Remnant mentality

I Timothy is the way the church is to be ordered and function and in II Timothy you have the apostasy and everything just winds up in complete disarray, departed from Paul’s doctrine; departed into the doctrines of devils.

That’s the way church history begins when the Scripture ends. Instead of II Timothy being the last of Paul’s epistles, he puts two more epistles after it (Titus and Philemon), says Richard Jordan.

In other words, when you see the church in complete apostasy, departed from the faith, what are you supposed to do? Well, that’s where Titus comes in.

The first chapter, Paul says, “You need to go out and rebuke sharply those people who are departing from the faith that they may be sound in their doctrine and not turn away from the truth.”

What you have in Titus is the remnant; what life is going to be in the apostate era. I’ve tried to make the point that the 500 years of influence of the Protestant Reformation, really the Protestant Revolt—only Catholicism thinks of it as a reformation--is over.

It wasn’t long after that thing got going with Martin Luther that it was clear they weren’t going to reform anything; they were going to revolt against, and what the Protestant Revolt did was it broke the back of the power of the Roman Church and really caused the Reformation to be a revolution.

The social, economic, spiritual impact on literature, culture, every part of life—all of what we call Western civilization came about as a result of the Protestant Revolt and that cycle has now really come to an end.

What was a revolt that had a blazing history has smoldered out into nothing. We’re going to live now, going forward, in the absence of what for 500 years controlled Western history.

Those cycles run in 80-year cycles, but they also run in 500-year cycles. History is a fascinating thing. It has that cyclical nature to it. All of that is coming to a head right now, so what’s the future going to be like?

If you want to know, look back at the last time that season showed up. If you look at life before the Protestant Revolt, there was ecclesiastical tyranny, but there were people just like us there all along.

They were a scattered-out people. The Waldensians, the Albigensians, the Cathars. Those are descriptions of people gathered together in localities, most of the time away from the great urban areas, and they did it for their own safety.

They were in danger because of their beliefs--if they got into the Catholic areas--and you had this remnant-mentality all over.

Here's a post from 2018 and will have a new article tomorrow:

“The world Timothy ministered in is the one we’re heading for,” Preacher Richard Jordan explained recently to a large crowd of young preachers.

“We’re in a transition period right now; you still have guys like me around. Timothy and Paul did not face the type of apostasized Christianity we’ve faced in the past; they faced a pagan world that thought like what our world is heading for. The apostasy of Christendumb has had 2,000 years to develop itself. That’s what’s crumbling.

“II Timothy 3:13-14 says, [13] But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.
[14] But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them;

“You see how he says, ‘But continue thou’? We’re not in verse 13, we’re in verse 14. We’re going to live in a world that’s like verse 13, but Paul’s telling us what we’re to do in that world.

“What do you first have to do? Learn it. As you learn it, it will give you assurance. Assurance doesn’t come because you talk yourself into it. Assurance comes from the truth of God’s Word taking root in your heart. As Paul says, ‘Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught.’

“II Timothy 3:15 says, [15] And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

“That salvation is not initial salvation and justification unto eternal life; that’s salvation from the problem of verse 13; from the apostasy in the chapter. Context is king. There’s all kind of salvations in the Bible.

“In I Timothy 4, Paul warns, [1] Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;
[2] Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;

“He tells Timothy in the last verse, ‘[16] Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.

“Paul’s saying, ‘Pay attention to the doctrine, because in doing so, you’ll save yourself and them that hear thee.' He’s not talking about getting saved from hell; he’s talking about being saved from the apostasy. The salvation here is from the apostasy and from being led away.

“By the way, at this point Timothy had a lot of Scripture. I read a thing the other day where a guy’s saying, ‘Well, we know that in the New Testament times they didn’t have any concept of a canon of scripture.’ I thought, ‘That fellow fell off a stump and hit his head.’ But that’s what they all tell you: ‘Oh, it wasn’t until the 4^th and 5^th century when the canon…’

“Listen, your New Testament scriptures were written, collated together, copied and distributed before 70 A.D. That’s what the evidence in the Scripture says. If Peter can talk about all of Paul’s epistles in II Peter 3, don’t you think people had them? Sure they did.

“You think the church at Thessalonica sent the original manuscripts to the church at Ephesus to read? Well, if you do, you fell off a stump and hit your head.

“Paul tells the Corinthians, ‘[37] If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.’ There were prophets in those churches who could identify, ‘That’s scripture and that’s not.’ They had a mechanism to do that.

“Your Bible didn’t come along as an afterthought of a bunch of mossy-backed religious prelates somewhere who couldn’t figure out whether Jesus was God or Mary was His mother. That’s the same crowd that says they ‘fixed’ your bible.

“That’s the same crowd that tells you the Church gave you your bible. It’s all backwards. You know what it is? It’s all religious nonsense and fortunately it’s something that the wintertime is allowing to be pushed away. Things disintegrate in the fall and in the wintertime you clear the ground. We’re seeing the ground being cleared about us.

“It’s the economic stuff, social stuff, arts and culture stuff being swept away too. You remember how in the mid-’70s the ‘Blue Laws’ that said you couldn’t be open on Sunday suddenly came crashing down in the space of a year?

“The reason something like that falls so quickly is the underpinning of it is gone. We’ve got laws nobody understands why we have them for so then it’s, ‘Let’s just get rid of it.’ You’re seeing that happen in our culture now where kids today know nothing about the founding of our country or its history. Your kids are blanks to what America used to be. All of that comes crashing down in the wintertime.”