This sermon delves into the seven levels of judgment as seen in the Bible, emphasizing the consequences of sin and God's response to it. It highlights the importance of recognizing God's consistent nature in judgment and the need for repentance and discernment in the face of escalating consequences. The sermon draws parallels between historical biblical events like the plagues in Egypt and current societal issues, urging a call to action and a plea for mercy and revival.

Good evening, we want to take our Bibles and open up to our background passage that we've been doing for a series of study on the seven levels of judgment. Discernment on these seven levels that we've begun with is the, we'll go in a review fashion here after we read in our scriptures, but if you take your Bibles and open up to Leviticus chapter 26, we'll read our background passage. Tonight we have a host of verses that we'll be looking at as we undertake for this study on the third level. Now the first level that we saw and we saw that it was that initiates, anything that initiates God's judgment on his people, on the land, on any of these seven things that we're looking at is because sin is involved. First response is that there was original sin that we saw in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Immediately God responded to that. Now the second level is that, is the understanding is that God will respond to sin. It is not a given in this society today or in the church that God judges sin. They believe is that at the final judgment is that final condemnation to either in hell or that they will be pardoned and that they'll receive everlasting life and they'll receive words of goodness from God, but that in this present life is that there is no judgment. That seems to be a fabricated lie and thought process in a lot of people, but let's not be mistaken that one of the things that I've devised in these seven levels that as we look at scripture, God is consistent. It's a verse that I have laid out for you before. One of God's attributes found in the book of Malachi is that God changes not. He is immutable and that reference to that is is that he is consistent, he is faithful, and he is the same. So as we look upon these verses here in Leviticus, we're going to examine the background for the seven levels and then we'll go over the rest of the seven levels of specifically naming them and then we'll get to our background passages for our third level. We'll begin reading in verse 16, Leviticus 26 verse 16. I also will do this unto you, I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning age that shall consume the eyes, cause sorrow of heart, and you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. And I will set my face against you, and you shall be slain before your enemies. They that hate you shall reign over you, and you shall flee when none pursues you. And if you will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sin. Our first reference there to seven levels, seven times more. And I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass. And your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits. And if you walk contrarian unto me, and you will not hearken unto me, I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins. I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, make you few in number, and your highways shall be desolate. If you will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrarian to me, then will I also walk contrarian unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins. And I will bring a sword upon you that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant. When you are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you, and you shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy. And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight. You shall eat and not be satisfied. And if you will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrarian to me, then I will walk contrarian to you also in fury. And I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall you eat. And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your image, and cast your carcasses upon the carcasses of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you. And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation. And I will not smell the savor of your sweet oats, and I will bring the land into desolation, and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and I will draw out the sword after you, and your land shall be desolate in your cities waste. Let us go to the Lord in prayer upon the reading of his word. Blessed Father, it is now that we seek to still ourselves. Let thy holy word, that which you have pronounced, that which you have prophesied, that which you have given and declared to us, not only to us in this day, but throughout the centuries you have been consistent with your faithfulness to your word. Lord, it is that we pray that we would glean a discernment tonight. Upon our hearts and upon our minds, Father, that we would weigh the consequences here, and know that we are found in fault before you, O God. Great is our shame. Great is our iniquity. Great is our transgressions against you, O Lord. We say with the prophet Ezra, I am so ashamed even to lift up my face, Lord, for all the iniquities that your own people have done, let alone the heathen in this land. Father, we stand before you condemned. You know that your anger waxes hot against us. You know that these things are happening even now, the levels of judgment, and that we have continued to provoke you, Lord, in all your ways. Lord, we have nothing left to stand upon except your mercy and grace. How longsuffering you have been with us, how patient, how kind. And so, Lord, upon you, we do anchor ourselves here tonight. Lord, let not thy wrath consume us. Let not thy anger, Father, destroy us. Lord, may you bring great redemption. May you bring a revival, Father, that glorifies your great name. Come in down among us, Lord, not in wrath, but in mercy. So, Lord, it is upon these prayers and petitions, teach us. Teach us to number our days, Father, for we are found in this time, in this age, O Lord, of seven times worse plagues upon us. Help us, O God, help the generation to come, our children and grandchildren. We seek you, O God, and we ask you for your favor and for your mercy, Lord, in the name of the one who offers us salvation, the only name that bears redemption and salvation, the blessed name, the beloved name, your Son and our Savior, Jesus Christ, we pray and we ask. Amen. All right, having read now that account in Scripture in Leviticus, it's for us to look at the accounts that we see unfolding in the verses that I've read. To go back and to review, what did we just read here? Well, we saw several portions in Leviticus 26 that tells us is that, I'm going to give you a chance to repent. I'm going to give you a chance to acknowledge where you're at, but if you don't, we read that repeatedly, if you don't, then I will send seven times more plagues. So, in studying that, I began to look at the different levels that God brings judgment, where he initiates it, how he initiates it, where we're at in our present day. And for our level tonight, level number three, which we'll be going through and studying, it is when God brings judgment on the land. Not so much against people and not so much against nation as a whole, but God begins to send judgment on his very creation, his earth, his environment that we call it, and we're going to look at the passages of Scripture, how that happened in Scripture, how that's happening today, and that we can understand is that because of a failure by God's people to see and to know what's going on, then the judgments continue to intensify. Now, I began with this in an explanation and I would continue to repeat myself I know, but it's to stress the importance of this. Why in the world begin to study this? Well, there's a little passage of Scripture that's found over in Jeremiah, and in Jeremiah it tells us that God says, but my own people, my own people, that's the church. Now, I know Jeremiah's day meant the Israelite, but today it's the church. It is we who bear the name of Christ himself. We are his followers, we are his disciples, but my own people do not know my judgments. Well, that verse just joked out at me is to say, why is the church not preaching this? Why is the church not publishing this? Why is the church not talking about this? Especially, why is the church not praying about this? And the answer is evident. We are in ignorance about the Word of God and about the God of the Word. We don't know God. We don't know his attributes. We don't know these judgments and these intensifications. We don't know the Word of God that tells us the history and shows us the demonstration of this, and we can't connect the two because we don't see it happening in the headlines in our newspapers, internet news, and we don't see it upon our own backyards. Because we are blind, because we don't have ears to hear, we don't have minds to perceive, or hearts to understand, therefore we're walking arm in arm with a lost world that's in darkness, being lied to by Satan. It's okay. It's okay. And we, of all people, ought to know it's not okay. We're in serious trouble. And these judgments that continue to get worse and worse, and you see this, it begins with this in verse 16, where he says, I will even do this unto you. I will point over your terror, consumption, and the burning age, and I shall consume your eyes and cause sorrow and heart. That's affliction. The judgment afflicts. It afflicts us near, and it afflicts us afar off. We don't care so much here on the east coast what's happening on the west coast, but my goodness, when it happens on the east coast, we're up in arms. We don't mind that California has all these major record earthquakes over on the west coast. We don't care anything about that. We don't care that Haiti was destroyed, leveled by that magnitude of that great earthquake down there in the Caribbean, but you have an earthquake in Virginia that rattles and shakes the things and makes the buildings swoon back and forth, then everybody's scared to death. Well, we have a greater population. We should be. We have a majority of our country's population found in the I-95 corridor from Virginia right on up into New York. It ought to concern us because any major devastation, cataclysmic event is going to affect us more because there's more people, but we see in this that he begins terror consumption. He's afflicted. Then he goes on where he says, and I'm going to break the pride of your power, and I will make your heaven as earth, and your earth as grass. That's drought. God withholds the rain. God removes the moisture that we are in desperate need of for gardens, for substance, for crops, for fruit, for wells, waters with wells. We need those things, especially in this area. That's what we live on. God has power to give it. God has power to take it. So he goes on with this, and he says, but if you continue to walk contrarian to me, then I ratchet up the judgment. So we go from level number three, which is God judging and afflicting the land, earth, our environment, nature, to where it says is that I will attack your government. Now, if one thing is that we can say, well, I hope he does. I hope he judges our government, our president, our congress, our governor, our state senators, delegates, the judicial system, all of our government authority that's owed for us. Well, that may not bother us so much on reading it on paper, but have no misunderstanding about it. He's already judging our government, and because he's making us to have the leadership that we have, it's destroying us from the inside out. Our economy is affected because of our government's choices. Our military is affected by our government's choices. Our lifestyle of freedoms is being decided by judicial selections and what the judges say from their respective places to make these things that are contrary to God's ways, and because we've done this, especially with the 1973 railroad versus Wade, we continue to live in a society, a nation, a culture that continues to provoke the Lord God almighty, and it's not going to make anything better. It's only making things worse. So the fourth judgment is when God attacks the government, and that may not be pressing to some, but it does get to the heart of our way of living. The next level, on level number five, is when God comes against his own people. That's the church. God sets himself against his own people, and there are some horrifying verses that, for those of you that have read and studied the Old Testament, horrifying verses where God says, I'm going to cut you off. Now, he was talking to his own children, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He said, I'm going to leave you. I'm going to forsake you. Now, that is in direct conflict with the one verse that we like to quote so much. In Hebrews 13, 5, I will never leave you nor forsake you. But again, if you are continuing to provoke the Lord God almighty, he withdraws because he does not have anything to do with sin. He will not tolerate it. He will not abide, but he will judge it, and his justice is right. So God will come against his own people, and he is judging the church today because we have never been more powerless than what we are right now. It is that you can see every definition of that which is happening under the skies of humanism versus the very lack of true salvation, true repentance, true movements of God. All these things coupled together is a judgment by God on his own people, and his own people don't even know. That's the danger and the damage of it. Now, that's number five. Number six. Number six is a kind of a culmination of all these that we're going to begin to be looking at with this level three, four, and five, and number six is that it gets very personal. You know, like I said, it's one thing if there's a drought out there and it's an inconvenience. It's another thing if Washington makes a decision and it affects, you know, the ones that are far away, and we're not worried about that. You know, we can survive. We can live on with Roe versus Wade, and it doesn't bother us or affect us. You know, well, we might be, you know, not as thriving as what we used to be in the church, but that's all right. We're still getting along. We're still standing, but number six, you don't have to worry about it affecting someone else or being external. It becomes very personal and internal. Level number six is when God sets himself against people, and it afflicts our children, and it afflicts our way of life, and it afflicts our life itself. Now, number seven is cataclysmic catastrophe. It is when God pours out his cup of wrath, and that literally scores of thousands, tens of thousands, upwards to the hundreds of thousands to millions are wiped out in a blink of an eye, and those are some very specific occasions in scripture and in our current world history that we've seen in our lifetime, but now that's number seven, but number six is that there is loss of life through calamities, catastrophes, through pestilence. We continue to see headlines of oddities to say that we've never seen this, we've never had this, where's this coming from, and it's a judgment, and it's not a huge score of where there are thousands of people dying, but there are dozens dying from it, and we'll look at that, how God is judging us as a people, and it is that there is loss of life, and these people are not ready to die, they're not ready to meet God, they're not ready for eternity, but the church sits in ignorance about this and is not addressing the assault that is happening in the here and the now. So those are the seven levels of judgment that we continue to go over, and we continue to see it here in Leviticus 26. Now, I want to come back to the explanation. Why is number three so important? Why is level number three relevant for us? I don't care if there's a drought happening in the Midwest, that doesn't affect me. Well, now start to put two and two together. Well, the drought has continued now for all this crop season, so all corn's gone, all the wheat's gone. We look back in pictures in history, and we can see the great dust bowl effects because of the same thing, and started in the 20s and went through the 30s, and there was great affliction because of loss of food, shortages of food. Now, it doesn't bother us too bad when the drought's going on now, but when you start buying food and prices start escalating two or three times more than what they are, when shortages start to happen and there becomes restrictions, and you see this kind of inconvenience now on our lifestyle, now it matters because it's affecting our way of living. We don't mind when the water goes bad or goes dry out in the desert somewhere because that's not our way of life, but when it happens to us, when we go to turn the kitchen faucet on and there's no water there, or when our inconveniences of water restrictions start to take place, then it bothers us. So it is that how much are we willing to suffer? How much are we willing to pay a price for our iniquities and sin, our callousness, our conveniences, our self-love, before we finally sit up and say, Lord, we're sorry. We see what's going on here. We read what's going on here. We know now what's happening, and Lord, we've been in the dark, and now we're in the light, and we see how much we've offended you, how much we've provoked you, and Lord, we're going to throw the emergency brake, and we're going to stop. We're going to stop our sin. We're going to stop our iniquity, and we're going to start living wholly, and we're going to start being righteous, and we're going to be the people that you want us to be. But you see, if we don't understand the assault that's happening to the land right now, we don't want to see when the calamities begin to affect us up on level six, and we are definitely not going to see when the catastrophe hits at number seven, and there's a catastrophe, a cataclysmic event. I don't want to have to be the one after hundreds of thousands of people die to be the one that said, I knew it was coming. I preached it was coming. I shared that it was coming. I prayed against it coming, but the people heard, but the people didn't respond. A message like this, a lesson to be taught of this is for a response. We cannot go any further than what we are. Now having said those things, it is that I want to identify in scripture how God afflicts, judges the land. We know, first of all, that the nation itself has sinned against the Lord. We know. We know from the top right on down. There are none of us that can stand up and say, I am void of offense against God or man. What a statement Paul wrote there, is it not? We know that there are in churches today people that are living together in sin. We know that in the church today that there are drug addictions today, prescription or illegal drugs. We know that there are lovers of self more than lovers of God among our own people. Now unless we just simply blame Washington, blame our in-laws or outlaws, blame the guy next door that doesn't come to church or doesn't give regards to God, it's easy to blame them, but it's not for them. This lesson tonight is not for them. This lesson tonight is for us. We need to know the Word of God. We need to know that God is the Word and we need to make the application of what's happening in our day and time right now. And unless we put all this together and get a proper response from God's people, we're sunk. There's a little verse at the end of 2 Chronicles 36 that I wish that I had started in our level number one and would come on through with it, but it doesn't always come to my mind when I'm sharing it. But in that chapter 36, there's a little verse there at the end of Josiah's days that says when Judah was taken away into captivity, they was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and it has a little phrase there that says, till there was no remedy. God's sentence sees our sin. That's number one. God responds to that sin by correcting us, by reminding us, thou shalt not, thou shalt. We are to change and correct our behavior. If we don't, the next level, God says, okay, I'm going to do signs and wonders among you now on the land so that you might see and that you might lift your eyes up to heaven and say, what's going on? That would produce in us a response that's acceptable to God. We didn't get it. The church didn't say it. We don't recognize it. We've got too many scientists out there. We've got too many editorial opinions out there. We've got too many people out there that are just too much consumed with the here and the now right in front of them and they're not worried about the external and they don't see it. So we haven't responded to this level. So God has upped it and now our government is collapsing. I dare say is that we are at the very fringe of utter collapse economically and as a government. It doesn't surprise me when I hear conspiracy theories about that there are troops being organized to keep the malls and the street riots from happening and keep them in place. It doesn't make me second guesses at all because we're out of places that anarchy is getting ready to be set up in a nation that has forgotten God. You see, when God is in charge, there's order. When God is not in charge, there's chaos. But we didn't get it. So our government is collapsing. We didn't throw the emergency break. We didn't respond and so we get to the next level and God assaults us. He assaults us in disease. He assaults us in catastrophes and abnormal circumstances and things that we just like, where is this coming from? So we have completed six levels of judgment without a proper response and this which is the obvious because it's so out of kilter because it's affecting nature itself that literally the land changes in front of us but we're blind to it. We don't see it. So I want to identify these things in scripture that changes the land that ought to provoke in us a response to say okay God we understand. Now I want to begin with, go back to the book of Exodus and let's go back to Genesis. I'll start with Genesis real quick because when Adam and Eve sinned and we looked at this and God's response to them, he cursed the land for Adam's sake and it was right then and there when sin entered in God's response was met there that he cursed the land. So we see that the ground does not yield like what we read of in the promised land that when they carried the thing of grapes on their shoulders the spies carried it out to Moses and the children. It took two of them on a pole to carry one thing cluster of grapes. Now that's some grapes. The land's not producing like that now. I can go to places around this country that has been assaulted by God's judgment that has shut down that which once was. So to see these things I see the correlation. God did it in scripture. God's doing it now. We didn't respond. Next level and that's how it's perceived. So God cursed the land in Genesis. Then we come over to Exodus and we see where God sends Moses down to Pharaoh to get the children of Israel after 400 years of captivity to come up out of Egypt and to go into the promised land, a land that flowed with milk and honey. Again, God gives, God can take it away. Now when Moses was down there and he would speak to Pharaoh, we read that phrase and God hardened Pharaoh's heart and every time Pharaoh hardened his heart there came another plague. Now it is the same sequence of events in those 10 plagues that we see in the 7 plagues that I just gave to you. He attacks external things that is not per se their flesh, their own living, but it got closer and closer to that until the 10th plague where there was death. Abnormal, cataclysmic catastrophe that the death angel came in one night and all the firstborn in Egypt died of men and beasts. What a grievous death. But we start with the first flood. The water was turned into blood. No biggie. Magicians come out. They did the same thing. It's external. We can do without water. We don't need water. We'll find other resources for that and it says that God in his mercy allowed for them to dig outside the Nile inshore and they were able to dig and then they had fresh water. So they could not do without water. It was a miracle that took place. It was a plague because it killed the fish and that was one of their life sources. It assaulted that but they could do without that. We can do without corn. We can do without these kind of things in our life for right now but we're not looking on down the road to say how is this going to affect me in six months? How is this going to affect my way of living in a year? If it continues as it has been, there's been no relief. There's been no oh this is just one and done. That you know hey we're under drought and then the rain is going to come next month and it's going to have you know we're going to get 12 inches of rain and it's going to bring everything back to normal and we can go on as we was. That's what's been happening for decades. But you see God trying to give us attention. The attention getters of judgment on the land. He's looking for our response. No response. So it continues. Now these are like building blocks. God responds as he always is. He has preachers proclaiming the word. Churches having invitations. Things happening to remind people of this truth and to get them to respond. That's God's response. This thing is still continuing. So God is still responding. Woe to us when God stops responding because he just cuts us off there. These plans on the land have continued as the other things have continued to build on top of it. So that there is this great weight weighing down. All these levels of judgment weighing down on our way of life. How much can we stand? Take a two by four. Lay it out there. Put 100 pounds on. It'll sustain it. Now 200, 300, 400, 500. Now you got a bow in it. It's only a matter of a couple more hundred pounds before that two before it gets snapped. And that's the weight of the judgments that are coming down on us. And this here on the land is affecting so many different things as coursing throughout our way of life. And that's the demification of that of the plagues in Egypt. The water was one thing but it killed the fish. They didn't care because they still had cucumbers and melons and other things like that. But then when the land started to get assaulted with hail that turned with fire running on the ground and it burned up the crops and God sent the locusts that destroyed the trees and there was nothing green left. Now it's getting ridiculous. Because now that which they had trusted in has been removed from them and they had nothing to replace it with. So you go from a level of a warning to a level of urgency. And that's where we're at. Now that's the plagues in Egypt external, the water being turned to blood, the hail destroying the crops, the locusts coming in and we're going to see again God is consistent. So that means that which God did by cursing the ground for Adam and that which God did when he sent the floods which was more of a cataclysmic event of number seven.