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Transcript 260E
The Fall of the Corporate Church in the Last Days
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Good evening. I'd like to have some points clarified about the last days. First of all, is not the true church the body of believers, or the body of Christ?
HC: When we talk about . . . your question is: Is not the true church the body of believers.
Now in the Bible, when the Bible talks about the church, or the Kingdom of God, or the congregation, it is speaking of it from two vantage points. It is speaking of it organizationally, or corporately. The congregations, for example, or the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3, or the congregation which consisted mainly of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, or the congregation that Jesus belonged to when He was on earth, that's the corporate congregation. That is the organized church as we find it spread out throughout the congregations and denominations found in the world today.
But He also uses the word church in the sense of the born again believers who are found in all of the organized churches, sprinkled through the organized churches. And they are the only ones, of course, who are eternal, who really have entered into the Kingdom of God in a real way, so that they have eternal life. That's the true church.
CALLER: When you talked about the last days, you said that Satan would overcome the church. So therefore you're talking about the corporate church, the organized church.
HC: Yes, because the true believers, of course, can't lose their salvation. They'll just patiently wait for all this to pass over.
CALLER: I'd like to read from Matthew 24, starting with verse 7: "For nation shall rise against nation; and kingdom against kingdom. And in various places there will be famines and earthquakes. But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pangs. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations on account of My Name. And at that time many will fall away, and will betray one another and-hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and will mislead many. And because lawlessness is increased, most people's love will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end, he shall be saved. And this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a witness to all the nations. And then the end shall come."
Reading these few verses here, it would seem to indicate to me that the Gospel will be preached until the very end, because it says that after the Gospel is preached, then the end shall come.
HC: Yes, except that that assumes that the end is immediately. In other words, that assumes that one day you have the Gospel being proclaimed, and the next day Judgment Day is here. Actually, the final tribulation spoken of in verse 15 really is just a final little period of time just before the end. But in the perspective of all of time, it is just an incidental point in time, as compared with all of time.
What I'm trying to say is that I think in verse 14, where it says, "Then the end will come," we have a statement that is giving an overall view. But then we have these other statements, like Jesus' statement of John 9, "Work while it is day. The night cometh when no man can work," which is focusing now on this in greater detail. It's opening it up so that we can look a little bit more carefully at the end. We've got a magnifying glass now, and we're looking right at the end.
Again, the language of Revelation 7 is a magnifying glass looking right at the end. I believe that Amos 8 is the same kind of a thing, where it says, "Men will run to and fro looking for truth, and they will not find it." There will be this brief period when the Gospel will be silenced. And this of course is Daniel 8, where it says that the continual will be taken away, and the sanctuary will be overthrown. This is the language again, you see, of the silencing of the Gospel.
CALLER: As you read this Matthew 24, up to verse 14, it's talking about all these "ends." And then you go to verse 15, and it says "Therefore." And that seems to expand on the previous verses.
HC: That's exactly it. Now you see, in verses 7 and 8 God is simply giving us the language of what is normative for the world, throughout time nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, famines and earthquakes, and so on. "This is but the beginning of the birth pangs." This is what precedes.
And then in verses 9 through 14, very quickly He is giving us the pattern of the end. "Then." This is a time reference. Sometimes you find the word then, and it's not a time reference. But in this Matthew 24, whenever you find the word "then," it's a time reference. "Then." Now He's going back to His initial premise, that He's laid down in verse 3: "Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and the end of the world?"
And so in verse 9 He's saying, "Then [that is, after you've had these wars and famines and earthquakes, which are a normative thing – they may even speed up at the end, although we have no way of saying it's absolutely so – but at least that is the condition that will always be in the earth] they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for My Name's sake." Now that matches the language of Revelation 20:8 where it talks about Satan being loosed: "And he will marshal the nations from the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog. And they will assault the camp of the saints [or the Beloved City, which is the body of Christ]." They will assault this. So here we have some details about it. "You will be subject to tribulation, and some of you they shall put to death. And you will be hated."
And then in verse 10 He's giving another aspect, indicating the tremendous activity of false prophets: "Many will fall away." And verse 11: "And many false prophets will arise, and lead astray." Verse 12: "Wickedness is multiplied. Most men's love will grow cold." In other words, the church is being decimated right and left.
The true body of Christ can never lose its salvation. But you see, here's the thing that's going to happen. Within the corporate church as we see it today, in any congregation, today the best we can do, and this is a traumatic idea, when you stop to think of it. When we look at any normal time in history, if a pastor looks at his congregation and sees he has 200 members, and they have all joined the church and they all partake of Communion and they're all reasonably faithful people, he may have questions about two or three of them, but fundamentally he really wants to believe, and as nearly as he can tell, they're all children of God. They're all born again believers. He has no reason to believe anything different than this.
And that's the way the church normally exists throughout time. And so these 200 people, they live and they die. And when they're buried, the minister preaches a burial service. And everybody is grateful because they know Brother John is in Heaven now. They have no way of knowing for sure whether he was born again or not.
But the Bible teaches, of course, that in the congregation, and we see it in the seven churches of Revelation, we see it in the church of Jesus' day, everyone in the corporate church is not born again. Many are not. Many have just been making like a Christian.
And so I expect to see that the true church, or the corporate church, will be decimated, so that here and there we're only going to find that there are only relatively small percentages of true believers in the congregation, after all.
CALLER: The true church are the believers.
HC: Let me put it another way. Here is a congregation that finally succumbs, and a man begins to be the pastor who is not bringing the true Gospel anymore. He's bringing another gospel. Most of the church, or maybe half of the church, or some part of it, is going to go right along. They're going to trust the pastor, and they're going to go right along with these other gospels, because they're not born again believers.
But there will be those in that congregation who will say, "Wait a minute. We can't stay here any longer, because this isn't the true Gospel anymore." And so they have to leave. And so that congregation effectively is going to be silenced then, isn't it? It's no longer the true church, but it was the true church. That is, it was the custodian of the Gospel. It was represented in Heaven symbolically by a lampstand, as we read in Revelation 1 and 2. But it has become ruled over by those who are another gospel.
CALLER: If these people are led away, then they were never actually members of the true church and the body of Christ.
HC: Let me say it again. Any congregation today is composed of saved and unsaved Christians. Okay? And as long as it brings the true Gospel, to any degree, in other words, as long as it holds that the Bible alone and in its entirety is the Word of God, even though it may bring it fallaciously at times, and poorly at times, yet it is the church of Christ. It is the body of believers. And as near as we can tell, we have to assume that the members are born again believers.
But when these snares strike, that we read about here, false prophets arise, leading many astray, wickedness is multiplied, many will fall away, we're going to find that many of these congregations only had a handful of true believers. Or maybe they had as many as two-thirds true believers. I don't know what the number will be.
And as they come under the rule of those who bring other gospels, the true believers will leave. And in this way the church is finally silenced, you see. The moment there's no true believers in that congregation anymore, then it's an apostate church. Then it no longer has any relationship with Christ.
CALLER: Are we looking at the church as the collective body of believers on this whole planet?
HC: Yes, but it will not be able to work as God normally has it work, as congregations of born again believers, for whatever reason. I don't know how all this is going to take place, but God indicates that the true Gospel will be silenced, and the believers probably will be scattered to some degree. We already see this in some communities. In some smaller communities, there may only be three churches in town. And you go to all three, and you find that they're not bringing the Gospel.
And so what do you do? Well, the best you can do is hope that you can find someone else in the community to worship with, and form your own church.