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How Shall We Tell The Children?
By Edward Chamberlain

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THE APOSTASY: Multiplied Lawlessness

Next in Matthew 24:12 Jesus made one of the most remarkable statements we have thus far looked at when he said:

"And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold."

This passage represents a material-spiritual relationship which can be empirically "discovered" as a kind of spiritual law just as the "law of gravity" expresses a discoverable relationship between mass and distance. Iniquity translates the Greek word, "anomia" which means lawlessness. Lawlessness is the characteristic trait of the rebellious heart. Lawlessness does not result from a lack of law, but from rebellion to it. Jesus said that in the times before he comes back, rebellion to all law will abound. "Abound" translates a word which means to be multiplied greatly. Since he said that the love of many would wax cold "because" of this multiplied rebellion to the law, he established the fact of a causal relationship between the rebellion and the diminishing of love.

Love translates the Greek word "agape", which is the divine example of love. We must examine the character of love as it has been expressed by God for his redeemed people in order to properly define agape. This character can be crudely stated to be a personal commitment to act with unconditional benevolence.

The phrase translated, "wax cold" is a single Greek word, "psucho". Psucho literally means to breathe, but by extension it meant to cool deliberately, as by gently blowing upon, like, for instance, cooling coffee in a saucer by blowing upon it. Jesus said that because lawlessness would be greatly multiplied, in the days before his return, the divine supply of HIS PERSONAL COMMITMENT to act benevolently toward mankind would be deliberately cooled. I know this sounds strange to say it that way, but give me a moment and we'll see that it is not God that is doing the deliberate cooling, but rebellious man.

The Bible teaches that God is agape. (1 John 4:8) and that agape is of God (1 John 4:7). It is therefore reasonable to understand that man can not love divinely except as he receives it of God. When rebellion to God separates us from Him, we lose contact with the source of divine love. The greater our rebellion, the greater is our separation, and the supply lines for agape are thus progressively diminished until they become severed completely. When that happens we are left with the imperfect and inferior human inadequacies of lust, desire, and passion in varying degrees.

That which applies to the individual Christian, multiplies to the civilization of which he is a part. Thus, as individual Christians become more iniquitous, which is to say, less holy, agape becomes less available for the rest of the world to share. I believe that is what Jesus was saying when he said that his church was the salt of the earth. As long as we remain true to our calling, i.e. we are truly salty or spiritual, we will be the savor that preserves the earth. But when we become unfaithful, i.e. lose our saltiness and become materialistic, we will be fit only to be swept out along with the other material of the earth. As long as Christians have not forsaken their first love, and are still doing their first works, the world in general will still be receiving agape as it is being poured out upon the church and overflowing from there. But one only has to look around at the world we live in today to see that neither the church nor the heathen are experiencing any large scale agape transactions and thus neither have much capacity for any degree of lifetime agape commitment.

Agape involves a great deal more that the friendly human attractions between kindred spirits. In John 21:15-17, Jesus asks Peter three times, "Lovest thou me?" and three times Peter answered him by saying, "Lord, you know all things. You know that I like you." The first two times Jesus asked that question, he used the word "agapao". Peter answered all three times by using the word "phileo". Phileo means "to be a friend." Jesus was asking for a personal commitment rooted in benevolence, and Peter was offering warmth. In the movie version of Lawrence of Arabia, Alec Guiness' character has the following line: "With Lawrence, mercy is a passion, with me it is more a question of good manners. I leave it to you to judge which motive is the more reliable." Therein also is the difference between agapao and phileo. Phileo is because of the warmth of passions, emotions, chemistry, etc. Phileo can, and often does, die completely with time, or it is often completely overrun by other passions. Phileo can come and go driven by mood, caprice, and circumstance. But agapao is centered in a commitment to act benevolently, and it is not conditional upon such things as feelings, circumstances, emotions, chemistry, or caprice. Once agape is offered and received, the condition of its persistence is not dependent upon the recipient, but upon the moral strength of character of the one who has offered it. The only way to stop receiving agape is to move out of the way of its "trajectory," the place where it is targeted. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina gave up a benevolent commitment from her husband for the capricious chemistry of a dashing lover that washed out.

This is not to say that God is less committed to us because of our iniquity, but that God has ordained a spiritual law that mandates something to the effect that the amount of agape a person will receive at any one time is inversely proportional to the square of the distance that his iniquity has separated him from God. Remember when we looked at Rom. 1:20 earlier that we saw where God has told us that by looking at the cosmos he has created we can discover some things about His supernature? This relationship between abounding iniquity and the deliberate cooling of agape is one of those instances that can be compared to some of our observations in the material realm.

If you look at a tree in the distance, it looks like you could step right over it. But if you walk up closer, the tree looks larger. The closer you get, the larger the tree looks. That is the way it is with getting close to God. The closer we get, the larger he gets, and the holier he becomes, and the more sinful we look.

Another thing about looking at a tree in the distance is that it can be hidden completely by some small object that comes between us and the tree. Hold your finger up to a distant tree and see that you can completely block out the tree if there is enough distance between you and the tree. But the closer you get to the tree, the nearer you have to place your finger to your eye in order to continue to block out the tree. If you are standing right up against the tree, you have to poke your finger all the way into your eye to block out the tree.

That is also how iniquity gets between us and God, the further we are removed from Him, the smaller is the iniquity that is required to block him out entirely. But the closer we get, the larger the iniquity must become to block Him out from our sight, until, if we were to stand right next to God, we would have to intentionally poke out our eyes before we could block Him from our vision. That is also how the principle of diminishing agape works. The farther our iniquities have removed us from God, the more our iniquities block out the amount of agape we can receive. Isa. 59:2 says, "But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear."

The psychology of the age of enlightenment has been directed toward getting mankind to give up the conflicts born of agape between his self and his soul, and to live by the passions and feelings of self. (If it feels good, do it. Whatever feels right to you. etc.) This doctrine is every whit, and at every point, antagonistic toward the spiritual realities of true Christianity, and yet, whether we know it or not, every one of us hears more from the doctrines of self based psychology and psychiatry today than from Jesus, and we think nothing of it. Mostly we are not even aware of it. We are perilously close to apostasy.

As Jesus was seeking a commitment in benevolence from Peter, he seeks one from us today, but commitment has become a superseded word. It has been replaced in every aspect of life by an ignoble impostor called self fulfillment. Marriages fail, businesses fail, families fall apart, churches break up, and even governments fail, and civilizations crumble because people will commit themselves no farther than their self interest will carry them.

Psalms 15:1 asks the question, "Lord, who shall dwell in thy holy hill?" God did not answer that question by saying that only those who applied the doctrine of "self interest rightly understood" to the affairs of life would live in his holy hill, or by saying that only those who had high self esteem and good self image would live in his holy hill. But rather, one of the ways in which the Lord answered that question is given in the 4th verse of that Psalm where it says:

"... He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not."

God says that people who honor their commitments, people whose bond is their word, people who keep their promises even when it costs them great personal or financial hurt, will occupy his holy hill. God benevolently commits himself to mankind in the person of Jesus Christ through agape. If any man has received this commitment by apprehending it in faith, its endurance is not dependent upon the character of the believer but upon the moral strength of the character of God. It then becomes the duty of all who have received this commitment from God to strive to achieve personal Godliness which cannot be attained without the kind of commitment that is the center of agape, the kind of love which held Jesus to the cross. We have forgotten to teach such things as commitment and duty to our children.

But when ungodliness separates us from God, our supply lines of agape get stretched thin and our supply of agape progressively diminishes as we get farther from God. If warmth of feeling is all that brought us to Jesus, we will apostate when that feeling cools, and it will, at times, be cool. As men and women cannot effect a lifelong marriage without the determined, intellectual commitment of agape, neither can they love Jesus, and endure to the end in accordance with his commandments without such intellectual commitment.

The church today is filled with reflexive, "knee jerk" Christians who believe they can commit their lives to Christ with nothing but the tongue and feelings involved. Such emotionalization of Christianity is as fatal as the rationalization of it. Jesus said we had to first count the cost and who ever tried to do be a disciple without doing so would eventually fail. There is no getting around the fact that counting the cost is an intellectual endeavor. It is a willful act of the mind. Jesus said anyone who tried to come to him without first engaging in that act of the mind would wind up plowing twisted, contorted furrows as they looked backwards. Many confessing Christians think that they can get by with serving Jesus only when they feel like it, or when the "spirit moves them." We need to continually remind ourselves of where we'd be if Jesus had told the Father, "Not my will but thine be done after the football game." or, if Jesus had said, "Father, I can't make it to the cross today, I'm having company, or I'm having a really bad day." or, if He'd said, "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God, just as soon as I feel like it."

The word of God says that the kind of people who keep their promises, regardless of how much it hurts or costs them personally, will live in the holy hill of God. There will be no arguments which we can give to Jesus which will justify the compromises we have made to our commitments. One day we will all stand before Jesus and watch, to our great shame and hurt, as our compromises are burned to cinders within the depths of our souls.

Dwight David Eisenhower said that duty was the most sublime word in the English language. For those who live by a code of duty, life takes on a sublime nature that transcends the banal and petty indulgences of self interest. When I was in the Navy I observed this first hand in the way people responded to the call of duty. There are basically two responses to the call duty: It can be avoided or it can be accepted. Those who learned to accept their duty and keep their commitments were happier, more complete, and healthier people. Those who shirked their duty invariably seemed to exhaust their personalities and their vitality through endless justification of themselves to themselves. They never seemed to run out of excuses as they rationalized their lack of commitment.

But duty is a passe concept today in a society of human beings whose lives are characterized by self interest. Duty invariably comes into conflict with self interest. We have previously discussed where we are all motivated by self preservation, self justification, and self glorification. Duty works contrary to these. Duty calls from outside and beyond the self and requires the denial of the self. Self seeks success; duty calls for service. Service is measured step by weary step, over many miles of hard road, pushed onward through dry and dead terrain, against every natural instinct that tempers each moment toward failure. Duty ever calls to service in spite of the enduring temper to quit. Many times it seems that the only reason to go on is because a promise was made. It will sometimes seem that it is a journey being completed for no other reason than that it has been undertaken. In this realm, true service involves neither short nor long term goals of the self, in fact, it is a wasted effort if it does. It involves faith, belief, understanding, endurance, persuasion, and persistence; in short it involves a commitment to act benevolently, it involves agape.

I served in the U.S. Navy from 1959 to 1979 and had planned to serve for thirty years. But in the early 1970's I began to perceive a change in the way the Navy was doing things and I did not understand what was happening. After many confused collisions with my superiors, I decided to leave after 20 year's service. It was not until the late 1980's, nearly ten years after I retired from active duty, that I understood completely what had happened and why.

By the time I retired in 1979, most of the Navy leadership had become so alien to me that I no longer understood it. When I had entered the Navy in 1959 there were still many veterans from World War II and the Korean War in the military. The senior leadership of the Navy was comprised almost entirely of these veterans and they were among the best leaders in the world.

This leadership was magnificent at winning wars and inspiring men to perform at levels of achievement beyond normal human endurance. Give them a task and a force and they would get the job done. But ask them how they had accomplished such things and they were mostly unable to quantify their answers, which made their methods unsuitable to peace time appropriation.

These men had come to their positions of leadership while serving gallantly under conditions calling for self sacrifice and commitment. They had not studied leadership to acquire it, they had incorporated it into their characters as they grew in the hostile and demanding environment of war. But, one by one, they reached the time of retirement, and as they passed the torch to others. Those who picked it up had not been matured by the commitments required by war, and there was a vacuum that began to be filled through training. But training can only teach about leadership, it can not make leaders rise to the top through demanding circumstances in desperate situations, and so inevitably there was a shift in emphasis away from leadership and toward management, for management skills can be taught, and managers can be trained.

Management involves the incorporation of no principles alien to self, whereas leadership and duty come into conflict with the self at every point of contact. Leadership pulls and draws, management pushes and shoves. I first noticed the change (although I did not know what it was at the time) from leadership to management philosophy in the Navy within the Navy Nuclear Power branch.

By the time Adm. Rickover had completely consolidated his influence in that program, it had become necessary for the other branches of the Navy to emulate his methods because he was the one getting the money out of the Congress, and his ways were strictly management. Men steadily became dehumanized resources which were seen as units of selfishness which could only be motivated through both positive and negative appeals to that selfishness.

Such administration necessarily involves a carrot in one hand and a stick in the other. But the carrot can never be wholly given up because the motivation to attain it would then be lost. Management technique is mostly a system of making conditional promises that, for the vast majority, are never going to be realized, but for which the failure for materialization can be attributed to some failing in the hopeful subordinate. These conditional promises are always found within a box of threats that are continually available for realization.

By the early 1970's the transition had been completed and by the mid to late 1970's every branch of the service had shifted from a leadership to a management philosophy. I later read that the U.S. Marine Corps quickly realized that management techniques simply did not apply to their particular objectives, and that the Corps had recanted (They figured out that you can not manage a man onto a hostile beachhead). By the latter 1980's I read where the only place one could go in America to study true leadership philosophy was the United States Marine Corps. Sempre Fi.

All this happened without a single word of explanation concerning what was being undertaken or why. As I've said it was a full ten years after I left the service in confusion before I finally understood what had happened. In full view of millions of servicemen, without our understanding what was changing, a system of belief that emphasized the most noble aspirations of man was surreptitiously replaced by a system of belief that emphasized his most base desires. In the 1970's one of the principal doctrines of the enlightenment, the doctrine of "self interest rightly understood," stole quietly into the military by default. In the 1980's it took the organized church after the same fashion. True leadership is practically an endangered trait and is in danger of becoming nonexistent within organized Christianity today. What now stands for leadership is the application of the godless, philosophical principles of business management founded upon the doctrines of "self interest rightly understood."

Many Christians are being taught that self interest is a good thing, but that selfishness is bad. Nothing good can come from self interest. Self interest is merely the "enlightened" manner of expressing our selfish nature. Because Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves does not mean that he condoned self interest. He merely accepted it as a fact within a fallen race, and told us that we must "deny" [say goodbye to] our "selfs" if we wanted to be his disciples. Because God said in Ephesians 5:28 that he that "loveth his wife, loveth himself," does not mean that love of self is a good thing but that a man must extend to his wife the same commitment of warmth (cherisheth) and strength (nourisheth) that he has to his own body. In other words, we are to take the same care of her as we do our own bodies until death parts the man and the wife in the same manner as it does the man and his body. No man will be able to do that without commitment to do his duty.

Today duty and commitment are in danger of becoming archaic terms, but it is a burning sense of duty and an abiding determination to honor one's commitments which are the heart and soul of agape love.

When Jesus said that there was a causal relationship between lawlessness (iniquity) and the loss of agape, I believe that he was speaking of the common cause of both problems. Rebellion against any form of restraint is the "heart-cause" of iniquity, and it is this same rebellion that burns against the restraints imposed upon the self by commitment and duty. It is this rebellion to duty which has driven the psychology of "enlightened," thinkers of weak and epicurean character to deny the benefits of a life of duty. They see the conflict between selfishness and duty, and believe the only way to end the conflict is to deny duty because they know only about the self of man and nothing about his soul. It is exactly the opposite of what Jesus told us to deny, which is exactly what one would expect from children of Satan. Truly does Jesus know and understand the rebellion that is in the human heart against all commands, God's first, and man's second.

Jesus said that because iniquity (rebellion against the law) will have multiplied greatly, the agape of many will be deliberately cooled. Iniquity separates us from the supply of determined, committed love, and because the supply of love is diminished, iniquity is bound to again increase, which causes further loss of agape which brings on greater iniquity. Rebellion against God brings on a downward spiral of calamitous results which rapidly gets out of hand. Rebellious man is forever in danger of destroying the facades of civilization when he is encouraged to forget his duty to God. We are entirely in jeopardy of destroying civilization today because of our ungodly iniquity.

The Apostle Paul, by the Spirit, spoke of these dangerous conditions in Romans 1:21-31 which we will cover in some detail in a moment, but just now we need to understand that when mankind slips into the kind of degradation and lawlessness described in that passage, the only way to bring them under control once again is either through the cruel and harsh brutality of the forceful application of law, or by spiritual renewal. Cruel and harsh application of law is what invariably awaits rebellious man when he refuses to repent. The cry for law and order in America is being heard today from the all political, commercial, and religious management. The demand from the general population is for more prisons, stiffer penalties, fewer paroles, life terms for habitual criminals, etc.

The cost of such isolation techniques in an overcrowded world will soon become prohibitive. When the cost of isolating the lives of humans who are dangerous to the system begins to severely and negatively impact the self interest of the rest of the population, executions will become the order for most criminal activity. I cannot over emphasize the hazards that face an unredeemed race of humanity in world crowded by 12.5 billion selfish people. Such conditions beg for tyranny and despotism, and even as you read this today, many in the world are coming to believe that we need to give up liberty so that order can be restored.

The idea of a benevolent dictatorship is finding considerable appeal in the rank and file of humanity. Since a benevolent dictatorship would reasonably well describe Christ's millennial rule, it is not too surprising that mankind would be conditioned to accept an early Satanic substitute.

When Jesus said that iniquity shall first abound which will cause the love of many to be deliberately cooled, he was describing the conditions by which apostasy would grow in both the world and the church before he returned. He said that we will first see a time of apostasy (abounding iniquity), then we will see the abomination of desolation stand in the holy place, then there will be a time of great tribulation such as the world has never seen, or shall ever see again. Jesus said he is going to return right after the time of that great tribulation.

The passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-4 is in complete agreement with this order of events:

2 Thessalonians 2:1-4
"Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for "that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed" (quotations added for emphasis), the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshiped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God."

The scripture is explicit: first there will come "a falling away (apostasia)" when the agape (divine, benevolent, committed love) of many is deliberately cooled down because of iniquity, then the man of sin will be revealed (i.e. We will see the abomination of desolation) because he claims a seat in the temple of God and declares himself to be God. Jesus said this abomination would stand in the holy place. The day of the lord will not come before these things are fulfilled. In fact, the above scripture emphatically says that unless there has been an apostasia, or divorce, between the church and Jesus, we should not let anyone fool us into thinking that the Day of The Lord is near.

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