The Last Trumpet Series

genre and I don’t expect that you are, either. I don’t particularly enjoy preaching on the judgment. But judgment is the flip side of mercy. We have already heard the saints who are hanging around the throne room begging for God to hurry up and bring justice to the world. They’re tired of waiting. They’re tired of watching evil appear to triumph, tired of lies winning out over truth, tired of seeing oppression and violence and hatred rewarded.

And so we long for the Prince of Peace to take over, but when he does, all those people and forces and institutions which destroy peace must first themselves be destroyed.

We see that in so many places in the world right now. In Iraq our troops are finding that winning the war hasn’t meant that people have stopped shooting at them. In the Middle East the road map to peace is filled with ruts and potholes made by hatred and violence. What gesture of goodwill will induce the terrorists to lay down their arms? Can it happen, or must they simply be wiped out? In the Congo the departure of foreign troops - which many people thought would be the first step to peace in that terribly war-torn country - left a vacuum into which home-

grown thugs swarmed with Kalashnikov’s, AK-47's and RPG’s. Congo may be the most brutal and bloody place on earth today; if the war is not brought under control the number of its dead will rival Rwanda’s.

Peace is not the natural condition of humanity. Violence springs up on every side like dandelions in the spring. How many of you get tired of that eternal battle? Wouldn’t you like it if you could just spray something on your lawn and wake up the next morning to a perfect emerald expanse? Well, sin is even more stubborn than crabgrass.

Peace, you may remember, is not just the absence of war. Biblical “shalom” is one of the most theologically significant terms in the entire Bible. A central part of its meaning is the idea of completeness, of wholeness, of health and harmony. At the heart of the whole concept is peace between God and his creatures, between the creatures themselves, and between creatures and the rest of creation. It is interesting that in this text the only people who are singled out for condemnation are “those who destroy the earth.” [v. 18] Do we have an environmentalist text here? Could it be that there is a hint that part of man’s inhumanity to man has

expressed itself in destruction of the environment?

The earth was cursed along with Adam back in Genesis 3: “Cursed is the ground because of you,” says God, “in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you...” [Gen 3:17-18] And so certainly the land also cries out for redemption under the harsh whips of its taskmasters, and Paul assures us that it, too, will be healed in the end. “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God... in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of