"The Future History of the Church, Part 1"
A typological and midrashic examination of what will happen in the future of the church by seeing how the past history of the church is recapitulated eschatologically; how past events happen again in the Last Days. What to expect, and what to prepare for.
Download or email Part 1 Download or email Part 2 Download or email Part 3 Two Forms of Gnosticism
This is what the Gnostics do today, and it is exactly what they did in the Early Church as well. In the time of the Early Church there were two forms of Gnosticism: the totally pagan form and the form that got into the church under the leadership of people such as Basil and Valentinus. The same applies today; there are two forms of Gnosticism. The utterly pagan form is the New Age movement; Gnosticism is really what the New Age movement is. It may have occult packaging and so on, but the core of it is Gnostic. The kind of Gnosticism getting into the church today is Restorationism. All of the visualization techniques among many other popular things Restorationists embrace – such as Joyce Huggett's books – are New Age ideas, totally alien to the Bible. Using breathing exercises for prayer, as she describes, comes from yoga. She states also that the exercises of Ignatius of Loyola should be used as a model for Christian prayer. Ignatius Loyola was the founder of the Jesuits, a religious order designed to stop the spread of the Gospel in the Counter-Reformation. He was a man whose order is responsible for the death, torture, and murder of probably a half-million Christians. Yet his shamanistic exercises are being upheld in today's church as a model for Christian prayer! These are New Age ideas creeping into the church. These were also the kinds of deception faced by the Early Church; the same ones have come back.
It doesn't matter whether you call it “Arianism” or Jehovah's Witnesses; it is the same thing. Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford, the founders of the Jehovah's Witness movement, claimed a gnosis. If you don't agree with them, you're under deception. Roman Catholicism = Gnosticism. Shia Islam = Gnosticism. Sufi Islam = Gnosticism. Zoroastrianism = Gnosticism. Hinduism = Gnosticism. Shamanism = Gnosticism. The house churches = Gnosticism.
Just look at the damage that heavy shepherding and similar practices have caused people. This Restorationism is a natural bedfellow for all kinds of other errors, one of which is heavy shepherding. We deal with this more in depth in a separate teaching; I am simply saying here that it was a deception in the Early Church, and it is again becoming a deception now. A person who claims the gnosis is naturally going to become a heavy shepherd; what else could he be? Jesus, however, said that One is your Teacher, Who is in heaven (Mt. 23:8-10).
God will do a new thing. If a couple has four children and they decide to have a fifth (God help them), God will do a new thing, but they will get the fifth child in the same way in which they got the first four. When God does a new thing, it will always be in character with the way He has always done things. What Gnostics will say is that everything can be abrogated because God is going to do a new thing in the Last Days; that is true, but it will never be out of character with the way He has always done things.
There is a lot wrong with abortion, but one of the things that bothers me most is the waiting list of couples who are trying to adopt a baby. This list is three miles long, while other people are killing children. There is no such thing as an unwanted baby. People will adopt handicapped children or just about any child if they want one badly enough; yet other people are killing them.
If a couple really loves each other, and they want to share their love with a baby, the mother never says, "I just can't face labor. I can't face morning sickness or contractions; therefore I am not going to have the baby. It's too miserable." The only thing she's thinking of is pushing the baby in a pram, taking him to the park on the swings, and going to the zoo to show him the zebras and the monkeys. Morning sickness and labor are not what occupy her mind; that's just what has to be gone through in order to get the child.
I'm glad I am not a female. I watched one of my children being born, and kept my eye on the monitor that measures the intensity and frequency of contractions. Every time the thing started moving I told my wife, "This is the last one, this is it! I wouldn't lie to you, baby," but I was lying. Forget those rugby players at Wiggin; women are the strongest creatures in the world! If one of those rugby players had a baby he'd be out for the season.
This is Page 6 of 12 of PART 2
Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.