Alright, we're going to be basically
looking at the first four verses of 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. The title of the message is The
Great Apostasy. The Great Apostasy. Now, the
word apostasy simply means falling away. And what this has to do
is with how the church began In the New
Testament, as Christ came to establish the New Covenant, the
New Testament, you understand those words covenant and testament
can be interchanged. The New Covenant was established
by Christ on the cross when He put away the sins of His people
and established the only righteousness by which God could be just to
justify us. And you remember He cried out
in John 19.30, it is finished. There were a lot of things finished.
The Bible says He made an end of sin. He finished the transgression. He brought in everlasting righteousness. He fulfilled the old covenant.
The old mosaic economy, as some of the old writers used to say.
That law that Israel was under as a nation has been abolished. by way of fulfillment, Christ
fulfilled it all. And you remember when he gave
up the ghost, when he died on that cross, the veil in the temple
was torn in two from top to bottom, indicating by God's providential
power that the old covenant was over, the new covenant began.
And as the New Covenant Church began, as it was inaugurated,
for example, at Pentecost, when Peter preached in Jerusalem,
and over 3,000 people were converted. And later on, there were more
converted. But the New Testament Church
was inaugurated, and Christianity began to spread throughout the
world, especially through Paul the Apostle, who was called the
Apostle to the Gentiles. And that's where it went out
from Jerusalem because of persecution. You had churches established
around that known world in Corinth, Philippi, Galatia, Thessalonica. This is what we're reading here.
And the church that was known as Christian at that time was
truly Christian. They believed the truth. They
believed the true gospel. They worshiped the true and living
God. through the true Christ. But it wasn't long that false
preachers and false believers began to creep into the church
and corrupt the message of the gospel of God's grace, the gospel
wherein the righteousness of God is revealed. They began to
add works man's works, man's will, man's ways, to the message
of the truth, and they corrupted it, and many who claimed to believe
the truth at first fell away. The apostle John dealt with that
in 1 John chapter two, where he recognized that many who claimed
to believe the gospel at first were falling away. They left
it. They turned against it. Now,
what reason did they turn against it? Well, first of all, they
never believed it to begin with. They didn't lose salvation, as
some say today. They never really had salvation. And John deals with that. He
said, had they been of us, they would have remained with us.
But because they were not of us, they went out from us And
by that they were revealed to be false professors all along.
Now that's 1 John 2.19. But now the false message of
salvation, and I've told you this, that all false religion
basically has two things in common, but even false Christianity,
and when we talk about the great apostasy, that's what we're talking
about, false Christianity, not just all false religion. This
is a falling away from the truth. You can't fall away from something
you've never claimed to believe to begin with. But they all have
two things in common. Number one, they always make
salvation in some way, to some degree, at some stage, conditioned
on men and women. You see, the gospel teaches us
that salvation is conditioned on Christ and Him alone, and
that He came and took on the likeness of sinful flesh, yet
without sin, to obey the law, go to the cross, die for the
sins of His people as they were imputed to Him, and by His obedience
unto death, He alone fulfilled all the conditions of the salvation
of His people. He brought forth an everlasting
righteousness, of infinite value that God has imputed to us by
which we're justified and eternally saved. All for whom he died and
arose again shall be saved. But false religion says otherwise.
False religion, false Christianity says no, salvation is up to you. Your will, your ways, your works,
some way conditioned on you. And if you don't meet certain
conditions, then it's a failure. But Christ did not fail. He met
all conditions. Hebrews 10, 14. By one offering,
he hath perfected forever them that are sanctified. That's what
the Bible teaches. The second thing that false Christianity
and all false religion corrupts the gospel with, is they always
judge holiness and righteousness on a sliding scale. The sliding scale is how holy
do you have to be to be saved? How righteous do you have to
be to be accepted with God? They'll talk about things like,
well, you gotta be sincere. Well, how sincere do you have
to be? What scale am I going to measure
my sincerity on? Is it 20%? Is it 30%? Is it 50%? Is it 99%? How righteous. And they always
measure that. Somebody says something like
this. They say, well, I know I'm not perfect, but I'm not
as bad as some others. They compare themselves with
themselves, you see. Or they'll say something like
this, well, I'm not what I should be, but I'm not what I used to
be. And that ought to be good enough. There's that sliding
scale. But the true gospel measures righteousness not on a sliding
scale. The true gospel measures righteousness
by the perfection of the law that can only be accomplished
and found in the Lord Jesus Christ. Perfection. God's going to judge
the world in righteousness. Not as you compare to somebody
else on a sliding scale. God's going to judge the world
in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained. This is
a man that God has appointed, chosen, in that he hath given
assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.
That's Christ the God-man. So the issue of the gospel is
how do I stand with Christ? When I come before God at judgment,
Will I be under his wrath, there on my own, pleading my own experiences,
my own decisions, my own works? Or will I be found in Christ,
not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that
which is through the faithfulness of Christ? Will I be found washed
in his blood, clothed in his righteousness, Like our brother
Richmond prayed, my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood
and righteousness. Not what I've attained, not what
I've worked hard for, not what I've given myself to, but what
he has done for me. That's the issue of the gospel.
Let me, before I get into the first few verses of this, it
won't take much time, but I wanna make a comment about something
that I dealt with in the last message from 2 Thessalonians
1. And that's this issue of the
wrath of God. Now you know a lot of times,
even believers get at odds, arguments, debates, And a lot of times,
it's over words. What you mean or what I mean
by a particular word. And this issue of wrath is one
of those things. Look at verse nine of 2 Thessalonians
1. And this is appropriate for what
I'm going to be dealing with in 2 Thessalonians 2, because
in that whole chapter, I'm gonna preach several messages from
that chapter, He's gonna be talking about people who are under the
wrath of God. He says here in verse nine, now
he's talking about believers here, talking about the elect
of God, justified in Christ. Those whose sins are forgiven,
not charged to them, those who are righteous in God's sight,
based upon the righteousness of Christ, imputed to them, charged
to them. And he's talking here about believers
as compared with unbelievers, those who never come to faith
in Christ. And he says, they shall be punished, that is the
unbeliever, who shall be punished with everlasting destruction
from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.
Now that verse nine there is a biblical definition of the
wrath of God. You see that? Look at it again. They shall be punished with everlasting
destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory
of his power. You could summarize the wrath
of God this way. It is eternal separation from
God. And it's an awful thing. We don't
like to talk about it much, do we? deal with it justly and rightfully,
are often criticized as being hell-fire and brimstone preachers.
But whatever people say, it doesn't matter. What's the Word of God
say? But what is it saying is this,
if you live your life in unbelief, and you die in that state of
unbelief, you die under the wrath of God. Now my point is this,
we who believe the gospel, we who know Christ, we've never
been under the wrath of God. Now let me make this clear so
you won't misunderstand me. We did fall in Adam into a state
of sin and depravity, and we do deserve the wrath of God. Do you understand what I'm saying?
We deserve it. We've earned it. Back over in
the book of Ephesians. Ephesians chapter two. Listen to the apostle's words
as the Holy Spirit inspired him here. In verse one he says, and
you hath he quickened who were Dead in trespasses and sin. Now
what's that quickening? That's the new birth. That's
a change of state. We start out in this life born
in sin. Born spiritually dead and depraved. A state of spiritual death. And
that's why Christ said you must be born again. Or you cannot
see or enter the Kingdom of God. Why is the new birth necessary?
Because we're spiritually dead, we don't have eyes to see and
ears to hear. Hearts and minds to understand.
We gotta be given spiritual life under the preaching of the gospel.
That's why the Bible says the gospel is the power of God unto
salvation. To everyone that believe it,
that's the gospel empowered by the spirit. The new birth, born
from above. So he's talking about people
who've been born again here. That's God's elect. Hold your finger there, Ephesians
2. Over in 2 Thessalonians 2, remember what Brother Richmond
read here, he said in verse 13, talking about believers in contrast
to those who die in unbelief under the wrath of God. He says,
but we are bound to give thanks always to God for you, brethren,
beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen
you to salvation, that's election, the election of grace, and through
sanctification of the spirit and belief of the truth, that's
the new birth, whereunto he called you by our gospel to the obtaining
of the glory of the Lord. Well over here in Ephesians 2,
he says, you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and
sins. Your natural state, my natural
state, was dead in trespasses and sins. But if you've been
born again, you've been quickened. You've been given life. Your
state has changed. Now your standing with God has
never changed. Always been in Christ. even when
we were enemies in ourselves. But he says in verse two of Ephesians
two, he says, wherein in time past you walked according to
the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of
the air, that's Satan, the spirit that now worketh in the children
of disobedience. Now a child of disobedience is
an unbeliever. Mark that down. It's not just
somebody who's out there, as some people say, sinning. We're
all sinners. There are sinners lost in their
sins, and there are sinners saved by grace. But he says that same spirit
of Satan is now at work in those who are in unbelief. Even us
before we were born again. And he says in verse 3, among
whom also we all had our conversation, our conduct in times past in
the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and
of the mind. And look at this last line of verse three, and
were by nature. Now what does that mean by nature?
It means as we're naturally born in sin. We were by nature, the
children of wrath, even as others. What he's saying is he's not
saying we were under the wrath of God as if God who loved us
with an everlasting love, who chose us before the world began,
looked at us and said, I'm sentencing you to damnation. We weren't appointed under wrath,
see. If you're saved, you've been
a child of mercy from the beginning. But yet you were born in sin,
born spiritually dead. And by nature, as we were naturally
born, we were no different than the children of wrath. Now I'm saying all that to say
this. If you're a sinner saved by grace, think about how much
you have to be thankful for. Think about that. And it's all
of grace. It's all based upon the blood
of Christ. You didn't earn it and you don't deserve it. What
have you earned? Wrath. What do you deserve? Wrath. Me
too. But God has not given us what
we've earned and deserve. He saved us by His grace. Isn't that marvelous? Isn't that
great? Is there anything better than
that? I don't believe there is. Nothing
better. And how did He do it? Through
the blood of His holy, righteous Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. That's how He did it. Christ
was made our surety. Our sins were imputed to Him.
Think about it, I'm a sinner, but God does not charge me with
my sins. He doesn't impute them to me.
Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? Now that's the wrath of God.
Now turn back to 2 Thessalonians 2. Now the point has been made up
to this passage. Christ is coming again. He's
coming back the second time. And unlike the dispensationalists,
He's coming back one time. And it's going to be a very,
very public Public return. Not going to be some secret rapture
where he, if you're driving your car, then you disappear and there's
a big wreck. That's not going to happen. When
he comes, it's all over. You won't have time to flee.
It'll happen. Just like that. So he's coming
the second time. Now what's he going to do? Well,
He's going to gather His people unto Himself, His church. The
saints that have gone to be with Him will come with Him, and then
the dead in Christ shall rise, and will be changed in the twinkling
of an eye, and be glorified to live forever with Him. Look at
verse 1. He says, Now we beseech you,
brethren, talking to the brethren now, By the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ, as sure as you know He's coming again. And by
our gathering together unto Him. Now that's what people call the
rapture. Being caught up, that's what
that means. The church of the living God. And what does the Bible say?
Well, that's those who God chose in Christ before the world began.
You say, well, I don't think that's fair. It doesn't matter
what you think. That's what the Bible teaches. And God is not
unjust. We'll be caught up with him.
That's the rapture. And it's not secret. We read
that over in 2 Thessalonians 1, how he's coming with the trumpet
sound. And 1 Thessalonians 2. All of
that. Now look back at 1 Thessalonians
5, just for a second. Now all those who are caught
up with Christ have never been under the wrath of God. And I'll
give you another definition of the wrath of God. See if you
can grab hold of this one. Christ on the cross being crucified. for the sins of his people. That's
the wrath of God. My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me? That's the wrath of God. That's
something that we who are in Christ will never have to face,
thank God. Now again, we deserve it. We've
earned it. By nature, just like those who
are gonna undergo it, but we've never been under. Look at verse
nine of 1 Thessalonians 5. For God hath not appointed us
to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ. You
see that? Well, back to 2 Thessalonians
2. Now, we're living in the last
days. We've been talking about that. We know we're closer to
His second coming than when the New Covenant age began. We don't
know the exact day or hour He will return for us. We'll live
every day expecting Him to return any day, any time. We're not to speculate as to
the time. We're not to listen to anyone
who does or claims to know the time. Somebody comes along and
says, I know the calendar date of His second coming. Don't listen
to them. They don't know what they're
talking about. We know that one of the signs of the nearness
of His coming is the rise of false prophets, false preachers,
who claim to believe in Christ and claim to preach the gospel,
but it's a false gospel. You say, how do I know the difference?
Gotta be on your toes. You gotta be skillful in the
word of righteousness. You gotta listen to what they're
saying. They can corrupt the message
in many ways. Read the book of Galatians. Those false preachers
were trying to bring believers back under the law for righteousness,
for assurance. Oh yes, Christ is our Savior,
He's our hope, but you've got to do this, you've got to do
that in order to really be saved. You've got to keep a Sabbath
day, you've got to keep a festival, you've got to be circumcised.
That's what they were saying. Look over in 2 Corinthians chapter
11. This is something that, this
is an eye opener to me. Paul writes to the Corinthian
church, 2 Corinthians 11 and verse 2. He says, I'm jealous
over you with godly jealousy. And he's putting it in the form
of like a husband and a wife. No husband who loves his wife
wants anyone to challenge his love for his wife. No wife who
loves her husband wants to be challenged. And these people
were being challenged. And Paul says, I have espoused
you to one husband. Now church, you're the bride
of Christ. You're his wife. He's your husband. And he's your only husband. And
he said, I've espoused you to one husband that I may present
you as a chaste virgin to Christ, a pure woman. Now you know he's
not speaking physically here, he's speaking spiritually. He
says in verse 3, But I fear less by any means as the serpent beguiled
Eve through his subtlety. Now you understand now, this
is a subtle thing. These false preachers don't get
up in pulpits and say, we don't believe in grace, we don't believe
in Christ. They say they believe grace, they say they believe
Christ, but they mask their corruption with the wisdom of words that
makes the flesh feel good. He says, but I fear it lest by
any means as the serpent begot Eve through his subtlety, so
your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in
Christ. Now, Important thing for us to
know on that passage is what is the simplicity that's in Christ?
Because if you don't know and you get corrupted that way, look
at verse four. For he that cometh, if he that
cometh preaches another Jesus. What do you mean another Jesus?
A false one. Claiming to believe in Jesus,
but not the Jesus of the Bible. Well, how am I gonna know if
it's the Jesus of the Bible? By the doctrine of Christ. Who
is Jesus Christ? What did he accomplish when he
died for the sins of his people? He says, or if you receive another
spirit, which you've not received, or another gospel, which you've
not accepted. What is that simplicity that's
in Christ? It's exactly what it is. It's
that singularity. That's what that word simplicity
means, singleness. That all of my salvation, 100%
of it, from eternity past in my election, from the cross of
Calvary in my redemption, from my justification, sanctification,
regeneration, conversion, perseverance and preservation, all the way
to final glory when He comes again, that it's all singularly
conditioned and fulfilled and assured in Christ crucified and
risen from the dead. Nothing added. Nothing taken
away. It's never Christ plus me. It's never Christ plus my baptism. There's a denomination who calls
himself Christian who says that you cannot be saved unless you
are baptized in water. That is a false gospel. That
corrupts the simplicity that's in Christ. That complicates the
matter. As you prayed, Rich, my hope
is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness.
I dare not trust the sweetest frame. You know, baptism in water
is a sweet frame. What do you mean by that, preacher?
Don't you rejoice when a sinner saved by grace wants to confess
his Lord in baptism publicly? But even that sweet frame, that
sweet frame cannot save me, cannot wash away my sins, cannot make
me righteous. You see that? I love for myself and to see
a believer being an obedient, responsible worker. I'll say it that way,
worker, obedient, servant of God. But even that sweet frame
cannot save me or make me righteous. Only Christ, singularly in Christ. When a preacher comes along and
says, well, I've seen a scripture here and I've got something new
for you, don't listen. Well, that's what was happening
in 2 Thessalonians here. Look back at verse two. He said,
I beseech you that you be not soon shaken in mind or be troubled,
neither by spirit nor by word nor by letter as from us as the
day of Christ is at hand. These were preachers claiming
to be Christian, claiming to be saved by the grace of God,
who were telling these people that Christ was going to come
into his second time before they died. He's coming back in your lifetime. Now I can't say that to you.
I cannot say that Christ is coming back before we all die. And they
were unscrupulous. They claimed to be speaking by
Spirit, by the Spirit of God. They claimed to be preaching
the Word of God. And some of them were so unscrupulous
that they forged letters and signed Paul and Peter, James
and John to these letters, saying, here, I got a letter from Paul.
He agrees with me. He said, don't listen to him.
Verse three, he says, let no man deceive you by any means,
for that day shall not come except there come a falling away, an
apostasy first. And that man of sin be revealed,
the son of perdition. A falling away. Now what that
falling away is, is a falling away or a defection from the
truth of the gospel. And it'll get so bad. And it
happens gradually throughout the history of the New Covenant.
It'll get so bad that what is commonly known as Christianity
will not be Christian at all, but a false Christianity. That's
the apostasy. You go up and down the streets
and you see all kinds of churches, don't you? All kinds of religious
organizations calling themselves Christian. Do they preach the gospel of
God's free and sovereign grace in Christ? Or do they preach
another gospel? Well, sad to say, the vast majority,
and I'm saying this upon the Word of God now, you remember
what Christ said in Mark 13 and Matthew 24, they'll be coming
saying, here's Jesus, there's Jesus, we've got Jesus, follow
us. And some of them, he said, will
be so close that if it were possible, they could deceive the very elect.
Now what that tells us is that ultimately, it's not possible
for the elect of God to be deceived and die in unbelief. But he says this is how bad it's
gonna be. Now he speaks of a man of sin here, the son of perdition,
It's antichrist, as people say. I'm gonna deal with that more
next week. All right? But it's not just one man. The
term antichrist is only used in John's epistles. Well, Romans,
I think in Romans 3, it's dealt with, antichrist. And it's claimed,
it's said to be a spirit, an evil spirit. And that evil spirit
is this false gospel It's the equivalent of what Daniel called
the abomination of desolation. The spirit of Antichrist, here's
what it is. False preachers standing in pulpits
preaching false gospels. That's what it is. And it's impended
upon us to know the difference. And he says in verse four, this
spirit of Antichrist, he opposes and exalts himself above all
that is called God. His word is greater than God's
word. You can show them in the Bible,
for example, the truth of election. Oh, I don't believe that. I believe everybody's got a chance.
Everybody's got a choice. All right? They're not speaking
the word of God. Or that is worship so that he
as God sitteth in the temple of God. You know what the temple
of God is in the New Covenant? It's the church. In the Old Covenant,
it was that temple. In the New Covenant, it's the
church. And what he's saying here is that over this period
of time, the visible church... I make the distinction between
the visible church and the true church. What people generally
see as the church will be false. There is a true church. That's
the true people of God. And you remember in Israel, the
vast majority of the Israelites, they rejected the truth of God
and the prophets. But there was always a remnant
according to the election of grace. That's the way it is today.
My goodness, everybody around here calls themselves Christian. And there's some of them, I hope
they are. But if they're sitting in a church where the gospel's
not preached or a false gospel's preached, they're apostate. That's
an abomination. But here's the key. There'll
always be a remnant according to the election of grace. Thank
God for that remnant. And I'm not saying that proudly
or exclusively or as if some kind of elitist. It's just what
I read in the word of God. what the Word of God says. Now
I'll be preaching on this more as we go through this chapter.
But let's close out this session with I Need Thee Every Hour,
page number 15, or page 318. Page 318, I Need Thee Every Hour. Let's stand and sing our closing
hymn.