How Far Will the Falling Away Go?
By Gene Lawley / Rapture Ready
When I first began to pay attention to the Scriptures where Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, saying, “Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4), I assumed it meant a “falling away” from the faith, a denial of Christ and rejection of church affiliation. Yes, but much more, as current events and trends are showing. It is a turning away from morality and lawfulness, and that includes many in the “Christian” category, no less.
How many mainline churches and high-level clergy are embracing with welcoming arms the raging sexuality movement? The gender manipulation frenzy, the clamor for acceptance of homosexuality as a normal lifestyle, the hard-driven demand that abortion of babies in the womb, even partially born, is fully acceptable and legal—these trends have grown exponentially like a brushfire in these past few years. It is indeed like a frenzy.
The abortion issue ties in with this sexual revolution, for it has all the markings of nothing more than a major birth-control method. How to have all the sex experiences possible without any responsibility, that seems to be the hidden reason. How many of the 61 million abortions recorded in America since 1973 (Roe v Wade) were actually due to the health of the mother?
Oaths of office to uphold the Constitution mean nothing anymore. Gangs in streets opposing lawmen, destroying property and human lives, demanding open borders for illegals and providing safe cities for killers—the signs of a dying society are enormous.
What is to become of America? What is to become of the world?
In the “rat race” of this world, the rats seem to be winning. But when God shows up, the rats will race for the darkness, just as they have been for centuries. When Peter wrote these words in his second epistle, he revealed a great truth that holds up, and has held up for these centuries, of God’s purpose over all that time:
“…Knowing this first, that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, 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 creation.’
“For this they willfully forget, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
“But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:3-9).
In spite of scoffers and naysayers, God is fixed in His patient desire that all can be saved who would be saved, that is, willing to repent and be saved. The current question, then, is how long will He wait in these days for that final one to be born again before He returns for all those whom He has bought with His own blood?
In the days of Noah, all of the world except Noah and his family were in rebellion against God. And in the days of Lot, the whole city of Sodom was totally saturated with evil when Lot went out of the city and sudden destruction came upon it and its inhabitants. Luke 17:26-30 tells us that the Son of Man will come for His own, just like in the times of Noah and Lot, but during a time of economic and social revival or seemingly “well off” times, especially in America.
When Noah and his family entered the ark and God closed the door on them (Genesis 7:16), there was no more representation of righteousness left among physical mankind. Evil had won its final and ultimate conclusion. God’s judgment had also arrived, for the flood came and took away all evil in a cleansing of the whole earth. In 2 Thessalonians 2 we have looked at the compounding of a “falling away” comparable to, so Jesus said in Luke 17:26, “as it was in the days of Noah.” Further in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, verses 5-8, he writes this:
“Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming.”
The born-again believer is described and identified in this way in 1 Corinthians 6:17, “But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.” Thus, the “One who restrains, the restrainer” is the believer in Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. The Lord has said to those who have accepted Him into their lives, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). (I quote these references to assert more forcefully that this passage, presenting the fact of the Rapture of the saints, is clearly the taking out of the earth the true body of Christ.)
It is comparable to the time of Noah in that, following that exit, there is no more representation of righteousness left on earth. Only left behind is the conclusion of evil—God’s judgment in the sudden destruction to follow, and then, seven years of tribulation judgment.
In this Trump administration we have seen a reversal of the deceptive plan to destroy the sovereignty of the United States and initiate a New World Order that would front for a one-world government. That is clearly the underlying plan subtly pointed to when President Obama spoke at the 2016 DC Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30, 2016. In the video produced by C-Span and online on YouTube, he greeted the guests with, “You are all looking great…the end of the Republic has never looked better!”
Perhaps the guests, all news correspondents, thought this was a joke since that was somewhat the format of the evening. Yet, throughout his talk, he revealed his certainty of the coming results of the 2016 election…as he was so sure who would win it. One of those references went like this: “I don’t know who the next president will be, but I’m sure she will be a good one!”
But God had other plans, according to His long-suffering for those who would become born-again believers before His Appointed Time for that 7th head of the Beast of Revelation, the one-world government. He said, in action if not words, “Barack Obama, you will get your one-world government, but it will be in My timing, not that of mankind.”
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Take a look again at Luke 17:26-30 and see what happened, apparently, because the raging fight against the reversal of their intentions has never been so intense anytime in recent decades. The “falling away” from lawfulness is so deeply embedded in our governmental bodies, in society, in every corner of life that it is beginning to look like those days of Noah and of Lot and their surrounding conditions. The bowing down to the demands of pro-abortionists and their determined ally, Planned Parenthood, and the perverted sexual and gender manipulation frenzy is nothing short of astounding. As Romans 3:18 declares, “There is no fear of God before their eyes!”
It is not likely that God will come to earth and bargain with anyone, like He did before the judgment of Sodom (see Genesis 18). He will come like a thief in the night, and sudden destruction will follow immediately, according to 1 Thessalonians 5:2-3.
The remaining question, again, is “how full must the cup of God’s judgment be before the Son of Man comes?”
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https://www.raptureready.com/2019/03/23/far-will-falling-away-go-gene-lawley/
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Whistler Blowers, Insiders
here’w my take on the church that went from being the leader in the cause of Christ and top missions church to the current state of demise in 2019:
The UMC in the USA should simply close up shop. It should have a dissolution conference & break up into at least five different churches based on theology. Let the evangelicals & charismatics have their property and go away. The liberals hate them anyway. Let the gay tolerant churches form their own national church, the “National Church of the Raging Rainbow”, or something like that. Let the leaky liberals campaign away with their leftist socialist agenda/social gospel.
Methodist churches close their doors for the last time in every city, every year. Let those that are about to go under, go under. They can combine with other lukewarm failing congregations in their city to form one big sinking ship church. Why do the hard shell evangelical Methodist congregations that still are having revivals and still getting their teenagers saved continue to carry the dead rotting corpse of the national organization with their annual dues? Who needs them? They contribute nothing to the local church.
Most Methodists don’t realize it, but the UMC passed the point of no return in its decline & fall several years ago, perhaps even decades ago. The state & nat’l organizations are just shells on paper, ghosts of their former glory days. Every great civilization that falls, falls from within. Or perhaps better stated: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” (Ariel Durant)
What a shame. The Methodists were the first in revivals, decisions for Christ, and building new churches, hospitals, & colleges one hundred years ago. Then the liberals took over the seminaries after WWI. The first wave of false teachers taught against biblical inerrancy. Once this point was conceded, the floodgates of false teaching were opened. Then their graduates took over the conferences’ administrations after WW2. They took over the seminaries to teach that the scripture was not the inspired Word of God, only words about God, and only the writing of men. Then they stopped having revivals & building new churches pretty much everywhere (1950′s to 1970′s) after the dry rot of humanistic liberalism took hold in every conference.
The Methodists sold out to humanism and the humanist agenda somewhere along the way. They changed their statement of faith to reject biblical literalism in favor of the historical-critical method. Hold-out preachers that still preached a biblical-literalist, “get-saved-gospel” message that would have been very familiar to Wesley were shunned, banned, retired early, forced to locate, or demoted to have to ride the circuit again for the conference minimum pay grade. The marriage of biblical literalist evangelical revivalism with pervasive humanism and its agenda resulted in a bad case of spiritual AIDS followed by inevitable spiritual death.
The Holy Spirit is easily offended and will leave a local church or a whole denomination after repeated warnings have been ignored. This happened in the UMC a long time ago. It is hard to get him to come back once this happens. Without his prevenient grace, nothing good will happen inside a church after he leaves. Congregations devoid of the Spirit are just a corpse waiting for someone to come along and to finally, mercifully pull the life support plug . UMC churches close every year for this reason. God wrote “Ichabod” over their front doors long ago, meaning, “The Spirit has Departed”.
The conferences will still hire biblical literalist/revivalistic grads from seminaries that still teach parts of the gospel. They will even hire in from Asbury, but they have to receive extensive retraining classes to purge the last vestiges of their dreaded, despised literalism. The conferences actually love to hire conservatives who can actually get something done. They exploit them by putting their most inexperienced pastoral staff into the most problematic churches. After the churches are turned around, the membership built back up, and the budget about where it should be, they move the conservative to another problem church, and then typically put a well-disguised liberal in the renewed/refreshed pulpit. It happens again and again. So beware, freshly minted literalist seminary grad. You are not an exception, they will do this to you, too, as they have done so many times before.
After about seven to ten years of this treatment, the superintendents will have a discrete talk with the hard-working conservative fool/tool. They will politely tell the poor soul that he needs to get on the liberal program, needs to turn down the volume on all the evangelical nonsense (all this going around converting everybody, really!), and that he needs to go left theologically, or he will be riding the circuit for conference minimum the rest of his career. The conservative preachers either compromise at that point or leave. What a waste. Can’t the liberals figure out that what they are doing is wrong & is hurting their church?
The conservatives that leave have “learned the trade” by that point, are proven stalwart survivors of the stuff you have to put up with in any church, and have the skills they need to set out on their own. They start their own churches, sometimes with great success, and who needs the old UMC at that point? And hooray for them, no more forced moves in the itinerant ministry, which forces them to leave behind everything they have built for the last four years on the previous assignment. When that happens, usually a liberal comes in behind them and takes full credit for all the improvements in that particular local congregation. And the cycle begins again…
Here is a Q&A I saw on a blog board posted at Perkins seminary a while back:
Q: Why did God create liberals?
A: So there will somebody left around to preach the Sunday after the Rapture.
The Methodist churches will have services as normal the Sunday morning after the rapture. Will anyone be surprised they were left behind?