As Paul tells us about the unbelievers left behind at the Rapture, God literally sends them a strong delusion. They want a lie so God says, “Okay, I’ll send you a lie. In fact, I’ll send you THE liar and THE ultimate lie.”
Jordan says, “In order to get Israel to buy into that they have to depart so fully from the truth to the lie program. Israel isn’t going to receive the Antichrist if they follow the truth God gave them, but they will depart so completely that the lie seems like the truth.
“I mean you imagine II Thess. 2:4: ‘Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.’
“Here’s how he does that. He’s going to substitute the truth of the Creator
for the creature as being God. Where’s the temple of God? It’s in Jerusalem.
“By the way, that’s a great verse to tell you the Antichrist isn’t going to come from the Vatican. He’s the profaned prince, as Ezekiel calls him, and he takes over in Jerusalem. But imagine having this character go in and sit in the temple. You see God had a throne in the temple where He sat. It was between the cherubim on the mercy seat over the Ark of the Covenant. This guy’s going to go into the throne room of the temple and sit there and say, ‘I’m the Creator.’
“Now for them to buy into that they’re going to be so spiritually blinded, departed from the faith so thoroughly that that’s all going to make sense to them. That’s how thoroughly deceptive this character’s going to be.
“The fundamental way he’ll do that is by demonstrating himself to be God by transitioning from the man of sin to the son of perdition by way of that resurrection.
"As the verse says, “that man of sin be revealed, that son of perdition.’ That’s a two-stage revelation of the Antichrist. Those are two very important titles and the third one is in verse 8 where he’s called ‘that Wicked,’ and you see that’s got a capital ‘W’ because it’s a proper name. That’s one of the names of the Antichrist.
“There are a couple of dozen specific names given to the Antichrist in Scripture. These are three of the most powerful ones because they describe him. Psalm 10 ends by identifying ‘that wicked one, that man of the earth.’ It’s a whole psalm about the rise and career of the Antichrist.
“It’s a psalm about him oppressing the poor and the poor there are those people who can’t buy or sell specifically because they didn’t take the mark of the beast. They’re the poor in Matthew 25 when it says ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat. I was naked and you gave me clothes.’ The reason for those things has to do with the persecution the Antichrist will be putting on some people in that specific period of time in the last days.
“Rev. 11:8 says, ‘And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.’ Notice that Jerusalem has become spiritually equivalent to Sodom and Egypt. That’s not a compliment. Spiritually they’ve become, as Rev. 18 says, ‘The hold of every fowl and unclean birds (spirits).’ This is the center where the Antichrist is going to come and set up his throne.
“What I want you to see is who it is that leads in the killing of these two witnesses. Well, it’s the beast but he’s described in an interesting way. ‘That ascends out of the bottomless pit.’ Now the dudes in the bottomless pit are, well, there not humans. And yet here, when he looks at the Antichrist, he’s been transformed into something that is beyond just a human experience.
“In chapter 17 he’s identified as the beast that ascends out of the bottomless pit. There gets be some rather extraordinary, if I try to be polite about it, activities involved in the career of this guy.
“How is it that he, in the middle of his life, becomes the beast that ascends out of the bottomless pit? If you come over to chapter 13 you’ll see this character. What John’s going to do here is amplify on who this beast is that you read about in chapter 11 and 12.
“Revelation 13:1 says, ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’
“In chapter six when he shows up, he’s only got one crown and now he’s got 10 of them. By this time in his career he’s gone out and taken over the ten kings that were there and he’s now sitting as the ruler of the government in that region.
“The chapter goes on, ‘[2] And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.[3] And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.’
“Now if you’re mortally wounded and then that wound is healed . . . if you
come down to verse 11-13 it says, ‘And I beheld another beast (this one will be called the false prophet in chapter 19) and he had two horns.’
“So this beast, this false prophet, is going to come along, and through the doctrine he promotes, is going to cause the world to worship. Now who do you worship? Don’t you worship God? The false prophet is going to preach a message that causes people to worship the first beast—the Antichrist.
“Notice the basis for the worship of that first beast is this deadly wound gets healed. The basis isn’t that he was wounded; it’s that he got over the deadly wound.
“Verse 13 says, ‘And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.’ Notice this guy is a miracle worker. Nobody’s gonna look at the miracles and say they were charlatans. He’s literally going to be able to . . . we read the verse in II Thessalonians about ‘lying wonders.’ Wonders that are designed to deceive. So he deceives them that dwell in the earth by means of those miracles which he had power to do.
(Editor’s note: To be continued . . .)
No comments:
Post a Comment