Have you ever considered how you would spend your last day on this earth before you die? Or, before Christ returns to this world to end the battle of Armegeddon? If you have never been born again or if you have and you have not grown in God’s grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, then I would imagine that your last day would be like any other day in your lifetime. In fact, unless you are an avowed hater of Christ Jesus, or are enlisted into one of the armies that will be battling Israel in the Valley of Megiddo, I am certain that your last day will be exactly like any other day of your lifetime.
Perhaps you are asking yourself “How does this fellow know what I will be doing when my time comes to exit this world?” As to specific details, I do not know. However, according to what we find in the Holy Bible, we see that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself told His followers what the world would be like when He returns to this earth. Do you reply “Oh yeah, where does it say that?” I would like to show you since you ask. Look what Jesus says in Matthew 24:37-39 “But as the days of Noe [Noah] were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”
Prior to the flood, Noah had warned the people that God’s judgment was approaching. They could see that in that he kept preaching to the lost world and kept building on the ark until it was completed and filled with animals and wotj Noah and his entire family. Then suddenly the floods came and all the people of that generation who had been going about their daily routines of eating, drinking and partying were swiftly killed by the worldwide inundation of water.
Jesus also gave us another clue in Luke 17:28-30, “Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.” Besides eating, drinking and partying they will be conducting business as usual, buying and selling, farming and manufacturing.
So, not only will people on this earth be living a typical day when He bursts forth from heaven in great and amazing power and glory, but they will also be totally unprepared for what awaits them.
What will await you if you have never been born again? What will await you if you are not one of the many that will be waiting with great anticipation for the return of the Savior the Lord Jesus Christ? Doom, Destruction and Despair. It will be too late to either change your mind regarding Jesus of Nazaareth or to turn to God from your sins and put the security of your soul into the loving hands of the Lord from Heaven Jesus Christ. Jesus said that once He takes the throne in Jerusalem that He will gather all the Gentiles, or Nations, to be judged. The prophet Joel foresaw this and told us that the judgment will be based upon how they had treated the Jews and whether or not they had taken part, either by consent or assent, in the dividing up of the land of Israel. See Joel 3:1-2, 11-12. There the Lord will sit as Judge of the gentiles. He will divide them as a shepherd divides the goats from the sheep. See Matthew 25:31-46. For the lost, unsaved goats at that moment their verdict will be pronounced and their sentence carried out. There won’t be a long, tedious appeals process of the legal decision as we have in our day. For Jesus will be sitting as King and there will be no one higher to appeal to.
This Valley of Jehoshaphat that Joel spoke of has traditionally been considered to be the Kidron Valley on the east of Jerusalem between the old temple site and the Mount of Olives opposite it. The name Jehoshaphat is a compoind word composed of Jehovah and Shaphat. Jehovah of course is the name of the Lord and is normally translated LORD in our King James Bible. The Hebrew word ShaPHaT means to judge, or render judgment, as in the sense of a judge hearing the testimony of the witnesses and then rendering the verdict and the sentence. As for the LORD pleading with the nations in that Valley of Jehoshaphat as Joel prophesied, it will not be a pleading as a child who begs its parents to give him what he wants. No, this is a legal word. The LORD Himself will be the witness that will be entering the legal pleadings, or the case if you will, against the lost, unsaved gentiles. There will not be any defense attorneys, no one will be able to give any alibies. For the Savior who knows the hearts of all men and women, boys and girls, will be reading every heart that stands before Him that day.
Your Doom will be determined. You never repented of your sins and submitted to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, trusting Him as your personal Lord and Savior. You will have assented, in the least, to the awful anti-semitism and anti-Zionism of those days. Read what the Lord Jesus says in Matthew 25:46 “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.” You will not be righteous, because you had never been saved from your sins. And what a shame that will be to have wasted your life in the pleasures of this world and the fleeting pleasures of your sins. It is those sins that will seperate you for all eternity from the presence and blessings and the life of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The righteous will enter into that life that is eternal, because they will then be eternally united with their Savior as they enter into His Millennial Kingdom.
What about the everlasting punishment that you are sentenced into, what is that punishment? The Bible, especially in the Gospels speaks more about hell than it does about heaven. Why would Jesus warn so much about hell? Simple, He does not desire for anyone to have to go there! That is why His Father sent Him to this world, to die in our place and take our punishment upon Himself, to shed His precious blood for the forgiveness of our sins, and then gloriously rose again from the dead, just like the Old Testament prophets and He Himself said that He would. And it is that life that He now offers to all who will repent toward God and put their trust in the Lord Jesus.
But, back to the point. What will your punishment be like? We find several descriptions of it in the New Testament. In Mark 9:43-44, 45-46, 47-48 Jesus described hell as the place where “the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” He describes it this exact way three times in this passage. And notice His doubling of the fact that the fire never goes out! You might wonder, well will I just be tossed in and then burn up and thats the end? You ask this question from ignorance of what Jesus decalred in Luke 16:19-31. Some call this a parable, that is, an earthly story declaring a heavenly truth. But notice that one of the men is named, Lazarus. This is a description of the judgment that awaited the rich man that refused to help poor Lazarus at all while living in pleasure here on earth. Once they both died, Lazarus went to Abraham’s Bosom, that is to the place of Comforting in Sheol, later to be taken to heaven. But the rich man went to hell. While there he could see Abraham and Lazarus afar off, but he had no way to get to them. Look what it says in Luke 16:23-24 “And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. 24 And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.”
Did you notice that? He was in torments and begged Abraham to send Lazarus to him to mercifully put a drop of water on his tongue to give him some semblance of relief from the torment of the flame. Remember that the fire is not quenched. It doesn’t ever get extinguished! And the rich man never burns up into ashes. He has to remain there in extreme torment of heat, while the worms endlessly gnaw on his flesh. Please don’t shut your eyes to this truth. If you have an honest heart you will ackowledge this truth and ponder your doom. But if you reject this truch, then the Lord is probably in the process of hardening your heart in your blindness,
Consider this, Romans 3.23 says that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” None of us meausre up to God’s perfect requirements for holiness and righteousness. No matter how hard you try to deny that you are a sinner and that you have sinned, God’s word stands true and let every man be found a liar! Although the following passage is speaking to saved believers, the truth is there for you to consider in 1 John 1.8-10 “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”
If you refuse the truth that you are a sinner and have sinned, then you are at best deceiving yourself and at worst you are calling God a liar. Actually, you are doing both. If you are honest with yourself, surely you will acknowledge your sin. Won’t you own up to it with God? He know you’re a sinner.
Being a sinner isn’t so bad really is it, you might ask? Again, consider God’s word in Romans 6.23a “For the wages of sin is death … “ Because Adam, the first man, sinned against one commandment that was given to him, he brought death upon himself and all of his descendants (Genesis 2.17; 3.6; Romans 5.12). He was banned from eating of the tree of life; the ground and all of earth’s creation was cursed, and he spent the rest of his days on earth struggling because of that one time when he refused to do God’s will and chose instead to do his own (Genesis 3.14-20). Every single one of his descendants, whose father was a man, share in that same nature and characteristic. We want to do what we want to do and not what God wants us to do. Because we are born sinners, that is what we do, we sin. But, there is hope for you. Romans 5.8 says that “God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Commendeth means to show, to demonstrate. God proved to us that He loves us, even though we are sinners of Adam’s race.
The Bible calls Jesus the Last Adam in 1 Corinthians 15:45 and that Jesus, the Last Adam, was made a quickening spirit. In other words, through Jesus’ work of redemption He has made it possible for those who repent, that is turn to God and away from their sins, and trust in the Gospel as spelled out in 1 Corinthians 15.1-4, to not only be spared from an eternal punishment in hell, but to be saved from and forgiven of their sins, to be declared righteous before God, to be given eternal life, to be born again and to become a child of God. See John 3.16; Ephesians 1.7; 1 Peter 1.3; John 1.12-13.
This can be seen by what is declared in 2 Corinthians 5.21, “For He (God) hath made Him (Jesus) to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” The “us” in the verse refers to all Christians who have been born again.
You will never perish in hell if you will decide to agree with and admit to God that you are a sinner in need of saving, repent (turn unto God from your sins) and receive, or rather believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, submitting to Him as the King of your life.
