The Last Days?
About fifty years ago the Christian world went crazy. The Jews were given land in Israel and this was seen as a fulfilment of prophecy. Millions of books were written depicting people disappearing, airplanes crashing to the ground because the pilots disappeared, families broken suddenly when one or more members were gone.
The books, of course, were fiction but they captured the underlying expectations of many of their readers throughout the world. We can look back to it as a time of widespread acceptance that such an event was coming soon.
Now, a half century later, the fervor has died down but many Christians are still waiting for the predicted rapture. They believed then and still believe today that God changed His mind and decided to end the world much sooner than He had originally planned.
Where in Scripture can we find a God so weak and so out of control that He cannot continue as He originally planned? Is it the same God that wrote the names of all His chosen people in His book befpre He made the worlds (Revelation 3:5)? Is it the same God that created the entire universe with the breath of His mouth and sustains it in existence to this day?
Of course not! It cannot be and is not the God of the Bible. So where does this false god come from? He is a character in a fiction story that calls itself a bible. It contains within its pages a complete copy of the King James Bible. It also contains the author’s explanations of what he believes each verse or group of verses mean. In other words, it was a Bible closely joined to a set of explanatory statements, one for each passage.
The concept of a god that changed his mind several times in history comes, not from God’s Word but from the notes that were placed alongside of God’s Word by the highly audacious author of this highly pretentious book. His name was Cyrus Ingersoll Scofield, author of the Scofield Bible, a man that will be seen as one of Christianity’s greatest enemies. [1]
Many Christians today still believe Scofield’s lies. They really believe that God changed His mind, revised His plans and that we are now in the last days. Many were deceived and now, a century later, their descendants are still waiting for Jesus to come and rapture them out pf this world.
The theological error that fed the rapture craze is still very much alive for many Christians today. These highly misled believers don’t believe in the God that Scripture gives us. They believe in the god that Scofield gave us jn the notes he attached to God’s Word in the Scofield-bible. Yes even now, a century later, many of God’s people still believe his horrendous lies. They wait for a rapture that God says cannot come before all the nations are converted to the Christian faith:
And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. (Revelation 11:15)
How, we must ask ourselves, did this huge failure come about? What deficiency was present that gave Satan such an opportunity to deceive God’s people? Very simply, we were so poorly prepared and so ignorant of God’s Word that we could not recognize the many contradictions of Scripture in what Scofield wrote.
God employs Satan and men like Scofield to test His followers. He shows us our deficiencies and our need to get serious about the study of His Word. As we do so and we learn more, He increases the pressure on us. He knows we have a long way to go and gives us ever more difficult assignments. Scofield’s book was one such lesson and so far, we have done quite poorly in it. We need to learn from it and recover from our failure. We should come away from it stronger and not weaker. We should see from our susceptibility to the Scofield test that we greatly lack a correct understanding of God’s Word.
A proper response is to recognize our failure, ask God’s forgiveness and do all we can to correct the damage we have done. When we do so in heartfelt sincerity, our loving God is ready and willing to forgive our foolish and sinful behavior.
Praise His Name!
[1] For a true picture of Scofield, see: C. I. Scofield: Scoundrel, Shyster, and Scalawag. https://heresyintheheartland.blogspot.com/2014/01/c-i-scofield-scoundrel-shyster-and.html