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Matthew 24:12 Because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold Once Moses finished his address to the Children of Israel, The Eternal called him and his faithful disciple Joshua to the Tent of Meeting. There, the One who first appeared to Moses in a non-consuming burning bush revealed that the Children of Israel will eventually forsake the God who rescued them from bondage; that they would also forsake and reject His commandments. To his great dismay and disappointment, Moses would also learn that because of it God would, for a time, hide His face from His people (Deuteronomy 31:14-21). Yeshua gave His disciples the same warning that eventually His followers will forsake the Torah. He said, because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold (Matthew 24:12). History records that before the end of the first century C.E., a movement coined as the ‘Anomians’ had appeared on the scene and was growing in strength. The translation of ‘Anomians’ is: the ‘Lawless ones’. It is the term that gives us the word, ‘iniquity’, or: lawlessness. This early heretical movement defined itself by a permissive and licentious understanding of ‘grace’. Misreading and misinterpreting Paul’s letters, these people proclaimed that the mosaic code of Law was no longer valid as the expression of faith in Messiah. Yeshua also warned the early congregations about these people. In His address to John on the Isle of Patmos He refers to those people as the Nicolaitans and the followers of Jezabel (Revelations 2-3). Paul always claimed to adhere to the code of conduct defined in the Torah (Acts 24:14). Peter remembered his Master’s warning and in turn warned the believers. He calls the anomians, untaught and unstable, saying that they distort the Scriptures to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:16-17). Jude, the brother of the Master calls them ‘hidden reefs in your love feasts’ (Jude 12-13). As we can see, the apostolic era believers followed in the footsteps of our fathers in the Book of Deuteronomy of whom it was said that they would reject the commandments. Today, the grand majority of those who claim to be followers of the Master actually define themselves by a rejection of those commandments. This is just as Yeshua prophesied, because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold (Matthew 24:12). About 150 years before the manifestation of Messiah on earth, a group of Torah loyalists started by a father and his five sons rebelled against the Hellenistic secularization of Israel. They fought to preserve the Torah and the sanctity of the Temple. This happened during the reign of one, both Prophet Daniel and Yeshua proclaimed to be a prototype of the Anti-Messiah of the end (The Book of Maccabees). In these days of introduction of the ‘man of lawlessness’, the ‘lawless one’, (2 Thessalonians 2), we again need a group of faithful ‘Maccabees’, unafraid neither of the king nor for their lives (Revelations 12:11); true warriors of the faith who stand against ‘anomianism’ and its perverted king to inspire the people of God to return to the Torah of Yeshua. Please Abba, raise them for us now!
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Maccabees, paul, Jude, Peter, anomians, antianomianism,
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