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2. The Seven Trumpet Judgments (Revelation 8:7 - 9:21)
A Call to Repent of Modern Idolatry: Mankind sins and commits age-old iniquity. It worships dead non-gods and vegetates away without truth and love. Many love their money more than their Savior! Bank accounts, stocks, speculation and the hunt for silver and gold take more people captive than we know. Jesus impressed upon us that no man can serve God and money at the same time (Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:13). The Lord also wants to be Lord of our possessions. Our being freed-up from the love of money and our trust of transitory values is an indispensable component of repentance. We should learn under the leadership of the Spirit of God to give gifts wisely, so that they will glorify Jesus (Matthew 25:35-40).
Another modern sin is the love of our vehicles. We want to earn more and more, enjoy more and more, and go faster and faster. The car has become the Golden Calf of many, danced around night and day. They wash, oil, feed, repair and insure their sheet metal gods and even set themselves in it! Trusting in the gas pedal and brakes they race 60 cm above the pavement at speeds often faster than a bird can fly. A single nail would suffice to pop the air out of a tire and send the car skidding. We should not climb into our steel carriages without prayer and our guardian angel! On Moroccan streets one sees over and over the practical reminder: Haste is from the Devil!
More and more people take refuge in good-luck charms or horseshoes, knock on wood, or have horoscopes made out. They admit that it is all a bunch of humbug, and say they don’t believe it. But as soon as one tells them they should burn or get rid of their humbug they begin to squirm and don’t want to part from their protector. Well-known athletes wear, from time to time, a small cross on their chest. They do it mainly not because of devotion to the crucified Savior, but because they are looking for magic protection from accidents, and are willing to misuse the cross of Christ. Fortune-tellers are not in full-demand only during times of crisis. Esteemed politicians, military and business people stand long in line to enquire about their future. Taking up contact with dead spirits and demons is a burdening and binding sin, which shackles people in their inner being. All forms of occultism, reaching all the way to satanic masses, drag people into their pathway who have no inward footing in Christ.
Whoever participates in such practices, from the reading of coffee grinds, all the way to the direct calling upon of Satan, commit, spiritually seen, profound adultery. He no longer trusts Jesus alone, his Savior and Good Shepherd, but binds himself to ungodly forces. But Jesus will crown no divided heart! We either belong to Him entirely and forever, or we increasingly fall prey to Satan. There is no middle way. Mankind will be called until the last days of the world to give honor to Jesus and His Father alone, and to have no other gods besides Him.
Without question, spirits and demons do not reside in carved out and painted talismans and idols, coffee grinds and cars. But wherever people love and trust something created above all else they bind themselves to these objects or persons. On all continents personality cults are remarkably in bloom. Normal minded people have been bewitched into mass hysteria. Through trust and excessive love of individual created beings they land up under the control of anti-Christian forces. Many people have become slaves of other people, hobbies and longings.
The warning against ungodly attachments to people does not apply, however, to marriage and the family, which represents the basic foundation for creation, as God intended. But in marriage, too, Jesus should remain the reconciling and consecrating focus of our lives. Only in fellowship with Jesus is there salvation and consecration.
A Call to Repent of Hatred and Murder: John clues us in to the areas in which humanity, uncoupled from God, incessantly sins in a collective frenzy. When the inner relationship of a person with God and His Lamb is no longer right, the results will soon appear in practical life.
Hatred and an unwillingness to forgive toward those who are difficult or even guilty harden the heart of each person who does not daily live from the forgiveness of the Lamb of God. Jesus teaches us that anger and hatred are equivalent to homicide and murder (Matthew 5:21-26; 6:14-15). We live among murderers and ourselves bear this evil hereditary trait in us. But the Spirit of Jesus Christ drives us to forgive as God forgives, and to love like God loves us (Matthew 5:43-48). That is possible when we are “in Christ” and when He lives “in us” (John 15:4-6). His love compels us to love and bless especially the difficult people in our workplace and community.
The person who does not live from the reconciliation in Christ can hardly love his enemies. Much more, he will try and force his own will through, cost what it may. Small wars, as well as mass murder among nations, reign over a world detached from God. The spirit of Cain makes its rounds and infects all who turn away from the Lamb of God.
Whoever maintains he is “fighting for peace” should examine his own self to see whether the one who was a murderer from the beginning did not wrap a religious cloak around him. Jesus categorically forbade every religious war when He commanded Peter: “Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52; Revelation 13:10). Many pious battles, quarrels and wars will be exposed and judged at the final judgment as having been demonic temptation.
It is a tragedy, and underlines the demonic origin of Islam as well, that more than 100 verses in the Koran incite to a so-called holy war. It is not extremists who again and again call for terrorist action and war against Israel and all Christians, but Allah himself commands armed battle against animists, Jews and Christians, until no more temptation to apostasy from Islam exists, and the religion of Allah covers the entire world (Suras al-Baqara 2:191-193; al-Anfal 8:39; al-Tauba 9:28-30; al-Saff 61:9). Mohammed himself was involved in 29 battles, and became the obligatory example for his followers. There reigns in Islam a religiously sanctioned murderous hatred against all who refuse to accept Islam. Christ, on the contrary, prayed for His enemies “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34), and died for their reconciliation. His love is stronger than the Islamic curse!
A Call to Repentance From Every Form of Fornication: Jesus not only wants to transform our hatred to sacrificial love, but also free and turn us from fornication to a life in the discipline of the Holy Spirit. Our sexual capacity is a gift of God from paradise, and is in itself neither evil nor unclean. But since we live in a world fallen away from God the relationship between man and woman has also become disordered. The written principles and revelations of Sigmund Freud reign in our society today and have destroyed every feeling of shame in many people. Films, television, advertising and clothing heat up the craving in us and drive some to do what they do not want to do (Romans 7:14-24). Our Entire life, even the instruction at school, has been sexualized. What was sanctified alone for marriage is unscrupulously placed into business and sport, politics and society, into spiritistic circles, and even, in some cases, into the church, as means to an end. Rapturous enthusiasm often leads to impure excesses. John did not command us in vain to put off in Jesus’ name and in His power every form of immorality, but especially to renounce every form of witchcraft. Where individuals or even an entire society looses itself from the true God, impure practices in every area of sexuality will follow.
Church leaders, too, can err when they tolerate or bless homosexual and lesbian marriages, all under the mantle of a falsely understood love, or an unbiblical concept of freedom! Today, even the adoption of orphans by homosexual and lesbian couples is allowed. Thereby it is well to remember that it would be better for the one who abuses a child to have had a millstone hung around his neck and be cast into the sea (Luke 17:2) – not to mention child pornography!
A Shiite scholar is reported to have said in recent years that sexual abuse of small children is compatible with the law of the Sharia. In the Koran the simultaneous marriage to four wives is religiously legalized anyway, what Biblically amounts to permanent adultery. When the Divine understanding of God in individuals or religions is no longer correct, there soon arises every form of immorality.
When the newly assembled committee for the responsible commissaries of the united Europe ran aground on the liberal attitude of the parliament in Strasbourg, it was because one of the installed commissaries described homosexuality as “sin”. This was a result of the elimination of the word “God” from the preamble to the constitution of the united Europe. Legalized unbelief first creates every form of sexual impurity, and then legalizes the practice. The hymn writer, Philipp Friedrich Hiller (1699-1769), composed, in view of the downfall of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in view of the increasing depravity of our day: When the wickedness of Sodom cries to heaven, the odor of sulfur cannot be far!
PRAYER: Holy God, we experience that the prohibition of murder, adultery and theft is a basic rule in all religions, but hatred, revenge and spite have slipped into houses and factories, and adultery has become widespread everywhere in public posters, advertisements, and movies, where we see natural pictures of sexual abominations. Forgive us our disputes with anyone else, and cleanse us from unclean thoughts that we may penetrate deeply into the holiness and love of Your Son Jesus.
QUESTION:
- How do you become free from hatred and overcome unclean temptations?