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About Jesus - Steve (Stephen) Sweetman Is
National Suicide A Reality?
Exodus
9:12 says "the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart and he would not listen
to Moses and Aaron". John
12:40 says God "blinded their [Jews] eyes and hardened their hearts,
so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts,
nor turn—and I would heal them".
Did God harden the hearts of Pharaoh and the Jews against their
wills? The
Bible portrays both Pharaoh and the Jews as consistently having hard
hearts. God's disciplinary
judgments offered them an opportunity to repent with submissive soft
hearts, but they refused God's offer.
I suggest that God's disciplinary judgments, meant to soften
hearts, actually hardened hearts. In
this sense, you might say God hardened their hearts, although in the end
they hardened their own hearts more than ever.
Knowing
God does not make us do anything against our wills, how does He depose and
raise up nations and leaders in our democracies today?
Romans 1:18 to 32 may answer this question.
Paul wrote that God gives "them over in the sinful desires of
their hearts", the first sin he lists being "sexual impurity for
the degrading of their bodies with one another" (Romans 1:24).
After
people are given over to sin, Paul wrote that they are filled "with
every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of
envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.
They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and
boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they
have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although
they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve
death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of
those who practice them" (Romans 1:28 - 32).
I note the words "deserves death" because "the wages
of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). In
short, national sins lead to national suicide.
Isaiah
3:1 through 7 portrays what "See
now, the Lord, the LORD Almighty, is about to take from Jerusalem and
Judah both supply and support: all supplies of food and all supplies of
water, the hero and the warrior, the judge and the prophet, the diviner
and the elder, the captain of fifty and the man of rank, the counselor,
skilled craftsman and clever enchanter. I
will make mere youths their officials; children will rule over them.
People will oppress each other— man against man, neighbor
against neighbor. The young
will rise up against the old, the nobody against the honored. A man will
seize one of his brothers in his father's house, and say, 'You have a
cloak, you be our leader; take charge of this heap of ruins!'
But in that day he will cry out, 'I have no remedy. I have no food
or clothing in my house; do not make me the leader of the people'". Does
Romans 1 and Isaiah 3 look anything like any of our western democracies?
Might God, as an act of divine judgment be deposing any of our
western nations by giving them over to their sin? Might
sin be killing them? Might
they be committing national suicide? If
so, how must Christians and the church live in a nation given to sin,
committing national suicide under God's judgment?
It's another question for another article.
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