When Can God Turn the Other Way?
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Intro:
God cast judgement on the world’s condition seen in the cross. Before we knew anything was wrong, we learned about the Cross, and last week Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Its only after the fact we have to learn, why did God do that?
That is what we are looking at today, how long could God ignore what people do?
Its the 20th anniversary of Columbine school massacre. I won’t say the name of the shooters, though some of you remember the names. I don’t want to contribute to their memory so won’t mention them today. But one of the shooter’s mothers talked about the missing the signs… the guilt she felt. The shooters had journals that record some of the days around the events and the coarseness of their talk and attitudes show some boys in raw form. We have gotten so use to some of it
As God looks down, how long can God be expected to ignore what he sees?
People’s Condition: It May Begin With Ignorance
People’s Condition: It May Begin With Ignorance
For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what He has made. As a result, people are without excuse.
Can God Ignore ignorance?
People’s Condition: Is a Refusal to Credit God
People’s Condition: Is a Refusal to Credit God
For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.
Can God Ignore People Blatantly Disregarding him?
People’s Condition: Is an Abandon to Appetites
People’s Condition: Is an Abandon to Appetites
Therefore God delivered them over in the cravings of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served something created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen.
This is why God delivered them over to degrading passions. For even their females exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. The males in the same way also left natural relations with females and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error.
Can God Ignore Increase in our sinful state?
People’s Condition: Needs God’s Help
People’s Condition: Needs God’s Help
And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a worthless mind to do what is morally wrong. They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. Although they know full well God’s just sentence—that those who practice such things deserve to die —they not only do them, but even applaud others who practice them.
Therefore, any one of you who judges is without excuse. For when you judge another, you condemn yourself, since you, the judge, do the same things. We know that God’s judgment on those who do such things is based on the truth.
Before Paul began talking about wrath, he writes about righteousness from God.
Paul is not a hell-fire accuser, he is a preacher of the gospel.
He had to describe the condition Jesus had to die for
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is God’s power for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, and also to the Greek. For in it God’s righteousness is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.
David Brainerd was a missionary to the American Indians in New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania. He was only on the mission field for four years and died at the age of 29. But in that short period of time he led several hundred to the Lord. On one occasion, he was witnessing to a chief, who was very close to deciding for Christ. But he held back; there was some pause or hesitation. Brainerd got up, took a stick, drew a circle in the soft earth about the chief, and said, "Decide before you cross that line." Why this passion and urgency? Because Brainerd recognized that at that moment, that chief was close to God. If he missed that moment, he might never be so close again.