Monday, September 24, 2018
Our Children Were Made For More:
“Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!” (Psalm 127:4–5)
For years I missed the importance of the imagery here. But Solomon is getting at a very important principle with the idea of children as arrows: God gives us our kids so that we can prepare them for his mission.
After all, what is the purpose of an arrow? An arrow is designed to be shot! As missionary Jim Elliot wrote to his parents, “Remember how the Psalmist described children? He said that they were . . . arrows. What are arrows for but to shoot? So, with the strong arms of prayer, draw the bowstring back and let the arrows fly—all of them, straight at the Enemy’s hosts.”
As parents, we must not only ask, “How should I raise these children?” but also, “Why did God give me these kids?” The purpose is to let them go, and that must undergird all we do in parenting.
Here in the U.S., we live in a safety-obsessed culture. And, of course, some of that is beneficial: my kids wear helmets while they ride their bikes; my kids ride in state-approved car seats, etc. Rules and restrictions to keep our children safe are valuable (especially when many parents ignore basic safety guidelines).
But many of us take the legitimate desire for our kids’ safety and magnify it into a dominating idol. The life of an arrow is not a safe one. As Reggie Joiner writes in Parenting Beyond Your Capacity,
“We’re fine if our children never climb a mountain as long as it guarantees they never get hurt. But what if your children were made for the mountains? . . . The ultimate mission of the family is not to protect your children from all harm but to mobilize them for the mission of God. . . . It is possible to hold on to our kids so tightly that we forget the ultimate goal of parenting is to let go.”
When God designs a child to be shot out like an arrow—and instead we treat that child like a piece of furniture that we plan to keep in the house—we not only stunt their development, we also discourage them from finding God altogether. In protecting them from all of life’s challenges, we show them a picture of our faith that is dismally boring. And where your depiction of faith is boring, they will drift toward more interesting things.
Preparing our children as arrows and sending them out applies in a number of contexts, but one that lies close to my heart is the cause of international missions. I know of so, so many college students who sense a genuine call to the mission field, but their parents either forbid it or make it incredibly difficult for them. They are looking to keep their arrows safely in the quiver—unharmed, but ultimately useless.
Is our hold on our children loose enough that we would send them out wherever God calls them? God gave us our children for the Great Commission, and if we want to make an international impact, many of the missionaries we plan to send out are in our nurseries right now. Will we release them?
The Kidification of America and the Need To Grow Up:
Compare this statement to the findings of a new study discussed in The Telegraph. According to polling data, many twentysomethings don’t consider themselves “grown up” even after starting a family. This is startling news:
Just over one in five (22 per cent) of the 2,000 adults surveyed said that people felt mature when they had their own children, while a further fifth (21 per cent) said it was when they moved out of their parents’ home.
We’re in the age of the “Kidification” of America. We adults watch comic-book movies, wear the shorts and leggings that seven-year-olds have traditionally worn, take our favorite games with life-and-death seriousness, show up late to the functions we attend, refuse to build a vocation in order to hold a series of jobs that we never truly commit to, spend above our means and thus incur heaping debt, opt out of our commitments on a whim, snark and blurt out a constant stream of commentary on social media, narcissistically whine about how hard life is (to people whose lives are demonstrably harder than ours), and act wounded when confronted with our faults.
We can understand why this complex of trends converges in “Kidification.” We’ve grown up in a feelings-driven, truth-averse, trigger-happy culture. We’ve been told that we’re only authentically human when we “express ourselves,” whatever that means. We’ve witnessed the breakdown of the family as adults dissolve lifelong bonds over a few afternoon court dates. We’ve observed the rise of 24-hour celebrity culture, with more people than ever longing to live like Hollywood stars (who inwardly crave the normalcy they had before clawing ambition overtook them). The economy over the last century or so has thrived, and so we have a good deal of leisure time, allowing us to devote ourselves to games and hobbies.
We’re all affected by these trends, and not all of them are bad. But we cannot help but notice that we find ourselves in a culture that has rejected traditional forms of maturity. When we’re honest about ourselves, we realize: it’s not just them. We don’t know how to be mature. But this too is true: whatever our background, in some deep part of us, we don’t want to be mature.
The new man, after all, inexhaustibly craves adulthood. The natural man wants to stay young forever.
This pattern permeates the life of the local church. The life of the child is largely about me, and so is the life of the childlike church. Man, not God, is the center. The preaching is not challenging; the songs are a confusing blend of milquetoast and imponderable. We’ve never talked more about grace but less about maturity in Christ. Because the controlling concept of the church is numerical growth, preachers are scared to graciously challenge their people. The result in too many cases is a church that doesn’t grow up. Happiness and an anodyne form of spiritual health is in; holiness and a zealous pursuit of Word-driven, God-intoxicated spirituality is out. Theology is scary and makes people hurt one another’s feelings. The truth is the problem, not the solution.
The “Kidification” of our culture is affecting us all. What can we do about it?
We can all recommit to maturity. In doing so, we truly stand out. The true rebel today is not the jeans-wearing, tattooed-arms displaying, Western canon-denying individualist (who happens to snark on Twitter in lock-step with their peers). The true rebel today is the one we could call the “traditionalist conformist.” Such a person pursues adulthood, whether personally or spiritually. They do not buy the lie of “expressive individualism.” They serve others and do not draw attention to themselves. Their schedule is not ruthlessly oriented around their creature comforts, around “me time.” Instead, they find much worthy human endeavor in serving God and man in the simple things, the basic institutions of life: family, church, vocation, neighborliness, and so on.
The true rebel finds their identity in things bigger than themselves, not the same filtered version of the authentic individualist that so many of their peers also magically happen to desire. To be truly human is not to discover your deepest inner realness in the cavernous reservoirs of the self, but to see your own tiny life in terms of the grandness and greatness and significance of God.
More simply: contra our narcissistic culture, you find yourself when you find God.
Theocentricity breeds growth. It occasions the killing of sin and death to self. It springs into motion the ongoing dynamic of maturity: we leave childish things behind and embrace adulthood. This is the ongoing work of the believer according to Paul: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (1 Cor. 13:11). What a text this is for a “Kidified” age.
I’m not suggesting that we exemplify a grim, joyless, uptight vision of life. Adults can and should enjoy the common-grace gifts of life—sports, movies, whatever. The key here is whether we see maturity as good, profitable, and doxological. Is adulthood our friend, in other words, or our enemy? Are we called to stand out by finding a new way to be human, or by embracing the true humanity modeled and given us in the God-man, Jesus Christ? Are our churches structured around least-common-denominator growth, leaving us baby Christians, or sound-doctrine-powered-transformation, making us storm-tested and God-approved workers?
Our calling today, at least in part, is this: in the age when everybody wants to be a kid, the church has a terrific opportunity to model what it means to grow up.
God, Give Us Men:
God give us men…ribbed with the steel of Your Holy Spirit…men who will not flinch when the battle’s fiercest…men who won’t acquiesce, or compromise, or fade when the enemy rages. God give us men who can’t be bought, bartered, or badgered by the enemy, men who will pay the price, make the sacrifice, stand the ground, and hold the torch high. God give us men obsessed with the principles true to your word, men stripped of selfseeking and a yearn for security…men who will pay any price for freedom and go any lengths for truth. God give us men delivered from mediocrity, men with vision high, pride low, faith wide, love deep, and patience long…men who will dare to march to the drumbeat of a distant drummer, men who will not surrender principles of truth in order to accommodate their peers. God give us men more interested in scars than medals. More committed to conviction than convenience, men who will give their life for the eternal, instead of indulging their lives for a moment in time. Give us men who are fearless in the face of danger, calm in the midst of pressure, bold in the midst of opposition. God give us men who will pray earnestly, work long, preach clearly, and wait patiently. Give us men whose walk is by faith, behavior is by principle, whose dreams are in heaven, and whose book is the Bible. God give us men who are equal to the task. Those are the men the church needs today.
What Is True Gospel Preaching?:
William C. Burns was preaching in Perth, Scotland, in 1840. His biographer writes,
“The power indeed that attended his words, and the effects which often in the most unexpected quarters followed them, was at this time most remarkable. ‘I never thought,’ exclaimed a strong, careless man, who had heard him, ‘to have been so much affected; it is surely something altogether unearthly that has come to the town.'”
Islay Burns, Memoir of the Rev. Wm. C. Burns (London, 1870), page 144.
I think of true preaching of the gospel as defined by three arrows. One arrow points backward into history, all the way back into the biblical world, drawing from the ancient text the pure, authorial meaning of the passage being preached.
A second arrow points forward into the world of today, into the questions and concerns and sins and sufferings of people today, pointing even into the problems they aren’t troubled by but should be. We preach out of yesterday, but we also preach into today.
But these two arrows alone do not suffice for true preaching of the gospel.
A third arrow points down from above. It represents something heavenly entering into the experience of the preacher and his hearers at the moment of the sermon, something that cannot be explained merely in terms of exegetical clarity or contemporary insight, something powerful that sets the moment apart as divine, a glorious awareness that God is there, that the sermon is coming to us as a message from a distant shore, a word from The Throne, something altogether unearthly.
True gospel preaching is more of God than of ourselves, and that’s why it is so strikingly helpful in our world today.
The Wrath of God:
Trying to discuss just one attribute of our infinite, intricate God can feel like trying to untangle the impossible. Wayne Grudem, in his excellent book, Systematic Theology, explains the reason for the difficulty: “Every attribute of God that we find in Scripture is true of all of God’s being, and we, therefore, can say that every attribute of God also qualifies every other attribute.” Because God’s attributes qualify one another, they can be difficult to unravel.
The wrath of God is an attribute that evokes a wide range of responses, all of which are proportional to the individual’s depth of understanding of it. In order to properly understand God’s wrath, we must refer to the Bible to make sure we grasp what God has revealed about Himself. We can more fully appreciate this facet of His character as we consider how His wrath is intertwined with His other attributes.
What is God’s Wrath?
Wrath is classified as a communicable attribute of God because it is an attribute of God that we can share with Him. However, this does not mean that we display wrath in our broken humanness in the same way that He displays His. Our negative experience of human wrath often distorts our ability to see His wrath as a positive attribute. Yet, we know that God is perfectly good, so His wrath will be no different.
Webster’s dictionary defines wrath as “strong vengeful anger or indignation” and “retributory punishment for an offense or a crime.” When we rebel against God and His commands in action or attitude, it is sin, and therefore a crime against God. God feels strong anger (or wrath) towards the sin and is justified in punishing the guilty sinner (Romans 2:5).
God expresses His wrath on both sides of eternity. God displays His wrath on this side of eternity when He allows unbelievers to pursue their sin unrestrained (Romans 1:18-32). They then experience the enslavement and misery that results from their sin (Romans 6:16). After we die, we will all stand before the judgment seat of Jesus at the Final Judgment (Hebrews 9:27, Revelation 20:11-15). Then, God’s wrath will be expressed toward those who are found to be guilty of sin. This wrath, however, is far worse than the wrath experienced on earth. The punishment following the final judgment will be frightening, irreversible, eternal torment in Hell (Hebrews 10:31, Matthew 13:50, Revelation 14:10-11).
God’s wrath is interconnected with His holiness and His justice.
God’s wrath is an expression of His holiness. God is perfectly holy (Leviticus 19:2). He is without any sin, and His holiness requires that He must not approve of or be indifferent to sin, but He must hate it (Psalm5:4). J.I. Packer in his book, Knowing God, explains, “Would a God who took as much pleasure in evil as he did in good be a good God? Would a God who did not react adversely to evil in his world be morally perfect? Surely not. But it is precisely this adverse reaction to evil, which is a necessary part of moral perfection, that the Bible has in view when it speaks of God’s wrath.” Because God is holy, He MUST exhibit wrath against sin. To fail in His wrath would be failure to accomplish the holiness that sets Him apart as good.
God’s wrath is an expression of His justice. God is the perfect judge (Psalm 7:11). When a crime is committed, the guilty party must be found guilty and then punished for his or her actions. We know this to be necessary because our hearts demand justice and fair punishment for atrocities committed in our world, and we rejoice when an offender has been caught, proven guilty, and rightfully punished (Romans 2:15). Our God, as the perfect judge, convicts for wrongdoing and delivers the perfect penalty—for not only these horrendous acts but for all evil committed. Because God is just, He MUST also exhibit wrath against sin. To fail in His wrath would be failure in displaying appropriate justice against injustice.
God’s wrath is tied to His mercy and love.
We must realize that ultimately, we all deserve to experience God’s wrath since we are all guilty of sin (Romans 3:23). God’s character demands that the penalty is paid for our sin. However, this is not the end of the story. God is also a God of infinite mercy and love. It is the simultaneous existence of God’s mercy and love, intertwined with His justice and wrath, which allow for God to provide a substitute for us, even though justice demands that we pay for our sin (Ephesians 2:4-5).
God, motivated by His perfect love, offered Himself as the perfect substitute (John 3:16). Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life, and then He willingly suffered and died on the cross. During His time on the cross, the cup of the wrath of God was poured out on Jesus, when it should have been poured out on us. Jesus experienced the punishment of eternal hell on behalf of those who would believe in Him. Three days later, Jesus resurrected from the dead, showing that He has power over death.
This is the Gospel message—that God met the demands of His own holiness, justice, and wrath on our behalf—and it is a message full of mercy and love. Those who turn from their pursuit of sin and turn toward obedience to God out of their belief in this message will not come under judgment for their sin (John 3:36, 5:24, Hebrews 8:12). Rather, when the time for God’s judgment comes, believers will be declared forgiven of their sin and free from God’s wrath, as a result of Jesus’s suffering on the cross (1 Thessalonians 1:10).
The wrath of God is a beautiful aspect of God’s character. It is meant to lead us to an attitude of gratefulness and worship of the God of our salvation. As Paul states in 1 Thessalonians 5:9, “God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” God’s wrath is final and terrible for those who are perishing apart from Him, but for those who respond to God’s call in faith, His wrath leads us to far greater comprehension of the mercy and love shown to us in His Son.
Saints-They're Just Like Us:
In 2002, however, celebrities seemingly fell to earth when Us Weekly launched “Stars—They’re Just Like Us.” Appearing in each issue of the magazine, this feature shows images of celebrities doing everyday activities. Journalist Ruth Graham explains its significance:
We saw the beautiful extraterrestrials pumping gas, schlepping FedEx packages, and tying their shoes. They ate junk food, picked up dry cleaning, and got parking tickets. The proof was right there on the same glossy paper that showed them walking the red carpet.
Suddenly, they were human and relatable. They were just like us.
Nature Like Ours
Elijah is a star in the Old Testament. He multiples food for a starving widow and her son (1 Kings 17:14), raises someone from the dead (1 Kings 17:22), trounces Baal’s prophets in a spectacular standoff (1 Kings 18), and ascends to heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11).The New Testament confirms his greatness. When Jesus and Luke want to emphasize John the Baptist’s unique spirit and power, they compare him to Elijah (Matt. 11:14; Mark 9:11–13; Luke 1:17). Some people even mistake Jesus for Elijah (Luke 9:19; John 1:21). On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus appears with Elijah (Matt. 17:1–13).
Yet the Scriptures don’t present Elijah as distant, untouchable, or otherworldly; they present him as just like us—flesh, blood, and human. After his stunning triumph over Baal’s prophets, he struggles with common human emotions—despair, unbelief, weakness, anxiety, and loneliness (1 Kings 19). And James writes, “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours” (James 5:17).
Yes, Elijah is an ordinary man, but there is something unique about him—he’s able to do extraordinary things because he prays to an extraordinary God. James continues, “He prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months, it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit” (James 5:17–18).
The difference was not in the man but in his God.
Cloud of Witnesses
The writer of Hebrews says we’re “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” like Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, and more. These men and women built an ark to save a family, led a people to receive the promised land, parted a sea to save a remnant, gave birth to a son after childbearing years, and hid spies sent by God. He continues:And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead by resurrection. (Heb. 11:32–35)
Today we have a greater cloud of witnesses—John, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Paul, Lydia, and more. They raise girls from the dead (Acts 9:40), drive out evil spirits from the possessed (Luke 10:17), walk on water (Mark 14:28–31), heal the lame to walk again (Acts 3:6–8), and more.
Yet these saints—from both the Old and the New Testaments—are profoundly ordinary. Peter is a simple fisherman. David is a man of small stature. Mary and Joseph are teenagers. Gideon’s family isn’t impressive or important (Jdgs. 6:5). Nehemiah is a cupbearer, tasting wine to ensure it’s not poisoned (Neh. 1:12). The saints of the Bible struggle with racism (Acts 10:28), sexual immorality (2 Sam. 11), cowardice (Exod. 4:10–17), fear of man (Esth. 4:10–11), pride (Acts 9:1; Gal. 1:14), and more.
Object of Faith Beats Strength of Faith
The Bible is honest about the limitations and flaws of its celebrities. There’s nothing special about them. They’re ordinary—just like us. Yet they do extraordinary things because they look to an extraordinary God.The foundation of our faith is not family, achievement, attractiveness, or cleverness. We don’t need special gifts and talents, book publishing deals, an executive suite, or a spouse and kids. Even the size of our faith and the height of our holiness aren’t the basis of our hope.
The value of our faith is based on the object of our faith. Tim Keller illustrates:
If there are two people on a plane—one passenger is afraid of flying and thinks the plane will go down at every bump, and the other is a frequent flier who sleeps through turbulence—neither their little faith nor their big faith matters, but only the competence of the crew and the integrity of the aircraft.
Thus we need a God who is real and big and extraordinary. He alone is the foundation of our trust. Therefore, the writer of Hebrews says, we look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith (Heb. 12:2). In him, we find what the saints of old found: strength, hope, and extraordinary life.
Stars in the Sky
When the Lord makes his covenant with Abraham, who is childless and whose wife is beyond childbearing years, he takes him outside and makes an incredible promise: “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them. So shall your offspring be” (Gen. 15:5).We are the fulfillment of that extraordinary promise. We are those stars. In God, we’re otherworldly, sojourning in this world and staking our citizenship in heaven.
Yet we’re not elevated to the heights because of anything we’ve done, but because of everything he’s done. On the cross, the largest star went black, as the Father turned his back on the Son. He received the darkness so we might receive the light. We’re otherworldly because he gave himself in our world.
May we stare afresh at the stooping, self-giving mercy of God. And may we boast in our ordinary weakness, since it’s his extraordinary strength that saves.
The Believers Triumph
“If God loves me, He will _____.”
What words would you use to fill in that blank? Most often when we answer this question, whether privately in our hearts or more boldly, we limit the love of God. We attach His love to the circumstances or results we want. We draw a straight line between God’s love and our comfort.
Romans 8 paints an altogether different picture of a love so much bigger, richer, deeper, and more complete than anything we are even capable of imagining. It isn’t a contingent love or one designed to dole out creature comforts. It cannot be cheapened by our color-by-number effort to depict it. Romans 8 is a masterpiece of God’s love, which is intended for our good.
In Jesus we live loved. We breathe love and exist each moment ensconced in it. No one can condemn us. No one can judge us. No enemy can assail us. Yes, we will be condemned, judged, and assailed in this world, but no one can remove us from Christ’s love. Our own fears and insecurities, even our own death, cannot remove us from the love of God.
This profound love of God was ours before we were conscious of it, and will be ours for all eternity to the fullness of our joy and glorification. God promised to complete the good work He started in us (Philippians 1:6), and He will—through the transformative power of His love.
When Romans 8:28 says “all things work together for good,” this is what it means: not that every painful or confusing moment will pay out in happiness, but that God’s love will not fail. We will reap its benefits throughout infinite time.
In this single passage we see the fullness of God—Father, Son, and Spirit—offer the fullness of His love to those who believe. The Spirit intercedes on our behalf when we lack the words or ability. The Son sacrifices Himself as the means—the access—to this rich love. The Father is the ordainer, author, and giver of the eternal plan of love. And we are part of it, in it for all time.
We may never get what we filled in the blank with above—that thing we attached to God’s love, that trite and limiting expected sign of His goodness. Instead we will be more than conquerors in eternal glory, no matter what we face in this temporal life.
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Five Lessons From Hurricane Florence:
But intuitively people know that God was in charge. I’m sure that even those who had not prayed in years called on God in their distress, asking Him to control their circumstances. And, of course, as believers we know that God was not just an interested bystander.
The book of Job is instructive here. God gave Satan permission to send wind and lightning to kill Job’s children but Satan could not act without God’s express approval. To be sure, nature is fallen and so earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis occur, but Job knew that whatever the secondary causes might be, his calamity was traceable to God. “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21).
Who sent the flood during the days of Noah? Who sent the plagues that ravaged Egypt? Who sent the storm that caused the pagan sailors to throw Jonah overboard? In these and dozens of other passages, the Bible traces the ultimate cause of these disasters to God. He does not usually do them directly, of course, but the secondary causes of nature are also under His command. Jesus could have spoken the word and Hurricane Florence would have become as calm as the waters of Galilee.
God has His own reasons for these events which are unknown to us. But from Scripture we can glean what our response should be and the lessons to be learned.
First: We Grieve, We Do Not Judge
Jesus, when speaking about a disaster in Jerusalem, asked, “Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:4-5). Here was a tragedy known and talked about in the city of Jerusalem. It is quite possible that this tower was an aqueduct built by Romans who were employing Jews in its construction. Of course the Jewish zealots would have disapproved of Jewish workers helping with a project that would benefit their despised oppressors. We can hear it already, “Those men deserved to die…they were victims of God’s judgment!” The self-righteous pointed fingers in those days too!
Jesus affirmed that those who died when the tower collapsed were not greater sinners than others in Jerusalem. It was both morally wrong and self-righteous to sit in judgment on those who were killed so unexpectedly. From God’s standpoint, disasters might be meticulously planned, but from our perspective they occur haphazardly, randomly.
Let our tears be translated into action, helping with our prayers, with our giving to organizations that help the distressed and, if possible, join others who are physically responding to those in need. We grieve we do not judge.
Second: Values Are Clarified
When that tower in Siloam fell, no one mourned the loss of the bricks, but eighteen families mourned the loss of a husband, father, or brother. As Max Lucado said back when Katrina hit New Orleans, “No one laments a lost plasma television or submerged SUV. No one runs through the streets yelling, ‘My cordless drill is missing’ or ‘My golf clubs have washed away.’ If they mourn it is for people who are lost. If they rejoice it is for people who have been found.” (1) He goes on to say that raging hurricanes and broken levees have a way of prying our fingers off the stuff we love. One day you have everything; the next day you have nothing.
“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26). Disasters help us separate the trivial from the weighty, the temporal from the eternal. Suddenly what is most important becomes most important.
Third: Life Is Uncertain:
The people who lose their lives in a natural disaster do not wake that morning telling themselves, “This could be my last day on Earth.” Collapsing towers, accidents, and floods happen without warning.
When you read the obituaries of those who have died in sudden calamities, you should visualize your own name in the column. All of us know someone who has been unexpectedly killed in an accident, perhaps in a car wreck, at work, or by drowning, not to mention a heart attack. When we grieve with the families, we should remind ourselves that our own death could be just around the next corner. We are born with an expiration date.
Tragedies rid us of the overconfidence we have that we are in control of our destiny. Disasters, in the words of David Miller, remind us that “Human existence on Earth was not intended to be permanent. Rather, the Creator intended life on Earth to serve as a temporary period in which people are given the opportunity to attend to their spiritual condition as it relates to God’s will for living. Natural disasters provide people with conclusive evidence that life on Earth is brief and uncertain.” (2)
In one of his most popular books, C.S. Lewis imagines a lead demon, Screwtape, telling his underlings that war can be dangerous to their demonic agenda because it causes humans to think about eternity. If the demons are not careful “they might see thousands turning to the enemy [God] during this tribulation. In fact, it just might cause thousands to divert their attention to values and causes that are higher then they themselves…Thus, in wartime men prepare for death in ways they do not when things are going smoothly.” (3)
Then the demon continues:
“How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every kind of indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestions of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition!” (4)
Lewis believes—and I concur—that “contented worldliness” is one of the demons’ best weapons at times of peace. But when disasters come, this weapon is rendered worthless. He writes, “In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.”
This is one of the reasons why we will never know all of God’s purposes in natural disasters—we simply do not know the thousands, or perhaps millions, of spiritually careless people who were forced to take God seriously in a time of crisis. Even those of us who watch these calamities from a safe distance, hear God saying, “Prepare for your own death…it may be soon.”
Fourth: We See a Preview of Coming World-Wide Judgments
Let’s return to the words of Jesus as He speaks about the collapsed tower of Siloam, “But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3). We’ve all seen a movie preview that gives us a glimpse of what is yet to come. Natural disasters remind us that severe judgment is coming.
Depending on how you classify them, at least three or four natural disasters will accompany the return of Jesus to Earth: “For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn…” (Matthew 24:27–30).
Convulsions of nature will eventually be a part of God’s sovereign judgment. Here is a future ‘natural disaster’ which is the real movie after the preview.
“When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’” (Revelation 6:12–17).
We owe a great debt to those affected by Hurricane Florence. What happened to them is a warning to us all. If we don’t repent we “shall likewise perish.”
Fifth: While There Is Time, We Must Find Firm Ground
Jesus likened a future judgment to a natural disaster. He ended the Sermon on the Mount by telling the story of two men: one who built his house on the sand, and the other on the rock. On a beautiful sunny afternoon they looked identical; perhaps the house built on the sand was even more beautiful than the one built on the rock. But a natural disaster revealed the difference between the two. “And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock” (Matthew 7:25). The other house could not endure the storm, “and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:27).Recall that the Titanic went under with 1,522 people knowingly going to a watery grave. At the White Star office in Liverpool, England, a huge board was set up; on one side was a sign titled: Known To Be Saved, and on the other, the words: Known To Be Lost. Hundreds of people gathered to watch the signs. When a messenger brought new information, the question was: to which side would he go?
Although the travelers on the Titanic were either first, second, or third class upon boarding, after the ship went down, there were only two categories: the saved and the drowned. Just so, in the final Day of Judgment, there will be only two classes: the saved and the lost. There is only heaven and hell.
God shouts from heaven, “Unless you repent, you will likewise perish.”
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