By David Hobbs
I
got an email from my state prayer coordinator today (I’m prayer coordinator for
my county). He said,
“I was privileged to be part of a meeting
called yesterday by the superintendents of three School Districts [in a
rural/urban county in Calif.]. More than 30 Christian leaders were in
attendance: pastors and parachurches were represented--anyone with a
demonstrated heart for ministry in public schools. These supts confessed
themselves at their wits’ end in trying to serve families in which students are
cutting themselves, first and second graders are threatening to kill others and
then stabbing themselves, and a fourteen year-old girl was just
murdered.”
Thanks
to our out-of-touch media, the focus of the country has been on the Sandy Hook
shootings in Conn., while more pervasive, yet unpublicized problems are going
on in our own backyards. Friends, this country is disintegrating right before
our eyes. It’s like a slow-motion train wreck. While some cars are going off
the tracks in spectacular fashion, others continue down the line for the time
being because they haven’t come to the break in the tracks yet. The people
focusing on the cars still rolling down the track can easily call the others watching
the cars careen off the tracks up ahead “scaremongers.” The wise in heart step
back, take the whole picture in, and realize that the whole train is coming off
the tracks, it’s just a matter of time as the wreck plays itself out.
That’s
where this country is at: the shaking has started, but it’s not happening all at once. Right now it’s "some here," and "some there," and it can still be ignored. But it won’t end until
the wreck is complete.
A
couple of weeks ago we had an extraordinary event: An unexpected rock from
space exploded over Russia, injuring 1000 and doing much damage. Hours
later on the same day, a much larger asteroid, which could have done catastrophic damage, barely
missed the earth, getting closer than some of our orbiting satellites. For
about a day people seemed to wake up to the possibility of major destruction
hanging over our world, and the fact that we could be entering the last days.
Then just as quickly as the next news cycle came out, the media was back
talking about sequestration, and the scare was forgotten, as so many others
have been since and including 9-1-1. But we forget such warnings at our own
great peril!
In
Daniel 12:10, the angel, talking to Daniel, says that in the last days, “none of the wicked will understand, but
those who are wise will understand.” We are seeing this happen before our very eyes:
the world is collapsing around us, yet none of the unbelievers have a clue what
is going on. They are as blind as they were in Noah’s and Lot’s day, which
shouldn’t be surprising. Jesus said that the end times will be just as it was
in the time before those two great judgments. In Luke 17:27 Jesus said, “People
were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark
[emphasis mine]. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.”
But
as Christians we have to be careful not to be carried away by the unbelievers’
example of cluelessness and unbelief. Just because they are asleep, we cannot
afford to be. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5, also talking about the last days, “6so then, let us not be like others (the unbelievers), who are
asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled…. 9For God did not
appoint us to suffer wrath, but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus
Christ.”
He
also talks about being clothed with the armor of God (in the verses I omitted).
We would do well to take these admonitions to heart. We cannot stop what has
already begun, but if we take the warnings of Scripture seriously, and take our
clues from the Bible and the Spirit instead of from the world, Jesus will preserve
us through it. Scripture makes plain that God’s people can be destroyed through
ignorance and disobedience (Hosea 4:6 & Heb. 4:6). Please take this
seriously!
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