Signs and Warnings in Today's World

So soon after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand comes even more devastation with the earth quake, tsunami and the potential nuclear disaster in Japan. At time like this many Christians call to mind Jesus’ words in Matthew 24:

3 As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” 4 Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. 5 For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many. 6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of birth pains.

9 “Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. 10 At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, 11 and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. 12 Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, 13 but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. 14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

While wars, famines and earthquakes have been happening to varying degrees throughout history, they seem to be increasing in intensity in our own time. And usually these are the things that bring the believer’s attention to Jesus’ words quoted above.

But overall, there is not much the Christian can do about these things. We can pray and we can contribute to aid appeals, if we have the skills and the opportunity we can personally assist those who are suffering. If we are in an affected area we can trust God for the safety of ourselves and our family.

And of course we can note them as the signs they are.

However some of Jesus’ predictions don’t attract so much attention, maybe because they are not always so obvious, and they don’t get the same kind of media coverage given to political and natural disasters. While it is understandable that the world pays no attention to these things, for the church to ignore them is foolishness. In fact Jesus has more detailed things to say about these than He does about the wars, earthquakes and famines. These are things that believers can do something about, things that we can avoid falling victim to.

Jesus starts his discourse with this warning:

“Watch out that no one deceives you”.

But why is it necessary for Him to say this?

Because many deceivers will come in the name of Jesus and they will go unnoticed if there is not due diligence; they may not be as obvious as we expect and clearly we need to “watch out” for a reason: so “no one deceives” us.

Jesus says they will come proclaiming Jesus as Messiah or maybe they will be promoting themselves as being messiah, “the anointed one” coming in His name (or likely both). They will convey an image of Christian legitimacy.

Jesus also warned there will be persecution against the saints leading to martyrdom – not only in localised areas but ALL NATIONS will be involved. That many will turn away from their faith and betray others and false prophets will arise deceiving even more people.
Wickedness will increase and the love of MOST will grow cold. But whose love will grown cold? Is this a broad sweeping statement about mankind in general or is it referring to those who had been believers?

Look at the context in verses 10-13, the statement is sandwiched between “many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people” and “but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” Surely there is at least a strong hint contained there?Also a person needs to have love in the first place in order to have it grow cold. And the word used for love here is agapē, which seems to imply that it refers more to the believer than a non-believer.

While the wars, earthquakes and famines get so much attention – how many are paying attention to the other things, the subtle deceptive things that Jesus warned about that could have very personal consequences for the believer’s relationship with the Lord?

All of these latter signs are portrayed as being interrelated: deception, falling away, persecution. Many who are deceived and fall away will be the ones who persecute and even kill those who stand firm in the faith. This may be hard for the Christian to comprehend or even accept as truth, but this is what Jesus reveals as some of the signs preceding His return.

If this section of scripture went no further than the “signs” mentioned above it would seem very discouraging, but praise God it doesn’t end with doom and gloom. It ends with important promises.” The one who stands firm to the end will be saved”, and “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come”. Along with the increasing problems and apostasy - the gospel of the Kingdom WILL be preached in the whole world prior to the end. The true church WILL be effective, and the bad times WILL be brought to an end by the return of Jesus.

We have been given signs that point to the coming of Jesus and the end of the age. But while these signs increase in the world today, they are only SIGNS of something bigger and much more important. They are not intended to draw attention to themselves but they do help to point us to the right direction. If we heed the directions Jesus gave we will remain secure on His path (on the Way) and that path will take us to the correct destination.

Messianic Disunity

In my reading about Jewish expressions of faith in Messiah I’ve had a look at several blogs. Through those blogs I think I have gained a wider perspective than is possible through reading published books.
Blogs give access to a more ground level reality. Books have to fulfil certain market-driven requirements which include not biting the hand that feeds them.
Bloggers are not subject to such restraints, and while that open ground also gives voice to all kinds of weird and not so wonderful ideas, occasionally it is possible to stumble across something worthwhile and enlightening.

The following article may be of interest to others. It is written by a gentile believer desiring and attempting a more Hebraic approach to his faith. I think his experience highlights the problems that unfortunately maintain the divisions between Jewish and Gentile believers.

http://searchingforthelightonthepath.blogspot.com/2010/07/forked.html

One thing that isn’t addressed in the article is the question of whether ANY of the examined worship styles and fellowship groups is “legitimate” in God’s eyes. Do any of them fulfil the genuine fellowship characteristics of a healthy and united body of believers? Or is it all about favoured form and ritual?

While the article addresses the current situation, scripture describes something totally different. Unity in Messiah still seems a long way off – but perhaps the disunity is nothing that an experience of severe, shared persecution won’t fix.



Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

Reclaiming Messiah

(Continuing my companion piece to “Messianic Quintet” which began with the article “Hijacking Messiah”.)

In his book Betrayed, Stan Telchin describes how horrified he and his wife (both Jewish) were when their daughter revealed she had found faith in Jesus. He writes “To mention the name of Jesus is awkward enough. To consider Him as the Messiah is to betray our people, to join the enemy and to desecrate the memory of all our ancestors over the last two thousand years”. He continues with the reason for this: “…the knights of the Crusades…descended on Jews with a cross in one hand and a sword in the other. They murdered and raped and pillaged, all in the name of Christianity.”
“Then there was the Inquisition in Spain in 1492, when refusing to convert to Christianity would cost a Jew his life…”

The realities of a 2000 year history of persecution are not easily brushed away. And it is not distant history when we recognise how recently 6,000,000 Jews were added to the number of those murdered in previous vendettas of “Christendom” against the Jews. However Telchin didn’t need to look to history, even recent history, to make the point recalling, at the age of 5 or 6, of being labelled a “Christ-killer”.

Yohanna Chernoff in Born a Jew…Die a Jew reveals another reason Jews have found it difficult to accept the gospel: the fear of losing or forfeiting their cultural identity. What other national group have been required to abandon or hide their cultural roots? Do Americans stop being Americans after coming to faith in Jesus?
Jewish believers faced rejection from two sides – from other Jews who see belief in Jesus as betrayal, “Are you going to become like those people who have been persecuting us for two thousand years?” And from gentile believers, who foster barely disguised anti-Semitism in their expectation that Jews give up their Jewish identity.
This has been expressed most clearly in replacement theology which insists that the Jews are a people rejected by God having been replaced in His affections by the church.

Yohanna Chernoff and her husband Marty were among the recent pioneers of a movement among Jewish believers in which they celebrate their Messiah as Jews. They started one of the earliest successful Messianic Congregations in America, with the mission of taking the gospel to Jewish families and bringing them into an expression of Messianic faith that joyfully embraces its Jewish roots. This mission not only brought opposition from more traditional church groups, it attracted massive protests from orthodox Jewish groups. This story is told in the book Born a Jew…Die a Jew.

Prior to the late 1960s/early 1970s, there were few Jews expressing faith in Jesus the Messiah. This was the time of the “Jesus Movement” through which many young people started to find the Christian message appealing. This influx of young people, often from the hippy community, also affected the new Messianic fellowships. The Chernoffs saw this as the fulfilment of a vision received by Marty which referred to a “ragged righteous remnant”. Their Beth Yeshua (House of Salvation) fellowship gave a spiritual home to many young people searching for truth and was the birth place of Lamb and Kol Simcha, two groups of singers/musicians who introduced popular, Jewish influenced music to the wider church.

While many still insist that God has rejected Israel and replaced them with the church –thought of as “new” or “spiritual” Israel - they cannot honestly deny that a wonderful move of God has begun within the Jewish people. The numbers of Messianic Jewish believers has grown significantly over the last 30-40 years. Even so, while acknowledging this fact, many still insist that there is no future for the people of Israel. And in this insistence there is not only a denial of what is happening around them, there is a wilful denial of what the apostle Paul reveals in his letter to the church in Rome. His words should take away ALL doubt. He categorically states that God has not rejected the Jews, and he is equally categorical when he states that ALL Israel will be saved in the same way that gentile believers have been saved. This will happen after an unspecified number of gentiles have come to faith.

Don Finto’s God’s Promise and the Future of Israel brings an overview of what God has been doing among the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It gives a perspective of the history of Israel and the church, and moves on to the future that both will share together, becoming members of the one family of God. He writes of the important part that Israel plays in God’s future purposes, a future in which the Messiah will return to earth to establish the Kingdom promised throughout countless prophecies in scripture.

Finto believes that the coming of this Kingdom is very near. The re-establishment of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent repossession of Jerusalem as its capital in 1967 are seen as major signs of the imminence of the Kingdom. Could these events be fulfilment of the return of Israel foretold by the old testament prophets: a return from ALL the nations (clearly a different event from the return from ONE nation after the exile to Babylon)? Those prophecies also promise that the people returning to the land of their ancestors will never again be uprooted – again the return from the Babylonian exile does not fulfil that condition considering they WERE uprooted again in 70AD.

Is it coincidence that Jerusalem came under Jewish control and an increase in the number of Jews recognising their Messiah started around the same time?

Believers Without Bibles Prosper!

A few times I have it said that many believers in the world don’t have access to bibles and that they often prosper more in their faith than most who do have bibles. The argument continues with reference to those throughout history who were either illiterate, too poor to obtain a bible, or were denied the right to have one by the authorities of their time.
If scripture is so vital to Christian life, how do (and did) those believers make it?

It is ironic that these arguments are usually raised by those who have easy access to multiple bibles who are not likely to find themselves in a position where they never have one.

If we don't have access to a bible and can't get access to a bible then we can not and will not be held accountable for what we don’t have. And I believe the Lord will provide in some way to make up for the lack.

But if we do have access:
“…from everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”. (Luke 12:48)

So why and how do those believers prosper in their faith without easy access to scripture?

They are often living in genuine poverty and/or experiencing genuine persecution and have to genuinely trust in the Lord for day to day survival. But bible ownership (especially multiple copy ownership) often comes with relative wealth and freedom from harsh persecution.

While these "benefits" are appreciated the freedom is usually accompanied by countless distractions. These distractions include a lot of "spiritual benefits" such as Christian books & music, TV, Church attendance, preaching etc., which can become substitutes for searching the scriptures for ourselves. Those resources are often given more influence and authority over our doctrine than scripture is - because they are so convenient and easy to take in.

And when we DO go to scripture, if we come across something we can't understand, we have so many resources to which we can refer for understanding. Unfortunately those resources can become substitutes for trusting the Holy Spirit to teach us.
We often prefer to turn to commentaries because we are impatient for answers and the Spirit doesn't always respond to our impatience as quickly as we would like. Unlike the commentary writers, the Holy Spirit knows the truth of EVERYTHING. He also knows our capacity and readiness to learn so He reveals what we need to understand when we are ready to understand it.

And how many people trust in study bibles to give them understanding? And how many of those people find themselves reading the study notes more than they read the actual biblical text? Those are just some thoughts on this issue. It is not due to the presence or absence of a Bible. It is due to the types of society in which Bible ownership is easy, hard or impossible. And most importantly, it is due to the value we REALLY give to scripture. Do we value it enough to actually take it seriously? Do we take it as seriously as those to whom access to the scriptures is a rare privilege?

Christians Don't Lie! (part 1)

Many years ago I met a former school friend in the street. He had strong socialist leanings and admired the Cuban leader Fidel Castro Being a Christian I brought up the issue of the Communist persecution of believers. My friend expressed doubt about the truth of persecution and I responded by asking why the Christians experiencing persecution under Communist regimes should lie. They were Christians and lying was contrary to their faith.

Now in THAT case I have no doubt at all that my reference to Christians telling the truth was valid. Christians were (and ARE) being persecuted under various political and religious based regimes. However, I later learned that not all “Christian” claims are trustworthy and the truth is not guaranteed from all sources professing to be Christian.

In my younger years I was extremely naïve, perhaps even gullible. I gave people the benefit of the doubt and trusted that the majority of people (especially Christians) were basically truthful. I easily believed what I was being told.
When I read or heard of fantastic experiences I didn’t doubt that the stories were true.

From early childhood I had a fascination with UFOs and read as much as I could find on the subject – but NEVER did I think that any of the stories may have been made up. This attitude remained with me after becoming a Christian – and if possible I had more reason to trust what I was told by other Christians. The truth was important to Christians, lying was strictly forbidden so why would any Christian disobey God by lying?

Even today I probably don’t realise how vulnerable this outlook made me. Whenever I read or heard Christian testimony I believed it without question. Why would a Christian lie?

In the church I attended I heard about a congregation member rising a foot off the floor during worship. I heard about angelic singing in a friend’s home. I heard the story of a group of ministers saved from a certain head-on collision when their car was instantly transported past the on-coming vehicle.
Why shouldn’t I have believed these stories – they were told by people I knew, about people I knew, and those people were Christians and Christians don’t lie.

There were also books giving amazing testimonies of God’s miraculous intervention in the lives of Christians. There were books of people literally set free from Satan’s power – being turned from practising witchcraft to having faith in Jesus, books that showed the reality of “both sides” of supernatural reality.

And I believed it all.
Why would Christians lie?

I’m not sure now when the cracks started to form; when I started to see that Christians are not always as truthful as they should be, and not everyone who professes to be a Christian is a genuine follower of Jesus.

I have written elsewhere about my “crisis of faith” that started in the late 1980s and lasted around 15 years. Maybe it was during this time that my eyes were opened. I had maintained my interest in UFOs and other strange phenomena and read widely on these subjects, and for the first time I started to come across some sceptical voices from those who had an interest in these subjects but also questioned the validity of many of the claims being made.

In my reading I was particularly interested in stories that had a “Christian” element and through this I became aware of investigation into stories I’d lapped up years before. Mike Warnke was a Christian with amazing testimonies. He was an excellent communicator using humour to reach people with the gospel. He did this through personal accounts of his involvement with the occult (published in his book “The Satan Seller”) and also through experiences in the Vietnam war.
His experiences in the occult did a lot to convince me of the reality of the powers of darkness. Some of his experiences could have been from a horror novel – but they were true. He was a Christian and Christians don’t lie.

BUT - I started to read claims that he HAD lied, that his stories were all false. And these claims were not from some antichristian group, they were being made by a Christian magazine. Now I had a dilemma. Who should I believe? Two separate Christian sources were contradicting each other over an issue of truth. They couldn’t BOTH be telling the truth – but surely Christians don’t lie.

I use that case as merely one example. Since then I’ve had reason to doubt many claims made by Christians and I have come to see that “Christians” are not always the most trustworthy sources of information. The situation is made worse by the same kind of gullibility that I displayed and people pass these stories on to others without giving due consideration for their reliability. We’ve all heard of urban myths – those stories with no basis in fact that become “true” through constant retelling. I’m sure that a lot of favourite Christian stories are the same.

How many have heard of the prayer meeting where armed soldiers barge in threatening to kill all Christians. And when the fearful have departed the soldiers put down their guns and ask to hear the gospel from those who REALLY put their trust in God. Is that story really true? Maybe – but it would be more credible if various facts (location and identity of the soldiers) remained consistent.

---
Re. Allegations against Mike Warnke.


http://www.cornerstonemag.com/features/iss098/warnke_index.htm

http://www.mikewarnke.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=60
Go to link re. "tribunal hearing"

Holocaust Past & Future

There’s a very interesting story here: The man who smuggled himself into Auschwitz

Thanks to the Arminian Today blog for making me aware of it.

This week I’ve been watching a BBC TV interpretation of “The Diary of Anne Frank”. There’s a 50 minute documentary on the DVD that I still have to watch – not about the Frank family, but about another girl of a very similar age who met the same fate.

I have also ordered a copy of a Martin Gilbert book, a history of the holocaust. Today’s comfortable westerners have no way of comprehending the experiences so many millions of people had at the hands of Hitler.

Many of those people were perhaps little different from ourselves, enjoying comfortable and successful lives until the world around them changed and they were thrown into an unimaginably miserable situation that millions didn’t survive.

We can look back on those events with justifiable horror and wonder how they could have happened. We can feel thankful that such atrocities could never happen again on such a scale. But it would be a misplaced sentiment. Not only will those evils be committed again, they will be surpassed.

Jesus warned of a time to come when: “there will be great distress, unequalled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equalled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.”

Can we afford to live in complacency? Note Jesus said that the time of distress would be unequalled both before and after. It will be the most horrific time in the history of mankind.

Around one third of the Jewish people were murdered through Hitler’s actions. What does that indicate about the future? Jesus' prophecy in Matthew 24 indicates terrible times for both Christians and Jews. It clearly doesn’t seem very bright and it would be easy to sink into a state of pessimism. But this time of unequalled distress is not the end. We need to remain aware that God has the last word, and no matter what evils man may commit, God will bring a glorious end to them with the return of His Son, the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

That return, that will end the "time of distress", is the great hope that will sustain followers of Jesus throughout that time of suffering. A motivating hope that will encourage believers to remain faithful despite the intense hardship they experience throughout the persecution they face.