We are at present at the end of the age of the Laodicean church which is described in Revelation 3:15 as being “neither cold nor hot,” but “rich, increased with goods and having need of nothing.” This means that all the seven churches with all their rebellion have come together in one church. This is the picture of a church well settled in the world, being the richest institution on the face of the earth, and wielding political and economic power of great proportions. Spiritually, she is inept and sick unto death with divisions and sin. The doctor would say her condition is incurable. The modern church system has slipped into a quagmire of preaching one thing, and finding it totally impossible to practice its own preachings from the Bible. Thus something more like the generation gap exists, ever widening, between her and her Bible. Something has to give. Therefore the Church, instead of giving way to the Bible, has been trying to bend the Bible to the Church.

By 1991, many of the churches had changed their hymnals to suit the trends of the time. Some have printed a new Bible which puts God in the feminine, and now we see the “overspreading of abominations” (Daniel 9:27) in the holy place. This alerts us that there will soon be the desolations and then the consummation of which this passage speaks.

The difficulty is like dealing with a pernicious disease, for the Bible was never written for carnal men and CARNAL INTERPRETATION. To remedy this ailment, every major religion has either done it herself, or embraced a translation of the Bible which appears to support her position doctrinally. In spite of this, the Bible as a whole condemns these organizations of man. Men who lack godliness institute doctrine to bind their adherents. Thus in this late hour of time, we find an influx of translations, with some passages being made clearer, and at the same time, other passages being made darker, increasing the confusion. It is alleged that even the Communists are making a Bible translation.

One POPULAR TRANSLATION changes all the figures in the Bible, bringing them to their English equivalent, thus destroying all their SYMBOLIC meanings. For instance, 12,000 furlongs translated to 1,500 miles destroys the symbolism of 12 with three zeros behind it to a meaningless figure. Not only this error, but others of a far-reaching nature such as errors of making a passage clearer according to the writer’s natural scope of understanding, when there is a spiritual understanding beyond the scope of the writer. Because of the number of men who translated and cross-checked the King James Version of the Bible, it does not carry any slant of any special doctrine for any particular group, whereas most of the other translations do carry such a slant.

THE INDICTMENT

The indictment against the present church system is:

1) DIVINE ORDER is absent in the rule of our church government. Not Theocratic Rule as was God’s intention, but Democratic, Autocratic, Despotic, Plutocratic and even Totalitarian in some widespread instances. EVERYTHING OUTSIDE OF Divine Order is DISORDER, and the worst kind of disorder is an orderly disorder. Disorder which is deliberate and ordered is, in effect, a rebellion. This is exactly how God looks at it. “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.” Isaiah 1:2.

2) The church system presents God to the world as a God that is slack concerning His promises, and one that is unable to rule His own household, by presenting themselves as His ambassadors while living in every type of sin in which the ungodly participate.

3) In doctrine they say that God is too good to judge and condemn sin, robbing themselves of the knowledge of their own judgment. This doctrine says that God is going to contaminate heaven with a lot of unwilling, self-willed, rebellious and sinful people who hate God and all His works. In doctrine, they distort heaven, making it a faraway dwelling place of spirits, yet with streets of natural gold and walls of natural jasper, upon some carnal, physical, faraway planet. They distort hell, making it nothing but a myth in one rendition, and in another they make it a hole in the ground, in spite of the hint given by the Word of God, “bottomless pit” (Revelation 9:2). A pit without a bottom is not a pit at all. That in itself shows that it is not a natural pit, since every natural pit, to be a pit, must have a bottom.

4) Finally, under the name of God, the churches occupy the most popular corners of every city, and under the guise of charitable organizations, transact business, buying and selling, usurping and lobbying for laws to be passed in all the legislatures of the world to facilitate their pursuit of power. Because of these and more, it is very evident in our time that the church system is at its lowest ebb, while some of the people of God are rising to their highest.

The logical conclusion is that somewhere in the near future, there must be a breakaway of the true Christian from the false church.

I am recording this as a matter of history for the information of those who do not know, that many years ago during the time when Dr. Ramsey was Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church of England advocated and lobbied for a law to be passed to legalize homosexuality among consenting adults, and to foster an abominable marriage between consenting males over 21.

Since this blatant example of defiance against God’s expressed will for humanity, many of the other churches, one by one, are following suit and some even surpass her in rebellion against God by creating homosexual churches. In 1991, the Episcopal church ordained its first woman lesbian bishop. This is abomination; confusion. The Presbyterian church, however, fought off a strong faction in the church which wanted them to recognize homosexuality, etc. in their 1991 Synod.

In 1993, many Anglican churches in England broke away to join the Roman Catholic church, and to claim the “Pope” as their head. It is inevitable that the daughters of the harlot of Revelation 17 must return to their mother.

The New York Council of Churches urged the New York legislature to repeal statutes banning certain sex acts between consenting adults.

“While adultery, fornication, homosexual acts and certain deviant sexual practices among competent and consenting adults violate Judeo-Christian standards of moral conduct, we think that the penal law is not the instrument for the control of such practices when privately engaged in where adults are involved and where there is no coercion.”

The above represents the published position of a church system which at one time had a name of being alive. In opposition to this, let me quote what God says about these “deviant sexual practices” which the council approves.

Leviticus 18:22, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

Leviticus 20:13, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

The judgment for this sin is burning by fire.

Genesis 19:24, “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.”

The word brimstone is an old one which needs some explanation in modern terms. This word simply means “explosive material.” It does include TNT and all other forms of gunpowder. It must be noted that almost all the weaponry in the modern arsenals are weapons of fire.

Genesis 9:11, “And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Genesis 9:13, “I will set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.”

Genesis 8:21, “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor; and the Lord said in His heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.”

God made a covenant with mankind that He would not destroy (a) all living creatures from the earth again, and (b) that He would not do it with water. The implication here under (b) is that even as the rainbow is a fiery aura across the skies that fire will be used in the next judgment. This assumption is borne out by 2nd Peter 3:10, “the elements (the Greek word is ‘stoicheion,’ meaning ‘part of the world’) shall melt with fervent heat, the earth (worldliness) also and the works (man’s works contrary to God’s will) that are therein shall be burned up.”

The fundamentalist belief that God is going to destroy the world with fire is only partly correct. The worldliness and all things that offend will be destroyed by fire, but the good things of God will not be destroyed. This would be consistent with the promise of the rainbow, that God would not again destroy all living things from the earth. Contrary to scripture, the rapturists say the Christians will be removed in a rapture, and while they are basking in the heavenlies, God will incinerate the earth, and then they will return to reign and rule with Christ, over nothing but heaps of ashes, or maybe over themselves. We will mention further scriptural proof that the earth will never be destroyed.

Ecclesiastes 1:4, “One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.”

Other references are in Psalms 104:5 and 119:90.

In the secular world, the governments of the nations are following the lead of the churches and being quite open about their position. At present our children are unsafe in the institutions of learning which are teaching them “sex” in its most perverted forms. What sane parent wants sex taught in kindergarten class? This, however, is what the government of America is making compulsory, beginning from kindergarten school.