Living in Light of the Day of the Lord
By Jay Wegter
In light of the 7.0+ earthquakes in ‘divers places’ this week (Mt 24:7; Mk 13:8), signs the end is near appear to abound. Think of how many texts warn us to be ready for Christ’s return, for He will come so suddenly His second coming is likened to a thief in the night (1 Thess 5:18). The vast majority of those who profess to be Christians will not be ready for our Lord’s return (Lu 21:34-36). Christ’s return will take them by surprise. But God’s faithful servants know well the signs that our Lord has described.
God’s men have an urgent task to carry out of warning the apathetic, the lethargic, and the unprepared. God’s choice servants will have a have to successfully pass through many narrow providences. They will have to navigate many narrow situations in which new levels of obedience and self-denial are required of them to fulfill their calling. They, like the men appointed by God throughout redemptive history, will be misunderstood, perhaps by the majority. So bereft of divine truth will the world be during the Tribulation that an angel is appointed to do what is normally assigned to saved mortals: preach an ‘eternal gospel’. “And I saw another angel flying in midheaven, having an eternal gospel to preach to those who live on the earth, and to every nation and tribe and tongue and people; and he said with a loud voice, ‘Fear God, and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come; worship Him who made the heaven and the earth and sea and springs of waters’” (Rev 14:6-7).
The gospel is filled with cosmology as this passage attests. Notice what’s in the eternal gospel: God is judge, and God is Creator, Owner, and Sustainer, Maker of all that reveals His goodness. Isn’t that interesting that these things seem to be lost from the gospel today? In part, due to the absence of biblical cosmology, for category of origins has been usurped by pseudo-science. Thus, the Lord’s second coming, and the events surrounding the day of the Lord will hit the unbeliever with breathtaking shock and disbelief. And prior to His return, the warning messages about His return before he returns will hit the unbeliever's tin ear in an odd way. They may take it as a ‘medieval message of fear’—a mere ploy to exert control.
The natural man today is so immersed in the Darwinian myth of origins (2 Tim 4:4), he is unable to tabulate the truths of 2 Peter chapter 3—namely that those who deny the reality of the Genesis flood are also going to deny the reality of Christ’s imminent bodily return. The Apostle Peter lays down an unbreakable equation regarding the scoffers who mock the judgments of God. Flood deniers are also deniers of the Second Coming. Now, Noah's flood affected the creation in incredible ways. When God violently tore apart Pangea in the Genesis flood, we learned something very valuable. Namely, that man, the steward of creation, by his wickedness he corrupts his dominion over the creation and the creation including the animals suffer because of man’s sin.
At the end of the flood, when God began to drain the global deluge from the surface of the earth, He pushed down the sea floors and He raised up the land masses, mountain ranges, and continents. From then on, storm and quake and tornado and glacier and avalanche became the norm. Erosion ate away at the mountain ranges. This deterioration of order, or bondage of decay and corruption, born of entropy became the norm (Rom 8:20-25). It replaced the pre-flood creational equilibrium. Thus, every single post-flood tremor, tsunami, cyclone, landslide, deluge, or whirlwind ought to remind us that the flood marked the end of the balance inherent in the creational equilibrium. What we call ‘natural disasters’ ought to warn us of great disturbances are coming that are associated with the Day of the Lord.
Scoffers find that hard to believe, if not possible to believe in the bodily return of Christ at the glorious second advent. For Peter tells us that they subscribe to a form of uniformitarianism—both a geological uniformitarianism—all things continue uninterrupted since the beginning. Thus, they scoff at the record of a global deluge. And they hold to a moral uniformitarianism—scoffing at the prospect of the coming Day of the Lord in global judgment. Since cosmology has been ripped from the gospel, it takes passages like Acts 17, and Romans one to ‘rejoin’ in the minds of men the fact that the Lord is Creator, Savior and Judge. For the natural man is so soaked in the reigning origins myth, he is baffled when the terra firma moves and sways beneath his feet. An earthquake temporarily shoots a seismic wave of wonder and terror through his scoffing, but it quickly dissipates. Just as those who were suffering the violent chaos of the plagues of revelation refused to repent— even when one-hundred- pound hailstones fell and killed their neighbors instead of them (Rev 16:21). They still refused to repent.
And so, we have a humanist naturalist materialist doctrine today in the media and entertainment, in the academy, and in some churches. It assumes an autonomous creation, an autonomous man, the myth of ownership and entitlement—leaving in its wake an ignorant, arrogant man who won’t pay the modest rent of gratitude to his Creator. By default, he worships and serves the creation, he exchanges the truth of God for a lie, and exchanges the glory of God for that of an ox. He has no thought of what he owes God, and so what a sinners do when their conscience is so heavy laden with mountains of legal guilt before God? When judgment is heavy upon man, the moral creature, he is afflicted in his moral center, his conscience. As the image of God, he carries mountains of legal guilt before his Maker. So, he chooses to escape or deny or defy or appease or define himself in relation to others— producing tribalism, and/or the vilification of those around him. He hates, attempts to make himself better than them, comparing himself, oppressing, biting, devouring, slandering, gossiping. We see these flesh fruits described in many passages, such as Galatians five; James chapter 4; Ephesians 5; Romans 3, Titus 3, etc. The weightiness of legal guilt does not only catalyze depression, self-recrimination, despondency, and suicide—a defiled conscience can also express itself in the machinations of despots and monstrous dictators.
How low must men be brought to sense their creaturehood before an uncreated Creator. “By the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19). Little creatures of dust have significance only because God has ‘stooped’ to bestow the glory of His image upon them. The fall did not alter their teleology one iota. Our faculties are designed to be in our Maker’s service—hands, feet, minds, mouths—how soon is too soon to instruct children in these things?