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Apostasy: The Great Falling Away
00:05:14
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| Here's the thing, is one of the most important things to understand. | |
| I was on a show and they said, well, what do you think are the, what would you say is the most strong signs of the end times, you know, as far as prophecy. | |
| And one, I said, well, Israel, number one. | |
| Number two, the apostasy. | |
| This is one where every single day you're getting a prophetic sign of the end times every day. | |
| It's all around us. | |
| It comes from 2 Thessalonians where Paul says this. | |
| We request you, brethren, regarding the coming of our Lord, Jesus the Messiah, and our gathering together to him, that you don't be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed by a spirit or a message or a letter, as if from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. | |
| Let no man deceive you by any means. | |
| For the day shall not come, that day shall not come, except there come first a falling away, and that the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition. | |
| Well, that's the Antichrist. | |
| But it's linking together a great falling away, and then it says the Antichrist. | |
| So that kind of goes with what we were saying before. | |
| It's linked to the spirit of the Antichrist. | |
| Great falling away, the word in the Bible is apostia, from which we get apostasy. | |
| Now, there's something, this is so big, the Bible, I mean, it's a great falling away, and it's so big that it has to affect everything that it's so important we understand what this means. | |
| I'm going to do something that's not normally done, and that is find apostasy in the Hebrew scriptures because it's going to give us a glimpse of what it is. | |
| Because when Paul writes this, he's Jewish, and he knows what apostasy is because it's from the, he saw it happen with Israel in the days of Israel. | |
| So here's the key. | |
| Remember, sometimes I talk about the Septuagint, which is that Greek translation. | |
| It's a decoder because it takes the Hebrew, puts it into Greek, then you look in the New Testament and you see the Greek, you go back to there, you can see what the Hebrew is. | |
| So there are times in the Septuagint, this is the Old Testament, Greek, where it actually uses the word apostasy, talking about ancient Israel. | |
| So that's going to give us a picture of what it is. | |
| And one of the times it uses it is in 2 Chronicles when it talks about the king named Manasseh, very horrible king. | |
| And it says he basically led Israel in apostasy. | |
| So what was the apostasy? | |
| It gives us details. | |
| And this is going to be linked to the end. | |
| One, he worshiped foreign gods. | |
| He turned away from God. | |
| He led other people to do the same. | |
| He desecrated the temple, spirit of desecration. | |
| He practiced the occult and witchcraft, an increase of witchcraft, consulted mediums. | |
| He shed innocent blood, filled Jerusalem with blood, persecuted the righteous or the prophets. | |
| He seduced Israel to do evil. | |
| He turned them away from what they knew. | |
| It's a nation that knew God, turned away from God, got into the occult, got into idols, got into evil, got into sexual immorality. | |
| And so that is what it's saying is going to happen in the last days. | |
| That's the reference point. | |
| But notice something pretty amazing because you have Paul saying that there's going to be a great apostasy. | |
| Well, apostasy means falling away. | |
| But back then, who was even a believer? | |
| I mean, back then, it was a few thousand people. | |
| So think about what this is saying. | |
| It's a prophecy saying there's going to be a great falling away all over the earth. | |
| But back then, everybody was pagan. | |
| So what is in there already is saying that the gospel is going to affect the whole world, that all around the world, they're going to be nations, there's going to be a culture with biblical foundations all over the world. | |
| Europe, America, South America, all around the world, biblical foundation. | |
| That's in this because you can't fall away if you're not somewhere first. | |
| So it's an amazing thing for Paul to say this to begin with. | |
| So what it means is that all over the world, there's going to be a moving away from what the world once knew. | |
| The nations that once knew God, there's going to be a giant giant turning away from it. | |
| So it means that what happened to Israel, how as Israel turned away, one nation, it's going to be superimposed on the whole world. | |
| It's going to be like the last days of Israel. | |
| Now, look at the harbinger. | |
| It's going to happen all over the world. | |
| Now, what does the word apostasy actually mean? | |
| It comes from two words, apo, stasia. | |
| Okay, so you got apo and stasia. | |
| Apo means to go away from. | |
| Okay, that's where you get falling. | |
| Stasia means the stand. | |
| It has two meanings, but the first meaning is the stand. | |
| So what apostasy means, you are moving away from your stand. | |
| You're moving away from where you stood before. | |
| So one of the things that this says here is that the church, number one, is going to be moving away from its stand. | |
| And so you see this, you see apostasy in the mainline churches moving away from the gospel, moving away from, you know, look at what happened with also not only the church, but, quote, Christian societies, America. | |
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Moving Away from the Word
00:01:50
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| We spoke about the 1960s, the start of the moving away, moving away from the word in the school, a prayer in the school. | |
| You know, back then, it was so shocking, you know, people don't realize this. | |
| President Kennedy got on the air after the Supreme Court said no prayer or no Bible in the school. | |
| He got on the air, or it was a press conference, to assure everybody, because everybody was panicking back then, that we wouldn't have prayer in school. | |
| We couldn't take that. | |
| He said, don't panic, basically, is what he said. | |
| You know, it's not the end of the world. | |
| Well, today, the idea of having prayer in school or the Bible in school is radical. | |
| Back then, it shows you how far we came. | |
| Back then, it wasn't, you know, in the 19th century, you had the Supreme Court said America is a Christian nation. | |
| So you got the culture moving. | |
| Then you have churches moving away from the stand. | |
| And generally, you see these liberal churches and what they're doing is they're just a few years behind the culture. | |
| I mean, basically, what they did, they made a mistake years ago. | |
| They said, well, the Bible is not exactly the word of God. | |
| Once they did that, that was it. | |
| Once they moved away from the word, there was nothing to hold on to anymore. | |
| That's why no matter what the culture does, those churches are right behind it. | |
| Okay, you know, killing children, unborn children. | |
| All right, give us a few years. | |
| We'll start calling that a great thing. | |
| You know, abominations, you know, the destruction of marriage, give us a few years and we'll start calling that a great thing. | |
| Because they moved away from their stand, apostasia. | |
| Once you move away from the word, you move away from everything. | |
| That's how it starts. | |
| That's why it's so important. | |
| Europe did this in Germany. | |
| It was called higher criticism. | |
| They came up with a thing saying the Bible is really not the Bible. | |
| The word of God is not the word of God. | |
| Well, guess what also came out of Germany? | |
| Nazism. | |