Dear friends:

A program on the History Channel made me think of Pompei, a Roman city that was totally destroyed by a volcano in AD 79, just nine years after the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem.

It was lunch time in the ancient Italian city of Pompei.  Vesuvius, the nearby volcano, was about to begin 19 hours of spectacular eruptions.
All the people in the 600-year-old town of 20,000 could have escaped. There had been time to flee. But in AD 79, no one recognized the inherent danger of the mountain’s warnings.

There was an eyewitness.  He was called "Pliny the Younger."  He wrote: "For several days before (the eruption), the earth had been shaken, but this fact did not cause fear because it was a commonly observed feature in Campagnia."  (Quote from Pliny the Younger, Eyewitness to Vesuvius Eruption 24-25 August 79 A.D.)

Through the modern miracle of television, I saw photos of skeletons of many victims who have been unearthed from the disaster.  One was a young lady holding and trying to protect a small child.  Both were destroyed by the sudden onslaught of fire, lava and ash.

The message to us, 1,926 years later is this: As in AD 79, people today are ignoring the inherent dangers and warnings of God's impending judgment on a wicked world.  When it comes, it will destroy all in its path, men, women and children.

In Pompei, only about 20,000 died, a small number compared with the 2004 earthquake and tsunamis in south Asia which reportedly killed well over 200,000.  Future natural disasters or terrorist WMDs could exceed that total many times over.

The earth is a dangerous place.  Sudden death without warning threatens every person every day.  Our fixed eternal state is only one disaster and one heartbeat away.

A person is a fool to falsely presume otherwise and to continue in sin or reject or delay a total commitment to Christ, the only One who can save us, in this world and the next.

Don't be a fool.  Repent of any known sin and commit all to Him today.  Then believe and claim the protective promises of Psalm 91 and elsewhere.  And when your time does come, you will enter into indescribable peace, joy and love in the presence of the Lord, and not a dark, lonely, hopeless eternity without Him in a place frequently spoken of by Jesus.

"What makes us think that we can escape if we are indifferent to this great salvation that was announced by the Lord Jesus himself? It was passed on to us by those who heard him speak, and God verified the message by signs and wonders and various miracles and by giving gifts of the Holy Spirit whenever he chose to do so" (Hebrews 2:3-4, NLT).

Remember Pompei, and tell others.

Jim

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