Apostasy and Misdirection

The New Testament consistently warns of coming apostasy and deceivers, and this warning is to the Assembly, the Church, that is, the Body of Christ comprised of followers of Jesus who are filled with God's Spirit. The warning is to the true church, NOT to any other group, people, organization, society, government, culture, etc. Satan is at war to destroy the Body of Christ, using his human agents to deceive and cause as many believers as possible to apostatize.

Alas, Satan is very clever. He schemes to exploit even scriptural truth to distract and otherwise fool us. He sends his false prophets and faux apostles to warn the church of the approaching apostasy, only with a decided twist to it. His lying agents do not want us to examine them and exercise our abilities to discern whether they are false prophets.

[Photo by Kyle Smith on Unsplash]

Instead, the Devil's pawns point us to things and persons outside the Church. No, instead of rooting out the deceivers who have infiltrated the Church, today's prophets and apostles tell us to “beware of the politician, the cultural leader, the non-Christian religious leader, the Woke Ideologist,” etc.!

Rather than actual apostasy or the presence of false prophets in our midst, false teachers and liars point to moral collapse in the surrounding PAGAN society as the fulfillment of the biblical warning. This is MISDIRECTION. It is a lie, a trap.

Society may be declining morally but that is NOT apostasy. A society or culture under the dominion of sin and Satan cannot depart from a faith that it NEVER held, and it cannot abandon the true God with Whom it has NEVER walked. The only “Christian nation” today on the Earth is the Kingdom of God, period, end of discussion. All others are part of the fallen world order that even now is “passing away.”

The Devil is out to destroy the Church, and it is always most effective to do so from within. He misleads and distracts us so we take our eyes off the ball and spend our time on other things - social reformation, “engaging the culture,” partisan politics, and other forms of “perishing meat.”

No existing nation, culture, political ideology, or form of government will survive the arrival of Jesus when he gathers all nations before him and renders judgment. They will all perish from the Earth. If you invest your time and resources in the ways and institutions of this world rather than in His Kingdom, one day you find yourself holding a very empty eternal bag.

We are engaged in an existential war, one that is not about saving democracy, Western Civilization, taking over the “seven mountains of culture,” or recovering some supposed societal ideal from the past, one that never existed in the first place.

No, the mission assigned to us by Jesus himself is about saving the world, and ONLY the Church empowered by God's Spirit can accomplish it. The disciple of the Nazarene does so whenever and ONLY when he or she walks the same self-denying path that Jesus did. It is by the disciple daily taking up the Cross, denying himself, and preaching the same Gospel that the Nazarene proclaimed to all nations that his Kingdom will advance across the Earth.