(#2 Session 6) Day 6 - Living in the Last Days

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my bi-monthly blog!

In our previous session, we saw how God’s greatest creation - mankind - became very bad with the Fall of Man. We then did a quick overview of the Kingdom of Man that emerged under the demonic influence of Satan - the Spirit of the Antichrist - which is opposed to the Kingdom of God led by the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of Christ. This demonic kingdom will ultimately bring together the State and Church in the end times in the form of an evil world power that will attempt to destroy Israel while the Church turns apostate and persecute those who remain faithful to Christ. The Bible speaks of a revived Roman-Babylonian Empire and Babylon the Prostitute to describe this evil end-time State and Church.

Let us now look at the key events from the time of Jesus’ departure and birth of the Church until His soon return on the Day of the Lord. Here, it is not wrong to say that we have been living in the LAST DAYS all this while since this entire 2,000-year period is literally 2 days - the Fifth and Sixth Days of Creation - before Jesus returns to usher in the Seventh or Sabbath Day rest of His Millennial Rule, according to what the Creation Account tells us. So what should we expect in these last days?

First, Jesus warned us that there would be deception, war, famine, and natural calamities and plagues, but that these were only “the beginning of birth pains.” These signs correspond to the opening of the first 4 Seals mentioned in Rev 6. When we take these signs together with the Fifth Seal concerning the persecution of the saints, we see that they are what the Old Testament prophets had foretold earlier as God’s way of disciplining His people and judging His enemies. As the Day of the Lord draws nearer, we can expect these events to happen more frequently and increase in severity but Jesus also cautioned us that we should not be alarmed, as such things must happen but the end was still to come. Unfortunately, over the past 2,000 years, many have pointed to these signs and cried wolf that Jesus was coming. As a result, many in the Church today are numbed and do not see the urgency of this message when God’s Rhema is finally telling us now that the end of the end times is indeed here! May we see and correctly understand the signs of the times as they are happening today.

Second, the persecution of the saints mentioned earlier is the other key feature of the last days. As the early Church writer Tertullian put it, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Jesus had warned us of this on many occasions. Salvation may be a free gift of grace by faith, but it does not come cheap - Christ paid with His blood on the Cross and many of us will be called to do likewise. How different this Gospel sounds compared to what we hear among some churches today! At the opening of the Fifth Seal in Rev 6:9-11, John heard the cries for justice of those who had died for their faith. They were given white robes and told “to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters, were killed just as they had been.” God is keeping count and is faithful to avenge them in His perfect time, when the full number of those who died for Him has come in.

Third, fullness of the Gentiles. This is different from the full number of those who died for their faith. We have already discussed before what the fullness of the Gentiles means. The point that I want to highlight here is that the fullness of the Gentiles, once reached, marks the end of the summer harvest, the Age of Grace or Church age, and the beginning of the 7-year Tribulation. Let me briefly explain - in a prophecy given to Daniel, we were told that the full cycle of God’s sacred time was made up of seventy ‘sevens’ or Weeks - here, one ‘seven’ or week refers to 7 years. This is made up of 69 Weeks from the time of the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 444 BC until the time of Christ’s crucifixion in 33 AD, and a final 70th Week - the 7-year Tribulation. If we recall the Seven Feasts of God, the first 69 weeks ended with the Spring Feasts marking Jesus’ first coming and birth of the Church, while the 70th week will end with the Fall Feasts when Jesus returns. For the past 2,000 years, we have been living in that summer interval between the 69th and 70th weeks of Daniel’s prophecy. But once the fullness of the Gentiles is reached, the world harvest will end as God turns His attention back to Israel with the sealing of those Jews who belong to Him and to the final events that will take place before Jesus returns. There will be NO MORE Gentile harvest from this point on - as Jeremiah had so vividly described it in the verse above.

So what happens to the Church? As mentioned earlier, what awaits it is not a rapturous return to Christ but rather a rupturing of an unimaginable scale, resulting in widespread persecution of the true saints of God until the full number of those who are to die for their faith is in. Revelations speak of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language … who have come out of the great tribulation [through martyrdom]”; of how the dragon (Satan) would wage war against “those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus”; how the beast (Antichrist) “was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them”; how Babylon the Prostitute (apostate church) “was drunk with the blood of God’s holy people, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus”; and therefore how “this calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of God’s people … [for] Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.”

Link to presentation.

(#1 Session 6) Day 6 - Rule of the Antichrist

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my bi-monthly blog!

God created Man on the Sixth Day to rule over Creation. However, what was originally intended to be “very good” became very bad with the Fall of Man.

Previously, we mentioned the emergence of a Satan-inspired kingdom of man beginning with the Tower of Babel. We later saw how this kingdom - in the form of the ancient empires of Babylon and Rome - destroyed God’s Holy City Jerusalem and exiled His people twice. In the end times, Satan will raise up an evil world power - a revived Roman-Babylonian empire - to destroy Israel, even as he misleads the increasingly apostate Church - Babylon the Prostitute as revealed to John in Revelations - to turn against those who remain faithful to God in the Body of Christ. This kingdom of man that opposes God’s Kingdom and people throughout history was what was revealed to Nebuchadnezzar in a dream 2600 years ago. It is a demonic kingdom working under the spirit of the Antichrist, just as God’s Kingdom is directed by the Spirit of Christ (Holy Spirit).

We see the spirit of the Antichrist at work in the first son of man, Cain, when he murdered his brother. Just as Cain was jealous that God favoured the offering of his brother Abel, Satan (Angel of Light) is jealous that God favoured Man (Lesser Light), God having made us in His image to reflect His divine light/glory. In Nimrod, whose name means “Rebel”, who established the first kingdom of man in Babylon where the Tower of Babel was later built. In Pharaoh, the hardened heart who tried to destroy God’s chosen people, Israel, when they were in Egypt. In Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed the First Temple and exiled the Jews to Babylon. In Herod, who tried to kill the infant Jesus. And in Israel - God’s very chosen nation - whose leaders crucified the Messiah.

Even within the Body of Christ, we saw how, throughout Church history, the divine life brought about by the Holy Spirit characteristic of the Fifth Day of Creation was quickly robbed away by the opposing spirit of the Antichrist characteristic of the Sixth Day. This unholy spirit was already at work among the Apostles - had it not been for the overwhelming power of the Holy Spirit that came upon them during the Pentecost, the natural inclination of the Apostles was to fight among themselves for position and power within Christ’s Kingdom (References). As the hope for Christ’s soon return faded over time and with Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Church became more and more “of this world”. What the Apostles had earlier struggled against - earthly power and politics - became the focus and ambition of the Church as man started to justify their own authority and rule in the name of God. This rule of man within the Kingdom of God culminated in the Great Schism or division in 1054 AD (AM 5013 - marking the beginning of the Sixth Day of Creation), when the Bishop or Pope of Rome declared himself head over all the other key bishops with authority over the entire universal Church. Indeed, Pope Innocent III put forward the famous idea that the Emperor was the moon (lesser light) to the Pope’s sun (greater light), meaning that the Pope ruled not only over the Church but over the earth’s kingdoms and nations. The Kingdom of God has now become the kingdom of this world!

As we approach the end of the Sixth Day of Creation in our generation, we can expect the unholy spirit of the Antichrist that has been working in the kingdoms of man and God to come together to form the rule of the Antichrist - the end-time Roman-Babylonian Empire and Babylon the Prostitute that we mentioned earlier. This joining together of the State and Church has happened before in the Christian Roman Empire, which lasted from the time of Emperor Constantine in 312 AD to 476 AD (in the West) and 1453 AD (in the East - this Eastern kingdom was also known as the Byzantine Empire). Following the fall of Rome, there were efforts to revive the Western Roman Empire (as the Holy Roman Empire) by both the French and Germans, with the Holy Roman Emperors crowned by the Roman Popes of that time. This was followed by Napoleon Bonaparte (1804-1814) and ultimately Adolf Hitler (1933-1945). In Hitler’s Third Reich (“Third Empire”), which he declared would last a thousand years; the Jewish Holocaust where 6 million Jews were slaughtered on this Sixth Day of Creation (incidentally, there are about 6 million Jews in Israel today); and the German Church during that period comprising the apostate Nazi national church and the true “confessing church” (Reference); we were given the clearest glimpse into how the future kingdom of the Antichrist may look like.

Finally, we need to consider the role that Islam and the Muslim countries could play in this end-time demonic kingdom - Islam is the dominant religion in those areas occupied by Israel’s former enemies; it is on the rise in Europe; and there are attempts to bring Christianity and Islam together as one religion for the sake of peace.

When we fit all these pieces together, we see the beginnings of the end-time evil empire of the Antichrist.

Link to presentation.

(#5 Session 5) Day 5 - Rhema of the Holy Spirit (The Apostolic Message 3 - Love)

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my bi-monthly blog!

In our last two sessions, we saw how we are to stand in Faith in what Christ has done for us, and to walk in Hope thru the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

But more than that, we are to walk with God in Love for the Body.

When Jesus was with us, He had repeatedly stressed the heart/spirit of the Law - which is Love. This was why He rebuked the religious leaders in His time for their hypocrisy in following the letter but not the spirit of the Law. This was also why Jesus died for our sins - out of love for us. Now, in His final words to His disciples before He was to be crucified (Jn 13-17), Jesus called on them to remain in Him in love and obedience, giving them a new commandment - “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13:34-35). Jesus then prayed for unity not just among the disciples then but for all who would hear and believe in Him in the years to come.

This bond of love uniting all believers was a key teaching of the Apostles. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul spoke of the unity of all believers in Christ and how they should use their freedom in Christ not to continue sinning but to serve one another in love. He rebuked the Corinthians for the quarrels and divisions within the church when it came to matters that required love and unity, dismayed that they were only “united” when it came to tolerating sin.

It was Paul who first coined the term “Body of Christ” to describe this unity bringing together Jew and Gentile, male and female,slave and free, all as equal children of God although different people might have different spiritual giftings and callings, just as a human body had many different parts with their own roles and functions. God’s purpose was that, by serving one another in love and humility, the Body “may be built up … and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:12-13).

However, the Church’s record on this has been far from perfect. Like Israel, the history of the Church has been marked by divisions and internal conflicts and all sorts of other weaknesses and failings from the very beginning. The Protestant Reformation, while restoring key biblical truths to the Body of Christ, created 40 major denominations and over 40,000 independent churches worldwide. We are far from the love and unity that Jesus commanded and prayed for.

Does this mean that God’s purpose for the Church has failed? By no means! What appears to be failure in our eyes is precisely God’s way to bring about His miraculous plan, just as Israel’s apparent failure and rejection of Jesus was according to the very will and mystery of God in Christ. We saw this happening to the early Church where, through developments that were entirely unplanned by men, the Gospel was brought to Judea, Samaria and beyond. The same can be said of the Church the past 2,000 years as it brings the Gospel throughout the world. God’s ways are never our ways.

With this in mind, let us persevere in obeying Christ’s command to love His Body, while resting in Him that the Holy Spirit would rule over the Church. Let us stop acting like the Corinthians, who took pride in arguing among themselves about useless spiritual-sounding topics but behaving as one when it came to matters of the flesh. In particular, let us look beyond our own local church or denomination to embrace God’s people everywhere. I believe that as the Church enters into the Tribulation in the end times, this will be the “finest hour” for the Body of Christ - united not by our human plans or organisation but by the Spirit to walk the way of persecution and the Cross.

One major obstacle to greater Church unity today is the divide between what we call charismatic and non-charismatic churches, between churches that believe in tongues, visions, prophecies, healings and other supernatural works of the Holy Spirit, and those that don’t. Charismatics point to the “dead” faith of the non-charismatic churches and argue that they had abandoned the Spirit behind the Word of God. Non-charismatics, meanwhile, point to the false teachings and practices common among charismatic churches and accuse them of abandoning the Word in favour of the so-called “Spirit”.

By pointing only to the extremes, each side risked throwing away what is of God along with what is not. The reality is that the Spirit and Word are one, just as Jesus and the Word are one. The Spirit speaks to us mainly through the Word and the Word can only be understood and bring forth fruit in our lives through the Spirit. The key therefore is not to reject the things of the Spirit but to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 Jn 4:1), and not to worship the spiritual gifts themselves but understand that these are given to serve the higher purpose of building the Body of Christ, just as the Spirit is given not to draw attention to Himself but to give glory to Christ (Jn 16:13-15).

Ultimately, the love and unity of the Body must bring back together Israel and the Church. The union of Jews and Gentiles as one Body of Christ was the single most important issue in the closing days of Israel and birth of the Church. If I could use an analogy from farming, the seed of the Gospel first sprouted among the Jews 2,000 years ago. However, it would not have made it past the nursery of Israel - which would soon be trampled by the Romans in 70 AD - to bring about the current worldwide harvest of souls had it not been for those Jewish believers then who overcame their own racial and religious prejudices to recognise how God was moving beyond their people and nation.

Today, this bringing together of Gentiles and Jews is again the single most important issue in the closing days of the Church and rebirth of Israel as God’s Millennial Kingdom. We know that the harvest is quickly coming to an end with the fullness of the Gentiles. However, it will not be gathered out of the fields of the Church - which will soon be trampled by the Antichrist - and be brought back into the storehouse of Israel to await the return of our King until we overcome our own spiritual prejudices to recognise the hand of God beyond what we know as the Body of Christ.

Some commentators believe that the Church will be raptured first, leaving behind Israel and the wicked world to suffer during the Tribulation. This perspective goes against the bulk of what the Bible teaches us and more importantly, the very nature of God. It denies the unity of Jews and Gentiles, and the prophetic bond between Israel and the Church that points more to the rupture and exile rather than the rapture and homecoming of the Church. It holds a flawed one-sided view of God and plays down His divine, good and perfect purposes in refining His people through suffering and persecution and the Way of the Cross.

Now, may our Lord who loves us enable us to love Him and our brothers and sisters above all things and even life itself.

Link to presentation.