Posted
by Michael Bunker
editor@lazarusunbound.com
***This is the transcript of Michael
Bunker’s sermon on the prophetic/religious condition of the world today. His sermon is based primarily on the
responses to his article on the “Passion”.
Editing has been left to a minimum, so it won’t read like a usual
article; it is, for the most part, left like it was delivered. We want to thank the LazarusUnbound.com
transcribing committee for their work in transcribing Michael’s sermons ***
“Take heed unto
thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt
both save thyself, and them that hear thee” (1
It
is necessary for those of you who are listening at home (around the world), or
if you’re watching the video tape of this sermon, that you have a bit of
background on what it is we are going to discuss; so, if you are able, go to Lazarusunbound.com and read the original
article on “The Passion” that is posted on the front page. Secondarily, for background purposes, I’m
going to discuss some things in relation to a doctrine series that I did where
we discussed the doctrine of the Papal Antichrist and the False Prophet. These articles can be found at our website in
the “Critical Doctrines” section. If you
need to get rehearsed on those, please do.
Those
here in the homegroup, if you need to go back through those teachings, it would
help you understand what I am going to say today if you understand the historic
teaching of the Church (the historic Protestant Church) on who the Antichrist
is, who the False Prophet is, and those things.
If you can study those it will help you understand what we are going to
talk about tonight.
1
Tim 4:16, Paul writing to Timothy warns him and says:
“Take
heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this
thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.”
Anyone
who has even a cursory knowledge of the Doctrines of Grace knows that anything
that we do does not (and cannot) save us. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves eternally
as far as our salvation goes. Paul here
is talking about temporal salvation;
the salvation from the everyday calamities and curses that can come upon us for
disobedience and the hardships that also come upon us for all manner of disobedience. Paul says,
“Take
heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this
thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.”
We
should understand from this (and of course only a hard-core Arminian would come
to the conclusion after reading this that it is possible to save yourself) that
this is temporal salvation in view, and we also understand from this how
important doctrine is and the preaching of doctrine is.
With
all the hostile e-mails I have received over the last couple of weeks; last
week or so from pastors, I would say to them:
“What
doctrine is taught is very important. And, according to Paul, by teaching to
proper doctrine, it is possible temporally to save both yourself and other
people. You are responsible for the
souls placed under your care and you will give an answer for them, and if you
don’t warn people about things that are blatantly dangerous then that penalty
will be meted out on you personally
and on those who you failed to warn.”
This
is a very, very important thing we are studying here. Christian men throughout the history of the
Church, through study, prayer and revelation, have come to the conclusion that
the religious system would eventually, through time, evolve into a one-world
cult. This has been the teaching of the
Church since very early on. I’m going to go back 700 years, starting:
1. In 1310 with
2. You can move
forward to
3. 1412
4. 1497
5. In 1522
6. In 1550
7. In 1553-54
8.
9. 1587
10. 1600 King
11. 1654
12. In 1727 by
13. In 1754 by
Even
that hyper-Arminian
This
is the point I am making here - if you study history, specifically
if we study Christian history, you will come to the conclusion soundly that it
is impossible to believe that we are in the end-times, and at the same time deny
that the Church has taught throughout history that the last days religious
system would be apostate and would evolve into a one-world cult.
You
must (if you know anything about history of the
Why
in the world has the world religious system come to the conclusion that we are
in a great revival or that this movie particularly is going to be on the
forefront of a great revival? The Bible
prophesies general apostasy and shows that the religious system will be moving
into a one-world cult. When we see that the Protestant Movement is
steam-rolling right back to
They’ve
somehow separated in their mind with the teachings of the Church and what is patently
obvious about what is going on in the world.
All of these great giants of the faith (and thousands more, by the way)
were killed by the
1.
Was
the Antichrist of the Bible.
2.
That
the Pope of Rome was the man of sin, the son of perdition .
3.
He
was revealed and has been revealed consistently for over 700 years.
For
700 years, the Church of Jesus Christ has come to the uniform conclusion that
the Pope of Rome and the Papacy were the Antichrist, and somehow over the last
100 or so years, this has been obscured beyond recognition and so this is an
underlying foundation of what I’m going to talk about tonight.
The
Great Deception that is spoken about in the scriptures says that “many will be
deceived”; in fact if you weren’t the very elect, you would be deceived. This is what we need to understand, when we
posted the article on “The Passion”, our position was very, very simple: the 2 nd commandment forbids
any images of the Godhead or any member of the Godhead. This was the
position of the Church from before the Protestant Reformation. It has been almost uniformly the position (and
I am going to read some quotes in a little while of the position of the
Reformers) of the Puritans and the Pilgrims and the Founders of this nation, that
to even make a picture of Jesus Christ was idolatry and a violation of the 2
nd commandment. All I’m saying is
that now, if I stand up here in the year 2004 and merely repeat what has been
taught in the Church for 700 years, we can find out exactly where we are on
God’s timeline by looking at how the world reacts to the statements that have
been the plain teaching of all our belief system for 700 years.
Histrionics
panic, absolute anger, hatred, threatened violence; merely for standing up and
saying, “Listen, the Church has always taught:
1. That we don’t make
any images of God, and,
2. That the Pope is
the Antichrist.”
So
now we should realize that if one of the Pope’s henchman makes an image of
1. That man would take
upon himself the name of
2. That he would say
he is
3. That he would do
away with God’s laws,
4. That he would
institute his own laws,
5. That he would sit
as a moderator or some type of intermediator between God and man.
This
has been the prophecies that the Church has been watching for 2000 years, and
all we’re saying is that this has not only happened, but it has happened right
before they eyes of the Church! If
you’ll look around today—to say anything against it (the RCC) today—it makes
you a hater. It makes you somehow a “non-Christian.”
So-called “Protestants” today have united their efforts to legitimize the
Church of Rome and anybody who denies that fact is a liar and the truth is not
in them.
If
you go down the list of those who have supported this movie, you’ll not only
find a list of people who have continually, throughout their careers, supported
the Church of Rome; but they have either passively or actively written or
taught that the Church of Rome is a legitimate Church. They will say that although the Catholic
Church may have some errors that they are still Christian in nature. I will tell you this; you can be a lot of
things at a particular time and still be a Christian. You can be a whore and be a Christian. You can be a murderer and be a Christian. You can commit all manner of sins and still be
a Christian. But there is one thing you
cannot be and be a Christian — that is Anti-Christian. You can’t be Anti-Christ and be a Christian,
it is impossible; that is simple logic. I could spend some time here and go through
the scriptures and go through that with you, but it is patently true that you
can not be Anti-Christian and be a Christian.
1. Anti-Semitic.
2. Looking for a hero.
Mel
Gibson stood up to make a movie of a false “Christ” that matches the false “Christ”
that these people have made up in their heads – and you can see these people
rushing to embrace what they considered (and hoped) to be an anti-Semitic
movie. If the Jews didn’t like the
movie, you knew the Patriot movement would LOVE it. So the movie was tailor-made to take the
Patriot movement off the map and to bring them right into the same one-world movement
they spend page after page after page on the Internet saying they are against.
So,
Mel Gibson captured their imagination, fed right into what was expected of him.
The Roman Catholic church has subverted
and taken over the Patriot movement (of course we expected this for some time,
since the intelligence agencies that have infiltrated and controlled the Patriot
movement are all run by Catholics).
Let
me tell you really quickly that the whole idea that this movie, from the
beginning, that people came out against
this movie as anti-Semitic is a lie. Nobody
was against this movie. In fact, nobody
really knew what was going to be in the movie. The Jews had not come out against previous
movies about “
Right
at the opportune time, a couple of globalist plants in the ADL who were
Jesuitical plants (who have always stood up to take the side of that particular
New World Order group) stood up and started saying that this movie was
anti-Semitic. Now that smells like a
plant to me; when nobody is saying anything and Mel Gibson suddenly comes out
and does interviews and says he is being attacked and his father has been
threatened because his movie is anti-Semitic; then all of a sudden you get a couple of talking heads in the ADL who
pop up saying the movie is anti-Semitic. This has been a diversion from the very
beginning to take attention away from the fact that the movie is Anti-Christian;
it is not anti-Semitic at all -- it is an anti-Christian movie. You see? It is very easy to take people’s minds off the
real issue when you start talking about something that doesn’t even matter. Since when has the Christian Church ever
consulted Judaism to decide if a movie is OK?
They never have, and all of a sudden this thing blows up and nobody asks
the question that’s really at the core of this —
ARE
WE SUPPOSED TO BE MAKING IMAGES OF JESUS CHRIST?
IS
THIS A VIOLATION OF THE 2 ND COMMANDMENT?
That
is the real question, you see, but that is the question that can’t be asked. The movie is anti-Christian, not anti-Semitic.
Nobody wanted to ask any questions about
Vatican
II, which happened in the mid-1960’s, changed the way the Roman Catholic Church
operated. Prior to that, in the historic
Roman Church, the masses were done in Latin. According to many of the most conservative
members of the Roman Church, because of those traditions, the miracles that
they believe happened during the Mass, happened because of the tradition. So if the Mass is properly done in Latin, by a
properly ordained priest, then they believe that transubstantiation actually
happens during the
The
Pre-V2 movement has been infested with Jesuits since the very beginning. They don’t mind hating a Pope that goes
against their power. The Jesuits have
killed at least 2 Popes. You can find that information in “The
Mel
Gibson says he believes that transubstantiation has not happened (except in a
very few places) since the Vatican II. So he opened his own church that does the Mass
according to the old ways, according to the Old Latin. Because of that, he believes that the miracle
of bread and wine actually turning into
Some
of you may be saying, ‘what does that have to do with what we are talking
about?’ It has everything to do with what we are talking about because those
miracles and transubstantiation in particular, are what causes -- according to
the pre-Vatican II Catholics -- the Catholic Church to have the authority to
act against those who are heretics. You
see if you are a heretic yourself, you don’t have the authority to burn another
heretic, but if you are doing things right and the miracles are happening and
transubstantiation is happening in your church, then you then have the
authority to act out what the Jesuits proposed in the 15-1600s, which was the
destruction of all non-Catholics, even to the point of murdering them or
burning them at the stake, which is why they had the Inquisition.
We
ought to be very, very careful of this pre-Vatican II movement, even if it
seems on the surface like we both are against the
This
is a classic dialectic. Let me tell you
how this works. In Soviet Russia it was
quite common to do what was called “the thaw.” What would happen is Stalin, or Khrushchev, or
Brezhnev, or whoever was in power, would start to liberalize and he would give
power and greater freedom to the intelligentsia and to the literary giants to
act with more freedom, and when he found out who his enemies were (this
happened in both in Russia and China, too) they would round them all up and kill
them or put them in the camps. That is
how they found out who your enemies are; you say, ‘oh, we’ve been too harsh,
we’ve acted too rashly, so we want to open things up.’ Then you round up anyone who sticks their head
out. If you get a book called, New
Lies for Old (I’ve got it here in the library), written by a man named
Anatoly Golitsen in 1985 before the fall of the Soviet Union, you will find
that he said that Perestroika and Glasnost was actually this same type of movement, only
on a bigger scale. They were going to
feign and fake the fall of the
Now
if you’ll follow the liberalization movement that has happened under Pope John
Paul II (and going back to V2) you’ll know that every time that a major
disaster hits the Catholic Church — such as the problem they’ve had with
priests fondling little boys — it’s actually when the Roman church is on the
move to ecumenicalism. The biggest moves
they make to infiltrate and destroy the Protestant Churches are when they show
themselves to be weak. So, you have the
great movement like the Promise Keepers and all these ecumenical types of
movements (like the Charismatic movement which is purely Jesuitical) happen
while the Catholic Church acts like they are weak. When they have scandals and these types of
things is when you have to watch them, because that is when they are making
inroads into destroying Protestantism. This
has happened continuously — this dialectic where you act like you’re weak and when
the inevitable conservative backlash comes — you can say, “we
are getting rid of this old guard that was touching boys out there behind the
altar.”
The
conservative wing of the Catholic Church is the
The
dialectic is there. The plan started
during the Reformation and I wrote about this in Swarms of Locust, and
we also have some videos available (Swarms,
The Papal Presidency, etc.) If you haven’t read Swarms of Locusts, you need to read the book. The counter-Reformation
was started in the 1540’s at the Council of Trent. At the Council of Trent they decided they were
going to destroy Protestantism no matter what the cost. By doing so, the Jesuit Order was put in
control. They would infiltrate:
1. Universities
2. Colleges
3. Protestant
seminaries
4. Acting groups and
guilds
5. Doctors
6. Lawyers
7. All different
manners of businesses
By
doing so they would subtly push Protestantism to embrace the basic doctrines of
Catholicism without having the name and the evil weight that was associated
with those. That is what Swarms of
Locusts is basically about…the doctrines.
Counter-Reformation
began to accelerate at the end of the 1500s and you saw people like Robert
Bellarmine, Alcazar and Francisco Ribera begin to put forth prophetic views
that were designed to protect the
Brilliant
move.
Those
teachings began to infiltrate through people like Scofield (and his Jesuit Bible);
they infiltrate the seminaries throughout
The
intelligence apparatus of the
All
this began to come together over the last 20 years when we saw the rise to
power in both the Democratic and Republican parties, people who either came out
of these same schools, or came from schools like
So
you see Jesuitism rising in the
Mel
Gibson played right into this, knowing that there was an anti-government
movement growing in this country in the early to mid 1980’s. He began making movies that played right into all
of this. At the exact same time, the great apostate religious phenomenon like
the
So
Mel Gibson, as he began to plan the rollout of this movie, played the
anti-Semite card and began gaining great attention toward this movie. Jesuit Zionists out of the ADL then came out
against the movie saying that it was anti-Semitic, which was a lie both on
their part and on the part of Mel Gibson.
So
we end up with the entire religious system in America and around the world
embracing a film that is not only flawed, not only a bad movie factually and
theologically, but one that is the most blatant violation of the 2 nd
commandment that has ever happened since Jesus Christ walked the face of the
earth. They not only are embracing it;
they are pushing it, hawking it, as if it is Jesus Christ Himself walking on
that flat screen. The indulgence pushers are back, and if you
don’t think that this is an indulgence you are wrong. You go down there and pay your ticket, and
the Catholic Church says that if you believe that movie, then you believe the
gospel and you are one of them. There is
a quote in my article on “The Passion” by the Pontifical Council which
basically says “If you deny this movie, you deny the gospel. If you embrace the
movie, you embrace the gospel.” That is
nothing but an indulgence; an indulgence for the price of a movie ticket. All of this is happening right under our eyes.
The
so-called prophecy hawks like Tim LaHaye, Grant Jeffrey and Hal Lindsey have
warned us about a coming “ecumenical movement” for the last 15 years, then the
minute the most blatantly ecumenical movie in history comes out, they all run
down to see it and say if you don’t go see it, something is wrong with you.
WHAT IS HISTORY
FOR?
Let
me ask you a question. What is history for? Why did God even give us a
historical perspective or the ability or the desire to record these things that
we think and believe through time? What
is history for if it is merely to be ignored? What is history for if we don’t learn anything
from it? If all we’re going to do is
wake up everyday as if nothing ever happened before then and make all our
decisions based on our five senses and what we think (which is to deify the
thoughts and sensations of our own brains) then there is no need for history. There is also no need to go forward because tomorrow is going to be
just as hectic and as Godless as today. History gives us the idea and the ability to
know that there is a plan being worked out through history and will be worked
out tomorrow. History is going
there. That is our hope.
The
reason I know I can trust God tomorrow is because the Holy Spirit has showed me
that men trusted Him 2000 years ago. People
trusted him all the way to the burning stakes 500 years ago. People trusted Him as they were being killed
by the Roman Catholic Church in the late 1500-1600’s. 100,000 Albigenses and Waldensians trusted
Christ as they were slaughtered by the Catholic Church. Hundreds of thousands of Huguenots trusted
Christ as they were nearly wiped out by the
There
is total despair when there is no history; because if I wake up and I have to
decide today what I’m going to believe based on my five senses and what is “happening”
to me, then there is no hope for tomorrow. There is no hope at all. I might as well end it all right now. The entire world is committing suicide because
they don’t know history. They are
killing themselves everyday because they don’t know history and if all you try
to do is tell them, “Let’s take a look at what the Puritans said and the
Pilgrims said and those of our forefathers said”, they say, “I’ll have none of
that history, I’m going to start off tomorrow like I started off today,
ignorant and stupid and fat! And I’m just going to keep killing myself until I
go to hell!” They might as well say
that. That is exactly what is going on. People are diving headlong into hell. It tells us in 1 st
There
is a love affair in this country with Roman Catholicism (or surreptitiously
through their doctrines) and with Mel Gibson in particular and with George W.
Bush. Nobody asks the hard questions. It hearkens back to the day of Hitler and
Stalin, especially the earliest days of Adolph Hitler. Here is another fact. The love affair with Hitler would have ended abruptly
if Protestant Germany had merely asked if the guy was a Roman Catholic. Do you understand that they didn’t have to
know anything about what the Nazi’s believed?
They didn’t have to know anything about his plans. The cradle of the Reformation was
The
same thing happened with Stalin. History
is continuous and now we have a love affair in this country with Mel Gibson and
George Bush. It hearkens the mind back
to the early days of
The
Let’s
look at our country. George W. Bush just
invaded
1. We’re in trouble.
This country is in trouble.
2. We’re (us in the
true remnant) in trouble because I’m not going to shut up! I don’t plan on
shutting up about it.