Posted on 09/20/2019 7:02:16 AM PDT by Pilgrim's Progress
“A king that sitteth in the throne of judgment scattereth away all evil with his eyes” (Proverbs 20:8).
Like the Great White Throne Judgment of Revelation 20:11-15, or the Battle of Armageddon, or Gog and Magog, God doesn’t have to call out an army to scatter away all evil, all He has to do is look upon them and there are all wiped out in an instant. One angel, of course, did this with 185,000 of Sennacherib’s fighting men as they encamped against Israel.
Likely, what is being referred to here is the destruction of the heaven and the earth: “And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away” (Revelation 20:11). The present heavens and the earth are evil—they’ve been tainted by sin, in the sense that they are unclean. Job says, “Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight” (Job 15:15).
The heavens are unclean, even the galaxies are the abode of unclean spirits. Satan has had access to them in the past, and he will have access to them during the Tribulation. God is going to destroy all of that and start all over again. That destruction is also found in Second Peter: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (II Peter 3:10-13).
“A king that sitteth in the throne of judgment scattereth away all evil with his eyes.” When you study that passage in Revelation 20, we need to understand that that resurrection of the unsaved dead is different from that of the saints of God, both New and Old Testament. The Christian’s comes at the rapture of the Church when the Lord blows the trumpet. If we are dead, our bodies will come up out of the ground. This is not so with the unsaved dead. God reveals His glory as the heaven and the earth flees away from His sight, and the dead are left standing there on nothing. Millions and millions of disembodies spirits standing out in space by the power of Almighty God.
Let’s read a chapter of Proverbs a day and see what God might have for us. As the Lord leads, share with us what God has shown you in a special way and by His grace let us build up a devotional repository. Let’s keep our knives and forks handy for some daily bread!
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I’ve always been taught that the most enlightened act as a casual observer and do not try to affect anything with their view of the world
Jesus tells us that we are the “salt of the earth.” That implies that we are to effect those around us. Perhaps make them “thirsty” for salvation. At any rate, unsalted salt, He says, is “good for nothing.”
One area, certainly, that we are not to be casual observers is in the life of our children. Proverbs is filled with the notion of the father teaching his son to avoid being a fool and to avoid the path of the strange woman.
This interaction with the world on the part of a Christian is the reason that we are often referred to as being “militant.”
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