A Christian news website I like to frequent had a newly posted blog entry today that read, “In the small town where I worship, a neighboring church holds Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on an almost daily basis. They know the Scriptures that clearly forbid mixing our Savior in with false gods, and yet this has made no difference. They do what they do because that is what they want to do. Not that this is unusual. It is happening all over our nation--churches embracing anti-Biblical activity, and choosing to portray it as God’s perfect will.”

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Jordan gave a study not to long ago on the overwhelming relevance of II Timothy’s focus on the “last days” in light of today’s apostasy. He summarized, “The church of Jesus Christ today sits before a world that needs it as never before, but the church has been set off on the side in impotent irrelevancy.

“You can take the average church, or the super mega-churches of our day, and outside of the interests they have in themselves, they are irrelevant to the community about them.

“People say the answer to all of that is to go back and develop some new methods and some new forms and create a new passion. But I’ll tell you something, folks, the form and methodology is never the answer, because form must follow function. That’s a law of life.

“Methodology must follow the message that it’s designed to implement. And the only answer is to go back to the basics of the message. When Paul writes Timothy, he writes to him in a world in which the gospel of the grace of God was first being proclaimed.

“He (warns) him, ‘Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.’

“That’s the conflict you and I face. We live in a world that lies in the lap of the ‘wicked one.’ I John 5 says the whole world lies in wickedness.”

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It’s fascinating that II Timothy is the last written book of the entire Bible and Paul chooses to address the apostasy in the “last days.” Also fascinating is the fact that each one of the second epistles in the New Testament—II Corinthians, II Thessalonians, II Timothy, II Peter, II John—has a special emphasis on the “last days” and the satanic policy of evil against the purpose of God in those last days.

While I Timothy is devoted to matters of church establishment, rulership and standards for operation, II Timothy reveals the church in absolute, total ruin. Paul starts the book by lamenting, “All they which are in Asia be turned away from me.”

Jordan says, “In every chapter, Paul points to the declension—the departure from truth and from sound doctrine. As you go through II Timothy, the steps in the apostasy are laid out as well as the countermanding responsibility in light of it and how to be faithful.

“The die is cast and the course is clear that the church the Body of Christ is going to spend most of its earthly sojourn in apostasy that permeates the whole of it. And that’s why when you study church history . . .

“You begin in the 1^st Century studying in the Scripture, but as soon as the pages of God’s Word are concluded and the Bible’s completed, what you begin to start studying in church history is the history of institutions, and organizations, and political, social kinds of movements.

“You can study your Scriptures ’til your eyes bug out and you don’t study about denominations and the history of buildings and institutions. What you study about is some truth; some doctrine living in some people, and that truth going out and permeating the communities they live in.

“The form is not the issue. That’s not to say there wasn’t a form to it because there was. In I Timothy is sort of a handbook for the operating of the local assembly. But when you come to II Timothy, it’s obvious the people are going to ‘have a form of godliness but they’re going to deny the power thereof.’

“The spiritual source of the life of Christ in them—working through the truth of His Word—no longer becomes the issue. In fact, it becomes very confused. When Paul says in II Timothy, ‘For Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica; Crescens to Galatia, Titus unto Dalmatia,’ he’s not just talking about them personally, he’s talking about the doctrine that he preached.

“He’s saying Demas has departed from the truth that’s been committed to him, and in light of all that, II Timothy was written. I heard a fellow describe the book one time as ‘Timely Tips to Timothy for Tempestuous Times,’ and I always thought that was a great title for II Timothy because that’s just what it is. II Timothy is an epistle that addresses situations then that are very similar to the way things are today.

“When II Tim. 3:13 says, ‘But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived,’ you know why things are worse today then they’ve ever been before. Because there’s more people on the planet then there have been before! You put more sinners in a bag you get more of the same.”