As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How, if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played. -C. S. LEWIS, Perelandra
The end of the world is at hand—and the world couldn’t care less.
Watching a bevy of local churches online this Sunday to see how many were talking about the prophetic significance of the war now ongoing between Israel and Iran, it was a sobering reminder of just how asleep so much of the Western church is. Nary a mention did Israel v. Iran get from the pulpits, but a whole laundry list of well-intentioned but tone-deaf sermons on how to be a better you. Is this accidental, or is this intentional? How could so much of the Western leg of Christendom not be keyed into what is happening with the birthplace of our faith?
Well, the spiritual suppression, as it were, is no surprise. The world we live in now—in its present form, is a world governed by unseen spiritual forces that manipulate it from the shadows, and has masterfully deceived the masses into believing that life will simply continue as is, indefinitely. This illusion is sustained by the deeply irrational grip of normalcy bias, reinforced by the triple engines of distraction, hedonism, and gradualism—all cloaked in materialism. Together, they keep man’s eyes fixed firmly on the now, blinding him to the judgment that looms just ahead.
To be fair, Satan’s use of distraction has proven astonishingly effective. It’s truly remarkable—and deeply troubling—that millions of highly educated individuals genuinely believe, and even teach, that this impossibly complex universe is somehow a product of random, meaningless chance. This, despite what we know from the Laws of Thermodynamics and other observable principles of the created order. Such belief is not merely ignorance—it is high-order deception. And these are the people leading the most powerful institutions on Earth!
The Fragility of Time and the Silence of Saints
“…whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away” (James 4:14).
Given that mortal lifespans rarely exceed 70 to 80 years—with perhaps 40 of those spent in peak effectiveness, it’s hard not to turn our attentions increasingly inward. When viewed against the vast arc of human history, and especially in light of eternity, our lives are, as Scripture so eloquently states, but a vapor. In fact, our lives are no more concrete than is a fleeting breeze, a petal on the wind, or a blink of an eye. It often feels like our lives are barely enough to begin the work we believe we were supposed to do—much less fulfill the greater, more divine purposes our Creator may have had in store for our lives.
I’ve known many good and honorable people—quietly faithful and deeply principled—who lived moral, upright lives but rarely spoke openly of their faith in God. Whether they were truly born again or merely moral by upbringing was often difficult to discern. These were the hard-working, Depression-forged men and women of the “Greatest Generation,” shaped by the WASP ethos (White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism), an inheritance of Reformation discipline, Enlightenment restraint, and Frontier perseverance. Their lives were marked by duty and stoic service—yet public expressions of faith or morality were often deemed impolite or unnecessary in civic life.
As the postwar boom brought about a population explosion and with it, seismic cultural change, this once-cohesive Judeo-Christian consensus began to fragment into thousands of doctrinal islands. What was once a relational and communal walk with Christ became increasingly specialized and privatized. Evangelism gave way to polished church-growth movements. The church retreated behind stained-glass walls, and the public square—once governed by a biblical conscience—fell tragically silent.
This admirable but cautious stoicism produced unintended consequences. Over time, loyalty to denomination and institution began to outweigh the personal leading of the Holy Spirit. Revival was stifled. Truth-telling went underground. Even so, God raised up voices—like Billy Graham, Reinhard Bonnke, Leonard Ravenhill, Hal Lindsey, Chuck Smith, and Luis Palau—to call the nations back to repentance. But the pulpits of America and the West, by and large, began choosing either cultural neutrality or outright silence in light of an increasingly decaying society. And into that silence, the vacuum appeared.
The Vacuum and the Invasion
“When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation” (Matthew 12:43-45).
History teaches that vacuums never remain empty for long. Into the void rushed a new pantheon of ideologies: materialism cloaked in consumer prosperity; Eastern mysticism rebranded as inner healing and enlightenment; secular humanism dressed up as rationalism and equity; and scientism masquerading as absolute truth. From Berkeley to Harvard, from Hollywood to the halls of Congress, systematic deception quickened its pace through the institutions.
From the 1940s through the 1980s—an era dubbed Pax Americana—the United States reached its zenith in global influence, military power, and technological achievement. And yet, embedded within that rise were the very seeds of its spiritual and moral unraveling. The “strong, silent hero” archetype—John Wayne on screen, Eisenhower in office—shaped a nation’s posture: stoic, reserved, serious, and unspoken. But while every effort was thrown at containing communism abroad, it had begun quietly flourishing at home, because affluence produces weak men who love pleasure rather than righteousness. The spiritual rot was flowing out of the vacuum the churches left unattended.
The very institutions built to preserve law and order, by way of virtue and permanence, began instead to perpetuate policies and agendas that served only to maintain their power and authority in perpetuity. Bureaucracy and nationalism began to supersede spirituality and morality, contributing greatly to the inevitable cultural decay by the normalization and legalization of licentiousness. Our governmental moral underpinnings, once anchored in Scripture, began to give way to multiculturalism. Between our affluence and enlightenment, we became proud. And pride, as they say, always precedes the fall.
By the time we reached the postmodern era, America had become a civilization publicly unsure whether objective truth even exists any longer. Our cultural slide into the debased mind moved quickly from the 1990s to the present day, going so far as to have political and cultural leaders attempting to normalize pedophilia and luciferianism. Even more troubling was the rise of a mainstream cultural zeitgeist that took pride in its inability or outright refusal—to define fundamental biological realities such as gender, marriage, and the sanctity of life. When a nation reaches that point, it is morally, spiritually, economically, and culturally bankrupt, tottering on the edge of civilizational collapse.
And so, as Western civilization reached its technological summit—splitting atoms, sequencing genomes, exploring other planets—it also descended into one of the most morally, spiritually, and ethically bankrupt conditions since the days of Noah and Lot. We know how those days ended. The greater tragedy lies not just in the inevitable faithlessness of this final generation, but in the abdication of moral leadership by the generations before it.
The Rebirth of Israel — A Cosmic Disruption
“Before she was in labor, she gave birth;
Before her pain came,
She delivered a male child.
Who has heard such a thing?
Who has seen such things?
Shall the earth be made to give birth in one day?
Or shall a nation be born at once?
For as soon as Zion was in labor,
She gave birth to her children.
‘Shall I bring to the time of birth, and not cause delivery?’ says the Lord.
‘Shall I who cause delivery shut up the womb?’ says your God” (Isaiah 66:7-9).
And yet, against the Western backdrop of deception and decline, a singular event disrupted the course of history: the rebirth of Israel.
In the aftermath of World War II, as the true scope of the Nazi Final Solution came to light, the world was shaken into a rare moment of moral clarity. The horror of six million exterminated Jews forced open a narrow window of sympathy—just wide enough to permit the legal reestablishment of a Jewish state in 1948. Keep in mind, this miraculous event did not happen in a spiritually neutral world.
Scripture tells us the whole world lies under the control of the evil one (1 John 5:19), and that the kingdoms of this world are under Satan’s temporary authority (Luke 4:5-6). In that light, Israel’s rebirth wasn’t just improbable; it had been relatively impossible until it was inevitable. Satan had managed to blanket the Middle East with a virulently violent, highly anti-Semitic religion called Islam for thirteen centuries.
Why else has he invested so deeply in keeping the Middle East veiled under the grip of militant Islam—a spiritual stronghold that denies Christ, denies the covenant, and opposes Jewish restoration? The fact that the Jewish state reemerged at all—in a world so dominated by dark powers—is proof of God’s sovereign hand. Moreover, Israel’s rebirth has since been a constant affront to the cosmic enemy, Satan, who has every reason to destroy her and prevent her rebirth from fulfilling bible prophecy.
And it’s no coincidence that, in our present moment, support for Israel—especially among self-proclaimed conservative and evangelical factions—has become sharply divided since October 7, 2023. As always, Satan’s tactic remains consistent: confuse, divide, distort. The same confusion he sowed into the church through centuries of Replacement Theology now appears again in various disguises: dead orthodoxy, Amillennialism, Calvinism, Pan-Millennialism, “anti-Zionism,” and a creeping disinterest cloaked as neutrality.
The Hope That Anchors
Personally, I find myself at the twilight of my “active duty” years. Each passing day brings with it the temptation to echo Solomon’s lament that all is vanity under the sun. And were it not for the Blessed Hope—the promise of Christ’s imminent, any moment return for His bride, the Church—I too might have drifted off into cynicism or fatalism. But the calling remains.
The Bride Groom Cometh, Make Ready the Bride!
Thus, the faithful in every generation are not merely to occupy until He comes, but to watch, to understand the signs of the times, and to anticipate. We are commanded to watch as a continual reminder not to fall under the seductive trappings of this world (hedonism and gradualism). Like Peter sinking into the water after taking his eyes off the Lord, when we take our eyes off the Lord and begin looking around, we too shall start sinking into the muck and the mire of this life. “And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:17) As one voice so astutely wrote online, and with sobering precision: “Your flesh doesn’t care about your eternity—because it’s not going with you.”
The flesh will always war against the spirit because it isn’t coming with you. At least this version of our flesh. How easy is it for us to turn our eyes or scroll to a new channel and not recognize and acknowledge the reality of what is coming? He’s coming.
“But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly. For it will come as a snare on all those who dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man” (Luke 21:34-36).