SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/29/2025 9:49 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “Difficult Times”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
2 Timothy 3:1
Message of the verses: “But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come.”
I think that it is best to understand that when Paul
writes “last days” that he is referring to the church age, and in these past
2000 years the apostle’s divinely revealed prediction of difficult times has
come true. We have seen heresies which
have become progressively more characteristic of nominal Christianity. MacArthur writes “In this passage he gives
the most serious possible command to avoid, expose, and oppose spiritual
impostors in the church.”
MacArthur goes on to write: “Throughout church history the full counsel
of God has been unpalatable (foul tasting) to many who have claimed the name of
Christ. In his book Damned Through the Church (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1970), John
Warwick Montgomery discusses the difficult times as he offers a list of what he
calls ‘the damnable epochs of church history.’
He identifies and discusses seven specific movements or theological
orientations—from the sacramentalism of the Middle Ages (also called the Dark
Ages) to the subjectivism that is so rampant in our own day—that are clearly
unbiblical, ungodly, and destructive of the body of Christ. As the title of the book implies, these false
gospels are damning to their adherents.”
Now in each of those difficult times, it was true that
men’s ideas were substituted for God’s truth and therefore for God Himself, and
that surely is going on in today’s world.
“It is under sacramentalism, the church replaced God, and under
rationalism, reason was god; under orthodoxism, god was sterile, impersonal
orthodoxy; under politicism, god was the state; under ecumenism, god was
uncritical fellowship and cooperation among nominal Christians, under
experientialism, god became personal experience; and under subjectivism, which
still reigns in much of Christendom, self has become god” (MacArthur’s
commentary).
MacArthur goes on, and I will end this rather short SD
with this quote: “It would be
appropriate to add to Montgomery’s list the current emphases of mysticism,
which seeks to determine truth about God by intuition and feeling, and on
pragmatism, which attempts to determine what is true by what produces desired
effects. These movements to not come and
go but come to stay, so that as the years go on, the church accumulates them,
and the battles continue.”
3/29/2025 10:12 AM
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