Does God Like Rituals and Symbols?

Tom: Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been discussing chapter 10 of Dave Hunt’s out-of-print book Beyond Seduction, and we’re going to pick up where we left off last week with this quote from chapter 10, Dave: “The history of religion is the tragic tale of those who are morally and spiritually blind and deaf, yet who devise rituals and symbols in an attempt to ‘see’ God and ‘hear’ His voice and benefit from His power through means that the Bible condemns as idolatry and divination.”

Dave, what about rituals and symbols to enhance our worship? I mean, that’s been the modus operandi for professing Christianity for about 2,000 years, and even today, evangelical young people are turning to ritual, liturgy—sacred liturgy—in the emerging church, so-called.

So what could be wrong with that?

Dave: Well, Tom, let’s be logical for a minute. I know a lot of people don’t like to be logical, but we’ll be logical. Now, what would be the purpose, let’s say, of swinging a censor with incense in it…

Tom: Dave, I used to do that…I was good at it. I could do the clickety-clicks…as an altar boy, growing up Catholic.

Dave: Yeah, now, what would be the purpose of that? Well, if you are in the Old Testament, and this is something that God has specifically required, I mean, He has designed this. He designed the tabernacle, He designed the temple. And He designed the clothes they wore and all the sacrifices—He gave the rules, and so forth. It was because, as Hebrews 9 says, “These were a sign, or a symbol, of things that were to come.” This was not the real tabernacle, but it was a picture of heaven, okay? So they were following specific instructions.

Now if you have specific instructions from God of what to do because it is a picture of something that is to come—for example, the lamb, and the bulls and the goats and all the sacrifices, God says in Isaiah 1, “I don’t want them. I don’t want any of your burnt offerings. I’m finished with you guys, because your hearts are far from me. You draw near with your mouth but your hearts are far from me.” But this was something that He designed, but obviously, it says in Hebrews 9 “The blood of bulls and goats could never take away sin,” okay? So you’re not impressing God with these sacrifices. It is a picture of something to come. But now, Tom, today, we have people who think that by swinging the censor, by taking a little wafer, which they say they have turned into the body and …this is the whole Christ, you know, the body, blood, personality, soul, spirit—that you are gaining something. That you are receiving spiritual nourishment. Even the Calvinist would say that, or the Lutheran. And that this is beneficial to you, as the Catholic Church says, you know.

Tom: It’s efficacious.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. This is a sacrifice that is efficacious for the sins of the living and the dead. Then you have been deceived. And if you think by visualizing you can bring Jesus, you’ve been deceived.

Tom: Backing up just a little bit to the incense, for example, the censor. Now, you just said a moment ago that these things were specific: the lamb…all of the things that God had individually designed. So they were specific in the sense…they were pointing to a specific thing that would take place later. They pointed to Christ, and so on. In other words, they were specific on God’s part, objective, even. Not something that would stimulate the imagination to have kind of an emotional experience or a mental experience. And that’s what we’re seeing today. We’re seeing so many of these things used as a launching point for the imagination to sense, and sense the presence of God, or see God in a better way, or something like that. That’s a big difference.

Dave: Well, you make a good point, Tom. All of this was not intended for man to arouse his emotions. It was intended to instruct.

Tom: But again, specifically!

Dave: Exactly. Exactly. You couldn’t make it up on your own. That would be an abomination. If you offered strange fire, for example. I guess they got in an area where there was naphtha in the…who knows what, you know, and they thought, “Wow, we can make the fire a little better.” And God killed them for that!

So, you can’t just make it up. Furthermore, you make a very good point, Tom. This is not to arouse our emotions, not to get us feeling “religious,” or sanctified or anything. This was intended to be instructive to the priests and the people involved in it concerning God’s holiness. You don’t just walk up and say, “Hi God.” I’m sorry. We have that idea today. And we do have…Hebrews 10 says that “we have access into the very presence of God through a new and living way which he has consecrated for us through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.” Okay? We have access to the presence of God by the blood of Christ, by His sacrifice on the cross. And you know, I don’t always say it when I pray, but very often I say, “Lord, we’re coming to you in the name of our Savior the Lord Jesus and by virtue of His shed blood and His body broken for us, His sacrifice on the cross, without which we have no access to You.” So the tabernacle, the temple, all of these things, the garments that they had to wear, that they were anointed with oil, you know, the anointing oil, and so forth—and of course, the veil that only the High Priest could go in, “not without blood” once a year. These were not to impress the people with how holy they could become or give them feelings of holiness. These were to impress them with the fact that God is holy, and you don’t just walk up, you know, into God’s presence, and say, “Hi, God, how ya doing?” But we’re getting that kind of familiarity today, and especially these people who say, “Visualize Jesus.”

Tom: Let’s go back to some of these others ones. You said, “Come on, let’s reason here. Let’s use some logic.” You just identified Old Testament rituals to a degree, symbols, and so on, that God had designed, and they pointed to Him. What we find today is, let’s say, even in the early church as these things began to develop as liturgy, ritual, and so on, you found that men started making things up along these lines. For example, the incense. My understanding, even growing up Roman Catholic, there were two purposes for it. Number one, it was a cleansing kind of thing. The priest would walk through the church swinging the censor. But also, there was an idea that these were like the prayers of the saints. Well, they wouldn’t call them “saints” then. That’s a biblical term. But this would be the prayers of the congregation going up to God.

So everything was symbolic, but it was focused more on the individual. Not on God but on those involved, although there was some, you know, some direction toward God. I’m not saying it was without that. But…

Dave: Tom, they’re going back to rituals, and they’re not even the proper ones.

Tom: No.

Dave: They don’t have the temple. When Christ died, and He said, “It is finished,” the scripture tells us the veil in the temple that kept the priests out of the holy place, the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom. And that was a huge, very thick curtain. You couldn’t tear that. I mean, you take a team of horses on each end, and they probably couldn’t do it either. It was the hand of God, showing, it says, that the way into the holiest was now made manifest. Now we have Christ! We don’t have to have a wafer and pretend this is Christ. And we’re ingesting Him into our stomachs. We’re supposed to believe in Him. He has become our life. He’s come to live inside of us in our hearts, not in our stomachs. Furthermore, the Catholic Church says this is an ongoing propitiatory sacrifice. Therefore, they are saying that the sacrifice on the cross was not enough. It’s amazing: The sacrifice of Christ on the cross can’t get you into heaven. The best it could do would get you to purgatory. And after you die, you’re in purgatory, they will say Mass after Mass after Mass in order to finally get you out of purgatory and into heaven.

Well, what the sacrifice of Christ—the real sacrifice of Christ on the cross—can’t do, apparently, repeating it in the Mass is going to do! Well, that doesn’t make any sense. The Bible says, “By one sacrifice, he has perfected forever those who are sanctified.” It says in Hebrews 9: “He has appeared once in the end of the world to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Then it goes on, it says: “As it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many.”

So if you don’t believe in reincarnation, you don’t believe human beings die more than once, then you will have to accept the analogy that Christ only died once. He’s not dying again and again. But you know, Tom, you can quote it: “He is being immolated….” That’s what the Catholic Church teaches.

Tom: And people could look that up in any dictionary. It says, “killed, as in a sacrifice.”

Dave: Right. So He is still being killed, still suffering! But I love Hebrews 10. It talks about the sacrifices now, that we’re dealing with—these were a type in the Old Testament. It says, “They had to be offered again and again and again.” And the writer of Hebrews (I think it was Paul, but anyway) the writer of Hebrews says, “That is evidence that they could not take away sin, because if the sacrifice could take away sin, it wouldn’t have to be repeated.” And then it goes on, and it says, In contrast to these sacrifices [in the Old Testament] that had to be repeated, that were only a picture of the sacrifice that would come, this man, it says, Christ, “after he had offered one sacrifice forever, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. By one sacrifice, he has perfected them that are sanctified.” This is all we need. And verse 18 says, “There is no more sacrifice for sin.”

Tom: You have just explained why the Mass is not biblical. And far worse than that, martyrs down through the history of the church have gone to their death for rejecting the Roman Catholic Mass—for calling it an abomination, even.

Dave: Well, Tom, you couldn’t call it anything else, and I don’t want to offend anyone out there. This is not my word. We’re not the authorities. This is the Word of God. The Bible is the Word of God. And we have mentioned it many times: Christ paid the penalty on the cross. He said, “It is finished!” That is, the sacrifice is finished, and again, we’ve mentioned many times, the Greek word that is translated to “It is finished,” like in the King James Bible, is “Tetelestai.” That was stamped on promissory notes in the day of Christ. It meant “Paid in Full.” Now if Jesus Christ has paid the sacrifice, the penalty for our sins, in full by the sacrifice of Himself, He has borne judgment that we deserve, He says, “Tetelestai,” paid in full. And then He yields His Spirit into His Father’s hands, and He goes into the grave, and then He’s raised three days later, and the scripture says there’s only one sacrifice for sin, and then someone comes along —a church—I don’t care how large they are, how old they are, and they say, “Wait a minute! If you dare to say that the sacrifice was finished on the cross 1,900 years ago, anathema to you!” That’s from the Council of Trent. “We must continue to offer Christ.” Well, they have various ways of saying it, you know, “it’s a re-presentation of the sacrifice of Christ.” Well, but wait a minute. Tom, but let’s say I owe $1,000 to the bank. And you pay it off. Thank you! And then every month or every week, I want to go in and re-present this payment. Well, I’m going to run out of money. I keep re-presenting it to them, or I want you to re-present it…no, the debt was paid! You can’t re-present a payment!

Tom: Dave, it actually gets worse than that, because growing up Catholic, again, we were taught that the first Mass took place at the Last Supper. So now we have Jesus right there, physically. It’s a pre-presentation of something they’re going to re-present. In other words, He hadn’t gone to the cross yet, so, it was “pre-“ going to the cross, so, again, it’s illogical, it’s irrational, but more than that, it’s not biblical.

Dave: Jesus said, “This is my body; this is my blood,” you know, as He gave them the bread and the cup. Now He’s sitting there in His physical body. I guarantee you, not one of those disciples thought that this was literally…now He’s giving them His literal body, or that they would one day be able to change bread and wine into His body. But if this was the first Mass, then Christ was offered, as you pointed out, He offered Himself, His body and blood as a sacrifice, before He went to the Cross?!

Tom: A pre-presentation of a re-presentation that they were going to do later.

Dave: That’s as bad as the re-presentation, okay?

Tom: Yeah.

Dave: So, Tom, you said that it’s not biblical. Is that serious? Yes, it’s serious because, look, if you owed  $1,000, and I paid it off, and then you keep pleading with me, “Dave, would you pay the bank?”

I’d say, “Tom, I already paid the bank!”

[Tom]: “Well, couldn’t you re-present the payment?”

You are denying that I’ve paid the penalty, right? And the Mass is a denial that Christ paid the penalty. It’s man trying to get himself in there, even daring to say, “Oh the penalty couldn’t be paid without our priests turning this wafer into the body and blood of Jesus,” and that is, indeed, an abomination! It’s a denial of what Christ did for our sins. And it gives people a false hope. People are trusting in the Mass, as you know, and when they die, they hope [that] Mass after Mass after Mass will be said for them in order to get them out of purgatory into heaven. Tom, that’s an abomination. It is a denial of the payment by Christ on the cross for our sins in full!

Tom: Dave, the sacraments…and we may touch on those in a minute or so if we have time, but Extreme Unction, which is the last sacrament, the sacrament supposedly you receive that gets you to purgatory, at least, but keeps you from going to hell. And in that you receive, as a part of it, the Viaticum, which is taking the host, as though that were going to speed you to purgatory, or get you at least in a direction toward heaven. Now, again, just as you’ve talked about, this is the denial of Christ they’re receiving at the eleventh hour of their death…it’s really bad news.

Dave: Well, Tom, look, we say it’s unbiblical. What’s important about that? Because the Bible is God’s Word. You don’t mess with God’s Word. You don’t play fast and loose with God’s Word. We take God’s Word for what it says. And if we reject God’s Word, that is serious business. Now, the Bible says when any Christian dies—of course, we’re saints; all the epistles were written to the “saints.” You don’t become a saint, you know, after your death…

Tom: Through canonization…

Dave: Right. When the Catholic Church votes you in or the pope makes you a saint, or whatever. And the saints, when they die, what does the Bible say? “Absent from the body, present with the Lord.” The moment a Christian dies, their soul and spirit has gone. Where? To purgatory? To some place of suffering? Because Christ’s suffering was not enough? And now we’ve got to make up for what was lacking in Christ’s suffering? And yet, He said, “It is finished!” He said, “Tetelestai! Paid in full!” To believe that is to deny that Christ paid the penalty, and that is a rejection of Christ. You can say, ”Oh, I believe in Christ!”

I’m sorry, you don’t believe in the Christ of the Bible because you believe in a Christ who didn’t pay the penalty in full, and it’s got to be made up for by the priest, or the church, or whatever. So, Tom, it is a very serious matter.

Tom: Dave, something that concerns me, here, and you, and many others that we know, is that the evangelical church now is moving toward these rituals, liturgies, of Catholicism. We see it happening among evangelical youth. You can find prayer stations, you can finds stations of the cross, in basements of many evangelical churches. They’re into candles, they’re into votive candles. This is heartbreaking, as far as I’m concerned, coming out of Roman Catholicism. But aside from that, it’s dead wrong according to the Scripture.

Dave: Tom, are we just narrow-minded, dogmatic fundamentalists?

Tom: Well, we’re trying to be biblical here…

Dave: We’re trying to be biblical, that’s right. How do we know about Christ? The Bible tells us. How do we know about our salvation? The Bible tells us. You can’t just make up something on your own. Now if I’m going to adopt a way of salvation that is contrary to the Bible, I’m not going to be saved. If I’m going to believe that a Jesus that is not the Jesus of the Bible who paid the penalty for our sins once and for all, but I’ve got to look at Him in an icon, for example, and kind of pray through this icon in order to make contact with Him; or I’ve got to take this wafer and this wine, you know, because that way, I’m ingesting His body and blood into me, and that’s somehow going to have some virtue, and I believe in a Jesus who is still being offered, still being sacrificed on Catholic altars, or Orthodox altars, whatever…

Tom: …try a Lutheran altar, consubstantiation.

Dave: …all over the world, millions of times a day, and He said, “It’s finished,” then, Tom, I don’t believe in Jesus of the Bible. Now, who’s going to save me? The Jesus that is being offered, sacrificed, immolated, over and over and over? Or the Jesus of the Bible who says, “It is finished! Tetelestai! Paid in full!” You can’t believe in both of them at once. You can’t believe in two contradictory propositions.

Now, changing our illustration just a little bit: I owe $1,000 to the bank, and you pay it. And then, every month the bank demands another payment. Or every month, I keep going back to the bank trying to pay them, and you say, “Dave, I paid it!”

“Oh, yeah, I believe you paid it, but I think I ought to pay it too.”

You either believe Christ paid the penalty for your sins, or you don’t. If you believe…for example, many Catholics, millions of them, wear a scapular…

Tom: Mm-hmm, I did, for a number of years.

Dave: On one end of it, it says, “Whosoever dies wearing this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire.” Now anyone who wears that…and the pope wore it all of his life from his childhood til his dying day…whoever wears that and trusts in that promise that by wearing the scapular Mary is going to get you into heaven out of purgatory, have they believed what Christ said? “I give my sheep eternal life. They will never perish. No one can pluck them out of my Father’s hand. I and my Father are one. Whosoever believes on the Son HAS everlasting life.” Jesus said, “He that hears my word (John:5:24Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.
See All...), and believes on him who sent me, HAS everlasting life, shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life.”

Now, if I really believe Jesus, I believe the Gospel, I’m saved through faith in Christ, am I going to wear a scapular that promises me that if I wear this when I die, I will be delivered from eternal fire? No! It doesn’t make sense. I would not wear it.

So I would have to say that the pope, or whoever, whatever Catholic, by wearing a scapular and trusting in that promise, has rejected the promise of Christ himself, and therefore is not saved, according to the Bible.