These are words embroidered on a wall frame by the wife of the religious but corrupt warden of a jail in the movie “Shawshank Redemption,” which I believe many of you have watched. The frame with the dire words hung in the office of the warden, to whom the words came true. It happened after the authorities got wind of his sheenanigans and came to arrest him. But before they could get to him, however, he had shot himself in the head.
While the movie story was but fictional, the framed words come right out of the Bible. Joel 2:1 [KJV, throughout] says: “Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble for the day of the LORD cometh, for it is nigh at hand.”
Psalm 98:8-9 declares: “Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills be joyful together before the LORD: for He cometh to judge the earth with righteousness; He shall judge the world, and all the people with equity.”
Psalm 147:15 describes God’s word or truth as running “very swiftly.” “Doomsday” preachers have long warned the world about God’s imminent judgment on earth’s inhabitants, but since until now that day hasn’t come, many scoffers doubt if it is ever coming.
The apostle Peter wrote: “Knowing this first that there shall come in the last days [our times today!] scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep [died] all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation’” (2 Peter 3:4-4).
Peter then went on to explain that God’s sense of time is vastly different from that of man. What men consider God’s slowness in acting, what to them seems like God taking a thousand years, is to God but one day (Verse 8). That God is simply giving sinful mankind some slack so they could repent and be saved, not perish (Verse 9).
This is the same call to repentance that God’s prophets of old had preached, the same message Jesus preached, and the same message His true servants have preached down through the centuries up to today (Micah 6:8; Matthew 3:1-2; 4:17; Luke 13:3, 5; Acts 2:38-39).
As God’s servant I also earnestly ask you, dear readers, to examine yourselves – see where you have run afoul of God’s perfect law – where you have sinned – and sincerely repent of those sins! God so graciously gave us His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, so we can have forgiveness – pardon for our sins – in exchange of His life-blood shed on Calvary’s cross, so we don’t have to die but have everlasting life at His soon return. This way we can have boldness and confidence in the day of His coming and Judgment! [See: The Ransomed of the LORD, Transgressions Under the First Covenant, Can We Fear and Love God at the Same Time? and “I Never Knew You!”]
Pedro R. Meléndez, Jr.
12052021