God accepted Jesus’ death as payment in full for our sins, and raised him from the dead. It’s a prospect we all face, because we’re all guilty of rebelling against God. This is a terrible thing, to fall under the sentence of God’s judgment. And since God is the source of life and all good things, being cut off from him means a destruction that never ends. He will cut us off from himself permanently. The sentence God will pass on that day will be to give us what we have asked for-which is separation from him. We will all one day stand before God and give account to him for our lives, for the damage we have done, and for our personal rejection of him as our ruler. The corruption, decay and death in our world are part of God’s punishment for humanity’s rejection of him.īut there is a further judgment that we will face. We experience God’s judgment against our rebellion in the reality of death. In other words, God won’t let the rebellion go on forever. He holds us accountable for our actions because it matters to him that we dishonor him, that we treat other people so poorly, and that we ruin his world. Like any good ruler, God cares enough to take our rebellion seriously. Our self-rule fails and we suffer the consequences, including the damage we do to ourselves, to the people around us, and to the world we live in. We find ourselves in a world full of little “gods,” each of us doing things our own way, each of us selfishly trying to bend the world and other people to our own will. The common Bible word for this rebellious stance towards God is “sin,” and we all do it-whether we follow a particular religion or not. We follow our own desires and priorities, and live by the values we decide are best (whether religious, secular, or a mix of both). We don’t honor and obey him as our ruler. We don’t thank him as we should for being our generous creator and provider. Most of the time, we simply ignore God or keep him at a distance, and get on with living our own lives. We rejected him as God by deciding to live our own way, in defiance of him. From the very beginning, we didn’t want God to be our ruler.
We need to start connecting the dots now.Everything that is wrong in our lives and in the world stems from the fateful choice humanity has made. We cannot wait for a traditional, united, far-right umbrella organisation to emerge before we act. “Added to this febrile mix is the release of Anjem Choudary and many of his network’s leading figures, likely to regalvanise their supporters and provide yet another seedbed for the far right to grow their support, too. We believe a very real threat remains from terrorism carried out by lone actors, too, radicalised over the internet. There are justified concerns that the police response to these rising threats, especially against MPs, has fallen short. “Meanwhile, while the banned terror group National Action has finally been destroyed by the authorities, there is a growing threat of violence from the younger neo-Nazis emerging in their wake. “Our latest polling also reveals a disturbing level of anti-Muslim prejudice and discourse running through society, with a third of people saying they believe there are Muslim-run no-go zones, and rising antisemitism on the left, which we have exposed in a new investigation,” said Nick Lowles, the chief executive of Hope not Hate. The group warned that there could also be a rise in support for Islamist extremist group Al-Muhajiroun following the release of one of its founders, Anjem Choudary, from prison. The report also found that while the numbers arrested for terror-related offences in 2018 was down on the previous year, there was a growing threat of far-right terrorism, which came both from organised groups such as National Action and from lone actors who are radicalised over the internet. “The inability of the Labour party leadership to understand and acknowledge this experience is particularly chilling when the Labour party and the left in general hold values of equality and antiracism as core to their identity.” Many people in the Jewish community therefore identify with a sense of the precariousness of their safety, where material security and educational attainment are not seen as guarantors of security and safety,” it said. “The family history of so many members of the British Jewish community includes first-hand experience of persecution. It concluded that the Labour party was still not doing enough to tackle antisemitism.
The report’s authors said a large group was involved in “denying a problem exists and dismissing the issue as a rightwing and Zionist smear”.