“Fire will come down! Brimstone will be upon you! In Forty Days you must get right with God, repent and turn from you your sin or else you will be destroyed.”
Oh yes we’re here in the open and I don’t know what you were expecting but I’m about to give you a little Fire and Brimstone. Because I think its high time that the Bridge went to places that we never go… Here we are today out in the sun. Worshipping God outside. And we’re out of our element. So I’m making it even worse and talking to you about one fire and brimstone preacher of the bible.
Now you might have heard of him but this was a prophet of old that had a lot of hatred towards the people he was preaching to. You see, this Fire and brimstone preacher had a strange call by God to go over to a very wicked city. And say that in forty days y’all gonna die.
Now when I say wicked city: There are some places where child prostitution is running repent in the world, and those citys are actually pretty tame compared to this particular one that Mr. Fire and Brimstone was called to. They had piles of severed heads of their enemies in the street. Perhaps at Christmas time they decorated the severed head Pile. If they caught and captured their enemies they would cut off their hands, feet, ears and noses, and would pluck out their eyes. This was one of the reasons why this fire and brimstone preacher didn’t want to Go…I think he rather liked his features. He hated them… they might have killed his friend, brother. And sure enough they sat high on the totem pole with their thumb on every nation in the land. But the other reason was the implication on why he had to go and preach fire and brimstone… There were countless nations that have been destroyed by acts of war in the past without warning… or more specifically Prophet’s warning. But this prophet was to go to this nation and tell them that if they didn’t shape up that they would be destroyed.
Now normally this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But the sheer gall of God asking this man. A holy man. But also a very angry man. To go to another Nation and give them a warning well it just wont do. So Mr. Fire and Brimstone packed up and went the opposite way.
Well perhaps you have heard of Mr. Fire and Brimstone before… His name was Jonah. And perhaps you have heard of the outcome of the story…
Jonah runs the other direction… towards Tashish… gets flung into the sea by a bunch of freaked out Sailors. Gets gobbled up by a fish. Three days later gets barfed onto dry land with fishy goo all over him. And he decides to finally do what God wants him to do.
Now something crazy happens when he ends up preaching the Fire and Brimstone. Something happened that probably no street Preacher in the history of time has ever had happen. The people listened. Not only did they listen, but the largest scale revival happened on account of it… This is what the King said “Do not let any man or beast, herd or flock, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”
And not only did they do this but God turned from his anger and spared the city… So the angry Fire and brimstone preacher was foiled. God’s in his grace and Mercy changed his mind about them and they lived… the end… well kind of 75 years later under a different rulership Nahum came tried to ask them to be nice again and they ended up getting destroyed.
Now… I don’t know about you but all of these fun bible stories about judgment and grace and the fishy fire and brimstone preacher make me wonder if my life is at all connected as a Christian. I know that my faith somehow says that God is Immutable…meaning unchanging. But it just seams that ever since Jesus, we don’t have random prophets going to nations declaring that there demise is imminent unless they straighten up. And I know that currently we don’t have particular nations that are severing the heads of those around them… but there are bad things that are happening. And So it is easy to ask… do I have the same God of the Old Testament?
Are you confused about the complexity of God, the allowance of pain in this world? Do you cry out “why God?!?” when you hear of all the evil that is in this world.
Someone might make the argument that God just lets this world follow the Third law of Thermo dynamics. That everything goes from a more orderly state to a state of chaos. And sometimes it feels that way. The fact is God has not created this world like a wise old watch maker and let it keep ticking and is now doing other stuff. God is intimately involved in everything that is going on in this world. From birds getting their food to nations crumbling. The idea that God is not involved is just not what the bible tells us. In Job when Job’s in the whirlwind and God is ripping him a new asshole near the end of the book he says: “"The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully, but they cannot compare with the pinions and feathers of the stork.14 She lays her eggs on the ground and lets them warm in the sand, 15 unmindful that a foot may crush them, that some wild animal may trample them. 16 She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers; she cares not that her labor was in vain, 17 for God did not endow her with wisdom or give her a share of good sense. 18 Yet when she spreads her feathers to run, she laughs at horse and rider.” and implying that the animal is actually too stupid to survive. So in order to maintain its existence God has to intervene. And in order to maintain our existence God is constantly intervening.
But if God intervenes how come there is so much evil in this world. We’ll #1 people are fucked up. So a lot of times people make choices that hurt other people because of selfishness, greed, desire, and old fashion sin… This is any choice you make “not” to love another person. Treat them like an object, use them, make choices that intentionally destroy promises you have made to them, using your words as swords, generally not treating them as a brother. There is a lot of evil in this world because people do a lot of evil in this world. God, though he is intimately involved in this world is also slow to anger, and abundant in mercy. Now when the evil is being done to you this is somewhat aggravating. But when the table is turned and you do something “wrong” it feels pretty good to have a second chance.
I was thinking about that this week and I started off with the really difficult idea that God hates sin. Why else would he have destroyed ninivah? But God hates sin? Now that statement to me is difficult. And when someone says that statement I actually cringe… because it’s usually uttered by one of our favorite street preachers. In their angry voice. More than that … I sin. So that means God hates me. I want to hear about the God of grace and mercy… and how much he loves me… not any of this sin stuff. And as I started thinking about the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New testament. There was something key to my faith that stuck in the middle that was the very representation of both sides of the coin. THE CROSS. What a symbol of how God feels about sin. The judging God of the Old testament is right there in your face with a very real bloody symbol of how he judges Sin. You can’t deny it. The cross is a very vibrant metephore for how God feels about sin. No wonder it has been a point of contention with society since it occurred… because Humanity doesn’t want to rest with the idea that it is apart from God. It would rather believe that it is God. Let me put it straight to you so you can understand. You are not God. You are Human. God is God. And he has done something to redeem you back to him. The very symbol of pain is also the symbol of pure love and communion. THE CROSS.
And he chooses everyone to play by these rules. The rules of love. And for some reason we sometimes have it in our head that God’s chosen are the men with crowns or women with the pretty dresses, the high hair and the bible tucked under their arm. But God’s chosen are the ones who have his nature imprinted on their hearts. God’s chosen are the ones who love. There’s no other litmus test. Do you love? If you don’t, fuck-an-A, this might be your first clue that you need to do something differently. And maybe you’ve already come to the conclusion that you’re not one of God’s chosen because you have seen some of them. Because sometimes even the chosen have a tendency to resemble assholes that simply poop out an angry message of their own agenda. You need to know that everyone is in process. Those who say they know about grace, and abuse it; as well as those who don’t. God will take care of the justice needed to handle those who abuse their heart’s nature. However we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. God has chosen all of us… all the world… And he has chosen, and created us to be in his nature. “God is love” first john reads. And in order to truly be who we were meant to be. We Must Love. There is no other meaning to life. If you play music without love you might as well be the wind blowing through a fence…useless and unproductive…and probably creaky.
God’s nature is to love… and in the third chapter of Jonah after the angry fire and brimstone preacher was spit up by the fish, the story says that God spoke to Jonah a second time. And probably if Jonah left again towards Tarshish a big fish would swallow him again. Because God is in the business of giving out his grace to everyone. To Everyone. Including the angry preacher who doesn’t want to give it out.
God wants to speak to us a second time today. And it could be that you’ve been in the belly of your own fish… your own death… and you know exactly why you have been in that fish. Because you have been hiding from God. Trying to separate yourself from God. Maybe because you feel you deserve it. But listen:
You don’t have to be separated from God. Your actions however wrong were exactly that…wrong. And you cannot undo the consequences. However you are not alone. And God says to you today that there is a way out. And that is grace. Grace travels outside of Karma. It sees you where you’re at and it lets you off the hook. It sees the massive debt that is in front of you and pays it. No fees, no sir-charge, no points, no interest. Pays it flat out and asks nothing in return. You don’t need to believe you deserve it…because you probably don’t. But in order to receive it, you do need to accept it.
Accepting such a difficult thing as grace means we have to soften ourselves. Allow ourselves to see that we might not have it all figured out. Allow ourselves to take a risk and believe in such a concept. And accepting that grace also means that we are admitting that we need it. Some of us today would believe that the very things that are killing us are the very things we need to hold onto. And we would rather allow ourselves the liberty and focus of maintaining our lifestyle rather than saying…”I need help.” There is grace for you today.
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