Day 199

Apostasy in last days 

Key Verses: 2, 7, 8, 15,

In my lifetime there have been several people who have claimed to be the Messiah. Moon, the leader of the Unification Church died just recently. Jim Jones died in a mass murder/suicide. False Christs have come and gone. There are always going to be people claiming something about themselves that just isn’t true. We have people being scammed every day. Paul’s day was no different.

One of the things we can look to happen is for the false messiah to set himself up in the Temple in Jerusalem. So a temple will have to be built, a temple, not a synagogue. He will sit there and claim to be God. This happened before Jerusalem’s destruction in 70AD. Some say it will happen again. I don’t know. I can certainly imagine it happening again, human nature being what it is.

There will be a clear separation between those who believe the Truth and those who don’t. The separation will be greater as God allows a big lie to be propagated. People will choose one of the other to believe. The middle ground will be eliminated. I find it funny that evolutionists rejoice when one “transitionary fossil” is found. There should be countless trillions of them, if evolution were true. What a deception!

It can be easy to grasp for new things, even new beliefs. The old can lose its luster. The shiny package gets worn out. The day to day application of Truth might not be as exciting as the new shiny object. But we must resist the temptation to run down every rabbit trail. These early believers, new in a new faith, needed to stay with the Truth proclaimed, and the Holy Spirit had witnessed to with powerful signs, confirming the Truth.

“But how can we know?” The Holy Spirit will confirm the truth of the Scriptures to you. Those confirmations will be just a real as those first century miracles, because God speaking to you is a miracle. You will KNOW that it is God. Other places around the globe God is still doing the kind of miracles that He did at the beginning of the Church. He is doing them out of His grace to peoples who need confirmation of the Truth. They also believe what they are told. They are not filled with the cultural passion for disbelief that we have.

We have made doubt an art form. And it is an ugly misrepresentation of the dignity with which God endowed us at creation. We are made in His image and likeness. We keep trying to remake ourselves in our own degradated image. Sin has become the object of worship, and people have flocked to the new temple and sold themselves to its practices.