Blog Archives - Ironworks Pike Community Church

This Is Not The Apocalypse.

3/20/2020

Earlier this week I read a Facebook post on our city notification page, in which the person cried out regarding the coronavirus pandemic, "Aaah, it's the apocalypse!!"

This is not the apocalypse, and we know that it is not from Bible prophecy. There are people whose minds are full of zombie movies, science-fiction thrillers, talk-radio conspiracy theories, crummy paperbacks, and half-remembered stuff about the number "666." We need to ignore them, and turn to the Word of God.

That sort of end-times panic has happened before. In the ancient city of Thessalonica, the Christians there began to believe they were living during the "Day of the Lord" (the final outpouring of God's wrath on the earth in the end-times). They were listening to false prophets, and heeding forged letters which falsely claimed to be from Paul.

The apostle Paul, in chapter two of his second letter to them, told them not to be deceived about the Apocalypse. He said this:

"Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God."

This is the Apocalypse. Although all false prophets are antichrists in a lesser sense (1st John 2:22), the Bible predicts one great, final Antichrist. In this passage, Paul calls this person the "man of lawlessness" and the "son of destruction." He will sit in the Jewish temple, and declare himself God. He will also manifest Satanic powers and deceptions (2 Thess. 2:9).

This is not happening, and it has never happened. Nero wasn't this man. Neither was Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler, or Saddam Hussein. The Christian Church has a long, rich history of being totally wrong every single time we named some cruel world leader as the Antichrist. Not even Barney the Dinosaur was the Antichrist.

The Jewish temple doesn't exist (yet), so there's no Holy of Holies for anyone to sit in. Vladimir Putin is an evil world ruler, but he hasn't worked signs and wonders.

More, Christ said His return for us, His Church, would be completely unpredictable. He said this clearly, repeatedly, and dogmatically, in Matthew 24:36, 42, 44, 49, and 25:13. He also said our removal would be before the end-time flood of God's judgment came (Matthew 24:38-39).

We are not in the end-times now, nor will we ever be. So looking for signs of the end is a waste of time anyway. We have more important things to do.

Even if you believe the Rapture happens at the end of the age, it is still not the Apocalypse right now. There's no Jewish temple. The Antichrist has not manifested. He who restrains his manifestation (either the Holy Spirit or one of the arch-angels, see neuter "what" and masculine" he" in 2 Thess. 2:6-7) continues to restrain. The other divine judgments described in the book of Revelation aren't happening.

Pestilence is a divine judgment on man's sins, for sure. Dealing with this coronavirus is bad enough. We shouldn't wrap it in end-times robes.

But this isn't the Apocalypse. Follow the Bible's actual teachings about prophecy, not Hollywood's hysterical mash of fearful nonsense.

A Short Post About the Days of Creation in Genesis.

3/9/2020

We are a church who believes that Moses was God's prophet, and that God created the universe from nothing. We don't follow Darwin because we aren't atheists, agnostics, or pantheists. Jesus Christ was the Son of God. He proved it supremely by rising from the dead. He believed in Moses' writings, so we do too.

Specifically and especially, the first 11 chapters of Genesis are history, not poetry or allegory. All our members are required to subscribe to this. For instance, a recent applicant for membership affirmed her belief that Adam and Eve were real, historical people, and that they were special creations of God.

Our national church association requires belief in the historicity of Adam and Eve; and that God created them as special creations. God didn't develop them from out of previous-existing animals. Jesus also believed this, so we follow Him.

Since we reject the philosophical presupposition of materialism (meaning, a belief that nothing but matter exists), we reject all the pagan conclusions which spring out of that poisonous root.

Jesus' genealogy in Luke chapter 3 goes all the way back to Adam. That means Adam was just as much a human being as Jesus of Nazareth was. This is consistent with Genesis 1, where God created the living things fully-formed.

God didn't create millions of nests filled with little eggs, He filled the sky with adult birds. God didn't create fields full of germinating seeds. He created all vegetation fully formed. God didn't create saplings. He created fully-grown trees with multiple rings, and burrowing bugs already in them. He didn't create earth's geology with un-decayed potassium. He created rocks with varying degrees of molecular decay. He didn't only create stars millions of light-years away. He created the stars' light, already in transit and already penetrating earth's atmosphere.

God created everything this way, because nature is a massive, interlocking, symbiotic system. Everything in nature depends on everything else, in various ways and degrees, so God created everything already grown, already reproducing, already shining, and fully operational. This is what Moses described in Genesis 1.

At the same time, our national church association chose not to draw a line on how chronologically long the days of creation were. My guess is this was because a word-study shows that the word "day" is used in a few different senses in the Old Testament, including Genesis 1.

Moses spoke of non-celestial light, thus disengaged from any shining star or earth orbit, and named it "day" in Genesis 1:5. He called the entirety of the creation process "day", in Genesis 2:4. He also used the word "day" to mean "moment" or "time", in Gen. 2:17.

I myself believe that the creation days were the same length as a Jewish Sabbath day (sundown to sundown), based on Exodus 20:8-11. But I acknowledge the variety of ways Moses used the word yom in Genesis 1-2. Nevertheless, our denomination, and all our members, explicitly affirm the historicity and special creation of Adam and Eve. Without a historical Adam, Christianity falls apart.