A Sea of Blood — E.A. Johnston

Heavenly Father, you are a great God, and we are great sinners. Oh, Ancient of Days, you are the Most High God, who dwells among the Cherubim and Seraphim. Lord, I'm bankrupt without you. I need your presence and your power to preach this message tonight, Lord.

I need you, Jesus. Though hellish hosts revile forever, I lay myself on Christ my Savior. Lord, attend this message, I pray, by your Holy Spirit, and come among us undisturbed folks. Open hearts, I pray, Lord.

I pray these things. Let someone here see Jesus. In the strong name of your Son, Jesus, Amen. Well, I've got a message I want to unburden upon you tonight, friends, that God's put on my heart. We want a comfortable Christianity today, where the world leaves us alone to live our lives with as much happiness as we can.

The Cost of Comfortable Christianity

We want everything easy today. We have an easy-to-believe gospel that makes it easy to become a Christian. Why, you don't even have to repent of your sins, and self can still sit on the throne of our hearts and rule there in this easy Christianity that costs nothing and has no cross.

But Christ gave His apostles a commission to go into all the earth and preach the gospel to every creature. And they ran and cried, repent and turn from your idols to serve the living God. And they turned the world upside down as they ran smack dab into a hostile crowd of Jews and Gentiles and Satan and hell.

The Blood of the Early Martyrs

And they each were butchered like beasts in a slaughter for their testimony of Christ Jesus. The early Christians refused to say Caesar is Lord. They'd only say Jesus is Lord. So they were arrested and persecuted and burned at the stake.

They were drawn and quartered and slain by the sword. They were beheaded and crucified. Peter was crucified upside down. Paul was beheaded. Andrew was crucified on an X-shaped cross. Thomas was martyred in India.

Philip was cruelly put to death in North Africa. Matthew was stabbed to death in Ethiopia. Bartholomew was flayed alive and beheaded near Armenia. Simon the Zealot was martyred in Persia for refusing to sacrifice to the sun god.

Matthias was burned to death in Syria. James the Greater was executed by the sword under King Herod Agrippa. John was put into a pot of boiling oil. But by God's grace, he survived it to live to be an old man and die in Ephesus.

In the early church, God carried on His work through a sea of blood. That's the title of my message tonight, friends. A sea of blood. And so He does today in northern Nigeria, Afghanistan, China, other areas in the world where there is vital Christianity.

There is going to be hot persecution. But if you want to have Jesus and have your sins too, and you want an easy way to heaven, even though Jesus declared that the gate is straight and the way narrow and few there be that find it, I feel sorry for you, friend.

The True Gospel and the Need for Repentance

You better get to Christ alone for real salvation. I believe there's some of you here within the sound of my voice who've never heard the real gospel before, the true gospel of the cross. We live in such a sad day, the spiritual declension, where few even preach anymore.

You never saw your heart as a nest of vipers. You never saw God in all His holiness and glory. You never ever closed with a bloodstained Jesus, even if you are the chairman of the deacons. I'm going to preach the real gospel to you tonight, friends.

It may make some of you fighting mad. It may make some of you angry at God and His sovereignty. It may make you hate this preacher. I've had deacons confront me after a service in a sanctuary, threaten me with hatred in their voice and fire in their eyes for telling them if they did not repent, they'd bust hell wide open when they died.

Tonight, with the Lord's help, I'm going to give you the true undiluted gospel of the Son of God. As we say in the South, I'm going to give you the oil straight from the can. Listen, friends, God's spirit will be among us as we read His word, as we look to Him.

But we must be honest with Him tonight. We must be transparent with our souls. We can't keep fooling our friends because we can't fool God. Listen, you have to know something. Listen, you have to know you live in a spiritually dangerous world of unseen spirits.

That's the first thing I'm going to speak on tonight. Then, the next aspect, I'm going to go on about how wicked your own heart is, how corrupt your natural condition is, and what a perilous position you rest upon as an unconverted church member.

You heard me. There's some of you here as an unconverted church member. Billy Graham, as a young man, went to a Mordecai Ham meeting. He was a clean church member. But in that meeting, Mordecai Ham, under the power of the Holy Spirit, pointed Billy Graham out, and Billy Graham got mad at the preacher for calling him a sinner.

But he was lost, and he got saved that night. And the rest is history. I'm assuming some of you listening to me were at one time or another members in some church. But as religious as you've been, you've never been changed.

Your religion is good for nothing. If your nature has never been renewed, then I'm going to point you to a bloodstained Christ tonight for forgiveness of sin. He's your only hope. Jesus is your only hope.

He's your only remedy, because I can't save you, friend, any more than you can save yourself. And if you're saved, it's because God gave you saving faith. Salvation is in the hands of God. Some of you here are strangers to grace.

Jesus doesn't know you any better than you know Him, even though you give Him lip service. When it comes down to where the rubber meets the road, you couldn't pick Him out of a police lineup. You've never had an experiential knowledge of God in your life, even though you may be able to fool your friends by calling yourself a Christian.

But if you dropped dead right now, demons would grab you by the heels, drag you down into darkness of hell, laughing like hyenas. You're strangers to regeneration, strangers to repentance, strangers to saving faith.

Listen to me. You're strangers to all these things, even though you sing like a Canarian church on Sunday. My first proposition, friends, is to tell you about the unseen world all around you. Just like the prophet Elijah had asked God to open the eyes of His servant, as we see in 2 Kings 6, and His servant said unto Him, Alas, my master, how shall we do?

And He answered, Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. And Elijah prayed and said, Lord, I pray Thee, open his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elijah.

The Unseen Spiritual World

Now, there's an unseen world all around us, friends. That's a natural fact. The apostle Paul underlines this in Ephesians chapter 6, when he says, Well, how many missionaries have found this to be true as they labored in jungles where the devil is worshipped by voodoo and other pagan forms of darkness?

There are some areas in the world that are Satan's seat and his hot spot of power and devilish activity. And if we go into those areas unprepared to spread the gospel, we'll have as much success as if we tried putting out a burning skyscraper with a water pistol.

You better know, friends, what you're up against. And what you're up against is the devil and his hordes. And the devil's going to fight hard to keep his goods. I'm going to give you some real examples of my own encounters with this unseen world.

So buckle up, friends. Sit up straight. Get the wax out of your ears and hear me. I won't give you all of these encounters because some of them are so terrifying. If I did, some of you may drop dead from a heart attack.

But I'm going to do my best because I want to get you saved tonight before that happens. Back when my daughter was a tween, I took her and her girlfriend to Shiloh Battlefield in Tennessee for a school project.

And on the way there, we stopped off in Bolivar, Tennessee, to look at an old vacant insane asylum because my daughter wanted to photograph it. I had bought her a new Nikon camera for her birthday, and she was into photography at the time.

And an old eerie building wouldn't make a good subject to take pictures of, so she thought. So I found the abandoned insane asylum, which had a bad reputation for cruelly treating its inmates. It was a black Gothic structure, three stories high, with windows all across the front of it.

And we parked the car and got out and stood in front of that building while my daughter took about 50 pictures. Later that day, when we returned home, my daughter went straight to her room to put the photo cartridge in her computer to look at the pictures.

And when she did, she began to scream and holler, Daddy! Daddy! Well, I ran into her room and she pointed with excitement to the computer screen of photos that she'd taken that day of that insane asylum.

And I'm talking to you now, friends. I'm telling you the truth. In those photos, in every window, was a person or persons looking at us. They were dressed in clothes of long ago. Some were in robes. There was a man standing with his mouth open, pointing at us as if yelling.

He was angry. In another photo, three hunched figures huddled together in fear. In other photos, people were standing, looking with interest at us as we stood there taking their pictures. But there was no one in the windows of that abandoned insane asylum when we were there.

No one we could see with our eyes, but they were there nonetheless. Well, I told my daughter to take that photo clip and destroy it, and she did. And we get chills when we talk about it, even today. And I'm going to share with you, friends, another story about the unseen world.

Personal Encounters With Satanic Powers

It's important you know about it because you need to know of your danger. It's pertinent to my subject tonight of my first topic of this unseen world all around us. There was a time I met a Satan worshiper who claimed to be now a Christian.

He was a young man of college age. So I had him come over to my house to tell me a story of how he became a Satan worshiper. I was greatly interested. He was a young man, and he told me that when he was 16 years old, he became addicted to hard rock music.

And one night, while he was in his bedroom listening to a hard rock album, he had an overwhelming desire to pray to the devil. This he did. Soon, he enjoyed praying to the devil, and he made it a regular practice with him.

And after a few weeks, he had a visitor in his bedroom. A demon entity showed up who had an ancient name, and this demon asked him if he would like to do a worship service to Lucifer. And this young man said yes.

Well, the demon gave him instructions to visit a neighboring farm after midnight and kidnap a goat, wrap it in a blanket, tie it with a rope, take it in his pickup truck to a certain forest where he would build a fire.

He'd take a knife, slit the goat's throat, throw it on the fire, and then call out to Satan, offer that goat as a sacrifice to his satanic majesty, which he did. A week later, the same demon entity visited him again in his bedroom, and he thanked him.

He said, I want to reward you for your service. I want to ask you if you'd like to receive special powers that other men don't have. Well, this excited the young man, and he was delighted with the prospect, and he eagerly agreed.

The demon chanted some ancient words which the young man did not understand, but when it was over, he could now see with new eyes the unseen world. He told me from that day on, everywhere he went, he saw demons.

He saw demons at the local mall, walking right beside the shoppers. He saw demons sitting on park benches. He saw demons walking in stores and buildings. He saw them going up and down the streets. He said, even though he now claimed to be a Christian, he could still see demons everywhere.

He said the most demon inhabited city he ever visited was the city of Rome. He said hordes and hordes of demons are crawling all over the city of Rome. Well, now that you know the danger around you, friend, as a believer, we know what God's word declares.

Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. True believers should not fear. It's time you were faced with something else that may be against you, and that is the rottenness of your own heart.

The Deceitfulness of the Human Heart

As the prophet Jeremiah declares, the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? It's deceitful in that many believe they rest upon a firm foundation with their faith, that they're on their way to heaven.

But for many, it's but a false piece from a false profession of a false faith. Many believe they're going to heaven because they're not bad enough for hell, but in the sight of a thrice holy God who sees all men involved in sin and guilt and ruined by Adam's first sin.

For God views all mankind as sinful and guilty and lost and undone, that man in his natural condition is perishing, exposed to the wrath of God and the curse of the law, subject to all the miseries of this life and the pains of hell hereafter forever.

Many men and women rest upon a rotten foundation because they don't know the rottenness of their own heart. They're on a rotten foundation of an empty religious profession. Many confuse church membership for salvation.

Many confuse membership in a religion as conversion. They say, I'm a good Catholic, so I'll go to heaven. I'm a good Methodist, I'll go to heaven. I'm a good Presbyterian, I'll go to heaven. I'm a good Baptist, I'll go to heaven.

But they've never, ever exercised repentance toward God in faith in His Son, Jesus. Listen, friends, get the wax out of your ears, I beg you. Sit up straight and hear me. God will allow no one, no one into His kingdom while you still have your shotgun of rebellion pointed at Him.

Salvation comes when self is dethroned and another is enthroned there, the Lord Jesus Christ. Men must be smoked out of all their false refuges of safety, of self-righteousness and a good opinion of themselves.

Men must be shut up to God and pointed to Christ alone for salvation. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me. Well, I'm going to share with you tonight, friends, the first message of the Gospel.

God's Judgment Against Sin

And the first message of the Gospel is this, God must punish sin. Most folks don't believe in a God who'll send you to hell. Your God wouldn't send you to hell. At least the God of your imagination won't.

But listen, the God of the Bible will. Jesus warned, and fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. The apostle Peter speaks of a God who will and must punish sin.

For if God spared not the angels that sinned but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment and spared not the old world but saved Noah, the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to an overthrow, making them an example unto those that should live ungodly.

I will stop there, friends. Surely God is a God who must punish sin. You better listen to me, friends. You better get out your sledgehammer, bust up that Santa Claus God of your own imagination before He casts you down into the very bowels of the devil's hell.

You better get serious with God, friends. God gets serious with those who get serious with Him. You can't have one foot in the world and one foot with God. He must have total submission. You better believe in the living God of the Bible that He is a God who must punish sin.

That's the first message of the Gospel. And if you go and believe that, then maybe you're ready for the second message of the Gospel, which is God has provided a remedy for sin in the person of His only begotten Son, Jesus.

Christ's Sacrifice as the Remedy for Sin

Most folks take Jesus today without ever feeling the need of Him. You can't have Jesus. Savingly, until you feel you have a need of Him. A man won't go to a doctor unless he first has a disease and he needs a remedy.

You got a sin disease, friend. You got a poison in your blood. Old friends, I hope you believe in a God who must punish sin. You better put it down in the margin of your Bible, big, plain, and straight, that God is a God who must punish sin.

Listen to the striking passage of Scripture from Matthew's Gospel. Hear now the Word of God. Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall and gathered unto Him the whole band of soldiers.

And they stripped Him and put on Him a scarlet robe. And when they had plaited a crown of thorns, they put it upon His head and a reed in His right hand. And they bowed the knee before Him and mocked Him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!

And they spit upon Him and took the reed and smote Him on the head. And after that they had mocked Him. They took the robe off from Him and put His own raiment on Him and led Him away to crucify Him. And as those Roman soldiers drew back their hammers, as they drew back their hammers to fasten the Son of God to their cross, every stroke of the hammer was an explanation point that God must punish sin.

God must punish sin. God must punish sin. Jesus bore the curse for us. Jesus was our substitute for sin. Jesus went through a sea of blood to purchase our redemption. Look at that man on the cross, friend.

Look at that blessed man on the cross. See Him there with His arms outstretched, beckoning you to come to Him and believe on Him. Look at that bloodstained Savior for sin. See Him agonize for you. See Him bleed for you.

See Him suffer for you. See Him squirm in pain for you. See Him die and give His last gasp for you. See Him raised for you, the One who loved me and gave Himself for me. Oh, friends, nails pierced His hands and His feet for my sins.

Why should He love me so? Oh, why should He love me so? Why should my Savior to Calvary go? Why should He love me so? What are you waiting for, young lady? Come to Jesus. What are you waiting for, mister?

The Call to Come to Christ

Come to Jesus and lay your sin burden down at His nail-pierced feet. Surrender your all to the claims and demands of the Gospel. In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.

He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. Oh, dear friend, listen to me. No matter how long you've been a member of a church, no matter if you've done something so horrible, you think God will never forgive it, He will.

If you're in need of your salvation, you've got to feel your need, friend. You've got to feel your need of the remedy. The remedy is Jesus. Jesus is the pearl of great price. Listen to me, friend. Put your pride in your pocket.

Get down on your face before God and seek Him earnestly with all your heart. Listen. Jesus held nothing back at Calvary for our sins. How can we hold anything back from Him? Give yourself to Jesus. Come to God and submit to Him.

Lean on Him. Cast yourself upon Him alone for forgiveness of sin. Listen, friend. The day is fast approaching. Will you face the king of terrors in death? And if you die Christless, you'll be like the wicked mentioned in Job.

He should be driven from light into darkness and chased out of this world. Don't be chased out of this world Christless, friend. Get under the blood. Some of you here may be out of this world before the year is over.

Don't delay. Obey this final gospel call. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let Him that hears say, Come. And let Him that is a thirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.