What’s the biggest lie you can think of?

Is it the one that says humanity evolved from apes – and before that, from a gob of goo? Or is it the claim that the world is plummeting into a climate catastrophe, and it’s all our fault? Maybe the biggest lie you can think of is the assertion that there is intelligent alien life on other planets.

Honestly, that’s generally the sort of stuff that maladapted scientists, tech geeks, and social nerds obsess over. What about the lies all the rest of us must contend with every day? 

You know what I’m talking about. It’s the lies that claim America has a legitimately elected President, that abortion is a Constitutional right, that conservatives are hateful while liberals are tolerant, that the jab has your best health in view, that there are more than two genders, that social media “fact checkers” really do support the facts, or that Islam is a religion of peace. It’s these daily deceptions – and so many others just like them – that add tangled layers of keen frustration to the challenges of life and duty.

It’s beyond debate that we live in times of great deception, and it’s getting worse every day. It used to be our leaders would get into hot water for telling a lie – now they are roasted if they speak the truth.

What we are seeing is lies have become strategic. They serve a purpose to those who employ them. They are used to reinforce a cause, to shape beliefs, and to align the masses with a larger agenda.

Paul Watson, a founder of the activist group, Greenpeace, claimed, “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” According to Mr. Watson, truth is irrelevant if it doesn’t achieve the desired outcome. It’s all about the end justifying the means.

That means the primary problems we face today are not the lies themselves but the motives behind them. The convictions of Paul Watson, and a host of other radical social engineers like him, are intentional lies are useful – even necessary to achieve conformity. 

These opponents to truth are radically committed to winning. They bring a gun to a knife fight every time. There are grave consequences for letting down one’s guard, for lacking discernment, or for underestimating the depravity of those who categorically attack what’s right and proper.  

The Bible says active deception will take center stage in the end times. The lies we endure now are nothing compared to those that are coming.  It will become normal to “throw truth to the ground” (Daniel 8:12).  It will be a matter of routine when “deceit will prosper” (Daniel 8:25). 

But a certain lie is coming that will dwarf all others before it. It’s a strategically managed deception that some translations call THE lie in 2 Thessalonians 2:9, and most translations refer to as THE lie two verses later. While the emphasis is mine, the Bible is hinting, “Something’s different here.” THE lie in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 will be the daddy of them all. 

What is this supreme lie that is forthcoming? Can we understand this unprecedented deception that will – soon, I believe – be foisted on an unsuspecting world?  What does the Bible tell us about it?

As with all ambitions to properly understand God’s Word, a responsible contextual analysis is important.  Paul begins the second chapter of 2 Thessalonians by providing a topical statement.  He writes in verse 1, “Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to Him….”  

This theme is a hub in this portion of God’s Word. Paul wrote this topical statement to point everyone’s noses in the same direction. The bulk of what follows in that chapter is associated in some way with that pivotal event known as the Rapture when true believers are “gathered to Him.”

That also means THE lie in verses 9 and 11 of that same chapter is likely related in some way to “….the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to Him.” With the church saints gone, and with them the restraining influence of the Holy Spirit acting through the Body of Christ (2 Thess. 2:7), THE lie will gain centerstage.  It will have unfettered opportunity to gain force and influence.

It’s an understatement to say everything changes after the Rapture. Before it, there is one routine of human experience. After it, a completely different routine takes over. Before the Rapture, life’s events are largely confined to operating within the natural dimension – to the things we all now see and accept as normal. After it however, the supernatural – the paranormal – will dominate instead.

It’s a very different world after Jesus Christ removes His church from this planet. The Rapture is the dividing point, and it will stand as a bright red line of evidence to underscore the veracity of God’s Word and the message of the Gospel. This fact will be intolerable to the devil’s agenda, to his “spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12), and to his depraved devotees here on planet earth.

Let me be clear. I believe THE lie in 2 Thess. 2:9 & 11 will be a comprehensive and concerted strategy to attack the truth of the Rapture. I believe this attack will begin soon after the church has been snatched from earth. 

I feel THE lie will promote the idea that the Bible is irrelevant, and it does not mean what it says. It’s easy to imagine that merchants of THE lie will suppress, censor, ridicule, “fact check,” shut down – – and even criminalize any efforts to present the Biblical truth about the Rapture.

There are ample arguments to support this view.  Here is a partial summary of the reasons I feel this anti-Rapture deception – AKA, THE lie – will quickly gain traction and support.

To start, it’s going to be a whole lot more of what we see happening right now.  Today, if you present the truth about COVID, if you publish the real data about our election fraud – or if you speak out in any way against Drag Queen Story Hour, against boys competing in girls’ sports, or against the delusion that men can get pregnant – you are immediately and publicly criticized. 

The situation is even worse if you mention Biblical values, or if you point out that your choices conform to God’s design. Libs will howl and bare their teeth and woke “Christians” will instruct you to “be more loving and inclusive,” or to “show grace.” You’ll be the target for every cliché slur the left routinely hurls, and you’ll risk getting fired from your job just for displaying the principles of your faith.

It’s easy to see the Rapture falling prey to these same assaults.  It won’t matter how obvious the truth is, many will ignore what the Bible has to say – just like they do today. There will continue to be masses of people who will simply want to believe anything but the truth.

A second reason THE lie will thrive is there will be plenty of folks after the Rapture that are left in the churches they’d always attended. I maintain one of the reasons the world will be persuaded that the Rapture didn’t happen – after it did! – is because so many “Christians” will still be found within their shallow, socially-conscious, seeker-friendly, woke churches. 

To be frank, I believe most of the Catholic “Christians” will be left behind too. There is very little – if anything – about the Catholic denomination which clings to the fundamentals of a right relationship with Jesus Christ. Moreover, I personally believe the Catholic church leadership has already signaled it will distract from the truth after the Rapture occurs.

But I think there is a special concern with those “Christians” and churches that celebrate their woke ideals, because many of these people embrace opportunities to emulate the world. Because they feel the Bible is of and for the community, and because they choose to see Scripture as little more than a collection of human responses to God, they want to see the Bible as encouraging, non-judgmental, and subject to various interpretations. Their choice is to put God in a box that is more palatable to their preferences, and so they resist approaching Scripture with a responsible and reverent posture.

It’s these people that run a strong risk of finding themselves left behind alongside those they’d tried so hard to please. The tragic consequences of this bunch will be used to argue that the Bible does not really mean what it says. I believe this will be a key reason THE lie will find footing to prosper.

Thirdly, I believe THE lie is going to be strategically advanced by fallen angels who will physically return to earth soon after the Rapture and re-enter the sphere of human experience. In several ways the Bible appears to say as much.  In Daniel 2:43, it says concerning the time of the end, “….they will mingle themselves with the seed of men.”  The text positions “they” and “seed of men” as two different sources. 

Jesus Christ seems to underscore this same scenario when He said in Matthew 24:37 and Luke 17:26, “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man.” The era before The Great Flood was uniquely one in which fallen angels and the Nephilim – the latter being the progeny of fallen angels and human women – interacted with humanity to deceive it, and to subvert God’s plans.  

God Himself prophesied in Genesis 3:15, in the Garden of Eden, that there would exist an ongoing enmity between “the [physical] seed” of the woman and “the [physical] seed” of Satan until the devil was ultimately “crushed.” Well, Satan’s still “prowling about like a roaring lion,” (1 Peter 5:8), and he won’t finally be crushed till The Millennial Kingdom ends (Revelation 20:10). It’s reasonable to conclude that the devil’s past enmities, methods, and motives will continue – in one form or another – to manifest ahead.

Furthermore, the arrival of the antichrist is stated in 2 Thessalonians 2:9 as an event that will be accompanied by “….counterfeit miracles, signs, and wonders.” This gets back to what I mentioned earlier: there’s going to be a new paranormal routine post-Rapture, and it will saturate the human experience of that time. All elements of this new routine will be designed to steer people away from the truth.

Keep in mind, many of the people who will miss the Rapture are those who had “refused the love of the truth that would have saved them” (2 Thess. 2:11). As such, they are pre-wired to believe any alternate idea, especially one that seems to be validated by superior beings from another time and place. After decades of conditioning by films and stories about superheroes visiting earth from other galaxies, mankind will be convinced that has happened. 

I believe this is a key component of the “powerful delusion” that 2 Thess. 2:11 speaks of.  The same verse says God sends this “powerful delusion” to those who have rejected Jesus Christ “….so that they believe THE lie.” The arrival of the fallen angels will be a stunning event in a post-Rapture world. To those with darkened minds and hearts, it will all smack of formidable authenticity.

Within this stew of supernatural deceptions, I believe a narrative will be advanced post-Rapture to argue that Scripture is false, that humanity wasn’t created as the Bible says, and that all those “fuddy duddy believers” needed to be transported off this planet for the sake of the earth and those who remain. Since “seeing is believing,” and since it’s human nature to downplay one’s personal shortcomings, many people who got left behind will want to embrace THE lie.

In fact, Satan’s forces are already advancing this very narrative. According to Douglas Hamp in his book, Corrupting the Image, “spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12) are already communicating this to prominent new age leaders. They are telling these occultic principals that the earth will soon go through a period of cataclysmic changes.

Specifically, the message from Satan’s forces to these individuals states the following points:

• Cataclysmic events will come upon the earth.
• They will help us overcome those events.
• They will take those that can’t or won’t evolve to the next level.
• Those that remain get to evolve to the next level.
• A man from among us will be raised up with special powers and knowledge.

It’s not hard to see what is happening here. The enemy of God already has a plan in place to explain away the Rapture and to establish a false narrative for the Biblical events which follow it. Satan and his minions will exert all their resources to provide an answer for the disappearance of millions of people. Satan is after all, “the father of lies” (John 8:44), and as I mentioned earlier, he will employ all manners of counterfeit miracles to reinforce this key deception.

Popular new age author and channeler, Barbara Marciniak, in her book, Bringers of the Dawn, lays out this future dynamic plainly. She claims to have received a message from “extraterrestrials from the star system Pleiades” in which they revealed, “The people who leave the planet during the time of Earth changes do not fit in here any longer, and they are stopping the harmony of Earth. When the time comes that perhaps 20 million people leave the planet at one time there will be a tremendous shift in consciousness for those who are remaining.”

Marciniak further adds that she was told by these “alien” messengers, “If human beings do not change – if they do not make the shift in values and realize that without Earth they could not be here – then Earth, in its love for its own initiation and its reaching for a higher frequency, will bring about a cleansing that will balance it once again. There is the potential for many people to leave the planet in an afternoon. Maybe then everyone else will begin to wake up to what is going on.”

Again, THE lie is one that Satan and his evil legions in high places are already preparing to foist upon an unsuspecting, depraved, and self-serving world. It is clear God’s enemy is capitalizing on the evolutionary, climate change, and “earth first” fanaticisms that have already deluded countless individuals.

Lastly, there is a strong hint that the antichrist himself will also perpetuate THE lie concerning the Rapture.  In Revelation 13:6, where the antichrist’s surge in global power and demand for self-worship is detailed, it states “….he will blaspheme those who dwell in heaven.” 

A question needs to be asked here, “Who are those who dwell in heaven at this point?” The answer is raptured saints. Jesus said in John 14:3, a passage that reveals His plan to return and supernaturally receive His bride, “I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” 

Again, this wonderful promise from God’s Word is “an inconvenient truth” for the antichrist and for those who – in contrast with those who “dwell in heaven” – are called “earth dwellers” (Rev. 3:10; 6:10; 8:13; 11:10; Et al.). It is these “earth dwellers” who will have subscribed to THE lie. Their leader, the antichrist, will do his part to advance this great deception.

Indeed, we now live in “perilous times” (2 Tim. 3:1), and God is sending clear signals that His return for His bride is very soon. Myriad deceptions are sweeping the globe – and the church! It is urgent that all believers be “awake” and “alert” (1 Thess. 5:6). 

Let me wrap up by admonishing anyone reading this to submit to a reality check. This next paragraph is a mouthful, but it needs to be read several times. 

If you are part of a church that supports behaviors and ideas that find their roots in a godless agenda, that defends political correctness even as it strays from a literal interpretation of God’s Word, that feels self-righteous for “exposing racism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy,” that nurtures a bias against anyone who responsibly teaches the full counsel of God’s Word, that supports patently deceptive government mandates, that mocks those who responsibly teach end times doctrines – or in any way feels affirmed when its positions align with mainstream media, then your church is already assisting the basic tenants of THE lie.

Here’s a bit of tough love advice. Leave it. Find a better community of believers.

This is no time for playing games. As the terrifying truth of Matt. 7:21-27 outlines, there are far too many people who find security within their “Christian culture.” They have false assurances in the things they do and say. They are no different than the Pharisees who did and said much that appeared righteous but were exposed as “whitewashed tombs” (Matt. 23:27). 

The worst thing you could hear is God saying, “Depart from me; I never knew you….” (Matt. 7:23).  Don’t get trapped within the seductions of the lukewarm modern church. It doesn’t see its condition as it needs to (Rev. 3:14-22), and you risk succumbing to the same self-delusion if you embrace its attitudes and ideas.  

Instead, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves” (2 Cor. 13:5). The Bible is clear, “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Nothing is more important than securing a right relationship with Jesus Christ.

In the final years before Christ’s Second Advent, Satan will exert unprecedented efforts to thwart his own inevitable demise. He’ll know “….his time is short” (Rev. 12:12), and so the lies we all endure now are going to get a whole lot worse. 

But make no mistake about it. The foundations for the biggest lie of all are already laid.

© Steve Schmutzer 2023. All Rights Reserved