Living in Denial

Earl Gillespie

A Country In Denial

A Church In Denial

There is a strange feeling of impending doom that permeates the world.  If not by the hands of God, then by the hands of world leaders or even the president.  This country is going through really rough spiritual and economic times.  Prices are up, wages are down.  People are losing their jobs.   Business after business is going bankrupt, cutting back, laying off, reducing hours. Stocks/investments, people’s life savings/retirement funds are tumbling.  Perhaps we’re in a recession, or even worse in a depression.  

Our schools have become a haven for knives, guns and drugs.  Many of our young people are becoming nothing but a drain on society and we keep looking to God to straighten out what our families and community leaders have messed up. The family structure was dismantled by the government long ago and new ideologies are being adopted. Many churches through special funding entered into a partnership with the government, thereby rendering themselves irreverent as a spiritual body.  As in the days of Constantine, the government and the church joined hands as become mired in a rut of self-importance, self-indulgence and false piety.  This relationship created an erosion that was instrumental in the decline of the Roman Empire and it became the catalyst that led to the destruction of the British Empire.  

This country was founded upon a strong belief in God.  In God we trust was printed on currency and documents and the tribe of Judah once more began to call upon the God of Abraham.  The concept of one God, the Hebrew God as the spiritual backbone, was paramount in the establishment of rules of order and conduct.  In our society God was allowed to roam freely as a separate entity without the restraints of the government.  In our schools the Bible was accepted as a guiding light and the bases of our Laws in the Halls of Justice was the Ten Commandments.  Men in their infinitive wisdom, decided that the laws created by this great nation to protect Christian values should be used to destroy Christian values.  

In todays society, God is being stripped out of our everyday activities and cast aside. Whether man likes it or not, his corrupt nature is the cause of the problems the world is experiencing. Man's nature is the cause of conflicts, arguments, dissension, envy, competition, hatred, wars, stress, and unhappiness in life.  Man, by nature, lives by the way of getting. Only when humanity begins to seek God’s help to change their nature, can they begin to find the true ways to peace. The man that God created whose nature was corrupted by the Devil simply does not know the way of peace. This is evidenced in a bloodstained earth through 6,000 years of human history.

It is hard for most of us to believe that this world is about to enter or has already entered the time of destruction that was prophesied in the Book of Revelation,  which will ultimately end 6,000 years of man’s government—man’s self-rule.   God is moving toward the seventh day, a thousand years of rest when he returns and establish his own rule.  When we see the dark clouds rising, strange weather patterns, earthquakes and destruction throughout the land, It should be clear we are dealing with an angry God.

The destruction that God has pronounced upon man-self rule is a stored up wrath, that he is waiting for the proper time to bring forth.  God gives the analogy of a woman in labor pain to show how these events will unfold. As labor begins, the contractions are farther apart and less intense; but as time between contraction decreases, the intensity of those contractions grows. Such is the reality of labor pain, and such will be part of the proof of what is written in the Book of Revelation.  

The church has already entered into its final state of apostasy as depicted in the seventh letter to the churches in the Book of Revelation.  We are definitely in the seventh church age.  Within the last decade a strange transformation began to take place, the God of our salvation was trivialized and now what once was considered unholy is now acceptable as Holy.  Worship services are drifting further and further away from the once acceptable standards, play acting is a part of, "getting our praise on" as the night club atmosphere invaded the church and respect for  the House of God diminishes as showing off and performances take center stage.   

Do we ever find oneself asking the question, "What is the purpose of all of this"?  Maybe we should do a study on the evolution of God.   Is to know God is to have someone to blame all of our failures on?  Better yet, God is a tool that slick motivational preachers use to make you want to give money so you can get more money.  

God’s purpose for creating human life goes far beyond anything man has ever imagined, even in fiction; and so it can be very difficult to believe the truth.  The truth is deeper than  what some obnoxious religious opportunists will tell you about prosperity and walking in God's favor.  God purposed from the beginning that human life was to be temporary. His design and purpose is that we be changed from mortal to immortal, from temporary life to eternal life. This transition is something that God will offer every human as a matter of choice. God’s ultimate purpose for creating man is that he is to become a part of the very Family of God, in the Kingdom of God.   This is not your life, this is the test. 

When asked, “Why didn’t God simply create us as spiritual God beings and immediate members of His Divine Family?” The answer is: God does not create righteous character in individual beings because living according to God’s righteousness must be and is a matter of choice.  Remember what happen to Lucifer and a third of God's angels that brought destruction upon the earth?  In Geneses 1:1 God began a restoration process, then he created man.  Man failed the first test, but God so loved man that he gave him another chance.  The testing of man's character has been going on for six millennia, God has been patient toward man’s unwillingness to listen to Him through His prophets. His Son, and His Ministers. 

When God delivered the Children of Israel and established them as a nation God reigned as king in Israel and the people were dissatisfied. They wanted to be like everybody else around them.  That sounds strangely familiar today.  We still have a tendency to want to be like everyone around us, even when that is not a good choice.

God, let  them have their way, and have an earthly king, Saul.  But he was a great disappointment and God replaced him with a man after his own heart, David, who was then followed by Solomon.  At Solomon’s death the Kingdom divided, North and South: Israel, with 10 tribes in the North – all of their kings were bad.  Judah composed of 2 tribes in the South, MOST of their kings were bad, too. 

The Book of Joel can be outlined into 3 easy points,            

The locust plague and drought calling the people to repentance

The Day of the Lord with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit

The glorious future of Judah and Jerusalem

1:1-4 It’s a mighty plague of locusts, of unparalleled magnitude, there were locusts everywhere.  Those then living, have never seen anything like it.  People would be talking about this plague be for generations to come.  Apparently, the plague was contemporary with Joel’s prophecy.  It was then and there, happening, Joel’s eyewitness account: Unimaginable ruin and destruction.

In verse 4, there are 4 different Hebrew terms to describe the invading insects — which probably refers to the various stages of the locust life cycle — each stage being more destructive than the one before.  The female locust deposits her eggs in the moist soil, and when conditions are right millions , billions of eggs are laid — on the order of 70,000 eggs per square meter.  Soon these hatch into grubs or larval stage — and the grubs  eat.  Next comes  the pupa or hopper stage, the nymph stage in which small wings appear — and they eat even more. Finally the full-fledged flying locusts — the swarm — which eat all the vegetation in sight.  All told the maturation process goes through 5 molts, and can take up to 3 years.  All the while devastating the vegetation — stripping the fields bare.

The Dec. 1915 issue of National Geographic recounts a similar plague of locusts which struck against Jerusalem — area wide devastation. 

v. 7  — the grape vines are destroyed, the fig harvest is gone.

v. 8  — once the leaves and fruit are eaten, the locusts are still ravenous and eat the bark right off the trees, leaving them white.

v. 9  — There is no grain for offering before the Lord.  No wine for the drink offering.  The food the gone.

Devastation, famine, hunger.

v. 10 — The wheat is destroyed, the barley fields are bare.

And yet the locusts still come, millions, perhaps billions in huge waves.  The sky turns black (2:10)  as they descend like an army, chap. 2.

2:3 — Though the land was rich, fertile, and green — like the Garden of Eden before the plague.  Once the hungry horde descends, only a desert waste is left behind.  

2:5 — As they descend upon Jerusalem it sounds like a chariot attack, rattle, rumble, and roar — as their wings buzz and they strip the vegetation bare.

2:9  — The insect army run along the city wall, invading the houses.

2:11 The plague not is simply allowed by God— we see here that the Lord himself heads up this army of devouring insects.  He leads the attack upon the city.  It was his way to call the nation to repentance.  Now, as to exactly what their sins were, Joel does not say.  Yet whatever they were, it was time for the nation as a whole to turn back to God. 

So we see in Scripture that hard times, bad times, hungry times — are used by God [even sent by God / led by God] — to call a nation back to its senses.  And maybe — in fact, I think very likely, that’s what our current economic crisis is all about: Maybe God is calling our churches and nation back to its spiritual senses.   Then agan, maybe we are running out of time.

If you can accept the God is love concept, then you must accept the angry God concept. 

And yet throughout it all, God is in control.  And if we (as Christians) really believe that our citizenship is in heaven (Phil.3 :20), that we’re only strangers on the earth, just passing through (Heb. 11:13), then the trauma of economy doesn’t affect us nearly so.