August 29, 2020 @ 12:00 PM
Fallen man and fallen angels have both fallen over the same transgression. They both attempted to usurp the place of God. Lucifer attempted to usurp God’s throne in Heaven and Adam and Eve attempted to usurp God’s place as arbiter of good and evil in the Garden of Eden.
When it comes to fallen man, his ultimate attempt at usurping God’s place in this fallen world always comes in the form of human government. While fallen man does so individually, substituting himself for God in his own life, he also does so collectively, substituting government for God in his own land. It is inevitable, in this sin-cursed world, that everything eventually boils down to a choice between Christ or Caesar. Which will you embrace as your Lord and Savior? Choose carefully, your eternal destiny depends upon it!
The Bible presents us with a panorama of human history, in both past facts and future forecasts, in which human governments are symbolized as beastly antagonists of God’s people. Indeed, it predicts an end-time government that will prove to be the most monstrous in all of human history, bringing unprecedented persecution upon the people of God; namely, God’s Old Testament people—Israel or the Jews—and God’s New Testament people—Christians or the church.
We are undoubtedly living in the last days of this fallen planet. Furthermore, America alone fills the bill for the Biblically predicted end-time Beast; that is, history’s unprecedented persecutor of Jews and Christians. Is there any wonder, therefore, that our country is increasingly becoming antisemitic and antichrist? Yet, in spite of all of this, America’s evangelicals are not only totally oblivious to all that’s occurring, but in many ways ignorantly being a party to it. For instance, consider the rousing applause evangelicals gave Vice President Mike Pence’s RNC speech this past Wednesday night.
Mike Pence closed his speech by misquoting Scripture. Indeed, he actually substituted our country for Christ in his conclusion, which is not just heretical, but blasphemous. Instead of calling upon us to look to Jesus and to be inspired by His past endurance of the cross and present seat at the right hand of the throne of God, as Hebrews 12:1-2 teaches us to do, Pence called on us to “fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents,” and to also “fix our eyes on this land of heroes,” in order for all of us to be inspired by “their courage.” Not satisfied with this single Scriptural sleight of hand, Pence proceeded to pervert another passage of Scripture. He turned the true interpretation of 2 Corinthians 3:17, that God’s liberating Spirit frees us from the Law, into a false insinuation, that the Spirit of the Lord is always with freedom-loving America, which assures us that America will “always win.”
The fact that our own Vice President can usurp the place of Christ in Scripture with our country; that is, our collective selves, without raising any red flags in America’s contemporary church, speaks volumes about how ripe we are for end-time spiritual deception. It also shows how today’s evangelicals, who applauded the Vice President’s Scripture-twisting and Christ-usurping speech, are not just oblivious to their present perilous predicament in the belly of the Beast, but also a gullible party to all that’s about to befall them.