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Ezekiel 18:4 (NKJV) “Behold, all souls are Mine; The soul of the father As well as the soul of the son is Mine; The soul who sins shall die.”

Ezekiel 18:32 (NKJV) “For I have no pleasure in the death of one who dies,” says the Lord GOD. “Therefore turn and live!”

These two verses bracket chapter 18 of the book of Ezekiel, the Old Testament prophet who wrote during the Babylonian exile of the Jewish nation.

The divine declaration in verse 4 is, as the saying goes, hated by all the right entities: atheists, unbelievers, and Satan with all his demonic minions. Not only is God’s unapologetic expression of His ownership of all humanity repugnant to these parties, but His pronouncement of inescapable death to unrepentant sinners sends them into fits of rebellious and self-defeating rage.

The very idea of being under God’s authority is utterly repugnant to those who refuse to recognize their own sinful hopelessness. As Jesus said, those who will not believe the Gospel love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil (John 3:19).

These sin-lovers delight in accusing God of being hateful, tyrannical, vengeful, murderous and unfair. I know. I was one of them.

But notice what they willfully overlook: the contents of verse 32. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Instead, He implores them to “turn and live!”

We all come into this world as sinners, inheriting that unavoidable propensity from our forefather Adam. Our sin nature is so firmly entrenched that the Son of God Himself had to come into the world and die for us so that a way of escape from our inevitable eternal punishment could be opened. Our default destination is everlasting hell fire, unless we put our faith in Jesus Christ.

That is the underlying meaning of God’s call to “turn and live!”

Turn from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. Turn from unending torment to unending life and blessing. That is what it means to be saved.

And this salvation is ours for the asking. There is nothing we can do to earn it. No action we can take on our own to disavow our sin nature. Our only choice is to surrender to the One who truly does own us. And believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.

Remember this when you are tempted to doubt God’s indescribable goodness and mercy… 

“The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)

In Him,

Bill L

When the wicked spring up like grass, And when all the workers of iniquity flourish, It is that they may be destroyed forever. (Psalms 92:7 NKJV)

I have often asked myself, especially lately, why evil and wickedness seem so prevalent. Everywhere we look, unless we stop up our ears and put blinders on, we see and hear things that even ten years ago would have been unthinkable.

The Psalms are full of the same type of question, most boiling down to this: “Oh Lord, why do you allow the wicked to prosper and to oppress the upright?”

The verse above is a partial answer.

Among other purposes, God allows wickedness and evil so that those who chose to follow that path can no longer disguise their unrighteousness. It is evident to all who pay attention. It also serves to increase the evil-doers condemnation. 

At the same time, the Lord always leaves a path open for redemption and forgiveness: and that path is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. 

A sincere confession of belief in Jesus is ALWAYS accompanied by changed behavior. A convenient word to describe this divinely empowered change is repentance. In the original language of Scripture, this is derived from a nautical term that means to make a course correction.

In a practical sense, it is an aboutface; a turning away from sin and a turning toward God and His righteousness.

Please note that repentance is NOT penance, which is doing something in our own strength to somehow make up for our sin. Penance is impossible. It would be like someone traveling back in time to erase something that has already happened.

Faith in Christ and His finished work on the Cross is the ONLY basis for forgiveness, for wiping the slate clean.

For those who chose not to repent and continue in their iniquity, there is only one outcome: “that they may be destroyed forever.”

And that destruction in not annihilation, else it would occur in a moment in time and not endure forever.

No, the destruction that God intends for the wicked is eternal torment in the fires of Hell, where “… the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night…" (Revelation 14:11)

God provides answers to all our heart-deep questions plainly in the Bible. All we need do is immerse ourselves in His Word and we can understand what is happening all around us.

In Him,

Bill L