Discerning the Signs but Looking for the Lord
I do listen. As I get older, I forget more easily, but I do listen to people’s concerns. In the last several years, a number of devoted Christians have asked me some form of the following question: “Are we close to the return of Jesus Christ?” As with any Biblical teaching, we must be careful with this subject. In Matthew 24:36, Jesus said, “Of that day and hour knoweth no man.” Later, in Acts 1:7, He added, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons.” Paul wrote in I Thesssalonians 5:2 that “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.” Thus, date-setting defies God’s Word and dishonors our Savior. However, in Matthew 16:3, Jesus pointedly asks, “Can ye not discern the signs of the time?” We do not know and cannot know the exact time of Jesus’ Second Coming and the resulting period of the Tribulation, but we are told to seriously study the signs found in Scripture. (I will be using this opening paragraph for each of the brief messages in this series. The following material will change daily.)
A sixth sign “that the day of Christ is at hand” (II Thessalonians 2:2) is perhaps the saddest of all: there will be apostasy within the professing Church. In II Thessalonians 2:3a, Paul writes, “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first.” “A falling away” is better translated “the rebellion” or “the apostasy.” It is the deliberate defection from a previously professed position. That this rebellion is from within the Church is clear from other uses of the same root word in the New Testament (for example, I Timothy 4:1 “depart”; II Timothy 4:3-4 “turn away”; Hebrews 3:12 “departing”).
Do we see evidence of this great apostasy today? We know that a number of churches do not preach the Gospel message of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, yet these churches usually label themselves as Christian. To me, the most troubling trend within the professing Church is the eager acceptance of postmodernism, a philosophy which excludes the possibility of absolute truth. Christianity and postmodernism are not merely incompatible; they are in bare-fisted opposition… or, at least, they should be. Some well-known and popular preachers call themselves postmodernist Christians; they might as well speak of holy demons. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father but by Me.” To deny absolute truth is to deny this essential claim of Jesus. Such a denial is aberrant and abhorrent and is consistent with the “falling away first” that signals the predicted end. Perhaps postmodernism will wane and another false ideology will arise within the Church. Certainly we currently see a general declension, but the “great revolt” (Williams) is a specific and dramatic event, one that will happen and could easily occur now.
What can we do? We can make sure that our church remains faithful to the Gospel and to the other teachings of the Bible. We can discern false teaching in books or online and flee from it. We can and must cling to the One Who is “the Truth.”