The Judgments of God

Here we are in mid-May, 2011 having broken all records for the costliest floods and costliest tornado damage on record for this nation in all our history for this time of year. The season is still early. A yearly record for storm related damage is nearly a foregone conclusion. Levees are bursting on the Mississippi. New Orleans is threatened again this time with water from the river instead of water from the sea. Glade Springs, a town near where I live was flattened last week with nearly every house leveled as I understand.

 Along with all of this we are facing the imminent destruction of the American currency, our humiliation at not decisively winning a war anywhere (although we have no lack of foreign wars to try to win), high unemployment and a host of other national unsolvables that persist.

 Circumstances have not always been like this for our country. It almost seems as if we are facing the judgments of God. What? You say? Judgments of God?? How can this be? We do not live in the Old Testament you know. We live under grace not law. We are in the New Testament now where grace and forgiveness prevail. I think – anyway that is what I was taught. But, did God really agree not to judge evil nations once Jesus died on the cross? Ummmm, well man, I cannot really point to an exact chapter and verse but it seems like that Old Testament stuff was in a different era. God is more merciful now. WE do not look back we look forward!  —and on and on go the rationalizations of the modern church.

 As much as any ordinary man making his way through life, yes, I too understand the laws of nature. Except, I also know that ‘natural disasters’ are not natural. Rather, they are supernatural. God uses the natural but He infuses it with the supernatural. All of life is under the supernatural care and control of the Creator. Remember God’s words to Job:

Job 38   ‘Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of distress, for the day of war and battle?  

 Have you ever in your life commanded the morning, and caused the dawn to know its place; that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it?

And, further remember with me these bits from the long list of cursings God threatens if His people disobey Him

Deuteronomy 28  ‘The Lord will smite you with consumption and with the fever and with inflammation and with fiery heat and with the sword and the blight and the mildew, and they shall pursue you until you perish.

 And the heaven which is over your head shall be as bronze, and the earth which is under you iron. The Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust; from heaven it shall come down on you until you are destroyed’.

 Here is an interesting thing. Nowhere has God ever stated that He is done with judging the nations in these manners. Nowhere are we informed that at the inception of the New Testament God has suddenly stopped His work among the nations for blessing or cursing. We have assumed these things but we are wrong. Go back, read the last chapters of Job and Chapter 28 of Deuteronomy. Read Jeremiah. If you sincerely believe Scripture I am confident you will come to the same conclusion I have. God still rules and judges the nations and He often uses supernatural disasters. Our national sins bring judgments from God in a wide variety of forms including supernatural weather and other calamities.

 It is disturbing then to understand that we have become the wicked. I mean as a nation. We abort 3500 children per day. We inflict warfare on nations that have not attacked us. We issue permits for homosexual parades in the streets. We pervert our money printing trillions of unbacked paper dollars. We give over our children to the humanists for 13 years of indoctrination/education. We jail the innocent and extol the wicked. We congratulate ourselves for our tolerance. We tolerate gross sin in our ranks and think ourselves large and above the suffocating elocutions about sin and judgment. We are the ones. We have become the wicked.

 The judgments of God are upon us. God is doing what He has always done. He leverages power from heaven to pry loose the repentance of men. God is against us. The face of the Mighty God is turning away from us. The blessings are fading and the curses have begun. We must turn back as a nation, ‘as one man’. Our forefathers often called the nation to days of prayer, repentance, and humiliation before the throne of God, believing that He would hear His people and heal their land. We are a nation desperately in need of real repentance and behavioral change.

 The threat of heavenly pestilences is real. Christians if honest will make our case to the larger world, for moral behavior, based on the threat of the hand of God being turned against us. This is not mere theatrics. God judges nations and we ought to tell the nations what He is doing. Jeremiah certainly did. He let the Philistines, the Egyptians, the Moabites and others know that God would destroy them as a just reward for their multiplied sins. This is a part of the righteous message of the church to the surrounding world. God judges the nations and it is time to repent.

 For Christian Culture,

 Don Schanzenbach    5-14-11