Are the religious leaders of Christianity responsible for the confusion?

--- Anyone who knows that the Bible is the word of God and therefore wants to join a Christian Church-organization must make a choice from an innumerable number of possibilities.

--- Anyone who is a member of a Christian Church and wonders if his Church is the right one has an innumerable number of organizations at his disposal that he can start to study. He can make a study of the doctrines of all sorts of Churches, their practices, their customs and the ways they are organized and governed. In addition to all this anyone who is looking for the true Christian organization should be aware of the following:

--- JHWH emphasizes in His Bible that there exist false religions and false Churches which He totally rejects. As such the Bible specifically mentions all those religions which derive their teachings and their practices from the first system of false religion that the Bible mentions: the religion of ancient Babylon. These false doctrines and practices are found in all the religious systems of the successive world-powers which the Bible mentions: Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece and Rome. It is well possible that through the religions of Greece and Rome false, Babylonian, ideas have entered Christianity.

--- The Bible emphasizes the great power which Satan and his demons can exercise in our world. See 1 John 5:19: the entire world is controlled by the power of the wicked one. Or Revelation 12:9: the one who is called Devil and Satan deceives the whole world. It is well possible that the terrible confusion within Christianity, as seen in innumerable Churches which compete with each other and teach doctrines which contradict each other, is the work of JHWH’s great opponent: Satan.

--- The writers of the Greek Scriptures have constantly expressed warnings that after the death of the direct eye-witnesses of Jesus’ actions, the apostles and Bible-writers, there will appear many false prophets and persons who are collectively called the Antichrist. The false prophets will attempt to enfeeble the true Christian faith with false doctrines. The antichrists will try to undo all the positive results of Christ’s acts and teachings. See 1 John 2:18.

--- In general the authors of the Greek Scriptures expected that after their death Christianity would be struck by great calamity. See Acts 20:29 and 30 (oppressive wolves will enter the Church and begin to spread lies), 2 Thessalonians 2:3 (the man of lawlessness and the son of perdition will affect the Church), 1 Timothy 4:1 (warns of the danger of false, Satan-inspired, teachings), 2 Peter 2:1-3 (there will come false teachers who will live a riotous sort of life and who will exploit the people through their false stories).

The only apostle and Bible writer who was still alive about the year 100 A.D. (John) saw the painful predictions of his fellow-apostles come true at the end of his life: see 1 John 2:18 (the antichrists are already there), 1 John 4:3 (the antichrists are already there). Mind: John wrote his letters about the year 100 A.D.

--- There are no texts in the Bible which point to the existence of a generally accepted authoritative institution in the first century A.D. An institution which took care of maintaining unity and preserving the purity of the Christian teachings. Jesus Christ, as head of the Church, had no successor. And the apostles had no successors either.

---The history of Christianity teaches us that not until the fourth century did the first ecclesiastical centers of power come into being. Once they were there, these centers of power were only authoritative in the regions where they were situated. For many centuries they competed with each other. The five biggest are: Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople and Rome.

---The history of Christianity also teaches us that in the course of the first four centuries the Roman Empire (the sixth world-power in Biblical history) and Christianity, which were enemies at first, became friends and even merged. All Church historians agree that Christianity has managed to become the state religion of the Roman Empire by mixing Biblical teachings with teachings from Greek philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Plato. It stands to reason that Greek philosophy does not come from God, but is the product of human, fallible thinking. This fact justifies the conclusion that starting from the third and the fourth centuries the Church began to propagate teachings that originated with humans besides teachings which originated with God

---The Bible clearly teaches us that anyone who wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Friendship with the world and friendship with God do not go together. To what degree the leaders of the Christian Churches have always craved for the friendship with the world is clearly demonstrated by the fact that practically all Christian leaders of all Christian nations have always supported their own national armies in all wars that these armies have fought in the course of the centuries. Evidently they did not do this to please God, but to demonstrate friendship and solidarity with nationalist political/military movements.

---.The Hebrew Scriptures constantly emphasize the fact that the Jewish priests played a major role in the religious and moral decline of God’s people. In addition the Greek Scriptures demonstrate that the Jewish religious leaders and the professional scribes rejected Jesus as the Messiah. Their learning and their knowledge of the Bible did not enable them to identify Jesus for what He was. These facts should make truth-seekers of the 21st century very skeptical as regards the trustworthiness of professional Christian leaders and Bible scholars. As we have seen: in the Bible they have a very bad reputation. And indeed: the spiritual leaders of the various Christian Churches are like sign-posts which all point in a different direction. Such sign-posts are useless.

---In the Bible we can read how every time when Jesus commands His followers to spread His teachings all over the world, He promises them that both He and the holy spirit will help them. This makes it more than probable that you can recognize the true Christian organization by the perceptible presence of spiritual help from Jesus and the holy spirit. Unfortunately, it is obvious for every impartial seeker that it is impossible to observe this spiritual help in one Church and not in another Church. Or to find a lot of it in one Church, and only a little in another.

---Final conclusion: if you define the word Christianity as the total of all Christian Churches, you cannot but conclude that this religion now makes a very chaotic and confusing impression. In the context of this chaos and confusion trying to find the true Church at first sight appears to be a mission impossible. And the Christian leaders (priests, ministers, theologians), who contradict each other and compete with each other, make the situation rather worse than better.