Biblical prophecy is God’s method of expressing His love for mankind.  As is the case with any loving father, He gives His children a choice which determines their relationship with him.  That choice, called “the Law,” carries two opposing messages–one positive, one negative.  This signature aspect of God’s expression of love for mankind was first seen in the Garden of Eden where it involved His first two children, Adam and Eve.  First, He expressed His love for them by creating a paradise and placing them in it with plans for them to live there forever.  But true love dictates choice.  Adam and Eve, like the angels before them, were given the power of choice.

Carefully, God laid out His double-sided Law of love for them and their descendants.  Their two options were: (A) If they obeyed Him they would live blessed lives forever in paradise–the positive aspect of His love for them.  (B) If they disobey Him they would live cursed lives and die–the negative aspect of His love for them.  Again, love demands choice.  Jesus told His disciples that if they loved Him they would obey the Ten Commandments.  They had a choice.  As do those who believe in Him.

With extremely rare exception, which Jesus spoke about in Matthew 7:13,14, people, including church people, fail to understand the two aspects of God’s love.  I once told a woman that His Law (Genesis to Revelation condensed into ten commandments) was a Law of love.  Not so, she responded.  His Law (the Old Testament) had nothing to do with love.  Rather, it was the expression of the angry Old Testament God’s distain for the Israelites.  Jesus Christ, love oozing out of every pore, did away with His Father’s oppressive Law when He took the reins of leadership and created the Gentile-populated New Testament Church.  Simply put, the Old Testament God was negative, domineering and legalistic while the New Testament God is positive, accommodating and laizze faire (individual choice) in His dealings with His Gentile converts.

With extremely rare exception, this attitude prevails throughout the whole of professing Christendom.  As a Truth-seeking study of the Holy Scriptures reveals, the two Gods are in fact one and the same and His Law has not changed, except for the animal sacrifice part that was “added because of transgressions” (Gal. 3:19) following the Mt. Sinai debacle but was later done away with by Him upon His death.  Jesus foretold of the demise of the sacrificial law during the Last Supper (Mat. 26:28) when He noted that henceforth His blood would be the final and ultimate sacrifice for human sin.  It was the sacrificial, ritualistic law–the “handwriting of ordinances” written by the hand of Moses–that was “nailed to the cross.”  The Lord’s Law of love–which He condensed into ten commandments–is eternal and unchangeable (Mat. 5:18).  Read the previous posting for more proof of the Law’s modern day importance.  Also, read The God of the Old Testament.  Key word–Old.  There I offer Scriptural proof that the Word (Jn. 1:1-4,14) Who was “in the beginning” is the One who became Jesus of Nazareth of the New Testament and is the God of the true church today.

Billions of people have believed in the God of love.  Some 2.5 billion believe in Him today.  They readily believe in and embrace the God Who sent His Son to earth to die for the sins of mankind.  But then there’s the supposedly different God of the Old Testament who was all about curses, plagues, defeat, enslavement, punishment and negative prophecy.  Salvation seekers readily accept the positive aspects of God, but readily reject His negative aspects.  What we must understand is that both are necessary, that together they lead to the most glorious outcome mankind can imagine.  Bible prophecy, though it leads to the only true hope that exists for mankind, is often dark and painful to contemplate.

I once worked for a roofer who used boiling hot tar to seal the rooves of flat-topped buildings.  We would haul the bubbling tar up to the roof, pour it on the flat surface where it cooled into a smooth, protective coating.  After I literally ripped off a chunk of my skin where a splash of “hot stuff” had landed, my employer told me a story about his dealing with that same problem.  After spreading the boiling tar on a roof he had fallen backwards into it, turning his back into a seething sea of charred, black flesh.  He had spent several days in the hospital where the damaged area had to be dealt with repeatedly.  In order for the burned area to heal properly, nurses had to literally scrape the dead skin off his back periodically.  The pain was almost more than he could bear.  He would lay on his stomach grasping the bed’s headboard with his hands.  The pain as so intense that he bent the headboard.  As bad as the treatment was, the alternative would have been worse.  If the dead skin had been left in place, he would have been scarred for life and his back would have been continually subjected to infection.

This story is somewhat like coming to grips with prophecy.  IF my friend had chosen to leave the damage in place he would have been not only physically grotesque, the germ-ladened tar would have affected him  for the rest of his life, which would have probably been shortened.  His dread for the pain-racking sessions was overcome by his knowledge that, having overcome it, the end result would be worth the suffering he knew was coming.

In the same way, IF we do not approach prophecy, including negative prophecy, in the way God intends, if we do not allow it to do its painful work in our lives, we will be sin-scarred for life and will suffer the eternal consequences of wasting the time given to us by the Lord in which we must qualify for entrance into His kingdom at the end of this age.

The evil forces that surround us do not want us to understand this process.  Satan, the “god of this earth” (2 Cor. 4:4), the “prince of the powers of the air” (Eph. 2:2), the “angel of light,” along with his “ministers of righteousness” (2 Cor. 11:13-15) constantly war against God in an attempt to keep salvation seekers ignorant of what prophecy is about and the consequences for not understanding it and reacting correctly to it.  Unfortunately, man, including churchman, chooses to follow Satan’s siren call to reject such understanding.  As a result of this self-inflicted spiritual ignorance, man repeatedly echoes the question of a young girl I read about years ago when Southern California was being ravaged by earthquakes.  The girl asked her mother: “Why is God mad at us?”  A good question deserves a good answer.  Unfortunately, the girl did not get one.  Hers was a “Old Testament no longer applies” family.  A study of Biblical prophecy would have answered her question perfectly.  Even a cursory reading of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 would have settled the issue.  However, there was no one around to point them toward the Lord’s Truth relative to why God was angry with the people in the affected area, which included church people.  In their view, “all that Jewish stuff” had been nailed to the cross some 2000 years earlier.  Satan’s success drives me to work relentlessly to get God’s Truth out to church people.  Many are reading what I am putting out to the world.  Hopefully, many of them are believing what they read and are ordering their lives accordingly.  L.J.