Yet the experts tell us that each real change takes a century and we should be patient like the generations that have died before us. One day the centuries all have to jam up together, both for good and evil, and all their changes have to fall out at once, as if from a great crash of time, like a giant wave crashing on the shore. For God is long suffering, not willing that the world should be ruled by the mind of sin forever, but instead that the whole globe should come to a day and true moment of repentance as one.
The witness of Israel has been conveyed to me by the Spirit of Israel's Messiah, the witness that a day of judgment has been appointed for the Earth and will not be delayed. Yet my own actions say that I don't quite believe this yet with my whole heart. I live too much of my life as though I doubted it just a little. Or I might say that my little doubts have the power to run a disproportionate portion of my life. It is time I took a further step away from these doubts, indeed, a decisive step to walk away from them.
I look at our tough and angry world, the world I was born and raised in, the world that is ruled by death but still, like a defiant child, never stops fighting back in order to build its dreams, even though its dreams are always crushed in the end, over and over again, one era and one civilization after another. I know there is a temptation to excitement in the fear of death, and there is temptation to vain pride in fighting against the inevitable, the temptation to the pleasure of self-consolation which leads eventually to any and every moral license. But I have heard the Torah tongue of the Spirit of the Messianic Redeemer of Israel saying, "Today I have put before you life and death. Choose life!" A simple choice, but it seems as hard as moving the mountain of the world off of one's own grave.
I see the beauty of this world that entices to self-consolation. But what beauty is like the beauty of life? What pleasure is like the pleasure of holiness? What success is like the success of obeying with perfect obedience a single commandment of God? I know the attractiveness of the salvation that would offer escape from the consequences of sin, but what salvation is like the salvation of repentance? I know the passion of temptation to find belonging with brothers and sisters in a fraternity of denial that there is a day of justice and judgment coming against all the world. But oh that the God of Israel might give me a way of repentance that I might turn my back on all these temptations once and for all and walk unwavering toward Him, to find my need for belonging met through belonging to Him and to His people forever.
