In big block letters the sign Prophesy Countdown spread broadly across the top of the church building. Newspaper proclamations had been delivered to each home in our little town. Everyone thusly had that personal invitation to come and hear the “End of the world prophesied.” In glancing through the 4 page paper, readers were faced with the big question . . . Is ours the last generation?
No, the invitation stemmed not from our Christadelphia. This invitation came from the Seventh Day Adventists—even the orthodox churches feel the imminence of a ‘great happening.’ But how much do they see in Truth? We sisters (isolated by distance from special evening ecclesial functions) felt compelled to attend the first session. Had not our Lord sat with publicans and sinners?
Every seat in the double rowed building was filled Saturday evening by 7:30. In masterful command of church-type preaching, the guest evangelist from Denver took his audience to II Peter 3:1-5. He tarried at the 3rd and 4th verses, “in the last days scoffers . . . saying, Where is the promise of his coming?” We’re not scoffers . . . Within our fellowship there has been the privilege for more than a generation to know that Christ Is Coming.
From the 5th verse of 2 Peter 3 he continued on, “The earth standing out of the water and in the water . ..” Where would this speaker of apostate faith go from here? To the same place where our brethren would follow at this point, to Genesis, chapter 6, to Noah and the flood. Therein began the real theme of the evening’s message—”Our world now is as it was in the days of Noah.”
The audience sat attentively as moral depravity, population explosion, energy crisis, and similar prevailing conditions were detailed. Very much like our brethren lectures he stated the Noahic problem was the people’s over-much concern with worldly matters, concern with common things — eating, marrying (Matthew 24:38) until the flood came and caught them, unprepared.
Now enter the devil. “It is not altogether man’s fault that there is wickedness, pollution, and growing shortages of vital needs,” he said. In perhaps softening closing tones, the evangelist was quick to explain that the higher powers of the devil have caused all earth to corrupt. “That Christ will come soon to earth is evident,” he continued. “He will then take the good people with him to heaven, leaving a desolate earth for the habitat of the devil, his angels, and all the wicked.” Truth? — not at all! Why can’t the ‘poor blind church leaders’ discern the prophecy of Jeremiah, that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked?” Oh that they too would preach that man only is the source of all sin (1 John 2:16).
The only point in recounting this visit to an orthodox church at all is to express our complete sorrow over how the sincerity of this half-truth message fell on those listening ears. People there were hungering for a better life, and theirs is a dedication that will not listen to Truth without error. And yet, there is still another reason for giving this account . . . a reason that hits home-base to each Christadelphian.
Have we grown so accustomed to the Truth that Christ is coming to be King on earth, that we are forgetting the command for readiness? Are our lamps burning? Are we so involved with the things of this world that there is precious little time to give back unto the Lord? Let us never forget the parable of the 10 virgins and stand on the side of the five who had oil a plenty, and yet none to spare to the foolish unprepared.
May we therefore rejoice. One of the signs of the times is that the entire world is becoming aware that the Christ is coming soon. How many of this world truly know that the righteous will reign with Him on earth?
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One