Misdirection and Apostasy

Believers watching for the Apostasy to occur outside the Church will miss the real thing because it is operating stealthily within our congregations.

The New Testament warns of coming apostasy and deceivers. This warning is to the Church composed of Christ’s true followers. It is not a message for outside groups, organizations, society, or governing authorities. Satan is determined to destroy the Body of Christ, not the world system that serves his agenda, and he uses human agents in the Church to deceive as many believers as possible.

Satan is clever. He plots and schemes to exploit even scriptural truth to distract and mislead us. He sends his false prophets and apostles to warn us of the approaching apostasy, only with a twist. His lying agents do not want us to exercise our abilities to discern whether they are false prophets or to see their deceptions.

[Signpost - Photo by Stan Sigawale (Fiji) on Unsplash]

The Devil's charlatans point to trends, groups, and individuals outside of the Church. Instead of exposing the deceivers within, prophetic pretenders tell us to beware of the politician, the cultural leader, the Hollywood entertainer, or the “Woke” propagandists in the Mass Media.

Rather than actual apostasy in our churches, false teachers point to the moral decay of the surrounding pagan society as the fulfillment of biblical predictions about coming apostasy. This is misdirection, and it is deliberate.

Society may be declining morally, but that is not apostasy. A culture under the dominion of sin and Satan cannot depart from a faith that it never held or abandon the true God with whom it never walked. The only “Christian nation” on Earth is the Kingdom of God. All other nations and civilizations are part of the fallen world order that is doomed to disappear from the Earth forever when Jesus returns.

The most effective way to destroy the Church is to do so from within with clever lies and distractions. Satan misleads us so we take our eyes off the ball and spend our time on things that can never produce righteousness, including social reformation, “engaging the culture,” partisan politics, and other forms of “perishing meat.”

No existing nation, culture, political ideology, or form of government will survive the arrival of Jesus when he gathers all nations before him for judgment. They will all perish from the Earth. If you invest your resources in the ways and institutions of this world rather than the Kingdom of God, you will find yourself holding an empty bag on the day when it counts the most. “Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness! I never knew you.”

We are engaged in an existential war, but one that is not about saving democracy, Western Civilization, America, taking over the “seven mountains of culture,” or recovering some supposed societal ideal from the past that never existed.

Our mission is to save humanity. Only the Church empowered by God's Spirit to preach His Gospel “to all nations” can hope to accomplish this. We become lights in this dark world when we walk the same cruciform path that Jesus did. It is by our daily taking up the Cross, denying ourselves, and preaching the same Gospel as Jesus did, that we begin to advance God’s Kingdom.

Believers watching for apostasy and deception outside the Church will be among the first overtaken by false teachings and apostasy operating within the Body of Christ. Do not be fooled by the misdirection being peddled by today’s faux prophets, self-appointed apostles, and evangelical political activists who have hoodwinked too many of us already with their damnable lies. Satan is waging war on the saints, not the surrounding world (“We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the Evil One”).

[PDF Copy]

SEE ALSO:

• Howling Imposters - (The New Testament warns repeatedly of coming deceivers and false prophets who will cause many to depart from the faith)

• Stand Fast in the Tradition - (To avoid deception and apostasy, believers must cling to the apostolic traditions, lest they drift away)

• Famine in the Land - (The contemporary church suffers from a famine for hearing the words of God, but it is a self-inflicted wound)

• The Spirit of Antichrist - (The Antichrist Spirit works to destroy the church from within, especially through deception propagated by false teachers and other deceivers – 1 John 2:18-22)