October 13, 2011
On Alert
Last week we had reports of an attempted child abduction in our
community. The description of the abductor was a man in his 40’s wearing a
cowboy hat and driving a white dodge truck with an extend cab. When I ran
errands the other day and saw a white truck driving down the road and I did a
double take at the driver because he was wearing a cowboy hat. The partial
description of a possible child predator will no doubt keep many of us on high
alert in the coming days. Isn’t it interesting though that the Bible too gives
us a partial description of our spiritual enemy the devil and yet we seem oblivious?
“Be
self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring
lion looking for someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Close your eyes. Plug your ears. Put a clothespin on your nose, and another clamping your lips together. Put on thick gloves. Now imagine these are all enough to switch off your senses. Finally, stop thinking and feeling, maybe hum a while or something. Now, imagine that Satan and all of the angels who followed him and all the human folks living on earth and who have died in denial of Christ switch off, too. Some would believe everything would cease existing. For reasons too complicated to set forth here, ignore them; they are wrong. Everything physical would continue to exist just as it was before everyone turned off. It needs nobody’s consciousness to be what it has come to be.
-----That is the problem. Every effect having a cause is one of the basic laws of physical existence. For millennia disobedience to God’s principles has caused effects upon this physical world. That means sin is built into even the shape of things physical, “...for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of Him who subjected it in hope; “ (Rom 8:28) Everything from fossils, to ancient ruins, to things eating other things for nourishment, to nuclear decay is the shape of sin and death in things physical. So earth and sky, having been shaped by sin, will flee the face of the Judge, not necessarily in direction or distance, but maybe in size. Blip! Oops! A collapse into the tiniest space of nowhere, where it might all eternally continue collapsing smaller and smaller, ever fleeing into new definitions for the size of minuscule, “...and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale.” (Rev 6:13) When a star roughly twice the size of our sun falls in upon itself it diminishes into a black hole, theoretically collapsing forever. All the stars falling to earth would cause a lake of fire collapsing forever into a black hole, fleeing the face of the Judge and carrying the screams of those trapped therein ever downward into tiny meaninglessness.
-----Everything remaining would be the simple truth. There God is; Jesus Christ is; all their obedient angels are; there everyone who has died in agreement with Christ is, as well as are yours, my, and everyone’s spirits who are yet alive now and agreeing with Him ( “...your life is hid with Christ in God. (Col 3:3) To exist or be what it is, truth does not need the thinking of man in his present condition or the consciousness of Satan or of his angels. I think this is what God meant when He told Moses He was I AM. So everyone can turn back on and it won't be effected.
-----But when Satan messed up the first consideration Eve gave him, man‘s mind began getting naturally distorted. And that distortion has continued passing from parent to child until today there is more distortion than truth available to our senses and thoughts. An evil age indeed! Within it, people deny the existence of God because His perfection and purposes are so hard to imagine. People deny the existence of Satan because the effects of his obstinacy, imperfection, and limitedness are so common that we simply call them normal.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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