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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