|
|
|
What the Bible and Common Sense Suggests May Happen in the Future
THE GATHERING STORM Michael Spencer has made rather strong claims about the future of Christianity. Several of his blog comments were summarized in an essay in the Christian Science Monitor on 3/10/09. Spencer claimed in part,
While these seem like strong words, they do reflect current trends in the culture. We live at a difficult point in history. Rarely in world history have people been both as intelligent in academics and as foolish in their life choices as they are today. The information explosion has made it possible to know far more data than previous generations would have dreamed possible. Yet the western world is plunging to its own destruction by decades of foolish and self-destructive behavior. A culture that had lived in ease and comfort for decades has come to live in fear and anxiety. It is not hard to trace how we reached this point. The fundamental problems in the western world are spiritual ones. To see that truth, think about the spiritual lessons that history has taught us for the last century. In the late 1800's, Europeans and North Americans fell in love with their own intelligence. The confidence in human reason was enormous. When the Titanic was being built shortly before World War I, the press claimed that even God could not sink the ship. That spirit was characteristic of the time. The huge confidence in the power of human reason crashed on the rocks of World War I. The war was a form of global insanity. There was no reason to fight the war. There were no good guys or bad guys in it. Yet over 15,000,000 people died in the trenches. When the war was finally over, the returning soldiers brought Spanish flu home with them. In the global pandemic that followed, another 15,000,000 people died around the world. The result was a traumatized world. The confidence in human reason was replaced by a spirit of cultural hysteria. When coupled with the crime wave resulting from the prohibition of alcohol in the US, the culture fragmented into the Roaring Twenties of the 1920's. Western culture, and especially the culture of the United States, kicked over all restraint and ran head long into sin. Open revolt against God was the cultural norm. The religious fashion of the day was "Modernism" which was the left wing liberalism of the day. The mainstream culture assumed that the Bible was wrong and that man could discover the truth without God. The process can be illustrated by looking at the Northern Presbyterian Church which was the precursor of the PCUSA. By the end of the 1920's, Princeton Seminary was the only conservative school left in the denomination. The faculty at Princeton supported the formation of an independent mission board within the church. The independent board sent missionaries out to the field who believed the Word and taught the Gospel. This contrasted strongly with the denomination's mission board that had partly replaced salvation through Christ's death with a social message of a kingdom that would be created by human effort. The conservative faculty at Princeton was placed on trial for supporting the Independent board. They were fired from the seminary and defrocked from the denomination. As a group, they moved south to Philadelphia and founded Westminster Seminary. After that, a variety of conservative independent Reformed seminaries appeared like Faith, Covenant, Biblical, and Reformed. At the same time, a number of small conservative Reformed denominations like the OPC appeared. A similar process can be seen in several other denominational traditions. The same year that the last conservative faculty was kicked out of the Northern Presbyterian Church, God raised His hand against the nation, and the stock market crashed. Massive unemployment followed the crash. It lasted for over a decade as the nation sank into the Great Depression. When this did not bring the nation to repentance, God removed the abundance that had made the Roaring Twenties possible. Instead of grain growing on the Great Plains, God brought drought and dust storms that crippled the nation's economy. Thousands of farmers lost their land, and their families were driven into a hopeless and homeless quest for work. The Great Depression ravaged Europe as well. The suffering was especially severe in Germany which had been devastated first by World War I and then by the terrible war reparations that Germany was forced to pay the allies. In the suffering that followed, the demonic voice of Adolph Hitler restored German economic stability and cultural self-respect. Hitler's Germany had already lost much of its soul to the theological liberalism of the previous fifty years. In the resulting spiritual vacuum, Hitler tried to create a new world empire opposed to God. Hitler embarked on a campaign to win military control of the world. He initiated a holocaust as he tried to exterminate the Jews and remove their influence from the world. He was also responsible for the murder of millions of conservative Christians who opposed his reign. In the war that followed, China, Japan, and much of Europe were devastated, and the war touched the whole world. The war's death and destruction finally broke rebellious hearts across the western world. Revival spread across the United States, although it hardly touched Europe. Only in recent years has the Spirit begun to move in the United Kingdom, in Poland, and in a few other scattered parts of Europe. At the same time, the Spirit began to move in a very powerful way in China, South Korea, and Africa.
THREE MODERN THEOLOGICAL OPTIONS The old liberalism of the 1920's had no answer to the problems of life. It had cut people off from God, and the consequences of that revolt had been terrible. After the war, the church in North America walked down three different paths. The first path was the introduction of Existentialism to North America. This philosophical system began in Europe before World War I. Authors like Kierkegaard spun Existentialism in a Christian direction while authors like Sartre structured it with atheistic assumptions. Existentialism was in some ways surprisingly honest. It taught that each person could only know the truth in the context of his own life. In a sense, each person created his own reality and his own meaning. Existentialists believed that life was absurd, and they had a deep sense of despair about understanding it. Since they saw the world as meaningless, Existentialists had little confidence in the power of human reason. They also thought that human freedom and responsibility inevitably led to a deep and lasting sense of anxiety because of the potentially devastating consequences of choices. Existentialism was a surprisingly accurate depiction of what people can know without God's revelation. If people try to reconstruct reality on the basis of their own reason without God, they may be driven to an Existential despair. That's why Sartre sometimes sounded rather like Solomon in Ecclesiastes. Purely on the basis of their own ability, people can not come very close to the truth no matter how hard they look for it, and they certainly can not understand the spiritual realities that shape history. True knowledge must grow from a proper vassal relationship to the sovereign God. When many Existentialists used the Bible, they had little interest in finding the true meaning of a text. They though it impossible to reconstruct what the various redactors intended by their additions to the text. Instead of looking for a correct interpretation of a passage, the Existentialists looked for a meaning of their own within the text. From an existential perspective, every reader could find his own meaning in a passage, and each person's meaning was as valid as any other person's meaning. This led to the use of Biblical passages as vehicles to accomplish political and social agendas. Since each reader could find his own meaning in a text, each reader could argue for a meaning that supported his or her agenda. One of the more important Existential theologians was named Paul Tillich. He was a brilliant church historian. As a theologian, he combined an existential perspective with a position that resembled the radical mystics of the Middle Ages. Tillich was essentially a pantheist. Tillich's students asked him why he called himself a Christian if he thought that all religions were equally valid. Tillich's answer was that Christian imagery was so beautiful that he identified with it. Tillich was one of the dominant theologians of the post-war years. Tillich's students viewed Christianity as simply one more religious tradition among so many others. Tillich's perspective was then reinforced by the History of Religions movement. This group studied religious traditions in the ancient world and compared them with Israel's faith. They argued that there was nothing unique in Israel, and that Israel inherited its religious beliefs from other cultures. This wing of Christianity is found mainly in the schools and universities because it kills churches. If all religions are equally true, why go to church? Why not worship God on the golf course? Why contribute part of your income to support a church? What answers can religion give to the problems of life or the guilt feelings that come from sin? So this kind of position appeals to university faculty, but it means little to people in the pews. The second path that replaced the older Modernism was Karl Barth's Neo-Orthodoxy. Barth was probably a real Christian. He tried to find a place in the liberal orbit for a relationship with God. Beyond that, Barth's position met the needs of Germany after World War II. Germany as a nation had done incredible things. Six million Jews had died in the concentration camps as well as millions of conservative Christians who had opposed Hitler's demonic policies. Europe was in ruins, and Germany was devastated. Millions of soldiers and civilians had died in the conflict. The heart had been cut out of the German church. Barth responded that God would never condemn anyone for anything that had happened because God's grace applied Jesus' death to every person. Barth offered hope and forgiveness to a people that had done unimaginable things. Barth's New Orthodoxy was a compromise position. Barth said that everyone deserved God's judgment because of their sins. Barth even claimed that God created hell as an object lesson for what everyone deserved without God's grace. Barth taught that salvation was only possible by God's grace through Christ. However, Barth then taught that God would never actually judge anyone. Christ's death was applied to all men, and God's grace was both offered and given to every person. For Barth, everyone was already saved no matter what they believed or did. Barth taught that God had given both Jews and Christians a special covenant. They were called by God to announce to the world the salvation that they had already received in Christ. Barth taught that Scripture contained many errors, and he assumed the older Modernist explanation for the origin of the Bible that had been defended by men like Julius Wellhausen. While Barth believed that many things in the Bible were not really true, he thought that God used the Bible as a vehicle to communicate anyway. What God communicated through the Word was a mysterious, nebulous, and personal message instead of the content of Scripture itself. Of course, as was typical of German philosophers and theologians, Barth would make statements that seemed contradictory. While claiming that God would never send anyone to hell, he would also claim that he was not a universalist. German philosophers and theologians usually tried to be nebulous so that readers would regard them as being "deep." Barth was not completely wrong. How do people find leading for their lives in God's Word? Often God does seem to speak to people through His Word in ways that are not directly related to the actual meaning of the text. Barth's position was problematic in the things that he denied more than in the things that he affirmed. It is also true that we are all equally sinners before God. None of us deserves to stand before God. That was the whole point of the book of Job. He thought that he had done enough right that he deserved God's blessings. He learned that we are all sinners saved by grace. The church must always be a community of forgiven sinners instead of a club of the righteous. The problem with the new forms of Christianity appearing today is that they turn God's grace into an affirmation of sin instead of a call to repentance. They turn God into a tolerant fatherly figure who would never condemn instead of a righteous and holy God who will not allow rebellion in His presence. They turn God into someone who is just like us instead of allowing an encounter with Him to turn us into His image. Barth's heirs today are teaching a form of Christianity that is deeply grounded in God's grace. Their teaching sounds on the surface to be true and valuable. The problem is in the way that they think that grace works. Jesus showed love for prostitutes, tax collectors, and the people who were despised in their culture. However, His consistent message was always, "Go your way and sin no more." Jesus called them to repentance, and He offered them His kingdom on the basis of their repentance. Barth's heirs today are using the promise of God's grace in a different way. They address a generation that has run away from God but hungers for Him. The spiritual hunger in the nation is vast among people who have no intention of changing their lives. The new Christian message being taught in so many churches implies that sinners should be accepted with love into the church no matter what they do and no matter how they live. If they continue in a life style that is appalling to God, they are covered by God's grace. So no one in the church has a right to question their life choices. Sometimes, they go so far as to redefine sin as righteousness. This is nothing new in history. The worship of Baal always replaced the worship of Yahweh in the Old Testament. People almost always eventually try to replace God with a god created in their own image. The only real difference is that people today create their designer gods with a word processor instead of a block of wood. The true God is a roaring lion. He can not be recreated in the image of fallen people. The third path down which some in the church have gone is a reaffirmation of traditional Christian beliefs and values. This is the conservative alternative. Conservatives are found in any denomination where God's Word is studied, honored, and obeyed. Conservative Christians can often be found even in denominations where they would not have been expected. The conservative Christian orbit has been fighting a loosing battle against the world for many years. Every year now, 70% of the young people raised in conservative churches turn away from the faith around the time that they graduate from High School. As this trend continues, real Christianity is less of a force, and it is slowly being driven out of the western world. The spirit of the age is rapidly turning against Evangelical Christianity, and persecution of the faith is already becoming surprisingly common.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF REVOLT While the philosophy and theology of western culture have been attacking the basic credibility of the faith, a parallel attack has been waged against the church in the arena of morality and basic Christian ethics. I went to college in the 1960's during the height of the Viet Nam war protests. My generation threw over our parents' values as part of the package of opposing the war. My generation turned to drugs, counter culture patterns, and free love as an alternative to our parents commitment and responsibility. The 60's were supposed to be about love and peace. By rejecting basic Christian values, the 60's became instead an orgy of ME while commitment and personal sacrifice became redefined in self-destructive ways. The free love dogma led to a national addiction to pornography and sensuality that has continued down to the present time. Internet porn has become so pervasive that a quarter of the pastors in the country are addicted to it and perhaps as high as 60 % of adult males in general. Immorality is taught as a norm throughout the entertainment media while those who try to defend traditional Christian values are depicted as people like Frank Burns in MASH. Turning away from Christian values brings a heavy price. Addictions to sensuality usually destroy the basic fabric of the family. God created families to share a deep spiritual unity of a man, a woman, and God. This deep unity was created as a parallel to the unity within the character of the Triune God. The deep unity between a husband, a wife, and god is supposed to be built by shared worship, shared joys and troubles, shared sexual experiences and the joys of raising children, shared faith and doubt, shared peace and grief. When commitment is replaced by sensuality, that deep and abiding unity becomes impossible to sustain, and marriages crash on the rocks of the culture. Today, more than half of our marriages end in divorce, and more than half of our family units are single parent families. Much of that is a direct result of the culture of sensuality. In this generation, the core values of family life are being challenged as gay marriages are becoming the wave of the future. The family structure is the basic building block of the culture. The central institution of the culture is being challenged by massive divorce numbers, by young people who typically live together without marriage, and by the gay marriage movement. When the center falls, the culture can not stand, and Western culture is on the verge of collapse. The ME FIRST mindset has also led to an epidemic of drug use. Thousands of young people have died from drug overdoses, and those deaths have struck families up and down the social ladders. The nature of the drug used is influenced somewhat by the economic level of the user, but the basic fact of drug abuse transcends social class. Those who have not been killed by the drugs have often had their lives ruined by the physical, mental, emotional, and financial costs of drug use. Beyond that, the drug epidemic has led to countless crimes against persons and property as tens of thousands of addicts have stolen enough to buy their next fix. Drug abuse destroys the soul of the nation, and in some cases, it opens people to demonic influence. The rejection of commitment and responsibility has also devastated the economic stability of the world. The ME FIRST mindset leads corporate CEO's to demand salaries over a hundred times the reasonable worth of their positions. All of that money comes at the expense of the employees, the share holders, and the general public. The ME FIRST mindset leads union workers to demand pay rates, benefit packages, and work conditions that their companies can not sustain. The ME FIRST mindset leads financial planners to defraud those whose finances they manage. It leads banks to give credit cards and home loans to people who can not possibly afford the debt. It leads the banks to offer credit at a far higher interest rate than is remotely fair until family finances are destroyed. It leads families to go ever deeper into debt to support an unrealistic life style. All of this is sin, and all of it leads to the economic disintegration of the nation. The resulting chaos and trouble becomes God's judgment as He brings on people the natural consequences of their actions. While these things are sins, they are also things that we slide into so easily. Families rarely intent to get over their heads in debt. We take out credit cards because the offers show up in the mail. We need them for emergencies, for renting a car, for reserving a motel or buying an airplane ticket. We need them to take advantage of sale prices. We keep them paid off in full for a couple of years. Then the car dies or a child gets sick. The credit card debt slowly rises. Then the credit card companies offer ever more credit. Then a job is lost, a payment is missed, the interest rates become impossible, and the cards are used to make the monthly payments until the family finances crash. The banks claim that families who are $2,700 in debt on the credit cards will probably never get out of debt to the card companies. Yet American families typically owe well over $10,000 on the cards. Families then refinance their homes to pay off the cards. The long range problems with that are becoming obvious. Many homes now have upside down mortgages so they can not be sold. The long term problem is more severe. Traditionally, families would buy a house when the parents were in their 20's. Then the house would be paid off when the parents were in their 50's. The parents would then be able to live on a decreased income level when they retired because the home was paid off. With so many houses refinanced, few people today will have their houses paid off when they retire, but they will be unable to sell their homes. The resulting problems will destroy the finances of people who can no longer work. Unrealistic income levels are also destroying the economy. When people with good jobs negotiate for a pay raise, they compare themselves with other people instead of comparing their salary to a realistic pay scale. It is usually possible to argue that you deserve more than someone else. That principle leads to ever higher pay scales for union workers, sport figure, or corporate managers. All of the huge wage and benefit packages have to be paid by someone, and in practice, they are paid by the culture as a whole. This creates a downward spiral for the economy, and it grows from a culture where God's righteousness has been replaced by a ME FIRST mindset. The ME FIRST mindset has led to a tragic epidemic of abortions. I've read that since Roe v. Wade in 1973, 45,000,000 infants have been aborted in the United States alone. To that number must be added vast numbers of abortions performed world wide as a means of population control and life planning. All of that vast army of infants have eternal souls. They stand before God and cry for justice. How long will He refrain from hearing their cries? However, the consequences for our culture are far greater than that. Most couples who use abortion for life planning feel guilty about what they have done to some degree, and most suppress that guilt. That becomes a huge problem. The suppressed guilt feelings turn otherwise good people into hardened and determined opponents of the Gospel. Thousands of people are determined that no one will ever be allowed to suggest that they have done anything wrong. That hardened determination is one of the most important forces driving the culture wars in the United States. It is having a huge impact on academia as well. Before Roe v. Wade, Evangelicals could be found teaching in the state university systems. Today, few state universities will knowingly give job interviews to anyone who believes that the Bible is true. Evangelicals who teach in the university systems usually survive by not letting anyone know what they believe. Examples of that basic reality could be discussed all day long. When deciding where to take my doctoral degree, I considered an Ivy League school. I talked to an Evangelical who was studying at one of the schools. He told me to avoid his program. He said that when the faculty learned that a student was a conservative, the faculty forced to student to keep taking history of religions courses until he either gave up a conservative perspective or dropped out of the program. A close friend of mine has a doctorate from a seminary. He wanted a PhD from the university, so he sent in an application form. He told me that he got a call from the head of the department. She said, "John, you are pretty conservative, aren't your?" He said, "Yes." She said, "John, you think that the Bible is true, don't you?" He said, "Yes." Then she said, "John, you have to understand that with your credentials, if you apply to our program, we must accept you. However, unless you change what you believe, we will never graduate you." Last week, I told that story to a man who teaches in a different department at the university. He replied that the whole Humanities department was like that, but at least they had told him before he enrolled that they wouldn't graduate him. A few years ago, I used to spend a lot of time in the library of the main campus of another midwestern state university. I met a faculty member from the university at the airport, and I asked him why I had never heard of an Evangelical teaching at the university. He told me, "Rodger, we will hire you tomorrow if you convert and become either a Muslim or a Bahai. However, we are all determined that no one will ever teach here who thinks that the rest of us are going to hell." My daughter attended a different state university. That school had one Evangelical teaching history because they did not know what he believed when they hired him. It took the school five years to force him out. That's the reality in education today. It is completely unconstitutional, and it is outright religious persecution. The conservative world has allowed it to happen because we have retreated from the intellectual debate. The cost is that few of our young people can take a degree at most state universities in the country without risking the loss of their faith. Without Evangelicals on the faculty, the church will slowly shrink because most Christian families can not afford the tuition for a private conservative college. There is an interesting movement today to remove theological studies from the university curriculum. That movement is not being pushed by conservatives who are angry at mainstream scholarship. It is also not being pushed by those who want to remove religion from public life entirely. The movement to remove religious studies (and especially biblical studies) from the universities is being pushed by the faculty of other departments in the state universities. Their concern is that religious studies tend too often to be highly speculative and poorly evidentially based. Religious studies are not really science. In the mainstream world, religious studies are closer to art. Perhaps mainstream (liberal) Bible scholarship should be classified with music, painting, and poetry that require little evidential base. If the state universities are unwilling to allow conservative representation in the religion departments, it would help if they would allow no religious education at all. The problem begins long before students enter college. Hitler took over Nazi Germany by first winning the young people with his youth programs. When they grew up, he had the nation. Something similar is happening in the United States today. Our young people hear a consistent attack against conservative Christianity both in the schools and in the media. That attack is winning their souls. My son went to a public High School here in the Twin Cities. The first week of his freshman year, the whole freshman class was taken into the Gym. They were turned over to the gay community who badgered them for four hours. They were taught never to say, think, or do anything to suggest that there was anything wrong with homosexuality. A former guidance counselor told me that teachers at several of the area High Schools wear pink triangles on their clothing to assure students that they support them in their choice of a gay life style. Those are perceived by the students to be modern, sophisticated, and concerned people. Teachers who choose not to wear the triangles are perceived to be old fashioned, uncaring, and out of touch. The parents rarely hear about the agenda that is being pushed at their kids, and the kids are buying into it. Even some pastors are buying into the agenda being pushed by the culture.
THE COMING DESTRUCTION AND THE END OF THE AGE What is the cost of cultural revolt against God? God promised His people in Deuteronomy 27 and 28 that He would exalt the Israelites if they loved and served Him faithfully. He would also respond to rebellion by bringing them disease, famine, oppression, and finally destruction. God judged Israel this way throughout history. While no gentile nation today can be interpreted as some kind of New Testament Israel, many of the same principles always stood behind God's interaction with gentile nations as well. God rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah because of their rebellion against any standard of righteousness. In Romans 2:9-10, Paul warned that tribulation and distress would fall on those who did evil regardless of whether they were Jews or gentiles. God's hand of judgment is returning to our nation today just as it fell on the land after the Roaring Twenties. It is fair to argue that many other nations are farther from God than America is today. The church is still relatively strong here. Many people still know and love the Lord. Many try honestly to live faithful lives here while that isn't true in some other parts of the world. Why would God's hand fall on the US? The answer is the holiness of God's name. I was talking to a missionary who worked in an eastern African nation. He told me that men in his area loved to watch "Christian videos." They just couldn't get enough of them. By "Christian videos," they meant pornography. Porn came from the United States, and the US was the Christian nation. So pornographic videos were "Christian videos." It is true that America was never really a Christian nation. At the American revolution, only 10% of our population went to church. Our founding fathers were more likely to be Deists than believers. However, this nation has the reputation in the world for being a Christian nation. That binds God's reputation to this country. When America runs headlong away from God into notorious sin, God must act to preserve the holiness of His name. That judgment is starting again now, and it will only become more severe unless God brings repentance to the nation. What will happen after that? One of the central issues in exegesis is whether the prophets' words should be interpreted as veiled descriptions of future events. The choice of a historic or symbolic interpretation of the prophets' words will always be based on the presuppositions brought to the text. If the prophets are assumed to speak about history, it is amazing how well events today are beginning to fit into the biblical pattern for the last days. All of Europe is being pulled together into a single culture. A world court has been set up that has the power to summon anyone before it. Europe has a common currency used by most nations in the EU. The European Union almost passed a unified constitution. It only failed because of concern that Turkey would be brought into the union. That fear was caused by the fact that Turkish workers and immigrants were already causing too much trouble in Europe. The next time that the constitution comes up for a vote, it will probably pass. Europe is pulling together a European fighting force that will replace NATO. Until it becomes a reality, NATO already includes nations from eastern Europe and Russia has been given an informal membership. All of that is disturbing because of the Bible's promise that the Antichrist will rule the new Rome. The old Roman Empire was a power that would fit well into the world today. Rome controlled the foreign policy of each country in the empire. Rome insisted that the nations pay taxes to Rome and do nothing to oppose Roman interests. Rome controlled the top management of each nation. Beyond that, Rome usually left each culture to run its own affairs. That kind of global empire would fit well in the modern world, and since Europe has largely turned its back on God, the empire could easily be opposed to God's kingdom. The rise of the Antichrist's new Rome could happen rapidly if two things happened. Their first is a collapse of the world's economy. When that happens, much of the world will call for strong leader to take over and restore the standard of living. The personal and national debts owed throughout the world make a global economic collapse almost inevitable at some point in the next decade or two. The second thing that would be required would be the removal of the influence of the United States. That could easily happen as well. Several models could be suggested that would remove the influence of the United States from the world's scene. One model could involve an eruption the super volcano beneath Yellowstone Park. In one previous eruption, the volcano covered a quarter of continental USA with lava. If the volcano erupted, volcanic ash would cover most of the country. Agriculture, the economy, transportation, power generation, and communication would come to an end. Millions would die. At the same time, ash from the volcano would return the northern hemisphere to glacial cold, and calls for a united government to deal with the chaos and suffering would follow immediately. It is troubling that the southern half of the caldera at Yellowstone has risen several feet since World War II. So it is not impossible that an eruption could happen at some point in the future. Another model would be equally effective. Terrorists could smuggle nuclear weapons into the country, set them all to go off at the same time, put them into rental cars, and drive them to cities across the country. The economy of the nation would be destroyed immediately. Fallout from the blasts would kill millions who didn't die in the initial attack. Fallout would also hinder any attempt to grow crops to feed the survivors. Overnight, the US would be removed from any significance in history. Either of these models could darken the skies of Europe for three years leading to glacial conditions. The resulting economic trauma could lead to calls for a united world ruler. This model is especially appealing to those of us who suspect that the United States may be the Great Harlot Babylon of Revelation 16-18. While it is popular to identify the Great Harlot Babylon as a religious institution of some kind, the imagery in these chapters sound much more like a rich, powerful, coastal nation. Revelation 17:16-18 claimed that Babylon was a great city that had reigned over the earth's kings. Yet the earth's nations destroyed Babylon because they had a common purpose of giving their power to the Antichrist. Revelation 18:3 claimed that the earth's merchants had become rich through trade with her. Revelation 18:8 claimed that she would be burned with fire in one day's time. Revelation 18:9-20 claimed that the earth's kings, merchants, and seamen would mourn for the losses that they experienced when she was destroyed. Yet they would stay at a distance from her so that they would not share in her suffering. While biblical prophecies like this are notoriously difficult to interpret, and while Babylon the Harlot in Revelation might be any number of things, it would be easy to see the US in Revelation 18. The Bible used the term harlot to describe nations that had been characterized by faith but that turned away from God. In the US, direct persecution of Christians has already begun. I've heard more and more accounts of direct persecution beginning here. If the slide away from God continues at its present rate, it will not be too many years before the description of the Great Harlot in Revelation may resemble the US in striking ways. I believe deeply that the future of the US depends on revival. If God's Spirit begins to work in a mighty way, there is still time to build a renewed church here that can stay or postpone the day of God's wrath. Without that revival, either a new Dark Age or the end history is at hand. The power of the demonic is already loosed on the earth. Like most conservative Christians of the day, when I was in college, I thought that demon possession was a biblical way to describe either medical conditions like epilepsy or psychiatric illness. Then I began to talk to missionaries from poor and deeply pagan parts of the world who described demon possession and demonic attacks in their lands. Since then, the power of the demonic has grown at a frightening rate. There are now a hundred covens in the Twin Cities alone where either witchcraft of some kind or demon worship occur. Where witchcraft covens multiply, there is a spirit of bandage over the culture, and it becomes ever harder to win souls to the Lord. I've talked to more and more Christians who have either encountered the demonic directly or have been involved in driving out demons from possessed people. That was once thought to be the crazy fringe of right wing Christianity. Now it is becoming part of the normal experience of many people who try to walk close to the Lord. At the same time, as Spencer noted at the top of this page, the church is slowly dying. Within ten years, half of the congregations in the country may be forced to close their doors, and the generation now coming into adulthood will have little tolerance for Christian values or beliefs. As these events unfold, many will give way to fear. Jesus promised in Matthew 24:9-31 that lawlessness would increase and most people's love would grow cold. False prophets would rise in the church, and they would lead many people away from the faith. Then there would be a great tribulation the likes of which has never been seen in history. It will be such a severe tribulation that it will call into question the continuation of human life on earth. The prophets promised that the nations would gather against Jerusalem and they would overrun the city. Then as the nations rained fire on each others homelands and coastlands, Revelation 20:8-9 claimed that they would be destroyed by fire from heaven. Zechariah 14:1-4 promised that the armies at Armageddon would see their flesh rot as they stood on their feet and their eyes melt in their sockets. That may be the clearest description of a nuclear attack in the Bible. That is exactly what happens in a nuclear blast. Isaiah saw that time. In Isaiah 13:12, he warned that mortal man would become as rare as pure gold on the face of the earth. Yet when the terror and suffering reach their greatest point, Jesus will be seen coming on the clouds of heaven. He will gather His own from one end of the earth to the other, and He will finally establish His kingdom of peace and righteousness on the earth. Is that what will happen in the fairly near future? Some people will say yes and others no. Biblical prophecies have always kept Christians expecting Christ's return in their own generation. I suspect that it is one purpose of prophecy to do exactly that. Do conditions in the world today uniquely fit into Scripture's promises for the future? It all comes down to the presuppositions that are brought to the Biblical text and the hermeneutical principles used to interpret the prophets. Until those events come on the world, Christians have a choice. They can listen to the fire of God's Word, or they can turn the Word into a safe topic for academic debate. Let he who has ears to hear, hear what the Spirit says to God's people. Even so, no matter what the cost, no matter what suffering may come at the birth pangs of eternity, Come Lord Jesus.
|
|
Copyright © 2009 Dr. Rodger Dalman
|
