Mass Deception, Moral Collapse, and the Knowledge Explosion | What's Really Coming

Have you stepped outside or looked at your phone lately? If so, you have probably felt a cultural atmosphere ripe with confusion and exhaustion.

It feels like our culture has completely inverted good and evil.
We are breathing in the toxic atmosphere of a collapsing society on the brink of the end times.

In this episode, we look past the Hollywood tropes of meteors and explosions.
Instead, we examine the actual cultural environment the Bible predicts for the last days.

We break down three critical cultural signs: mass deception, extreme moral decay, and the unprecedented explosion of knowledge.

We also outline exactly what kind of man you need to become to withstand this cultural erosion.
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10 Signs We’re Living in the Biblical End Times (And What Men Should Do About It)

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Equipping Men for the End Times. Be Informed. Be Prepared. Be Faithful.
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#ManhoodTribes #EndTimes #Culture #Deception #ChristianMen

Timestamps
00:00 The toxic atmosphere of a collapsing culture
02:15 Sign 5: The rise of mass deception and AI tech
06:15 Sign 6: Extreme moral decay and narcissistic love of self
10:30 Sign 7: The unprecedented explosion of knowledge and travel
14:45 Discerning the season of Christ’s return
16:15 Moving from panicked consumers to prepared spiritual leaders

PS: Feeling like the world is getting crazier by the day, but you’re not sure what it all means? Download our free guide The Final Countdown to explore the biblical end-times signs that help us interpret this season of chaos.

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Transcript

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You've probably watched a movie at some point in time about the end times with meteors and red dragons and global conflicts and explosions everywhere. And while some of that definitely does get referenced in biblical prophecy, the scriptures tend to point to things that hit much closer to home, things that we might call the cultural atmosphere, the vibe of the last days. If you've stepped outside or looked at your phone lately and felt just sort of an underlying sense of confusion and exhaustion, like the world has completely inverted good and evil, you're not crazy. You are breathing in the toxic atmosphere of a collapsing culture. Men, welcome back to the Manhood Tribes channel. My name's Don. I'm the host here, and we are in the midst of a series where we are taking a look at the biblical end times and really trying to ask the question, are we actually living in the biblical end times? The world has gotten so crazy between political upheaval and cultural confusion and all of the things that are just making life crazy for all of us at the moment. Lots of people are asking, "Is this really what's going on? Are we at the end of the world? And if so, what do we need to do about it?" That's really what we wanna try to unpack here in this series of episodes is to figure out what kind of man do we need to be to face the end times if that really is what's upon us. And in particular right now, we are going through some signs related to scriptural prophecy to help us really examine and take a look at what are the things that would indicate we might be in the end times, and does the world around us actually match those signs. Can we look at it and be able to tell, yes, this is what's going on? So we started last episode, if you haven't watched that, I would encourage you to go back and check it out, but we are going through 10 biblical signs that will help us be able to determine if this is in fact the end times age that we are looking through. So we did four signs last time. We're gonna do three more today, and these are what I'm gonna call the cultural signs. These are the things that if we look at the world around us, what does it tell us about the kind of environment that we're living in, and does that match the sort of environment that the scriptures and that Jesus himself predicted would be characteristic of the end times season? Okay, so let's take a look then at our first sign today, which is really what I would call the rise of mass deception and the occult. If we look at what Jesus talked about in Matthew chapter 24, he says this: "Watch out that no one deceives you, for many will come in my name claiming, 'I am the s- Messiah,' and will deceive many." Okay, now you hear that word a couple times, deceive, and this is really what the idea is about here of this sort of end times culture, is that it does become a culture of mass deception, that things are not what we expect them to be, things are hard to figure out what's true and what's not, and I think we are beginning to see that kind of environment raise up in our culture even now. With the rise of AI and deep fake technology, it is a commonplace occurrence on a daily basis for most of us to open up our phones or our laptops and wonder, is what we're looking at real or not? Did this actually happen in the news? Is that video something that someone actually recorded in the real world, or did somebody make that on a computer using an AI robot? Sometimes it's really hard to tell, and that kind of confusion is exactly what sets the stage for this era of mass deception and the possibility of what Jesus described of people deceiving about who the Messiah is and maybe even deceiving followers of Christ Listen as well to what he says further along in Matthew chapter 24. "For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect." Now, the elect there is a term for people who are, their names are written in the Book of Life. In other words, they are followers of Jesus, and they are part of the Kingdom of God. These are the people who are faithful to Jesus, and that mass deception program might even be something that deceives them, that causes them to wander away from the Jesus that they have chosen to follow because of how confusing and maybe even how convincing this deception technique can be. We are certainly living in an era where that type of deception is possible, and maybe in ways that it never has been before The Greek word here for deception is plane, and I hope I'm saying that right. I'm no Greek scholar, but I think that's correct. It just simply means to drift. You don't have to have some kind of like momentous occasion of saying, "Oh, well, now I'm a Jesus follower, and tomorrow I'm not going to be," or, "Yesterday I was a Jesus follower, and today I'm choosing something totally different." Okay, that's, that's not usually what deception and falling away from Jesus actually looks like. Instead, it looks more like, uh, I, I'm not really dialed in to following Jesus on a daily basis. Like, I kinda believe in him, but it's not really my biggest priority in life, and on a daily basis, I'm getting fed with all kinds of other information that are convincing me I need to prioritize these other things in my life, until eventually you wake up years down the road and realize that Jesus isn't a priority for you at all anymore. And so mass deception isn't usually something that's gonna convince the people who are most committed to following Jesus to walk away, but what it will do is erode the faith of people who are casually invested in following Jesus. And so if that's you, I want to encourage you that the solution to this problem in this era is that you've got to have a way of staying committed to your faith in Jesus. The thing that is gonna help you end up on the right side of the end times is by maintaining your commitment to Jesus. We're gonna talk a little bit more about how you do that later on in this episode, so stay tuned All right, let's go to the next sign, which is what I will call extreme moral decay. Listen to the words of the Apostle Paul in the Book of 2 Timothy. He says this: "Mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God." Okay, so Paul kind of goes off in this section here, right? I mean, he's just sort of naming everything possible that seems bad. But I, I think if you pay attention to the list there, you really start to notice how much the whole idea of being lovers of self really comes through that passage, and that's the first thing that he says, that people will be lovers of themselves. But then you get all kinds of other ideas there that support what it means to be a lover of self, boastful and pr- and proud, without self-control, not lovers of good, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure. All of these things that are about me, me, me, and focusing on who I am and who I want to become. It is the essence of you do, you boo kind of culture, right? It, it is really kind of all about I'm gonna get me and mine, and I'm gonna invest in myself, which is really where our culture has gone over the past couple decades as we have seen this rise of the focus on self and an emphasis on self-optimization. Our culture has really began to-- begun to go down this road to the extent that cultural researchers have actually seen that over the last 40 years, there has been a massive spike in narcissism. Now, narcissism is something that can be clinically diagnosed, but even if it's not clinically diagnosed, we do see signs of it all throughout the culture where people are increasingly focused on themselves, even to the detriment and to the exclusion of others in their lives. This is a real, real problem, but it is evidence that we are moving closer and closer into this type of culture that gets described in the New Testament But guys, here's really the thing. It's not good enough for us to just complain about it or to be upset about it, to talk about how much the cultural, the culture is rotting around us or how bad things have gotten, okay? That isn't going to help anything, and that's honestly not what we are called to as men of faith and men of character. We are called to be the kind of men who can withstand that type of cultural erosion, that even in the midst of a culture that is becoming increasingly focused on self to the harm and the exclusion of others, that we are becoming men who are actually doing the opposite, that we are facing the culture around us and saying, "You know what? Vanity is just vanity. I don't have any reason to solely be focused on myself. I want to make sure that I can take care of my family, that I'm invested in close relationships with other men around me, and that I'm making a significant difference in my community, and that people around me know they can lean on me for protection, provision, support, just somebody to go to and talk to when they need an opportunity like that." Are you becoming that kind of man who's known for that kind of thing in your world, in your community, or are you the kind of guy who is increasingly invested in his phone, what he's seeing on social media, what he's posting to other people, the reputation that he has in the digital world and in the physical world? Those are things that everyone is obsessed with, and we have to be able to pull back from that to really kind of become the men that Christ has created us to be and the kind of men who will sustain themselves to the end as we seek to follow Christ. Okay, let's talk about the last sign for today, which is, I think, maybe one of the more interesting ones, which I will call the explosion of knowledge and travel. Listen to this word from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. "But you, Daniel," this is, uh, an angel speaking to Daniel, "roll up and seal the words of this scroll until the time of the end." Okay, so he's being told some things about what the end times are going to look like, and he's being told to write it down, but to seal it up so that others will have it. "Many will go here and there to increase knowledge." Now, this is a short little verse, but I think it's really important. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge. Now, you could argue that that can mean a whole bunch of different sorts of things, and that maybe that kind of prophecy has been true at many different points in history. And I would say, yeah, you'd be right. If that, if that's how you wanna look at it, that certainly is the case. But I think what we can look at is our cultural moment today and say, is there something unique about how this might be true in our day and age that would be different in other time periods and at other points in history? And I think the answer is absolutely. If we especially look at the idea of how quickly knowledge is increasing in our world, we begin to get a sense of just how fast things have exploded Up until about the 20th century, the total of humanity's knowledge tended to double about every 100 years. So about every century, you could say that human capacity and human knowledge, the sum total of human knowledge, was doubling every century. Now, with AI and with the internet, it's doubling about every 12 hours. N- not months, not years, not even days, 12 hours that human knowledge is doubling that fast. This is unprecedented in human history, and so there is something truly unique about what's going on in our world today. Knowledge is increasing so fast that humans can't keep up, up with-- can't keep up with it, right? I mean, we know this inherently. We look at the news, and we see how much AI is changing things. Uh, we wonder if we're gonna be able to keep our job. I saw in the news today honestly that, uh, another big tech company just laid off something like 15,000 employees because they believe that AI is going to be able to replace most of those jobs, and they want to continue to invest their funds in that, as if somehow the world is going to work well if we continue to eliminate possibilities for people to work and make money and just let the robots run things. Yeah. N- nobody believes that, but that's the direction that the companies in our world is, are headed because information is growing and changing so swiftly that the only things that can keep up with it are the computers. Humans cannot, and so therefore, we have started to create a world where information and knowledge is exploding so rapidly that we are becoming obsolete in that regard. Travel, in the same way, has become something that has never existed in human history before. The ability to get around the world in an afternoon is something that was inconceivable to pretty much every generation of human beings besides the ones today. And because of that type of rapid travel and rapid increase in knowledge, I do think there is something unique about the era that we are living in. Now, in another-- if we lived in another 100 years, would we be able to say that same thing about the culture ahead of us? Yeah, very possibly. I mean, we could continue on the same trend line, and, and maybe we look at knowledge that's, uh, increasing, you know, that's doubling every six seconds or something. Who knows? I mean, that, that would be absolute insanity. Maybe we come up with other m-means and mechanisms of travel in the future to where, you know, we walk through portals and end up on the other side of the world. I don't know. Crazy things could happen. But the point is, there is something unique about our era in history compared to all other eras in history, and that is the point. That is the point at looking at this sign and going, in comparison to all the other things that we see, all the other signs that are going on, does this tell us something unique about our moment, our particular time in history? And I think the answer is yes, it does So here's what I'm trying to say. When you add all of this up together, when you start to look at all of these signs together, I do think it begins to tell us that it is worth taking very seriously that we could be living in the end times. We could be living in the very moment where in our lifetime, or maybe in the lifetime of our children, we will see the return of Christ, that we are at the end of the age. Jesus was really clear that we can't know the hour and the day. We're not gonna know the moment that He's coming back. But what we can know, what He does seem to point to, is the season. We do need to pay attention to the signs. That's why He gives us so many of them, is so that we would be able to look around at what's going on in our world and say, "Here we are. We are at the season when Jesus' return is most likely." And so in light of that, we need to be the kind of men who are prepared and ready. That is exactly what He said to us. "Don't be deceived. Watch and be ready." That is the kind of manhood that we need to cultivate in these end times days in order to be prepared to serve our family and our communities around them Now to do that, I want to encourage you towards one thing in particular. Uh, I've got a resource that I want you to download that you could check out all of these signs together. And so if you go to manhoodtribes.com/countdown, you can download the final countdown document, which has all 10 of these signs that we're talking about in this series. And so you can look at them together and explore those, uh, with a group of friends or just on your own and compare them to scripture and come to some of your own conclusions. But in addition to that, I want to invite you into a community of men who are seeking to be ready and prepared for what it looks like to weather the chaos of the end times season. At the Manhood Tribes community, we are developing men who are not any longer going to be panicked end times consumers, but instead are going to be prepared spiritual leaders who are ready to take on whatever the world might throw at us and are committed to following Jesus and to sticking close to one another so that we can help support each other through what will undoubtedly be a terrifying and horrific season, but one that we are meant to survive and to move towards Jesus in the midst of. So I want to invite you into that where we are doing things like going through live biblical teaching to help us understand what the scriptures say. We're reading books about the end times and discussing them with each other to get better informed. We are doing manhood challenges and spiritual devotions to help us grow in our masculinity and our preparedness and in our faithfulness to Jesus Christ. So I want you to go and check it out at manhoodtribes.com/community, and you can sign up there to be able to join in on what we're doing in the Manhood Tribes community and get involved and be a part of this incredible group of men. So guys, come see us there, manhoodtribes.com/community, and I look forward to seeing you inside the group. I also will look forward to talking to you next time here on the show as we finish out these 10 signs together. Thanks, men. We'll see you then