A warning to the Church on unity

This second beast, like the first beast, rises fully at the end, but also like the first beast, is slowly rising throughout the New Testament age. Don't you see him if you look around you a little bit? Much of the church world, influenced by postmodernism, will compromise just about anything for unity with the world and to be in the good graces of the world. The world decides that homosexuality is not wrong, and the false church and many apostatizing churches decide that maybe homosexuality is not wrong anymore now either. Many more are going to decide this in your lifetime, beloved, and do so because they will say, We cannot look foolish to the world. We have to be one with the world. We have to be united together. God doesn't think it is sin anymore. Maybe He never really did! Just accept each other no matter what we do. That is what this is all about at the end of the day, isn't it?

Francis Schaeffer, the American Christian philosopher and critic of Evangelicalism, said once, Tell me what the world is saying today, and I’ll tell you what the church will be saying seven years from now. And that is often correct. The weak and apostatizing church jumps on the bandwagon of what comes out of the mouth of the kingdom of this world. She whores herself out to the first beast and twists God's Word in order to baptize those blasphemies in Christian lingo. She puts upon it the stamp of God Himself, to the deception of many. Because what she wants ultimately is not the truth of God's Word, but the unity of man, for the glory of man, in God's name.

The false and apostatizing church promotes the healing of this wound and points to it by means today, too, of false ecumenicity: The joining together of all branches of Christendom not on the basis of the truths of God's Word, but on the basis of the denials of the truth of God's Word. The World Council of Churches, for example, is a union of 500 million people and their churches. It is an ecumenical union that tolerates absolutely anything except the belief that the Bible is infallibly and word for word the Word of God. And there are denominations that are very close to home that are a part of this World Council of Churches. You can look it up on the internet.

Think of Rome and her influence, and the modern movement in Protestant circles (including among some Reformed and Presbyterian people) to go back to Rome and to become one under Rome's leadership again. Evangelicals and Catholics Together is a large influential movement to that respect, working to get Protestant churches to say that we are one with Rome. The spread of Federal Vision theology applies to this too in the church world, as it teaches that salvation is by faith and works – the exact same thing that Rome has been teaching forever – a theological movement that is leading people (even in Reformed and Presbyterian churches) to go back to the Roman Catholic Church. Our own mother denomination, sadly, has been engaged in talks with Rome, seeking unity in various ways. The World Council of Churches is actively pursuing unity with the Roman Catholic Church. Do you get the point? The desire for unity will continue to outstrip the desire for fidelity to God's Word, and will in the end promote the unity of the anti-Christian kingdom.¹

Cory Griess