Overcoming Last Days Deception

Last Days Ready Part 3

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The false bride or the true bride? Are you willing to risk your eternal reward for a false or incomplete gospel? No? Then stick around because life’s too short to miss the real thing.

My name is Gideon Loots, and this is how to discern and overcome Babylon, the great last days deception.

“… many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.”

~ Matthew 24:11-14

THE COUNTERFEIT

Breaking Free from Mystery Babylon

The Father is busy preparing a bride for His son. Satan is also busy preparing a counterfeit bride: Mystery Babylon. Her main assignment is to deceive believers into a false gospel of the kingdom so that they will not complete their mission.

We will either build our lives on the true and full gospel according to God’s blueprint, or we will fall for the deception, build on a false foundation, and become part of the false bride. Babylon will be destroyed by the Antichrist, and believers who have joined themselves to her will lose their inheritance in Christ. They will not lose their salvation, they will be saved, but as through fire, with no reward.

In Revelation 18:4 God is calling all believers:

“…Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues.”

~ Revelation 18:4

Babylon represents the religious system corrupted by its alignment with political powers: the agendas of worldliness on one end and legalism on the other. Within it is found many believers who has lost sight of their true mission. This is a pattern that has repeated itself throughout history and is a warning to all who place their faith in the institutions of man rather than in God.

Although the main deception of Mystery Babylon is the corruption of the church with political power, it has many other deceptions designed to weaken believers. The weaker we are in our faith, the more likely we are to fall for this great deception that is already picking up momentum.

Following we take a closer look at the main deceptions I believe form part of the end-time onslaught on the church. They were already problems that the apostles in scripture had to deal with; but they have become more rampant in our day. The chances that you will have to overcome one or more of these deceptions is almost certain. What I’m about to share is from my own journey. For a season, I either fell for or saw others fall for these deceptions.

Grace vs. Licence to Sin

The grace of God is wonderful. Corrupted grace, on the other hand, either gives you a licence to sin or downplays the seriousness and effects of sin in your life.

I see more and more churches and believers fall into an accommodating gospel where there is nothing wrong with worldliness. Looking and acting like the world is seen as being relevant. Being separate and different from the world is seen as narrow-minded and legalistic.

Legalism is a problem, as we will explore in the next section. Just like holiness corrupted ends up in legalism, grace corrupted ends up in sin without conviction.

True grace is defined both as God’s unmerited favour and God’s empowering favour to overcome. These are the two sides of grace. The one is justifying grace and the other is empowering grace. Justifying grace is given as a free gift because we believe in Jesus Christ. Empowering grace is given freely based on justifying grace so that we can overcome sin.

With justifying grace, nothing you do or don’t do qualifies or disqualifies you from God’s acceptance in Christ. It only depends on faith in Him, not on your works. This acceptance of God also gives you access to God’s empowering grace so that you can overcome.

You will get stuck in your spiritual growth journey if you don’t grasp God’s unmerited acceptance of you in Christ. Satan wants you to feel so condemned and full of shame that you won’t approach God’s presence.

Again, unmerited favour means that you don’t approach God on your merits – how good or how bad you did or did not do. You approach Him on Jesus’ merits: He became sin for you so that you are now the righteousness of God in Him. You enter through His blood and based on His righteousness.

If you don’t get to a place where you grasp this, you will forever struggle to approach God after you have sinned or failed. The only way you can overcome sin or failure in your life is by getting into God’s presence, where He imparts His empowering grace.

His unmerited acceptance doesn’t, however, now give you an excuse to keep on sinning. While it assures you that you are still accepted and welcomed into God’s presence, it also invites you into His overcoming presence.

Learning to Overcome by God’s Presence

In this season of my journey, I got to a place where I could sin now and the next moment come into God’s presence. I simply confessed, thanked Jesus for His blood that washed away my sin, and stepped in by faith. If I continued to feel guilty, I would thank Him again and praise Him for my acceptance through the blood of Jesus.

I would press in until I had no more consciousness of sin, but only an awareness of His presence. These are the necessary first steps that every believer has to come to. However, because I also did not understand God’s empowering grace, I would fall into sin again and again.

This continued for a season until God showed me the necessity of getting into His presence when I am tempted to sin. I needed to learn to overcome Satan’s lie that when I feel dry and empty, sin satisfies. I needed to get into the presence of God, which truly satisfies. This is how I overcame a one-sided understanding of grace.

Let’s be clear: your sin is not good for you, for others it affects, or for your relationship with God. If you use God’s grace as an excuse to never overcome sin, you might be saved, but as through fire, with no eternal inheritance. The measure to which you overcome is the measure to which you will gain an inheritance.

However, if you keep on wilfully living in sin, without any conviction, and there is never growth in your life, you should question your salvation.

We are called to live in the world, but we are not of the world. We should not act like they do and minimise worldly behaviour as not that bad or not so serious. Sin is sin, and God wants us to grow in holiness.

His grace helps us grow despite our failures and keeps us on track; but it doesn’t give us a licence to never grow. God is patient with our struggles, but He is deeply displeased with an attitude that says: “this is not that bad”.

He is patient with our struggle to overcome sin; that is His grace. But He will never excuse us if we just live like we want to, with no regard for His holiness. No, your sin and worldly behaviour is serious to God, and He wants to help you overcome it by His grace.

SPIRIT-GYM TRAINING will help you to cultivate the biblical mindsets needed to embrace God’s grace and overcome sin in your life. For more info, visit spirit-gym.com.

Discipline by the Spirit vs. Legalism

The antidote for corrupted grace is not to try harder to ‘not sin’ and to try live a holy life by keeping laws or Christian rules. A lot of Christians and movements have noticed the problem with corrupted grace. They then started emphasising obedience, but in a legalistic way.

My wife and I were part of a Torah-observant Hebrew Roots group before we got married. Although we do not identify as Torah observant now, we believe that there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with being Torah observant in the way most of our Torah-observant friends practice it. Where we would differ with a lot of Torah-observant believers, is regarding whether we should obsess over keeping laws. Please hear me out before you jump to conclusions.

Regardless of whether you are Torah observant or not, your focus and point of reference should be the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and not on laws or even Christian rules to keep. When you come into God’s presence and behold His glory, His grace empowers you to walk in obedience.

When you focus on laws or rules to keep, you end up disconnecting from His empowering glory, and you are left dry and empty. This leads some to just try harder to keep these laws or rules, but it still does not satisfy, and it makes their struggles with sin even worse.

Sin is to seek satisfaction in other things rather than in God. We overcome sin by faith. Faith says that God is my life and satisfaction. If you truly believe this, then you will respond by seeking your satisfaction in Him.

This is what is meant by obedience to the faith in scripture. You become obedient through faith and not through rules. The focus of law is on behaviours that please God. The focus of faith is on God Himself in Christ.

It is not about how we please Him with our good behaviour. It is about how we are satisfied with Him by faith and how He is pleased with this faith in us. It pleases Him that we believe He is our satisfaction and that we turn to Him for our satisfaction rather than to sin.

The New Testament teaches obedience to the faith. It doesn’t teach conformity to outward behaviours. Don’t get me wrong: obedience to the faith has actionable steps. However, these steps are not focused on doing the right thing. They are instead focused on God’s attributes and how to engage with Him in a relationship.

Laws and rules are behaviour centred, with the motive to please God. Faith is God centred, with the motive to grow in relationship with Him, and this automatically pleases Him.

The antidote for lawlessness and sin is not laws and rules, it is discipline by the Spirit. So, the question is: how does discipline by the Spirit work?

Cultivating Discipline by the Spirit

In his book Spending Time with the Lord, Bill Freeman explains how we need to take the initiative to spend time with the Lord. He then explains how taking the initiative is actually just going along with the inner working of the Holy Spirit. He describes it this way:

“If you are honest with your deepest sense, you will realize that day by day there is a still small voice within you speaking to you about spending time with the Lord — about enjoying and beholding Him. In fact, on the negative side, it feels like something nagging you. When you live neglecting your time with the Lord, there is something within you that spontaneously feels dissatisfied. You sense an incompleteness in your daily life even to the point of an inner protesting. On the positive side, however, there is a desire and a longing to be with the Lord in a definite way — to wait upon Him, behold Him, and enjoy Him. This desire and longing is God working in you.”

~ Bill Freeman

As Philippians 2:13 says:

“… for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”

~ Philippians 2:13

Discipline by the Spirit is obeying the inner promptings of the Spirit: to act on it by faith. This is discipline nonetheless. It isn’t just going to be natural and automatic. We need to decide to go along with it.

Sometimes I am tired and distracted in the mornings. Even though my spirit is dry and hungry for the Lord, my flesh doesn’t feel like spending time with Him. I need to then discipline my flesh by the inner workings of the Spirit that is prompting me.

Every time I do this, after a short while, it becomes such a joy. The initial few steps feel like discipline, but after this, when the Spirit takes over, I don’t even remember how difficult it was initially.

The same applies to overcoming sin in my daily life. Every time I’m tempted to look to people or things for my satisfaction, I discipline my flesh by choosing to turn to God for my satisfaction. After engaging with His presence, I am satisfied and the temptation has lost its appeal.

SPIRIT-GYM TRAINING will teach you how to cultivate discipline by the Spirit with practical steps helping you engage with God’s presence moment by moment.

The Power of the Gospel and the Power of Prayer vs. Dominionism

The previous two deceptions are what I would call Babylon on the left and Babylon on the right. We should avoid the ditch on the left side of the road and the ditch on the right side of the road. You can become too lax and permissive on the one side, or you can become too legalistic and judgemental on the other side. The key is to stay on the road.

Permissiveness relates to the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life; legalism relates to the “good works” of the flesh. Whether you excuse the sin of the flesh or you try to keep laws in the flesh, both are the flesh.

However, the greatest deception of Babylon is Dominionism, which a lot of people in both these groups support to some degree. I know an influential Christian political activist in our city who repeatedly denies that he is a Dominionist, but he continues to propagate Dominionist ideas. It is like he doesn’t even know that his beliefs are Dominionist in nature.

Dominionism is the idea that Christians should not only influence but also take control of the government and all other aspects of society. The motive is to put Godly government and Godly legislation in place.

While this seems like a noble cause, it is total deception. Dominionism is a deception that seeks to use political power to impose a particular religious worldview on society. The true gospel message is about the transformation of hearts and lives through the love and grace of God, not about enforcing outward laws and regulations.

The true gospel will bring people from all nations into obedience of the faith. Dominionism wants to force outward obedience through laws that do nothing to transform hearts. This is not the great commission! This is the great deception! God has not called us to waste our time on earth forcing people to obey Christian laws while they will still burn in hell.

False Narratives of Dominionists

Dominionists will protest and say: “But we are called to be salt and light to influence society. When society embraces Christian values, then people are more open to the gospel.”

This isn’t necessarily true; it only makes society more outwardly religious while hiding their sins. It does little to change people’s hearts.

Dominionists will also say: “But we must make sure that laws are put in place so that evil is kept in check and evil practices don’t go unpunished.”

Yes, but the Bible says we should pray for this and leave it up to God, not take it into our own hands. We should trust the wisdom of God in how He chooses to address these things. He has the king’s heart in His hands. Sin creates problems for a society in the long run and therefore motivates rulers to do something. Evil running rampant also creates desperate people that end up seeking after God. God knows what He is doing.

Another Dominionist idea is: “What about the Josephs, Daniels, Esthers?”

None of these characters sought political power; God’s sovereign hand placed them in positions of power. So, yes, God can do that, but these characters were a teeny tiny minority, and the Bible never ever teaches that we should seek to emulate them. The only way you can find this as an ideal in scripture is if you twist scripture to say things that it clearly doesn’t.

The Fate of Dominionism

Revelation 17 and 18 reveals what the fate of Dominionism will be. The great whore, which symbolises the religious system, is in bed with the kings of the earth. Revelation 17:3 describes her as “sitting on the beast”.

The beast is symbolic of the world system, and the horns on the beast are the kings that rule it. The woman thinks she is sitting on top of and ruling the world and its kings. The woman is the deceived church that thinks they are ruling.

Revelation 17:16-17 reveals what will happen to her:

“And the ten horns which you saw on the beast, these will hate the harlot, make her desolate and naked, eat her flesh and burn her with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to fulfill His purpose, to be of one mind, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled.”

~ Revelation 17:16-17 NKJV

These deceived Christians who did not obey God’s call to come out of Babylon will suffer immense persecution. Unlike the faithful remnant that God will protect during this time, they will be utterly destroyed and lose their eternal reward.

The True Gospel Call

God has called us to pray for those in authority and to be faithful witnesses to the gospel, not to take over society. As Christians, we are called to be peacemakers and to seek the welfare of our communities, but we should not be overly preoccupied with politics or power. Our mission is to share the good news of Christ and to love our neighbours, and we can do that through prayer for those in authority and through faithful witness.

Followers of Jesus cannot simultaneously take the role of the persecuted and the persecutor. We need to choose: are we on the side of the cross or are we on the side of the sword? The choice between the cross and the sword is a choice between two fundamentally different ways of living. The cross calls us to love and serve others, while the sword calls us to dominate and control them. As Christians, we are called to hold fast to the cross and to reject the way of the sword.

There is much more that can be said on this topic. Instead of trying to convince you, I will pray that God Himself will reveal the mystery of Babylon the Great to you.

Through SPIRIT-GYM TRAINING we seek to spread the true gospel of the kingdom, stay faithful to God’s blueprint revealed in scripture, and train you how to spot and overcome these deceptions by teaching the Word of God.

Rejecting Babylon and her deceptions is just half of the story. For the other half on what I believe God is moving the body of Christ towards, click on this video called: ‘End-Time Shaking: What Type of Church Will Last?’