Firewood

Luke 23:27-31 And there followed him a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him. 28 But turning to them Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. 29 For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ 30 Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ 31 For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

Jesus was on his way to die, and was being followed by many people who were mourning for many reasons. Jesus turned to them and selflessly told them to weep for themselves, not for him. He told them to weep for the coming judgement of God upon Israel, and quoting from the Old Testament prophets, made it clear of the coming calamities. We can even look into our own judgement coming in the book of Revelation; when God’s judgement is released upon the world. Jesus has given reference to judgement of Israel, and the coming judgement spoken of in Revelation. Both of these references tell us how we will want to hide from the judgement of God; we will seek refuge in caves and plea for them to bring death, rather than suffer God’s righteous hand. Revelation 6:15 And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, 16 and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! 17 For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”

The call God has placed on my life, a call to preach repentance, is as unpopular as it was for the Old Testament prophets. A call placed on my heart for especially the American Church, is to get on our knees and repent. I grew up in religion, I have seen and lived the level of hypocrisy in the church, and God took me to India to see what true Christianity can look like. Many of them fail just like us, but many have a purity that we can only desire. We as the American church have mocked God for too long, have weakened the Gospel to 60 seconds of time, and have preached of prosperity that comes to those of great faith. We have removed Hell from our preaching for fear it offends, and pursued entertainment as the way to pack pews. We stand before the judgement seat of God as a nation now, as he permits levels of evil as never seen before. We will either succumb to evil, or prayerfully repent and experience revival. We are at a pivotal point in eternity for our nation, and we must remember and wonder why our nation is not in the final book of history, the book of Revelation.

If God allowed the suffering of the world to be poured out on his Son, what will be the level of our suffering as those who have turned our backs on God? If Jesus is the pure, green wood of verse thirty-one, what happens to the dry dead wood of evil? In John 15, we are given the call to abide in Christ. We are told of the blessings and the warnings of those passages. John 15:6 If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. Jesus is the green vine, the living vine that does not burn. If we become disconnected from Jesus, letting sin rule our lives, we spiritually die and become dead wood; therefore we are thrown into a fire and burned. Get the idea?