rning, out of a world of increasing materialism, self
-sufficiency, boasting, pride, violence, war and multiplied peril, a
world that under the guise of general indifferentism and cultivated
cynicism mocks at the things of God and denies we have a written,
final and sure revelation from Him, the Lord will snatch away the
genuine, regenerated Church (the dead raised, the living changed)
and take them to Himself, into the place prepared. For at least
seven years spiritual blackness, measureless woe and indescribable
anguish will fall upon a Devil-deceived and Devil-ruled world. Then
will the Lord come with His previously gathered Church, execute
judgment on the ungodly, sweep away all iniquity and set up the new
administration of righteousness and truth. Noah is therefore a
figure, a prophecy of the closing hours of this age and its climax
in the Second Coming of the Lord.

One day Lot went into Sodom, took office, tried to reform the evil
city, succeeded in vexing his righteous, but unspiritual soul with
the filthy conversation of the wicked, got down to the level of the
natural man, lost his testimony and seemed to his friends and
intimates like a madman or the most excuselessly inconsistent
trifler when he attempted to take up once more his damaged
testimony.

Then there was a night when God's angels came and snatched him out
of the doomed city. The next morning the fire of God fell and Lot
"saved so as by fire" looked on at the blaze and the burning of all
his works of righteousness as wood hay and stubble, big in bulk but
rejected of God.

Looking forward to His Second Coming and backward for an
illustration the Son of God declared as it was in the days of Lot so
should it be when the Son of man should come again.

There are good and righteous Christians--righteous enough but wholly
unspiritual who are seeking to make spotless town of a world God has
judged and doomed, failing to see the cross is not only the judgment
of the individual, but equally the judgment of the world; that not
only does the cross reveal the end of all flesh but the end in God's
sight of that system of things which men call the world; that on the
cross the world is crucified to the Christian and the Christian to
the world; and failing to see this, failing to get the mind of God
are daily descending to the plane of the natural man, are losing and
in many cases deliberately setting aside the testimony once for all
delivered to the saints.