Well everyone, here is the anticipated part 3... just to warn you however, there will have to be a part four to finish up the story...As usual, I can't keep up with life when it comes to telling the interesting stories... I haven't told you any of the stories from this year yet! Thanks for all your prayers and support. It's not easy being chaplain, part of the Admin. committee, and teacher... but God is good. I know he doesn't allow any trial to come without providing the strength to meet it... I just pray that I can be a quicker study...it's not only not fun, but also dangerous to have to keep repeating the same lessons!
"Great peace have they which love thy law and NOTHING SHALL OFFEND THEM." That verse often reminds me that I apparently don't love the law of the Lord as I should... May God grant more love. :)
P.S. (I had a problem with the formatting copying and pasting from Word, so the endnotes might be hard to follow. If you see the letter(i) in parenthesis, check the end of the document to read the endnote.)

PART 3: Antichrist Strikes
“Now we beseech you, brethren…That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for [that day shall not come], except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;” 1 Thess 2: 1-3.

“Hey Kody, we need you to read a letter and let us know what you think. Saúl asked Lyli to print it for him yesterday, and praise the Lord she had the presence of mind to save a copy on her computer. It’s a letter from Juan Carlos.”
Oh great. More trouble! I thought. With the Yani incident still fresh in my mind, I was really curious to see what the letter would be all about. At Ruan and Tara’s house, I began to wade through the nine-page epistle. After a short salutation, it began by quoting Acts 17:22-31, followed by the reasonable claim that in this passage Paul is giving a summary of the gospel. Next came an admonition to memorize the passage and meditate on it, letting the words become your “rational worship,” or as some versions say “reasonable service:” That phrase from Romans 12:1, in its original context refers to submitting and surrendering ourselves to God, but Juan Carlos’ application seemed to imply that knowledge (memorized scripture in this case) is a valid substitute for surrender and sanctification. This first problematic statement was immediately followed by a second:
“I just want to concentrate on a specific phrase from Paul’s discourse,” he continued. Interestingly, the single phrase of his choosing was the inscription from the pagan altar in the Athenian Areopagus, ‘to the unknown God.’” In the rest of the letter he more fully defined and explained his concept of the “unknown God.” He used an eloquent and wordy style, sugarcoated in fragments of bible verses taken out of context and familiar phrases such as “the great controversy” that feel comfortable but, upon analysis, are diametrically opposed to his argument.

The teachings of the letter can be summarized as follows:
1. The purpose of existence is to know the Unknown God
2. The Unknown God is defined as the “greatest mind” of the universe, and thus immaterial.
3. God the Father and God the Son therefore are merely manifestations of the Unknown God, this Greatest mind, and they will one day cease to exist because they will no longer be necessary when the Unknown God becomes truly known. (i)
4. The existence of everything began first in the mind or imagination of God. Nothing can surprise him (it?) because he knows everything, but has always kept at least certain important parts of that knowledge secret. (ii)
5. Knowing everything, God chose from all the possibilities of existence a single course of events (history), or line of existence, and that is the one that we have lived and are living in the world today.
6. Since God is love, we can assume that he chose, or predetermined, from all the possibilities, the best line of existence and the one that best serves his purpose for us, which is to know him. (In other words, God created sin intentionally in order to give us the opportunity to better know his mind! Does not this sound like the age-old deception of Genesis 3:5, “you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”?

The terrible implications of this basic framework are not hard to recognize, and the conclusions immerge clearly in the rest of Juan Carlos’ letter, although they are not all stated so explicitly as in the following summarized list:

1. God (The greatest mind in the universe) is the originator of sin and evil.
2. Therefore, sin is not really bad or wrong, because it comes from God. (In the letter there is no reference whatsoever to Satan, at least not in the sense of an “Adversary.”)
3. It follows logically then that there is no sinner, and hence, no necessity of a Savior or of any plan of redemption. Christ and his sacrifice therefore has very little significance, and his coming to this earth had no purpose other than that it was an attempt to help men realize their purpose of existence in knowing the “unknown God” In fact, the letter alleges that it was a failed attempt, because although “the face of Christ is now everywhere,” men today are farther from knowing the “unknown God” than they have ever been. (p. 3).
4. Since there is no sin or redemption, neither is there a final judgment or reward. In fact, everyone at the end will realize that they have played the part they were meant to play in the history of the world (p. 9).
5. Finally, since the plan of salvation outlined so clearly in all of scripture is not necessary, we need a new way of interpreting the Bible, and that is to “look beyond the words themselves and connect with the divine mind” (p. 8).

Wow! Unbelievable! This was far beyond anything previous that we had heard from Juan Carlos, and it clearly exposed what he was really about! After I read the letter we met with all of the staff and went over it again. How many letters like this had Saúl already received? Just how indoctrinated might he be? We didn’t know how much he may have communicated with Juan Carlos during the three-month vacation, but we doubted that Juan Carlos would have shared such blatant heresies without having conditioned his target to be ready to accept them!
As we talked, more troubling details began to emerge. Damaris, one of our teachers who graduated a few years ago when Saúl was still a sophomore, and who had also been one of his romantic interests, shared that Saúl had given her a book on justification and had pressured her to read it, urging that it was of the utmost importance. At the time she hadn’t paid much attention to the incident, dismissing it as another one of his attempts to get her attention. She hardly even gave the book a glance. As it turned out, the book was by Juan Carlos, and Saúl had given it to several students as well. He also told several of his classmates that he had returned to the school that year for a specific purpose, and it was beginning to appear as though that purpose was to recruit more followers for Juan Carlos. Limbert, Joaquin, and other 3rd and 4th year students had recently begun to approach staff members with questions on the Sabbath, tithe, the covenants, and other teachings that had previously been clear to them.
Worried, and not without some righteous indignation, we began to form a plan of action to determine whether all of this was really part of a sinister plot as it appeared to be. Obviously we needed to talk to Saúl. But how would we broach the issues? Someone suggested we pray about it. We all knelt and poured out our concerns to the Lord, and I was struck by the realization that this was the first time in months that we had all been together on our knees as a staff, asking God’s guidance! As we prayed, I took courage from the story of King Hezekiah and how he prayed over a disturbing letter from the King of Assyria that was also attacking the nature and character of God.(iii) I knew that God would give us wisdom. We figured Saúl would already have some idea about what was coming, and we decided we should start by making it clear to him how much we care about him and his salvation. We wanted to be sure he knew that we were meeting with him because we were deeply concerned for him as well as those that he was influencing. Next we would ask him why he had decided to study here again this year and continuing with a series of questions on his personal beliefs, particularly in regard to the doctrines that had recently come under question. Each staff member chose a question to present so that one or two people wouldn’t do all of the talking.
It was in the wee hours of the morning by the time we finished planning and praying and went to get a few hours of sleep before the morrow's conflict.

(i) It was after reading this letter that Ruan realized what Juan Carlos had been intimating in his week of prayer sermon on angels back in 2009 (See Part 1, “A Trojan Among Us.”) By taking the out-of-context phrase “took upon himself the form of a servant” from the well-known passage about Christ in Philippians chapter two and connecting it with the thesis of his sermon that angels are “servants of God,” Juan Carlos was attempting to strip Christ of his divinity by making Him merely a created being like any of the angels!

(ii) This idea that God holds back essential knowledge from us is one of the very first accusations that Satan made in heaven. He wanted to enter into the secret councils of the Godhead. He was jealous of Christ, and spread lies and discontent to win over the other angels. He continued with the same rhetoric in the garden of Eden, claiming that God had forbidden the fruit because He wanted to hold back special knowledge from the human family. It is also noteworthy that this motif of secret knowledge and mysteries that can only be known by a select few, the initiated, is central to many popular clubs and organizations that at their highest levels are merely modern versions of ancient pagan cults, and thus Luciferian.

(iii) 2 Kings 19:10 “Thus shall ye speak to Hezekiah king of Judah, saying, Let not thy God in whom thou trustest deceive thee, saying, Jerusalem shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria.
19:11 Behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, by destroying them utterly: and shalt thou be delivered?
19:12 Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed; [as] Gozan, and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of Eden which [were] in Thelasar?
19:13 Where [is] the king of Hamath, and the king of Arpad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, of Hena, and Ivah? 19:14 And Hezekiah received the letter of the hand of the messengers, and read it: and Hezekiah went up into the house of the LORD, and spread it before the LORD.
19:14 And Hezekiah received the letter of the hand of the messengers, and read it: and Hezekiah went up into the house of the LORD, and spread it before the LORD.
19:15 And Hezekiah prayed before the LORD, and said, O LORD God of Israel, which dwellest [between] the cherubims, thou art the God, [even] thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; thou hast made heaven and earth.
19:16 LORD, bow down thine ear, and hear: open, LORD, thine eyes, and see: and hear the words of Sennacherib, which hath sent him to reproach the living God.
19:17 Of a truth, LORD, the kings of Assyria have destroyed the nations and their lands,
19:18 And have cast their gods into the fire: for they [were] no gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone: therefore they have destroyed them.
19:19 Now therefore, O LORD our God, I beseech thee, save thou us out of his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that thou [art] the LORD God, [even] thou only.”