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AS WE DRAW CLOSER to the appointed "End of Days," it is crucial that we gird ourselves by recalling the truth of God and by refusing to embrace the world and its despair... The coronavirus may be a foreshock of judgment upon the world system that scorns the truth of God, though the real judgment may come not so much in the form of the virus itself, but from the control measures instituted by godless worldly powers that seek to capitalize on the disaster... In this time of divine judgment, we must keep our eyes focused heavenward, trusting in the LORD God Almighty (כֹּל יָכוֹל), invoking Yeshua who is the only Savior (המושיע היחיד). Just as the patriarch Noah foresaw the great cataclysm to come, so we understand that the world above our heads and under our feet is likewise destined to destruction, as we also await the promised world to come. As it is written in our Scriptures: "Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for the heavens vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and they who dwell in it will die in like manner; but my salvation will be forever (ישׁוּעתי לעולם תהיה), and my righteousness will never be dismayed" (Isa. 51:6). Amen. "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God will stand forever" (Isa. 40:8).
Faith sees the invisible... Our father Abraham was promised descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky or sand on the seashore, despite the fact that he was an old man and his wife had long past the age of bearing children. Abraham believed in the One who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist: "He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that, what He had promised, He was able also to perform: And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness" (Rom. 4:19-22). Faith in God trusts in an unseen good, apprehends a future and a hope, and refuses to allow this world to have the last word of what is ultimately real. Therefore, like Abraham, we are "strangers and exiles on the earth, looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God" (2 Cor. 4:18; Rom. 1:20; Heb. 11:10,13).
From C.S. Lewis:
"The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence, they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt. And pain is not only immediately recognisable, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today ... when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends the whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God's grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources.
But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over -- I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless." (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain; 1940).
Hebrew Lesson
Isaiah 40:8 Hebrew reading (click):
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