In the news recently, a girl from Austria who was kidnapped when she was ten years old had escaped from her captor—eight years after going missing. Eight years of being held captive in a dingy underground cellar, where she was used as a slave for the twisted purposes of some 44 year-old weirdo. She apparently escaped when her captor was distracted while talking on the phone and she was vacuuming his car. He had stepped away to hear the person on the other end more clearly over the noise of the vacuum. When the man realized or discovered she was free, he drove to another city, parked his car, and threw himself in front of a commuter train. He’d rather face death than the consequences of his evil actions.

Do you think he might be shocked to wake up standing before a righteous and holy and just Judge?

Some of the saddest words I’ve ever read in Scripture are in Revelation, where it says several times “and they did not repent”. Despite the various plagues and judgments described, man in his arrogant pride and defiant attitude towards a holy God, would still rather remain in willful and deliberate sin, rather than repenting and giving God glory. All throughout Revelation, we see countless examples of people repenting and giving God glory in the midst of massive upheaval and judgment, but at the same instances of judgment, man hardening his heart even harder and harder.

Thousands of years ago, Noah’s contemporaries scoffed for over 120 years as he worked on an ark, warning constantly of the coming judgment of rain and flood that was coming soon as a result of men’s wickedness. But one day that very grace that was giving them the air they breathed as they scoffed Noah and his God, ran out as the floodwaters rose, and it was too late to get in the ark with that man and his family.

It happened at the cross too.

Man looked upon the man Christ Jesus, beaten and bloody, hanging naked from a cross while dying a criminals death. Some standing there came to their senses and their eyes were opened to the fact this was indeed the Messiah, the man who came to save them and us from our sins. Meanwhile, others standing there balked as well, and watched as He breathed His last, and they became even more convinced that as He hang there dead, there was no way this “blasphemer” could have been God or even divine. Some even denied and scoffed as days later word spread that His body was missing from the tomb.

Somehow, man has something in his heart that would refuse to turn from his own ways, even in the midst of suffering the consequences for having indulged in those ways in the first place. I remember volunteering at a drop-in years ago when a guy I knew from high school would frequently visit. One night he adamantly stated that there’s no way there’s a God, or else that God wouldn’t let his girlfriend find out he was sleeping around with some other woman, or let his parents find out about his rampant drug use. Huh? There’s no God because you got found out in your sin? Sin will find you out friend, and when it does, the turning point in the road ahead of you that God has placed in your path is not to swiftly smite you off the face of the planet, but to encourage you towards repentance that you may be rightly restored into a relationship with a loving—and HOLY God who yearns to be with you.

All throughout the book of Revelation we see people trying to avoid the wrath of God—because there comes a time when it will be too late to presume upon the grace of God anymore. Several times we see it repeated that people hid themselves in caves and cried out to the rocks and mountains to throw themselves upon them so as to avoid the wrath of the Holy One of Israel.

Friend, there is no hiding ourselves from God, your sin will find you out, in this life or the next, it doesn’t matter when, but it will. Get right with God today, let the advocate Jesus wipe your sins away and set you free from the sins that ensnare you, that you may avoid a guilty verdict from that judge in that day. Read your Bible, pray, and obey what you read.

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