The Last Days Of The Church XXIII

 It’s no surprise that those who are lovers of themselves, proud, blasphemers, unholy, unloving, and without self-control are likewise brutal and despisers of good. Few people in the world can be more savage and vicious than a believer whose preconceived notions you’ve challenged in some form or fashion. It’s not that they attempt to debate the topic in question or present their side and allow for an opposing view; they believe what they believe, and if you dare say otherwise, even if you have the Biblical foundation to do so and their opinion is antithetical to scripture, Ichabod to you.

While we’re Ichaboding each other over wearing a wedding band is a salvific issue and the determining factor as to whether you will hear “well done” or “depart from Me,” the enemy is hard at work dismantling the church brick by brick from within.

I’ve always been a reader. Ever since I learned to read in English, I was constantly on the hunt for a book I could get my hands on. The only caveat is that it had to be cheap. There was a local run-down thrift store in our neighborhood, and although the things they had on offer looked like the contents of a homeless person’s garbage bag, they did have a bin of five-cent books that I’d riffle through every couple of weeks. It was on such an occasion that I picked up a book called The Manchurian Candidate for no other reason than it was the cleanest book in the bin, and none of the pages stuck together.

If you’ve never read it, it’s a novel about the highborn son of a political family who gets brainwashed by communists to be an unwitting assassin. What’s happening in many places passing for seminaries today is on par. The only difference is that it’s not Communists doing the brainwashing but individuals whose singular function is to muddy the waters, detract from the supremacy of Christ and use all manner of tertiary issues as wedges to divide and separate the household of faith.

It’s easy to spot those who are among us but not of us. When they can’t win the argument on the merits, when they can’t point to the Bible and say I believe what I believe because it says so in the Word, they revert to personal ad hominem attacks and pivot, shifting the discussion to something other than the original topic. They can’t defend their position biblically, so they resort to nitpicking the delivery or focusing on appearance, all to save face and not have to admit that they might have been wrong.

When you refuse to see it their way or challenge their perception of something, all the niceties evaporate, and the fake smiles disappear, only to be replaced with sneers and eye rolls. If you doubt that believers can be brutal, all one needs to do is look back on church history to see what some supposed believers did to other believers because they disagreed on some doctrinal point or another. If having someone burned at the stake isn’t considered brutal, then I don’t know what is.

Yes, believers, brothers, and sisters with whom you broke bread and had fellowship can become brutal to the point of calling for your demise if the truth of the gospel is no longer their ideal but rather some tertiary issue to which they’ve glommed on and are willing to defend at all costs.

If you think being shunned by a community or your own family is the pinnacle of brutality, you’re blessed because you’ve been spared the horror of some of the things that go on in certain churches. Nothing is off-limits when it comes to protecting the golden goose of a well-oiled money-generating machine the likes of which some churches have become, whether it’s character assassination, underhanded dealings, threats, lawsuits, smear campaigns, and even less savory things that men will resort to in their zeal.

Although Jesus said that no one is good but One, and that is God, and Paul echoed the statement by reminding the Romans that there is none righteous, this does not mean that we cannot define good or cannot discern the difference between good and evil.

Insisting that we cannot know what good is because no one is good is a copout and a justification for accepting and tolerating things we know to be demonstrably evil. Paul warns that those of the last days' church will be despisers of good, and as though the signs weren’t already plentiful, this would be another sign of the times.

The clearest example of this, and one that is objectively undeniable, is the push by leaders and pastors of various denominations to embrace the murder of the innocent via abortion and seeing nothing wrong or evil in the practice thereof. This is the very definition of men being despisers of good, and it’s not limited to this one thing either.

When men are unholy, they are predisposed to despise the good, making allowances for it, practicing it, encouraging it, validating it, and celebrating it. Their embracing of evil is always couched in some delusional notion of love, and they are quick to lash out against anyone who refuses to go along or agree with their ideology.

Ask anyone with a modicum of morals, ethics, values, or empathy, regardless of religious leaning, if it’s okay to murder a baby, and they will say no without delay or having to consider the question. The same cannot be said of many currently sitting in pulpits pretending to be ambassadors of Christ and teachers of the ways of God.

This isn’t some future event at some future time but something the household of faith is currently contending with. Though few might want to acknowledge it, the enemy is gaining ground, and more and more spiritual leaders acquiesce to such evils because their purpose is not the truth but rather their own material successes and earthly comforts.

Even though Jesus said we would be hated for His name’s sake, many today are doing their best to avoid being hated. If being a despiser of good is a prerequisite for being loved by the world, so be it. That countless thousands continue to follow these men’s teachings is just as troubling as the fact that such men have risen to such prominent positions within the church.

To make matters worse, these selfsame despisers of good attack those defending it with all the vitriol they can muster, whether it’s because they don’t want to be exposed for the vapid ghouls that they are or because they want to silence any opposition to their narrative.

Being aware that such individuals exist within the church prevents us from being surprised by their attacks or by what they say and do. Disheartening as it might be to be attacked by those you assumed would be on your side, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Jude 4, “For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.”

How they were able to creep in unnoticed is yet another vexing question we must ponder because this presupposes that those tasked with watching for the wolves that would come to tear the sheep asunder weren’t doing their duty and failed in their mission. By any metric, the modern-day church is a mess, yet this selfsame church insists they will be the means by which great revival will sweep the world from sea to shining sea. Make it make sense.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.