Where did all the people go?

On a warm spring day back in the early 80s, two of my friends were called upon to make a trip to the dump for one of their high school teachers. It was an opportunity to get out of class and ride the White County back roads for a while and experience a bit of freedom.

While on that outing, the two found a large snake in the road. “Now there’s always one in every group,” and that one just happened to be driving the truck. They quickly stopped, caught the snake, threw it in the back of the truck, and proceeded back to school to scare any curious onlookers. However, not long into their journey, their newly acquired snake decided to move from the bed of the truck to the front seat. He climbed through the window and landed in the lap of the driver. After avoiding the ditch and oncoming traffic, all while fighting a huge snake for front seat supremacy, the snake slithered under the seat, and, when they pulled into the school, they quickly invited everyone to view their ruse. What took a minute or two to gather a crowd, quickly disbanded when the serpent was flushed from the truck and onto the sidewalk. The lesson remembered was that if you want to see people leave the scene in record time, then throw a snake in the middle of their party.

As humorous, yet true, as this story is, the lesson I would love to lean into is how quickly a large amount of people can suddenly fall away when their focus is on the serpent. Now the snake in this story, albeit large, was also harmless and non-poisonous. He possessed a cunning and used the element of fear and intimidation to cause fully-grown high school students to run away.

In scripture, a story is told of a time when people of faith will fall away from their God. It’s told of concerning the future, and, in 1 Timothy 4:1, Paul tells of those days by saying that in “later times some will fall away from the faith.” He also gives us another snapshot in 2 Thes. 2:3 and elevated the scattering when he mentions the falling away or abandoning of the faith to be in “great numbers.” So, as the ending of the dispensation we now live in comes ever so closer to its end, the Bible is clear when its Holy Spirit led scripture marks this exodus path by saying that a lot of people will quit attending church, become lazy, and just view on TV or online, or they will simply lose a desire to cultivate their Christian walk.

In short, one very certain sign to watch for that the end of time as we know it will soon come upon us will be a noticeable decline in church attendance. That ending of time will transition into a horrific and terrifying series of events known as the great tribulation. It will be a time like none of us have ever seen. I cannot stress enough the urgency to accept the Lord now to avoid the tribulation that is to come. Now concerning the abandoning or the falling away, how will that look, and how will it be recognized? For starters, the church, in America, has been in a steady decline for the last 14 years, but one alarming statistic we cannot ignore is that since the discovery of COVID-19, 32 percent of the church population has quit. That’s one in every three people who were attending before COVID have now stopped coming. There is no greater record of Christian gatherings than the church, and a recent study shows the numbers don’t lie. According to this statistic, in the past four months, an estimated 25 million people have quit church. They have simply fallen away. I guess you could say they have abandoned their faith. There has never been a time in recorded history where that many people have abandoned their faith in such a small window of time. Could it be that we are seeing the great falling away coming to pass right before our very eyes? If so what is next, and how do we prepare?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can ride out the great tribulation. Don’t misunderstand the severity of what is to come, and, by all means, don’t be ignorant of what the Bible clearly says concerning the signs. The serpent is desperately trying to scatter the crowd, and the fact remains that if you can’t serve the Lord now, you will not make it then. The servant of the Lord that remains faithful will not experience or endure the wrath that is to come, so I urge you to make that decision to accept Christ as Savior, and do it now. We can help you with that prayer and would love to see you this Sunday, at 9 a.m. and 11 a.m., on the square in Sparta. We’re real people, living real lives, serving a real God. Welcome home.