The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good

“They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.”─Christ.
“We do not present our supplications before Thee for our righteousnesses, but for Thy great mercies.”─Daniel.
“And this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.” ─Jeremiah.
(Matt. 9:12; Dan. 9:18; Jer. 23:6)

The bad person thinks he is really pretty good; but the good people think badly of themselves. Their self-esteem is pretty shot. But they are close friends with a very friendly Person, and that makes all the difference for them. He accepts them like they are, and He fills their thoughts. They yearn to be more like He is, merciful, faithful in all things, holding up His Father’s high standard like He does, reaching for perfection like He does, treating everyone fairly and respectfully, irrespective of social status or personality, race or culture, creed or character. They want to be just like the Jesus they know.

Jesus has made them a most wonderful offer. They don’t have to satisfy the Law anymore. They need not serve two personless tables of stone (Gal. 3:25), even if they are the Law. They don’t have the work of fighting sin. Jesus says if they will just come to Him and spend time with Him, He will take it from there (Matt. 11:28;Heb. 7:25). So they can confide in Him over their horrid lack of goodness (1Thess. 5:23;1 Pet. 5:7). To them prayer is the opening of the heart to God as to a friend (Heb. 10:19). And in the process of building a relationship, He slowly but surely weans them off self, and washes their life white as snow (Eph. 5:26,27). Away goes the past guilt, away the past weaknesses (Jn. 8:11;Lk. 7:37,38). Out goes the old life of sin and disease, in comes the new life of energy and holiness (Rom. 6:2,11;2Cor. 5:17). And they realize this is such a bargain (Is. 55:1;Ps. 19:10; Rev. 3:18), as only God could devise (Eph. 1:9-12), that they must pass it on, with loving discretion (Mk. 1:45), to everyone and anyone who will listen (Jn. 4:28,29;Eph. 4:15).

Righteousness truly is the good life! (Ps. 16:11)


The Bad

The results of setting aside the God of righteousness: “Even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: who knowing the judgment of God that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.” Rom. 1:28-32.

Does this sound familiar in your corner of society?

After staying away from Washington, D.C. for 30 years, with exception to a few quick visits, and now having returned to work on my sister’s house in a D.C. suburb, I am taken aback by the rush and stress of traffic, the impersonal carelessness between citizens, the madness to make investments and reap wealth to the exclusion of anything more enduring, the pretense, and the fake or shallow love and companionship, the total forgetfulness of the Creator and all His abundant blessings to America, the nation He put on the map.

Americans are in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity. (Acts 8:23) The grinding internal pain and dissatisfaction has no reprieve, save for the short-lived entertainment or alcoholic, drug, or food binge induced sedation. They have no peace. “Great peace have they which love Thy Law,”─but Protestants have forgotten God’s Law. Like Israel of old, God says to His Protestants, “I have written to him the great things of My Law, but they were counted as a strange thing.” (Ps. 119:165;Hos. 8:12). The Lord’s warnings to Israel from the days of Moses were that if they forsook His laws and statutes, His judgments and His ordinances, He would give them up to the nations which they loved so much to copy. Once scattered, He promised, “The Lord shall smite thee with madness.” “Heaven that is over thy head shall be brass.” “They that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquities in your enemies’ lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with them.” (Deut. 28:28,23;Lev. 26:39).

An irremovable bitterness and impatience clings to the heart of so many who have banished from their thinking the God of mercy and justice. We cannot long endure the angst and unappeased torment that results from indulging in the gods of this world. (Rev. 14:10,11) “For lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land, to possess the dwelling places that are not theirs.” (Hab. 1:6) Much sophistication bleeds away our simplicity and our emotional health. In our continuous round of study and research, we never arrive at solid truth. (Acts 26:24;2Tim. 3:7). It turns innocent laughter into mad hilarity; and of real joy it makes us say, “What good is it?” (Ecc. 2:2). The Lord “frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad,” He “turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish.” (Is. 44:24,25). When will we wake up to acknowledge the madness of this foolish nation? (2Pet. 2:16; Ps. 53:1)

“For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me; Take the wine cup of this fury at My hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it… Therefore thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Drink ye, and be drunken, and spue, and fall, and rise no more…. And it shall be, if they refuse to take the cup at thine hand to drink, then shalt thou say unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Ye shall certainly drink.” (Jer. 25:15-25, 27-28)

“Babylon,… O thou most proud…; for it is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their images.” “The days of visitation are come, the days of recompense are come; Israel shall know it: the prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad, for the multitude of thine iniquity, and the great hatred.” “Every man is mad and maketh himself a prophet.” (Jer. 50:1, 31, 38;Hos. 9:7; Jer. 29:26)

Will Harry Potter magic or Wicca bring us the relief that is so illusive? No, the Occult will be the final move that binds people into a desperate possession of the devils, from which they will not escape.

Will it be a tattoo? Will it be like a bar code? Will it be a microchip under the skin? Theories abound concerning the Mark of the Beast, but they all overlook the warnings to the original Old Testament Babylon and the similar conditions of this modern Babylon in which we live, especially here in America, especially in the American big cities, and very much especially in the Capitol city of Washington D.C. Culture, wealth, luxury, convenience, fashion, appetites and passion being indulged in a furious, headlong dive into hedonism, the bold and daring promiscuity, all this─Satan’s mold on the character, is the Mark of the Beast. Because of the lack of appreciation to the great Giver of bounty to His modern day “Golden Cup” and boasting that the United States will never fall, Americans will find that the Day of the Lord comes as a thief in the night. We’re spoiled and ruined. We have had it too good for too long, and “the good life” is about to be all swept away. (Is. 28:15;33:14) Just as the ten northern tribes of Israelites copied Assyria, the Protestants have given up their Reformation roots and duplicated the practices of the world, and the Lord is about to bring swift judgment upon His land. “And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.” (Is. 3:24)

But, though the day of judgment comes as a thief in the night, and although “the Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness,” yet He is “longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” (2Pet. 3:10,9)

“Babylon hath been a golden cup in the Lord’s hand, that made all the earth drunken; the nations have drunken of her wine; therefore the nations are mad... We would have healed Babylon but she is not healed; forsake her, and let us go every one into his own country; for her judgment reacheth unto heaven, and is lifted up even to the skies.” “How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her; for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.” “I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her My people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.” (Jer. 51:7,8,9;Rev. 18: 7, 4-6)

There is yet hope for everyone in Babylon, if they heed the call when it comes.


The Ugly

Thus far we have described the Good and the Bad. Now we must describe the Ugly, who are really the Filthy (Rev. 22:11). They are the lukewarm: untouchable by conviction, too cool to be warmhearted with Jesus, and not feeling wicked enough to need any warming up. There is hope for the Good and the Bad, the hot and the cold. There is no hope for the ugly, filthy, lukewarm religious moralist who persists in ignoring the goodness of God that would lead to repentance. In their little world of religious make-believe, they say to all the threats and warnings that infinitely protective Love can wage against them, “‘I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart,’ to add drunkenness to thirst.” Deut. 29:19.

She is like the sow that justifies wallowing in hypocrisy. He is the unclean person who divides his hoof from the evil path of life, but refuses to chew on the cud of the Word of God. (2Pet. 2:22; Lev. 11:7.) They have the stubborn rebellion akin to witchcraft and to the idolatrous worship of self, and are the donkey that must either be redeemed or have its neck broken. (1 Sam. 15:23;Ex. 13:13;Ps. 32:9). They are the unclean and hateful birds caged up in the church. (Rev. 18:2). They look good on the outside, but inside is full of death and rottenness. (Matt 23:27,28) They don’t go into the kingdom of grace, and play it down and attract others who might have gone in. (Lk 11:52)

Yet even they can be redeemed. Listen to the entreaties of Jesus’ mercy/justice blend: “So then because thou art neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of My mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing: and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor and blind and naked: I counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eye salve, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten; be zealous therefore and repent. Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him and sup with him, and he with Me.” To the Filthy that overcome “will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in His throne.” Rev. 3:17-21.

And the Good are God’s missionaries for the Bad and the Ugly. They are happy to be made use of. They identify with the Bad and Ugly so well, because they have been them. The struggle to get and stay with Jesus, and all their badness and ugliness, they remember all too well. It wasn’t by their own inherent righteousness that they were delivered from those two groups. They know how to reach them. They have the secret weapon; it was the mercy and justice of Christ all the way. The fullness of His love won them over, so they know Jesus loves Pharisees. His offer to look to Him instead of the Law, reconciled them to Him. Once reconciled, they were able to see His Father’s Law to be more palatable and made peace with it. And in obedience they found even more peace. So they can bring blessing to the Ugly and the Bad. And with the great heavenly High Priest behind them, they are assured success. (Ps. 1:1-3;Matt. 24:14)