What Can Believers Do in Days of Apostasy? / Part 2

Thru the Bible Radio Network
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Unless noted otherwise, all Scripture references
are from the New Scofield Reference Bible.
Printed in the United States of America
1969, Revised 2005

Now all of this is changed. The storm has broken with all of its fury. Though I am not a pessimist (I refuse to be called a pessimist unless the pessimist can be defined as the man who blows out the light the optimist thought he saw in the dark, and I do not want to blow out that light), I do think that we need not let the apostasy take us by surprise. We ought to be able to meet it in this hour in which we are living and to recognize it for what it is.

Our Lord Jesus never did predict phenomenal success for His church. This is the thing He did say:

...When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the
earth? (Luke 18:8)

In the Greek it is “the faith,” and the faith is that body of truth which the apostles have handed down to us. It is not a reference to personal faith, but to belief in the whole body of revealed truth.

The question, “Shall He find the faith on the earth?” is couched in such a way in the Greek that it demands a negative answer. No, He frankly says that He will not find the faith on the earth when He returns. Now I recognize that He is referring to the day when He returns to establish His kingdom, but this hour in which we live is the beginning of that apostasy. So we need to recognize it. We should not let it take us by surprise.

Jude is the book in the New Testament that deals almost exclusively with the apostasy. Jude begins his subject with verse 4:

For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were
before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men…

He warns against these certain men who have crept in unawares. “Ordained” here means they were written of beforehand. This is not something new, Jude says. They were “long beforehand marked out for this condemnation.” We went through a period when theologians said that God was dead. Of course they would say that because they were “ungodly men” and God was not even in their thinking.

…Turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.

A better understood translation would be, “They turned the grace of our God into blatant immorality.” You see, the difference today is the fact that sin, which before was carried on undercover (I’m perfectly willing to admit that there was sin and unbelief in the church before), is today blatant. Immorality has come out in the open. Ministers in our great denominations are saying that adultery, lying, and stealing are perfectly permissible. They have turned the grace of our God into blatant immorality.

A few years ago in Washington, D.C., a minister said, “We liberal churchmen are no longer interested in the fundamental modernist controversy. We do not believe we should even waste our time engaging in it. So far as we are concerned, it makes no difference whether Christ was born of a virgin or not. We don’t even bother to form an opinion on the subject.”

An Arlington, Virginia, minister said, “We have closed our minds to such trivial consideration as the question of the resurrection of Christ. If you fundamentalists wish to believe that nonsense, we have no objection, but we have more important things to preach than the presence or absence of an empty tomb twenty centuries ago.”

A leading minister in Washington, D.C., said flatly, “In our denomination what you call the ‘faith of our Fathers’ is approaching total extinction. Of course a few of the older ministers still cling to the Bible. But among the younger men, the real leaders of our denomination today, I do not know a single one who believes in Christ, or any of the things that you classify as fundamentals.”

Another man said, “We are interested in human life and human destiny on earth. We don’t know or care whether there is a life beyond the grave. We presume there is a God but we know that he will ever be a mystery to us. We do not know or care whether God possesses personality or not. He may be just an impersonal force. Religion means very little, if anything. In the modern world religion has no vital place. The function of the modern ministers is to guide the thinking people along social and economic lines. Morals, like religion, are out of date. The world today requires a new social order. The younger generation won’t need either morals or religion if we create a social order without ignorance or poverty. We are moving in the direction of the elimination of prayer from our services entirely. We still include it occasionally, to please those who are accustomed to it, for prayer is a sort of habit with folks. It takes time to educate them to a realization that it is a hang-over from the superstitious past. We do not teach Bible to our young people. We do not teach them to pray. Our youth program is centered around recreation.”

Friends, at the present moment and for some time now the church has been engaged in a great brainwashing program to absolutely get rid of the Word of God. Now I went to school with some of these fellows, and I know what kind of grades they made, so their intellectual facade is interesting indeed.

It is my feeling that real believers ought to wake up at this hour. What a wonderful hour in which to live! We can still be intelligent and believe the Word of God, believe that Jesus Christ nearly 2000 years ago intruded into history and died on a cross, that He arose again the third day bodily, ascended back to heaven, and that He is alive today. He has sent the Holy Spirit into the
world, and the Holy Spirit has made Him real to multitudes of folk in every walk of life. This is our message, and it is still pertinent for this hour to meet the needs of the human heart.

I feel sorry for these men who have departed from the faith. My heart goes out to apostates, because they are lost without a compass, lost in the dark, lost without knowing where they are going.

Have you ever been lost?

I used to hunt up in the Tehachapi mountains in California. Several years ago a friend and I went up to the Kelso Valley to hunt quail. We parked the car and walked two or three miles, but we did not see a quail. Finally we came to a covey of quail, there must have been 200 birds in it! I have never seen such a large covey – believe me, we were excited. My companion had a heart condition, and he overdid it so he had to return to the car. But I stayed on and followed that covey as they scattered in every direction. As I followed them, I lost sense of time and direction. I didn’t even know where I was. All of a sudden it occurred to me that I was lost. I did not know which direction to go. The foothills of the Tehachapis are rugged country. I climbed to the top of one of the hills and looked around to see if I could recognize some spot.

I give you my word, I couldn’t see a hill, a tree, or anything that looked familiar. At a time like that one has a feeling of fright, so I started out rather hurriedly and walked, I’m sure, for thirty minutes. Suddenly it occurred to me that I must be going in the wrong direction. I could see nothing familiar. I turned around and started off in the opposite direction, thinking I would see something familiar. There was nothing.

Without a compass, without knowing where I was, I became absolutely frightened. Again I climbed to the top of the highest hill in that area and scanned the landscape. Believe me, I prayed to the Lord to get me out of that situation. And as I stood there, I thought how tragic it is to be lost in this world and not know where you are going – to have no compass, no map, no anything. Just lost.

I must have stayed there over an hour praying and wondering. Finally I saw a car coming down a very rough trail. Men got out and started down the road. I called to them, “Have you seen a blue car?”

“Yes, parked up the road about one mile.” That was my direction. I came down off that hill, went up that road, and when I saw my friend – I never have seen anyone that I was as glad to see – there he was sitting, eating lunch.

My friend, today multitudes in this world are lost. And the tragedy of it is they have wrecked their compass, they have mutilated their map, and they don’t know which way to go.

Maybe you are lost.

Well, I am delighted to be able to tell you that this Book, the Bible, is a compass, and it’s a map. It clearly reveals the way to God. In it the Lord Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Multitudes who have been lost in this world have come to Him and found it to be true, and you can find it to be true even in these days of apostasy.

What Can Believers Do?

But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith,
praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God,
looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal
life. And of some have compassion, making a difference; and
others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even
the garment spotted by the flesh. Now unto him that is able to
keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the
presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God,
our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both
now and ever. Amen. (Jude 20 – 25)

When Jude began to write his epistle, he tells us that it was his thought to write on some theme that pertained to our common salvation. I imagine he could have been writing on repentance or redemption or sanctification or even the coming of Christ. But he was detoured by the Holy Spirit to write on the forthcoming apostasy, and he uses frightful terms to speak of it. I am of the opinion that folk in the early church, as they read the Epistle of Jude, found it difficult to believe that the days would come when there would be that kind of an apostasy in the church.

You see, the apostasy is not outside the church. It is on the inside. The severest attack upon the Word of God, upon the Christian faith, and upon the church, is coming from inside the church today. So much so that Charles Lee Smith, who founded the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, said: “The pulpit is doing a much better job than we are doing!” You will no longer see the greatest attack upon the Word of God made in the city square where the soap box orators hold forth – they are pikers. Go to some liberal church today and you will hear the greatest attack upon the Word of God. The Bible is being discredited all across America every Sunday morning.

It was Horatius Bonar, a great saint of the past, who made this statement in light of the little Epistle of Jude: “In some ages evil seems to sleep. In the last days it will awake to full life and activity. It will seize every instrument: the press, the pulpit, the platform.” Today evil has taken over the press; it has taken over the pulpit and the platform. Bonar continues, “It will enlist every science and art – music, sculpture, painting, portrait, philosophy – making them all subservient to its development. The multiplication of crimes, contempt of laws, blasphemies – these are the specimens of the energy of evil.” In this day in which you and I live, these are the things that fill our morning newspaper. There is no use for me to recount ad nauseum the things that are happening in our contemporary society. We are now in the midst of the apostasy.

What can God’s people do? Jude details for us what we as believers can do in days of apostasy. Frankly, these are things we must do if we are to keep our heads above water.

Now it irritates me a little when I’m aboard an airplane, especially when I’m flying over water, to be given those long instructions about what I’m to do in case we ditch. As you know, the stewardess goes through a demonstration, explaining what to do. I was complaining about this to a friend of mine who is a pilot. He said to me, “You’d better listen to those instructions. If you don’t follow them, you’d never get out alive. But you have a chance if you will follow the instructions.”

Jude has given us instructions. He warns us that we are flying over dangerous territory. If we want to survive, these are the things we must do. He mentions seven things that believers can do in days like these in which we are living.

Beginning with verse 20, he says, “But ye, beloved…” Up to this point he has described the apostasy. And, believe me, he paints a dark picture. But now he is speaking to believers. “But
ye, beloved” do these things:

1. Building up yourselves on your most holy faith…

The word “faith” is actually the faith, the body of truth that has been given to us in the Word of God. When the first church came into existence, it is said that they “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine” (Acts 2:42), which was the body of truth that has come down to us in the Word of God. We must build up ourselves in that if we are to stand.

In other words we are to study the Word of God. Since God gave sixty-six books, He meant that we are to study all sixty-six of them – not only the three or four that are our favorites. How many Bible classes go back and forth, teaching John, Romans, and oh, they’ll teach Revelation, but what about the other sixty-three books that are in the Bible? Why don’t we study them? Why don’t we study all of them? My friend, if you are going to build yourself up in your most holy faith, you must have the total Word of God. You can’t build a house without a foundation. And when you get the foundation laid, you will need to put up some timbers to hold the roof, you’ll need sides on it, and of course you’ll want to fix it up on the inside. Friend, you need all sixty-six books of the Bible if you are going to build up yourself on your most holy faith.

Paul and Peter urge us to study the Word of God. Paul in his “swan song” said:

Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15)

We are to study! And he added:

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. (2 Timothy 3:16)

In other words, the recourse that you and I have in these days is the Word of God.

The reason that many fall by the wayside is that the Seed fell among stones. It didn’t get deeply rooted. The Word of God is the Seed, and unless you study all the Word of God, getting down in the good rich soil, you are not going to become a very healthy looking plant. And it won’t be long until you are trampled down and burned out by the sun. To stand in days like these you need to be rooted in the Word of God.

Now Peter in his second Epistle (he is writing of the apostasy, just as did Paul) says:

We have also a more sure word of prophecy, unto which ye
do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a
dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in
your hearts; knowing this first, that no prophecy of the
scripture is of any private interpretation. (2 Peter 1:19, 20)

Don’t pull out just one or two verses and think you have it, my friend. That is the tragedy of Bible study today – drawing out a few verses here and a few verses there and building a system. Why not take it all? Certainly there are parts of the Word of God that you are not going to like. It steps on your toes, or it runs counter to current philosophy, but it is necessary to build up ourselves on our most holy faith.

In other words, when you get into days of apostasy, the compass and the chart that you have is the Word of God. This is the reason I have built my ministry entirely upon the Word of God. I believe it is our only hope.

Now these pastors who say they do not believe nor teach the Bible – I am wondering how many people are interested in their liberal message today. In spite of days of apostasy, I find that there is a great heart-hunger on the part of many folk for the Word of God. They want a sure word from God Himself in this hour of uncertainty. They want to know what He says.

At the turn of the century there was a movement in the church away from preaching and teaching the Bible. I remember as a boy going to church I knew nothing, and I knew nothing after I’d been to church because the Word of God was never preached. It was always a service built on emotion or it was a book review or it had to do with some sort of an entertainment. As a result, we have in America a “Christian” civilization of the most biblically illiterate people who ever have been on top side of the earth. The common man in Germany after the Reformation knew more about the Word of God than does the average man in America today.

The tragedy is that even believers are ignorant of the Bible. In this hour of apostasy, God’s people need not only to say they believe in the Word of God from cover to cover, but they need to know what is between the covers. In this day of confusion and compromise you need to build up yourself in the most holy faith by a serious study of the Word of God.

Let me remind you that the Bible is unique. It is a Book that is different from any other. It is written by men and they include in it their own personalities – God did not disturb that at all – but He so guided them that when they had finished, God had gotten through His message to man without error.

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