Since the fall of man, there has been an ever-mutating and growing system in the inhabited world. Over these thousands of years, this system has been intriguingly empowered by the Devil, hoping mankind would join him to overthrow God and His plan for the earth. This growing system has aggressively expressed its philosophical twist and mood seeking to control the world of humanity in each generation. Each generation’s emerging philosophy became its dominating worldview; this worldview was the encompassing contemporary thinking of that generation or age.

For the first four or five thousand years, this worldview or contemporary thinking of an age was limited to the dominating governmental powers of local geographies. Since the inhabited world was fragmented by languages and cultures for those centuries, controlling philosophies tended to extend only through a nationality’s limited reach. Not until the times of expanding and influential communication from country to country and from continent to continent have controlling philosophies pervaded nations and achieved a global influence.

The power of the printed page certainly became the precursor to thought communication beyond the boundaries of a nation. But as telecommunication rapidly emerged in a global expanding influence, a controlling thought upon an age became a greater possibility. The late 19th and early 20th centuries began to realize that the world could yield to a unifying philosophy that might literally control the global population.

The Present-Day Worldview

We have now come to an hour in history where carefully planned political and religious presuppositions can literally control the philosophical, political, and religious thought of the world population. The system of the world (which is set against God and empowered by the god of this world, the Devil) has been permitted by God through the technological abilities of mass media to control what men think, how they act, how they live, and how they respond to perspectives of others and the current political climate.

The world system has basically reached the potential to control the presuppositions of people, shaping what they hear and observe, and how they will respond to these senses from a global perspective. The inexhaustible power and influence of finances (reputedly manipulated by only eight individuals) control the global media of our times. At least from the natural perspective, fake news, fake history, fake science, fake medicine, and even fake Christianity are impossible to combat in their bombarding ploys of mind manipulation. For example, the scholastic world of secularism, along with its horrendous media aggression, has propelled the philosophy of evolution to a predominant worldview.

The Influential Powers of Evolution

The hypothesis of Charles Robert Darwin called evolution mythically transformed into a law of science by the end of the 1800s. This hypothesis pervades all sciences of our times. What are the profound side effects of this false presupposition?

When man ceases to believe that his beginning is from a supreme and sovereign God, this opens the philosophical door to all forms of agnosticism and atheism where man becomes the measure of all things. Thus, man no longer has any accountability to his Creator for his beginning, his living of life, and the end of his life. This also profoundly plagues and utterly distorts all the concepts of ethics and morality.

The notorious global presupposition of evolution was man’s weapon to obliterate any concept of a higher, personal Being from his worldview. As a result, man embraced a closed-world-system view. The kings of the earth and the rulers of the social realm of man have been fortified in this thinking. These days have brought us to the prominence of thought in which every individual, every community, every nation, and even every church has its own worldview. This worldview refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs through which an individual, group, or culture interprets the world and interacts with it.

The Christian Worldview

What should be the worldview of a Christian, especially one living in what he believes to be the End Time of the last days? My worldview is my perspective of my world and all the compartments and concepts that make up my world in the defining light of the Word of God. It is what I perceive my world to be and where it is going as I view it from the perspective of the Scriptures.

Each generation of God’s elect has had a biblical view of the world and its contemporary characteristics. Each generation has had to look to God’s Word on how it is to live in its generation. Though generations may change, and their polarizing philosophies pervading all compartments of global life change, the Word of God never changes! It remains absolute in its principles and declarations of living no matter what is happening in world history.

Thus, I must live as a Christian with a presupposition and worldview controlled and established by Scripture. God’s remnant people of every generation have had to confront the uniqueness of what made up their age, their contemporary, their world. The next generation of the remnant may have to face a different set of philosophical trends; but they too must know their generation and face that world with the Word of God.

Heretofore, it could take perhaps an entire generation to make a change in world trends that would dominate the next generation. But we have come to a rapidly vacillating time in history when the world can philosophically change radically once, twice, or even three times within a Christian’s lifetime. Therefore, the Christian must desire discernment from the Holy Spirit to perceptively see these changes and then find from Scripture the position of living to which he must come.

The Worldview of Daniel

A classic example of this is found in the young man Daniel. As a child he dwelt in the city of Jerusalem. He lived in the time of the falling away of Judah when Zedekiah was king. He lived in a time of Jerusalem’s hatred for the prophet Jeremiah, who eventually was incarcerated by evil men. Yes, it was in the time when God’s Word was being rejected by the Jews. Nevertheless, it is evident that Daniel had been taught the truth, perhaps by his parents, and certainly through hearing the preaching of Jeremiah.

As a young man he had a worldview that was limited to a city that was on the verge of being destroyed. Up to this time Daniel only knew about Jerusalem and what he had been taught in a limited way. However, in his teenage years when this young man was taken down in that first deportation as a captive to Babylon, his worldview radically changed. He now was thrown into a Gentile-world capital city. He now was hearing a language which he had never heard before; he was now seeing a form of government that he had never seen before; a pantheon of new gods was now being introduced to him. He was even given a new name.

Daniel was quickly thrown from one set of religious and political presuppositions into a dimension of history that was radically different from what he had known. He was now experiencing a paradigm shift of human existence.

Because of this, Daniel now had to change in his worldview. He could no longer think as a Jew in Jerusalem; he had to think as a Jew in Babylon, the place of Babel, the place of confusion. God appointed this day and time in history for this young man. He was appointed to live in a palace of an empire king. He was forced to adopt another language; he was forced to learn the ways of the Babylonians. Truly this was a radically different worldview. Within one year, his view of his world drastically changed. But the Book of Daniel reveals through the many revelations given to him by God that his presupposition of God simply enlarged to include the expanding view of the world as we see in Daniel 2:19–23.

From Daniel’s youth (Dan. 1) until his elderly eighties (Dan. 12), all the prophecies found within his book reveal that Daniel’s God was still the unifying principle behind the enlarging premise of the worldview of this prophet. Though the world enlarges in its all-encompassing view, the presupposition of God and His Word remains the same.

The Changes Taking Place

Considering Daniel’s contemporary, we must also ask ourselves what is our generation in the light of God’s history? What is to become my worldview, and what is my contemporary in the light of God’s Word? Amidst all the segments of history and the worldviews that have existed, we are living in a most distinct time. It is different from the history of the Renaissance; different from the days of the Reformation, or the Puritans, or from that of the Enlightenment.

Those days had a worldview for God’s people. But what is the worldview for my time? Careful reflection tells me, I live in a different worldview than that of my grandfather, than even that of my father. Worldviews change from generation to generation. The mood, the philosophy, the national and global climates of each generation all change. World transitions that have taken place in my lifetime with such swiftness were not present in my father’s generation.

My father was a unique man in that he knew these transitions were coming, though they were not at hand in his prime. He had a worldview; he preached the Word of God in the light of his worldview. My father lived prophetically in the End Time; I believe my grandfather lived in the End Time. But I am in a different segment of the End Time than my grandfather or my father. My father was in a time when there was perhaps still hope in Fundamentalism, although he knew its spiritual demise was coming. He was not at the end of hope for the Fundamentalist movement, but I am, because of its capitulation to Neo-Evangelicalism and all its contemporary changes.

We do not live in the Protestant Reformation or the days of the Puritans. We do not live even in the days of the Philadelphia Church Age of biblical awakenings and revivals affecting sometimes entire countries with the influences of holiness and godliness in daily life. But in this acknowledgment, I must go a step further: I am not living in the days when I first began in the ministry 52 years ago. My summer months during college years were filled with preaching beginning at the age of 19. I regularly viewed souls being converted and hungering for the deeper things of God. In those days it was more than “praying the sinner’s prayer”; I witnessed days of crying out with weepings before the Lord. The former days were also days of manifested miracles. I was healed of polio, paralyzed from my waist down, my parents having been told by the doctors I would never walk again. But in a polio ward God brought about my healing instantly early one morning with never any side effects. My dear father was healed in the aftermath of an explosion of a large furnace that totally disfigured his face. The healing took place two weeks later, instantaneously overnight. When he awoke and looked into the mirror, the change was clear.

Though I believe God can still perform such miracles, they are not as common as they once were. As we near the secret coming of the Lord, it seems that God is now drawing a line of demarcation between the false, heretical Charismatic concepts of miracles and that of the true saints living by the simple providence of God. Yes, we have witnessed the change in God’s methods over the past four and five decades.

One of the greatest changes has been found in the preaching of the Word of God. Former days saw anointed preaching with depth of both Word and heart. Men who were in touch with God in prayer and came to the pulpit anointed with fire from heaven were more of the norm in strong, conservative churches. But the pulpits are now filled with essays about truth, oratorical sermons, joke-filled trivia, scholastic presentations, or (the antithesis) trite watered-down sermons that give no leading to deeper living. It will be a miracle now if an audience even hears an anointed message of Truth.

Yes, I must come to acknowledge that the days have changed. The mood of history has changed, the mood of Fundamentalism has radically changed, and even good denominations that were birthed in revivals of the past have now left the “heart” and turned to the “mind” or to the contemporary for their presentations and concepts of truth.

Even the generation has changed in the last forty years. Oh, do we see this? Do we see that the churches have changed, our country has changed, the principles of government have changed, the concept of the economy has changed, education has changed, music has changed, the arts have changed, marriage has changed, the family has changed, and morals of living have changed? There is no longer any semblance of what it was years ago. Yes, our days are governed with a totally different worldview.

The Worldview of the Sea

Looking for principles and patterns in Scripture to find where we are in prophetic history, it seems that we are in the beginnings of the striving of the sea of humanity as predicted by Christ in the Olivet Discourse—the sea waves are roaring (or swelling) and the hearts of men are failing because of fear (Luke 21:25, 26). The sea of humanity is being churned and stirred severely in our generation, while we witness fearful sights to come out of this sea of humanity.

It was not until the twentieth century that the neo’s of Christianity began to rise one by one: Neo-Orthodoxy, Neo-Morality (and its situational ethics), Neo-Pentecostalism, Neo-Evangelicalism, and the rise of the Charismatic movement. All these movements had an in-depth, profound effect on the tenor and tone of Christianity, aggressively affecting its message. These concepts of Christianity were unknown before. All this churning of the sea of humanity will ultimately produce the appearance of Antichrist, the beast out of the sea.

But oh, the enigmas that surround the concept of Antichrist today! Is he a system? Is he a real person? Is he (or “it”) the papal system of Roman Catholicism? From what geography does he come? One thing we certainly know is that according to Revelation 13, when this sea is agitated and roaring (the swelling of it), he (a true personal individual, being supported by both a political and a religious system) is going to come out of that sea. Are we in the beginnings of this sea now churning?

We believe the beginning of the End Time of the last days was first manifested with the “latter-rain” outpourings between around 1830 and 1860. Some sixty years later (around 1919), Neo-Orthodoxy appeared first and then Neo-Morality and situational ethics at the end of the 1920s. Around 1947, Neo-Pentecostalism came out of this churning of the sea, and by 1948, Neo-Evangelicalism had become an open heresy. Then around 1967–68, the Charismatic movement was born.

First John 2:18 declares there is the “last time,” or the last hora (last hour). This reveals there will be a coming down to the final hour of the End Time of the last days. It speaks of many antichrists that will become the prelude of “the Antichrist.” These antichrists are found within the institutional Church:

“They went out from us; but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us” (1 John 2:19). John the Apostle reveals to us that End-time Christianity is going to bring forth antichrist people in the churches that will help forge the coming of the Antichrist—political—but it will start in the fomenting of the institutional Church!

The Christian’s Worldview of Today

In light of today’s worldview, the remnant of God must deal with concepts that were once taken for granted (at one time, all men acknowledged certain principles and concepts, even the unconverted). In presenting the message of salvation to sinners today, we must first present who God is and then the correct “Jesus” that is capable of saving individuals from their sins. Today, Universalism is the sweeping presupposition of most, declaring that all men are saved. Universalism has permitted each individual to create his own Christianity.

Contemporary Christian music is the norm of churches; the world’s music—rock and country-western, rhythm and blues, bluegrass, etc.—is all now part of the “Christian” faith. How does the remnant of God’s people live amidst all this? Such contemporary thinking well defines the fact that we are facing a new breed of enemies today that certainly was not present when I started out in the ministry.

The powers of the “casual” have now taken hold of the lifestyle of Christian living; this is seen in the way Christians act and in the way they dress. This “dress-down” look has even taken over church worship! New innovations and methodologies are now part of evangelicalism; even a new vocabulary has been written for the expression of present-day Christianity.

Yes, it is a new world, a new generation, and a new mindset. Thus, the preaching of God’s men must now hit the target with insightful strength in this mutating age. But there is a reason why most ministers of today are not equipped both in mind and heart to face this new worldview. Christian schools and seminaries are “mis-training” their students, becoming more a part of the problem rather than a cure for spiritual disease.

Another great grief today is the consciousness that Christian youth are struggling to truly find the will of God for their lives. There are so many voices (even so-called Christian voices) that are drowning out the voice of God concerning His will for each Christian youth. It will necessitate a greater investment of prayer and the seeking of God than when I was a young man seeking God’s will.

One of the grave problems is that the age in which we live no longer has a conservative environment; likewise, most local churches lack this conservative environment. It is true that the world has always been in the Wicked One; but we once lived in an environment in America where people believed in God, talked about God, and respected God. As early as the 1950s, and in the post-World War II era, people were going to church. But we are in a day when the worldview of Jesus has radically changed. Who is He? What is He? There is no proper view of God. We find ourselves in a generation embracing a neo-theistic worldview today. Yes, it is the same world, but even the Church has a totally different presupposition because the people have been breathing in the age in which they live. We are at a time now that the church of the world knows what it is intelligently doing; the church is radically changing to accommodate the world.

The Worldview Change of Missions

Even Missions has changed from its former days of spiritual glory; it has mainly become a lot of busy work around a simplified message. There is no spiritual depth to missions anymore. There have been several mission movements in Church history. There was the early church view about missions presented in the Book of Acts. When the Gospel first came in its proclamation on the Day of Pentecost, there was no Gospel in the land. A God-called minister could go anywhere in all Europe, throughout the Roman Empire, and there was no Gospel. This was the first time humanity had ever heard it. There was no Christian apostasy, there were no false preachers, and there were no false concepts of the Gospel. The birth of Christianity was in virgin territory in the inhabited world. In that precious time, we read of thousands accepting the message. We read of miracles happening. It was the first time humanity was hearing about Jesus and His Gospel.

At that time even the New Testament had not been fully written. Their spiritual fruit was fresh and abounding, often accompanied with miracles. In carefully reading the Book of Acts as it unfolds, we later view fewer miracles and fewer converts. When Paul retraced his steps over previous territory, it was clear that a false gospel had already commenced its pervasion, profoundly affecting congregations. By the time Paul pens his second Epistle to Timothy, he expresses the fact that “they which are of Asia” have turned away from him. The apostasy was already settling in; false teachers, false preachers, a false Jesus, a false Holy Ghost, and a false gospel all had made their way into the churches. The latter books to be written in the New Testament express this burden as well.

Centuries later God gave birth to the Protestant Reformation. The Gospel began to quickly spread throughout Western civilization. Then came the great revival of the Philadelphia Church Age pouring forth its influence and bringing many into a deeper life with Christ. Such revivals and awakenings taking place on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean contributed to birthing what became known as “modern missions.” All the Orient opened up, including China, Japan, and India. Places that never would have permitted the Gospel to enter (because of the radical reaction of their own religions) were now being opened to the Gospel. God truly opened the door to geographies that men had never entered before. Yes, this move of God brought a fresh beginning for missions. The Gospel was now to go literally to the ends of the earth.

Mission manuals were being written; schools were being opened. A. B. Simpson opened his school in Nyack, NY, and literally tens of thousands were being prepared and sent out by that organization—more than any other organization in the world at that time. Missions was a dominant cry of the church! Revival was in the air! God was moving in the earth.

Conclusion

Then the Neo movements entered the Christian world on the heels of Liberalism and Modernism. These movements were accompanied by the birth and confusion of multi-versions of the English-language Bible. The twentieth century produced a mass confusion globally about the Gospel. The institutional Church introduced new ideas, new doctrines, new powers, new perspectives about each member of the Trinity, and new presuppositions about the very concept and purpose of the Church itself. Today we find ourselves in the deadly poison of postmodern church philosophy and its emerging church presuppositions. Yes, the institutional Church is looking for a new church, an emerging church that will fit in to the paradigm shifts that are sweeping the world. And it is believed that the Church must change, or it will be left behind in the coming “new world order” and the new day for mankind.

The churches and Christian colleges and universities of our times are being assimilated into the vortex of world change. God’s people must remain true to that which has been committed unto them by the Holy Ghost through the unchanging Word of God. Dear reader, this is not the time to sell out the truth of the pure Gospel, or compromise its message and standards, or change the landmarks of holiness and godly living. This is the hour to be continually militant against the apostasy, yet magnificent for the Lord.

We have come to a new breed of politicians in the year 2021, a new form of government, and a new “normality” of natural living. The winds of the End Time are moving and stirring up the Great Sea of humanity. In such times God’s people must see the world as it really is in the light of God’s Word and prophecy. Our worldview must be what it really is, not what it wants us to believe it is. And we must have our worldview exclusively based upon the Scriptures which are still infallible and inerrant. Our life and living must be found within that Book, that blessed book. May God empower us to be established upon the Faith “once delivered unto the saints”!