At the dedication of Solomon’s Temple the great song or poem that God revealed to Solomon was sung. It ran along these lines: if we sin like this and we do such and such a thing and our hearts are touched and we come to our senses and look to this house in repentance, there is forgiveness and mercy for us. Solomon says it again and again in his great message at the dedication of the temple. If we then turn to the temple and repent, God’s forgiveness is with us. But in a final plague you cannot turn; it’s too late. You are now hardened in your unbelief, your obduracy, your resentment against God and hatred of him, and we have seen it. You can see it in the videos; you can see it in the faces of some of the extreme and militant atheists. You can almost see their hatred of God, and you think: ‘That man seems to be completely hardened; he’s crossed the line.’ He is as good as doomed, as good as in hell, and God’s judgement of him will be perfect and fair. There will be nothing cruel about it. It will be exactly what he merits, and it will be terrible, and even now he seems to be consumed. That is what we are looking at in the last plagues. So there are two kinds of judgements constantly poured out in the world: reformative – represented by trumpets of warning – and punitive – represented by the last plagues.