I would like to turn to Lamentations 3. This is a book that the Lord moved Jeremiah to write. We will begin in verse 21. We read in Lamentation 3:21-26:
This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of JEHOVAH’S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. JEHOVAH is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. JEHOVAH is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of JEHOVAH.
I will stop reading there.
This is a passage that has really been a comfort and an encouragement to the people of God for a long time throughout the centuries. God is telling us, the reader, to hope. He is telling us to hope.
Looking ahead to May 21, 2011, many people are not sure of their salvation. Of course, there are some who have assurance; yet there are many others who are not sure of their own salvation. They are not sure if God has saved them and where they stand with God; however, they do hope. They do have hope.
Look at it this way. God has opened up the Scriptures and revealed many truths to people. Some people are not resisting this. They are not fighting against God regarding the information that He is opening up. They understand and recognize that these things are true, “Yes, it is true concerning the end of the church age.” This is a truth that they recognize. They also recognize that God’s judgment process is not what they had thought and that, instead, God intends to utterly destroy and annihilate the sinner. They say, “Yes, I understand this.” They also understand that May 21, 2011 is Judgment Day. They are not fighting against this or resisting this in any way. They also understand that God saves by the “faith of Christ” and not by their own faith; and they understand the five months of torment.
They understand all of these things, but they also understand that knowledge does not save. They understand that knowledge or correct doctrine does not save anyone. They realize that an individual could know these things intellectually, and yet this does not mean that they are saved.
What is the Bible’s definition for Biblical understanding? Turn to Job 28:28, where we read:
And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.
So this goes beyond what we think or what we agree with. It goes beyond what we understand with our minds. It must translate into a fear of God. The fact that we are continuing in sin, even though we have an understanding of these things, is really telling us that we do not understand in the way in which God indicates that His people will understand, as it says in Daniel 12:10:
…the wise shall understand.
Yes, part of this understanding is what happens in our minds. We understand it. We see it intellectually. We agree with it. We know it. However, there has to also be action. There has to be some action in our lives. There has to be a turning from our sin in repentance.
We also understand repentance at this time. God’s people know that they cannot repent satisfactorily enough to please God. Right? I hope that we understand this. God commands us, “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and we should do all that we can to turn away from sin. We should turn away from whatever sin we see in our lives. We should turn away from lying or cursing or stealing or drinking or smoking. We should turn away from whatever it is, but we should never think that turning away from these things is salvation. It is nothing but a step in the right direction.
The Ninevites did this. They turned “from the violence that [was] in their hands,” but they did not think that this saved them. They cried “mightily unto God” because they said, “Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?”
So they believed God through the prophet Jonah, and they took action. They began crying out to God, sitting in sackcloth and ashes and fasting. This impacted their lives. It stopped them in the way in which they were going.
In this we see an intellectual understanding coupled with right actions as they went to God. Of course, God is the One who would have to bring this about in anyone’s life.
But God’s people are made to be honest with themselves, because God gives them a spirit that has “no guile.” If you remember, Jesus said this of Nathanael, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!”
We do not want false salvation. We do not want false assurance. This is the problem with the churches. If we wanted false security, we would stay in the church and follow their method. By doing so, we could guarantee our salvation, except for the fact that this would be false. This is not true salvation.
So for the ones whom God is really dealing with, they do not want any kind of falsehood. This causes us to take the Bible seriously when God tells us to “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith”; and when we look at ourselves honestly, we do see sin. This troubles us, but all of these other things are in place and we are hoping that God will save us, that He will deliver us.
God has some very good things to say about people who hope in His mercy. He has some excellent things to say about those who are waiting on Him. Waiting on Him and hoping go hand in hand. They are waiting on Him to do the work. They are waiting on Him to take the action in granting assurance. Is this not what the Bible says?
Do you remember Psalm 35? I like this verse because it really says a lot. We read in Psalm 35:3:
Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me…
This is a Psalm of David and God is moving him to write this, but this is also a prayer from David. It is a prayer of a child of God. It continues:
…say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.
That is, “You, God, speak to my soul and say, ‘I am thy salvation.’” In other words, “You convince me. You do it.”
People read, “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith,” as it says in 2 Corinthians 13; and so they look at themselves and, perhaps, they see some change in their lives. Maybe they have been able to get away from a couple of sins, and so they intellectually agree with a lot of these things.
The problem arises when they say, “You know what? I examined myself. I looked at myself through the mirror of the Word of God and I think that I am saved. I do think that I am saved.” From this point on, they will tell others, “I am saved. I am a child of God.”
What is the problem? What is the problem with this? Who is saying this to their spirit? They are saying this to themselves. They are telling themselves, “I am saved.” But the Bible says:
…say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.
Look at Romans 8. Romans 8:15-16 says:
For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit…
This is referring to God the Holy Spirit, and so it says in Romans 8:16:
The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:
How does God’s Spirit “bear witness” to our spirit? The Bible says, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
So as we read the Bible and as we pray and as we cry out for mercy, it would be an excellent prayer to say, “O Lord, speak to my soul that You are my salvation. May You convince me. May You give me assurance of salvation. I do not ever want to do this myself.”
We say this because of what we read in Jeremiah 17:9, which says:
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked…
This is our heart. Something that is deceitful is like a con man. A con man is someone who is deceitful. Someone who is a liar is someone who is being deceitful. Satan is deceitful; so is man. We are born liars. We are conceived in sin.
Do you remember what God says of a baby? He says that a baby is “born, speaking lies.” This is relating to all of mankind; and so how do you trust yourself? How could you ever trust yourself?
God does not want us to trust ourselves. He does not want this. He says instead, “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith”; but as we do self-examination, it should bring us to the point of recognizing that we can never know ourselves. Yes, we can know ourselves better than anyone else can know us. The Bible says, “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?” But no one really knows us, not even our wife or our husband, our mother or our father. No one knows what is really going on within the mind or the heart of a person.
This is why when someone goes crazy and kills half a dozen people, the neighbors often say, “He was such a nice guy. He was such a good guy. I never would have expected this of him.” This is because we cannot know one another. We only know what comes out of our mouths and the things that we do. We can get an idea from these things; but even in this, people are still often fooled by what others are capable of whom they thought that they knew. Even you or I, any one of us, we do not know ourselves as well as we think we might.
Look at Jeremiah 17:9 again. It says:
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
We cannot know it. Deep down in the subconscious, deep down in our hearts, if we were put in a certain position or into a certain situation in our lives, would we be any different than the guards at concentration camps who were placed in positions because of the way in which things unfolded in Germany?
Maybe some would. Maybe someone would never do things like they did; but until tested, we do not know what we are capable of in our sinful condition.
So when God commands, “Examine yourselves,” our response should be, “Okay, Lord. I will look at what I can. I will look to see what I can see about myself.” Ultimately, though, in the command to examine ourselves, we fall short.
It is just like every other command. We are commanded to believe. Well, we can believe to a certain degree, but we fall short of believing unto salvation. We are commanded to repent. We can repent to a certain degree, but we fall short of repentance unto salvation. We are also commanded to examine ourselves, and we fall short.
Look at verse 10, Jeremiah 17:10:
I JEHOVAH search the heart, I try the reins…
This is where we need to go. “O Lord, I want to be sure. I want to know if I am saved or not, but I do not trust myself. I do not trust myself. How do I know that I am really a child of God?”
We are living in a world of over two billion professing Christians who are in the churches and who do not understand what God is saying. If they remain, they will be bundled as tares for the burning.
This means that over two billion people are deceived. Their hearts have deceived them into thinking that they are right with God when they are not. Since this is a day of great deception, how could we ever trust ourselves? What are we to do then?
Look at Psalm 139:23-24. It says:
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
So we go to God and we cry to Him, “You complete the search.”
This would be similar to me trying to find a virus on my computer. With my limited knowledge in technical things, I would never get to the root of where a virus would have hidden itself in the files of my computer. However, I could have an expert look at it or I could purchase software that runs a virus check; then it would be found.
Basically, this is the idea. We are so complex, we do not know what is going on deep-down within us; and so we can pray to the Lord, “O Lord, I started the search, but I have to give this up at this point to You. You continue searching. Look in me and lead me in the way everlasting. Save me. Save me, O Lord, and make sure that I am not going in any wicked way.” This is what God would have us to do.
Can God give true repentance? Yes. Can He give faith? Yes. Can He give assurance of salvation? Yes, He can.
Have you ever asked Him? Have you ever asked Him, “O Lord, have mercy on me. I know that You can save me even right now, O God, but could You please say to my soul, ‘I am thy salvation’? Can Your Spirit testify and speak to my soul and witness to my soul that I might know that I am a child of God, as it says in Romans 8?”
Why not pray this way? Why not pray that God give us the assurance so that we know, especially as this Day is approaching?
So this is what I wanted to talk about, as we read in Lamentations 3:26:
It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for…salvation…
This is a really good verse. There are good verses in relation to this in Lamentations 3.
So God tells us to wait and to hope, to wait and to hope; but at the same time, there is an urgency. Is this not true? There is a great urgency right now because we have so little time left. We have just a short while and the Day of Judgment will be here.
God tells us in 2 Corinthians 6:1-2:
We then, as workers together with him, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain. (For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.)
It is today. Today is the time. It is not next week. It is certainly not May of 2011.
What a wonderful blessing we have today that we can cry to God and we can beseech Him. If it is as though there is just silence or if it seems that God is ignoring us, we can always think, “Yes, but I have tomorrow. I have tomorrow. Thank God that there is tomorrow and that it is the day of salvation tomorrow.”
So we can still go to Him, but we cannot demand that He save us. This could be a temptation. This could be an urge that we have, “God! Save me now! Save me! You must!”
But this is not how we go to God. We have to go to Him humbly and we have to go in a very contrite way. We go to Him and say, “O Lord, may You have mercy. I know that You have saved people from the foundation of the world. Before the foundation of the world, You paid for their sins; but I do not know if I am one of them. Could it be that You would have mercy on me and save me.”
It may be that nothing happens, just like the Canaanite woman. She went to the Lord and besought Him and He ignored her. I love these verses in Matthew 15, because how many times have you prayed when it seemed like nothing happened? Did God even hear?
In Matthew 15:21-23, it says:
Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. But he answered her not a word…
Is this not amazing? Now, put yourself in her place. She had been hearing incredible things about this Prophet who certainly, by all of the miracles He had been doing, very well could be the Messiah. As she must have thought about this, many said that He was the Messiah. He had all this power. He made the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak, the lame to walk, the dead to rise. He had done all of these miracles; and so she must have thought, “My daughter is grievously vexed. I love my daughter so much, and so I will go to Him. I have heard nothing but good things about Him. I have heard of His great compassion, mercy, and grace; so I will go to Him and just lay it all out.” She even called Him the “son of David,” which was in recognition that He is the Messiah. She cried, “O Thou Son of David, have mercy on me! Have mercy,” and the Bible says that He answered her not a word.
If you talk to someone, especially if you are pouring out your heart, and they do not say anything back and just walk away, would this not be rude? Yet there was Christ, the Saviour. She came to Him and poured out her heart, and He did not say a word.
Have you prayed and poured out your heart and it seemed like there was no response? Well, did Christ hear her? He heard her. Did He have a plan for her? Yes, He did have a plan for her. He wanted to use her as an example of great multitudes, probably, of the people of God who have gone to Him over the course of history and besought Him for their own salvation or besought Him for the salvation of their children or the salvation of their family, when it seemed, at first, that there was no response from God. Some people may even wonder, “O Lord, are You hearing me? Are You hearing me?” But, yes; yes, He heard and yet He ignored her.
Why do you think that He did this? Why would Jesus ignore her? We have other instances where He immediately granted someone’s request. Immediately, He could perform a miracle; however, not in this case. Why not?
We know the story. We know that He is going to heal her daughter, but He did not answer her a word because He was testing her. He wants us to know this, too. The test was, “You come to Me and you understand that I am merciful. You understand that I am the Messiah, that I am the Saviour and that I have the power to heal you, but I will do this in My own time, if I do it at all.”
Now, how are you going to respond? Are you going to get angry? Are you going to get upset and stomp your feet and walk away? Are you going to respond with, “Huh; some compassionate Saviour; some gracious God He is! He did not listen to me; He did not even acknowledge that I was there”?
Well, on one hand, Jesus is holding her off, while on the other hand, He is drawing her to Himself. She did not go away angry, nor did she go away discouraged. She knew that if her daughter was to get well, He was her only hope, which is just like God’s people who know today that there is nowhere else to go. There is nowhere to go.
Are you going to go to the church? Are you going to find salvation in the church? Are you going to go to the world and its philosophies? Are you going to find some religion somewhere? Are you going to go and dip yourself in the Ganges River, which is a filthy and polluted river that never cleansed anyone? Where can you go?
You go to God because He is the One who has the words of eternal life; and so you pray, “O Lord, I am coming to You and I am going to wait. I am going to wait on You. I am going to hope in You because I know what You are like and that You delight in mercy. You are very merciful, which I do not deserve at all, and so I am going to wait on You and on Your timing.”
It continues on in Matthew 15:23 to say:
But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.
They saw that Jesus was not paying any attention to her, but they made a wrong assumption that He had no interest in her. Therefore, they said, “Send her away.”
We then read in Matthew 15:24:
But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
Who are amongst the “lost sheep”? Is it only the Jews? No; it is people from all over the world, people from all nations, Gentile and Jew; but the Jews had a wrong understanding about this.
Then we read in Matthew 15:25-26:
Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me. But he answered and said…
He said, “Okay; I will help you.” Right? No; He did not say this. It continues:
But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and cast it to dogs.
So He stopped ignoring her, but now He is insulting her by calling her a dog. A dog was an unclean animal. He tells her that it was not meet to take the bread for the people of God, the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.
Can you see how Christ is pushing her away? He could very well be doing the same thing with you. He could be pushing you away. You could be getting very frustrated and tired and you may even feel like fainting.
What does God say in the Gospel of Luke? If you remember, He says in Luke 18:1:
And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;
Keep praying. Keep going to Him. Keep beseeching Him for mercy and do not faint.
Here in Luke 18, we have the example of the widow and the “unjust judge.” We read that her continual coming to him wearied him so that he granted her request. This is what God is saying. How much more will He, who is a just judge, grant the request of His elect people? So He tells us to keep coming. We are to keep coming.
Remember what we read in Luke 11. In Luke 11, we have the account of a man who goes to his friend at midnight. We read in Luke 11:5-10:
And he said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves; For a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and I have nothing to set before him? And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee. I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity…
That is, because of his persistence. It continues:
…he will rise and give him as many as he needeth. And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
Is this all that we have to do? We just have to ask God, right? We just have to seek Him. This is what many say today, “Seek the Lord and you will be saved,” and then they go to Romans 10; because in Romans 10:9, it says:
That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.
The key statement here is “believe in thine heart.” We are to believe in our hearts, but our hearts are dead. The heart is dead; it is a stony heart, “an evil heart of unbelief.” You should not count on your heart. You need a new heart and then you can believe. It is then that your confession will match your heart. This is what God is looking for.
We continue on to read in Romans 10:10-13:
For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Again, this is what is commonly presented to people, “Here is what you have to do. Call upon the Lord and you will be saved. It says it right here.” However, the problem is that man cannot call upon the name of the Lord.
Isaiah 64:7 says:
And there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee…
God commands us to call on His name and then we will be saved, but then He gives us other information that none can. None can do this, not in the way in which God means it. For instance, God says, “Seek, and ye shall find,” but what is the Biblical definition of seeking?
If we go to Deuteronomy 4:29, it says:
But if from thence thou shalt seek JEHOVAH thy God, thou shalt find him…
This is exactly as it says in the Gospels, “Seek, and ye shall find”; but look at the rest of the verse:
…if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul.
This is the condition. Apart from God saving someone and giving them this kind of a heart, has anyone sought God with all of their heart and with all of their soul? No; no one can do this. At best, we seek God with a certain low percentage of our hearts. Actually, most probably, we are at 0%, because the seeking is really just something that we think that we are doing. God says that true seeking would be with all of one’s heart and with all of one’s soul. Since none can do this, He therefore says in Romans 3, “There is none that seeketh after God.” None seek Him because no one can do this with all of their heart and with all of their soul.
Let us go to a couple more verses. I just wanted to emphasize some things because we are right at the edge of the end of the world. Because of this, there is tremendous pressure being placed upon everyone to obtain salvation. There is tremendous pressure.
This is similar to when the Israelites came out of Egypt and they were right up against the Red Sea. They had Pharaoh and his army after them and then they had a sea in front of them, which was impossible for them to cross. There they were and they needed a miracle.
This is exactly the situation that we are in. If we are to find safety and deliverance and enter into Heaven, we have to get through the Red Sea to get to the Promised Land. We cannot do this ourselves.
The problem in today’s churches is that they believe that we can do this ourselves. Because of this, they teach a freewill Gospel. This causes people to wonder, “If it is up to me and I can get myself saved at any point I want to by accepting Christ, then why do I have to wait on God? What is the sense of hoping and waiting quietly on God if I can get myself saved today? All I have to do is take steps one, two, and three. I have to recognize that I am a sinner. I have to say the sinner’s prayer. Then I have to walk down the aisle and accept Christ.”
So why in the world did God write something like Lamentations 3 or why did He write what we read in Psalm 130? It says in Psalm 130:5-7:
I wait for JEHOVAH, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning. Let Israel hope in JEHOVAH: for with JEHOVAH there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.
Why wait? Why wait, as it says in Psalm 123? We read in Psalm 123:1-4?
Unto thee lift I up mine eyes, O thou that dwellest in the heavens. Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters, and as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress; so our eyes wait upon JEHOVAH our God, until that he have mercy upon us. Have mercy upon us, O JEHOVAH, have mercy upon us: for we are exceedingly filled with contempt. Our soul is exceedingly filled with the scorning of those that are at ease, and with the contempt of the proud.
Why would I have to wait when what is taught in the churches is that I can do this today? The problem is that the Bible does not teach this. The Bible says to “wait on the LORD.” The Bible says to “hope in his mercy.” We are to wait for Him to act.
As far as free will, Jesus said in John 15:16:
Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you…
Does this not answer the question? Do we choose Christ? Do we accept Him? No; Jesus says, “I have chosen you.”
Or look at John 1:12. It says:
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
So He is talking about belief. Many pastors quote this verse to show that you have to believe, but they forget the next verse. It says in John 1:13:
Which were born…
John 3 speaks of being “born again.” This is what is in view here. John 1:13 continues:
Which were born, not of blood…
No one becomes a child of God because of their ancestry or their lineage or who their father was. This does not matter. It is “not of blood.” It continues:
…nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man…
Remember that the context of this is believing and being born again. Someone is not born again, in other words, by the will of man. This is very definite. God is saying to those who say that man has a free will that this is not so in the case of salvation. A person’s free will will never save them. We are not born again by the will of man.
How are we born again? We are born again, as John 1:13 ends with:
…but of God.
Another way that the Bible says this is “salvation is of the LORD.” He also says, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” “I will,” God says; it is not man’s will. There is no possibility that salvation is based on man’s will.
This is why the disciples were shocked after the rich man had gone away and Jesus had told them that it was impossible for a man to enter into the Kingdom of God. He said, “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.” This is where salvation is. It is in God. It is not in us. We can never obtain it through our own works or through our own efforts.
To finish, let us go to Luke 14, which is a parable that Christ gave that I think is very important for us today. We read in Luke 14:7-8:
And he put forth a parable to those which were bidden, when he marked how they chose out the chief rooms; saying unto them, When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding…
God likens His salvation plan to being invited to a wedding. Do you remember the man who went into the wedding but did not have on the proper garment? Spiritually, this would be Christ’s robe of righteousness, that “pure and white linen” of the saints. He did not have this, and so they bound him “hand and foot” and he was “cast into outer darkness.” In a sense, we are all bidden to this wedding.
Luke 14:8 continues:
When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him;
What would this be referring to if you are bidden to a wedding and you go and sit down in the highest room? The key word here is “highest” because God likens pride to those who lift themselves up. Humility is likened to those who are brought low; they are “lowly.” Jesus was “meek and lowly in heart,” and so He was of great humility.
In terms of the Gospel, how could someone lift themselves up to a very high place? How could someone take the highest room? How could someone do this? What happens upon salvation? If someone says, “I accepted Christ and I became saved,” what are they actually saying? Where did they go?
Ephesians 2:6 says:
And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly [heavenlies] in Christ Jesus:
Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father in Heaven. When someone says, “I accepted Him, and so I am born again; I can tell you the day and the year when I accepted Him,” what they are basically saying is, “At that point, I was lifted up into Heaven itself and exalted on high in Christ.” However, this is pride. This is pride because they think that they did it all. They did it all. They lifted themselves up by their own action, by their own will, by their own work; but God does not accept any of this.
In the book of Obadiah, in Obadiah 1:3-4, the Lord says in relation to Edom or Esau, who is a picture of those who are in the corporate churches and not truly saved:
The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee…
We were talking about the deception of our hearts earlier. The pride of man’s heart has deceived him. It continues:
…thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground? Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith JEHOVAH.
This is what will happen on May 21st, the Day of Judgment. God will rapture His people, He will resurrect His people to life, and He will take them up; and it will be the lowly ones, those poor beggars.
Just look at how much reproach God’s people experience in this world. We are the “offscouring” of the world. We are the lowest in the eyes of the world. We are lowly esteemed. This is true especially if you are standing on a corner and handing out tracts, or if you are holding a sign, or if you have anything to do with Judgment Day and you are putting forth a date.
Anyone who has experienced this to any degree knows how this is received by some. By some, it is not very highly esteemed at all; and yet God indicates that He is going to bring down Esau or all those who thought that they were saved but never were. On that Day, He will lift up His people.
We read in Revelation 11:12:
And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them.
Where are the enemies of God? They are down below. God’s people go up. The enemies remain down on the earth, which is quite a distance from Heaven up above. The enemies are made low.
If we go back to the parable in Luke 14 again, God had just warned about taking the highest seat. Then we read in Luke 14:9:
And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.
May 21st will be a great day of shame. It will be the exposure of the sins of man. It will be God judging man, and a big part of this judgment will be the shame that they were never able to feel for their sins that they committed in God’s sight. At this point, God will be making the sins of man known and His judgment known. This will be those who had exalted themselves to Heaven in Christ but who will then be shown to have never been saved. They will be left behind where they will remain upon the earth. They will be made low.
Then Luke 14:10-11 says:
But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee. For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
This is a Biblical principle. If we lift ourselves up in any way, God will bring us down. However, it would seem that God would be pleased with anyone who hears the Gospel and who agrees with it and says, “O Lord, I understand all of these things that You are saying and I believe them, but I do not know if I am saved. I know that because I am a sinner, this means that Your wrath could be upon me and that I might be destroyed. I am continuing to head towards this very Day with this understanding, but I just do not have 100% confidence that I am a child of God; yet I hope in Your mercy. I wait upon You to speak the Word to my soul. I wait for You to lift me up into Heaven and to save me. Though You slay me, I will trust in You.”
I think that God would be pleased with those who take this position, this low room. Day after day, they are not going to run away. They are not going to try to lift themselves up in any way, shape, or form. They are just going to wait on the Lord. It would seem that God would be pleased with anyone who is doing this.
Let us stop here.