Researcher L.A.Marzulli discusses how a recent string of events validates notions of a coming great deception, as foretold in ancient prophecies. He cited the Myanmar cyclone, the Chinese earthquake, and other natural disasters, along with the Middle East tensions as being indicators that we're living in the time prophesied by Ezekiel, and in the Book of Revelation.
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Monday, May 7, 2012
Ichabod Revisited
Commentary by Roger Oakland
www.understandthetimes.org
www.understandthetimes.org
Several years ago, I wrote a commentary that created a huge controversy. Some who read the commentary took it personally and thought I had written the article to specifically fire a missile over the bow of the leadership I was most familiar with. While I can see now why they would come to this conclusion, when I wrote the commentary, this was not my objective. I was trying to wake these leaders up so they would recognize the error of their way, repent, get things right, and be a lighthouse in these Last Days.
Sometimes God speaks to his servants to warn others. Certainly, this is proven over and over again through the testimony of the Old Testament prophets. Sometimes those who were being warned listened, but in most cases, they did not. Judgment always followed.
I wrote Ichabod in 2007 because I was compelled (I believe by the Holy Spirit) to warn many that I knew and loved about the apostasy that has now swept so many denominations and other groups. In many cases, these groups have now sold out to the ecumenical movement that leads to Rome and the One World religion.
Rather than Christian leaders and pastors recognizing that the Holy Spirit had departed from many churches and denominations, they themselves were swallowed up by strong delusion, and the march towards apostasy continued. Few have been bold enough to say anything because they do not want to rock the boat.
As we near the end of 2011, we will make one more plea for those who still believe they are serving God, when instead they are abandoning His Word either through their actions or their silence or both. This is why we are republishing the commentary Ichabod.
Maybe there is still time for some to wake up.
ICHABOD REVISITED
The Bible calls Satan the great deceiver. To be deceived means to be led away from the truth without knowing it. If the person being deceived knew he or she was being deceived, then deception would not have occurred. One must believe that one is not deceived in order to be deceived. It is just that simple.
Understanding deception has a lot to do with having a proper perspective. Instead of having God’s perspective, the person being deceived has his own perspective. A human desire for power and the potential to be proud are two of the greatest barriers that prevent us from seeing God’s perspective. Satan’s plan is to deceive mankind by working on human weaknesses. He knows what he is doing.
In Proverbs we read: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” Think about this for a moment. The Bible states, “the wages of sin is death.” So what may seem right can lead to death because the consequence of sin is death. Do you see how deception works?
Sometimes it is beneficial to take time to do a reality check on our lives. For example, a Christian can be confident that he or she is serving the Lord when he is actually deceived. This is because what we do “seems right” in our eyes.
Not long ago a situation occurred which helped me to see how easily one can be deceived by not having the proper perspective. I was looking over a series of slides on my digital camera. I had taken these photos while traveling around England. Without knowing what I had done I had somehow expanded the view on one particular slide from the normal view to a view that was 10 times enlarged. As I was flipping through the slides, I could not figure out what the scene was that I had photographed.
Moving the picture around on the screen from left to right and top to bottom did not help. It was the most frustrating experience. Nothing that I could see in the photo seemed to give me a clue where I had taken this photo. Suddenly, I remembered how to view the slide in the normal unexpanded view. In a second I could see what the picture was and recalled exactly where I had taken it. I just needed the proper perspective.
Perhaps this illustration will be useful to help you see what can happen to human beings, ministries, pastors, and even denominations. It is very easy to go about our lives thinking we are God’s chosen vessels, doing His will, when in fact we are deceived and doing the work of Satan. This is why it is important that we read the Word and give ourselves a reality check from time to time.
When the Glory Has Departed
I know Christian leaders and denominations that started out right but have ended up wrong. This downfall can be predicted in light of church history. God has raised up individuals from time to time to be leaders. As long as these leaders are led by the Holy Spirit and continue in His Word, God’s blessings will be abundant. Sometimes, a pastor will become a leader and a model for many other pastors. Eventually, a fellowship of churches with like-minded pastors may be the result.
This fellowship of pastors teaches the Word of God and the sheep are enlightened and fed. The sheep, because they are learning, love God with all their heart. This love spreads to the horizontal plane, and love is overflowing. The sheep want to tell others about Jesus. It is even possible to have a “Jesus” movement.
However, the passing of time has a way of helping us forget. Perhaps another way of saying this is that Satan hates what God is doing. It doesn’t take long before the fellowship of pastors takes on a different perspective. Some pastors forget from where they came. They were once shepherds with small flocks. As they taught the Word and fed the sheep, the small flocks grew to become mega-churches.
These mega-churches grew to the point that there was no longer a flock - there was a herd. There were so many sheep in the flock that the shepherd felt he had no choice but to manage the flock by turning the church into a corporation.
As everyone knows, churches, when they become corporations, have to operate like a corporation not a church. In the world, people in corporations are always looking for position. The only way one can be successful in climbing the corporate ladder is to be loyal to the corporation and the corporate president.
Here lies a problem—when a Christian becomes more loyal to a man than to the Son of Man, spirituality can soon turn into carnality. Carnality that is further driven by the obsession for power, position, and possession often is the perfect recipe for disaster. What once may have been a wonderful Spirit-led church now becomes a machine that simply goes through the motions. Everything looks like it is working. However, the machine is broken.
When the Spirit Departs
In the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit inspired the writer of I Samuel to give us an example of what happened to the children of Israel in days past.
Israel, as a nation, knew the glory of God's presence among them. The children of Israel prospered and became strong as they followed the Lord. However, Israel turned from God by making wrong choices. Eventually, the people of Israel came to the place where the presence of God was no longer among them. The glory of God had departed.
In a desperate attempt to win a battle with the Philistine army, Israel devised a plan. The leaders actually believed that if they took the ark of the covenant with them to battle that God was obligated to lead them to victory.
Such was not the case. God did not fight for Israel. Israel was defeated, and the Philistines triumphed and even took the ark. When a messenger returned from the battlefield with the sad news that the army was defeated, the ark was captured, and the two sons of Eli were dead, Eli fell backward off his chair, broke his neck, and died.
Eli’s daughter-in-law, the wife of one of the sons killed in battle, was pregnant. When she heard the news that her husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law were dead, she went into labor. She gave birth to a son, but she died during the delivery. The Bible states that the woman who was acting as the midwife named the son—Ichabod. “Ichabod” means the glory has departed.
There are other examples in Scripture of what happens when the Spirit of God departs from a man. For example in 1 Samuel 16: 14 we read, “But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him.” Or, remember the story of Samson. Once empowered by the Spirit there came a time when the LORD departed from him, and Samson was not even aware that it happened.
A Biblical Solution
The Bible paints a grim scenario with regard to what happens when the Spirit of God departs, doesn’t it? Well, I have some good news. There is a solution.
I believe that such a scenario could be turned around. God wants His servants to finish the race. He does not take joy in seeing them defeated. Do you recall the words of Jesus when He spoke to the church at Ephesus as recorded in Revelation 2? While the members of the church were noted for saying what was right, in their zeal to be right, they were wrong. In fact, it almost seems as if the Spirit of God had departed from their midst.
This can be deduced by reading what Jesus said. He was warning that He would depart from their midst. Jesus said that the church at Ephesus had “left their first love” and that they needed to “repent” and “return to the place” where they had once been. That means they had departed and did not know it.
Jesus said He would remove the “candlestick” if they did not repent. Clearly, Scripture interprets this to mean that Jesus would remove His presence from the church of Ephesus. Did that mean He was about to write “Ichabod” above the door of the church?
The Spirit of God points us to the Word of God. The Word, Jesus said, is the truth. What we do with the truth is entirely up to us. We can choose to obey or to disobey.
I would pray that every Christian would sincerely ask God for His perspective of where we are and what we are doing. Don’t rely upon the praises of man or the fear of man as a spiritual barometer.
When we stand before the throne, all the things we did in the flesh will burn like wood and hay. Only those things that were done when we were led by the Spirit will count.
It is all about getting the right perspective, now.
Before it is too late.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
The Hidden Faith of The Founding Fathers
"The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers" by Adullam Films, written & directed by Christian J. Pinto. The full presentation is 3 hours long, and covers the beliefs of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and John Adams. The film also gives a Biblical view of what these men believed, and how their philosophies are acknowledged in Bible prophecy.
Learn more at
http://www.adullamfilms.com/
Learn more at
http://www.adullamfilms.com/
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Strange Fire: The Rise of Gnosticism In The Church
by Travers and Jewel van der Merwe
This is one little book that may save a soul from walking into the error and falsehood so prevalent in our time.
FOREWORD
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10)
Some books are written before their time. This is one such book. It was never our privilege to know Travers van der Merwe but we had heard of his exemplary walk before God and man while on Earth. While battling cancer, a painful ordeal that lasted for many years, Travers and his wife Jewel penned this book. He saw an ancient heresy arising in the modern Christian church and it weighed heavily on his heart.
After the book was completed, it lay dormant for several years. In the meantime much was happening in the Christian church nationally and internationally to confirm that there was a revival going on - not accompanied by repentance and a turning away from dead works - but of Gnosticism.
Gnosticism has a chameleon-like ability to appear like the genuine article, true Christianity, and thus has managed to transform itself to fit the times in countless new wrappings over the centuries. It particularly adapts itself to that place where the ideas of the east and west meet. Whenever eastern mysticism and western rationalism collide, one can find there the seedbed for a pseudo-Gospel that mimics the real thing.
Gnosticism is fool's gold, shiny and beckoning on the surface, yet phoney. Modern Saints are poorly equipped to recognise the counterfeit. Much Gnosticism enters the Church via the popular Christian media, where the real and the false get mixed up in a garbled soup of doctrines and teachings. The rise of the New Age movement, and the extent to which it has permeated Christian thinking, further clouds the issue. How is a Christian to sort out these strange teachings?
When Jewel first sent us the unpublished manuscript for the book it was because we had been asking her for more information about the rise of modern Gnosticism. The book, she said, would answer many of our questions. Indeed, it did. So many, in fact, that we then began pressing her to let us publish the book. We believed that it should be widely disseminated and read by Christians who were seeking to understand their growing uneasiness with the "new" moves of God, signs and wonders, "laughing revivals", and ecumenical unity.
Strange Fire is a brief, easy-to-understand book that explains how to tell the Truth from the Lie. It doesn't dwell on the spectacular manifestations, but concisely illustrates modern Gnosticism. The real gold of the Gospel is presented in such a way that it outshines the fool's gold of Gnosticism. Readers will have no doubt as to which is which. This handy tool enables even the unlearned to discern Gnosticism the next time they encounter it.
Lynn & Sarah Leslie; December 1995
To read the entire book, click here:
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Roman Control of America and Her Slaying of it's Leaders
Revelation Ch.17, v3:
"So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns."Revelation Ch.17, v4-5
"And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration."Revelatoin Ch.17, v9
"And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth."Revelation Ch.17, v18
"And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth."
The united states of America has been taken over. The covert coup d'état to destroy the states and bring about a Global dictatorship took place right under everyones noses since the 19th Century. One of the final attacks to finish off America once and for all is the engineered economic collapse to come between December 2010-July 2011 onwards.
For more info about the Jesuits and the Papacy control over the World:
Invisible Empire Series
Free e-books on the subject
Vatican Library (click the link, then scroll down for the free e-books)
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