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Summary
In this episode of Dispatches from the Spiritual Front, Alan Wartes discusses the urgent need for believers to recognize the pervasive evil and deception in the world. He emphasizes the importance of coming out from the world’s corrupt systems and institutions, including the church, which has conformed to worldly ways. Wartes calls for radical repentance and a deeper understanding of the biblical prophecy regarding the end times, urging listeners to abandon their attachments to the world and embrace the truth of God’s word.
Chapters
00:00 The Wake-Up Call for Believers
04:33 The Process of Refinement and Revelation
11:01 The Urgency of Radical Repentance
Transcript
Welcome to Dispatches from the Spiritual Front. I’m Alan Wartes.
I hadn’t intended to continue last week’s Dispatch in a part two. I called that episode No Middle Ground and pointed out that the evil depicted in the recently released Epstein Files is a wakeup call to believers to get serious about what it means to follow Jesus. I discussed just how deeply the world is saturated with deception and evil.
There’s always a fine line to walk between being aware of what’s going on in the world and giving it so much attention that it breeds fear rather than leading to greater understanding about how to abide in Christ.
But every day now the spiritual front lines seem to come closer to home. That’s no accident. It’s happening now because time is growing short for believers to see the world for what it is and come out of it. So long as you think the world is kind of a mess, maybe, but with a lot of good stuff worth fighting for too, then you will not understand verses like this:
“Therefore, ‘Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.” 2 Corinthians 6:17
To gather the courage needed to truly come out, you must be able to answer the questions: “Come out of what? Why?”
All the evidence of chaos in the world is pointing the followers of Jesus to a conclusion that we should have reached already, because it is clearly spelled out in the Bible. That is that this world is a total write off. That’s a blunt way to put it, I know, but no more so than when Peter wrote:
“But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.” 2 Peter 3:5-7
What’s clear in the story, from Eden to the New Jerusalem, is that this world was not intended to last. God knew from the beginning what the wicked would do and that Satan would have rulership over the earth until the very end because of human rebellion. What we see all around us today is not failure, it’s fulfillment.
All of history has been a crucible meant to contain the heat necessary to refine the precious metal of God’s chosen. As it says in Psalm 66:
“For you, God, tested us; you refined us like silver.” Psalm 66:10
Jesus brought us to the Great Refiner by securing forgiveness for any who would believe. But it’s what happens next, when He places us in the fire, that truly makes us ready to share in the glory of Christ and reign with Him in the kingdom to come.
When we surrender to it, the heat of discipline and hardship for His sake drives evil from all its hiding places within our hearts and minds to it can be seen and rejected.
This feels like death, because it is. It is the death of that version of yourself that belonged to Satan. From the point of view of your old self, it is a catastrophe. It is, quite literally, the apocalypse. The Greek word apokalupsis means “revealing” or “unveiling” or “disclosure of hidden knowledge.” That’s not something I had ever heard until recently.
How many Christians realize that when we pray, “Your kingdom come,” we are asking for an apocalypse, the end of the world as we know it so that another can begin? The end of that world begins with the stark revelation of what it really is: thoroughly evil. John said so when he wrote:
“We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” 1 John 5:19
Understanding that, we have a chance to see that we, even as believers, have participated in creating and sustaining that evil world by believing the lies upon which it is built. The whopper that launched everything is that it is possible for us to make our own way in the world without God and that we might even be better off. That’s what Satan sold to Eve in the garden.
But the lie that binds most Christians to collusion with the enemy is that we must all compromise in some way or another and feed at Satan’s table to survive in this world. That’s very convenient for our sinful nature which wants to do so, even after we have believed.
Furthermore, we tell ourselves that this is the world God made, so we must make the most of it and get along the best we can.
That is not what the Bible says.
“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.” 1 John 2:15-17
No. This is Satan’s world. Someone might argue with that by quoting Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and all who live in it.” I struggled with that apparent contradiction myself until I found a way to see it in which both things are true.
Imagine we are looking at a magnificent Manhattan skyscraper, and we know that it belongs to God. He conceived it and built it. Everything about it exists because of Him, all its artistry and marvelous workings.
Now we look again at the tenants of the building. They don’t own it, but God has given them the freedom to use it in any way they choose. Satan, because of what he achieved in Eden, owns the master lease and he oversees everything that happens there. Jesus cancelled that lease forever in His death and resurrection, but the final eviction is yet to come.
What we see all around us today is not failure, it’s fulfillment.
For now, though God owns the heavens and the earth, the human world within it is utterly lost. Not all the people, of course. Grace has made a way out for anyone who believes. But all the systems, institutions, industries and governments of the world are thoroughly corrupted by deception and evil.
Someone might say, surely you don’t include the church in that. How I wish that were true. The revelation of evil in the world today is not sparing the church. I don’t mean the sanctified body of Christ, which is an invisible work of the Holy Spirit.
I’m talking about the church infrastructure, material and philosophical, that seemingly exists now to serve and perpetuate itself. To be blunt, it has inherited the woes of the Pharisees by conforming itself to this world’s way of doing business.
And if the church can be shown to be corrupted, and it can, then what hope is there for the rest of society? Satan is a deceiver who rules everything that happens on earth. We have no reason to assume that his reach or his zeal for chaos is limited. The present apocalypse points to the opposite conclusion: his hand is in everything.
A lot of courageous followers of Jesus have begun unpacking that by questioning the pillars holding up everything we think we know, in science, history and what the Bible really says about where we are in the prophetic timeline and what is yet to come. It is apocalyptic, catastrophic work that must be done to propel us forcefully into radical repentance.
That’s the point of all this, that we finally see why we are called to come out of this world and cry out to the Holy Spirit for help doing it. The command to come out has never been more urgent or more plain.
Why? Because the Bible says that God intends to demolish the building he created and replace it with another. Not gradually remodel it. Destroy it. Listen to Revelation 21:
“Then I saw a ‘new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.” Revelation 21:1
If the phone were to ring right now, wherever you are, and it was the police department telling you the have reliable information that a bomb is about to go off at your location, what would you do? I’m confident you wouldn’t hesitate to leave everything behind and flee. If you didn’t and insisted on clinging to all the stuff around you, we’d call that insane.
And yet, Satan’s deception is so powerful, so persuasive that he’s convinced us that the crazy ones are those who take God at His word and abandon everything in order to live.
The truth is we have received that phone call. God’s word plainly tells us how the story ends and what we must do to be saved. The hardest hearts among us just refuse to believe it and hang up. That’s heartbreaking. But far worse is what many Christians do: they believe, but then put the Lord on hold so they can finish up whatever they were doing when the call came.
Don’t do that. Open your eyes to the apocalypse of evil happening all around you. Drop everything and come out.
