Charles Whitaker
December 5, 2017
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and said to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?" Revelation 6:16-17
We
need to dig deeper into the minds of these end-time spelunkers. What thinking
underlies their words?
A
shaking fist is absent; these individuals do not express anger or outright
rebellion against God.
Conversely, they make no confession of personal guilt; they express no repentance. While they recognize the existence of the Father
and Son, they do not understand that God is a Family into which they can be
born. They do not know—or believe—the gospel. They do not
realize that they can develop a personal relationship with God and grow to
become like Him. In other words, the caveman's words are not those of converted
individuals at all.
The
underlying thinking behind their comments is desperate self-preservation.
They
want personal safety. Understanding more than many do about God, convinced that
the Father and the Lamb are stirred to anger, their knowledge is still so
limited that they can only irrationally command "mountains and rocks"
to fall on them. Pathetically, in the end, they can only ask a question that
exhibits the depths of their despair. Who is able to survive during the Day of
the Lord? They have no answer.
Isaiah
2 provides us a bit more insight. In verse 9, the prophet, speaking of
idolaters, addresses the issue of their repentance. These people, he says,
"will be brought low and everyone humbled—do not forgive them" (Isaiah
2:9, New International Version). God
has humbled them through mind-numbing terror; they hide in caves from God and
His Son and talk to rocks. Yet, in all this, they have not yet expressed godly
sorrow, not yet repented. So God has not yet forgiven them. The prophet Isaiah
continues:
Enter into the rock, and hide in the dust, from the terror of the LORD and the glory of His majesty. The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down, and the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day. For the day of the LORD of hosts shall come upon everything proud and lofty, upon everything lifted up—and it shall be brought low. . . . (Isaiah 2:10-12)
Notice
that the cave-dwellers are those who have been humbled. In verse 11, Isaiah
states the time frame: They are humbled in a time when "the LORD alone shall be exalted. . . ."
So, this passage in Isaiah 2 is dealing with the general period that we call
the Day of the Lord.
Interestingly,
in verses 20-21, we see that they have eschewed idolatry:
In that day a man will cast away his idols of silver and his idols of gold, which they made, each for himself to worship, to the moles and bats, to go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the crags of the rugged rocks, from the terror of the LORD and the glory of His majesty, when He arises to shake the earth mightily.
If
the people who hurl their idols "to the moles and bats" as they enter
the "clefts of the rocks" are the same ones who ask "mountains
and rocks" to fall on them in Revelation 6:16,
these folk may well have started out on a road to repentance. They are not
there yet, for they lack the proper understanding and motivations. Though God
has not yet granted them repentance (II Timothy 2:25),
He is working among them, perhaps through the work of the Two Witnesses.
He has increased their knowledge about Him, brought them to an understanding
that idolatry is wrong, and led them to subterranean "places of
safety."
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