Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth? Luke 18:8
Faith on the earth? What is the Lord Jesus speaking of here? There will never be a time on this earth when there will be nobody who has faith in God. Even during the appalling control of the antichrist during the Great Tribulation years, there will be some who will be faithful, some who will be willing to pay for their faith with their very lives. All through history, even during the dark periods of Israel’s rule of the judges and rule of wicked kings, there were seven thousand men who had not bowed the knee to Baal (1 Kings 19:18). During the dark ages of medieval Europe, as Roman Catholicism snuffed out any who would oppose or challenge or deviate from its vile doctrines, individuals and small groups faithfully followed the Word of God until the pope had his minions murder them. No, our text is not speaking of individuals exercising saving faith in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is addressing the spiritual state of the Lord’s people when He returns.
Our text is posed as a question; it is not saying that the faith will have faded to nothing at Christ’s return. But it is directing listeners to consider the deterioration of Christians’ spiritual condition. If we look around ourselves, we will find Christians relying less and less on the provision of God, and more on their own resources. Christians today don’t trust the Lord to supply our daily bread or to preserve us from danger or to keep us within the truths of the Word of God. No, the spirit of Laodicea has gripped the Lord’s people to the extent that we have become lukewarm. We can handle our own affairs, and do not feel the need to rely on God for any of these things. The faith of our fathers that learned to trust in God through times of poverty, danger, and opposition is now just a theme for nostalgic songs. Well might the Lord Jesus question whether faith might exist when He returns.
One of the things that is vanishing in our day is the confidence in the Word of God and what it teaches. Christians have taken to reading modern versions of the Bible, versions that have deleted most of the the references to the lordship of Jesus Christ, that question many of the primary doctrines of the faith, that even pervert the truth of the Lord Jesus gathering in the midst of His people. These watered-down and contaminated versions are designed to soften the barriers that ought to be clear and stark between the truths once delivered to the saints and the damnable heresies of Rome and the cults. Many of the Christians today are no longer quite sure of what they should believe about the essential doctrines of the faith. They are also unsure of why we as Christians must maintain separation between ourselves and those who would deny the truths of the Gospel, of baptism, of the principles of gathering to the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of many other doctrines that were at one time absolutes. Those things most surely believed among us are not as surely believed as they used to be. The faith is being eroded more rapidly and deeply than we could have imagined only a few short years ago.
May God preserve His truth among us, and may He also preserve in us a desire that there should be faith on the earth until He come. -Jim MacIntosh