Living in The Time of God's Judgment - Bill Perkins -www.compass.org
"There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven." Eccl. 3:1
In the not-too-distant future the world will change suddenly and dramatically.
At the end of each of God's specific time periods on earth, referred to as "dispensations," God judges the earth for failure to obey God's commands. There's a penalty to pay and no one on earth gets out of God's judgment.
Examples of God's worldwide judgment in the first three dispensations-
1) In the first Dispensation of Innocence, God's command was very simple for Adam and Eve: "Don't eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil."
But they disobeyed, ate the fruit, and the result was that death entered the earth. God judged the earth by allowing every human to be infected with sin, separating them from a righteous God.
2) In the second Dispensation of Conscience,
God's command was to be moral, which included the command to marry one man to one woman. That command was broken and a devastating worldwide flood wiped out everyone but those on Noah's Ark.
3) In the third Dispensation of Government,
God said fill the earth. But instead of following God's command, the people of earth stayed in one place and built the Tower of Babel. So God judged the earth by mixing the languages.
Each time a dispensation ended, the whole earth was affected. The people alive at the time of those dispensation-ending judgments were affected whether they knew about God's commands or not. God never changed, but He changed how He dealt with humans on the earth.
The Flood of Noah was God's worldwide judgment.
I can't imagine what it would have been like to be alive at the time of Noah when God shut the door of the Ark and the waters burst forth from below and flooded the earth.
The people of that day were going about their daily lives, ignoring God's warnings and had no clue what was dead ahead.
One minute things were normal. The next minute the foundations of the world were shaken. People certainly weren't standing around watching the water rise, wondering what to do. Rather, in an instant, the earth was moving under their feet, buildings were collapsing, the wind was howling and people were screaming.
The amount of water that came out of the ground all around the earth would have sent scores of tsunamis hundreds of feet high that traveled hundreds of miles inland, all while the earth shook mightily.
But this was not an earthquake like we think of today, where only one area is decimated. The whole earth shook as it was quickly covered with water.
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