“Remember Lot’s wife.” Luke 17:32
What a strange command for Jesus to give; especially since her name is never given to us. Why should she be remembered? What benefit would her remembrance achieve?
Lot was Abraham’s nephew who left Mesopotamia with Abraham when God called him to relocate. There is no doubt that Lot was a believer.
Have you noticed that today's "Messianic synagogues" are made up mostly of Gentiles, not Jews? Among some Christians there is the thinking that to partake of Jewish feasts, Jewish rituals, Jewish days and Jewish attire makes one more spiritual than a Gentile in a New Testament church. Even in the future Smyrna church during the tribulation period there will be people claiming to be Jews who are not (Revelation 2:8-10.)
Israel, today, is "Lo-ammi" (Hosea 1:9) meaning not My people. Israel's condition is described in Hosea 3:4:
Do you ever feel like you don’t know what to do? Do you ever give your best and still lose? Do you ever really have faith that things will turn out well and they don’t? Do you ever feel like you will never be discouraged again, then one telephone call or incident sends your confidence to rock bottom?
How often do God’s children experience all of the above? There is a line in one of the southern gospel songs that says:
“If I’d never had a problem, I wouldn’t know that God could solve ’em.”
Not too many years ago, subjects like abortion, homosexuality, same sex marriages, children born out of wedlock, adultery, unmarried couples living together and our continued drug problem would have caused our pulpits to be on fire. Those God-called men would have preached loud and clear about God’s judgment. With our morals and convictions hitting an all time low, our pulpits are speaking of developing a better self-esteem and encouraging more tolerance. Preaching about sin is pretty much passé.
We live in unusual and interesting times. Never have things moved so fast around us. It took right at 5900 years for transportation to advance from animals to automobiles. In a 100 years man has achieved speed faster than sound, traveled to destinations as far as the moon and changed the English Bible over 200 times. In less than 50 years we have seen the most prosperous and advanced civilizations legalize murdering innocent babies, approve same sex marriages and strive to remove God and the Ten Commandments from our society. Man keeps contradicting himself.
We can only evaluate things by what we have read and by what we have experienced. From those two perspectives, it seems we may be living in the greatest time of magnified stupidity since Noah.
"The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever." Psalms 12:6-7
In my lifetime, I have seen America's leadership begin to "…hate the good, and love the evil…" (Micah 3:2.) This hate of good and love of evil seems to parallel with the changing of one Bible translation right after another. Like the Athenians on Mars' hill, today's religious (not necessarily Christian) crowd seem to spend "their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing." (Acts 17:21) {C}
One of the most familiar stories in scripture is the parable of the “Prodigal Son” in Luke 15. The word “prodigal” is man’s making, the scripture does not use it, but the word fits; he did waste some of his life. The story of the prodigal son is part of a parable, not a complete parable within itself. Luke said that Christ spoke a “parable (singular) unto them,” (Luke 15:3) which consisted of two other events.
A wise man once said, “When a person who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he then ceases to be mistaken or he ceases to be honest.” James said something comparable:
“Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.” James 4:17