SEEING CLEARLY IN THESE LAST DAYS ~ EXPOSING HYPOCRISY ~ Part 33

 

The world is enthralled with and enticed by wealth, power, fame, worldly wisdom, and beauty. Whether positively or negatively, people are influenced by these fleeting and elusive qualities in others. Even if one possesses them to any extent in this life, that one will find chasing after them akin to falling into a bottomless pit of the never-ending search for satisfaction. The writer of Ecclesiastes, wise King Solomon, had more than most in this world. Yet, when all was said and done in his pursuit of personal pleasure rather than God’s glory, he concludes: All is vanity! In his futile attempts to be satisfied in this life apart from God, he realized the emptiness of these idols of the heart.

 

Before I was saved, I remember coveting any number of ‘things’ I thought would make me happy. If only I had this or that, were this or that, could do this or that, I would then be happy. I would learn in time that this was a lie I had told myself after having believed worldly philosophies. “This or that” in this world never brings true happiness or satisfaction. It never fulfills that deep hunger and thirst in our hearts for something more than this life. Each of us has our ‘if only this or that’ scenarios. Anything that promises to fulfill this deep void in our lives, apart from God, are lies from the pit of hell.

 

Isaiah 55:1-3—"Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and delight yourself in abundance. Incline your ear and come to Me. Listen, that you may live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you.” To know true satisfaction and fulfillment in this life you have to be willing to lay down your pride and come to Jesus. You must be willing. It cost Christ His very life to extend this invitation to those He willingly died for. We have so much excess and abundance in our day, the words “wine and milk” might be lost to a modern audience. “Wine and milk” are symbols for abundance, satisfaction and prosperity…true abundance, satisfaction, and prosperity. Wise old Solomon says: “Cease striving after the wind.” In other words, stop chasing after success and other materialistic things that don’t satisfy and just don’t matter in the big eternal picture. It is all empty and elusive.

 

When things glisten and sparkle before our eyes tempting us to long for them, we must remember that they aren’t always as they seem. In fact, they rarely are. For instance, what may seem to others like someone living on top of the world may be, in reality, a façade that is all smoke and mirrors. According to definitions.net, ‘smoke and mirrors’ is a metaphor for a deceptive, fraudulent or unconvincing explanation or description. The source of the name is based on magicians’ illusions.

 

The word hypocrite in the Greek is the word hypokrites which means “an actor” or “a stage player.” It literally translates as “an interpreter from underneath” which speaks of ancient Greek actors who wore masks and spoke from underneath the mask. Eventually, this word came to refer to anyone who was wearing a figurative mask and was pretending to be someone or something they were not. This same meaning made its way to medieval France and England, where it showed up as ‘ypocrite’ in 13th-century religious texts referring to someone who pretends to be morally good or pious in order to deceive others.

 

They say that people trained to recognize counterfeit money study real money so that when they see a counterfeit, they can spot it immediately. When any present-day movement comes along purporting to be something ‘new and improved’ do your eyes and ears of discernment go up, Beloved? Or do you seem to buy everything hook, line, and sinker as long as it uses the ‘Christianese’ language to describe its contribution to the kingdom? How do we learn to recognize what is real, what is true from what is false? All around us, we are being bombarded with lies and enticed with empty promises. How do we develop a taste for that which satisfies the deepest longings of our hearts? Even if we don’t recognize it, the deepest longings of our hearts are spiritual and eternal—for God Himself. Discernment comes from studying the truth. Often people don’t see issues clearly and are then easily misled because they don’t think biblically. We can easily see this today when Critical Race Theory and the Social Justice ‘gospel’ are being embraced and eagerly received into many evangelical churches.

 

Some believers have an unusual measure of discernment as a special grace gift. This spiritual gift, sadly, is often not widely welcomed in the church. Others are given the same grace to exercise their gifts to the Body. But like all the gifts, we are all to develop and practice some measure of each of the areas of the gifts of the Spirit. Discernment is needed by all. The psalmist says in Psalm 119:66—Teach me good judgment and knowledge. The word for judgment here means to “taste”. It is the same word used in Psalm 34:8—O taste and see that the LORD is good; how blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him! Everyone knows what it is to eat and to drink for life’s sustenance. This is why this picture is used often in Scripture. ‘Good judgment’ or discernment (according to Ligonier.org) is “the ability to make discriminating judgments, to distinguish between, and recognize the moral implications of different situations and course of action. It includes the ability to “weigh up” and assess the moral and spiritual status of individuals, groups, and even movements.” New believers, spiritual babes in Christ, are not unlike physical babies who are known to put anything and everything in their mouths as they crawl along exploring their new worlds. Good discipleship comes alongside the new believer and says, “This is not good for you; eat this instead.”

 

In John 2:24-25, Jesus is seen not entrusting himself to those who had supposedly believed in His name merely by observing the signs He was doing BECAUSE He knew what was in a man. This is astonishing and must perplex many in the church. Jesus was exercising discernment. He didn’t wholeheartedly commit Himself to everyone who named His name but only to those who were genuinely converted. He made a ‘judgment’ that would be more than frowned upon today. He knew that enthusiasm for the spectacular was not true genuine saving faith. Giving intellectual assent is not what it means to know Christ. The Good Shepherd knows His sheep and they know Him. (This refers to an intimate relationship one with the other.) The Lord gave the prophet Samuel a lesson in discernment when He told him, “God does not see as man sees, since man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

I do subscribe to the interpretation that Christians will be raptured before the Antichrist enters the final world stage during the time of the Tribulation. That’s not to say that things won’t get really bad before that time; Christians need to be discerning as the spirit of antichrist continues to ramp up his all-out assault on the truth. People will continue to be saved even during the Tribulation. However, as it has always been, in those days, most living in this world will be deceived by the smoke and mirrors of Antichrist. Even now, there are many who profess Christ who subscribe to the ideologies of the apostate religious system which will eventually align itself with the last one-world church. The world’s ideology is always inclusive pointing to the wide road that leads to heaven with many who are walking thereon. Biblical theology is exclusive always pointing to the only narrow road where few are walking thereon (comparatively speaking in relation to the world history’s population).

 

We have been looking at John’s vision pertaining to this woman who rides the beast in Chapter 17 of Revelation. This woman is clothed in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, precious stones and pearls carrying a gold cup in her hand. Those who are discerning can see she wears the masks of wealth, power, fame, worldly wisdom, and beauty that is attractive to this world. And she comes in the name of religion.

 

Christ has a bride, the Church, referred to as a ‘mystery’ (See Ephesians 3:1-21; 5:23-32). Therefore, it is no surprise that Antichrist has his own bride, “Mystery, Babylon the Great”, the false world religious system. Christ’s bride is referred to as the holy city, new Jerusalem in Chapter 21 of Revelation. Verses 9-10 of Chapter 21 says: Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and spoke with me, saying, “Come here, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. She has made herself ready as a bride adorned for her husband. Having the very glory of God, her brilliance is like a very costly stone, as a stone of crystal-clear jasper (a completely clear diamond which is rare*). Her brilliance is ‘like’ a perfect diamond. But this diamond reflects not the light of the sun but the Light of the Son, the very glory of God! The New Jerusalem is the capital city of heaven where the saints will live.

 

*According to Sotheby’s, only seven flawless white diamonds of more than 100 carats have ever been sold at auction. One hundred-carat diamonds as a rule are exceedingly rare; one hundred-carat D flawless are even more rare.

 

Revelation 17:3-5—And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness; and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of blasphemous names, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and of the unclean things of her immorality, and on her forehead a name was written, a mystery, “BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”

 

Those who know the Lamb can clearly see the contrast between the bride of the Lamb and the bride of Antichrist. Those who are attracted to the world and live for themselves are drawn by Satan to the false religious system of Antichrist and are part of his bride. Those who have denounced the world (with all its faux charms), and have denied themselves, are drawn by the Father, attracted to the righteousness of the Son, and made part of His bride.  The bride of the Lamb is made up of those whom the Father foreknew and predestined to be in Christ from the foundation of the world.

 

1 John 2:18—“Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.” Someone once told me that it stands to reason that Satan, while knowing his time is short but not knowing the exact hour, has always had his man ready behind the world’s curtain to take center stage when his brief moment to ‘shine’ comes. Antichrist means “against Christ”. There have been many antichrists, but the Antichrist is yet to come. He will deny the Father and the Son, not acknowledge Jesus, and will deny that Jesus came in the flesh. Other phrases have been associated with him in Scripture—“the abomination of desolation” is an act of abomination by the Antichrist that renders the Temple unclean (Daniel 9:27, 11:31, 12:11, Matthew 24:15), “the man of lawlessness”, and “the son of perdition” (2 Thessalonians 2:3).

 

Christians today live in an age that knows some persecution, but in that day, persecution will be fierce. Antichrist will oppose Christ and His followers more than anyone else in history. When we look back at the history of the holocaust (by most, far removed from any real experiential understanding), we can only imagine what it would have been like to be Jewish in Hitler’s day. That was in my grandmother’s day; in my day, it has been relatively easy to be a Christian…in this country. It is for that reason, the Church (for the most part) has grown far too soft in her vigilance to be about her Master’s business while she waits and watches for His return. For that reason, many will be taken by surprise in the final days.

 

We know that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, and his comrades are really wolves in sheep’s clothing. It is not unthinkable, then, that Antichrist will come most likely claiming to be the Messiah whose sole purpose is to claim the world as his rightful kingdom with hidden motives to destroy all followers of Jesus Christ and the nation of Israel. The majority of all living on the earth will believe him. Why? Because they had not studied the truth so as to recognize the counterfeit as a phony.

 

The question that came to my mind in this end-time drama was: Why would anyone buy the lie? Hasn’t the world and even those in the apostate church been told the truth enough? Christians have never eschewed end-time scenarios. ‘Left Behind’ multimedia franchises elicited very little pushback from the secular world. Why? Is it because it was just viewed as mere entertainment by the multitudes? Why would anyone buy the lie of Antichrist? Why does anyone buy lies at all? Because those who have no love for the truth, love lies. Lies feed the self-life of humanity’s depraved nature. Lies stroke the flesh by telling it what it wants to hear. What does ‘self’ want to hear? “You will have peace, peace—protection, pleasure, and prosperity.” That’s what we all want to believe. Why? We were made for that, but only as it is found in Christ. Before the Fall, because it was part of God’s perfect plan, it was reality. Because of the Fall, only those who have put their faith and trust in Christ will have it forever…eternal peace in Christ. For now, believers have the peace of God spiritually; even while living in a world full of chaos. One day, it will be reality both spiritually and physically.

 

For now, the god of this world, Satan, loves to whisper in the ears of those with unsettling convictions, “Shh…go back to sleep. Everything will be okay. This won’t hurt a bit.” In a soothing voice echoing past musings (“indeed, hath God said?”), he can even sing his lullaby without a baby ever questioning the lyrics…when the wind blows, the cradle will rock, when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all. Have you ever listened to those lyrics? Crazy, for sure.

 

The bough is going to break! While the multitudes are being lulled to sleep with a false sense of peace and safety, literally all hell will break forth upon the earth as God unleashes His fury in judgment upon the world while Satan fights for earthly reign over his kingdom (that all along has been under God’s sovereign control). 1 Thessalonians 5:2-3—For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night. While they are saying, “Peace and safety!” then destruction will come upon them suddenly like labor pains upon a woman with child, and they will not escape. The passage in 1 Thessalonians goes on to contrast those who live in the darkness with the sons of light and sons of day. Children of the Light don’t sleep as others do, but they are alert and sober knowing that God has not destined His children for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through Jesus Christ, who dies for us, so that whether we are awake (alive) or asleep (already dead), we will live together with Him.

 

The mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. Working behind the scenes for now, the spirit of antichrist has not yet been revealed to the world in the man who fully embodies this spirit. When he comes, he will wear a mask, disguised as the Messiah bringing peace to the world. When he is revealed, he will come in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish BECAUSE they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. For this reason, God will send upon them a deluding influence SO THAT they will believe what is false, IN ORDER THAT they all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in wickedness.  (2 Thessalonians 2:9-11 - Emphasis mine)

 

John 3:19-21 says: This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.

 

2 Corinthians 4:3-4—And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

 

Those who love their sin and Satan’s lies rather than God’s truth “will receive severe, divine recompense” (John MacArthur commentary on 2 Thessalonians 2:9-11). Their judgment is so sure that God will seal their fate with a “deluding influence” so that they continue to believe what is false. Accepting evil as good and a lie as the truth (which sounds an awful lot like what is going on in our world today), God uses Satan and Antichrist as His instruments of judgment.

 

Romans 1 speaks of God’s wrath on unrighteousness saying that those who do not see fit to acknowledge God, He will give them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful, and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

 

God, the righteous Judge, is standing at the door ready to be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power, when He comes to be glorified in His saints on that day, and to be marveled at among all who have believed. May God open our eyes to the truth as we stay focused on Him.