The Great Falling Away
John Eldredge
Giving up has always been a struggle for frail humanity. But when Jesus urges us to ask for strength to escape, he has something particular in mind, something he sees coming: “At that time many will turn away from the faith” (Matthew 24:10).
Saint Paul was deeply troubled by this as he wrote his friends living in Thessalonica: “Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day [the day Christ returns] will not come unless the falling away comes first” (2 Thessalonians 2:3 NKJV). Prior to the climax of this story, and the wonderful return of Jesus to make everything new, there will be some sort of global Falling Away. The Greek word here is apostasia, and that is why some translations put it this way: “No one is to deceive you in any way! For it will not come unless the apostasy comes first” (2 Thessalonians 2:3 NASB).
But the word apostasy conjures up more zombie apocalypse imagery, and that’s not helpful in our effort to understand our situation. I don’t think we’re going to see millions of people tattooing “I hate God; I love Satan” on their chests, or marches in every major city blaspheming Jesus Christ. Satan is much cleverer than all that. I believe what we will see—what we see happening now—is simply people giving up on God in large numbers. Which is why I think the New Life Version has it right: “For the Lord will not come again until many people turn away from God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3).
I believe we may be witnessing the Great Falling Away.
Let me be quick to say that there isn’t a simple explanation nor simplistic solution. Some people are fed up with religion. But much of the turning from God is born out of heartache and disappointment—God did not seem to help. He did not seem to hear. These are the deepest hurts of the human heart. We will explore what to do with those hurts as we go along, but let me say here that giving up your faith is like finding yourself in a desert, your weary legs throbbing with pain. You can’t find your way out by cutting your legs off. God can handle your anger, disappointment, even bitterness. But walking away from Jesus is forsaking your only hope out of the heartache.
I bring this up because the enemy is wickedly skilled at pouncing on our vulnerabilities. He is using these trying times to cloud our hearts with unbelief. If in fact the Falling Away is sweeping the earth, we want to have advance warning. It gets in the air like poison, and we don’t want to slowly succumb to it ourselves. It gains a social momentum, and since we are social creatures, we can get swept up in it without a conscious decision on our part.
But this is our moment, and Jesus offers us strength, so let us seize it now with both hands while we still can. |
The Apostate Church
Five hundred years after the Protestant Reformation
the Lutheran State Church in Germany was fully apostate.
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller [1892-1984] was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor who served from 1931 to 1937 at Saint Anne’s Lutheran Church in Dahlem, a wealthy suburb of Berlin.
Believing as a young man that Germany needed a strong leader to promote national unity and honor, Niemöller thought that could be achieved by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party touting nationalist slogans and advocating autonomy for private worship of the Christian faith. Niemöller voted for the Nazis, both in the 1924 Prussian state elections and in the final national parliamentary elections of March 1933.1
Most Germans hailed Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor on January 30, 1933, but few were more jubilant than Protestant church leaders, who welcomed the possibility of national regeneration. Yet, following Hitler’s rise to power and Nazism’s interference in church governance, Pastor Niemöller became a disillusioned and outspoken critic.
Niemöller had come to the ministry late in life, at nearly 40 years of age. A gifted charismatic preacher, he soon became widely known for his critical sermons against the state and the view that neopaganism was being encouraged by the Nazis.
As a consequence, Pastor Niemöller was frequently arrested between 1934 and 1937. In February 1938, he was sent off and held in solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In 1941, the Gestapo transferred the pastor to Dachau. The last eight years of Nazi rule, Niemöller spent in Nazi prisons and concentration camps.
Martin Niemöller was a complex man and a self-confessed antisemite, in contrast to modern Evangelicals, who are viewed as Israel’s best friends due to the Abrahamic Covenant, which came about when God said to Abraham, “I will bless those that bless you and curse those who curse you, and I’m giving you the land.”
As an aside, I went in 2013 with my friend Ralph Hallow [1938-2020], the celebrated chief political correspondent for the Washington Times, to his scheduled interview with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. When asked in the foyer outside Abbas’ office, “Why do the Evangelicals back the Jews over the Palestinians?” I answered by paraphrasing Genesis 12:1-3;7: “God said to Abraham, ‘I will bless those that bless you and curse those who curse you, and I’m giving you the land.’” The official responded, “So you’re saying that I’m not a son of Abraham?” I replied, “You are a son of Abraham, and you came through Ishmael.” All hell broke loose.
Ralph and I were thrown out of PLO Headquarters in Ramallah for articulating the very last truth that God spoke to Moses in Deuteronomy 34:4: “This is the land that I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your offspring.’”
Niemöller’s unscripted remark from his 8-year period of captivity is what he’s best known for today. He said: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Pastor Niemöller’s colleague Dietrich Bonhoeffer [1906-1945] didn’t fare as well. A Lutheran pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident, Pastor Bonhoeffer’s theology would not lead him away from the German public square, but instead deeply and profoundly into it.
In witnessing the atrocities of the Nazi Regime and the unspeakable human suffering, Bonhoeffer became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Imprisoned for the last two years of his life, Pastor Bonhoeffer was executed at dawn on the morning of April 8, 1945, having been led naked into the execution yard while prison guards jeered and ridiculed him.
At the foot of the scaffold, Bonhoeffer paused to kneel and pray, then got up and climbed the steps to the gallows. Using a meat hook from a slaughterhouse, Bonhoeffer was then slowly hoisted by a noose formed of piano wire. Asphyxiation is thought to have taken half an hour ... one of the last gruesome acts of Adolf Hitler.2
The SS camp doctor who witnessed Bonhoeffer’s death later recalled a man “devout, brave and composed; I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
Pastor Martin Niemöller came to the realization that compliance and doing nothing, as expressed in his ‘they came for’, is that which led Germany to Adolf Hitler, a despot “who consorted with crazies and criminals and was often seen carrying a dog whip in public.”3 Niemöller’s adage is especially prescient and current as America drifts idly towards the abyss, having surrendered the culture to religious secularism over the last 100 years or so.
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The Two Churches
Reference Reading
References to Falling Away from the Faith
The Meaning of the Remnant
The Church Papers
Wikipedia on Apostasy
The Hidden of the Lord
Hiding in the Rock
When a Nation Dies
The Apostate Church
The One True Church
Jeremiah in Stocks
Revival? No!
The Left Behind
The True and the False
The Two Churches
The DAY of the LORD
Hiding in the Rock
Is God Angry?
Habakkuk
The Revirginized Bride
Amos
When a Nation Dies
The Call of Heaven
The Real Jesus
Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you,
not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come.
Let no one deceive you by any means;
for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first,
and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition,
who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.
Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things?
And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time.
For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way.
And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming.
The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders,
and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie,
that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth,
to which He called you by our gospel, for the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle.
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and our God and Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting consolation and good hope by grace,
comfort your hearts and establish you in every good word and work. (2 Thessalonians 2) |
"Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure,
for if you do these things you will never stumble;
for so an entrance will be supplied to you abundantly
into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."
(2 Peter 1:10-11)
Notes by Lambert Dolphin
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December 27, 2021. April 7, 2022. October 3, 2022. February 26, 2023. March 14, 2023. May 7, 2023.
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The creedal statement will probably remain orthodox, kosher, but the growing church becomes "seeker friendly." Hypocrisy sets in. So does apostasy. The creed stays in place, but fewer members know and walk with Jesus. The original warm, caring Fellowship is now just another church on church row with very little light and not much love overflowing into the community. The visible church is now mostly compromised as far as God is concerned. Fewer real seekers bother to show up. The members know that are not really loved and but everyone is welcome as long as they have no "problems" and/or "issues." The younger generation loses interest and drops out! No one knows quite why. The outward form is preserved but there is dry rot inside.
There is nothing new about this series of events. Through two thousand years of church history, the professing church has reinvented her image and protocols seven times now. See 
