We ended the last module by saying that God as our Judge has the sole right to decide to serve a Judgement of death on a wicked person and that He can reveal to His Prophets, this decision to bring judgement (which could be death or other terrible occurrence) on those who take sides with the devil against us.
As we said in a previous module, although we can ask God for His Judgement (both for ourselves so that we can be corrected and for those who have done wickedness against us), we are told not to seek vengeance (1Cor 11:31-32, Heb. 12:5-11, 1Cor 4:4, Romans 12:19-21). The primary reason for Judgement in this era of grace is to help the guilty to find repentance however in certain cases as decided by God the Judge; such a wicked person is condemned to death.
In this module we shall consider two cases in the Old Testament where God passed Judgement on the wicked.
First Case: Genesis Chapter 6, 7 and 8.
When God wanted to destroy the world with flood, He revealed it to Noah who was instructed to build an ark of escape and preach the message of repentance to His generation (2Peter 2:5). Notice that although God had passed a Judgement on the entire human race to wipe them off the face of the earth, He still sent Noah to preach the gospel of repentance to them. He was actually willing to reverse the Judgement if they would repent but unfortunately they did not repent hence they all perished in the flood.
Second Case: Jonah Chapter 1,2, 3 and 4.
When God passed a Judgement of complete destruction on Nineveh, He sent Jonah to proclaim it to them. God was expecting them to hear about His decision to punish them and repent so that He will not need to carry out His Judgment on them. In this interesting story, the entire nation repented and God reversed His Judgment on them by sparing their lives.
Notice that in these two cases mentioned, none of the Prophets to whom the Judgement was revealed needed to pray so that the Judgment they declared as already decided by God could happen.
Once God has decided on a Judgement to punish a wicked person and reveals it to a Prophet, all that the Prophet does is to declare it by saying “thus says the Lord…”. Unlike what is usually the case in non judgemental Prophecies, for a judgemental prophecy, the Prophet is not required to pray for it to happen. The wicked person has already sown a bad seed which is now ripe for harvest hence He must reap it. The evil seed sown is what was required to set law of this judgment in motion to receive the harvest of death or other terrible occurrences. The only prayer that will be needed is that of intercession to stop the Judgment from coming to pass or to reduce its gravity (Eze 18:21-23, 22:29-31).
It is like a stone already falling under the influence of gravity, you don't need any additional force to make it to continue to fall down but you will need a great force to to stop the force of gravity and hence prevent the stone from reaching the ground to destroy it's victims.
To be continued…
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