Pastor John,
I just finished reading your Blog, “Where is the God of Judgment?” I think it is excellent. Those thoughts are just not of this Earth.
At the beginning of your Blog, you quoted a verse from Isaiah, and that verse made me recall something that the Lord started showing me a few weeks ago. The verse is, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil.”
What the Lord was showing me that day was that everything in this entire creation is His; it is all His doing, as Isaiah was declaring in that verse. This includes the path of disobedience. The path that leads a man away from God’s salvation is just as much the Lord’s creation as the path of obedience that leads to eternal life. If anything exists, He created it. If there is evil in the world, Jesus created that evil. How else would it get here?
Every single thing that is within this creation came into existence by the expressed will of the Creator, and it exists with boundaries and limitations, starting points and ending points, created by Him alone. Within these boundaries men have their being. They are permitted to move about, explore and unearth hidden things within God’s created Earth, rearrange and assemble old and new-found materials, tear down those things that they have built, and then start the process all over again – all of this occurring with what appears to be an unfettered freedom. But it is all being done within the confines of an existence…a creation in which every tiny atom has been created, and its capability measured by the Son, to His exact specification.
We are all in a box – Jesus’ box. And everything in here with us, the Lord has meticulously created and installed.
If a man chooses to ignore God’s unwavering command that “all men are to repent”, Jesus created that! The very choice to ignore God is the creation of God. That choice is in the creation “box” with us; otherwise, it could not be done.
If a man chooses murder and hatred over love and thanksgiving and mercy, it is only that Jesus created the possibility of that path of wickedness; otherwise it could not exist.
Nothing that is in this creation is here of its own doing. If a created-man can think of it, desire it, do it, see it, touch it, hope for it, act on it, etc, Jesus did that!
We have never seen nor experienced, imagined nor desired, nor have we had a single thought that has ever extended outside of God’s predetermined creation for us. It is not possible. Man cannot think or perform outside of the creation that contains him. That is what makes a revelation from God so very precious!
There is a song that we sang together not long ago, while we sat around your basement on a Saturday morning. It is entitled, “I’m Going That Way”.
The glorious truth is, everything is going that way – His way.
The way of righteousness is going that way, as well as the way of disobedience and eternal damnation. No man has ever gone any way that Jesus didn’t first create. All things are the works of His hands, and nothing escapes His goodness, nor His wrath.
So the question for a man isn’t, “Will he choose God?” For that has been decided for him.
The question is, “Will he choose the path that God has created that leads to eternal life, or the path that God created that leads to eternal suffering and damnation?
Jerry
============
Jerry’s email reminded me of an experience my mother had before she died.
She was only 67 years old and was diagnosed with cancer. Judy, me, and others were in the hospital waiting room for news about her cancer surgery. The Dr. told us that he could do nothing but sew her back up and keep her comfortable. It was a sad day.
During her surgery, the Lord gave my mother a dream, or a vision, which she couldn’t speak about it for weeks. She finally called me to talk to me about it. She told me that everyone on this earth is given a clear square box that contained only so much space. You couldn’t have someone else’s, nor could they have yours. In it, you could put anything you want, good or bad. You could rearrange the items in your box, but if you wanted to add something, you had to remove something. In her box were good and bad things, and mom told me she knew the difference, and she also knew that she could not meet Jesus with the bad things in her box. Mom said she knew love definitely belonged in there. There were things in her box that she had a feeling that they were not good, but really didn’t know why; she only had the feeling of it not being good.
Mom spent the remaining months that she had left after her surgery working on putting good things in, taking bad things out, and arranging the right things in her box. Those of us who knew the “before and after surgery” mom knew she worked double time to make sure the things that were in her box pleased God. God gave her time to get things right before she left here. After her surgery, and especially at the end of her life on this earth, I felt like God gave me the mother I had when I was growing up as a child . . . full of the Spirit and joy of the Lord.
I cried just before she died in 2009, during my last visit with her, but afterwards, I never cried again for her. I miss her tremendously! I only feel joy and happiness for this great hope (legacy) of pleasing God and living forever with Jesus that she left us all with. From the moment after her surgery to the day she died, she was working on keeping, arranging, and putting only god things in her box.
I pray the Lord allows me to see myself honestly and helps me to keep my “box” in order.
Billy M.