3 But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? 4 Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? (Romans 2:3,4)
There seem to be two great follies that man is guilty of during his life, and a third folly that has the exact opposite result as man would intend. And each of these follies gives birth to a type of vanity when they are played out in each of their own circumstances.
It is folly for men to pass judgment on the transgressions of others and yet believe that the things that they do in secret will avoid any prosecution. For if, with our own skewed vision and sense of justice, we can see the transgressions of men and bring them to account, how much more would the creator of all things, Jesus Christ the Son of God, be able to see, expose, prosecute, and convict you of your secret transgressions. It is this inner knowledge and understanding of the character of God that causes men to hate Christ and His church.
Oh, yes, men like an idea of Jesus or of the church that doesn’t compromise their own life-style or vices. They rally around this man called Jesus, and they sing praises of the great religious and pious man, or of the social revolutionary, or of the man whom they shape into filling any one of their own pet social or political causes. The true Jesus who is revealed in the pages of the Bible was a religious and pious man whose teachings did lead to social change, but this is only a fragment of the picture of the Biblical Jesus. One other portion of His divine portrait is His illuminating light on the sins of men. And it is this that causes men to love their Jesus idol but hate the Lord Christ. For men hate Him and loved the darkness of their own sins because their deeds are evil (see John 3:19).
Men who want to focus on social justice, to the extent that they ignore the teachings of sin and salvation or simply water down what the Scriptures say about His eternal righteousness, run to the beatitudes and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount for their purely social manifesto. However, it is in this same book leading up to this same sermon that John the Baptist, who Jesus hailed as the greatest of the prophets, made this declaration concerning the two ways in which God will deal with humanity,“His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” (Matthew 3:7)
And when men find themselves under the judgment of God, they recoil and feel wrongfully assailed. This is the pride of vanity to believe that, even though the weight of evidence is utterly against them, they still perceive that they are being wrongfully singled out or that their good intentions are not being accurately weighed in the balance. But if this judgment begins to fall upon this man during his life, he is blessed! Because it is this judgment that can bring a man to understand his sin and see his need for the Savior. It is a measure of God’s grace that He brings sins to light and yet graces the man with time with which he could repent of those sins and fall prostrate before the Savior.
It is folly to for men to experience the blessings of God in life and breath, and even more so, but not exclusively, in prosperity and peace, but yet not acknowledge that they are the recipients of God’s blessings. When men find themselves in any state of temporal blessing, they hail themselves as being wise enough or shrewd enough to have attained such affluence, or they praise the gods of luck or fortune for their luxury. Either way, it is vain pride that sees a privileged position in life and gives praise or thanks to self or the randomness of life. If men find themselves in prosperity, they should see and know that the blessings that we receive in this life are expressions of the kindness of God that should lead us to repentance. 7 Two things I asked of You, Do not refuse me before I die: 8 Keep deception and lies far from me, Give me neither poverty nor riches; Feed me with the food that is my portion, 9 That I not be full and deny {You} and say, "Who is the LORD?" Or that I not be in want and steal, And profane the name of my God. (Proverbs 30:7-9)
It is folly for men to believe that their heart and their good intentions will be a witness in their defense when they stand before the Lord. Whether men are blessed with affluence and the blessings from God that demonstrate His exceeding kindness or whether they are blessed with suffering to show God’s judgment and righteous accounting, man will always believe that his heart and intentions are good. Most men will not assert their perfection, but will excuse the varying degrees of fault as being normal or human. But this perception will be shown as folly by God because the conscience of man will testify against the man in the courtroom of God. The heart of man will show the consistent transgression of God’s eternal and holy standard.
Whether you have prosperity or poverty, freedom or bonds, health or sickness, God is giving you a measure of His grace; both in the fact that you are drawing another breath and that He is kindly revealing truth about Himself in a very applicational way. To be sure, men cannot be saved in their circumstances alone. For how would they know to call on Christ? God in Christ must be proclaimed through the Scriptures, whether read or heard through a preacher, and only then will man have the knowledge of how one is saved. Without the Scriptures, men only know enough and are given enough revelation to justly condemn them before the God of the Bible. 
As Christians, we know and we praise God that on a Friday like this almost 2,000 years ago, our Savior – the God Man Messiah, Jesus Christ of Nazareth – was cruelly beaten, tortured, mocked, humiliated, and died. He died the death of a criminal as an innocent man so that as a criminal, I could be treated as an innocent man.
So many blessed and glorious things that intersect with one another come to mind whenever I think about the cross: justice and mercy, wrath and grace, condemnation and pardon, love and hatred, death and life. One of the things that brought this to mind, of late, was an evangelistic talk by Louis Giglio. In it, Giglio attempted to give his audience some perspective as to how big God is by putting the earth in perspective with some of the known universe. According to Giglio, if the earth were the size of a golf ball, then the biggest star that we are currently aware of, Canis Majoris, would be comparable to the size of Mt. Everest.1 His point was that sin tends to puff us up and make us feel important and powerful, but simply putting our earth in its proper place in the created (known) cosmos, as far as its relative size, should dissuade us from that type of haughtiness.
By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host. (Psalms 33:6)
It was Christ Jesus who called all things into being by the power of His Word. But it was this same star-breathing God who humbled Himself even to death on the cross. So what could be grander than the glorious intersection of supreme authoritative and unstoppable power with abject torture and mockery?
The glorious restraint of our God is evident in many places, but perhaps nowhere is it more poignant than when our naked Christ was hit, spat upon, whipped, and mocked. Yet, the same restraining power and grace of God that was displayed during the construction of the ark was present again on the day of the cross. Christ would not have had to call for legions of angels to come to His aid; He simply needed to decide to destroy His torturers and they would have been utterly consumed. But it was because of His glorious restraint, for the joy set before Him, that He endured the cross to justify many (cf. Isaiah 53). That God Himself would endure vile torture by His own creation for the glory of God is simply amazing. It is equally amazing that, as a result of His obedience, death, and subsequent total victory, He also accomplished the redemption of men. Soli Deo Gloria.
But thanks be to God that that’s not the end of the story…
1 There is some dispute in the scientific community as to the size of this star. Some estimates make it 1/3 or the size that puts it in this proportion, and I am not nearly knowledgeable to venture a discerning opinion one way or the other.
The story of Noah always makes me sit back and read it as a little child. I mean, there is so much in this story that the scale alone makes me want to catch my breath. Perhaps it is just me, but when we see the whole earth as wretched and vile and that it deserved to be wiped out completely, it makes me sit back and marvel at God’s favoring Noah. If Noah’s heart, just like all men everywhere for all time, was only continually evil from his youth (cf. Genesis 6:4; 8:5), then when Noah found favor in God’s eyes, it must have been because of God’s desire to have mercy on Noah.
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. (Genesis 6:8)
God would have been justified in wiping out Noah and the rest of his family that were saved when He destroyed the rest of humanity. I think that it would be extremely detrimental to gloss over this fact or not to address it when reading and meditating on the story of Noah and the flood. And that Noah found favor in God’s eyes must have been attributed only to God’s mercy and grace. Furthermore, for anyone to find favor before God happens despite anything and everything that the person says, does, or thinks. But God remembered Noah (Genesis 8:1a)
The fact that God remembers His own is an astoundingly glorious truth. Even amidst the destruction of literally everything else on the planet, Noah could have (and should have) had the uttermost peace and felt completely than safe and secure in the ark. One of the truly great things about God’s favor in salvation that we learn see clearly from the New Testament is that once God has saved you, once you have found favor with God based on His grace and mercy alone, we have no need to fear even though the world comes crashing down around us. As a practical note, this doesn’t mean that Christians won’t endure hardship, persecution, torture, or violent and horrible deaths, but it does mean that this is the extent at which we can be tormented or suffer (cf. Matthew 10:28). But Noah had the expressed promise of temporal delivery from this maelstrom (cf. Genesis 6:18ff), and so he could confidently wait for God to deliver him even though he was on the ark for over one year.
Regardless of the time between the promise and the deliverance, God is faithful. If anyone has trusted in Christ alone for salvation, whether they did that at 5, 55, or 105 years of age, God will remember the saving work that He has done when death comes and we have nothing to fear. But know that the LORD has set apart the godly man for Himself; The LORD hears when I call to Him. (Psalms 4:3)
Praise God that He sets apart those in whom He favors, and He then hears us when we call to Him.
Today’s Reading (read on 12/22 & 12/23):
- Zechariah 2:1-5:11
- Revelation 13:1b-14:20
- Psalms 141:1-142:7
- Proverbs 30:18-23
Today’s Thoughts:“1 Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. 2 The LORD said to Satan, ‘ The LORD rebuke you, Satan! Indeed, the LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?’ 3 Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments and standing before the angel. 4 He spoke and said to those who were standing before him, saying, ‘ Remove the filthy garments from him.’ Again he said to him, ‘See, I have taken your iniquity away from you and will clothe you with festal robes.’" (Zechariah 3:1-4)
This section of Zechariah stuck out to me for a few reasons. The first was the fact that two times God (I would guess that it is Christ in this context) rebuked Satan, but He didn’t do it in the way that many modern Christians practice commanding Satan what to do and what not to do. The trend seems to be that if you command (or claim) something “in Jesus’ name” that you have the authority to do what you have said. Now, I don’t want to get into the whole problem of the “name it, claim it” false teaching in the church today, but I will say that there seems to be some reason for not using the commanding “in Jesus’ name” formula. Jude also warns of false teachers “revile angelic majesties” by, among other things, not acting as Michael the archangel did when dealing with disputing with the devil saying, “The Lord rebuke you!” (cf. Jude 8,9) I think that we need to be careful of how cavalier we are when we attempt to deal with the demonic.
The second thing that stuck out at me was the picture of the Lord ordering that the “filthy garments” be taken from him, and it is explained that God has “taken your iniquity away from you.” I just thought that this was a beautiful picture of the mercy of God in how He chose Joshua as “a brand plucked from the fire.” The picture of having our sins dealt with and being clothed in clean garments before God is beautiful in light of how the Bible repeatedly describes our natural attire before Him (cf. Isaiah 64:6). Praise God for removing my filthy garments and clothing me with His Son.
“9 Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, ‘If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, 10 he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.’” (Revelation 14:9,10)
The only reason why this really jumped out at me was a combination of a few things. First of all, the increasing number of people inside of Christendom who deny the existence or reality of Hell as a place of eternal torment has really been overwhelming lately. I know that people who have believed this have been around for a long time, but the increasing visibility and volume of them today is very distressing. The second reason that I grabbed this verse was recently I read Habakkuk where God turns the tables on those who indulge in drunkenness (cf. Hab 2:15,16).
I don’t know all of the cultural implications of drinking “a cup” in this type of a manner back in the first century, but the imagery of having to drink some horrible concoction is nothing pleasant. Eating foul food, taking medicine that tastes unpleasant, or otherwise accidentally ingesting something foreign is a terrible thought. The cup that we will drink is the cup of His anger at me and the wine is His wrath being applied to me. Wow, that is a vivid image of hell that I don’t think can be explained away as the life we’re living now apart from God or something innocuous that man-hating peddlers of their so-called gospel put forth in an effort to calm the screaming consciences of their dead followers.
Today’s Reading:
- Zephaniah 1:1-3:20
- Revelation 10:1-11
- Psalms 138:1-8
- Proverbs 30:11-14
Today’s Thoughts:4 "So I will stretch out My hand against Judah And against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And I will cut off the remnant of Baal from this place, {And} the names of the idolatrous priests along with the priests. 5 "And those who bow down on the housetops to the host of heaven, And those who bow down {and} swear to the LORD and {yet} swear by Milcom, 6 And those who have turned back from following the LORD, And those who have not sought the LORD or inquired of Him." (Zephaniah 1:4-6)
I am finding that it can get a bit overwhelming to read Minor Prophets because of the wrath and judgment that they are declaring against Israel. The one thing that struck me here is that in between the condemnation of the idolatry of worshiping Baal and Milcom (these two are possibly one and the same along with Molech), the Lord condemns those who seemingly mingle worship of Him with the worship of false gods. I guess I find that it is an interesting dichotomy that God cannot tolerate what our postmodern society lifts up, and our postmodern society cannot tolerate what God demands.
This makes me weep for the droves of people who are being falling led astray and who are headlong into the sin of Bono with his anti-Christian, God-insulting, and otherwise damning coexist campaign.
16 In that day it will be said to Jerusalem: " Do not be afraid, O Zion; Do not let your hands fall limp. 17 "The LORD your God is in your midst, A victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy. 18 "I will gather those who grieve about the appointed feasts-- They came from you, {O Zion;} {The} reproach {of exile} is a burden on them. 19 "Behold, I am going to deal at that time With all your oppressors, I will save the lame And gather the outcast, And I will turn their shame into praise and renown In all the earth. (Zephaniah 3:16-19)
2 I will bow down toward Your holy temple And give thanks to Your name for Your lovingkindness and Your truth; For You have magnified Your word according to all Your name.
6 For though the LORD is exalted, Yet He regards the lowly, But the haughty He knows from afar. (Psalms 138:2,6)
It is quite amazing that the same God who will crush (in the most complete way possible) those who oppose Him, and He will be righteously just in doing so, will show compassion on the “outcast” and He will have regard for the “lowly” and express His lovingkindness to receive praise and glory from them. The doctrine of God’s infinite, but jealously guarded, mercy and grace is so much more beautiful than a pandering call to coexist.
Today’s Reading:
- Habakkuk 1:1- 3:19
- Revelation 9:1-21
- Psalms 137:1-9
- Proverbs 30:10
Today’s Thoughts:15 "Woe to you who make your neighbors drink, Who mix in your venom even to make {them} drunk So as to look on their nakedness! 16 "You will be filled with disgrace rather than honor. Now you yourself drink and expose your {own} nakedness. The cup in the LORD'S right hand will come around to you, And utter disgrace {will come} upon your glory. (Habakkuk 2:15,16)
This passage was in the context of God declaring “woe” on those who build their empires or civilizations on bloodshed or deceptive means. But then God transitions to talk about making people drink to see their nakedness. I could not help but think of our debaucheries society where “Spring Break” is like a religious ceremony where this seems to be the act of worship; people going to warm beaches, drinking to see nakedness and fornicate. But isn’t God’s justice language here sobering? He will cause that person to drink the Lord’s cup and be naked before Him! How scary is that – to be naked in all of one’s sinfulness before God Almighty who is “of purer eyes than to behold evil, And cannot look on wickedness.” (Hab 1:13) How terrible will that day be for those who are naked and shamed before God.
20 The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, so as not to worship demons, and the idols of gold and of silver and of brass and of stone and of wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk; 21 and they did not repent of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their immorality nor of their thefts. (Revelation 9:20,21)
I guess I’m not sure why I marveled at this statement, but I did. After all of the plagues and death and suffering that the world endures up until this point, but they did not repent. Twice, it says it twice! And, as an aside, for my easy-believism friends, repent here implies more than simply a “change of mind” about who Christ is. They didn’t repent “so as not to worship demons, and the idols of gold….” In other words, the repenting would have included putting a stop to all of that. Anyway, it is shockingly clear that the mind and will of man will not turn to God, but only blaspheme Him, even when that same man is being righteously punished.
Copyright © 2005-2010 Eric Johnson
