Blog Archives - Ironworks Pike Community Church

Satan Says, "Be Afraid! Be Afraid!"

4/29/2020

Satan's first strategy in the garden was to make Adam and Eve afraid. He convinced them that God was up to no good -- that God had ulterior, sinister, self-serving motives for denying them the fruit of that tree. "God knows that you will become like Him, knowing good from evil!" Satan's seeds of fear took immediate root, and they broke the commandment of the good God who loved them.

Satan continues to use fear -- unbelieving, controlling, often irrational fear -- to great effect among us. Some people are socially incapacitated by their fears. Some refuse to marry, because they fear that their marriage will automatically be as bad as their parents' marriage. Others are so traumatized by evils that were visited upon them in their youth, that now they habitually look upon everyone with fear and angry suspicion. They run when no one is pursuing; they die in loneliness, because they don't trust anyone.

This is not God's will for us! The only people who should be terrified of God are the Devil, and the people who serve the Devil's will. The Bible says again and again that God is good. Good, honest, fair, and, dare we say it, considerate. "He takes into account that we are dust" (Psalm 103:14).

The purity of God's goodness, honesty, trustworthiness, and wisdom will detoxify our minds of our poisonous fears. The more time we spend with God, and with His Son Jesus Christ, in the pages of Scripture, the more He cures us of warping fears. Also, the sobriety of judgment that God's word develops in us will cure us of fleshly paranoia, baseless anxieties, and a judgmental spirit.

The Bible counsels prudence, and warns us we live in a troubled world scarred by sin. It teaches us to be canny, perceptive, and wise. But it also tells us to sink our emotional anchor into God. God's goodness toward us is a mental gyroscope that keeps our emotional ship steady.

God is the emotional Healer of our injured hearts, and one of the diseases He heals is fear. Faith casts out fear -- 1st John 4:18.

The Real End of the World.

4/15/2020

One of the benefits of knowing Bible prophecy is how it enables you to react wisely to current events. The book of Revelation predicts the horsemen of war, famine, disease, and death will ride upon the world. We also know from history that the world has always suffered these miseries, though Heaven mitigates them if a nation walks with the Lord. So Scripture distinguishes between the general fallenness and brokenness of the earth, and that distinct future time we call the great tribulation.

This means that every time there's an earthquake, flu epidemic, or something like a solar eclipse, it doesn't mean we're in the end-times. When we read the prophecies of Revelation, we see that those plagues will be massive, simultaneous, and worldwide. In one case, 1/3rd of the grass and trees are destroyed; in another case, some sort of huge meteor strikes a sea (perhaps the Mediterranean?), and a massive number of ships are wrecked all at one time.

Here you can see the importance of the literal interpretation of prophecy, unless Scripture itself justifies a hidden fulfillment, like John the Baptist being the "Elijah" that the OT predicted would come (Matt. 11:14). The norm for Bible predictions are literal fulfillment, otherwise we could never tell if they came true. Moses told the Israelites to expect literal fulfillment (Deut. 18), and Agabus' predictions in Acts came true literally.

You'll be blessed if you study the book of Revelation and keep the moral instructions Christ included in it! One of the those blessings is the ability to tell the signs of the times. Revelation is so clear on the worldwide judgments of the end-times that you can tell they're not happening now. What's happening now is bad enough, to be sure! But it falls under Amos 3:6, as a divine calamity such as those God has inflicted on nations in the past.