Wilde Oats

It was Oscar Wilde who said the wise words, “I am not young enough to know everything.” Wilde was the famous writer of the 19th century who led a secretive double life. He is quoted as saying, "I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.” He confessed, "I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring. I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art. I altered the minds of men and the color of things; there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. I treated art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction; I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me. I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."

Yet, after a homosexual relationship with a young man named Alfred B. Douglas (whom Wilde referred to as “Robbie”) nearly destroyed his life and "led to his downfall," Wilde made this eerie statement: "Ah, Robbie, when we are dead and buried in our porphyry tombs, and the trumpet of the Last Judgment is sounded, I shall turn and whisper to you, 'Robbie, Robbie, let us pretend we do not hear it.'" (As quoted in Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads, by Roy Williams [Austin, TX: Bard Press, 1999]).

So it looks like Oscar Wilde could have inspired John Lennon's "Imagine." Except that his version was called "Pretend." Though Wilde may pretend not to hear the last trump, God will have His way. There is no myth or legend surrounding the Supreme Reality of God. As Charles Spurgeon said, "The trumpet of the Archangel shall tear you from your grave, and the eyes of God will burn into your guilty soul..."

Six feet of dirt will not hide guilty criminals from the Justice of a holy God.

The dead will be raised to stand before Him in judgment: murderers, rapists, thieves, liars, fornicators, homosexuals, hypocrites, atheists, agnostics, adulterers, perverts, and pedophiles. God will bring every work to judgment, including every secret thing, whether it’s good or evil.

Yet, anyone can be saved today from His just wrath--Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, pretenders, etc. All they have to do is repent and trust the God-given Savior, before what the Bible calls the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord...the Day of Wrath.