message from heaven # 27

Robert J. Wieland

NEWSWEEK had a cover article entitled “Splitsville,” a study of divorce in modern America. It wasn’t a happy article.

“Once considered shocking and shameful, divorce has become a routine fact of American life in recent decades” it says. The divorce rate is more than double what it was in the 1950’s. The “statistics” are “depressing,” adds the article.

Two thousand years ago the Savior of the world declared that in the last days of earth’s history “the love of many shall wax cold” (Matt. 24:12; if we had no other “sign of the times” to tell us that we are living in those last days, this sad news of divorce itself would be sufficient).

There must be a reason for this spiritual “disease” of lovelessness; shockingly, it can be found (of all places) in church!

Paganism has infiltrated and yes, has invaded, the Christian church. One example only can be cited here: the false doctrine of the natural immortality of the human soul. What this “Christianized” fallacy has accomplished is the virtual eclipse of the truth of the cross of Christ, the denial of what happened when Jesus died for the world.

If the human soul is by nature immortal, then Christ did not die on that cross! Thus in foisting this pagan philosophy into the popular church, Satan has succeeded to foment his rebellion against the true Christ, the son of God, the Savior of the world.

The death that Jesus died on that cross was not the “sleep” that we commonly describe as “death.” Says Scripture, “We see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man” (Heb. 2:9). That “taste” was not simple “sleep;” it was the real thing—the awful “second death.” Christ “poured out His soul unto [that] death” (Isa. 53:12).

There is the truth of “love,” the agape that Paul says is God (1 John 4:8). Take that truth away, and we are left with “the love of many wax[ing] cold.”