Choose

One foundational belief in the Christian religion is that God make all things right.  He rights every wrong and corrects the errors of the human condition.  One emotional response by people who are opposed to the concept of God to this proposition is to say that God is wrong to judge people in any way.  After all these are the same type of people who feel any judgement made by one individual to another is a significant moral evil.  They are the type of people that shriek, “who are you to judge” when any negative judgment is made for any reason.  On the face of it this is a self-refuting logical contradiction because they make moral judgments every day in regard to who they allow into their personal lives based on a variety of factors from outside individuals.  They make moral judgments on who is worthy enough to babysit their children, fix their cars, repair the rain gutters on their house, treat their infection, or manage their money.  The idea of moral oughtness is baked into the human conscience.  Since God is the author of morality, the moral law giver, and goodness itself any judgment he makes, whether we agree with it or not, is, by definition morally perfect.  The point being any person who would like to stand in judgment of God for him judging people the way in which he does in this chapter of Revelation would have to presuppose the very concept of moral perfection to do so thus conceding to God.  This is the first point of Revelation chapter nine.  The second point of Revelation chapter nine is equally as significant as the first.  God has given the people who are the subjects of his judgement innumerable opportunities to follow him and irrefutable evidence of his existence so that they can believe in him.  What follows from this is that God does not force his will on them, he allows these people to freely come into relationship with him and despite the innumerable opportunities and the irrefutable evidence some people will still choose not to follow him.  They would never do it even if they were given a million years and God came down to them personally.  They are obstinately hard-hearted, they are infinitely selfish and they will choose the gratification of their flesh over the complete fulfillment of their existential spiritual longings every time.  There isn’t anything else God can do, and it is not God’s fault.  Those people chose their destinies, they selected their own eternal outcomes.  They were and are idolators.  Lest we be brazen enough to think that we are safe from the same bad decision making we need to remember that idolatry is defined as anything we place before God.  What have you placed before God in your own life?  Money?  Family? Possessions? Time?  It doesn’t have to be a statue of another God, or a graven image, it is much more subtle than that, and that is what the devil is hoping you overlook.