Get Out While You Can

Sometimes the lonely 83-year old man cried himself to sleep. Five years earlier, he’d been devastated when Eddie, his wife of 30 years, had died Her calm and reserve had balanced his feisty, sometimes cranky nature, and together, they traveled widely in their 1957 pink Cadillac with the gold-plated wheels.

Now the old man lived with his 16 cats and an 1883 player piano in a rustic lodge on the south shore of a lake near the base of a beautiful snow-capped mountain. He was a minor area celebrity, a fascinating front-porch story teller who could keep tourists spellbound with his tales of the area. But in the spring of 1980 state officials paid him a visit and warned him to leave immediately, because they feared the ancient volcanic mountain was about to erupt.

But Harry Truman refused to leave his lodge at the base of Mt. St Helens. He’d been there foe 51 years. “That mountain’s part of Harry and Harry’s part of that mountain,” he said.

“I’m coming down feet first or I’m not coming at all.” His defiant stand quickly spread to the national media, and Harry became an overnight national celebrity. On May 17, officials tried once more to reason with the old man of the mountain. Again, he refused to leave.

The next morning, Mt. St. Helens exploded with the force of a 23- megaton nuclear bomb. In seconds, the top 1,300 feet of its nearly 10,000-foot peak blasted into the sky, burying Harry’s lodge beneath hundreds of feet of volcanic ash and debris.

All though time we have heard the warning, “Leave now! Leave while you still can!” Nearly 2000 years ago years BC, God warned Lot and his family to flee the city of Sodom before its destruction along with the neighboring city of Gomorrah.

The book of Revelation presents another life or death message life-or-death message. Just as the state officials called Harry to leave his home, and Lot to leave Sodom, God is calling His followers out of another corrupt, wicked city. A city that so totally confuses those who stay in it that its very name has come to be considered a term for confusion: Babylon. Now right away you may be thinking, Well, I’m relieved, because I live in Gaston (or name of local city), I don’t live in Babylon.

Wherever this city is I don’t live in it. Friends, this city is so confusing that you might be living in it and not even know it.