2PE 3:3 "First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.
4 They will say, "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation."

It's interesting that this question, "Where is this "coming" he promised?, is so prominent in light of the fact that this letter was written around A.D. 66. This is only 30+ years after Christ's crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. It would seem a relatively short time and yet if you had been expecting Christ's promise that He would return soon, this would seem like an eternity.

And the scoffers of Peter's day understood the dynamics of the expectations of believers at that time who longed for Jesus to return for them. For these Christians Christ’s return was not just a theological premise or simply part of their doctrinal creed. To them, it was as sure as the sun rises each morning that Jesus would return for them in their lifetime.

You'll remember what the disciples were told in ACT 1:10 "They were looking intently up into the sky as he (Jesus) was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them.
11 "Men of Galilee," they said, "why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven."

Now, if you had been there and experienced the whirlwind of events from the depression of losing your Master and Messiah on the cross, to gaining Him back again as He rose bodily from the dead, you would certainly have believed the angels' reports that He was coming in the same way you had seen Him go into heaven.

And this is clearly brought out all through the N.T. as the apostles encouraged the Church to look for this second coming of Christ in their own lifetimes.

1TH 1:8 "The Lord's message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia - your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it,
9 for they themselves report what kind of reception you gave us. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God,
10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead - Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath."

PHI 3:20 "But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,
21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body."

HEB 9:28 ".... so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him."

It was simply understood that they would expect to see Christ coming again for them. So much so that when someone began to spread rumors that He had come and some missed our Lord that it upset entire Christian communities.

2TH 2:1 "Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers,
2 not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by some prophecy, report or letter supposed to have come from us, saying that the day of the Lord has already come."

No one in those days wanted to miss the coming of Jesus Christ to receive them to Himself. And if they didn't believe that, it would not have been an issue Paul would even have to address. But he did because he like the rest of the Christians of that day all expected to see Jesus in their own lifetimes.

But here we are almost 2,000 years later. Should it surprise anyone that the world scoffs at this idea and that even many Christians have put this hope on the shelf?

As we touched on this last week, the teaching of the second return of Christ is paramount to the hope that our Lord gave us concerning our salvation. To take that hope out of the equation of our salvation is to nullify the expectation that each of us in Christ should have.

And when we take the expectation or the "near at hand" excitement away our attitudes have a tendency to look for death as the final release instead of the life we expect when we see Jesus return.

And though it's true that death is certainly the door through which many Christians will arrive in the presence of the Lord , but that’s not the final hope we have when Jesus comes back for us to give us our glorified bodies to be with Him forever.

When we lose that expectation His return can become an after-thought instead of the focus. What do you think those disciples were continuing to rejoice in after Jesus rose from the dead and ascended back to the Father? They expected to soon be reunited to Him in the fellowship with Him they longed for.

But as months turned into years and then into decades the hope for His return began to wane for some. Part of Christ's design in this waiting period is to compel us to live by faith. Do we believe He will return for us or not? Or have we resigned ourselves to the fact that it will probably be the next generation or two, down the road, who will enjoy this blessed event and not taste death in this life.

Part of the tactics which are used by the enemy is to take away our hope. All hope that Christ is coming back in our lifetime, all hope that He is really interested in our individual lives. "Hey, if He's forgotten to come back for us, maybe He's forgotten us all together. Maybe we are in this by ourselves."

These are all lies and the scoffers use these tactics to take our eyes off of the heavenly realities of Christ's return and place them squarely on only those things we can see today: the electric bill, the phone bill, the car which seems to spend more time in the shop than in our driveways, the vacation we dream about but never seems to become reality.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned with these worldly realities, but there's a sense that God wants us to look beyond these things as we go back to the hope that this world is not our home. Paul touches on this when writing to the Colossians.

COL 3:1 "Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things."

To set your heart and mind is to set your hope firmly in place on those things that will not disappoint, nor will only be temporary things. It's putting into perspective this salvation we have in Christ and trusting Him enough to look beyond real trials and tribulations we all experience and know that they are for but a moment in the larger scheme of eternity.

That doesn't mean trials and tribulations aren't real and that we shouldn't deal with them. It just means the way we deal with them is as important as the One who will bring us through them as we look to Him for grace and strength. And it's putting into perspective the hope which is always set before us. This is what Peter wrote about in his first letter.

1PE 1:3 "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade -kept in heaven for you,
5 who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.
6 In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.
7 These have come so that your faith - of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire - may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy,
9 for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls."

So, what changes this attitude? Well, as we've seen, scoffers and those without faith boast of an edge in their teachings because they can point to reality.

"You silly Christians are spending much too much time looking for His return when you should be more concerned with where you are. This is reality. If the Lord were going to come back He most certainly would have come back by now. In fact, it looks as though He's abandoned you. You better take life by the horns and get on with what you can see, hear, taste and feel."

We look around us and it seems hard to argue with that logic. But true logic is exactly what our Lord wants us to consider. Logic concerns knowledge, intelligence and common sense. And if we look at the facts, as we did a couple of weeks ago on Resurrection Sunday, concerning the resurrection of Christ, logic tells us that if He is able to rise from the dead, returning for us is then certain as he promises He will do.

Who you gonna trust? The scoffers who haven't got a clue, or your Almighty God who demonstrated with power the salvation He came to secure for us and the hope that goes along with it?

This morning I want to touch on how modern day scoffers have actually succeeded in drawing attention away from the truth and have replaced it with an earthly solution together with an earthly kingdom which is still spiritual in nature.

The scoffers in the days of Peter were people who had an agenda. They were people who wanted to promote themselves at the expense of God's truth. But we are told that God will ultimately deal with their treachery as they try to deceive His sheep. The sheep His Son gave His life for.

2PE 2:3 "In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping."

God always has the final word. But what about today? Do we see these scoffers? Are they really so bold as to try to infiltrate the Church to deceive? You bet they do, and many of the New Age religions are taking center stage in not only trying to infiltrate the Church, but as we'll see later have become successful.

From an article entitled "The latter rain revival" (http://watch.pair.com/rain.html) the author notes how "prominent New Agers have openly expressed the intention of their movement to infiltrate the Christian Church in order to introduce their esoteric teachings and to draw disciples after themselves. In the "Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness", Theodore Rosak revealed that "Charismatic congregations in main-line churches are entry points into the Aquarian frontier."

"Alice Bailey, Theosophist (Theosophy is the belief that only those of such a movement have a mystical insight into the divine nature, in earlier days this was known as Gnosticism). [She is the] mother of the modern New Age movement [and has] revealed an ingenious plan in her 1957 volume, "The Externalisation of the Hierarchy". [According to her plan Secret] agents would infiltrate the Christian church to modify its message, while adapting it as a vehicle for the Universal religion of the 21st century."

"... The church movement, like all else, is but a temporary expedient and serves but a transient resting place for the evolving life. Eventually, there will appear the Church universal, and its definite outlines will appear towards the close of the century... This church will be nurtured into activity by the Christ and His disciples when the outpouring of the Christ principle, the true second coming has been accomplished..."

Notice that New Agers will actually speak of the second coming of Christ. But their conception of His return has nothing to do with the person of Jesus Himself coming for His church but rather the "Christ principle" will issue in this second coming of a new age. This principle is not the person of Christ, but rather a movement which is loosely identified with the Church to promote their own agenda.

It has to be this way for the Church-at-large to be fooled into following after the anti-christ. It must be a religious movement. Let me continue with the quote from the book which came out in 1957.

"...the Christian church in its many branches can serve as a nucleus through which world illumination may be accomplished... the church as a teaching factor should take the basic doctrines and (shattering the old forms in which they are expressed and held) show their true and inner spiritual significance. The prime work of the church is to teach, and teach ceaselessly, preserving the outer appearance in order to reach the many who are accustomed to church usage’s."

Listen again to what Peter warned the true Church about almost 2,000 years ago.

2PE 2:1 "But ... there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them -bringing swift destruction on themselves.
2 Many will follow their shameful ways and will bring the way of truth into disrepute.
3 In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up."

The New Age movement is exploiting the Body of Christ with stories they've made up. But how can this actually effect the Church? I mean, how can people who claim to know Christ fall for this stuff and actually adapt it for their own purposes as they promote heretical teachings leading many astray?

"About 50 years ago, William Branham, George Warnack, Paul Cain and others attempted to introduce Latter Rain/Manifest Sons of God teachings into the Pentecostal movement. In 1949, however, the Assemblies of God officially rejected the Latter Rain/Manifest Sons of God doctrine as heresy. The cult went underground but surfaced again in the 1960's as the Manchild Company....

.... Disregarding the Assemblies of God decision, Paul Cain, the Kansas City prophets and Vineyard Ministries have subsequently reintroduced and successfully established this false doctrine in Pentecostal churches." (Article: "Latter Rain Revival")

As I mentioned earlier the New Age movement is part of what is known as gnosticism. This was a problem in the first century church and it was essentially the same thing we now have today where a select group of people have a secret knowledge about God which only they know and that the rest of us need to submit to their new revelations if we would know God's will.

This is what the Latter Rain movement is all about. It's confined to a self-elected few who claim to have new revelation about the end times. According to this New Gnosticism found in Latter Rain, "Pentecost was the former rain or outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the Church must yet receive a second Holy Spirit visitation. At this time, the Sons of God will be glorified and manifested to all as they establish the Kingdom on earth before Jesus Christ bodily returns. Latter Rain prophets are now preparing multitudes for this transformation. In a 1991 program entitled, "Manifest Sons of God", Morris Cerullo flattered his audience with the following blasphemy,...

"You represent all that God is and all that God has... Jesus was the visible expression of God. Jesus was the Son of the living God. Now, who are you? Sons of God... everyone say it. What is working inside of us is the manifestation. When you look at me, you are looking at Jesus... To see Jesus was to see God. To see me is to see Jesus. Jesus knew who He was. Don't you think it is about time we know who we are?" (Latter Rain Revival)

"Benny Hinn fills convention centers worldwide preaching a similar message, which exalts the creature rather than the Creator. In one such convention he says this: "This spirit-man within me is a God-man. Say after me, he's born of heaven, he's a super-being... Say, I'm born of heaven - God-man. I'm a God-man. I'm a sample of Jesus. I'm a super-being. Say it! Say it! Who's a super-being? .....

...... I walk in the realm of the supernatural. Get the spirit man renewed... when he's strong he'll hold off sickness... you want to prosper? Money will be falling on you from left, right and center. God will begin to prosper you, for money always follows righteousness... Say after me, I hold my destiny."

This type of teaching is not limited to just a few. From Kenneth Copeland to Paul Crouch of TBN and even many of the teachings coming from Pat Robertson’s 700 club are promoting different aspects of Latter Rain Theology.

All of this stuff is made to sound spiritual and made to sound like it's biblical. But when you teach that people have the potential to become God-men, after the likeness of Jesus Christ, you are not teaching anything different, in substance, than Shirley McClain teaches in her New Age religion.

The Latter Rain/Manifest Sons of God movement has taken on a variety of forms in many different Churches down through the years from visualization to regression therapy where you go back into time and literally meet Jesus there to heal you of the bad incident. But concerning the last days this heretical movement has placed itself as the Gate-Keeper in issuing in this last days revival.

Tricia Tillin of Banner Ministries explains the Latter Rain/Manifest Sons of God doctrine concerning the last days... [It] "involves a man-child elite group of Overcomers taking dominion over all nations and reigning in the heavenlies while overseeing drastic judgment on all who remained in the "old generation". ( And by old generation they mean those who will not bow to their new revelation, those who hold only to the revealed word of God.) The Latter Rain teachings promised a Second Pentecost outpouring to empower this elite group, and to incarnate the Christ within them to the degree that they will become perfect and invincible, even to the overthrow of heavenly powers."

This principle which Tricia Tillin speaks of is also found in "Kingdom Theology", some Post-millennial eschatology, most of the signs and wonders movements and the Ecumenical movement.

This movement is well entrenched in many churches today. It has effected the way people view themselves as well as Christ. It has placed more of an emphasis on self, power, and worldly things, all the while stating that it was Christ who set the example of becoming wealthy. After all you don't need a treasurer for your group, like Judas, unless you've got lots of money.

These self-proclaimed prophets and teachers are wreaking havoc with the Body of Christ as they twist Scriptures and actually teach a false gospel that looks more like what most religions are involved in by adding good works as part of your way to salvation.

Again, quoting the article "The Latter Rain Revival". "False prophets preach another gospel, which is not the true gospel of Jesus Christ. Vineyard scholar Jack Deere has even admitted that he is not sure of the true gospel. In an interview, Deere told Robert Dean of Biblical Perspectives, "I used to be like you... thinking the gospel was simply justification by faith. This [former] spiritual adviser to the [late] John Wimber, Director of Vineyard Ministries, added that the gospel would have to include works, such as healing and deliverance...."

The article continues: "The false gospel of works is leading a vast religious system into spiritual deception. Enchanted by signs and lying wonders and riding the ecumenical bandwagon, the Latter Rain/Manifest Sons of God will be easily assimilated into the Mystery Religion revival foretold in Rev. 17....

What makes this movement so dangerous is how these self-proclaimed prophets and teachers have assumed an authority and power which goes way beyond any biblical approach to such authority.

To question them or the movement in its various forms is tantamount to questioning God Himself, according to them. This further binds the recipients of these teachings to spiritual blackmail. "They commonly protest that any objection to the new revelations is of a judgmental spirit or a personal attack on the prophets. These kinds of assumptions prevent all honest discussion concerning the doctrinal bases for assumed "new revelations"....

... "Paul Cain even advised his audience to wait until they get to heaven to examine his exposition of the Manchild Company which would never stand the test of Scripture: ...."I know some of you are going to disagree with me on this. Don't you even stop to disagree. Rev.12:5. If you disagree, just file it in 'miscellaneous' and check it out. And don't bother with it; when we get to heaven we'll check it out and you'll find out I'm right." (The Latter Rain Revival)

These false prophets and teachers bully and intimidate many in the Church. They accuse many who would question them as being "unscriptural and lukewarm, immature or even divisive members of the Body. A prophecy given by Gwen Shaw, President of End-Time Handmaidens is typical of this attitude:

"If you can't think in a new way, if you can't accept what I am going to do, you will burst. You will not be able to accept the expansion of this new wine. This new wine shall cause many to expand in their understanding of the ways of God. Because some are not equipped, and some are not prepared, and because of their indifference and their critical spirit, their wineskins shall burst." (The Latter Rain Revival)

When personalities and new revelations take center stage at the expense of the hope we should have in Christ alone then it's time to opt for Christ alone and expose these false teachings and teachers for what they are: false.

Instead of turning our minds off and just accepting what a select few promote as truth we need to be like the noble Bereans in Acts 17 who "searched the Scriptures daily, to see if these things were so."

The apostle John also agrees with Peter when it comes to these false prophets and teachers.

1JO 4:1 "Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world."

JER 14:14 "Then the LORD said to me, "The prophets are prophesying lies in my name. I have not sent them or appointed them or spoken to them. They are prophesying to you false visions, divinations, idolatries and the delusions of their own minds."

JER 23:21 "I did not send these prophets, yet they have run with their message; I did not speak to them, yet they have prophesied."

We have an obligation to teach the whole counsel of God's word and allow it to expose falsehood. Whether it's the Latter Rain/Manifest Sons of God movement, or the Toronto Blessing which is associated with it, or any number of false movements in the Church we need to be faithful to God's word and walk in the truth our Lord gives us in His word.

We also need to rejoice in those promises we have concerning our salvation which includes Christ's second coming which we will explore from God's word next week. We don't need to fear these false movements and we don't need to be intimidated.

We simply need to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind and know that He is a faithful God who will never leave us of forsake us, no matter how nutty the world around us appears to be, including some nutty things happening in the Church. May we go forth with the command and hope we have in Christ.

MAT 28:19 "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."