Misdirection and Apostasy

Believers watching for apostasy to occur outside the Church will miss the real thing since it is operating stealthily inside our congregations.

The New Testament warns of coming apostasy and deceivers. This warning is to the Assembly, the Church composed of Christ’s true followers. It is not a message for outside groups, organizations, society, or the government. Satan is determined to destroy the Body of Christ, not the world system that serves his agenda, and he uses his 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 faux apostles to warn us of the approaching apostasy, only with a twist. His lying agents do not want us to exercise our abilities and discern whether they are false prophets or see their deceptions.

[Photo by Stan Sigawale on Unsplash]

The Devil's charlatans point us to trends, groups, and persons outside the Church. Instead of rooting out the deceivers within, prophetic pretenders and apostolic grifters 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 collapse of the surrounding pagan society as the fulfillment of biblical predictions of apostasy. This is misdirection, and it is quite 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 the Earth is the Kingdom of God. All other nations and civilizations are part of the fallen world order doomed to disappear from the Earth forever.

The Devil is out to destroy the Church. The most effective way to do so is from within with clever lies and distractions. He misleads us so we take our eyes off the ball and spend our time on things that can never produce righteousness such as 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 His Kingdom, you will find yourself holding an empty bag on the day when it truly counts. “Depart from me, you workers of iniquity! I never knew you.”

We are engaged in an existential war, 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 in the first place.

Our mission is to save the world. Only the Church empowered by God's Spirit to preach his Gospel “to all nations” can hope to accomplish that. 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 that he did that we even 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.

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SEE ALSO:

• Overwhelming Flood - (The New Testament warns of a future apostasy caused by deceivers, false prophets, and the Lawless One before the return of Jesus)

• The Danger Within - (The Greatest threat to the church of Jesus is posed by the deceivers who propagate false doctrines and misleading information in the church)

• Famine in the Land - (The contemporary church is plagued by famine for hearing the words of God, but one that is a self-inflicted wound)

{Published originally on the Prophetic Reflections website}