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I wrote this early 2018, but I am posting it now because it is more applicable than ever. Tell me what you think or add your comments.
In this study, we will look at the scriptures that deal with the apostate church and an event that will happen before Jesus’s return. This event will be in concurrence to the coming of the end time antichrist.
What happens may be surprising to you because it will use elements of what we would think of as the church to accomplish this. You also may be very surprised as a believer, that you may be part of a church or ministry that Jesus Christ is not the head of, and that it will help give way to this end time event that will come to pass.
In 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3 The apostle Paul says,
Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to Him: We ask you, brothers, 2 not to be easily upset in mind or troubled, either by a spirit or by a message or by a letter as if from us, alleging that the Day of the Lord has come. 3 Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way. For that day will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction.
In some bible translations, they replace the word “apostasy” with the words “a great falling away from the faith”. The word apostasy really means a rebellion, in this case against Christ. And this rebellion will come through those within the church. It will be through self-identified Christians and Christian institutions (denominational and non-denominational) that you thought you could trust. But they have been persuaded to rebel against Jesus Christ and His ministry that he desired to be among us.
When I say ministry, we are talking about the structure in which the knowledge of God was meant to pass through. It is God’s way of administrating through His Spirit to bring about an understanding of who He is, what He can do and what He desires from us. It is an exchange in which we can live this life we were given through the power of God who is the creator and illumination of life itself. Makes sense, right? But when we weaken our dependency on God’s way of doing that, or break away from our Lord altogether, it is our sin then that interrupts the stream of the Spirit in which through all things flow. All the things that were meant to help us grow in knowledge and understanding of God. When it stops, we spiritually suffer from the sins God wanted us to avoid bringing death and destruction into our lives.
When there is an absence of God’s influence of power to keep us, change us, and guide us, the trouble our sin causes continues to increase to some point in the future when it causes a big world trouble. It will be the kind of trouble that will have grown throwing the whole world into a great tribulation. Jesus said, it would be unlike anything that has ever happen. What has held it back until now is God’s mercy. It is the mercy that He has had on those who truly believed and those who would come to believe in Jesus, because God loves what He has created. But a day will come as it did in Noah’s day, that wickedness will have corrupted humanity to the point that humanity became unredeemable because of sin. Noah and His family were all God could save. Noah was all he could find that would listen. Likewise, it will be the same for the remnant who will be saved through this time in the last days. Even after lots of warnings the rest who thought they knew God and the others who didn’t think they needed to know God will come to know the Lord’s judgement.
As a believer, we need God’s knowledge, we need the Spirit’s power, we need Jesus Christ’s guidance which God provided that flow through the ministries He gave to humanity, first through Moses and today to us through Jesus Christ.
But many of those who once called on the name of the Lord will quit listening and following Jesus Christ, becoming deceived and deceiving others to the point of their own destruction. Just as it happened in Noah’s day, it happened in Moses day, it has happened over and over again to the Jewish nation to serve as a warning. A warning to us that a day like it will come upon all the people of this world who were called upon to hear the word of the Lord, the Jew, gentile, and believer. The destruction will come to those who have chosen to disobey and live in an ungodly lifestyle that they will not repent from.
These apostate individuals and Christian organizations will not see it as having broken away from anything or being a problem to anyone because their hearts will be filled with pride. Pride being the self will to continue in what they want. They will be deceived believing they are doing God a service. They will see it as making things better because the standards of life will have been moved so low. Sin through their unrepented disobedience will have seared their conscience so there will be no need for truth to get in the way of acceptance of their beliefs, which will look more and more like what the world believes.
The remnant of believers holding to God’s standards for life will be thought of as unloving and judgmental and as time passes, labeled as haters and troublemakers and worse. This is how they treated the prophets. This is how they will view you.
It doesn’t mean all the believers within these entities are among the misled or rebellious Christians, yet. But by the time all the corruption, stumbling blocks and road blocks have entangled them in sin, keeping them from the truth, the frustration they will experience can end up in a lack of desire to continue in following Jesus Christ. They will worship him with their lips, but their hearts will not be near God, simply because they will not know Him. The apathy that once was maybe an acquaintance at times, relaxing in it to do what is wrong will now become a familiar friend taking them everywhere else, but to where Jesus is. Let that not be us for all that it has cost God to save us and keep us.
As things grow darker we will all face being tempted to take our eyes off Jesus and be stopped at one of these stumbling blocks placed to corrupt our faith. The worst part is many of these deceptive road blocks will come from within the church from people who have been deceived that are always learning, but unable to come to the truth that can save them and others. It is like leading people to a door of hope, but not having the key to open it. Jesus is the one who said he would give the keys of the kingdom to those who built their lives on Him. People who call themselves Christians in general are becoming more and more wicked and unrepentant, living ungodly lives because what is being taught and shared no longer comes from God to convict and persuaded them. It is built on something else, man’s ideas and inventions. Jesus in Matthew 7:26 &27, refers to this as the man who built his house on the sand. When the trouble came what he built to live in came crashing down.
We will come to understand before we are finished how even once faithful believers may become misled and entrenched in deception. All who have fallen into the trap, if they do not repent will find themselves suffering under the weight of the judgments that will come upon the lawless of the last days.
As the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:15 says, “you will be saved, but only as one escaping through a fire.”
I was trapped in a fire once and everything was burning up all around me and I too just manage to escape with my life! It was myself and two other friends that poured gasoline all over a structure we were allowed to burn down. Before we knew it the gasoline we were so liberally pouring all over, once lit, became an engulfing inferno that we were standing inside of looking for a way out. Seeing our way out, we exited quickly, but on my way out I stepped on a big rusty barn nail that went through my boot right into the bone of my heal. I then spent over a good week nursing that injury which kept me from walking normal for a couple weeks. I will tell you that experience was scary.
But when I think of those living in the end it will be much scarier because instead of an old farm building burning down that was part of a controlled burn, this will be the complexity of someone’s life and the things connected to it that they themselves built. What remains will testify if it was either done with God or without God, and He alone will be the judge.
This will not be the first time in history that this has happened. We see that in other times and in other ways God’s judgement on rebels and rebellions have come to pass, but at the same time, God has preserved his remnant and has brought & taught them through it.
Just like the Israelites rebelled against the ministry God brought through Moses, (which we will learn about in part 3) the world, and more precisely the Christians will likewise rebel against the ministry God has given us through Jesus Christ.
When we think about this future event and the thought of the great tribulation, the great trouble that will come because of this rebellion, we have to look at some similar events. These are accumulative events which have piled up over a long period of time, but the patterns of rebelling against God, God’s judgement and the death and destruction that the disobedient bring upon themselves are consistent, pointing to a consistent purposeful God in all He has created. God uses these events to teach us what this worldwide, end of days one will look like and how it becomes what it is.
To see this, we have to look to God’s own people he had separated out from among the nations whom He chose to make Himself and His ways known that is the Jewish nation. We have the scriptures to look at the persistent rebellion that kept occurring over a long period of time that finally brought the Jewish people to a place of judgement. One time the destruction of their nation came through the king of Babylon. Before that Egypt and if God had not step in to save them through Moses it is possible they could have been destroyed, but God was at work. That particular event of the Exodus shows us God can save us, but if we persist in rebellion He will allow us to reap the fruit of it. The lawlessness of His chosen people towards God eventually brought the kings of lawlessness of this world to their doorstep.
In the course of history this pattern has repeated itself over again many times, but it hasn’t been the end for the Jewish people. But each time they never fully recovered or separated themselves from the influences of the world and return wholeheartedly to God. Instead, they along with many of God’s other chosen people including the believers in God in Christ have join the world through the worldly mindset that Babylon represents becoming one with her in heart. A use of religion to mask the pleasures of sin.
This enticement is fueled also by man’s sinful desire to divide and dominate one another for one’s own pleasure, being at the core of this thing. Instead of finding pleasure in the salvation we received from Jesus Christ, we seek to dominate others for our own pleasure, our own self-interests, simply our own needs.
Unless God had sent his son Jesus Christ, Israel’s fate would have been permanently sealed for destruction along with our own. Wickedness left unchecked never progresses to a state of something better. Ask Noah and his family, survivors of this sinful disease that had destroyed the rest of humanity during his time. God foreknew the need of a savior to save us from ourselves and our thinking which has the ability to produce death within us and rebellion against the one who made us. He is the only one who can help us live this life that was created out of Him. This has been His plan from the beginning to make that known to us.
The flip side of this for us is that in the end those who have been influenced by the spirit of Babylon will depart from the faith to follow deceiving spirits becoming one with them until she has made a path for the anti-Christ to appear. Lawlessness on a world-wide scale will demand its king once again, who will be the anti-Christ.
And so, you have her, Babylon the great, the mother of all harlots, the abominations of the earth that will help bring about this end time judgement. And she will ride on the political tides of the powers of this world until God’s judgement deals out her fate.
In referencing God in one of His commands said, “Do not misuse the name of the LORD your God, because the LORD will not leave anyone unpunished who misuses His name.”
Who is it the misuses His name, she is the apostate Christian religious system the rebellious church and she will not go unpunished.
Let’s look at Hebrews 12: 25-29
Make sure that you do not reject the One who speaks. For if they did not escape when they rejected Him who warned them on earth, even less will we if we turn away from Him who warns us from heaven. His voice shook the earth at that time, but now He has promised, yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also heaven. This expression, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what is not shaken might remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom (a government) that cannot be shaken, let us hold on to grace. By it, we may serve God acceptably, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
Folks, you DID receive a government if you yielded yourself to and accepted Jesus Christ for the pardon of your sins and His authority as Lord. You are part of a kingdom that even though we don’t presently live physically in it, exactly like any other government it has patterns and laws, these are not only physical but are spiritually known and preserved.
Speaking of Jesus, Isaiah the prophet said, “For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on His shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”
The responsibility of this government has been placed upon Jesus and the triune God our Creator will not show kindness to a rebellious people who are misleading the saints and teaching others its O.K. to be rebellious towards God. And God will also not show kindness to those who have presented the road blocks that have kept the saints and the lost from finding salvation in Him.
This shaking away what was “created” in the scriptures we just read, means it came from the invention of man, manmade, not from God. This includes political and spiritual corrupt ideas and inventions, education contrary to God, ungodly cultural and societal influences. All the things that have been made and allowed to stand as idols and stumbling blocks keeping humanity from knowing our God.
All these things will be separated out and all people will know Jesus’s government before the end. The bible records that in the end, ever knee will bow and every tongue will confess this, that is Jesus as Lord. But for now, today, Christ’s kingdom exists within the believer, so I should say to us who are part of it, we are being separated from what is wrong, we are being called out of the world. It is a process that is at work in a believer who is following Jesus Christ.
The “yet once more” mentioned here comes from the book of Haggai. The author of Hebrews used it to refer to a future shaking that will happen so that the things that are glorious will be revealed. What is wrong will be shaken away from what is right. The things that will appear will have come through Jesus Christ. This is bride bringing God glory by their worship making him known. This is the bride Jesus returns for.
Why must all this happen? So those who have made the decision to follow Christ can see and have an opportunity to repent and even in that last hour serve God acceptably with reverence and awe and be his readied bride at the time of his return.
Things will not go on forever as they always have, there will be a revealing to the whole world of what is right and what is wrong. All will be given one last opportunity to escape the final judgement if they desire too with God’s help. I want to say; this judgement is different from God’s wrath that will be poured out on those whose names are not written in the Lamb’s book of Life. This judgment is with hope that the people of God will turn from their wicked ways to Christ and that others who never knew God will see all of this too, and turn to the only one who can save them, Jesus
At the end of the scriptures we just read in Hebrews the writer referred to God as a consuming fire. Fire in light of the knowledge of God always means a type of judgement or judging because justice is an attribute of love. God is love. So, whatever is not burned up by His judgement and remains is acceptable, but whatever is burned up and destroyed because it is wrong and cannot exist in his presence, it is unacceptable. (If you want to know more about fire being a type of God’s judgement or an act judging just do a quick bible search of the word usage.)
What we are going to cover in this series is the following:
What is ministry?
We will look into the rise of the first denomination and how God dealt with it. This is prophetic in how God has dealt with ministries that are not His and in the future how He will deal with the denominations and ministries that has deceived his people and abused & murdered his saints.
We will look at how God will save Jesus’s bride in the mist of the great tribulation the great trouble that is going to come upon the whole earth. The 5 foolish virgins in Jesus’s parable of the 10 virgins are the ones who will not make it because they will not have been prepared.
And lastly, we will share a summary of indicators to see if the ministry of Jesus Christ is present among you. We will also look at when it is not and how to deal with this problem. 10 virgins showed up to wait together for the bridegroom. So, they were all together but only 5 were wise enough having prepared themselves to meet the groom.
I look forward to have you join in reading part 2 What is Ministry? Everything has meaning and knowing what that something means helps to lay and maintain a proper foundation in which to build on.
In this study, we will look at the scriptures that deal with the apostate church and an event that will happen before Jesus’s return. This event will be in concurrence to the coming of the end time antichrist.
What happens may be surprising to you because it will use elements of what we would think of as the church to accomplish this. You also may be very surprised as a believer, that you may be part of a church or ministry that Jesus Christ is not the head of, and that it will help give way to this end time event that will come to pass.
In 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3 The apostle Paul says,
Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to Him: We ask you, brothers, 2 not to be easily upset in mind or troubled, either by a spirit or by a message or by a letter as if from us, alleging that the Day of the Lord has come. 3 Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way. For that day will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction.
In some bible translations, they replace the word “apostasy” with the words “a great falling away from the faith”. The word apostasy really means a rebellion, in this case against Christ. And this rebellion will come through those within the church. It will be through self-identified Christians and Christian institutions (denominational and non-denominational) that you thought you could trust. But they have been persuaded to rebel against Jesus Christ and His ministry that he desired to be among us.
When I say ministry, we are talking about the structure in which the knowledge of God was meant to pass through. It is God’s way of administrating through His Spirit to bring about an understanding of who He is, what He can do and what He desires from us. It is an exchange in which we can live this life we were given through the power of God who is the creator and illumination of life itself. Makes sense, right? But when we weaken our dependency on God’s way of doing that, or break away from our Lord altogether, it is our sin then that interrupts the stream of the Spirit in which through all things flow. All the things that were meant to help us grow in knowledge and understanding of God. When it stops, we spiritually suffer from the sins God wanted us to avoid bringing death and destruction into our lives.
When there is an absence of God’s influence of power to keep us, change us, and guide us, the trouble our sin causes continues to increase to some point in the future when it causes a big world trouble. It will be the kind of trouble that will have grown throwing the whole world into a great tribulation. Jesus said, it would be unlike anything that has ever happen. What has held it back until now is God’s mercy. It is the mercy that He has had on those who truly believed and those who would come to believe in Jesus, because God loves what He has created. But a day will come as it did in Noah’s day, that wickedness will have corrupted humanity to the point that humanity became unredeemable because of sin. Noah and His family were all God could save. Noah was all he could find that would listen. Likewise, it will be the same for the remnant who will be saved through this time in the last days. Even after lots of warnings the rest who thought they knew God and the others who didn’t think they needed to know God will come to know the Lord’s judgement.
As a believer, we need God’s knowledge, we need the Spirit’s power, we need Jesus Christ’s guidance which God provided that flow through the ministries He gave to humanity, first through Moses and today to us through Jesus Christ.
But many of those who once called on the name of the Lord will quit listening and following Jesus Christ, becoming deceived and deceiving others to the point of their own destruction. Just as it happened in Noah’s day, it happened in Moses day, it has happened over and over again to the Jewish nation to serve as a warning. A warning to us that a day like it will come upon all the people of this world who were called upon to hear the word of the Lord, the Jew, gentile, and believer. The destruction will come to those who have chosen to disobey and live in an ungodly lifestyle that they will not repent from.
These apostate individuals and Christian organizations will not see it as having broken away from anything or being a problem to anyone because their hearts will be filled with pride. Pride being the self will to continue in what they want. They will be deceived believing they are doing God a service. They will see it as making things better because the standards of life will have been moved so low. Sin through their unrepented disobedience will have seared their conscience so there will be no need for truth to get in the way of acceptance of their beliefs, which will look more and more like what the world believes.
The remnant of believers holding to God’s standards for life will be thought of as unloving and judgmental and as time passes, labeled as haters and troublemakers and worse. This is how they treated the prophets. This is how they will view you.
It doesn’t mean all the believers within these entities are among the misled or rebellious Christians, yet. But by the time all the corruption, stumbling blocks and road blocks have entangled them in sin, keeping them from the truth, the frustration they will experience can end up in a lack of desire to continue in following Jesus Christ. They will worship him with their lips, but their hearts will not be near God, simply because they will not know Him. The apathy that once was maybe an acquaintance at times, relaxing in it to do what is wrong will now become a familiar friend taking them everywhere else, but to where Jesus is. Let that not be us for all that it has cost God to save us and keep us.
As things grow darker we will all face being tempted to take our eyes off Jesus and be stopped at one of these stumbling blocks placed to corrupt our faith. The worst part is many of these deceptive road blocks will come from within the church from people who have been deceived that are always learning, but unable to come to the truth that can save them and others. It is like leading people to a door of hope, but not having the key to open it. Jesus is the one who said he would give the keys of the kingdom to those who built their lives on Him. People who call themselves Christians in general are becoming more and more wicked and unrepentant, living ungodly lives because what is being taught and shared no longer comes from God to convict and persuaded them. It is built on something else, man’s ideas and inventions. Jesus in Matthew 7:26 &27, refers to this as the man who built his house on the sand. When the trouble came what he built to live in came crashing down.
We will come to understand before we are finished how even once faithful believers may become misled and entrenched in deception. All who have fallen into the trap, if they do not repent will find themselves suffering under the weight of the judgments that will come upon the lawless of the last days.
As the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:15 says, “you will be saved, but only as one escaping through a fire.”
I was trapped in a fire once and everything was burning up all around me and I too just manage to escape with my life! It was myself and two other friends that poured gasoline all over a structure we were allowed to burn down. Before we knew it the gasoline we were so liberally pouring all over, once lit, became an engulfing inferno that we were standing inside of looking for a way out. Seeing our way out, we exited quickly, but on my way out I stepped on a big rusty barn nail that went through my boot right into the bone of my heal. I then spent over a good week nursing that injury which kept me from walking normal for a couple weeks. I will tell you that experience was scary.
But when I think of those living in the end it will be much scarier because instead of an old farm building burning down that was part of a controlled burn, this will be the complexity of someone’s life and the things connected to it that they themselves built. What remains will testify if it was either done with God or without God, and He alone will be the judge.
This will not be the first time in history that this has happened. We see that in other times and in other ways God’s judgement on rebels and rebellions have come to pass, but at the same time, God has preserved his remnant and has brought & taught them through it.
Just like the Israelites rebelled against the ministry God brought through Moses, (which we will learn about in part 3) the world, and more precisely the Christians will likewise rebel against the ministry God has given us through Jesus Christ.
When we think about this future event and the thought of the great tribulation, the great trouble that will come because of this rebellion, we have to look at some similar events. These are accumulative events which have piled up over a long period of time, but the patterns of rebelling against God, God’s judgement and the death and destruction that the disobedient bring upon themselves are consistent, pointing to a consistent purposeful God in all He has created. God uses these events to teach us what this worldwide, end of days one will look like and how it becomes what it is.
To see this, we have to look to God’s own people he had separated out from among the nations whom He chose to make Himself and His ways known that is the Jewish nation. We have the scriptures to look at the persistent rebellion that kept occurring over a long period of time that finally brought the Jewish people to a place of judgement. One time the destruction of their nation came through the king of Babylon. Before that Egypt and if God had not step in to save them through Moses it is possible they could have been destroyed, but God was at work. That particular event of the Exodus shows us God can save us, but if we persist in rebellion He will allow us to reap the fruit of it. The lawlessness of His chosen people towards God eventually brought the kings of lawlessness of this world to their doorstep.
In the course of history this pattern has repeated itself over again many times, but it hasn’t been the end for the Jewish people. But each time they never fully recovered or separated themselves from the influences of the world and return wholeheartedly to God. Instead, they along with many of God’s other chosen people including the believers in God in Christ have join the world through the worldly mindset that Babylon represents becoming one with her in heart. A use of religion to mask the pleasures of sin.
This enticement is fueled also by man’s sinful desire to divide and dominate one another for one’s own pleasure, being at the core of this thing. Instead of finding pleasure in the salvation we received from Jesus Christ, we seek to dominate others for our own pleasure, our own self-interests, simply our own needs.
Unless God had sent his son Jesus Christ, Israel’s fate would have been permanently sealed for destruction along with our own. Wickedness left unchecked never progresses to a state of something better. Ask Noah and his family, survivors of this sinful disease that had destroyed the rest of humanity during his time. God foreknew the need of a savior to save us from ourselves and our thinking which has the ability to produce death within us and rebellion against the one who made us. He is the only one who can help us live this life that was created out of Him. This has been His plan from the beginning to make that known to us.
The flip side of this for us is that in the end those who have been influenced by the spirit of Babylon will depart from the faith to follow deceiving spirits becoming one with them until she has made a path for the anti-Christ to appear. Lawlessness on a world-wide scale will demand its king once again, who will be the anti-Christ.
And so, you have her, Babylon the great, the mother of all harlots, the abominations of the earth that will help bring about this end time judgement. And she will ride on the political tides of the powers of this world until God’s judgement deals out her fate.
In referencing God in one of His commands said, “Do not misuse the name of the LORD your God, because the LORD will not leave anyone unpunished who misuses His name.”
Who is it the misuses His name, she is the apostate Christian religious system the rebellious church and she will not go unpunished.
Let’s look at Hebrews 12: 25-29
Make sure that you do not reject the One who speaks. For if they did not escape when they rejected Him who warned them on earth, even less will we if we turn away from Him who warns us from heaven. His voice shook the earth at that time, but now He has promised, yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also heaven. This expression, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what is not shaken might remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom (a government) that cannot be shaken, let us hold on to grace. By it, we may serve God acceptably, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
Folks, you DID receive a government if you yielded yourself to and accepted Jesus Christ for the pardon of your sins and His authority as Lord. You are part of a kingdom that even though we don’t presently live physically in it, exactly like any other government it has patterns and laws, these are not only physical but are spiritually known and preserved.
Speaking of Jesus, Isaiah the prophet said, “For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on His shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”
The responsibility of this government has been placed upon Jesus and the triune God our Creator will not show kindness to a rebellious people who are misleading the saints and teaching others its O.K. to be rebellious towards God. And God will also not show kindness to those who have presented the road blocks that have kept the saints and the lost from finding salvation in Him.
This shaking away what was “created” in the scriptures we just read, means it came from the invention of man, manmade, not from God. This includes political and spiritual corrupt ideas and inventions, education contrary to God, ungodly cultural and societal influences. All the things that have been made and allowed to stand as idols and stumbling blocks keeping humanity from knowing our God.
All these things will be separated out and all people will know Jesus’s government before the end. The bible records that in the end, ever knee will bow and every tongue will confess this, that is Jesus as Lord. But for now, today, Christ’s kingdom exists within the believer, so I should say to us who are part of it, we are being separated from what is wrong, we are being called out of the world. It is a process that is at work in a believer who is following Jesus Christ.
The “yet once more” mentioned here comes from the book of Haggai. The author of Hebrews used it to refer to a future shaking that will happen so that the things that are glorious will be revealed. What is wrong will be shaken away from what is right. The things that will appear will have come through Jesus Christ. This is bride bringing God glory by their worship making him known. This is the bride Jesus returns for.
Why must all this happen? So those who have made the decision to follow Christ can see and have an opportunity to repent and even in that last hour serve God acceptably with reverence and awe and be his readied bride at the time of his return.
Things will not go on forever as they always have, there will be a revealing to the whole world of what is right and what is wrong. All will be given one last opportunity to escape the final judgement if they desire too with God’s help. I want to say; this judgement is different from God’s wrath that will be poured out on those whose names are not written in the Lamb’s book of Life. This judgment is with hope that the people of God will turn from their wicked ways to Christ and that others who never knew God will see all of this too, and turn to the only one who can save them, Jesus
At the end of the scriptures we just read in Hebrews the writer referred to God as a consuming fire. Fire in light of the knowledge of God always means a type of judgement or judging because justice is an attribute of love. God is love. So, whatever is not burned up by His judgement and remains is acceptable, but whatever is burned up and destroyed because it is wrong and cannot exist in his presence, it is unacceptable. (If you want to know more about fire being a type of God’s judgement or an act judging just do a quick bible search of the word usage.)
What we are going to cover in this series is the following:
What is ministry?
We will look into the rise of the first denomination and how God dealt with it. This is prophetic in how God has dealt with ministries that are not His and in the future how He will deal with the denominations and ministries that has deceived his people and abused & murdered his saints.
We will look at how God will save Jesus’s bride in the mist of the great tribulation the great trouble that is going to come upon the whole earth. The 5 foolish virgins in Jesus’s parable of the 10 virgins are the ones who will not make it because they will not have been prepared.
And lastly, we will share a summary of indicators to see if the ministry of Jesus Christ is present among you. We will also look at when it is not and how to deal with this problem. 10 virgins showed up to wait together for the bridegroom. So, they were all together but only 5 were wise enough having prepared themselves to meet the groom.
I look forward to have you join in reading part 2 What is Ministry? Everything has meaning and knowing what that something means helps to lay and maintain a proper foundation in which to build on.