James O. Davis is the founder and president of Second Billion (TM). You are invited to learn more about Second Billion by visiting www.billion.tv.
INTRODUCTION
This is going to be the first of a two-part message from two different passages that relate to the end-times before the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I want to deal with what Paul said to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:1-9. Paul summed up the closing days of the Church Age in a passage pregnant with doom. He said they would be marked by perilous times. The word here used for “perilous” is one that means heavy, difficult, hard to bear, dangerous. The only other use of this same word is in Matthew’s account of the two demoniacs who met Christ when He visited the country of the Gadarenes. They are described as being “exceeding fierce” in Matthew 8:28. Paul links the arrival of perilous times with the last days. It is an expression first used in Scripture by the dying Jacob. It is used 14 times in the New Testament to describe both the course and close of the Church Age.
Paul’s list of the end-time events can be summarized as follows: he saw a world controlled by people without character. Their supreme concern was love for self and lust for wealth. Their scornful contempt is found in their boastful, haughty abusiveness. Their sinful conduct is toward parents and others. There is no reverence, no regard, and no restraint. Not only are they people without character, they are without conviction. Their false principles show they are ruled by wickedness, wiles and willfulness. Their foremost passion is exposed and their false profession is made known.
Not only are they people without character, but they are without conviction and conscience. In a few moments, you will see their vileness, their victims, their values, and their vanity. Fierce times are upon us today. Illustrations of unscrupulousness, ferocity, and planned wickedness can be found among some nations, and in the general godlessness of the once great nations of Christendom. Organized crime has disgraced the nations of the world. The reappearance of these kinds of lawlessness and licentiousness are they which characterized the days of Noah and Lot.
Evil people have always plagued society, but for most of the last two thousand years the Christian ethic has acted as a measure of restraint. Today, however, Christian standards of morality and decency are being swept aside. Perversion unashamedly and boastfully flaunts itself. Our courts, colleges and communication media are showing increasing bias against the Christian moral code. Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at the last days.
FIRST, LET’S INVESTIGATE THE PEOPLE WITHOUT CHARACTER
A) “Lovers of Their Own Selves” (v. 2) -- Paul listed a dozen things to substantiate this aspect of the end times. He wrote down first that people would be lovers of their own selves (v.2). Self-love, of course, is native to the human heart. It is something which shows itself in a child as soon as one can express himself. Nobody has to teach a baby to throw a temper tantrum to get his own way.
A healthy society, however, imposes restraints on extreme selfishness. It recognizes the need to teach children respect for the authority of their parents at home, of their teachers at school, and of the laws in society. A healthy society teaches children to be well-mannered and respectful of the persons and property of others. But our society today has institutionalized love for self. Children must not be punished lest they become inhibited. If they are failing in school, the grading system must be adjusted lest their failure does them psychological harm.
Criminals must be given rights even though they have shown no respect for the rights of those they have robbed, murdered and maimed. Recently, a police chief summed up our generation by calling it a lost generation, a generation which thumbs its nose at everything once held sacred. He described it as a generation addicted to drugs, given to self-indulgence, contemptuousness of the law and totally without regard for social values. In other words, he described the kind of end-time generation mentioned by Paul.
The acquittal of John Hinkley, Jr. demonstrates how far we have gone in allowing human selfishness to go virtually unchallenged in our society. This man put a bullet in the stomach of a secret service agent, a bullet in the neck of a police officer, a bullet in the brain of the president’s press secretary, and a bullet in the body of President Ronald Reagan. Yet, he was pronounced not guilty on all thirteen counts of assault, attempted murder and weapons offences. A Wyoming lawyer called the acquittal by reason of insanity proof that Americans are a people of law and compassion. One juror thought Hinkley was a sick white boy looking for someone to love him. And why did he do it? He wanted to prove his love for a movie actress. It would be hard to think of a more callous act of crass selfishness.
B) “Covetous” (v. 2) -- Second, Paul says that men shall be covetous, or as the New International Version reads, that people will be lovers of money. Benjamin Franklin’s dictum, “It’s better to go to bed supper less than to run into debt,” sounds silly to this generation. The craving for the good life has lured millions of Americans hopelessly into debt. If we add home mortgages to what Americans otherwise owe then consumer debt reaches an astronomical amount of trillions of dollars.
As a nation, we are a people addicted to living beyond our means in order to gratify our wants. The old-fashioned idea of working and saving for what we want has long since been abandoned. Our love of money and the things that money can buy has saddled millions of Americans with a hopeless burden.
C) “Boastful, Proud, Abusive” (v. 2) -- Paul says that in the last days people would be boastful, proud, and abusive. No where in our society is that better illustrated than in the popular music of this age. How a generation looks at life is often reflected in its music. One generation gives birth to hymns, another to marital and patriotic songs, and another to romantic melodies. Our generation has given birth to rock, hard rock, punk, and acid rock music.
The music of today is filled with contemptuous attitudes toward human life and society. It is the music of a generation that is defiant, blasphemous, proud—and yet at the same time gripped by an overwhelming sense of despair. The lyrics of today’s popular music often glorifies sin and rebellion. They scream in the face of God. The relentless beat hammers the message into the depths of the human heart. The names taken by popular contemporary music groups also mirror arrogance and abuse. Such names as the Dictators, the Stranglers and the Sex Pistols reflect clearly how these groups think.
The three words “boastful, proud, abusive” sum up much of the music of today and the masses love it. They invest millions of dollars in it. They adulate its composers and performers and listens to it by the hour, usually in blaring tones. The fact that the words glorify sex, hate and drugs, that they attack time-honored concepts of patriotism, decency and respect, and that they assail moral purity makes no difference. The boastful, proud and abusive words strike a deep cord of response in the soul of this generation.
D) “Disobedient to Parents, Unthankful” (v. 2) -- Next, Paul says that in the end-times people will be disobedient to parents, unthankful. The Apostle foresaw an ominous attack upon the family unit and the home life in the last days. The roots of family problems are many and varied. There is a soaring divorce rate which has totally undermined the stability of the home and the authority of parents. Nearly half the marriages in this country now end in divorce.
One of the chief reasons for this is the easy accessibility of divorce these days. Many states have no-fault divorce laws which encourage throwaway marriages. Advocates call these, “easy laws—an idea whose time has come”. Conversely, millions of people don’t bother getting married at all. They simply live together as man and wife in scornful disregard for the laws of God. With such lax attitudes toward responsibility displayed by adults it is no wonder that children are growing up with no respect for authority.
It is estimated that the average 18-year-old American youth has spent something like 22 thousand hours of his formative years watching television. That’s far more time than he has spent in school. During those hours of TV brainwashing he has been subconsciously conditioned to a life of fantasy, violence, sex, drink and amusement. Is it any wonder that disobedience to parents has become the hallmark of our age? But even conscientious parents are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the rising tides of permissiveness tolerated by society and with the secular values taught in public schools.
Schools across the country simply ignore parental objections to liberal teaching on homosexuality, abortion, birth control, sexual indulgence and relative morality. And, of course, teaching the Bible is banned from our classrooms. We can assign for reading and discussion any filthy book that comes off the press. We can study Karl Marx and George Bernard Shaw. We can invite witches, homosexuals, and anti-Christs into our classrooms to air their ideas, but we must not teach the Bible nor have token prayers or scriptural readings in our schools. Is it any wonder that a quarter of all America fifteen-year-olds, and a tenth of all thirteen-year-olds, have experienced or experimented with sex?
We can come up with an equation—add liberal, secular educational philosophies to the lack of classroom discipline, to indifference, to parental objections about certain books and items in the curriculum, to the eroded teaching standards of many school systems and multiply that by a very large percentage of the public schools in this country and the result equals disaster. It is no wonder that millions of youngsters leave school wholly unprepared to meet the harsh realities of life on the outside.
And the courts seem to have joined in the overall attack upon the homes as the basic unit of society and upon parental authority as the key to all authority. Juvenile courts in America have a reputation for inefficiency and leniency. Many offenders are acquitted on legal technicalities even though they are known to the police as hardened offenders.
Some years ago, a study of juvenile and youthful crime in America documented the fact that youngsters in many of our large cities rob, maim and murder as casually as they would sit down to dinner. The observer called the young criminals who roamed many of the great cities of America as a new remorseless generation and said that there was no more terrifying figure in America today. Much of the blame, the documentary stated, should be placed directly on the courts which generally take the attitude that there is no such thing as a bad boy.
E) “Unholy” (v. 2) -- Paul next turned his attention to another ingredient in the recipe of ruin for the last days. He wrote that people would be unholy, that is profane. There can be little doubt that we are witnessing a widespread profanation. It reaches into every area of society, is well financed, and is organized directly by forces that are hostile to our way of life. Our very freedoms are being used to destroy us. For instance, vice is encouraged at all levels of society because vice weakens. Rome rotted from within long before she was overthrown by the barbarians from without. Vice saps a nation’s moral fiber, promotes apathy, weakens character, and destroys the will to exist. The enormous drug traffic in the United States and the western world, and the wholesale promotion of sexual excess and perversion, are all part of a cleverly orchestrated plot to produce a decadent society to demoralize you and to lure people into compromising situations so they can then be exploited in the interest of a foreign power by means of blackmail.
Further, the communication media has been infiltrated so that news stories can be twisted and slanted in the interest of the enemy. Churches have been infiltrated as evidenced by the leftist causes espoused by the World Council of Churches and by certain segments of the Roman Catholic Church. Any drift toward unbelief, skepticism and leftist theology is helped today. The results of thirty years of steady erosion is now all too evident in Western society.
Everything is profaned. Art forms are become decadent and profane. The American flag is burned by protestors. Old fashioned ideas of morality are ridiculed. National and international figures like the President of the United States, the Queen of England, and even the Pope are targets for assassins. Subjects, that would have been considered off limits a few decades ago for polite conversation, are now aired, explored, touted and publicized on radio and TV talk shows without any sense of shame or propriety. In the last days men shall be profane Paul said.
F) “Without Natural Affections, Truce Breakers” (v. 3) -- He also wrote that people would be without natural affection, truce breakers. The Greek scholar or bishop, Richard C. Trent, says of the term “truce breakers,” that it does not seem to be used of truce breaking as such. Rather it refers to a class of people who will make no truce, they are implacable and relentless. In other words, Paul foresaw a time when people would be callous and without either a heart or principle.
The epidemic of heartlessness which has so disgraced the 20th century reaches into many of our city streets where gangs of thugs and hoodlums hold almost undisputed sway. Many of them are organized, not just for financial gain, but to indulge sadistic taste and crimes of senseless violence.
G) “False Accusers” (v. 3) -- Paul next said that the end times would see the rise of false accusers, people who would be fierce. There are a number of interesting words here. The first is “false accusers” which comes from the Greek word diabolus, meaning a slanderer or an adversary. The same word is used in the Bible as a name for the devil. When the anti-Christ comes, he will cause craft to prosper according to Daniel 8:25. And his coming will be with all deceivableness. (2 Thessalonians 2:10) He will be diabolus incarnate. The shadow of this coming prince, this world dealer in deceit, already lies across our world. Hitler was a great believer in deceit as an instrument of policy. He wrote in Mein Kampf that the greater the lie the more chance it had of being believed. Hitler’s mantel has fallen on the communists who believe if you tell a lie big enough and often enough people will believe it.
H) “Incontinent” (v. 3) -- The meaning of the word incontinent is not to have power or command over a thing. Its Latin equivalent is impotent. Usually the word means to be without power or command over one’s passions or desires. The Word is very expressive of some of the foul things we see expressed in our society today. Paul uses the word for fierce to further describe this aspect of the last days. We are living in days where fierce men terrorize whole segments of society.
There can be little doubt that international terrorism is on the rise. The Rand Corporation, which keeps an eye on the escalation of terror used to achieve otherwise unattainable objectives, claims that the number of acts of terror is on the rise. They are characterized by one thing—their fierceness. Terror is their favorite weapon because a bomb secreted in a car, a school, a hospital, a church, a bus, or on an airplane can influence millions who will see the results of the explosion. The greater the newspaper and television coverage the better. The aim is to gain propaganda mileage and influence social and political decisions. These fierce people have no regard for their victims.
SECOND, LET’S INVESTIGATE THE PEOPLE WITHOUT CONVICTION
A) “Despisers” (v. 3) -- Paul is saying, before Jesus comes back people will be without character. People will also be without conviction. He said in the last days people would be despisers of those that are good, or as one translator renders it, they will be haters of good in the New American Standard Bible. The moral rot of our age has already penetrated deeply into Western society.
In Sweden for instance, a royal commission some years ago heralded the arrival of the contraceptive society as though the achievement of free sex were a national, moral goal. The commission announced that ninety percent of all Swedish people have a permissive attitude toward pre-marital sex and that some thirty-three percent of all Swedish brides were pregnant at their weddings. The commission not only announced the contraceptive society was here to stay, but added that it could no more be reversed than could the industrial revolution.
B) “Traitors” (v. 4) -- Paul next tells us that in the last days men will be traitors. There have always been traitors. Jesus had Judas, but in our day treachery has become epidemic. Movements such as communism have banded people together by the thousands for the sole purpose of betraying their homelands to foreign foes whose ideologies they have been taught to embrace. The parade of traitors in the news is endless.
We think of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and their accomplices David Greenglass and the Soviet intelligence courier Harry Gold. They were members of a network of spies who handed over atomic secrets to Russia after World War II and made it possible for Russia to become an atomic power. Thus, the world became an infinitely more dangerous place. The threat of nuclear war hanging over our heads today is largely the work of these treacherous people. Judge Koffman when he sentenced the Rosenbergs to death declared, “Plain, deliberate, contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed.”
C) “Heady and High-Minded” (v. 4) -- Paul also said that they would be heady and high-minded in verse four. The Greek word translated “heady” means “head-long, restless, and precipitate”. It carries the idea of falling down. The only other place where it is used in Scripture is Acts 19:36 where it is rendered “rashly”. We do not have to look far for illustrations for people acting rashly today.
The drug scene alone gives us countless examples. It is estimated that in the United States alone people spend 80 billion dollars annually on drugs. The business is too big to fight. The big dealers scoff at the law. It is nothing for one of them to post one million dollars bond and then simply walk away laughing. About 15 million Americans smoke pot regularly; some 45 million Americans are said to have tried this drug. We are told that people are starting to take it at an earlier age than ever before and that they are smoking it more frequently and in much longer doses.
Teenagers think it is smart to smoke marijuana. In fact, more money is spent on marijuana than on tobacco. Users consider marijuana a safe drug and scoff at stories that tell the opposite. Yet, scientists warn the habitual use of the drug damages the white cells reducing the body’s ability to fight infection. The best way to describe these drug users is with the old-fashioned, King James Version word “heady”. Unfortunately, they often have the sad example of their pot-puffing older brothers, sisters and parents. Worse still, they receive confusing signals from officialdom.
Another popular drug in this highly dangerous world is PCP, sometimes called angel dust. And yet, millions of professionals have another drug of their own—it’s called cocaine. Lawyers, politicians, businessmen, bankers, government officials and solid middle class citizens are said to be users. Yet, the most deadly drug is heroine, the exotic export from poppy fields. It reaches the market via the syndicate which has its own processing plants and an army of distributors in the world’s great cities. The drug’s route from the Golden Crescent to the market has been dubbed “the godfather line”.
D) “Lovers of Pleasure More than Lovers of God” (v. 4) -- Along with all of this, Paul says people will be lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. There was once a time in this country when Sunday was the Lord’s Day, publicly set aside for worship. Stores were closed, places of amusement were closed, taverns were closed, public transportation operated on a reduced schedule—but it is not like that today. Now, Sunday is the big day for pleasure. In this country, as in the Western world in general, we have become a nation of pleasure seekers.
What someone has called the pleasure explosion has overtaken us so that in the United States alone the pleasure business has been growing at an average rate of 6 billion dollars a year since 1965. Thrills and chills are available on demand. Popular amusement parks offer themes and thrills of all sorts, including spectacular shows and breathtaking rides. And, there are the video games which rival TV itself, one of the most pervasive sources of amusement. One estimate is that 5 billion or more is spent in a single year on video games and that during a single year people play them for the equivalent of 75 thousand manned years. Over and above that something like an additional one billion dollars is spent annually on games that can be plugged in and played on television sets and computers in our homes.
There can be little doubt that we have become a generation addicted to pleasure, that this is a generation addicted to pleasure more than to the things of God. The United States probably has the greatest percentage of people going to church on a more or less regular basis. The spending habits of the American public make it quite evident that token attendance to religious duties is in no way allowed to interfere with most people’s pleasures.
One survey taken some years ago, that is still relatively valid today, showed that in one year Americans spent 16 billion dollars for amusements, 10.5 billion for alcohol, 5 billion for tobacco, 2 billion for travel, 325 million for cat and dog food, 304 million for chewing gum, and 76 million for lipstick. During the same period, the total given for foreign missions by all Protestant churches of the United States was said to be only 145 million dollars—less than half of what Americans spent on chewing gum. If these figures are only reasonably accurate, isn’t it evident to you and me now that people are lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God?
E) “Having a Form of Godliness but Denying the Power Thereof” (v. 5) -- Along with this decline in any real interest in the things of God, Paul foresaw in the last days that people would be marked as having “a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.” He added, “From such turn away.” The word for power refers to the kind of power entrusted by the Holy Spirit to the Church. It is the word used to describe the saving power of the Gospel in Romans 1:16. Paul is here describing people who have a religious exercise. They have perhaps been baptized, made a profession of faith, joined a church and become communicants. They support its program and have been ordained to its ministry all without ever having known the life-transforming power of the Gospel in their lives. They have a form of Godliness.
The word translated “form” is a rare one in the New Testament. It is used here in Romans 2:20 where Paul accuses his unsaved, fellow Jewish countrymen of having a form of knowledge. It was knowledge without substance because it kept them from Christ. Paul saw the end times as a period when church attendance would in itself be deceptive because so many religious people would be unsaved people going through a mere empty form of the Christian faith. Paul warns true believers not to have fellowship with such. “From such turn away,” he says, sensing in his very soul the spirit of the age in which we live. Paul urges us to put distance between ourselves and superficial professors of Christianity.
THIRD, LET’S INVESTIGATE THE PEOPLE WITHOUT CONSCIENCE
A) “Never Come to a Knowledge of Truth” (vv. 6, 7) -- So far we have seen that in the last days there will be people without character, people without conviction, and last there are going to be people without conscience. Paul foresaw a day when spiritual wickedness would masquerade successfully in religious disguise. The Bible often reserves its most scathing words for those who propagate false religion in the name of Christ. Referring to those who will masquerade as Christians in the last days, he wrote, “For of this sort are they which creep into houses and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of truth.”
J.B. Phillip’s colorful rendering of the expression “creep into” is “worm their way into”. The New English Bible is just as graphic. It renders the sentence, “They are the sort that insinuate themselves into private houses.” These deceivers worm their way in. They gain entrance by coming under the cloak of the truth. Their favorite target is the woman of the house so they frequently come at times when the man is away at work. They hope to get their feet in the door so eventually they might subvert the entire household. For example, many modern cults specialize in this method of propagating their false teaching.
Paul, seeing these end-time dangers, seeing people creep into houses, warns us to turn away from such. There are few things more underhanded than abusing hospitality in order to take over a home in the name of a Christ-denying religion. Paul points out that silly women laden with sins will be the primary targets of the end time cults. The word translated “silly,” is a diminutive of the word “woman,” and is used in a derogatory sense. One translator used the phrase “creatures of impulse”. Another says the word silly comes to us from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “inoffensive or harmless” because such persons are looked upon as easy prey by scheming persons. The word silly has come to be used for those easily duped. Dean Alford says of the phrase “laden with sins” that it means that these persons are burdened by their wrong doing. Their consciences are oppressed by their sins and in this morbid state they are an easy prey to religious teachers who promise them ease of conscience if they follow them.
J.B. Phillips renders the statement “silly women” with an exaggerated sense of sin and morbid cravings. Paul adds that these people are ever learning. One translator rendered that as “curious to learn”. That, of course, was Eve’s great sin in the Garden of Eden. She was curious to learn the forbidden secrets the serpent dangled alluringly before her and her curiosity led her into rebellion against God’s Word, into sin, and on to judgment. Paul foresaw the end-time cults making a special target of certain kinds of women in order to further their own ends.
B) “Men of Corrupt Minds, Reprobate Concerning the Truth” (v. 8) -- He has something else to add to the picture though. “Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth, men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the truth.” Paul saw these false and subtle teachers as traitors to the faith. The Old Testament to which he referred is recorded in Exodus chapter 7. It happened when Moses first appeared in Egypt as a liberator of the Hebrew people. Aaron was with him. At Moses’ word, Aaron cast his rod on the ground before Pharaoh and it became a serpent. At once the magicians of Egypt imitated the miracle. Moses turned the water of Egypt into blood and again the magicians duplicated the miracle. Moses summoned frogs from the river and the Egyptian magicians did the same. Their sole purpose was to resist and oppose the truth of God and hold Pharaoh in bondage and error.
Paul names these two magicians and holds them up as examples of end-time false teachers who will likewise resist the truth of God and hold people in the chains of deception. It is not that they do not know the truth, but they have deliberately opposed the truth. We would probably be astonished if we knew how many false teachers and apostate religious leaders there are who once knew God’s Word in truth.
C) “Their Folly shall be Made Manifest unto All Men” (v. 9) -- Last of all, Paul shows that eventually God draws the line with all such people and with the cults they establish and promote. “But they shall precede no further for their folly shall be manifest unto all men as theirs also was.” These people are reckoned without God. God permitted the Egyptian magicians to go just so far with their deceptions then He stopped them in their tracks and exposed them as empty, shattered and defeated. Likewise, God will allow these end-time false teachers some seeming successes but in the end, in His good time and way, He will expose them for what they are.
CONCLUSION
In the coming days Satan’s two men, the beast and the false prophet will be the supreme examples of false deceivers. The great river of apostasy is rising today. The perilous times of which Paul wrote are upon us. Soon the river will overflow its banks as the various tributaries of delusion and deception join the mainstream. When it reaches flood level, the river itself will inundate the earth with the final apostasy and enthronement of the devil as the world’s god and king. At the end of it all, Jesus will come for the Battle of Armageddon. With His Word, He will defeat the enemy and gain victory for God’s people.
We are living in the times before the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ!
