9 Dec 2024
Restraint, Rapture, Recompense
Most educators in higher academia who make space in their thinking for the existence of deity believe that entity to be existential—i.e., any such God who might exist has, at best, created the world and left it to evolve or whatever, as through some natural process. It is a hands-off, not a hands-on God who inhabits their worldview.
While it’s unlikely that any exploration of these ideas will penetrate the hard shell of their intellect, I nonetheless believe it a worthwhile endeavor. That is, it’s worthwhile to look into God’s Word, overlaying that holy template upon the issues, events, and ongoing developments which, to those who truly “watch,” as Jesus commanded, prove the nearness of Christ’s return.
As one who has done so for decades, I can with certainty confirm that the God I serve attends to the minutest detail of every life, including what the academicians would term the “lower forms.”
I was thinking about Jesus once stating that God clothes the flowers of the fields with glory that not even Solomon, in his kingly attire and wealthy splendor, could match. I remembered that beautiful, radiant face of Ethel Waters, her eyes seeming to project light from Heaven itself while she sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” at Billy Graham crusades: “His eye is on the sparrow…and I know He Watches me…”
Jesus’ words:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:29-31).
Our God is not an existential God, as even some of our founding fathers believed. He is hands-on, giving attention to every person who has ever lived—the depths of which far exceed any degree the finite mind can fathom.
The title of this commentary is meant to encapsulate the Heavenly Father’s complete oversight of this world, many of the inhabitants of which neither accept nor want to accept His governance. But He governs regardless.
God’s restraint has been governing in recent months in ways starkly observable to those who “watch” as commanded in, for example, Mark 13: 37: “And what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch.”
We have, for example, watched God deal in derision with the “powers and principalities”—the globalists that comprise the human element of Satan’s Ephesians 6:2 cabal. Despite all-out efforts by that so-called deep state entity to destroy God’s obviously appointed man for this late hour of the age, Trump triumphed and is now in position as president, just as the Lord determined. His restraining hand was starkly on display when He spared Mr. Trump that day in Butler, Pennsylvania. I believe His hand continued to be on display as the many-pronged attack from Satan’s forces came against Trump and failed miserably in changing the minds of voters–except, perhaps, to change minds in a direction opposite to what Trump haters desired.
We know the result. The people voted overwhelmingly to return this supposedly universally hated man to the most powerful governmental office on the planet.
Only God’s hands-on activity could have bent the election in the direction it went.
We who “watch” through the lens of Bible prophecy are convicted through Holy Spirit influence. We understand that all God is doing with His hands-on shaping—the stage setting we see that indicates the Tribulation is near—means that Christ is at the very door He will open to welcome all believers into His glorious presence.
It will be the Rapture of His Church, that “twinkling of an eye” moment when we will hear our Lord shout, “Come up here!”
Then there will be God’s recompense.
For Raptured believers, it will be a glorious time of recompense.
God’s just-gathered family will stand before their Lord at the judgment seat of Christ to receive rewards earned in life while on earth.
About this, God’s Word says:
“But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
For those left behind on the earth, however, the recompense will be filled with punishment from God’s cup of wrath that will be beyond anything ever experienced by humanity. It will be recompense for wickedness of the sort that caused the Lord to completely destroy all the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah once righteous Lot and the few with him were removed from that doomed region.
The recompense will be for such activity as reported in a recent news item that proves we are living in the days like Lot’s day just before God’s judgment and wrath fell.
“Children, boys and girls, are being sold for sex,” Tara Rodas, a whistleblower from the Department of Health and Human Services, told Congress. “Just last month I spoke with a care provider in Florida who told me about cases of migrant children as young as 8 with sexually transmitted diseases.”
Rodas, a former deputy to the director of the Federal Case Management Team at the Department of Health and Human Services, had been working on spotting red flags for child trafficking among the underage migrants who were being wrongly released to sponsors,
“Today, children are being sold for sex. Some children, girls and boys, will get sexually transmitted diseases. Some girls – as young as 12, 11, or even 10 years old – will give birth to children of their own. Forced labor and prostitution among underage migrants have more than tripled,” she warned, under the Biden-Harris administration…
Tara Rodas had watched as underage migrants were turned over to non-family sponsors with no tracking or accountability. No welfare checks were conducted on those children, and the word of the sponsor was considered enough. But some of those sponsors were the worst of the worst.
Children were handed over to “traffickers, members of transnational criminal organizations, bad actors, bad, bad, bad people” after the Biden administration “stripped all the vetting out of the process.”
And Rodas said that “after nearly 3 and a half years of sounding the alarm, no significant action has been taken to rescue children.”…
Alicia Hopper, a consultant on human trafficking, described “a young girl who arrived at the border in the custody of individuals claiming to be her family was bruised, disoriented, and in pain. Medical examinations revealed that she had been raped, yet she was sent back to her abusers because no verification was done to confirm her guardianship.” (“Open borders tripled child prostitution” | World Israel News, Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine, November 26, 2024)
God neither slumbers nor sleeps. He is restraining evil and has anti-God forces in derision, despite the abhorrent things reported above. The Rapture is next on His agenda to bring this Age of Grace to a close. Then will come recompense, and God’s process of prophetic fulfillment will unfold precisely as He has promised.
Even so, Come, Lord Jesus!
—Terry
Pardoning the Unpardonable
As I write, one of the top news stories is President Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden. The blanket forgiving of crimes goes back to January 1, 2014. As Amir Tsarfati pointed out on his Telegram channel, the younger Biden “joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma” in May of 2014, which makes the pardon just as much about the father as the son.
Sadly, for both parties, it maintains the illusion that God will never hold them accountable for their crimes. The words in Ecclesiastes 8:11-13 came to mind this morning as I thought about the breaking news:
“Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they fear before him. But it will not be well with the wicked, neither will he prolong his days like a shadow, because he does not fear before God.”
I don’t know all that the future holds for the Bidens, but it isn’t good. Unless they bow before the Lamb as the result of saving faith, it’s likely they will witness God’s Tribulation wrath in this life as well as the even worse eternal consequences for their sins. Once the Day of the Lord begins, few will remember the pardon or even the Bidens.
The Forgotten
Despite the welcome news of Donald Trump’s election as President, it doesn’t change the fact that a myriad of signs point to the nearing Tribulation period when the judgments of Revelation chapters 6-18 will devastate the planet. By the time antichrist begins to control all buying and selling throughout the world, very few will remember the Hunter Biden pardon. Most will have forgotten all about him and his dad amid striving to survive.
As 2024 draws to a close, I’m seeing social media posts asking about how history will remember the current U.S. President and other globalist leaders in our nation. My answer is simple; no one will remember them in eternity. We see the first hint of this in the verses quoted above in Ecclesiastes where Solomon wrote that the wicked will not “prolong his days like a shadow, because he does not fear before God.”
I believe that the ultimate fulfillment of Psalm 37 will happen during the seven-year Tribulation when at the end, a redeemed remnant of the Jewish people will “inherit the land.” Throughout the Psalm, we see the theme that it’s only those who trust the Lord now that have a future while the wicked, despite their temporary success, will be “cut off” (v. 9).
In Psalm 37:18-20, David describes the differing endings for “blameless” versus the wicked:
“The Lord knows the days of the blameless,
and their heritage will remain forever;
they are not put to shame in evil times;
in the days of famine they have abundance.
But the wicked will perish;
the enemies of the Lord are like the glory of the pastures;
they vanish—like smoke they vanish away.”
There’s a finality about the fate of the wicked. Who thinks about smoke after it disappears? In eternity, no one will remember the Lord’s enemies, who now make headlines across the world as they seek to form a one-world government. Those who now wield great power among the nations will “vanish” like the vapor of our breath on a frigid day.
As we near the time for our homegoing, the wicked boast of great things as they seek to leave their legacy of evil by enslaving people under a Marxist world order. In the end, however, they will be among the forgotten.
The Good News
As I contemplate Hunter Biden’s pardon, I’m reminded that because of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross, I have received the only pardon that matters. Ephesians 2:4-7 describes the radical nature of our regeneration whereby the Lord changes us from “children of wrath” (2:3) into saints destined to forever enjoy His favor.
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”
Apart from Christ’s redeeming work on our behalf, we were all once unpardonable by nature (see Romans 3:21-26). But even when we were His “enemies” (Romans 5:10), He died in our place, enduring the Father’s wrath for our sins. That’s why the Gospel is such over-the-top good news. Not only does God forgive all our sins, but as verse 7 states, He will “show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” in the coming ages. Is this not the most overlooked verse today?
During the perilous times in which we live, we must not forget the eternal nature of the Gospel. In 2 Corinthians 4:18, Paul reminds us that “the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” We are heirs to a “kingdom” (1 Corinthians 15:50-52), and we most certainly will reign for a thousand years alongside our Savior and then forevermore. This is the promise of God, the One who will never renege on His word or deceive us.
The pardon for our sins that we receive through faith is eternal and carries with it the hope of everlasting life that will be far, far better than we can even imagine.
It’s the only reprieve that matters, and it’s eternal.
-Jonathan
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