Pastor Sullivan's Blog

1)          By nature we fear God’s judgment. Fearing God, that is, being terrified of Him and His judgments, is the sinful flesh’s natural reaction to God. After choosing to disobey the Lord God in Eden, Moses records the first result of sin. “ Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden .” (Genesis 3:8) They knew their crime and they knew the punishment affixed to that trespass, “ in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. ” (Genesis 2:17) Since that moment mankind, if he does not suppress his conscience, lives in terror of God’s judgment. Adam’s sin is our sin. We do not rightly fear God, nor do we love Him above all things, nor do we really trust Him in all things. This lack of righteousness, inherited from Adam, leads us to commit our own sins. Some revealed. Some hidden. All of them known to God, who is Judge. The author of Hebrews writes, “ There is no creature hidden from His...

1)          Jesus foretells the destruction of Jerusalem in today’s gospel lesson. At the beginning of Matthew 24 Jesus remarked that a day will come when the Jerusalem Temple will be torn down stone by stone. The destruction of the Temple would amount to a complete destruction of the Jewish people. Jerusalem was a fortress. The Temple, with its Most Holy place, marked the gracious presence of God amongst the Jewish people. No Temple. No people of God. No more sacrifices for sin. No more cleansing from ritual defilement. No more mercy. The Temple had been destroyed before. Solomon’s temple was torn down by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 586 B.C. The Jews were carted off to Babylon for a seventy year exile, punishment for their continual backsliding and willful idolatry of the heart. The Lord allowed them to return and the temple was rebuilt by the Davidic governor Zerubbabel. That temple was defiled by Antiochus IV of Syria, when he took Jerusa...