Articles

2 Peter 3: 8-9

“But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. ⁹ The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”

A few years ago, one of my colleagues from Seminary made an observation that he did not do a lot of planning for retirement because he did not think we would still be here. He expected the rapture to have happened a long time ago. It is kind of funny in a sense, but many of us who entered the turmoil of the 2000s and the upheavals we saw in government and society, in general, were expecting Jesus to return a long time ago.

The rampant rise in lawlessness, the huge cases involving billions of stolen dollars, and the revelations of the very disgusting trafficking of children for sex that has become front and center in the news led us to look to the skies. We hear the stories about the evil that has happened and is happening in Hollywood going back to the 1940s and 1950s, the supposed ‘clean era,’ and we see that evil has been running rampant for a long time under the surface.

When we see the experiments that were done on people for all kinds of ‘medical’ projects, we can see that even those charged with helping us were evil. Surely, the Lord was coming back soon to take us home and rescue us from this tsunami of evil. But we are still here, the Lord’s churches are still here, tasked with reaching the lost and being light and salt.

In the last few years, God has really ramped up His reaching out to a lost and dying world. He has begun to use the platforms of the devil to reach the lost, and He is winning, of course.

If you had told me that one would be able to listen to a Joe Rogan podcast and hear Oliver Anthony reading Psalm 37, or hear Dr. Jordan Peterson explaining the authenticity of the Bible and the gruesomeness of the crucifixion, or hear Hulk Hogan quote John 3:16 while sitting there wearing a shirt with John 3:16 on it for the 200,000,000 followers of Joe Rogan to see and hear, I would have laughed. Joe Rogan hates God and hates the Bible, but his podcast has shared the Gospel with more people than many churches.

If you had told me that Russell Brand would get on his podcast and proclaim that he has devoted his life to Christ, I would have laughed out loud. Now, to be honest, he was baptized, and I did not know from his statement if he had surrendered his life to Jesus before being baptized, but there he was talking to his millions of followers about ‘surrendering his life to Jesus.’

This is happening everywhere. I see posts of Christian concerts attended by thousands all over the world. I have a friend who posts pictures of revival services from all around the world where people are praising Jesus.

Just a few weeks or so ago, I was researching Billy Graham’s crusades and found out that he did about 409 of them around the globe. Imagine the amount of people saved, and then the number of subsequent salvations from those people. My mom was saved in 1957 at a Billy Graham crusade; in all, 4 brothers and one sister were saved, and there are countless people who have been saved from this one person.

Franklin Graham has done about 280 events, one of which I was a part of here in Toronto, and we saw about 3,000 people saved in 3 days.

God is working hard, working overtime, and working smart to reach people all over the world. While COVID was a bit of a hindrance, what it did do was flood the internet with a lot of Bible teaching that became available for the whole world.

God loves mankind, He loves His creations, and his true desire is for all to repent and be saved. He is actively working on getting as many saved as possible; God is doing things that only He can do.

If you had told me that I would hear Alice Cooper talking about being saved, about the need for the world to turn to Jesus, if you had told me that God would use him, I would have shaken my head and thought you to be nuts; but God is the miracle worker still to this day. He is supernatural.

God has taken a clear run at people like Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, and many others in these last days. They cannot say that God did not pursue them even in their hostile hatred of Him. He put the Gospel front and center in their faces, and they cannot deny His love for them.

I have often pointed out that New Jerusalem is about 1,400 miles cubed (Revelation 21:16); this is a large facility that should give us a clear understanding of the kind of population that God is expecting. He is expecting the Billions – yes, you heard me, the Billions to be saved and inhabiting the city, and I would not be surprised if there are trillions.

God has pursued mankind with loving fervor since the Fall of man, He has trumped the wiles of the devil time and time again, and He still does and is.

Often, we have the ‘we are defeated’ mentality that Elijah had. This is found in 1 Kings 19:14-18:

“And he said, ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord God of hosts; because the children of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left; and they seek to take my life.’ Then the Lord said to him: “Go, return on your way to the Wilderness of Damascus; and when you arrive, anoint Hazael as king over Syria. Also you shall anoint Jehu the son of Nimshi as king over Israel. And Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel Meholah you shall anoint as prophet in your place. It shall be that whoever escapes the sword of Hazael, Jehu will kill; and whoever escapes the sword of Jehu, Elisha will kill. Yet I have reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”

Elijah thought that he was the only one left, but God assured him that He had 7,000 who had not turned their backs on Him and were faithful.

God has people everywhere. God is redeeming people all the time. Remember that it takes just one moment, one moment of repentance and calling on the Lord. The thief on the cross is a constant reminder that salvation is a simple and easy process. Anyone anywhere can, in a moment, call on Jesus and live forever. Thankfully, God is patient and in no hurry to return and doom more people to Hell. Rather, God is exploding the Gospel, and even some of His greatest haters have come to accept His grace and love.

What an awesome God we serve!! He pursues those who hate Him. I can’t wait to hear Joe Rogan tell of his conversion to being a disciple of Jesus. Don’t be defeated; God cannot lose. God knows the end of the story; He knows every move of the enemy, and He has a counteraction to meet them all.

Jesus will come back; He said He would. One day soon or maybe one day far away. He will come back to get us in the air or call us from the grave, but He will come and get us. We will blot out the sun with the amount of people that are taken. We serve a winning God. He plotted, designed, and executed the plan of salvation, and He made it as simple as possible so that everyone who believed in the Lord Jesus could be saved.

I pray that your eyes are open and that you can see the hand of God working not just in the life of others, but in your life as well. God loves you! He also loves the guy who hates Him, and He loves the guy who works against Him.

One day, Paul was killing Christians, and the next, he was one of us preaching Jesus. Satan’s best weapon at the time became one of God’s greatest weapons forever. Check and Mate!!! God does the same thing to this date. Keep your eyes open; God is putting on a show of His redeeming majesty that you will not want to miss.

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

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History Repeats Itself

I was reading this week about Israel’s founding in 1948. I posted a piece about it on my Patreon site. In Sir Martin Gilbert’s masterful work, Israel, he provides rich detail about the Jewish state’s modern history. I was struck by how similar 1948 is to 2024 and the interference of the Biden Regime. Really. I was not really aware that American perspectives on the Arab-Israeli conflict have not changed at all in 75 years. And they have been consistent.

In 1967, with Egypt breathing down Israel’s neck, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson urged Israel’s Levi Eshkol to stand down and not attack first. LBJ promised Israel could count on America.

Israel knew that they couldn’t. In fact, LBJ is among history’s most foul liars. Not only did Israel ignore him, they preempted the Arab armies surrounding them, and you know the rest.

The Six-Day War. Total victory. The return of their ancestral land.

Ahead of Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, David Ben Gurion sent Golda Meir on a secret mission to Transjordan to gauge where King Abdullah was in his view of war. The surrounding Arab states had promised to invade Israel if they went ahead with their plans for statehood. Abdullah represented the closest thing the Arabs presented as sane and reasonable. In fact, a few years later, Abdullah was apparently prepared to recognize Israel and sign a treaty. Of course, jihadists murdered him on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was a tragic failure to normalize relations.

And guess what? In the weeks leading up to May 14, the U.S. was pushing… a three-month ceasefire!

The days and hours became so tense and tight that no one knew what was going to happen. Military estimates were that Israel had, at best, a 50/50 chance of staving off a shattering defeat. They had very few tanks and a couple of planes. From Gilbert’s work:

“With Yadin and Galili on their way back to Haganah headquarters, Ben-Gurion, as chairman of the Provisional Council, called for a decision by a show of hands on the United States proposal for a cease-fire. By six votes to four, the proposal was rejected. It was then agreed that statehood would be established on the following Friday afternoon, in two days’ time.”

Wow.

This is what I think is going to happen this time, too. The demonic pressure on Israel—America telling them how to fight their war and demanding ridiculous ceasefires—is simply the wrong way to go.

And sure enough, in only the last couple of days, Israel has uncovered the horrors in Rafah everyone knew were there. Three Israelis kidnapped on October 7 are now known to have been murdered then. For more than seven months, as their families hoped against hope, those three people have been decomposing in a hellhole made by Hamas. And also this week, five IDF soldiers were killed in a friendly fire incident. That incident wouldn’t have happened if Biden hadn’t pressured Israel. Their blood is on his hands. In the next life, he’ll be accountable.

Think of it. Every time their “great ally” America promises this and that, Israel knows they are alone. A good rule of thumb is, if patterns are present, if precedents are set, don’t trust anyone. If Israel had relied on the U.S. advice several times since World War 2, they wouldn’t be here now. During World War 2, FDR refused to send even one plane to bomb the tracks leading to Auschwitz.

The U.S. government is not Israel’s friend.

Israel right now is operating all through Gaza. In Rafah, they have cut off Hamas finally from the outside world. No more re-armament, no more supplies to wage war. More Hamas terrorists are being killed every day. The IDF has reduced the number of rocket launchers from 20,000 to a handful. And in the north, Hezbollah heats things up, but I have a conviction that all the doomsday talk of overwhelming Hezbollah rockets will turn back on the terrorists. It’s happened so many times before, stretching back to antiquity. God fights for His people.

He will now, too.

God’s Love for Mankind on Display :: By Sean Gooding

20 May 2024