The Day of the Lord

The End of the World, it's certainly a provocative statement, isn't it?

The end of the world, when terrible natural disasters strike, fires and floods, storms and earthquakes, when there is civil unrest, chaotic riots, war, even rumors of war, pandemics.

They often earn the label in the news reports apocalyptic, don't they?

And the journalist is trying to communicate, there is a sense that it feels like it's the end of the world.

Words and phrases like cataclysmic, extinction event, the singularity are at times associated with this idea of the end of the world.

And you might wonder, does the Bible say anything about all this?

And the answer is, yes, it does.

It's not always easy to actually understand, but I believe the Bible does speak to the end.

A couple of months ago, I read a book by Moe Gordat, an Egyptian man.

It was called Scary Smart.

Moe was one of Google's top artificial intelligence programmers and managers.

In fact, he headed up the cutting edge group called Google X for ten years.

And in the book, he suggested from his experience and looking at what is happening, that artificial intelligence is becoming, as the book suggests, scary smart.

If you haven't heard about ChatGPT and the rise of artificial intelligence, or AI as it's called, and supercomputers, I imagine you will soon.

It's pretty big news.

We're living through a significant shift in technological capacity in computing, such that many are suggesting that supercomputers, that is computers that can learn, they don't just do what we tell them to do, that they are learning and in a networked, brain-like connectivity with other learning computers, they are growing in their capacity to understand, and some, many, many in the know, are suggesting that in the next 10 to 20 years, supercomputers, not every computer, but supercomputers will get to the point where they are something like a billion times more intelligent than the combined intelligence of humanity.

That's what's being spoken about, and many are describing that part of history, that development of technology as an artificial intelligence, supercomputers being God-like.

Now, most Christians should think, well, that's disturbing if that was the case.

And so we're going to unpack some of this.

If or when computers get to this level of power, the seemingly science fiction question of could they turn on us becomes very significant.

People are calling this moment in time the singularity, and it comes from an understanding of black holes in the universe, where they call it the singularity, where physicists don't know what happens.

Everything is thrown out the window.

We don't know what happens at a certain point, and they're calling this point the singularity.

Anything could happen.

We, as human beings, would be in free fall.

Now, who knows that we wouldn't be in free fall?

Well, if you read your Bible, God's in control.

Amen?

It's never going to be a free fall.

Amen?

Because God runs the universe.

He runs this world.

But it may feel like that.

It may.

Now, of course, the easy thing to do, as some of you are already doing, I think, I guess, you're saying, what are you talking about?

You're a conspiracy theorist.

It's not going to happen.

That's a long way off.

That's silly talk.

You're getting caught up in watching certain YouTube algorithm feeds that have come because you've shown interest in conspiracy theory.

But that's one option.

I think another option, which I think is also fair, is to acknowledge we are actually going through a time of massive societal upheaval and disruption of the kind that we have never seen on earth.

Never, never seen what's coming.

And that's why we sort of shifted gears a little bit and changed direction.

We're going to come back to Romans, but I think it's a really worthwhile time to look at what the Bible says about the end of the world.

And that's what Lord willing we're going to do.

Because if AI plays a part in the end, if nuclear war, we've been wondering about this for the last 30, 40 years, if nuclear war plays a part, if climate change plays a part in how the world ends as we know it.

And we do read stuff that talks like this.

I feel confident that the Bible will speak into this.

And so let's ask the Lord to speak to us.

And hopefully, we will be equipped to have words of wisdom and peace and calm and inspiration to tell to people that we interact with.

Because we're a light on a hill.

And we have truth from God's word to share, when things seem chaotic in society.

So Lord willing, over the next five weeks, we're going to look at today, the Day of the Lord.

I'll give fair warning, it's a somewhat heavy five weeks.

It's not sort of going to be probably the comic relief five weeks.

We never are really at this church.

But we're going to look second week, the classic Christian end time positions.

We're going to just do a survey of that.

We're going to look the third week at what Jesus, the Old Testament prophets, Paul and Peter said about the end.

And then we're going to look at how to code break apocalyptic language in Revelation, so hopefully it'll make some sense.

And you can read it and go, okay, let's see what the Lord is saying to us through that vision.

And finally, Lord willing, again, we're going to have a one Sunday overview of the Book of Revelation.

And then we are, I've nearly finished writing a Bible loop for anyone who wants to read through verse by verse, the Book of Revelation in 30 days.

And sitting that and just learn as much as we can and let God inspire and encourage us.

So today our subject is the Day of the Lord.

Zephaniah 1.14 says that the great day of the Lord is near, near and coming quickly.

First Thessalonians 5 says the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.

Jesus said in Matthew 10, truly I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town, the day of the Lord.

Or it's often called that day, or it's called the day, refers in scripture to two things, to both a celebration of God's rescuing love, that's the day of the Lord, and it's also a fearful expectation of God's wrath, the day of the Lord.

God's mercy and God's judgment both are found in the day of the Lord.

And it currently, when we think about the day of the Lord, it is referring to the end of the world, the ultimate end of the world.

But to understand the day of the Lord, we have to go back to the beginning of the world.

So let's go back to the beginning of the world.

We'll look at quite a bit of scripture today.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

It's our beginning to our Bibles that many of us are familiar with.

And then a little later on, in chapter 2, we're told in verse 15, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it, you will certainly die.

The Bible is very clear.

There is only one who gets to determine, who gets to declare and teach what is good and what is evil.

That's God.

Amen.

That's the one who created everything from nothing.

From nothing.

He created it all.

He defines what is good and what is evil.

But what we're going to find is throughout the story of the Bible, the story of history, human beings have this tendency to want to redefine themselves what is good and evil, don't they?

And this is in essence the problem we have.

This is why you end up having a day of judgment.

That people who are created beings shake their fist at their creator and say, you don't get to tell me what is good and what is evil.

I say what is good and what is evil.

So there's a tension, a long-term tension in history, and it's between who gets to define what is good and what is evil.

The story changes in Chapter 3, and many of us would be familiar.

It's the story of the fall of humankind.

When a mysterious character called the serpent appears on the scene, and deceives the first woman and the first man, what does he say to deceive them?

In essence, he goes straight to the core of that tension.

He says, can you really trust God?

I'll tell you what's good and what's evil.

You can't trust God.

He does not have your best interests at heart.

And in Adam and Eve, by eating the fruit, begin this fall of humanity into sin and violence and injustice and death.

It's exactly what God said.

Don't eat that tree.

Don't disobey me.

In essence, don't disobey me or the result will be evil producing death.

Because God is saying, I get to tell you what is good and what is evil.

Don't try to redefine it.

So, then the next ten chapters of Genesis is the spread of sin to more and more people.

It's more carnage, but yet there's a spread of grace at the same time.

It leads us up to chapter 11, which is a really significant chapter in Genesis, where we find the Tower of Babel.

In Hebrew, it actually means the Tower of Babylon, where there is a city, a united city, that becomes the archetype of combined humanity, shaking their fist at God, saying, we're going to define what is good and what is evil.

And this city of Babylon, in chapter 11, they say, we're going to build a tower to the heavens, and symbolically, I'll read to it, Genesis 11, the whole earth had one language and one common speech.

As people moved eastward and they found a plane in Shinar and settled there, they said to each other, come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly.

They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar.

This is the first human technological advance, trying to take technology to reach to the heavens.

Then they said, come, let's build ourselves a city, which is Babylon, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.

Otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

Babylon is the archetype for the cumulative desire of humanity to rise up and even take over God's throne.

So that's so important for us to understand.

The Day of the Lord is linked to God dealing with the archetype of Babylon, which is always fuelled by the serpent.

And later in Revelation, he's called the dragon.

Later in Genesis 11 and then moving into 12, we're introduced to who starting with A?

Abraham.

And Abraham and Sarah become the mom and dad of the people of God.

Basically, and with their miracle child, Isaac, they begin a genealogy known as the people of Israel, God's people.

And throughout Genesis, the 50-something chapters, the family grows.

And by the end of the book and in the beginning of the Book of Exodus, the people of Israel have grown to over a million people and they find themselves enslaved, the beginning of Exodus, to which nation?

To Egypt, and Egypt is led by a king called Pharaoh.

Now, what you find in the Bible, and you find it in Revelation, and we will hopefully cover it, is the dragon is the source of evil and coming out of the inspiration of the dragon is an evil empire known as the archetype of Babylon, the beastly empire.

And out of the empire, there is a charismatic personality, later known as the antichrist or the man of lawlessness or the beast, who is the one that speaks on behalf of the dragon.

And later on, we will call that, see, it's called 666, one less than the holy trinity.

So 666 represents the beastly charismatic leader, but it's this unholy trinity that we'll understand as we work through this stuff.

The dragon is the behind it all.

There's a beastly empire, Babylon, and then there's a beastly charismatic leader who is known as the Antichrist later on.

And so what we find is the first iteration in human history, truly, of the Babylonian archetype, but they're called Egypt.

And what do we do?

Pharaoh and Egypt, they say, we're going to redefine what is good and evil.

We're going to say that murdering infants is good.

We're going to say that enslaving immigrants to build our city, that's good, that's not evil.

Can you see what they're doing?

Egypt was the first Babylon.

They weren't called Babylon, they were called Egypt, but they're the archetype of the city of humanity that defines or tries to redefine what is good and what is evil.

And so in Exodus, the diagnosis of this evil is shown to be Yahweh, Pharaoh's refusal to acknowledge Yahweh as God.

Exodus 5, verse 2, we read, Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, This is what the Lord, the God of Israel says, Let my people go so that they may hold a festival to me in the wilderness.

Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord that I should obey him and let Israel go?

I don't know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.

What he's saying is, I get to define what is good and evil.

You don't.

I don't know this God and I won't worship him.

Egypt or Babylon never listen to God.

They never acknowledge him as God.

They always try to define good and evil themselves.

The great story of God rescuing his people from the Egyptian starts with these ten plagues and culminates in the blood of the lamb.

Do you remember?

The blood of the lamb smeared across the doors of the people of God to mark them as belonging to God.

Now, as we try to think about the end, it's in this story is very important.

So let me read it.

Take a minute to read and please try to concentrate.

Exodus 12, Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, Go at once and select the animals for your families and slaughter the Passover lamb.

Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood in the basin and put some of the blood on the top and on both sides of the door frame of your house.

None of you shall go out of the door of your house until morning.

When the Lord goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the door frame and he will pass over that doorway and he will not permit the destroyer, who is an angel, often angels are used to inflict and pour out the wrath of God, the destroyer to enter your house and strike you down.

Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants.

When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony and when your children ask you, what does this ceremony mean to you?

Then tell them it is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.

Then the people bowed down and worshipped.

The Israelites did just what the Lord commanded Moses and Aaron.

At midnight, the Lord struck down all the first born in Egypt from the first born of Pharaoh who sat on the throne, to the first born of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and the first born of all the livestock as well.

Pharaoh and all his officials and all the Egyptians got up during the night, and there was a loud wailing in Egypt for there was not a house without someone dead.

This happened in history.

So, this is in time and space.

This is a day, but it was a night.

It was a real day, the Day of the Lord.

So, this is the first Day of the Lord.

And when you think about it, together with the loss of life of the Egyptian army in the crossing of the Red Sea, because that's sort of part of the judgment, and also the rescuing of God's people as He opened up the Red Sea to save them.

So, it's not just what happened in the Passover Angel at the Passover, the destroyer and the blood of the lamb, but it's also the Red Sea being judgment and rescue.

This is the great day of God's judgment on Babylon and his rescuing love demonstrated for his people.

Does that make sense?

It's both, right?

The day means rescuing love, blood on the doorposts, marking the people of God as gods.

And those that are not marked, it's binary.

You are covered by the blood or not.

And then the destroyer, a supernatural being comes and pours out wrath that no one can stop.

It doesn't matter how powerful that Pharaoh was.

He's the most powerful human that had ever lived.

So we're trying to understand power.

People are going to tell you that AI will be the most godlike power, but it won't be above Yahweh.

It won't be.

There's only one God.

And when he decides to bring his judgment, you cannot stop it.

But it's a wonderful thing if you are loved by him and you obey him.

So, the Day of the Lord is always this sense of wonder of the love of God, the rescuing mercy of God, and the fear of the wrath of God being poured out, like he did on Egypt.

And so, this is what Moses says in Exodus 13, commemorate this day, the day.

Today, we're talking about the Day of the Lord.

The day you came out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, because the Lord brought you out of it with a mighty hand, eating nothing containing yeast.

The Day of the Lord.

So, we have to stop and just ask ourselves, do I believe that the Bible is true in the past?

Does it really speak of events that will happen?

Because this is not an abstract idea.

This is a day.

So, the Bible in the New Testament, when we get to talk about the Day of Judgment, the Day of the Lord, it's a real day in the future, at the end of the world.

It's not just conspiracy theory.

It's going to happen.

The first day happened and the people of Israel were saved and Egypt were destroyed.

And then, if you read the Bible, you notice, well, the people wandered, the people of Israel, they wander in the desert for 40 years.

And then the Book of Joshua and Judges take us through the story of them finally going in and defeating the nations in the land and they get given the promised land.

And it's wonderful.

And then they have that terrible time where they say, make us like the others.

We want to be just like all the other nations.

Give us a king, a human king.

And over time, who do they actually become like?

The people of Israel.

They become like Babylon themselves.

The great tragedy is the city of Babylon was a type in Genesis 11, the tower.

And in Egypt were the next Babylon.

But the next Babylon we find is Israel.

And Isaiah 2 and to other prophets, they speak to Israel saying, the Lord Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty, for all that is exalted and they will be humbled.

And these people of Israel, what did they do about good and evil?

They said, we're going to define what good and evil is, Lord.

We're going to have gods just like the nations.

We're going to sacrifice our children to them.

They did evil, but they called it good.

They set up prostitution rackets and housing prostitutes in the temple.

In the temple itself, they said this is good.

And God said, it's not good, it's evil.

But the heart of man is to say we get to define what is good and what is evil.

It's the heart of Babylon.

It's the heart of the beast.

And Joel speaks about similar stuff in chapter 2 verse 11.

They speak of a judgment day.

And so what did we read about in Habakkuk recently?

God said, I'm going to raise up, ironically, a nation called Babylon, led by a beastly empire, emperor, Nebuchadnezzar.

And they're going to come and bring the Day of the Lord on you guys, because you're like Babylon.

And so 722 BC, the top 10 tribes, routed and they experienced the Day of the Lord's judgment.

And in 587 BC, Jerusalem itself and the temple, they experienced the Day of the Lord's judgment, because they were like Babylon.

And it was a terrible, terrible day that was prophesied.

Nebuchadnezzar came and sieged Jerusalem and they had to eat their children, the people of Israel, on that day.

And then after Babylon had done the work of God to bring judgment on people, the people of Israel, Babylon itself became, what do you reckon, Babylon.

They were the archetype.

And so God sent the Assyrians to judge the Babylonians, and the Day of the Lord was poured out on them.

So there are multiple days of the Lord.

And it's always a situation where, when you are marked by obedience and being found in his mercy, it's a good day.

But not if you're not.

You've got to be in relationship with God and obeying him.

And we find in Isaiah 14, this classic verse, verse 12, How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn.

You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations.

You said in your heart, I will ascend to the heavens.

I will raise my throne above the stars of God.

I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.

I will ascend above the tops of the clouds.

I will make myself like the most high.

But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit.

From the Garden of Eden, through Egypt, through the wilderness wanderings and the promised land and the success the people of Israel had, through Babylon with Nebuchadnezzar, with his success, there is this constant zeal, obsession to rise up to the heavens, to be like God.

Have you ever heard that verse read before, Chapter 14 of Isaiah?

Who do you reckon that's normally attributed to be talking about?

The devil.

And it's important that we acknowledge that that is exactly the devil.

But it's the devil, the dragon, the serpent, the evil one, who's always behind humanity's drive to shake their fist at God and say, I get to decide who is evil and who is good.

It's a spiritual problem.

Our problem is a spiritual problem.

We can't blame the devil for all the sin we do.

We're good at it.

We can sin ourselves, but the power behind the wrong of the earth, the power behind sin, but the power behind every sinful governmental structure, every unjust, horrible societal program, every organized crime syndicate, every family that's fully dysfunctional in evil.

It is the dragon.

He's behind it all.

He is our main problem.

So when Jesus arrives on the scene, who was the evil empire representing Babylon for Jesus?

Rome.

And Rome had its beastly anti-Christ leaders, who at times, especially later towards the end of the first century, demanded worship as God.

Anti-Yahweh.

Anti-Christ.

The Day.

The Day of the Lord was most fully manifest in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and more importantly, his death and resurrection.

Can you imagine, when you think about the Gospel, how wonderful it was that God's righteous judgment, which is the Day of the Lord, was being poured out, yet at this time time, his merciful love.

And the wonder, the wonder that it was happening, poured out on the one who didn't deserve it.

He was conquering evil with love.

He was conquering evil with good.

When Jesus arrived on the world scene, think about it, this titanic battle between good and evil, though it's not a dualistic one.

God is creator and the devil is smaller than that.

But he is an antagonist in the story.

He's certainly been given that role.

So Jesus arrives on the history and he's born and evil gets involved immediately and there's the massacre of the infants.

Can you see how evil is at play?

And the main force that Jesus, the Messiah, was on earth to push back was the devil.

He came to defeat once and for all the dragon.

And so when he starts his ministry at about 30 years of age, he does what Israel did.

He goes into the wilderness, not 40 years, but for 40 days, and he's tempted by the devil.

There's a spiritual battle.

And do you remember really what the devil was trying to do to the representative of humanity?

What do you think he was trying to do?

He was trying to get Jesus to redefine what was good and evil.

And what did Jesus keep saying back?

I won't read it all out.

It's sort of there on the screen.

But Jesus kept saying, basically, man doesn't get to define what is good and evil.

My father in heaven does.

And you're not going to trick me, devil.

I'm here to defeat you.

And he doesn't let the devil convince him to redefine.

And he comes back from the 40 days victorious over the evil one.

And what does he immediately do?

He grabs the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

He says the good news is going to be preached to the poor.

The power of God is being unleashed.

And he goes and delivers an individual from demonic oppression.

So the point is, the Day of the Lord is all about God and his good defeating evil.

That's what the Day of the Lord is about.

That's what is required in human history.

And so the Lord Jesus, as many of us know, goes to the cross and in a very strange way defeats evil by allowing evil to seemingly conquer him.

But love wins.

And then we come to the portion that that Carlo read out for us in Joel 2.

Afterward, Joel prophesied, I will pour out my spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesied.

Your old men will dream dreams.

Your young men will see visions.

Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days.

I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth.

Blood and fire and billows of smoke.

We know that this is what's quoted at the bed Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit is poured out.

But can you see, often we only focus on sons and daughters will see visions.

But what else is going on there?

Cataclysmic, cosmic upheaval.

It's end of the world language.

That's always what you find in Day of the Lord.

Day of the Lord language is always cataclysmic.

The sun will be turned to darkness, the moon to blood before the coming and the great day, dreadful day of the Lord.

Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, there will be deliverance as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls.

Isn't it impacting?

This wonderful good news of Jesus dying on the cross for our sin, and yet it's called a great and dreadful day.

It is both the mercy of God, the day of the Lord, and a fearful expectation of his judgment.

Love and wrath poured out on the same day.

And so we come through that, through the gospel, and we get the Book of Acts and the Day of Pentecost and the story of the early church, and then we start hearing more about this idea of the day of the Lord being fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but that there is an ultimate day of the Lord which will coincide with the end of the world, that which will come.

And this is where we sort of bring it around to our subject matter of the end of the world.

And the Day of the Lord is very crucial to understand with regard to this.

Second Thessalonians 1, verse 8, Paul writes this, and we, you know, you've got to, how many times have you heard this read out in church?

Maybe back in the 70s in a very fundamentalist holiness church, you'd hear this a lot, but you don't hear this very often.

I don't go out of my way to read this publicly.

God is just, Paul writes, He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well.

This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels.

He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.

They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory.

Of his might, on the day, on the day he comes, to be glorified in his holy people, and to be marvelled at among all those who have believed.

It's quite sobering, that passage.

So, we constantly get ourselves in a position where you've got to do something with truth like that, or categorise it that is not quite true.

Sort of categorise it, put it somewhere.

Or you just go, oh, la la la la la, I'm not listening.

Or you put it in the context of the whole Bible and think, this Day of the Lord idea, it's been there from the very beginning.

God is not mushy marshmallow.

You don't get to tell him what truth is.

He's just telling you, he's telling us, he's all the way through history and the Bible.

He's saying, sin's real.

If you try to define what's good and evil, my wrath will come upon you.

You will receive it.

But I've made a way through my son to take my wrath away from you.

Every human being who would believe can be saved, just like the blood of the lamb on the doorpost protected the people of Israel.

Amen.

It would seem that the Bible does not teach that humans, an archetype of Babylon, will take humanity to Utopia.

It doesn't seem like that's what the Bible teaches.

So, if you read that the supercomputers, the machines, are going to take us to Utopia, I don't see that in the Bible.

History is moving towards a very clear delineation between those who are marked by the Spirit of God, by the blood of Christ, who are saved in Revelation, referring to as the 144,000, perfect 12 by 12, which means humanity.

They are, we talked about in Romans, marked by the Spirit, sealed in him by the blood of Christ.

Or you're not.

There's no middle ground.

And that's what Paul says, inspired by the Spirit here, in 2 Thessalonians 1, 8.

There is a judgment coming.

Now, I was talking to some people in the lead up to this, and I was just going through some of this, and people said, Oh, you've got to be careful.

You know, this sounds like...

Talk about conspiracy theory.

Talk about pulpit-pounding, judgment day, fear-mongering.

And it's sort of true.

It's like, I think, how do you preach this stuff without it seeming like the end of the world's coming and turn or burn?

Forget about the love of God, but it's just all judgment.

But it's utterly heretical.

It's utterly unbiblical to say there's no judgment.

It's not what the Bible teaches.

You might sit there and go, you're a universalist and you believe love wins.

There are people in the world who do, but not at this church, not in this pulpit.

We don't believe that.

As evangelicals, we don't believe that.

We believe there is a consequence to sin.

There is a wonderful gospel.

It's good news.

Our sin has been taken away by Christ on the cross.

But if you're not found in him, the news is sobering.

And so I guess it's like, well, what's the takeaway today from all of this?

And it makes me think of, as odd as it might sound, a young couple or a young woman having a child.

And I've never come across a young woman as by a single mom or a young couple who said after six months of their first child, I've never seen anyone say, that was easy, that was easy.

There was no sort of sense of challenge in that.

It's not.

You're playing for keeps.

You're giving birth to a human.

And then unless you've got someone else to look after them, they're going to rob you of sleep and sanity and the capacity to feel like you're in control.

It's just going to happen.

I don't say that in a disregarding way for those who are living through it, but it's the truth.

And we have to acknowledge that the postmodern world we live in that has a rule that the first commandment of postmodernity is, thou shalt not tell me that I do not define what is good and evil.

That's the society we live in.

It's like I get to decide what is right and wrong.

I get to decide what is good and evil.

No one tells me that.

That's the greatest aspect of human expression.

You tolerate me.

I might tolerate you.

But the main thing is I get to decide, no, you don't.

That's Babylon.

Amen?

That's the city of Babylon.

That's what will take you to judgment.

I'm not saying we don't have an amazing free will that we get to choose stuff by God's grace.

But, there's a day that is coming, the ultimate day, when God wraps up history on this planet.

And the Bible says we will see plagues, wars, natural disasters, persecution of Christians, it gets real if it hasn't already been real for you and your life.

Because what we'll find in Revelation is it's not just talking about the end, it's talking about the whole 2000 years.

There's just hard stuff that happens after they wrote Revelation.

Jesus predicted it.

There's just going to be tough stuff.

But at the end, it will heat up.

So what do we take out of it?

We hear the call that God gives, come out of Babylon, my people.

Come out of her.

Don't be swept up in the world.

Don't let the world convince you, you get to say what's good and evil.

Come out of her into my wonderful love and grace and I'll show you how to live.

I'll show you how to live an abundant life.

Not a life of slavery, but a life that's full of zoe life, God's life.

Do we all get to see the day of the Lord?

We do, maybe not this side of death, but you know when we die, it's the day of the Lord.

Now, we may die and you may be disembodied and you might go to Paradise or Sheol, there might be an intermediate state, we don't know for sure.

We often talk about that like going to heaven.

Maybe that's happened.

I think it's more biblical to say, you'll go into sleep and you will wake up into the resurrection.

I think personally, but I don't know, could be either.

But the bottom line is for us today, either Jesus returns and it's the day of the Lord, or we'll die.

And it's the day of the Lord.

You do not get another chance after you die.

We faced God's judgment about whether we pay for our own sin at the day of the Lord, or we celebrate that Christ has paid for our sin.

Because that's what happens at the day of the Lord.

It's either a wonderful celebration of the rescuing merciful love of God, or is a fearful expectation of his wrath on sin.

The day of the Lord, the end of the world is coming.

And so the question we have today, and it is a sobering one, it's not a laugh-a-minute, it's a sobering one, but there can be joy amidst it.

The question is, do I look forward to it with the saints?

Or do I fear it?

Because I don't know whether I'm found in Christ or not.

And so can I encourage you, brothers and sisters, today to choose by God's grace that you would walk down a path of not compromising, of trusting in his mercy, and trust that he will take you all the way home, no matter how hard it gets.

There's no one's arms and hands that we want to live our lives in other than Jesus himself.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Lord God, it's a little bit overwhelming to think about the terrible day of the Lord.

We just confess we're so finite, we're so limited in our scope, we're so fallen, we're so in need of your grace.

And yet, we want to be found faithful as a church.

We want to proclaim and herald the truth of your word, like the light on a hill that you have called us to be.

We thank you, Lord Jesus, that you're the one who seeks and saves the lost.

We thank you and give you praise that you've done everything required to save.

You've done everything required to defeat the force of evil, the evil one.

And so now, Lord, as we stop for a moment and as a community of people under one roof, we sing songs.

Jesus, Lord Jesus, King Jesus, may you be glorified.

Amen.

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