanted in the beginning.

The Catholic “Pope”:

Those of you who are Bible students are aware that the New Testament assemblies of the first century had overseers (often mistakenly translated as “bishops”), shepherds (“pastors”), and elders (presbyters). Other functionaries were also in evidence—such as servants (deacons), teachers, and preachers (evangelists), as the other workers that were perhaps temporary (apostles, prophets, etc). See especially Ephesians 4:11; Philippians 1:1; Acts 20:17, 28; 1 Timothy 3:1-8; Titus 1:5-9; etc.

What do we do with these facts and this evidence? Why is it that New Testament organization is vastly different from the religion that some may call “Christianity” in our age?  What happened to the overseers, the servants, the preachers, the teachers, etc., that were found in New Testament assemblies and the leaders found in modern day false Christianity? We refer to such positions as popes, patriarchs, bishops, overseers, and dozens of other positions today?

Patriarchs are Very Different from New Testament “Bishops”:

When we keep our eyes and ears open, we see that there are men who are very different from these functionaries (at least they have not begun to choose and ordain women into these positions)! In order for us to see the vast difference between what we find in the 20th and 21st centuries and what existed in the first century, let’s briefly notice a number of pictures of some of these religious leaders.

Remember that we are not examining all of them. Examples might be the Anglican Church of Great Britain, the Methodist Church of America and elsewhere, the Lutheran Church of Europe, and others. So let’s just concentrate on the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and the extremely pompous, prideful, and wicked positions that these leaders fill!

You may wonder whether very many adherents actually follow these religious leaders. Indeed they do!  Let’s notice the percentage of members who are from the Eastern Orthodox Churches:

Russia—77%

Ukraine—65%

Romania—82%

Belarus $48%–73%

Greece—95%

Serbia—97%

Bulgaria—88%

Moldova—93%

Georgia—84%

North Macedonia—65%

Cyprus—89%

Montenegro—72%

Orthodox Churches also are found in Abkhazia, South Osetia, and Transnistria.

Of course, members of the Orthodox Churches are found in many other countries, with numbers from 5% to 31%. We can see that vast amount of false religion would be found in these places. In fact, when we compare the Orthodox Churches with the Word of God, we find a vast difference! We may wonder why millions upon millions of people can’t see the truth of God’s Word any why they are deceived by these false religions!

You will notice that we have only examined the Eastern Orthodox Churches and have not examined the Roman Catholic Churches and others of the same category.  There are hundreds of millions more Catholics than Orthodox. Keep this in mind when you continue your examination!

For those who wish to examine some of the differences, we would suggest comparing the Bible with these religions or churches, as found in the Wikipedia article cited below.

In this little article, we are using such terms as “Pope” (“father”) and “Patriarch” (“father”) but we do know that we must not call others “father” in a religious sense (cf. Matthew 23:9). Those who wish to study into this matter further will find great differences between these dozens of Orthodox Churches and the Word of God.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodoxy_by_country