SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/10/2021 9:41 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “The Coming Consummation of Judgment”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
9:37a
Message of the
verse: “37
Then He said to His disciples, "The harvest is plentiful,”
We have been quoting from John
MacArthur’s commentary on this first part of verse 37 and as I explained in our
last SD this is a very new concept of what I thought this verse meant and so I
think it best to continue with his comments from his commentary.
“Jesus ministered compassionately
and tirelessly because He could see the ultimate consummation of divine
judgment toward which every person in the multitudes was healed who did not
trust in Him. Paul said, ‘Therefore
knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men’ (2 Cor. 5:11), and in another
letter he reminded his readers of the vengeance of God (Rom. 12:19). In 2 Thessalonians he paints a vivid picture
of God’s judgment: ‘The Lord Jesus shall
be revealed from heaven with His might angels in flaming fire, dealing out
retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the
gospel of our Lord Jesus. And these will
pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and
from the glory of His power’ (1:7-9).
“It is easy to lose awareness of the
imminence and the inevitability of God’s judgment, but the Christian who loses
sight of that judgment loses a major portion of his motive for witnessing.
“Someone has written:
‘There is no way to describe hell.
Nothing on earth can compare with it.
No living person has any real idea of it. No madman in wildest flights of insanity
every beheld its horror. No man in delirium
ever pictured a place so utterly terrible as this. No nightmare racing across a fevered mind
overproduces a terror to match that of the mildest hell. No murder scene with splashed blood and
oozing wound ever suggested a revulsion that could touch the border lands of
hell.’
“Our Lord, however, knew the tragedy
and anguish of a destiny of ‘unquenchable fire, where their worm does not die,
and the fire is not quenched’ (Mark 9:43-44), and it grieved His heart that
even one person should be there, because it is not His will ‘for any to perish’
(2 Pet. 3:9). When He saw the crowds, He
taught them and preach to them and healed them.
This was for the ultimate purpose that they might come to Him and escape
‘the harvest’ of judgment they could not otherwise avoid. There will be a ‘harvest’ of damnation for
those not in ‘the harvest’ of salvation.”
These are some really intense
thoughts that both believers need to understand and that unbelievers need to
greatly fear and come to Christ.
Believers are to fear these too in order to be willing to tell their
friends and family of the judgments of God and the fact that Jesus took our
judgment on Himself while on the cross and therefore no one needs to have to be
a part of the judgment that hell has for those who do not believe.
7/10/2021 10:00
AM
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