Corporate Logos:Consumerism and the Growth of Apostasy

By Lee vanWesterborg

Is our modern religious institution merely a religious corporation and Christianity just another consumer product? Do our religious institutions actually follow scripture as professed? How much of modern Christianity is actually human tradition with no Biblical basis? Have our religious traditions rendered the word of God of no effect? Do our corporate religious institutions oppress and exploit people in God's name? How has our love of consumerism affected Christianity? Is there an abundance of coercion and control in modern worship rituals and practice?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee vanWesterborg
• Release date: May 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310820946

Lee vanWesterborg

I have a podcast on Spotify (and Apple podcasts) that can be listened to here:https://anchor.fm/lee-vanwesterborg/episodes/The-Parable-of-the-Weeds-e139k2m

Book preview

Corporate Logos: Consumerism and the Growth of Apostasy

Logos (Greek): (G3056) log-os – a topic, computation, reasoning, motive, Divine Expression.

Lee vanWesterborg

Corporate Logos: Consumerism and the Growth of Apostasy

Published by Lee vanWesterborg,

Copyright Lee vanWesterborg 2013

Smashwords Edition.

ISBN 13: 978149211D16

ISBN 10: 1492111015

This book is available in print online

Let me therefore beg thee not to trust to the opinion of any man concerning these things…search the scriptures thyself…if thou desirest to find the truth which if thou shall at length attain thou wilt value above all treasures…search into these scriptures which God hath given to be a guide…and be not discouraged by the gainsaying which these things will meet with in the world

- Sir Isaac Newton

Faith is strictly rational, for assuming a divine revelation belief is the highest act of reason.

Sir Robert Anderson

Contents

Introduction

1: From The Ancient World to the Post Modern

2: Sowing the Seeds of Heresy and the Corporate Church

3: Does the Bible Command Us to Tithe?

4: Love of Money, Credit, and the Devil’s Business Card

5: Eternal Security… Or Not?

6: Impact of Society’s Sin on Family

7: Film and Media, Vampires and Zombies

8: Consumerism, Deception and Forms of Control

9: Propaganda

10: Pride

11: Unity and the New Testament Church

12: Bible Is Guide to Holy Living

13: Scriptures for Encouragement

References

Introduction

In the thousands of years since Moses gave the Israelites the first books of the Old Testament, our world has grown increasingly more complex. Despite the passage of so much time, human nature hasn’t changed according to individual character descriptions given throughout the opening book of Genesis; we today need the instruction of the Bible as guide to morality and holy living just as much as in the past. This book is written for those who profess to believe and practice Christianity, those who do not will likely find little of interest in the following pages. To those who are not yet Christians there are many great books focused on evangelism and the life of Jesus, in addition to the greatest book of all, the Bible, and what it testifies about the truth and how to live it. Biblical parables and metaphors involving comparisons with sheep (Isaiah 53:6, Jeremiah 12:3, Ezekiel 34:6, Matthew 10:6) remind us how humans lack the ability to direct our lives successfully (Jeremiah 10:23), for this reason God gave His word, the Bible, to us as a guide to holy living.

The Bible is both the first book ever printed, and the greatest book in history. Post-modern humans inevitably ask, how can something that was completed almost 2000 years ago still be relevant for us today? Our 21st century society does not harmonize with scriptural descriptions of family life and cultural morality. Thousands of years have separated us from the culture of the ancient world. However, the truth (of God) is always relevant, for He is the only one who knows our complete future. Despite our amazing technological advances, without God’s commandments we grope in the dark without any moral basis to guide our lives. The greatest minds throughout history have proclaimed this, for example, eminent scientists Sir Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, philosophers Thomas Hobbes, Emmanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard, and, even national leaders such as William Wilberforce and according to Halley’s Bible Handbook on p.18, Abraham Lincoln, the greatest, most loved president of the United States referred to the Bible as God’s greatest gift to man.

All scripture verses given in the following chapters are taken from the authorized King James Version of the Bible. To those seeking to learn about and know God, the New Testament’s four gospels are the best places to start searching for wisdom and guidance, when we read them the universal truth contained within presents its relevance to us.

Do we still need God? The harsh truth most don’t want to admit is we need God more than ever. Looking into our recent history, the 20th century saw the greatest advances in technology and science in man’s history but not morality, as citizens of the early 20th century witnessed the birth and subsequent expanded use of global industrial mass murder, as introduced in both World Wars and demonstrated by the Holocaust. We have achieved incredible levels of technology to make our lives comfortable, and incredible levels of preoccupation with ourselves. Because our society is now centered on human technology, we have lost our relationship with nature, we don’t know where the food in our supermarkets comes from; trucked and shipped from thousands of miles away, grown on industrial farms using factory modeled mass production unlike the natural processes of the Biblical pre-industrial world.

The industrialized world we live in is now completely artificial. Our homes and workplaces are temperature- regulated environments completely sealed off from the elements outside their walls. For many of us, our lives have become so easy, instead of doing the hard physical labor our ancestors were forced to, we work in air -conditioned buildings sheltered from the sun, wind, rain, and snow, typing on a keyboard. Only the poorest people have to walk anywhere, for all types of non –human powered transportation is available. Our cars have indoor climate control, theater quality sound systems, and heated seats. We seek to make our lives so easy we never have to sweat or struggle. Clothing manufacturers are designing temperature controlled athletic wear so when future generations exercise they won’t even have to sweat. Is this defeating the very purpose of exercise? Most of us intentionally isolate ourselves from the outside world in islands of comfort, or at least distracted from the presence of others on public transit or on the sidewalks by our earphones and electronic devices.

We have drive through banks, fast food restaurants, Internet shopping from the comfort of home, and most of our daily activities are universally optimized for convenience. We live in a world of easy credit, electronic transactions, and maximized consumption based on instant gratification and disposability. Modern lives are designed to be easy, comfortable, and luxurious as possible. Maybe even too comfortable, many of us pay membership fees at a fitness center to exercise, what our ancestors used to have to do as part of their daily routines. Even our pets are supposed to live in luxury, including gourmet food, made from the finest and most expensive (human grade) ingredients. In nature, undomesticated dogs eat insects, rodents, carrion, all of which are things most of us can’t even look at, and in fact terriers were actually bred to kill and eat rats as a form of pest control. The fact we think our pets now need gourmet food could be seen as an indication we have lost both our relationship with nature and our common sense. Human society has changed so drastically the original purposes of many creatures has been lost, likewise cats occupied a niche in the environment as small predators who live on mice and other types of rodents, insects, and small birds, now some of us are disgusted if they ate a mouse and might even attempt to charge the owner with animal cruelty. This is quite a radical change in perspective compared to thousands of previous years of recorded history. In the past animals were used by humans primarily as sources of labor, now they are pets needed for companionship in our impersonal, disconnected world, and are completely dependent on us for survival.

It isn’t just technology that has evolved over human existence, our societal values and practices are even more unfamiliar from lifestyles of the past. In ancient society a religion based on the stars referred to astrology, now it could just as easily mean celebrity worship, just as the term sun worship now most commonly means sunbathing. Additionally, the incredible speed and quantity of change in our modern world affects our understanding of scripture, many passages of the Bible written thousands of years ago intended to be understood by an agricultural society are much harder for us to understand today because we are so disconnected from nature and the original cultural meanings or references have been lost. The symbols in Jesus’ common parables; seeds, the sky, harvest, labor, sowing and reaping communicated universal meaning to people living in an agriculturally based society, and indeed were well understood by most readers, until the 20th century when we became completely removed from the processes of nature. We now read the words out of proper context and expectedly have trouble understanding and applying them in our lives as the ancient ways of agriculture, manual labor, and crafting products by hand have now become alienated from our modern life experience. Unlike the Biblical world, the post-modern world we inhabit is continually changing around us faster than we perceive it.

Humanity has been affected by both world wars and massive scale natural disasters, which test, and strengthen or erode our faith. Many unpredictable natural events have also shaped our past society, such as disease epidemics. In 1358, the Black Plague killed 100 million Europeans, in 1918 the Spanish flu killed between 20 and 100 million around the world. These epidemics had traumatic effects on the generations that experienced them, and caused subsequent changes in human history that reached far into the following centuries. Social conditions have had as much effect as technological advances, or more. Think of the abolition of slavery in America in the 19th century and the civil rights movement of the 1960’s as responses to conditions of inequality and oppression, for example.

Our environment is continually changing. For hundreds of years the only and therefore essential form of communication across great distances was through handwritten letters, which had to be delivered. Today we are about to witness the demise of the Post Office, made obsolete by the Internet, email, and other electronic communication devices, which can send text messages instantly. While the form may be new, communication through the written word is one of the oldest forms of expression. Our ancestors at the beginning of the last century saw the demise of the blacksmith and horse- related industries as the birth of the automobile eventually rendered them obsolete, and then caused the birth of new industries itself. In the 21st century we are witnessing the obsolescence of the once powerful newspaper industry after over 150 years as the dominant form of information media as new empires are created in electronic commerce.

Change in our technology based world is so fast that industries such as rental stores for video tapes became instant wealth creators in the 1980’s, only to be eliminated by direct downloads on the Internet less than two decades later, just as in the same period the compact disc caused an information revolution, only to become obsolete within a decade. These industries employed and supported the families of millions of people, who learned a harsh lesson that the traditional idea of remaining in one career or industry for the entirety of their careers is no longer possible, because many of our new industries won’t exist in a decade or two when replaced with newer technology, and the even harsher lesson that modern technology usually eliminates skilled occupations such as blacksmiths, many types of craftspeople such as tailors and shoemakers and replaces them with minimum wage fast food service type jobs. For the last hundred years the trend has been that as all industries have reduced the skills needed for labor to make all employees interchangeable.

With the rise of humanism beginning at the end of the 19th century and successively multiplying every fifty years, with its accompanying increases in self-promotion, narcissism, and self-absorption, we live in a radically different society than in the past. Each successive generation since the baby boomers, ((born 1946-1962), then X (1963-1979), Y (1980-1996)), has become more increasingly focused on self. All our politicians now routinely advance their careers by attacking the opposing party’s representatives and blaming them for our problems. Because of our self -first narcissism, we all learn early in life to become experts at spreading the blame for our failures onto those around us. The Millennial generation / Gen Y can’t wait for Generation X and the Boomers to get out of their way so they can take control of the world and force conformity to their ideals, and conveniently blame the previous generations for all their problems despite the fact current philosophy and practice perpetuates the problems of the past, in imitation of the previous generation’s philosophy, to whine and blame the Boomers. It’s always someone else’s fault when we make mistakes, we’re quick to justify ourselves and criticize others, always passing the blame to someone else, proving we are a completely narcissistic society.

This is our modern world of ugliness and strife, centered on the added emptiness of instant gratification. As a society, we have indeed learned how to better follow Satan and his patterns of thinking, the continual self-centered satisfying of our lusts and desires and continual accusation of others of blame for our failures. Not surprisingly as gratification and comfort seeking are now our main motivators when we make choices, we now live in a culture of fear, manipulated by series of crises motivated by the threat of loss of our sacred comfort. Our faith as believers is regularly shaken by current circumstances.

Fear often makes us more religious, as when we only make time to pray when we’re in trouble, or desperately in need of something. Unfortunately we often assume more faith in Satan’s ability to harm us than God’s ability to protect us. Remember, the objective and absolute truth remains constant whether it offends us or not. Because of constant exposure to advertising we expect our journey to happiness will be one of instant gratification, but where do we find love amidst all that selfishness? Does that become the truth for us?

The post-industrial church has been infected by our societal philosophies of consumerism and extreme individualism, encouraging us to be continually obsessed with self-promotion, greed and self-aggrandizement (what scripture refers to as vanity) and how to satisfy its desires through acquisition of material goods. Our past leads us to our present in the form of long chains of consequences we are unable to fully see or understand. Today’s religious corporation of the 21st century has roots in the heresies of the past, successfully introduced into and absorbed by the church by the fourth century, just as the Apostle Paul warned of in 2 Timothy chapter 3, and continuing to expand through the centuries. With the rise of science and materialism following the Middle Ages mankind found new reasons to turn away from God, and with the addition (distraction) of consumer driven society we now see God pushed further and further out of our societal institutions and into the margins of society as we instead pursue self- deification. Consumerism is the height (and the logical conclusion) of the modern human’s reduction of everything to the physical.

Our society’s current path more closely resembles the reprobate mind described by the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 2 with its media encouraged continual lusts for entertainment and gratification controlling our decisions. Indeed we may call ourselves a Christian society or nation but we spend far more time shopping than we do seeking the presence of God. Most professing Christians now deny the majority of truth of the Bible and expect God not to interfere with however we want to live our lives, pursue our definition of happiness and especially not to tell us when we sin. This is open rebellion against God, is He about to rebuke us with the words of Isaiah 1:4-6, or worse yet, Proverbs 17:11? A hundred years ago society still offered lip service to God’s commandments, now we don’t even pretend to respect them as society rejects God’s laws as irrelevant to modern life because we have supposedly evolved beyond the need for morality and conform to the world’s ways, despite Jesus’ instructions to the contrary in Matthew 19:17.

Pastor Bill Wilson, founder of Metro Ministries, the largest Sunday school program in America, lamented on his television program In the Crossfire that when he began in ministry in the early 1960s anointing of the Holy Spirit was common, but that now anointing is extremely rare. Probably this is because we are even more conformed to the world than in his youth. We hear abundant messages from celebrity preachers how we are entitled to all of God’s blessings, but with no emphasis made on living as a people showing their love for God by keeping His commandments (Leviticus 20:25, Isaiah 48:18, Romans 13:11-14, Titus 2:14).

Many professing Christians are leaving or dissatisfied with their churches, the emptiness of our religious system has been showing itself for several decades because we no longer try to live like believers, we blend into the world as much as possible to have what they have. We complain about the lack of God’s presence in our churches but don’t want Biblical morality telling us sin is wrong. We protest it’s impossible to live by the Bible, so convinced by our excuse not to try. What does living for God really mean in our modern world? Do we want God’s will in our life situations or our will? Conformity with the unbelieving world has taken the place of desire for holiness and love for God. Apostates and hypocrites discourage us from living our faith. We may profess belief in God but evidence shows we more commonly worship materialism, human reason and science (especially in the form of technology).

No matter what spiritual belief we profess, each of us believes above all we individually have a rational secular destiny which most of the time overrides our personal faith or Biblical commands. Humanism teaches us we reach heaven our own way, apart from God, this was the root of sin at the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:4), and the formation of human society. The lack of true conviction, especially in our churches, exposes our religion and tradition as empty behaviorism, a gospel of materialism in which we seek the blessings of Abraham without his obedience and faith, our new and improved consumerism inspired religion. The New Testament’s Pharisees maintained the appearance of righteousness, but it was merely superficial (see Matthew 23:25-27, Luke 16:15, 11:39, and Mark 7:6-9). Throughout the gospels Jesus spent the entirety of time in their presence condemning them, instead of showering them with the praise they expected. The New Testament’s Pharisees were legalists who used their man made rules as a means of control over others; they didn’t care about internal states, only about the outward appearance demonstrated through observable behavior. In contrast, scripture tells us God cares deeply about what we think and keep hidden in our thoughts, as Jesus demonstrated in His rebukes of the Pharisees.

From the Ancient World to the Post Modern

Few of us actually understand how important context is when reading or studying the Bible. We are no longer connected to the world culture that existed when any of the books of the Bible were written. In the ancient world, as described in both testaments, society’s public meeting places for both legal and religious purposes were commonly at their city gates; this is no longer practiced or understood (Deuteronomy 11:20, Isaiah 26:2). Obviously in Biblical times almost everything was done by human labor, sometimes with the help of animals, especially farming, and were subsistence type activities. A farmer in Jesus’ day depended on an ox pulling a plow of very heavy wood and had to walk alongside it as the point of the plow furrowed the earth to place seeds in the ground. Unless we live in underdeveloped nations, no one in the modern world has ever seen this process. Because the ancient world’s foundation was agriculture, Jesus often spoke of seed and harvest, and signs of coming weather given in the appearance of the sky, because events in society were organized around these practices and parables, symbols and metaphors depended on common knowledge to communicate to hearers. In most of our major cities we can no longer even see the stars of the night sky because of light pollution caused by the familiar patterns of light displayed by the downtown skylines, mostly from streetlights and high -rise office buildings not turning off their lights at night.

Today’s adults plan through our entire lives to escape physical labor, because we have automated manufacturing (it is hard for many of us to imagine that mass production did not exist before the 18th century when James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny), and created labor saving devices we now rely on. Very few people now choose to enter jobs or careers where the work is physically demanding, and even then, we rely on power tools and have minimized the need for human labor through machines. Ancient trades such as blacksmithing have become obsolete despite being practiced for thousand of years. In the days when scripture was written, most people had to walk long distances as a regular part of their daily routine, across town or to a well to collect their daily water. Citizens of the ancient world walked hot, dusty roads for miles each day in leather sandals, if they even owned shoes, which adds needed details to us in Jesus’ example of washing His disciples feet (John 13:4-12). None of us has to carry our day’s water in a bucket from a well or grind grain between mill stones as the people of scripture had to. In the ancient world humans were also constantly exposed to the unpredictability of nature, there were no air -conditioned buildings, and travelers walking along the roads from town to town would be frequently caught in rain and dust storms as well as other unexpected circumstances. We fail to realize daily life was much harder for people of the past than it is now, and consequently they had much shorter life spans.

Modern farming especially is nothing like the practices of Biblical times, as only in underdeveloped nations farmers still walk behind a donkey or an ox and push seeds into the earth by hand. These methods were commonly seen by the people of Jesus’ day with obvious universal meaning to the hearers, even up until the advent of gasoline powered mechanized farming in the early 20th century. Agriculture is now factory style mechanized mass production, even on family farms, as the vast majority of our food comes from corporate industrial farming, which depends on expensive machines, massive amounts of petroleum, and lab created chemicals. We no longer know what most ingredients in our food are, because they are synthetic additives created by chemists, even plant products are mostly grown from genetically modified seeds, which didn’t exist before 1935. Ancient people used to grow fruits, vegetables and animals for subsistence, as well as hunt wild animals; we need to drive ourselves to a supermarket or shopping center, where all our food products are trucked to us from over a thousand miles away. Few of us have ever seen animals slaughtered for food, while ancient people used to kill their own chickens or goats as part of the normal process to prepare a meal. The people of Biblical times couldn’t even imagine the lifestyle we live now. The comparatively few modern humans who hunt animals largely kill them for recreation, where in the past this was considered wasteful as the motivation for hunting used to be for food.

We have lost the meaning of the Bible’s pre-industrial practices in our modern world, which greatly limits our understanding of scripture’s parables and metaphors. None of us today see their lives, or God’s word, from the perspective of early Christians and Jews of the Biblical world, which is just as unfamiliar and foreign to us as ours would be to them. Socially the changes have been just as radical, throughout the time period of the Old Testament, the courtship that occurred before marriage was both legally binding and strictly supervised by parent chaperones in which the couple was not allowed to become physically intimate with each other before marriage, while in current society even very young teenagers have unsupervised dating often with no intention of future marriage and no restrictions other than those of the participants, additionally in a world where every event involves a consumer transaction. The object of modern dating is as much or more to provide corporate economic stimulus, as it is to create relationships between individuals and involves the purchase of many products and services by which the suitor proves his worthiness as a provider. The marriage ceremony alone supports a billion dollar per year wedding industry for countless corporations.

To our grandparents’ generation, privacy used to be extremely important and valued in society where it is non-existent now. Most of us broadcast every detail of our lives on our social media websites, and a generation already exists which cannot remember or imagine life without constant, immediate electronic personal communication. Global communications in our world have become instant, regardless of distance, since the arrival of the Internet. Modesty used to be a major feature of society which was taught to children, now young people are showing as much of their body as legally allowed in order to conform to societal norms of attractiveness and desirability. It should be noted, this causes lust (both intended and unintended) and could be interpreted as another indication of our apathy concerning the consequences of our actions for others, while the values of the Bible from the earliest Old Testament laws indeed teach us we have responsibility to others. The way of our society has become disposability, with nothing intended to last a lifetime, this was not the way of the people of the Bible. With greater and greater societal acceptance of disposability we tend to ignore, or throw away the parts of scripture we don’t agree with.

Many Biblical stories and passages have long lost their intended meaning as ancient social customs or lifestyles referred to within them are no longer practiced or understood, for example farmers offering sacrifices to statues in a temple to gain crop fertility. Issues surrounding sex and sexual morality have radically changed since the books of the Bible were written. Fertility rituals involving shrine or temple prostitutes were long practiced in the past and described in the very earliest chapters of the Old Testament. While far less widespread today, the original forms of these rituals are only practiced in tribal societies, although we have traces of the ancient practices in the industrial world in Europe, Asia, Japan, and parts of North America in the forms of Wicca, renewed interest in shamanism and the free love sexual liberation philosophy of the youth movement that gained mass popularity in the late 1960’s. Likely as a consequence of the new freedoms and liberality promoted by social trends, we are seeing a rise in practices involving sex as spirituality, such as Tantric sex, sexual yoga and shamanism, and sexual healing therapy, which all use the sex act as a path to spiritual enlightenment, as opposed to the majority of citizens of industrial society which view sex as recreational, a consumer product to be used as an escape from daily pressures.

While currently only a minority of modern society sees practices such as polyamory and promiscuous sex as a spiritual activity and path to enlightenment, we could see new trends in the future as these ideas grow in popularity. Our Burning Man type festivals and gatherings include aspects that could loosely be described as fertility rituals, as the recreational sex is often a motivating force in attending them for a large percentage of the participants. Sexual rituals, when practiced today are not to guarantee crop fertility as they were in the distant past, but for the experiencing of individual recreational pleasure. Many more sexual practices are seen as socially acceptable today than in the past century, only incest and pedophilia are really seen as immoral by the majority of the population. This shows a progression of culture in our modern world, old practices have taken on new meanings, and the old ones are lost due to changes in technology, culture or practice. For example, we no longer offer sacrifices to statues in the industrial world, but our lives usually revolve around our careers, or lack of, our marriages, relationships, possessions, addictions, money, and most of all, ourselves. This is the modern, new and improved version of idolatry.

In addition to the massive restructuring of the social order following the passing of the Middle Ages, entities such as corporations did not exist in Biblical times, people of ancient society were influenced directly by family, tradition, social laws (the King’s) and the temple. In our post -modern world of control largely by faceless institutions and bureaucracy, Revelation 13:15 giving life to the image of the beast could be interpreted symbolically (in a Hegelian way) as making a god out of the state and our corporations. Corporations have legal rights as a person, in fact far more rights than any individual human, and no morality or responsibility to society other than to create benefits for shareholders. The people of the past also did not worship extreme individualism and individual destiny to our level that it completely shapes post-modern life. In scripture God speaks of nations, or people within corporate groups, as when He attributes sin or iniquity to them according to those around them (Zechariah 2:11, Philippians 2:15, Revelation 5:9). Group memberships are far less significant than in the past, everything is now focused on the individual. There are positive features of this, as God relates to us each as individuals, but anything carried to the extreme that we take this philosophy becomes self -worship.

In our modern culture of greed, profit maximization is sacred, and anything that achieves this must be promoted and valued by the world system for stimulating the economy despite the damage it causes. The financial crises of the last decade should highlight this fact to us. In our unrestrained desire for wealth and success we have become all too comfortable with profiting from other’s misfortune and circumstances, because our hunger to get ahead has taken over our lives and become completely consuming. In our culture exploiting those who are financially or otherwise desperate is a common practice and seen as perfectly acceptable, even to Christians, who rationalize their deeds in many ways, such as if I don’t take advantage of this situation, someone else will who’s not as nice as myself will do worse, etc. It is expected that someone must suffer for us to gain or succeed. We feel as though we have a duty to take as much as we can, all of us have seen the t -shirts and bumper stickers telling us, He who dies with the most toys, wins. We have all heard many excuses in our lifetime for greed, and as we will see through the following chapters what is socially acceptable in the world is usually far from what is moral. 1 John 2:16 indeed shows God’s perspective of our global society and its self promotion at all costs, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. The global culture of the world dictates uniformity in almost every nation as we all have learned the same values, to desire above all else, coveting massive wealth to honor ourselves and most importantly, the freedom it brings with it to do unto others without fear they will do unto us.

With the rise of the global economy in the 20th century the world has never been as interconnected and interdependent as it is today, we express this inter-relatedness in common metaphors such as comparing a pond to the global ecosystem in which the results of tiny ripples in the environment are gradually magnified, such as air currents affected by a butterfly’s wings on one continent leads to a gradually increasing chain of events ending with a tidal wave on another, if we are remarking on the global chain of consequences of today’s actions. The world is more and more centrally controlled by organizations like the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, global nonprofit or charitable organizations, and international corporations. Since the 1st century when the antichrist spirit first manifested, it has become more and more a part of our world leaders. We have massive corruption and tyranny throughout our worldly governments, an abundance of dictators throughout history like Hitler and Stalin, and totalitarian states like the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and many third world nations that seem perpetually controlled by a series of fascist or oppressive governments. If Satan manifests through people, and indeed he does, our world leaders are increasingly little antichrists.

Since the 1600’s, as man’s cultural domination increased, new philosophies emerged that embody ideas that are strikingly like the ancient empires of the past, for example Hegel’s materialist philosophy encouraged us to worship the state (government) as god, which was also a doctrine of ancient Rome and Babylon. For the Christian citizen, practicing this becomes a violation of the commandments (sin), as we are to have no gods other than the eternal Yahweh himself (Exodus 20:3).

The pace of change since Hegel’s time has become faster and faster, beginning in the 1700’s mankind saw both Industrial and Social Revolution where the end result was that centuries of tradition were wiped away, with very little time for humans to adjust to the almost instant destruction of the social and natural order. This is probably the origin point of us losing our place and connection with nature. Historians have commented on the fact that those who lived before the 1760s had lives almost identical to their grandparents, those who were born after the same time lived lives almost nothing like their ancestors. This period also represents the birth of consumer society, which has only grown more dominant each century.

A hundred years ago H.G. Wells predicted change and complexity of society would only increase. Since then the speed of change has multiplied ever more rapidly to the point where progress is valued above everything except materialism and science / technology, and moves far beyond our ability to adapt. A commercial on the Discovery Science channel in 2013 informed viewers that English scientists had asked their government for permission to combine human DNA with bovine embryos to create stem cells for research and experimentation, this tells us about the incredible progress of science in recent years. In the Bible’s book of Daniel, he lists the characteristics of both the current (in his time) and coming empires, of gold, the silver, the bronze, and finally iron mixed with clay in a progression or perhaps more accurately a process of de- evolution (Daniel 2:32-36). The final empire, clearly ancient Rome, with its great crushing iron teeth does seem to have characteristics of our modern alienating post- industrial world.

The world culture, it seems has become progressively less moral while God has become increasingly unwelcome in our institutions as man’s solutions to problems are promoted as the only ways. Nativity plays and references to Christ and the cross have long been banned from most North American public schools. Evolution is promoted (and almost universally accepted) as the only true answer to the question of how we got here. The general population has grown tired of hearing about Christianity (partially because of the proliferation of apostates who profess Christianity but live like they don’t believe) and has turned to seeking other forms of religion in search for the truth. While not overtly persecuted in North America, Christianity has become unwelcome, looked on with disinterest, and characterized as a backward leftover of the past trying to hold back the advances of the modern world. Few see the value of morality or the Bible in our modern consumer driven culture of extreme individualism that strives to free itself from all ethical and moral limitations on human behavior (because it speaks against and attempts to restrain our selfishness).

Has man’s religious system joined the rest of our world and become just another element of consumer choice, just like we can choose what style of fashion we want to wear to express our individuality? We have many brands of Christianity to appeal to many different demographic marketing segments and layers of society, indeed there are numerous denominations with the accompanying doctrinal differences and styles of worship. Indeed, we are the new Pharisees, adding so many man made rules to God’s ways, there isn’t one absolutely true denomination, and all are man’s systems of religion added unto God’s words of truth. This can be demonstrated through changes in the practice of worship in our modern churches. Has the practice of worship been altered from what was done in the past?

Certainly. How we worship has changed with the refocusing and purposing of society, and defines man’s purpose throughout history. Biblical based worship has evolved over the centuries, first as our understanding of God increased and then as man’s traditions continued to multiply and compete with God’s word for importance and authority. Since the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:4), we see man striving to overcome God’s authority and replace it with that of our most powerful leaders. In the earliest books of the Pentateuch, worship is defined as keeping God’s laws and having no other gods before Him (Exodus 20:3) as well as assembling corporately in the tabernacle for offerings and fellowship, these principles constituted the Israelites instructions to worship the Lord with all their hearts and this definition remained throughout the duration of the Old Testament. In the New Testament, besides the addition of Jesus, and inclusion of the Gentiles, the definition of worship hadn’t changed.

The years following the lifetime of the apostles saw many changes and additions to what defines worship of the Most Holy God. One church eventually split into many denominations with different features of the corporate body emphasized and practices gaining or losing importance. Once established in the early centuries, the liturgical model of worship lasted throughout the Middle Ages, and even when Protestant Reformers broke away from Catholicism (they were in reality forced out, excommunicated for trying to reform a corrupt system), they did not radically change the church service form, hierarchy structure or practice. The Reformation was an intellectual, and certainly, theological revolution, but the actual institutional practices remained unchanged (Viola, Pagan Christianity p.96). Following this, church history had a prolonged period without major innovation until the 18th century. With the revivals of the early and mid -century, methods and practices of the church began to be modernized to reflect a post enlightenment age. Society was beginning to undergo massive changes in structure due to the industrial revolution, and increasing numbers of people were losing interest in the ancient institutional practices of the church. This set the stage for a massive shift in society’s institutions as the average human’s lives had remained mostly the same for centuries now began to give rise to a future and complicated modern world, which was quickly becoming increasingly unfamiliar and uncertain.

The progression of science and philosophy expressed potential to remake the world in increased freedom and liberty, and caused increase of expectations that suggested the removal of limits on human potential. As man was liberated from the old world, the new one began to take shape and the speed of changes was determined only to multiply.

New philosophies emerged, ultimately leading to pragmatism, which is the idea that whatever produces the desired results is the correct method, regardless of ethical considerations, which is now the prevailing practice in society. With the beginning of the 19th century and the meteoric rise of science and technology it seemed man’s religious institutions were nearing extinction as the hunger for progress and evolution spread like an epidemic through all classes of society. The public education system now planted the seeds of doubt in the Bible as the word of God, and the thrill of new experiences and truths uncovered by the revelation of scientific practices empowered man’s love of his own philosophy and of objects he creates. Where the geniuses of the past like Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal, and Robert Boyle had been men of God who sought to uncover the secrets of His creation by means of understanding science, now the greatest minds of the times were using scientific discoveries to question the validity of the word of God. For the first time, God’s scriptures were forced to defend themselves against the new discoveries of medicine and technology. The corporate church was forced to re -evaluate its practices and methods as the younger generations lost interest in its teachings, and desperate and fearful church leaders began to focus on new philosophies to win the lost, as discipleship and especially evangelism became centered on human work through the correct use of formulas and techniques and moved away from the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Many of us are asking, are we in the Biblical last days? Yes, according to scripture, according to Hebrews 1:2, 1 Peter 4:7, 1 John 2:18 and Revelation 1:3. The Jews of 2000 years ago who formed the early Christian church had a far different understanding of the prophetic timeline of history than post-modern Christians; this is yet another area where proper context has been lost. Jewish tradition taught that history would unfold in the following way: the time between creation and the giving of the law, a time of chaos was to last 2000 years, the time of the law until the first coming of Christ was to last another 2000 years, this would be followed by the age of the church which was to last another 2000 years. What makes this important is Jewish teaching given by Peter that is key to interpreting the meaning of this periods of 6000 years divided by 3, is given in 2 Peter 3:8, that with the Lord a thousand years is as a day. In the Jewish understanding of the passing of time, each thousand years of the six thousand is a week of six days, Jesus first coming is at the very end of day 4, after Jesus is crucified the remaining 2000 years, or two days of 1000 years are the last days.

Therefore, Biblically speaking we have entered the last days many centuries ago. Every generation since the first century thought they had