From Adam on, the thing God’s been most concerned about in relation to His human race is freedom. That’s what faith is all about.

A great definition of faith is it’s the ability to have absolute, complete freedom in your inner person to do exactly what you choose to do. God knows inherently that without that total personal privacy, you can’t make a personal choice; a free choice.

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At a weekend Bible conference I attended last fall in Ridge Farm, Ill., a preacher I like from Columbus, Oh., David Reid, asked the crowd to really think about what the Bible says will happen at the end of the Bible’s prophesied Millennium Kingdom.

Basically, Satan, who’s been locked in the bottomless pit, will be set free for ‘one last stand’ in which he immediately goes out into the nations and gets men to rebel against the Lord Jesus Christ who’s literally been reigning over the entire earth from the city of Jerusalem.

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“Think with me what’s happening here,” Reid said by way of introduction. “At the Second Coming, right before the Millennium is set up, there is war in heaven, Satan and his angels are kicked out, the sun’s turned to darkness, the moon’s turned to blood.

“If you’re on the earth, do you have inkling that there may be a problem about to happen?! The Lord Jesus Christ returns on a white horse with the armies of heaven, and when you read through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and what (they) have to say about this time, He goes through the earth and every single person who rebels against His authority is conclusively destroyed.

“With the Second Coming all His foes are just utterly destroyed and then He ‘rules with a rod of iron’ during the Millennium Kingdom.

“Psalm 2 says ‘kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way,’ and what happens is the Gentile nations of the earth come up to Jerusalem to acknowledge Him, and when they don’t, He causes it not to rain on their nation.

“When they come up to Jerusalem, they go over and literally see down into hell. In the process of coming and worshipping the Lord, they literally see, ‘Wow! The worm dieth not and the fire’s not quenched! Down there’s all the people in the past who rebelled against the Lord’s authority!’

“So then (when the thousand-year Millennium Period expires), Satan is let out of the bottomless pit and basically the entire earth says, ‘Hey, yeah, let’s go kill the Lord Jesus Christ!’

“After Christ’s just wreaked conclusive havoc on everyone who’s ever opposed Him and man says, ‘Yeah, we can take Him!’ It’s just absolute, total insanity! So, as I reflect on why people aren’t beating down the door today (to hear biblical truth and become saved), the issue with men is men are just crazy! They’re just rebellious and ornery and the sad thing is . . .

“We conduct a prison ministry in (central Ohio) and one of the things we tell the guys is there’s only way you end up in hell. You don’t end up there because you tried really hard to be good and, instead of getting a B minus, you got a C plus and God cut off the curve right there and sent you to hell.

“You end up in hell because you made a conscious decision to reject the grace of God! Think about how tragic that is because what He did on the Cross—when He said, ‘It is finished,’ it was finished for every single human being that ever lived, and the sad reality of what happens today is the vast majority of the earth says, ‘I don’t need that; I’ll earn it myself!’ And that’s just asinine stupidity because it’s not going to work.”