Last week I wrote that I would share the two things we must do to have the Lord pay off the entire world’s debt. The first is to simply turn to Him in repentance for thinking we did not need Him, asking Him to help us. The second is to let Him help us. It is that simple.
Will the world do this? Yes. As we see in Isaiah 60:3-5, after darkness has covered the earth and deep darkness the people, the glory of the Lord will appear upon His people, and the nations will turn to the light of the Lord that is upon them. The nations will come to the light. The darkness that they have gone through will convince the world for all time not to ever try to live without God again.
Jesus has already paid our debts, and this includes the world’s financial debt. The Lord could easily snap His fingers and pay off the entire world’s debt today. Heaven would not even know anything had gone out of its vast treasury. The reason He does not do this is because we would be right back in the same debt, or worse, if we do not learn what leads us into such bondage. So the Lord is first waiting for us to understand this, and turn from our evil ways, which is repentance, before He forgives our debt. This is true for us personally, nationally, and for the whole world.
The world will come to the light as we see in Isaiah 60:3. However, right now it would be great to see the church coming to His light. Have the dark times already been enough to have us repent of our rebellion and return to Him so that we do not have to experience anything worse? Obviously it has not. We are told that judgment begins with the household of God because He must set His own people free before we can be used to set the nations free. The Lord prefers mercy over judgment, and even His judgment is discipline for those whom He loves so that we will learn to not keep doing the things that are hurting us.
All of the financial shaking the world is going through is a parallel of the judgments that came upon Egypt in order to set God’s people free. Once Israel got free and was established in the Promised Land, they were called to be a light to lead other nations out of bondage. This is still the calling on God’s people—to get free of the bondage of this world, go through the discipline of the wilderness to learn God’s ways, and then possess our promises so that we can help the world out of its bondage.
The signs of another Great Awakening are now appearing. There is increasing evidence of a pushback against the great darkness of our times, and a great turning back to God is imminent. This is most encouraging, but it does not mean that the troubles are over. Through the darkness we will soon begin to see God’s glory appearing on His people. People will begin coming to the light until ultimately the nations come to it.
In Acts 14:22, it says the Apostle Paul went about “strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying, “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.” At present, it is hard to find Christians who do not close their ears to such “strengthening and encouraging” because they have fallen to the delusion we were also warned about for these times—that they would only want to “have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires” (II Timothy 4:3). However, to the mature in Christ, they get excited when they hear of coming troubles because they know, like Paul, that in every trial there is a doorway to the kingdom.
For this reason, the mature have learned as James said to “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials” (James 1:2). When we learn that in every trial there is a gateway to the kingdom, we do start to get excited by the trial. We all want a big victory, but we cannot have a big victory without a big battle. The bigger the trial, the bigger the victory, and the bigger the door to the kingdom will be. Likewise, the entire world is going to enter the kingdom through the “great tribulation.”
The escape from every trial is the same—turn to God and resolve to obey Him. Every human problem is the result of mankind turning away from God, and the answer to every human problem is to turn back to Him. When the world turns back to God, all debt in the world will be resolved. As we read at the end of the Book of Revelation, it is even better than that:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He shall dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be among them,
and He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new”
(see Revelation 21:3-5).
The prophet Isaiah also spoke of how the earth would be returned to the paradise it was originally intended to be, as we see in Isaiah11:6-9:
And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little boy will lead them.
Also the cow and the bear will graze; their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat
straw like the ox.
And the nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child will put his hand on
the viper's den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of
the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
The kingdom is surely coming, and we have the greatest message of hope the world has ever heard that must be preached before it can come. The first sign we must see is this hope rising in God’s people.
