Are You Ready for This?

(A Message to the Multitude)

(Preached Sunday Evening, July 5, 2020)

I am naturally a positive person who prefers to encourage rather than disappoint. What about you? Are you like that too? Always at least wanting to somehow bring a kind word to those around you? That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

There is however one great retractive to this. In our desire to please we sometimes find ourselves in conflict with… the truth; truth which, if we were to dare reveal it, would turn us into that proverbial “bearer of bad news”: a killjoy, a downer, a party-pooper… that guy.

And so, in encountering this truth from the Word of God, which must be shared today, a proposed Minister of the Lord Jesus Christ must decide – to either be like Micaiah, cut off and enchained within the dungeons of wicked King Ahab, or to add to those easy speeches given above, at the feast, by that vast crowd of false prophets (see 1 Kings 22:3-38).

And so, knowing the joy of truly standing with our crucified and yet resurrected and ascended Savior, we ask you: please turn in your Bibles to Amos, chapter 4, verse 1; where a declaration has been placed, given, recorded directly from the very mouth of God. As you turn to Amos, chapter 4, please make yourself fully aware that – what you are about to hear is that voice from Heaven that, some of you, having been touched by the Spirit of God, have come to this message longing to hear. This declaration that you will now read and/or hear spoken to you, these words were prepared then to be given to you now; now, as the situation, which you and the rest of the world find yourselves in… as the situation that you are now in has aligned itself in such a way that makes these words precisely applicable to you.

“Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring, and let us drink. The Lord God hath sworn by his holiness, that, lo, the days shall come upon you, that he will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fishhooks. And ye shall go out at the breaches, every cow at that which is before her; and ye shall cast them into the palace, saith the Lord. Come to Bethel, and transgress; at Gilgal multiply transgression; and bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes after three years: and offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven, and proclaim and publish the free offerings: for this liketh you, O ye children of Israel, saith the Lord God. And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord. And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered. So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water; but they were not satisfied: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord. I have smitten you with blasting and mildew: when your gardens and your vineyards and your fig trees and your olive trees increased, the palmerworm devoured them: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord. I have sent among you the pestilence after the manner of Egypt: your young men have I slain with the sword, and have taken away your horses; and I have made the stink of your camps to come up unto your nostrils: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord. I have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord. Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel: and because I will do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel. For, lo, he that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, The Lord, The God of hosts, is his name.” (Amos 4:1-13)

One day, the entire nation of Ninevah heard such a merciful warning given directly from God; “and they repented at the preaching of Jonas.” (Matthew 12:41) In the days of Nehemiah, when the congregation heard the reading from “the book of the law of the Lord their God” they surrendered: “they confessed, and worshipped the Lord their God.” (Nehemiah 9:3) When a jailer in the city of Philippi experienced just one strangely occurring natural catastrophe, he promptly cried out, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (To which the Apostle Paul correctly replied, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” – Acts 16:25-34)

And what of your case, dear friend? You have just heard clearer and heavier words than any of them. Likewise, in your lifetime, and increasingly within the first six months of this year, you been surrounded with worldwide plagues; nationwide rioting in the streets; technologically and now physiologically imposed isolation; the animals, the insects, the winds and waters of the world growing out of control and in rising direct conflict with mankind; and Earth, the very planet that we all live on, clearly and loudly predicted by our top scientists to soon no longer be able to sustain human life.

“Yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord. I have sent among you the pestilence after the manner of Egypt: your young men have I slain with the sword, and have taken away your horses; and I have made the stink of your camps to come up unto your nostrils: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord.” (Amos 4:9-10)

And so we now appeal to your hoped-for common sense by laying in front of you a few obvious facts, both from the pages of Scripture and from the well known truths spoken and printed all around you, and so easily accessible through either a simple search on YouTube or that even more popular search engine at Google.com.

As it is written and as we have just read in Amos 4:12,

“Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel: and because I will do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.” (Amos 4:12)

So then we now quickly attempt to help you to prepare to meet God, because, yes, Jesus is coming, and according to the very rapid events speeding up all around you… he is coming very soon!I.

I. Prepare to meet God by considering the atom.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:1-5)

The Gluon

An article written by well known science journalist Robert Kunzig and published on June 30, 2000 in Discovery Magazine is entitled, “The Glue That Holds the World Together”, and has the following subtitle, “The most we learn about subatomic particles called gluons, the more the universe seems to be made of nothing at all.”

Listen to the following key excerpts from this article.

“You do not know what stuff is, you who hold it in your hands. Atoms? Yes, stuff is made of atoms. And every atom is a nucleus orbited by electrons. Every nucleus is built of protons. Every proton is – but there you reach the end of the line. Inside the proton lies the deep, unsettling truth: Stuff is made of nothing, or almost nothing, held together by glue, lots of glue. Physicists first began to suspect this in 1973. Lately it has been proved by experiment. … The close-up reality, the one Wilczek and his colleagues got a glimpse of long ago, is far more [maddening] and strange.

“A proton is made of three quarks, yes, but the quarks are infinitesimal—just 2 percent or so of the proton’s total mass. They’re rattling around at near light speed inside the proton, but they’re imprisoned in flickering clouds of other particles—other quarks, which materialize briefly and then vanish and, above all, gluons, which transmit the force that binds the quarks together. Gluons are massless and evanescent, but they carry most of the proton’s energy. That is why it is more accurate to say protons are made of gluons rather than quarks. Protons are little blobs of glue—but even that picture conveys something too static and substantial. All is flux and crackling energy inside a proton; it is like an unending lightning storm in a bottle, a bottle less than .1 trillionth of an inch in diameter. … “The proton has parts, but it can’t be taken apart,” says Alvaro de Rújula, a theoretical physicist at CERN. “You can hold an electron in your hand. You can’t hold a quark or a gluon in your hand.”

“The weirdness comes from the gluons. Quantum chromodynamics, the force that holds protons together, is modeled closely on quantum electrodynamics, the force that holds atoms together—but the gluons change screening to antiscreening, intuitive to bizarre. …

“The quantum of the field, and the transmitter of the strong force, is the gluon. Like the photon that transmits the electromagnetic force, a gluon is massless. But unlike the photon, a gluon is charged. It generates its own color field, exerts its own strong force, and interacts with other gluons. … gluons move at light speed … Gluons are … like little dipole magnets. The gluons that surround a quark align themselves parallel to its color field, as magnets would, and so instead of weakening it, as virtual particles do an electron’s field, they strengthen it. …That’s what holds a proton together, and that’s what gives it a bizarre internal structure. … “When you look close and get inside these clouds and start seeing the basic structure, you see that it’s mostly glue.”

“Which makes all the more interesting the question of how the universe [!?!] ever managed to design such a thing. … If you really study the equations, it gets almost mystical [!?!].” (Read the whole article by clicking the link here: The Glue That Holds the World Together.)

The Glue

“For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” (Colossians 1:16-17)

II. Prepare to meet God by considering the Earth.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:1-5)

One Earth!

Here is what Nathaniel Scharping had to say about the uniqueness of our planet and the impossibility of finding life anywhere else in the cosmos. Listen now to these brief portions taken from his article, which was published in Discovery Magazine on February 22, 2016, and entitled “Earth May Be a 1-in-700-Quintillion Kind of Place.”

“A new study suggests that there are around 700 quintillion planets in the universe, but only one like Earth. It’s a revelation that’s both beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

“Astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden arrived at this staggering figure — a 7 followed by 20 zeros — with the aid of a computer model that simulated the universe’s evolution … Zackrisson’s model combined information about known exoplanets with our understanding of the early universe and the laws of physics …

“Zackrisson found that Earth appears to have been dealt a fairly lucky hand. In a galaxy like the Milky Way, for example, most of the planets Zackrisson’s model generated looked very different than Earth — they were larger, older and very unlikely to support life. The study can be found on the preprint server arXiv, and has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

“Zackrisson’s work suggests an alternative to the commonly held assumption that planets similar to Earth must exist, based on the sheer number of planets out there. … Current estimates hold that there are some 100 billion galaxies in the universe containing about … a billion trillion [stars]. … According to Zackrisson, … his research indicates that, from a purely statistical standpoint, Earth perhaps shouldn’t exist.” (Read the whole article at Earth May Be a 1-in-700-Quintillion Kind of Place.)

One Creator!

“For ask now of the days that are past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from the one side of heaven unto the other, whether there hath been any such thing as this great thing is, or hath been heard like it?” (Deuteronomy 4:32)

“Thus saith God the Lord, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein:” (Isaiah 42:5)

III. Prepare to meet God by considering your being.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:1-5)

Designed!

Many sensible scientists today soundly agree that the plain truth revealed within the submicroscopic examination of DNA has proven, decades ago, that we, the human race, were designed and not evolved. Despite this, strangely wild-eyed loyalists still hold on to the old now disproven theory (a.k.a. atheist religion) of evolution. Meanwhile, articles documenting this truth, which had long ago been revealed in the Bible, continue to appear, such as the following, written by Jeffrey P. Thomkins, Ph.D., published on May 31, 2017 by the Institute for Creation Research, and entitled, “DNA Science Disproves Human Evolution.”

“Those who embrace the presupposition of naturalistic origins have put much effort and even monkey business into a propaganda crusade to claim a bestial origin for man. The idea that humans evolved from an ape-like creature was first widely promoted by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early 1800s and later by Charles Darwin in his 1871 book The Descent of Man—published 12 years after his acclaimed evolutionary treatise On the Origin of Species. Thomas Huxley, a friend of Darwin, also did much to popularize this idea. Since then, the secular scientific community has promulgated the still-hypothetical idea of human evolution as an established fact. [However,] after the 150-plus years since Darwin’s famous publication, we still have no fossil evidence demonstrating human evolution. Darwin believed such fossils would eventually be found, but that has simply not been the case.

“DNA is not called the genetic code for nothing. Just as different software programs on a computer have similar sections of code because they perform similar functions, the same similarity exists between different creatures in certain sections of their genomes. This is not evidence that one evolved from another but rather that both creatures were engineered along similar basic principles. DNA similarities between different creatures are evidence of common engineered design, and the fact that the differences in these DNA sequences are unexplainable by alleged evolutionary processes is also strong evidence of design.” (For the full article and others, please click the following link: DNA Science Disproves Human Evolution.)

Created!

“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.” (Genesis 1:24)

“But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” (Matthew 10:30)

“I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” (Psalm 139:14)

“Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” (James 4:14)

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:26-27)

IV. Prepare to meet God by considering a world without God.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:1-5)

You cannot resolve the problem of sin.

- As revealed by a lack of morality.

- - Genocide, Communism & Eugenics

- As revealed by a lack of society.

The Lord of the Flies

- As revealed by a lack of sleep.

- - Sleeplessness: chemically-induced & natural

Only God can resolve the problem of sin.

- As revealed when God’s Spirit is removed from the Earth.

“For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” (2 Thessalonians 2:7-13)

- As revealed when God’s Son returns as Judge of the Earth.

“Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.” (Revelation 1:7)

- As revealed when God’s Son was sacrificed for you.

“For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Corinthians 6:2)