Is It Possible to Be Deceived Today?

Last month I gave a sermon on Satan's plan for humanity, and I talked about how there are five parts to his plan. His tactics change, his strategy never does. His strategy is the destruction of the, well, the plan of God. It's the destruction of humanity. And we talked about how it always begins with deceit and creates doubt, creates distraction, and that's the stage where we really go off because we get distracted by so many things. And then it causes division, and then it causes destruction. Chaos is what happens. That is his plan for humanity. It's what he always tries to do with the church. Bring in deceit and doubt and distraction and division and destruction. So we understand that in our lives. That's his plan for our lives. What I want to do today is I want to pick up on the first concept of deceit and how subtle that can be. How subtle Satan's deceit can be. You know, there's, when we look at prophecy and the Olivet prophecy, Jesus said, false Christ and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders as to deceive, if possible, even the elect. Now, in other words, this deception is going to be so great, so persuasive, that the elect, only with God's help, will not be deceived. Now, you and I think, how in the world could the beast and false prophet deceive us? I mean, it's going to be obvious. We know the Scriptures. We know the prophecies. And of course, we better know the Scriptures, and we better know the prophecies, because we're going to have to face that.

But what I want to do today is, in the sermon, I want to set up a little prophetic viewpoint. And it's just an overview. I'm not going to be going into a lot of details on purpose. In fact, I was looking at the last time I covered some of this material. Remember a number of years ago, some of you will remember this, I gave a…it took two or three years to do it. A series of Bible studies and sermons where I went through…I had PowerPoint. We went through Daniel. We went through the Olivet Prophecy. We went through Revelation. And in that PowerPoint, we showed the major themes that run through all three of those prophecies. Well, today I'm going to look at a major theme. I'm not going to go through all those prophecies, but a major theme. I'm not going to get too much into details. Sometimes because there are details, I don't know the answer to. But a lot of times, I don't want to get lost in the details. I want us to look at what it's going to be like, what's going to happen. Because this is just a setup for the Bible study. In the Bible study, we're going to have a discussion on could you be deceived today. We're going to go through three scriptures and have a discussion on how we can actually be deceived today in the world we live in now. And if we become deceived today, we will be a prime target to be deceived in the future when those events happen. If we're right with God, we won't be deceived. But is it possible to be deceived today? Well, we'll go through that. So we'll discuss that, and I really would like to have a discussion in the Bible study. But first of all, I just want to give this overview. I didn't bring the slides. You know, we're not going to go through 30 slides on on first Thessalonians or second Thessalonians, the things I've done in the past. And I may do that again. I've had a number of people say they would like to go back through that at some point. So we may do that in the future here. But let's go to second Thessalonians as our beginning point. Second Thessalonians. And here we have really one of the most detailed of prophecies given by Paul about the end times. Now, 1 Corinthians 15 is a remarkable prophecy about Christ's second coming and the resurrection of the of the saints. But this is specifically about what leads up to Christ's return. And he gives some details here that we find in Daniel, we find in the prophecy, and we find in the book of Revelation. So let's just look at this. Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you. So he says he's zeroing in on we are gathered to Christ at a certain point in time, not to be soon shaken in mind or trouble, either by spirit or by word or by letter as if it came from us, as though the day of Christ had come. So there is a heresy going through the church at this point and being spread around that the day of Christ had already happened. And you think, how could that be? How could people be deceived by that? I mean, there were people who knew Jesus still alive at this time. How could that be a deception? How could people actually believe in that? The seeds of this concept were planted. They came to proof. They really grew up and became major back in the 300s when Catholicism was formed.

In the beginning stages of Catholicism, they weren't sure how to interpret the return of Jesus Christ, and they weren't sure how to interpret the thousand-year period. So in the 400s, Augustine comes along and says, well, you have to understand the thousand-year period of Jesus reigning on earth is in the church today. And that became official Catholic teaching. So the millennium had started when Christ was resurrected and now was reigning in the church.

That became so powerful in Catholicism that in the 11th century, when a thousand years were up, they wondered why Christ hadn't come back. And what the Pope decided, Pope Urban, was that, oh, that's because the Muslims have Jerusalem. And that's why they launched that first great crusade. We have to go take Jerusalem so that Christ will come back because He's reigned in the church for a thousand years, and now He's coming back. Basically, they'll really stamp out the Muslims. So the first crusade in which caused the death of tens of thousands of Christians and Jews and Muslims, tens of thousands of people was launched. And they took Jerusalem, and it was, they had slaughtered people. I mean, Jerusalem's streets ran red with blood, and Jesus never showed up. He never showed up. So the seeds of this, and I'm not saying it directly came from Thessalonica, I'm saying the seeds of that thought, of that deception was here, and by, you know, a thousand years later, there's a slaughter going on because Jesus' reign on earth had ended, and now He had to come back and take all the saints to heaven and destroy the world, basically. So you think, how could they come up with this? The impact of these kinds of thinkings went on for centuries. Let no one deceive you by any means, verse 3, for the day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition. So this falling away will involve the whole world, but it's also a warning to the church. We'll show that in a minute.

That this man of sin, this man of perdition, this man of absolute lawlessness, is going to have an impact on the earth. And what we're going to see is, this man is possessed by Satan. I mean, this isn't just a deceived person. This is a person, he and another person, called the false prophet, are literally possessed and driven by Satan. So this deception is going to come on everybody, on the whole world, he says, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped. So he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. Now, we tie this in, once again, I'm not going to get into the details, we tie this into the fact that we believe there is a temple that's going to be rebuilt before Christ's return, and he's going to sit in that temple, and he's going to claim to be divine, that he's going to unite religions together in an ecumenical spirit. Now, he may not be saying, I am the only God, it's more plausible he'll be saying, I am the incarnate God, I am the Christ. Christ has come, like it's predicted, and he has come to unite all religions and all peoples together.

Who opposes, or verse 5, do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? Don't you wish Paul would have taken a little extra time, or God would have inspired him, to write down all the things he taught them? But it's a letter, you know, he didn't write it. You remember, I told you these things. So he had taught them about what the day of the Lord is, which we will be commemorating and celebrating and look forward to when we keep the Feast of Trumpets, right? Feast of Trumpets is when we look forward to the time called the day of the Lord.

He says, and now you know what is restraining, and he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, only he who now restains will do so until he's taken out of the way. In other words, God is holding this back. It's already begun. It's interesting. He's writing this to a church in the midst of the Roman Empire.

And as we went through Daniel last time, or a couple years ago, went through all the beasts and all the things, it showed how there it is a continual resurrection, reconstruction of what had been the Roman Empire, that will be so instrumental in what happens here. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of his mouth and destroy with the brightness of his coming. So we know this person comes along, this person sits in a temple claiming to be a divine power, and he is destroyed when Christ comes. The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan with all power, signs, and lying wonders.

Satan works in this individual. Now, we say, well, I will not be deceived by that. Remember, if it were possible, we would. Jesus said that. So we have to be very, very aware of what is going to happen, and we're going to show in a minute why it will be easy for some people to say this must be of God.

The conclusion will be this is of God, when it's actually of Satan. He says, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this reason, God will send them strong delusion that they should believe the lie, that they may all be condemned who do not believe in the truth, but had pleasure and unrighteousness. So this is a world event that's happening. It's a world event. But there's also a warning to the people of God to be aware of this, to be aware of this event.

In fact, if we go to the Olivet prophecy, let's just turn there. Let's go to Matthew 25. I'm not going to read the whole thing, because this is just, like I said, leads up to what I want to talk about in the Bible study. But Matthew 25, sometimes we take these parables, and they're such great parables.

We pull them out, and we study them, but we forget that Matthew 25 is all part of Matthew 24. This is part of the Olivet prophecy. These were given to the church. So we look at the Olivet prophecy. We like to talk about, you know, all the wars and rumors of wars, and all the things are going to happen, and we tie that into Revelation, how he's describing the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

And those events are very important, but Matthew 25 is his warning to the church during that time. So Matthew 25, you have the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. Now, we know that parable, and probably need to go through it again sometime. And we get cut, we get really sometimes into the weeds of who is this and who is that, and, oh, I know who the five foolish virgins are.

They are these people. I know who the five wise virgins are. And whoever decides that, decides that their group is part of the five, right? We're part of the five. Set that aside. What we need to look at is always be looking at ourselves. What is God's message to us? And it is that you have virgins. Spiritually, these are people of God, and some of them aren't prepared for what's going to happen.

And you know the story. God calls them out to come to Him. The door is shut, and they're knocking at the door, and He says, I don't know you. You know, that and what He, what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, when people say, but I preached in your name.

I did great deeds in your name. There were miracles done in your name. And His answer is, I don't know you. That is the most frightening statement in the entire Bible. That statement is just absolutely frightening for Jesus Christ to say, I don't know you. Now, at this point, I know there's some of you that'll be saying, maybe He doesn't know me. Maybe He doesn't know me. Maybe I'm lost. Stop a minute. You get right with God, and He knows you.

This is us doing something. We're pulling away from God. We are falling into deception, removing farther and farther away.

When we're humbly on our knees before God saying, I want to be right with you, He's going to do that because we're relying on Him to do it. The more we rely on ourselves, usually the more we mess things up. Right? And you all know that. We've all done that. We rely on God, and we're constantly in this state of humility before God, seeking His will, seeking what He wants, humbly just trying to follow along and obey and be repentant when we don't. Be repentant when we don't. So what you have here is a warning to the church that some won't be ready when this deception happens, and they don't hear the call.

So, once again, I'm zipping through concepts. This is a conceptual sermon. I love giving detail sermons, right? That's why I like doing dispository preaching, where I take six verses and do the whole sermon on six verses. But there's a time for concept sermons. And we're just looking at the concepts here. So now let's go to Revelation 13. Revelation 13. By the way, the Jamaican video we're going to show, remember Good Works, we collected a lot of money and a lot of sense and help over to Jamaica, because we had a lot of brethren that their homes were destroyed in that hurricane. And it's very interesting. Hopefully we can play it next week. We just had some technical problems. But it's a lot of it's just interviews. I didn't watch all of it. I watched part of it with the church members who we took care of, and they showed what they went through and how we came in and helped them at least have a living, you know, they're living in a clean place that's not filled with mold, that's not or been destroyed. Some of their houses have been destroyed. And it's just nice to see the people you actually help. It's one thing to send off some money. It's another thing. To see the real people that were helped. So we'll try to show that next week. Revelation 13.

Now we have all the imagery of prophecy. And the imagery is to teach us, you know, this isn't a literal beast, right? What we're looking at, we're looking at events in which things are described sometimes by their nature.

There is, then I stood, this is John saying, on the sand of the sea, this is a vision, and I saw a beast rising out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten crowns, and on his heads a blasphemous name. Now we could go to Daniel and talk about that. We could go, you know, we can put this together with Daniel 2. But let's just picture this. At the end time, there's a beast. It has the nature of a beast. It's a human government, but it has the nature of a beast. Now the beast which I saw was like a leopard, his feet were like the feet of a bear, his mouth like the mouth of a lion, the dragon gave him power, his throne, and great authority. Now we have this leopard and bear and lion. We go back to Daniel once again, and we have two entire chapters describing this and how, you know, this is Babylon, and then it's Persia, and then it's Greece, and then it's Rome. In fact, three of the four are mentioned in the book by name, Babylon, Persia, and Greece. Rome isn't mentioned. Rome hasn't happened yet. But if you historically, that's the next chain. There's no other, I mean historically it's obvious.

So we know what he's doing here. Once again, maybe we'll go back through that. I saw on one of its heads that it had been morally wounded, and his deadly wounded healed, and all the world marveled and followed the beast. So they worshiped the dragon. Now the dragon is Satan. That is used throughout Scripture as a description of Satan. A dragon is a vicious, terrible, destructive beast, right? It is interesting that in many cultures throughout the world, they have dragons, which has led some to believe possibly there were actually a dragon-type animal before the flood, or maybe even after the flood for a while, and they're extinct. I'm not saying that's true. I'm just saying it's interesting. I don't know. I mean, it keeps showing up all over the place that there's these dragons. They probably weren't 40 feet long. You know, they weren't big, like in the movies, but they were terrible creatures, and they were probably killed off by human beings. But if they existed, and I'm not saying they did, I'm just saying it's a symbol that everybody recognizes, a terrible beast, right? And it is Satan. They worship the dragon who gave authority to the beast, and they worship the beast, saying, He was like the beast who was able to make war with him. So when this beast, which we're tying in to the man of sin, when this individual comes along, he creates a powerful military. He creates a powerful military. Now, once again, now I'm not going to go through the Olivet prophecy, and I'm not going to go through Romans 6. So let me summarize it so we can really see the picture. The four horsemen show that what's going to happen is that there's going to be terrible catastrophes, war, just constant war that never ends, destructive war that never ends. There's going to be disease epidemics, natural catastrophes. All these things are going to happen and get worse and worse until at the end of that passage it says 25% of the world dies. Now this is important. 25% of the world dies. This isn't going to happen. Like we're going to wake up tomorrow and say, oh, is that the beast? You know, look, he's dressed real nice. He speaks real clear. That can't be the beast. He's a nice guy. Understand the world in which he gains power.

It is a collapsed economic system. I mean, we're watching what's happening with Iran right now and the straits over there. What if that gets shut down for three months? What could happen in the world? China could be on the move. It doesn't have enough oil. And they're so demographically upside down. Ten years from now, they want enough people to run their factories. They'll just have, you know, hundreds of millions of people, elderly people that need to be taken care of. The whole world's upside down. Russia's destroying itself. The United States is trying to bring order into the chaos that's happening. And sometimes we're just making it worse. Everybody's trying to save what's happening. Everybody realizes it's somehow coming apart. Think of a world that continues to come apart to the place that 25% of the world dies. And then Jesus says in the prophecy, and then there's great tribulation. That's not the great tribulation. That's just what leads up to it. This man comes into power at a time when the world has come. It's just falling apart. There are no answers. Governments are collapsing. And he comes along, puts together a military, and starts to bring control to the absolute destruction of humanity. People will follow him because he's saving them. They will follow him because he's saving them. They see Satan as their savior. Of course, Satan created the mess to begin with, right? Satan created all this crisis and this stress, and then says, oh look, I can save you from this. And that great deception is going to come on this world.

And that's why he says, Jesus said, if it even possible, the very elect would be deceived.

As you can see, there's a worship going on. This is an ecumenical system.

I still believe it's going to be driven by Catholicism, but it won't be just Catholicism.

I've mentioned this before. When I published Plato's Shadow, I took it to a professor at a Catholic university and asked him to review it before I published it. He did. And he said, why did you write this? He said, the Catholic Church has always been a mess. He says, you know, there's enough proof of that. Why did you write this? And I said, oh, well, you look through it. What I'm doing is saying we need to return to first century Christianity. And he got really excited. He said, you're a primitive Christian. He says, I think that I think primitive Christianity needs to be really studied and explored by all Christians. You need to publish this book. Okay. And then he said, you know what I'm working on in my next project? I've discovered that Hinduism and Catholicism have so much in common. And I'm thinking, well, even I knew that. I didn't say that, but...and he was so excited. There was this...you know, we can work together, Catholics and Hindus.

Ecumenical is what's going to happen here. This movement that this somehow the Savior that has come, that is Satan, you know, possessed by Satan. This person is bringing this. He's stopping wars. humanity was on the brink of destruction. And he stopped there. He slowed it down. And it was given a mouth speaking great things in Blasimes, verse 5. And he was given authority to continue for 42 months. And you all know what that is. That's three and a half years. So we know when this is going to happen. Then he opened his mouth with blasphemy against God to blaspheme his name, his tabernacle, and those who dwell in heaven. And it was granted to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them. And authority was given to him over every tribe, tongue, and nation. He's going to exert an authority that has never been seen and a power that's ever been seen. It won't last long. Because we know three and a half years later, the world's turning against him. Okay, the whole thing's collapsing again. So it doesn't last long. But for a short period of time, this can only happen because the earth is in such catastrophe and crisis that people will sell themselves. They'll do anything to stop what's happening. And all who dwell on the earth will worship him whose names have not been written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. If anyone has an ear, let him hear. So the warning then is, look, make sure you're written in the Lamb's book. That's what we do now. We are written in the Lamb's book. We need to be living and acting and thinking and growing as someone written in that book. Because those not written in the book are going to be deceived by this.

Now we know there's another beast, so let's talk about that for a minute. Verse 11.

Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. And this imagery is very, very important. All through the Bible, Jesus is the lamb. He's the lamb of God. He's the Passover. And we know who the dragon is. So this will look like Christianity in some form. But it will be totally driven by Satan. It will look like Christianity driven by the dragon. But this is a second system and actually ends up being a second person involved in this. So we have this political leader who claims to have all this power, all this in his divine. And you know when this is being written, this isn't strange by the way, to them as much as it is to us. This was written to people who all lived in the Roman Empire, where the Roman Emperor was divine. Now he had problems. It's amazing how many Roman Emperors, divine Roman Emperors were killed. So they, he didn't have just eternal life. But once they died, they went to join the gods. It was long after Julius Caesar was killed, there was a comet that went across the sky and the Romans said, even the Romans who had just killed him said, oh, it's Caesar. He's showing us he's with the gods. So this divinity of the leader of the Empire isn't a new idea. And so that will come back as part of this. But he has power behind him. And he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence and causes the earth and those who dwell on it to worship the first beast whose deadly wound was healed. And he performs great signs so that he even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. He's going to do things that seem supernatural. And maybe, Satan may be doing some kind of supernatural tricks here. And of course, it's interesting that all the world witnesses these things. That wasn't, that couldn't happen until the last couple decades. You can go into the darkest places in the world where there's hardly any civilization and everybody has a cell phone. This can literally happen where the whole world is being deceived because of what they're seeing. And he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image of the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived. And he was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worse the image of the beast to be killed. So you're going to have, there's a lot of explanations of what that could be. And I won't go through that today. There's a number of different explanations. But the bottom line is, is that this image is going to represent the beast and there's going to be miracles involved in it and it's going to be, it's going to deceive people.

You see, wow, how could that happen? It's very interesting and when was it? It's in the first couple centuries after Jesus, there was a Roman temple that took a bull and it spoke for the gods. And people would come up and give it money and smoke would come out its nose and it would, it would, the people would ask it a question and it would give it an answer in this booming sort of voice. And what they didn't know was underneath this empty bull was some priest down below with some, they didn't have microphones, but they were channeling their voice up through the mouthpiece. And so they would answer and his voice would go like, God, and people would, oh, we've been, it's spoken to us and firewood came out its nostrils. And it was all just a little bit of show going on. This seems to be greater than that, but once again, this is not totally out of the experience of humanity, but Satan's going to be driving this and the world can see it. He causes all those small and great, rich and poor, free and slave to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads. Now, there's all kinds of speculation to what this is. You know, chips, AI, credit cards. I don't know. It may be all those things. I have no idea what the manifestation of it will be. I do know it's an issue of control, right? It's an issue of control. Now, let's just compare this to, we'll come right back here, let's compare this to a statement made in Deuteronomy Deuteronomy 6.

Because we'll know what is controlled by this.

People ask me all the time, not all the time, but quite often, do you think it's this? My answer is, I could be. Do you think it's this? Could be.

I don't want to pick what it is because I don't want to be seced if it's not.

When it happens, I want to know, okay, I can see what's happening. Deuteronomy 6.6, this is the instruction to teach your children. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be front lengths between your eyes. In the Old Testament, that phrase means it's what you think and what you do. So whatever this is in Revelation, it's going to be driving what people think and what they do.

So that's what we need to look for, what's driving people in the way they think and what they do.

And those at verse 17, so that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark of the name of the beast or the number of his name, and then it gives the number 666. I'm not going to go deep into that. There's lots of ideas of what that means. I particularly like the oldest concept, Polycarp, who in the second century we know believed, he didn't believe in the immortal soul. He believed Jesus was coming back to resurrect the dead. He kept the holy days, he kept Passover, at least Passover, Days of Love and Bread. He rejected Easter. If you're keeping the holy days, I've never seen any group that kept the holy days and not the Sabbath, so I assume he was keeping the Sabbath. But he is standing up to the bishop of Rome and saying, you're taking the church in the wrong direction. And his conclusion was 666, because letters had numeric value to them, especially in ancient languages. And if you take 666 in Greek, it means Latinos, which means Italians, which means Rome. Okay, so that's the conclusion he came to. I like that one. I just have always liked that one, mainly because I really like Polycarp. So, you know, that has been an explanation. One is it's the mark of man, therefore it has to do with humanity and rebellion against God. Another is that it has to do with Sunday worship. That has been promoted by Sabbath keepers for a long time. So there's these different ideas. The point is, if we're watching this, we'll know it when it happens. We'll see it, we'll understand it. We will not be deceived. If we're right with God, we won't be deceived.

You know, I'm hoping I meet Polycarp some days, say, hey man, you were right. But I don't know.

It's okay to say we don't know. It's okay to say it could be this, this, or this.

That keeps us from getting too vain. That we know all the details of prophecy. You know some prophecies when they happen because you know them. And then you can't be deceived.

Let me end here. Then we'll take our, I guess we eat first, don't we? Does anybody feel bad about eating at 1130? Or should I just preach, preach and preach? So we usually eat then, right? Then you have the Bible side of the Bible. So we usually eat then, right? Then you have the Bible studies? That what we do? Okay. It's opposite in Nashville and I always get it mixed up. You people like to eat.

Revelation 18. So I've just given an overview, very broad overview here, but you see it. You see what's going to happen. The collapse of the whole world economic military system, which is happening. The United States stopped being a sovereign country a while ago. It is an empire. It controls the world economy and has been in competition with the Soviets and the Chinese for decades. Of course, the Soviet Russia collapse. It's trying to rebuild itself. But the United States has for decades been acting like an empire because it does so to keep the chaos from happening. But no human effort can stop the chaos. It's part of Satan's plan. It's what it always leads to is chaos, collapsed destruction chaos. That's what it always leads to as when I went through those five steps in his plan. It's nothing new. Tactics are different. As I said, strategy is the same. He never brings peace and goodness and harmony ever. It always is destruction and chaos. That's all what he creates. It is his nature to do so. What happens at the end? Well, in Revelation 18, it explains what happens just before Christ returns. After these things, I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was illuminated with his glory. And he cried mightily with a loud voice, saying, Babylon the Great has fallen, has fallen, and he's become a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird. Babylon is collapsing. And of course, Babylon is just that image from Daniel 2, all these empires. The whole thing is collapsing now. For all the nations have drunk of the wine or of the wrath of her fornication, the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance of her luxury. When you look through, you study the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and then you study how this empire comes along. The earth doesn't have much luxury. I mean, the earth is struggling for survival, and the good times have returned. They don't last long. I heard another voice from heaven saying, come out of her my people, lest you share in her sins, lest you receive of her plagues. Come out of her my people. We do know, in some cases, that will mean dying, because there is a great persecution on the people of God. Not all the people of God, you know, die during the tribulation. Some are protected, but it's some stand up for God. You know, sometimes I've heard people say over the years, well, the Laodiceans, they're the ones, you know, they're the ones who don't get to go to the place of safety or whatever.

You know, some of the people in the Bible who were persecuted and died for Christ, read the New Testament. Many of them were the strongest. So I think, okay, God, you know, help me to be strong enough not to be Laodicean, but weak enough. You know, so I want to be strong and weak so I don't get persecuted, which makes me lukewarm. And I find, oh, I'm now a Laodicean.

Come out of her. This is when it's collapsing God's telling people still to come out of her.

And I heard another voice from heaven saying, come out of her, my people. Five, for her sins have reached heaven and God has remembered her iniquities. Render her just as she rendered to you and prepare her double according to her works and the cups which she has mixed, mixed her double for her. And all this happens where, interesting enough, Babylon collapses. This doesn't mean, by the way, the beast and false prophet and their armies are destroyed. The beast and false prophet and their armies try to fight against Jesus Christ. It means that the empire, the system, collapses. Its own weight, it can't work. None of Satan's ideas, his schemes, ever work. Even this one doesn't work. It collapses in on itself. Verse 9 says, the kings of the earth who command afford occasion to live luxurious with her will weep and lament for her when they see the smoke of her burning, standing in a distance for fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, the great city Babylon, that mighty city, for in one hour your judgment has come. And it talks about how that city, that system brought merchandise. It brought all kinds of spices and ivory and iron and marble. And in verse 13 it says, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots and bodies and the souls of men. Slavery is going to be a big part of what happens. Slavery of human beings. And it's going to collapse. That's what happens before Christ returns. And the beast and the false prophet and their armies decide that they're going to stop him. And that fails too. And then even Satan is removed from influence humanity until he's released just a little bit at the end of the millennium, well after the millennium, that leads up to the great white throne judgment. And he's going to, he won't be able to affect human beings for that thousand years. But what a mess he leaves behind. What a mess. You know, when you start to think about our calling, when we're changed in that resurrection and we come back with Christ and he begins to change the world, it's not so that we can show up, you know, because we're spirit beings, we can show up shining and say, you know, repent and bow before me. No, it's so that we can show up and say, we can show up and then look, be like a human being and say, I understand I was once like you. That's what this is.

We're not called so that we get the Lord over humanity. We're called so we get to help lead them to Christ who's on the earth. Think about that. I can't think of a greater privilege in life to be resurrected, to help lead a hopeless, destroyed humanity. Many of them will be mentally ill. You know, you think of all things it's going to be. It's going to be a mentally ill, crazy humanity who has what? Followed Satan for three and a half years. Now, Satan influences him now. Can you imagine literally following Satan for three and a half years? What does that do to you? And they've watched the world be destroyed and now it's being healed miraculously through Christ.

Because it says that if he doesn't return what he does, nobody survives. Nobody. They all die. And that's not his will. It's not his plan. It is Satan's plan.

Satan, I know you probably get tired of me here. We say certain things. Satan's plan is either to make us animals so we no longer can have a relationship with God or to destroy every one of us so we can't have a relationship with God. That's his plan. That's what he wants to do.

And for some reason he can't see this. He can't see what's happening.

So, you and I live in a time of great deception. The world is deceived. We are here because we're coming out of that deception. We're still struggling with deception all the time. But we're coming out of that deception. I mean, sometimes we deceive ourselves. We're actually pretty, I'm pretty good at that. I can deceive myself in almost anything, you know. I can't blame it on Satan. It's me doing it to myself and you have to work through it and say, wait a minute, what am I doing here? We fight deception all the time. So we need to be watching for the beast, the two beasts, oh come on. It's not going to be secret. It's going to be obvious. We can't be so caught up in other things that we somehow think is good. Somehow it is of God. And so what we'll do in the Bible study is we're going to take just three scriptures about deception in our lives now. And that if we, I want to talk about it, have you all contribute, how do we make sure we're fighting that deception now so we don't end up maybe being susceptible to the deception in the future?