Friday, October 25, 2019
At the micro level many of us in our 60s and beyond could wish for “the good ol’ days”. Few want the hectic schedules, rush-hour traffic, competitive jobs, and hi-tech communications. We lament the increasing loss of Christian freedoms, partisan hatred and incivility from government leaders to schoolyard t-ball games. And some of us deeply mourn that much of the evangelical church has progressively bowed the knee to the world, and is now irreversibly compromised.
Do not look wistfully in the rear view mirror because religion, culture, city, state, national and global conditions will increasingly become much worse until the second coming of Jesus Christ. Looking to heaven’s eternal glory ahead, we who believe Christ must endure the “difficult way” having a macro level view of God withdrawing His restraint of evil until the end of this age. Life will only get better at the micro level by loving and teaching our families in righteousness and preparatory end-time truths during these Laodicean and wicked end-times.
Decide that you will by God’s truth, grace and Holy Spirit, lead your family and loved ones to know what’s coming, and not assume that this world will get better, because it won’t. You will not live your best life now. That’s yet to come! This is not a pessimistic but loving word of truth, for love speaks the truth, while fear and hate conceals it. Determine by the Holy Spirit’s power to meet Christ as He descends on the clouds of heaven at the last day, at the last trumpet, at the first resurrection, for He must remain in heaven until God restores everything.
Centered in the Bible is Ecclesiastes, halfway between the beginning and end, a fitting location for these Words: “That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said, ‘See, this is new’? It has already been in ancient times before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come by those who will come after” (Eccl. 1:9–11). Here God reveals His macro level assessment of people’s end-time oblivion.
We must not be among those of whom “There is no remembrance of former things”, because “That which has been is what will be”! And in macro view of the apocalypse Jesus said “as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man” (Luke 17:26) which should compel every Christian to research the days of Noah and why Jesus warned of them. But to comprehensively do that we must go back even further, back to the fall of mankind to study God’s sentence and judgment upon Lucifer, and Lucifer’s response to that judgment.
After Eve’s deception and fall of humanity, God said to Satan “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel” (Gen. 3:15). God said Lucifer would have “seed” meaning offspring. This, and its reality for the end is clearly being ignored by the church today because it believes a pre-trib rapture, and disregards the big picture and return of Satan’s seed, “as it was” in Noah’s day. To their own loss, believers who hold a pre-trib rapture deceit avoid the end-time macro warnings God gave. And the unexpected reality of Satan’s returning seed will terrorize and offend many!
Why God had to destroy all life except Noah and his family, reveals the horrors of the seed of Satan which corrupted humanity, even after the days of Noah. And human DNA is once again being corrupted. And in the midst of the tribulation, discerning Christians will “on some have compassion, making a distinction; but others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh” (Jude 1:22–23). “But the fearful and unbelieving” (Rev. 21:8 KJV) will suffer the eternal lake of fire!
From the beginning of His ministry, Jesus said salvation faith actively enters “by the narrow gate…[and] difficult way…which leads to life…and there are few who find it” (Matt. 7:13–14). That’s a choice to which one responds by faith or not. Yet, much of the church seeks an easier, even deceptive way; many by Calvinism’s Irresistible Grace of choice-less salvation; some by the wealth and prosperity gospel; and multitudes by a pre-tribulation rapture, for which not a single verse of Scripture can be found! By our God-given will we believe Jesus or not.
Since their creation, Calvinism’s choice-less salvation and the pre-trib rapture deceptions continue deceiving people to believe “another Jesus” (2 Cor. 11:4), not the Jesus of the Bible who makes salvation a personal choice, and promised a post-trib rapture “Immediately after the tribulation” (Matt. 24:29–31). Many love the false Jesus of the pre-trib rapture which excludes them from the days of Noah. But they’ve been set up for offense as the rapture “will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition” (2 Thess. 2:3). Notably, one cannot fall away from that to which one had not once attained, here, explicitly the Christian faith. Accordingly, Calvinism’s “once saved always saved” is a massive deception!
Satan’s seed came by his fallen angels when “There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, [after the Flood] when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown” (Gen. 6:4). Fallen angels had illicit relations with women and created giants, called Nephilim and Rephaim, non-redeemable creatures. Their seed mingled not only with humanity, but with beasts of the earth. “So the LORD said, ‘I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them…for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth” (Gen. 6:7, 12).
The Nephilim and Rephaim are returning and will join Antichrist’s fight against God at the Battle of Armageddon. Their presence is recorded even now in different parts of the world. It’s the promise of God, that “as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man” (Luke 17:26), thus giving us every reason to believe because God said it. Not to even mention wars, famines, pestilences and natural calamities, “as it was in the days of Noah” will cause men’s hearts to fail for fear “of those things which are coming on the earth” (Luke 21:26).
Marlin J. Yoder
