It is almost as if Israel is left without a future. Indeed, unless God intervened, there would be no future for Israel. There would be no future for mankind. That is how bad the times are going to be.
Can you imagine how terrifying that would be? If you are in a place where a lion is—you are out of your element; you are in the lion's element. He has the advantage, he is on home territory, and you are in his territory. You are the stranger. You are the intruder there. All by itself that is enough to give a person a feeling of insecurity and then comes the roar of a lion—your hair stands up on end, your loins begin to quake. "Where was he? Where is he now? Is he creeping up on me? There he is! RUN. . .(pant, pant, pant, pant)." You know, you are just out of breath. "Oh I escaped him, I escaped him." And just as you feel safe again. . .
If that is not bad enough—if a lion is not bad enough—how about a bear? Think you can outrun a bear? A bear can run much faster than you can, especially after you just escaped from a lion. "I'll go up a tree." A bear can come up after you—all several hundred pounds of him, if he wants to. Well, you escape the bear and then. . .
That is not a very happy picture. I think that God is trying to draw our attention to the kind of times that are coming. They will be unrelenting in their terror—to such an extent that unless He intervened—"no flesh would be saved alive." Now we have to put ourselves into this. Is God able to protect us in a time like this? Yes, he can.
Do you desire the Day of the Lord? I think you should. But that has to be understood properly. We should want the return of Christ. But here he says, "Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord!" These people understood that the Day of the Lord was, in its overall sense, going to be something good. But the question is, "Were they prepared for the Day of the Lord?" That is a very important question, and the truth was that they were not.
He wants those of us reading this to desire the Day of the Lord in the right way, but He wants us to be prepared for the Day of the Lord as much as we possibly can. It is going to be then:
That is, just one calamity after another. It looks as though you escape one thing, and you get into a worse calamity. The Day of the Lord is going to be a time of unending catastrophe and trouble.
