Once
we have a general understanding of God’s righteous disposition, we
can return our attention to the city of Sodom—what God saw as a
city of sin. By understanding the substance of this city, we can
understand why God wanted to destroy it and why He destroyed it so
completely. From this, we can come to know
God’s
righteous disposition.
From
a human perspective, Sodom was a city that could fully satisfy man’s
desire and man’s evil. Alluring and bewitching, with music and
dancing night after night, its prosperity drove men to fascination
and madness. Its evil corroded the hearts of people and bewitched
them into degeneration. This was a city where unclean spirits and
evil spirits ran amok; it brimmed with sin and murder and was filled
with a bloody, putrid scent. It was a city that chilled people to the
bone, a city that one would shrink back from. No one in this
city—neither man nor woman, neither young nor old—sought the true
way; no one yearned for the light or longed to walk away from sin.
They lived under Satan’s control, corruption and deceit. They had
lost their humanity; they had lost their senses, and they had lost
man’s original goal of existence. They committed countless sins of
resistance against God; they refused His guidance and opposed His
will. It was their wicked deeds that carried these people, the city
and every living thing inside it, step by step, down the path of
destruction.
Although
these two passages do not record the details describing the extent of
the corruption of the people of Sodom, instead recording their
conduct toward God’s two servants following the latter’s arrival
in the city, a simple truth can reveal the extent to which the people
of Sodom were corrupt, evil and resisted God. With this, the true
face and substance of the city’s people are also exposed. Not only
did they not accept God’s warnings, they also did not fear His
punishment. To the contrary, they scorned God’s anger. They blindly
resisted God. No matter what He did or how He did it, their vicious
nature only intensified, and they repeatedly opposed God.
The people of Sodom were hostile toward God’s existence, His
coming, His punishment, and even more so, His warnings. They saw
nothing else worthwhile around them. They devoured and harmed all
people that could be devoured and harmed, and they treated God’s
servants no differently. In regard to the whole of the wicked deeds
committed by the people of Sodom, harming God’s servants was only
the tip of the iceberg, and their wicked nature that this revealed
actually amounted to little more than a drop in a vast sea.
Therefore, God chose to destroy them with fire. God did not use a
flood, nor did He use a hurricane, earthquake, tsunami or any other
method to destroy the city. What did God’s use of fire to destroy
this city signify? It meant the city’s total destruction; it meant
that the city vanished entirely from the earth and from existence.
Here, “destruction” not only refers to the vanishing of the
city’s form and structure or outer appearance; it also means that
the souls of the people inside the city ceased to exist, having been
utterly eradicated. Simply put, all people, events and things
associated with the city were destroyed. There would be no afterlife
or reincarnation for them; God had eradicated them from humanity, His
creation, once and forever. The “use of fire” signified a halt to
sin, and it meant an end to sin; this sin would cease to exist and
spread. It meant that Satan’s evil had lost its nurturing soil as
well as the graveyard that granted it a place to stay and to live. In
the war between God and Satan, God’s use of fire is the brand of
His victory with which Satan is marked. Sodom’s destruction is a
great misstep in Satan’s ambition to oppose God by corrupting and
devouring men, and it is likewise a humiliating sign of a time in
humanity’s development when man rejected God’s guidance and
abandoned himself to vice. Furthermore, it is a record of a true
revelation of God’s righteous disposition.
When
the fire God sent from heaven had reduced Sodom to nothing more than
ashes, it meant that the city named “Sodom” would cease to exist,
as would everything within the city itself. It was destroyed by God’s
anger; it vanished under God’s wrath and majesty. Because of God’s
righteous disposition Sodom received its just punishment; because of
God’s righteous disposition, it received its just end. The end of
Sodom’s existence was due to its evil, and it was also due to God’s
desire to never look upon this city again, as well as any of the
people who had lived in it or any life that had grown within the
city. God’s “desire to never look upon the city again” is His
wrath, as well as His majesty. God burned the city because its
iniquity and sin caused Him to feel anger, disgust and loathing
toward it and wish to never see it or any of the people and living
things inside it again. Once the city had finished burning, leaving
only ashes behind, it had truly ceased to exist in God’s eyes; even
His memories of it were gone, erased. This means that the fire sent
from heaven did not only destroy the entire city of Sodom and the
iniquity-filled people inside it, nor did it only destroy all things
inside the city that had been stained by sin; even more so, this fire
destroyed the memories of humanity’s evil and resistance against
God. This was God’s purpose in burning the city down.
A
humanity had become corrupt to the extreme. They did not know who God
was or where they had come from. If you mentioned God, these people
would attack, slander and blaspheme. Even when God’s servants had
come to spread His warning, these corrupt people not only showed no
signs of repentance; they did not abandon their wicked conduct. To
the contrary, they brazenly harmed God’s servants. What they
expressed and revealed was their nature and substance of extreme
enmity toward God. We can see that these corrupt people’s
resistance against God was more than a revelation of their corrupt
disposition, just as it was more than an instance of slandering or
mocking stemming from a lack of understanding of thetruth.
Neither stupidity nor ignorance caused their wicked conduct; it was
not because these people had been deceived, and it was certainly not
because they had been misled. Their conduct had reached the level of
flagrantly brazen antagonism, opposition and uproar against God.
Without a doubt, this kind of human behavior would enrage God, and it
would enrage His disposition—a disposition that must not be
offended. Therefore, God directly and openly released His wrath and
His majesty; this is a true revelation of His righteous disposition.
Faced with a city overflowing with sin, God desired to destroy it in
the swiftest manner possible; He wished to eradicate the people
within it and the entirety of their sins in the most complete way, to
make this city’s people cease to exist and to stop the sin within
this place from multiplying. The swiftest and most complete way of
doing so was to burn it down with fire. God’s attitude toward the
people of Sodom was not one of abandonment or disregard; rather, He
used His wrath, majesty and authority to punish, strike down and
utterly destroy these people. His attitude toward them was one not
only of physical destruction but also of destruction of the soul, an
eternal eradication. This is the true implication of God’s desire
for them to “cease to exist.”
from
“God Himself, the Unique II” in Continuation of The Word Appears
in the Flesh
Recommended
： What
exactly is the true belief in God? How should one believe
in God in
order to obtain His praise? The Lord
God Almighty
Has Appeared | Christian Song | "None Can Do God's
Work in
His Stead"
No comments:
Post a Comment