I read Nehemiah 8. It is a short book in the Old Testament, and it is good. Nehemiah was the fellow who supervised the rebuilding of Jerusalem and alongside Prophet Ezra help to purify the Jewish community that had re-gathered there. Nehemiah was governor and Ezra was the priest and the scribe.
The day came when Ezra called all the adults, and all children who could understand, to come and listen to the reading of the Law. They stood and listened. The Levites were there to help them understand what they were hearing. Soon there were tears, weeping, and crushed hearts. They fell on their faces. “For all the people wept, when they heard the words of the Law.” The Jews realized how far they were from God. But Ezra said not to weep, for it was a day of rejoicing. The Festival of Booths was born, and the people celebrated, giving gifts to those who had nothing, and went their way eating and drinking. It is a short chapter. I recommend reading it.
The response of the people was the only proper response but it is one from which we can gather strength and praise our Savior all the more. First, the people listened to the word. Any walk with the Lord should begin with listening, either by reading yourself and listening with your mind and heart, or listening to a pastor. The people were instructed, and that is a good start.
Then they wept. There are a lot of reasons people weep when they read or hear the Word. It is precise, beautiful, true, and convicting. It is a gift delivered once for all to the saints, and it is good for reproof, exhortation, and education. The Word also reminds us how far we are from Him, Him as savior and we as sinners forgiven by His blood and His grace. But the Word also reminds us of how close we can be to Him!
Then the people were glad. He restores us! He hears prayer, he regenerates us in His likeness, and we are glad, going forth in joy to know that we CAN know our Savior personally. They celebrated, and they gave gifts. We should do that as well, always being on the lookout for those who are in need to fill that need. Giving the gift of the Word, or our time, or our love or all three!
Finally, the people went away rejoicing but their response to hearing the Word did not stop there. They DID something. In this case it was to begin the Festival of Booths (Sukkot). The Israelites evidenced an emotional response but the instructors encouraged them to apply the words to a spiritual response, and they did so.
What is your response to hearing the word? Do you remain unaffected? Do you fall on your face? Do you weep? Do you rejoice….but remain inactive? Or does hearing the word motivate you to a response in the world that in turn affects others?
Our joy should be all the greater because not only do we have the word, we have the promise of the Word.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” (John 1:1-5)
May He shine brightly in your heart today. If it has been a few days,…weeks…months since you have really listened to the Word, do it today. In Him is life!
Are the weeks getting longer, or is it just me? By the time Friday comes, I’m just pretty tired!
Of course, I’m thrilled to have been working in a job I love, so no complaints there. Weekends are an opportunity to rest and reflect on the week. I like to think back and go over the times where I may have stumbled and use the weekend for Bible reading or household tasks to keep my place shipshape. Also to enjoy the nature around me, and slow down to contemplate life- this one and the next.
I like to look back and praise the Holy Spirit for when I see where He helped me overcome something. I pray, study and think on Him and His word. Sundays are days for worship and fellowship, praising Him. In short, weekends are not only respite from the busy week but a clearing of space and time to reflect on the relationship I have with Him.
The Bible does not speak much of the concept of rest, except that when it does speak of rest, it is always in the future. There are few people resting in the Bible. They are always busy.
Even in Genesis 49:15 where Jacob said “When he saw that a resting place was good, And that the land was pleasant, He bowed his shoulder to bear burdens, And became a slave at forced labor” it means that they saw that the place was permanent and restful so they worked hard to prepare it for the day in the future when they could rest.
Hebrews 4 discusses rest. In that verse, the LORD is called the Rest. Heaven is the place of rest. (Also Psalms 5:11 and Hebrews 3:11).
God said for the Israelites to let the land rest, let it lie fallow every seventh year.
Of course, the most important mention of rest was in Genesis 2:3 where God Himself rested on the 7th day. “Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.”
I like to be busy for the Lord and to use every minute I can to do His will and further His kingdom. But at times we have to stop. Continual work for the sake of work is not good. Though God was not tired, He stopped and rested on the 7th day to show US we need it. In addition, He didn’t just stop and rest, He blessed the day, AND He made it holy.
God made the sabbath a day of rest so rest must be important. He blessed the day, which means we should honor the sabbath and Him who established it in ancient days. He made it holy, putting His holy hands around the day as a hedge to set it apart as a day to honor Him, specifically.
Many other more worthy and academic people have preached on the importance of sabbath rest, so I’ll just say that as busy as I am and I like to be, setting aside a time when I can simply meditate on Him, praise Him, sing to Him, and rejoice in Him is a blessing indeed.
On this earth, we are called to work, to fight, to persevere, to wrestle, to run. There is no rest for us, the weary. At least, NOT YET. Picture the sabbath rests of those few precious hours on a Sunday as a drop of water on the tongue of parched worker, soothing for but a moment; but when we enter THE Rest, and lay down our burdens in heaven, the full flowing water will slake our thirst forever and we may then rest. Imagine how refreshing it will be!
The permanent rest will be as a flowing fountain of peace, thoroughly drenching every cell of ours and relaxing us to a degree none can even imagine. No more fighting! No more persevering! No more wrestling! No more running! Our rest will be Jesus Himself!
Hold on but a bit longer. Enjoy your Sabbath day knowing it is a drop of a foretaste of what is to come. And it will come, and SOON!
A post on Instagram by the ever-solid Doreen Virtue (it’s here) about channeling reminded me that in 2011 I had written a series of essays examining what channeling is (AKA ‘automatic writing’), and had examined three highly popular books that these allegedly Christian authors had published. I revived and updated those essays, I also shortened them splitting them up to examine each author in turn.
Neale Donald Walsch wrote “Conversations with God” (1995), William P. Young wrote “The Shack” (2007), and Beth Moore wrote “When Godly People Do Ungodly Things” (2002). All three were Christian bestsellers. All three are unholy and blasphemous.
Automatic writing is when a writer clears his mind, gives his will over to another entity from the supernatural realms, and allows his hand to be used as a transcriber, thereby allowing the entity to produce the work, and not the human writer through his own mind or consciousness. Not even the scriptures were generated in this manner. The Bible’s authors received inspiration but were mentally and emotionally present. The Holy Spirit inspired their own minds and personalities to write. The authors didn’t zone out and become robots as another entity produced the works.
The point of the 2011 essays was not so much to examine the content of what these writers wrote about. Though discernment lacks in many a Christian heart these days, the ungodly moments in those books eventually become apparent to the readers who call upon the Spirit for light and illumination.
Turning to the point of this essay, I noticed similarities in the emotional lives of today’s ‘Christian’ automatic writers used by spirit or a ‘force’ from the other side. Hopefully I will provide an understanding of how satan works in the emotionally vulnerable.
One thing these automatic writers who channel these supernatural entities people all have in common is they all had a Christian-ish background. The second thing they all had in common was sexual abuse, parents who were distant either physically or emotionally, and/or trauma of severe kinds that usually resulted in a deep depression through to adulthood. It was in the depths of their depressions at the bottom of their turmoil that they began to experience the “call” from the other side. Here are their stories. Today, we look at Neale Donald Walsch.
Neale Donald Walsch, 81 years old. Photo Source- Facebook
Neale Donald Walsch was brought up as a Roman Catholic, he was an altar boy, actually. Born Again Christians know that Roman Catholicism is not Christianity. It is a false religion. However, in a conference on ‘God and Love’ at the Fort Collins Lincoln Center, Colorado in what looks to be about twenty years ago, Walsch described his growing disillusionment with the rigidity and minutiae of Catholic traditions as a youth and mocked it cynically in a ‘humorous’ speech at the conference.
His family encouraged his quest for spiritual truth and eventually he wound up informally studying comparative theology for many years. In that quest, Walsch sadly did not turn to the Bible but to himself.
He was at an incredible low point in his life. A fire had destroyed everything he owned, his marriage had broken up, he was in a car crash and suffered a broken neck, then became unemployed and homeless. Living in a tent, Walsch picked up cans in order to eat.
He had no faith to cling to, and no way to resolve his anger. In 1995 Neale Donald Walsch realized his life was a mess. He said, “I woke up one night just angry, really frustrated, and wrote down what was on my mind” in an angry letter to God. God ‘answered’.
As described here, Walsch has said, “After writing down all of his questions, he heard a voice over his right shoulder say: “Do you really want an answer to all these questions or are you just venting?” When Walsch turned around, he saw no one there, yet Walsch felt answers to his questions filling his mind and decided to write them down. The ensuing automatic writing became the Conversations with God books.
Walsch’s own words, “To my surprise, as I scribbled out the last of my bitter, unanswerable questions and prepared to toss my pen aside, my hand remained poised over the paper, as if held there by some invisible force. Abruptly, the pen began moving on its own. I had no idea what I was about to write….Out came….Do you really want an answer to all these questions, or are you just venting? … Before I knew it, I had begun a conversation.” (New York Times article).
From Amazon
Walsch’s spiritual stance is that we are all one with God and that helping people is the satisfaction to life.
No. Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy HIM forever.
What resulted from Walsch is a cottage industry of false religion permeating the world. Wikipedia states that “Conversations with God, was published in 1995 and became an international bestseller. It remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for 135 weeks. Six of his other books have made the Times list in the years since. He has published 28 books and his works have been translated into 37 languages.” His books are not a small problem.
Screen shot from his book 1, chapter 1.
“In the spring of 1992 an extraordinary phenomenon occurred in my life. God began talking with you. Through me.” ~Neale Donald Walsch No, God doesn’t talk to me thru Walsch. God talks to me thru His Son! (Hebrews 1:1-2)
God is not speaking today. True, in the past He has spoken directly to several people in the Bible (not as many as you’d think) and in various ways, too. But He has spoken in His word, which is complete and sufficient for all training. (Hebrews 1:1-2; 2 Timothy 3:16).
Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God contributed to the New Age religion and its growth. The counterculture hippie movement of the 1960s had by the 1970s morphed into the New Age movement containing elements of the early twentieth century Victorian Theosophy spiritism, 1050s UFO mania, and Helen Schucman’s 1975 A Course in Miracles. Shirley MacLaine’s 1983 book Out on a Limb added much fuel to the fire of fervency for a holistic spiritualism devoid of God. I remember that book, it caused a huge stir.
What has been, it is what will be, And what has been done, it is what will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
Satan from before the beginning of human history through to now and beyond, will try to poison God’s Gospel. In some people, man’s inherent pride will click with this notion that God selected them specially to speak directly to them and they will be used in this way to pervert the Gospel. Some who seek a man-made religion will pick up these wrong theories and philosophies and connect through these unfortunate authors and their books. Millions.
When I was on the path toward the cross but not there yet, I was curious about religion. But my pagan mind didn’t know which religion to choose. I did not know at the time the God chooses us, we do not choose God. I bought the trilogy Conversations with God and I read book 1. The book did not make sense to me. It meandered, it was internally contradictory, and it was boring. I didn’t even bother to read Walsch’s book 2 and 3, they stayed on my shelf, unread, until I was born again and I then threw them all out. I thank God for preserving me until the time He appointed the moment of justification.
Sisters, when an author says that God spoke the book to him or her, run. The only book God spoke in is the Bible, and the only authors who had a conversation with God are the 66 authors who were inspired by the Spirit, not possessed by a spirit.
EPrata photo. Not a photo of our office, but another local building who put up an enormous flag
I was in my newspaper office. Tuesday is a big paper day, we go to print Wednesday morning. I rented the office from my friend who lived a big farmhouse, and she called me from her living room. I thought it was unusual that she phoned, being just a few feet away from me in the same building. But her voice evaporated all other thoughts. She said quietly but with fervor, “COME HERE NOW”.
The first plane had just hit the twin tower in NY. We watched with eyes open, breathing shallowly, standing with arms numbly at our sides…until the second plane hit at 9:03. Our eyes locked together, and we knew without saying a word that this was an attack. We also knew that nothing would ever be the same. We watched until another plane hit the Pentagon 34 minutes later. It felt like the world was coming to an end. It really did. We thought the world was ending. A knot was in my stomach and coherent thoughts refused to form in my head. We got our purses and the first thing we did was walk across the street to the hardware store and we bought the biggest flag they had. We went back to the office and put it up. Then we went to the bank to get money. Cash was going to be important if the electricity went out or we were ordered to evacuate. We didn’t know what was coming next and we wanted to be prepared. It could have been a nuke coming next, for all we knew. At the bank, they had the TV on in the break room with the door open and the volume up so customers could hear what was going on. A fourth plane had just gone down in PA. We saw the smoking crater. We knew that plane was part of whatever was happening.
We resolved that our freedom was under attack. Running a newspaper which reported the news and offered a platform for the people to speak their thoughts on any political or civic matter freely, we decided our most patriotic thing we could do to support the Constitution that day was to get the paper out. The terrorists were not going to stop the presses. They were not going to stop freedom from ringing out. And that is what we did.
Churches were full that Sunday, though a bit less full the following Sunday. By about four slim weeks, churches were back to their spotty attendance. Why is this? Why do people fly planes into buildings and kill others? Why is there murder? Why is there war? Why are there conflicts at every level? Because man is inherently wicked. Our hearts are evil above all things, who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9). Because man is basically evil. If we didn’t have laws and limits we would be killing each other at every moment.
Jesus is the hope we have to become good. Not on our own merits. We do not become good through our own efforts. No, “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good–except God alone.” It is not a popular thing to say, that we are not good, but we are not. [Click on the link for John MacArthur’s sermon the Sunday after 9/11/01 as he takes us through a biblical understanding of death, terrorism, and the Middle East]
I thank Jesus that He poured out His life so that we may live…and become righteous. “It is because of him [God] that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Even at that, our fleshly lives on earth are a struggle, a struggle against sin and growth in righteousness. I long for the day when flesh shall be glorified and sin shall be banished.
So people are evil, and we struggle against our nature. We want what we want and we sometimes terrorize or go to war to get it. Such will be the way, until the end. The end that comes before the beginning!
In the meantime, as we watch the death throes of this old world (which means the birth of the Glorious World!)…we mourn but also we love our nation America.
The song you are about to listen to is from a Las Vegas Diamond Rio concert. They received an immediate resounding standing ovation, and continue to do so every time they perform it!
Here in America, In God We STILL Trust:
On the day of 9/11 there were people trapped above the strike zones who thought it would be preferable to hurl themselves out the shattered windows of the twin towers rather than burn to death. One photo in particular caught the world’s attention. It is called “Falling Man” and it seems that his graceful swan dive plummet was poignant in the extreme. Here is the back-story of that photo.
Five months after 9/11 the Superbowl came along, just as it always does. The Superbowl is noted for artful, funny, or avante garde commercial debuts, due to the high viewership of the game. Budweiser showed a commercial called “Respect” and showed it only once, then until now. Thanks to Youtube, the ad has resurfaced. It is sure to bring a tear to your eye. We remember American greatness, American products, American ways.
Jesus will return in glory with His glorified saints. He will institute new nations and new cities populated by sinless resurrected chosen ones. There will be no more war because our hearts will be made right with Him. There will be no more terror because we will want nothing, having been given it all by our Savior. If you bow low to the Savior, He will lift you up high. Please do it soon.
Are the weeks getting longer, or is it just me? By the time Friday comes, I’m just too pooped to pop. Of course, I’m thrilled to have been working in a job I love, so no complaints there.
Weekends are an opportunity to rest and reflect on the week. Sundays are days for worship and fellowship, praising Him. In short, weekends are not only respite from the busy week but a clearing of space and time to reflect on the relationship I have with Him.
The Bible does not speak much of the concept of physical rest, except that when it does speak of rest, it is always in the future. The Bible does speak much about work. Paul uses many active verbs to describe our life here on earth- walk, strive, wrestle, run…
Hand to the plow, (or mower) look ahead, not back. EPrata photo
Jesus at His zenith of popularity… Big crowds, laudatory accolades, and promises, promises by the naive:
“And another also said, “Lord, I will follow You, but let me first go and bid them farewell who are at my house.” But Jesus said to him, “No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:61-62).
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Commentary says of that verse, “As ploughing requires an eye intent on the furrow to be made, and is marred the instant one turns about, so will they come short of salvation who prosecute the work of God with a distracted attention, a divided heart. … The expression “looking back” has a manifest reference to ‘Lot’s wife’.“
This “Back to Basics” series explores some of the more basic doctrines of the Bible Believing faith of Christianity. After the rapture there will be millions of new believers who must come to grips, and quickly, with the basic tenets of our faith. This series is a primer. Other entries in the series are
Hell is real. The current American culture doesn’t want to believe that hell is real. Liberal Christians all around the world don’t believe it is real either. Rob Bell wrote a book called “Love Wins” in which he says “A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better…. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.” It should be noted that Mr Bell has become apostate by now.
Of course, Mr Bell is completely wrong, at least about the doctrine of hell being a misguided teaching. Jesus taught it. Was Jesus misguided? Certainly not.
I wrote this series in 2011, ten years ago. Things are worse now, as we know. Things have worsened exponentially. So I’m bringing back this series for another round in hopes it might help someone in this decade.
I’ve been mulling over some things about apostasy. This is because in the course of my online and real life discernment and encouragement ministry, I see that the essential doctrines of our faith not only are being eroded “out there”, but also “in here”, in Christian places and in people close to me. I am horrified at the depth and breadth of the erosion of what I believed were the obvious givens. I am grieving over the adherence of many people to the destructive heresies.
Have you ever heard of people getting killed by hail? I haven’t so much, either. I’ve heard of lightning strikes, and deaths by tornadoes, hurricanes, and windstorms. But not hail. Until yesterday:
“Hailstones the size of golf balls have reportedly killed three people and injured 25 others in China. The giant pieces of ice pelted several rural areas in east China’s Jiangxi province overnight and on Wednesday morning, resulting in the deaths of three people, the Xinhua news agency said. The hailstones were said to be as large as 3.5cm in diameter and weighed 18g on average. The storms forced the evacuation of more than 700 people, destroyed about 2,700 hectares of crops and damaged more than 900 houses, a spokesman with the Jiangxi provincial department of civil affairs said. Around 170,000 Jiangxi residents have been affected by the freak weather, the spokesman added.”
So let’s take a look at whether the impression I have of the rarity of death by hailstones is legitimate or not:
The folks at American Association for the Advancement of Science; ScienceNet Links were asked the same thing.
“Every year, tornadoes, hurricanes, and snowstorms claim lives and cause injuries. But strangely, hailstorms, which pelt the ground with hard balls of ice, never seem to hit human targets. A listener called Science Update to ask why. We’ve all heard stories about golf ball- and baseball-size hail denting cars and damaging houses. So that prompted Lee Greenfield of Washington, D.C., to ask why we never hear about people getting hurt by hail. We checked with Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at The National Severe Storm Lab in Norman, Oklahoma. He says hail stones have to be a couple inches in diameter to cause injury. But hail of that size is pretty rare. And hail that could really seriously hurt you—getting to be baseball-size and larger—there aren’t very many storms each year that do that. And even within a storm that does produce hail that size, not very many of the stones are that big. Most of the stones are much smaller than that. … the listener’s perception—that relatively few people get killed or injured by hail—is correct.”
So just as I was mulling all that over, today I read of another hailstorm that was freak to say the least.
“DALLAS–Maintenance crews worked Thursday to clear roads after a storm dumped several inches of hail on parts of the Texas Panhandle, trapping motorists in muddy drifts that were waist-to-shoulder high. The storm left so much hail in its wake that workers had to use snow plows to clear the piles from the road.”It was crazy,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Justyn Jackson said about the strange storm, which hit Wednesday afternoon. The hail was “real small” but there was a lot of it in a concentrated area, accumulating 2- to 4-feet deep, he said. The rural area where the storm struck was mainly ranch land, about 25 miles north of Amarillo and south of Dumas. Rainwater gushed across the parched land, washing dirt and then mud into the hail, pushing it all onto U.S. 287, Potter County Sheriff Brian Thomas said. “There were just piles of hail,” said Maribel Martinez with the Amarillo/Potter/Randall Office of Emergency Management. “Some of the cars were just buried in hail and people were trapped in their cars.”
This story from the UK Daily Mail is pretty interesting. Apparently even though the US Weather Service confirmed the freak weather event, people were dubious. So they posted photos on the US Weather Service Facebook page and people were still dubious. Skeptics derided the unlikelihood of the event as actually having occurred, it was so outside the scope of understanding and expectation as a weather happening. The Daily Mail focused on the skepticism part, and titled their article, “Hail No!“
“A small town in Texas was hit with a whopper of a storm Wednesday morning that left four feet of hail in its wake.Officials from the National Weather Service in Amarillo said that the storm was so severe and the hail so unrelenting that a major highway in Potter County was completely covered. But the photos of the one-off event are so unbelievable that an army of online sceptics have cast doubt on their authenticity, suggesting that instead they may simply show large rocks. When the weather service posted a photograph to Facebook of a firefighter next to the ice — which reached all the way up to his chest — commenters couldn’t believe their eyes. That just doesn’t even look real! Dang!’ Bridget Hefner said on the site. Commenters turned their disbelief into hypotheses, offering alternative explanations to the unbelievable reality. ‘Looks like a bunch of rocks/stones,’ suggested Tiffany Baugh Berry. Another cynical poster wrote: ‘It’s a lite dusting of hail on some damn rocks.’ ‘I can assure you we do not have big rocks like that in West Texas,’ Scotten retorted to MSNBC.com. ‘That was four feet of ice,’ she insisted, adding that the hail was compacted by rain and floodwater across a wide area. She blamed the ice’s rock-like appearance on drought.’We’re very dusty around here,’ she said.”
Here is a raw video from an eyewitness. At about 51 seconds in, one guy says to another, Have you ever seen anything like THIS?” The other guy answers, “No! No I have not.”
Yesterday I noted that the Lord said in His Olivet Discourse of the signs in advance of His coming that “you will hear…” and the word for hear means to listen, with an attendant figurative meaning of “to hear God’s voice which prompts Him to birth faith within.”
THESE ARE SIGNS FROM GOD, people! Wake UPPPPP.
As far as the localized nature of the Texas hailstorm goes, He has done that before:
“And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another ….” (Amos 4:7)
In the past He has used hail to wake up the population to turn to Him, as well: “I smote you with blasting and with mildew and with hail in all the labours of your hands; yet ye turned not to me, saith the Lord.” (Haggai 2:17)
And He will use hail in the future. Now, if golf ball sized hail can kill, weighing mere ounces, what will a global deluge of 100 pound hail do to people? It will be massive death:
“And huge hailstones, about one hundred pounds each, came down from heaven upon men; and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, because its plague was extremely severe. (Revelation 16:21).
See, by then they know it is God who sends the hail, and for judgment, too, but they are so far gone that they simply blaspheme Him. Don’t let that be you. Repent NOW.
Jesus at His zenith of popularity… Big crowds, laudatory accolades, and promises, promises by the naive:
“And another also said, “Lord, I will follow You, but let me first go and bid them farewell who are at my house.” But Jesus said to him, “No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:61-62).
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Commentary says of that verse, “As ploughing requires an eye intent on the furrow to be made, and is marred the instant one turns about, so will they come short of salvation who prosecute the work of God with a distracted attention, a divided heart. … The expression “looking back” has a manifest reference to ‘Lot’s wife’.”
You can imagine what a furrow looks like when a plow has swerved. Or a mower with the operator looking backwards. It soon gets crooked.
The ‘don’t look back’ warning in Luke does bring immediately to mind the warning given to Lot and his family as they prepared to flee the imminent judgment at Sodom, that most wicked city. The angel told the family,
“Escape for your life! Do not look behind you nor stay anywhere in the plain. Escape to the mountains, lest you be destroyed.” (Gen 19:17b).
Those directions are pretty clear. Don’t look back. The family had been told in no uncertain terms that what was going to happen to the city. They knew it was judgment from God, and they knew they were in the presence of an angel who was delivering this message. you cannot get much higher than an authority than an angel sent by God, and you would think that a person would listen to the directions. When the judgment started, this is what happened:
“Then the LORD rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the LORD out of the heavens. So He overthrew those cities, all the plain, all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But his wife looked back behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” (Gen 19:24-26).
She had a divided heart.
Now, the Lord is THE highest authority. And He told the would-be follower in Luke not to look back. He had discerned that the would-be follower already had a divided heart. You can’t move forward while looking back. If you do, you mar your walk.
Jesus is the most beautiful treasure, the most glowing glory, the most perfect sight one could ever imagine. He is the most important person in the Universe, from all time and forever. The question is, why would you WANT to look back? Is there a possession Mrs Lot had that was worth more to her than her family around her? More important than an angel from God? More important than judgment behind and salvation ahead?
Of the young follower questioning Jesus, who was at his house that was more important than the Messiah?
In John 6, Jesus was talking with the disciples. A great many of them had been following Jesus for some time, including the Twelve. As Jesus was preaching about the bread and the blood, and saying that no one can come to Him unless it has been granted by the Father. It was a hard saying, hard to understand and hard to accept. The scriptures say,
“As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore. So Jesus said to the twelve, “You do not want to go away also, do you?” Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.”
Peter got it. He knew that there was nothing else on earth more important than the time He could spend with Messiah in person.
Do you have a divided heart? Where else would you go, once you found the key to eternal life, and the One who brings it? There is no place else to go, nothing else to have, not one thing of any iota of importance compared to Jesus. A divided heart is no heart. What was Mrs Lot looking at? What was back at Sodom that was better to mourn over than in looking back, rather than looking ahead at the angel who was leading them to safety? Who was better for the young would-be follower to be with than the most important Person of the universe??
My hope for myself and for you is to have a whole heart for Jesus.
the-end-time.org 