CommandmentKeepers Exclusive The Firstborn of Satan Simon Magus: The Father of Gnostic Christianity Rick Allen

“The Decline and Fall of Christian America” was the title on the cover of the latest issue of “Newsweek Magazine.”  The lead article basically claims “America is loosing faith in her Christianity”.  That’s according to the American Religious Identification Survey of 2008.  Similar surveys in Europe also report the same loss of faith in Christianity among Europeans.

According to Newsweek and other sources, the reason for this decline in faith is a recent sharp increase in clerical transgressions in the “Christian Churches” across America and Europe. To support their claims, journalists site: the recent rise in financial scandals by church officials, homosexual priests praying on altar boys, pastors having illicit affairs with their parishioners, and evil deeds in general perpetrated daily by the “Christian Clergy.”

But the real reason that today’s Christianity is fast loosing its religious zeal among Americans and Europeans is not because of what has happened within Christianity the past hundred years, it’s because of what happened to it in the first hundred years.  That’s when the True Christian Church established by Jesus Christ of Nazareth and His Apostles was hijacked and compromised by a Satanically inspired evil sorcerer named Simon Magus.    

 Very little is written in the Bible about Simon and his evil exploits. Most of the evidence against him, and how he disrupted Christianity was written between the lines of Scripture, and buried in the ancient annals of the Apostolic Church.

Simon Magus is mentioned in the King James Bible, in Acts 8:9-24, but the KJV doesn’t accurately convey how angry Peter was with Simon when he tried to buy the Holy Spirit to further his own agenda.  However, Moffatt’s version of the New Testament tells it like it was:  Peter said to Simon, "Death to you and your money, for dreaming you could by the gift of God! You come in for no share or lot in this religion. Your heart is all-wrong in the sight of God. So repent of this wickedness of yours, and ask God whether you can be forgiven for your heart's purpose. For I see you are a bitter poison and a pack of evil" (Acts 8:20-24 - Moffatt).

The reason Peter called Simon Magus a “bitter poison” and a “pack of evil” was because he knew that soon after their confrontation Simon would cleverly intermingle pagan Roman Mithraism with Apostolic Christianity to form his Gnostic-Christian Religion; and thereby successfully poisoning people’s minds against the doctrines of True Christianity, in favor of the “strong delusion” of Simon’s version of Christianity.

Unbeknownst to “Newsweek”, and most everyone else, what people are losing faith in today is not Biblical Christianity but the Gnostic-Christianity that Simon Magus and his disciples deceptively spread throughout Europe in the first three centuries; and all the time they were claiming that their religion was the same religion that Jesus of Nazareth established. 

To prove what I just said, let us simply compare what Jesus taught with what Modern, or Gnostic Christianity (M.C.) teaches.  Consider the following:

            (1) Christ said: “If you love Me, keep My Commandments" (John14:15). M.C. says the Fourth Commandment is no longer important to God, and that we should now worship Him on Sunday, and not on the Seventh Day, as He commanded. 

(2) M.C. says that Christ did away with His Laws and Commandments by nailing them to the cross. Jesus said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled (Matthew 5:17,18)."

(3) M.C. says that “once saved, always saved”. Jesus said many times, "He that endures to the end shall be saved" (Matthew 10:22).

(4) – M.C. says that the reward of the Saved is going to Heaven when they die. Jesus said that the Saved only go to Heaven at the First Resurrection, for a short time, and then return with Him to establish the Kingdom of God on the earth, and that their reward is to live and reign with Him there for a thousand years (Revelation 20:4-6) (John 3:13).

(5) M.C. says that if we just "believe on Jesus" we are "born again". Christ said we would be Spirit Beings when we are "born again", like he was after His resurrection (John 3:3-8).

(6) Christ said for us to observe the Holy Days of God as commanded in the Bible, and M.C. says for us to forget those days, and keep instead the non-Biblical holidays like Easter, Christmas, and Sunday (Leviticus 23).

(7) M.C. says that the Old Testament has been nullified by Jesus’ Resurrection, and we don’t have to observe its teachings anymore, but Jesus said that we should live by "every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God", meaning the Old and New Testaments (Matthew and Luke 4:4).

Many of the earliest Christian Apologists, like Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, held Simon Magus in such utter contempt that they gave him the title of: "FIRST-BORN OF SATAN".   In today’s vernacular, I guess we would just call him: The Godfather of all seditions and heresies that ever confronted the Early Christian Church of God.

Finally, consider the words of William Shakespeare, who once wrote:  “The evil that men do lives on after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.”  So it was with Simon Magus; of the good he did no evidence exists, but his evil deeds have lived on long after him.  And those deeds inspired his followers to work long and hard to oppose Jesus’ Apostles, and change Christ’s version of Christianity into what it has become today—a troubled religion that many Americans and Europeans are fast losing faith in.

But thanks to God, True Christianity has survived on the Earth.  But the path that leads to it is narrow, and the directions to that path can only be found in God’s Holy Word.  Read it to strengthen your Faith in Jesus Christ, and not in the traditions of men; and when you do you’ll discover the one True Way of Salvation!

Rick Allen
Rick is a Sabbath-keeping Christian who lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.  An Architectural Engineer by trade, Rick’s hobby and passion is researching and reporting the Truth about Early Christian History.  Using the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University, second largest in the nation, he has uncovered many little known facts about ancient Christianity; facts that Rick has revealed in a book to be published later this year.