Great and Terrible

Psalms 24:1-6 The earth is the Lord ’s, and all its fullness, The world and those who dwell therein. For He has founded it upon the seas, And established it upon the waters. Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord ? Or who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, Who has not lifted up his soul to an idol, Nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive blessing from the Lord , And righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is Jacob, the generation of those who seek Him, Who seek Your face. Selah

Right now, in this moment, God is doing a VERY unique thing upon the earth. I believe this is the generation that will see the physical return of Jesus. There are some inherent promises tied to the return of Jesus, called the "great and terrible day of the Lord."

Joel 2:31 The sun will become dark, and the moon will turn blood red before that great and terrible day of the Lord arrives.

The return of Jesus is both great and terrible. It is great for the "generation of Jacob"...those who seek God's face actively, as described in Psalm 24 above...it is TERRIBLE for those that don't. Like many Psalms, Psalm 24 is an end-time Psalm describing the return of God into the Garden He made for Himself and called "very good."

Right now many dwell in the broken, thistle-infested, garden of God, believing this was the way He created it. It is not. The earth is not the way it was formed. According to the Bible, in one day, it began changing to what we now experience. The change happened when God withdrew His perfect glory in order to allow mankind to continue to live. For love, God withdrew from His perfect garden that He made for Himself to enjoy. But He IS coming back. He hasn't changed His mind about what He called very good.

Genesis 1:31 Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good! And evening passed and morning came, marking the sixth day.

Genesis 3:17-18 And to the man he said, “Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat, the ground is cursed because of you. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains.

This entire earth was made in brilliant perfection so we could have a "very good" place to abide with the God of all creation. God chose to relate to us not as servants under His command, but as sons and daughters bonded to Him in love. Love is risky...love requires a choice to love back as much or as little as we want.

Adam and Eve chose to explore evil. They wanted to see what life apart from the love of the owner of the Garden might be like. They opened the door to the absence of God in the garden, introduced darkness to God's garden, and broke the garden for themselves AND for the Father.

God could dwell here with no trouble, but we could no longer be in the presence of God's infinite perfection. We were made with an "infinite capacity" to encounter an infinite God, and the garden was the perfect place of encounter BY the presence of His glory!

Our introduction of darkness into our hearts made us something less than infinitely capable to entertain God's glory without being consumed. Anything less than infinite is "infinitely less." God withdrew from His own garden for US. When God's glory left the garden, it immediately began to fall from perfection. It now groans from the weight of the fall:

Romans 8:19-22 For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.

Not only is creation "earnestly awaiting" the return of its Author, and all the glory that comes with Him, but God Himself earnestly desires to be here, with anyone willing to die to...to completely trade... this "less than life" and live all in for His return:

John 17:24 “Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.

Luke 17:33 Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.

Creation DESIRES God, God DESIRES to dwell with us back in creation, yet most of the world DESIRES to maximize their experience of life in a broken garden absent the glory that is the only thing that could make it good. The earth can no longer endure this lie. It is only God's incredible patience...His desire that none should perish....that has allowed creation to groan for so long. All the while...while God is desiring and creation is desiring restoration...the men and women of the earth have mostly gone on about claiming God's garden, and the 70 or 80 years he is patiently giving them to decide what they really want, as their own! This is a bit like children fighting over the cardboard box that their loving mother's beautiful jewelry box came in after they smashed her precious jewelry box.

There is nothing in the box apart from the treasure God intended to be in it...the box is about to be thrown on the fire, along with everyone unwilling to let go of the box and desire the restoration the Father's dream of very good. Everyone gets what they want. That is the law of love.

We have continued to occupy the slowly dying garden, kept alive only by the lifeline of God's glory touching earth, mostly under the delusion that THIS is life. It is not. I was made to live face to face with infinite beauty...THAT is life...until that happens, we are in the middle of a rescue operation.

This is the promise: that God's glory is coming back, not in a magical waving of His hand, but in a process. This process REQUIRES the agreement of anyone who desires life. To ignore the process is to say "no" to life forever.

All of creation is formed to operate in processes. Mankind, in our impatience, imagine God will just "make things work out"...magically...over night. That is the opposite of what the Bible says. The earth was "given" to man...it is our responsibility:

Psalms 115:15-16 May you be blessed by the Lord , Who made heaven and earth. The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord ’s; But the earth He has given to the children of men.

God has a plan to get a "generation" of Jacob. A generation that seeks His face through the time of the worst trouble earth has ever seen...the great and terrible day of the Lord. This time will be "Great" if you seek His face, and "terrible" if you do not. The amount you seek or ignore will determine the level of great or terrible you experience.

It is His garden, and it was made for Him and those who love His face to be together. The earth is rapidly coming to this day, the day Joel spoke of. For those who seek His face, this will be the greatest day so far...for those who do not, it will be the most terrible so far:

Revelation 6:12-17 I looked when He opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood. And the stars of heaven fell to the earth, as a fig tree drops its late figs when it is shaken by a mighty wind. Then the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved out of its place. And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”

The glory of the Lord IS coming back to the earth as "the water covers the sea." It is coming back where it is invited by people who respond...by communities of people who cast off their desire to make something of this "less-than" life, and trade it for an all in push to see God come back into the garden.

Habakkuk 2:13-14 Behold, is it not of the Lord of hosts That the peoples labor to feed the fire, And nations weary themselves in vain? For the earth will be filled With the knowledge of the glory of the Lord , As the waters cover the sea.

The waters of the sea are shallow at the beach, and deep in the ocean trenches...cold in the Arctic, and warm in the Caribbean...stormy in one place and serene in another...the response of the people who have been given their piece of the earth will determine the amount of glory "poured out" in any given location. Desiring the "great" now will minimize the terrible and release the great later. Being indifferent now, spending your labor in vain on vanity itself, will release much more terrible and much less great later. It is that simple.

The great and terrible day is speeding at us faster than most could imagine. The answer isn't food and guns. It isn't selling your possessions or quitting your job. It isn't dropping out of college or moving to a warm climate. The answer is doing everything you can to dig a "trench" of fasting, praying, and seeking the face of God as a community so that the heavenly process of the glory being poured out is met by an earthly "bowl" prepared to hold it!

Everyone gets what they want in the end.

Amos 9:9-10 “For I will give the command and will shake Israel along with the other nations as grain is shaken in a sieve, yet not one true kernel will be lost. But all the sinners will die by the sword— all those who say, ‘Nothing bad will happen to us.’

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