Day 4004 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Amos 8:11 NIV

The emptiness

There’s a coming day upon which we’ll all of us finally understand fully the version of God’s justice that is to be defined as just in the upmost. For to be just is to be well founded, something thus justifiable as it's built upon a foundation that is well poured and seated solidly upon whatever it is that has elsewise been chosen as the footing upon which the building might begin. But to be just is too defined as that which is considered to be understandably deserved and thus too appropriate given the particular circumstances or situations within which whatever decisions are finally determined.

In other words, there’s a violently simple version of justice that is retained by God that is defined by God who is a God who is just.

Because as He is the very Author and Maker of all life on earth, even making the earth upon which all of life is, for now at least, this thus means that whatever else He determines to do is too something which is done that He just in doing as He who created everything thus too retains the only right to decide what best to do what He’s already done. This is the conundrum considered in Scripture where it’s covered that a vessel hasn’t the right, the authority nor even in all reality the ability to ask of its potter why it was made nor then the way in which it was made.

Nor then to ever even consider what’s become our instead widespread approach to all but all of life itself in which we all choose to live as if we each have a better idea as to why we’re here and what that means and what to do in light of what we alone assume it might mean than He who made us might.

Indeed, this is life. It’s become this time in which every mind is seemingly made upon this making up of our own way and that mostly as we go oddly enough pretty much nowhere, at least not much of anywhere that our future selves will have the glory of looking back and being proud of having gone. Instead we all daily do so many things that we probably know we ought not to because such things as ought and naught are not anything that we in any way seem able to understand, welcome or want.

Rather we seem to still assume these lives as but our times in which to try for all that we do want, giving ourselves so fully unto our cravings that we care not to give any of our time or thoughts to the wonder or worry which should always be won within our walk and where it has us heading.

Why?

Why should we wonder? Why should we worry? Because of this promise right here. One that, whilst scary as we see it seemingly unfolding already, it’s one that is but a down payment upon its superior. For first comes the times which will bring with them a famine of hearing the words of God, a time which thus precedes the end in which all will have been done that could be done and we’ll all have done whatever we cannot then undo.

This is why we have God’s Word to peruse, to pursue.

It’s said that His Word has been breathed for the benefit of such things as inspiring inside of us a growth of both humility and hope as are sown inside the story that’s told of a God who so loved the world that He sent His one and only Son into the same in order to save the same from their sins by laying down His life upon a cross taken up unto the call left unto all to come and do the same.

Something that none of us want to do.

Rather we continue to prove a people who wish only to love our lives as we live our lives so lost inside our minds seeking for only more ways to please or pacify our deceitful hearts and their destructive desires. Desires so deadly that they’re already starting fires that He has promised He will let burn forever. Indeed, this too is something that I believe we can read within His Word as was writ to aim us against the heavier promise of it.

For Christ tells us that it will be more bearable upon the Day of Judgement for the people of such places as even Sodom than it will for those who have had the undue privilege of having seen, heard or been elsewise made at least aware of the Son and all He’s done only to have instead continued to do all they’d chosen to do as if said Son had not come nor then done any of all He has.

Because it’s one thing to act in a plausible ignorance as could be argued for all those who lived before Christ did. But for any who’ve lived on this side of that cross, if we choose to remain lost, He will indeed do as He’s promised and give us that for which our actions have asked.

Now it’s true that such promises are made in a much lighter way in such places as 1 John 5:14 and Matthew 7:7 which say, “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” and, “ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” respectively.

Problem being that God, being just, is too to be just as just should He determine to fulfill those promises in the same way unto the opposites for which He breathed them to inspire us toward.

What I mean is this:

If God will give us whatever we ask of Him because He does hear us when we ask, then is it not reasonable to imagine that He might give unto all those who ask Him only to leave them alone as He does unto those few who don’t?

Because Scripture expressly states that He will give us the desires of our hearts, a promise made in response to the hopeful outcome that we’ve since learned to delight ourselves in the Lord. Problem being that not all are going to so learn to so delight in the Lord alone.

And yet God is not divided.

So again what I mean is that if those who have delighted themselves in the Lord shall be given the desires their hearts have learned to desire inside of that delight, might He not just as well be just as just to give unto those who delight not in the Lord whatever their hearts desire to delight in?

For indeed, again in Scripture we can find these places in which it’s said such things as how “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” Romans 1:24. Or how in Romans 1:28 it reads that “furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.”

Even in the Psalms we see this in that Psalm 81:12 tells us that “I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices.”

It’s even something which seems promised to continue unfolding in light of such words written in 2 Thessalonians 2:11-12 in which we see that, “for this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

What lie and what reason?

“The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.” 2 Thessalonians 2:9-10

And so you see it’s that it all comes around to our choices as are made in or based upon our desires and delights that achieve for us things that we might not like nearly as much as we may have liked thinking we would. And this is because, as a people so blind to everything better that we could have all already been by now, we tend to struggle to see beyond such things as craving and lust and this ease of our staying as lost as we’ve since learned to love being in life.

This is why it was once commonly heard to be careful what you ask for as you just might get it. A warning written within the wisdom of a world that was filled with folks who’d asked for things they thought they wanted only to get them and finally see them as nothing they needed.

A choice we’re still making in what are probably more ways than ever before.

Because what we see now is a world spiraling out of control in terms of sin and the radical lack of shame which often comes with it. Indeed, so many in this place are serving such amazing disgrace that I fear we’re approaching this very point of life breaking in which it all just crumbles and proves, like our old friend Humpty, all but impossible to be put back together.

And that’s because once this here promise is fulfilled among us, what hope will then be found for us?

For if there’s a time coming, one on its way in response to the verse we discussed yesterday in regard to itching ears gathering around them only those who only say only what they want hear, a choice made in light of a clearly already growing disinterest in the endurance of sound teaching, in which said sound teaching as is taught in and from only God’s Word, what then will be there be left to lead us? To teach us? To help us become what it’s said His Word was breathed for to benefit us?

Because it’s said in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 that “all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Thus seeming to mean that should there truly come a famine of people hearing His Word, then there could neither be any good works such as teaching us the way in which we should walk or the rebuking us when we fall or correcting us and training us in and toward the righteousness that we so clearly are not ourselves capable of. This is a reality we see around us daily!

We are incapable of righteousness, of morality, of decency even.

We are degenerate.

And that word means what it seems to mean in that we are de generate, as in un generate, as in the opposite of generate or thus going against what it is to generate.

We’re losing ground as we’re losing ourselves to a way of life in which we’re losing our minds trying to find some way to make our way seem as good to everyone else as it’s always seemed to us: So very good in every possible way that again we deny the Way because we seem to think that our ideas, our delights, our desires, our designs are to prove somehow better than His.

Something that we’ve each believed in so fully that we’ve all turned our attention away from Him and there chosen to ignore His Word, refuse His Way, fail His will and thus live as if nothing short of His enemies.

But friends, look again at some of the things that we’ve come to consider ourselves just in doing unto our enemies.

And then look again at the cross and consider the life He lost to save His.

Why do we hate this hope so much as we do? For Christ came here with a life to lose so as to help save the lost from their sins so that they could, in Him, take up their own cross and follow Him where He went after having lost what was affixed to a flesh that was given over unto sin and thus into death.

How can our way be better than that?

Or is it that we seem to still assume it is only because the famine has already started and we’ve then started to become more and more unaware of just how good He really is?

I believe this is the emptiness.

It’s something that hit me quite heavily yesterday, just as heavily and in the very same way as back in May of last year. For yesterday a man left who’d become known for sharing the Gospel of Christ Jesus from rock and roll stages. Last May a man left who’d lived one of the most remarkable and respectable examples of repentance and sanctification that I’ve personally ever heard of. Another left last September. One last July.

They’re leaving here left and right.

And what hit me yesterday was oddly enough what I said felt an emptiness in the world as Mr. Brad Arnold left this world to head on home. Same feeling I felt when Mr. Phil Robertson did the same last May. Same as when Mr. Voddie Baucham left in September and Mr. John MacArthur went home in July.

It’s not that these men were perfect, would imagine they’d be the first to happily and readily admit they weren’t. But what they were seemed to be men faithful unto the commission of going into all of creation and testifying to the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

And their having left for home leaves what feels a hole that is now an army that’s four fewer unto this duty of sharing that message of the cross.

It seems then that the famine has indeed started as some are leaving all the time who have lived at least some of their lives trying to spread the hope that is the promise of Heaven. And as more and more leave, chances are few will step up and take their place as in this world most still find this faith to be foolish, proving hearts still wayward and lost despite the cross and the many lives since lost to trying to help the lost find that they’ve been found.

What’s to happen when our awareness of this world finding our faith foolishness is matched with few willing to be considered foolish? What’s to happen as more men and women leave this world who’ve stood bold in their faith despite the hate that doing so so often brings? What’s to happen to those who’ve never wanted to see faith any other way when there are fewer and fewer who dare try and convince them, beg them to reconsider?

I don’t personally see how things are to get better.

Not here.

Why?

Because this world is already so starved for such things as holiness and righteousness and humility that as those who seek for such things leave, well, those who seek them not will only have fewer reasons to wonder why they should, to wonder what they’re missing, to imagine they’re missing anything. For this world sells this lie that we’re missing nothing by missing Christ or denying faith or refusing repentance. If anything, this world considers those things “winning.”

But what are we winning my friends? I mean, just look around at how things are going. Look at what the world’s become and is further becoming. I’ve said it often it seems but lately it feels that this world we’re in today only somehow replaced the world in which I grew up. It’s almost entirely unrecognizable. In fact I find that I feel this struggle inside as I fight to understand how things have come to this. I can’t balance it most days. It’s all just too strange.

Is this winning? Are we happy with how things are going? Is this the kind of life that we want to be living, this life in which we’re losing our time and effort unto things that aren’t making things any better?

What is supposed to improve when we become more divided, more deceitful, more dishonest, more ungrateful all the time?

And again that in what is a time in which those chasing after Christ seem to be being pulled out of the fight?

I just know that in His Word we can read that He will save those who are His from the wrath of His that’s coming upon those many who refuse to be. And so when we see those who are bold in their beliefs being called unto their reward, it just starts making you wonder how much longer the rest of us have.

A wonder that ought to inspire worry as, well, His wrath is one of those things that many will one day come to realize they spent their whole lives asking for only to receive so fully that they finally find, and feel forever, they didn’t want after all.

Friends, my point is that that day is coming upon which our every eternity will be determined and that based upon the merit of our actions. Indeed, God’s Word reads that He “’will repay each person according to what they have done.’ To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger.” Romans 2:6-8

I think the problem is that we’re used to facing human anger and at best then assume His much the same as ours.

It isn’t.

For the worst we can do unto one another is kill the flesh. He on the other hand, well, He “can destroy both soul and body in hell.” And friends, that’s Jesus’ words in Matthew 10:28.

My point is that we’re already seeing humanity devolve unto the point in which we’re proving the former.

How much longer do we think we have before He proves the latter?

All I know is that there feels this emptiness here as many of the faithful are leaving for home. And as they’ve been ones who’ve boldly proclaimed His Name, their not being here anymore seems to prove that the number of those who will do as they’ve tried is shrinking as they go.

Thus the famine has at least begun.

So again, be careful what you ask for because He’s starting to prove that He will give us whatever we ask.

Even when that means His leaving this world alone with fewer and fewer in it who are willing to try and point the rest toward He who came to save all of us from what He’s said is coming next.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold