Verse 9 and following of the chapter 6
of Revelation.
And when he had opened the fifth seal,
I saw under the altar the souls of
them that were slain for the word of
God and for the testimony which they held.
And they cried with a loud voice, saying,
How long, O Lord, holy and true!
Dost thou not judge and avenge our blood
on them that dwell on the earth?
And white robes were given unto every one
of them, and it was said unto them
that they should rest yet for a little
season, until their fellow servants also and their
brethren that should be killed as they were
should be fulfilled.
And I beheld when he had opened the
sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great
earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth
of hair, and the moon became as blood,
and the stars of heaven fell unto the
earth, even as a fig tree passeth her
untimely figs, when she is shaken of a
mighty wind.
And the heaven departed as a scroll, and
it was rolled together, and every mountain and
island were moved out of their places, and
the kings of the earth and the great
men and the rich men, the chief captains
and the mighty men, and every bondman and
every freeman hid themselves in the dens and
in the rocks of the mountains, and said
to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us,
and hide us from the face of him
that sitteth upon the throne, and from the
wrath of the Lamb, for the great day
of his wrath is come, and who shall
be able to stand?
Now, if you'll remember, in the 4th chapter,
the eternal throne and one seated on the
throne, and a rainbow around the throne, and
the beasts and the elders and living creatures,
and then in the 5th chapter, the book
and the search for someone worthy to open
the book, and the finding of that one
in the person of the Lamb, the Lamb
of the tribe of Judah.
Then he took the book and began to
open the seals, and for the first four
there were the four horsemen, war and antichrist
and famine and plague.
Then comes the opening of the 5th seal
that we read tonight, and he said, When
they opened the 5th seal, I saw under
the altar the souls of them that were
slain, the souls of the martyrs.
Now the question I suppose we should try
to answer is, Is this altar on earth
or in heaven?
Some say this altar is on the earth
because the scene is earthly.
But I'd like to call your attention to
something in the book of Revelation, and it
is that the whole book shifts continually as
though God were playing a tremendously powerful spotlight,
first on the heaven and then on the
earth, and then on the heaven and earth
together, and then on the earth, and then
on the heaven, and then on the earth,
and then both together, so that it takes
a great deal of careful reading and a
good deal of careful exegesis to know whether
a thing is on the earth or in
heaven.
But this altar, I take it to be
in the heavens above, and he said, I
saw there the souls of them that were
slain for the word of God, and they
were under the altar and they were waiting.
And they were waiting, obviously, with not too
much patience, for they said, How long, O
Lord, holy and true, before you avenge our
blood on them that dwell on the earth?
And God said to them, as a mother
might say to her child, Now, hush, don't
be impatient, because we're waiting until the rest
of the brethren have died as you've died.
In the meantime, take these white robes, every
one of you, and wait and be patient
until the time comes.
God's time isn't always known to us, and
it isn't always known to us, apparently, after
we're dead, because these persons were dead.
Now, I want to mention a little as
we go along here about these souls of
the righteous.
Somebody has been asking me lately about soul
sleeping, what happens to a man or a
Christian man when he dies, whether his soul
sleeps in the ground along with his body,
and the two of them shall be waked
simultaneously in that great day, or whether the
body only sleeps in the earth and the
soul goes to be with the Lord.
You know, it's strange how you can take
a truth and believe a truth for a
hundred years, for 500 years, and you have
your scripture for it, you have it believed
by the students and scholars and Saints and
hymnists and evangelists and revivalists and reformers and
missionaries and prayer warriors, and you can believe
it for hundreds and hundreds of years, and
even a thousand years, even two thousand years,
and somebody will come along and challenge it
and say it never was true in the
first place.
And everybody gets all excited and runs around
like a chicken thrown off of a nest,
squawking and shaking their feathers and saying, couldn't
it be possible we've been wrong all this
time?
Well, there's a doctrine abroad, and I'm not
going to be personal tonight and name groups
because you only cause trouble, and anybody that
doesn't have intelligence enough to know who I'm
talking about wouldn't have intelligence enough if I
photographed the thing and put it up here
greatly enlarged to understand what I mean.
And I know there's nobody here like that,
you're all a very intelligent audience.
So we'll not mention names, but we'll only
point out that there are those who say
that the body and the soul are inseparable,
and that the body never separates from the
soul, but when we die, the body and
the soul sleep together in the grave.
Now, I want to give you just a
few little scriptures here.
Look in Luke 23, verse 46, when Jesus
had cried with a loud voice, he said,
Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
And having said this, he gave up the
ghost.
He said, I commend my spirit to thee,
Father, and he gave up the ghost, but
his body hung there on the cross, and
after a while they found him dead, and
they took his body down and they wrapped
it in cosmetics, and they put it in
the tomb that Joseph had hewn out of
the rock.
And so there was the dead body, but
where had the spirit gone?
It had been commended into the hands of
God.
Now, if there wasn't a separation of the
spirit from the body, then I don't know
what words mean.
And it was always believed that by the
Church of Christ, down the centuries, back to
Paul, and so why be disturbed by somebody
who comes along and says, I'm sorry, but
you've been wrong all this time, I'm right.
Then look at 1 Peter 3, verses 18
-20, says, For Christ, being put to death
in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit,
by which also I went and preached unto
the spirits in prison, which were once disobedient,
when the longsuffering of God waited in the
days of Noah, while the ark was preparing,
wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved
by water.
Now, here, if this teaches anything, it teaches
that when our Lord Jesus Christ had died
and was dead in the flesh, his spirit
was quickened, and he went and preached to
the spirits in prison, that is, in Sheol,
in the place of the departed spirits, and
he preached to those spirits in prison.
And those spirits in prison were the spirits
of persons who had lived back in the
days of Noah, and Jesus preached to them.
And look at 2 Corinthians 12, verses 2
-4, I knew a man in Christ, said
Paul, about fourteen years ago, whether in the
body I cannot tell, or whether out of
the body I cannot tell.
Some think Paul was talking about himself, but
whoever he was talking about, he said, I
knew a man, and that man was the
individual, the man.
And he said, I don't know whether he
was in the body at the time or
out of the body at the time.
And then our overheated friends come and tell
us that you can't leave your body, that
the body and soul sleep together.
But here was a man who said that
he knew a man who, whether he was
in the body he didn't know, or whether
he was out of the body he wasn't
sure, that is, he didn't know whether the
whole man had been caught up, or whether
his spirit had left his body temporarily.
Such a one, he said, was caught up
to the third heaven, and I knew such
a man, whether in the body or out
of the body I cannot tell, God knoweth,
he said, how that he was caught up
into paradise and heard unspeakable words which it
is not lawful for a man to utter.
Now there are those that say that the
soul sleeps till the resurrection, and I ask
you to notice Luke 16.22, it came
to pass that the beggar died and was
carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom.
And the rich man also died and was
buried, and in hell he lifted up his
eyes.
Now here was two men, one man who
was ready for heaven and one man who
wasn't, and they both died.
And it doesn't say that one of them
was buried, but it says he died anyhow.
And he was carried by the angels into
Abraham's bosom.
Now I want to ask you if you
think that they carried that old, sore-ridden
body into Abraham's bosom.
If you think they did, why, then look
at the next line that says, The rich
man also died and was buried, and in
hell he lifted up his eyes.
He died and in hell he lifted up
his eyes.
He was buried after the funeral, or at
the time of the funeral, or before the
funeral, I don't know.
In hell he lifted up his eyes.
Now, there was a burial of a man,
and I'm quite sure the man they buried
didn't lift up his eyes.
I'm sure that body they laid away there
didn't lift up its eyes, because it was
dead.
But this man, nevertheless, in hell, lifted up
his eyes.
And of course, our overheated friends tell us
that hell means the grave.
They say it means Hades, and Hades means
the grave.
And now I ask you to note how
the rich man fared in the grave.
Here is the rich man in the grave,
the soul and the body can't separate and
the soul sleeps until the resurrection.
Here is a man in a state of
deep unconsciousness, lying in the grave along with
his body, sleeping away there until the resurrection.
The body lifts up its eyes and he
sees Abraham, and he says, Abraham, give me
a drop of water to quench my thirst.
Abraham said, Son, you, while you were on
earth, had all your pleasures, and now you
are tormented, and this other man is comforted.
Well, he said, All right, then, Abraham, if
you won't comfort me, comfort my brothers who
are back on the earth, because they are
there, and if somebody goes to them from
the dead, they will hear.
And Abraham said that they wouldn't hear Moses
and the prophets, they wouldn't hear anybody anyhow,
because they came back from the dead.
Now, that was a man lying unconscious in
the grave, and he was having a conversation,
he was making suggestions, he was asking for
water, and he was talking about his five
brethren and all that, and yet he was
lying unconscious in the grave.
That's a strange thing, indeed.
Paul didn't know anything like that, and Peter
never mentioned it, and it isn't mentioned by
our Lord any time during his talks.
And then there is Luke 23.43, Jesus
said unto him, Verily I say unto thee,
Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
Now the old trick that has been used
by the devil is used now by the
Communists.
It is to stampede you and sweep you
off your feet by abuse and charges of
all sorts, and just sheer steam and human
energy.
And the poor Christian, he loves God and
he is saved and he knows he is,
and he trusts the Lord and he is
looking forward to going to heaven, but when
he suddenly gets attacked by these fellows using
the old trick to lie long enough and
big enough and loud enough, and you'll break
down and bear down the defenses and pretty
soon you'll have them believing.
Now I ask you to notice, Jesus said
to the thief on the cross, Verily I
say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with
me in paradise.
And that was all right, until somebody came
along and got the notion that he wasn't
going to be with Jesus in paradise, and
the reason he wasn't going to be was
because he was going to sleep in the
grave until the resurrection.
So he had to do something with that,
and you know what they did?
They changed the punctuation, and here is the
way they make it read, Verily I say
unto thee, Today thou shalt be with me
in paradise.
In other words, they changed the punctuation.
The Lord said, Today I'm going to tell
you that you'll be with me in paradise.
And then the man died and slept in
the grave and he's still there.
Now, that's what I consider the trickiest kind
of skullduggery, and I'd have no part in
it at all.
Now I want to give you some scriptural
proof that the dead Saints go immediately to
God.
Let's look at 2 Corinthians, the 5th chapter,
where the man of God, Paul, says, 2
Corinthians 5, We know that if our earthly
house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have
the building of God, a house not made
with hands, eternal in the heaven.
Now, he said, we, we, we.
Here we are, we, and we've got an
earthly house, and that earthly house is your
body.
And he said, Now this is dissolved.
And Paul knew what happens to a body,
it dissolves when it dies, it decomposes, is
the word we use now.
Paul said, dissolved.
I know the translator said, dissolved.
He said, We have a building of God,
a house not made with hands, eternal in
the heaven.
For in this one we groan, he said.
Have you groaned a little recently?
I've been groaning most of my life.
I pray the Lord will help me to
stop groaning and start praising, but you know,
these bodies of ours, they make us groan
sometimes.
When you cut your teeth, you groan, when
they pull them out, you groan, and when
they ache, you groan, and when you fall
and get hurt, you groan.
In this we groan.
What are we groaning for?
We are earnestly desiring to be clothed upon
with our new house.
He said, You don't know it, but what
you're groaning for is your new house.
You want a new body, you're the new
one, you're going to get over there.
If so be that being clothed, we shall
not be found naked.
Now some people talk about naked souls, but
I don't think there's going to be any
naked souls.
For we that are in this tabernacle to
groan, being burdened, not that we be unclothed.
Nobody wants to be a blessed ghost.
Nobody wants to be unclothed.
But he said, We want to be clothed
upon that mortality might be swallowed up of
life.
Then in Philippians 121 to 24, For to
me to live is Christ, and to die
is gain.
Now if a man to die was to
go to sleep and sleep in the ground
until the Lord comes, I want to know
if that would be a gain.
To die and go to heaven would be
a gain, but to die and sleep in
the ground would be a specific loss temporarily
anyhow.
So surely Paul couldn't have had that in
mind.
But if I live in the flesh, he
said, What does he mean, if I live
in the flesh?
This is the fruit of my labor.
Note he didn't say, Not if my flesh
lives.
But he said, If I live in my
flesh.
Paul had two ideas of where he was
going to live, in his flesh and out
of his flesh.
He was going to live in his flesh,
or he was going to live with the
Lord out of his flesh.
He said, I don't know which I choose
really, I am caught in the middle.
He said, I'd like to die, but I
don't want to, because I've got work to
do.
For I am in a strait between two,
having a desire to depart and to be
with Christ, which is far better.
Do you suppose that a man praying with
these people and loving them and singing and
worshiping with them and walking around on the
earth and seeing the sunshine and breathing the
air and looking at the blue sky, do
you suppose that he said, I want to
die and lie unconscious in the grave, which
is far better?
I think that's nonsense, and I think that
we Christians, you Christians who have believed that
when you die you go to heaven, and
I think other people are wrong, and the
Church has always held it, and it's only
the fringe people who hold otherwise.
Now I want you to beware of false
teachers who come in, and they are usually
more zealous than the holders of truth, and
that's always been odd to me.
A man who believes the truth may take
it very calmly and restfully, but the fellow
who gets ahold of an error, he steams
up about it, really.
And these false teachers who teach soul-sleeping,
that the body can't separate from the soul
and we're going to lie unconscious in the
grave, they tell us among other things these
four things.
They tell us that all Christians have been
wrong throughout the centuries, and they alone are
right.
Out of my mind that would be enough
to prove they were wrong to start with.
Anybody who would suddenly come out and say,
Now here, I'm going to sweep all the
Churches taught away, and I'm going to tell
you what's the truth, I say, Leave him
away, because that fellow, even if he was
right, he'd be too humble to say that.
But that's what they're saying.
All the Christians have been wrong throughout the
centuries, and we alone are right.
And they say, All translations have conspired to
deceive you.
We alone have the right translation.
A fellow wrote me the other day in
answer to my little affair there in the
magazine on various translations, and he said that
the King James Version is all wrong, and
he said, I want you to get such
and such a version because it's straightened it
all out.
He said, for instance, the King James Version
says, Forever and ever and eternally and everlasting.
He said, There's no such a meaning in
the Bible.
And he said, The translators were wrong that
put that in the Bible.
But if you'll get this other, I forget
what translation it was, it was one private
one they must have had.
He said, Here, that will straighten you out.
I don't know.
I try to answer every letter I get,
even cracked parts.
Paul Rader used to say, The brighter the
light, the more bugs you attract.
And I attract some very, very, very gorgeous,
oversized bugs.
And yet I try to answer all the
fellows that are writing me.
Some write me and tell me that I'm
an astonishing phenomenon in this world of men,
and others write me and tell me to
go get lost.
And I try to write and answer both,
but I think I'm going to let this
fellow stew in his own grease.
I don't believe I'm going to reply.
Then the third thing they say is, All
who teach different from us are evil, and
we alone are the saints of the Most
High God.
We are the latter-day saints.
We are the saints of today, and everybody
that teaches different from us, if you believe
in heaven, you're all wet.
If you believe that the soul goes to
be with God, you're all wrong.
Now they tell us that for the fourth,
all interpreters are wrong, and we alone have
the correct interpretation.
Now, there's a little question I'd like to
ask, and then I'm going to leave this
and go on to something else.
The question is, Jesus said, By their fruit
you shall know them.
I want to ask you if these people
live better lives than the rest of us,
if they live better lives than the Methodists
did and the Presbyterians did and the Baptists
did and the Quakers did and the Salvation
Army did.
I want to know if they live better
lives.
It hasn't been my observation that they do.
They don't live better lives than Augustine or
Bernard or Saint Francis or the martyrs who
died and said, I'll die here, but I'm
going to be with the Lord.
They say that martyr was foolish, all those
martyrs by the millions who gave their lives
and said, I'm giving my body to be
burned or I'm giving my body to the
lions, but my soul is going to be
with God.
Those poor martyrs, they were all mistaken, don't
they know that's not so?
Somebody said he was going to go to
heaven, and he said, I'm going to see
my Lord.
Stephen looked up and saw the Lord, and
they say, poor Stephen, he should have had
that other interpretation because there was no heaven
to go to.
When Stephen died, they laid him away there,
and there he is, he's been unconscious for
1900 years.
Now, are those better than other people, are
they the sample saints, do they have love
and peace and mercy and goodness and long
-suffering and kindness and temperance?
I don't think so.
They come barging in, cuss you out, tell
you that you're a dumbbell and you're no
good, and are generally abusive, hard to get
along with, and generally nasty.
That's been my experience with them, these teachers.
Then when our people die, why do they
say, now, don't get all excited and say
that your dear loved one is with Jesus
in heaven for the simple reason he's sleeping
out there in Evergreen Park Cemetery, and he'll
sleep right there until the Lord wakes him
from the dead?
I don't believe it.
Not for a second do I go along
with Paul on this, and Peter and James
and John and Jude and Christastom and Stephen
and Bernard and Saint Francis and Luther and
Wesley and all of them.
I'm not ready to hold my hands up
and surrender and say, Comrade, I give up,
I'm not giving up.
I still believe the Bible, brother, and I
believe what it says, and I don't believe
ridiculous interpretations by men who are neither scholars,
saints, nor anything else.
Well, the souls of them were under the
altar, the souls of the martyrs, from Stephen
to the latest one.
I don't know who the latest martyr is,
but whoever he is, these souls were under
the altar.
And why hadn't they been heard from before?
Why hadn't these martyred people, for you know
when you martyr a man, when the world
martyrs a saint, the world commits a frightful
act of injustice, a frightful, unspeakable act of
iniquity.
Why weren't these saints heard from before?
I'll tell you why.
Because nobody had opened that book, no, those
seals were still closed.
Nobody had opened the book, they hadn't found
anybody that could.
And when they found Jesus Christ the Lord,
were they to open the book?
Why, the book was opened and the seals,
and then they heard from them.
Now, it's a solemn thought that the blood
of every martyr and every murdered saint cries
from the ground and their soul cries from
the altar.
History is all mixed up, but the omniscient
God knows, and he knows where everybody is.
He knows where all the bones of the
saints are, and he knows where all the
dust of the saints is.
He knows it all.
He said, then, that white robes were given
to them.
Now, there are four states of a ransomed
man, four states, I want you to get
this.
There is a time when he is lost
on earth, he is lost on earth.
He is not a saint yet, but I'm
talking about and taking the broad view of
him.
He is lost on earth, he is without
hope and without God in the world, his
sins are piled on him, and he has
the judgment of death on him, and he
is lost.
Then he passes out of that through the
door into the kingdom, and he is saved
on earth.
He walks around on the earth for a
while, saved on earth.
I have a dear old friend out on
the West Coast, a dear brother, F.H.
Rossiter, he is 99 years old, 99 years
old!
I feel like an adolescent when I talk
to him, and he is 99 years old.
He's been around a long time, he was
converted when he was in his teens, and
here he is 99 and I think he'll
probably make it to the 100 mark.
He is still able to write letters and
talk, and is still a preacher, he's a
preacher.
99 years old, he's been a long time,
he's waiting on the earth.
Then when the man dies, that same man
dies, he waits in heaven.
And then when the Lord returns, he is
glorified in heaven.
There are four states of a man.
He's lost on earth, he's saved on earth,
he dies, and he is waiting in heaven,
and then he is glorified.
You say, what about the body?
Well, the Lord isn't as much concerned about
the body as people are, but the Lord
is concerned enough that he's going to resurrect
everybody.
He's going to resurrect the body of the
Saints, and he's going to resurrect the body
of those who weren't Saints.
And we're going to get our bodies back.
So don't complain about your body and take
good care of it, as good as you
can, if you need to give it up
for the Lord, give it up, the Lord
will take care of that and have a
better body for you.
And then comes the opening of the sixth
seal, and we'll cut through all the extras
and say that these people they saw there
in that place, it says that there was
a great earthquake and the sun became black
as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became
as blood, and the stars fell out of
heaven upon the earth, and as a fig
tree cast her untimely fig, and the heaven
departed as a scroll, and then the kings
of the earth and the great men and
the rich men and the chief captains and
the mighty men and every bondman and freeman
hid themselves in the dens and in the
rocks of the mountains, and said to the
mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide
us from the face of him that sitteth
upon the throne.
Now, here's something you can expect, just when
I do not know it.
There have been those who have tried to
predict and they always get in trouble because
the Lord told us not to predict.
He said he knows that, that the Father
knows that, and for us not to waste
our time predicting or trying to pin down
time and seasons.
But there is something you may be sure
of, that we are going to see heavenly
phenomena.
We are going to see things.
Did you hear about what happened yesterday or
the day before yesterday?
They sent up a rocket to go around
the world and went into orbit, and there
were 30 million copper needles, and what they
were supposed to do was to distribute themselves
in little shields all around the earth.
Up there a few hundred feet away were
30 million copper needles distributed all around the
earth.
And if the old boy over in the
Kremlin puts off his 50 mega-typhoon flare,
that will make a little noise up there,
too.
And they are already up there now, you
know, the heavens are getting as noisy as
the earth.
You'll have to have a traffic man up
there before long.
They keep throwing stuff.
I think that the United States has sent
up 35 or so hunks of metal, and
Russia has sent up a lot.
And they are up there, and I don't
know whether they can talk or not without
an interpreter, but here they go around there.
But that isn't anything but as insidious compared
to what we are going to see, the
phenomenon in the heavens one of these days,
because the sun and the moon haven't been
affected, and the stars and their courses, but
they are going to be.
God is going to take things out of
the human hand.
The awesome picture that he gives us here
of the people and their like us, those
people that he calls great men and all
that, their people with families, they could put
their picture in the paper there, there's a
fatal mistake we're making now to put our
trust in men.
I don't know whether I should say this
or not, because some of these are going
to be released out on the West Coast.
Anyhow, I had breakfast with a senator down
in St. Paul, a state senator, and he's
a Democrat, and I was sitting there eating
ham and eggs, and I said, well, Senator,
I'd like to ask you a question.
I'd like to ask you now that you've
had lots of time to think it over,
what do you think of Jack?
Democrat or not, he shook his head, he
said, really, I don't know, I don't know.
He's a Christian man, and he talks with
Christians.
He said, I don't know.
Well, we'll put our trust in Jack.
And Jack smiled and gave us that accent
from New England, and shook his bushy head,
and he said, we've got our boy.
And now he's just as badly messed up
as all the rest of them have been.
And that's the way it always is.
Don't blame him at all.
Nobody could do it.
If you wanted somebody to come out here
and lift the Royal York Hotel up on
his hand like a waitress, as a waitress
lifts up a platter, why, no matter who
you sent down there, he couldn't do it.
No matter what his political party was, he
couldn't do it.
And the world's too big for any man
to carry around.
Nobody can do it.
They managed to talk as if they were
doing it, and I've always thought that was
amazing, how the politicians are able to do
that.
But here we find when the stars begin
to fall, and the glory begins to shine,
and the souls of the martyrs begin to
plead, and God begins to speak, and the
seals begin to be unloosed, the politicians are
going to stop making speeches and cry for
the rocks and the mountains.
And the great men, and those are the
heavy thinkers.
We've got them heavy thinkers, you know, big
dome boys who sit around and think up
great ideas, and they put them to work,
and those ideas blow up in their faces.
Long before they ever sent those poor, poor
people around the world, those poor little kids
not dry behind the ears, who don't know
their right hand from their left, sent them
out there among the wolves.
One little girl wrote a postcard home, and
she got bounced.
And they're going to bounce them, you'll see
the whole thing blow up.
These heavy thinkers with their big domes and
their ideas, they're going to cry for the
rocks and the mountains.
And these rich men, these lords of finance,
these men that can write big checks, these
chief captains, those are the militarists, I guess
we ought to call it, if you want
to pronounce it correctly, and these chief captains,
and these freemen, I suppose you'd call that
the west, and the bondmen, I suppose those
are behind the iron curtains.
Now, all the curtains disappear, and there aren't
any bamboo curtains, and there's silk curtains, no
iron curtains, but rich men, and great men,
and chief captains, and kings, and freemen, and
bondmen, and all like cry out and say,
will fall on us to hide us from
the wrath of the Lamb.
They used the name of the Lamb in
curse words while everything was going their way,
but now they're crying for God to save
them from the wrath of the Lamb.
They don't have a place in all the
United Nations where the name of Jesus Christ
is honored, not a place.
I understand they were going to have a
spot in there where you could come in
and pray, if you wanted to pray, if
you were a Buddhist and wanted to tell
your beads, or if you were a yogi
and wanted to stand on your head, or
whatever you wanted to do, you were supposed
to go there and do it.
But there isn't any place dedicated to Jesus,
the Lamb, to take away the sins of
the world.
But there will be the day when the
United Nations, whether it's in New York, or
Berlin, or Moscow, or wherever it is, there
will be a day when everybody in it
will forget who they are, and they'll cry
to the heavens above and call on a
God in whom they didn't believe before, or
a God whom they neglected.
And they will say, Fall on us to
hide us from the wrath of the Lamb,
for the day of his wrath is coming.
My friends, this is the day of his
mercy.
This is the day now when his mercy
is all over the earth, that the day
of his wrath is coming.
The wrath of the Lamb, the wrath of
the Lamb we could expect, but the wrath
of the Lamb, the outraged Lamb rises in
his wrath, and the heavens are shaken and
depart as a scroll, and the mountains and
the islands are moved out of their places,
and the kings of the earth and the
great men and the rich and the mighty
men call on God.
And there will be a prayer meeting.
And the day when Billy Sunday was preaching,
he used to sing a song, The Great
Judgment Morning.
I had dreamed that the Great Judgment Morning
had dawned, and then one stanza or one
verse of the thing says, The rich man
was there, but his money, when that time
came, it all passed away.
And the great man was there, but his
greatness had all passed away.
There wasn't anything left, and the righteous man
was there, but his righteousness had all passed
away.
And all they had left was these filthy
garments full of holes in the presence of
an orphaned God.
And they asked the question, Who shall be
able to stand?
Who shall be able to stand?
Well, I bring this to a close by
saying that he shall be able to stand
whose foot is thin.
The reason these great men and kings and
rich men and peace men and free men
and bondmen, the reason they are in such
terror is they love their kin.
I heard of a woman out in Kansas.
The twister was coming a great funnel a
mile high.
They saw it coming.
They saw a little lake, and they had
a storm cellar.
They suspected those things, and they had a
storm cellar a little up there below the
surface of the ground.
When the wind came, it just blew over,
and they were safe down there.
She was afraid her house would blow away.
She got her children down there, and her
husband was down there and the rest of
the family.
But she decided that there was, I forget
what, back in the house.
She said, I don't want that to be
destroyed and take the house from down.
And she dashed back to get that little
knick-knack that she wanted to keep.
And while she was in the house, the
twister struck, and they found her all torn
and bleeding and dying among the rubble after
the twister had passed.
And who shall be able to stand?
Those who have given up their trinkets.
Those who have quit loving this world.
Those who have given up the hope that
anything down here is permanent.
Those who hate their sin as God hates
it.
They'll stand all right in that day.
The first psalm says the righteous shall stand
in the judgment, but the wicked shall not.
No one who has not put his trust
in Christ shall be able to stand in
that day.
No one who has not forsaken the world
shall be able to stand in that day.
And the one who has overcome.
What has he overcome?
He's overcome the temptation to quit.
The devil came along and said, you've been
serving God now for ten years, and you've
had nothing but trouble, and you lost your
job, and your wife broke her leg, and
your baby got serious, and your car ran
off the road and piled up, and you've
never had anything but trouble.
Well, now he started serving the Lord.
We listen to the blandishments of the devil
and decide what to use.
Start, stop tithing, stop going to church, stop
going to prayer meetings, pretty soon stop praying.
That's the business of the devil.
But the man who knows God in reality,
he doesn't listen to those blandishments.
He says, if naked came I into the
world, and naked I'll go out, and if
God takes away everything I have, I'll love
him anyhow.
I'll praise him even if he slays me.
You've got to overcome, brothers and sisters.
The overcomer will be able to stand in
that day.
What a terrible, terrible day.
I've never been in an earthquake.
But they tell me that the terror of
an earthquake is your sudden loss of confidence
in the earth.
Always when you walk around on the earth,
it stands up on you.
You walk down the sidewalk, it's there.
You walk out on the ground, it's there.
And always you can orientate yourself.
Here you are, standing on your two feet,
and here's the earth, and there's the clouds
of the sky, and here you are.
And you're sure of yourself.
But when the earthquake comes, everything begins to
rock and dance.
The floor, you can't trust the floor anymore,
and the floor and the wall get all
mixed up with the ceiling.
And they say that's a terrible psychological shock.
And everything gets mixed up.
I told you, we were riding a plane
here where we got into a little trouble.
And the thing was doing such shenanigans that
I couldn't even find my mouth.
I tried to take a glass of a
cup of coffee, and the thing went up
here instead of coming in here.
And I couldn't find the horizon.
I didn't know which part was up quite
literally.
Well, I don't suppose that the men out
in the cockpit thought it was bad, but
for an old landlubber like me, I thought
it was pretty bad.
And that's what's shocking, you know.
Not to be able to find your feet,
not to be able to put your feet
down and say, here's something I can trust.
And that's a terrible day.
And stars don't act like stars.
And the sun doesn't act like the sun
anymore.
And the moon doesn't act like the moon
anymore.
And the north and the south get mixed
up with the east and the west.
And the earthquake shocks.
Men and cities go down.
Oh, brother, you will wish you were a
Christian in that.
You will wish in that day you knew
the Lamb of God that takes away the
sin of the world.
When the Lamb of God who comes with
his hyssop to cleanse your soul turns into
the Lamb of God who comes in his
fury to pronounce wrath upon a world that
has rejected him.
Who shall be able to stand?
I trust you will.
I believe I will.
I hope you will.
And if you're not ready to stand, this
is the night.
Without any doubt, this is the night.
God help us all.
This is a swift formation of things.
And I certainly haven't given all the details.
But I want to ask the question, who
shall be able to stand?
Are you among them?
If not, you might as well not have
been born.
And if you're never among them, you'd better
never have been born.
But it's so easy.
Turn from our wicked ways unto Jesus Christ
our Lord and become one of those protected
and shielded ones forever and forever guaranteed by
the Lamb of God.