Monday,
August 14, 2023
For God did not spare even the angels
who sinned. He threw them into hell, in
gloomy pits of darkness, where they are being held until the day of
judgment. And God did not spare the
ancient world—except for Noah and the seven others in his family. Noah warned the world of God’s righteous
judgment. So God protected Noah when he
destroyed the world of ungodly people with a vast flood. Later,
God condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and turned them into heaps of
ashes. He made them an example of what
will happen to ungodly people. But God also rescued Lot
out of Sodom because he was a righteous man who was sick of the shameful
immorality of the wicked people around him. Yes, Lot was
a righteous man who was tormented in his soul by the wickedness he saw and
heard day after day. So you see, the Lord knows how to
rescue godly people from their trials, even while keeping the wicked under
punishment until the day of final judgment. He is
especially hard on those who follow their own twisted sexual desire, and who
despise authority. These people are
proud and arrogant, daring even to scoff at supernatural beings without so
much as trembling. 2 Peter 2:2-10
There is a very
common, albeit empty-headed trend today, as in the days of Noah:
Whistling in
the darkness – imagining that since God is only loving, there can never be
judgment for sin. Scripture, however, answers:
And just as each person is destined
to die once and after that comes judgment, Hebrews 9:27
Denying the
existence of Hell and judgment, in favor of universal redemption, is (at least)
the work of fools, uninitiated as to the eternal consequences of sin! Denying judgment places one squarely in the
crosshairs, a target for Satan’s lies.
If the enemy cannot convince someone that there is no God, the next evil
tactic will be to blunt the idea that God would punish sin. Scripture replies:
For all
people are mine to judge—both parents and children alike. And this is my rule: The person who sins is the one who will die. Ezekiel 18:4
The Scripture
speaks to the spiritual argument, but (for those who lean to the skeptical
side) there is also logic. The logic of
punishment speaks to the nature of God, including His love for all He has
created. There are abundant numbers of
proofs from logic at this point, but for time’s sake, we consider just this one
truth:
Equal, but Opposite
In physical
dynamics there is for each action an equal, but opposite reaction. UP requires (by definition) DOWN, HOT means
there must be COLD, and RIGHTEOUSNESS demands we are capable of UNRIGHTEOUSNESS. Evil and Good cannot coexist without the
consequences of either. For there to be
a REWARD (Heaven), there must be RECOMPENSE (Hell). Evil requires punishment in the same way
righteousness deserves reward, or God cannot, in fact, be good. The corollary then would be: to avoid death, forgiveness must intervene, or,
if God does not step-in, death in its eternal finality must ensue.
For You Today
Billy Graham
once said: If the Bible is false, then
nothing matters, and if the Bible is true, the Bible is all that matters. And this is what Scripture said about the
penalty of sin being death, and how God intervenes:
For the wages
of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus
our Lord. Romans 6:23
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky
Road; have a blessed day!
There are about 2,600 devotional
posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.
Title Image: 1)
Pixabay.com 2) Pixabay.com (images combined)
Images without citation are in public domain. Unless noted, Scripture quoted from NLT©
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