Ananias, Sapphira, and Truth

The Anatomy of Deception: Chapter 5 - Ananias, Sapphira, and Truth

By Art Katz

The account of Ananias and Sapphira in the Book of Acts is a remarkable episode of an incident that occurred in another age, in an hour when the Spirit of God prevailed in such magnitude and purity that the very same act which might well be applauded today, resulted, in that day, in sudden judgment and death. By applauded, I mean that we do not ask questions about those who give great contributions to the Church, but instead, we give such a person a place of honor and acknowledgement, a deacon at least, if not an elder. But the Church, which identified the lie and was not impressed with the sum, is not the Church of today.

It was the Church in its glory then, because it was alert to the issue of truth and deception, because it knew that before the Spirit of God manifests as the Spirit of power, He is first and foremost the Spirit of truth. When truth is disallowed, when truth is compromised, can we think that the dove is going to be around to perform the expressions of power that serve our needs and gratify our souls, if we have forsaken Him and His first designation and identity as the Spirit of truth? There needs to be a jealous regard for the truth that Peter exercised, enabling him to discern the fraud of a man and his wife giving a sum of money, however impressive, presenting it as the whole, though it was only in part.

But Peter said, "Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit, and to keep back some of the price of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God."

And as he heard these words, Ananias fell down and breathed his last; and great fear came upon all who heard of it (Acts 5:3-5).

Almost in the next breath we read,

And at the hands of the apostles many signs and wonders were taking place among the people; and they were all with one accord in Solomon's portico (Acts 5:12).

In other words, the respect for the Spirit of God as the Spirit of truth makes way for the Spirit of God as the Spirit of power. The contemporary Church has reversed it; we have celebrated the power, the signs, the wonders, and relegated the truth to a distant consideration, if indeed, any consideration at all. And which of us has not played the game of giving the part and making that to appear to be the whole? There was a time when we used to say that the truth is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or it is a lie. It is the whole truth, or it is not the truth. Any disqualification, any cutting of corners, anything less than what is whole and full converts what seems to be impressive into a lie. I take pains to dwell on this because it is a statement of the Church today; we have only given part, but we call that part the whole, when it is only a part. We have not the reticence, the modesty or the meekness appropriate to a Church whose Lord is the Lamb, because we are full of hype and exaggeration, pompous ambition and activity, and think that that constitutes the whole.

So we need to ask ourselves, are we doing anything different from what Ananias and Sapphira did when we seek and expect the evidence and power of a life totally given to God, while giving ourselves only in part, but presuming to have given ourselves wholly? We all want the semblance of these things, the comfort of the Spirit, the intimate communion, but we want it at the lesser price of acknowledging truth only in a doctrinal sense, or in the sense of being correct, rather than acknowledging truth as the very sum and substance of the reality of our lives. We want to speak truth, but not to be true; we want correct words, we want to acknowledge truth, but not to obey it. We are bringing our partial, phraseological truth and making that to stand for the whole, as if we have the reality that we are describing.




To decide to tolerate one deceit is to violate the whole truth. To be ninety-nine percent true, or mostly true, and represent that as the whole truth is to lie utterly, and to sin in one part is to sin in the whole. It is where we are most tempted to keep back for ourselves that the issue of truth really lays. What one truth, what one final issue, what one reserve is the thing that keeps us back from that utterness towards God, that makes truth really the truth, and brings to the Church and to its fellowship the reality of His presence and His glory?

Jude Foresaw This Day

Why is it that in the Church today we are willing to be so uncritical about anything that purports to be power, especially as it comes to us through popular ministries and personalities who have become so accepted and so much a part of the norm of our modern charismatic and pentecostal Christendom? Can we not bring ourselves to consider that those men might be themselves the vehicles through which deception can come? There is a certain pattern of dangers that God wants to bring to our attention in the Book of Jude.

Yet in the same manner these men, also by dreaming, defile the flesh, and reject authority, and revile angelic majesties (v. 8).

We may have thought that this warning in Jude speaks of a future time when these things shall be so blatantly conspicuous that it will be clear to whom they refer. I am already beginning to sense and to see the resonance of Jude's reference here, and the time has come to examine our present Christendom and its ministries in the light of these warnings.

Who would ever think that Jude v. 8 would be a description of any present-day ministry or minister, let alone those who have touched the public imagination and for whom we feel such affection? All that is being spoken of here are not things as we perceive them, but things as God perceives them. He sees them as filthy dreamers, and what makes their dreams filthy, I would suggest, is their ambition, and the way in which their ministry is a means to their own empowerment and to the establishing of a kind of sumptuous lifestyle which has somehow been thought to be perfectly in keeping with the importance of the kind of work that is being done by these individuals. But they are ambitious, and it is shown by the character of their ministries: the millions of dollars that are required to finance them, and the lifestyle that is very much in keeping with the whole magnitude of the thing. The only minister that can be trusted at the end of the age is one who does not dream his own dreams, does not have personal ambition, and does not see himself as some kind of exalted personality commanding the attention, the devotion or the affection of millions.

What does 'rejecting authority' mean? Could it be that they have no real heart for authority; they do their own things, and are not responsible or accountable to anyone. They might have some credentials in a Pentecostal organization, but the way in which those organizations are structured today, there is very little accountability. They have a staff and a board who themselves are paid handsome salaries to affirm the celebrity in his own desire and will, certainly not to contradict him, and certainly not to hold him accountable, but even, at times, to bail him out of the predicaments that come through those things that defile the flesh.

But these men revile the things which they do not understand; and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed. Woe to them! For they have gone the way of Cain, and for pay they have rushed headlong into the error of Balaam, and perished in the rebellion of Korah. (Jude v.10-11).

There is a tension, and even a hatred, between those who purport to serve God and who make a sacrifice for God which is not acceptable in His sight (however much it is heralded by man), and those who do bring the sacrifice that is honored of Him, who have to bear the brunt of the animosity and the hatred of those who are running on parallel tracks but are doing their own religious thing. Balaam's error was 'ministry for sale.' The ministry, or the calling, or even the anointing that was validly given by God in its inception, for God's gifts and callings are irrevocable, was greedily appropriated somewhere in the course of time by the individual himself for his own self-gain. The Spirit spoke through Jude to give a portent of things to come in the Last Days through men who are not of the faith, though they are somehow within it. They are a perverse distortion of the authentic and yet have a powerful influence, with symptoms that we need to recognize, because their influence is working in the Church today.

These men are those who are hidden reefs in your love feasts when they feast with you without fear, caring for themselves (Jude v.12a).

They have access to, and places with you, in your own Christian celebration. The absence of the awareness of God as Judge has produced a like decrease of the fear of God, so that we see the most blatant, mindless and unholy displays of activity. We can only understand that these people, both perpetrators and participants, are 'without fear,' as if God Himself is not observing, as if God Himself did not say in His word, "Be assured that your sins will find you out." We are in a dangerous condition, if we have not already fallen totally into deception, being taken in by too many manifestations that appear to be the power of God, uncritical and mindless in ourselves, lacking in the fear of God, and even emulating the very ones that are being described here.

Clouds without water, carried along by winds; autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up their own shame like foam; wandering stars, for whom the black darkness has been reserved forever (Jude vs. 12b -13).

When the ministry collapses, they just establish another. There is no place like private enterprise America, in which a star can wander to another location, take on another name, employ a lawyer to establish another charter, and become a star again, sending out the public relations materials and the mass mailings. These wandering stars appear to be something, but after you have left one of their meetings or shut off the TV set, what remains? What effectual thing has been transacted? What significant ministry has been performed, other than that it has been entertaining or amusing?

We are at such a dangerous point that the Christian entertainment industry is being considered as the sixth of the five-fold ministries. We consider it to be as valid as any of the others, but we need to understand what entertainment is. It is sensationalistic, and purposes to fill the void of boredom and emptiness; it is a pleasing diversion from the things that are real and actual and which really deserve our attention as the Church in the earth that is called by God to be the ground and pillar of truth. For if we are escapists, if we feel a need to be diverted, if we cannot take the realities that are constituted by our life and our relationship together in the world in which we are, and to which we have been called in this hour, to whom then should we turn for the willingness to face those realities and to bring God's redemptive answer? The word 'amuse' means to negate thinking and contemplation, to stupefy or to stare stupidly, to occupy in a pleasing or agreeable way. The original meaning of the word is to 'divert the attentions of in order to deceive.'

If these are the symptoms of our condition as the Body of Christ, what then is our safety? The only context in which I can be comfortable with any expression of power as signs and wonders or miracles is not with 'God's great man of faith and power,' but with the power that is safely exercised in the context of the Body of Christ, the framework that God intended from the first, as the signs of the apostles, and the wonders that they performed to authenticate their callings. Power would then be in conjunction with apostolic character, and not with some 'wandering star' who is a cloud that does not hold water. That is the safe context in which God intended power from the first, and in which He desires to restore it; power as the expression of faith that works by love rather than 'faith' as a gimmick or repetition of a certain formula, even the reciting of scripture in order to obtain a certain end, thus making faith a method and a technique for manipulation. Faith is too holy a thing to be so employed, and in order to safeguard us from that misuse, we have been given the conjunction of faith that works by love.

We need to know each other and not be looking for the 'great man of faith and power' to come to town in order to lay hands upon us and magically deliver us from the ill that we retain because we had not the courage to call for the elders of the Church that they might anoint us with oil and pray the prayer of faith that we be forgiven our sins. Somehow it seems easier to have faith in the magical personality than the elder whom we see every day. It saves us from the embarrassment of having to express or to reveal anything about our lives that we want safely to conceal so that we can be happily delivered. Let the demonstration of power to the unsaved in the world as validating the apostolic message come within the structure that God intended, that establishes the safety and the sanity that keeps us from deception, because we know the elders and are known by them.

Why is it that we need so much healing, so much demonstration? Maybe God is wanting us to examine the root causes for it, and maybe we need to be reminded that, more often than not, there is a conjunction between sin and ill health. God does not want it magically relieved, but He wants to deal with the root of that disease, that agitation and tension that comes from a life not properly lived according to the word of God. There is something more important to God than that we should be relieved of a troubling symptom, namely, that we concern ourselves with the character of our life and the quality of our walk and the reality of our lives together as believers. Our unspoken resentment, bitterness and jealousy that we swallow down because we will not confess our faults one to another, that we might pray for one another and be healed: all of that evasion will surface eventually as something wrong in our minds or our bodies.

Whose Power?

When experience as a quick-fix alternative is preferred to the disciplines of diligently seeking God, authentic apostolic Church life, denying self, carrying one's cross daily to follow Him, we put ourselves in a place of spiritual jeopardy, but is not the Lord near at hand to all who seek Him? What is the enduring benefit of having received merely some alleviation from the symptoms that were occasioned by serious defects of character, and yet retaining those same character defects? Whatever the future will reveal of the present 'revival' phenomena, perhaps the greatest thing will be the profound repentance of thousands upon recognizing their susceptibility to deception, their lack of elementary discernment, and their haste to run after demonstrations of power in atmospheres so contrary to God's known holiness and character.

Clearly, a power is at work, but the question is, whose? Who is it that is mediating an alternative and lesser joy to the immature, the carnal, and the undiscerning? Assuming that our fears are exaggerated and that the present phenomenon is of God, though admittedly marred only by certain excesses, in what ways will future lying signs and wonders be different from those with which we are presently being confronted? By what criteria will these differences be identified? Are we presently at the level of maturity and discernment by which these important distinctions can be made? By what means shall we come to that place if we are now prone to describe as 'enemies' those who are only raising questions about it? The very ridicule and censure brought by the advocates of this revival of those who attempt to do so makes suspect the very claims they espouse. The fact that something eventuates in blessing, release, or deliverance is no sure evidence or guarantee that it is of God.

For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders; so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect (Matt. 24:24).

The same powers of darkness which have wrought the oppressions through careless or unclean living can just as easily relieve them, restoring even relationships that have been broken and made miserable by them, in order to bring about a greater deception! Even the most rapturous 'love of God' can be a pseudo-sensation produced by spirits in the indiscriminate and slothful who are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to seek God's face in truth. Is the 'hunger for God' in fact that, or a hunger for an experience of God that will assure the insecure soul that he is known and accepted of God? Is this not the unrecognized motive that makes many pant after present-day prophets in hope of a 'prophetic' word of this kind? Does not this tendency promote the immaturity of such, rather than encourage them in the faith as sons? Do we not prefer to be effortlessly acted upon miraculously rather than diligently seek God on the basis of the promise of His Word?

The Power in His Name

The emphasis on power and miracles in the Church today is rife, and it needs this balancing consideration:

And He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned. And these signs shall accompany those who have believed: in My name they shall cast out demons, the will speak with new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly poison, it shall not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover."

So then when the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God.

And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them, and confirmed the word by the signs that followed (Mark 16:15-20).

The very conclusion reminds us that one of our principal tasks is to preach, and that the Lord, who was working with them, confirmed the word of their preaching with the signs that followed. We need, therefore, to see the signs, the power and the miracles in the context of God's intent, not displacing the word, not being an activity independent of the word, but confirming the word. That is the way that it was at the inception, and that is the way God intends for it to be at the conclusion also, contrary to the tendency to become heady and carried away with so much emphasis on power evangelism that is now circulating in the Body of Christ.

My concern is that a power is being worked by a people who think that all they need to do is invoke the name of Jesus and employ a certain kind of methodology or technique. They need to understand and be reminded that 'in the name of Jesus' is not a catch phrase or a magical incantation that one recites in order to get the desired result. The name of Jesus is a powerful phrase that refers to what He is in Himself. The desired effect of the work or the prayer must be in keeping with what the Lord is in Himself. He is meek and lowly in heart, and the complete opposite of our swaggering to a ministry of healing because we have learned how to do it by invoking the name and expecting results with a kind of arrogance or self-serving exaltation that is not in keeping with the character of the Lord Himself; I wonder whether we are, in fact, doing something in the name of the Lord or by some other power. It is even more sobering to read the Scriptures that immediately precede this passage:

And they went out, and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had gripped them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Now after He had risen early on the first day of the week, He first appeared to Mary Magdalene, from whom He had cast out seven demons. She went and reported to those who had been with Him, while they were mourning and weeping. And when they heard that He was alive, and had been seen by her, they refused to believe it. And after that, He appeared in a different form to two of them, while they were walking on their way to the country. And they went away and reported it to the others, but they did not believe them. And afterward He appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at the table; and He reproached them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who had seen Him after He had risen. And He said to them, "Go into all the world, and preach the gospel to all creation (Mark 16:8-15)."

The whole account is a chronicle of unbelief, a staggering unwillingness to believe the resurrection evidence, and an unwillingness to believe the testimony of the women who had received it from an angel. Having just upbraided them for their unbelief, Jesus immediately says, "Go into all the world." I have an overwhelming respect for the genius of God. This is perfect, and it stands as a sober warning to all of us in every generation who might be bitten by religious ambition, and who think that all we need to do is to learn 'how to' perform miracles, and we can go sailing forth and watch people being slain by the score, and witness tremendous miracles and power.

The Lord wants to remind us that the very men whom He commissioned to do and teach these things were those whom He had just rebuked for their hardness of heart and unbelief. To be reminded that we are flesh and blood, just as they, will keep us in a safe balance. We are not made of better stuff, and if we were confronted with the same phenomenon of resurrection, then in fact, we too would rightly balk. It is this kind of recognition of our fallibility, our failure and our weakness as men that will save us from an arrogance and presumption that will degenerate into something far worse.

Not every one who says to Me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven. Many will say to Me on that day, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?" And then I will declare to them, "I never knew you; Depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness (Matt 7:21-23)."

This is another caution and a healthy reminder that not every act, even though it has a consequence for good, is God's act. There is a power in the name of Jesus that evidently some can invoke, and see a result, but which will not impress God on the Last Day when all of us shall stand before Him as Judge, and our works will be tested as to whether they will pass through the fire. Many of us may be among those who say, "Lord, Lord, did we not do this and that, and prophesy, and perform many miracles?" The fact that the word 'many' is actually in this text indicates that they were indeed substantial works that really effected things and brought about real consequences, and yet He calls them those who practice lawlessness because they invoked His name, but He never knew them. It is a sobering admonition about invoking the name of Jesus as a kind of catch phrase that, even in its misuse, evidently has an efficacy that works. That means there is all the greater danger for deception. Would to God that it would work on only one condition, namely, that it came out of the mouth of one who was sent by God to do that work, a work that honored God and glorified the name of the Lord, that it was not some kind of a giddy thing done by a soulish or carnal believer who loves the sense of power and self-exaltation that comes when a miracle is worked by his prayer.

Who of us have come to a sanctification that believes he is above that kind of spiritual egotism, that he could not be touched in any area of self-exaltation if he should see mighty miracles performed at his hand and by his prayer when he invoked the name of Jesus? In the realm of power there is great risk of which we need to be mindful because the text here reminds us that they said, "Lord, did we not perform many miracles?" Performing a miracle is not a guarantee that it is God's work. Certainly, it is not a guarantee of our own sanctity, or the assurance that God has sent us, or that we are even in right relationship with Him. The mere invocation of the name of the Lord has become commonplace; anyone can vocalize the phrase, but does that sanctify it? Does that make it official? That is exactly the thing that is profane, the employment of the name of God to somehow validate the human and religious thing that we are promoting.

We need to be concerned for the works that are demonstrations of the power of God, that are a glory to the name of Jesus, because they were done in His name, in the spirit that is in keeping with the character of His name. They were done in a seemly way, in humility by persons who are not self-aggrandizing, not exalting themselves when they see an evidence of power when they invoke the Name. We need to see the use of the name of Jesus in exact proportion to the real knowledge of Him whose name we are invoking. Jesus calls any work as evil which is not born out of the knowledge of Him or for the glorification of His name. He will not allow us, without consequences, to manipulate power independently of the quality of our relationship with Him.

In fact, we cannot consider power and miracles that are independent of Jesus. They must always be in keeping with who He is in His own person, always with humility: "Learn of me for I am lowly and meek of heart." But we will only be meek in proportion to our union with Him who is lowly and meek. The unimpeachable mark of the true living God, His character and person, is His meekness. When that meekness is employed in conjunction with power, we have finally arrived as the sons and the daughters of the living God in Christ.

If we somehow think that we would never be among that many who say "Lord, Lord..." then we are, of all people, the most likely to be deceived. There is no more certain ground for deception than the smug assurance that we ourselves could never be candidates. If our flesh is hankering for great deeds and exciting miracles and demonstrations of power, more than a pure relationship with Jesus in truth, then we are already on the way down. The chief safety for those who will be the instruments of His power is that the first priority be this quality of relationship, before the expression and the manifestation of that power. What is our motive for power? Is it to honor and glorify Him? If our motive is to see the alleviation of sickness and distress, as honorable as that is, then it is not yet a pure motive. The first motive is the glorification of His name and not the response to human need.

The Lawless One

It is clear that the 'lawless one' will be majoring in power, signs and wonders in order to deceive the unwary:

For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. And then that lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming; that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. And for this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they might believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness (2 Thess. 2:7-12).

Here is a further sobering warning: we will actually see legs grow out, visible things before us, unquestionable miracles, but the Lord calls them wicked. It is a miracle, but a lying miracle. Can we discern the one from the other, and on what basis are we making that distinction? We have got to see beyond the things that are apparent, and beyond the things that are employed to somehow sanctify them, when the fact of the matter is, they are evil. Iniquity or the spirit of lawlessness is a soulish desire for the gratification that comes with signs of power unrelated to the character and person in whose name they are invoked. Those signs and wonders will look like the real thing, and if we are so starved for a demonstration of power, or for something that will break the monotony of our predictable Sunday services, we will get swept in.

with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved (v.10).

It is not just the truth, or the acknowledgement of the truth that God makes the key to the issue of deception, but they did not receive the love of the truth. Truth needs to be loved, or we are not going to suffer the sacrifices by which truth is obtained. Confessing your faults one to another is being truthful. It is a painful and humiliating sacrifice to do so, and we will only do it because we love the truth. The love of the truth that will withstand whatever cost it requires is God's only provision against the deception that comes from lying signs and wonders. If we are only habituated to the effect of them, if we only want to see the excitement, if there is a void in our lives that wants to be titillated at the apparent miracle and power without asking too many questions about how it is performed, and by whom it is performed, and who is ultimately receiving the glory for the performance, then we are candidates for being deceived. Do we love the truth so much that we will raise those questions, that we will be alert to them, that we will not just be impressed by the performance?

Evidently, there is a conjunction between character and power that is important in God's sight, and equally, there is a conjunction between lying signs and wonders and unrighteousness. Unrighteousness in this context is any exercise of power ostensibly in the name of the Lord that has not to do with His glory and honor, but the glory and honor of the one who performs it. The establishing of one's ministry and reputation, and receiving the adoration of those who are the beneficiaries is unrighteous because it is a misuse of the Lord's name for self-aggrandizement. There is something more important than being relieved from distressful symptoms of pain, something more important than impressive demonstrations of signs and wonders; it is the issue of God's fear and His glory. When that is not the palpitating and central and jealous concern of His people, we make ourselves candidates for lying signs and wonders. The signs and wonders are a lie because they do not bring the attention of those who observe them, or those who are the beneficiaries of them, to the Lord Himself, but to the one who performs them in the Lord' s name.

But we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth. And it was for this He called you through our gospel, that you may gain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Thess. 2:13-14).

Here is the reference to the glory of God as being the factor for safety. How many of us would prefer to remain with the suffering of an unhealed bodily condition if that would more properly assure God's glory than our healing? There are sufferings that are not healed. The issue is not being delivered or dying, but the issue is, what does it please Him to do in His manifold wisdom that will affect His glory? God did not call us to healing, He did not call us to a whizz-bang Christendom and charismatic flair and exciting services and great personalities. He called us to gain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Apostate and the Apostolic

We are in a time of separation, and what we are seeing in contemporary church life is the first expressions of what will distinguish the apostate from the apostolic, true Church. It is remarkable how taking opposition to the issue of current 'revival' phenomena is already a factor in separating believers in churches. If indeed, there are powerful deceptions at work, we look to the day of reckoning in which those who have been deceived would recognize it, and repent to such a depth that they would be restored to God and made fit to stand in the Last Days, then the Lord will get His value out of what is presently taking place.

What we are experiencing is not so much the deception in itself, but the final consummation and consequence of a longer standing softness and shallowness in the faith, a giddiness that finally has resulted in 'signs and wonders' ministry. In other words, it has been made possible by what has preceded it, namely, the lack of a disciplined faith of a people who have been moved toward experience rather than the word, by soft pastors who are afraid to offend and thus speak only general biblical messages. It is a summation of an error of spirit that has had a long history, but now we are coming to the day of reckoning. It is not out of place to make it analogous to the crucifixion of Jesus by the Jewish nation in that it was not the sin in itself, but the final consummation and statement of a longer standing Jewish apostasy that finally had its outworking in that tragic crime. To say that that was the thing in itself, and not to see that it was preceded by a history of apostasy is to miss the point. We are reaping a harvest of what has been sown in the last decades of charismatic casualness, and lack of discipline now coming to roost in phenomena that are very grave. Our running after places, making of them a kind of Mecca, as if God is only to be found there, seems to me to be a continuation of the same kind of propensity.

In my view, we have come to the point of no return already, in view of the fact that the Church is so open and susceptible to the kinds of things that are now taking place. Maybe God wants us to pray for its lamentable condition. We have a whole generation being raised up that has never known the holiness of God and who talk about God prolifically, loosely, glibly and easily, but which God? I am even wondering if these central personalities have covenanted with someone other than God and do not even know it themselves, and in some Faustian way, they are receiving a power to affect bodies and lives that they thought was coming from God, but their knowledge of God is so sparse and so utterly questionable, that it may well be that they have been covenanting with some other thing that parades as light, and that responded to their cry for something to happen, and so they only think that the are communicating with God.

The prospects seem dim, but we need to be reminded again of the Last Days' deceptions, of false apostles who will transform themselves into apostles of Christ as it says in 2 Cor. 11:14, "And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light." Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers are also disguised to appear as the ministers of righteousness whose end shall be according to their works. We need to be sobered by statements of this kind. Satan's devices and wiles are uncanny, and that the most powerful of them is that which is not an appeal to our carnality, but an appeal to our spirituality as an angel of light, but light of what kind? My concern is that if we are missing it now, then what about the final deceptions that are to come, the future lying signs and wonders? Are we presently at the level of maturity and discernment by which these important distinctions can be made, and by what means shall we come to that place of maturity if we are now prone to describe as enemies those who are only raising these questions?

Prayer:

Lord, we just appeal to You in Your great mercy. Come, my God, and breathe a sense of Yourself to congregations who have never known You as they ought, to, where Your fear is absent from the Church. We have made ourselves candidates for many things, deceptions of many kinds, in our arrogance and presumption. We lack a broken spirit. We are not chastised or affected by what is going on. We celebrate the things that are so contradictory to Your holiness and call it 'God.' Lord, we are in a low and pitiful state, and if these are not the Last Days' deceptions of which You have warned us, how shall we be guarded from that which shall come? How will we recognize it if we are unable now to exercise even the most minimal cautions and discernments? Lord, I am appealing to your mercy. Who is the greater candidate for deception than he who thinks that his spirituality is so secure that he cannot be deceived? Lord, we ask that You bring Your humility and brokenness to the Church to save it from these terrible things. We look to You, Lord, and know that You are going to have a Church that will be a glory to your Name forever, that Israel will be restored through the good offices of that Church, through its mercy and through its witness, and grant us fresh strength to go on and be what we ought to be in Your sight, and to Your people as these Last Days become indeed so much the fulfillment of that of which we have been warned. We look to You and thank You for Your precious provision of Your word, Your Spirit, the Church itself in its configuration as a Body that can speak the truth in love, that can exhort us daily, speak to each other as we ought, and receive from each other what can only come to us through Your Church, Your great sanctifying provision to save us, so that we might not have to stand before You with shame at the day of


Your appearing, but with joy to hear the precious words, "Well done good and faithful servants." In Your holy name we ask it. Amen.


See Also:
   Introduction
   Chapter 1 - The Cry for Reality
   Chapter 2 - Holiness or Blessing
   Chapter 3 - True Church
   Chapter 4 - Hosea: A Word to the Church
   Chapter 5 - Ananias, Sapphira, and Truth