by Jacob Ninan
The Antichrist is going to be a very impressive man who can ultimately make most of the people of the world believe he is God (2Thess.2:3,4). He is going to be Satan’s representative on earth (Rev.13:1-4), and we can imagine that Satan will support him with all the powers he has at his disposal. If we look around thoughtfully we can see that things are building up towards the day when the Antichrist will be revealed. The world is moving fast towards the atmosphere that will be conducive for the reign of the Antichrist. Satan is building up support for the Antichrist through carefully orchestrated strategies, by changing opinions, replacing values, and generally turning people against Jesus Christ and His kingdom of righteousness and peace. Satan is not doing this by telling people straightaway to do wrong. As the master of lies and deceit, he is accomplishing this successfully by making people believe that they are standing for the truth or upholding high standards of justice while they are actually overthrowing and undermining the truths, principles, values and guidelines which have been given to man by God. Satan has been raising up ungodly people as activists to try to change public opinion in different areas of life by mass propaganda and pressure tactics—spreading falsehood, coercing and threatening—and finally making those who innocently oppose them feel guilty or confused in the process! The media which enjoy sensation more than truth or facts fall a prey to Satan’s manipulations and end up promoting falsehood. With all such pressures coming at them from all quarters, even sincere Christians are beginning to accede to public opinion and to tone down or give up their own opposition to these concepts (Matt.24:24). Leaders and even church groups are bowing to the pressure, and choosing to join the bandwagon instead of standing as the lights in this world.Christians begin to get defiled when they dilute their commitment to the word of God as their ultimate standard for life and doctrine, and start giving more attention to ‘learned experts’. What a lot of people do not recognise is that many of these so-called experts are not without their own biases as the public imagine them to be. Many of them are godless people with their own personal agendas; some oppose anything connected with God in order to avoid having to become responsible towards Him in their own lives; some do not mind hiding the truth here and there or exaggerating something in order to grab fame. Without examining the claims of such experts carefully to check their validity, the media jump up to create sensational stories around them. When some of the theories of ‘experts’ are later proven to be invalid, that does not come up in the media at all.
Let us look at some typical examples. The feminist movement came out as a revolt against male domination and claimed equal rights for women as men. But one of the offshoots was the focus on the so-called rights of women to determine whether they wanted to continue with their pregnancy. Millions of babies have been aborted because of the whims and fancies of ‘liberated’ women. What the rights activists have managed to do is to bury the issue of babies being killed under what they project as the ‘greater issue’ of the rights of women to determine their own future. Media has gone along with this to such an extent that people who speak out against abortion are made to look ridiculous as being out of touch with the times. Murder is being carried out in the name of human rights.
From ancient times homosexuality was considered as an aberration and homosexual acts as unnatural and wrong. Most of the countries had laws that made homosexual acts a criminal offence, indicating that everyone recognised this as a matter of conscience. (The Indian Penal Code Section 377 still provides for punishment up to life time imprisonment for homosexual acts which it classifies as ‘unnatural acts’.) But homosexual activists came out into the public and demanded that their lifestyle was a matter of individual choice that other people had no business to interfere with. Then they went on to bring out ‘scientific’ research that purported to show that homosexual tendency was something some people were born with (actually this has not been validated even now) and they coined the term ‘sexual orientation’ for this ‘tendency’. The implication became that if someone was born with a homosexual orientation, he or she could not be held morally responsible for their lifestyles. The media published this with great enthusiasm, and the activists put great pressure on psychiatrists and psychologists not to treat homosexuality as abnormal. Guidelines are now being issued to make it unethical for anyone to try and correct this sexual orientation, saying that such attempts might cause trauma to the clients. The next natural step was to legalise same sex marriages. As some social scientists predicted, further developments are already going on in terms of wanting to legalise polygamy, polyamory and incest as matters of individual choice and right. A classic case of ‘rights’ took place when a couple refused to announce the gender of their baby, saying that it was up to the child to choose its gender!
Many Christians began to accept the concept of homosexual orientation, and soon several leaders began to announce their homosexual relationships openly. Churches began to conduct marriages between homosexuals. Organisations which were helping homosexuals chose to shut down such activities. The fear of being tagged as ‘homophobes’ is overpowering their desire to help.
What we see is that the pressure in this case too is coming from the contest between ‘rights’ and being right. It is as though if anyone talks of his individual rights, no one else has any right to oppose him or tell him that he is wrong. See how the right to free speech is being misused by many to abuse and insult people, religions and races, and people support free speech even then!
We can see this tendency in plenty among Christians too to ignore the issue of right and wrong for the sake of appearing to be broadminded and avant garde. Hardly anyone seems to be willing to point out errors in anyone’s or any church’s teachings or practices because the cry will come out immediately, “Judge not!” People are being moulded to think that ‘love’ means tolerating anything other people do.
Many Christians now are even prepared to accept that all religions essentially lead to the same God, even though Jesus Himself has declared His uniqueness (Jn.14:6). Anyone who has come into a personal relationship with God through Jesus knows clearly that there cannot be any other way. The pressure from people of other faiths is for Christians to be ‘loving’ and ‘tolerant’ and not to be narrow-minded or fanatical. Many Christians seem to be getting overwhelmed by this pressure as they do not want to be considered odd. To be accepted seems to be more important than being right.
People are becoming less and less willing to differentiate between black and white or to call a spade a spade. Political correctness is the order of the day. Even when one knows the truth clearly and without doubt, one has to be careful not to express it less it offend someone else! What a grand preparation for the coming of the Antichrist who will stand for everything that is opposed to Christ! When the Antichrist comes, “He will use every kind of evil deception to fool those on their way to destruction, because they refuse to love and accept the truth that would save them” (2Thess.2:10 NLT). Let us pray that as God’s witnesses on earth we will not lose our light or taste even as the pressures increase to make us compromise.
-- Editorial in the Light of Life magazine, April 2015
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