1 Samuel 2:22-25 Now Eli was very old; and he heard everything his sons did to all Israel, and how they lay with the women who assembled at the door of the tabernacle of meeting. So he said to them, "Why do you do such things? For I hear of your evil dealings from all the people. No, my sons! For it is not a good report that I hear. You make the Lord's people transgress. If one man sins against another, God will judge him. But if a man sins against the Lord, who will intercede for him?" Nevertheless they did not heed the voice of their father, because the Lord desired to kill them. NKJV
The Dire Desire of a Deadly Divinity
Somewhere in New York, an old Italian guy watched his son, day after day, leave the apartment block and walk down the road towards his stop for school. Day after day, the old Italian father saw his son bullied by members of a local neighbourhood gang. Day after day, his son would go hungry at school because the older boys would steal his lunch money and day after day, his son would return from school, stiff with the beatings he had taken on his body. The son never said a word to his father and the father never told the son that he secretly observed and knew everything that was happening to him. The old father couldn’t tell you when he made the decision, but in his heart the sails were set, the rudder was pressed away from him and he had now come about to a very different course. One day soon, unexpectedly, he would kill those gang members who had robbed and abused his son for now so very, very long. Not yet but soon, he would punish those perpetrators of such violent abuse and miscreant injustice against his very own beloved so.
The top two levels of fear I have experienced in my life, yes there have been many levels, has been first, the outburst of violent emotional anger. Passionate crime, like a summer storm, can be devastating but never the less it is over quickly and frankly its violence is often so widely spread, that in its effect, most of the time, those valuables of ours, those vital interests we cosset, are often spared it’s angry and unexpected onslaught. It was scary, it was tempestuous, but the violence it generated was in the end, its own means of dissipation.
Secondly, there is a more terrifying settling of anger, which I have observed first to begin in the eyes of a man, only to flow slowly, like thick molasses down the side of an open jar and fix itself like motorway bridge concrete in the deep foundational depths of the soul. When this firm, fixed and set decision of destructive and planned devastation, slots quietly like a key into the lock of the door of death, the icy countenance it produces, chills the very spirit of those who see and know, in a certain and terrifying expectancy that full-formed anger has finally come to visit them. There is no escape from this for there is no dissipation. Once hardened anger is released, it buys a big, bad, boat and sets its course for death filling its own black and bellowed sails with undeterred desire. Surely, there is no greater terror, than when a decision of death is turned into an active and unstoppable purpose to fulfil?The sooner we tremble at the quietness of God’s capital decisions the sooner we will seek to calm and expiate, His so great, His so fixed and His so focused and purposed anger. This calm and confident, fixed and icy stare of the Most High God, is one our world needs to be made much more familiar with and that right quickly, for I hear the deep long intake of angry, angelic breaths and the soft sound of golden trumpets, being pressed to pursed lips...
Listen: - Then the sixth angel sounded: And I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, "Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates." 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. Now the number of the army of the horsemen was two hundred million; I heard the number of them. 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. 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. 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. 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. And they did not repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts. Revelation 9:13-21 NKJV.
Pray:- Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus! Revelation 22:20 NKJV
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