Originally published in "The Lord's Coming Herald & Wesleyan Bible Prophecy Advocate," Winter Edition 2007
The Come Out Message
You should come out of Babylon because the Bible says to do it: "And I heard
another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not
partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues" (Rev. 18:4).
"Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and
touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto
you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters saith the Lord Almighty" (II Cor.
6:17-18).
Now, obviously, those who do not know who, or what, "Babylon" is do not know
what to come out of, either. The clarion call of God to separate from Babylon,
then, will always remain irrelevant to them.
The early Protestant Reformers identified the Roman Catholic
Church--particularly the papal hierarchy--as "Babylon." This objective
historical identification, along with other important doctrines, such as
justification by faith alone, the priesthood of all believers, and the authority
of Scripture alone, led to the great reformation of the Sixteenth Century.
The Reformation dogma of the "Roman Babylon" was based on what was understood at
the time to be an accurate interpretation of the prophetic Scripture. That
interpretation--so central to early Protestantism--has gradually gotten lost in
modern times. Now much of American Protestantism is going back to the paganism
of the old Roman Empire via its widespread embrace of dispensational
premillennial teachings, which system of revived Jewish fables Wesleyan
Methodist theologian Dr. Daniel Steele once called "A Substitute For Holiness,
or Antinomianism Revived."
We are talking here specifically about the concept of "futurism." That is the
idea that the Book of Revelation is to be interpreted in a totally futuristic
manner, beginning from chapter six onwards. As Scofield/Darbyism would have it,
the church is not on earth during the events that transpire between Revelation
chapter six and chapter nineteen. The futuristic basis of this modern system of
interpretational fabrication, according to George Eldon Ladd, can be traced
directly back to the Roman Catholic Jesuits in 1590 (The Blessed Hope, p. 37).
The ploy back then was to take the heat off of Rome, and ultimately to deceive
Protestants in their ability to identify Babylon. Today we are in the continuing
throes of that delusion. Millions cannot see America as the logical contemporary
imperial extension of the Roman Babylon because they are mesmerized by their
long-standing embrace of liberal teachings that truncate the eschatological
motifs of Holy Scripture.
A major "paradigm shift" is now in order--enter Reformation of the Twenty- first Century!
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