Are we really a nation under judgement?

There is a popular idea that ‘God is love’, as taught by Christ, means that whatever we do, no matter how self-centred and even obviously ‘bad’, is absolutely fine.  At the end of the day – or in this case, after death – nothing matters.  We’ll all be welcomed into heaven, regardless, somehow magically transformed into beings of sweetness and light, all past misdemeanours forgotten.  And as for those who’ve been wronged or damaged by our actions in life … well, they’ll just have to get over it, won’t they!  Not our problem.

The trouble is – God doesn’t see things like this.  To say that God is love does not mean that He’s some permissive, squidgy, avuncular figure, who doles out treats right, left and centre, and doesn’t give a fig about what actually promotes our wellbeing.  God loves us so much that His aim, ever since the Fall, has been to liberate us from Satan’s hold and help us become fully what and who He first made us to be.  That indeed is why he sent His own Son, Jesus, into the world – that He, the only one who could, might go head-to-head with Satan and once and forever break the hold that had kept mankind under bondage to sin.  That’s what Christ’s death accomplished – He set us free from sin and gave us life.  But that freedom doesn’t mean that we can carry on sinning regardless.  No, it means that we must live now as redeemed children of God, in obedience and purity, seeking after what, in days gone by, was called righteousness.

Sadly, as a society, that is what we have signally failed to do.  Rather, over the last hundred years of so, we have increasingly rejected God’s Lordship, making instead a god of Self – raising altars to sex, on which we have slaughtered, without thought, millions of unborn.   Each one of these lives was and is precious to God – and a gift to us.  Yet we blocked our ears to their cries, demanding instead the right to have sex whenever, wherever, and with whomsoever we pleased – free of unwanted consequence!

We have remade God in our own image.

In this brave new world, we have celebrated both ideologies and other faiths that are hostile to God and deny Christ.  And we have said that it was ‘good’.  That we are good.  In all of this we have worshipped sin and, by our choices, welcomed into our midst spirits of death and perversion, that seek to destroy.

So, are we a nation under judgment?  Yes, we are – but it is a judgment forged by ourselves.  God will not bless sin, because to do so would allow its continuance.  Though He remains Sovereign Lord of this nation, and His will is still to help – in the darkness that now draws close, He will not deliver us … while we persist in rebellion.  Rather, He will let us reap the fruits of our wrongdoing.

To receive God’s help and deliverance – the help He longs to give – it is urgent that we repent.