We are in the end-times, but where?

Personally I think that these movements are problematic for Biblical Christianity.

False doctrine, being propagated, is one of the major signs of the end times.

 

Hm. I wonder why you would think so. My experience has been that these third world congregations have much more in common with Biblical Christianity and tend to be more conservative than the western churches. Western Christianity in the last days of the Christian dispensation is going the way of Israel in the last days of the Mosaic dispensation . . . growing fat and lazy and hard of hearing. Like the Rabbis of old, we have our religion down to a science, spending countless hours debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. These brown and black and yellow Christians live much like the early church did, in poverty and want, where people bow their heads gratefully to thank God for their daily bread because they know what it is to not have bread to eat. No one has told them that God stopped working miracles, that the sick and maimed cannot be healed, or that the dark powers that are at work in their world cannot been broken. They tend to practice a Christianity that is much more akin to that of the Acts church than what western Christianity has developed into. For some strange reason, the hope that is in the Gospel being preached to hungry, dying people is the purest form of Christianity there is.

But doesn't that depend on which "end times" we are talking about? There is simply no denying that the 1st Coming of Jesus brought the Old Testament dispensation to an end.

And it seems to me that many prophecies in the Bible speak of the "last days" or "end times" of the Old Covenant dispensation, which the New Testament writers were living in, were witness to, and spoke of. Perhaps the reason they saw the "end" as imminent is for that very reason, they were living in the last days of an age that was quickly drawing to a close. An age that can symbolically be said to have ended with the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem and the whole Mosaic economy and Jewish commonwealth, ergo the Old Covenant form of worship literally passed away. But the age officially came to an end with the final battle in the Spring of 73 and the fall of the final Jewish stronghold of resistance, Masada, a tragic tale of blind religious zeal gone amok . . .

Not coincidentally, the writers of the New Testament were also living in the beginning of a new age, the dawning of a New Day, the New Testament age, the New Covenant dispensation, the age of Grace, the age of the Good News of the Kingdom and the Gospel of Christ. Both the end of the Old and the beginning of the New came to pass in the days of the 1st Coming of Jesus, not coincidentally.

The issue then is to figure out which end times or last days the Scripture is speaking of. I have found that far more Scripture speaks of the last days or end times of the Old Covenant age that the New Testament writers were witness to, looked for, and wrote about.

In Christ,
Pilgrimer

 

We might be free from the Wrath of God, but we are not Free from Persecution which will surely increase as we move forward.

The church age will end and we will be called up with Him before the Tribulation, but we will face persecution from our "brothers and sisters in Christ" and non-believers/

 

What? With the destruction of the Temple? So what exact period are we in again, like point to it on a timeline, have we ushered in the the Kingdom yet? Because if so, "If Heaven Ain't A Lot Like Dixie" sounds more like a hymn to me now if the end times have ended.

 

Are you alluding to dispensations?

 

Is the "present age" the Church Age? Is this also the age the Disciples asked about in Matt. 24:3

Mat 24:3 And when he is sitting on the mount of the Olives, the disciples came near to him by himself, saying, `Tell us, when shall these be? and what is the sign of thy presence, and of the full end of the age?'