"The Future History of the Church, Part 2" - Deception Then and Now (page 2 of 12)

Deception Then and Now

It is important to realize that the kinds of deceptions perpetrated by Satan against the Early Church are the kinds of deceptions he will use against the church in the Last Days. The same heresies, false doctrines, and deceptions that the devil introduced into Christianity in its early centuries make a comeback in the Last Days.

In the Early Church people with a low Christology – people who did not believe that Jesus was God – were called “Arians”. Today we call them Jehovah's Witnesses; the two are essentially the same.

In the Early Church they called the Sabbatarians and dietary legalists and Nomianists “Judaizers” (see Galatians). Today we call them Seventh-Day Adventists.

In the Early Church people who were hyper-Dispensationalist – who took Dispensationalism to a bizarre extreme and made a radical, tremendous separation between the Testaments – were called “Marcionites”. Today they are the Exclusive or Closed Brethren.

In the Early Church, the people who said that the Father was Jesus, the Son was Jesus, and the Spirit was Jesus were called “Sabellians” or “Patripassionists”. Today we call them Jesus-Only Pentecostals, or United Pentecostals. There is nothing new under the sun.

Undoubtedly, however, of all these lies and the many others, the two most damaging were the Montanists and the Gnostics, who were related to each other. The Montanists had over-realized eschatology; they believed that the kingdom was now. They made many crazy predictions and prophecies that revival was coming to their capital or that Jesus was coming there Himself in Phrygia or modern-day Turkey. They had all manner of wild predictions, but the way they sucked people into it was by putting a heavy emphasis on signs and wonders. “The Apostles had these things, the Bible teaches them, so we should have them” was their philosophy. Irenaeus, the pre-Nicean church father, wrote against these people while yet defending what was right about them. He did say that signs and wonders and the gifts of the Spirit are Biblical; but this particular group was using them to get people to believe other bizarre things. The same is true today.

In the Early Church people like Tertullian, the church father – people you would never have expected to get caught up in crazy errors – did. Today, too, I find people I never would have expected being caught up in the same kinds of Kingdom Now ideas of Triumphalism, Restorationism, and Dominionism. It works the same way, with the emphasis laid on signs and wonders, etc.

These people in the Early Church made insane predictions that didn't happen and led to total anarchy. At any turning point in church history, this same Kingdom Now theology has surfaced. The Montanists began to surface when the Roman Empire went into decline.

During the Renaissance, which was a very important turning point in the history of Europe, believers in Montanist doctrines were called the followers of Joachim of Fiore. This man, leader of Kingdom Now theology at that time, has such a similar philosophy to that of the Vineyard movement today that he could have written for their magazine. We see in them the same ideas, for example: there are supposedly three ages, the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the Age of the Spirit; the Age of the Father being Old Testament Israel, the Age of the Son being the church age, and the Age of the Spirit being the latter-day rain, identified with their own movement. They believed they belonged to a new religious order that was going to take over all other religious orders. This is the same belief found today in John Wimber's Vineyard Movement.

During the Reformation, there were the Prophets of Zwickau. Now, if you're Brethren, Pentecostal, or Baptist, don't ever consider yourself a Protestant. If you had been around during the Reformation, the Protestants would have called you an “Anabaptist” and they would have killed you as fast as the Catholics would. Zwingli said, "So you want to be baptized again?" and cut a hole in the ice in Zurich in which they drowned the believers there who believed in believers' baptism. The followers of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli killed Anabaptists. If you're Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Reformed, then you're a Protestant; but anything non-conformist is not Protestant.

The Anabaptists were in most ways much closer to the Scripture than the Reformers were. The Protestants ran around pretending they had rediscovered the Gospel, when in fact there were people who had never lost it. Long before Luther, Calvin, or Zwingli, there were people on the Continent such as John S. Huss and the Bohemian Brethren, or in England the followers of John Wycliffe, or the Waldensians who were around for centuries – all of whom were Bible-believing Christians. There were always people who understood the basic truth and knew the church at large had gotten away from it.

However, in the time of the Reformation something happened. Feudalism ended, and capitalism began. The decline of the Holy Roman Empire – which was neither holy nor Roman – was occurring, and that Empire was being replaced with the nation-state; people began saying “I am English”, “I am German”, “I am Scottish”, etc. Therefore, the Pope no longer had the political leverage to exterminate Christians and suppress the preaching of the Gospel in the way that he had throughout the Dark Ages. Additionally, Gutenberg invented the printing press. You no longer had the Vulgate, which was the Latin edition of the Bible that monks copied; instead you had people like Luther putting the Bible into German and Tyndale into English and so on, and Bibles could be mass-produced because of Gutenberg's invention. So the Bible went out, literacy increased, and the Pope lost his ability to stop the spread of the Gospel politically. That is why the Reformation happened. The only thing people like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli did was get away with something that other people before them had always said, only the political and social circumstances were not ripe for them to live to tell about it. The idea that the Reformers rediscovered the Gospel is a perversion of history.

There were some Anabaptists whose capital was Muenster in Germany, near Holland. They followed these “prophets” called the Prophets of Zwickau, who made a lot of crazy predictions, prophecies, and practices, with excessive abuses of the gifts of the Spirit etc., which led to total anarchy. Today we have the same thing, only instead of the Prophets of Zwickau we have the Kansas City Prophets. After Paul Cain publicly made false predictions with John Wimber in England, the same people who witnessed these false prophecies will get on buses again to go hear a repeat performance by this man, who prophesied falsely in the name of the Lord. The Anglican bishop David Pitchers wrote a book called Some Said it Thundered, telling all Evangelical Anglicans to follow this guy. They did, and Paul Cain has since that time gone to Saddam Hussein, a man who has murdered God only knows how many tens of thousands of his own people, and apologized, repenting on behalf of the born-again Christians in the United States and Great Britain for “what we did to him”.

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