Only God could summarize all of church history in a one sentence parable. Today I want to look at this verse. It is Matthew 13:33. "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three pecks of meal, until it was all leavened." (NASB)
The kingdom of heaven is the church.
Leaven is false teaching. "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, I don't mean literally bread, but of their false teaching," Matthew 16:1-12. "A little leaven leavens the whole lump," I Corinthians 5-6.
The woman is the devil.
Three pecks of meal is the three divisions of Christianity, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. All three have become full of false teaching or apostate, as the Apostle Paul describes it.
In II Thessalonians 2 Paul says 'Jesus will not return to earth until the apostasy comes first'. The apostasy is simply the church departing from the Scriptures, our faith. "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths," II Timothy 4:3-4.
This apostasy leads to the 'man of sin'. The sin of Adam and Eve, and the rest of us, leads to the 'man of sin'.
The Apostle Paul makes it clear that Jesus doesn't return to earth until the man of lawlessness is revealed. He calls him 'the son of destruction'. "This man opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, (yet to be built in Jerusalem north of the dome of the rock), displaying himself as being God," II Thessalonians 2:1-4.
Our world is heading faster and faster into economic, political, and religious chaos. Europe is going to revive a new type of 'Roman Empire'. The leader of which will ultimately be this Zar, Cesar, or 'Christ' who will finally strike a peace treaty between the Jews and Arabs, and solve the worlds economic and religious problems. The majority of people are going to believe him and like him and follow him and ultimately take his 'mark' and worship him as God. Big mistake!
Paul goes on to say in II Thess. 2 that because men refuse to repent and believe the truth God sends upon them a strong deluding influence so that they might believe what is false. They refuse God's plan of salvation and refuse to repent and bow to Jesus Christ. Their wickedness is they worship themselves and what they think and make themselves their own gods deciding they have a better plan than God does. It's pride! Satan is going to spend eternity in hell because of pride and so will everyone else who winds up there. Sorry! I didn't write the rules.
"But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, gossips with malice, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; holding to a form of godliness, (going to church and taking communion, getting married, baptizing babies, going to church schools, etc.), although they have denied its power; avoid such men as these," II Timothy 3:1-5. (I would have to leave town).
"But the Spirit explicitly says that in latter times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own consciences as with a branding iron, men who forbid marriage, (teach celibacy is more spiritual), and advocate abstaining from eating meat, (who teach vegetarianism is more spiritual), I Timothy 4:1-3.
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