The Beginning Has Begun!

A young lady was brutally raped and murdered in our town recently, sending shock-waves throughout the entire nation. A week later over twenty thousand people gathered for a peace march in her memory in the street where she went missing. As a proclaimer of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I couldn’t help but note how biblical the comments, made by people in the march. I’m incredibly heartened that so many people believe in the message of peace and hope. Hope is more important than fear. Peace is more important than violence. It’s all about hope and peace, let’s encourage peace and love amongst each other. We will not live in fear. “If only,” I thought.

More: Be vigilant, not afraid. Enough is enough. No violence. We feel a sense of comfort from gathering together. Had someone stood up and shouted these comments into a loud speaker, no doubt twenty thousand heads and mouths would have nodded and voiced solid agreement. But if one should then add that peace, hope and love belong to the Lord Jesus Christ only and that to permanently experience them one must turn away from self and turn to Him, receive Him as Savior and Lord, perhaps only a handful among them would nod and say, “That’s right.” There’s nothing like a human tragedy to give witness to the truth of all that the gospel of Christ tells us about human beings – their spiritual emptiness, their innermost fears, wishes and desires.

At the same time, there’s nothing like the gospel of Christ to tell us that most people will continue to reject true peace, hope and love and as a result, rape and murder will continue to happen to young ladies – in fact, increasingly so from this time onward. Why from this time onwards? We are living in the time of the signs of Jesus’ return and the end of this age; a time of abounding lawlessness, a time where the love of many is growing cold Matthew 24:12. Things will get much worse once the church is removed from the earth, but the beginning has begun! The apostle Paul speaks of it as the last days when perilous times will come 2 Timothy 3:1-4. Perilous times and perilous people – they’re here!

Not everybody in the church believes we’re living in this time. There are Christians who teach that the church is going to grow and get more powerful. They believe they will make the church more attractive to current unbelievers, as well as make the world a better place to live in, setting things up for Jesus to return and reign over His kingdom. If that were true there would be evidence of such during this sad time and others like it around the globe. But there’s no evidence and there will not be because it’s not true. If this were a matter of mere disagreement about one’s theology, I would not be one to give it the time of day. But it’s more than that. How we view end times theology is how we view Jesus Christ and His message.

In other words, if Jesus is not coming back until the church makes the world a better place the urgency to preach the gospel is diminished. What is the gospel? It is the good news that Jesus Christ, God Almighty Incarnate, came to earth as a Man and died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin so that each one of us can become a child of God through faith alone in the resurrected Jesus alone plus nothing else 1 Corinthians 15:3-4. On becoming a child of God we receive the life of God … life  eternal, it does not die. What is sin? For the purposes of this post it is defiance and rebellion against God and His revealed will as set down in the Holy Scriptures of the Bible. If we reject the Lord Jesus we pay our own price, eternal death – hell.

That’s the urgency of the message; eternal life or eternal death; a life of eternal peace and love or a life of eternal despair and hopelessness. Then there are the man-centered religionists who outrightly reject this teaching and label us who hold to it as, “exclusivists, unreasonable and cruel.” To them the doctrine of “inclusivism” is more  reasonable and compassionate by far. It’s certainly more palatable; everybody likes to hear that there’s more than one road to heaven and that Jesus is not the only way John 14:6. “As long as one is sincere, that’s all that matters; it doesn’t really matter what you believe. Live a good life; treat others as you want to be treated.” Even as one who was not good or sincere, I hung on to that for years.  

Clicking around the Internet I discovered these quotes: ‘Christ and the Bible are not the issue, sincerity and goodness is the issue.’ ‘It’s not fair if somebody is not saved because they don’t have access to the gospel.’ ‘God has more going on by way of redemption than what happened in first century Palestine.’ For all its claims of being the One True Church, the Romanist popes teach similar. Pope John Paul taught all who lead a just life will be saved and go to heaven even if they don’t believe in Jesus Christ and the Roman Catholic Church. He said those who live according to the Beatitudes will make it to heaven Matthew 5:3-11. More. “Those who bear lovingly the sufferings of life will enter God’s kingdom.”

Well, I’ve witnessed lots of Catholics lovingly bearing their sufferings, but not one of them gave witness to any assurance of heaven. In my experience the old saying, “talk is cheap” has shown up to be one hundred percent accurate! People might like to tell themselves ‘all roads lead to heaven’ ‘live a sincere, good life’ etc, but deep down in their heart they don’t believe it. When put to the test, the best they come up with is, “I hope so.” That’s not hope, that’s hopelessness! Hopelessness is the state of the condemned, the guilty, the ungodly, the children of disobedience….having no hope and without God in the world Ephesians 2:2, 12. There’s not a believer in all the world that doesn’t know what that feels like. It is hell on earth! 

The same goes for peace. Biblically, peace means: ‘rest’ ‘ease’ ‘security’. The twenty thousand peace marchers most certainly were seeking after those three things. But once again, you don’t get them by marching; you get them by praying. You don’t get them on the streets; you get them on your knees. Peace is what one gets as a result of repentance and surrender to Jesus, not as a result of rallying and protesting for it no matter how noble the cause might be. People ask why, “Why doesn’t God show Himself?” It’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why don’t I show myself to God?” In other words, “Why do I keep running and hiding from God?” When I stopped doing that and showed myself to God, He then showed Himself to me.

We are living in what is known in Christendom as the Age of Grace. This age began with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and it finishes with Jesus invisibly coming again to remove the church from the earth. This is what’s known as the Rapture 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. Nobody knows the day or the hour of this dramatic event but we are told by Jesus to, Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming Matthew 24:42, 44; 25:13; Mark 13:32-37. Jesus is not referring in these Scriptures to His coming again to earth to set up His reign; that comes at the end of the seven-year Tribulation (judgment) period spoken about in the prophetic book The Revelation of Jesus Christ.

This is why we know the world is not going to get better; it’s only going to get worse. All over the world God is lifting His hand and allowing men’s hearts to be exposed. There’s never been a time like our time. Look at our political leaders … there’s barely a God-honoring man or woman among them. They intend to take this world down!  They look into those TV camera lenses and lie, deceive, cheat, connive and steal from us and the sleepy, dumbed-down viewers on the other end haven’t a clue as to what’s going on. It is time for peace seekers to wake up to this; time to get real and stop hiding behind foolish and childish accusations such as, “scaremonger” “pessimist” “doom & gloom merchant” “prophet of doom” etc.

“You’re just like the boy who cried wolf,” you say. Well, the wolf did eventually come. So will Jesus. And if you are left behind, it won’t matter how many peace marches you participate in protesting against brutal rapes and murders on young women, the wolves will win out because there will be nobody to stop them. Even now there are insufficient police numbers in every major city of the world – martial law is the next thing, but even that won’t stop those hell-bent on evil; nothing will, short of a bullet. But for every one who goes down there will be another to take his place. Remember, this is judgment time. It’s the time of God’s wrath being poured out upon an evil, God-defiant, rebellious world Revelation 6:17.

Looking at the faces of that crowd of twenty thousand peace marchers, I believe it’s fair to say that the majority of them have belief systems that exclude the possibility of God – certainly a God who has revealed Himself in the pages of a book known as the Bible. If they are anything like the hundreds I have personally met of the same age, then they’re more likely to be evolutionary humanists, even Marxist atheists. Such people have embraced the doctrine of Moral Relativism … there’s no God, no objective standards, no right or wrong, everything is subjective, everything is whatever you say it is, everything is whatever you feel it is, no opinion is better than another opinion, there’s no such thing as evil people nor evil acts.

And they call us hypocrites! They call us weak! If they really believed their “doctrine” they would not have marched. There’s nothing like a human tragedy to expose such a shallow belief system. “We feel a sense of comfort from gathering together,” some said. Of course they do! I’m glad they do. Yet up until the tragedy, how many of them mocked, snarled and sneered at Christians for doing the same thing? How many will do it again once this tragedy is all over and forgotten about? Let me repeat. We are living in the end times … not the end of the world, the end of the age. Just as the Scriptures declare, lawlessness of every kind is abounding across the globe; the beginning has begun! There’s no turning back.

But you can turn back. You don’t have to follow the crowd. Does that mean lawlessness won’t come near you? Not necessarily, but it has to come near God before He will allow it to go any further. And Psalm 91:1-16 plus Psalm 121:1-8 are grand indicators that He keeps us from it. Biblical Christians pray those Psalms over their lives and those of their families on a regular basis … and because it is the word of God we’re praying, the God of the word comes to our aid to keep us from much of it in the physical sense and all of it in the spiritual sense. “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish: neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand………and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand. My Father and I are one” John 10:27-30.