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"End Times" Syndrome
Howdy, Folks!
Ready for another one? Brother, did our temperatures ever drop here in south Texas! In the nearly six years we’ve lived here, I don’t ever remember a February like this one.
Global warming? Snnoorrrt!! Hmmmmphhh!! Yeah, right! Let’s don’t go there, shall we? That whole controversy is a sore spot with me.
My fresh Dark Roasted Columbian coffee is ready, my cup is steaming, and I’m ready. How ‘bout you?
Whewwweee!! Yesterday’s beginning on the Fear of Death – and that’s what it was: just the beginning – provoked a flurry of comments. It quickly became clear from the commentary that I need to build some fences around some of my statements so folks don’t draw the wrong conclusions.
Let me address you, Sharon, this way so that everyone has the benefit of the answers to your questions.
While many diseases are most certainly the direct result demonic activity, no one should draw the conclusion that I’m suggesting all diseases are the product of evil spirits. It is important to remember, however, that Jesus dealt with numerous diseases by casting out evil spirits.
In our push-button society today with its easy answers and instant responses to things we do and say, we should neither over-generalize the presence, the activity or the influence of demons, nor should we underestimate their activities in our lives. The body of Christ has largely forgotten that fully one-third of all Jesus' ministry involved the casting out of evil spirits. When He prepared to ascend into Heaven, and He gave the Great Commission to His followers, the very first sign He promised to "them that believe" was "in My Name, they shall cast out demons." (see Mark 16:17)
No one should conclude that I believe the presence of demons frees one from the responsibility for their decisions and actions.
Quite the contrary.
Demonic activity, demonic torment, demonic influence in the lives of people comes mostly as a product of their own actions, their own sin and rebellion, their own stubbornness, or their own refusal to follow God’s commands. Demonic invasions come because we open the doors ourselves.
There is an area where demonic activity can gain a foothold in people’s lives that is a product of spiritual inheritance, but I’ll leave that subject for a later discussion. The points I need to make in these discussions is that, (1) we open doors to evil spirits through our own decisions and actions; (2) we are still ultimately responsible for anything that happens – even if those events or happenings take place under the dominance of evil spirits; and (3) there are no evil spirits we cannot kick out in the name, the onoma, the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ!
Pure and simple, it is sin that opens the door to demonic activity. Period! That said, most folks who live under the torment of evil spirits do so because they don’t recognize what they are dealing with. They often think it’s just a character flaw or a personality quirk. My purpose in sharing these things is to cast the light of the Holy Spirit into areas of understanding so that folks realize the Lord has given them the means to be free.
When people take advantage of the gift of freedom and liberty that Jesus provides, the truth of Jesus’ promise becomes a reality in their lives. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” (John 8:36 KJV)
That’s not freedom because you have a theory that you are free, or because you have a doctrine that says you are free, or because you have a pastor or church leader who says you are free, or you have a psychologist or psychiatrist who says you are free. That is freedom in truth, freedom in reality, freedom experientially!
That said, let me get to today’s discussion.
When Della and I first began our five-year trek of traveling throughout Canada, the northwest, and across the northern tier states sharing in people’s homes and in churches on worship and being in the presence of the Lord, we met a few folks who redefined for us what we’ve come to call the “End Times” Syndrome. Let me explain.
If you’re like us, and you’ve grown up in Evangelical or Pentecostal church circles, you’ve heard the “Rapture” taught hundreds, if not thousands of times. One of the attendant teachings has been on “The Great Tribulation,” and depending on whose doctrine you want to listen to, this is either a 3 ½-year period of doom and gloom preceding the Rapture, or a 7-year period.
I’m not here to debate the fine points of tribulation teaching, other than to say that tribulation is as much a part of the ordinary Christian’s life as is breathing, walking and talking. Neither am I here to debate the Rapture. I’m not a particular fan of the use of the word, “Rapture,” simply because it doesn’t exist in Scripture. Neither does “the Millennium,” for that matter. What many, if not most, folks refer to as “The Rapture” is simply the catching away of a people who are readied for the Lord Jesus Christ.
That event is a certainty! No quibbles. No argument. How and when is another issue, and I certainly am not going to debate that. Jesus said, “ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh,” and I’ll leave it there.
Tribulation is a certainty. “The Great Tribulation” is a doctrine I don’t want to debate – not here, anyway. Nevertheless, this is a teaching that has permeated much of the body of Christ for the past century. What is unfortunate is that it has become the focus of so much teaching and attention is that folks have developed what I have come to call a “tribulation mindset.” They have developed "End Times" Syndrome. By that, I mean that people have gotten so wrapped up in doom and gloom that they fear the tribulation.
In actual fact, the “tribulation mindset” has become something which the spirit of the Fear of Death has taken advantage of in the lives of many Christians. It has produced this “End Times” Syndrome where people literally plan their lives and their activities around preparation for “end times.” It’s tragic. It monopolizes their thoughts, their conversations, their lives.
In our travels, Della and I came across groups and organizations devoted to preparation for a great persecution of God’s people. We did a double take more than a few times when we saw the lengths to which folks had gone in getting ready for persecution.
One minister, whose name I will omit, was traveling back and forth to Israel, Russia, and a number of the previous Iron Curtain countries setting up escape routes for persecuted Christians so they could escape to certain sanctuaries folks referred to as “home bases.” These sanctuaries were usually equipped to the hilt with food, fresh things, water supplies, generators, clothing, and hidden bunkers where folks could hide out during “the tribulation.”
Some extremist groups in the U.S. and Canada were even reported to have (although we never saw any evidence of it) caches of weapons and ammunition in case of attack by the Communists. Black helicopter conspiracies ran rampant in some of these groups, and there was an incredible focus of attention on how our federal government had been infiltrated by the Communists, and by groups of rabidly anti-Christian politicians whose aim and goal it was to arrest and detain Christians in concentration camps.
Sounds extreme, doesn’t it? No doubt there are grains of truth in some of the rumors. We know, for example, that many left-wing organizations exerting power and influence around the nation and world today have their roots in Communism. We know that politicians have been elected to office who hold extreme left-wing – almost anti-American views. Does that mean there are conspiracies afoot such as those proposed by these fear-mongers?
The Fear of Death absolutely loves to torment folks with grains of truth, blowing things so out of proportion that a person becomes paranoid. Paranoia is an affliction which directly stems from the Fear of Death. The Fear of Death literally creates folks we often sneer at, and deride as “fear mongers.” The problem is that the fear mongers literally believe their agenda, heart, mind and soul.
Their spirits are ruled by the Fear of Death. They live their lives in constant torment of oncoming attack. Worse, genuine, believing Christians are among those most tormented. The tribulation mentality has enveloped many churches and church groups, and the fear ruling these people feeds off itself increasing steadily in magnitude until people commit many extreme acts believing they are acting for their own self-preservation.
Self-preservation is a natural response of the human condition. The Fear of Death, however, takes our need for self-preservation and blows it out of proportion. Consider the Y2K crisis that hit this nation and much of the industrialized world prior to January 1, 2000.
As one who has been involved in the computer industry (in addition to, or in relation to my broadcast engineering activities) for the past twelve years or so and done beta testing for Microsoft, America Online, and a group of smaller software companies, I am reasonably expert in computer technology. When word first began to filter through the ranks of computer technologists of a possible problem related to the fact that older computer BIOS’s only used two digits for the year; and that computers could conceivably read the year 2000 as 1900, many hardware and software engineers went to work on the problem. An easy fix was developed for the overwhelming majority of computers using a tiny bit of computer code that tricked older BIOS’s into rejecting 1900 as the natural changeover from 1999.
Many devices used in power plants and utilities all across the continent, however, simply could not be accessed in time with chip replacements. The same thing was true of devices used in numerous communications centers utilizing older processors.
Had the problem been left unattended to in the early and mid-1990’s, it could have turned into a serious inconvenience for hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions of people. It became THE serious focus of attention in the computer world, and many computer engineers made huge incomes selling their expertise to the highest bidders. Many of these same engineers were extremely self-serving and promoted the potential crisis in order to further improve their income possibilities.
Newspapers and magazines began to carry one story after another about the impending crisis. You couldn’t pick up a computer magazine off the racks anywhere without reading several stories dealing with the Y2K scenario.
By mid-1997, enormous progress had been made in addressing the problem, but you’d have never known it from reading newspaper articles and magazines. If you believed what was being promoted, the world was on the edge of the greatest single crisis it had seen since World War II.
Would-be prophets stood up in churches and began to predict the coming of the anti-Christ in 2000. “The Great Tribulation is just around the corner! Better begin making preparations for national and world-wide chaos.”
One of the most idiotic stories making the rounds in some churches was that Y2K was going to precipitate such confusion and disorder that the dilemma would be used to declare martial law; that following the declaration of martial law, Christians would be rounded up and put in huge camps in the Arizona, New Mexico and California deserts in order to prevent them from blocking huge changes that were going to take place within our government. The merchants of fear even used pictures of the China Lake facility in southern California or the Luke Air Force Base Testing Range in Arizona with their barbed wire fences as proof of the prepared concentration camps.
Della and I were visiting a Christian group in the southwestern United States when one of their leaders began spouting this fear. I spoke up immediately and confronted the speaker, making it clear that the problem was not the serious national crisis he purported it to be. I addressed the situation from a technical standpoint.
When it became apparent that he was refusing to accept my technical analysis, I rebuked him as a Christian, and as a leader for using fear as his tool to frighten folks and precipitate unwarranted actions that would lead to their spending of huge sums of money unnecessarily. I chided him for preaching fear instead of faith.
This individual was truly infected by the Fear of Death! He shut up while I was there, but after Della and I left, he promoted a program whereby they began to collect bottled water, food, fuel, tools, generators, clothing – you name it – and store everything in caves where they could hide out during the “coming crisis.”
He wasn’t alone in his fear. Prominent church leaders, even heads of certain denominations began to send out letters to their people warning them to prepare for the Y2K disaster. My own mother called me to tell me that I needed to really get prepared for Y2K. My advice to the contrary fell on deaf ears. Despite the fact that she lived on a remote island, far from the supposedly vulnerable infrastructure, she spent thousands upon thousands of dollars of the savings my father had left her when he passed away.
When the Y2K day came and went with hardly a ripple, my mother called me sheepishly and said, “Sure wish I’d listened to you, Son. Instead of listening to the Holy Spirit, I listened to people who didn’t know what they were talking about and spent lots of money foolishly.”
I had a very dear aunt who likewise spent money she could ill afford to spend in preparation for the supposed disaster simply because church leaders she trusted promoted a fear mentality instead of faith.
My mother and my aunt were pikers, however, when it came to spending money foolishly on the Y2K fiasco.
Della and I met people who had spent years of their lives, multiplied thousands of dollars they could ill afford to spend, and most of their energies in preparing for “End Times,” and “The Great Tribulation.” They had built storage bins and warehouses, dug underground tunnels and opened up caves to store food and perishables in preparation for hiding out during “the coming persecution of Christians.”
Della and I grieved in our spirits when we saw all this activity. By the time we had an opportunity to share with them how they were being driven by the Fear of Death, for many it was too late. Some of these people died from strokes, from heart attacks, from various medical conditions brought on by the terror they lived under.
We began to point out to those who would listen that the food they stored was rotting, the clothing was molding, the fuel containers were leaking, and the water they had stored was taking on the taste and contamination of the containers. My comment to them was this, “If the Lord had directed you to do all this, would all the effort go to waste? If God warned you to store food for some coming crisis, would that food have all rotted? Would your clothing have mildewed, molded and disintegrated if your instruction to do all of this had come from the Lord?”
I went on, “You try to draw on the analogy of Joseph, and how the Lord sent him to make provision for his people and for Egypt during a seven-year famine. The food he stored didn’t rot. The supplies were as good the day they were taken out and distributed as the day when they went into storage.”
Paranoia, and that’s what this is, is driven by unbelief. If you listen to the Fear of Death, and react accordingly, you neither trust God, nor believe His Word.
Those whose lives revolve around an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ have no need to focus on such worries. They know beyond any shadow of doubt the safety that comes in the place of intimacy with our Bridegroom. They also know that any focus of attention on the preservation of the flesh is a futile exercise. There is no fear of any kind in a close and personal love relationship with Jesus Christ.
In Mark 8:35, Jesus talks about the efforts to preserve one’s life. We can render this verse, expanding upon two of the key words in the Greek text:
“For whoever will seek to preserve his life shall lose it; but he that willingly surrenders his life – overcoming the fear and possibility of death – for my sake and the gospel’s, that same person shall see his life saved, preserved, and made whole.”
The implications and consequences are clear. Those who make the preservation of their lives the focus of attention and objective will find their efforts wasted and futile. Conversely, those who seek the presence and intimacy of Jesus Christ without any consideration for possible consequences to their flesh will see the miraculous preservation and intervention of the Lord in their lives.
The Fear of Death has no place in our lives. Like all evil spirits, the Fear of Death is a liar. Listening to that spirit and believing anything it has to say under the premise or guise of “exercising caution” only provides a false hope.
The Fear of Death has no authority over those who implicitly trust the Lord Jesus Christ and put their faith in Him. If you are reading this, and you see that you’ve been tormented by this fear, take the authority you have in Christ Jesus and get rid of it. Begin living your life in freedom and liberty!
Finish your coffee, folks. Enjoy your weekend. I’ll see you again Monday. There will be no Coffee Break piece on Sundays from this point forward. I’m taking advantage of the day of rest, relaxation and fellowship with other believers.
Blessings – multiplied blessings – on all of you!
--Regner
Regner A. Capener
EKKLESIA HOUSE
RR-15, Box 6180
Mission, TX 78574-9589
(956) 583-5355
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This article may be reprinted, reposted, copied and re-used – in whole or in part – with proper attribution.
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