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Anti-Christianity is the employment of every means, of anything that appears to work, including the power of God if available, to enable ourselves and certain other people of our choice to enjoy a secure, happy, and successful life. We take for granted that it is morally right and God’s will for people, especially us and our loved ones, to be happy and healthy now and to enjoy "nice" things in this world. Our goal is our own betterment and sometimes the betterment of others. Also we would like to have as much fun and money as possible.
True Christianity is found in seeking God in order to work with Him to accomplish His goals in our own life and in the lives of others. We must lean as completely as possible on our ever-increasing union with God in order to determine what God’s methods and goals are, not taking for granted what we are to do or how we are to do it. We seek God because we love Him and desire to glorify Him.
God’s wrath is on Antichrist because the antichrist spirit is man making himself God, man preserving his individuality against God, man striving to use what God has given him—and God Himself if possible—in order to gain security, pleasure, and achievement.
Before the peoples of the centers of civilization become fully aware that the plagues of the last days are coming from God’s hand they will persecute viciously any who would dare suggest it is sin which is causing their problems. When the inhabitants of the cities finally recognize that the plagues and disasters of the end-time judgments are coming from God they will curse God and blaspheme His name. People will band together against God and His saints, becoming part of the adversary, Satan. The wicked will be the body of Antichrist.
Indeed, God does plan to make people happy and prosperous for eternity but only as part of Himself. Sometimes it is necessary for us to be unhappy and restrained, perhaps for a long period of time as we measure time, in order for us to attain the happiness and prosperity that come as we are part of God. Any gain we make that is not part of Christ is loss to Christ.
But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. (Philippians 3:7)
The individual who attains security, happiness, status, fame, ability, health, power, fulfillment, apart from union with God through Christ, who accomplishes anything apart from Christ, is a potential antichrist. If he does not set aside all he is, all he has accomplished, becoming nothing in order that he may be born again in Christ, he never will see the Kingdom of God. God will not receive him. He is another god and will dwell in eternal night. He is a source of doom to himself and those whom he influences.
To overcome Antichrist is to take God’s side against man making himself God—against our own determination to become God, to be like God apart from union with God, to maintain our own way against God. The human being who becomes angry with God, whether or not he is a Christian, is of Antichrist. He must repent of this grievous sin, humbling himself and asking God to forgive him for such blasphemy.
Part of the end-time judgments has to do with blood, with the turning of water to blood. This is because of the blood-guiltiness of mankind.
All mankind shares in the blood-guiltiness of the human race. Some of us have gorged ourselves while others have starved. We have been warm while others have frozen. We have gone to war and slain multitudes of people. We have received the knowledge of Christ from the Gospel while others have perished in ignorance. We have stood by and permitted Hitler to slay six million Jewish people. We have done little while the infants forming in the womb have been aborted.
The blood of the innocent cries to God from the ground.
The only way in which any human being can wash the blood from his hands is to offer his body to God a living sacrifice to use however God chooses. None of us can meet all the needs of people. But as we present ourselves to God, God makes use of us according to His wisdom. When we follow God completely, with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength we are free from blood-guiltiness. Otherwise God holds us accountable for the sufferings of the poor and needy of mankind.
The sealed remnant and the great multitude of the redeemed, as we understand it, are God’s Israel, His royal priesthood. The smaller nations that are saved from destruction during the Day of Wrath are those that have not been part of the Antichrist system. Some of the surviving nations will be ushered into eternal life because they have helped the Lord’s witnesses during the days of Antichrist’s persecution of the saints. They will be governed by the royal priesthood.
The difference between the sealed remnant and the great multitude of the redeemed is that the sealed remnant are God’s bondservants. They not only have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, and have overcome Antichrist, but in addition have pressed into the heavenly romance. They have entered an eternal experience of serving and loving the Lord. The multitude of the redeemed do not attain to this place of service, love, and rest while in this world, but they do repent of their sins and resist the seductions of Antichrist during the great tribulation.
The sealed remnant are spared some of the more severe judgments, as symbolized by the omission of the tribe of Dan (judge).
The multitude stand true as martyrs in the hour of their testing but the sealed remnant sing and dance in the height of Zion during the darkest of hours. This is because they, like the Apostle Paul, count their own life as nothing, seeking only to live by the Lord Jesus as He lives by the Father.
The key to washing our hands of the blood of the innocent, to being a part of the sealed remnant, to serving God and being a source of help to many during the great tribulation, is found in Revelation 14:12,13:
Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.
The antichrist spirit in each one of us is our self-will and self-centeredness. We want to be a god like the true God but not as part of Him. We desire to maintain our individuality, our own will, our own being, apart from God.
God desires to remove the antichrist spirit from us. He accomplishes this by bringing us into situations that demand much patience. It is in the patient waiting on the will of Christ that the antichrist spirit of self-will is destroyed.
This is why the Scripture says, after describing the torments of those who succumb to Antichrist, "Here is the patience of the saints."
Meanwhile we must keep the commandments of God. We must, through the help we gain in prayer, do those things Christ has commanded in the Gospels and through the Epistles of the Apostles. We must make it our duty to love God, to love one another, to refrain from every uncleanness, from sorcery, from violence, from drunkenness. We must put our flesh to death by the Spirit of God. We must do all these things through faith in Christ, continually seeking His face, abiding in Him, doing His will, confessing His name.
The exhortation of Antichrist is that we live, that we accomplish much in this world, that we make a name for ourselves, that we prosper.
It is at this point in history, the time of man loving himself and contemplating his potential to govern his world, that those who die in the Lord are blessed.
Why are they blessed? Because they have turned away from the antichrist spirit and have yielded themselves to Christ. They have abandoned their own life so He may live. They have become crucified with Christ so He may live in them.
They are delivered from blood-guiltiness. They are delivered from the antichrist spirit. How? By dying in the Lord.
The term "henceforth" means from the time mankind is tempted to make itself like God—from that time, those who die in the Lord are supremely blessed.
They enter into rest during the end-time judgments.
. . . and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble: . . . (Habakkuk 3:16).
Their works follow them because it is not they who are working but the Father and the Son through the Spirit of God who are working in them. They have entered the secret place of God, into the cleft of the Rock.
There has been a marked change in the spiritual environment over the past forty years. At some point there has entered a fullness of God that does not seem to have been present previously, a move from the spiritual fulfillment of the feast of Pentecost to the spiritual fulfillment of the feast of Tabernacles.
It may be true also that a spiritual darkness in which no man can work has come upon us or is close to coming upon us. We believe that from this time forward, "from henceforth," the ability of the believers to "do things for God" will be overcome, either by violence or by deception, and only those who enter rest in God will be able to stand and bear fruit.
We would like to comment once more concerning the "faith" movement. We have noted that those who advocate getting one’s way by faith stress that the Bible is Jesus, that the living Word and the written Word are one and the same.
It seems so right to "stand upon the Word," to declare what the Scriptures state and maintain that such will become reality provided we think it, speak it, hold to it. This approach sounds so positive, so victorious, so hopeful.
But there surely is death in the pot. The Bible encourages us to pray to God through Jesus, not simply to say something is true in any situation of our choosing merely because the principle may be set forth in the Scriptures. Also, the "faith" advocates do not emphasize nearly enough the Presence of the Holy Spirit or of the Lord.
Let us say someone is ill. We can pray with him and beseech the Lord concerning his health, or we can ignore prayer, ignore the Lord, ignore the Spirit of God, and state positively it is God’s will the sick be whole. He was healed by Jesus’ stripes.
Both of these approaches cannot be correct. One is correct and the other is incorrect.
We may note that nowhere in the Scriptures, Old Testament or New Testament, is there an emphasis on presumptuous faith. In fact, "standing upon the promises," as the phrase is employed today, is reminiscent of Satan’s exhortation to Jesus to leap from the pinnacle of the Temple.
None of the Prophets or Apostles of the Lord ever attempted to utilize the Scriptures in a presumptuous manner. Rather, in strict obedience they followed the Lord Himself and stood on what He had told them personally. The eleventh chapter of the Book of Hebrews, the "faith chapter," contains no concept of an aggressive use of the Scriptures to achieve one’s desires.
We are not ministers of the letter of the Scriptures but of the Spirit (II Corinthians 3:6). It is not true that Jesus and the Scriptures are one. Jesus is One with the Father, not with the Scriptures. The Scriptures are to lead us to the Person, Jesus. They themselves are not the Lord Jesus. There is no life or healing in the Scriptures. There is life and healing in the Lord Jesus.
Every true saint learns the Scriptures and trusts in them. What God has said He will do, He shall do. The Holy Spirit is the One who guides us, who teaches us when and how to apply the promises of God. When the Holy Spirit is applying the Scriptures, when we have the sense of the will of the Spirit, we can stand in faith on the Scriptures.
When we are using our own mind, our own faith, in an attempt to make the Scriptures work on our behalf, we are out of Divine order. It appears to us that the "faith" advocates, in their attempt to force the Scriptures to work according to their own desires, sometimes pass over into that which is satanic—namely, the release of the latent powers of the subconscious mind. Because they were not willing to humbly take up their cross and follow the Lord Jesus they have become deceived. They have entered into a relationship with the antichrist spirit, the spirit of man making himself a God. They have become the prey of the False Prophet, the spirit of religious delusion.
There may have been a point in our life when we chose to believe a promise of Scripture and then received an answer as a result. That was God’s goodness to us at that time.
But as we grow in the Lord we discover that an attempt to apply faith after this fashion no longer works. This is because God is drawing us closer to Himself. He wants us to look to Him, not to the blind exercise of our human faith.
The exercise of belief in an attempt to get what we want is not a loving entrance into union with Christ. It is of the spirit of the False Prophet. There is a world of difference between praying to the Father in Jesus’ name, and commanding the spirit realm "by faith."
Salvation is not a means of living a happy, successful life on the earth. Salvation is the Divine plan for moving us from the power of Satan to the power of God. There are times when happiness and success are part of God’s plan for us. There are other times when utter failure, pain, frustration, and piercing—almost unbearable—miseries are part of the Divine plan.
The goal is not that we always be happy. The goal is that we be changed into the image of Jesus and learn to be sternly obedient to the Father and to always trust in Him.
The current stress on success now, the answer to prayer now, healing now, is not of God. It is of Antichrist. Many believers already have reaped a bitter harvest because of the "faith" teaching.
Let us repeat. It is proper for the Christian to walk in confidence in the Scriptures, pressing forward to victory over every problem and pain. But maturing in the Lord Jesus means we ourselves begin to diminish and Christ begins to increase in us. As He does the victories begin to come, perhaps not as simply and readily as before but as part of an ever-deepening union with God through Jesus.
The darkness that even now is coming upon us is so profoundly satanic, so much more perverse and hellish than anything we have encountered to this point, that our formulas for victory will decrease in effectiveness. A desire for revenge may compel us to say or do something that is not of the Lord. Only the believers who die in the Lord and become part of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, will be able to survive the darkness and stand triumphantly before the Son of God in that Day.
Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast. For, behold, the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain. (Isaiah 26:20,21)
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