An Elephant in the Room Kind of Thing

 

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

Placing one’s faith in God, through Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross, is the only means of forgiveness for our sins.  It’s free for the repenting and asking!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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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^©   

Loved and Belonging

 

Thursday, January 14, 2021

O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me.  You know when I sit down or stand up.  You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.  You see me when I travel and when I rest at home.  You know everything I do.  You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord.  You go before me and follow me.  You place your hand of blessing on my head.  Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand!

You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb.  Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!  Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.  You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.  You saw me before I was born.  Every day of my life was recorded in your book.  Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.  How precious are your thoughts about me, O God.  They cannot be numbered!  I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand!  And when I wake up, you are still with me!  Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

It’s easy to feel insignificant in this universe.  It occurred to me that may be one reason those who feign atheism do so…overwhelmed with the immensity of the cosmos, one cannot imagine God thinking of a single creature as consequential.  It’s like whistling in the dark to ignore-away the bad things that can happen.  A professing atheist feels alone and therefore without purpose or reason for existing. 

We whistle (or scream) against the night of our fear. 

And yet, for those like the Psalmist, who choose to acknowledge God as Sovereign Creator and sustainer of life, the terror of being alone is dissipated, evaporating like a morning mist…and in its stead there is a wonderful dawning of, not just significance or purpose to this existence, but an unfolding and undeniable sense of being loved; of belonging. 

In my youth the prospect of staking it all on trust that a god I could not see would deign to love one like me, small and insignificant…well, it was more than I could bear to face.  So, I hid in the security blanket of agnosticism, a denial that anyone can know the truth about where we come from, and therefore, without definitive understanding about meaning or purpose, I could not be blamed for bumbling around about God.  In time, I realized that would not do; it was much like a stay of execution for a man on death row, or a baby sucking on a pacifier – it passed the time but did nothing for the sense that time would eventually run out on ignoring God.

And then God once again spoke through the Psalmist to my childish excuses:

When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers—the moon and the stars you set in place—what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?  Yet you made them only a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor.  You gave them charge of everything you made, putting all things under their authority—the flocks and the herds and all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, and everything that swims the ocean currents.  O Lord, our Lord, your majestic name fills the earth!  Psalm 8:3-9

God spoke significance into my heart.  He told me I was with consequence in His eternal existence, crowned with a Godly glory and honor; I bore His image, and I have purpose in His will and plans for everything created.  I, the dust speck, born to a simple, unremarkable family…was on His mind.  Frankly, the thought still leaves me breathless.  But I have discovered, in the passing of time, that, along with John Wesley’s famous last words, that the best of all God is with us, He is still with me. 

For You Today

Faith, the journey upon which we all explore our relationship to everything, is only possible when one takes the leap of moving forward…not whistling – worshipping.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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[1] Title Image: Courtesy of Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©

Calvin and Hobbes (cartoon) by Bill Watterson

For other posts on this text see Still There and The Doily