Christ is ready to put to death the "kings" in us that He will not accept in His Kingdom. But we have to cooperate with Him by naming them, judging them as wicked, and then denouncing and renouncing them. We must draw near to God and resist them.

Just as the Lord helped Joshua in the battle for the land of promise, so Jesus will help us as we go from battle to battle in our land of promise, which in this case is our own personality.

We want above all to dwell in peace with God and to always do His perfect will. But we cannot because these kings in us keep pressuring us to disobey what we know to be God's will.

If you have been a Christian for a while, and God considers you to be strong enough for the work of eternal judgment to begin in your personality, you may find that things in your life that you thought were long dead are now beginning to emerge. This means Christ is bringing out the kings hidden in you. He is ready to put them to death and hang them on the cross.

A passage that suggests the work of judgment and deliverance will take place at the end of the age is as follows:

As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear. (Matthew 13:40-43—NIV)

I suppose most of us have read the above passage many times. Maybe we thought this would take place when we went to Heaven; or perhaps, as is so often the case with Evangelical scholars, all such unpleasantness is directed toward the Jewish people.

The passage is not directed toward the Jewish people but toward the Kingdom of God. It is saying that first, everything that causes sin will be weeded out of the Kingdom, and then all who do evil will be removed. This means there will be a time when the evil can be removed from us; but if we do not cooperate with the Holy Spirit at that time, then we ourselves—Christian or not—will be removed from the Kingdom and thrown into the fiery furnace.

The above passage is showing us the working of the Day of Atonement, which I like to term the Day of Reconciliation. Every person that is to be brought forward to the new heaven and earth reign of Jesus Christ must be free from evil. The evil will be incarcerated for eternity in the Lake of Fire.

Sooner or later all who would be saved, whether members of God's elect or citizens of the nations of saved people, must be reconciled to God. This means all love of the ways of the world (which the Father hates), all the ungovernable lusts and passions of the flesh, and all self-seeking, must be removed. God will not have fellowship with any of these.

To be continued.