By the time that Jesus came, the Jewish religion had lost sight of the living God of which it was but a picture and had degraded to the extent of carnalizing spiritual things:
They had lost an actual, living contact with God and had degraded into an organized, systematized religion based on knowledge, practices, and works.
They even had turned the brass serpent, a type of Christ through which God had wrought a miraculous work, into an idol and were worshiping it as if it had special powers of itself.
This is a good illustration of what is an idol and what it does. Any previous genuine spiritual experience can become an idol to us if we let it. Thus, there are many genuine believers today who, in looking back on their initial regeneration experience, never learn to walk in the Spirit daily.
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