The title should be in the form of a question, perhaps, to better emphasize the issue. It is not “How can a holy God stoop down to that?” but God only needs to step back and let sinful man do what he does best, sin. God only has to open the right doors. Some examples follow, starting many centuries ago.
When it came time for the children of Israel to come out of Egypt to freedom from that slavery, God raised up a man named Moses to lead them out. However, he was not ready for that leadership, and the people were not ready to go. It had become “home” after four hundred years; and change, like it is for all the rest of us, was not welcomed at all.
But God’s timetable was set, so He raised up a new pharaoh who had no favoritism toward the Hebrews. The new pharaoh made their slavery requirements—making bricks—exceedingly difficult to where the Jews began to long for freedom, to long to escape that burden and cruelty that came along with it. God used an ungodly ruler to turn their hearts to desire the Lord and to follow Moses, who by then had become usable to God as the leader for their escape.
Another instance in Old Testament times is spoken of by Isaiah in Isaiah 41:2, saying, “Who raised up one from the east? Who in righteousness called him to His feet? Who gave the nations before him and made him rule over kings?”
More specifically, in Isaiah 44:28 the prophet declares, “Who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd, and he shall perform all My pleasure, saying to Jerusalem, ‘You shall be built’ and to the temple, ‘Your foundation shall be laid.’”
The remarkable thing about this quotation is that it was a prophecy some 200 years before Cyrus was even born and named Cyrus, who later became the king of Persia! As king of Persia, Cyrus issued a decree that allowed Ezra and his contemporaries to return to Jerusalem and begin rebuilding the temple and the city. God moved in the heart of an ungodly man to accomplish His purposes.
In another incident of gigantic import to the Jews was that of the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem in AD 70. Now, what did God have to do with that? Remember how God had promised the Jews that their rebellion would result in substantial judgment upon them. They were told again and again that He would scatter them into all the nations, no longer to have their own nation until a future time of restoration. After that event in AD 70, it still took sixty-five years for Jews to depart Jerusalem in AD 135.
It is surprising how some prophecy watchers put great spiritual emphasis on that destruction of the temple, then. They want to call that the abomination of desolation predicted by Daniel and restated again by Jesus. They want to say that the Romans were those who desecrated the temple, as prophesied by Daniel and Jesus. Here are some facts that clearly deny that possibility:
When Jesus was crucified, Matthew reports that a great earthquake shook the city, and the veil covering the Holy of Holies in the temple was torn open from the top to the bottom. Thus, that inner place where only the high priest could go once a year, and not without blood for himself and the people, was emptied before the whole world. God was no longer in that place.
Jesus explained it to the Jewish leaders like this: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” for He was speaking of His body as the temple of the Spirit of God. In the same manner, born-again believers are the temple of the Holy Spirit, as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 3:16, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”
So the Romans were only after the gold inlaid between the stones of the temple, as well as any other treasure they could find. Jesus alludes to this in His answer to the disciples regarding their view of the temple’s beauty, saying, “one stone shall not be left upon another.” There was no evidence that the Romans tried to make any one of them take the place of God in the temple. That desolation will take place at the halfway point in the seven years of the tribulation, just as Daniel 9:27 and 2 Thessalonians 2:3-8 tell us.
However, we cannot proceed without acknowledging that God also promised the Jews, repeatedly, in the Old Testament prophecies that He would restore the Jews to their own land, as given to Abraham centuries before. That initial provision was made on May 14, 1948, when the United Nations Security Council voted to establish a homeland for the Jewish race, a nation among the nations. After 1,800 years, the land of Israel is again blooming like a rose, and has been for these 71 years since 1948.
Another in more contemporary times, even within the memory of many today, is one of horrid circumstances. It is the raising up of one Adolph Hitler, who instigated the holocaust against the Jewish people in Europe. This was necessary, as in the days of Moses but much more severely, in order that the Jews would forsake their places in the world and want to return to their ancient homeland. At that point, though, a restoration of the nation was not yet apparent.
The number is said to be six million who were killed. Adding to that is the possibility that Hitler, himself, was part Jewish, an additional travesty, if so. (It is not entirely unlikely for such to happen, for it is on record that a person now known as George Soros was born in Germany in 1930 as a half-Jew under another name. At the age of fourteen, he was revealing the hiding places of Jews being sought by Hitler’s goon squad for extermination. In 1953 he changed his name and came to America, according to the online encyclopedia.)
Do you recall your readings in the Old Testament, where it was a constant need for God to discipline the Hebrew people to turn them from idols and from their rebellion against Him? Think about the response of the Jewish leaders at the trial of Jesus: “Crucify Him! Let His blood be upon our hands and on the hands of our children!” Yet God has held to His promise; and one day soon they will “look upon Him whom they have pierced and will mourn for Him as for an only begotten son” (Zechariah 12:10).
Finally, we come to a contemporary action of God that has the leftist element of our nation in an uproar. It is the elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. This one is not particularly a godly man but it is becoming more and more apparent that he is God’s man for the hour. That, of course, is my own opinion and has been since his debut on the political scene back in April 2011.
At that time, as well as before and since, it was not allowed for anyone to inquire about the background of President Barack Obama. All of his records were off limits, and even the courts would not accept a case dealing with anything about his background. Nevertheless, it was Trump’s courage and recognition of the travesty against the American people that has led me to believe he is God’s man to expose the intent of the evil faction embedded in top levels of our nation. It has been called “the establishment,” of which Trump is not a part, but apparently knows its inside purposes. His abrupt challenge to their deception made him their instant enemy and added a new word to the dictionary – “birthers.”
How devastating it was to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that they did not win the presidency in 2016. The subtle gloating of Barack Obama at that Correspondents’ Dinner in DC on April 30, 2016, reveals the direction of his intentions for this nation: “All of you are looking great tonight. The end of the Republic has never looked better!”
God snatched that goal out of his hands, and also of those who are behind him in his efforts. Why? It appears quite likely that God has His own timetable for the windup of this age of the Gentiles and the development of a New World Order with its one-world government, and it is not the soon happening planned by those of that persuasion. That seventh head of the Beast of Revelation is quietly being developed for God’s eventual judgment, as Revelation 17:10-11 tells us that the Antichrist becomes its eighth head and is headed to perdition – that is, the lake of fire:
“There are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, and the other has not yet come. And when he comes, he must continue a short time. The beast that was, and is not, is himself also the eighth, and is of the seven, and is going to perdition.”
When Trump was elected president instead of Hillary Clinton, it was just as the psalmist had written, in Psalm 75:6-8:
“For exaltation comes neither from the east nor from the west nor from the south. But God is the Judge: He puts down one and exalts another. For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup, and the wine is red; it is fully mixed, and He pours it out. Surely its dregs shall all the wicked of the earth drain and drink down.”
Thus, God prepares the way for judgment to come. Then, in Luke 17:26-30, Jesus says He will return at a time when the economy will rebound favorably, along with a saturation of moral degradation and lawlessness with a party-time frivolity, just as it was in the days of Noah and of Lot:
“And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.
“Likewise, as it was also in the days of Lot, they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built; but on the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.”
Will you, then, be ready when He comes?
Contact email: andwegetmercy@gmail.com