Dear brothers and sisters in Messiah,
Praise be unto the Lord Jesus Christ who gives us this new life through His blood atonement on the Cross, rising from the grave to give us new life, and ascending to the Father in heaven to sit at His right hand. Glory unto Him in the house of the Lord our God.
I thank the Lord for this message that He has given me. I know I normally do not introduce such a sermon in this fashion. You might be asking why I am doing differently this time. Over the course of the past two and a half years, I’ve been studying Revelation waiting, and waiting patiently to get to this chapter and the next one as well (chapter 17 and 18). You may be asking why also would I state that? Over the course of my public preaching ministry, I have often spoken of false teachers. If you haven’t heard me speak about false teachers before, I encourage you to go to servantsofgrace.net scroll down to Pastors corner then hit Pastor David, and you will be directed to where my sermons are from there.
You see its important for us to understand that in the present age we live in, there are false teachers abounding. These false teachers preach a false gospel full of not the salvation which Christ wrought for us on the Cross, but the salvation which Satan offers to the world. The comparison between the two is simple. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Gospel of grace, and faith. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the gospel of repentance, reception, acceptance, belonging, believing, and conforming into His image through His blood sacrifice. This Gospel of Christ has nothing to do with accepting Him on the merits of works, but merely through receiving His grace. Living for Him has nothing to do with rewards, although we will be rewarded according to what we have or have not done. No, the Christian life is all about believing upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, as a direct result then entering the race towards the prize of reaping the harvest from the purpose Christ gave for you as a believer from the foundations of the world.
False religion is dangerous because it leads one not to thought about faith, but too contamination of faith. This is dangerous because if one does not own their faith or know there faith, or what they believe in for that matter they can very easily in turn be lead astray down the path of destruction. This is exactly the problem that we confront in Revelation 17 and 18, as we have throughout our study in Revelation. We are forced to confront the false satanically inspired gospel, because it is the gospel that is prevalent in our society today. You may be asking or are interesting in knowing why?
As was stated earlier, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Gospel of grace depending upon His sacrifice in turn to receive the free gift of pardon through His blood. That is an indisputable claim clear by the teaching of the whole New Testament. False satanic religion wants us to believe that the Gospel of Christ is not a Gospel of grace, rather it is a Gospel of works. Yet we can take a look at such passages such as Ephesians 2:8-10 and others among the list, to check this line of thinking. If one does the studying as I would highly recommend, you will not only find that Church did not believe in the Gospel of works, they believed that its motivation was primarily to motivate them towards pursuing intimacy. You see the works are never more than the intimacy than we have with the Messiah. Our works can only be derived properly in respect to the fruit of the Spirit, by the amount of time we then in turn spend in intimacy with Father.
Yet false satanic religion wants us to believe that this is not so. It is the clear teaching of cults, that want nothing more than for people to not think about there faith. Some of you may be aware but in the Roman Catholic church, and other such cults they do not allow one to read the Bible. Of course though, one can, but if they catch you they will excommunicate you. Why do you think Wycliffe was so heavily persecuted before the start of the Protestant reformation? Look up your church history, the catholic church persecuted this man who was trying to help others know the Word of God. Or why the Mormon church and other such cults keep detailed records of every single member that they have.
Why would churches keep massive detailed records as the Mormons do underneath the temple in Salt lake city? Why would the world bank have its basis in Rome? Why would the Vatican have a special forces type entrogue connected to it since the time of Luther in 1492? Why? Why would the most heavily recruited religion in government agencies be the Mormons? Because all these false religious cults want is more power, control and manipulation so as to lead the people of God astray into the false gospel of works that is so prevalent in our society if one were to take a look at it not from a secular stance, but from a biblical worldview it is astounding.
It is astounding that our media can get away with the treason that it does. It is shocking to me that a Supreme Court that is supposed to be one third of the powers that govern the United States is the overwhelming power that governs the land. The supreme court can override the votes in congress, the very vote that is supposed to in turn be for the people? This isn’t a democracy, it is nothing more than a country run by judges who are satanic agents of darkness who twist and bend the very constitution that was meant to establish and cherish biblical principles that our founders saw. The founding fathers were decisively and overwhelmingly Christian. They all held at least masters of divinity, but many of them also held Doctor of Divinity among others.
Our secular world wants us to believe that these same founding fathers were not only not Christian, but theists, basically meaning they were people who believed in God, but not necessarily in the bible. The only problem with such a view is that so many of them wrote treatises and articles on the Christian faith and the Word of God, that should be negated as intellectual folly. It is intellectual folly to say that the United States of America was not founded upon the Word of God. I use this example because it is the best one that I could muster up. It shows that our society is bend upon destroying the Word of God in its entirety yet the Word of God is living and active as a Sword it can pierce any man’s heart, mind and soul so as to cause them to turn away from sin and turn towards Messiah.
Yet those in the false religious cults want us to believe that this isn’t so. This is exactly what Satan’s ultimate plans are during the Tribulation, to lead as many away, even as Satan does now from believing in and accepting that the Messiah is the only truth worth believing in. All false religions and cults believe in some shape, form or belief in the system of works base salvation, which rejects theologically the death, resurrection, ascension and sinless life of Messiah. Dr. Lahaye has wonderfully pointed out in his book Revelation Illustrated, “It was my privilege a few years ago to make a trip around the world. My wife and I visited some fifty temples and religious shrines of the major religions of the world. We were appalled to find the strange chords of similarity in all these forms of religion. Mystery, darkness, incense burning, superstition, ignorance, immorality, priesthood, nuns, sprinkling, idolatry, and many other Babylonian customs appeared repeatedly, I can only conclude that Rome is not the only form of Babylonian mysticism, but merely the one that has infiltrated Christianity. And she may be the one leading all forms of religions at the end time.”
It must be noted in any serious study of the Word of God from Revelation 17, that the world religions uniting is not an accident. This movement is clearly of Satan. There are many who believe that this will be Islam, and the Catholic Church, as well as Liberal Protestantism, which denies the exclusivity of the work of Christ on the Cross, and which is really not even in the same ball park of Biblical Christianity, in fact it is so foreign to the understanding of the Word that it is best seen as a cult. Yet the point is simple, that these false religions will all unite together even as the religions are now, yet even more so in the tribulation times other religions that oppose Biblical Christianity which is found in the work of Christ on the Cross and the steadfast belief in the inerrancy of the Word of God, will in turn unite together in their commonality denying in essence all that they hold to be true, so as to justify their escape from there beliefs, even as they are doing now, which in turn will lead to what we shall look at today in Revelation 17, which is the unification of the world religious system, and also its destruction.
I urge each one of you if you are not saved or made a decision today regarding Jesus Christ to come to the Cross. The Christian life is not an easy life by any stretch of the imagination, but it is the only life that is worth living in this life, not because of any reason, but because of the reason and purpose which we have been given to here on earth. Believers our purpose is to expose false religions and cults, because they stand in direction conflict with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the salvation of souls and the work of God here on earth. God can do anything in His sovereign will, and He has sovereign plans for each one of you which He fordestined and foreknew before the foundations of the world.
Yet God in His wisdom and majesty has chosen for all who believe in Him throughout all the ages, for you dear reader to be here in the present so as to testify of His love and the revelation of that very same love through the work of the Son on the Cross which through reception of His Son then you become a child of God by and through His very blood, you are His child, adopted forever into His fold, chosen, called and destined to be faithful as you walk uprightly before the Lord of hosts. God did not create people in mistake, He created them with a divine destiny for them to be His children, born to worship Him.
God does not make mistakes, God created humanity to worship and glorify Him, yet in their folly humanity wishes to upheaval God in the process as humans we reject the fact that we are created by the Creator of the world, born with an image. This image is found in the human desire to worship everything that we come into contact with. It is this desire then that Satan plays off of and then in turn gets us into trouble. This trouble resides within the fact that when we worship idols we commit spiritual prostitution, which if you have read your Old Testament is exactly the problem that Israel had. This is also in the mind of the Apostle John and at the heart of this chapter as well.
We commit spiritual prostitution with the world when we do not adopt an attitude of conformality to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and in the process then reject the heart of the message which Christ has given to us as believers to preach to the world who needs necessarily and justly hear the message of the Good News of Christ, as revealed through His blood sacrifice on the Cross. Today then we turn to Revelation 17. We shall be examining many of its themes and its message for us today. I urge each one of you to prayerfully submit your lives afresh to the Messiah today so that together we can launch out in fulfillment of the Great Commission, and Great Commandment lifestyle that the Lord Jesus gave us to be as salt and light in the world exposing all that is false, unholy, immoral and unjust in this present age. May we all seek to better understand the Word and in the process further refine ourselves in faith in Messiah.
Pastor Jenkins
