The Road Hosea 6:5: "Therefore have I hewed them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth: and thy judgments are as the light that goeth forth."
“But if thou scoffest at hearing of hell and believest not that fire, remember Sodom. For we have seen, surely we have seen, even in this present life, a semblance of hell. For since many would utterly disbelieve the things to come after the resurrection, hearing now of an unquenchable fire, God brings them to a right mind by things present. For such is the burning of Sodom, and that conflagration!…
“Consider how great is that sin, to have forced hell to appear even before its time!… For that rain was unwonted, for the intercourse was contrary to nature, and it deluged the land, since lust had done so with their souls. Wherefore also the rain was the opposite of the customary rain. Now not only did it fail to stir up the womb of the earth to the production of fruits, but made it even useless for the reception of seed. For such was also the intercourse of the men, making a body of this sort more worthless than the very land of Sodom. And what is there more detestable than a man who hath pandered himself, or what more execrable?”
“The time of your devastation and gloom is now here. Your fists in the air will soon be hands digging in the sand for food. Your cities and towns are becoming waste places. Thieves steal your goods and violent crimes are your new allies. Your sex-revolutions are worn-out like an old rag. The sermons of tolerance are thought of as a joke because your hypocrisy knows no end. Your taglines and buzzwords are as empty as your souls. In your closets are found the lives of those you shamed. You got your way, (the destruction of the nation) but the pain is coming to you. Mr. Payback is here and he wants the balance in full with added tariffs, taxes & late fees. The cards you played on your fellow country-men will be the cards you are dealt. What you have put down, you will pick up, full measure. Your sedition and treachery against God against all that is right and good will be met with your turbulence and tribulation. You ‘called down the thunder’ and now you will be thundered upon. The misery you have brought will be your doom. The evil you demanded humans buckle to will be the force that comes upon you. You hear the sound in hell yet, wicked reprobate Leftists? Soon, you will hear non-stop screams and cries of the innocent unborn that you put in the ground. The brutality you forced upon young children in your dens of pedophilia will be your beating received for the destruction of innocence. The trans agenda shoved on parents will be forced upon your Grandchildren who will rise up and kill you.”
Psalm 94:23 “He has brought back their wickedness upon them And will destroy them in their evil; The Lord our God will destroy them.”
Romans 9:22 “What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?”
Psalm 28:5 “Because they do not regard the works of the Lord Nor the deeds of His hands, He will tear them down and not build them up.”
“The Gospel teaches us to cut off the roots of our sins and not merely their fruits. When we have dug the root of anger out of our heart, we will no longer act with hatred or envy. ‘Whoever hates his brother is a murderer’ (I Jn. 3:15), for he kills him with the hatred in his mind. The blood of a man who has been slain by the sword can be seen by men, but blood shed by the hatred in the mind is seen by God, Who rewards each man with punishment or a crown not only for his acts but for his thoughts and intentions as well.”
“To be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave; so to be the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave; and it usually happens to the appointment, and as it were retributive justice, of the Deity, that that people which cannot govern themselves, and moderate their passions, but crouch under the slavery of their lusts, should be delivered up to the sway of those whom they abhor, and made to submit to an involuntary servitude.”
–John Milton, Second Defense of the English People
Proverbs 14: 34: “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”
Jude 6 & 7: “And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”
“Every man on earth is sick with the fever of sin, with the blindness of sin and is overcome with its fury. As sins consist mostly of malice and pride, it is necessary to treat everyone who suffers from the malady of sin with kindness and love. This is an important truth, which we often forget. Very often we act in the opposite manner: we add malice to malice by our anger, we oppose pride with pride. Thus, evil grows within us and does not decrease; it is not cured – rather it spreads”
The quote by A.W. Tozer above was taken from the Singapore Christian blog. This is my comment below:
I Corinthians 9: 20-22: “And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.”
I believe too many Christians take the above scripture and re-translate it like this: “I must be conformed to the world so that I can save the world.” Too many worldly Christians on this planet. The Lord has called us to be a holy people–separate from the world system.
The Holy Ghost Fire really separates the wheat from the chaff.
II Corinthians 6: 17-18: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.”
James 4: 4: “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”
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Something to meditate on:
Why did John the Baptist camp out on the other side of the Jordan River?
[John 1: 28: “These things were done in Bethabara beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing.]
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John the Baptist lived a very short life; very little is written about him in the New Testament. Jesus called John the Baptist the greatest man ever born of woman. Maybe we could say that John the Baptist was a greater prophet than Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah and all the rest of the Old Testament prophets. The Book of Isaiah has 66 chapters; the Book of Jeremiah has 52 chapters; much more is written about Samuel and Elijah than John the Baptist.
Why is the life of John the Baptist still a powerful witness unto this day?
Probably because the crucified life has more power than the words that come out of our mouth.
Genesis 19: 28: “And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.”
Harlot of the Tetons
The stench of your sin
Rose up to highest Heaven
You were fashionably dressed
Like ancient Sodom
Till the day the Lord
Scorched your streets with fire.
You have plowed iniquity;you have reaped injustice;you have eaten the fruit of lies. Because you have trusted in your own wayand in the multitude of your warriors, therefore the tumult of war shall arise among your people,and all your fortresses shall be destroyed, Shalman destroyed Beth-arbel on the day of battle; mothers were dashed in pieces with their children.Thus it shall be done to you, O Bethel,because of your great evil. At dawn the king of Israelshall be utterly cut off. – Hosea 10:13-15 ESV
At times, even as believers, we are surprised at the outcomes of some of our decision making. We are somehow amazed that our lies have consequences. We are shocked when our love affair with materialism leaves us struggling with greed, envy, covetousness, worry and anxiety. We wonder why we are so angry, yet never connect the dots to our daily consumption of violence-filled media. We wrestle with lust, but never seem to associate it with the sexually explicit programming that fills our TV screens each and every night.
The Israelites were also oblivious to the cause-and-effect nature of their lives. So God made it clear to them: “you have cultivated wickedness and harvested a thriving crop of sins” (Hosea 10:13 NLT). In other words, they were reaping exactly what they should have expected. No surprises. Just the natural consequences of living their lives apart from God. They had consumed a daily dose of lies about everything. They had been told that God would not punish them for their sins because they were His chosen people. They had been promised that alliances with foreign powers would protect them from destruction. They believed that the gods of pagan nations were anything but false. But while a steady diet of lies may taste good going down and make you feel good for the moment, it will leave you spiritually weak, malnourished, and starving to death.
Self-reliance and misplaced trust were behind the behavior of the Israelites. “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22 ESV). The prophet, Jeremiah, recorded a similar indictment from God against the people of Judah. “My people are foolish and do not know me. They are stupid children who have no understanding. They are clever enough at doing wrong, but they have no idea how to do right!” (Jeremiah 4:22 NLT). They thought they knew better than God. They rejected His commands and ignored His warnings. They lived life according to their own terms. They stopped trusting God and, instead, placed their hope in false gods. When things got tough and they found themselves threatened by outside forces, they turned to alliances with countries like Egypt. They refused to rely on God. He had become small, insignificant and insufficient to meet their needs. The God who had delivered them from captivity in Egypt and given them the land of Canaan had become too weak to meet their needs. They had long ago forgotten the words of David:
Now I know that the Lord saves his anointed; he will answer him from his holy heavenwith the saving might of his right hand.Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand upright. – Psalm 20:6-8 ESV
Not only did they doubt God’s salvation, they denied His judgment. They really did not believe that they could fall. They were so confident in their status as God’s chosen people, that they believed they were invincible. And yet, they never seemed to recognize the fact that their protection by God was based on their obedience and faithfulness to him. He had warned them that disobedience would bring His discipline. Unfaithfulness would have consequences. So God gave them the bad news: “Now the terrors of warwill rise among your people” (Hosea 10:14 NLT). Their army would be impotent. Their alliances would prove useless. Their fortresses and defensive measures would be insufficient. And their false gods would be exposed for what they were: non-existent and, therefore, no help in time of need.
The devastation would be horrific. Referring to a past battle, God warned them that their fall would be brutal and merciless: “as Shalman destroyed Beth-arbel on the day of battle; mothers were dashed in pieces with their children” (Hosea 10:14b ESV). The Assyrians were going to show no mercy. Their destruction of the nation of Israel would be complete and no one would escape their wrath. From king to commoner, priest to prostitute, the influential to innocent infants – all would feel the wrath of the Assyrians and the judgment of God.
These kinds of passages make us uncomfortable as believers. They paint a picture of God that seems to contradict our view of Him as loving, gracious, forgiving and merciful. But too often, our understanding of God can become one-dimensional. We prefer to emphasize His love while downplaying His holiness and hatred of sin. We find comfort in His grace, but don’t want to think about His righteous wrath and divine obligation to punish sin. In doing so, we diminish the value of the gift of His Son. But it is in understanding the severity of sin’s offensiveness to God and His just and righteous obligation to punish sin that we fully comprehend the magnitude of what Christ has done for us. “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8 NLT). Jesus “was handed over to die because of our sins, and he was raised to life to make us right with God” (Romans 4:25 NLT). The inescapable reality was that “even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead” (Ephesians 2:5 NLT).
Our sin was real. God’s judgment against our sin was deserved. And yet He showed us mercy – in spite of our sinfulness. Grace does not diminish the gravity of sin. It actually reveals the amazing love of God as He provides a means of salvation that is capable of satisfying His wrath against sin. He gave His Son. It was the death of Jesus alone that could propitiate or satisfy the just judgment of God against the sinfulness of mankind. Nothing else would do. No other payment could have been made that would have paid the debt that was owed. So when we elevate God’s love while ignoring His wrath, we actually diminish the amazing nature of that love. He loved us in spite of us, not because of us.
And yet, we continue to sow and reap, sin and suffer, because we don’t fully appreciate the gravity of sin and the greatness of His grace. We justify our actions, rationalize our sinful behavior and then wonder why we reap discontentment, dissatisfaction, anger, joylessness, envy, greed, and immorality. It is an accurate understanding of the grace of God that should produce in us the fruit of righteousness. As God told the people of Israel, “Plant the good seeds of righteousness, and you will harvest a crop of love. Plow up the hard ground of your hearts, for now is the time to seek the LORD, that he may come and shower righteousness upon you” (Hosea 10:12 NLT).
Last Monday, Oct. 5, 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown signed ABX2-15, the End of Life Option Act, thereby making lawful “physician-assisted suicide” — the politically-palatable name for euthanasia. (See “California legalizes euthanasia“)
A day after euthanasia became legal, KPBS reports that a group called Seniors Against Suicide (SAS) filed papers to place a referendum to repeal the law on next year’s ballot. SAS has only 90 days to collect the signatures of 365,880 registered voters.
The referendum effort faces steep obstacles, if we go by the results of the latest Field Poll.
Released a day after Brown signed ABX2-15 into law, the statewide poll of 1,002 registered voters found broad voter support for the End of Life Option Act:
2 in 3 voters in the poll (65%) favor the new law; only 27% are opposed.
Support is broad-based, spanning nearly all major subgroups of the state’s voting population:
Groups giving the law the strongest support – 70% or more in favor – are liberals, Democrats, non-partisan Independents, white non-Hispanics, those with no religious preference, and non-Christian religions.
Majorities of Protestants, Catholics, and registered Republicans also support the new euthanasia law.
Political conservatives and born-again Christians are least likely to support the bill.
71% of those polled favor a more generic question about euthanasia — allowing terminally ill patients the right to ask for and
get life-ending medication.
The Netherlands and Belgium show how physician-assisted suicide can be and is being abused, resulting in doctors killing people who are not terminally-ill, including the elderly, the young, the mentally ill, and babies. See:
The Road 