Apostasy

Have you ever had a co-worker who just didn’t do their job. I have run into this a few times. In some cases it was just a bad hiring decision. Sometimes as soon as somebody shows up you know they are not going to do anything. It puts stress on the workgroup and makes everyone else try to pick up the slack. It is overall a bad deal. Some people just refuse to do their part.

Other times it seems different. I have known people who were retired in place. They did their jobs for years and at some point they just decided to coast until retirement. They had already checked out but they just hadn’t gone home yet. In some ways that’s worse. I have known people who did a good job for years and years, people who were the ones you could count on and depend on to do their part who just slowly stopped.

Now everyone has bad days where they just don’t get much done or where they feel bad, everyone has days where they just check out and come back later. Maybe that is how it starts. I have been a supervisor and if an employee who has been a good worker for years has an off day you tend to ignore it. If an employee who has had an off day has three in a row you wonder what is going on and try to help. I have seen someone going through a divorce or a death in the family who just has a hard time, a rough patch, on Monday everything is fine and they are a great employee, same thing on Tuesday, and Wednesday but on Thursday they just seem checked out and distracted and a repeat of Friday. So we let it go and see what happens. Next week the zombie is back and they seem to just be going through the motions, now is the time to offer some help, to try to figure it out, to help them get past it.

When suddenly someone goes from all good to checkout out we know something is up and we want to help get it fixed.

Then there is the other kind. Perhaps the most common kind. They do good for a while and then start to slack off. At first you don’t even notice it. It’s just one or two things here and there, but over time more and more things are let go, late, or done badly until there comes a point when it has gone too far.

I think that is the easiest trap to fall into.… gradually letting go until it goes too far.

One day at work you see a dime on the ground, you pick it up and think did this drop out of the register or someone’s pocket. Do I put it back in the register or in my pocket. It’s just a dime, so you stick it in your pocket. This happens a few times and one day you drop a dime out of the register yourself. As you pick it up you think this is just like finding a dime on the floor, what should I do. So you stick it in your pocket. Later you are getting more and more clumsy and dropping more and more dimes with the occasional quarter. You think this is silly, why not skip the middle man and put it right in my pocket., so you do. Then it becomes dollars and fives and later even twenties. Somewhere along the line you became a thief. You never meant to, you can’t imagine something like that happening to you, but gradually, step by step it did. A lot criminals start that way. Most don’t start by robbing a bank, maybe they start by picking up loose change and then finding more ways to make loose change fall.

Most people that cheat on their spouse say that they don’t know how it happened. They didn’t wake up one morning and decide to do it. It started with fighting or dissatisfaction at home, talking to someone else like they used to talk to their spouse. Becoming good friends and one day it just went too far.

Having lived long enough to see multiple people fall into these kinds of traps I read an old familiar bible passage and thought about it in a different way.

2 Thessalonians 2:1–4 NASB95

Now we request you, brethren, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, that you not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one in any way deceive you, for it will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God.

Lots of people are speculating today about whether or not we are in the last days, whether or not the antichrist is here yet or not. That is not new , people have been doing it since the days of Paul. In fact that is his topic in this chapter. I am not going to speculate on who the antichrist is or when he will start. instead I want to concentrate on another part of Paul’s message.

It (meaning the day of the lord, the end times) will not come unless the apostasy comes first. Many have talked about apostasy, about the shrinking of the church and the abandoning of the faith. I have heard preachers talk about the feel good, self help Gospel that some are spreading as evidence of the apostasy and that may be but I think the real evidence, the real danger is something else.

This apostasy, Paul says. has to happen before the last days come. The word is not a English word but a Greek word. It is a transliteration. In other words someone took the Greek word and spelled it in English. I wonder if they did that because it was so hard to translate. We translate it as a falling away but it literally means to stand away from or stand of from. Kind of like we use the idea of someone who is stand-offish.

I have come to believe that Paul is not talking about false teachers, he talks about them enough in other places and names them as false teachers. He is not talking about atheists or idolaters, he names those people as such in other places. He is talking about Christians. People who once were faithful members of the faith. They did not lose their salvation and they did not become idol worshipers or atheists or Paul would have called them what they were. Paul was never afraid to call a spade a spade.

These are Christians who once were right in the middle of it all, who once were the backbone of their local congregations, people who believe, people who will be with us in heaven. The ones who were always in the thick of things........but something changed.

I don’t think we are talking about people who teach false doctrine, most of the false teachers were always false teachers, their doctrine didn’t just suddenly change. I don’t think he is even talking about the ones who have always existed on the fringes of the church. The ones who attend an occasional service and consider themselves Christians but who never really let it have much of an effect on their daily lives. The church has always had such people and probably will until Jesus comes back. I think it is much, much worse.

I think the apostasy is about people who used to be the salt of the earth. They used to be proud to be a Christian and everyone knew where they stood and in their mind nothing has changed but little by little, day by day they just became less and less obvious about it. They didn’t want to be pushy or overbearing so they just took a backseat and they are not as vocal or obvious as they once were. They kind of became standoffish.

They have always believed that bible reading was important and they still read their bible but it just doesn’t seem to have the urgency it once had. It used to be really important that they find ways that the bible related to their everyday lives and that when they got onto their kids they used the bible to prove their point, that they talked about God and what God said in their daily conversations and that the reasons why they did what they did were good reasons because they were biblical reasons. But gradually they began to use the words of God less and less in their daily lives and it seemed less important that they talk about God and God’s word. They didn’t stop believing they just kind of backed off and kept God to themselves rather than taking a chance on offending someone or saying the wrong thing. They just kind of took a step back.

You know the type of person I mean. They used to be in God’s house every time the doors were open and spent their time with Godly people doing Godly things. They still believe in God, the still think associating with God’s people is important but they have taken some time away, they have stepped back a little to relax or to get through a busy time at work or to allow someone else to step up. They think nothing has changed on the inside it is just harder to see, not quite so obvious, they have just stepped back a little.

During COVID most churches did not have services. Some who had three services a week before COVID never did go back. Many people who went to church and volunteered before just stayed home. Many say they can worship as well at home or watch a television show at home and it is much more convenient. They haven’t quit, they are still Christians, still saved, they have just dialed it down a little, you might say they have stepped back from where they used to be.

I thing that the great danger of apostasy is not heretics or atheists or false teachers. It is stepping back a little. During

Edmund Burke, an Englishman who was a very respected politician at the time of our founding fathers said “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. “

Martin Luther King Jr. said “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but silence over that by the good people”

I wonder if someone looking at the church today would not say something like this

The tragedy in the church today is not the bad theology of the heretics or the attacks of the atheists but the fact that so many bible believing Christians just stood back out of the way and let it happen.

Apostacy means to fall away from or to stand of away from. Paul says that the antichrist cannot come until the people of God choose to stand aside and let it happen. What if the reason that so many generations of Christians have expected the second coming and not seen it is because they were willing to stand in the gap, they were willing to get involved and stay involved. They were willing to get right in the thick of things and stay there and so the end could not come, because they would not stand aside. What about us, what about our generation, what about now.

Are we willing to stand in the gap, are we willing to stand up and be counted, are we willing to make our voices heard, or will we be that final generation who just stands back and watches it all happen. Since the days of Paul someone has stood in the way of the antichrist, since the days of Paul the church has been the staying force in the world, standing against Satan and holding off the end of time so that thousands more could be saved, so that you and I could be saved.

I wonder, are we the last generation, has a generation finally come who will stand quietly by and let it happen. Have we stepped back once too often, given in and given up one too many times. Have we stepped aside so many times that we have finally given up too much ground? Is the Great Apostasy here, or are there still those willing to step up to the challenge. Have we given up and given in, or have we just begun to fight. I think faith is worth fighting for, do you?