The Lord Jesus Christ didn’t wear robes or religious paraphernalia; He wore the common clothing of His day when He walked the earth. He didn’t stand out in the crowd based on the way His outfit looked or how His hair was cut.
Jesus had short-cropped black hair like any Jew in His
day would have had, like anybody in the world of His day had, explains Richard
Jordan. If He was sitting in this crowd tonight there wouldn’t be any way to
point Him out.
You know one of the ways you know that? From the Garden
of Gethsemane, the night before He was crucified when Judas was going to betray
Him. How did Judas betray Him? They said, “I’ll take you out and I’ll point Him
out to you.” It wasn’t, “He’s the guy wearing the funny clown outfit.”
Christ was so common, so blended into the crowd that Judas
had to go over and plant a smacker on His cheek, kiss Him, before they were
sure they had the right guy. He was just like everybody else.
*****
II Kings 10: [20] And Jehu said, Proclaim a solemn assembly for
Baal. And they proclaimed it.
[21] And Jehu sent through all Israel: and all the
worshippers of Baal came, so that there was not a man left that came not. And
they came into the house of Baal; and the house of Baal was full from one end
to another.
[22] And he said unto him that was over the vestry,
Bring forth vestments for all the worshippers of Baal. And he brought them
forth vestments.
You see how it says “and the house of Baal was full from
one end to another”? They got a big church building going, and they’ve got them
all inside the house of Baal where the place was full—there wasn’t an open spot
to to sit anywhere. “Our attendance is up, the crowds are big, offerings are
going through the roof, we got everybody going, this is exciting, look what
God’s doing!” Does that sound familiar to you?
The verse says, “Bring forth vestments for all the
worshippers of Baal.” Vestments are the special clothing; they were long robes.
Hence, you have in today’s church vernacular the “vestibule.”
I Kings 19:18: [18] Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all
the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed
him.
The word “Baal” means bull and when you go into the house,
bowing down is real important, as well as kissing. You with me?
Hosea 13: [1] When Ephraim spake trembling, he exalted himself
in Israel; but when he offended in Baal, he died.
[2] And now they sin more and more, and have made
them molten images of their silver, and idols according to their own
understanding, all of it the work of the craftsmen: they say of them, Let the
men that sacrifice kiss the calves.
Kiss the ring, kiss the hand. This is where all that
stuff in religion comes from!
*****
Lucifer’s job was to go out and lead creation in worship
of Almighty God but he was lifted up by pride and decided he wanted to be like
the Most High; take God’s place.
He developed him a system whereby he would have a
mediator who would be worshipped and worshipping that mediator would be to
worship Satan. Satan has one who will go and orchestrate the worship of his
mediator, the Antichrist, and that’s the false prophet.
What you’ve got here is the functioning of the unholy
trinity to counterfeit the activity of God the Father, God the Son and God the
Holy Ghost.
Just like the Antichrist is a counterfeit of Jesus
Christ, the false prophet’s function will be to counterfeit the function and
activity of the Holy Spirit, and he’s going to go out and seek to cause people
to worship the beast whose deadly wound was healed.
Revelation 13: [14] And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by
the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast;
saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the
beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.
The basis of the worship of the Antichrist is going to be
his miraculous resurrection. You see there’s an absolute fascinating counterfeiting
of what went on in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the early Acts period in our
Lord’s ministry and His empowering of His disciples.
There’s this deadly wound and it’s healed and he lives
from it and the false prophet takes this event of the death, and then the
resurrection of the Antichrist—he takes this event in earth’s coming human
history and then reduces it to a religious system and what he does is he
develops a NEW religion.
Of course, there’s been a religious system in place prior
to this point. In Revelation 17 there’s this woman, this religious system,
clothed in scarlet and purple, that starts out back with Nimrod (Genesis 10-11)
and goes all the way through human history and she rides on the back of the
beast for a period of time. But what people forget is that then the beast turns
around and destroys the woman and what he does is he takes all the sham, and all
the various forms . . .
In the Bible, the religious system is called Baal worship
and what the Antichrist does, when the middle of that week comes, he develops
and sets forth, through his death and resurrection, a new, ultimate form of
Baal worship and negates all that went before, destroying it, registering it
null and void, setting up his OWN religion.
II Thessalonians 2: [3] Let no man deceive you by any means: for that
day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin
be revealed, the son of perdition;
[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.
He’s going to do away with all of the other religions of
the world “so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that
he is God.”
He’s going to do away with all of the other religions of the
world and establish a NEW one based solely and completely upon him.
Now, that religion is a new one and yet it’s not really new.
Unfortunately, because of a lack of real right division of Scripture, most
Christians, even dispensationalists, when you talk about the religion of the
Antichrist, they immediately identify a church. What church is that? Rome.
Martin Luther, John Calvin, Zwingli, Bullinger, all those
great reformers, they saw the church and then they saw Rome and Rome was the
Antichrist and the pope, and anything associated with him, was the Antichrist.
I mean, Luther said of the pope sitting in his day, “He’s
the one; he’s the Antichrist!” and of course we know better than that. They didn’t
understand too much about what prophecy was about or the distinction between
the Body of Christ and Israel and so forth, so there’s a lot of things that get
“brought over.”
The point is when the Antichrist comes, the pope will
have been involved in there, pitching with the guy, as well as the Buddhists
and Muslims and all the rest, and the Antichrist’s just going to wipe the whole
bunch off and set up a new one; set up his own and there will be his own church
and all the world is going to hail HIM.
And this new, ultimate form—there’s a mindset in
religion. The mindset goes along like, “You know, you’ve got what you’ve got
and it’s an ancient idea, but we have a more recent revelation from God.” You
go out and study world religions and that’s the idea.
If you go study the way they think, you see they don’t
have an absolute authority—they don’t look at life the way you and I do with
the Bible being the authority. They look at life where their attitude, their
thinking, their education, their scholarship, their tradition, the vastness of
the subject, is the authority.
Chicago’s a great center of theological discussion. One
of the great centers in the world is at the University of Chicago, only
challenged by Union in New York and then you have to go to Germany to find where
the resident theologians of the day live.
But if you sit down and talk to these people about
personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ like you and I understand it, you begin
to think, “Well, what exactly is it that you guys believe?!”
What you find out is they have a philosophical commitment
to a philosophy of life and it’s different from the way you and I understand
it. The reason it’s different is the
source book and the basis of authority.
We’re called “Bible thumpers,” which I don’t mind that
term, and then they get way over to, “You actually believe you know where it is
and what it is and you have the audacity to say you have it in your own language?!”
and they just go, “Wow, you’re cuckoo!”
For most of the world it’s not a living thing inside of
them; it’s a piece of paper that they read and recite and think when they did
it, they did good and they can go home feeling good about themselves.
All that stuff’s going to be wiped off the scene and the
false prophet is going to establish for the Antichrist, in his name, a system—he’s
going to take his resurrection and use it to codify and reduce it down to a
religious system and the system is going to be called Baal worship.
The majority of Protestant prophecy preachers in our day forget about Israel and identify everything as popery. The fact is that when the Antichrist establishes his church under the leadership of the false prophet, it isn’t going to be Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Islam—he’s going to wipe those off and take things from them and amalgamate them all into this new religion.
No comments:
Post a Comment