I see posts expressing mixed emotions of angst and eagerness over what some view as Revelation’s end-time seeming to be playing out in the world today. I just am not an apocalypse speculator, neither afraid, nor eager. I just take each day as it comes, trusting God with it, as well as each tomorrow.
When I think of God’s destruction of the evil and broken world of Noah’s day with the flood and God’s promise not to destroy it again with water, it occurs to me that the point then was to destroy evil. Surely, there was a lot of collateral death of animals and innocent (though not righteous) people, perhaps. God took those, I’d venture to say, straight to heaven as they drowned. Afterall, God knows and judges hearts.
I think about the expectation that God will destroy this evil world with fire next time. And I remember how the Holy Spirit manifested His permanent arrival at Pentecost to abide with believers in Christ as tongues of fire resting upon their heads. God initiated the sanctifying, imparted righteousness in Christ to us as an adjunct to the justifying, imputed righteousness we received from God through Christ. I think God has been destroying evil in the world through fire since that day. It’s been somewhat like a smoldering, growing, heat and light generating movement from heart to heart and generation to generation ever since. What I am looking for is the breakout of fire of the Holy Spirit all around the world as the smoldering pockets become raging infernos and people all over the world are awakened to the power of God already at work in the world. Destroying evil through sanctification from within humankind is far more like the way I think God intends to renew the earth. The fiery physical manifestations we observe with our eyes in the world are merely a sensory preview of how the spiritual conflagration is going to follow a similar pattern. The Spirit reveals it. It is not as obvious to those who lack the eyes to see and the ears to hear. They see only the physical things of the world. They won’t know it’s even happening until the smoldering of righteous hearts reaches critical mass and spontaneous combustion of the Holy Spirit comes upon and consumes all who are open and willing. Others will succumb to the evil of the world and go to the hell in which satan is confined. CBB 9/20/26