Coming To Terms with Death and Life in the Present Age :: By Lynda Janzen

God’s Wrath on Unrighteousness

Romans 1:18-32, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.

Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonour their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving,  unforgiving, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.”

This passage from the Book of Romans has been much on my mind over the past week or so. It seems that our current state of being is as Jesus told us the last days would be: “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:37).

And how was it in the days of Noah? “The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5).

Are we there? And has the LORD God given us over to our depravity, as Apostle Paul writes in Romans 1?

Welcome to another in a seemingly endless pile of articles by people both of faith and unfaith, trying to come to terms with the evil, senseless killing of Charlie Kirk.

Every day since it happened, I have prayerfully tried to organize my thoughts and feelings about what it all means and about where the consequences take us next, as a society, as a nation, but more importantly, as the Body of Christ.

Last night, my husband and I were trying to find something worth watching on TV. TCM was airing the 1964 movie “Sex and the Single Girl,” very loosely based on Dr. Helen Gurley Brown’s book of the same name. Now, what caused us to pause and have a look was a curiosity about what the 1960s morality looked like from a 2025 perspective. This movie was made just as I was coming into adulthood, and I remember the era very well indeed. At that time, I had not yet accepted Jesus’ free gift of Salvation. As believers know, especially those of us who come to faith later in life, there is a “great divide” between the time of unbelief and the acceptance of the Greatest Gift ever given to humankind – the Gospel of Jesus Christ (John 3:16).

The movie is about the time when sex was being downgraded in the public arena from an act of loving procreation to one of recreation. It was made in the same era that prayer was being thrown out of schools and government offices; when young people were being fed the lie that human potential could be reached through self-aggrandizement rather than by glorifying the God Who made us; when rebellion against God was couched in terms of throwing off our Victorian moral yoke. ‘FREEDOM,’ they cried. But it wasn’t freedom at all. Way too late, many of us learned that, instead, this so-called freedom was, indeed, heavy bondage to sin. It was the Evil One disguised as an angel of light with his ageless whisper, the same one he whispered to Eve in the garden:

“You will not certainly die. For God knows that when you eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Needless to say, we did not watch the movie, but just seeing it served the purpose of stirring up memories of when the world was coming out from behind its cloak of respectability, decency, and the Fear of God. Did evil begin in the 1960s? Of course not. However, I do believe now that the era was a tipping point at which the LORD God began to give “them over to a depraved mind.”

In 2 Thessalonians 9-12, Apostle Paul writes: “The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works.  He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

If we remember that Jesus, in the Olivet Discourse, taught us that the events of the End Times would come on us like labour pains, we can look back over the decades between the end of World War II, or, more importantly, the rebirth of Israel (1948) and the present day, and watch evil coming and going but always growing more and receding less with each wave.

It was, for me, the Obama years that began the most blatant divide between good and evil. It was the era when Isaiah 5:20 really came to the fore. “Woe to those who call good for evil and evil for good; who light for darkness and darkness for light, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” It was the first time we, who are in Christ, watched the Gaslighting of a whole generation into believing so many lies that eventually the truth was obscured to all but those of us who cling to God’s Word as the Truth and the Life.

Enter Charlie Kirk. He will always be, in my memory, the boy who stood up and shouted that the Emperor had no new clothes, and indeed had no clothes on at all! (The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson)

As so many were fearful of being silenced by the left, being cancelled, Charlie shouted God’s Truth from the rooftops. His energy, his drive to obedience to the LORD, his graciousness to those in opposition, all made him a magnet for the righteous — young and old people alike. It also made him a target for the unrighteous, who never stopped trying to smear him with leftist rhetoric. But the Light of Life in Charlie, the Holy Spirit, would not be squelched with rhetoric, so they killed him. Little did they know how their evil plan would backfire.

Christ said of Himself (John 12:23-24), “The hour has come for the Son of God to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

This statement was born out in the exponential growth of the church following the death and resurrection of our LORD. While it remains to be seen just how much fruit for the Kingdom will be born as a result of the death of Charlie Kirk, it can safely be predicted that many will likely turn to the Gospel of Jesus in the wake of it.

Read the rest of the passage from John 12, verses 25-26: “Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves Me must follow Me; and where I am, My servant also will be. My Father will honour the one who serves Me.”

Charlie Kirk served the LORD God Almighty and His precious Son, our Saviour Jesus Messiah. Can we do less?

Grab a backbone. Be of good courage! Spread the Gospel – the Good News of Jesus Christ to all while you still have a chance to do it. Life on earth is fleeting. Life in heaven is eternal – never-ending. Choose LIFE as Charlie Kirk chose LIFE.  And live it to the full in Christ Jesus. AMEN!!

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