End Time Bible Prophecy Fulfillment, Part 1 : Where's The Love?

The bitter life of a hateful woman is a sign of Bible prophecy.

And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.

Matthew 24:12

1. Our ministry proceeds from the rock solid observation that we live in the final days before the return of Jesus for His church and the beginning of judgment on this sinful planet. Since time is so much at a premium here, I'll keep these as concise as blogging demands you to be. I'll be speaking on the ongoing fulfillment of Bible prophecy about His return .. 

Jesus' prophecy here was in response to the questions of his disciples about his return and the end of all things? " .. what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?"

He made it soberingly clear: the human faculty of love, the emotive state of mind that elevates, restrains and sacrificially gives of itself unto others,  will become worn down to a frozen, lifeless and ultimately worthless shadow in the lives of fallen humanity. And that will be as a direct result of the unimaginably poisonous influence of the sinfulness of that same rebellious race.  Love will turn to frigidity due to the wickedness of today.

I would dare say that the present state of affairs today very well qualifies.

From the ongoing bloodbath of people shooting each other over slights in Chicago to the vicious divide that politics has become in America at large, it's no secret. It's a no brainer when seeing how completely cold the world has become. Every human institution is breaking down and you have to be living under a rock to not see this breakdown in human society .. when ISIS fighters can butcher babies and stream it for their edification, kids are bullied to suicide, and corporate business uses the emotional triggers love has to market your dollars into their coffers. When churches can mushroom in a town while social problems mount, it's plain to see. It's all around.

The Black Eyed Peas in 2003 sang about this sad state of humanity .. and redid the song in 2016 since the times have gotten that much more savage. 

Where is the love? Will.i.am and his posse just don't get this: the only love that doesn't wax cold is the love of God burning out of the presence of His Spirit in the life of His children. His love is an undying fire for all to cling to. The problem is that humanity is so toxically bent toward itself and so ready to buy into the innumerable counterfeits for love all over that it never truly sees His love shown in His Cross and the faith it offers. They'd rather binge watch the Hallmark Channel (or Brazzers).

And Jesus said this is what would happen .. before His return.

Courtesy 320 AD: When Talk Is Cheap And Faith Costs All You Have

When Zeal Without Understanding Becomes The Road To Hell

And the rest of the people, the priests, the Levites, the porters, the singers, the Nethinims, and all they that had separated themselves from the people of the lands unto the law of God, their wives, their sons, and their daughters, every one having knowledge, and having understanding;

They clave to their brethren, their nobles, and entered into a curse, and into an oath, to walk in God's law, which was given by Moses the servant of God, and to observe and do all the commandments of the Lord our Lord, and his judgments and his statutes ..   Nehemiah 10:28-29

Did you know you can go farther than you are supposed to go .. and that the road to hell still is paved with the best of intentions?

He who has ears to hear, let them hear ..

Our church has been reading through the Bible this year and a few weeks ago, we read through the book of Nehemiah, the book written by a servant of the Persian King who had essentially enslaved Israel as another captive class of servants in Persia. God used the Persian Empire to bring a renewal of the nation .. and in so doing, a genuine spiritual revival swept those whom the King allowed to return to destroyed Jerusalem, rebuild it and the Temple.

 And in so doing, the zeal and the passion for truth that went beyond what God's Word had said compelled these people into taking the first steps toward hell. It struck me as I studied this then and I'm only finding time to speak of it here. This is another Biblical illumination into the falling away that this blog comments on.

In their hunger for purity, the survivors of the captivity in Babylon and then Persia set forth the creation of a spiritual legalism by determining they would "cleave to" each other and bind curses upon themselves for not following the Law they had just re embraced. This effectively spelled their spiritual doom. They set forth their own religious customs that would metastasize into the innumerable Talmudic and rabbinical traditions that warped so much of the spiritual life of Israel since that day.

They meant well, but by turning to their own religious impulse and creating their own hierarchy of religious authority apart from what the Law had set forth, the seeds were sown for a harvest of hurt. Israel today still lives under that shadow, blinded to her Messiah, and chained into cultural traditions that powerfully bind it to religion and block them from trusting their Redeemer. Here in these verses, we see the nation throw itself wide open to religious innovations that would enforce with actual curses to indict and condemn those who didn't measure up to the level that they established was acceptable.

It is singularly telling that this was a movement among the people and not a direction from God. It would go on to become the foundations for cultural and social evolutions that would culminate in the creation of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the scribes of the Law who would come to assume an autocratic power over Israel. And it would be their traditions that would become what the Lord Jesus Christ roundly condemned and what he would contend with them over during his earthly ministry in ancient Israel.

The spiritual bondage to these purely human traditions are what led the nation into its' Pharisee-orchestrated rejection of Christ's call for Israel to believe the Gospel that He preached. And it was this stubborn rebellion that Christ would weep over, even as crowds around him shouted his praises in the streets of Jerusalem only a week before His crucifixion.

Here we see the first steps of "the elect" barely back from one frying pan into the fire that would consume them and which has them completely bound today. They are a cautionary illustration of the nature of fallen nature as well as the apostasy around us.

Today, this same kind of legalism is what has been one of the greatest snares used by cults and false prophets of every shade. Cultic legalism is a powerful tool of manipulation that, when combined with the group dynamics of cultic mind control and the deceptive nature of cultic recruitment, turns the underestimated dogma of the Jehovah's Witness pioneer, the Remnant Fellowship weight loss "expert" and the La Luz del Mundo pastor into the most powerfully transformative and enslaving power of the heart mind and conscience the world has ever seen.

It hasn't stopped. The victim count continues to pile up.