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I‘m going to share today on understanding the judgments of God because I believe that as intercessors, it’s really, really important that we understand that the Lord is the only perfectly just one.

The Book of Proverbs states that a man who does not fear the Lord cannot even understand justice. Chapter 28 and verse 5 state that a man who does not fear the Lord cannot even begin to really understand justice. So, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

The fear of the Lord is also the beginning of understanding justice.

I’m going to share some scriptures that I hope will help us to understand why they could say in the Book of Revelation, chapter 16, verse 7, and Revelation 19:2, true and righteous are your judgments. We can honestly say that the better we know God, the more we know that true and righteous are all of His judgments. He is the judge above all judges.

God’s Justice and Mercy are Embodied in Jesus

So, in the context of Israel and the Hague,  the international criminal court needs to realize that they are human and, therefore, fallible judges and that He will judge them. He is the judge above all judges.

He will judge political parties. He will judge governments, kings, presidents, prime ministers, all of it because Yeshua is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, but he’s also the President over the Presidents, the Prime Minister over the Prime ministers, the Mayor over the mayors, the Judge over the judges.

He is over them all. It’s so important that we realize that He is perfectly just in all of His ways.

We were talking the other day in one of the Bible studies about how important it is to realize God is 100% of everything that He is. So He’s not 50% just and 50% merciful, and He’s having a tug of war.

Which will I be today? Will I be just or merciful today?

God is 100% just all the God is 100% merciful all the time. There’s no conflict. There’s no struggle with Him. He can be perfectly merciful and perfectly just at the same time. And we see that in all of this what we’re actually speaking about is Yesuah, of Jesus coming to the earth and taking our sins.

So, as the judge, He gave a sentence that there had to be blood shed for the forgiveness of those sins. He gave a sentence there had to be the death of a sacrificed lamb, of a perfect lamb. And then He came as the perfect lamb. He gave the sentence, and then he fulfilled the sentence for us.

He took it upon Himself so He remains true to His justice while He was true to His mercy.

God’s Judgment with the Wheat and the Tares

And before we go into this in a little more detail, I want us to just say at this time of the year, we’re recording this at the beginning of January, and at this time of year, many, many people are sharing what they feel the Lord is saying for this Gregorian year 2024.

And if you hear certain words, everything seems to be all gloom and doom. And if you hear other words, everything seems to be glorious and amazing and wonderful and harvest and all of this. So which one is right? It’s actually both.

Matthew 13: They will Grow Together to the End of the Age

And that’s very clear from Matthew 13 in the parable of the good wheat and the weeds, where Jesus, Yeshua said, Don’t try to pull them up when they’re little, because sometimes you can’t tell the difference yet. Is this a wheat or a weed?

The particular word that’s used for weed, there’s a particular weed that looks much like wheat. When it’s young, it’s almost impossible to separate that weed from the wheat. But He said, Let them both mature.

And he said, at the end of the age, so he’s talking about now, they will both mature, and the weeds will become very clear, and the wheat will become very clear. And He says, I will send my angels that they will harvest and they will separate. It’s their job to harvest and separate.

Weeds Stand Proud, Wheat Bows Before God

But what’s interesting is I read something written by an agricultural person who understood this wheat, and this type of weed. And he said, You can hardly tell them apart for a long, long time. And then suddenly, as they come into the stage of maturity, he said, The weed stands very tall and arrogant and proud, and the wheat field bows down low.

Isn’t that amazing? I mean, the wheat humbles itself. The wheat walks in this amazing humility and dependence upon God, trusting in God, giving all glory to God, all the praise to God. And so He said, It will be very easy at the end of the age to tell the difference between the tares that are standing proud and stiff and arrogant and proclaiming their evil with great pride and those who will humble themselves in the fear of the Lord, bow before the Lord, say, ‘You’re the King, you’re the Lord.”

We yield everything to you. We trust you. Your ways are higher than our ways. Your thoughts are higher than our thoughts.

So there’s a sense in which both of these kinds of things are true. I believe, yes, we are entering a time where we will see more conflicts, as we’ve been praying that these regional conflicts would not turn into a premature World War III to stop the harvest.

So there will be conflicts, there will be earthquakes, there will be plagues. But He says at the same time, there will be this glorious, amazing harvest. There will be a body of Messiah that arises that is full grown and mature.

The wheat will mature and will exhibit the light of God, the glory of God. So we are in for the worst of times and the best of times. Both are simultaneous.

According to this passage of Matthew 13, they seem to mature in parallel. So that helps us, I think, if we begin to realize, okay, it’s not all just gloom and doom, praise God, but there will be glory, there will be harvest, there will be a great move of the Holy spirit.

God’s Judgments are Righteous, True, Perfect

It’s very important for us to understand God’s judgments and how His judgments really are true and righteous altogether. That we can say they’re perfect, they’re just, they’re righteous, they’re good, they’re true.

And even in our own lives, we can welcome His righteous judgment, and we’ll explain why later, which is not to destroy us, but to redeem us, to purify us, to strengthen us, to bring us to much greater maturity and much more being like Yeshua.

So, the first point I’d like to mention today is that, as I understand it from the scripture, judgment is a lifting of God’s grace, a hedge of grace, like a wall of protection. It’s like bushes that become a wall.

The lifting of God’s hedge of grace or hand of protection because of a refusal to repent of sin. Now, that’s very different than God’s just looking for someone to zap and judge, which some people have this caricature of Him that’s absolutely false.

The God of the Old Testament, which I prefer the word Older Testament, and the God of the Newer Testament is the same God all the way through. He never changed. He never changes. He never will change.

All that He was from the very beginning, He will be at the very end. And many people error and get into problems because they only focus on one little part. For example, if we only look at Yeshua and what he reveals of Himself in the Gospels, we don’t see that there’s a balance of the other side of Him in the Book of Revelation.

So in the Gospels, He’s coming more like the son of Joseph. He’s the servant who went ahead, who goes into the pit, who is raised out of the pit, and all of it suffers, and all of these things. But He returns as a son of David, the mighty conqueror. And in the Book of Revelation, we see the balance of who He is, and that He is a just judge.

He’s not just a gentle shepherd. He is a gentle shepherd, but He’s also a just judge. And that’s where the kings of the earth need to fear the Lord, because He is a just judge.

So God’s not, as we said, he’s not struggling within Himself. He’s not divided. He’s everything he is. He is 100 %. He’s 100 % just, 100 % merciful.

God’s Judgment of Israel

Now look at Isaiah 5 and verse 5. It says there, Now I will tell you what I’m going to do to my vineyard. Who is His vineyard in the context? It’s Israel, the nation of Israel.

There, God says,  I’m going to take away its hedge.

A hedge is what a farmer puts around his crops or animals. It’s bushes that are trimmed to and are very thick and very strong and protect sheep, for example. They can’t get through the hedge and get out, and it also keeps out intruders from the other side.

He said, I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed. I will break down its wall, and it will be trampled. Now, that came true very clearly at the end of the time of the Romans, when they destroyed the temple in this city and basically destroyed most of this land and drove most of the Jewish people away.

He says I will break down its wall. It will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland. Neither prune nor cultivated. Briers and thorns will grow there. I will command the clouds not to rain on it.

But it’s not judgment. It’s more like I’m going to lift my hedge of protection. I’m going to lift my hands of grace. And instead of getting my grace, you will get what you deserve. Do you understand the difference?

It’s a big difference. It’s not like I’m going to send this on you. It’s more, I’m going to command it not to rain on the land, which happened. This land became basically a desert for hundreds and hundreds of years. This land was basically deserted and a desert.

Then He says in verse 7, the vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel. The men of Judah are the garden of His delight. In other words, he’s saying, You’re still my delight. I’m not doing this because I don’t love you anymore.

But because of the bloodshed, because of the distress, because of the unrighteousness, He said, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to lift my gracious hand of protection. And instead of receiving what you do not deserve, you will receive what you do deserve.

But it’s for a period of time, and we’ll see that all of it is with a redemptive purpose. And so we need to realize that, again, he sometimes has to lift His protection out of His great love in order that men would repent and would turn to Him and would be saved.

The Judgments of God are Redemptive

The judgments of God are redemptive, a form of discipline to keep us from that which could destroy us or would destroy us. So He is a loving father who is concerned that we not be destroyed and that we not destroy ourselves.

What father would not protect their child from something that would destroy them? If you train children not to run out in the street in front of a car. Why? Is that some evil, horrible discipline to discipline your child because the little child ran out in front of a car? No. You’re teaching them that they could get killed and run over.

It’s a loving discipline. In Hebrews 12:4-8, it says, In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

Have you completely forgotten that it’s a word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses His son? It says, My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline. Do not lose heart when He rebukes you because the Lord disciplines the one he loves.

That discipline does not mean he doesn’t love me. It means He does love me. He disciplines the one He loves. And he chastens everyone He accepts as His son.

Endure hardship as disciplined. God has treated you as His children for what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone in it goes disciplined, then you’re not legitimate. You’re not a true son and daughter at all.

Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us, and we respected them for it. In other words, they may have been disciplined sometimes in error because they’re human. But the heavenly Father is always perfect. He’s never in error in His discipline.

In other words, if we submit to His discipline, we live, we’re choosing life. God doesn’t just do what he thinks is best. He knows what is best in order that we may share in His wholeness.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time. He’s very honest. But it seems painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

A Childhood Example: The Goodness in Righteous Judgment

Now, I just want to give a quick example of this. Some of you know I’m adopted, and my adopted father was a wonderful man, and I never felt like I wasn’t his son. I always felt like I’m really a son. And one of the ways I knew it was not only his hugs but also his discipline.

When I was a little boy, we lived in South Dakota. It was very near a river.

It would be dangerous to go down there. So my father said, Don’t you go down to that river by yourself, or even with just two or three other little friends your age. You always have to have your older brother or an adult, but someone grown-up needs to be with you.

So one day, my mom and dad were taking a nap and my little friend came over. And my friend said, “Let’s go down to the river and swim.”  And I think I forgot my father’s warning, and I didn’t want to wake him up from his nap.

So I went down with my little friend, and we went swimming in the river. We’re having all kinds of fun. And suddenly, I hear this booming voice, “Richard Mark Ridings!” Now, he usually called me Ricky, and I knew I was in a bit of trouble if he called me Rick and I knew I was in more trouble if he called me Richard, and  I knew I was in more trouble if he called me Richard Mark.

But if it was Richard Mark Ridings, I was in big trouble. And yes, Daddy, and I told you that it’s dangerous to be down here without someone older. You can’t go in the river like this. And I said, But Daddy, I forgot. And he said, Well, I’m going to help your memory.

Actually, he had a belt, and he took his belt off, and he applied it to the part that has padding. And itwas amazing. My memory just suddenly improved. Just like, It just suddenly had a great memory.

I remembered not to go down there again. It just really improved. It did work. It improved my memory.

Now, all of that’s rather funny. But a few weeks later, one of my friends, the same age, probably disobeying his parents, was down there at the river by himself, and he stepped into an area that was almost like quicksand, and he grabbed onto a metal pipe that was nearby, not realizing that it was a pump and got electrified and instantly died.

I had to be a pallbearer at his funeral. The men carried the big ends, but little boys carried the sides.

It was a very sad thing, but I realized, Oh, wow, I’m so glad my dad disciplined me. I could have been with him that day. It could have happened to me. He was protecting me from danger by discipline.

Now, earthly fathers do it as they think best. They hope they’re going to get it right, but he always gets it right. But God understands perfectly every thought, every motive, every deed, whether we really forgot or didn’t forget, whatever. He understands it all. But when he does discipline us in some way, it’s always for our good, and it’s not for our destruction.

Daniel 4: God’s Judgment is for Redemption

There’s a very good picture of this in Daniel 4. Now, our friend Thomas Sandel and some others who go into the UN and are used to these kinds of places, some will say to them, Well, what are you doing in that? That’s Babylon and all of this.

God had Daniel right in Babylon. Why did God send Daniel to Babylon? Because God wanted Babylon to have a chance to hear the truth and to turn from their wickedness to the truth.

God sent Daniel as a voice. Now, sometimes, he was listened to, and sometimes, he was not listened to.

And in Daniel Chapter 4, Daniel prophesies over the evil king Nebuchadnezzar, who, how can you say, almost makes some Hamas look not as bad as they look. He did horrible, horrible things. He was an evil, evil man. And it’s the same demonic spirit that’s working now in Hamas.

But Nebuchadnezzar  was the leader of the whole world. He was the king of Kings, the Emperor over the known world at that time. God sent through Daniel a warning for him to repent and humble himself, but he didn’t.. He just got, like the weed, more arrogant and more proud.

God had told him through Daniel, You’ll eat grass like an animal, like a cow. And he did. Suddenly, he lost his mental abilities. He was driven out. He was in the fields. He was in the rain, the water. His hair became matted. His fingernails grew like claws.

And he ate grass. This man who had been like the big ruler over the whole world is suddenly very, very humbled. But the amazing thing is, at the end of seven years, he came to his senses and he declared the God of Daniel, the God of Abraham, the God of Israel, is the true and the living God who created all things.

And he gave glory to God. And when he did, he was totally restored. And it’s amazing that he actually was restored as leader after seven years like that. So, God’s discipline in his life was a very redemptive thing.

Natural Disasters and Redemption

And some people ask, even with things like, say, certain natural disasters. Now, Yeshua makes clear that certain disasters are not necessarily upon specific people, but they happen because of sin in the world. And yet, even in them, God can bring forth redemption in the midst of things that Satan sends to steal, kill, and destroy.

Let me give you another example. Back many years ago, there was a huge hurricane in the city of New Orleans in the United States.

It was a city known for witchcraft, voodoo, debauchery, and sexual impurity. People came from all over to come into those things because New Orleans was known for that. A lot of the city was evacuated from their homes for quite a long time.

When that disaster hit, some people said, well, is this the judgment of God?

But I felt it was the judgment of God in this redemptive sense that God was allowing people to be uprooted from where they would never listen to anything else, to be displaced somewhere else where they could be presented with the gospel.

So there was a church in Dallas, Texas, who before this, had discovered oil on their land. And that meant they could build a huge, beautiful building.

And as they were getting ready to build this building, the Lord spoke through some of the elders as they were praying and said, we need to build this building bigger. Half of it needs to be like a warehouse to take care of the poor because God is going to send a lot of people here who are going to be in great need, and we need to prepare a great warehouse for them.

So they did. Half of this huge building was a warehouse. And guess where many of the people from New Orleans were sent when the hurricane happened, and they had to leave their homes? It was to the area around this church. And they ministered to them.

They had everything ready. They’re giving out all this food, clothing, all these things, taking care of all these people. And a lot of people came to Jesus.

Now, how many people would say, I’d rather lose my home and come to Jesus than never know Jesus, never know Yeshua? Do you see what I’m saying? It could be seen as a judgment, but it was redemptive.

It allows them to look at eternal things instead of temporary things.

Judgments to Expose Unrighteousness and Uproot It

There are judgments that expose deception, unrighteousness, and injustice to help people come out of them and to come into the truth. Now, many times here, we’ve been praying, Lord, we pray you will expose evil.

And by God’s grace, we’ve seen some miraculous times when that has happened. But we need to realize this is part of the judgment of God, not just to expose but to uproot. Do you realize the difference?

There’s a difference between exposing roots and uprooting. And in Jeremiah 1:9-10, he talks about two prophetic intercessors. He’s talking to Jeremiah as a prophet, and He says:

Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.

Now, there’s both of these. And that’s an important thing as intercessors.

We’re not just called to uproot. We’re also called a plant. We’re not called just to tear down but to build up the Kingdom of God.

How do we do that? He says I will put my words in your mouth. So when His words are put in our mouths, we actually have the authority of His word coming out of our mouth to enforce His kingdom as we were seeing today.

Let heaven come, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And we begin to proclaim into certain situations an uprooting.

Now, some of you who were here will remember last at Roshashana. I shared some things I felt the Lord was saying for the new Hebrew year. And one of them is that this will be a year of many sudden storms that will not only expose roots but will uproot. And that shakings can expose, but greater shakings can actually uproot.

So we are experiencing a lot of shaking. It’s just here where we live in Israel. We’re experiencing a lot of shaking. But God is uprooting.

I believe with all my heart, and we’ve been proclaiming this, that we are to proclaim the word of the Lord and that Hamas, as an evil terrorist entity that has oppressed its own people as well as Israel, will not just be pruned this time and grow back even greater, but it really will be uprooted.

That’s going to take a lot of miracles in terms of international pressures and all kinds of things. But I believe we’re to persevere on this.

Every plant that my father has not planted shall be uprooted. And he shakes all things that can be shaken so that that which cannot shaken will remain.

I remember at the beginning when ISIS first appeared on the scene in Iraq, and they were rolling over one province after another. They seemed unstoppable. They were talking about making their huge caliphate all over the Middle East.

I remember one of our intercessors said at the time that we must remember that God is shaking everything that can be shaken so that that which cannot be shaken will remain. And he said Isis can be shaken because they’re not going to remain.

Now, others things will pop up and other things will happen. It’s not saying there will be no evil in the world. But there are times when God says, enough is enough. The Canaanites, God said to Israel, the cup of their iniquity is not full. So God allowed Israel to be in Egypt for 400 years while the Canaanites filled up the cup of iniquity. And when it was full, God said, okay, that’s it.

Now, they have not turned. They’ve not repented. I’ve given them chances, but they haven’t.

God wants to give truth. He wants to expose, but not just to expose, but uproot. When He just exposes, we can repent and turn, and then we won’t need to be uprooted.

But remember, years ago, Jim Baker in the United States. He had a huge television ministry. It was very, very famous. But there were a lot of things that were wrong, that were covered up: sexual sin and financial mismanagement, really more than mismanagement, stealing of funds and all kinds of things.

I heard from others afterwards that said, well, we went and we warned him God had shown us by the Holy spirit, or they knew things about situations and warned him. And God gave him opportunity after opportunity to repent and change. God exposed it to him. And he could have been like David with Nathan and said, yes, I’ve sinned and I repent, and really turned, and repented. But he didn’t.

And so, in the end, God had to uproot that whole ministry. God allowed him to go to prison. It was proven that he had stolen huge amounts of money, and he went to prison.

But when he got out, he said, That was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I was so deceived, I could not realize that what I was doing was wrong anymore. I had deceived myself to the point where I just had no conscience anymore. But in prison, he said, God has restored me.

And so that’s the goal.

So, why does judgment expose deception? The problem with deception, someone has said, is you’re deceived. You don’t know you’re deceived. It’s not like you’ve hardened your heart so much that you don’t even realize that you’re deceived. That’s why it’s good to pray.

One thing I pray often, I say, Lord, just show me any deception in my life. Show me so I don’t walk in deception.

Now, in Isaiah 19 one of our favorite verses around here that we’re quoting all the time are the verses. At the end of these verses, it says, In that day, there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. From Egypt to Assyria, a highway of worship.

The Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians. And then it says they’ll come together with Israel.

But if we look back further in Isaiah 19, most of it is talking about a time of judgment that will come upon Egypt to get them to that point of becoming His people. It talks about this starting at verse 2,

And I will stir up Egyptians against Egyptians, and they will fight, each against another and each against his neighbor, city against city, kingdom against kingdom; and the spirit of the Egyptians within them will be emptied out, and I will confound their counsel; and they will inquire of the idols and the sorcerers, and the mediums and the necromancers; and I will give over the Egyptians into the hand of a hard master, and a fierce king will rule over them, declares the Lord God of hosts.

And then later on, in verses 9,10:

The workers in combed flax will be in despair, and the weavers of white cotton. Those who are the pillars of the land will be crushed, and all who work for pay will be grieved. In other words, a great economic collapse. Now, that’s pretty heavy stuff. I don’t know how much has already been fulfilled in history and how much has yet to be filled.

But before Egypt becomes His people, He allows an evil oppressor to be over them. When they cry out to the Lord because of their oppressors, He will send them a savior and a defender, and He will rescue them.

Verse 21 says, “The Lord will make Himself known to the Egyptians, and in that day, they will acknowledge the Lord.” And Verse 22 says, “The Lord will strike Egypt with a plague, but then He will heal them. They will turn to the Lord, and He will respond to their pleas and heal them.”

So, in other words, when God lifts His protective hand of grace upon a people, then what normally happens happens. But he says, I’m not doing that to destroy Egypt. I’m doing it so Egypt will call out to me.

And Egypt will no longer be under Pharaoh, the spirit of death. It will be under Yeshua and the spirit of life. And He will bless him saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt, my people. ‘

So there’s this glorious, glorious end to that story. They actually will listen. They actually will, in the middle of it, cry out and say, We’re tired of consulting spiritists and medium and empowering the spirit of death. We cry out to the God of life to save us. And He reveals that, to their surprise, He’s the God of Israel, which is what a lot of them rejected.

In the end, they serve the God of Israel, and they choose life, and they’re redeemed. And so sometimes things, as God lifts this hedge of grace, this hand of grace, of protection, and allows us to get what we deserve, it prepares us to come out of deception, out of lies, to see the truth.

And that’s what we’re praying for Gaza right now, that not only will Hamas be uprooted, but the power of their lies will be uprooted. The power of the spirit of death working through them will be uprooted. And then instead, the people of Gaza would choose the Lord of life, would have a revelation of Yeshua and come to him and choose life rather than death.

God Judges Sometimes to Prepare People to Turn to Him

Now, I wanted to just give a quick example of how sometimes what is a judgment in the sense of God withdrawing His hand of grace and allowing these things to happen, prepares people to turn.

Over the years, I’ve worked a lot into Algeria. We have a good Algerian friend who will be actually with a suit at a gathering in Dubai. I met him in 1987, I was at a Bible College, and they’d ask me to speak in Brussels, Belgium.

I got up, and the Lord said, Say there’s someone here tonight who has planned to leave this Bible College. God led you here, and you’re ready to leave, but God didn’t tell you to leave, and He has some good things for you here, and you’re to stay.

And so then I taught a whole thing on worship. At the end, this Algerian guy came up to me and said, I had my suitcase to leave right before the meeting, and I was ready to go out the door, and somebody said, Oh, there’s a guy speaking on worship tonight. I love worship, so I wanted to come and hear you talk about worship.

And he said I was ready to leave because culturally they’re so different, Europeans are so different from us. It was just really hard for me and I was going to leave. But he said, I realized God wants me to stay.

Then he asked me if we could get together regularly and talk about worship and prayer, the tabernacle of David and all these things I was talking about. So I said, yes, we can. And we became friends.

When he had come to that Bible school in his area of Alger, there were only five believers in the whole region, a whole huge region in the high mountains of Alger. There had been years and years of ministry in that region, and only five people had come to the Lord.

Now, God will bless those who ministered all that time, faithfully all that 20 years. It’s a pretty big thing to give 20 years to see five people come to the Lord. But he was one of them. But a gun was held against his head, and he left Alger, saying, I’m never going back.

Long story short, after three years of worship and prayer and different things God was doing in his life, he said, Rick, the Lord spoke to me today and said, go back to Algeria and see a breakthrough there. He said, the Lord told me, if I can find one other of the four others who will pray with me and worship with me every Friday night, all night long, we will see a breakthrough in Alger.

And so he went back, and only one said yes. The other said, No way. But this one said, yes. And for six months, they would worship and pray together all night long, every Friday night.

At the end of a period of time, the Lord said, The main thing holding it back here is not Islam. It’s the spirit of witchcraft. Pray that witches will be exposed and uprooted in your region. They did.

Suddenly, a witch was caught trying to kill a baby and sacrifice a baby. Their culture loves children. They rose up against them, and they cast all the witches out of the region. Immediately, the Holy Spirit started moving, and people started coming to the Lord.

God just moved in a powerful way. But do you know why? What God also did in God’s sovereign timing is he had allowed all of Algeria to be attacked by Islamic extremists.

Now, this is a country with no connection with Israel. It’s a 99% Muslim country. And the extremist Muslims came and attacked them and killed over 100,000 people because they refused to become extremists. But what that did was it prepared a whole generation that said, We don’t want Islam.

The mask had been taken off. And they saw what it really was. And because of that, a lot of young people, when I first started going there with him, would say, I don’t know about this Jesus, but I know I don’t want Islam because of what they had seen.

So out of that judgment, it exposed the the deception and the lies of the Quran to them. And they were ready. So then when the Holy spirit began to move and there began to be miracles and signs and healings and all of this, they were ripe. They were just ready.

One after another would come to the Lord. It was just so amazing how easy they were to come to the Lord.

God’s Judgment in the New Testament

Now, some people would say, But I don’t think God judges like in the New Testament. But look at Acts 13:6-12. It says, “They traveled through the whole island, talking about Cyprus, until they came to Paphos.

There, they met a Jewish sorcerer and false prophet named Bar-Jesus, Bar-Jesuah, who was an attendant of the Proconsul, Sergius Paulus, the Proconsul, an intelligent man sent for Barnabas and Saul because he wanted to hear the word of the Lord.

But Elymus, the sorcerer, this Bar-Jesuah, against Jesuah, opposed them. In other words, he’s in the spirit of anti-Messiah, the spirit of Antichrist.

Then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at him and said, ‘You are a child of the devil, an enemy of everything that is right. You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?

Now, the hand of the Lord is against you. You’re going to be blind, and for a time, you will be unable to see the light of the sun. And immediately, mist of darkness came over him, and he groped about seeking someone to lead him by the hand.”

Then it says, “When the Proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was amazed at the teaching of the Lord.”

So there are times where God exposes deception, takes the mask off of evil so that people could see this is just plain old evil. God gives many warnings and many opportunities to repent before He sends judgment. Even though judgment is more of a lifting off of grace and protection.

You’re warned, you’re warned, you’re warned.

Removal of Grace Can Lead People to Faith

Though the Lord has sent all his servants, the prophets, to you again and again, you have not listened or paid attention. They said, Turn, turn now, each of you, from your evil ways and your evil practices, and you can stay in the land the Lord gave to you and your fathers forever and ever.

‘Do not follow other gods to serve and worship them. ‘ ‘Do not provoke me to anger with what your hands have made; then I will not harm you. ‘ ‘But you did not listen to me, declares the Lord, ‘ ‘and you have provoked me with what your hands have made, and you have brought harm to yourselves.

So, in the end, God didn’t bring harm to them. They brought harm to themselves because God let them get what they deserved because they refused warning after warning after warning. I mean, the most obvious picture of this is Pharaoh. Why did God send so many plagues?

It wasn’t so we’d have a lot of drops of wine on the plate at Pesach, at Passover. God sent all those plagues, and they increased in intensity because He loved Pharaoh and He wanted Pharaoh to turn like Nebuchadnezzar did.

He gave him an opportunity time after time after time. And Moses would come back in, and he’d say, No, I’m not going to let the people go to worship God. And he would harden his heart.

The Bible says he hardened his heart, hardened his heart, and at the end, it says God hardened his heart. And I’ve heard skeptics say, Well, that a God would not harden the heart of someone. He only was declaring what Pharaoh had already done to himself.

Pharaoh hardened his heart, hardened his heart, hardened his heart, hardened his heart. At a certain point, God said, In my perfect knowledge, I know that you, Pharaoh, have so hardened your heart that you will never repent. And so I declare your heart is hardened.

It wasn’t that God took a soft heart and hardened it. God just spoke forth, This is the truth. You’ve hardened your heart to a point of no return now. And so then Pharaoh had to perish with his chariot in the sea. And that was it. It was over. God took out that evil spider. God took that evil spider out of the spider web.

Now God is very gracious, has many ways to do that. Some of you have heard me share this story before in Sudan, how we prayed with the Sudanese refugees in Mount Carmel, and And we complained over the nations that were represented there, that the blood of Yeshua was put upon each evil spider, where there were evil rulers, and that they’d either repent or turn to the Lord, and turn to the Lord or be removed.

And the next day, the New York Times headline said, Albasir, the evil spider of Sudan, has been removed from his spider web. Now, in this case, he wasn’t killed. He went into exile. They had tried time after time after time to do a coup, but it didn’t work. But this time, it did.

There finally comes a point at which God judges, and He removed the spider from the spider web and removed him from power so that Sudan then made peace with Israel and stopped being a terror nation.

So in Exodus 14:17, I will gain glory through Pharaoh and all his army, through his chariots and his horsemen. The Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I gain glory through Pharaoh.

How many believe God can gain glory through Hamas? Is that what we’re praying for? God, do it in such a way that everyone knows it was not just to the power of man, but you did something.

You did something to the evil spiders. You did something to the evil spiderwebs. And gain glory for your name. Then the Egyptians will know that I’m the Lord when I gain glory through Pharaoh, his chariots, his horsemen.

And when the Israelis, even the Israelis, when they saw the great power the Lord displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and put their trust in Him. Hallelujah. Is that going to happen in Israel? We believe that.