Tony Miano posted the following on Twitter with a link to a Youtube video.
“May you never, EVER again question the “effectiveness” of open-air preaching.”
ARE YOU READY?
Category: repent
Sin is a snare
“Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.” (Ecclesiastes 9:12)
The bible speaks of snares a lot. Sins, people, doctrines all can trap a person and there they stay in the snare of sin, and then they die. I heard a sermon recently and the pastor was speaking of unaddressed sin in a person’s life. Whether you’re a believer or a non-believer, we all sin and we all need to repent. Of the believer, if you have sinned but not repented, the pastor preaching the sermon said that on the day you die or the day you are called home to the Lord in the rapture, you will be flash-frozen in your sin. THAT will be the status upon which you stand before Him at the Bema seat, giving an account of yourself. There will be no more chances. When Jesus calls an end to your days or an end to the Church Age, there you go with all your unrepented sins with you.
Now, that should give you pause to let your sins go unaddressed, lol!
There are frequent mentions in the bible about snares. Sins are snares that trap us. (1 Timothy 3:7). Enemies are snares that trap us. (Judges 2:3). False doctrines are snares that trap us. (Proverbs 13:14). False gods are sins that trap us. (Exodus 23:33; Deuteronomy 7:16). Idols are a snare. (Psalm 106:36).
Since many of us are no longer living in an agricultural environment, trapping food for our sustenance or even hunting it for pleasure, let’s talk about what a snare is, how it works, and what happens when you’re caught in it.
We all know a snare is a trap. It traps birds and smaller mammals. But let’s go deeper into understanding the metaphor of sin being a snare.
Snares are anchored cable or wire nooses set to catch wild animals such as squirrels and rabbits. A snare is essentially a loop that is set up to tighten around an animal as it passes through. Snares are one of the simplest traps and are very effective. They are cheap to produce and easy to set in large numbers. A snare traps an animal around the neck or the body; a snare consists of a noose made usually by wire or a strong string. The snare can be laid down on the ground and camouflaged, or upright like the Wiki Books illustration at left.
Did you catch that? Snares are simple, easy to make, lots of them can be made at once, and they are effective. That is how sin works. Sometimes we think of the devil as an unholy being with super-complicated methods. And he does indeed, and we are not unaware of his schemes (2 Corinthians 2:11), but really, why waste energy on complicated stuff when a simple sin-snare is so easy to set up?
A person will become captured in a snare and right away things get a lot worse. The animal fights for its life and even more damage can be done to him as he struggles. David was “only” an adulterer, until he was about to get caught, Then he became a murderer too. One sin piles on top of another. Lance Armstrong was “only” a doper, until he was about to be exposed. Then he became a liar, a brutal revenger, an intimidator and an enemy to his friends. His sin-snare tightened its noose-like grip the more he struggled against exposing the first sin the more sins got piled on top.
Do you see the snare at right? It is almost invisible, and an inattentive rabbit wanting just to take a mouthful of the juicy and tempting moss will get caught! It’s like when we say, “one visit won’t harm me…one drink will be OK…if I take just $5 from the till no one will notice…”
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| Rolling snare, Alderleaf Wilderness College |
There was a chapter in the book Watership Down by Richard Adams called “The Shining Wire”. It was a fiction book about rabbits looking for a new place to set up a warren, due to imminent development of their pasture. A brave band of rabbits set out to find a place and they came to a warren where all the rabbits were fat and sleek and had plenty to eat. However as they stayed a while, visiting, they noticed that the rabbits exhibited strange behavior. They focused on making art and poetry instead of hunting and procreating, never mourned the sudden disappearance of friends, and refused to listen to stories about Rabbit God.
It turned out that the rabbits had capitulated, allowing themselves to feed on the food that the farmer put out, knowing full well that he also set out snares and took some from their number frequently.
The knowledge of their deadly compromise enslaved them, and after a while, made them crazy. They were fed, but at a terrible price. No rabbit in that warren could ever speak of the shining wire.
The rabbits became dependent on the overlord that will eventually kill them, but they still preferred to live and die by the snares than to be free. Although they had the illusion of freedom, they all knew deep down that the snares are ever- present, and they doom themselves the moment they make the decision to live off of food the farmer gives them. (source)
It is like that for the unsaved. They all know that they are feeding on food (sin) that is handed to them by someone who wants their death, but they focus on other things, refuse to speak of what their sin is doing to them bodily and spiritually, and hope that that day is not their day to become trapped and die. And they are all a little crazy. As Dan Phillips wrote at Pyromaniacs, “Sin makes you irrational, insane, crazy, nuts (cf. Genesis 3—Revelation 22; especially, for instance, Genesis 3:8; Numbers 13-14; Matthew 12:24; Ephesians 4:17-19).”
The Lord Jesus Christ freed us from our original sin, and continues to free us from the snare of our daily sin. When we repent, He opens the snare and we hop free! Soooo, repent! And don’t delay. You don’t want to carry them to heaven and lay them down at the throne and explain them all to Jesus, do you?
Blessed be the Lord,
who has not given us
as prey to their teeth!
We have escaped like a bird
from the snare of the fowlers;
the snare is broken,
and we have escaped!
Our help is in the name of the Lord,
who made heaven and earth. (Psalm 124:6-8)
They refused to repent
The bible is full of examples of people given time to repent but they refused.
One that comes to mind is in Jeremiah 5:
“O LORD, do not your eyes look for truth? You have struck them down, but they felt no anguish; you have consumed them, but they refused to take correction. They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refused to repent.” (Jeremiah 5:3)
The situation in this chapter is dire. Isaiah had prophesied doom for 50 years in the century before Jeremiah’s prophesying. The people did not take it seriously enough. By the time Jeremiah came along, they did not know it but the prophecies of destruction and abandonment were almost upon them. It happened in Jeremiah’s lifetime. The LORD is patient, giving time to repent!
God’s willingness to spare and bless the nation if the people repent is a theme throughout the bible. He is patient, too. He says repent, and waits in Amos 4:6, Zephaniah 3:2, and Zechariah 7:11 to name just a few examples. In the New Testament Jesus called for repentance to the false prophetess He calls a ‘Jezebel’. In Rev 2:21 it is written, “I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality.”
They refused to repent.
The Lord is gracious and kind, always calling for us to repent and giving us time to do so. Seems amazing, doesn’t it? That they refuse. Even after prophets prophesy a direct word from the LORD, they don’t. Even after they receive a direct letter from the Lord as in Revelation, they refuse.
Lest we think that the refusals to repent are an Old Testament, bygone behavior, here is an update from two dedicated servants of the Lord on mission in a South American jungle. Though they are seeing some harvest, they sadly report heartbreaking news. As they were welcomed into homes and they presented the Gospel, they saw some commit their lives to Christ. Praise the Lord for that! Every single soul added to heaven is a praise to the Lord in His loving-kindness. Yet…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some say ‘no’.
“After we clearly presented the Gospel, we asked, “Do you understand what we are sharing?” and several responded that they did understand. When asked if they were ready to receive Jesus as their Savior and Lord, they said “No.”
“Why would they respond this way? The local believers said it is because they find pleasure in their sin and are not ready to forsake their sinful ways. They understand that in following Christ, they will have to leave their lives of immorality, drunkenness, and other sinful ways. They are not willing to give up their sin.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They understood but refused, preferring to remain in their sin.
Paul wrote, “But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.” (Romans 2:5).
That Day is fast approaching. Please do not reject any Gospel message you hear. As Wesley said, “man may refuse it; God will not compel.” The fact that the Gospel exists is a praise to the Lord who died as the substitution for our sin, becoming sin who knew no sin and enduring all of God’s wrath as punishment for it. And it is a praise to Him who was resurrected and who now sends witnesses, ambassadors, and missionaries to proclaim His beautiful truth- that He loves you and He wants you to become part of His family. As in the OT times, God’s willingness to spare and bless the nation and spare and bless and individuals who repent still stands. But equally true, as Paul said, there will come a day when His righteous judgment will be revealed. I can’t imagine how it will be for those who have heard but who have consciously and willfully rejected Him. Worse still, having rejected Him for the reason they they want to extend their season of sin is a terrible reason.
Sin is actual rebellion against God. It is not a matter of taking pleasure in alcohol, adultery, homosexuality, carousing, thievery or what have you. No. In fact, each of those acts and all sins are a direct poke in God’s eye.
So as you pray tonight, pray for all those who have heard the Gospel message and have refused to repent. Our missionaries asked, “pray with us that they will desire the hope that is only in Christ, obey the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and receive Jesus as the Savior and Lord of their lives.”
So you think man is good? Only Jesus is good.
The conditions preceding the last global judgment- the Flood- had reached a point where the LORD was grieved He had even made man, because the thoughts of man’s heart were only evil, continually.
God said that at that time He “saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. (Genesis 6:5-7)
Jesus said, those conditions will reappear prior to the second global judgment- the Tribulation.
“For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24:37)
People seem good on the surface. They’re not. The bible is replete with verses telling us that man is evil from the get-go. We’re bad from birth-
“What is man, that he can be pure? Or he who is born of a woman, that he can be righteous?” (Job 15:14)
We’re bad as youths-
“And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” (Genesis 8:21a).
We’re bad as adults-
In this verse Jesus is speaking- “Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:9-11) [emphasis mine.]
Man is not good and earth is a hostile, dangerous place. It is satan’s place. When we read about a shooting in a movie theater we like to think that this kind of evil from man against man is an anomaly. “Aw, we’re all right,” we fool ourselves, “that was just one crazy man. Man is basically good.” But all men are crazy, or at least have the potential for that kind of evil. Witness these few examples from recent news which resulted in great pain to people. These are photos of the pain of the world. It is agony!
“A man cries in front of houses destroyed during a recent Syrian Air Force air strike in Azaz.”
“Nicolas Kristof, Journalist and NY Times Columnist, recently wrote a column for NYTimes.com titled “On Top Of Famine, Unspeakable Violence.” He describes the horror of “mass rape” that many women fleeing Somalia, in pursuit of food and water, are currently facing. He challenges the reader to “Imagine that you’re a Somali suffering from the drought and famine in that country. One of your children has just starved to death, but there’s no time to mourn. Depleted and traumatized, you set off on foot across the desert with your family, and after 15 exhausting days finally reach what you believe is the safe haven of Kenya. But at the very moment when you think you’re secure, you encounter a nightmare broached only in whispers: an epidemic of violence and rape.”
“One of the UN’s largest international relief efforts is under investigation after it emerged that thousands of sacks of food aid were being diverted from starving refugees and openly sold for profit.”
The grief of a father whose 9-year-old daughter was found dead in an alley
The grief of an Aurora CO family whose child was killed in a mass shooting
And this is the time of gentility! This is the time of the Holy Spirit’s restraining ministry on earth! And yet we see man’s inhumanity to man on a constant basis. We have seen man’s evil ever since the Fall. Cain killed Abel. There is none good, no not one! (Romans 3:10). Only God is good. (Mark 10:18). We are evil.
If we are this inhumane to each other now, with the Spirit’s restraining ministry on earth, what will happen when He takes it away? God took Him away before the first judgment. “My Spirit will not remain with man forever,” says the LORD God.” (Genesis 6:3). God will take Him away prior to the second judgment,
“For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way.” (2 Thessalonians 2:7).
And yet, Jesus sacrificed Himself on the cross, dying in history’s most agonizingly brutal terroristic, heinous act for the very people who flew planes into buildings, bombed a residential area, murdered a 9-year-old, shot up a movie audience, knifed a sleeping Jewish family- including a months-old infant, stole food from the starving, and raped refugees. Jesus is THAT Good. He died for bad people, which means He died for all of us.
Don’t you want to follow a God who came down to us and taught us and then sacrificed Himself for those sins, your sins? Man is not good. But Jesus, who once lived as a man, is Good.
Repent. The end is nigh, and when it comes, and people’s inner evil will come bursting out. If you repent to Jesus, you won’t be here on earth to experience it. Jesus made a way to escape it. He IS the way, and He is the truth and the life. If life is agony now, just wait until satan is given full sway to allow unrestrained evil to take over the world.
If this could happen when the Holy Spirit restrains man’s inclinations…
What do you think these guys could get man to do?
Repent.
Repent, the end is near. Here is the Gospel, may it save your souls
My dear friends, internet acquaintances, and family,
One of these days soon I am going to be whisked to heaven alive, transformed from corruptible flesh into glorified, eternally pure flesh, to live with Jesus forever in heaven. My pleasure and treasure will be that I dwell with Him who sacrificed Himself for me in the universe’s ultimate and most majestic act of love ever. His name is Jesus. Everyone who ever lived for Jesus through repentance and claiming His Lordly blood as the covering for their sins will be there too.
I’m looking forward to talking with Deborah, Rahab, Jael, Huldah, David, Abraham, the Ethiopian Eunuch who won’t be a eunuch any more so we can’t call him that (Sir, what is your name? Nice to meet you!). Philip, Stephen, Paul, Jeremiah…all the ones known and unknown to me will be there. (1 Corinthians 13:12).
I shall see His truths plainly and with no distortion of flesh or depraved mind. I will get to meet you my readers and friends, who I only know through a keyboard. I’ll speak to pastors who have gone on already Charles Spurgeon, John Owen, John Huss, Martin Luther, Tyndale, Whitefield… I can say thank you to the pastors I listen to today, Pastor John MacArthur, Steve Hadley, Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, Phil Johnson, JD Farag, Don Green.
I will be able to rest.
I will have eternal relief from sinning against Jesus.
This event which all born again believers are looking forward to is the rapture. It could happen at any moment. It has always been imminent, so how much more imminent is it today than 2000 years ago? I truly believe with all my heart that we are on the cusp of it happening any day. Any day. I really believe that.
So dear friend, one day, this blog will become stale. You will hear no more from me. My facebook page will have that last update..and that will be it. I could be taken from the shower, with the water permanently running. It could happen when I am cooking, and the burned food starts a fire in my apartment. It could be at midnight, and the bed clothes will be in the last position I had slept in. It could happen at school, with the unsaved and deluded who thought they were saved running up and down the hallways looking for all the children and many of the staff.
When it happens, and you come to this blog that I have faithfully updated each day for 1,340 days in a row for a total of 1,665 times, and it has not been updated, you will know I was part of that group of people across the world who disappeared.
Do not be fooled by the government’s excuses for where we all went. We were not the troublemakers taken away so the rest of humanity could improve. We were not removed by aliens into their spaceships. A radon electro wave did not overpower us. Do not believe the lie! It will be God who will take us thereby proving once again that everything in the bible is true. Any explanation besides that will be a lie.
You will know that I am in heaven with a multitude of other believers rejoicing along with the holy angels of Jesus and praising His perfect love for humanity. We will be singing accolades of worship for our Holy God who created us. We will be praising the Holy Spirit who enabled the power of salvation. Do not worry for me nor wonder. I will be more than all right for all eternity.
But you won’t be. And that is my worry and fear. I claimed the blood of Jesus through repentance to obtain the prize. You will be shedding your own blood when a horrific series of judgments rains down upon your sinful self.
You can be in heaven with Jesus! I hope you are! You must recognize that your sins are a rejection of a Holy God who created you. Your sins prevent you from being with Him and has earned you His eternal wrath. Hell is not just a place separate from God, it is the place where He rains down His eternal anger on you because of your sins. But if you are sorry, and ask Jesus to forgive you, recognizing He laid down His life to take God’s eternal wrath and that His resurrection satisfied God as the sacrifice for your sins, you can be in the group that is bodily lifted into heaven.
Paul wrote in the bible: “Now I want to make clear for you, brothers and sisters, the gospel that I preached to you, that you received and on which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received—that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve…” (1 Corinthians 15:1-8).
I have just shared the Gospel with you. It is of first importance. It is Good News! You do not have to stay on earth during the wrathful judgments to come and you do not have to spend eternity in hell in agony of the fiery flames! Isn’t that good news?! You can be with Jesus and with us, His Bride.
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:15)
Learn how to be saved:
What is the plan of salvation?
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2)
Gay demographics: what are the REAL numbers?
If the homosexual lobby is to be believed, every other person you bump into is gay. At work, at home, in town, in the city, in church, the more vocal activists in the lobby make it seem like people who self-identify as homosexual or lesbian are a major portion of the population.
They scream about rights, and their civic due, and not being marginalized any more like any other large minority group, such as African Americans. Black people as a major minority rose up in the 1960s to claim their civil rights, the gay lobby says, and homosexual lobby now makes the same claims. Homosexually-oriented people are elected to office, serve as community leaders, even preach from pulpits. There is a homosexual character on most sitcoms now, either as a regular character or as a recurring character. Homosexual references are made on scripted shows and on reality television shows, movies, and books. Christian colleges have gay support clubs now. We are literally saturated with the notion that homosexuality is the norm. Heck, even the animals do it, so it must be normal, right?
Not so fast.
I opened with “If the homosexual lobby is to be believed…” but what are really the statistics on numbers of self-identified gay and lesbian people in America? Can we believe those numbers? I am not talking about a girl who experimented once when she was 12, or the guy who woke up sorry and embarrassed after the drunken orgy of a frat party. I am talking the militant, life-long, “out” homosexuals who choose to live that lifestyle as mirror to heterosexuality.
No. We can’t believe the numbers. They’re a crock.
“Americans Have No Idea How Few Gay People There Are“
“One in ten. It’s the name of the group that puts on the Reel Affirmations gay and lesbian film festival in Washington, D.C., each year. It’s the percent popularized by the Kinsey Report as the size of the gay male population. And it’s among the most common figures pointed to in popular culture as an estimate of how many people are gay or lesbian. But what percentage of the population is actually gay or lesbian? With the debate over same-sex marriage again an emerging fault line in American political life, the answer comes as a surprise: A lower number than you might think — and a much, much, much lower one than most Americans believe.”
So, what are the numbers? Well, Americans believe a quarter of the population is gay. The true number is about 4% and is probably probably closer to 2%. A 2011 report by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation estimated that 4 million adults identify as gay or lesbian, representing 1.7% of the population over 18. (source)
That is some very successful perception-altering on their part. So how is it that the homosexual lobby has made it seem like you can’t swing a cat in the Bible Belt without hitting a queen or a dyke? Because of this.
Bunheads.
Bunheads is a new ABC Family show by the producers of Gilmore Girls. I never saw the tv show Gilmore Girls but every news story I read about Bunheads identifies the show that way so I will too. Bunheads is the nickname for ballerinas, and the show that made its debut last Monday is touted as a new family oriented entertainment.
I saw the pilot and I liked it. I thought the writing was sophisticated and witty, the show was emotional without being sentimental, and I put it on the list for future watching.
So what is my concern with the show and how does it relate to the vastly overestimated homosexual numbers? Here:
At one point toward the end of the pilot episode, which is on ABC Family I remind us all, the mom-in-law character was having a heart to heart talk with her new daughter-in-law. The girl had just married the mom’s son and had moved into their home in a town called Paradise.
The scene took place in a roadhouse toward the end of the show, a show in which constant references had been made for the last 90 minutes to the smallness of this rural seaside town. It is small. There is no movie theatre. It has just about one store. (Giving directions to a newcomer- “Go to Main Street, turn left, and look for the store called Sparkles.”) The teens, when feeling frisky and up to no good, break into the library and, gulp, read. It’s so small that teenagers literally have nothing else to do but read? THAT is how small, out of the way, and retiring this little town is. Even the show synopsis calls it a “sleepy coastal town.”
So back to the scene. The new daughter-in-law asks about the dancers attending the mom-in-law’s ballet class. The teenage girls all had a story, and of one, the mom-in-law said,
“Her dad’s gay. Oh, he thinks it’s a big secret but we all know. Thing is, if he would just come out of the closet he would smile once in a while. And plus, there are a lot of very nice, single gay men in town.”
A town so small has “a lot” of gay men? The perception the homosexual lobby would have us believe, and uses family entertainment to do it, is that literally just about everyone is gay. Bombard a population with that message for thirty years and you get a new generation coming up who thinks everyone is gay. And if there are so many gays, then it must be normal. That is the strategy. Normalization through numbers.
Of course I’m not blaming the entire skewed perception on one television show, but it is representative of the insidious but casual nature that scripted tv and movies: that every closet has a gay person lurking inside it, summoning up the courage to leap “out.” We have been saturated with casual one-off lines like the one in Bunheads casually declaring that there are “a lot” even in this small town. ‘We don’t have a theater but we’ve got our gays!’
You can see the success the homosexual lobby has had in altering the perception of a nation of over 300 million souls. The homosexual lifestyle is an aberration. Some succumb and choose it. Make no mistake, though, it is a choice, not an identity. I understand the fight that homosexual people have in resisting that aberrant behavior. All people attempt to resist sin in some form or fashion. I understand also that some sins are more besetting than others. God will still judge them.
BUT, God in His loving kindness, accepts the repentance of one who seeks to shed that lifestyle and turn to Him. His mercy is greater than any sin, and He listens to prayers beseeching deliverance. Here is a moving three minute clip from a testimony John MacArthur shared of a homosexual’s repentance. (The clip says 7 minutes but the audio goes out after three minutes.) It is quite moving:
If you are involved in a homosexual lifestyle, or any lifestyle that is unacceptable to God, please repent. Ask Him to forgive your sins, and make Him Lord. His wisdom is so vast that he will lead you into a life that is purer and more peaceful than you can ever imagine.
And Christians? If the US population of born again believers was 3% of the total population, and we had been as vocal (but not law-breaking) and persistent as the homosexual lobby has been, where would this nation be now? Joel C. Rosenberg is working hard right now with his “Implosion” simulcast in Houston today, praying for revival. You can join him in prayer and on Facebook at the Epicenter Team page.
It all begins with prayer. For the penitent homosexual, reviler, blasphemer, slanderer, it begins with a prayer of repentance. With the Christian, it continues with prayer. Seek Him while He may be found.
“Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts;let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” (Isaiah 55:6-7 ESV)
Quake Expert: Earth Cracking Up
Here is something interesting from the Croatian Times a couple of days ago:
“A leading earthquake scientist has warned that the planet could be cracking up after a series of massive quakes in just 48 hours. Expert Gheorghe Marmureanu – from Romania’s National Institute of Earth Physics – says 39 quakes had hit the globe within two days. The series started with two massive quakes in Indonesia measuring 8.6 and 8.2 on the Richter scale rapidly followed by three more only slightly smaller in Mexico within hours.”
“There is no doubt that something is seriously wrong. There have been too many strong earthquakes,” said Marmureanu. He added: “The quakes are a surprise that cannot be easily explained by current scientific knowledge. With the Indonesian quake for example, statistically, there should be one big earthquake in this part of Asia every 500 years. However, since 2004, there were already three quakes with a magnitude of over 8, which is not normal.”
Not normal indeed. So many things are happening that are so outside the scope of scientific understanding and expectation as a weather or earth happening. Just look at the major quakes this week:
6.2 EAST OF THE SOUTH SANDWICH ISLANDS
6.8 EASTERN NEW GUINEA REG, PAPUA NEW GUINEA
6.7 OFFSHORE VALPARAISO, CHILE
6.2 OFF THE WEST COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA
6.5 VANUATU
6.2 DRAKE PASSAGE (the passage between Antarctica and southern tip of So. America)
6.9 GULF OF CALIFORNIA
6.2 GULF OF CALIFORNIA
6.5 MICHOACAN, MEXICO
8.2 OFF THE WEST COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA
6.0 NORTH INDIAN OCEAN
8.6 OFF THE WEST COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA
Scientists are really doing the old soft shoe shuffle right now. They are vociferously denying that anything untoward is going on when we all can see that it is. I am reminded of the classic show “Chicago” starring Richard Gere as the lawyer, on how to fool people into thinking that there is meat to his case when there isn’t, he sang the famous tune “Razzle Dazzle ‘Em”.
Yet, there is an honest scientist, Gheorghe Marmureanu, saying that something is wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. And Mr Marmureanu is right. The bible says the earth WILL CRACK UP.
The earth is broken asunder,
The earth is split through,
The earth is shaken violently.
The earth reels to and fro like a drunkard
And it totters like a shack,
For its transgression is heavy upon it,
And it will fall, never to rise again.
(Isaiah 24:19-20)
Is the earth beginning to crack up now? I daresay it is. It will not complete its cracking up until the fullness of the sin weighing upon it is also finished, at the end of the Tribulation (Daniel 9:24). But in my opinion at least, there is no doubt in my mind that the judgments are about to fall because the events are passing the normal and are consistently ABnormal. I think this is almost as far as things can go before they are actually judgments. Paul said that we are not appointed to wrath, (1 Thessalonians 5:9) and that our sins are forgotten when we repent, (Heb. 8:12, Heb 10:17) so I do not believe that the Bride will be on earth when judgments in wrath befall the unrepentant. But how it seems that the tension is dragging out, that the warnings are veering ever so precipitously to wrath!
You can escape all these things by repenting and believing on Jesus as risen Lord and Savior! It is just that simple. It is not easy, but it is simple. He paid for our sins with His flesh and shed blood, sacrificing Himself for us. God was pleased to raise Him up on the third day and He lives now. We cannot stand before Him as sinners, so believing on His work on the cross as pardon for those sins justifies us before Him. Otherwise, you have no hope, now or forever. He is the hope! Believe on His glorious name and be saved from his wrath for your sins. The earth is cracking up, but even better to hear is that your pride is cracking up. Allow Him in and humble yourself before Him, and ye shall be saved.
Nebuchadnezzar understands the power of a holy God
“Nebuchadnezzar responded and said, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, who has sent His angel and delivered His servants who put their trust in Him, violating the king’s command, and yielded up their bodies so as not to serve or worship any god except their own God. Therefore I make a decree that any people, nation or tongue that speaks anything offensive against the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego shall be torn limb from limb and their houses reduced to a rubbish heap, inasmuch as there is no other god who is able to deliver in this way.” (Daniel 3:28-29)
THERE IS NO OTHER GOD. (He is holy and true).
There is no other God ABLE TO DELIVER. (Jesus saves)
There is no other God able to deliver IN THIS WAY. (His power is unsurpassed).
So what does all this mean?
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” Mark 1:15
The Lord is coming soon
The Lord is coming soon. He will call His bride (the believers) up to Him. After that He will begin judgment on the remaining unbelieving world.
The Lord is coming soon.
“Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” (2 Peter 3:4)
In Noah’s day, they didn’t believe they would be held individually accountable to a Holy God for their sins and were doing and thinking evil continually. (Gen 6:5-7). The LORD prepared judgment, and told Noah to build the ark because He was going to wipe out mankind. He said He would do it, and He did it.
How long did the world have to prepare? “When Noah is first mentioned in Genesis 5:32, he is 500 years old. When Noah enters the ark, he is 600 years old. The time it took to build the ark would depend on how much time had passed between Genesis 5:32 and the time that God commanded Noah to build the ark (Genesis 6:14-21). At the absolute most, it took 100 years.” (source). Knowing God’s patience and longsuffering, (Numbers 14:18) we can surmise that the Lord used Noah’s righteous life among all who lived at the time (Genesis 6:9) as an example. We can surmise that the ark building activity itself was an example, too. Just as Christians today are an example to the ungodly. “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.” (2 Corinthians 5:20)
We can think of the conversations at Noah’s place that went a little something like this:
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| Artist-Attributed to Francesco Bassano |
Building year 1:
Noah! What are you doing?
Building a boat because the LORD is angry at the sin in the world and will destroy it.
HA HA HA Noah, you’re nuts. Everyone’s going to heaven, didn’t you know that? Love wins.
Building year 25:
Noah! Are you still building that thing?
Yes. The LORD is patient but righteous and He will judge sin and sinners.
HA HA HA Noah, there is no God! He would have shown up by now. Think for yourself!
Building year 75:
Noah! You should be ashamed. Your whole family is involved with this thing now.
Yes, we follow the LORD. The LORD is angry with sinners and will judge the world. Repent.
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| DORÉ, Gustave |
HA HA HA I’m fine, I’m a good person. YOU’RE the one who’s nuts. Come to the market with us, get your mind off this ark thing.
“First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.” (2 Peter 3:3)
Building Year 99 and 360 days:
Noah! Aren’t you tired of that by now? Give it up, man. Come to Joe and Pete’s wedding. There’s free booze.
The LORD is holy and wants all to be righteous. Repent.
HA HA HA No wonder no one wants to be around you, Noah, you’re so intolerant.
100 years after the command to build the ark: DEATH
I say the Lord is coming soon. I do not think it is early in the call to repent. I do not think it is in the middle of the time set aside for His longsuffering to call sinners to His bosom. I do not think it is late in the Age of Grace. I think it is VERY LATE.
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| BOURGEOIS, Léon Pierre Urbain |
One of the times in one of the years, one of the months the mockers who mocked and the scoffers who scoffed mocked once too often, and scoffed once too many, and the Day came.
“For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Mt 24:38-39)
The Lord is coming soon. It won’t be 100 years from now. It could be tomorrow. Are you ready?
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About blogging…
In January of 2009 I started this blog. It wasn’t my first blog. In August 2006 I started The Quiet Life, a more personal blog and one which I still keep up to this day. I picked up on blogging only a bit late, 2004 was proclaimed the Year of the Blog. Before that I’d been writing for newspapers and before that I’d been writing academic papers for Universities as a graduate student. 2004 was the year that the medium burst onto the scene and journalism has never been the same. Neither have activism, diaries, relationships, or book publishing. Even some churches have their own anonymous blogger watchdogs.
So in 2009 I received a conviction that my lifetime of writing would and could be put to good use for Jesus. World Wide Web outreach was possible through this medium. However, I was daunted in January of 2009 by the sheer number of blogs out there. Blogs covered every topic and every corner of the internet. “[T]he current estimates say there are about 450 million “active” English language blogs right now, but that number varies according to the source. Technorati estimated over 200 million blogs at the start of 2009, with exponential growth since then.” (source)
200 million blogs? Plus one more? Was anyone even going to notice my blog? My paltry words floating out on the ethersphere? But I leaped in, confident that the Holy Spirit knew what He was doing and that even if only one person ever read this blog that it would be the right person at the right time. So on January 6, 2012 it will be the three-year anniversary of this blog. I’ve blogged on this blog 1411 times, an average of 470 essays per year. More than one a day, every day, for three years. The Holy Spirit is endlessly creative.
I thought that the economic crash of October 2008 was a huge end time sign and was pleased to be used of the Lord for His name by writing. I love writing and I love the Lord so it is literally a match made in heaven. Through prayer and bible study the Spirit makes me aware of the deeper things of the Word and then I can turn around and write on topics I feel led by the Spirit to write about. If what I write is of the Spirit, He will pierce the heart of the person and they will be convicted, or encouraged. I’m humbled by this process, and often am reduced to tears of thanks when someone writes that they were moved by something on the blog. When that happens it is a visible manifestation to me of the Spirit’s working in the world.
But not so many visitors came in 2009 even after the crash. People still thought what was happening in the world was kind of normal. I didn’t think so but I knew the nature of birth pangs would be such that eventually they’d become noticeable to a wider swathe of the population, and then they would come running for answers. Hopefully they would accept Jesus as that answer.
For all of 2010 there were still millions of blogs being opened each day. I blogged on. Sometimes I’d get discouraged that the people would not respond as well to the theological posts as they would the weird posts. Essays about UFOs or sinkholes or weird noises or vampires always got lots of hits and the ones about Jesus being God … didn’t. But in the end I was grateful that someone felt compelled to read what is here because that meant they were searching for a Divine reason for the weird things happening rather than a secular one.
In January 2011 the page views went from the steady hundreds per day as they had been for two years, to a steady thousands per day. If you remember January 2011 opened with Aflockalypse. That was the world-wide event where thousands of birds at various locations simply dropped dead to the ground. Then it started happening with fish and then other wildlife such as starfish or penguins or seals. THAT seemed to get people’s attention in a way that even the economic crash of 2008 hadn’t. In March 2011 was the all-time high for page views and you’ll remember that was when the Japan earthquake and tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster occurred. People were awake now.
Since Aflockalypse, the page views have only been upward. Last night I passed 1 million views.
Though the numbers are humbling to me, they aren’t really so great in the blogosphere. Many, many other blogs get a million views per day, not a million views in three years. But I wanted to take a moment to thank the Holy Spirit for this ministry, because each and every one of those views is a blessing. Someone, somewhere, looked at a page here and in so doing learned a little bit about Jesus. Each time I write I aim to exalt Him, and to promote that He has a plan for each of us and that it is available to each of us if we will just repent of our sins.
I boast of Him, and the opportunities and ministries He gives us for His name. Delivering information about Jesus, connecting people with Jesus, alerting people about Jesus’ soon arrival, urging people to repent before it is too late, are blessings for me to perform in His name. Seeing the interest in prophecy go up as the page views rise (not just my blog but many others) means that people are becoming alerted to the times. They are waking up. And it is a blessing because He gave us a more sure word, prophecy, and it is coming to pass just as He said. (2 Peter 1:12-21).
THIS is the reason for this blog: (Philippians 2:6-11):
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
I want this blog to be as this verse, “For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
Thank you all for your visits and your encouragement. I will keep blogging until the day I die or the rapture, whichever comes first. I will keep proclaiming the Goodness of Jesus until the end of time and then for all eternity. I hope that for your Christmas present you fall out of love with your sin and in love with the Savior from your sins.
As we read in the above sermon, “Romans 10:9-10, ‘If you confess Jesus as Lord with your mouth, and believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you’ll be saved.’ Saved from hell, from sin, from judgment. Better to confess it now and go on confessing it forever in heaven than to go on confessing it in bitterness and remorse forever in hell. Every tongue will confess it.” (source). Will you confess today? It would be the best Christmas present ever.
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