Knowledge, today, is a tricky thing, because there is a lot of ‘pseudo-knowledge’ out there. People today are indeed “ever learning, but never coming to the knowledge of The Truth”. [2 Tim 3:7]
The book that Daniel sealed, I believe, was the scroll that was unsealed in the book of Revelation. Yeshua unsealed it, and it shows the time of the Trouble of Jacob, from seven different perspectives.
The time of the end started when Peter stood up to preach the first gospel message:
“16But this is that which was spoken by Yo’el HaNavi [Joel the Prophet]: 17“It shall come to pass in the last days, says Elohim, that I will pour out my Ru’akh upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; 18and upon my menservants and upon my maidservants will I pour out my Ru’akh in those days; and they shall prophesy; 19and I will show wonders in the heavens and signs on the earth: blood and fire and vapor of smoke: 20the sun shall be changed into darkness and the moon into blood, before that great and fearful Yom יהוה shall come.”
The time of the end will not end until “Yom יהוה “, what most people would call the “Day of the LORD”, … So, we are still in the ‘End Times”, the “Last Days.” The signs mentioned above have not happened yet, and are not happening, and will not happen until the seven-year period begins. That will mark the end of the “Et Ketz”, the time of the end.
The “knowledge”, however, stirs until that time; and the knowledge that is proliferated today is often not scrutinized, and it indeed does not bring people to the truth. Some of it is ‘alternative knowledge’ because people think that anything that was established prior to their ‘awakening’ is suspect. Newton’s interpretation of ‘physics,’ the law of gravity, the immutable laws of physics, the knowledge upon which the modern world is built, has all come under suspicion for some, simply because we have found the authorities lying about other things; now, everything is wrong.
During the whole of the last days, from 33 AD up until now, knowledge has indeed increased. It took some time to prime the pump, but then there was an explosion of knowledge. But, after COVID hit, and people found out the American government was willing to lie to them and manipulate them, they now suspect all former knowledge as questionable.
Personally, I think the solution to all man’s woes is very simple, but the application of it is problematic, because one simple problem, though it has been dealt with, still dominates mankind: the sin nature.
Yeshua died to give us the ability to conquer man’s ‘nature’, the natural state of being. Man is inherently selfish and prideful. Even those who do actually trust in Yeshua often have not conquered their sin nature, because many do not know that they should, and many do not know that they can. But, since we haven’t learned how to live in a state of compassion, we strive to learn other ways to deal with it; one of those ways is to become a bit disillusioned, and possibly even modestly delusional. The narrow road is right up the middle between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’, both sides of which have their delusions. Most people are either moderately left, or moderately right. But, I submit that very few have balanced the scales of justice in their hearts and minds.
The first delusion that took over most of mankind was ‘evolution’. Darwin hated the idea of God and Creation, and so he created an alternative, and convinced the whole scientific community it was right. He had help. His friend, Charles Lyells, who pulled a calendar of earth’s development out of thin air, and the whole world still basically follows it. They cast away the absolute knowledge of a global flood as causation for much of what we see, and accept the sophisticated imagination of God-haters, just because they did not want to do the work of understanding the evidence.
Today, a lot of people think that we have to tolerate the LGBTQ community. The very fact that we have to have such a label for about 5 to 10 percent of the population calls into question todays ‘knowledge’. Each of the behaviors represented by one of those five letters are exactly that: behaviors. Those behaviors should not define a person; but today, many define themselves by one of those behaviors. They do not realize that there is a dark element that pushed them into that behavior, and they had no help from parents, friends, or wider elements of society to figure out what was going on that was driving them to it, so they thought “God made me this way”. That’s exactly what Adam did in the garden: he blamed God for his error: “the woman YOU gave me gave the fruit to me, and I did eat”. Eve blamed the serpent; Adam blamed God and the woman. There was an element of truth in both responses, but neither got to the root: you did it! You decided to do what God said not to do. That really is how simple it is to get to the root of the LGBTQ question, but today we over-sophisticate the issue with other ‘knowledge’.
There are many other issues occurring today that take on this same phenomenon.
The Palestinian issue is another big one. There truly never has been a Palestinian people who lived in and governed themselves in the land of Israel. Even the name itself, “Palestinian” invokes the image of who they really were, which people claim is the people of the land of “Palestine” where today’s Jews are thus interlopers,: Palestinian comes from פְּלִשְׁתִּים “P’lishtim”, which means “INVADERS”. These were a people who INVADED Israel AFTER Israel conquered the territory that had belonged to the Caananites. It was during the time of the “Judges” of Israel that the “Philistines” invaded, and were put down by the various judges, and King David finally did so and established the Kingdom of Israel way back about 1,000 years BC. It was never called “Palestine”. That was a pejorative name, given to the land of “Judea”, which is what the land was called in the time of Messiah, because it was made up of the tribe of Judah and a remnant of all the other tribes. After Rome conquered it in 150AD, Rome started calling it “Palestine” after the arch-enemy of King David and Israel. It was an insult. After the fall of Rome, it came to be called “The Holy Land” during the crusades. But, the name “Palestine” still stuck, and it was called that in the Balfour Declaration, and before, until Israel became a nation again in 1948. What most people fail to understand is that there has been a persistent Jewish presence there for 4,000 years. Yes, most of the Jewish people were scattered abroad, but, not all. There has never been a time when Jews did not live among the Arabs and many others who also lived there. But, people believe the false narrative of the left, because they choose to, instead of learning and admitting to the truth.
Similarly, that same group of people has within it those who deny the Holocaust. A tragedy that the whole world witnessed, that is documented by millions of witnesses, is denied, simply because people do not want to believe it.
We used to teach children the truth about pronouns: “we/they” is for more than one person. “He” is for a boy or a man, and”she” is for a girl or a woman. It is basic grammar. Today, professionals in the government and elsewhere are requiring that all personnel, whole corporations, follow someone else’s delusion, forcing employees to call another person “they/them”, or “she/her” when that person is in fact an individual, or a male dressed in women’s clothing. We used to tell the truth that this person is delusional and just does not want to be what God made them, for whatever reason: now, new knowledge says that we must accept their delusion and assist them in perpetuating it, even to call it ‘normal.’ Those who refuse to accept the new ideas are marginalized, persecuted, and more.
But, the phenomenon of believing something that is not true no longer surprises me; it saddens me when believers jump on a bandwagon, like believing that giants were in the promised land, and other very mythical ideas that have surfaced today, simply because they want to believe it, when there is no indefatigable proof, and not even any sound evidence or reasoning for the belief. They just choose to believe it, because their favorite celebrity or podcaster said so. It makes telling the truth truly the most unpopular position to hold in our day.
“…all those who wish to live a godly life in Yeshua HaMashi’akh shall suffer persecution. 13But evil and deceptive men shall grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. 14But hold fast to HaD’varim [The Words/Torah] which you have learned and have been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned it, 15and knowing that you have learned from your childhood the consecrated scriptures, which are able to make you wise to life through absolute trust in Yeshua HaMashi’akh.”
Today, even trying to correct someone of their error in order to keep them from going astray will get you persecuted, even if they have said “O I love you so much”; that love is conditional on never offending them by telling them what they are learning is error.
The prophets and the apostles knew this day was coming. Honestly, I have known it was coming since the early nineties, when I first experienced people persecute me simply because I believed a truth of scripture they found impossible to believe. That is the rub: I know for a fact that Yeshua is the Son of God, risen from the dead, and that He is a MAN, seated at the right hand of the form of the Creator, in heaven, and will return in the future with vengeance on all false knowledge and everything that calls itself or something else God, other than יהוה the Creator.
We live in a country that still claims Christianity as its base. Yet society has capitulated to all this evil. If so many people claim to believe in God and in His Salvation in Yeshua, whom most call Jesus, then why is it that anyone who says “No, you’re wrong”, is relegated to the margins of society? It’s what Sha’ul/Paul said above: “all those who wish to live a godly life in Yeshua HaMashi’akh shall suffer persecution.”
In our country, one does not suffer persecution for ‘being a Christian’. One does, however, suffer persecution from Christians for simply striving to live a Godly life according to the Word of God, especially if one is brave enough to speak out against the atrocious ‘knowledge’ that is proliferated even through some of their ‘churches’. [There’s another one: a church is a building [from Gaelic ‘kirk’, but the Body of Messiah is called “The Assembly” of His followers, ‘ecclesia’ in the greek, “Kahal” in the Hebrew].