God Is Patient
When! When is it coming? How much longer must we wait for God to rapture His people out of this evil world? The world gets more and more evil day after day and still no rapture. We thought it was imminent a half-century ago when Israel was restored to the Jews but nothing yet.
God has great patience you say and His time is always the perfect time. Yes, but did we get the correct story in our churches? Were our pastors and theologians mistaken somehow? Was the restoration of Israel not really the so very significant milestone we were told it was?
If we were so very wrong about this, where else might we be wrong? Would God really rapture the few true believers in the world today and send the rest of the world to Hell for all eternity? Isn’t God a God that loves His creatures? Is His patience really so limited that He can’t wait any longer? Doesn’t God have infinite patience?
There was a time when almost all God’s people believed that the world would one day be a truly Christian world, a world in which everyone you met was a true born-again believer. Where did that hope go? When and how did we lose it?
I remember! It began with the so very popular Scofield Bible, the Bible with Scofield’s notes that explained the meaning of the biblical text. Many of us may remember it from a time when we sat at our mother’s knee and she read God’s Word to us.
It was not the Bible at all. It was Scofield’s notes that taught us to see God’s plan in a new and very different light. He was no longer a God that never changed His mind, One that had infinite patience. According to Scofield, God changed His mind (and how He relates to us) at least seven times in history.
How in the world did this ever happen? How were we so utterly deceived by this evil man’s evil book? It was because we were so very weak, so very lacking in our knowledge of Scripture. We had become dependent on our pastors and could not understand God’s Word without their help.
How did we let this happen to us? How did we become so weak and so dependent on these utterly incompetent pastors? Very simply, we failed to obey God and study His Word on our own in small groups. Instead, we relied on others, supposedly well trained, godly men; but they led us far away from God’s truth.
What we must do to correct this deplorable situation is to reject these godless churches and begin to study God’s Word on our own. We need to form small groups of believing families that meet together regularly to learn for ourselves. This is what the early Christians did before there were any churches. They could hear an apostle speak perhaps once or twice in a year but were on their own most of the time. They studied God’s Word the only way they could, in small groups that hid from Rome’s rulers.
We need to emulate the early Christians and abandon these faithless churches and mega-churches we attend today. We should do what the Apostles did. They formed small communities of new believing families that worshipped God without seminary-trained pastors or institutions of any kind. God is truly patient and will bless and reward our every effort to restore this faithful form of worship.