The Nearness of Judgement

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The Nearness of Judgement

February 23, 2022

People are often confused by what the wrath of God is and how it is revealed upon humanity. In this podcast I try to make a case that God's judgement is much more near than we would imagine. I hope you see the truth of what I am presenting and if you do not know Christ then repent and turn to him as KING!

Key Texts:

* Romans 1:18-32

* Genesis 19:24-29

* Revelation 19:1-3 ; 20:7-10

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Transcript

Even in the scriptures, the normative way that God judges his people is through a giving over of sin, which then brings about the destruction of the people either internally or from an outside nation. So, I want to talk about the reality of this judgement, but people will often say, "Obviously, things are just as sexually immoral as Sodom and Gomorrah." Or, "Why is God not raining down fire and sulfur on us yet? Why does he not judge us that way?" Don't think I will even ask you to make Jesus Lord of your life. That's the most preposterous thing I could ever tell you to do.

Jesus Christ is Lord of your life. Whether you serve him or not, whether you bless him, curse him, hate him, or love him, he is the Lord of your life because God has given him a name that is above every name so that the name of Jesus Christ every knee shall bow and tongue confess that he is Lord. Some of you will bow out of the grace that has been given to you and others will bow because your kneecaps will be broken by the one who rules the nations with a rod of iron.

And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible. Revelation chapter 19 verses 1 through 3. "After this, I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out, 'Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God for his judgments are true and just. For he has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality and has avenged on her the blood of his servants.

Once more they cried out, 'Hallelujah! The smoke from her goes up forever and ever.'" Welcome to the For the King podcast. I appreciate you being here with me and joining me to open up the text of scripture, to learn about God, to learn about his son Jesus Christ, and to learn about the works of the Spirit of God in our lives. This is the great king, the one who visits the earth not only to save the earth, but also who will visit once again to judge the earth.

And he has done that once in 8070 and he will do it again when he finally judges Satan for the last time. So I want to talk this episode, by the way I'm all by my lonesome, so just bear with me here. But I think I have something I want to share with everybody on the podcast that listens.

With no guests, these are just original thoughts from yours truly. I want to talk about the judgment of God. So fitting that I would read from Revelation 19 where the mystery Babylon gets judged and the people scream out "Hallelujah! For the smoke from her goes up forever and ever because she had corrupted the earth with her immorality." Now I'm post-millennial and I'm a partial praetorist so I think that this has already happened.

I think that Babylon, this mystery Babylon, was the Jews that had hoared themselves away with the surrounding nations all throughout the history of the Jewish nation and God finally visits them in judgment. And just as a quick little fact, the word hallelujah doesn't show up in all the text of scripture until here in Revelation 19. And they're saying hallelujah in response to the wrath and judgment of God.

That is what is causing them to say the words "Hallelujah! Praise be to God." So I want to keep that in mind that we ought to praise God because of His judgments, because of His wrath, all of His attributes, His justice, His wrath, His righteousness, mercy, grace, all these things. These are who we know our great Lord as and we ought to worship Him and praise Him for all of who He is. And He is a God that is angry with sin.

Now there's grace in Christ and the satisfaction of the wrath of God could be put on Christ rather than you if you would but repent and believe in Christ. But for those that don't, He is angry with your sin and He will judge you rightly and perfectly. So first I want to go to Genesis chapter 19 when God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and He's doing this in response to what? Well a similar thing to what's happening in Revelation that the mystery Babylon, this woman, this harlot, it says in verse 2, "His judgments are true and just, for He has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality." The great prostitute, this harlot.

So I want to juxtapose that with what's happening here in Sodom and Gomorrah, that there is just rampant sexual morality, prostitution and homosexuality, all sorts of perversions going on in these cities and this is what causes God to judge them. So this is what happens in chapter 19 of Genesis verses 23 through 29. "The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zuar.

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah, sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven, and He overthrew those cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on the ground. But Lot's wife behind him looked back and she became a pillar of salt. Then Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley and he looked and behold the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.

So it was that when God destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had lived." So I'm juxtaposing these texts because we see the judgment of God coming. He destroys a city, a wicked city, and there is smoke coming up from that city. Like a furnace is what it says, which should... This text in Revelation when God judges mystery Babylon should remind us of the immorality of the people that had forsaken God in this valley and He destroys them because of it.

And what we see I think in that Revelation text is that the people of God had continuously throughout the Old Testament hoared themselves away with the nations around them, adopting their the Ashtaroth and the Bales and all these false religions that were really just the worship of demons. They did this over and over and over again and finally God visits them in judgment in AD 70 and cuts them off. This is why John the Baptist says at the beginning of his ministry, even now the axe is laid to the root when he's talking to the Pharisees.

And then he tells them that even from these stones could God raise up children of Abraham. So they had presumed that just because they were Abraham's children they wouldn't be judged like the gentile nations, right? Yet God visits them in judgment in AD 70 and cuts them off. And they ultimately indict themselves when Jesus is before Pilate and they say, you know, Pilate says, "Do you want me to release to you king of the Jews?" And the Pharisees say, "We have no king but Caesar.

Let him and his blood be on us and our children." So they indict themselves and bring cursings upon themselves because they rejected the Messiah. So connection is Sodom and Gomorrah is rained down sulfur and fire from heaven. The smoke from them continues to go up because of their immorality and they're whoring themselves away, both literally because of sexual immorality but also to foreign gods, which is the the the axe of the heart are always out of the heart flows the wicked axe and murderous deeds.

All sexual immorality and all these things, their hearts were wicked before they were ever doing wicked actions. So God judges them and this is a type of hell. Sodom and Gomorrah is a type of judgment, of the final judgment, which comes at the end.

So in Revelation 20 verse 7 it says, "And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are on the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle. Their number is like the sand of the sea and they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints of that beloved city. But fire came down from heaven and consumed them." So we see fire coming down from heaven again and judging the wicked acts of the devil and the people that he gathers to come against God's anointed.

"And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever." So fire and sulfur, this reminds us of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is imagery used all throughout the scriptures of judgment and this is a true reality that will happen. Now God does not, we see God flooding the earth one time in judgment.

We see God raining down fire and sulfur only a handful of times in the scriptures. Even in the scriptures, the normal, the normative way that God judges his people is through a giving over of sin which then brings about the destruction of the people either internally or from an outside nation. So I want to talk about the reality of this judgment, but people will often say, obviously things are just as sexually immoral as Sodom and Gomorrah were.

Why is God not raining down fire and sulfur on us yet? Why does he not judge us that way? This is a similar argument to why do I not, if God really did exist, why doesn't he just write his signature in the sky or leave us beyond any measure of doubt that he exists when first of all, he has. What I want to do on this episode is show that his judgment is actually more near than you might think because some people, when you read the scriptures, you see these very dramatic apocalyptic events that happen and people connecting their mind that God will judge us with sulfur and fire. He'll rain it down from heaven and there'll be earthquakes and famines and all these things.

But really what the teaching of scriptures getting at when these events happen is those are very, very unique circumstances and they're not the normative way that God is judging people. God's not normally flooding the whole earth. He's not normally raining down sulfur and fire.

These are very specific events left for very specific times. So we see here the defeat of Satan. Wow, what a large event.

Well, how does he consummate this defeat of Satan? Well, through raining down fire from heaven on him and throwing him into the lake of fire and sulfur. So these are momentous events that happen and the judgment likewise matches. Now, not that the things that I'm about to talk about are momentous or important, but I want to lay out the normative way that God judges people, either his own people or those reprobate in a society or in the world and bring the nearness of the judgment of God to you that we might have a proper fear of the Lord.

If you don't know Christ, this should strike fear in you of his judgment and that he will destroy you. He will cast your soul into hell. Don't fear the one who could just kill the body, but fear the one who can kill both body and soul.

That is the one you want to fear. But if you do know Christ, then we no longer submit to a fear of bondage. Like it says in Galatians, the kind of fear we have towards our father is a reverential dread towards God that we might not displease him, that we might not receive his discipline, but we would please our father.

So I want you to either be encouraged or to be very afraid of the judgment of God on your lives and be called the repentance. So I'm going to read from Romans chapter one. And I'm just going to read, I'm going to read a long section of Romans chapter one.

I'll do the latter half from 18 to 32. This is going to be important though. And it all kind of hinges on verse 18 here.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.

So there without excuse for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give him thanks, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened, claiming to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immoral God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up to the lusts of their heart to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever. Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions for those that are contrary to nature and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetous, malice.

They were full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossip, slanders, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

Okay, this is the clearest text in scripture I could go to about the normative judgment of God upon a nation, upon a people. This first verse in verse 18 of this chapter, chapter 1 in Romans, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." And then he walks through how the wrath of God is revealed in response to their ungodliness and unrighteousness of mankind. What happens? God gives them up to the lust of their heart, the impurity of their thinking, a debased mind.

They become fools. They serve the creature. They're enslaved to created things.

They have dishonorable passions that are not in right natural relation to reality. And then this long list of sins that he gives in verse 29, 30, and 31. And these are all things that he ends with that they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die.

So what happens in you get a society, you get people that the common grace, the natural light given to all mankind, the law that's written on their hearts, which Paul gets into in Romans 2, that they know these things that are not good, that they ought not to be done. They don't have to practice these things because they deserve death, but they give approval to it. They encourage it.

There's a group think that happens about sin. And we see this clearly in our nation. There's a group think on the emotional truth of abortion, of vaccine mandates and the state being God, the state being able to tell the individual what to do when there are matters of self-government that they're impeding upon.

The state thinking themselves over the church and telling the church how to dictate when they can congregate and administer the sacraments. This is God giving up our nation to a debased mind, foolishness and unreasonable thinking. Darkened minds, worship of the creature.

This is the judgment of God on our nation. So this whole argument, this whole little spiel I'm going on is to bring the nearness of God, the nearness of God's judgment to our minds. That what we see in our nation, people are saying, okay, God will, you know, look at how, I hear a lot of Christians say, look at how wicked things are in America.

God will soon judge America. And the truth is, my friends, that God has been judging America for a long time. Since liberal Christianity and feminism entered our society in the 1850s, God has slowly been giving us up to a debased mind in mass and swath.

Right? Yeah. Lots of people being given up to a debased mind. This is what's happening in our society.

Romans one is being lived out in our society. The same thing happened to Rome. Rome was a powerful nation that was very successful in military feats, but then the men became effeminate.

They started, they switched from, they became industrialized in a sense, right? They became industrialized and they ate more grains than they did meats and saturated fats and grains in the male body signal for estrogen. And the men became weak and Rome began practicing homosexuality at a large level. And Genghis Khan comes in with a bunch of manly Mongols that were raised on yak curds and yak meat and raised in the steppe planes of Asia.

And they come in and just start tearing Rome apart. And then this is Rome's slow descent towards disintegration. We see this all throughout history.

You have a society where there's strong male leadership at the beginning, and then you have God giving a society up to debased thinking in their sin without the restraining act of God's word and the spirit of God working through God's word as a sword in the society. If that's not present, then we're slowly given up to effeminacy and to all sorts of malice and maliciousness and deceitfulness and strife and covetness and all these things he lists off here. And then ultimately, homosexuality is the pinnacle of the judgment of God.

And the reason why it's the pinnacle, you know, why does Paul go here in Romans? Why is this kind of like the end of a society is this like large given over, get being given over to impure sexual thoughts and this like dishonorable passions of homosexuality? Why is this the end of the judgment? Why is this kind of the pinnacle of the wrath of God? And the reason is because it is a complete undoing of society. Societies are not built on individuals because individuals cannot reproduce themselves. Societies are built on a strong family unit that builds up the rest of the society.

So churches are made up of what? Families. The civil magistrate is made up of what? Men and families. What are businesses made up of? Families, a family business.

Family owned businesses is, you know, the model that we've seen all throughout human history. Corporate America is very new phenomena. And what homosexuality does is it treats the human as an individual based on lusts of the heart and acting upon those things that are not according to the natural relations of mankind.

It is an implosion of human society because a homosexual relationship cannot reproduce itself. It doesn't propagate itself. Just like we see now this attack on the family in our culture, from sexual immorality, there's no commitment of men to women or women to men.

There's promiscuity and there's homosexuality run rampant in our culture. This is kind of the end of the leg of a society. And the society only functions as well as it is able to reproduce itself at a high level.

Right? So if you have men that are not teaching their sons to be strong, godly men that produce a lot for society that are competent men that can work a job and do things that the society needs and lead in society, if you're not teaching men to do that, then you will get an implosion of society is what will happen because eventually you will get a feminacy and then you will get homosexuality both on the men and women. Right? Women will try to usurp the role of man is what we see in feminism. And then we see men given up their god given role to lead women when rather they would turn with inflamed passion towards one another in a homosexual union.

So this is the end of the judgment of God as we see in Romans 1. And this is exactly what happened to Rome. This is why he's like telling this to the Romans. And the goal is right to not sear your conscience by continuing to do things that you know is not right.

Any common sensical man would understand that homosexuality in no way, shape or form makes any sense whatsoever to partake in no matter how good it might feel for one individual. It is completely antithetical to any logical thinking whatsoever. And the people that would try to defend homosexuality as a desire that is acceptable in society like literally hates society.

They want to see society implode. They want to see the destruction of society. Anybody that would defend that.

And the reason why is because it cannot propagate itself. It's very clear. And I mean the most grand reason is that God condemns it as sin.

And the creator of the universe knows what is best for human society. He's ordered things in a certain way. Homosexuality is chaos.

So I think that is where I'll kind of end. Let's remember Romans 1. This is a timeless, timeless teaching that we've seen cycles of this play out in so many nations all throughout human history. And let us as Christians not be caught up in this sort of debased mind.

These heart issues that then lead to these impure actions that come from an impure heart. Proverbs 4.23, "Keep the heart with all vigilance for ferment for the springs of life." This is something I am desperately trying to put into practice because I do not keep my heart well. And you need to diligently do this.

This is a task all Christians have that we must daily seek after because if you do not keep the heart, the heart will run astray. And you're not keeping yourself, you're keeping the heart in response to God's word, the Spirit of God working in you. God's grace is the foundation by which you would keep your heart.

That would keep a society from going in this direction. So as Christians let's keep our hearts that we might not have our fullest hearts darkened. In verse 21, "They became futile under thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Keep your heart with all vigilance for ferment for the springs of life." And if you want a great book on this, I just started a book called Keeping the Heart by John Flavell. I think you should pick it up if you want to know how to keep the heart. And the Bible is clear that this is a task we ought to engage in.

And if you don't know Christ and you're listening to these words and you're listening to what I'm saying, and you can go to the Bible and see the words yourselves, but this is a very clear teaching of the scriptures that this is kind of the end of God's judgment on society. And either that society will repent and turn back to Christ and be restored to right thinking about the way God has ordered the world, or we will slowly implode and destroy ourselves. So we'll see what happens in America, but if you don't know Christ and you're hearing this, common reason would help you to understand that our culture has gone insane.

For me to be saying these things and to be labeled "I'm the crazy one in our society right now," really goes to show how far we've gone. This has been common sense teaching for a millennia, and we've just now surpassed our humanity. Transhumanism, we're evolving.

We're evolving. We're way past condemning homosexuality. We would never be as daft as to think that homosexuality is wrong.

When we can just upload our consciousnesses into a computer and just live eternally and have all the pleasure we want, why would I think such foolish, foolish things? I'm being rhetorical, by the way, and I think you obviously see what I'm saying. So I would implore you to repent of your foolish thinking that you cannot outplay God, you cannot outdo God, you cannot outthink God. His word is very, very clear that homosexuality is a heinous, heinous sin that was a large portion and reason why Sodom and Gomorrah is destroyed, why the harlot is destroyed in Revelation, and why Rome was eventually destroyed.

All nations rise and fall, but they fall in response to their inability to propagate their own greatness, right? If they were doing a good job and their nation was thriving, if you're unable to propagate yourself and reproduce that kind of greatness, then your society is bound to be destroyed. And that's why God's kingdom never ever ends, because it is great. The kingdom is amazing.

It cannot end, because the morals are just too perfect. They're very character of God. The kingdom of God is that which accords to righteousness and those that live in that.

So if you're looking for the kingdom of God, you can know the king in Jesus Christ and see his kingdom being spread throughout the whole earth as those that sit under the authoritative text of God's word and live accordingly. That is the king's edict. So that is my exhortation.

I hope that you would consider the things I'm saying, and as a Christian, you would consider the things I'm saying as well, and a non-Christian, that there would be fear struck in your heart. So I think I'm on there. As always, you can reach me at forthekingpodcast@gmail.com. You can go check out the website for thekingpodcast.com, and you can donate in any way, shape, or form you'd like to financially.

I have crypto available or a regular financial donation. And I would appreciate if you could pray for me, that the podcast would continue to glorify God, and that people would come to know Christ in a more full sense because of what I'm doing. So I appreciate you listening.

I'm gonna quote 1 Timothy 1 17 to the king of the ages of mortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. Solely, day, oh, glory.

Amen. Amen. Amen.

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