Is the Doom of the World Near?
Selected Scriptures
Without question, a new horror and a new fear has seized the hearts of men today in our world, and it is the fear of extinction. For really the first time on a total basis, man lives in a constant fear that he may go out of existence as a species, the fear that at any moment, man's existence may come to a sudden halt. War, the bomb, polluted air, contamination, famine, earthquake, overpopulation, all of these things have the world in a pall of a death fear that is inescapable.
And the kind of sad thing about it as you look at men is the fact that there are no answers. Things are beyond control and man is trapped, unable to cope with his coming doom. The elite of philosophers and the cream of the crop of scientists are scurrying around as busily as they can, trying to figure out how to stop the terrible suicide of the human race and they really haven't figured it out yet. They have some ideas, but unfortunately they won't work.
They've decided the only way to stop the extinction of man is to control man. And we've been teaching you in recent weeks that what is going on in our world today is an effort upon the parts of some elite and some top-drawer scientist to gain control over the minds of men, over the reproduction of men, over the wages of men, over everything. And we see in our world, more and more controls being exercised. We see that there's going to be brain stimulation; LIFE Magazine ran a large feature article on it. They've already figured out how they can do it, using monkeys, of course, as test cases.
We hear constantly and incessantly about daycare centers, which are already being subsidized by the government, which are guaranteed efforts on the government's part to take children and indoctrinate them aside from the home in order that they may recreate the human race, in a sense, or create a new kind of people who don't have crime, and who don't have greed and who don't overpopulate, etc., etc.
Birth control, the talk about putting sterility drugs in water and then handing out fertility drugs to people who are designated by the government to have the right to reproduce. Money control, price control, wage control, all of this kind of control that you're seeing is man's efforts to grab his existence and keep it.
Right now there are over 100 bills before the United States Congress under the category of changing human nature; 100 of them. One of them provides that your infant would be taken out of your home and kept until 5, then sent to mandatory government schools. One hundred and eighty-six Congressmen voted for it. It would take $20 billion to implement.
The panic is on, my friends, in our world, in every corner. The world must be changed; man will never survive his own suicide if it isn't. But the doomsday machine is already rolling and it's a little bit late. The heart of man is still deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and my friends, no change is ever going to come in man, no change. They can try every system they want but they'll never stop man from greed, from crime, from lust, from all of these other things.
Man will always kill. Man will always make war; he will always lie; he will always cheat; he will always steal; he will always overindulge; he will always pollute; he will always make waste; he will always hate; he will always rebel. Because he is a sinner; he is depraved; he is deceitful above all things; he is desperately wicked and he cannot change himself.
He's racing to his doom; he has no power to stop it. Man will not get better. The world will not get better, my friends, it will get worse. If you say, "You sound like a prophet of doom." And indeed I am. The Bible tells us that the world is doomed; it is inevitable. Everything in man's own sphere says it's inevitable. Everything that man sees around him says it's grinding to a halt. And everything in the Bible says it. Not only is man saying the end is coming, and some scientists tell us we'll never make the year 2000, but God says the end is coming and God writes history.
The sun is setting. The sun of man's day is already casting its red glow of wrath against the clouds, and night comes very, very soon. The handwriting is, again, on the wall; thou has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. And a man who can't see the impending doom isn't really looking, because it's there.
Tonight, I want you to see some of the signs in the word of God that tell us that the day of man is ending. And I want to give you four general - well, let's say three general and one specific sign - three general signs and one specific sign that the day of man is coming to an end. Now, there's so much material that we should really stretch this out over months. But we're gonna try to pick out the highlights for you tonight.
The first general sign that man's day is coming to a close is lawlessness, lawlessness. The world will not be peaceful, rebellion and war will not end, and no peace will ever come until the Prince of Peace comes, who is Jesus Christ. And the age of man will end with a return of Christ, in a great holocaust and a great judgment like the world has never seen. And the Bible tells us that a sign of the end, as it moves toward that judgment, and the coming of the Prince of Peace, will be lawlessness.
Turn in your Bibles to 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 verse 3, 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 verse 3. Now here the Apostle Paul is talking about the end and he says this, 2 Thessalonians 2:3, "Let no man deceive you by any means, for that day shall not come," that is the final judgment, the end of man's age, "shall not come except there come the falling away first and," and I just want to deal with this, "that man of sin be revealed the Son of Perdition. And he is called here the lawless one, the Anti-Christ."
Now go down to verse 6, "And now ye know what restraineth, that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity," that's the word anamia, which means lawlessness, "doth already work. Only he who now hindereth will continue to hinder until he be taken out of the way."
Now watch this. The Bible says that now there is a mystery of lawlessness at work. A mystery in the Bible is always something which is hidden and will someday be revealed. The total full, watch it, the total full expression of lawlessness is still hidden. It'll be revealed during a period of time the Bible calls the great what? Tribulation, which comes when the church is taken out. At the end of man's day, there will be this horrible Tribulation, this horrible time when lawlessness will be full blown and it won't be a mystery anymore.
But the mystery of it now already begins to work. But God has moved into this world and he has set some restraints on lawlessness. And we believe that the restrainer here is the Holy Spirit. Now watch that. The Holy Spirit is in the world now restraining lawlessness from going full blown, see. But someday it's going to be fully and completely revealed, verse 8, "And then shall that wicked one be revealed." Then we find out about all of the horrors that are gonna take place when he is revealed.
God has restrained lawlessness in the world, but someday, the restraints gonna be taken out. The Spirit of God will leave as a restraining influence. The Bible tells us those who love Jesus Christ will be taken out of the world before all this stuff begins. That's our hope, isn't it? And at that point, when we're taken out of the world, the spirit of God's ministry of restraining lawlessness stops, stops.
But, friends, the