The Bible Provocateur
The Bible Provocateur
LIVE DISCUSSION: Knowing the Terror of the Lord (Part 2 of 3)
What if your destiny is set the moment you die—and there are no second chances? We wrestle with that claim through Revelation 22:11 and John 8, laying out a sober, hope-filled case that your eternal state is fixed by how you respond to Christ now. Not to frighten believers, but to light a fire for prayer, mission, and endurance.
We push past religious performance to honor the hidden saints—the quiet intercessors whose prayers shape families, workplaces, and nations. Along the way, we draw a hard line between regret and repentance through the story of Judas: remorse without running to Christ cannot save. The message lands with pastoral weight and practical clarity: gratitude for undeserved grace, urgency to share the gospel with those closest to us, and courage to keep going when faith feels thin.
You’ll hear candid reflections on aging, assurance, and the desire to finish well, alongside a clear rejection of purgatory based on scripture. We talk about how assurance is recognized not by hype, but by endurance; how private prayer thunders in heaven; and how a life anchored to Christ today answers eternity’s most pressing question. If you’ve felt the tension between public spirituality and quiet faithfulness, or if you’re praying for someone who seems far from God, this conversation will help you act with love and conviction.
If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs courage, and leave a review to help others find these conversations. What’s one person you’ll pray for and reach out to this week?
BE PROVOKED AND BE PERSUADED!
Your situation is fixed based on how you chose to live your life, how you chose to handle the gospel message when you heard it while you were alive. When you die, persons, Christians or otherwise, when you die, your destiny is sealed, it is locked, it is firm, and it will never change. It is either going to be in hell with torment and everlasting punishment forever and ever and ever and ever again. Or you turn to Christ in your lifetime. You followed him, you served him, you loved him, and you loved his people like I love you guys, his people, and you better love me whether you like it or not. We will go to heaven and inhabit those heavenly mansions, those dwellings that Christ said he would go before us to prepare. And we will go there not because of anything good in and of ourselves, not because there was anything better about us intellectually than those who rejected him and went to hell. We are no different than they are. No different than they are, except for the fact that the Lord God of glory set his affection upon us before the foundation of the world. He is the one that put a difference between us and them, and that is why we are thankful. That is why we are thankful. We need to be offering up the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving every day to our Lord and Savior for what he has done for us because we did not deserve it. What we deserved is hell and destruction and damnation for all of our sin that we don't even, if we just consider the sin that we that we don't even know we did, let alone the sin that we are conscious of. This is giving me a happy headache. That might take a while to sink in with some of you guys. Purgatory, no such thing. There's a great gulf fixed between the unbelieving dead and the believing dead, and no one can cross over to either side. So that means that if you go into hell, you don't get out. And Christians, when you go to heaven, you don't get out. That's heavy. When you go to heaven, you don't get out. Because sin has no way to enter in. There are no slippery serpents that will come underneath the cracks and invade the heavenly domain. It doesn't happen. There's no temptation, there is no evil concupiscence to seize upon within the buried in the heart of the sinner who has been saved by grace. It doesn't happen. I know what I'm saying to some of you might be boring. Maybe you don't like the way I'm saying it. Don't focus on that. Focus on what is being said. Focus on what the word of God is saying. Pay attention to what I'm saying. Listen to what we are told by the Apostle John in Revelation twenty-two, verse eleven. Those who have perished in their sins, verse eleven. He says that he the angel said this actually to John. He who is unjust, let him be unjust still. He who is filthy, filthy, let him be filthy still. He who is righteous, let him be righteous still. He who is holy, let him be holy still. So what is the angel telling the apostle? He's telling him that when people die in whatever state they were in prior to death, that state has solidified their existence forever. In other words, they will remain in that state forever. If you died unjust and filthy, you will remain that way forever. There is no way out of that state. You know why? Because there is no purgatory. No purgatory. Your state is locked and loaded forever and eternity. Get used to it. Christians, I'm telling you this not because I fear loss on your part, but because I'm hoping that you will be ignited with a fire underneath your feet to go and reach every person that you know who does not know Christ the way you do. And I hope that you will pray that they will come to Christ and love him more than you or me. I feel like the way I was before I knew Christ, I feel like I robbed people because I feel that there were so many people who were so much better than me who don't have what I have in Christ. Sometimes I confront I'm confronted with guilt over the fact that God has given me so much, considering who and what I was before I knew him, and people who I looked at and thought, that person is a good person, but they don't know and love Christ the way I do. Why did he do this for me and not them? I'm just saying. What is it going to take? I'm talking to you Christians. We are looking down the barrel of an apostate age. What are you going to do with the gospel with which you have been entrusted with? You have family, friends, enemies, neighbors, co-workers. What do you think your what do you think? Who who do you think your missionary field is? There is going to be an awful lot of disappointed Christians. There is going to be an awful lot of disappointed Christians. An awful lot. Including all these people who come on TikTok and start speaking in tongues and all that kind of stuff. They're not going to be there. All these TikTok preachers casting out demons in front of the cameras. They're not going to be there. No. You know who's going to be there? Those people who you don't know. Those ignominious people, those anonymous people who are at home, sitting at their tables, on their knees, by their bedsides, praying, asking God to save their family members, to save the co-workers, to save their politicians, to save their governments, to save their countries, to save their brothers and sisters. People that are constantly praying that nobody knows about. Anybody can do what I do in this context. But it is hard to go and sit down in the privacy of your own home or your bedroom and to pray when nobody's watching. See, I know you guys are watching. So from your perspective, you can look at me and go, he's probably just doing this for followers and likes and all that kind of nonsense. I'm not, but I can see why you might think that. But there are those people who are silent openly. But in heaven, their voices ring loud. Here they're quiet. But in heaven they are loud. They're loud. God is swimming in their tears. He is swimming in their tears, and he's going to answer their prayers. He's going to, he promises to listen and hear his people when they cry out to him. And the tears of God's saints are fuel for our Lord to act on our behalf. The tears of the saints fuel our Lord, and he will act on our behalf. And he will be relentless in accommodating our cause, which is his cause. And his cause is his glory, his praise, the promotion of his fame. Still. Let him who is filthy be filthy still. The angel tells John's that, tells John the Apostle, that when sinners die, their state that they were in before they died is a state that they will be in for the rest of eternity. Let the righteous who is let the righteous be righteous still, and let the holy be holy still. And that those will go into eternity and shall never know what sin is ever again. Although we will remember. And we will look up in any direction, and we will see our Lord, and we will be able to thank him and to worship him and to give him glory and to extol his beauty. And to be thankful for his covering that he put over us, his canopy of love that he shrouded us in and kept us from cursing him after he saved our souls. Amy, yes, you rely on Jesus Christ to take the hit for all of your failures. He bore them all. And the ones that remain, he will carry you through them all. Do not weary, sister. Hang tight. Be enduring. Endure in the faith. All of you Christians, endure. Do not cower out and fall out of the race at the last minute. Don't do it. You say that Jesus won't let you go lightly, Jesus won't let you go at all. If he lets you go, you he never had you. He never had you. So, sister, hang in there because the way that you know you belong to Christ is that you endure. You don't give up, you don't quit. You don't quit. I am 58 years old. And from the time I was 18 to 58, all my Christian years, it seems like it was overnight. It feels like overnight. And so, Amy, you know what I'm talking about. One day you're 20. The next day, you're 60. And then the next day, you're on your deathbed. Somebody's having to make the choice to pull the plug or not. If I'm on my deathbed, Christians, let me tell you something. I don't want nobody putting me on no life support system. I don't want no chemotherapy. I don't want none of that. I am looking forward to going to see my Lord. That's all I want to see. I don't want nothing. No AIDS, no drugs, no helps, no nothing. No none of that. I want to go be with my Lord. If he wants me to stay, he'll keep me here. But I don't want to be a zombie. I don't want to be a zombie. No purgatory. I'm losing my thoughts here. No purgatory. John eight twenty-one. Just two more verses. John eight verse twenty one. Jesus is talking about his death. He's talking about his death. And he tells his disciples, I am going away, and you will seek me. And you will die in your sin. And where I go, you cannot come. And I said he was talking to his disciples, but he wasn't. He was talking to those who were not. They were not his disciples. He says, I'm going away, and you will seek me. And you will die in your sin. And where I go, you cannot come. Now listen, Jesus is telling sinners that if you die in your sin, you will not only not go where Jesus is, but you can never go where he is. You know what that means? No purgatory. There is no purgatory. You tell everybody that you know who tells you that there is, there's no purgatory. When I was young Christian, I swore up and down that there's no possible way that anybody who claims to be a Catholic can be saved. Now I don't know that so much. I don't know. Now, generally speaking, I don't consider that to be a Christian faith. But I do believe that there are individuals scattered throughout who don't know any better. Who go home and read their Bibles and whatever, and they believe things, but they don't know anything. And they are attached to the form of religion, the form of it, the formality. And in spite of themselves, they might be Christians. I don't know, some of them. A few, not generally. I'm talking about one in a hundred thousand, one in a million. One thing that age teaches you is not to judge. Let God do all the judging. All we can do is believe the truth and convey the truth. That is it. But the doctrines and the teaching of the Catholic faith is wrong. All of it. It's wrong. The sacraments, wrong. Purgatory, wrong. The priesthood, wrong. Pope, wrong, evil, wicked, ungodly. So Jesus says to the wicked, where I go, you cannot come. You cannot come. Once again, another proof text that there is no purgatory. Now in Matthew twenty-six, Matthew twenty-six, verse twenty-four, Jesus says something astounding. He says something really astounding. In Matthew 26. Let me look it up real quick. I thought I had a marker on the page, but I did not, so please forgive me for wasting your time. I will get it. In Matthew 26, Judas had betrayed our Lord. And he said to his disciples, while they were with him in the upper room, he says, He who dipped his hand with me in the dish, he will betray me. Jesus said that he who dips his hand with him in the tray will betray him. And then Jesus said in verse 24, The Son of Man indeed goes just as it is written of him. But woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. Now watch this. Listen to what Christ says about Judas. It would have been good for that man if he had not been born. Now listen, I'm gonna tell you something. Christians, put yourself back in Palestine. Jesus is with his disciples. Judas was one of those disciples of Christ. Judas was the treasurer, the one who kept the purse, the one who kept the money. Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver, and he told the people that paid him for the betrayal that the one that he kissed would be the one that they were to arrest and ultimately kill. But when Judas betrayed the Lord Jesus Christ, he took the thirty pieces of silver, went back to the temple, to the Pharisees, and threw the money back in there and expressed guilt. He realized that what he had done was wrong. He realized that he had betrayed innocent blood. But when he came to this realization, look at what he did. He went to the priests, the Pharisees, the chief rulers. He went to them saying he did something wrong. He went to them saying that he betrayed innocent blood. But you know who he didn't go to? He didn't run to Christ. He didn't go to the disciples and ask, Where is our Lord? I need to see him. I've offended him. I want to get things straight. I want to set the record straight. I want to get right. I want to stay with him. I repent for my sins. That's not what Judas did. He went back to the ones who gave him payment. His acts looked noble, but they were not. They were not. Judas was Judas. He was a betrayer. He was the betrayer of our Lord and Savior. And Jesus said, because remember, Jesus knows what's in all men. Jesus knew what Judas was doing. He knew that he took the silver bag. He knew that he went to them and said, I have betrayed innocent blood. Jesus knew all of this. He knew it all. And when Jesus and when Judas went out to go hang himself, Jesus did not stop him. That's right. I said it. Jesus did not stop. Judas. Jesus is the same one who said, now listen, Christians, listen to me. Judas was not the disciple Jesus loved. Brother, I love you, but that's not what he said. Judas, Jesus said that of all, Jesus said that of all that the Father has given me, I shall in no wise lose one of them. I will not lose one. Jesus said that if I have one hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, I will go after them and bring him back into the fold. Judas betrayed our Lord for thirty pieces of silver, realized that he had betrayed innocent blood. Then he proceeded to go and hang himself, but Christ never stopped him. I'm just telling you what the Bible says. Jesus did not stop him. But this is what Jesus said in Matthew 26, verse 24. This is what he said. But woe to that man by whom the son of Man is betrayed. It would have been good for that man if he had not been born. I will not, cannot.