Sabbath study, v: the glorious justice God promises to those who follow Him to the end
Too much woe for your human soul to witness and/or bear? Understand the appointed end destination of the righteous.
In my first sabbath study post, it was explained why providential decree permits not only the continuation but full ripening1 of human wickedness:
Let’s now consider and hopefully take into heartfelt internalized understanding why any human being is supposed to live a “quietist” life in difficult-to-sustain patience, meekness, and nonviolent pacifism. Surely in a world plagued by endless Anglo-Nazi barbarism manifested in the Epstein-Zionist pedophilic torture of innocent little girls, sadistic genocides of Arab and African human populations, and neverending political elitist abuses, injustice, and lack of accountability waxing from worse to worst, any expectation that the average person is just supposed to “live an individually quiet life,” a.k.a. one that would be separated from mass mobilized popular call-to-action movements for human-led liberation, is just absurd… right?
For anyone who is wise enough to understand that:
God is above men, as the heavens are higher than the earth2
every event happening in the universe is fully naked before God3
every human being must one day appear before the judgment seat of God to receive their deserved fate for what was one in the flesh4
…the question might still remain: what will God do to make sure all His righteous adherents who repented in His Son Jesus Christ, who were victims of human-inflicted grotesquely evil cruelty, will be personally avenged in vindication before their tormentors?
At the absolute-final, universal scale encompassing all humans who ever lived, that will of course be Final Judgment where all the wicked are judged and subsequently thrown into a lake of fire and brimstone5 annihilating them to ashes.6 But what about for the very meantime to comfort and assure this present human generation, and all that happens in between, seeing the consummation of the penultimate events leading up to the consolidation of the mark of the beast is drawing nigh?
The apostle John explained:7
Beloved, now, we are children of God, and it was not yet manifested what we shall be, and we have known that if he may be manifested, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is; and every one who is having this hope on him, doth purify himself, even as he is pure.
So what does it mean exactly that the faithful follower of God, who walks in the footsteps of His appointed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and redeemed in Christ’s shed blood from all sin, will ultimately be made like God? Obviously it is not to imply that any created being will literally become a god, but rather that some overall fundamental defining attribute will be reflective of God’s nature. It is stated in the Psalms (and quoted by Paul the Apostle in his Epistle to the Hebrews):8
Bless, O my soul, Jehovah! Jehovah, my God, Thou hast been very great, honour and majesty Thou hast put on. Covering himself [with] light as a garment, stretching out the heavens as a curtain, Who is laying the beam of His upper chambers in the waters, Who is making thick clouds His chariot, Who is walking on wings of wind, making His messengers—the winds, His ministers—the flaming fire.
(“messengers” here, as rendered in the YLT, is simply an alternative translation synonymous with “angels”)
Jehovah is consistently affirmed—in both Testaments—as a “consuming fire.”9 Additionally, in Jesus’s earthly ministry, the Messiah stated:10
For when they may rise out of the dead, they neither marry nor are they given in marriage, but are as messengers who are in the heavens.
What will the Parousia be like for the redeemed who rise in the first resurrection11 to meet the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the air?12 Let’s see!13
In that day I make the leaders of Judah as a hearth of fire among trees, and as a torch of fire in a sheaf, and they have consumed—on the right and on the left—all the peoples round about, and Jerusalem hath inhabited again her place in Jerusalem.
This apocalyptic prophecy from Zechariah is referring to none other than the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, where God will transform all of His redeemed saints on the earth and under the earth in “the twinkling of an eye”14 into becoming as the angels in heaven, being made unto a flame of fire resembling the Almighty God (who is a consuming fire lest you forget) they worship.
And what will happen to the kingdoms of the earth, the wicked human empires? The prophet Obadiah declared:15
And the house of Jacob hath been a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau for stubble, and they have burned among them, and they have consumed them, and there is not a remnant to the house of Esau, for Jehovah hath spoken.
One must properly grasp the type-antitype interwoven continuity between the Old and New Testaments: the house of Jacob in antitype is the spiritual Israel of God a.k.a. the faithful adherents of God redeemed through the shed blood of Jesus Christ unto everlasting salvation and who practice the justice and mercy of Jehovah from out of a convicted and converted heart. God’s one body of unified believers—out of every ethnicity and nationality, of one accord—is the antitypical twelve tribes of Israel16 where the house of Judah represents those raised up in Christian households, while the house of Joseph represents the ingrafted believers who grew up in the earlier part of their lives as unbelievers—here is the full explanation:
Note that in the prophecy from God declared by Obadiah, the antitypical picture of the Second Coming signifies the wicked masses in humanity as typified by Edom. While it would be difficult to concisely with assurance identify exactly which earthly ideological “faction” would be antitypical Edom (especially as it more specifically concerns a study of Dan. 11:40-45 in antitype), the larger important takeaway from the very meanwhile (as of typing on this sabbath) is that anyone who seeks after the righteousness of God as expounded sola scriptura in the Bible to follow after from the bottom of their heart in their everyday life can rest assured in the faith of this providential guarantee: the redeemed righteous will one day be made unto a spirit, a flame of fire, like unto their Creator who became a quickening spirit17 and is a consuming fire, a jealous God who loved His faithful adherents enough to vicariously die for them on the cross to grant them everlasting life through His shed blood, and who ultimately will deliver them from the hands of their unrepentant oppressors and tormentors, whose end is to be extirpated into annihilation by the wrath of just God of the whole universe.
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. —Romans 12:19
Before His indignation who doth stand? And who riseth up in the heat of His anger? His fury hath been poured out like fire, and the rocks have been broken by Him. —Nahum 1:6
Cf. Jl. 3:13.
Isa. 55:8-9.
Heb. 4:12-13.
II Cor. 5:10.
Rev. 20:15.
Mal. 4:3.
I Jn. 3:2-3.
Ps. 104:1-4; Heb. 1:7.
Deut. 4:24, 9:3; Heb. 12:29.
Mk. 12:25; cf. Matt. 22:30; Lk. 20:35-36.
Cf. Rev. 20:1-6.
I Thess. 4:16-17.
Zech. 12:6.
I Cor. 15:50-51.
Obad. 18.
Cf. Jas. 1:1.
I Cor. 15:45.