There were two great heresies that threatened the life of the infant church. The first was Judaism and the second Gnosticism. Many of the New Testament epistles were written to combat these two heresies. Judaism threatened to confine the Christian Faith to sectarianism, by making it a mere Jewish sect, nothing more than an appendage of Judaism itself. If successful, this heresy would have halted the Christian Faith from getting off the ground as God’s universal call to all men everywhere to come to His Son, Jesus Christ, for their salvation.
The second heresy threatening the fledgling church of the New Testament, Gnosticism, was a counterfeit cult of Christianity. It threatened to undermine the teachings of Scripture, which serve as the foundational and fundamental tenets of the Christian Faith, a faith not only once and for all delivered to the saints, but that all saints are called upon to defend at all times, lest it, along with its message of salvation, be lost to posterity (Jude 1:3).
Gnostics taught that they themselves were the sole possessors of “gnosis”; that is, they alone were “in the know.” As the self-proclaimed possessors of superior enlightenment and intelligence, Gnostics looked down their noses at all dissenters as unenlightened ignoramuses. According to the Gnostics, anyone disagreeing with their dictates was just simply too dumb to understand their brilliance.
In his defense of the Christian Faith against Gnosticism, the Apostle John warned us that Gnosticism was the spirit of antichrist, which was in the world in his day, would continue to grow in the world thereafter, and would finally crest and break over the whole earth at the end of time (1 John 4:1-3). This manipulative and coercive spirit of supposed superior enlightenment and intelligence will, John predicted, reach its crescendo when the whole end-time world is indoctrinated and incarcerated by it.
Like John, the Apostle Paul also issued a very critical warning to us in 1 Timothy 6:20-21. According to Paul, we should "avoid godless, foolish discussions with those who oppose [us] with their so-called knowledge" (NLT). In the King James Version, the phrase “those who oppose [us] with their so-called knowledge" is translated "oppositions of science falsely so called.” As Paul warns, it is possible for us, especially in the last days, as John points out in his first epistle, to be deceived into erring from the Christian Faith, not only by those who will profess to possess superior knowledge, but also by what will falsely be called science.
Have you ever stopped to think about how similar many, if not most, modern-day scientists are to the ancient Gnostics? Do they not also profess to posses an intellectual superiority, which leads them to peer down their noses at all who refuse indoctrination into their “infallible” creed as intellectual inferiors. For instance, anyone who professes to believe in the “fanciful” Genesis account of creation rather than in the scientifically “proven fact” of evolution is readily and roundly ridiculed today as intellectually impaired. In addition, anyone daring to question the medical science on the coronavirus or the environmental science on climate change is instantaneously renounced and reprimanded as a numbskull and nemesis to public safety and planetary survivor.
With the manipulative and coercive spirit of antichrist now sweeping our planet under the guises of “knowledge” and “science,” our world is increasing spurning the Lordship of Jesus Christ and subjugating itself to the lordship of its new science czars. Instead of following Scripture—living by the Word of God—today’s end-time world is following the science—living by the words of men, like Anthony Fauci and Al Gore. Tragically, as time runs out on this Christ rejecting planet, our world has no idea that it is sealing its fate by swapping infallible Scripture for imperfect science, divine revelation for human reason, Jesus Christ for Fauci and Gore, and an omnipotent God for an impotent government.