Chapter 1

The Last Days Church - Apostate!

 

·        “When the Son of man comes, will He find faith on the earth?”  (Luke 18:8)

 

·        ¹The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons…³For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; ⁴and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.   (II Tim 4:1, 3-4

 

·        ^“1 But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: ²For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, ³unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, ⁴traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, ⁵having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away.”  (II Tim. 3:1-5)

 

·        ^“3knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, ⁴and saying, "Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation." (II Peter 3:3-4)

·        ⁹"Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name's sake. ¹⁰And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. ¹¹Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. ¹²And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.  (Matthew 24:9-12)

 

The Falling Away

 

I don’t know how the Scripture could possibly be any clearer.  The church in the “last days” will be apostate.  True believers will be among them, but as a whole, the church will be fallen away.  Jesus is asking a rhetorical question, knowing what the answer is.  And Paul tells us that in the “latter times” Christians will abandon their faith and sound doctrine and gather around teachers who will tell them what they want to hear.  He goes on to describe people who have a form of godliness but no substance, no power.  And finally, our Lord describes a time when Christians betray one another and follow false prophets who deceive many.  There are many more passages, but these are just a few.  This goes counter to the televangelists and preachers today who predict world wide revival.

 

In his book, “Final Warning,” Grant Jeffrey comments on these scriptures:

 

“We should not be surprised at the progressive abandonment of the authority of Scripture among churches today; the prophets warned this would happen.  This growing apostasy is leaving many new believers in great spiritual danger due to the lack of truly biblical teaching in our churches.  A confidential survey in 1982 by sociologist Jeffrey Hadden asked about the private religious convictions of Protestant pastors and found that a majority of these mainline ministers have lost their faith.

 

When asked if they still believed that Jesus Christ was God, over 45 percent of the ministers said no.  An astonishing 80 percent of the ministers rejected both the claim that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and that Jesus is the Son of God.  Thirty-six percent of these pastors do not believe that Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead.  Anyone considering these horrifying results will realize why the mainline churches have lost their moral and spiritual influence in society…The apostate church of the end times will be a church with the lowest common denominator faith…” (pp. 244-245)

 

Catholic-Protestant unity is being propelled by the death of John Paul II and the brains behind him – Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI!  You have evangelicals praising the Pope and Roman Catholic-Protestant unity.  In the days before and after as seen in the website of “Christianity Today” or “Charisma Magazine” or the pronouncements of the conversion of such well known Christian leaders as Jack Van Impe.

 

If you want to know the state of the church today, just go to the website of the Christian market research group – the Barna Group.  You will find some alarming things on their website – such as the fact that the divorce rate in the church is no different than society as a whole, or that faith has a limited effect on people’s behavior or that millions of Americans are spiritually satisfied but confused.  Another study finds that children are loved but not well-served spiritually, and that there is lots of spiritual activity but limited spiritual gains.  Another study (surprise, surprise) finds that morality even among Christians continues to decay.  Eighty five percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians and a third as evangelicals.  Yet two thirds believe truth is relative, having affairs or living together is okay, etc.  It goes on and on.

 

Since the evangelical church seems to have lost her moral compass, leaders are turning more and more to the Roman Catholic Church because of the clear stand they take on moral issues.  As I said before, anyone who thinks the Roman Catholic Church has really changed in relation to all of their traditional teachings is in for a shock.  They haven’t.  Anyone who thinks he is the Vicar of Christ on the earth and accepts all of the adulation of the masses, is an imposter!  But the evangelical embrace of the Roman Church shows how far it has fallen.

 

But how low can we go?  Sorry to say, the Scriptures above indicate we have a ways to go and it will get far worse before it gets better (when our Lord Jesus returns).

 

Not only is the church falling away in many respects – embracing the moral values of the world, the relativism and so forth, and is looking for a unity not based on the truth of the Bible, but evangelicals have basically written themselves out of the game with false teachings.

 

False Teachings

 

I am not going into this in a great deal of detail because I covered the subject in the first three chapters of another book on-line titled “In Search of Babylon.”  There are insidious teachings today that would rob God of His testimony in the last days, the two witnesses – the two lampstands and the two olive trees, the Church and Israel.   Christ is walking among the churches, the lampstands, as we shall see in Revelation 2 and 3. 

 

There are two basic schools of thought: one is that Israel lost all promises and the church inherited them (Covenant Theology) and the other is that the church age ends when it raptures and God wraps things up with his people, the Jews.  There are variations and they are discussed in detail in other places.  The first basically says we have been living in the “last days” for the past 2,000 years and that there will be no tribulation and physical return of Christ until the church takes dominion.  The other has the church leaving – rapturing leaving everyone else behind as Tim LaHaye would say.  Both teachings remove one of the two witnesses.

 

You may object to my calling these “false teachings”.   You can’t have three very different positions on the same subject that are all correct.  The fact remains that two of the three teachings are false: 1) Either the church takes dominion or 2) it raptures leaving the Jews alone or 3) both Christians and Jews go through the final hours on earth together.  I address the question of why the church goes through the tribulation in great detail.  Suffice it to say that his two peoples are His testimony on the earth: one, His earthly stiff-necked people and the other those saints washed in the blood of the Lamb and born of the Spirit.

 

As a practical matter, you should care about which of these three scenarios is correct.  What you believe determines what you do.  Either you: 1) work to bring the kingdom of God to earth or 2) wait confidently for the rapture knowing you will escape the tribulation or 3) prepare for what lies ahead.  Most Christians fall into one of these three categories.  Our end times view may have nothing to do with our salvation, but it will have something to do with our preparation and our vulnerability to deception.  Next, we will look at the letters to the seven churches.  What is God saying to us today?

 Proceed to Chapter 2