Please open your Bibles to 2 Peter chapter 2. We're going to pick up at the end of verse 3 and go to the beginning of verse 10. That's the way it works out. We're going to fit between those verses. 2 Peter 2, beginning in the second part of verse 3, listen now to God's holy, inerrant, and life-giving word. The apostle writes, their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep. For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment, if he did not spare the ancient world but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly, If by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly. And if he rescued righteous lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked, for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard. Then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority. Rest with us, the flowers fall, and the word of our God abides forever. Amen. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the truth that is in your word. We thank you for the warning in advance of judgment. Oh, we thank you for the offer of salvation, your work of grace through Jesus Christ, so that in him we might be saved. Give us ears to hear. Help us to understand, Lord, this passage, and help us to take it to heart. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. The Italian region of Campania is dotted with scenic villages bursting with the riches of art and history. But Campania is also home to the active volcano, Mount Vesuvius, from which pearly strands of smoke waft into the crystal blue sky. Looking at Vesuvius in that beautiful Italian landscape, you can hardly imagine it would ever do any harm. And yet nearby the mountain, archaeologists have unearthed the ancient ruins of the Roman city Pompeii. which suddenly was destroyed with all its people when that mountain exploded, actually about a decade after Peter wrote this letter, 79 A.D. And the English preacher, Archibald Brown, tells of visiting Pompey. Soon after its excavation, he says, you went into the houses and the frescoes on the walls were still fresh. It had just been opened up. It had been encased in ash and lava all those centuries. He said on the table there was a bottle of olive oil and the oil was still in it. But there also were the bodies of the occupants lying in the poses they were in the moment the ash struck them." And you see, he said emerging from that scene, he looked back up at Vesuvius with new eyes. He said, it seemed to me as I stood there that I heard Vesuvius speak, I can do it again. I can do it again. Well, as the Apostle Peter considers in this chapter the danger of judgment that is awaiting the false teachers who afflict his church, he employs the same logic that applies to Mount Vesuvius. And Peter's going to recount in these verses cataclysms recorded in the Old Testament, drawing the conclusion that those who persist in sin and rebellion to God are in dire peril of final judgment. You see, he looks upon these ancient judgments the way that Archibald Brown looked at Mount Vesuvius, smoking Mount Vesuvius. And Peter concludes, the Lord knows how to judge those who reject his authority and engage in wicked deeds. Now of all the Bible doctrines despised today, and there's so many Bible doctrines that are despised today, none may be more despised than the Bible's teaching of God's fierce judgment on unforgiven sinners. The British skeptic agnostic Bertrand Russell complained that there was a serious defect in the character of Jesus Christ. He said that defect is that Jesus believed in hell. And influenced by the culture today, increasing numbers of Christians question the biblical notion of divine wrath. And the argument today is mainly that it just doesn't consist, it doesn't fit together with the New Testament teaching of God's love. And so there's this attack, even within the church, on the doctrine of God's judgment. But you see Bertrand Russell was right. when he noted Jesus as the Bible's most explicit, most ferocious teacher of eternal punishment. It was Jesus who said, do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Matthew 10, 28. Well, according to the Bible, the wrath of God in divine judgment does not conflict with the love of God. Rather, God judges because He loves His law, because He loves His truth, because He loves His people. Moreover, God's judgment serves as the means by which he delivers his people out from a sinful world. Now, second Peter is particularly focusing on God's judgment as his way of overcoming the false teachers. He's been talking about how they deceive and exploit the unwary people. It's going to be through judgment that God expresses both his hatred of sin and his upholding of the integrity of his word. Well, this passage has two intertwined messages, and the primary one proclaims the certainty of God's judgment. He's going to tell us that the Lord knows how to judge. And he said of the false teachers in verse three, their condemnation from long ago is not idle, their destruction is not asleep. You see, Peter in verse two, he'd been lamenting the problem with the false teachers is that they're successful. They get these big followings and they exploit them and they ruin the evangelism of the church because the world doesn't want anything to do with people who look like that. And it's a terrible success that they have. We might expect Peter to be bitter about this situation the way that Asaph in Psalm 73 is bitter. I love Asaph in Psalm 73. The Lord is good to Israel, but I'm mad at him. I'm fed up, because the young gods are having a great time. Just go ahead and read it. Actually, Brendan's preaching it tonight, so come. It's a great psalm, Psalm 73. But he's indignant towards the Lord, because, I love this line, because they're fat and sleek. I don't think that would be praise today. I envy you, because you're fat and sleek. You wouldn't say that. It's Old Testament abundance. And it's gnawing at him until Asaph said, then I went into the sanctuary of the Lord and I remembered their end. Oh, that's right, they're going to hell. Maybe I shouldn't envy them. Don't forget that. Why am I resenting it when God's got them on a slippery slope? I don't want to be on that. Well, Peter skips all the steps that Asaph had. And he draws the same conclusion. He's frustrated about the false teachers. But he says, their destruction. Oh, it's like Mount Vesuvius. It may look like it's just sitting there, but don't forget those tendrils of smoke. It is not asleep. Now, the way that Peter knows this, Peter knows that the false teachers are destined for destruction. He knows this because he's been reading his Bible. And he's seen it in the Word of God. And his argument is going to take the form of an if-then construction. He says, if God did not spare sinners long ago, he's going to give three examples of it from biblical history. If he judged them, then he's going to judge you. He's going to judge sinners again. That's his argument. Then the Lord knows how to judge the wicked. Verse 9. God has put first forth in judgment, just like Mount Vesuvius, with its deadly explosions, and he can be relied upon to do so again. Now, Peter's following the logic is if you really wanted to predict someone's future action, you look at their past actions. You look at their track record to see what they're going to do, particularly when they're a sovereign god who has the attribute of immutability. If God does not change and cannot change, being perfect in all His ways, His track record is an extraordinarily good way to anticipate His future behavior. Well, 1 Peter turns in verse 4 to God's judgment of fallen angels. For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell, verse 4, Now the Bible reveals that a portion of the angels whom God made in such splendor, a portion of them fell under Satan's rebellion and they lost their holy estate. Now we're not given details. One thing about angels is that the Bible leaves the vast majority of issues about angels a mystery. We're to keep it that way. The Bible is just not about the angelic order. And so we are given details of these things. However, it's likely here that Peter is referring to those events recorded in Genesis 6 as occurring right before Noah's flood. Genesis 6-2 says that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive and they took as their wives any that they chose. Now there's different ways to interpret that statement, there's legitimately different ways, but we know that the Jewish tradition held that the sons of God there refers to the angels, that's a common biblical way of talking to them, and what these wicked angels did was they lusted after human women, they took up human bodies in order to engage in illicit sex with them. That is what the Jewish tradition states. Now what's interesting is, there's an intertestamental book called First Enoch. Not a Bible book, it's not inerrant, and it records Jewish tradition. And in the New Testament book of Jude, with its parallel passage to Peter here, Jude actually quotes from First Enoch. making the point, presenting the argument, that this does represent those angels, those fallen angels, those evil angels, who engage in those liberties with human women. Actually, when I was preaching Genesis, when you're just interpreting it straight up, you actually don't likely come to that opinion. But then you read the New Testament, you go, well, that's what the version that ends up in the Bible is the right one. There's your interpretive rule. And Peter and Jude both take the view that this is what happened. These were the angels who sinned in that way. Now the point is not to embellish what exactly was the sin, how did it happen, how does an angel do all that? No, the point is simply that when they sinned, God sent them into hell. That's the point. Peter doesn't use the word for hell that he normally uses. The normal word is the Greek hades. He actually uses here the word for Tartarus. He says in the Greek that God cast them into Tartarus. Now if you know any Greek mythology, you know that in Greek mythology Tartarus is the bottom region of hell reserved for the most wicked and rebellious men and gods. Now, as Peter uses this term, he's not buying into the Tartarus myth. He's not endorsing the myth. He's using the idiom. And in that Greco-Roman culture, what he wants to describe, the depths of hell, the underworld, and a place of darkness and torment, the word is Tartarus. That's the cultural term where he's interacting. And like that myth, Peter says that God committed the fallen angels, look at verse four, to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment. Now some manuscripts say, not in chains of gloomy darkness, but in dungeons of gloomy darkness. It's hard to tell which one's right, but it doesn't really matter. The fact is that the angels, here's the point. These angels are beings of great glory and power, and people will say, you know, God would never judge human beings, because mankind is awesome, and we're God's highest creature. No, actually, we're His second highest creature. The angels were super awesome, and He did not hesitate to cast them into hell when they sinned. That's the point. Robert Mounts announced, guarded in the dark dungeons of the underworld, these angels await their doom. God has judged. When they sin, he casts them into hell." That's what Peter says. Now it is worth noting that Peter's citations of these events closely resemble the similar discussion in the book of Jude. In fact, the passages are so similar that it's widely believed that one must have drawn from the other. I'm not completely persuaded of that, but I understand why. In fact, the most common theory is that Peter wrote after Jude and Peter drew his material from Jude. That's possible. There's no problem with that if he did. Inspiration of the Holy Spirit allows that. But there are many differences, in fact, and one of the differences is that in contrast to Jude, Peter, his second example he uses is the judgment of sinners through Noah's flood. That's unique here. First, he says, I'll give you God's track record about how he's judged. First of the fallen angels, but secondly, he speaks of, he says now, of how if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserve Noah. That is clearly talking about the great flood. Now one reason why I think Peter might have brought Noah's flood into it is because he's talking about false teachers. As we will see, Noah is an example of a righteous preacher. And so that contrast is being made. Well, if the false angels represent beings of glory who sinned and God wasn't deterred by that, he cast them into hell. Well, Noah's flood shows God's willingness regarding the scope of his judgment. He destroyed the entire human race, minus eight people, for sin. That's the point here. Archibald Brown was writing about this a hundred years ago when the big claim was the universal fatherhood of God. You'll still hear it. God wouldn't judge anyone because he's the father of all peoples. God is father, but he does not have a father-child relationship with anyone but believers in the Lord Jesus, as the Bible is clear. And Brown points out that, he says, you look at this situation, the great flood where he wiped out the entire human race minus eight people. He says, does that look like the universal fatherhood? Does that look like an indulgent father who knows nothing of righteous indignation against sin? No, he was righteously indignant. He destroyed the whole world in his wrath apart from eight people. Genesis 6-5 explains that the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. It's a great statement of total depravity. Only evil all the time. And so God was willing in His holy wrath to judge and destroy a vast number of people. It's going to go on in 2 Peter. If you make the argument, oh, there will be no second coming, there will be no destruction of the world. Well, there already has been once. That's His argument here. If you think that you may safely provoke God through unbelief, through a rebellious lifestyle, Noah's flood tells you to think again. In fact, Jesus used this very scenario as a type, a pattern for what is going to happen when he returns. He says, for as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man." Matthew 24, 37 to 39. Well, Peter's third example concerns the destruction of those evil cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, verse 6. If by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, he condemned them to extinction. Now Genesis 19 tells us of how God sent two angels to Sodom because Abraham's nephew Lot was living there. And they were sent to warn him of that judgment. Now when he arrived, they took on human form. And when they arrived, so evil was the city that these debased men sought to sexually abuse them. And so Lot had to protect them from homosexual assault in the streets outside his house in wicked Sodom. Well, after that event, the Lord judged the cities. They escaped. And then, Genesis 19.24, then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. Those two cities together with the whole plain, all the villages were utterly destroyed. In fact, we're told later on in Genesis 19-28 that Abraham went over and he looked from the heights down into the valley and the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace. Now, through the well-known fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, now Peter is emphasizing the eternal quality of God's wrath. quality of his hatred of sin and judgment. You know, even today you go to the former location, the Dead Sea, and you will see desolation. It's a unique place and there's pools of pitch around it, bearing witness to the finality of God's hatred of sin. Peter's contemporary, Philo of Alexandria, wrote this. He said, even to this day, Peter's time, there are seen there monuments of unprecedented destruction that fell upon them in ruins and ashes and sulfur and smoke and the dusky flame, which still goes up from the ground as of a fire smoldering beneath. the eternal nature of God's judgment and wrath. Moreover, Sodom, by the way, you know, was known for its wealth, its materialism, its opulence, just like our culture. And the people were led by those devices to forget about God and his wrath. They only remembered too late. Now, the point of these examples, remember, is to illustrate God's track record. So Peter's going to come to his conclusion in verse nine. If the judgment of angels, if Noah's flood, if the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, then the Lord knows how to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment. See, what he's saying is that rebellious and sinful men and women will never escape from God's judgment apart from faith in Jesus Christ. It may seem to you that, why should I bother? People actually say this. God hasn't struck me dead yet. Vesuvius hasn't exploded yet, smoldering though it is. They may not see that. But God's not going to judge me. No, He will. He has a plan for the judgment of every sinners. There will be no way to evade Him. By ignoring Him, you will not escape Him. When he strikes, when he awakes in Peter's language, he will strike you whether you are high or low, whether you are many or few, his mortal blow will last forever. Now notice what he says in verse nine. Peter specifies that God acts to keep the unrighteous under punishment. That's actually the present time prior to the final judgment. He's referring to the suffering of souls in hell while they await the last day and its final judgment. And people wonder about what is the state of the ungodly after they die. The Bible tells us that the believers, the godly people, when they die their souls go into the presence of the Lord in heaven with great beholding the face of God in light and glory. What about the ungodly? Thomas Schreiner gives Peter's answer, the wicked on this view are suffering punishment even now while awaiting the judgment of the final day. When that day of judgment comes, those who are judged for sin will experience an even greater horror. You think of Revelation chapter 20 and it tells of them being tormented day and night forever and ever in a lake of fire. With this end in mind, Peter cites the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, verse 6, as an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly. That is what he did. It's what the future holds. Now he specifies in verse 10 that he's particularly talking about the false teachers. especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority." It's the sensual lifestyles of the false prophet. And they're angering the Lord. They don't yield to the Word of God. They don't yield to the authority of the Scriptures. No. They exploit people. They twist the Word, and they are especially going to be judged. One thing it reminds us is the way for us. to lead not only wholesome lives now, but also to have security in the age to come, is that we would yield to the authority of God's Word, that we would be people of the books, that our Bibles would be open, that we would believe in Jesus Christ as he's presented as Savior. Well, I admit that the Bible's depiction of divine wrath is terrible. But it's terrible because sin is so infinite offense to so perfectly holy a God as the Lord of heaven. We see in Jesus a stirring example of God's love and mercy. You think about all the kindness, all the mercy, all the healing Jesus did. The way he spoke to the poor and needy and the sinners. What grace he showed. He offered salvation. He offers today salvation to everyone who believes. But it was that same Jesus who spoke so severely about the awful reality of hell, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. Matthew 9, Mark 9, 48. The Lord knows how to judge. Now one answer to the question of God's severity in eternal judgment, I've mentioned one already, well, God hates sin. God's a holy God. Sin is an offense to Him. It is a just judgment. Another answer is the mercy that God shows in saving those. All the while, He's going to save those who are turning to Him in faith. It's the second point. The Lord knows how to judge, but He also knows how to save. He knows how to rescue people. He's going to give two examples of this. Noah was a person who was in the minority, probably in Peter's time, it's probably the case that the Christians whom Peter is writing have become the minority in the midst of a false teaching bonanza with heresies and widespread followers. But that's the way Noah was. And often God's people, I think we feel this way, they feel like Lot and Sodom, surrounded by an ungodliness, were unable to stop. We know we have reminders of how God delivered in the past. He will deliver again. He knows how to rescue the godly from trials. Thomas Schreiner writes, believers are encouraged with the grace of God, for if God strengthened Noah and Lot in situations where evil dominated, then he would also preserve the believers confronted in Peter's time by the false teachers. Well, Peter has pointed out God's track record in judgment by means of the flood, but he adds there's also the track record of God delivering Noah. But he preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly. Verse 5. You see, the same flood that destroyed all the ungodly who were afflicting Noah and his family, that flood was the means by which he delivered them out of that world into a new world cleansed of sin. Now we learn in verse 5 of this passage that Noah not only built the ark, that's what we think of him for, but he actually was a preacher. He was a preacher, a herald of righteousness in that wicked generation. You see, here's the point. Noah did not keep quiet. He didn't stand there with his mouth shut, never telling forth the word of God while the culture around him was going to ruin. Any more than Christians today are to be silent about God's judgment on sin and his forgiveness through Jesus Christ. He was a herald of righteousness. Now, it is possible that he's talking about his lifestyle witness, and undoubtedly he gave a great lifestyle witness. 120 years he took to build that ark. Harry Ironside comments, every spike he drove into the ark was a sermon to that ungodly generation declaring that judgment was about to fall. Amen to that. But he must have spoken. People would have come to him and said, what are you doing? You're crazy, Noah. And he would have borne testimony to the righteousness of God in judging the wicked, the salvation that comes through faith. Well, times like Noah's call for Christians who are prepared to stand against the crowd. who are prepared to speak up for God in His justice and His grace. Though the godly are surrounded by false voices, though in Peter's context, everybody's following false teachers with their obvious wickedness and exploitation and greed. It's amazing that they follow them, but they do. God will yet deliver His people who stay true to His ways, who speak in a spiritually collapsing society. Well, the second example of deliverance is Lot. Abraham's nephew, who in Genesis 14 so foolishly cast his eyes on the Jordan plain and saw how prosperous, all he could see was the materialism, how rich they were, how lush it was, he had no spiritual priorities, and he chooses to move his family down there, and then before long, they're not living near Sodom, they're living in Sodom. He's found dwelling in that wicked city, But Peter says, if God rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked, that will tell us so much. You see, when the fires would fall on that evil city, Lot would be in there, except that God sent angels and they physically removed him from that place. God rescued righteous Lot. Now, you may already be thinking that that is not exactly the picture you get of Lot reading Genesis. Righteous lot is not what comes directly to mind. I mean, here's the guy who went to Sodom, completely neglecting it. He's like the byword of doing this. You know, choosing worldly things over godly things and end up ruining your life and corrupting his whole family. That certainly happens. And even after he's delivered, this results in him falling into the sins of drunkenness and even incest at the end of Genesis 19. So how is he called righteous? Well, the answer is that he is righteous because though his faith was so small as hardly to leave a footprint, he was nonetheless saved by the grace of God that ensures the eternal safety of those who are his own. Michael Green comments that Lot's rescue was entirely due to the unmerited favor of God, which he shows to men because of what he is and not because of what they are. Well, we may lament Lot's great folly, but it's true. Even in Genesis, you have to admit there's something different about Lot from the Sodomites around him. He responded to the summons of the angels when they told him to leave the doomed city. He didn't do it wholeheartedly, but he went. They did not. Moreover, he sought to protect the visiting men. He thought they were men. When this sexual assault was going to happen, at risk to himself, he pleads against it. He seeks to protect them. And so Peter goes out of his way here to explain that he's really righteous. In fact, I want to use the Shakespearean line to Peter about Lot. The lady doth protest too much. He calls Lot righteous three times in two verses. He's defending his character. He tells us he was greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked, verse 7. See, the whole time we learn he'd been tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard. What a great encouragement there is in Peter's Spirit-inspired description of Lot. Like Lot, our sins are obvious enough. But the Bible shows here that God looks at believers as we are in Christ. You and I look at Lot and go, I don't think I'd call him righteous. Peter looks at him in Christ. and says, righteous lots. And notice that he points out that the new birth doesn't fail. He's a born-again believer, and you go, he's done terribly. He's like the case study for playing to lose as a Christian. I like to say, let's play to win. We're saved by grace through faith alone, but let's have the blessings of a growing faith. He doesn't do any of that. He's practically a byword of it. But no, but he's saved. And that faith never dies. It grows dim, and that grace never fails. The Lord saves him, even if his faith is so weak as hardly to be seen. I think Lot may be the greatest proof of Jesus' promise of his people. He says, they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. And still, the Genesis record shows that he did ruin his life with his compromises. His spiritual legacy was crippled and corrupted. And his example warns us against a willing exposure to sin, especially perverse sexual sins, like those that fill our popular media today. He's the warning. Do not become used to these things. Do not willingly indulge in these things, because it's going to affect your character. As a believer, his soul was tortured by the immoral air that he daily breathed, and his spiritual influence on his family was next to nothing. Well, see, by using this example, Peter warns his readers against following the crowd with the false teachers into their ungodly lifestyle choices, not that much different from Sodom. In fact, I do think he's insinuating homosexuality among the false teachers by this reference. He says, look, it would be better for you, even if you're obscure, even if the world passes you by, even if you have to be this little remnant faithful to the Word, that's far better. than following into all of that which will corrupt you. James Shaddock supplies Lot's lesson to us. He says, the biggest danger many of us face as believers is not of being martyred for our faith, but having our faith dulled by repeated exposure to wickedness. While the hero of these stories is not Noah the righteous preacher or Lot the righteous sinner, it's God. God saved them, and if God saved them, verse nine, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials. He's not saying God saves us from trials. He says God saves us out of trials. In fact, God uses the trials to strengthen our faith, to save us. Neither Noah nor Lot got a quick and easy deliverance. There's years and there's struggles involved with this. But you see, all the while, God had a plan for their rescue. And by means of his own choosing, he delivered them from judgment. When you and I pray as Jesus taught us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, Peter is saying, if you trust him, he will certainly do that. Well, when we think of the terrible examples of God's judgment in the Bible, these awful depictions Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone, the pictures of eternity and hell. We do seek to reconcile God's wrath with the teaching of His tender love. And we may do so by noticing, notice the patience that God had. to these unbelieving sinners. Notice through Noah and Lot that even the antediluvian world, the world before the flood, God did not leave them without a witness. He had Noah there to tell of why judgment was coming, to invite them into the ark. Even in wicked Sodom, Lot was there. He may not have been a great preacher, but he was pleading with them not to go their way. What mercy God had. And so when the drowning voices of Noah's flood were heard no more, and when the brimstone had fallen on wicked Sodom, the people who were judged were not abandoned without a witness from God. What mercy! I think of what we read in Isaiah this morning. Even today, as our society plunges into its own abyss, God stands with His arms stretched out. His arms are stretched out to you. He offers salvation. You know, when we talk about the judgment showing God's hatred of sin, these examples pale compared to what happened on Good Friday. For there was God's own beloved Son, and it was our sins that He bore. And when God was pouring His wrath into that beloved soul, He did not withhold a single ounce. How great is God's hatred of sin. How infinite is the judgment that must fall on those who bear their sins in the life to come. that there we have the message of Christ's atoning death, telling us of love, of the amazing grace of our Savior, so willing to endure that wrath for our deliverance, the love of God the Father who sent His Son to redeem us. You see, Peter simply states the truth when he says, God knows how to judge, but God also knows how to save. Those are the truths. And yet, what is the message today for you? Well, as the gospel of Jesus is preached today, God offers you deliverance, a rescue from destruction through faith in God's blood. His track record is sure. He knows how to judge. He is going to judge. But God knows how to save, and His arms are extended to you now, appealing to you to come to Jesus, His Son, to believe, to confess your sins, and to be saved. And then God will know how to rescue you when the day of trials come, if you are joined through faith to His Son, Jesus Christ, and you will escape the coming cataclysm. You will emerge Noah-like. Through Christ, the ark that is Christ, you will go through the final judgment into a new world, cleansed forever of all sin, to dwell in God's love forever. You see, if you know that's true, then you'll also be Noah-like. that you will tell people today. If we see the awful truth of hell for those who don't believe, surely we must tell them. We must be heralds of righteousness, the righteousness of God in saving sinners through faith in His Son. Father, we pray Your blessing on our study of Your Word. Thank You for the truth. Thank You for loving us enough to warn us that You are able to judge. Your judgment is not sleeping. It is awaited in Your appointed hour. Father, I pray for those who hear my voice, Lord, that all would confess our guilt. This judgment would be just, Lord. We would deserve it completely. It would glorify You if I was sent to hell forever for my sins, but You have sent Your Son. and that you know how to save. Well, Father, cause us by your grace to lay hold of Jesus through faith, and that we would live forever, passing through judgment, from death into life. We pray this in His name. Amen.