FARMERS JOURNAL Apostasy in the Land -- outlook 2017 ??
Apostasy in the Land
AN ESSAY ON HISTORICAL
TRENDS
R. B. THIEME, JR.
PASTOR,
In times of apostasy
government seeks to control its citizens from the cradle to the grave. Free
men are treated as criminals, and criminals are treated as free men. Freedom
of thought, decision, and speech by which the Gospel and Bible doctrine are
communicated merge into the shadows of tyranny and slavery.
The tentacles of socialism
and bureaucracy strangle and destroy free enterprise. Freedom to succeed or
fail in life through one's own motivation and decisions is neutralized.
The individuals no longer
take the responsibility for their own decisions and actions. Apostasy and
evil, along with dishonesty and hypocrisy, immorality and greed, power lust
and racial prejudice, become the tools of politicians and the dissension of
the hoi polloi.
The heritage of regeneration
is traded for Esau's mess of pottage. The glory of God is exchanged for the
arrogance of the social gospel.
These historical trends
provide a system of temptation luring the born-again believer into that
sphere of emotion combined with arrogance called Christian activism. The
plan of God is buried in the potter's field of whitewashing the devil's
world.
Believers in Jesus Christ
are distracted from God's will, plan, and purpose for the Church Age by
trying to reform Caesar and ignore God. Suddenly God's plan for the believer
is covered with the spider webs of neglect and put in the mothballs of false
doctrine.
Spiritual values related to
Bible doctrine are exchanged for chasing butterflies whose gossamer wings
carry the heavy burden of redistribution of wealth all the way back to the
island of Utopia.
The Supreme Court of Heaven
sends bolts of lightening in the form of the law of volitional
responsibility and divine punitive action to the wayward children of God.
When this punitive suffering
called divine discipline is ignored, and carnality is perpetuated, the
loser-believer marches to the beat of a different drum and gets his bugle
calls form the cacophony of heavy metal and hard rock.
What is the legacy to the
generations of apostasy in this great dispensation called the Church Age?
The sin unto death! They are entombed in the field of spiritual failure
where once that fertile field of metabolized Bible doctrine produced the
remnant according to the election of grace - spiritual mechanics of the plan
of God for the Church.
But now unbroken clods of
human lust bury the loser-believer in the tragedy of lost opportunity for
becoming winner-believers and invisible heroes.
The only bulwark against the
onslaught of apostasy in the land is the believer advancing to spiritual
maturity.
But grow in the grace and
knowledge of our LORD and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory, both now
and to the day of eternity. Amen. (2 Peter 3:18)
*Sic transit gloria mundi. *
"Thus passes away the glory
of the world."
Heaven and earth will pass
away, but My words shall not pass away.
(Matthew 24:35)
R. B.
THIEME, JR., BIBLE MINISTRIES 5139 WEST ALABAMA COPYRIGHT 1994 by R.B. THIEME, JR. All Rights Reserved.
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