The Last Days Of The Church XVI

 As we go down the list of the things we will see within the church during the last days, Paul points to men being unholy as one of the signs that will be evident. God never expected the godless to be holy, but He does expect His children to exhibit holiness. This is yet another one of those terms that have fallen out of favor with the contemporary church, accompanied by others such as repentance, sanctification, and righteousness, which, if spoken of or insisted upon, will have the pastor answering to the elder board for having hurt the feelings of one individual or another.

That the message of the cross, the gospel of Christ, and the Word of God were meant to be inoffensive, all-inclusive, permissive, and innocuous is yet another lie that has crept within the household of faith and declared to be the truth. God did not take my feelings or yours into account when He inspired the writing of the Bible via the Holy Spirit. He didn’t give a second thought about how it would make men feel when He called them wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. God’s not looking for your affirmation, approval, or vote, so He doesn’t have to soften blows or try His best to make you feel warm and fuzzy.

He is God! The Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the omnipotent, omniscient Creator of all that is and who spoke the universe into being.

1 Peter 1:13-16, “Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ, as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance; but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, ‘Be holy, for I am holy.”’

Given that God said to be holy and that the men of the last days claiming to be of God will be unholy, we would do well to define what unholy means before going any further. Some synonyms for unholy are profane, indecent, absent shame, blind to modesty, blind to decency, lacking purity, or absent of righteousness. The unholy of the last days won’t be one of these things but an amalgam, a mixture of all of them, whether profaning the Word of God by declaring it said something it didn’t while being shameless in doing so, living in open sin while calling themselves men of God, lacking decency, modesty or righteousness, or just working against the plan and will of God believing themselves to be above the Word.

What Paul declared as future tense is now present tense, and you don’t have to look far to find a handful of examples from any given denomination. You wouldn’t have to go back far. A few weeks would suffice, and if you counted on your fingers how many elders, children’s pastors, senior pastors, evangelists, and ministry leaders were arrested for bonafide crimes, you’d need more fingers.

Every new day seems to be another heartbreak, another black eye, another individual exposed for the unholy conduct in which they have engaged, thereby bringing shame to the household of faith.

If Paul were writing about the godless in his letter, there would have been nothing revelatory in saying that during the last days, they would be unholy. You don’t say! The godless will continue to be godless, and the unholy, unholy. Will water also continue to be wet, and fire continue to burn?

The tragedy of it is that he was writing about the church of the last days and all the festering boils, putrid wounds, and spreading stains that would be evident during the last days, not only from within but also from without. The godless are noticing the hypocrisy of those who beat their chests, insisting that they are godly. The godless are wrinkling their noses as pastor after pastor gets exposed for being an unrepentant pervert or gets arrested for doing things even most of the godless cringe away from. Tell me we’re living in the last days without telling me we’re living in the last days.

That the guy who kissed dating goodbye also ended up kissing Jesus goodbye, or that one of the lead singers for Hillsong, Hillsonged himself into the mud from which he’d claimed to have been set free are the tame ones. It gets worse, much worse, and it’s not hard to find the stories, confessions, half-hearted apologies, and outright renunciations of Christ as Lord.

Before the other denominations begin to point out that this is a charismatic problem, you would do well to do some research and see how many progenies of some of the most well-known names in your denomination are avowed atheists who are doing their utmost to turn the young and impressionable away from the light and the truth of Christ as the only way to the Father.

Whether Baptist, Methodist, Reformed, Pentecostal, Lutheran, or any other of the major denominations one could think of, the unholy aren’t just a negligible minority. There is a groundswell of godless people insisting that they serve God, even though the god they serve is of their own making. To such individuals, Jesus is whatever they want Him to be, and the deeper the depravity of their hearts, the more depraved their definition of Jesus. They are irreverent to the utmost, profane, and lacking righteousness or purity, yet there they stand, insisting that their Jesus is just as divine as the Christ who said, go and sin no more.

This is the natural decline and end result of a church, denomination, or generation whose singular pursuit is watering down the gospel and nullifying the need for repentance and the blood of Jesus to make one clean, whole, and regenerate.  

An unholy man or woman will always prioritize their wants, desires, and lusts over the will and Word of God. Their identity is not in Christ but in some other thing to which they have surrendered and are now ruled by their predilections in perpetuity. While the Word of God tells us that without holiness, no one will see the Lord, holiness is the furthest thing from their hearts and minds, and if anyone dares to point to Scripture, they mock, scoff, and obfuscate. They will always find others who will justify their rebellion and celebrate their sin because birds of a feather flock together, and those who have been given over seem to find each other readily enough.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.