Volume 44 | Number 3 | May–June 2016

Inglés Español

But the Wise Shall Understand: Part One
“The End Time Defined”


By Dr. H. T. Spence

In the light of unprecedented growing powers of darkness taking hold of our times, we are at a most urgent hour for the imperative intervention of God for the lives of His people. As we near the ominous presidential election in November (coming on the heels of the infamous past eight years of post-American changes, as well as the resolve of the public outcry for a “new world order”), we shudder to think of what is before us as a nation. The concept of leadership has radically changed in America: character is a thing of the past, truth is a matter of semantics, and morality has abandoned definitive mores. America has become an existential island floating on the immense sea of humanity with a determination to literally obliterate from memory its past, leaving its future to the whims of insanity and evolutionary chance. One thing remains clear—we are living in the transitional season of history where all political energies are out to destroy our past sacredness and preciousness.

In this issue of Straightway, we are drawing from the recent Men’s Prayer Conference’s burden “But the Wise Shall Understand” (Daniel 12:10). Herein is a principle of both a hope for God’s people in this diabolical generation and a prayer that in the light of God’s precious Word, the wise shall understand the times in which we live.

Understanding the Times of History

But before we come directly to this burden, preliminary truths declared in God’s Word must be established. We must first understand the time in which we presently live. Secondly, we should seek out both principles and patterns in Scripture that help to identify our times.

We firmly believe that the phrase the “times in which we live” refers to both the last days and the time of the end. But we carefully need to define this aspect of time.

The unfolding of Scripture reveals that God deals with this world and its history through the dimension of time. There was a definite beginning for the history of this world’s existence, there is a continuation of its history, and there will be a future designation for its existence. Time is a gift from God in creation, and He has total control of it. The entire unfolding of history has already been planned out; furthermore, history continuously unfolds according to the appointment of a Sovereign God.

Thousands of prophecies in Scripture prove that God knows the future and confirms that He is the ultimate controlling factor of history. The Book of Daniel especially reveals this truth about time, history, and the sovereignty of God manifested through time and history. The Bible reveals that God has numbered the days of history, including the personal history of every individual conceived.

We have often observed that the Bible declares the “last days” (which according to Acts 2:16, 17 and Hebrews 1:2, along with other passages) began with the coming of God’s Son to earth and continues to the present. Therefore, we can declare we live in the “last days.” The New Testament also reveals that the last days were appointed primarily for the Church, especially developed in the Gentile world. The last two thousand years have been appointed by heaven to the Church ages.

The apostle Paul declares in Romans 11:25 that these last days would be true “until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.” This “fulness of the Gentiles” seems to come to an end at the Rapture, when the concept of the Gentile Church ages ceases. God has appointed the several seasons of time that have unfolded the Church ages of the past two millennia.

Within these Last Days of the past two thousand years, the Bible prophesies also of a concluding time called “the time of the end” or the End Time. This End Time is approached and described from various perspectives, depending on the burden of the writer in Scripture. Daniel uses the term “the time of the end,” or the End Time, from the perspective of the Gentile empires and their lingering influence in the End Time (or when their time of existence comes to an end). He culminates in chapter 11 primarily with the political and religious aspects of the End Time. Later in chapter 12 Daniel relates the End Time to the people of Israel.

Jesus Christ, when dealing with this truth in Matthew 24, gave us greater details in the two segments of the End Time: the “beginning” of the End Time (Matt. 24:4–8) and the “end” of the End Time (Matt. 24:9–14).

There are also patterns and types of the End Time that Christ gave to us, shedding light on our understanding of this biblical term. Christ declared He would come at the end of a certain age. Our Saviour speaks of “the days of Noah.” Noah’s days came at an end of time, or an age, which covered from the fall of man to the destruction of that first earth by a flood. Noah lived in the end time of that appointed age or season of time. He was told how long his end time would be—120 years (Gen. 6:3). Living through that end time, he was delivered through the Flood.

Christ also revealed to us that His coming would be as “in the days of Lot.” Lot lived in an end time of the history of Sodom and Gomorrah. He was snatched out by the angels in the end time of that city’s history.

But there is also the end time of the consummated Church ages. We believe we are living in the End Time of the Church ages, or the time which will bring the fullness of the use of the Church in God’s dispensational economy, and thus bring an end to the purpose of the Church. The end of the Church ages will culminate in the secret second coming of Christ for only those who are watching and waiting for Him in the last Church age of history. This end of the Church ages will be the fulfillment of the words of Paul concerning God’s spiritual dealings with the Gentiles in Romans 11:25, the “fulness of the Gentiles be come in.” Following this, there will be the Great Tribulation and its appointed time seasons, rendered to us in Revelation 6–19. There will also be an end-time season of the Great Tribulation. It will con-summate at the open display of the second coming of Christ back to earth as mentioned in Revelation 19. This will ultimately lead to the setting up of His kingdom and the ushering in of the nation of Israel as the superlative and reigning nation on earth.

In regard to the two advents of the second coming of Christ, there seems to be one perspective in the light of the end of the Church ages, and another in the light of the end of the Great Tribulation. We observe somewhat of a definitive clarification to the fact that there are two noticeable segments to the first coming of Christ. He first came secretly, as far as those who were watching and waiting for the consolation of Israel and those who saw Him (such as, Mary, Joseph, Simeon, Anna, Shepherds, Wise Men, Zacharias, and Elisabeth). But there was an open and public display of His first coming to all at the beginning of His public ministry at the age of thirty. This pattern is true of the Lord’s second coming: a secret coming to those who anticipate His coming in what is called a Rapture, in the air; and then at the end of the Great Tribulation, His open display to all the world, which geographically will commence on the Mount of Olives.

Yet the key context of the “time of the end” in the Book of Daniel concerns the end of the Gentile political power. Chapter 2 gives a brief presentation of the “day of man,” represented in an image of a head, breasts and arms, belly and thighs, legs, and finally feet and ten toes. The “last days” began in the legs of this image, representing the Roman empire. The dismantling of the Roman empire is represented in the feet mixture of iron and clay. Ultimately this image of man’s great days will be destroyed; there will be an end of the “day of man,” an end of the “times of the Gentiles.” This is what Christ was referring to in Luke 21:27.

Let us keep in mind the distinction between the “times of the Gentiles” and what we have observed in Romans 11:25:

For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.

The “fulness of the Gentiles” is resolved at the Rapture when God will turn from the Gentile Church concept and then begin to spiritually move in dealing with the Jews as a nation. We believe we are in the End Time of the Church ages; it is God’s final providential use of the Gentile Church concept. Daniel’s “time of the end” addresses more particularly the end of the Gentile political power.

Characteristics of End Times

Each “end time” in Scripture is marked by certain similar characteristics. The end time of Noah before the Flood is a type of an end time before the judgment of the Great Tribulation. The end time of Lot before Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction is a similar type of an end time. Both Noah and Lot are types and shadows of the days before other “end times,” including the end time of the Church ages. Although the context of the principles in Daniel 12 concern the remnant of Jews living in their end time at the end of the Great Tribulation (that is, nearing the end of Daniel’s Last Week), the principles seen here are end-time principles that are very pertinent for our time in history as well!

We must remind ourselves that the apostasy of Israel and its judgment of the Babylonian Captivity is what brought into existence the “times of the Gentiles.” What will bring the Gentile Church to an end will be its persistent, resolved apostasy in the Laodicean Church Age. It is true that the institutional Church on earth has gone through many apostasies (its defections from the truth, from the Word of God, and from Christ the Head of the Church). Yes, there have been many apostasies or fallings away from this trilogy. Truly, the Roman Catholic Church is the oldest, continuing apostasy within Christianity.

But when God providentially brought the Reformation into history, it profoundly affected the age time for Christianity. Perhaps if this move of God had not happened along with its impact on Western civilization, the Rapture may have come at that time in the climax of the Church’s darkest hour.

When God sent the Great Awakenings to America and the Evangelical Revivals to England, Germany, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and other countries in the 1700s, it brought the Church into deeper insights of the redemptive work of Christ. These revivals drew believing hearts more to the inward workings of grace, rather than simply the outward and the upward objective workings of grace on man’s behalf.

In carefully reflecting upon this time, the eighteenth-century revivals seem to have commenced a preparation on earth for the two advents of the second coming of Christ. As this move of God became evident in the history of the Church on earth, it brought a reactionary, aggressive work of the Devil that in a radical way accelerated in the 1800s. Global ideological movements began to take place through agnostic and atheistic men in the secularist, modernist movement throughout Europe. There was also the birth of the cults (Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventist, Christian Science, etc.) that have had a profound but subtle effect on the Church. At this same time Protestant Liberalism and Modernism swept across Europe with a vengeance, washing ashore with hurricane force in America. Evolution rose with great influential power, both in the secular world and through the avenues of Liberalism, making inroads into Christian seminaries. There was also a flood of corrupted, heretical ancient manuscripts discovered by archaeologists; these were often written by early-century apostates who had tried to overthrow the Faith. This torrential flood of manuscripts furthered attempts to pollute, defame, and deny the true Gospel!

God has permitted all of this to arise in order to prove that the institutional Church is like a man who built his house upon sand, discarding the wisdom of the rock for its foundation. By the Laodicean Church Age, the institutional Church has laid aside the Rock of the infallible Christ and His Word and turned to the sand of secular humanism for its foundation. God has tested this End-time institutional Church with the false rains of the Charismatic movement, the floods of rising troubles within the Church and the world, and the continued winds of false doctrine. These events have helped to bring a clear line of demarcation between the wheat and the tares growing ever so close together within the Gentile Church.

The greatest spiritual heart-movings of God in Church history came in the 1700s and helped prepare the remnant for the coming greatest apostasy ever known in the history of the Church. The rejection of the deepest light brought forth the deepest apostasy.

Conclusion

We live, dear brethren, in the last Church age, which seems to have begun around 1900. Many of God’s men believed back in the 1800s that the Church was coming to its worst hour and warned of such a pervading heart apostasy that would bring the finality of the apostasy to the institutional Church globally. It must be said that we are in the worst and most deceptive falling away of the Church in all of its history. It is not so much the apostasy of Romanism; it is the apostasy from the great move of God in the Reformation and the Evangelical Revivalist movements, through which God brought the deepest insights of spiritual living to the Church.

Yes, our Church age continues to declare the terms Gospel, Jesus Christ, and Christianity. Yet it is another Gospel, another Jesus, and another Christianity, because the institutional Church has denounced the literality of the Bible and the historical Jesus. Christianity is the only religion that has publicly renounced the historicity and the divine inspiration of its sacred writing (the Bible) and its true Christ. In the place of these rejections, the Church has itself created a modern Jesus and a modern concept of being a Christian. Both are antithetical to the Christ and the Christianity revealed from heaven to the saints. Yes, we have witnessed the public death of Christianity in the public, institutional Church around the world. We have come to the “end” of the Church as a true witness on earth; it now has become the voice of apostasy, destroying itself from within, rather than being the “pillar and ground of truth.”

Dear reader, how are we to live in this End Time? What are the problems that we will face? What is it that God desires for us to see, to know, to preach, and to teach in the End Time of the Last Days? It is our prayer with this issue of Straightway that the Lord will call us to the truth of His Word for this End-time season of history. We must be ready in heart for the secret coming of the Lord; we dare not place our trust simply on an experience of the past, or on our water baptism, or on our being a member of some local church. We must be of those that are looking for Him to come, those who are walking daily with God, who are being delivered from this world of sin and its affections. God has called us to live in the worst hour of history, yet in the greatest hour of insight of His Word in order to overcome the greatest deception of human history.

Yes, we live in the time of the End Time. We must know this, and we must acknowledge this. We must live our lives in Christ in the light of this End Time.