Future Events that will Impact Your Life

Isaiah 51:4-6

These verses are so full of information you may want to pay attention, in that God is announcing future events, big events that will impact your life.  First, God is reminding all of us and He is addressing Israel of a promise He made to Abraham, that Abraham’s descendants will bless all nations.  In the fifth verse, “My righteousness draws near, my salvation has gone out, and my arms will judge the peoples; the coastlands hope for me, and for my arm they wait.” (Isaiah 51:5 ESV)  This prophecy is 700 years before the birth of Christ, and yet we are told often in Scripture that salvation is found in no one but Christ.  Acts 4:12, makes this very clear: "And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved." 

A large number of people in and outside of the church are making plans for heaven based on their actions or goodness, and not on Christ.  So the question must be asked, can one enter heaven by some other way?  I find no option in God’s word for a back door into heaven, what I find is 1 John 5:11-12, “And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”  John 3:36, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”

God announced His Salvation hundreds of years before Jesus stepped out of heaven and showed up on planet earth in a manger born of a virgin named Mary.  And from the beginning God has sent word of His salvation by men who risked everything to warn nations, and people that the road they are on has a bridge out.  And the question must be ask of me, what kind of a man lets someone parish when they are on that road to destruction and in the darkness of life, found safe passage?  Many of you have put your trust in other things, and the one Jesus calls the thief in John 10:10, the one who has come to kill, steal, and destroy has told you not to worry for God is kind and good and would not do those nasty things the Bible and Jesus says He will do.

Let me share a tidbit from Lee Strobel’s book  “The Case for Christ” with you.  If you have not read the book it is a very informative read; Lee is interviewing Biblical scholars like Donald A. Carson, PH.D, at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and asking some very hard questions.  The subject Lee is addressing with Dr. Carson is hell, and Lee posed this question from the agnostic Charles Templeton: “How could a loving Heavenly Father create an endless hell and, over the centuries, consign millions of people to it because they do not or cannot or will not accept certain religious beliefs?”  The answer from Dr. Carson is just an excerpt I have not typed the whole conversation. “First of all,” he said, “I’m not sure that God simply casts people into hell because they don’t accept certain beliefs.”  Carson goes on to give the example of Adam and Eve and how they looked forward to being with God and they lived to do His will, and they were rightly related to him and they’re rightly related to each other, that is till they sinned.  Sin made them, as it has us, rebel against God’s authority, and we became in our thinking the center of our universe.  Frank Sinatra’s song “I did it my way” became the theme of mankind.  Carson states that all the things we call social pathologies’ – war, rape, bitterness, nurtured envies, secret jealousies, pride, inferiority complexes – are bound up in the first instance with the fact that we’re not rightly related with God.  The consequence is that people get hurt.  Should God do nothing about sin, what about the Holocaust?

Carson goes on to state; hell is not filled with good old boys who missed the way and God isn’t gentle enough or good enough to let them out.  From page 222, Carson words, “It’s filled with people who, for all eternity, still want to be at the center of the universe and who persist in their God-defying rebellion.  “What is God to do?  If He says it doesn’t matter to Him God is no longer a God to be admired.  He’s either amoral or positively creepy.  For him to act in any other way in the face of such blatant defiance would be to reduce God himself.”  This has become too long so I will end with this statement: “Justice is not always done in this world; we see that every day.  But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see.  And no one will be able to complain by saying, ‘This isn’t fair.’ ”

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice