September 12

The prudent see danger and take cover, but the simple keep going and suffer the consequences. — Prov 22:3 BSB

Noah, warned by God, prepared an ark to save his family. Lot, warned by the angels, fled from Sodom. In the same way, there is a fleeing from the wrath to come. How careless, secure, and unconcerned we are until spiritual life is awakened within us! Solomon speaks of those who sleep on the top of a mast, where one wave or one wrong movement could throw them into the roaring sea. God’s anger is gathering against a sinful world. Who will escape this terrifying storm of eternal, unrelenting wrath? Only those who flee to Jesus. But who flees to Jesus? Only those who feel their desperate need for him. And how do they come to feel that need? Through the flashes of God’s anger. And where do those flashes come from? Out of the thundercloud of God’s holy law, where he reveals his anger against transgressors. That’s why it’s so essential to feel the law applied to the conscience, to experience what Job calls “the terrors of God,” so that Jesus Christ, the "shelter from the storm," can be seen and run to for safety! It’s like the warning given in Egypt about the severe hailstorm—“He that feared the word of the Lord among Pharaoh's servants hurried his servants and cattle into shelter, but he that ignored the word of the Lord left them in the field” (Exodus 9:20, 21). Faith believes what unbelief mocks. The nature of each is shown in their outcomes: faith leads to salvation, unbelief to destruction.