CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES!”
Troubling Tombs? Troubling Tombs of Godless lives, like self-centered lives striving in a Godless existence, even striving to find meaning to life without God but assured in self, worldly, demonic deception that your life will work it out and find meaning, a sense of peace and purpose without Him, though for most with godless minds, they never consider what or who or why life has to be a struggle finding any sense of blessing or peace or satisfaction as they see it, doing so without eternal identity and eternal purpose!
Troubling Tombs of Godless Lives? When in James 1:8 the brother of Jesus said, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways,” you get a true picture of a godless life that has a hint of a God-filled life as a possibility, but has no desire to die to the ‘flesh’, the old sin-nature, or devotion to a world of unbelief – he, she desires, though troubled, because their greater allegiance is satisfying the ‘fullness of the flesh’ rather than experiencing “New Birth” in and through the Holy Spirit!
Troubling Tombs of Godless Lives? How clear do you find the words of Christ Jesus in Luke 11:34 when He said: “The light of the body is the eye: therefore when your eye is single (Settled in on God alone in His love, grace, and mercy!), your whole body is full of light; but when your eye is evil, your body also is full of darkness.” Some say Jesus was “too strong” in His words about lives that choose to accept, visit, remember, hold on to, indulge in a false confession of faith with one foot stepping forward in Him and the other foot yielding to the world, the old sin-nature, and, yes, to Satanic, demonic deception! Haven’t you crossed paths with, yes, many ‘religious’ (?) people who want the best of both worlds?
Troubling Tombs of Godless Lives? Is that a “downcast life”, a life that seldom, if ever, looks UP toward the King of kings and Lord of lords, as He sits on His throne ready to respond to the needy, empty, sin-sick soul, though they mentally, at times, at least ‘wanting’ to be religious without being ‘dead to the old sin-nature’, but they never ever consider being made ‘alive’ in the Resurrection Presence of the Reigning Lord and Savior?
Troubling Tombs of Godless Lives? How easy is it for Godless lives, even some modern-day ‘religious profess-ors’, to ‘profess’ but never “POSSESS” the fullness of the blessing of the Resurrected Christ? There are ‘religious-cave-dwellers’ that are not just prehistoric men but modern-day-religious pretenders dwelling in the cave of self-determination, “saying” one thing about their ‘faith’ (?) but “living” still in their ‘godless life’, though they sing about “blessed assurance” as they practice their “cursed existence”!!
Troubling Tombs of Godless Lives? How aware are you of the disease of “the reverence of a man’s self-nature”, so in love with his/her ‘fleshly passions’, that he/she never looks to the eternal Truth of, yes, “crucified with Christ”; or, as some, they profess allegiance to the false expression: “God helps those who help themselves, saying “I try”, rather than truly trusting in Christ’s finished work at the Cross”, or, “Do your best”, as religiously they bow at the altar of ‘self-control’ rather than “resting” in Resurrection Life, Resurrection Power, and Resurrection Hope IN “Christ Only, One’s Only Hope of the Glorified Life”!!
Troubling Tombs of Godless Lives? Oh, how easy it is for far too many people to live in a false pretense of faith rather than the “blessed assurance” in and through Christ alone! Alexander MacLaren once said, “All along the Christian course, there must be set up altars to God on which you sacrifice yourself, or you will never advance a step.” This is why in Galatians 2:20 Paul said, “I AM CRUCIFIED WITH CHRIST: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in this fleshly body I live by The Faith of The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me,” adding in Verse 21, I do not frustrate the grace of God!”
In the short but sensational word of Jude you find him writing about “pretenders”, though they ‘dressed’ daily in imitation garbs! In Verses 3-5 and Verses 8-15 Jude exposes not only those in his day but also those in modern centuries and in our current century who live the “victimized life of religious pretense” filling some church pews!!
Jude said, Verses 3-5, “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that you should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.
For THERE ARE CERTAIN MEN CREPT IN UNAWARES, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God INTO LASCIVIOUSNESS, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
I will therefore put YOU in remembrance, though you once knew this, that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not.
Verses 8-15 then says: Likewise also these filthy dreamers (who) DEFILE THE FLESH, DESPISE (CHRIST’S) DOMINION, AND SPEAK EVIL OF DIGNITIES. Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke you.
But, these speak evil of those things which they know not; but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. Woe unto them! For they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core.
These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear; clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withers, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots;
Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever. And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his saints,
To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds, which they have committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
It was Sir Francis Bacon in his writing, “New Atlantis”, who said: “The reverence of a man’s self is, next to religion, the chiefest bridle of all vices.” Have you ever crossed paths, in a local church, with ‘active’ church members who are ‘brain and heart dead’ to “taking the sentence of death daily to the mortal sin-nature that the Resurrection Life of Christ may be manifested in and through their mortal flesh?”
Oh, and reflect upon the startling, shocking, awakening words of Charles Caleb Colton, (The Enclypodia of Religious Quotations, p.397, Fleming H. Revell Company, Westwood, New Jersey)!! “Heroism, magnanimity, and self-denial, in all instances in which they do not spring from a principle of religion (and, I say, “Biblical Faith”!), are but splendid altars on which we sacrifice one kind of self-love to another.”
TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES ARE DARKENED HEARTS SADLY DENYING RESURRECTION LIFE IN AND THROUGH CHRIST ONLY!
TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES ARE DARKENED HEARTS DOMINATED BY FLESHLY “WARPED WITS”!!
TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES ARE DARKENED HEARTS STILL SATISFIED WITH HIGHLY EDUCATED WORLDLY WILLS, YES, CELEBRATED BY SATAN AND HIS DEMONIC DECEIVERS!!!
TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES ARE INDIVIDUALS VICTIMIZED BY THE POWERS OF DARKNESS RADIATING THE “FLESHLY LIGHTS OF SEIF-IMPORTANCE AND SELF-INDULGENCE” WITH NO NEED OF BEING RESCUED BY GOD!
TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES ARE LIVES JOHN MILTON ONCE DESCRIBED AS: “HE WHO REIGNS HIMSELF AND RULES HIS PASSIONS, DESIRES, AND FEARS IS MORE THAN A KING,” and, I say,- “HE, SHE IS A DECEIVED SINNER WITHOUT ANY NEED OF A SAVIOR SINCE “SELF-RULE” STUPIDLY REIGNS!!”
TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES ARE LIVES RADIATING THE ‘DARKNESS’ OF CAGED SELFISHNESS THOUGH ‘PROFESSING’ A RELIGIOUS FAITH!
TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES? OH, THERE IS FOR MANY A TROUBLING AWARENESS OF THEIR ‘SIN-NATURE’ BUT IN THEIR DARKENED HEARTS AND BONDAGED-SELF-WILL NO AWARENESS OF THE NEED OF GOD’S INTERVENTION – THEY CAN HANDLE THEIR ‘MENTAL MISTAKES”! REALLY?
TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES? HAVE YOU EVER CROSSED PATHS WITH,YES, CROWDS OF PEOPLE WHO ARE APPRECIATIVELY INFORMED ABOUT CHRIST’S “BLOOD SACRIFICE” IN THEIR BEHALF BUT SEE AT AS AN UNNECESSARY EVENT BY GOD SINCE THEY SEE THEMSELVES AS RELIGIOUSLY “OK”?
TROUBLING TOMBS OF GODLESS LIVES? “BELIEF” THAT IS DARKENED UNBELIEF THAT DESTROYS BECAUSE, THOUGH “CONFESSING CHRIST”, ONE’S WALK- HIS PATH, HER PILGRIMAGE-IS AN IMMORAL DESERT WHERE ONE CONTINUES TO WALK DEAFENED TO THE PRECIOUS VOICE OF GOD AND BLINDED TO HIS FOOTSTEPS TO CALVERY, OUT OF THE TOMB, BUT HIS CONTIUNUING WALK WORLD-WIDE TO KNOCK ON THE DOORS OF MEN’S HEARTS! HAVE YOU OPENED THE DOOR TO THE SAVIOR’S LORDSHIP AND SOVEREIGN REIGN OVER YOUR WALK, YOUR PATH, YOUR PILGRIMAGE TO HONOR HIM DAILY? It was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her writing “The Cry of the Human”, who wrote:“There is no God,” the foolish says, But none, “There is no sorrow”; And nature oft the cry of faith In bitter need will borrow. Eyes which the preacher could not school, By wayside graves are raised; And lips say, “God be pitiful,” Who never said, “God be praised.”
Sadly, yes, across many ‘Christian paths’, people walk and talk and pretend but are blinded in unbelief by the mind of religious human reasoning, superficial in religious thoughts and pretense, but void of Resurrection Presence – Christ knocked, but they didn’t answer because their pretense was sufficient rather than His Presence!
How clear and convicting was Paul when in 1 Corinthians 13:11 he wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Are You ruled by ‘self-love’ or fully embraced and overflowing with your love for Christ Jesus who suffered, bled, and died on the Cross of Calvary as He, yes, carried YOU with Him to be “crucified with Christ”? In Mark 8:34 Jesus said: “Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, AND TAKE UP HIS CROSS (DYING DAILY!), AND FOLLOW ME.” For YOU? A TROUBLED TOMB OR TRIUMPHANT IN JESUS?
In the old “American Hymnal” of 1938, Broadman Press, Nashville, Tennessee, is a hymn entitled, “O For A Faith That Will Not Shrink.” It says:
“O for a faith that will not shrink Tho’ pressed by many a foe, That will not tremble on the brink Of poverty or woe.
That will not murmur nor complain Beneath the chastening rod, But in the hour of grief or pain Can lean upon its God.
A faith that shimes more bright and clear When tempests rage without, That, when in danger, knows no fear, In darkness feels no doubt.
Lord, give me such a faith as this, And then, whatever may come, I taste even now my hallowed bliss Of my eternal home.”
Can YOU say Amen to that Truth? Are YOU settled and cemented in Christ alone, or do you ‘rest’ in your fleshly self?
Are YOU a TROUBLED TOMB OR HIS TRIUMPHANT TEMPLE OF ETERNAL PRESENCE REIGNING VICTORIOUSLY THROUGH YOU?