Originally published in "The Lord's Coming Herald & Wesleyan Bible Prophecy Advocate," June/July Edition, 2010
The Scrunch-Time Irony Of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The midnight cry awakening is the whole process of the end-time church’s attempt to rethink basics in end-time Bible prophecy.
Before this time comes she has been massively deceived by a system of false doctrine Daniel Steele once called “a substitute for holiness” or “antinomianism revived.” We are talking about nineteenth century Darbyite dispensational premillennialism, which has swept like a raging fire storm throughout the evangelical fundamentalist church-world of America during the course of most of the past twentieth century. Many today, ironically, still consider this heresy to be pure gospel truth.
True to its inherent nature and form, the effect of this gestalted gospel of false doctrine has been to produce a great apostasy of worldly backsliding wherever it has spread. This leveling phenomenon partly explains the wholesale flight from the Bible standards of holiness in dress, and many other troubling signs of immorality and outright sinfulness that plagues the Christian movement in America today. We find now that Christianity exists in a much purer form in many third-world countries, where Scofield/Darbyism and other Western heresies have not been so pervasively believed and taught.
Why do so many seem to think that America is such a shining example of Christianity? The evidence for this is simply lacking, friends, so we should stop being self-deceived. We are far more secular and self-righteous, than we are Christian in any true sense of the word. We discover this fact when we read the New Testament honestly and compare what is described there with what is happing in the many religious social clubs today that are falsely labeled churches.
Authenticity within Christianity can only be verified by soundness of doctrine. Where antinomianism in doctrine is enshrined (as it is in the many premillennial denominational sects of our land today) no true Christian church exists.
The basic outline for our road to ideological recovery follows this pattern: Christ is the covenant-maker of Daniel 9:27, and not Sir Robert Anderson’s fabled future Roman Antichrist theory. If you are not fully convinced of this fact, please read our books to get the last vestages of the Darbyite mentality surgically (meaning logically) block-busted.
The upshot is that Daniel’s seventieth week is the Christian age, and not Darbyism’s limited future seven year great tribulation period, before which the church is presumably to be removed in some clung-to secret pretribulational rapture.
Where does the New Testament say anything about a future seven year great tribulation period? Let us read our New Testaments more carefully until we discover this fact for ourselves: the New Testament says nothing about those distinctives that are so germane to modern popular dispensational premillennialism.
Rethinking basics in end-time Bible prophecy also means understanding the Christian gospel of our salvation as universal in its scope and application. Jewish racial distinctiveness (the old covenant upon which the Old Testament nation of Israel was founded) has been entirely eliminated and there is now “no difference” between Jews and Gentiles in the most absolute sense (Ephesians 2:13-17).
The above is very hard for most modern evangelicals to swallow because they have been so steeped in Scofield/ Darbyism for so long they cannot conceive of anything else. This heresy has taught them that racial Jews are still God’s chosen people, and that God still has a plan for the Jews in end-time Bible prophecy that by-passes their need to come to grips with the fullness and finality of the Christian revelation in the here and now. Such theological concession-making, logically speaking, leads Christians into apostasy.
Dispensational false learning is now blowing-up in the face of the American evangelical, many of whom are now foaming and fawning over the terrorist Zionist agenda, though which they are being played for useful idiots and for suckers, as the secular Zionist agenda is anything but Christian in its out-flow and intent.
Our mission of clarity in this modern chaos is to help the Wesleyan holiness movement rebuild a truly Christian world view. We fear this knowledge may come to late for many, not necessarily because they do not want to know the truth, but because they do not act fast enough to move on the truth they already have.
Ideological change always happens slowly and often takes a generation to have its full effect. Our scrunch-time irony is that we may not have the time to spare. Our situation is the plowman now overtaking the reaper (Amos 9:13). This means that the judgment for past ill effects is spoiling a present opportunity for harvest. We cannot harvest before the proper sowing has been done, but we are always reaping from the seed that has been sown in the generation past.
Yesterday we sowed the seeds of Scofield/Darbyism and today it has produced a harvest of worldly backsliding in our churches. Judgment must come on this apostasy, even at the same time that some of us are working to sow a better kind of kingdom gospel seed that tomorrow will produce a better harvest of righteousness and true holiness in the earth.
Who will prevail?The one that works the hardest at the job will prevail, but timing is a factor that must be considered. Jesus told us that the wheat and tares must be allowed to grow together until the time of the harvest (Matt. 13:24-30). This does not mean that He was disposed to tolerate corruption within His church. It means that in the world, where the sowing takes place, the forces of nature must be allow to run their course.
In the Old Testament God often used third-party surrounding heathen nations to punish Israel when she broke the covenant. Many of the self-righteous Jews of that day could not understand how and why God would do such a thing.
Now we are in the same boat as an apostate Christian movement in America today. And God will shatter our illusions by using our enemies to preform His acts of judgment on us, too, whether we can psychologically handle that possibility or not. It’s scrunch-time irony, friends, wake up!
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