The Church in the Last Days

The

Church

in the Last Days*

Pastor David J. Bowers

ISBN 978-1-64492-152-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64492-153-1 (digital)

Copyright © 2019 by Pastor David J. Bowers

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

Laying Down the Proper Foundation

Gaining the Eternal Perspective

Vital Issues Affecting Christianity in the Last Days

The Pillars of the Christian Gospel

The New Covenant

Following in the Footsteps of Jesus

The Role of Conscience

Examine Yourselves!

The Church in the End Times

The Great Commission

Analysis of the Tribulation, Part 1

Analysis of the Tribulation, Part 2

The Church’s Finest Hour

The Event Sequence of Jesus Christ’s Second Coming

The Judgment Seat of Christ

Epilogue

Appendices

Profile of Antichrist

What Type of Christian Are You?

Legend for Appendix B:

Last Days Timeline Charts

Time Tag Scriptures

Excerpts from Glossary of Terms:

*For more information on terms marked with asterisks, see Appendix E: Excerpts from Glossary of Terms.

Turn you at my reproof: Behold, I will pour out My Spirit unto you; I will make known My Words unto you.¹

He that has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says unto the churches.²

Preface*

Preface

Dear reader:

The author has written this book to empower and prepare Christian believers to face the last days with a biblical New Testament perspective. If we seek truth independently and fervently, the Holy Spirit will enable us to reclaim the original sense of Scripture and history. For this to be effective, proper and contextual comparison to the Standard of New Testament Scripture must be a given. This applies especially in those areas where traditions and dogma have biased or distorted the meaning, in however innocuous and unintentional a way it may have been. Faithful and diligent students of the Word always compare Scripture with Scripture to realize the goal of doctrinal accuracy. Any true believer can do this with the faithful Paraclete that we have in the person of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Seek to visualize the Truth as the Holy Spirit reveals it within and let the meaning filter in and percolate into our minds. Jesus once said, Let these sayings sink into your ears; Be careful how you hear.³

Moreover, it is the author’s heartfelt desire that through it all, the reader would keep an open mind. In this rite of passage that every believer must pass, indoctrinated religious beliefs can be difficult from which to break free and can form a real barrier and hindrance to true biblical conversion. Since the only goal is the Truth itself, the reader will find no hidden agendas here. Many years ago, I received a piece of very good advice from a pastor’s son. He was going through a difficult transition from believing what others had taught to a truly biblical perspective. His advice to me was, "Disregard it all; read the Scripture for yourself, and see what comes back." Believe me, the Holy Spirit is trustworthy to reveal to anyone the very character of Jesus personally and independently.⁴

Since the Bible is God’s Word, the author only writes that this book provokes independent study of it. The Bible teaches that one does not need the teachings of a religious nonprofit organization or a degree from a seminary or Bible school to know the truth of the Word of God!⁵

Jesus also reveals the ways one could tell whether someone is just promoting their own opinion.⁶

So when the truth is the real objective, you have nothing to worry about!

The purpose of this book is manifold. First, the author teaches that believers must be set free from their slavery to religious dogma that betrays Christ and neutralizes spirituality. The second is that the proper priorities for the church must be reestablished according to the original standard. This is the New Covenant of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Yes, one can historically verify that the author is in fact affirming the original truths as recorded in the New Testament accounts. Thirdly, that we must properly teach believers the necessity of Biblical conversion! Unconverted Christians invariably end up conforming themselves to the world.⁷ As a Christian who received Christ very early in life, I grew up in the organized church since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. As a son of a church leader, I have seen more than my fair share of the wicked dishonorable things that Christians can do to each other.

Frankly, churchianity grieves me to tears with their humanistic ways. Nevertheless, as a biblical pastor, I still love the church, warts and all. So because of this love for God’s people, I am determined to do something about it. Long ago, God told Ezekiel that, You dwell among rebellious people. God told him to tell them, whether they listen or respond or not.⁸

The harsh truth is that many are just too stubborn to change because of their pride. Nevertheless, as Larry Norman once said, Here I am—talking about Jesus, just the same.⁹

Was not it Jesus who told us about leaving the ninety and nine to go and look for the one lost lamb, and that there is rejoicing in heaven when one sinner repents? Yes, I believe that it was worth Jesus coming down and giving his life to save just one soul! God loves us so much! However, it was this very Jesus who was so unmistakable about his distaste for the way religious leaders have bound up the Gospel and have stood in the way of those seeking salvation!¹⁰

Therefore, this provides a more than adequate biblical precedent and basis for us to be doing the same today if we follow the rules God has given us in His Word.

The Holy Spirit is seeking to conform all believers into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus is only coming back for a pure, spotless, and chaste bride! However, to achieve even a modicum of revival requires that we make major changes!

Maybe this book is a stab in the dark, but it speaks what must be spoken these last days! God is seeking to break up and through the fallow ground of hardened traditions and those convenient coverings that religious people use to veil their unbelief! ¹¹

If we really want revival, the church needs to go back to Second Chronicles chapter 7, verse 14and to abide by the Christian application of the ancient fourfold admonition: "If My people, [who name ourselves after Christ] will humble themselves and pray and seek God’s face and turn from their wicked ways—then will I hear." Widespread apostasy has blinded far too many to the truth. Many Christians have even failed to discern the difference between simple confession and true biblical repentance! Very few possess the maturity or spirituality to differentiate between the soul and the spirit.

Many leaders have lost their moral compass and the ability to separate the sacred from the profane, watering down even the most basic of moral standards to people-please and get the pews filled. The conditions are intolerable and even getting worse. Yet, it seems that mostly everybody is putting on blinders and vainly thinking that if the problems are ignored long enough, they will go away. Nevertheless, they do not, and if anyone dares to point out the source of the problems, they attack the messenger! Many have been wounded in the house of their ‘friends.’ Have you been redeemed from the vain traditions of your ancestors? Yes, it is time that judgment begins with the house of God.¹²

How do we get back to where we should? The first step is to gain the eternal perspective! Let us learn to see things as God would see them and learn to think like God thinks! We can do this if we begin to receive His higher wisdom.

We do this by repenting, being broken and walking in the light daily. By doing this, God can transform us by the renewing of the mind and we can be on our way to revival.

Yet, my friend, this is a colossal order. To fulfill it, believers must establish the proper priorities. Yet we only need to look unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.¹³

Moreover, this same Jesus said, Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these [other] things will be added unto you, and He who seeks to save his own life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake, will save it to life everlasting.¹⁴

Finally, the doctrines, assertions, and conclusions contained in this volume are not just the opinions of a man.

That is because the author did not make the rules. Jesus makes the rules!

As such, I merely restate in paraphrased form, what the Living Word of God personally teaches as the Truth.

Your friendly neighborhood biblical pastor,

David J. Bowers

Part 1

Laying Down the Proper Foundation

Chapter 1

Gaining the Eternal Perspective

Introduction: The Call to Repentance

From the beginning to the end, God’s voice calls out in His Word (written or spoken Scripture), in history and in nature. These three universal witnesses all proclaim the fact that human beings are special creations. As such, the one true living Father God who is in heaven has designed us to worship and serve Him only! St. Paul’s comments recorded by Dr. Luke will teach us that God is never so far away from us that we cannot reach Him.¹⁵ His Word says that we need only to cry out in penitent and humble submission, and he will answer. To start that process, God first requires that we admit (confess) our condition before him as needy sinful creatures who need a relationship with God to survive! Second, God expects us to be willing to repent of all those things standing in the way of His love. Christian believers who have done this are incredibly privileged people! Through the wonderful grace of Jesus enabled by his perfect work on Calvary, we can have a personal relationship with Almighty God and experience life to the fullest degree! Even Christians continue to need God. Indeed, our awareness of that need should even be more acute. We should acknowledge our abject need of the Savior to deliver us from this present evil age we live in and from the evil that lurks within our own human nature. Pay close attention to what Isaiah wrote to God’s people long ago. ¹⁶

I. Notice the contrasts between God’s ways and man’s ways. Paul describes this contrast well in Romans 8. The spiritual mind versus the carnal mind illustrates these ways. God’s Word says that the spiritual mind is the mind of Christ, and that it brings life and peace. Conversely, the carnal, self-centered or humanistic mind is death to us. This mind-set cuts us off from God because Scripture tells us this attitude is the enemy of God. Not only that, it inevitably causes conflict. This is so because those living in those ways are in rebellion against God, seeking to go their own way!¹⁷ Moreover, since God is Spirit, the truth is that believers must progress from the carnal state to the spiritual first to form a lasting personal relationship with God and to reach spiritual maturity. It also follows that one cannot ever hope to attain the eternal perspective without first undergoing a radical transformation of the mind!

One must realize that it takes godly and spiritual wisdom to be able to discern the sacred (the spiritual and godly) from the profane (soulish, humanistic, and ungodly). Isaiah’s prophecy to Israel echoes King David’s correct spiritual attitude about God that the Scripture overall teaches us.¹⁸ Nevertheless, notice that God does not contend forever. To avoid judgment, we must reach a point of repentance!

Yet God knows everything—and He always perfectly preserves the delicate balance between judgment and mercy!¹⁹ Scripture tells us that in God’s eyes, God always intended mercy to triumph over judgment.²⁰ Dear reader, that highlights the over-arching precept of Agape love in technicolor. God’s Word has mirrored this kind of love in the New Covenant understanding of the Christian Gospel! That is because, in Christ, mercy does triumph over judgment in real time and in real lives, and on earth, [just] as it is in heaven. All you have to do is seek the truth from God’s Spirit, who will break it down to the fundamental elements for you.

That is how you can understand it from a spiritual vantage point. If you do this, you find that this precept is a central tenet of New Covenant theology! Believers must understand that the New Covenant gospel is verily the fruition of all covenant history up to this present point in time we call the age of grace. In the Old Testament, according to Paul’s derivations in Romans and Galatians that we also see in writings of the undisclosed writer of Hebrews, God used various temporary arrangements with man.²¹

The most recognizable of these was the time when God gave Moses the Law—which developed into biblical Judaism, which Paul calls the Schoolmaster (based on the Tanakh, not the Talmud). Thus, God shaped a special people who would provide the Seed. Paul identifies this seed as the Messiah, Jesus Christ, who would fulfill the original promise made to Abraham in the book of Genesis. This promise was that the seed of Abraham was to provide a blessing to all the nations. This we know as the New Covenant of Jesus Christ or Christianity (original definition).

God’s original plan was always to redeem humanity using the sacrifice and perfect work of Jesus Christ, the Seed and Lamb of God. This is also the eternal paradigm that contains God’s eternal perspective for believers today.

God’s will is that His holy presence live in man. The Holy Spirit does this via the new birth of the human spirit—regeneration.

At the consummation, after Jesus Christ comes back, the kingdom is restored to the Father. The outcome will be that the tabernacle of God will be with man in a new set of heavens and earth.²²

In the interest of maintaining a focus, we will be dealing primarily with those events that directly concern the church during the period called the last days, which includes the following:

The great apostasy. This leads us into

The tribulation of those days including the period called

The great tribulation, which also includes

The event called the second coming of Jesus Christ, which includes

The rapture of the saints and

The day of the Lord

Moreover, in preparation for understanding these very significant events, we will attempt to lay down some fundamental biblically-based New Covenant doctrines. These will serve to provide us a more detailed understanding of what our responsibilities are as believers in the last days.

The reader will notice the intentional use of repetition to emphasize specific doctrines that are crucial elements during biblical conversion and for survival in the last days.

II. Consider the doctrine of law vs. grace**

Again, Paul gives us many insights in his letters to New Covenant churches of the first century. In Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians, he develops the precept of faith that first divides into two spiritual streams of law and grace that recombine and flow into the New Covenant river. By grace, God gave faith to the patriarchs. Then, God gave the Law to Moses=Old Covenant/Testament=(Biblical)Judaism. God intended this temporary arrangement to bring man to the ultimate realization that he could not relate to God because of sin. The law told him that the universal penalty for that sin was death! Yet the old covenant used a stopgap measure that enabled man at least to have a limited relationship to God via the *Mosaic-Levitical-Sacrifice System.* God inaugurated this because of Israel’s intransigent rebellion in the wilderness. It was a complex and very messy set of ritual acts that the sinner would have to undergo. Yet this was the way God used so that people could worship a holy and righteous God and avoid destruction.

However, God never intended to continue this system indefinitely. Paul explains to us that the two main purposes of the law were: 1) to bring the consciousness of sin to the surface, 2) to make man realize that nobody can be justified with God by compliance with the law! Nobody can keep the whole law, not even one point of it, no matter how righteous they think they are. This is because God says that even if we err only in one point, we are guilty of all! ²³** Notice that it was this aspect of the law that Jesus frequently raised when discussing matters with the Pharisees! However, these facts, as important as they are, were still subservient to God’s greater plan of *Redemption*. God’s Word points to the only solution: once the Seed Sacrifice Lamb that Jesus Christ Himself provided was in place, humanity could be freed from the curse of the law. Then the doorway was finally opened for all sinners to receive that once-for-all perfect sacrifice of Christ by faith. This is how we become righteous before God without the works of the law.²⁴

In the New Covenant, the blood of Christ does all the work that the old covenant could never hope to attain to in man’s lives: that is, to cleanse the conscience from guilt; forgive all sins that would have exacted eternal penalties and place the sinner-convert in a favored position before God where he is justified and righteous in his sight. Spiritual *regeneration* requires that God extend a special type of grace we call *prevenient grace*.

However, once God has established this restoration of the spiritual functions in a life, God requires that we also maintain a personal relationship by engaging our reborn human spirit. Yes, it is every believer’s responsibility to abide in Christ by our daily choice! The New Covenant enables man to commune with God. Moreover, the regenerated sinner can accrue gifts and benefits never available before! Yes, the perfect sacrificial atonement of Christ provided a perfect elegant solution to the ancient problem of reconciling a sinful humanity to a Holy God while simultaneously maintaining both His justice and mercy! The New Covenant does it all in Christ, the over-arching principle being none other than divine grace.

First, God operates by *prevenient grace*, by which God freely advances faith to every person to provide a way in the door to the Kingdom of Heaven and Salvation. God operates in us by the process of *infusion grace* after the person responds in receiving the sacrifice of Christ. God’s spirit transposes the very mind and nature of Christ directly to us. God’s Spirit is the agent of grace in all.

The beauty of it all is that the very presence of God can live in us during the same time he does this special work of internal metamorphosis and transformation within us that we call *conversion.* Of course, we must realize that once God has commenced this process, it requires our cooperation all the way through. The crucial point is that the regenerated sinner must develop (by transformation only) the spiritual mind of Christ, which in turn enables us to think like God thinks. Subsequently, we can visualize the eternal perspective that he sees.

Let us also continually realize that this very special and sacred process of *salvation* is not automatically permanent after the time we initially decide to receive Christ. We must repent daily and actively cooperate with God continually to escape the tyranny of the carnal mind and to move on to achieve the things that are His will for you! Moreover, God does not consider this active cooperation to be work, but rather it is our God-ordained responsibility that fulfills our part of the New Covenant agreement.

Whether we realized it or not, we accepted this crucial condition when we first signed on with Jesus, for it is part and parcel of the New Covenant. Finally, we must understand that the heavenly things concerning the Kingdom of God must gain the place of highest priority. Not only that, we must do this while we are living here on earth to be ready for Jesus Christ to come!²⁵ **

III. Christian, beware of the Esau mentality!

Can we recognize the utter futility of a self-centered and worldly focus in our own lives? Consider the responses Jesus had in John 6.²⁶ The outside crowd of supposed believers could not handle the truth and left. Jesus asks Peter, Will you also leave? Peter responds, saying, Where shall we go? You have the Words of eternal life. Yet, why did the crowds leave? Why could they not see what Peter saw? That is the problem I believe the church is facing right now in these last days! Can we see the big picture that God sees and act according to faith and not fear? Do we have the courage to stand out from the crowd—even the compromising Christian crowd? Many have already bartered away their eternal future for that mess of pottage that we can identify today with: popularity, acceptance, and many transitory temporal things of this world like financial gain, job security, houses and lands, family traditions and national customs, all of which are ephemeral and will not last!²⁷ Nevertheless, the truth hardly ever seems to slow the downward slide to more compromise, does it? Admittedly, the illusion of temporal security is a powerful mirage, is it not? Yet, God’s Word tells us that the only guarantee of absolute