Monday, August 08, 2016

Dial Daily Bread: The Core Issue of the Great Controversy

Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"

Daniel is the one Old Testament book that Jesus specifically singles out as urgently requiring our attention (Matt. 24:15); and Revelation is the one New Testament book that Jesus likewise singles out (Rev. 1:1-3). We can't understand what's going on in the world around us without this "light" focused from heaven in these two special books!

The two are complementary, each explains the other. It's amazing how hundreds of millions of Christians blithely disregard both! But both are easy to understand--user-friendly, so much so that youth can understand with only a little careful thinking.

Both describe in detail how a great "falling away" (apostasy) would seek to hijack the world Christian church with an enormous counterfeit religious organization that "opposes and exalts [itself] above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. ... The mystery of lawlessness ... with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who ... did not receive the love of the truth, ... strong delusion, that they should believe the lie" (2 Thess. 2:3-12). It's the core issue of the great cosmic controversy.

The identity of this massive deception is not cloaked in foggy uncertainty: the Holy Spirit is clear and unequivocal in pinpointing this church power in history as the grand religious successor of the paganism of the ancient Roman Empire (Dan. 7:7, 8, 20-25)--the Papacy. Revelation 18 pictures its coming total exposé. "Come out of [Babylon], My people" (vs. 4). Be alert.

--Robert J. Wieland

From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: July 3, 2005.
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