"Let no man deceive you by any means:
for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first,
and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition."
(2 Thessalonians 2:3)
INTRODUCTION
Yesterday, I watched two video presentations which, in quite different and yet interlinked ways, caused me great consternation, as both will be seen by very many people who I fear will be gravely misled by strong assertions made therein, assertions which I accordingly find myself having the unpleasant but unfortunately necessary duty to address and refute.
VIDEO 1 - THE DOWNPLAYING OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS
I'll deal first with Grace To You's video entitled 'Thinking Biblically about the COVID-19 Pandemic: an Interview with John MacArthur' uploaded on 24 April. (200K+ views at time of writing). In this talk, he completely dismisses any consideration that the current global Coronavirus crisis has eschatological significance, or that there is any aspect of God's judgment to what is happening. He flatly declares that "this doesn't connect with anything in the Bible," even throwing out any idea that it might be at least a harbinger of what is to come upon the Earth.
To dismiss the pandemic as being really no big deal at all in the great scheme of things, in either a worldly or a spiritual context, but just an influenza essentially like any other, I consider to be extreme folly on the part of any Christian leader, and particularly one who through the internet has the ear of thousands if not millions who will hear this determined downplaying, and be encouraged to similarly completely gloss over this unprecedented crisis as having zero spiritual significance. They will not see "that now it is high time to awake out of sleep" (Romans 13:11), and like John MacArthur sadly fail to recognize the fact that in church doors being everywhere closed, which is something that has NEVER happened before, judgment has indeed begun - as the Word tells us that it must (1 Peter 4:17) - at the house of God.
Furthermore, in continued contented slumber, such folks will not take careful and prayerful note of the "new normal" - which everyone is even now being conditioned to accept - which is so clearly and irreversibly arising out of the whole COVID-19 situation. They will not perceive that it is a truly massive milestone on the road to establishing a NEW World Order; the OLD world order, as we knew it such an incredibly short time ago, is to all intents and purposes now dead in the water. Let us clearly understand that said New World Order, when it arrives in all its eventual tyrannical fullness, will be the kingdom of Antichrist. Jesus told us to watch, but John MacArthur is essentially saying there's no need for such vigilance in these present circumstances. Common sense, however, never mind spiritual wisdom and discernment, tells us that there's a most pressing need for exercising MUCH vigilance in all of this!
VIDEO 2 - THE 'FALLING AWAY' RADICALLY RE-DEFINED
Which brings me to the second video of concern, uploaded by J.D. Farag, entitled 'Bible Prophecy Update - May 3rd, 2020' which has already had over 80K views. Now, I've long warmed to this man's personality and have often listened to his 'Prophecy Updates' and found them to be helpful and informative, so it very greatly saddens me to have to warn people about this latest offering of his, the focus of which is a most alarmingly erroneous teaching on the Scripture which heads this article, namely 2 Thessalonians 2:3.
His teaching (and he is regrettably far from being the first to hold to it) is that the falling away spoken of in this verse is the rapture of the Church. We needs must go to the original Greek, where falling away appears as the single word apostasia, from which we get our English word apostasy:
Strong's concordance No. 646 - apostasia: defection from truth, apostasy, falling away, forsake.
The meaning is clear. The falling away is the falling away from Truth, the apostasy of those who would claim to be God's people but have in reality forsaken the True Way, and defected to a different way which is NOT truth. Apostasia appears in just one other place in the Greek NT text, viz Acts 21:21: "And they are informed of thee (i.e. Paul), that thou teachest all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to forsake (apostasia) Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs." Obviously, apostasia in this instance also is referencing an apostasy, here denoting a departure from the Jewish faith while 2 Thessalonians 2:3 references a departure from the Christian faith. J.D. Farag, amongst others, teaches that apostasia means just departure, not departure from Faith, and extends this misunderstanding to pronounce that this alleged departure is the rapture, thus compounding and worsening the basic error of defining the falling away mistakenly. It is simply not rightly dividing the Word of God.
If Paul had meant to say departure, he would surely have used the Greek word for departure that he did in 2 Timothy 4:6, analusis (Strong's No. 359) to inform of his imminent departure from this world, going home to Heaven following his martyrdom: "For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure (analusis) is at hand." Most tellingly, just as he declined to use analusis here, neither did he use harpazo (Strong's No. 726) which he carefully selected to describe the rapture event in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 (and also his being personally caught up to Heaven in 2 Corinthians 12:2 & 12:4).
Friends, this is not just an issue of incidental semantics, but a matter of the greatest importance. Firstly, because erroneous exegesis is always a no-go, secondly because the fundamentally flawed exegesis in this case is a false argument for the Pre-Tribulation rapture position (whereas there are quite legitimate reasons for believing in this timing), and thirdly because it takes our eyes off the Great Apostasy and its huge eschatological significance as occurring just prior to the emergence of Antichrist. Let us well remember that in the Olivet Discourse, Jesus's Number One priority was to warn of deception. It is, of course, deception that has caused the apostasia, the prophesied falling away from the Faith that was once and for all time delivered unto the saints that we are witnessing all around us today. It is in this wilful desertion of Truth that the professing Church has so wretchedly failed to be salt and light to a stricken Hell-bound world, thus inevitably causing Godly judgment to be executed upon it.
CONCLUSION
As I stated in the opening to this article, these way off-beam teachings of John MacArthur and J.D. Farag though quite different in focus are nevertheless interlinked. How so? In that each of these teachings sidesteps the critically relevant apostasy of the contemporary Church and its resultant righteous judgment, and at the very time that it should be highlighted as needing to be an absolutely essential part of our spiritual awareness. Friends, at such a critical juncture in history, when the hands of God's timepiece are inexorably moving ever that much closer to midnight, let us not have our eyes taken off the ball!
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Other related reading:
Coronavirus and closed churches:
https://watchman4wales.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-and-closed-churches-let-us.html
The Rapture:
https://watchman4wales.blogspot.com/2015/10/pre-trib-or-mid-trib-or-post-trib-or.html
Judgment on the Church:
https://watchman4wales.blogspot.com/2016/07/judgment-must-begin-at-house-of-god.html
