Sign/ Blindness to the Future
Before God brings total destruction upon a wayward society, He generally gives many warnings. These may include a series of lesser calamities, continuing with increasing severity until men recognize their peril before God and turn to Him in repentance. If they continue unrepentant until their hardness exhausts God's patience, destruction will finally come.
In another paper on this site, I present a summary of recently emerging threats to survival of human civilization. In my book on signs of the times, I give them all fuller consideration. There is no doubt that mankind stands on the threshold of social chaos and collapse.
All the calamities now or soon coming onto the scene are warnings of impending judgment, but although world leaders are obsessed with climate change, they are blind to the spiritual dimensions of what is happening. They, and all their spokesmen in the media, have refused to consider that the ultimate reason for these calamities is God's displeasure with sinners. If any public figure suggested that the spate of disasters and diseases is a divine call to repentance, he would be laughed out of the limelight. The average person who hears about the suffering of others feels little concern and continues a lifestyle of absorption in his own pleasures and pursuits. If he himself meets disaster, he reconstructs his life the best he can, but he does not repent.
The role of God as overseer of human events hardly enters anyone's thoughts. No one heeds the warnings that are becoming ever louder and more frequent.
All this agrees with prophecy. The Bible says that in the Last Days, men will be blind to the horrible disasters soon to descend upon the world. Recall what Jesus said about the coming of the Son of man.
37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,
39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
40 Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
41 Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
Matthew 24:37-41
Just as the people in Noah's day lived in ignorance of the Flood until it swept them away, so people in the days before Christ's return will continue in their sins without any awareness that God will soon judge the world.
Peter offered a similar warning.
3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
2 Peter 3:3-10
Why will the people in the Last Days be ignorant of what is about to happen?
- It will be a long time since Christ's first coming (v. 4).
- People will no longer believe that God judged the world once before, in Noah's day (v. 5).
- They will be in bondage to lusts (v. 3). One symptom of this bondage is everyone's addiction to the media, which offers its viewers a simple deal. "In return for letting us control your mind, we will fill it with every conceivable image and sound that will bathe your senses in unrivaled pleasure." One truth never conveyed by immersion in virtual reality is, of course, the imminence of divine judgment.
Sign: Disbelief in the Second Coming
Paul warns that men of the Last Days "shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables" (2 Tim. 4:4). Some of these fables are described by Peter.
3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
2 Peter 3:3-7
In an earlier lesson, we demonstrated that the scoffers Peter anticipates would belong to organized Christianity. They would consider the original teachers of the Second Coming—that is, the apostles and their followers—to be their spiritual fathers. Yet Peter makes the shocking prediction that these self-styled Christians would regard the promise of Christ's coming as no more than an ancient superstition.
The Second Coming is a central teaching of the New Testament, giving hope to a suffering church that evil in the world will someday be overthrown, and assuring the Jew that all of God's promises to Israel will in due time be fulfilled. If we search church history, we find that disbelief in the Second Coming hardly existed before the nineteenth century. Only after the rise of modern liberalism and modern skepticism did multitudes in the church begin to doubt core doctrines of the Bible. We conclude, then, that Peter is looking ahead to the sort of apostasy that has appeared only in modern times. The times in which we live are the fulfillment of what he calls "the last days."
Sign: Moral Corruption in the Church
As we saw in an earlier lesson, Paul predicts that the churches in the Last Days would be filled with people who are gravely deficient in moral character.
1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
2 Timothy 3:1-5
Is this the situation we find in churches today? If we take into account all churches with a Bible-believing heritage, even though they have drifted far into apostasy and worldliness, the answer is clearly, yes. Within my lifetime I have seen within these churches a sharp decline in integrity. Also, many who profess Christ today are selfish and self-centered, obsessed with gaining more of the world's pleasure and prosperity, difficult to get along with, and as prone as unbelievers to quarrel with family and to separate from a spouse.
It is deeply saddening to see the moral standards of our godly forebears being cast aside.
- Many in churches today are actually blasphemers. It is shocking that many modern churchgoers see no sin in using the word "God" as an expletive.
- I recently saw on YouTube a church meeting with at least hundreds in attendance where the guest speaker told not one, but two, off-color jokes. This is merely a small taste of a pervasive rottenness.
- Standards of modesty are evaporating. Many churchgoing women are willing to wear bikinis, and many churchgoing men go to beaches, or look at the web pages of Fox News and other sites, so they can gawk at bikinis or worse.
- Standards against worldly music of a fleshly kind have essentially evaporated. I also saw on YouTube a so-called revival meeting where the music was sensual jazz with sexy performers dancing provocatively.
- Scruples against worldly entertainment are steadily weakening. Do professing Christians today limit what they watch on the screen? Hardly at all.
- Drinking alcoholic beverages was once strongly condemned by all Bible-believing Christians. Today? Drinking in so-called moderation—in other words, only little more than you have ever drunk before—is widely seen as perfectly normal. We have reached a nadir where it is possible to hear someone profess Christ with slurred speech.
But the problem is far deeper and darker. In days past, it would have been impossible for a man practicing gross sexual sin to continue for years as president of the leading Christian college in the country: namely, Liberty University.
The famous preacher Warren Wiersbe wrote a book entitled The Integrity Crisis.1 He complained that pragmatism, profiteering, and immorality are plaguing the church at the highest levels. Unfortunately, he is right. Yet corruption behind the pulpit is merely a reflection of corruption in the pew. Men of poor character are rising to lead churches and church bodies because men of good character are in short supply.