Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
Every rainy winter we here in California see the same heart-breaking pictures: luxurious homes built on shifting foundations sliding down cliffs, even into the Pacific Ocean. (But yes, while they lasted, the owners had glorious views.)
This must have been a common sight in Jesus' day for He draws a lesson from it. He likens those who build a house of religious belief on falsehood to those who build a mansion on a sand dune with an ocean view. They are "foolish," He says (Matt. 7:24-27). Note, He doesn't call them "wicked."
This introduces us to one of the most pathetic and tragic aspects of church life: sincere, devoted people who can't tell the difference between Bible truth and fanaticism. They are not wicked people, they don't rob banks or commit adultery, but they spin wild theories out of Bible texts wrested from common sense contexts. Almost every church, no matter how small, seems to have one (or more) of these extremists who keep promoting their ideas. They mainly misconstrue Daniel and Revelation, but there is a solid-rock, common-sense understanding of those prophecies, and it developed in the Great Second Advent Movement of well over a century ago. The rain and storms of opposition have "beat on that house; and it did not fall."
But every departure from that clear-cut prophetic truth has resulted in a "house built on the sand," and as "the rain descended, [and] the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; ... it fell." It has left the extremists looking "foolish." But fanaticism doesn't mind the acute embarrassment of appearing naked and foolish before the world and before heaven!
To change the metaphor, Revelation 16:15 says, hang on to your clothes; all those nightmares you've ever had about appearing naked in public will be fulfilled unless you study Daniel and Revelation and know for sure what is that bed-rock foundation of truth. Heaven's Weather Service says the storm is on the way.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: February 9, 1998.
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