The Testimony of Truth, by Rick Sterling

The Testimony of Truth, by Rick Sterling

Imagine a sower going out to sow… The kingdom of the heavens may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field… As he sowed, some seeds fell on the edge of the path… Others fell on patches of rock… Others fell among thorns… Others fell on rich soil… The sower went away; while everybody was asleep his enemy came, sowed darnel all among the wheat, and made off.
Then, leaving the crowds, he went to the house; and his disciples came to him and said, ‘Explain the parable about the darnel in the field to us’. Then the disciples went up to him and asked, ‘Why do you talk to them in parables?’ ‘Because’ he replied ‘the mysteries of the kingdom of the heavens are revealed to you, but they are not revealed to them. For anyone who has will be given more and he will have more than enough; but from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away. The reason I talk to them in parables is that they look without seeing and listen without hearing or understanding.
‘It (the kingdom) is like a man on his way abroad who summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them… “Sir,” said he “ I had heard you were a hard man, reaping where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered; so I was afraid… For to everyone who has will be given more and he will have more than enough; but from the man who has not, even what he has will be taken away…
The above are excerpts taken from Matthew chapters 13 and 25. The reader is strongly encouraged to read these in their entirety and in their context. May God bless you and give you enlightenment as you read.

The Son of God came to this earth for one specific purpose, to sow seed; the seed He sowed were His words, His testimony. The Son of God plainly stated that the words were not His alone, they were given to Him by His Father. His Father is God, the creator of heaven and earth. When the Son of God returns to this earth it won’t be for the purpose of sowing more seed, but to reap the harvest of the seed He sowed almost two-thousand years ago.

John 18:37 Therefore Pilate said to Him, “So You are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”

The Son of God is a king; He is the king of the kingdom of God; the kingdom of truth; all who are of the truth hear His voice/words.

John 8:43 “Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word. 44 “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 “But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me.

The Son of God was speaking to the religious leaders/theologians when He made this statement, shouldn’t they have been the ones who would recognize Him; indeed, if they had known the truth, they would have recognized Him. They had been mastered by a lie, a lie of their own creation, passed down from their fathers, generation after generation. Who was the originator, the instigator of this knowledge; the one responsible for this was none other than the devil, the great deceiver. The devil gives you what you want to believe, and helps you support it through lies and deceptions. The reason and purpose for the life and ministry of the Son of God was to testify to the truth. His words are the standard of truth; all other teachers/apostles teachings are to be compared to. Any person making claims for themselves, saying they have been “called or commissioned” to deliver a message from God the Almighty, must be held up to the standard of truth, the testimony of the Son of God; if their teaching differs, in even the minutest detail, it must be totally disregarded and thrown out completely. If you do this you will find that everyone who has come after the Son of God, claiming to be an apostle or prophet/prophetess, is a lying fraud. If you want to know the truth that leads to salvation and eternal life go no further than the words from His own disciples Matthew, Mark (writing for Peter), and John. Anyone else claiming God given authority to proclaim the good news of salvation is lying.
By eating the words of the Son of God you will become like Him, full of light and truth. By eating the words of the father of lies you will become like him and will receive his judgment; his judgment is the lake of fire, the second death. The words of the great deceiver are the darnel, they look like wheat, but they are not. When consumed, darnel gives a feeling of drunkenness, a false euphoria that numbs the senses and makes one feel that everything is alright; if it makes you feel good, it must be so!

When considering the parables of sowing seed together, we see a clear picture, that of the “sower” the “Son of Man”, who came from heaven, sowed the good seed; the testimony He received from His Father, then He went away for an extended period of time. He entrusted the care of the seed He planted to His disciples.

Matthew 28:18-20 All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And know that I am with you always; yes to the end of time.

John 17:20 I pray not only for these, but for those also who through their words will believe in me.

One thing I find absent from the commission recorded in Matthew, and the prayer in John, is the revelation of another message that was to be giving to another apostle; a message specifically designed for the pagans, who would be saved through a dialectic that had the appearance of authority, but lacked substance. The one who would deliver this message would claim it’s foundation was from long ago, as testified in the Law and Prophets. However, when this message is fully investigated it would be shown that it was only cleverly spun together, dissected threads of verses. When the parable of the sowing of seeds and darnel is examined it is clearly revealed that the devil moved in to sow the seeds among the wheat after the seeds of truth had been scattered. The last words written by John, the disciple of the Son of Man, are words of deep concern, concern that the testimony of his Master was in danger of being lost forever.

2 John 7-9 There are many deceivers about in the world refusing to admit that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. They are the Deceiver; they are the Antichrist. Watch yourselves, or all our work will be lost and not get the reword it deserves. If anybody does not keep within the teaching of Christ but goes beyond it, he cannot have God with him; only those who keep to what he taught can have the Father and the Son with them.

John was concerned that the testimony of his Master would be lost, swept away by the plethora of lies gaining wide acceptance throughout the nations. The words of his Master must have been ringing in his ears; teach them to obey all the commands I have given you. John saw that these words of truth were in grave danger of being lost, forgotten forever.

The wheat and darnel were sown together in the same field, first the wheat than later the darnel, making it impossible to differentiate one from the other until the wheat would be ready for harvest. When the teaching of the Son of God is finally recognized as separate, unique, and the truth; which reveals the way to the kingdom of God and eternal life, than it is the time for the harvest. The words of the Sower clearly reveal the words of the enemy because the words of death are never the words of life, and will never be.

God has given us many wonderful qualities, but two of these qualities stand above all the others; the ability to learn, and the ability to choose. The ability to learn is clearly the most important of these two, because what we know affects the choices that we make. The choices we make determine the course of our lives; therefore it is most important to make sure that what we learn is the truth. What we learn is the foundation of our expectation. Our ability to recognize an event is greatly influenced by what we are expecting. God not only gives us reliable instruction, but gives us accurate revelation of future outcomes. The parables were not clever analogies or spiritual tales, they were revelations of future outcomes. The sower sowed seed, and went away with instruction to His servants care for His field until He returned. Two servants acted constructively on His instructions, one did not. When the Master returned it was harvest time and the darnel was harvested first, and put in piles to be burned. The wheat was placed in the barns (kingdom).

God is loving and just, His commands are righteous and just. God loves those who love Him and keep His commands. God’s love does not make Him impotent when it comes to obeying His commands. There is only one way to enter the kingdom of God, it is through the testimony of His only begotten Son.

John 14:23 Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him. 24 “He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.

You determine what you learn, what you learn determines what you know. If what you know is a lie then it is worthless. You are what you have learned. If what you have learned is a lie then that is what you are. We have been given the opportunity to learn the truth, and it is up to us to take that opportunity and act on it. All of mankind is born into a world of lies. Every organized religious practice is full of lies and deceptions. It was because of lies that the Jewish religious leaders rejected the testimony of the Son of God, and with bold confidence pursued a course that would put an end to His testimony. It is most difficult to acknowledge the fact that we have been participating in a cleverly constructed matrix of lies made to appear as truth. This matrix has existed for many millenniums, it has existed for so long no one thinks to question it. The Son of God exposed it and only a handful of people believed Him. In order to see this, one must be honest with themselves. It is curious to me as why people can be honest with others, but not with themselves. An honest person never knowingly lies to others. A person who is honest with themselves would never knowingly believe a lie, nor would they lie to themselves. The great deceiver knows this, and has cunningly crafted a fraud which has enjoyed wide acceptance throughout Christianity; this fraud is faith. To pull off this slight-of-hand trick the devil took the words that God uses to convey what He expects from His people and shortened it in order to change its meaning; that word is faithfulness. The Devil removed the ‘fullness’ part from “Faithfulness”, which left ‘faith’. Satan has convinced those who profess a belief in God and His Son Jesus Christ that ‘faith’ is the key to the kingdom of God. They believe that Christ died for their personal sins, thereby granting them entrance into the kingdom through circumventing the Law of Ten Commands in favor of salvation by ‘faith’ through grace. The stronger their faith the more certain they are of their salvation. By this type of ‘faith’ one can believe that they can enter the kingdom without keeping the Ten Commandments. What they fail to understand is that by faith it is possible to believe a lie without knowing it. The really powerful part of this fraud is that the devil has convinced “Christians” that faith is the key to their salvation, and nothing else is needed. Therefore, it is only those with an abundance of faith who will enter the kingdom of God. In this way the Devil has convinced these “people of faith” , these ‘born-again’ Christians, that knowing the truth only serves to weaken their faith, and this is anathema to salvation in modern Christianity. Yet as we have seen, it is by faith that one can believe a lie as though it is truth, without accountability. Faith is the darnel, that deadly seed planted by the Devil in the same field sown by the Sower of Truth. Satan accomplished this great deception through his popular and much loved apostle, Paul. Paul is the apostle of faith. Before planting his darnel Satan waited patiently until the Sower of Truth had gone home to His Father. Satan, realizing that the original disciples of Jesus who were the leadership of the Jerusalem church (The Way) were slightly confused and uncertain about what they were to do next, and capitalizing on this uncertainty and sized control of the early church. He put James the brother of Jesus in charge of the Jewish side of the church, and put his own apostle Paul/Saul in charge of the pagan (Gentile)side of the church. He then put these two men in direct doctrinal conflict one with the other, knowing that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand; the net result of which was that the Law abiding portion of the church in Jerusalem faded into history, while the pagan/orthodox church experienced tremendous growth. Faith and lawlessness won out, and the truth went into the wilderness.

Revelation 12:5,6 The woman brought a male child into the world, the son who was to rule all the nations with an iron sceptre, and the child was taken straight up to God and to his throne, while the woman escaped into the desert/wilderness, where God had made a place of safety ready, for her to be looked after in the twelve hundred and sixty-days.

The sower, Son of Man, sowed the words of truth; the devil sowed lying words; words that could only be understood through faith. Faith brings on a false sense that the believer has nothing to fear or dread as long as they maintain their faith. They become intoxicated by faith and have no idea that they are on the road that leads to death. The only way for them to have a chance to enter the kingdom of God is to stop eating the darnel/lies, and eat the words of truth.

The French word for darnel is ivraie (from Latin ebriacus, intoxicated), which expresses that weed’s characteristic of making one feel poisoned with drunkenness, and can cause death. This characteristic is also alluded to in the scientific name (Latin temulentus = drunk). (Taken from wikipedia)

Revelation 2:2 I know all about you, how hard you work and how much you put up with. I know you cannot stand wicked men, and how you tested the impostors who called themselves apostles and proved they were liars.

God requires that His people know and practice the truth. God has given us the truth through the testimony of His Son. He has preserved the truth over the last two-thousand plus years, so that those who come at the end of time would be able to accomplish His plan of restoration. God has been waiting for a long time for someone, anyone, to wake-up in the darkness, and to make a commitment to Him and to themselves to search for the truth. When they find it they will see the light of dawn on the horizon, and they will walk toward it. They will learn more about truth along this pathway until they are in the full light of the day. Then they will become sons of the light and sons of the day; sons of the living God.

Rick Sterling


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