Tag Archives: wrath

Intolerant But True!

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INTOLERANT BUT TRUE!

“The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what He has seen and heard, but no one accepts His testimony. Whoever has accepted it has certified that God is truthful. For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in His hands.

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.” John 3:31-36.

Whose words are these? Jesus’ words? John the Baptist’s words? The Apostle John’s words?

My guess is that they are a little aside that John wrote to interpret John the Baptist’s defence of his lesser position as the friend of the bridegroom, not the Messiah. Sounds like Jesus, doesn’t it? Again, my guess is that, during John’s years as an intimate friend of Jesus, first as His disciple during His earthly ministry and then as an apostle to the world, he began to think like Jesus.

Over the years of his walk with the Lord, John saw in Him a man, but much more than a mere man. Jesus had spoken about heavenly things with such authority that He must have been there before His sojourn on earth. Unlike other humans who only came into being at their conception, Jesus existed long before His time on earth.

We cannot conceive of anything we have not actually experienced. How can we? No matter how lively an imagination we might have, whatever we conjure up is only fanciful. It has no foundation in fact. Science fiction is only that and only useful for entertainment. Jesus was not into sci-fi; He spoke about reality based on truth. This is the difference between Him and those who have created religious beliefs out of their imagination.

Why is it that people refuse to accept His testimony? The religious leaders clung tenaciously to their ideas and interpretations of the Torah because they believed that they were right. Underneath that was the need to impress the people and to hold onto the power they had over them by setting up and policing the rules they had made around the Torah. Underneath that, however, was something far more sinister and closer to the bone – they were greedy and wicked at heart.

Jesus diagnosed their problem, and the problem of everyone who refuses to believe in Him:

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” John 3:19, 20.

John uncovered another amazing truth about the man, Jesus. It was His anointing by the Holy Spirit that made Him the man He was. Contrary to what we may think, Jesus set aside His deity when He came into the world, and lived and acted only as a man. He steadfastly chose to live in submission to the Father and not use His divine power to do anything.

At His baptism, He was affirmed by the Father and anointed by the Holy Spirit for His role as Messiah. Satan hounded Him to act independently of God but, to His dying breath He chose to be a true Son by trusting and obeying the Father, not doing His own thing. The Father, in turn, entrusted Him with the role of atoning sacrifice, and gave Him the highest name and authority in heaven and on earth.

Unfortunately for those who reject Jesus and declare that Christians are intolerant by insisting that He is the only way to the Father, they will discover in the end that they were wrong. The Bible could not have stated it more clearly:

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.”

Acknowledgement

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

Faithful And Fair

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FAITHFUL AND FAIR

“God “will repay each person according to what he has done.” To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honour and immortality, He will give eternal life. But for those who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil; first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; but glory, honour and peace for everyone who does good; first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For God does not show favouritism.” Romans 2:6-11.

Isn’t it amazing? God is so fair that He allows us to choose the outcome of our lives! But, unlike the devil, He tells us all the options and doesn’t hide the small print. He lays it all out for us and then allows us to make an informed choice.

So why do so many people ignore His warnings, reject His offer of a new start on the right way, and end up where they didn’t want to go? There are some very powerful forces at work to keep us from believing God and being the beneficiaries of His mercy and grace.

The first is the same deception that led the first pair to defy God. Satan suggested that God is unreliable and unfair. He sowed doubt into their minds about His integrity. According to the devil, God either did not say what He meant or He did not mean what He said. In spite of all the warnings in Scripture, many people still refuse to believe that God means what He says. In their foolishness they brush Him aside with the age-old argument, “It won’t happen to me.”

Long ago God said through Asaph, the psalmist, “You hate my instruction and cast my words behind you…When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you.” Psalm 50:17; 21. People are still like that today. They think that, because nothing bad has happened to them, God either does not see or does not care about what they are doing. But they have forgotten that there is a day of reckoning coming.

The second force at work to keep us from God’s grace is the evil nature within us. Not only do we not believe Him; we don’t want to believe Him because we enjoy our sin too much. Satan does not have to do much deceiving and much persuading because we are willing allies to his deception. It suits us to believe him because we have no inclination towards God and His ways.

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear their deeds will be exposed.” John 3:19, 20.

But, in contrast to the dark side, there is a bright side. Paul said that there is a reward coming for those who persevere in doing good. Perseverance is the key. In the same way as punishment doesn’t come immediately, so rewards are being kept for the day when Jesus returns. It would be easy to lose heart and give up if we were not convinced that God is faithful and fair. We can count on the fact that He means exactly what He says.

“Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.” 1 Corinthians 15:58.

This is what the Bible calls “the fear of the Lord”. To fear God is to revere and honour Him, and to act on what He has said because He is utterly faithful; firm and immovable on what He has spoken. We can depend on His reliability because He can never contradict Himself.

It costs discipline and stickablilty to keep on doing the right thing, like the salmon swimming against the current to get to their spawning ground. Like them, we have a reward coming at the end of the journey and it is worth the trouble to keep the end in view. Those who live for the moment have their reward – the momentary “pleasure” which will turn around and bite them in the end. Those who live for the end result, glory, honour and peace, will have to wait for it, but the outcome will be forever.

Acknowledgement

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

 

 

 

It Begins With Ingratitude

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IT BEGINS WITH INGRATITUDE

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.” Romans 1:18-21.

Well, at least Paul was not afraid to call a spade a spade!

If he wrote this letter to explain to the Roman believers the righteousness of God in providing salvation, why did he start by painting such a bleak picture of human behaviour? Who is He talking about?

Paul spent half of chapter one, the whole of chapter two and half of chapter three taking pains to show his readers that everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, is guilty before God. There is not a single righteous person who can escape God’s wrath against sin because of their good behaviour.

What did Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit have to say?

First of all, there is a whole group of people who ignore or deny the clear evidence of a Creator, which is written on every leaf and blade of grass and on every star in the sky. They choose to live as though He does not exist; they never give Him the time of the day let alone acknowledge His goodness by thanking Him for the very breath they breathe.

The road to ruin begins with ingratitude. Anyone who fails to acknowledge God by being thankful for what they are and have is in danger of taking the road to perverted values and a perverse lifestyle. Ingratitude makes God angry. Ungrateful people are self-centred and discontented. Ingratitude kept the children of Israel who were delivered from slavery in Egypt, out of the Promised Land.

Ingratitude is the first step towards muddle-headed thinking and mental “darkness”. What is darkness? Darkness is the absence of light, and in this case, the light of understanding. When people throw God out of their lives by refusing to acknowledge Him or His goodness, they lose their ability to think straight.

The light of understanding has only one source – God. David knew that, and he wrote about it in the Psalms.

“For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.” Psalm 36:9

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” Psalm 119:105

“The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.” Psalm 119:130.

God is the source of light, truth and understanding. Without Him, we are left to make sense of our lives on our own and, unfortunately for us, we cannot make sense of anything because we have thrown out the “glue” that holds it all together. All we can do is think up nonsense which has not connection with reality. How pathetic we are to think that if we believe what we made up, that makes it true!

There is a terrible downward path to destruction for people who choose to disregard God and go their own way. Unfortunately for them, they do not know that it is not God who chooses their end; they do because their empty and futile lives are only fit for one thing — the rubbish dump. God did not plan their lives to be useless and worthless, and it makes Him angry to see wasted potential when He had so many good things in store for them.

The problem with denying God’s existence is that we have to replace Him with someone or something because we all feel incomplete in ourselves. We all need someone bigger than ourselves on which to depend. When God is no longer there, and we have muddled brains, who or what are we going to put in His place?

Acknowledgement

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.