Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfector of our faith. It's easy to imagine that a world weary of war would gladly worship a man who guarantees global peace and prosperity. In the end times, only one religion will be allowed. The penalty for believing anything else, death. Today we'll see another sign of the glorious.
Coming of Jesus Christ from the Moody Church in Chicago. This is Running to Win with Dr. Irwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Erwin Lutzer is in a series on seven signs of Christ's return. Today we come to sign number four: the rise of one world religion.
Pastor, what signs do you see coming for a fusion of all religions into one? You know, Dave. Many years ago, I attended the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago. About a hundred religions or more. Gathered together for a full week to discuss the possibility of unity.
Well, of course, that unity was not achieved for various reasons. But we can imagine, as you have already implied, that when things become difficult—for example, we saw a part of this during the COVID experience—when things become very difficult, the whole emphasis will be on a united world. Coming together to solve problems, to do their best. In order that we might be able to survive.
So yes, it's certainly possible to have a one-world religion, and Revelation chapter thirteen makes that very, very clear.
Well, I'm holding in my hands a book entitled "When Jesus Returns." Those are the kinds of issues that are discussed by various prophecy teachers, and I think that this book will not only enlighten you but encourage you to be faithful. All. Way to the finish line. Here's what you do: go to rtwoffer.com or call us at one eight eight eight two one eight ninety three thirty seven.
Now we go to the pulpit of the Moody Church, and following this message, I'm going to be giving you that contact info one more time. The great historian Arnold Toynbee said that the nations of the world would eventually unite. He said, either by force or by federation, and they'd be kept together by a common religion. As you may know, this happens to be number four in a series of messages titled "Seven Signs of Christ's Return," and today we come to the rise of the One World Religion. When I was at the Parliament of World Religions in 1993, here in the Palmer House in Chicago, a speaker one evening said, "Imagine all the religions of the world to be like a wheel." He said, "At the level of the rim, we are all different, but he says when we come to the hub, which he defined as the clear blue of sky, it is there in the mystical center that we are all united." Let me simply say this: that we can even say in a preliminary way that, first of all, when we think about a one-world religion, we obviously know that truth will always be sacrificed for the sake of unity, because people will say we have to be united, and what really gets in the way of this unity is all these people who believe in truth.
As a matter of fact, Mortimer Adler—I wish I had the quote with me. I don't, but he said, in effect, that religion can do a great deal of good in uniting the world as long as no one thinks they have the truth.
So, as long as we don't have the truth, that's no problem. But those who think they have the truth—they're the problem. Secondly, tolerance will become a national icon. It already is. In fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the value of a view today is not its truth content, or not whether or not it can be verified, or whether or not it is rational.
The thing that makes it special is that it is so tolerant of other positions, and because of that, we have people who think to themselves that as long as I am willing to include others. Whatever it is that I think is right and is right for me, just because I think it, the very thought that I have means that I must be right. Wow. Let me give you five characteristics today of end time one world religion. Five characteristics.
Two passages of scripture, both absolutely crucial that you turn to in your Bibles. The first is Second Thessalonians chapter two. It is speaking about Antichrist because even in those days, the people in Thessalonica thought that maybe Jesus had begun his wrap up of prophecy. Maybe the end times were. Beginning and maybe the return of Jesus Christ, the glorious return, may have been near.
And the Apostle Paul wants to set them straight. This is Second Thessalonians chapter two, and he says in verse three. And I need to pick it up there. Don't let anyone deceive you in any way. For that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.
I take this to be Antichrist. Verse four, he will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshipped, so that he sets himself up in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God. First characteristic of end time religion is unrestrained idolatry, unrestrained idolatry. You can worship whatever you like, but you can also worship people. You are going to worship this man of sin.
The people of that day are going to do that because he himself will claim to be God.
Now there are three possible views of God. One is atheism, that is to say, there is no God. There are a few of those folks around. The other view is theism. That's what we believe: that a God exists who is independent of the world, a personal God who created the world.
And then there is what is known as pantheism. Pantheism says all is God and God is all. It is characteristic of Eastern religions, and nobody can believe that one is. Is God actually in the sense of being the creator? But if everything is God, why then indeed we can say that even we are God, and that's why you have Shirley MacLaine running out onto Malibu Beach shouting, "I'm God!
I'm God! I'm God!" And Coulson, remember, said, "Aren't you glad she's wrong?" Now. You'll notice in the text it goes on to say, and we need to skip some verses here, but skip to verse eleven. For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie. What is the lie?
The lie is that man can take the place of God. It's the lie of Eden, where Satan said to Adam and Eve, "You shall be like." God, like Elohim, that's the lie. And time, religion is going to be characterized by this idolatry because idolatry is simply setting up something else other than God. It doesn't mean bowing before wood and stones and things that you've created. It means simply that you worship yourself and you take yourself into consideration first, without reference to God.
That is idolatry because the Bible says, "Thou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength." And if you don't love God that way, you are an idolater, and self, in the new age style, gets put in the place of God.
Nowadays, the big problem is not sin; the big problem is sadness. You're not supposed to be sad. If you're sad, what you should do is to buy certain pills and certain medications because nobody should ever be sad. You're supposed to be happy, happy, happy. And if the people around you don't make you happy, you make yourself happy because you are the center of your universe.
Like the curriculum taught in many schools, it's entitled "It's all about you." I, I, I, I, my happiness. I can determine what I want to do. I can even heal myself. I can become rich. I can do whatever I want to do.
Rampant idolatry. Let's go on to a second characteristic of end-time religion, and that is rampant. Spirituality, spirituality. We live in a very, very spiritual age. When Cindy Crawford married Randy Gerber out on a beach, she said we wanted a spiritual ceremony without it being religious, spirituality, but no religion, and most assuredly no God religion of Christianity, but spirituality, nevertheless.
It's all over the place already, and I think it's going to be a part of end time religion. Look at what the Scripture says here, and I'm in verse nine now of Second Thessalonians. Still speaking of the same man who's going to do all these things. And by the way, what we talked about a moment ago is really the end time, the final stage of end religion. It's not quite what we see today, as we'll notice in a moment.
You just stick with me, and that will become clear. But here we have also now unrestrained or rampant spirituality. Verse nine: The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan, displayed in all kinds of counterfeit. If you're in the habit of underlining your Bibles, you might like to get these three words now: miracles, signs, and wonders, and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing. Why did I say that you should underline those words?
Those are the very same three words that are used in the New Testament for the miracles of Christ. These are counterfeit miracles, and people today are doing miracles, and miracles are everywhere. And a miracle crazed world will believe Antichrist when he pulls these things off. Because of some other studying that I'm doing, I went to the library and checked out the book A Course in Miracles by Helen Schukman. And I was interested.
You shouldn't read books like that, but I needed to do some research to find out the origin of the book. She said she heard voices. It was almost as if someone picked up the pencil and and wrote this book for her.
Sometimes she said it was terrifying, but she knew that the voice must be saying good things. Thousands and thousands of people have taken her course in miracles and have performed their own miracles. We live in a miracle age. Everybody's into miracles. Everybody accepts them.
And then, of course, we have to understand that the distinction between the good miracles and the bad miracles—that's very difficult for us to discern.
Sometimes, almost impossible to tell the difference. You know, in the Old Testament, there's an interesting story. Moses was able to do the miracles of God, and he threw down his staff. And for the benefit of the people who are sitting behind me, I have to understand that when he threw down his staff, it means like a pole or something like that on the ground. Right?
You got it. He threw his staff onto the ground. The Bible says, and it became a serpent. And then Pharaoh got his enchanters and his soothsayers and his people who do magic arts together, and they did essentially the very same thing. The Bible says they threw their rods onto the ground, and they also became serpents.
In fact, the most shocking thing is Moses spoke, and the Scripture says that the Nile River turned into blood, and the fish died. And then the text says, and I just read it this morning to confirm it. It says. And the enchanters did the same thing. They followed Moses' miracle for miracle, and then at a certain point, they couldn't outdo him.
But what deception! And this world, this age, is filled with that deception. Angels are all over the place. Angels doing things for people, wondrously, beautifully, rescuing people—people who do not necessarily believe in Jesus. The angels are there to do all those good things, and they've got to be good angels because they've done good things.
That's the age in which we live, my dear friends. When demons appear, they don't appear like demons; they appear like angels. That's what the Bible says. It says Satan is transformed into an Angel, not a furious being that comes and says, "I want to destroy you." He's an angel sent to do good things to deceive. What is another characteristic of end time religion?
Unrestrained spirituality, psychics, astrologers, books on how to get plugged into whatever. I noticed at an airport the other day a book on talking to heaven and medium communicating information from the other side and teaching people how to get in touch with their spirit guides. My friends, those are demons that they're getting in touch with, and it's all there already. And when Antichrist comes on, the people, the world will say, "Yeah, yeah, we can do them too," and he's doing bigger, bigger ones, and he's doing the same thing that Jesus is doing. Unrestrained spirituality.
Third, unrestrained immorality. This is part of end time religion. Unrestrained immorality.
Now, for this, I have to ask you to take your Bibles, turn to the seventeenth chapter of the book of Revelation.
Now, when we read this seventeenth chapter, and we're going to be reading the opening verses, you're going to say, Pastor Luther, that's not fair. It's not fair for you to just dump us right in the middle of the book of Revelation with all of this symbolism. Here you have a woman who's riding this beast. What in the world is going on here?
Well, we need to understand that this is end time religion because it ends again with the coming of Jesus Christ and the destruction of this religious system. And the book of Revelation actually recapitulates; it goes back over some of the same territory, only looked at in more detail, just like the book of Daniel does.
So I want you to hang in with me. We're not going to interpret all of it, but enough of it so that you see where it is that I'm going. Revelation seventeen. One of the seven angels who had seven bowls came and said to me, "Come and I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute who sits on many waters. With her, the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries." Then the angel carried me away in the spirit into a desert.
There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones, and pearls. And she held a golden cup in her hand, filled with the abominable things and the filth. Of her adultery,s this title was written on her forehead: Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes and the abominations of the earth. I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore the testimony to Jesus.
Who is this woman? Couple of comments. First of all. This woman, this madam who is riding the beast, is a religious figure. She's a religious figure, the mistreat Babylon.
You need to remember that Babylon was the seat, actually, of occult religion, the ancient seat of religion. And throughout the scriptures, it talks about Babylon actually being symbolic of all occult religion. As a matter of fact, they tried to build, you know, the tower that would go to heaven, and they wanted to worship the stars, and they were into astrology, and into all of those things. As a matter of fact, at least twenty different techniques used today by the New Age movement were already rooted as practices in Babylon, false religion, and that false religion even influenced Christendom. For example, they had a mother-child cult.
You can read this in the Old Testament in the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah speaks against this. He says, "You are bringing incense and you are bringing bread and baking bread for the Queen of Heaven," and he condemns the people for doing that.
Well, what happened is. That when Babylon shut down and the Persians came, they said, "We don't want you to practice all of these abominations." The Persians had a different religion, so the people went to Pergamum, where the occultists all gathered. And in Pergamum, they built a huge altar. In fact, in the Book of Revelation, it refers to it when it says, "To the church that is at Pergamum, it says, 'I know you are where Satan's seat is.' It's the great altar of Pergamum." Where where occult religion was performed and people were sacrificed, would you be surprised? By the way, if I were to tell you that your pastor and his lovely wife have walked on the top of that altar of Satan's seat.
I think we prayed on every step before we did it, but it's in Berlin in the 1920s. German archaeologists went and they excavated it, and they took it stone by stone, column by column, and they built a museum in Berlin, large enough to house it. And there are some other things there also from Pergamum, but it's called today the Pergamum Museum. It includes even the Ishtar Gate, the actual Ishtar Gate of Babylon, is there as well. It's in the museum now.
Here's what happened: the ancient religion of Babylon came to Pergamum and, through Pergamum, influenced the Christian Church. I mentioned a moment ago in the Old Testament, Babylon. They said we are worshiping the woman, the Queen of Heaven, the Queen of Heaven. That very expression, if you can believe it, was applied to Mary, and that kind of worship went on there too.
So Babylon has to do first of all with false religion. She is a religious figure representing the religion of Babylon. Secondly, she is also a political figure. At least she's tied into politics.
Now notice this: she is riding the beast. What is the beast? The beast is Antichrist. We've learned that from previous messages. Talks about the beast being thrown into the sea of flames, and and we went through that in the previous messages.
Here you have a an ecclesiastical system that is riding and in cahoots with the political ascendancy of the great leader Antichrist, who is going to rise. I take it out of Europe, out of that ten nation confederacy, and they are really together in this for a while. It doesn't end that way. That's why you need to wait before you leave to go home today. You have to wait until this message is over.
It's not going to be like that. But I'm ahead of the story. She's a political figure, but she is also a very immoral figure. Notice, and I read it a moment ago. We're in verse four.
She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with the abominable things and the filth of her adulteries.
Now, folks, I want you to listen to me very carefully. Everybody awake at this juncture. I know you are awake at every juncture, but at this one. Whenever you have rampant idolatry and rampant spirituality cut off from the Scriptures, you will always have rampant. Immorality for this reason, God made us as sexual creatures, and that sexuality is to be expressed between a man and a woman in marriage, terms of its expression.
Period.
Now, when you leave the Bible, you see, and when you come up with your own religion, and you are God, and you bow before the cult of self-worship, and you're God. You're going to want to fulfill every single desire that your body has. After all, you only go around once in life. Consequently, sex will be cut off from love and marriage. In the immortal words of Tina Turner, "What's love got to do with it?" It is cut off from love and marriage, and therefore, several things happen immediately.
Number one, it will always lead to perversions. Of all kinds, terrible perversions, not just the marriage of the same sex, child molestation. You know, when the text says, "Here, come and I will show you the great prostitute." In Greek, it is, "I will show you the great porné," from which we get the word pornography. Who could have ever possibly believed? That pornography, which was largely hidden in the fifties, came out onto shelves and newsstands in the sixties and seventies, and videotapes.
And then, to make matters worse, what bondages are being developed because of the internet?
Well, my dear friend, we certainly are living in perilous times, and even as we think about the future, we can become very discouraged. But we want you to be optimistic. If you're a believer in Jesus Christ, it is important to know why faithfulness matters and how history is going to be wrapped up. I'm holding in my hands a book entitled "When Jesus Returns." It's not a road map that gives you a sequence of events, but rather takes various prophetic themes and expounds on them. You may be acquainted with some writers, such as Jack Hibbs and Graham Lotts.
A number of others talk about the future. They talk about judgment, but they also talk about the hope. Of Jesus Christ's return, we can be optimistic, because we have read the book and know how it will end. For a gift of any amount, this book can be yours. Here's what you do: go to rtwoffer.com.
That's rtwoffer.com, or call us at one eight eight eight two one eight. Ninety-three thirty-seven. Perhaps it's been a while since you've been to a prophecy conference.
Well, one way that you can access that kind of information is ask for the book when Jesus returns. Right now, go to rtwoffer dot com, or call us at one eight eight eight. Two one eight ninety three thirty seven. My heart is so full of gratitude because of people just like you who support this ministry. You can write to us at Running to Win, sixteen thirty five North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois six zero six one four.
Running to win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. The tides that will sweep in the coming one-world religion are already swirling in our culture. Erwin Lutzer has brought part one of the rise of one-world religion, the fourth sign in his series Seven Signs of Christ's Return.
Next time, more details about what will truly be the dark side at its peak. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Irwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
