Thursday, June 13, 2019

Hardened Unrepentant Hearts or Salvation in Christ?

Revelation 9:13-21 
13 Then the sixth angel sounded: And I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, 14 saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.” 15 So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour and day and month and year, were released to kill a third of mankind. 16 Now the number of the army of the horsemen was two hundred million; I heard the number of them. 17 And thus I saw the horses in the vision: those who sat on them had breastplates of fiery red, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow; and the heads of the horses were like the heads of lions; and out of their mouths came fire, smoke, and brimstone. 18 By these three plagues a third of mankind was killed—by the fire and the smoke and the brimstone which came out of their mouths. 19 For their power is in their mouth and in their tails; for their tails are like serpents, having heads; and with them they do harm.
20 But the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons, and idols of gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk. 21 And they did not repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.

The sixth angel’s trumpeting reveals God speaking from the golden altar before His throne to loose four angels waiting for this hour.  They were prepared and destined by God to move at this sixth sounding to go out and kill a third of the people because of this day of judgement they had been warned of for thousands of years.  They released an army of two hundred million, an overwhelming force to accomplish the task.  More fire will consume men who refuse to turn from sin and to Him who made them and whose Son they reject for deliverance from this and other awful judgements.  Fire, smoke and sulfuric brimstone will unleash a taste of eternal hell as if from serpents and ravenous lions mated together.  Those left after this attack who still refuse to turn from sin and toward the Savior, who do not admit or stop their idolatrous and sexually immoral sin, these will go on with unrepentant hardened hearts to their destruction to come in further judgements executed by the Righteous One.  These warnings should move readers and hearers now to stop worshipping other gods, to turn from sexual immorality of all kinds such as adultery and homosexuality, before their hearts are so hardened that they continue as these will in the end to their own destruction.  This book gives warnings with consequences, but also hope of deliverance in Jesus the Christ.  This is good news for the bad news of our fallen sinful nature and its consequences, being revealed to John and to us in these visions of what is and is to come. 

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