CHAPTER TWENTY

In the following Chapters, DV there will appear the fourth topic of mainland mountains chosen, namely CREATION, both in general and in particular. The former is logical, the latter textual.

There is about the concept of a prince something that might seem young, exuberant, well-brought up, trained, prepared, perhaps with dash, hopefully with wisdom, administrative skill or leadership with ringing tones and crested equipage.

Not now, you may reply. Now it rather betokens spoiled natures with persistent privilege making life a cheap imitation ... and so on.

However, there is obvious in any coverage of royalty in various countries, always the spark, which in turn may be ground for disappointment or even in extreme cases, reactions into cynicism, when its light does not come. The concept of a leader of distinction, young, refreshingly nascent, working and moving with address and skill, with something of splendour, not wallowed in, but yet discerned in the very spirit and movement of the prince: this is not dead.

Yes, you may reply, but what on earth or beyond it has this to do with ... God ?

This. The whole availability of a prince depends on human generation, for our race; for if there were none, who would be young ? There is the ... latest edition, if you like.

Yet God is eternal! you say, so what does He have to do with it. You make the concept still more obfuscatory.

To be sure, we are dealing here, with our interlocutor, who may be seen as rather rambustious, but still, there are such, so let us persevere with him.

In reply, this: God's eternity is not the same as inactivity; if it were, none could know Him, for to be known involves being willing to reveal yourself, which takes action. In ancient times, there was the concept of 'eternal generation' of the Son of God, pursued by the Cappodocian doctors. The concept is interesting and close to scripture. They meant that continually the Father exposed the Son, that His life was in continuance shining forth, perhaps as light from the sun, or better, a stream from a lake, a continual ebullience .

You see in Hebrews 1:3, that the Son, Jesus Christ who came as Messiah for the work to be done in redemption and demonstration in person of the glory of God, was the brightness of His glory and the exact image of His person. Brightness of His glory is its zenith were it to fluctuate, which it does not (James 1:17), but the point is clear: there is no diminution in the Son of the glorious light which is that of the Father. What the Father is in glory, that He also is.

Since, as noted earlier, no one in heaven even is LIKE God, it follows with logical necessity that the One who is not merely like Him, but in fact EXACT in representation of His being, IS God. No other interpretation is possible.

It is for this reason that we find a total parallel on the occasion when Christ, being disdained as so often, just as God is now whether in particular or in general by millions, declared, I and My Father are One (John 10:30). He did not mean two. The expression signifies complete accord in spirit and mind, and thus excludes both divergence and diversity. You cannot be thus with anyone who is not in effect or in general principle, your equal, for the simple reason that you would be so dwarfed otherwise, that the concept would be pretentious.

This of course is similarly conveyed by Christ as the SON of the FATHER, these also being correlatives in KIND, if you want to use that term. SUCH a Father has SUCH a son, for that is the sense of these correlatives. Thus whatever power, being, ontology, essence, either has, so does the other; and if for the salvation of souls, Christ on mission takes a specific format for a specific purpose, so be it: the case is not changed, merely the humility shown, precisely as in Philippians 2.

Of course, it is not a 'kind' that is in view, since as to God, there is ONLY ONE; but the concept is useful as a preparation. Put it rather, then, this way, that they are, Father and Son, of entirely comparable power and nature, the one always doing what pleased the other, operating in the same things and at that, in the same way. Hence their names as ONE are for baptism as in Matthew 28, and all three names of the trinity are used both there and in the blessing of Paul in II Corinthians 13:14. The persons are quite distinct, the nature and name is simply ... ONE. One NAME, three PERSONS, such is God. (Cf. SMR pp. 532-560).

To have such unison and unity as this with God, then, implies therefore being in NATURE His equal, like a husband and wife, at one, or friends at one, and in the mode of Father and Son, equal in essential being. If one is God, so is the other. If one becomes man, the other does not, but SENDS from the infinite glory (John 17:1-3, 6:60ff.), the One who has this mission, and who loves to do it (Psalm 40 cf. Joyful Jottings 22) and who, coming from this ONE, appears in an expression of God not merely suggestive, but definitive, as Hebrews 1 so clearly states.

In fact, then, the expression and the fact alike is this: that they ARE ONE. No fleck of dispersion, no fashion of diversity inheres, between Father and Son. These are intimates (John 8:29), always in unison, of mutual understanding to the uttermost, one in nature, infinitely intimate in understanding, each of the other, for this is a matter of spirit. No sin is possible in such a case, for the One sent, the Christ, since the doing of any sin in body, mind or spirit would be an ACTION and it could not be one pleasing to God (contrary to John 8:29).

This being an impossible attainment to the mere children of Adam (cf. Romans 5:1-12), is possible with what is called the second Adam, a "life-giving spirit", God in flesh, able to control all the power of the devil, casting out devils by the Spirit, the finger of the Lord! (Luke 11:20, Matthew 12:28).

Positively, then, He is God; negatively sin is NOT available, being contrary to His being and nature.

That is why Christ could say (John 5:19-23), that He does what His Father does IN THE SAME WAY. If the unity before is potent, this is omnipotent. Habitually to do God's work in the WAY, EXACTLY the way He does it, implies ability on the same plane. Otherwise, at best, you would do it in your own way, not His, and certainly not in exactly the same way as He does. If not God, the creature would be infinitely disenabled from doing it in the same way, just as in sharing his name with that of God, as ONE NAME!

That is precisely why Christ could go on to say, as He did in John 5:19ff., that ALL MEN should HONOUR the SON JUST AS they honour the FATHER. You do not honour a metaphor, but the matrix. It is Son and Father alike in honour, in a field where the attribution of divine glory where it does not belong is blasphemy worthy of ... DEATH! (Leviticus 24:16). It would be blasphemy of the highest order, as in the statement about seeing the Son and thus seeing the Father, if it were not an equality, that God the Father is one Person and God the Son another, with the Holy Spirit who is sent from the Father by the Son (John 15:26), the third. It is thus that Christ is saying that baptism is to be in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). ONE in power to act and MODE of action; ONE in honour; they are ONE in unison. They are not two. NO ENTITY is like this one!

God REFUSES to give His glory to another (it would be a lie anyway if such a thing happened, inconceivable with God cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 -7), and hence in sharing these names, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in terms of the entry into His presence, He is giving glory where it is due, from which it cannot be dispersed, to His own name. It is not the NAMES, indeed, but the NAME, since it is one name, that of God (Matthew 28:19).

Yet let us pursue this work of Christ, His doing it in just the same way as His Father.

In any sport, to do the stroke in the same way as the champion grows harder as the stroke or strategy or series of strokes, grows greater and harder. To be able to do ALL His strokes in the same way, would imply you were as great a champion as he. Thus in John 5:19, we see that ALL THINGS WHATSOEVER that the Father does, THESE the Son does, and not satisfied with this omni-comprehension jointness, He proceeds - IN THE SAME WAY. The totality in scope is shared in the identity of method, relative to DOING.

Thus Christ declared that if they did not believe Him, then to believe for the works' sake (John 14:11). This was supplemental to the fact that seeing the Son constituted seeing the Father (cf. Matthew 11:28), just as seeing in faith the Son, constituted eternal life (John 6:40). It is all entirely operative in the Son, in whom salvation is clustered, is constituted, who obtained it and dispenses it to all who come to Him in faith, as He is, and not to a Pawned Substitute!

What then ? When the issue is doing what GOD DOES, there being but one God, there is but one way to have this power, and this is to BE GOD; for indeed, no one else is even LIKE Him in heaven itself. Man is a derivative image-bearer it is true, but his inability to act as God is precisely one part of his problem.

From Eve on, he has wanted, in various vast competitive compositions of brashness and pride, to act as if he could dismiss God, or ignore Him, or His commandments (Genesis 3:2-6), which involves very much the same thing. He has found since Babel and the flood (Genesis 10, 6), that this conception is mistaken. What is born and dies is not what creates birth and death. The disparity is apparent.

Christ however is not an uppity-phenomenon like faithless secular man, or pawning religious man. As God, He became man, needing no elevation, and as such He is involved in a life in which He does what the Father does in the SAME WAY, indeed JUST the same way, is the force of the Greek.

In view of such claims, which could mean nothing other than incarnation for someone born, the people, as recorded in John 10 felt it would be fitting to kill Him. Why ? It was because he, they cried, being man, was making Himself God. That was their understanding of it, as in John 10:33). There is no blasphemy if you are not referring to God Almighty, the only God there is, in such a manner (Isaiah 45:6, 21ff.). Therefore it follows with necessity that they saw that these words of Christ implied an equivalence with God; which of course, as noted above, it was. They were not mistaken in interpreting their own language, to the point of throwing stones about it!

From this failure to believe, seen with such lamentation in Christ who, having given all and come to such a place as this sinful earth on expedition of salvation, there has come the entire horror of the last two millenia or so of the Jewish race. From this failure to believe, there has come on the Gentile world its current terrorism, from the power complex and apparatus of the false prophet Muhammad (cf. SMR pp. 1080ff.). From this same failure has come the Inquisition and all the other arms of flesh, carnal dynamisms, gross distortions, substituting BEING crucified with Christ to crucifying, burning, expropriating in sheer robbery, people who did not so depart from the word of God, the Bible, who refused to use force to forward religion, as Christ did (John 18:36ff., Matthew 26:52-56). Worst of all, these heresiarchs even did it in HIS NAME! (as foretold in John 16:2).

The Prince is the pivot; and the disfaith (q.v.) is the ruin of many, the torment of this world, its ground of judgment and its folly of mind, heart and spirit.

Very well, our PRINCE, which is one of the titles of Christ (Isaiah 9:7), our leader, our commander (two more of His titles as in Isaiah 55:4), is related to GOD as prince. How can this be ?

Firstly, as noted re Hebrews 1:3, He is the exact representation of His being. As God IS SPIRIT, as Christ Himself declared (John 4), and is to be worshipped in spirit, it follows that Christ is in SPIRIT, in nature, in person, this exact representation, not in body!

That was simply a new form taken for a purpose, as Philippians 2 expressly indicates, adding that prior to this, Christ was in the FORM of God, and so in no way incorrectly described as God's equal. In Colossians 1:15 we find that EVERYTHING created was through Him, and in John 1:3, we learn that the whole category of created things arose from Him, who of course therefore cannot inhere in it, or He would have had to make Himself first, not being there, which as nothing has no characteristics, would be impossible. Quite simply, if EVERYTHING made has this status from Him, then He is beyond that status. He is not made, or increate, and so eternal, and of such beings, there is ONE.

That is why He and His Father are correctly described as ONE. Creator, not created, eternal, not placed in that creation called time (Romans 8:38-39), God moves in these triune ways, and in so doing, has plotted the course of the plan of salvation for man.

That is why when God the Word, the Son, became man, He was without sin, which since all men have sinned (Romans 5, and 3) REQUIRES a different parentage. Of Mary's there is no doubt; the other party therefore HAD to be GOD HIMSELF, using without need of means, which having created He could readily surpass, His own generation direct so that, as Luke 1:35 puts it, THEREFORE that Holy One would be called the Son of God. The Holy Spirit would overshadow her, and the power of the Highest would so act, and THEREFORE that being who was so engendered would be called the Son of God.

Our PRINCE thus is seen as engendered into flesh by God, so that He and His Father would indeed be one in spirit, in nature, in capacity; and although in flesh, by its very nature as a chosen format for the purpose of manifesting God and bringing redemption for man, to as many as received Him, there would be constraints and restraints, and especially the power to suffer injury and death, yet IN FLESH He would SHOW the way the prince of God conducts Himself, His purposes in His face and function, His power no fraud, but the very indefectible power of the ONE GOD.

Nothing could overthrow His statements whether in word, or in deed; no miracle essayed would fall without result; if He put it to the test, telling the paralysed man to take up his bed and walk, as a SIGN and verification that if this which could be seen would follow, then the power back of it being true, so He could and would and DID forgive sin's in His own NAME!!

As you see in Mark 2, they did not like this; but if He has failed to gain the verification for power to forgive sin in the way which He proposed, in healing the sick and overthrowing in one moment the deadly paralysis gripping the suffering seeker, then that, that one case, would have ended the messianic role. If JUST ONCE, in parallel, those vehemently in mobs trying to drag Him down, overcome Him in words, had succeeded in showing Him wrong, then that too would have ended what only God could do, and what Christ, being God, both could and did do. He was a priceless Prince, even using he DOING OF GOOD to show the REALITY of power to those who insisted on condemning Him! (Mark 2:1-10).

What a benign test, and what a therapeutic marvel, to answer in blessing, those who cursed!

This too is just what He taught in the sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:44ff.). There too with the vehemence arraigned against Him, it was necessary that His words should be seen to be DONE by Himself in the quality of His own life, and not only in pure power in healing! Anything, everything, they eyed, they debated, they judged, they watched. Consider Luke 11:52:

The more they hated, the more they tested; the more they tested, the more they demonstrated His authenticity; and the more they pursued him, frustrated in their guile, pushing Him to death, pursuing vexatiously (Luke 11:53-54) their own temporary escape from the Truth which He demonstrably was, then the nearer they came to the fulfilment of Isaiah 52-53, Psalm 22, Psalm 16, Daniel 9:24-25^*1, so instituting in their inane hatred, the love of God in its highest expression, the Cross! So did God, giving millenia of notice, simply carry out ALL that He had said in prediction, in history, with that ready facility which betokens supreme power, and that anguish in pain, which signalled extreme love, to bear what was needed, to liberate man, as many as would receive it, and not sit in darkness by some sort of rote and routine.

Indeed, the more they failed to overcome a group of no worldly power whatsoever, even after the crucifixion, ludicrously unable either to produce the body or to give any sound reason for not killing the guards who lost Him (as was a custom), but rather showing as normal with Him, no power to control Him, though they seemed to have all the power required: the more their debased part in the abyss of history became an object of loathing. For all that, even there the love of God was paramount, for even to such as these, the Lord on the cross KEPT ON crying to His Father, Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing! (Luke 23:34). In this way, His objective of liberation proceeded, even in the midst of His enemies, for this, it is the day of salvation, even until He comes (cf. Matthew 24:29ff.).

It was not a ministration like that of Elijah, with donated power, and times of being downcast, weak; it was rather an integral realisation of God in flesh, so that as in Hosea 13:14, it would be TRUE that disdaining any other agent, GOD WOULD REDEEM MAN BY HIS OWN BEING.

It is for this reason likewise, that this prince of Isaiah 9:7, of the house of David (through Mary, one of his descendants), would be found to have such titles as "everlasting Father", inextricably interwoven with "prince". HOW could He have such a title ?

The case is simple and HE explained it in His own way. In John 14, you find Philip asking to SEE the FATHER. He who has seen ME, said Jesus Christ, HAS SEEN the Father. This was not all. The pith of it, Christ had presented, pursuing the point and even declaring this: "Have I been with you for such a long time and you yet you have not known ME!"

It was then that He added, He who has seen Me has seen the Father. Not satisfied with this, Christ pursued it further. How then do you say, Show us the Father!

Even with the worst will in the world, it is not possible to distort this threefold presentation. To see the Father is the ultimate, the desideratum of Philip, it is to see God, to dispense with preliminaries and with steps. Jesus indicates that this is done, in one thing, that when you see this one being, JESUS CHRIST, you have already seen the Father. Long has He been with them, and so what a ridiculous question! How could Philip possibly ask it. In other words, this indicates a lack of the most fundamental realisation, and now with Philip's understanding increased in this crucial aspect of the Lord, the Prince of Peace, the Commander, the Leader of Isaiah: this disciple is told that from that point on he HAS SEEN the Father and known Him.

To suggest that the true perception of Christ INVOLVES without addition the true perception of God, so that there is NO difference, NO further step, and to have such a concept regarded as wholly erroneous in three stages leaves no question. THIS prince is God. No sinner could possibly limn in his own being, the glory of God; and no creature could attain even in kind, to the glory of God, so that seeing the creation you saw the creator.

Some sign ? some suggestion ? some symbolic index ? yes, but not the being Himself, or otherwise the finite would be equal to the infinite, and the sight of the finite would SHOW the infinite, like a pauper with one cent, having a bank balance which in itself was the full representation of the US national debt. The thought is ludicrous, and no wonder Christ exhorted Philip so strongly upon it, for on this hangs all life. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son does not have life (I John 5:12). Such is His eminence in deity.

Yet is He also PRINCE by virtue of birth as a man, a change of format, as Paul declares, from that which being that of God, is unique and apt for infinitude of power, to that of man in pursuit of a purpose which is now fulfilled (Philippians 2). With this on the one hand, and by virtue of His eternal status as the EXPRESSION, the word of God, on the other, you have the PRINCE, in fact the prince of peace, since through His judgment, He proclaims peace to those who receive it in their own stead.

That whole process of course is also seen in John 1:1, where, there being but one God, there is the declaration that the Word of God, who became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, WAS GOD. There is no 'a god' for Him to be, as you see in Psalm 82, where the pretentious use of the term 'god' of men, is brought to the bar of guilt even with irony, for such 'gods' are told of their human status roundly. Gods ? says God derisively: you will die like men! Are they really and truly gods ? how wonderful! Let us see their calibre, then, and find their connotation when they DIE LIKE MEN. Pretension God hates, as you see in Matthew 23, and you find the same ironic exactly in Ezekiel 28:9:

So much for pretentious gods, seeking by mere possession of strength to change status. It cannot be done. Polytheistic were the neighbours of Israel, but the word of God KNOWS NO OTHER GOD WHATSOEVER.

In Isaiah 45:21ff., you see God declaring, using both el and elohim as we saw last time, two words able to be used of Himself, that of such beings there is ONE. If it is the heavenly you think of, if it is in the realm of GOD at all, that you are dealing, then the number is of no difficulty whatever to encompass. It is ONE (cf. Ephesians 4:4). Let us hear Isaiah:

No one is like Him in heaven. He is ONE, and UNIQUE, and as Creator, obviously is infinitely so.

Thus when we are talking of the Creator, of the divine, of deity, of the Saviour, of the revealer of truth: there is ONE. You can use el, meaning strong, mighty and obviously one of the names of God in terms of its quintessence, or elohim, that plural noun with the singular verb, that so well fits cases like that of the THREE men who came to Abraham, and were directive in their way to Sodom, about to be destroyed, and who had sacrifice given to them. It is then that the narrative resumes in terms of THE LORD! (Genesis 18). He appears as three, and then continues to speak to Abraham as ONE: the LORD.

Thus the three are found suitable as a theophany, giving information concerning Abraham, and Sodom, and merge into the voice of the LORD. It is the LORD. The SPIRIT of the Lord hovered, in the image of Genesis 1, over the waters on the surface of the earth. GOD spoke, and here we see three representing God. Just as the grammar allows for it, so the symbolism to Abraham expresses it.

In Genesis 1, accordingly, God speaks, and His Spirit hovers over the result. We learn as the Old Testament proceeds, that there is to be ONE who will come to earth, the STAR (Judges 24:17), a RULER (literally sceptre) whose will be a vast dominion. Since this is a man, and one who has such characteristics, one is reminded at once of the promise in Genesis 3, where despite man's fall into ignominy and sin, under judgment, ONE as man will come who will destroy the power of the serpent, stamping on it with supernatural assurance and dominion^*2.

Who could this be but one of the stature of God, to overcome the vast power of the evil one, a spiritual being of enormous guile and cunning, power and fraudulence! Only the life of God can overcome the curse of God, and the power of the jackal, the Adversary with it. So it became clearer and clearer, in such passages as Psalm 45, where this PRINCE has the name GOD given to Him, so that God addresses Him as God (45:6); just as in Psalm 2, though men are FORBIDDEN to trust in man (Jeremiah 17), yet in this ONE men must trust, and to Him give religious devotion is NECESSARY.

Thus is deity in man’s format, Jesus Christ, the overturning of what for mere man, is blasphemy and idolatry. Here it actually becomes a divine stricture and requirement! When GOD is at work, and when GOD is present, the difference is just that, categorical, overturning all that is applicable to mere man.

In the same way, though Christ, the Prince is Saviour (Isaiah 52-53 giving the means and the result of this death defying sin-atoning act, in the illustrious One so enduring for the divine purpose in view), yet GOD ONLY is Saviour (Isaiah 43:10-11). Similarly, shows the prophet Isaiah, though GOD ALONE IS CREATOR (Isaiah 45:12, 44:12), yet this One, this God as man, this Prince, this Messiah is the same, Himself the Creator no less, and that not of some but of all (John 1:3, Colossians 1:15). As to that, it is scarcely surprising, for even in Micah 5, we find that the MAN who is to SMITTEN, though He be the judge of Israel, is the one whose GOINGS are from EVERLASTING.

What GOD ALONE CAN BE, repetitively and characteristically, Christ is. It is so simple that the child could see it, at five years old, but the savant cannot see it when blind, for the blind cannot see. Hence was Christ so strict in stricture in Matthew 13:15: the heart of this people He there declared, has become gross, their ears dull in hearing, their eyes they have closed! How sad is the divine exposure and diagnosis that follows ...

It is this same power and presence of God, in the Messiah that Isaiah and the psalms, for example have repeatedly shown.

It is exactly what Psalm 2 and 45 have been telling us, and what Isaiah 11 tells us, when the MAN who is to rule with the understanding of God, and whose power will strike evil to devastation on this earth, is a descendant of David according to the flesh. Indeed, in Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, with 9:7, we find that it is HE who is be the light of God, and CONSTITUTE THE DIVINE COVENANT, thus summing up in Himself, the very word of God, invariable, ineluctable, irrepressible, immutable, ruling a kingdom which will endure forever.

Focussing this same ONE, then, Isaiah indicates from the inspiration of God, that this being will BE the salvation of God to the earth, just as Isaiah 52-53 attests in literally gory detail. This is one case where the gory is the glory, for that God should so suffer and demean Himself in love for man is stupendous, almost distressing in its grandeur, but beautiful beyond bounds in this cursed world. Here is the answer to the curse, like light from the everlasting sun of righteousness, focussed on earth, featured in Israel, killed by His fellow countrymen, raised in their land, the Gospel His mandate (cf. SMR pp. 763ff.), expressible IN HIMSELF, the very salvation of God which the eyes of Simeon actually SAW as he beheld the babe, and held Him in his arms (cf. Luke 2:30-32). Why was this so especially delightful to Simeon ?

One extra element was this, that God has ASSURED him in prayer that he would not depart from this earth until HIS EYES HAD SEEN the salvation of God. This was it, and he held Him in his very arms, before leaving, sighting what the blind could not see, what he had long realised, and now held (cf. John 6:40, Luke 11:52ff.).

Thus have we met the PRINCE. He is prince by birth, becoming in the sense of PRIORITY, the 'first born of all creation' (Colossians 1), BECAUSE He created all things, and because He is here born who goings have been from of old, from eternity (Micah 5:1-3). That 'first-born of all creation' is the Pauline statement. Indeed, the apostle goes further and states of the Christ, that He is the first-born BECAUSE He created all. Thus, coming late into history as man, He yet has the status of the first-born, not because of contemporary priority, as if Adam, but because of honour and glory, because the whole thing is His, and He made it, so that on entry He has this role, this eminence, this pre-eminence, this status, this right over it all.

He is not only the first born not of creation, the one in prime place over it, but over ALL OF IT. Why ? He made it, so WHENEVER He comes to it, He is its primary prince, in format of flesh belatedly it may be, but in taking flesh, the very first-born status, the authentic leadership and possession, the place with precedence over all. Nothing could be more emphatic concerning His authorship of creation that this direct statement that this is so, coupled with the statement on His pre-eminence when in creation for His divine purpose as Messiah, on the ground that because of His having created all, He is first over all.

He, entering upon it, having made the category of creation, becomes PRINCE on entry, by right not only of prior existence, not only of being divine, but because HE made it all, which now for a benign purpose He inhabits for a time, direct, man among men, God as man. As the WORD of God, and GOD, the only one there is, whatever term you use, the only Creator, the only Saviour, He is the expression of God, BECOME flesh, incarnate.

The Spirit of God is seen by John descending on Him as a dove, a signal which that prophet was caused to understand designated the Son of God; and this same Jesus was driven by the Spirit to be tempted as in Matthew 4, to pass this, His test in the wilderness. Thus does the trinity show its glory, ONE as to being, THREE as to persons, purity in all and over all, to perfection.

At times, one almost despairs of inveterate incredulity, but then, ONLY GOD can awaken the dead and give sight to such blind. Some try to make it seem in some obscurantist way, 'difficult' that in one respect you have one, in another respect you have three. How on earth is this difficulty to be invented ? If there is one Australian coastline, it has many indentations, if there is one family, it has many members, if there is one man, he has various functionalities.

Even man will talk to himself, quite sanely, or even exhort himself, so that his SPIRIT, the spirit of man is addressing his life, his character, his established personality, subjecting it to review and challenge. With God, the matter is of course unique, since of infinite beings, creator, saviour categories, there is only one member, and indeed, so amazing is this singularity, that it is only for clarificatory purposes that one could use the term 'category' at all. Rather He is the ONLY one whose actions are such; and in Himself He consists in three persons, infinitely mutual, divinely disposed as He will.

One of these, the Expression, or Word, is so far above man, that just as an author writes a book, and it is his expression in some sense, so this Author, God, exhibits Himself in the LIVING WORD, operative creator and intimate beyond barrier with the Father. Nor is He embarrassed to put for man into propositional form, using verbal symbols, the realities thus disclosed in the coming of the Prince; for whether in the eternal Word, or in statement and declarations, it is One. God can speak to man in one form, or in both, and does in both, the One expressing for the leisure of reading, what the other did and only could do, in the measure of salvation!

Moreover, since heaven, the mode of creation which involves male and female is not operative (cf. Matthew 22:30), obviously the term 'Father' in this spiritual context means what is correlative in some sense to our use of the word, adaptation being made for the independently given context.

In practice, this simply means that Christ on earth, the Prince, the Son of God via the virgin birth, is indeed the SON of God, and we remember that "therefore" in Luke. Yet what is seemly for exhibition of the Father on earth, is not divorced from the reality in heaven, so that the Father though of course, as SPIRIT, not Father in an earthly reproductive way such as we have, relative to the Son, yet has affinity in this respect, so that the Son is His exact image, His word.

Thus, as Dr Allen Killen pointed out, we do not have an invention of fellowship in the act of creation, since God had it always, in Himself.

To pawn normally means to allow something to depart from you in the interests of gaining some temporary or lesser thing, such as money; with the hope that perhaps you may wish to get the thing back when better supplied with money.

To pawn Christ then would and does signify to get rid of Him, to reject His overtures, or to ignore His entreaties, or to devalue His offering , if you like, in biblical terms: in some cases it would mean to "have trodden under foot the Son of God" as in Hebrews 10:29. It would mean to keep some sort of 'tab' on Him, some sort of recollection or possible intention to resume or begin a real relationship rather than a merely formal one, for instance. That would be another correlation with a pawning!

It would be like leaving Him, dumping Him, somewhere, with a view to using Him yet in some way, or the proceeds of His sale, for your own purposes.

Pawn-brokers, this is the name of the category who receive such dumped goods, and issue chits for possible recollection, assuming the object is not sold in the interim. Selling Christ is a well-known occupation among men, notoriously in the case of Judas, but there needs to be a realisation that Judas being 81/3 percent of Christ's elders, or apostles, was a substantial and significant section; and that this has implications. What are these ? In view of the prediction that false christs and prophets will multiply at the end of the Age (Matthew 24:5,24), which is our lot as seen in Answers to Questions Ch. 5, then there may well be far more than this percentage of the pawn-broker habitués, nowadays in so-called churches, many of which are not more churches than were those in Revelation 2:9, 3:9, some within them being collectively referred to as a "synagogue of Satan" , and this not once but twice.

Small wonder in those chapters we see people threatened with having their 'churches' de-recognised, made mere pretence, without God, without hope, mere reckless polluters of the spiritual atmosphere.

The NAME of Christ is thus used, like an object for deposit with the pawn-broker, and the broker himself, or herself, may greatly desire to have this object on deposit, like some imaginary relics, and to have it for use and abuse as he or she will; and then, if the price is right, to give it back, in tatters or in polished format, depending on business, so that the pawning agent may continue this deceptive, delusive use of the 'name'.

Thus do those who rejecting the deity of Christ, as if absurdly shouting at Christ to shut up when He instructed Philip, but still wanting to keep some 'him', some object of spiritual art, for various purposes, dare to use HIS NAME for their purpose, inventing their own religion, as if someone used the Holden or the GM name for a new car, one made not by those bodies, but by themselves, at their own will. There would doubtless be a law suit or some confrontation, since it would be bogus and a trading on the performance of an established maker, on the part of someone wishing to utilise what they have done, without having to do it themselves.

It would be insufferably dishonest and misleading. Small wonder that Paul uses certain distinguishing phrases on just such people, who make a NEW JESUS, and a NEW GOSPEL therefore, or ANOTHER ONE, since He is the heart and centre of it, and have ANOTHER SPIRIT. Let us hear them: "false apostles, deceitful workers". They transform themselves into the apostles of Christ in a way which causes no astonishment, since SATAN HIMSELF, says Paul in this epistle, "is transformed into an angel of light."

Such therefore are enemies of Christ, fraudulent and deceptive, and should by no means be received. That is Paul's exhortation and divinely inspired declaration (I Corinthians 14:37). In this day, one not only MUST, but does say: LET HIM WHO HAS EARS, HEAR! Does this seem like soporific inaction to you ?

If you should talk outside your house to any such false teachers, hoping to snatch from the flames (Jude 22-23), remember TWICE is the limit (cf. Titus 3:10). Further, if they will not listen, do not speak; and if they will not take, do not receive what they give; and do not on any account undertake to read any of their materials, as if you should inhale sulphurous gases, turning to acid. It is enough that they are blasphemers, misusing the name that is pawned. Give them opportunity if you will, but keep to one scripture is often best, such as John 20:28, where Thomas calls Christ THE GOD OF ME!

The conversation is between Christ and Thomas, each addressing the other in sequence, and in this interview, as with Nicodemus, the interchange is that of two minds, on one topic, with events unfolding. This "THE GOD OF ME", which Thomas employs in being reconciled to Christ as the death-breaker, even at the very physical level involved (cf. I Corinthians 15:1-4, where the thing buried is the thing raised), becomes in Christ's lips a CRITERION. Thomas in this has BELIEVED, having seen; blessed said the Lord, are those who having not seen in this direct, laboratory way, yet believe.

In whatever way you proceed however, let NO scripture pass, or be overlooked, disregarded; let NO case arise in what is written is suffered to be bypassed. Use the sword of the Spirit (Ephesians 6, Hebrews 12), for here is invasion into the kingdom on false pretences with another Gospel, making alleged 'witnesses' of those for the Lord, who reject Him and discard His word This is the worse in that Christ is already the witness who AS GOD declares God, and He, He is the FAITHFUL WITNESS (cf. Revelation 1:5). No other is needed when God is His own witness!

In other words, DO NOT TRY TO PAWN Christ, or frequent pawn-shops. All that such people sell is pretence, and there is no value in that shop at all. The 'name' they sell is a word, without the works which go with its authenticity, divorced from its history and its place in scripture, made over to another usage for another cause.

Let God be God, let God define Himself as He will, and do not contend with Him who has said, "Before Abraham was, I am", using thereby the Exodus 3:14 NAME of God, signifying an eternal existence, as in Micah 5:1-3, Psalm 45, Hebrews 1:8-12: dependent on nothing, accountable to nothing, ringing through the ages, sacred to God, ascribed by God to Himself, declared to man in Christ whose is that eternal life which He confers (I John 1:1-4).

How clearly it is expounded when we see the dialogue, moreover, as in John 8. If Abraham rejoiced to see your day, they said to Him, how is this so, since you are not of such an age ? Not of such an age, is the logic of the answer: not only was I in existence before Abraham, but the mode of existence which I had was not a matter of before and after, but eternal continuity, for which I use the famed name of God: Before he was (in time), I AM (beyond it).

Such is the intimate harmony of all scripture, the fulfilment of all the eminent promises of the Old Testament, the parallel of Isaiah and John 1, the insistence on Christ as being equal with God, both as understood by men and as stated by Paul, and manifested by Himself in word and deed. Such is the intimacy of the ultimacy, that God became one of us in format, not only to show the way in suffering, but to create the way for the NEW CREATION in Himself, by carving it out of the rock, taking death as in Hosea 13, He said He would, PERSONALLY HIMSELF, in order to create redemption.

What then do we find ? It is harmony for 3500 years, development in prophetic detail of the whole wonder of the PRINCE, over such a time, all the phases in unison, in wonder, in glory, fulfilled already in substance what has been presented in foresight, focussed in the Christ, acting in compassion, the dénouement in passion, infallible in act, never distressed to answer, His main pain the thought of the bearing of sin, as Saviour (Hebrews 5:7, Luke 22:40ff.), His last word, "It is finished" and to tell His Father that into His hands He committed His Spirit.

That, it was His last word before the resurrection, and after it He showed them as in Luke, the meaning of the scriptures (Luke 24:25ff.), familiarity with which having apparently rather deadened the perception of some; but then it is so amazingly wonderful, that it was when HE DID IT, that the eye was opened (cf. Luke 24:31-32, John 20:8). The astonishing reality of word becoming deed, prediction performance, annunciation incarnation, prospect propitiation, came into their hearts like an eternal dawn.

Now He who sees the Son, likewise, has eternal life (John 6:40), for what He sees is the SALVATION OF GOD, which He has provided. For these millenia it has been presented, then done, then its application wrought as predicted; for the Gospel itself was predicted (SMR pp. 755ff.). Now following like stations on a train line, the Age has come to its terminal times, in some ways resembling a hacking death rattle and cough, this too as predicted; and now we shall once again see this great action of the only Creator and Saviour God, consisting in glory, acting in compassion, performing power.

In times past, the world was inundated, leaving staggering layers of massive sediment (cf. News 1), in what now follows in the divine plan of salvation, the people of God are removed at His coming, and while the world writhes in its last rebellions, near Israel, He returns with His own people, resurrected, to cover the earth with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14).

It is well to be prepared. It is well to serve the Prince of truth as well as peace, the Leader of Love as well as the Faithful Witness. Life apart from Him is only a form of death in waiting. Faith in Him, not another Jesus, this is the preparation, and it is to be found according to His ever effective and always
unblemished word, not in another Gospel, that is for the pawn-shop, where the pawn-broker is Satan, an unreliable character at best, and a lie in heart (John 8:44).

Let God be God; let the Prince be your peace (Isaiah 26:1-4, 9:6-7, Philippians 4:4-6, Ephesians 2:17-22), the foundation of all who are not to be confounded (Isaiah 28:16, I Corinthians 3:10ff.). There is, in fact, no other. It is as simple as that. Double dealing with God does not create another option. Let God be God, or else truth will itself crush you (Matthew 21:44); and why should this be so, when the author of your life and your very power to love or even think, has done all this for you, so that you might become a new creation with the Prince of Peace your rest, the truth your delight, adopted children of God (Ephesians 1:5ff.).

Daniel 9:24-27 is one of the most meticulously magnificent prophecies in the Bible, and small wonder, since here lies the prediction of the state of the case for the Messiah and the date of His rejection, cutting Him off from the people. For detail on this, and its outcome, see Highway of Holiness Ch. 4.

The reference to the death date is there adequately provided; but here our interest is in the PRINCE, in terms of our topic and theme in this chapter. Keil with a thoroughness not often sought in vain in the Old Testament Commentary from himself and Delitzsch gives a fascinating word study associated with the verse 26, where the NKJV has, concerning the prediction of the Messiah, that He will be "cut off but not for Himself".

He points out that grammatically the formula of words here, "cut off and there is not for Himself" is NOT simply a negative. The word "there is not" is a denial of EXISTENCE, he affirms with careful perspective on its usage. There is no subject, though one is normal for such a construction, so that the sense is one of DENIAL, and the subject is found in the focus, the Messiah, verse 25 - that is, not the grammatical subject, but the referent. What then is the meaning of this ? It is this, that there is a denial of existence: there is not, relative to the Messiah; and with this, we learn that He is to be cut off.

The Messiah as in Psalm 2, where the grievous ranting against Him, and the open discord and effort to disperse His role and deny Him life indeed is seen, is found transfixed in Psalm 2 (cf. Joyful Jottings 25), and wounded and set to death in Isaiah 52-53, a veritable sin-offering without praise, an offscouring of the Almighty in His presence in the format of flesh, as noted in this chapter (cf. Isaiah exposition in Heart and Soul, Mind and Strength Chs. 4ff., and here esp. Ch. 6).

This Prince however is cut off and there is nothing for Him. In other words, as Keil so well expounds it, there is an excision from the congregation - the word is also used of the destruction of the wicked - and He is removed from sight, offered to nothingness, and given nothing. It is a solemn removal with spiritual loathing which is in view as in Isaiah 49:7. Though the MESSIAH, the anointed One, so often in focus in the Old Testament in preparation, as in the New in culmination and fulfilment, is in view in Daniel 9:26, yet the response is this -

Yet how blessed to be permitted to suffer for Him (cf. Acts 5:40-41), who so many find insufferable as an antidote, since it requires the swallowing up of sin's guilt and power, and the unleashing of the divine beauty of holiness, IN HIM (cf. Romans 5:1-11, 8:1-10,37ff.). Let us however revert to Daniel 9:26.

Someone once asked me concerning the translation, being obviously vexed by this and that wording. Whatever the wording of the translation, the understanding of the text here is straightforward when carefully considered. Messiah ?

On the increasing detail in the Old Testament as it successively divulges more and more of the coming Messiah and His work, see

All this Rot about Not

Believing the Gospel

1 TRUTH

Look at our title!

Public relations experts, who abound, may quickly advise... inform? us that this is no way to address one's public. It is offensive, harsh, has discord, is not advised, ruffles the ego, troubles the peace loving instincts, and so on, and on. However, if it is rot, why not say so? Are we to be so anaesthetic a people that we lurch towards some soporific-looking drowsiness, lest we awake?

The implication of the title is in any case not personal, in any individual sense. I used to think of the Gospel, myself, in something of that negative light. Oh, there would have been some element of fearfulness perhaps, as if it had some majesty, and something almost unspeakable; but for all that, it appeared at that time perhaps as the lurk for weak people, strange people, emotional people, oddly and curiously holy (godly ?) people, and at any rate other people; and it appeared altogether such an intrusion, such a way of direction and inconvenience that naturally it was best avoided, and that rather ... quickly.

So you see, it has nothing whatever to do with one's IQ. Mine has not changed. It has much to do with drowsiness spiritually, a sort of insulated, isolated, consecrated devotion to i) oneself or ii) the world or iii) one's success or iv) one's way of life and so on: it was this for me then, as it is now for multitudes. For the time I found it, as many find it, just - an alien phenomenon.

What however has THAT to do with its truth ? People who make such excuses do not excuse themselves for not facing the truth. The truth WILL be faced, whether one chooses to face it or not; that is the nature of truth. It IS!

Incidentally, that is close to the name God gives for Himself to Moses, and Christ likewise to Himself to us in the New Testament (John 8:58, Exodus 3:14): "I AM" ! I love that name. It is so uncontrived, so lacking in salesmanship, like oak furniture; it has grandeur and simplicity, it is strong, right and serviceable, but not changing in order to be so. It just is.

As Keil and Delitzsch point out in their Old Testament Commentaries, names formed with the imperfect tense, as here, show that the quality in view is constantly manifested, is continually deployed. Here it is the divine being, the life which is manifested, and in this glorious being, life is without constraint, containment or intervention.

What it is, it is, and it goes on being it, not in the abstract, but in a constant deployment which exhibits the character, here not formed but formal, not intruded into, but as it were, extrusive. It is independent in existence, in action and in life.

THAT is the truth. He, having created persons, His will transcending them, can communicate with them, for "in His image" is precisely what our capacity to so speak and consider implies. ONLY when we are willing and able so to learn, can we have valid logic (SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10 ; That Magnificent Rock,
Validity ); and ONLY on the basis of a person who is

i) not only THERE, but

ii) able to speak HERE

and so communicate what IS there, at His will and His discretion,

is there any POSSIBILITY of what? Why this: of having the perspective which not only is helpful pragmatically, but far more, is past all investigation, accords with all reality - while capable equally of withstanding perfectly any investigation - that which is correct. This, it incorporates all aspects, omits nothing and sees things as they are in the unique, transcendent mind of the Creator who needs neither hypothesis nor instruction in anything.

Einstein gives a splendid opportunity to consider these facts, and an excerpt now follows from The Shadow of a Mighty Rock (SMR), pp. 299-300,
to attest this.

Albert Einstein provides an excellent contemporary example of the living dynamics of this sort of thing. He rejected philosophical relativism, while proposing certain new absolute relations between things. He felt there was available an objective awareness of reality, but acknowledged that he could not prove this (Encylopedia Britannica 1986 edition, Vol. 18, p. 198).

He believed in the creative flair of man and that the human spirit could reliably intuit, guess, invade, construe and counsel concerning what really is there, and (ibid.) holding with determination that there is a god, he dismissed any view of God playing dice with the universe (London Observer, April 15, 1964). An abdication of quality control would of course be a denial of oneself, if one were all-powerful, valuing quality - a denial of the nature that was one's own (cf. SMR pp. 32-35). Further, to learn from one's own universe would deny its absolute creation, though this last consideration is not to be attributed to Einstein. Indeed, it leads inexorably to conclusions.

Thus an objective, intuitable, realisable, comprehendable universe is posited by this scientist, but there is no `proof' that he can supply. On the other hand, since Einstein did not present evidentially-held communication relative to the God of the universe, he held, as has been shown, not only no way to base his `feeling' for the view posited: he really was excluded from it, logically speaking.

Thus if one is limited by nature (by what one is), and not equipped with an objective tag defining what one is and can do, then one is by nature subjective. All one does is therefore ultimately subjective: without communication from the One who is not so, from God. Now there is within this subjective condition the relatively subjective and the relatively testable: but it is all the product of what is, strictly speaking a subject, a limited and objectively unanalysable subject... from its own standpoint, alone.

The productions are not assessable beyond the knowing equipment, and this is limited, tuned to this, not tuned to that; able to exhibit this - but systematically mal-conformed to that task, beyond the horizon of its sensitivity and ability ... and so on. There are consequences of not being infinite: creatures suffer them; the Creator does not. To be sure, evidence may indicate and logic constrain to the Creator Himself; and they do; but without His resolution of these pressures, response to these constraints, the nature of His heart, purposes and plans is not known. Minimal powers: yes, but actual magnificence, no, not without divulgement.

The subjective cannot by wishing become objective. It cannot by a sort of existential leap, a logical lapse, transcend what it is; and it is not God, it is not infinite ... that is its nature, observable in a few oddities like those of being born and ... dying with no power.

It is not equipped with automatic knowledge of reality as an innate conferment. By definition, its work falls short of absolute total awareness of all; and of all actual inter- relations, including that of one's knowing apparatus to reality. It fails to reach infinite comprehension of all variables and of all that makes them vary, contingencies, limits, support, capacities; and this in terms of a perspective adequate in grandeur, scope, in comprehension, without distortion, limitation or exclusion: so that justice will be done in any point to all points.

Further, as we have seen, there has to be an absolute viewpoint for absolute knowledge to be possible^*1. (Einstein would not deny the existence of this viewpoint.) Yet it must not only exist but be accessible as a station for view and review. An uncommunicative God is not psychoanalysable (cf. Chapters 4, Section 1, and 8 Section 1 infra, and pp. 30 ff., 46 ff., 88 ff. supra). This being so, without communication express and explicit from God, there is no base. There is unanswerable thrust towards Him, on penalty of contradiction of oneself, one's reason and one's evidence; but without Him, the positive realities await the transcending of the minimal with the actual.

Indeed, the comic blasphemy of God being tele-psychoanalysed by man, must be faced rigorously, and we may do well to revisit it here. First, we cannot even with profound assurance know what another person thinks, at our own level, in our mere selves. There are subtleties and comparative depths; and some even are variable and deceive their own selves... about their selves... How then, without God, should WE then know them! This applies to individual thoughts.

Second, we could not begin to predict, command or predicate what should be another's decision on the possibility, fact or mode of forgiveness to us, should we offend. How much less could we know, without divulgement from God, what His mind on the subject of misuse of His conferred equipment, which we habitually and daily use; and if this is not known, how could the required relationship with Him be known, even if He were in some way apprehended.

Third, if we being limited, cannot know fully the mind of another, how then would we aspire to predict, pronounce, propositionalise, assess, convey, construe and communicate what God thinks in His heart (the attitudes, in this case, the purposes, programs or penchants, the atmosphere, the relationships at the personal level and so on...)! Or how would we substitute `meekly' for His infinite understanding of all His creation, in our so limited declarations, intimations and thoughts.

An `inverted commas' revelation is needed to communicate from this personal infinitude to our finitude.

Einstein for his part did not confess such knowledge; and thus could not have the logical consistency for or from his standpoint. Yet he discerned, intuited, that objective truth was there. In this, he was right; his instinct attests the reality of the image of God in him, by which he is in principle attuned. Similarly, his yearning and conviction attests the Rightness of the relationship as a potential, for which he was made; in which he was created; but which, as far as his testimony goes of his relation to God, he simply did not in practice have. What has been proved to be the case, this beautifully verifies.

God is, and must be known; even to know that He must be known, He must be known. Oh yes, you can show the NECESSITY, as we have done in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, that He must be; and that He has spoken - but as to WHAT He has said, until you READ it, you know not what the highest and final assessment of all things is.

Now you may of course read it, and yet know nothing. How? In this, that you do not BELIEVE IT! It matters not at all that it is PROVEN that it is true; if you do not BELIEVE it, then as with anything else you do not believe, you are not in possession of this thing, but alienated from it, divorced, it does not inhere in you, is not one of your operating facts, features, or functional contributors.

II The PERSONS OF THE GODHEAD

But why does this relate ? Surely persons who comprise God are not to the point here or yet ? On the contrary, it is vital to know and to understand this. Let us start by making the distinction between personality and person. It is just a verbal definitional matter of preventing confusion. If we define personality as:

The operating system and proclivities which constitute the deployment of will and desire, understanding and thought which works for and between human beings as such - if you like; and we call it,
That combination of mind, matter and spirit, in the special case of human beings in whom this trilogy enables unitary action and interaction with others such, both physically, mentally and spiritually:

then we can at once see the danger humans may have.

This synthetic unity is susceptible to INFLUENCE, from within, from without. It can be damaged, deranged, polluted, infected, distorted and so forth. Its springs can be poisoned, its vision vitiated, its desires contorted, twisted, sick, unrealistic and ruinous, and all this without it being realised; for when the unity is wrong, the results are wrong, and the unity may be more or less unaware of the condition with which it is afflicted. Sick personalities are not automatically self-analysing! (hence the highly dubious value of pscho-analysis - dubious because, to put it in a symptom, many psychiatrists commit suicide, or more formally, personalities without truth are not good assessors, and truth is not an automatic result of ANY human education as such).

If THAT is personality, what is "person" ? We now define this to refer to:

the underlying reality of which the personality is the expression.

Beneath the contrivance, or the cultural conditioning and so on, lies
the identity which was created. It is what it HAS BEEN MADE. THAT is the first and most obvious difference between it and God! He IS WHAT HE IS!

The person then, is the goal. THIS is what matters most. For man, the design specifications thus matter much, for even the person may be from birth imbued physically or mentally or spiritually with poison, with needless limitations of decline, as well as with necessary limitations which belong to all that is MADE, or in this case, CREATED. Still, we move nearer in terms of the design basis, to the truth.

GOD comprises three persons. As shown in Part IV of Chapter 7 in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, they do not ADD UP to Him! He is not an integration of 3, since He always was, and hence there were not three in independence which had to be made one in synthesis. You simply have to stop thinking in terms of the processive and the progressive when you think of God; for that is the childish matter of the temporal, when we are here confronted by the Eternal. Hence in all details, we must preserve this necessary perspective.

As to BEING: ONE. As to PERSONS: three. As to NATURE: ONE. As to individuality, THREE. The three with the identical nature, character, yet have a differentiation of function. All this was dealt with rather well by the Cappodocian doctors, early in Church history, but it is well to become aware in our own time. There is in infinite intimacy of the three, a dynamic without interstices, so that there is not SPACE or THING or OBJECT beyond them, but rather their very beings and inter-relationships all are without confinement, condition or conduit. From this arise our CREATED and IMAGE-of-GOD related families, loves and so on. That is the basis of them all, this Creator.

As created, they relate; but also as created, they lack the supra-temporal, supernatural eternity which always was, and from which 'time', our time, came as we know it, and experience it. Indeed, it is precisely because of this, together with the fact that we are made BY and FOR the Eternal God, that there is such glamour and resurgence of interest in so many drug related feelings of unity and depth and so on: there is the natural impetus even in deformed and defiled personalities to experience or know ... God. Mischievous manipulated substitutions attest the form, through ... even disease.

Now let us look at an illustration which I have often used, and we shall not extract this, as indented below.

III. The Illustration

"Where to go ?

It is GOD who is the only sound quest. His SON is the only verified way. His SALVATION is the only offer on record to man, to give righteousness. His CROSS is still the only remedy which covers man's sin, showing that God is just and we are not - but that He has a way to make up the difference. Heaven has greater values (I Peter 3:18, II Corinthians 5:19-21) and better strength (I Corinthians 1:20-25).

But that way takes repentance (Luke 13:1-3). How CAN you meet God's specifications in your own life if you have not even studied them. God-given FAITH in Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord enables you freely to RECEIVE the GIFT of ETERNAL LIFE (Ephesians 2:8, Romans 5:15): just as a wire admits electricity, surging from its generating equipment into your house.

YOU do not create the electricity. It is like a lake on a mist-shrouded hill, with a waterfall of sparkling, thirst-quenching blue waters leading you by its stream, to the top. The lake at the summit? it is like the Father who sent His own Son. You will note that lake and waterfall are both water; and without that, your thirst would be unquenched. Christ declared: Before Abraham was, I am (John 8:58; 5:19-23; cf. Isaiah 48:16, Zechariah 2:8, 3:9, Psalm 45, I John 1:1-4, 4:9-10, Micah 5:1-3, ).

Jesus said: Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst! But the water .. will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life (John 4:14). Note the vitality. He also stated: I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes to the Father except by Me (John 14:6). Then, for our picture, the stream rushing down, spills over a rocky precipice to fall where hydro-electric works are built.

That jagged place is like Christ's Cross.

Thence, pylons convey the power to needs of the city: like faithful people passing on the message of God's love and salvation (II Timothy 2:2). True, in some houses there is no electric connection. That is like unbelief. Some prefer candles (Romans 6:23, John 8:12, 3:19-21). They show less dirt, but also less beauty. Perhaps invisible to you, there is a highway: it is called the Highway of Holiness. No don't wince! Holiness is wholesomeness and real devotion to God your Maker, in Christ the Saviour. With mind undivided, it has the gift of peace. On this (Isaiah 35:8), we read, that "the travellers, though they be fools, will not go astray."

Let us consider this. When you are in love, it is not the experience of love which concerns you, but ITS OBJECT. It is not whether you speak in poems (which may be poor), or tongues of glory, or not. It is not tongues but truth that matters! It is the OTHER PERSON whom you love. It is whether you are at peace with your loved one - and near. God's people love Him, and thus love His sacrificed but risen Son (John 8:42, Ephesians 2:12-22), and His words; and so plan to keep these (John 14:21-23, 8:31). If you don't know His words, you can hardly keep or follow them. God's people are set on a highway. Are you ?"

This gives you the illustration. The movement of God to express is in the Person of His Son - not of course biological Son in eternity, since GOD is a Spirit (John 4:14); but the Eternal Son is the eternal EXPRESSION (WORD, John 1:1 - there being only one God, as is demonstrable - SMR Ch.1,3 - as Biblically affirmed very often, as in Isaiah 41-45 - this is the One with GOD, and who IS GOD, as in Colossians 2:9, 1:19-23, John 8:58, 5:19-23).

The FACT of human sons indicates the REALITY of transmission in our terms, of being, nature with tenderness towards company and mutuality, with continuity, and so on. The REFLECTION of God, in whose image we are, is that HE has the EVERLASTING SON, to whom, in due course, He gave biological expression in the person of the ONE formed by direct supernatural intervention (Luke 1:35) in a human format, through the person of Mary. The result was this: the ETERNAL SON, WORD of God, the living person became flesh, took for His current or contemporary format, that of man, while He went as sent to redeem those who would come to Him.

It is most important to realise this, as the passage in Colossians 1 just noted, attests, that it was to ALL that He came - GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD*²; but it was not a world of system. It was PEOPLE IN IT, for whom He came. The corrupted people have a corrupted system, and no system, however fine, ever works or could work or even should work, because they leave out God and the Kingdom of Heaven (see Ch.2 in The Kingdom of Heaven; and The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 623-631A). The way is narrow, like that waterfall from the lake. It is beautiful, clean and serene; it is real; it IS. It must be negotiated; but only God is able to do that. YOU must repent of sin, submit yourself to Him, call on His name and accept Him, believing in the PERSON of HIS SON, because THAT is the PERSON of the TRINITY who is sent (Psalm, 40, I John 4:9, Zechariah 2:8-9, Isaiah 49:16). There is no other pathway to glory.

Forget the trinity? You might as well forget your visa on an international tour. It is HE who is the entrance - John 10:9. Without Him, your flight does not even leave. You sit meditating (transcendental meditation? ) on the tarmac. But in this, there is no lift. Feelings do not lift aircraft. You see, we are dealing with reality, with what is, not with what it seems to be, should be, might be, could be. We deal with the things that are.

IV. The Flight

The Father SENT the SON. Without the Father, there is no sending. The Son likewise leads you TO the Father (John 14:6). Indeed, ALL THINGS ARE DELIVERED TO THE SON FROM THE FATHER (Matthew 11:27, cf. John 16:15), and they are His. You cannot even KNOW the SON by yourself. NO MAN knows the SON except the Father, He knows Him. No man knows the FATHER except the SON reveals Him (cf. Matthew 16:17) - CHOOSES to reveal Him. Thus Father and Son are not penetrable like a recess in Tibet. They demonstrate, take the initiative. The Holy Spirit (John 14:15-18) will comfort, that is strengthen, be present in and for, provide and present Jesus Christ to the inner person of man - believing man. So there is this glorious interplay, if one might almost reverently use the term, to exhibit one aspect. Rather let us say, there is a mutual mediation and inter-relation which is inseparable.

Christ has come forth from the Father (John 16:28, 30), yes, like a waterfall from the lake; but more than this, He has come CLOTHED IN OUR OWN FORM AND FORMAT, displaying in terms most natural to our hearts, if only they look and see, what He has to give and to show and to offer and to be for us.

You TAKE OFF on your flight when you ARE TAKEN. For that, you need to be ON the flight, and the "aircraft" is Christ.

V. The Entrance

But you may say: How do I get on this flight? I CANNOT just grab Him, my eyes are not in my control to see, and where would I put my feet to "board" for the flight?

A good point.

You do not want Christ, the Son, the Word, then? Why worry, you have what you want! You DO want Him. Simple: Tell Him so - and tell Him that you repent of your sins, that you are without significance except by His mercy, that you deserve destruction according to strict justice for which only perfection is even relevant (and incidentally, God IS perfect, and what is not does not cohere with Him in heaven: indeed it would no longer be able to BE heaven with THAT in it!).

TELL HIM! Say to Him, "Take away all iniquity, and receive (me) graciously" - that is how Hosea 14:2 has it. You DO NOT BELIEVE this? very well, again, why worry! You do not believe it, so what are you missing - to your mind. Certainly you are wrong, since it is demonstrable, but if you do not believe it, why let it concern you! You will suffer for your contumacy, obstinacy (I Samuel 15:23 gives a good picture of the pure folly of not knowing God): but since it is not in your heart to even believe it, why are you concerned?

You DO then believe it? Fine. No further problems. Go to HIM, as noted above, to the SECOND and the SENT PERSON of the TRINITY who came for you, and is ever ready to succour and receive you. Tell Him more, that you accept that HE is God, that it is to HIM you must come, that HE alone leads to the Father, and in COMING, then GO with Him TO the Father, who is then not only in form and in body, but in spirit and in truth YOUR FATHER, and accept His redemption in which He DIED for you, so that your SINS are now BORNE by HIM, since He is willing and able to bear those of all who come, and could take unlimited numbers, being infinite. His death is sufficient cover for any and for all; but it is deployed ONLY for those who coming, avail themselves of the pardon so compressed in it, so available, so devastatingly available - to sin, so wonderfully available, to hope.

You come? Alas, there are many who do not because they will not. Let me share with you an experience with quite a large group at a University, and for this we go to our Questions and Answers - The Word that Speaks, No. 7: we shall give it in a little context. It was dealing with the question of Good Government, and we shall allow the illustration to appear as you read below. The indent is the quotation from the work just noted.

A: There needs to be an awareness of talent, and positive desire and interest in its exercise. You need to be a talent scout, and to take real pleasure in seeing talent and task well-matched, goodwill and good graces in excellent function, and a complete abortion of the detestable and selfish desire for 'survival' (in your own place, as in the places of all leaders below you, if you are a Minister of Government).

In fact, of course, the desire to survive, collect maximal superannuation, collect dividends in the form of travel allowance and so on is sometimes almost a game, a clever game, so that those who do best at it are 'clever', good leaders, men of the world, women of wit, and they are treated at times as if this makes them better suited for higher office. The opposite is

true.

If you despise the rat-race, the simple plan is to opt out and to walk in moral grace, seeking good - not survival. A person who trusts in Christ has no need of 'survival'; the cross is the OPPOSITE ambition. Resurrection is quite adequate. Goodness meanwhile is an indispensable quality. Indeed, service at sacrifice is a real thing which has sometimes a bad name because so many hypocrites find it easier to mouth than to put into action. This does not alter the reality, only illustrates the farce of Satan who has no heart for the truth.

Q: What about freedom in this moral government of yours?

A: There MUST be freedom. That is why, at the University of Adelaide, we were advertising often and extensively as The Truth and Life Club Inc., so that any who felt able should overthrow our demonstration that the Bible is the only authorised, divine word from God Almighty to the human race.

It involved the points that there is God Almighty, that He HAS spoken to the race, that THIS BIBLE is precisely what He said, and is His word. Since the GOSPEL is IN that word, and it portrays JESUS CHRIST, LORD AND SAVIOUR, these things followed.

Advisedly, we did not (and if we could, would not) FORCE anyone to accept our challenge. It is enough that one group fled after the first meeting, one of them returned, failed to disturb the proof of the Bible, said he would return, never did so, and they then talked about it on the Net to which at that time, I had no access. Indeed, it was years before I took it up. As years of challenge passed, some came from time to time, but the truth of the Bible position was never endangered.

In the meantime, we asked such people if they would like to write their answers; none came; we asked later, when I took to the Net, if they would like to confront us there, no answer. But it is GOOD that they had freedom to meet us if they would.

Our point of course was this: IF anyone can NOT overthrow the PROOF that the Bible is the word of God, and all this shows, then it is MORALLY WRONG to attack it anywhere in the University, since the answer is there. ANYONE, professor, student, could come. Comically, some highly articulate people began to make excuse, saying they could not match us with words - that leading to our other offers of writing and so on. The fact is, as we have shown, and I have found over many decades of all this sort of thing, NO ONE has an answer to this. The BIBLE IS THE TRUTH. Laughter, lampoons, flames - inquisitorial or modern-day psychic binges, flights and fiascos do nothing but show the emptiness of the reason bin of all opposition.

Now back to government. For all that, even if I had the political party in power, and were its leader, I still would not FORCE any persons to believe (or really, to pretend to believe), WHETHER they thought they could answer or not. The REASON for the faith is not the faith. If you do not have faith, you lack the most essential thing; for without it, you and God are apart. Since He made you, and you are not self-sufficient, this is a most unhappy state of things. It is in one sense, a form of madness, spiritual madness as the Bible puts it; but this is no REASON to use any form of force. (See SMR pp. 65-72, 1186A ff. ).

This of course shows up one important focus. People in general do not really WANT^*3 the truth.

THEY are and THE TRUTH IS^*1, and there is a strong move to keep it that way. The truth is fine if IT SERVES. Serves what or whom? The personality who wishes to avail him/herself of it... For what? For the purposes of the personality concerned. Where do these come from? From itself. What is it? Without the God to whom it belongs. What does it do about this? Keeps its distance (cf. Ephesians 4:18-19). Where then can it find relief? By faith. How does it get it? By repentance and coming to the SECOND PERSON, the SON who was SENT for just this. HOW can one come? By the power of the Holy Spirit, the THIRD Person, sent from the Father by the Son, who, on going, said He would not leave them comfortless (company-less, strengthless, without the presence of God). This SPIRIT CONVICTS (John 16:7-11).

What is the good of being convicted? In a law court, it is bad, very bad. True, but where it is THE TRUTH (and the Spirit of God is also called the SPIRIT OF TRUTH) which, who convicts, then that is fine, just fine. Why? Because then you find the truth, and the truth finds you - or this is at last along the way to becoming an occurrence. May it cease? Of course. You could grieve the Spirit. That is terrible? Yes, it is. But IF YOU COME, THE SON UNDERTAKES NOT to cast you out (John 6:37). So come. You do not want to? Again, why worry! You do not believe it, as before. But you DO want to, but cannot? Nonsense. If you want to come, come. It is not hard to fall down before the Lord Jesus Christ as noted. IMPOSSIBLE! you retort. True, IF you do not believe. But if you do, then it is impossible NOT to! It is WHAT YOU BELIEVE and you will OF COURSE act on that. If shares are about to fall to nothing, and you value your inheritance, and wish to use it, then you sell first... don't you?

You may be disposed to argue. I MAY not, you say? No, you may not; but if you VALUE your inheritance and BELIEVE this is about to happen, then you will. Your double-mindedness (singularly unblessed before God - James 1:5-7) will not alter the fact that in that case you do not BELIEVE. A double mind is like double vision: as to sight, you are not there. If you believe, act; if you do not, there you are. You have what you want. I pity your plight then, but not more than that of someone with a fatal cancer - unless there be immediate operation. If the personality refuses, so be it. It is sad; but nowhere near as sad as would be the case if the OPERATION WERE UNAVAILABLE!

It IS very available; and it was made so by a grant of the Father so immense and so intense, that to refuse it is folly.

Erasmus, the famous Dutch scholar of the reformation, wrote a book, In Praise of Folly, in which he lashed the follies of Rome. I however do not even ironically praise THIS folly, roaming from the religion of truth, from what is, from the truth, from the Person who was sent, who has come, who is available, who does not have to be researched or beseeched out of heaven. No propaganda machine is necessary to seek (vainly in such a case) to INDUCE GOD to sent His Son. He resolved to do so, did so and it is to you that this SON is addressed. Come then! Come... One by one we come, for it is fitting to come to the truth, welcoming in the love of God, miraculously (in the strict sense of the term) provided for in the practical engineering of God, whose love has feet, used hands, and had them both pierced.

End-notes

*1 Unmoored Driftings that Talk about Navigation Science - from The Shadow of a Mighty Rock pp. 100-101

One further element, which follows from the others, is this. If it were felt that God, the Almighty, the Creator had in fact not spoken, not merely would it be contrary to the justice which is from Him, who made all things in their relationships as they ought to be; not merely would it similarly conflict with His truth, by which all reality has an owner and a word. Not only would justice and truth lie dead, while injustice and lies and fraud abounded. (Cf. Isaiah 59:14-15, and the divine sequel in 59:16-19, as to judgment, and Isaiah 51:16 as to remedy. Here the scripture also implies by revelation, and concerning revelation, that to which we have reasoned in terms of His manifest, divine nature.) If, then, God had not spoken, while the world remained as it is, then God would also be insulted by the very thought that He would remain inactive in speech to direct and resolve the problems in His world, leaving in silence the insolence and madness of man, assaulting and offending each one the other.

It is not only blasphemy, that is a misuse of the very character of His glory; it would also be a denigration, a travesty and a direct personal offence so to speak or to think. A problem out of the power of God! a problem in the very world which He created, out of His depth, beyond His scope, when He had freely created all things, the whole set of abilities and of circumstances for all created life! It would be like telling a film star that she had no face, or a financier that he had no funds, or a real estate agent that he would not know a house if he saw one!

The concept that He would be willing, moreover, to let be such folly and filth, such wilful, wanton pain as we have just seen in Kuwait and with the Kurds, when, having a solution, He did not use it, this would be like telling a social hostess that she couldn't care less if her guests starved!

Thus there is not only the metaphysical madness of such assertions, such views, such positions: there is also the moral assault on God which is involved. If, indeed, we his creatures would be amazed at the madness of anyone suggesting such things about us, how much more should we be ashamed even to think such things about God, who gave us the power to think and the knowledge with which to know (cf. Psalm 94:8-11).

A solution He has indeed shown; and man, willing to move the blame for undoubtedly high-level immorality and actual agony, often sustained, onto God, wants Him a dumb dog, lying down and snoozing. Thus we, whom He created, are active, we think, we look for solutions, we can feel the horror of so much pain for others... but He, who made our hearts and our feelings and our moral thoughts in the beginning (however we misuse this equipment, yet it is there, in our hearts, however spoiled, leaving its residue at the worst), He does not feel ? God who made the heart, does He not feel? God who made the mouth, does not speak ? God who made the mind, does not think? To ask is to answer.

We have elsewhere traced the impossibility ontologically, the frank contradiction in having the all-powerful author of justice and ground of truth needlessly allowing flat and continual contradiction, when merely to apply His power removes the problem by removing the people who make it! Now we dwell on the incredible cheek, the irrational implicit assumptions on which any such notion is built.

The solution is available; has been shown from the first, predicted for centuries, performed by Jesus Christ, published, proclaimed and preached for thousands of years concerning this same Jesus Christ, concerning whom no one has been able to show even one sin, and of whom even Muhammad had to admit the righteousness. To suggest that God has not spoken when His word circles the earth, His predictions noticeably control the whole direction and character of history, uniquely and utterly, and His Son went to the pain and anguish of bearing the sins of those who will forsake their own: this is to sustain, reinforce and add to the insults of the Cross, the calumnies of Calvary, the madness of the priests. It is to stand, arrogant and upright, in the presence of love, and call it hate or indifference; it is to look, princely and pure, at one's Creator and call Him dumb; compassionate and sensitive (courtesy of being created by one's Creator) and to call Him heartless... this while all the time, ignoring the solution which He has constructed, the sacrifice which He has made, the pardon which is so needed, but so ignored.

What is it like ? It is like prisoners in a prison, cut-throats, immoral and dead in spirit, raging at their victims, buried as a result of their crimes against them. Thus Jesus Christ was made a sin-offering to take the burden, the blight and the bane of sin from all who come by faith to receive Him. But He is not dead, and this insult to the moral nature of God is similar to the studious blindness which also slanders His power, by which His people have for centuries lived, their hearts in His peace and their persons alight with His love and presence.

It is therefore one more sin, that God is so `sentenced', as C.S. Lewis phrases it, God in the Dock, at the hands of man, His judges. But let us add this: He is being `sentenced' by those sinners to whom He is offering pardon, who are meanwhile slandering His sacrifice and sentencing themselves. In their hearts, truth is contaminated twice: once by sin, and then by sneering at its solution! For all this, the Bible has provided.

31 It is unwise and indeed the utmost in arrogant presumption if derivative man, with unmoored mind, man who does not accept the specific, identified and rationally necessary revelation of God, comes to pontificate on `truth', on the reality of things.

Will a conditioned or limited man, reacting and being able to do only what has been given him to do, erect himself as a founder of truth, a source of criticism of the God who made his little mind ? Will a cog discuss the design with the designer ? Will a man without the revelation of God, tell Him what it would be ? Will man show God His own mind!

Will a limited and sinful man without knowledge of absolute truth, even as a perspective, say that something is absolutely true, or work on bases and ideas as if they were valid and worth arguing from, when he does not yet have the knowledge of absolute truth, on which to start and on which to proceed: either not knowing God, or if knowing something of that, not believing it; or in any case, not having access to this absolute truth in the mind of God, who speaks when He will, as He will...

The case is hardly improved if man does not believe there is such a thing as absolute truth, while making various statements in which such a property is assumed to inhere, or presumed to be possible! Surely the Primary School student is scarcely guilty in his first beginnings of such enormities, through sheer immaturity, as beset the mind of mature man, through rebellion. (Cf. Chs. 3-4; pp. 292-315, 934-936 esp., infra.)

Footnotes:

1. Thus Surah IX.27 also has this: ``Fight against such of those to whom the scriptures were given as believe neither in God nor the last Day ... and do not embrace the true faith, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued.''

As to the LOVE of God, see Love that Passes Knowledge, Ch. 4 in The Kingdom of Heaven... Also consult, Predestination and Freewill, Section III, up to Foreknowledge, and in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock (SMR), Appendix B.

As to the GRACE of God, see SMR pp. 520-432, 570-578, 582-594, 611-623 and 1037-1088H, the end of Ch.10.

As to the KINGDOM of heaven, see The Kingdom of Heaven... Ch.2.

All these thing are interwoven, like a tapestry of exceeding beauty, unutterable distinction and of a uniqueness which is literally divine.

It is sad. Thus so many of these students will look forward to the everlasting darkness of gloom, where reality has been countermanded by their wills, and reality is NOT available at their desire.

Excuses, excuses, excuses! They are like the people who were invited to the King's Feast for the Marriage of His Son (Matthew 22:1-4). Some were pre-occupied with a new wife, a new land purchase ... but not occupied with that which was right and due and required.

Whether it be rational or volitional or cultural or historical, whether psychical or emotional: there is no valid excuse, but there are many words. Neither reason nor culture nor emotion nor will has any sound ground to offer; only the vexatious contumacy of alien desire. Nothing logical so much as stands, as shown in SMR Chs.1,3,10 and in That Magnificent Rock so often.

Reality countermanded by will is not countermanded; it is merely denied, and where denied it can crush without apparent feeling, though in fact, the system which is then the steam-roller, having been opted for, and this without its Maker, it can seem that way (cf. Psalm 1:4-5). Like the chaff blown away are the wicked, and what more wicked than this, that the invitation of the King of Eternity is given in time, short, breath-drawing time, an asinine rejection, as if the passing wave of a moment, were worth the ocean!

Many like jet-setters seem to rush to their doom as if there is scarcely time to reach it, before, before ... But it will be there. The flight in this short life is so fast. The time is so short, to reach an eternity emptied of all except judgment, it is quite fast for so short a time as that in which we draw breath on this earth. There is not the slightest danger of missing this, on that way and walk and procedure and ground. What is vapid does not stand; and what is rested on, being not there, gives no support. The bottomless pit is what it says, a way of life without support, ground or meaning, that goes down, descending to ever more apt and desolate depths that are grounded on ... nothing.

Paul Davies' metaphysical theories must be given credit for having formulated this part, from the physical side, so well, yet alas, so blindly! However this, his nothing is not what he imagined (That Magnificent Rock, Ch.7), this efficient nullity that does so well without anything to it ; and alas, it is not merely physical, but spiritual; and is not a genesis, a contradiction in terms, but a destiny; and as to that, not its totality, but its heart. His 'nothing', as illusion, should be tagged, not trusted in. There will be enough of it before the judgment seat of God, where it consists not least in the no-basement to the pit ( Matthew 22:13).

It is this which the Bible teaches, the Book which changes not over thousands of years, while physics makes its bow to the 'inevitable' almost every year, a mutability as ephemeral in its ideas as the butterfly. God? He says it, and it endures (cf. Matthew 24:35); and then endures.... Nor is it surprising that He should know so much better! Nor is it wise, in treating His word, to disregard it. It does not change. THIS is the analysis of God, not man, for all who disregard His infinite wisdom and counsel and might, as a Person: THE FOOL HAS SAID IN HIS HEART, THERE IS NO GOD (Psalm 14:1, 53:1), and the noteworthy point here is this: The word 'fool' in that context means - empty person!

God in the Bible is the Almighty, is Spirit, is the Creator and Purveyor of all, and the divergence between Him and .... nothing, is infinite.

That is some error, to make: an infinite error. The results of it likewise have no end.

The rebuff? It is from God - not man, from His word, not that of man: like the result.

The Trinity, and the Deity of Christ

The Spirit of God, the Lord and the Trinity

Adapted from

Chapter 6

The Glory of Spiritual Things
Seen in New and Old Testament Perspective

A Profound Parallel in the Work of the Holy Spirit

THE WITNESS OF CHRIST AND THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT

Having no part dark! That is the criterion for desire, the quest for sanctity, the realm for spiritual liberty, the site for savour and the strength for spirit. No part dark is the prescription but it is one based on a pre-condition: BE FULL OF LIGHT! (Luke 6:33ff.). Take heed, moreover, Christ made a proclaimation about your light! Being full of light is the aim, but a method of protection is this: Be careful that the light which is in you is not darkness!

Many are full of light, no doubt, in their own eyes. The UN is a good example: they are so full of 'light' that they go about doing good ... but without God, what is the good of 'good', for it is then a human definition, prescription and even invention, not based on our own basis or directed by God, and hence merely a sub-variety of darkness. Small wonder therefore that a top official's son is attested by some as receiving vast sums through misuse of his position, that many nations and groups are overlooked, while others are exalted, some are touted, some are flouted, Moslems may appear as 'brothers', while others need dispossession, even by and on behalf of, their enemies!^*1

It is not only national or international, this phenomenon. Many are they who, trusting in themselves, their own prejudices, passions, or alleged dispassion, are as reliable as drawn swords, as serpent's poison and go about doing good in their own eyes with all the blessedness of acid poured on flowers or pride poured out on meekness (cf. Mystery of Iniquity, TMR Ch. 8, y.html).

To be full of light is to be full of the Spirit of God, as a result of being adopted into the family of God, so that not only are you sealed by the Spirit, but assured by grace and through the word of God, of your 'inheritance (Ephesians 1:11 in the context of Ch. 1). You are filled with goodness when you are filled with God (Galatians 5:22), not with some occupant of a culturally manufactured pantheon.

When you resound to the word and presence of the God of glory, of testimony, of truth, of the Bible, the Father of Jesus Christ, being able to find the validly verified, the irrepressibly attested: then you are open to an enduring work of God. It is when you are invested with Him that you are open to being filled with the very Spirit of God. As David puts it in Psalm 143:10-11:

"Teach me to do your will,

For You are my God;

Your Spirit is good.

Lead me in the land of uprightness,

Receive me O LORD, for your name's sake,

For Your righteousness' sake bring my soul out of trouble..."

Good ... God's SPIRIT is good! In God is no iniquity at all (Deuteronomy 32:4).

It is only when you realise and know truly that you are dealing with God, and not some other, that the question of goodness arises; but when you are, in the name of the world's only Saviour, Jesus Christ, doing so, then being filled with His Spirit, who is good, led into the land of uprightness, which is a righteous framework and name and power for good moving in you in a domain of citizens who are His, not in some geographical arena, but in a spiritual field: what then ? It is then that being filled with light becomes a need that zeal savours. It is a target its passion desires (cf. Philippians 2:12-13).

It is possible instead to have a 'spirit of infirmity' such as did that poor woman who for 18 years had been so bent over that she simply could not straighten her spine and stand erect. In this instance (Luke 13), Jesus did not, apparently, wait to be asked. SEEING HER, He called to her and declared, Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity! When the impassioned formalists tried to accuse Him of Sabbath-breaking, He accused them of hypocrisy, indicating that even they would loose a caught animal on the Sabbath, and here, look, He announced, here is a person caught for 18 YEARS!

There is a spirit of helpfulness and perception, of understanding in the fear of the Lord, neither wilfully ignoring the day of rest, nor ignoring the need of man, but selecting what in an opportunity demanded of love, help. It uses this case without disrupting the whole concept of rest, which after all, in the end makes men more useful, more usable!

Thus we find a SPIRIT of infirmity. This is another option to being filled with the Spirit of God. It is something which oppresses. Physical disease may have many causes and manifestations, but this one was related to a certain kind of SPIRIT. There is a spirit of joy and triumph, of delight and yieldedness to God, and one of weakness and despair. As for Christ Himself, we read in Luke 10:21 that Jesus rejoiced in the Spirit, and this was in a perception and performance combined: His perception and the performance of the disciples who had been sent by Him, in His name, to do the works of the kingdom and preach the Gospel, even 70 of them, led to this divine exultation.

The 'wise', the professedly scholarly having failed in their due task (as in Luke 11:52), as a class or group characteristically not only went for the 'key of knowledge', but so misused it that they tended to withdraw it from popular circulation; and on top of that, they hindered those who were entering the kingdom, not having entered themselves: Jesus, however, was most happy about a workable option. It was this. The disciples in HIS name had wrought and taught by His power, and in His name likewise, many were those blessed. Here was the prototype of the Church of Jesus Christ, not of latter day saints, but of contemporary saints, the sort of people who being filled with the Holy Spirit, walked in holiness, abiding in Him, in His word, in His walk, witness and way.

Babes, they were, as in the world's eyes, but for all that, things hidden from the 'wise' were revealed to them; and this was illustrative of that great principle which Christ then revealed in Luke 10:22: ALL THINGS have been delivered to ME by My Father; ONLY the Father knows who the Son is, and no one knows who is the Father except the Son.

There is one more facet of this revelation, which the word of God here shows. It is this. While the the Father uniquely knows the Son, the infinite intimacy of His own Son, the Son categorically and uniquely knows the Father, this knowledge is shared on a specific basis: as to the OTHERS who are to know who the Father is, these are a group. They are those to whom the SON WILLS to reveal them. It is singularly unfortunate that the AV has 'will reveal' for 'wills to reveal', but whatever the reason, linguistic or other, the result is the same. The Greek text in modern English, is rendered past the slightest doubt, 'wills to reveal'. Here is a rare parallel to John 2:19:

"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."

This, we learn, was a reference to the well-known but not always realised fact that (as in John 1:29), He was the Lamb of God (and as having accomplished His mission, still is) who takes away the sin of the world! This, John the Baptist announced as part of his own prophetic mission as given to his father, Zacharias, from the start (Luke 1), with the coming birth, by divine announcement. That was the ultimate declaration concerning Jesus, at the outset!

AS the SON, He is in the Messianic role, part, a servant (Isaiah 42:1): but in reality, He is the One who being in the form of God, did not think it robbery or a thing to be snatched for, to be equal to God (Philippians 2), but for His mission (as in Psalm 40), He humbled Himself to this servant's role. In this, He healed, being filled with goodness, with the Spirit, being the Word of God incarnate, having the power such as was His at the creation, long before the incarnation, to SPEAK so that it was DONE (as in Genesis 1). In the role of servant, ultimately to serve in salvation, providing a ransom for many (cf. Matthew 20:28, 26:28).

Now, as in II Corinthians 4:6, incarnate on earth, He commanded a different light into a different situation, even into the heart of man, and on the way, revealed His Father to those who were granted eternal life (as in John 6).

As the LORD, HE would raise up His body, though it should be destroyed. How this rings with a resonance when compared with the words of Job in Job 19, Though after the flesh, this body be destroyed, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom my eyes shall behold, and not another.

Christ spoke as the Redeemer here, while Job there, asserted his faith as one of the redeemed, declaring that in the latter days, his Redeemer would stand upon the earth. Christ did that, and in the approaching terminus of prophecy, will again so stand, even on the Mount of Olives (Zechariah 14:5), and on this earth which will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11, Habakkuk 2:14).

That is to come. In His own day on earth, however, at which we are looking in terms of spirit, Christ rejoiced IN THE SPIRIT, and acted in such ways as to release a woman from a SPIRIT OF INFIRMITY, and indicated that He cast out demons by the FINGER OF GOD, identified as the HOLY SPIRIT (Matthew 12:28, Luke 11:20), that fountain of goodness which it is most unwise to blaspheme! (Matthew 12:31-32). It is most fortunate that God is love, who does not seek to ensnare, but to dis-entrap. He is not a lawyer seeking occasion against us wilfully (as did the spiritual lawyers of the day, against Him as in Luke 11:52ff., 20:27), but One seeking to RELEASE from a spirit of infirmity, of spiritual weakness, declivity, fear and mere fashion, where the spiritually deluded can dance like a doll, instead of walk like a disciple!

This is goodness, and unless it is seen and REALISED that it is from GOD as such, not from someone or something else, it is of no value; for it leads merely to confusion. Thus when Christ was called GOOD MASTER, and asked WHY do you call Me good ? it was to clarify this point. It is not enough, even with Christ 'in the flesh', to call Him in some patronising way, 'good', as if He were of a kind of teacher, in the 'good' box.

It is, instead, necessary to realise that it is as the SON of GOD, that He has goodness, and only in this recognition, can He bring blessing (as in Matthew 16:13ff.), making the illustration through Peter. That HE is the SON of the LIVING GOD, is the necessity for recognition, and hence even introduction, for that is His name and status; and not to see it, is merely to make of a human being (seen by unbelief as such), an idol. ONLY when He is seen for WHO He is, is He able to liberate fully, for otherwise an idolatrous spirit of infirmity rests in the mind of the blind! as in Matthew 13 - where they have 'closed their eyes' and this 'lest they should see'!

If, He declared, you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins (John 8:24); and as to Him (John 8:58), before Abraham was, I am. Time does not contain Him, but He it, a creation of His own (John 1:3, Romans 8:38-39).

Thus this same SPIRIT of infirmity, this time in the mind, was at work ASKING Him for a SIGN, when He spread signs like Autumn leaves, about the place, in this healing, in that raising from the dead, in this remarkable rebuttal of error, in that test situation, as in Mark 2, where on express CHALLENGE as to His right to declare someone pardoned from his sins, He responded by moving that the OBVIOUS be observed.

What was this so obvious test to discomfort professional doubters, and expose His own manifest power ? It was this. If the invisible right to pardon were under challenge, by those who said He could not do it, and should not so speak, then what about seeing the visible, distinct drama, ocular, therapeutic, with continuing attestation over time, that of someone being healed! What if, then, by this same word with which He, speaking, pardoned, He healed. What indeed if He healed a person who had long been paralysed, and did so, at that very moment.

Nor was this all. What if He not only healed one long paralysed, but did this in such brio and exuberance that the person healed would at once pick up his bed of weakness, and in strength carry the very symbol of weakness, that bed! He proposed the challenge in answer to their challenge, and did it. One slip would have ended His career, His testimony, His claims; but truth is ever unafraid. It has what it takes and acts on it.

It was not only the power, but the timing of its deployment which tossed the drama to the eyes of the unbelieving critics. Thus, it is not only the power to run which makes the triumphant athlete, but the power to perform under test. Similarly, it is the power of God to perform ALWAYS under ALL tests by ALL people that attests the truth; and assuredly, had Christ but given the WORD once, and failed, He would have been mocked and silenced in a way more effective than murder could do; for that murder, which was soon to come, yielded to the predicted resurrection (you simply COULD not get rid of the man, for God is like that, when as a man, He gives His goodness). On the other hand, it would only have taken one simple, single failure BY Christ, when He declared otherwise, and this would have made nonsense at once of so vast a claim as His.

What was that claim ?

It was this. Not only did He claim to BE the Son of God, but the EXCLUSIVE CHANNEL through whom you could know God (John 14:6, Luke 10:22), since He is the ONLY and the predicted Saviour, predicated as such, sent as such, with the unique authority of the God of creation, to relieve the desecrated remnants of sin called modern man (then, as now)!

Thus when they asked Him for a 'sign' (as in Luke 11:29), He told their evidently hardened and unspiritual ears, set before their closed and unspiritual eyes, which could not LOOK at what was CONSTANTLY and CONSISTENTLY happening in front of them (cf. Matthew 11:5), this: NO SIGN would be given except that of His resurrection! This was set forth in the imagery of Jonah, but with a clarity that was as distilled Jew. As Jonah was for three days in the mouth of doom, in a fish's receptacle, so would He be held and delivered (Luke 11:29-32); and in His case, dead, He would rise three days later (Matthew 12:40).

THEY would stoop, He knew, to His murder, but HE would arise, as the sent Saviour and Redeemer, not a participant of death to disclose its power, but of life to envelop death with innocence and remedy its ruin with justice, in His own sinless case (I Peter 2:22ff.), and to pass this on to those to be saved in His name, because of the One who He was and is (for He does not change - Hebrews 13:8).

Thus, the way in which He announced THIS sign, was in terms of the prophet Jonah. Let us explore it a little further.

He disclosed that this prophet, for three days and nights in the large fish (perhaps, suitably, a whale-shark, which is equipped for such a voyage, and some such fish is reported at various times to have carried others), was the relevant sign.

What was the point ? It was this. HE would be in such a state of horror and enclosure for such a period, and thus fulfil what the sign of Jonah portended, implied, signalised, symbolised and in image, foretold. HE would be taken one night and buried in injustice, afflicted, tormented, tortured, as if the very bars of hell were about Him, disbelieved, and formally discredited as unfit to live, condemned, killed, buried, and after the three days and nights, arise, as Jonah escaped his format of death. Thus did the often predicted 'three days' as in Matthew 16:21ff., Luke 18:31ff.) become three days and three nights.

What Jonah did in symbol, Christ would do, as He did, in fact. THAT was the sign. As He had already noted, even that would not make the unanointed, the unappointed, the categorically and chronically disbelieving persons, equipped with a spirit of slumber (as in Matthew 13), to believe. Rising from the dead, even as predicted, when predicted, after a death the mode and model of which was predicted, not only by Him but in the prophets for a millenium, even when the power of God defeated the malignity of the priesthood and the abuse of power of Rome, and even when one Man overcame two hosts, and escaped even in death, their power and manifested life and that where test was open and free (as in John 20), even then, they would not believe. Scattered after a millenium of notice of what God would do, they still could not defeat one man! Masterful in their joint Israelite and Roman power, they were left bereft. Yet would they not believe.

Christ had NO illusions, being Himself the truth (John 14:6). Indeed, He made it painfully clear just how ludicrous and certain it was, in His parable concerning Lazarus the beggar, and the rich man, as in Luke 16:19ff., that they would not believe, would not receive, would not seize the truth and act, not though all destiny blew over them like a suffocating cloud.

He said so, and they did not believe. Instead, the ruling authorities proceeded to form themselves into a Judaistic, neo-testamental group, and have many stayed that way (Luke 16:27-31), and while the nation has become a mixed multitude, many are they who adopt this posture; and the land is still not found in Him, though some, not many, are Christians there.

If, declared Christ, they do not believe Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe though one should rise from the dead! After all, Moses had foretold the one to be placed above himself as Lord and prophet, in Deuteronomy 18 ('that prophet' to whom reference is made by John the Baptist, as in John 1:25). Isaiah had foretold the model of His death, David the mode (Psalm 22, Isaiah 50-53), Isaiah the result (Isaiah 55, 53:10ff.), Zechariah His stature as both God and condemned (Zech. 12:10), and David His status as Messiah in His eventual triumph (Psalm 45, Psalm 2, 110), just to mention a few. Thus, the evident performance of the criteria required of the Christ, the Messiah, from all the prophets, even these were visited with ornery unbelief: the point was made. As He said it would be, so it was; and indeed as Isaiah 49:7 said it would be, so it was fulfilled.

If this performance on the part of Christ, in such a high stakes arena, where the demands were such as only deity could meet, if this was not enough, would rising from the dead do more!

In Matthew 11, we find the question coming from a concerned John the Baptist, and Christ's reply is categorical.

^“And said to Him, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?

^“Jesus answered and said to them,

‘Go and show John again those things which you hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Me.’

“And as they departed, Jesus began to say to the multitudes concerning John,

‘What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what did you go out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? behold, they who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.

^‘But what did you go out for to see? A prophet? yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. For this is he, of whom it is written,

“Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who shall prepare your way before you.”

‘Verily I say unto you, Among those who are born of women there has not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John.

^‘And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, who was for to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

^‘But to what shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling to their fellows, and saying,

We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.

^‘For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He has a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.’

“Then he started to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they did not repent:

^‘Woe unto you, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

‘But I tell you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you.

^‘And you, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shall be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in you, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

‘But I tell you, that it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for you.’ ”

Indeed, in the very next Chapter of Matthew, we find that the negativity becomes so great, that even when He healed by casting out devils, the inveterate disbelievers tried to ignore the heuristic evidence, exclude the empirical facts of healing and dismissing evil, by asserting He was doing it by the devil. This ludicrous device was duly answered by the point that if a house is divided against itself, it will not stand! Our theme then leads us to the point that there comes here, in terms of the Spirit of God, a warning. Blasphemy against Him, can be fatal and final.

It was BY THE SPIRIT that He cast out demons, as by the finger of God, He declared, and such assertion of evil in the manifest presence of salvation and deliverance, pointing at the very spirit of the work, and declaiming against the work indeed of the Holy spirit, assigning it to the devil, can indicate a soul so wry and corrupt, irrational and ruthless in the face of God's mercy, that no hope may remain!

Even this, this also, is parallel to the Old Testament in its dealing with the matter of spirit, for in Isaiah 57:15-17, touching this time the human side, it declares the dangers:

"For thus says the High and Lofty One

Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:

"I dwell in the high and holy place,

With him who has a contrite and humble spirit,

To revive the spirit of the humble,

And to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

"For I will not contend forever,

Nor will I always be angry;

For the spirit would fail before Me,

And the souls which I have made.

For the iniquity of his covetousness

I was angry and struck him;

I hid and was angry,

And he went on backsliding in the way of his heart."

There is an end to backsliding, to spiritual corruption, to coruscations of dark light, mixed motives and the machinery of decline. We shall shortly deal at more length with the parallels which attest the consistency of view, the collaboration of thought, the parallels of approach and the relationship of results in spiritual things, and meanwhile note that naturally if one is already saved and secured by Christ (as in Romans 10:9), what is to the contrary cannot become applicable, and is hence excluded from operation!

Let us however return to the concept of the sign sought, as noted in Luke 11. This arising from the dead, which was to come, to be sure, would be a sign, but there had been signals in multitudes already, and its great focus and feature was that in this was authentication of the deity whom He was (and is), in a direct and insistent manner: for even when His own body in the flesh was denied Him, it still was not denied life. Death could not hold Him, and life was restored to this same body which was buried (I Cor. 15:1ff.), by the God of truth who thus verified what Christ had said, as did His own earlier works (as in John 14:11). One of the most important things said ? it was who He is!

It was this Jesus (Acts 1:7) who would return in His own time, and who in the interim would send His Holy Spirit upon His disciples (Luke 24:46-49), whose coming is so often misnamed by Pentecostals^*2, who confuse it in the most amazingly erroneous way, with Corinthianism, the use of the babble version of 'tongues' which, though it has a place if need be, is one of the most downplayed of all gifts (as in I Corinthians 14, where 5 words of wisdom surpass in public value, 10,000 of the gabble type). At Pentecost, the Spirit of God came and statedly made those of foreign speech, not Hebrew, able to understand in their OWN LANGUAGE just what Peter was saying.

It is the exact opposite to making what COULD be understood (as in Australia when those present may readily all understand English in many of the cases, yet 'tongues' incomprehensible are featured significantly), not to be understood by means of gabble. In this actual Pentecost, by contrast, what could NOT be understood, the Gospel, because of language diversities in the multi-national visitors, was made comprehensible by the explicit device of having an interpreter who made the language of origin to come to the ears of those hearing, in their own language of origin, so that they heard in their own tongue. This, the overturning of Babel (Genesis 11) as a facet and focus of the glorious truth of the Gospel, had its own symbolism of the GOODNESS of God. Here confusion became clarity, curse became blessing, outrage became acceptance, elevation of man became submission and meekness before His majesty, whose control of the situation was manifest.

It was wrought by the SPIRIT of God, who had touched each one's head, exhibiting by the actual but symbolic means of flame and sound, through His presence and the objective reality of His coming, just as the gift of virtual translation continued the impact and testimony, after that. As in the days of Christ, so now in this explosive opening for the birthday in power of the Church following Christ's ascension, the Spirit CONTINUED to work in the application and release of the Gospel (as in Acts 1:1), and wrought what could not be missed, if your eyes were open, and not shut tight. Moreover, what Christ TAUGHT was thus made clear, and what He had done was applied.

Clarity is one of the features of goodness, for this does good. There are of course very deep things which need deep digging: there is milk to use Paul's terminology (I Corinthians 3:2ff.), but there is also meat, and meat needs chewing. We do not always imbibe milk as major diet, but in due course, if all is well, come to the phase of meat. Predestination is in that category for example, though it is readily enough chewed if you have teeth, and appetite of the Lord! (cf. Ch. 5 above), avoiding with care the bare bones of party-schism and the name of some man or other, as a criterion, a strictly forbidden rite of disunity and harrowing of holiness - also condemned in I Corinthians 3.

NEVER should Calvin, or Wesley or Spurgeon or Augustine or any other, become the name that you use to designate your position. Not Paul, not Apollos - it is only the inscripturated word of God which is the criterion, and parties from such persons, all of whom have given much to the church, these are abhorrent. When the Bible comes from whomever, it is not the one who writes, but the one who gives who is crucial; and to rest a case on man is as foolish and divisive as to rest in some man, instead of in the Lord. At all events, it is forbidden, but horrendously common, and one way of ensuring that the excellent insights given to one or to some, become a limit instead of a component in the wonders and treasures of the liberal Lord, whose name alone is to be exalted (Isaiah 2).

With this caution, however, we return to our theme, the depth that is to be found in some of the grand topics of truth, and the wonder of the Lord's provisions as you follow the rules and are moved into meekness and admiration, by His Spirit with clarity (Ephesians 1:17ff.), as indeed Paul prays for those of Ephesus. Such challenges are as much a test of integrity and a scope for advance as those of Job; for often unrealised, are the challenges the Lord permits us, not for glorying in flesh, but for glorying in Him in the midst of trial, and finding truth where dust storms are wont to blow.

Blessed, said Christ to His disciples, are YOUR eyes; for many righteous men had sought long to understand what was now clearly provided for them (Matthew 13:14ff.). Indeed, on that occasion, Christ proceeded with the parable of the sower and the seed, in which it is apparent that some receive the word with joy for a season, but do not actually absorb it, being merely superficial in their insight and in their understanding, and that this merely shallow penetration, not amounting to faith and not equipped with the breaking up of hard underlying soil of the heart in repentance, is shown when any test comes!

Then, to change the figure, the attraction of the word is lost. They leave it like leopards! They bound away. The sun, to revert to the parable's terms, beats on the shallow soil and the seed of the word is extinguished from further impact on their rock hard hearts beneath. They may then show themselves as having a heart of stone, or in refiner's terms, to be 'reprobate silver' (Ezekiel 36:25-27.Jeremiah 6:28-30). The latter deserves inspection here:

"They are all grievous revolters, walking with slanders:
they are brass and iron; they are all corrupters.

^"The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melts in vain:
for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them,
because the LORD has rejected them."

Again in Ezekiel, we see the more blessed and positive side, when the miracle of restoration is wrought, and the seed penetrates, the life is granted and faith comes:

"Then
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean;
I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you;
I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes,
and you will keep My judgments and do them."

We cannot but notice the 5 "I will" clauses, significant firstly of the sovereign majesty of the Lord, secondly of His intense mercy and thirdly of His intensive action. The heart is changed, the Spirit of the Lord enters their hearts (Romans 8:9), the heart of stone being removed, the tenderness of understanding can grow, and the fruit of such regenerated life appears in obedience, not as the ground, but as the growth!

Thus, in accord with such principles, power and privilege, the work of Christ, applied by the Holy Spirit, came to the disciples to continue, not now into redemption, for they themselves were redeemed, as to if achieve it which Christ had already granted: but as to pass it on. The great commission became empowered before their eyes, and its impact was vast on the multitude who heard. Thousands were converted.

Indeed, the Spirit of God had of course long worked in man, and all throughout the Old Testament, as in the New, you see His power, procedures and wonders, and these are very much the same in both Testaments, since God is One and does not change. The major difference is systematic in its environment: that is, the need for priests and programs of worship in the Temple, as a modus operandi, is removed, and each person DIRECTLY and without intervention has access in all things to God (I John 2:27) without the paraphernalia of symbolism which, though vast in its long-term advantages, was now fulfilled (as in Hebrews 8), so that continuance in it would be wilful obsession with the obsolete.

This new liberty John refers to in terms of "the anointing which you have received from Him", so that He, ONLY MASTER and TEACHER, sending forth His Spirit to anoint, needs no systematic supplement in order to understand, no other master, no other Lord! This makes the New Testament man more entirely and directly reliant on the word of God (as in John 15:7, where its blessedness is apparent); yet even in the Old Testament, and even in the case of a King, the necessity of following His word is dramatically exhibited (as in the case of Josiah, recorded in II Kings 22:11ff., a man of vast passion and tenderness towards the word of God, its inculcation and its fiery power). This does not mean that people may not MINISTER to, serve one another with this or that gift; but it does mean that this service is not that of some lord, master or ruler (I Peter 5), for the Lord Himself rules, and His Spirit gives light.

With this goes that grace towards each other which adherence to the head gives to any body, whose head is well set! and in this case, the head is the Lord, who should be heeded in His admonitions about schisms and tender-heartedness. It is into Him by one Spirit that each soul is brought on conversion (II Corinthians 13:14), and the knitting of each part in growth is the beautiful symbol of growth which Paul evokes in Ephesians 4:16, just as in Ephesians 2:20-22, he uses the figure of a building together, with Christ the foundation (as in I Corinthians 3:11, the irreplaceable, irreversible, single and singular foundation). But let us revert to the parts, the members of the body, the bricks, the lively stones as I Peter has it (I Peter 2:5).

Psalm 119 in turn both focusses and features the need of the individual spirit of a particular person, to be imbued with the word of God. Nevertheless, in the New Testament, the parallel structure of symbolism in priest and temple, having passed, becoming obsolete (as in Hebrews 8:13), and the direct glory of the Son of God, the Saviour now renders all animal and repetitive sacrifice ludicrous and a thing of the past, becoming where insisted on, mere folly! whether with actual animals or multiplied sacrificial acts, and these whether practically or notionally, as in the case of Romanism, which thus joins with Judaism in error of an essentially similar kind (as in Hebrews 9, 10 cf. SMR pp. 1088Aff.).

How deep is the wonder of the foundation in Christ, thus conveyed for so long, over so vast a breadth of time, and how high is the glory of the One who is revealed, and who reveals by His Spirit (as in Matthew 16:17), and how intimate is the relationship, infinitely infinite, between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Son shown by the Father, the Father by the Son, and the Spirit moving to open eyes and anoint!

It is also a thing of wonder as you watch the work of the Spirit of God in both Testaments, seeing the essential identity on the one hand, and the wonder of the culminating phase of the Gospel and the work of God in the Church.

THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS

Genesis, Ephesians, Matthew and Isaiah

In Genesis 1, we see the Holy Spirit brooding, or hovering over the waters of the initial phase of the creation of the universe, at the earth's aspect. Here is the sense of exhibiting in moulding, the roving, contemplating, considering, carving, conforming work, covering the event with the dynamic needed to achieve all intended, implied and following. This Spirit of course is what ALL of the creation of God is NOT, and hence as with the other persons of the Trinity (John 1:1-3), He is in essence non-material, neither delimited by material format nor function, nor hounded nor surrounded nor confoundable by any other delimitation, demarcation imposed, or denomination^*3, being wholly free as God, institutor of action, not recipient of external and far less extraneous impulsion or compulsion, but working with Father and Son in autonomous love (cf. John 8:58).

In Ephesians 1:15-21, we have at the internal level of the saint, the moving, the strengthening, the bringing of resources to meet the implications of that other order, shown in II Cor. 4:6, where the God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts with the knowledge of Christ and His salvation. Accordingly, we have in Ephesians, this testimony (italics for stress on passage most relevant to our current theme, not in original):

^"Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus
and your love for all the saints,
do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers:
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory,

may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,

the eyes of your understanding being enlightened;

that you may know what is the hope of His calling,

what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,

and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe,

according to the working of His mighty power

which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead

and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,

far above all principality and power and might and dominion,

and every name that is named, not only in this age
but also in that which is to come.

And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him
to be head over all things to the church,

which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all."

We note at once the "spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him," just as Christ attributed the opening of Peter's eyes at Caesarea Philippi, to the work of the Father, from whom the Spirit comes (John 15:26) who leads into all truth (John 16:13-14), but not on His own authority, but in the name of Christ (as also in Ephesians 3:13-17). That is, the Spirit who 'strengthens with might in the inner man' so acts

"that Christ may dwell in your hearts, through faith", and this to the result that

"you being rooted and grounded in love,
may be able to comprehend with all the saints
what is the width and length and depth and height -
to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge
that you may be filled with all the fulness of God."

Thus as in the creation, with that parallel expressly made by Paul in II Cor. 4, there is both the grandeur of the vastness of the wonder of the Almighty in His works, the height, the depth, the length, the breadth, and this moulding and revealing and establishing by the Spirit, that the word may be fully resident, its mandate clear, its session unfolded, its power known, its marvels of revelation applied. Whether in the universe at creation, or in the heart at the 'new creation' of a person, there is such a glorious function by the Spirit of the Lord.

This is precisely, moreover, to tie in synthesis yet more components of both testaments, the work which is epitomised and crystallised in the Messiah Himself, as revealed and foretold in Isaiah 11 (again, with the thematically most related parts in italics):

"There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse,

And a Branch shall grow out of his roots.

The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him,

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding,

The Spirit of counsel and might,

The Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.

His delight is in the fear of the Lord,

And He shall not judge by the sight of His eyes,

Nor decide by the hearing of His ears;

But with righteousness He shall judge the poor,

And decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

He shall strike the earth with the rod of His mouth,

And with the breath of His lips He shall slay the wicked.

Righteousness shall be the belt of His loins,

And faithfulness the belt of His waist."

Correlatives of this, in the blessed work of the Lord on man, have already been noted in Isaiah 57 and Ezekiel 36, and more is to be found in Isaiah 66:1ff., Isaiah 57:21, Zechariah 4 with the olive trees and Psalm 143, 51:9-13 allied to 77:3ff., ; and with these, that deliciously figurative but strongly declarative and clear word in Isaiah 33, which follows on from the work of the Spirit, in Isaiah 32:15.

Thus, to revert to Isaiah 11, what for the Christian is the "spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him," in Christ Himself, is even more emphatic, so that The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord." In this, a singular and sufficient might of majesty, filled with counsel, uprightness, integrity unimpugnable, discernment unwavering, justice impregnable, is that of the Messiah, and His heart is filled likewise with compassion as with truth, and with power to provide, not merely to orate.

No system can begin to replace the magnificence of this integrity, the glory of this vital, personal and penetrating truth, the incorruptibility of this compassion, the authenticity of this unwavering love, the power to perform and the depth of understanding, not in always changing postulates, but in immutably certain knowledge of all things^*4; and all system is the work of God, who by delimiting, gives cause for its existence and ground for its arising. God is more irreplaceable in human affairs than the heart in the body, or the brain, and this latter organ, a mere site for mentality and organ for disposition, is itself a delimitation, albeit one in the case of man, in alliance with a spirit enabling its usage in ways which are as discretely different as is the pianist from the piano, though in this realm, without the piano, his relevant music is for the time and on this earth, stilled.

It is in the Spirit of God, and in the spirit of man, the infinite on the one hand and the finite on the other, yet for all that, the Image Maker and the image bearer: it is here that lies the facility of man that surpassing all other material creation, leaves him through its due use with his Creator, a being eminent and overlord of lesser creation. By failure from the first (Romans 5:1-12), without this use, man is left a puny potentate, a minimal midget, a deceased glory that rots while it roves, mawkish, maudlin or trivially magnificent, a very essence of culpability, inability and mortality awaiting its date.

The Lord who made man makes man again, not en bloc or in bulk, but one by one (cf. Zechariah 12, John 3 cf. Psalm 51, Colossians 1:28, Romans 10:9), by redeeming him from this state, and in bringing him back to Himself, covering his sin with salvation, regenerating his fouled condition (Titus 3:3-7), revitalising his lost spirit with life by the Spirit, thereby showing in the very contrast in what is lost and was foundering, and in what is found and is now founded, the glory of God Himself, filled with counsel, might and understanding, and well able to care for His own.

Thus does the Old Testament and the New, whether in symbol or expressly have the same work and office, might and power, inwardness and outwardness, relation of the Spirit of God to the Word of God.

It is deep, it is wise, it is revealing, revelatory indeed, and it is constant, abiding, resting in love, immovable in might.

Acts and Judges, Hebrews, Samuel

Sometimes in the Old Testament, you find that the Spirit of God comes upon someone, as in the case of Samson, just as in the case of Philip, the former for a physical work with spiritual implications, the latter for a spiritual work with spiritual implications. Thus Samson is seen in Judges 15:14, confined, bound up, ready to be mutilated by the Philistines, his own people having weakly left him bound, like those who attack the Bible while calling themselves Christians and expose their 'brethren ?' if it be permitted, to devastation in the meantime, as they stand with courage for the truth. He, abandoned, bound, left weakened to their joint foes, now has this experience. What however does the Lord do ?

"Then the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him,
and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that is burned as with fire,
and his bonds broke loose from his hands."

He proceeded to gain a mighty victory over the stated, idolatrous foes of Israel, even though his own people had timidly left him compromised.

In the case of Philip, in the New Testament, as parallel in much, he is in the very midst of a mightily successful evangelistic campaign, one epochal for the Samaritans indeed, when the Spirit of the Lord impels him to leave all and go to the desert where he 'comes upon' an Ethiopian official of high standing in his kingdom, and returning in his chariot to his land. Wrestling with Isaiah 53, this official has Philip, led of the Spirit, go to him and at precisely the right time, explain the meaning of the message which so few would believe, but which God would make real in its time. It was that of the substitutionary, suffering, Messiah who would be the terminal and only effectual sacrifice for sin.

Then in Isaiah's day, it was formulated, fashioned, predicted; now in Philip's day, it had been fulfilled, depiction becoming deed, and the power of God to act and deliver had been shown in this consummate form.

Believing, the Ethiopian was delivered from his bonds of unbelief, by the direct power of the Lord, using another Samson in another era, in another theme, but with the same basis. That ? What God is there like the true God, and in whatever preparatory or direct way seems good to Him, He attests His power and His mercy. If in this case, Philip merely delivered the Saviour who in purity, left Samson literally for dead, the deity Himself, yet the One whom he ministered had the Spirit without measure, as we read in John 3, and His work was without limit.

If in the case of Samson, it was to deliver the people through whom the Messiah would come, or in the case of what Philip was so singularly led to present, to deliver a people to whom the Messiah was sending, in Ethiopia. For this, the power of the Spirit, coming in express and sudden fashion, moved to accomplish through human means, the exalted task.

It must be remembered that any suddenness, which is the case when you have to run a race at an appointed time, or play as a concert pianist NOW and immediately, and continue at once till it is complete, is common in the realm of test!

Suddenness indeed is not to be confused with irrationality or the merely impromptu. Long practice, over years, precedes in these skilled cases for musician or athlete; and similarly with Samson, for all his faults, he was prophetically declared to be coming, before even conceived (Judges 13:3), and his entire life as he grew to manhood, had been regulated by a precise discipline, both symbolic and actual (Judges 13:14ff.). So with Philip, he had been chosen for the manifestation of gifts, as a deacon, and doubtless in that spiritual climate, this would have involved no small preliminaries, preparation not only of heart, but for the ‘concert’ moments which come, as they must, when things invested, are at last tested!

Again, you see the meditative side of it, perhaps expressed in utterances of praise, and over a long period, conceivably with some relevance to the later tongues outside worship. This is observable in Samuel, as Saul goes to 'get' David, and instead meets some of the 'sons of the prophets' deeply involved in worship. This is related to the exalted (because humble) prophet Samuel, and Saul for his own part, now stopped in his evil intent acts very strangely. Stripping naked, he prophesies all night (I Samuel 19).

While this is unique in form, yet as to its prolongation, we recall Paul also spoke in tongues in private quite a lot.

However, whether it was this, or some other form of giving praise, of course, what we do know is this: when King Saul was pressing into the field near Samuel in order to do evil to young David, already anointed to become king in due course, "the Spirit of God was upon him also, and he went and prophesied ..." instead of 'taking' David.

They even asked "Is Saul also among the prophets ?" Presumably, in fact, it was not tongues, as it was 'prophesying' and the usage in Paul, who was acute in the Old Testament, separates these categorically and exceedingly. The one is to be sought, the other is to be minimised; and of particular gifts, ONLY prophecy is brought for seeking (I Cor. 14:19, 38-39, 12:29ff.) - the rest are simply received as God sends (I Cor. 12:6). In other words, the prophetic gift was immensely valued, just as the tongues gift is intensely devalued, but not deleted, merely controlled with an iron hand! (cf. I Cor. 14:27-32), as to amount, mode and point.

However the parallel is in the extent of the matter, in the non-formal worship setting.

Indeed, this for Saul, was the second such occurrence, for at the very outset of his move to become King, Saul was sent by Samuel and told he would become 'another man' and that "the Spirit of the LORD will come upon you, and you will prophesy with them, and be turned into another man" (I Samuel 9). This too occurred.

Here we find, then, that there is in this early Old Testament period, evidence of the acute conscious awareness on the part of Samuel, of the liberating power of the Holy Spirit, who would illuminate, fortify and enable expression of praise, for whatever the form of the prophesying, it is surely praise which emanates. This is like the passage in I Corinthians 12,14, where the prophets are stirred by the gift God gives to them, and all are edified, this species of prophesying being subject to mutual concern, and therefore not as in the more elemental calling of the prophets themselves. THAT was a direct sovereign declaration in the name of the Lord: this is a mutual sharing subject to review. This too is a parallel between both Testaments.

A further parallel immediately appears. Saul was moved, performed initial exploits indeed (cf. Matthew 7:21ff.) in his field of soldiering; he tasted of the heavenly gift and had some new knowledge of the world to come. He rejoiced for a season, he felt the power of God, he was imbued to some extent, like a solution on cotton wool, left for a while, but not quite penetrating. That changes the texture of the thing, if perhaps oily, but is not fully absorbed. It is different, but can be purged. Thus Saul was moved, even found some measure of change, became different, was filled with power for service, and with such power did in fact serve in battle; but giving place to jealousy, and to pride, to irksome ways and to wilful disobedience, he was exposed like Judas, as not really of the Lord, like a tree of lime stock, with orange grafted, where the graft does not take.

It is an interesting question whether in the end, Saul became a man of God, but it must be confessed that his later effort to bring up Samuel from the dead, in a way forbidden in the word of God, together with the retort from Samuel in this spiritistic situation, does little to bring hope for him! (I Samuel 28).Necromany was not encouraged (cf. Deuteronomy 18:11). That sort of thing was distinctive, we read, of the nations which at that time, Israel was called to displace and replace! It was not to be so with them, for they were instead to be "blameless" before the Lord their God.

This is very like the passages in Hebrews 6 and 10, where there is reversion after tasting, instead of swallowing, and a falling into the hands of the living God through treading under foot the very means and medium of mercy, instead of taking it to heart and so living for ever as promised in John 6:50-54, 4:14, 5:24. The danger is for some, to taste and not imbibe, to experience and, not founded, to founder, never finding the intractable anchor lodged in the Lord Himself (Hebrews 6:19), impervious to change, keeping for ever (as in Hebrews 9:12, 10:10,14).

Thus what is pure and perfect in wisdom and justice and a deep, mediating of loveliness to the soul as in Isaiah 11, may as in the New Testament, be aborted as it were, before birth, and so lead to a double death.

Accordingly, in both Testaments you have the troubling of the spirit of man, whether as in Saul in Samuel, or depicted in the book of Hebrews, where a deviation into unspirituality brings out the deficiency syndrome, coming from a heart uncontrite, the ground being hard, beneath. In both Testaments, you find an evil spirit troubling a man, whether in Luke 11:16-26, or in I Samuel 16:14ff.. In each case, similarly, this evil may be ameliorated with fatal results, or overcome, with great power and possible discipline in the process.

As well as the case of the merely superficial work, where salvation and conversion do not result, there is also that where the evil may be temporary, and merely wound a servant of God. Such was the position with David and his military numbering program, recorded in I Chronicles 21, where "Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel..."

The tone and tenor of Hebrews 6 and 10, with stark warning but for all that, stated assurance to those concerned, reminds one of the fall, discipline and restoration of David. Parallels indeed abound as one would expect in the word of the same God, whether directed to the day of theocracy, in preliminary preparation for the international directness of the Messiah, or in the day of the Christian Church which came. This is merely one of the seemingly unlimited verifications of the word of God, which may abound so readily, like carpets of flowers in the fields in Spring.

David, then, for all his great sanctity and beautiful character, failed in this area of military self-assurance, or self-regard and this led to discipline. Since he was a child of God, it was as from a Father, carefully controlled and effective.

In this case, before the actual numbering of the troops available in the nation, Joab warned David and did much which might have avoided the discipline to come for such deviation in spirit from trust. He urged the point, but was not heeded, a useful lesson in having open ears, and being the more careful when more is committed to one! The danger, then, was represented, but that was in vain.

The error therefore imperturbably proceeded, and the disciple with equal assurance, eventually came! It led to a great plea for mercy by David, yes on the people, with moving solicitude at the results of his own folly! (I Chronicles 21:17ff.). Again, as in the New Testament, so in the Old, the fatherly kindness and precision of the Lord, to His child David, king or not, was to chasten, and He even allowed the king the choice of which discipline he should have! (I Chronicles 21:11ff.).

This fatherly chastening is just as shown in Hebrews 12 in principle, and II Corinthians 1 in practice.

As in both Testaments, there is often an area of SUDDENNESS as with Peter (Matthew 16), of the instantaneous, and at the same time, this may lead on to the abiding beauty of holiness as in Samuel, as in David.

The physical power, as in healing or fighting a divinely appointed invasion, and the spiritual perception, thus are found alike, the suddenness of impact and the abiding beauty of holiness when the truth is fully received, these too are in complete parallel. The type of war is translated in the New Testament, as in Ephesians 6; but it is still deadly, the current format for the fray, now that the Christ has altogether and indeed come to Israel, and for it and for all who will come, and paid the price, so that the application of what Christ wrought in supreme power and purity, is now the theme.

Indeed, the parallel may in particular be drawn further, even in the case of Saul.

In I Samuel 19:19ff., one reads that Saul, learning of the whereabouts of David, acts so that he may fulfil his EVIL intent AGAINST David. He sends first one group of messengers, who are arrested by the Spirit, and prophesy with the other prophets near Samuel, at that time engaged in that function. So Saul sends another group, who are arrested spiritually in the same way with the same result. He then goes himself, and to him it happens also, as to the others. He is baulked and himself prophesies. This threefold series of steps, culminating in the personal coming of the king, for purposes most evil, is an exact inversion of the threefold series of steps, noted in Mark 12. There we find from the lips of Christ the brief account. First we hear of God sending prophets and then more, and then His Son (the escalation being twofold in categories at least).

Here however, the sending is with a GOOD intention, and the last step is PERSONAL on the part of God Himself, the King of Eternity, in that it is His eternal word who being incarnate, comes at the last.

Evil in three steps in the case of Saul seeking to slay the progenitor on the mother's side, of the Messiah, is seen mirrored by good in three steps from God, seeking to deliver not only one, but many, yet through the work of one. The work of Saul, alas, forms an almost perfect contrast to the work of God in the Gospel, first sending the prophets, then more, then coming Himself (as stated or implied in Hosea 13:14 and Zechariah 14, in Psalm 45 and in Isaiah 53, HE being the ONLY Saviour, as in Isaiah 43:10-11).

As the evil exemplar led to an escape of David from death, though it seemed sure with all the power of the kingdom of Israel now directed against him by King Saul, so the good exemplar has the Lord's own escape, not only when all seemed overpowering by the power of the State of Israel and the Empire of Rome, but when they had actually done their worst.

His escape, who came to break death by bearing it, in innocence having no sentence applicable, yet bearing that sentence for those who received Him, was VIA death.

David's escape was from death.

The one symbolised in a grant of deliverance, but what the other achieved, was in the breach of the penalty itself.

Just as the Spirit of God arrested Saul, and this led to prophesying or praise to God, so the Spirit of God attested Christ's resurrection for glory and praise (Romans 1:4), the former thus becoming a kind of inverted type of Christ, a marvellous teaching device by CONTRAST, and in some ways, a very exact one!

Speaking of resurrection, we find another parallel. It is in Ezekiel 37, but before we turn to this, there is an intervening period, that of Elijah, Elisha, compared where New Testament comparison figures in the work of the Spirit of God.

Moses and Elijah, Elisha and Philip, Paul and Peter

In Moses' time, this great saint had an over-burden of work, not merely in official and routine labours (which were helped by the appointment of administrators as in Exodus 18), but in the convolutions of popular revolt by a people weary of hardship, as perhaps Britain was after World War II, a time in which perhaps that nation lost the place at the helm of many things, which they had been occupying. Moses was led to appoint 70 to help, perhaps in counsel and the calling of control, and we read in Number 11:16ff., of the Lord taking of the Spirit which was ON Moses and putting it on them, as one might spread an abundance of rose plants from one heavily concentrated area, to several others.

In parallel, at a much later time, Elisha asked Elijah for a double portion of the Spirit, the miraculous, counselling, comprehending, deep and dutiful, responsible working which the Spirit of God wrought. What God had given to Elijah, he wanted in very abundant, very liberal measure. He did not want to limp, lassitudinous or to faint, or feint weak and willowy instead of triumphing in the Lord's praises and completing His work: he wanted to be a man of God who DID what was needed. His desire evidently was to MEET what confronted him and WORK in the power of God, providing as he was enabled, what the fallen nation required.

For this spiritual gift, yes and specialised, specific power as a prophet of God, he had to keep his eyes on Elijah, just as he had done so zealously from the time when he realised Elijah was to go to the Lord, that his time had come. When Elijah answered this request of his assistant, Elisha, the younger man found that he was even required to see Elijah go, witness his translation to heaven! This was no mean thing, as it could happen at any time; but it spelt out a devotion to duty, and a conscientious care in preparation, in the preliminary phase as helper to Elijah. This it symbolised, an unflagging zeal to the very end of this phase, when the amazing and unique sight was granted to his watchful eyes.

He DID see Elijah go (II Kings 2), and since this was in a chariot of fire, it provided a magnificent stimulus and verification of the power already shown by the singular propeht, and in this spirit, Elisha using Elijah's mantle, then proceeded to smite and divide the river Jordan, thus proceeding on is way in the very manner that Elijah had come to that place, a little earlier! This was done by FAITH ("Where is the LORD God of Elijah ?" he cried as he so acted), and the answer was plain to see, just as is always the case when the invisible is invoked and called on by faith, in the realm of the visible, to do whatever it is that is commissioned.

In fact, the young school of prophets saw it, and were thus prepared for the place of Elisha, all things working for good. More good still, if slightly humorously, was shown when the jejune youngsters insisted on hunting for the body of Elijah, as if it were some kind of levitation, not transformation, which had occurred. Elisha, pressed, let them find out for themselves, the heuristic method of education!

Amazingly, and to our point then, Elisha had KNOWN that Elijah was to go, and had pursued him despite all negative protestations from Elijah, until the latter asked him what he wanted (II Kings 2:9), with that delightful concern and kindness which so characterised him (cf. I Kings 18:12ff.), just as it would Elisha (II Kings 4:8,13). Here was no power for glory, but glory in goodness, and power for a commission as palpable as in any city, but one working in a city which has foundations, whose builder and Maker is God!

Thus not in mere power, but by no means without it, Moses and Elijah, Elisha and Elijah showed the working of the living God, with emphasis on the function of the Spirit of God. Similarly in the New Testament, there is guidance and power available, for commission, as in the leading of Paul quite specifically and locally, both by positive and negative spiritual constraint (Acts 16), and by vision (Acts 16:9ff.)*⁵. The same is true of Peter, as seen in Acts 8, where even his natural inhibitions, based on a symbolic past, are removed by a combination of vision and event, including a direct order from the Lord, through the Spirit, who "told him" to proceed with the Gentiles who had come to his house, seeking him (Acts 10:19). Otherwise, a certain distaste and disinclination would have prevented his receiving them and following them to their place. So was Peter led in his vision, and so did the Spirit of the Lord TELL him to go with them (Acts 10:20).

It is in parallel clear with what assiduity the Lord kept Elisha informed. This too was by His supernatural grace, and through that 'double portion' of the spirit upon Elijah, as asked for, and so immediately illustrated when Elisha, following Elijah's mode of crossing Jordan (itself symbolic of the power of life at the juncture with death, in the Lord for His people), smote the waters with the mantle and divided them. We find this habitual counsel received by the prophet, from the Lord, clearly shown in a simple statement of Elisha.

When confronted at this time, with the Shunammite woman, who had asked for a son, being childless, from the prophet when he sought her desire in gratitude for her accommodation, he was surprised. The boy whom the Lord had given to her womb, had duly been born, but now had died and the mother was stricken. Yet was she determined that no dead son should be the gift, not after so short a time. When Elisha perceived the distress of the woman, when she at last reached him, hastening on her donkey and stopping for nothing till she came to him personally, he made a telling remark. It was this. "Let her alone; for her soul is in deep distress, and the LORD has hidden it from me, and has not told me."

How stale and remote this by contrast makes any bureaucracy seem! At the same time, it shows that Elisha is accustomed to such communion with the Lord that such extremes come to his mind, by the function of the Lord, who had given him so abundant an indwelling of His Spirit; and he is not normally left unprepared. This is the same kind of guidance, in extreme intimacy, as was found in Paul, as in Philip indeed, when he was sent AWAY from a triumphant and prevailing mission in the most difficult region of Samaria, into the DESERT.

It is the SPIRIT which tells Philip (Acts 8:26) to overtake the chariot of the man he finds in this desert, a high court official of the then prominent land of Ethiopia (Acts 8). The man had been pondering Isaiah 53, and Philip showed the Christ whom it portrayed. This leads to the conversion of this official, just as Elisha's response to the woman of Shunem led to the resurrection of her son. The work of the Spirit of God in both testaments thus is shown in power (unlike the unbelief shown for days near the return of Christ, in II Timothy 3:5, where a mere FORM of godliness without its power is seen), in communion, in guidance, in kindness, in helps and in wisdom.

Ezekiel and Zechariah 12

We have come again to resurrection, and now we may the more readily revert to this sublime topic, which earlier came to our minds as we were discussing young David's escape from King Saul. This was achieved through the intervention of the Spirit of God, which blocked Saul's path, and led to his prostrating himself in some sort of prophetic mode, and proceeding no further! Note was made of the parallel when the Spirit of God again was at work, in the New Testament, after Christ had not only been threatened, as David had been, but had been murdered according to plan, and then resurrected, the ultimate escape.

In the New Testament, in fact in Romans 1:4, we find this parallel of Christ, that He "declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead." It was of course the Spirit of God which fell upon the disciples, as in Acts 2, giving them miraculous power to speak, so that many languages were instantaneously given in translation of the apostles' testimony which publicly followed. Thus this 'declaration' was dynamic and miraculous in power, as well as propositional in content.

In all these ways, the Spirit of God has been promoting holiness, engaging in power in the work of deliverance, attesting, investing, moving, working, speaking, controlling. Restoration of what is hopeless in the flesh is by a power of eternal life, which He attests (Psalm 17, 52:6-9, 145:1, 21, 133), a life which from the first was the very life that God gave in His own name, when He made man, which was what left to yield to God, when they gave up the ghost, or breathed the end of that gift of godly life, which God first imparted to man in His image. Thus, and then, as Solomon declares in Ecclesiastes 12:7, the body returns to the dust and the spirit to God who gave it.

A body, a nation, or even a blessedness can be resurrected: the first in its own domain of flesh and bones as Christ attested and the disciples found (Luke 24:38-39, John 20:17,27ff.), the second when as foretold, all is lost and almost ludicrous (as in Deuteronomy and in 1948, 1967 in the practical sphere of bodies!), yet a nation or other entity, rescued from impending oblivion, lives; and the third in the revival of failing spiritual bodies, such as churches deviating, and needing restoration (as appears to be the case in II Corinthians 12, Galatians), which sharply arrested by the apostle, appear likely to respond, such is the depth of the calling, commission and communication, and such its expectant tenor.

Thus in this theme, in Ezekiel 37, we see figuratively, the spread of a ruined Israel throughout the globe. There is a call for these, depicted as dead bones, to be carried holus bolus to Israel, and to be set up as the skeletons of men, to become, in other words, a nation again, albeit not yet a spiritual one. Then there is a separate and sequential command (Ezekiel 37:9), in which breath is to be imparted to the bones. Just as the Lord 'breathed' into the dust and the spirit of man was thus imparted, just as moreover they breathe their last, give up their breath, or thus, the spirit which animates them, so the essential life is imparted to these dead bones, by the second command.

While, thus, the bones assembled now in Israel obviously meant physically living people, it is apparent that the significance of the 'breath' is the spirit of GOD. People, though as dead as forsaken bones, are to be transported back to Israel, yet without spiritual life, as if a graveyard assemblage, an ossiferous ecstasy! THEN in the second command, the life which through its lack, brought upon them their dispersion, is the one now gained by the 'breath', what makes them no more even metaphorically ‘dead’, but spiritually alive! That is as directly indicated in Zechariah 12:10 -13:1, when realising their sin of slaying the Messiah, and yielding to intense grief at this, in retrospect, as if in the last of an only begotten, they mourn and are then washed in the fountain for sin and uncleanness, which of course is the Messiah as base and the Spirit of God as agent (as in Titus 3:3-7), so gaining ETERNAL life. NEVER again will they lack HIM,

"I will set My sanctuary in their midst forevermore.
My tabernacle also shall be with them; indeed I will be their God,
and they shall be My people.
The nations also will know that I, the LORD, sanctify Israel,
when My sanctuary is in their mist forevermore."

Here then the dispersed nation is restored (36:22), not for their own merit, the one scattered (Ezekiel 36:18-19) being brought back from a death consequential upon idolatry when in their land and with the Lord. Its restoration is to the Lord as their King, this their new situation, their sins being figuratively dismissed by sprinkling with water (36:25), and the King being the Lord by whose death they are to be covered (as in the earlier prophet, Isaiah, in 52-53). Indeed, then, "I will put My Spirit in you, and you shall live..."

In this way, the right spirit, the spirit of knowledge an illumination in the awareness of God as in Ephesians above, is to be imparted. We know this also because of the result (Ezekiel 37:11). Now they KNOW why they left their land, why they are returned, and they KNOW THE LORD. Moreoer, just as He declares to them, "I will put My Spirit in you..." (37:14), thus leaving no doubt as to the intention, either by implication or by explication, so He makes by this very action an awareness in the foreign nations about them. They too have something to learn, that the tabernacle that the LORD now puts in Israel in the real source of her power and place, eternal, unarrestable, indestructible. Israel realises the reason for her going, they for her coming!

All of this, then, results in their understanding their sin and their Redeemer, with the provision of spiritual knowledge from the Messiah (Ezekiel 37:24), that source of the same who so vividly and quintessentially depicted it, as in Isaiah 11, who there wrote concerning Him. It is indeed this same Messiah who next appears as in Ezekiel 37:21-24, and this is to be an interminable and blessed thing (37:23-25).

What then, these things being so, and this being the focus of it all, this Messiah, this King, this cleansing, this keeping, this tabernacle - IS that tabernacle ? It is of course the same as in earlier Isaiah's words in 4:6 and 32:1-4, where a MAN is as a tabernacle, rest for the weary, refreshing, and as in Isaiah 11:10, His resting place is glorious. This man is the only one who can give rest, for in Him only is to be found the pardon (Isaiah 53) which is crucial to rest, and to Him is this assigned. THIS is the eternal tabernacle, never to be taken down, very much in the way that Hebrews 8-10 shows in its profound and precise exegesis of such things.

Despite the ruinous endeavour of Israel's enemies, reported to follow in Ezekiel 38-39, the LORD is their defence; and their security, who actually BELIEVE, is eternal. The repulse is, as also shown in Micah 7:15, phenomenal, after the order of the Lord's working in the Exodus, when the enemy nation was at that time, Egypt. Indeed, it is the Spirit of the Lord, as in Isaiah 59:19, who raises up a standard for defence, as the Lord will, and this in turn reminds us of the small scale but highly significant event, when David, the young man, was protected by the Spirit of the Lord, when a single enemy, Saul (though one equipped with an army) came to seize him!

This theme, then, is as in Zechariah 12:10, where the spirit of grace and of supplications comes upon the beleaguered people of Jerusalem, leading to solemn, pervasive and intimate repentance, for then they look upon "Me whom they pierced." Moreover, it is the LORD who is there speaking in His sovereign, majestic and autonomous style.

Accordingly, they will in fact, we find, at this time in Zechariah, and in view of this vision of their guilt and ground for pardon, both in one Lord, grieve for that Lord, whom by that time, they had both crucified and despised, as one grieves for a firstborn, the first son of the womb, the very apple of the eye, the first impartation that a family finds. That is, they will mourn this exquisitely aweful death, this loss now, and do so with a tender and deep remorse: for what they did to One so precious, they can scarcely bear, even in retrospect, to behold. Yet they DO behold it, as revealed by the Spirit of the Lord, who thus is working within the heart as well as bearing a standard of protection against extinction!

Indeed, in this name of firstborn, or indeed more particularly, ONLY SON, it is even as in Colossians 1:15ff., where Christ appears as the 'firstborn' BECAUSE He is the Creator of all: He is accorded pre-eminence within the creation, since He made it!

In Zechariah 3,4, 6, we see further the preparation for this vastly significant word concerning the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to come on Israel, after its return and triumphant wars at that time, which is the historical locale for Zechariah 12, as they, in their place once more, after the desolations foretold in Matthew 24:37ff., Luke 19:42ff., come through these battles to the great war, that for the soul. The former battles are in much past already, in 1948, 1967, 1973, and all is fulfilled in that grandly sensational style which had Life magazine devote a special issue to one of these, that of 1967! Unique in military history was the apparent consensus, for this triumph of the midget nation against the vast wealth, lands and power of the Islamic hosts assailing it.

The earlier chapters in Zechariah provide, however, not only preliminary for this outcome, but testimony of a kind that matches our current spiritual theme. Thus in Zechariah 3, we find Joshua, High Priest, exchanging filthy robes for clean, in a symbolism of sin and salvation, but more than this. It is explicitly made a sign, a symbol of the One who will change the foul to the sublime (Zechariah 3:8-9), the “Branch” of Isaiah 11, as of Zechariah 6, the One who will “bear the glory” being as Messiah, in such fulness (cf. John 1:18, 2:24) that the former separation of the princely and priestly powers was not only unnecessary, but would be improper.

Thus, ALL power is given to Him (as in Matthew 28:19-20, cf. Isaiah 11), just as He did not have the Spirit by measure (John 3:34).

Again, in Zechariah 6, we see this same Joshua, High Priest, crowned, as symbol for the Branch, who is identified in Isaiah as the Son of David, who in Psalm 110 is identified as David’s Lord!

Thus when in Zechariah 12, they repent of piercing the Lord, we who read have been prepared by the elaborate forecast that the Messiah is to be MAN (in fact shown from the first, in Genesis 3:15), coming in that format for His great work, and it was for this reason that He COULD be pierced. Here then is background for that amazing forecast of the REPENTANCE much later, for a work of crucifixion not yet performed, and which indeed, would not be performed for several more centuries after the time in which Zechariah, the prophet, spoke.

Such is the scope of the work of the Spirit of God when He provides scripture (as in I Peter 1:10-12, II Peter 2:19-21, II Peter 3:2ff., cf. Matthew 4:4), giving the very words needed to convey these pungent declarations, these poignant understandings, this grandeur in pathos, this sublimity in spirit. It also comes as the pinnacle of power, as seen in Zechariah 14:5, on the Lord's return, when His very feet come to the Mount of Olives, seen as we find in the New Testament, of Gethsemane, where His struggle for something more than power, with great drops like blood on His brow, for readiness to consummate His sacrificial role (Hebrews 5:7), was triumphant. Without this, no other battle would be meaningful. That was thus the greatest triumph of all, that of love.

It is the Spirit which is clearly designated, moreover, in Zechariah 4, in the great imagery provided by the Lord to the prophet, of the olive trees. From these comes an oil production which drips into a receptacle, and the oil-producing branches are found to be the “two witnesses” whom we further meet in Revelation 11. They are “the anointed ones”, already signalised as Joshua, High Priest, and Zerubbabel, Governor, and which always thematic, remain so, designating there the aspects of the Church of Christ, giving the necessary testimony of two witnesses, and the necessary facets of ruling and prophetic power.

It is the Church which there is called to COME UP, and goes as Christ foretold. As Israel was called as a witness for the Lord (Isaiah 43:21), so is the Church, and so does it act, with these two aspects signalised in advance in Zechariah 4, to which John undoubtedly refers! COME UP HERE! He calls (Revelation 11:12), as in Matthew 24:40ff., and the Lord then indeed comes to call His own, that "where I am, there you may be also" (John 14). Meanwhile, to every individual, there is the call from the Spirit and the Bride (the Church as in Ephesians 5): COME! (Revelation 22:17). Let whoever wishes, drink freely! the call there appears, as indeed it came in an individual case in John 4, and was shown in general, in John 7:37ff..

Thus, in Zechariah 4, the princely and priestly powers given by God to His called people, in the theocracy shown through the relevant leaders, these are seen supplied by the OIL. This appears surely to show the Spirit of God bringing the unity noted in Psalm 133, and the peace. It has indeed been in this very Chapter 4 that we are told, and just before this vision do we find that it is “not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit” that the results are achieved.

Zerubbabel is then focussed in the text, and the vision proceeds to the anointed ones. With what then are they anointed, if it be not by what it IS that the Lord has just stated, “My Spirit”; and with what are they NOT anointed, but human power and pomp, principle and procedure. It is a work of God BY His SPIRIT! The worldly powers are elsewhere symbolised not by oil, but by beasts! (as in Daniel 7, 8, and of course, as in Revelation 13, another of those intimacies of both testaments).

Thus we come from repentance and cleansing, to princely power and pre-eminence, and the work of the Spirit of God is seen in all of these things, as it is in the New Testament, whether in Revelation 11, the explicit parallel, or at the baptism of Christ, where His identity was declared, or in the Pentecostal anointing, where the work is at once implemented, whether in return to land, or in return to the Lord, whether then or now, forecast or found.

Corinthians, Zechariah 3, 4, 6 , Isaiah, Psalms, Matthew and Job

All of these elements of remorse and valuing, of tenderness and repentance, of perception and of understanding, these are conveyed by the Spirit of grace and of supplications, in which designation the Holy Spirit appears indicated, in the Old Testament, no less, in essence, than in the New. Thus one finds in II Corinthians 7:10, that "godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world produces death."

There is precisely the same thing, whether practised in measure, whether seen in principle or in predictive prophecy, the same work of the Spirit, diversified according to the preliminary situation before Christ came, but determinate and clear, according to the unchanging nature of that God whose Holy Spirit it is.

More of the gracious and abiding nature of the Spirit of God in the believer, is attested in Zechariah 4, where as we have seen, olive trees are depicted, conveying oil, and their productive branches are the two witnesses, relating to the priestly and princely powers of the nation, ultimately to be found in Christ whose are, astonishingly but in the end, necessarily, both (Zechariah 6:12-13), as the prerogative of deity, on earth. This is found in the following imagery in Ch. 6, where Joshua, the High Priest, is seen as recipient of a crown, so that in sequel we turn to the Man who is the BRANCH (defined as the Messiah in Isaiah 11:1), and shown to be so by this double office, one utterly forbidden to mere man, the sinner (as seen dramatically in the rebuke to King Uzziah, in II Chronicles 26:16ff.).

In the symbolic Temple language, all signified, and duties were appointed for one or for another, but no king became priest.

It is one or the other; and hence in Zech. 6, we find that this Branch shall BEAR THE GLORY, what glory ? That of both of king and priest, being the One to be pierced, the LORD, the One moreover to offer Himself sacrificially for sin, as implied in Hosea 13:14 and declared in Isaiah 49-55, the One in whom as in Colossians 2:8-9, all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in bodily form – thus the status as Creator of ALL that is created, Saviour, eternal, for God ONLY is the Saviour (Isaiah 43:10-11), and God ONLY is the Creator (Isaiah 44-46). There is no other, but He, the Lord God, who with His Spirit, sends the Lord to act, as seen in Isaiah 48:16; and what that action is, appears in bold and clear form in the succeeding chapters, 49-55, of this great evangelical prophet, Isaiah!

It is well now that we consider this revelation in Zechariah a little more fully, as we compare it with New Testament features.

HIS throne, we read in Zech. 6, shares the counsel both of priest and prince, the one to rule, the other to save, and the good Lord does both! being now not seen in symbol, but come in fact. As God He is one, and omni-competent, offering Himself as priest, as victim, and finding His role as King in the resurrection and return to come, as in Ezekiel 37, Zechariah 14, and Acts 1.

It is to this Lord, past symbol in fact, to come then, and having come now, and to come again, that the title headstone is given (as in Psalm 118, where it is He who as headstone who is nevertheless rejected, a scripture quoted of Himself by Christ - Mark 11:11, Matthew 21:42).

The SPIRIT is represented, then, in Zechariah 4's imagery, by the OIL which flows from the olive trees, which anoints the witnesses, who are different facet-functionaries in the nation, later to be phases of the rule of Christ in the Church. How fully was the Church anointed, and indeed, it is by one SPIRIT that believers are baptised into ONE body, which is Christ’s (I Corinthians 12:13), and it by this baptism that they enter, and so become Christians at all. In this Spirit, there is need to be FILLED (as in Ephesians 5), and to each of Christ’s people (Romans 8:11), it is given to be so anointed, indeed sealed (Ephesians 1). Sealed by the Spirit! is the very word of the passage!

It is He, the Lord, moreover who teaches, the ultimate high priest, and it is by His Spirit that the work is wrought, the word determinate, the work holy and beautiful (as in Matthew 5:17-20, I John 2:27).

The same concept of oil, of anointing oil, is seen in Psalm 133 as signifying the unity of spirit in the people, where it is symbolically shown as dripping from the anointed priest's head, down his bead, assigning a blessing, life for evermore (Psalm 133:3). This is what in the New Testament has the expression - maintaining "the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4:3).

Again,

	as in the New Testament, we have the threefold baptismal and blessing formulae (baptising in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, in Matthew 28, and blessing with the love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the communion of the Holy Spirit as in II Corinthians 13:14),
	so in Isaiah 48:16, we find amidst the speech of the LORD, so designated, that there is He who is to come, who was from the first, and that He is sent by the Lord God and His Spirit.

This intense and immense, evocative and constraining intimacy, the Father sending the Son, the Son sending the Spirit from the Father (as in John 3, John 15), the Father revealing the Son, and the Son the Father, while the Spirit conveys the revelation as in Matthew 11 and 16, is thus in the Old Testament as in the New.

Further, just as the spirit of wisdom and power RESTS on the Lord in Isaiah 11, so does the Spirit of God rest, in the dove imagery, on Christ at the baptism, and so is He full of grace and truth, for the Father does not give the Spirit to Him by measure (as in John 3).

Moreover, just as in the Old Testament, indeed in ancient Job (19), Job is convinced that though death should remove his present body, YET with his own eyes HE WILL SEE GOD, BECAUSE his Redeemer is to come and stand on this earth, so in the New Testament Peter is seen realising that for him, this is happening already, with perhaps the additional revelation of John 14, to bring the point to the summit of comprehension, at least perceptively. There, before his very eyes is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. It will of course be further implemented when, as with Job, he meets Him face to face as in Revelation 22.

It is by the SPIRIT of God that this is brought home to Peter, and in Job, we read even from Elihu, how a spiritual understanding can come (Job 32:8), so that as with Job, the vision of God may imbue one (Job 33:4 cf. Matthew 5:8). The SPIRIT of God has made Him and His breath gives him life, and more than this, from all this there can come spiritual realisation; yes and revival. Such is from Job as from John. The Redeemer who is quintessentially necessary, as the eternal Word of God, begotten into flesh, is apparent in both, in John as in Job!

The revival and realisation we see in the outpouring of the Spirit, as in Isaiah 32:15, just as it is in Romans 11:25, where the failed Jewish nation is restored to sight, or in Revelation 2:10-11, where a strengthening and illuminating message brings fresh courage and hope to the Church, "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the Churches."

As to Isaiah 32:15, there is foretold for a then rebellious Israel, the nation, a period of considerable desolation and grief "until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high...", which parallels in different ways, both Luke 24:40, and Acts 2, yes and these two with Romans 11:25 and more broadly, Ephesians 5:14-21.

"Therefore He says:

"Awake, you who sleep,

Arise from the dead,

And Christ will give you light."

"See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise,
redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

"Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,
singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord,
giving thanks always for all things to God the Father
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
submitting to one another in the fear of God."

Here as in Isaiah, the result of such outpouring or abiding of the Spirit is seen in wisdom, grace, spirituality of nature and disposition, thankfulness or graciousness and serviceability.

FROM FOOTHILLS TO PLATEAU TO PEAK

One Journey, One Perspective

Rising Altitude toward Heaven

There has been of course, a divine procedure in illuminating man, and preparing him for the greatest event in history, when the Author of man, became a man. In our topic, we need to consider this aspect.

For this, God elected to save some in the flood, to call one in Abraham, to make a nation, to institute a highly illuminative, and often symbolic setting of sacrifices, yet one which showed clearly the character of sin, the nature of death, the remedy to be provided. He surrounded this with the prophets, like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Micah and Daniel, who as one team, separated by centuries and at times by vast distances on the earth as well, brought one message of one God with one vast intent to save, and one centre and focus for the salvation, the Messiah, to come and die at about 30 A.D. (as it is in our parlance - cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4), so settling the sin account once and for all, in an offering sufficient for all, adapted for all, to be refused by many, but received by many.

In the interim, there was therefore a theocratic State, a conveyor belt for this coming manifestation of ultimate truth in personal format, as it had been in preparatory form given in the prophetic writings of the Old Testament, which foretold Him in so many ways, now intensely direct, now using symbols, now giving time and place location for His advent, and the powers to be deployed by Him, now speaking of the sacrifice He was to make, now of the rule He would at last institute (Isaiah 11, Micah 4, Isaiah 2, 65, 32 with 4:6; Isaiah 49-55).

This preliminary State necessarily acted like a filter, if you want to compare it with the liberty in Christ which we have now; or it worked as a preparation, if you want to see it as leading up to Him. In the first perspective, it means that the theocratic State of Israel had kings, personages who could give a vital lead as led by the Lord. Sometimes this operated at a great and substantial level, as you see in the famous event of King Hezekiah personally going into the Temple to spread out before the Lord the infamous letter, from the attacking King of Assyria (Isaiah 37:1-14, II Chronicles 32). There by himself, he could be found praying to the Lord in round and assured form.

Then the Lord delivered both the people and the king, who had been so passionately keen to restore the nation to spiritual ways, after the dereliction of duty of the king, Ahaz, who had preceded him. To be sure, it was to Isaiah he sent in its time, and from that prophet came the bold and delightfully poised word of the living God; but first Hezekiah went himself, and then he also took the initiative of seeking from the prophet. The Lord acted as He promises (Isaiah 64:5) in such a case.

Again, King David was constantly communing with the Lord, so that the theocratic fact of a KING meant a functional reality of much input from that quarter, into the spiritual life of the nation, and you see it again in the day of Josiah, when he sought with a zeal like that of Hezekiah, to remove perversion, physical, mental and spiritual from the land, and restore the worship of the God of truth and mercy to the land, in purity.

In addition, speaking in terms of filter function, that is use of categories of authority in ways which tended to focus major matters in leaders, individuals or groups, there was the entire Temple priesthood and work, including that of the High Priest. Here was a place of divine blessing, as in Psalm 133; and it is spiritual. You see this in operation to the height, in such actions as those of priest Jehoiada, who helped to remove the murderous Queen, Athaliah, and bring back to the throne the young boy king who had escaped the slaughter, Jehoash. There was a priest indeed who stood for the word of the Lord, and sought to bring spiritual guidance to the nation (II Kings 11).

The prophets were another, and thus a third spiritual filter, in the sense that to and in them there came not only inspiration and illumination, but help and immediate direction, as in the above-noted case of Isaiah speaking to Hezekiah, as he did, concerning the Lord's deliverance. In fact, he delivered to him a word from the Lord covering the case gloriously (Isaiah 37:22ff.).

To them indeed in some cases was given that formally inscripturated word of the Lord which does not pass away, and thus as we look at the times nearer to the coming of Christ, there is not only an accumulation of preludes and preparations in the word of God to man via the prophets, but there is a constant opening up for them of a brand-new vision, not in some sense of divergence, but cumulative compilation, constantly showing more the mind of God for man. This was always as one; the revelation however was growing like a tree!

In all these ways, three in all, there was a filter, or focus, a way in which the ordinary people had LESS scope of function than they would, had there been what we now have, ONE OPERATIVE LORD, ONE CHRIST, who has paid and declared as in I John 2:27, that you need not that any should teach you, for the Holy Spirit anoints. That New Testament Covenant brought the relationship between the ordinary member of the people of God closer, for now in our era, those three filters gone. They had done a wonderful work; but now it was finished.

Nor did, nor does this mean that, in the New Covenant, we do not serve one another with spiritual gifts as God ALONE appoints (I Cor. 12:6). Indeed, the one gift which alone is authorised to be sought, is prophecy in the local New Testament sense of that termhere used by Paul^*6, which of course is not to add to the word of God, and allows for mutual auditing and review (I Cor. 14:30-33).

Unlike the commands through the scriptural writers and apostles (I Cor. 14:37, I Cor. 2:9-13 cf.SMR Appendix D and C), to whom the word of the Lord was delivered, centring at the foundation in Christ, and providing the apostolic testimony following the incarnate and express revelation of God in Him, these counsels as at the Corinthian Church, are illuminative only, and do not require in themselves, obedience. For all that, yes, there is assuredly service in these domains, but it is not in the domain of writing scripture, or giving commands, but rather exhortation and order, edification and counsel, reliability and transmission of the truth (as in I Timothy 2:2).

The removal of the three filters noted, however, does mean that NO PROPHET, NO PASTOR, NO PRIEST and no whatever you may wish to call it, has any more power to DIRECT our doctrine or CONTROL our thoughts than is found in the completed BIBLE itself. There is NO OTHER LORD, corporate or individual (Matthew 23:8-10), but One, and His name is unique, pre-eminent and unduplicable being incomparable. His name is Jesus Christ, sinless, eternal, higher than the heavens, increate (John 1:3, Colossians 1:15), the eternal Word of God (cf. Hebrews 1:1ff., 7:16,24ff., 8:6).

There is indeed, all through these times, despite and in keeping with - both - the filters, the same God and the same love and mercy, and the same liberty ON HIS PART to commune and communicate with His people. Using many means did not mean the removal of the end and object of it all, being in the favoured friendship of the redeeming Lord! These were HELPS, and if they had an effect of preparing for the consummation in Christ, and so tended to focus functions in ways we do not now need or have, yet they were not to the detriment, but to the blessedness of those who used them.

Thus the parents of Samson, before he came, were ordinary people, but to them came the direct and manifest presence of the LORD, with introduction and instruction, concerning the son to come, whom God would use in a highly specialised manner (Judges 13). God might appoint and anoint in a most personal and individual manner, someone who as in the case of Jephthah, was even the son of a harlot (the sins of the fathers are NOT visited on the children except where they too HATE the Lord, so that mercy is exempted by will!). This is is seen in Judges 11.

Joseph and Mary were hardly royalty, certainly not rich: God appeared to, communed with, gave direction to various persons as He saw fit, and the entire structure for focussing, preserving and bringing consummation to the faith, was not in the way, even if it meant some functions being more concentrated in certain people than in others. Actually, many people were not at all in any specialised group, yet the Lord counselled with them in the most intimate and objectively substantial manner, in situations to affect one and all!

Indeed, so far was the theocratic preliminary advancing toward the day of Jesus Christ and the Church which is His, that even in Moses' own day, when it was reported to the leader that two people were prophesying in the name of the Lord, who were NOT among the 70 persons chosen for special spiritual service, Moses was far from fazed (Numbers 11:25-30). I wish, he declared, that ALL the Lord's people might so speak! He would like to have more and more people so endowed, so enabled, so functional. It was nothing at all EXCLUSIVE, therefore, just because it was structured. Intimacy of communion was of course the generic result for all, with the abiding graces so often seen in the humble such as the parents of Samson; and so the Psalms often refer to this underlying spiritual life through the Spirit of God in fact, which was in the people who actually know God.

There are always hypocrites, and 8 1/3% of Christ's team was a hypocrite, namely Judas, as we learn from John 6. He was in fact declared to be a devil, quite early (John 6:70). He too had gifts, pseudo-spiritual, and his macabre task had been foreknown and declared in the Bible from a millenium or so beforehand (cf. Psalm 55, 69 and see Joyful Jottings 22-25). Love is more important always than gifts (I Cor. 13), and gifts are not foci for personal aplomb, any more than a bomb is an item for serenity: they are to be used without display, for the functional realities of service. A proper spirit and a seemly function are available, gifts too, and service assuredly; and while some misuse the entire body of Christ, this is a pathology. It is available too.

However, that is not to the point, since we are discussing what good thing was AVAILABLE in those days. In the Psalms therefore we find in scriptural form, often from the hand of David at the mouth of the Lord (II Samuel 23:2), expositions of spiritual life available to all in the name of the Lord. In this Samuel passage, he in fact declares this, in intimacy for his own gift, sourcing it:

"The Spirit of the LORD spoke by me,

And His word was on my tongue.

The Rock of Israel spoke to me..."

In Psalm 73, accordingly, you find from Asaph a testimony to his sense of dereliction as he saw the wicked in their fatuous but flash glory, and as he moves to the resolution, we find the depth of his spiritual nearness to the Lord. It is sometimes, if you will, when disease strikes, that one the more perfectly realises or speaks of the nature of health!

"You hold me by the right hand!" he declares in v. 23,

"You will guide me with Your counsel, and afterward receive me to glory."

Indeed, as far as his mere flesh, for whatever that is worth, is concerned, he continues,

"My flesh and my heart fail," and yet to that there is the divine antidote of his life:

"But God is the strength of my hear t and my portion forever... But it is good for me to draw near to God. I have put my trust in the Lord GOD, that I may declare all Your works."

Even for a King, it is the LORD who is his Shepherd, as in the famous Psalm 23, whose gentleness and comforts, kindness and leading make life categorically in contrast with the mere residue of those who do not know the Lord!

Psalm 37 specialises not a little in the very nature of the life of any man of God, declaring this:

"Delight yourself also in the LORD, an He will give you the desires of your heart!' (v. 4),

and again,

"The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD, and He delights in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down, for the LORD upholds him with His hand."

In Isaiah 63:11, we see something of the historical perspective concerning the availability of the Lord to His people, to such as knew Him. It comes in the form of an interrogation:

"Where is He who brought them up out of the sea,

With the shepherd of the flock ?

Where is He who put His Holy Spirit within them..."

In Psalm 51, we see in the case of David, after an appalling episode, his request as a son of a father whom he has vilely concerned and grieved, with with a filial bond still intact, "Do not take Your Holy Spirit from me!" Once saved, always His (as in Ephesians 1:11, Psalm 17, Psalm 145), and forever is the extent of it! God heard, and the fact that David DID belong to the Lord, gave the paternal access, then as before. Not that this was without discipline as in I Chronicles 21, and Hebrews 12, alike: it was however without end, and with depth, a communion.

One could gloriously wallow in the wonder and wisdom of the Psalms, but our point is simple: here is the abundant testimony of the life which God provides, the intimacy He moves to create, the counsel He gives and the deliverances, to His people. It is not a pleasure-power push, but a Shepherd, who leading His sheep, attends to their needs. Sometimes great is the commotion as one suffers for Him; but then, in such a world as this, for pilgrims like diplomats abroad, this is part of the work of spiritual war with the sword of the Spirit not at all appreciated by many, while the girding with truth, not to the taste of more! It is not a question of avoiding the Cross, but taking it up. As one walks with the Lord, whether in Old Testament times or New, the work of the Lord is near, and the heart has its own communion.

It is then of interest that one may find the phrasing that the Spirit spoke to or by, that the Spirit came upon someone, or that He is IN someone in the Old Testament, as in the New. In the New Testament, moreover, there is a fascinating development, consequent upon the Lord, the second person of the Trinity, coming actually and physically and locally BESIDE them. Thus there was not, while He was present in the flesh, that same amazing liberty in consummate form, which now exists, in the sense that the three filters of the Old Covenant are now fulfilled and not operative, this being part of its obsolescence, due to fulfilment (Hebrews 8, Matthew 5: 17-20).

Accordingly, in New Testament times, if the LORD, present beside you as a man, orders, commands or communes in this or that matter, then this is already GOD HIMSELF speaking to you. Thus Christ indicated that it was expedient that He should go, because otherwise the Spirit, in the special New Covenant sense and setting, would not come (John 16:7-15). In His departure as the Second Person of the Trinity, He left open the place for direct power in HIS NAME from the Holy Spirit, to act in the hearts of multitudes, this new phase of the universal Christian Church.

The Spirit would not act on His own authority, He went on to say, but would take of the things that are Christs, and bring them to the apostles. He pursued the theme, declaring that ALL things that the Father has are His, so that the Holy Spirit is in fact rightly said to be taking the things that are His, and bringing them to the apostles.

That was to be, and scripture was one of the results, the New Testament scriptures.

In this way, He also showed this:

"And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever— the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you."

Notice, in terms of the infinite intimacy of the trinity, that not only does He state that He is going, but that having indicated that the Holy Spirit will come to them, He adds this, that "I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you." This of course is entirely consonant with what Paul declares in II Corinthians 3:17, that "the LORD is that Spirit." The Lord comes IN and THROUGH the third person of the Trinity, in that they are all one; and although there is a diversity of functional emphasis in their glorious and infinite intimacy, yet there is a distinguishability in their operation.

Hence I WILL COME TO YOU, refers to the Holy Spirit (as in Luke 24, closing verses), and the LORD IS THAT SPIRIT, are saying the same thing. God is a Trinity, Christ the incarnate and eternal Word, and the Spirit the everlasting worker of wonder and inspiration, conveyer of truth, named the Spirit of Truth, the Strengthener and the one who SEALS what is Christ's (Ephesians 1:13-14), being given as a guarantee of the inheritance of the 'purchased possession', stamping it as Christ's against that great day when the final facts are seen in the light that none can clamour about, or refute.

In this very place, Paul is found praying that

"the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory,
may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,
the eyes of your understanding being enlightened,
that you may know hat is the hope of His calling,
what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe,
according to the working of His mighty power,
which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead
and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all principality and power and might and dominion;
and every name that is named,
not only in this age but also in that which is to come."

He proceeds to speak of this same Jesus, who stooped to the form of a man, and displayed in that form such fervour and power, authenticity and acme as the deity, in terms of the Church, His body, "the fulness of Him who fills all in all."

It is in this same body that we learn that Christians should be FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT. Thus does the vine, to change the figure to the botanical, present strength to itself through the sap, an image for the Spirit, which conveys the wonder of the plant to the arms here and there, faithfully.

There is such a closeness and a calling and a co-function, that when the Spirit is so acting, He is actually bringing the Lord Himself to you. It is easy, if only an analogy, to think of the beaming of the person's face, who is in the studio, via the TV to your own hearth.

Of course, thus far, we know only in part (I Corinthians 13); but the part that we DO know is He who IS the truth. In heaven, however, we will see face to face. It is not that He did not speak the truth, but the exact opposite; for He challenged them why they wanted to kill One who told them the truth (John 8:40-45). In fact, it was predicted that they would kill Him BECAUSE He neither did violence (to protect Himself), nor lied (to pretend He was not the Messiah, and so escape death). After all, He came to die for sin.

One lifts up one's eyes to the hills and sees aright; but when by car one comes to the exact point of focus, of course one sees yet more! The land is now "very far off" (Isaiah 33:17); but we do see it, and it is clear; yet how much more manifest will it be when we live there - who are His by faith, at the resurrection.

Thus, when Christ was physically present by them, the word of God could not be clearer or nearer in precise and sure knowledge. By the same token, the free working of the Holy Spirit within them, while not absent, was limited by the presence of the word of God beside them (John 14:17,26,16:7). There is ONE Lord. It was when He left, that the Holy Spirit would then in the fullest sense be IN THEM, and to this He referred; for then there was direct transmission without the priesthood as rulers, symbols as media as distinct from reminders, for now the work has been DONE and needed no pictorial accompaniment as a condition of its application (Hebrews 8-10), for the day of shadows as Hebrews advises us, had yielded to the day of eternal redemption already wrought, paid for. In this way, says Hebrews 10, by ONE offering (not many or more) you are sanctified for ever.

Thus the work in a group who being all BRETHREN with NO MASTER but Christ, could relate to Him direct, as to each other in the Spirit, with great immediacy.

In fact, at Pentecost, the matter was most dramatic and poly-functional, both. Like a birthday party, it came, the sound and the fire as in Acts 2, the flame dividing itself into tongues, one on each head, and so they were anointed, and the Spirit came in its direct form, within them, conveying Christ and His power and function, through them. It was accordingly with this new power that they preached, and the miraculous quality of the words, now comprehensible for each foreigner in the swelling multitude then in Jerusalem, was that they could understand them, each man in his own language.

That was one great birthday party, leading to thousands of souls being converted. Moreover, it held a marvel and a wonder, that it was in ISRAEL and by JEWS that the Christian Church started. As Romans 11 relates, a Jewish contingent of no small magnitude, is to come in its time, when we see as in Zechariah 12-13, the nation rubs its eyes, begins to see and to mourn for its lost Lord. Thus it becomes, to use Paul's imagery, 'grafted' back into its own tree from which, says the apostle, it had been removed because of unbelief. It is then that they see through the working of the "Spirit of grace and of supplications", looking to the Lord whom they had pierced.

Indeed, the Christian as in Romans 8:9, always has the Spirit, and without it, one is not a Christian. Moreover the Christian always has the Lord Jesus Christ, BY the Spirit, and thus the Lord is IN him or her, as in John 6:50-54, "and shall be IN you". Nor is this something to wait for, as if you were only partly born! John 6:51 tells us not of a continuing matter, but of an event that is past, as to accomplishment, and present as to endurance. This, indeed, is as in John 4:14 where Christ speaks of the 'water' which by believing in Him, one may receive from Christ, and so NEVER thirst again. In John 7:37ff., we find explicitly that this represents the Holy Spirit. Now "the Lord is that Spirit," He reminds us, in this intimation of the infinity of the intimacy of the trinity.

What then do we find ? It is this. In 6:51, if anyone should eat of this bread, identified as His sacrificial self given, laying down His life on the Cross (not present tense here of 'eating', just the aorist of action done), then one lives for ever. It is not merely processive, for as in the water case, you NEVER thirst again, and we are told in John 7:37ff., that in referring to the water He gives, it is to the Spirit that He alludes! Indeed, in 4:14ff., we learn that the water that He gives will be welling up to eternal life, and it is this which, for the one once drinking it, removes the necessities for frequent trips, since it is not only IN one, but WELLS UP within, for ever, to eternal life. How sublimely simple and simply sublime; and small wonder then that in Galatians 6:14 Paul declares this, that God forbid that he should glory except in the Cross of Christ by which the world is crucified to him and he to the world!.

Thus in the Old Testament, you have the LORD above, and the Spirit working; and in the New Testament, while Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity is present with them, you have this same LORD (Isaiah 45, Philippians 2), but now down to earth and beside them. Nevertheless, the working of the Spirit (as in the sending of the 70 noted in Luke 10, just as He had sent out the 12, noted in Matthew 10), is through them. In Matthew 10:20, they are told of certain vicissitudes they face, and of one He declares, that when they speak in reply, "It is not not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you!" IN YOU!

Thus the principle does not change, but while Christ was physically present, the full liberty in the Spirit was for that reason, reduced in the disciples who heard Him DIRECT.

Accordingly, when He went, and the need therefore was total, then He who could always work as He willed, was not only in them but continually acting with the communion of Christ, which they shared. No more was Christ beside them in the flesh, with His word that of the Lord; and now the Spirit welling up, and functioning to each, apostle or other, as appropriate, in lavish generosity, worked His works, according to the word of God.

So is the unity of theme allied to developments of operation; but One God always works as He will, bringing to consummation the Cross, the consequence, the life within and the destiny to come.

THE TEACHING ON SCRIPTURAL INSPIRATION AND
FAITHFULNESS IN PRACTICE

Again, the doctrine of the relationship of the scripture to the Spirit is quite identical in both Testaments. Thus in Isaiah 34:16, we find that there is a collation of results for the destruction of a place named, and these include various aspects of the desolation, including birds of a kind. Each of these elements is to be there, for they are to be GATHERED BY HIS SPIRIT, the Spirit of God! Whether therefore you regard the words as being signified or the items to which they refer, the result is the same. An intelligible, verifiable, practical and precise series of events and pairings of events is to come, and the underlying words make this clear beyond contention, so that it will be visible beyond question when the time comes. That is the prediction, and this is the model of inspiration and revelation depicted with it.

There is to be, we further read in Isaiah 34, an irresolvable nature to the disposition of the word of God: there are no buts, ifs or maybes. It will be as it is stated to be, and this of course is precisely what Christ said in Matthew 5:17-20, about every jot and tittle of the law and of the prophets being fulfilled.

Again, in the Old Testament as in the New, this is not just some verbiage, a lovely dream (as negated for an approach to the word of God, in Ezekiel 33), but a practical fact and reality, a testable product of God Himself, His very word. Thus IF they do not speak in accordance with the word found in the Book of the Lord (Isaiah 8:20), there is a reason.

What then is this reason ? It is that there IS NO LIGHT IN THEM! That is the reason for such speech, so contrary call or idea or view. God is the light, and without Him, there is none, merely a series of reflections, a menagerie of imaginations.

Without this word, out of accord with it, man is lightless, having a spiritual default, and those who are thus wordless in terms of the word of the Lord, showing a rebellious spirit towards the words of God, are light-free, like darkness. Thus it is on those who sat in darkness, in anguish and grief,
on whom the light shines (Isaiah 8), which is enshrined in One, in Him of whom it is said in Isaiah 9:6-7^*7:

"For to us a Child is born, to us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and His name shall be called, Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

We learn that of the increase of His government there will be no end, just as in Daniel 7:14,25-27, we find His kingdom the last, He who receives all kingdoms and power.

God works as One, word, Spirit and Father.

Thus in the Old Testament, unauthorised innovators at the level of the word of God were consumed in fire, and those who, in the New Testament likewise despise the authority of the writer of Scripture, God Himself the basis and assurance of it (as in I Corinthians 2:9-13), are in no better case (Leviticus 10, Jude, II Peter 2), and the degree of repugnance in both Testaments, is identical!

	As once more, the spiritual man is to abide in the word of God with intense desire,
	so that the word gives life, and his soul is in pangs if the word is denied him (Psalm 119),
	his soul breaking with longing for the word of the Lord (Psalm 119:20),
	so in the New Testament,
	not only is one to abide in the Lord
	and have His word abide in one (John 15),
	as a natural norm for genuine vine, planted by the Lord
	(and if not, beware - Matthew 15:13, for there is no place for fraud):
	but great is the reward for so doing! Indeed, founded on this word in the Lord Himself, one is on rock, not sand. And, as David declared, Who is a rock, but our God! (II Samuel 22:22), that Lord on whom one looks when one awakes from the preliminary life of test and testimony here, to eternity with Him (Psalm 17).

The words of Paul about divine inspiration in I Corinthians 2:9-13, are close to those of Peter about the inspiration of the prophets of old, in the Old Testament as found in I Peter 1:8-10, II Peter 1:19-21, 3:2. In the last, as in Matthew 4:4, we find that the very ipsissima verba, words themselves, have been provided by the power of God, just as their meaning will not be lost (Psalm 111), for they are to be done, and will be fulfilled to the uttermost point (Matthew 5:17-20). Indeed, those practising and doing these commandments will be called great in the kingdom of heaven, and those abusing the least of them, and teaching this, small!

Consider this Matthew 5 declaration of Christ!

How great then is the greatness of the word of God (cf. John 14:21-23), that so mistreating the least of His commands, in deed and teaching, makes for the least, and teaching and following them, for the greatest.

It is GOD who is great, His way is great, His word is great, the power of His Spirit is great (Zechariah 4, Ephesians 3:16), and following Him is a thing to be grateful for, as He so enables you (Philippians 2:13). It is great to be near to the fear (Psalm 19), when the fear means reverence, not doubt and distress, for perfect love casts out fear (I John 4:17ff.), whereas to faith it is given to KNOW that one has eternal life (I John 5:11ff.), and good it is to encourage the saints with this glorious privilege, when the ONLY Saviour is Christ, and not you yourself, or any other source of weakness, error of fall!

Moreover by every WORD of God, individually conceived, but of course in meaning the intent, is man to live! This is as Christ both showed and declared, when He came as man (Matthew 4:4). In both New and Old Testament, the same is implied of the status of precision and practicality, reliability and fulfilment in ALL the words of the Old Testament, and to these Peter adds Paul's words, in II Peter 3:16, as also being scripture, while Paul adds in I Cor. 2:9-13, the nature of the inspiration, both in substance and spiritual constraint over the word of expression.

A WORD ON THE WONDERS OF SPIRITUAL APPLICATION

OF REDEMPTION AT ANY TIME

The APPLICATION of this word to our spiritual calibre, moulding, quality is also clearly depicted by Paul in II Corinthians, where as by the SPIRIT OF THE LORD, we are being conformed to Him, from glory to glory. This is just as in the Old Testament, where we find first the same categorical cleansing and change depicted, as for High Priest, Joshua, in Zechariah 3:2ff., as for the individual or the people in Ezekiel 11:19-21, 36:25-26, Zechariah 13:1, Psalm 119, 143; and this resembles Titus 3:3-5!

Secondly we have in both Testaments, the call to the same continuing, abiding conforming to the Lord (as in Psalm 139:23), whilst it is the Spirit of the Lord who, being called good, is to lead into the 'land of uprightness' as in Psalm 143.

As in Ephesians 1, the WORK of redemption is done by Christ, and the sealing of it and the securing of guarantee in the heart, concerning it, is the work of application of the Spirit of God, so in the Old Testament, sin is covered in terms of the Day of Atonement, as a crux, in its redemption (Leviticus 17), the centrality of the sacrifice being clear (as in Galatians 6:14 for the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, the ultimate and final sacrifice); and then the application appears.

The latter devolves uniquely and pre-eminently, on the Messiah as the Word Himself, conveying the salvation (Isaiah 61:1-3); then the application in holiness is found in such words as those of Isaiah at 32:15-17, where assurance of salvation is thus brought by the Spirit, and the very vision of the King is assured (32:17ff.), in the 'land that is very far off', these things coming home as it appears, as consequences of this same pouring forth of the Spirit, as once more, at Pentecost.

To Isaiah 32:15-17, we do well to look with care
(bold added to aid what here is the relevant impact):

"Until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high,

And the wilderness becomes a fruitful field,

And the fruitful field is counted as a forest.

Then justice will dwell in the wilderness,

And righteousness remain in the fruitful field.

The work of righteousness will be peace,

And the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever."

Thus on every side, sometimes with the preliminary and preparatory, the domain of the preface or introduction, sometimes in the more developed, the consummation of the paid-up Gospel after Calvary, we find the work of the One God, and the work of His Son and His Spirit, their relationships and their work on His people, whether in the Lord, to redeem, or in His Spirit, to apply and multiply the results of the one source, one life, one Gospel (Galatians 1:6-9, Ephesians 1:10, Acts 4:11-12, Revelation 5,21-22, Daniel 7:25) and one peace.

Thus in general, there is a clear-cut and marked parallel or even identity; and the work of the Holy Spirit, of the Word of God and of His sending, of His written word and of His peace and assurance, wholeness and wholesomeness, goodness and mercy, is that of one unchanging Being. First He moves to show the individual, Noah, Abraham and many another; then the nation, then the grace for faith, then the Law for definition of sin to drive home and drive into the arms of the saving mercies of the covenantal God, and with this, there is the exposure of the once for all Saviour with the once for all Message of the once for all Gospel (cf. SMR Ch. 9, Barbs ... 17, TMR Ch. 3), the MESSIAH.

During these things, He moves on His people with strength, wisdom and understanding during their theocratic phase; then in more directness, fulfilling what was said before, but in precise accord with it, He unveils the Christ.

This, it is not a vision but a man, at this stage; and it is now for usnot a coming event, but now a past one, which as in Hebrews 9 can only with the consequences of Hebrews 6 and be fooled with, as if folly became the name of the play: Essay in Folly ...

So does the unity of the Spirit appear, not only as drawing all men together if they but follow HIS WORD AND NO OTHER WORD (Proverbs 30:6, Revelation 22, Deuteronomy 12), but in its ways of ministration and blessing, and as in the Aaronic blessing (Numbers 6:24ff.), so now, does it bring augury of rest and peace; and this is precisely the message of Isaiah 26:1-4, as of Matthew 11:27-30.

This, it is to be expected of so great and unchanging a God, just as with relish we receive the phases which have brought all things so securely, and with such unity of purpose and preliminary program equipped with prediction, to their orderly consummation. That, it is the testimony for Christian Apologetics; and the rest, as also in Isaiah 11:10, this is the testimony for personal rest beyond simple ecclesiastical blessedness.

It is a rest in Him who, being God, is both delightful and all-sufficient, whose sufficiency is practical, powerful and total (cf. Ephesians 1:6, II Corinthians 3:5-6).

Even the fact that what was at first encapsulated in a nation to show forth God's praises to a fallen world, as an integral unit, with full spiritual operating equipment in Temple and priesthood (Isaiah 43:21), would become for all the world, as it was in essence from the start, a shaft of singular spiritual beauty. This, moving thus out from one nation, to which at any time proselytes could come, went to all nations and to each person. You see this preparation in prophecy constantly, as in Psalm 67ff., Jeremiah 16:19, Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, 54:5, 72:17, 82:8, 86:9, 113:4, Deuteronomy 32:43, and as attested by Paul in Romans 15:7-12.

Indeed, as in Isaiah 11:12, in this Christ, born in Bethlehem (as in Micah 5:1-3), the Eternal God become man (as in Isaiah 48:16, Micah 5:3), recompense-payor for sin, resurrected as a pointer for His people (Isaiah 26:19), resurrected from the vicarious and sacrificial death as in Psalm 22,16, you see God. It is as in Colossians 1:15ff., John 1:1-3, for here now is the Creator, the Predicted Purveyor of Pardon, the Crucified Messiah, the Resurrected Redeemer (Colossians 1:5, John 1:3). Here is not only the CREATOR, but the one who makes of ALL things created, a CATEGORY from which He AS Creator is entirely missing. Here then is YOUR GOD, as Isaiah proclaims it in Isaiah 40:11, and it is He who indeed took up the lambs in His arms, as Isaiah foretold (cf. Mark 10:13-15).

It was then, as it is now, for one as for all, for all nations, all peoples, and for anyone at all. That, it is found in Colossians 1:19ff., John 3:15ff., I Timothy 2:1ff., Ezekiel 33:11ff.. Thus the divine lament for the ruinously, the recklessly, the impenitently lost, and His mourning and for the needlessly fallen and needlessly unredeemed, is in both Testaments, as deep as the heart of the God who is love (I John 4:8ff.; Luke 19:42ff., Jeremiah 48:36, Ezekiel 33:11, Lamentations 3:33 and all, Jeremiah 9:1ff., 17, Jeremiah 5:1ff., Proverbs 1, Luke 19:42ff., Matthew 23:37ff. cf. SMR Appendix B).

It is He, who being truth, does violence to none, as if to persuade by force, and does justice to what will not receive mercy, for the judgment is with Him. Judgment is always according to truth (cf. Romans 2:1), whether the truth comes to be that one is redeemed, or that someone is not; and if redeemed, then the gift of divine righteousness being received (Romans 5:17, II Corinthians 5:17-21, Romans 3:23-27), work becomes irrelevant as a basis, for it is Christ's work which counts; works then become as in James, the indissoluble consequence of authenticity, as when - from Christ's own lips in Matthew 7 - a good tree, here a regenerated one, CANNOT fail to bring forth good fruit. The fruit is not the planting however, or the root, but the byproduct.

The Spirit of God meanwhile, whether in Isaiah 32 or Romans 8, is seen pouring out assurance, enabling one to discern the eternity of the bond to the Father, through the Redeemer, and so is peace.

Indeed, as in Zechariah 12:10ff., Isaiah 32:15ff., John 16:8ff., the Spirit of God pours out in a deep stirring to repentance upon the hearts of men. It is in one as in the other, in the Old as in the New, for the same God is ever immutable, His love beautiful, His concern dutiful, His sacrifice sufficient for all, and if applied only to some, yet not as if He did not love, but does not pay for what He does not buy! Ransom is for many (Matthew 26:26, 20:28, Isaiah 53:10-11), those indeed whose iniquities He bears specifically (Romans 8:32), and those who have not "believed the report" (Isaiah 53:1), remain as Christ confirmed in John 8:24, in their sins, these neither conveyed, covered nor atoned, neither paid for nor pardoned!

It is assuredly most sincerely, and in one deeply spiritual sense, passionately offered to all, but equally certainly, it is not gained without its results (Romans 8:32:ff.), which keep for ever the purchased possession (II Timothy 1:9), which was foreknown, predestined and never in doubt, chosen in Christ by the love which knows His own, and seeking all, lamenting for some, takes His 'portion with the great' (Isaiah 53:12). .

It is quite different indeed for those who toy with truth, flirt with salvation, merely sound and resound that He is Lord or that they are purchased; but such anomalies are the mere work of hypocrisy, and to those of this sort who, loud in their proclamations of their fidelity in great works when on earth, protest their own worthiness, He replies in heaven: I never knew you! (Matthew 7:21ff.).

God IS Spirit and those who worship Him must do so in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). There is no room for expert manoeuvre, careful real estate deals concerning heaven. If you repent, if you believe, if you are regenerated, if you are not a mere nominal but a phenomenal product of the Lord’s mercy, of the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:3-5), then as His child, you are sealed and guaranteed, and both of these are wrought by His Spirit (Ephesians 1 so tells us)!

He who buys and seals has not lost His ancient power, as in Psalm 51, but is the same, as He swears in Malachi 3:6, notes in Psalm 102, affirms in Hebrews 13:8. His welcome is not less kind, but most manifestly secure and secured by His being delivered up for those to whom He then gives all things (Romans 8:32ff.). One of these is eternal life, God Himself for Christians, our shield and our exceedingly great reward.

How foolish to be left out of what God provides, as if to have the body part, but not the Spirit, to have the opportunity part, but not the taking of it, to have the love, but not the response, to have the glory of integrity in the everlasting God with everlasting life, freely (as in Isaiah 55 on the one hand, and in Ephesians 2 on the other), and yet to fail!

In HIM however is no failure, and in Him who has come, none goes in vain, but His sheep, who are statedly those who ENTER BY HIM (John 10:9), simply never perish (John 10:27-28). NONE can snatch out of his hand, and indeed those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with tis lusts and affections (and for that matter, no doubt, affectations - Galatians 5:24). Having been created, and being a design, albeit a thinking one with potentials of different kinds, it is wonderful to be allowed to be re-created both by and for God, whatever one's race, place, prestige, pains, pangs, hopes, importance or unimportance.

THEN and then alone, does the word of God, as in both Testaments, consummated in the incarnation, paid for on behalf of man at Calvary, so that it is adequate for any, applicable to all, become actually, personally, and eternally APPLIED. Then, and then only, is the foreknown cost accomplishing its foreseen result, and pardon with peace becomes the most modern resultant in the new soul who comes, comes, comes to Him who came! He did it; it is time to receive Him.

Assurance for ever in Him, the Redeemer, from Job to John, from Isaiah to Ephesians, this is the restful result that results in such tireless labours of love, as you see in Paul, an example indeed, and in those who love Him.

NOTE

See on the background, basis and attitude of the UN, in such terms and beyond them, in

It Bubbles ... Ch. 11, 10,

Light of Dawn Ch. 6

His Time is Near Chs.     1,   3, 10

Things Old and New Epilogue, Ch. 2

The Defining Drama Ch. 10

Overflight in Christ Ch. 6

Regal Rays of Revelation Ch. 1

Calibrating Myths, Machining Dreams and Keeping Faith Ch. 5

Sparkling Life ... Ch.   4

*2

On this entire theme and topic, see A Question of Gifts.

*3

See Let God be God Ch. 2.

*4

See Worn-Out World and Coming King Ch. 2.

*5

See on visions and guidance: A Question of Gifts, in    X.

*6

See: A Question of Gifts, Appendix II.

*7 See on this text, Bible Translations 20;

Repent or Perish Ch. 7, pp. 174ff., cf. SMR p. 773-774;

Divine Agenda Ch. 5 .

The Bodily Resurrection of the Lord,
Presenting as Jesus Christ, the Righteous, the Just One

Adapted from

Chapter 5

Stepping Out for Christ

Rot and Reality

about The Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ

Chapter 5,

from NEWS 85

Part A

ROT AND REALITY ABOUT
THE RESURRECTION

New Life, Melbourne, August 26, 99

with a wide ambit of current developments

"Archbishop reaffirms resurrection" reads the headline on p. 5.

Thereby hangs a tale. It is important in view of the tail end.

THE WORDS AND THE MEANING - OF THE ARCHBISHOP ?

Whatever this particular archbishop may or may not believe is not our present concern. The principle of the thing within Anglicanism, this is.

Thus, firstly, we note the ambiguity of the reaffirmation as provided. This merely shows what CAN be done, and indeed WAS done in N.Z. in 1966, by playing with words. This may be innocent, THAT was not.

Thus the statement "we cannot with the same certainty say that we know He was raised by God from the dead," was the quotation attributed to the archbishop. The same certainty as what ? as that He died.

That was the point made. In seeking to rescue the statement from misinterpretation, the report is interesting.

Thus, this archbishop said "in his 1998 Easter sermon, 'Why do you look for the living among the dead? They were looking in the wrong place. Death could not stop Him; he was risen ... the challenge therefore for us as His Church is so to convey the good news of the risen Christ that they find Him in the joy of our lives, in our services week by week...' "

Such a statement as that, however, is quite capable of being made by people such as those, in NZ in 1966, who REFUSED the bodily resurrection of Christ. The 'right place' would then be in their own hearts, which would then reflect some sort of spiritual result. Again, our interest here is NOT what the archbishop here believes; it is what CAN be said with such a totally opposite meaning, the subtlety of phrasing disguising the brutality of the reality of unbelief.

It was indeed in 1966 that the PC NZ (in that the 1967 Assembly did not radically change things) AFFIRMED some sort of resurrection. This one ? It was a nice commodious sort of a thing, including within its verbal bounds, those who considered the dust of Christ's body resided in Palestine, or thereabouts.

What sort of resurrection it is which leaves what was buried where it was, what sort of glory shares the flesh with the worms, or what power is shown in the vanquishing of life in the flesh, by flesh, of blood by murder, it is not at all clear to find! How death is beaten when death wins, and how flesh is vindicated when flesh fails, or how it is reassuring to find that the tomb is womb for mortality: again it is not at all clear. When imagination rules, facts are not in vogue.

How revitalising to find that the murdered form was indeed finished, that the One who could and did raise the dead lacked this work in His own particular case, and that man could after all dispose of God on earth's surface, though God made it, and have the last word on the body devoted! If that is revitalising, then so is vomit, so is explosion, so is the tortured remnant of courageous workers, left bedraggled in the torture chamber. Of what then does that reassure ? that power is corrupt, and that that is that!

How fine to know that one can feel happy about it all! What sort of happiness visits the broken heart, what sort of vindication arises in this world to attest the power of God (Romans 1:4), when the power of man leaves it merely the vitality of memory, perhaps assisted by the splendour of discordant inspiration of some kind, within! Disbelief founders at its very foundation in this arena, the only delusion in the minds of those who imagine so botched a scenario, outrageously contrary in all things, to what it is to account for!

What kind of explosive vindication, authentication and vitalisation arises from ABSENCE of the body which was to rise; what kind of hell appeals to lying disciples, mythicising a sodden coup which ostensibly included soldiers who risked their lives for gross negligence and then reported what happened in their sleep! or who did so yet more surely, for the sake of corrupt collusion in illicit corpse evacuation, in an aroused city, where twice doubled justice would be given for this, as for negligence:

from officialdom
as from the murder-minded mob,
from the priesthood
and from the parties, Pharisees and Sadducees, subjected to His withering scorn (Matthew 23, Luke 11:53) and outright exposure!

Motivation was everywhere to prevent it, from the watchful eyes and fearful wills of vulnerable parties; and the prediction which aroused them, only added to it (Matthew 27:64), that on the THIRD day He would be away! but on His own legs. It is this which happened; which was thrust into the wild and earlier frenzied mob, on fire for His evacuation from this life by refined and slow butchery, amid a people who had observed His deeds, received His therapy, witnessed His miracles, to whom Peter spoke in just such terms, appealing not to cynicism, but to knowledge: THESE THINGS Christ had manifestly done: and now, this! (Acts 2:22). That moved in his message. It was, like His seamless robe, all of one piece...

How peaceful the military outcome for the soldiers in their ludicrous story, sleeping witnesses; but there was soon to be one world-echoing result, the torrent of truth thrusting aside all fabrication like molten lava to scorch conscience and make for action, that action which led ot the sure establishment of the Christian church: repentance and faith.

No! no fact could be induced otherwise to relieve the astonished city! (cf. SMR Ch.6 ). It rubbed its bewildered eyes in amazement as the fact, the amazing and triumphant, the persistent and all-resistant fact began to emerge, fearless in the face of fear, guilt and promulgated despite motivation of another kind!

To achieve this result, nothing less was needed. On that first Sunday morning, evil was smiling, smirking in bloody triumph.

Only reality could awaken now, and only power could convince. This is precisely what it did.

THE WORDS AND THE MEANING OF THE BIBLE, AND OF CHRIST

But this! it is merely the beginning. The ludicrous distortions of corrupted imagination, grating like an exhaust pipe touching the road behind a derelict vehicle: they are merely the negative.

The raising to walk away was not only a fact. It was also a predicted fact, and God had given them over 1000 years to prepare for it: either to abort it, if they would and could, or to receive it. His plans are open, and His power readily able to match against counter: for you see, it is yet the simpler, for He ALSO knows the countering efforts in advance, and instead of discounting THEM, can account for them and overturn them with the same ease as that with which He predicts in the first place!

In fact, Psalm 16, quoted by Peter at Pentecost, makes it clear that "my flesh" shall rest in hope, and that the Holy One would not suffer corruption. Peter brings it out with frank and direct force, relishing it, applying it (Acts 2:29). Here was the ineradicable, the foundational, the cardinal FACT: David's body rotted, he being a prophet, Christ's body did not rot, He being the one prophesied.

In simple terms, that Greek verb means 'ROT'. Now if flesh is to rest in hope, and the One of whom it is written, is not to rot, that is perfectly clear. A thing may rot, and if not, remains unrotted. This is of course not the fate of the flesh which does NOT have this provision!

As to that, it rots. In Psalm 16, we find this, that neither hell nor rotting is permitted to seize the Holy One, so that His flesh rests in hope! and as to David, of course, by virtue of the Holy One, his flesh can do the same, even though in his case, it would first rot, since the Messiah, though his descendant on the mother's line, is also his Saviour! 'Let's be clear!' - in effect, Peter says (Acts 2). DAVID's flesh rotted; but the Psalm is written of Christ, that HIS FLESH WOULD NOT ROT! THIS, said he, is the case!

Contrasting the Messiah with His maternal forbear, Peter states that the non-rotting, NOT applicable to David who merely predicted it, to David whose flesh did indeed rot, IS applicable to the Messiah.

"Being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne,

he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in hell, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses"

(Acts 2:31).

NOTHING COULD BE CLEARER: the terminology, the contrast, the promise, all is there. You see that it was 'concerning the resurrection' that it was written that "His flesh did not see corruption". The non-rot program related to the body of which resurrection was the stated end. It did not relate to some other body, some other person, some other time. It related to the Messiah, to the One whose body was massacred, to the flesh which had a divergent destiny from rotting. Indeed, as Christ so often showed, it related precisely to the third day after the crucifixion, with a stated time for a stated body doing a stated thing! (cf. Matthew 17:22-23).

Peter the fisherman was not in the business of having nice little 'lifts' from rotting flesh, and reflections about it! On the contrary, he spoke of the promised and prophesied power of God which, with the Messiah, did precisely the OPPOSITE to the norm, to the case of David's flesh, and raised Him, Christ, from the dead.

As a result, Peter advised them to repent: for not only was Christ raised, but raised to be Lord. In view of it, without more ado, the multitude began to repent, and to cry, "Men and brethren, what shall we do ?" (Acts 2:37).

THE WORKS AND THE WITNESS OF CHRIST AS RESURRECTED

Christ was careful. He made sure He ATE fish in the presence of the disciples (Luke 24:42-43).
The resurrection was so in bodily FACT.

He with resolution addressed the hearts and consciences of the disciples on the Emmaus road, showing them clearly at length that both SUFFERING and GLORY were the dual lot of the Messiah, so that His suffering should NOT have blinded them to the practical realities of power which were to occur on the third day (Luke 24). It was then that He broke bread with them, and evidently the WAY He did it had a bearing, for they then realised that their discouragement with death was to be replaced with delight at resurrection. The resurrection was so IN BIBLICAL PRINCIPLE and PRACTICAL PERFORMANCE ALIKE.

When in Galilee, as per program (cf. Mark 14:28, Matthew 28:7,10), He made sure that He not only had a fire ready, but fish to hand, and that once again, they had a meal, Jesus GIVING the cooked fish into the disciples' waiting hands (John 21:13), along with bread. It was then that the famous incident occurred when, with John near to Christ and Peter, the latter indicated John and sought understanding on John's future. Christ replied to indicate that Peter would die before John, so leading to an understanding among the disciples (John 21:20ff.). So the program of eating and cooking, of speaking and reasoning, of interactive communication among the watchful disciples, and discourse that each could see and hear, of teaching and reaching, proceeded.

THE WORDS OF OTHER ANGLICAN BISHOPS

Whatever then the archbishop may or may not have meant, there is no doubt about some of the others, according to the reported words. Their views ? One, Bishop of Worcester, "described the event as ...not 'filmable' "

Although he uses the word 'mysterious' - all according to the report, yet there is nothing mysterious about what the Anglican word here has to say: the implication is that the resurrection is NOT PHYSICAL.
It is not a matter of light-reflecting flesh and blood. THAT body which Peter affirmed risen, would be, on such a basis, happily rotting. This is a rejection of what is necessary for salvation (Romans 10:9, I Cor. 15:1-4, 12-17), 9), namely belief in Christ as bodily resurrected, according to the scriptural definition of the term. Thus if a bank wants interest on your loan, you cannot change happily from the document's definition and say, 'Ah yes, but what I myself mean by interest, is a pat on the shoulder. It is the essential thrust that matters, that the bank FEEL good!'

Whittling with words is a game, and it is not that religion of truth and factuality which the Bible repeatedly stresses (Proverbs 8:8, John 3:11, Acts 4:19-20). Indeed, it is precisely in the case of the VISIBLE, filmable healing of the visibly lame that Peter affirmed this.

"We cannot but speak the things that we have seen and heard!"

There was no other option, no other argument, no finesse, no consideration of interpretation. Quite the contrary. The things in view were insusceptible to argument, being primary data, obvious, deniable only by liars, not thrust into the eyes of the great as if to challenge them, but unchallengeable because beyond all men, being actual happenings, affirmable on pain of conscience, deniable only by fraud.

And what WAS this topic so to be silenced by priests, but to be affirmed despite their threats, by Peter ? It was what the apostle was saying in Christ's name. And what was the issue ? Acts 4:2 tells us. They were disturbed that the apostles "taught the people through Jesus the resurrection from the dead." To be frank, that certainly would not be appealing for the smitten conscience: too direct!

As to Peter: he was not stating that he was unable to do other than follow an inner light. He was unable, in the process of healing a lame man, to do other than talk of what he perceived in terms of the actual name he had used in the performance, that of Christ. Facts were facts, and no nonsense could evict Peter from their clear testimony. As we have often seen, in Isaiah 41,43,48, God insists that His prophetic word is ALWAYS right and that NOTHING and NO ONE else can duplicate His factual precision in making future things appear in words that do not fail. Go back, go ahead is the challenge of the Almighty: FIND ANYTHING which matches what I AM TELLING YOU! Of course, they could not. That is a crucial test. The Christian religion, moving from and with the everlasting God whose testimony has never lacked, is not about vapours.

What else have Anglican bishops to say that is a variant from the Bible, on this basic necessity of the Christian faith, then ? Another one is cited as saying, "I'm happy to accept that there was a physical resurrection. My job is to teach the faith of the Church and not my own opinions."

Really ? One should have thought that the FAITH involved should first and foremost be that of the believer, and in this case therefore, of the bishop! IF his OWN faith was not the same as that which he perceived to be that of the church (by whatever process of inference), then of course he would be an unbeliever and wholly unfit to be on the roll of members of any Christian church, let alone a bishop. Now he may not have meant this; but it is exceedingly difficult to see what his 'business' relative to the Church's teaching has to do in this duality, of HIS private opinions on the one hand, and ITS public statements on the other, unless there is a distinction!

Imagine Peter saying this: 'My business is to say what the other apostles thing on the topic of the bodily resurrection of the Lord, not to give you what I personally think!' It would be a riot! The faith would be wholly diverse from what it is, if that were the manner of things. In fact it was the transforming, irradiant certainty of simple reality which made each apostle's statement like faggots on a fire.

Even in the case of Thomas

a) his difficulty lasted only one week.
b) he stood ready to believe on seeing the physical evidence in the most direct, unambiguous and sure way (poke fingers in holes).
c) he repented in glorious certitude and worshipped the Lord, who, complete with body, presented Himself ready for the prescribed ... test! (John 20:20-29).

In fact, Thomas' decided simple practicality was of much service, and it enabled Christ to make the principle plain (John 20:27-29) for all time: THOMAS had the opportunity to perform the most radical physical test. THEN he believed. THAT is the term Christ uses here! It is a question of believing or not believing in the most generic sense.

Thomas needed to be able to probe. OTHERS would believe without this DIRECT method being available. Blessed were they! Thus this became a touchstone of the resurrection, in turn, a touchstone of the faith, a minimal pre-requisite of salvation, for another Jesus does not save (II Cor. 11), and not believing is not believing; whereas THIS SAME JESUS so rose. This indeed is the GOSPEL to be believed (Isaiah 53;1) as in I Cor. 15:1-4, where Paul makes it clear as Machen emphasised: THE THING THAT WAS BURIED WAS THE THING THAT ROSE. What was this ? In fact, His body.

Again, in I Cor. 15, Paul makes it evocatively, provocatively, incisively and decisively clear that WITHOUT the resurrection, so defined, there is no faith, there is no clearance from sin, indeed people would still be in their sins. IF the resurrection (so defined) HAD NOT happened, then says Paul, what is the good of saying one believes in it! ( I Cor. 15:14). If there is NO resurrection, HOW is Christ risen!
( I Cor. 15:13,16). If Christ is not risen, how IS there anything to believe in, for faith is then cancelled! Like a barrister, he leaves no standing room. It is all or nothing. A non-Biblical, anti-prophetic, anti-apostolic, Mark 1 Thomas 'resurrection' is good only for damnation. It leaves people in their sins, it does not clear the books, it makes Christ into a fraud, God into a humbug, prophecy into a muggins, the faith into a fiasco.

"Only a few Western bishops would want to deny these truths. The resurrection is something a bit unusual that we as Christian sometimes have to convince people of" - says another Anglican official. ONLY A FEW! IF ANY deny it, as was the case in NZ in the Presbyterian Church, which rightly set about resolving it, but wrongly denied its necessity as bodily: if any should deny it publicly and clearly, then as in the case in NZ in 1966, there is only one option. The Church dies or the person ceases to hold office! How then is this so ? Why it is so simple: IF the PRINCIPLE is such that the church says this: Resurrection, whatever you like to mean by it, take your pick, you MUST believe in, but as to Christ's body, we hold no particular position in this, so that someone in our teaching ranks can deny the bodily resurrection, then the stage is set.

Then the CHURCH'S POSITION, its MINIMAL REQUIREMENT, its overall consensus and policy and place is that the resurrection MAY/MAY NOT have been bodily. On Paul's own testimony such a body is not a church. Imagine Peter preaching : 'Now as to Christ, I personally have an opinion about this, although we have friendly divergences one with the other, and some say one thing, some another, for it is really quite hard; but overall, I should think the general consensus should be that we believe in a resurrection. Certainly it is most important that we should.'^*1

Even Athens (Acts 17) with all its new things and endless chatter, might be bored!

What then of such a dead church ? The ONLY WAY it could be 'resurrected' would be by repentance, clearly expressed, not some refuge in nuances and ambiguity (I Corinthians 14:8), and return to the faith. NO CHURCH has ANY POWER or PLACE or POSITION except in this, that it testifies to the truth. As even the apostle Paul said, I have no power against the truth, but only for it ( II Corinthians 13:8).

Ashamed of Jesus is to be ashamed of what HE IS, not of what He is NOT! What shame and shambles is a ghostly, ghastly thingummy residing in clay and vision! Ashamed of that fiction, that libellous discord with the testimony of truth and the sanction of reality! Exceedingly so. But of the One whose resurrection confounded all His enemies and thrust home the church like lightning in its song: of that one, never! To be ashamed of that actual Christ is to court His shame in the judgment! (Luke 9:26, II Corinthians 11:1-15), and indeed, Paul brings the matter of variation from this same Jesus, to the very domain of devilry.

THE RESULT

If someone insists, being warned (Ezekiel 33:1-11), on staying where Christ is not given His place, so that it is another Christ, where the faith is not required, so that this or that one may preach some other faith, hence some other gospel, then it is merely to stay where death replaces life, where rebellion replaces obedience, and as to rebellion, the Bible says this: "Rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft" - I Samuel 15:23. What about being obstinate and doing it anyway: "And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry." Idolatry of course is what excludes from the kingdom (I Corinthians 6:9-10).

Christ is not a plaything, a toy, but a Person, the Truth. To play about with truth is to invite falsehood; and faith it is which is required, foundational in Christ, in His words, in His works: in HIM!

THIS is the resurrection preached, this is the resurrection which took contemporary Jerusalem by storm, which captured the minds of thousands who had heard and seen what Christ did, in their own day, and continued to do through the apostles (Acts 1:1). In the Gospels, we read as Luke here shows, what Christ began to do; in the Acts, of the continuation of His work through the Spirit. Like His own, it was spiritual AND practical, and in both cases, the dead were raised (John 11, Acts 8), the sick were healed (Acts 9, Matthew 4:23ff). ALL POWER, said Christ, is given to Me in heaven and in earth. THAT was and is the position. It is NOT the power of a dictator, but of the Saviour (John 3:17) and it continues till He comes, King not only over death, but manifestly over life. In nothing is His word broken, in no place is resort or crevasse, cavity or qualification to be found. That is the way with power, when it is also the truth.

SEE: Separation, Ch.7 in The Kingdom of Heaven, and Resurrection in the Index for SMR and for the Rest of the volumes.

END- NOTE leading into

PART B

AN EXPLORATORY EXCURSION INTO
THE BACKGROUND AND NATURE OF THE PHENOMENON:

and allied elements

(including jangling jitterbug and solemn truth
about the joy of justification)

What is required: Action

*I In the Anglican case, the church is hierarchical, with bishops, archbishops, and collective, having synods with authority. It is in much a useful example to give a basis for application to other denominations.

Thus if any one communion or church grouping, national or whatever be the integration adopted, should leave a publicly known case of a cleric denying the bodily resurrection, or refusing to affirm it when asked, then that communion, national or of whatever proportion or dimension, is one in principle accepting that it is not bound by the doctrine. It is optional for it.

Hence one remaining in such a communion becomes partaker of its sins - if competent to know the case as it has developed. It does not take an Einstein to know what it is to rot. That is the question. We all happen to have bodies. When we lose them it tends to be traumatic; it is one of the chief problems of man that death and judgment remove him from the normal interplay of things; exams come up; assessment has its day. Christ in removing death, abolishing it and bringing life and immortality to light (II Timothy 1:10), has done the greatest thing since creation, and when the sin-cancelling iniquity bearing of the cross, done on behalf of all who come, offered sincerely to ANY, is added, this IS the greatest thing even INCLUDING creation.

THIS is what the Lord has done. This is the acme, the criterion, the wonder: HE BOTHERED, HE BORE, BE BROKE DEATH. HE is practical as well as loving, death defying as well as life affirming, an as author of death - as well as life - has a heart that cares, as well as ideals and principles which do not vary or corrode, is incorruptible and merciful (cf. Romans 3:25ff.).

He who dwells in light unapproachable, has come to earth as man to be approachable, and in this humble and serviceable state, He has borne scorn as well as sin, rudeness as well as disease, scoffing as well as contempt. It quite swallows the imagination, for it is He who made it, who does these things. Love, power, mercy, grace, strategy, triumph - they are all there, to be the criterion of each!

In denying to Him His attainment, in limiting in this puny and anti-Biblical way His atonement, making it a thing of the febrile wit, not the flesh sovereign affirming what He took away, this is the last scoffing, the final contempt, the utter torture, as it were, beyond death: if the implications and not the power of man's action be taken into account. HE cannot be touched; but IF He could, this is what is kept back for Him till last! THIS is the choicest wine of death, like the arsenic laced wine evidently served by the French to Napoleon, to remove perhaps, a diplomatic problem in his person.

And justification ? "It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus from the dead, who was delivered up because of our offences, and was raised because of our justification" - Romans 4:24-25.

HE was not delivered up in theory, in symbol, in feeling, but in lacerated flesh, that harbour of the spirit, in cumulatively tortured brow and beaten back. He was not raised up in symbol, in theory, in concept: He did not go to the cross in spirit and He did not leave death in spirit, some floating ghost, but all that He did, He did as sovereign: LAID in the tomb, He was RAISED from it, as Paul explicitly asserts in I Corinthians 15. Hence this is nothing less - this denial of the bodily resurrection - than a scenario storming, a grand parade disruption, a victory song invasion, and that it CANNOT affect the result does not disguise the fact that for the malefactors, it not only CAN but DOES. Without this, no justification, for it is its stated vehicle and partakes of its ground.

If then an Anglican, or indeed ANY OTHER COMMUNION or church body, great or small, tolerates this denial in its clerics, its clergy, its pastor or teacher, or their body, if numerous, that is no church: IT MAKES WHAT GOD DEMANDS AS ESSENTIAL, FROM HEAVEN, THEIR OPPORTUNITY TO DISAFFIRM, OR DE-AUTHORISE AS ESSENTIAL, ON EARTH. That rapidly becomes an anti-church. Of small account the English desire to accommodate, the Anglican 'genius' for compromise. Compromise with the cross and resurrection of Christ and you are like a woman who, having sold her virtue, wishes not to appear in public without gloves. It is odious disproportion. If the foundations are destroyed, where then shall the righteous flee (cf. Psalm 11:3). NOT to the rubble!

THEN it is time to leave the ruin. It is useless merely to accept some other diocese. The structure is ONE, organic, hierarchical, collective, be it national or other. IF ONE dissident is accepted, then the WHOLE is implicated in the DECISION to accept, or NOT TO CORRECT (contrary to the stringent and clear word of Titus 3:10, and of Romans 16:17). THUS the foolish can become partakers of other men's sins (I Timothy 5:22, Ephesians 4:29-5:7, Revelation 18:4-5), and what allows what God cardinally REQUIRES, to be removed, is an authority AGAINST CHRIST, a servant who dismisses the majesty of the Master, an intruder, be it for the sake of one or many.

There is one other option to departure from such a mess. It is this. Restore the church concerned to its foundations in Christ, reform it, revise it, insist on a restoration of reality, of the bodily resurrection in its place in that grandeur amid humility seen in Christ, relent from folly, practice righteousness. BUT IF the church will not hear you, leave it. You have no other option but rebellion.

Christ may be denied in many ways: if you must 'hate' father and mother and so on (Luke 14:26), in the sense of letting THEIR CLAIMS ON YOU have no competition with those of Christ, then how much more must you 'HATE' in the sense of allowing no competition, the claims of what is NOT MERELY a natural desire, which must be kept in place as inferior to the claims of Christ, but a wayward and even rebellious wish, to sanctify man more than God, the people of God more than Christ, and the action of a church more than the action of Christ! Fail here and Christ says (and He, you will remember, is the One about whom it all works, for whom it is made, by whom it has come to be, who has given it His OWN name), and "YOU CANNOT BE MY DISCIPLE."

Christianity is not a social game but a spiritual calling.

Such a thing is contemptible to such an outrageous degree, that falling into this pit is a thing to be viewed with horror, a matter for anyone seeing it to warn of, lest the end of the thing be that the soiled spirit become the poodle of flesh, not the servant of God. What is ordered is not an option.

If they "teach otherwise" (I Timothy 6, eterodidaskelei: engages in heterrodox teaching), NOT following sound words, those of Jesus Christ, the immovable standard: then it is a principle of universal application which is being breached, and if it cuts in smaller things, what shall its breach in the great things require! The principle once broken, means that the proponents are

"proud, knowing nothing, but obsessed with disputes and arguments over words, from which come envy, strife, reviling, evil suspicions, useless wranglings of men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth."

THIS is the Biblically depicted nature of false teaching,
not according to godliness, unapostolic.

What does it require for such a case ?

It requires this :

"from such withdraw yourself" (I Timothy 6:5).

If then they "teach otherwise" and not according to the words of Jesus the Christ, this requires departure from their midst (Romans 16:17), if they will not come; and even if they will, you must take care as you draw them from the fury of folly (Jude 22). It is then a work of deft rescue, not sharing in squalor of unspirituality, as if some other dynamic, some other preference were working your mind, moving your legs and activating your conscience. Let Christ suffice you, and His word rule, as was the intention of so many of the martyrs and workers who started the Anglican church. Yes and the case is not diverse with many other churches.

If you do not, are you then not also a rebel, and is not Balaam with his own wishes, oh though he seemed ever so orthodox, becoming the role model! Do what you want in the very face of the known will of God, and see how far you can stretch it! And he, Balaam (Jude 11, II Peter 2:15, Numbers 22) - was rebuked by an ass, confronted by an angel, and has left his name as the very sobriquet of deviousness, the badge of spiritual decline, the path of corruption.

The resurrection! Yes but there is far more besides.

THE WHIRLED COUNCIL

In the World Council of Churches,

even an entire THEOLOGY can be created, and not ruled out but rather allowed in

(for example, Liberation Theology, putting Christian doctrine into secular terms, with redefinition);

spiritism can be commended from the pulpit at its gathering, even proclaimed;
communist representatives can foregather in its parlours,
churches of atrocious doctrines can collect in its palaces,

churches which invent new christs without the Bible,

construct new Bibles and new doctrines as if philosophy,
like mistletoe had invaded the grand eucalypt forest with its cheap bedraggled parasitism,
contributing nothing, merely drawing nurture from what is not its own,

churches so far from believing the Bible
that they are free to invent their own canon law and put it in place, with a pope to boot,
as a criterion of correctness, though it is not at all one, but myriad in its views
and not at all the word of God, but the word of man, milling fashions and forms of thought from many.

Indeed, Rome is involved in the workings of this body, though it be not a full member. Its place through representatives in the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council, demonstrates its acceptability.

The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission

has recommended the Pope as leader (since 1982 cf. A Question of Gifts pp. 67ff.), and now (ARCIC 1999, "The Gift of Authority", with its ‘convergent theology’ - so styled by De George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of the 70 million Anglican Communion).

provides talk of the Pope as having the gift of primacy or leadership or authority.

has an Anglican co-Chairman of the Commission, who talks freely of the commission "addressing itself to the conditions necessary for the restoration of the communion between Christians."(emphasis added). And if that is not clear enough, he adds this: "It believes that, if Christian people are to find that unity which is Gods will, this will entail acceptance of a particular ministry for the maintenance of unity, to be exercised by the bishop of Rome" - Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1999.

gains intriguing reaction. HOW, goes the song of an Anglican voice, will we resolve our ordination (as of women: to be or not to be! - see A Spiritual Potpourri 10-11) and similar divergencies in our own midst. Why look! the gift of primacy. Marvellous! THIS we RECOMMEND. THAT was the reaction to this grand new ‘opportunity’. Mow the lawn by using an atomic bomb on the site!

So the Anglican movement goes on its long and odious path back to the tyrannies disenfranchised by the Bible (I John 2:27) and odious to God (Matthew 23:8-10, II Cor. 11:1-11). So too the gift of primacy of the word of God becomes shunted onto the side-rails, while on rushes the new express train of false prophets who do not bow to the word of God, but rather add to it, contradict it (cf. Jeremiah 23:16-21#, SMR pp. 1042ff.). Meanwhile, the world Anglican movement resides squarely in the WCC.

The Orthodox churches with their worship of bread, their mass, are in it too. Idolatry is placed within the religious synthesis of the World Council therefore (cf. SMR 1088B-H). It is all there, in your WCC synthesis.

If this is not Babylon in her social clothes, her perambulations and shows, what is! Rome is her death mask, but the WCC is her flight attendant! (cf. Revelation 17:5-18:24). This liner however, is destined for doom, for just as the KAL airliner was shot down by the Soviets, apparently without warning, so this one is to be shot down by the Lord, with 2 millenia of warning!

The Anglican Church, like the Uniting Church, is a full member of the WCC. As to the last, its members do as they wish. Its fellowship is forbidden; for it not merely causes divisions contrary to the doctrine received (Romans 16:17, Titus 3:10), but causes growth in the divisions, is their very hormone and stimulus, help and prestige, place and dormitory for the works of the night. To belong to this WCC is to belong to what in practice is lax not with just ONE doctrine, to what tolerates not merely ONE lapse, but to what fosters a mobile attitude to the faith, with the faith, through the faith to other 'faiths' (cf. Proverbs’ warning - 24:21). It is to sit with what is not at all bound to what is written, but rather can co-operate with Buddhists via the Pope, with his sanction for the Dalai Lama to put a Buddha on the Roman Catholic altar at Assisi (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri 17, p. 233, On Stand-by or in Flight).

OTHER WINDS, IN THE PREVAILING WIND DIRECTION

The charismatic liberty movement, conjoined to unbiblical excess, with its autonomous abuse of tongues (as distinct from the true and restricted Biblical provisions for the work of the Lord as He sovereignly will, I Cor. 12:11,30), was a further ecumenical exercise showing 40,000 people on their feet with joy as to the group, the largest single part being Roman Catholic, the preacher cried, "Let’s stop the competition…", or as he might have put it, let’s stop fighting for the gospel and go lock-step with the body which insists on no change but only the changes it makes! And this beyond the Bible, the Lord and the salvation which is by grace through faith, apart from works!

All these things show the direction of ecumenism to retreat from that vital gospel stand which, since the days of the apostles, has brought so much evil from the aroused field, to the faithful preacher, so much good to the listener, as the world oppresses (John 16:2). Convenience is the password, human aggregation the name. Now is the time of compromise, of Vichy France in church clothes, of wolves in sheep’s clothing guarding the flock, crying for the need to be left free to serve …!

The same back to Rome thrust appears indeed in the American Baptist Churches USA at one of their biennial meetings having a Roman Cardinal preach to a plenary session, from this appearing the extent of the holocaust of holiness (Foundation, July-August 1999, p.11). Swallowed up if not in the WCC then in other ways, the engulfing continues.

Indeed, now the Lutheran World Federation is reported unanimously to have approved its Joint Declaration with Roman Catholics (June, 1998), a Cardinal noting later, that this "virtually solved" the long standing question. We have dwelt on this in an earlier report, but shall deal with this degeneration of doctrine anew, since it is so basic, in our wider survey of developments among churches, of ecumenical energies and enervations in some of the religious spheres. The joint declaration on justification was of course a joint betrayal, made broader in the return to the vomit of virtue which the works-related, incremental and slow working dogma of Rome implies (cf. II Peter 2:22).

JUST JUSTIFICATION

To the contrary, Paul in Galatians 3 marvels: IF YOU RECEIVED THE SPIRIT WITHOUT ALL THIS ‘WORKS’ BUSINESS, WHY BRING IT IN NOW! he expostulates. It was by the "hearing of faith", you entered: so continue! Law is irrelevant to this issue. You have been saved by predestinated counsel of the Lord (II Timothy 1:9-10, Romans 5:1), so why bring yourself to the shameless carnal elevation of adding anything of your own or a priest or a church, as if your place depended not on Christ and Him crucified, "placarded" before you, as Paul puts it (3:1), but on the sweat of your spiritual brow. This ? It has its place, but not in grace.

This is for sanctification, but not for status. This is for growth, but not for adoption. As a child of God, you are eternal by guarantee (Ephesians 1:11), not by dictation, direction or imbuement. "You are all the children of God through faith in Christ Jesus," says Paul to these souls in danger (Galatians 3:26), and as to that, "He who is born of God, his seed remains in Him" - I John 3:9, so that John assures the believer that his is eternal life, that he wants him to KNOW this (5:12), that he will be raised up as such on the last day (John 6:51-50), so that he lives forever (cf. Philippians 3:20-21).

This conditional hypothesis is a child of philosophy, a nemesis of grace, protagonist of flesh, father of folly, at war with salvation, propounded by enemies of the cross, however sad it is to have so declare it (Philippians 3:18). They are on the one side, the certain resurrection to the presence of the Lord by faith, on the other. So speaks the apostle; and it is by the cross and resurrection (Romans 4:24-25), not by other ecclesiastical innovation, as though churches could escape by being many, for even wolves can hunt in packs.

WHAT IS by the cross and the resurrection ? JUSTIFICATION IS THERE DECLARED TO BE: "He was delivered up for our offences and raised up for our justification." So what ? So this: "Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God" (Romans 5:1). Do you, reader ? If so, rejoice, and if not get it quickly, for on this doomed airliner, there is in the end, only one finale: doom.

Are they then deluded ? certainly, but their teeth are just as sharp, the flesh is just as soft, and the folly of not heeding just as sure. Hear Paul:

"Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves. Therefore watch…" (Acts 20:30-31)

Hear Peter: "But there were false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord" - and how better to deny Him than to replace Him, operationally, by a church, a man, an idol and a system IN HIS NAME! (SMR 1088Bff.).

GOD FORBID, says Paul any glorying EXCEPT in the CROSS. Not in mass, in men, in priests, in world thoughts, in ecclesiastical compromise, in a unity like that of many in Israel against Christ at the time of the Roman Governor. Unity is always possible, not always permissible! The cross is not bought and sold (I Peter 1:18-21), is not subject to scrutiny. Its work is done, not being done (Hebrews 9:12-28). You were redeemed this way, says Peter, "so that your faith and hope are in God," so that as John declares, you need not that men should teach you (I John 2:27). Convenience is one thing, oppression and dependence is another. It is in God that your faith is THUS made to rest.

God is not men. God was never begun and is the judge. He neither sins nor can sin, for it is foreign to Him in whom is "without iniquity" ( Deuteronomy 32:4). No one can replace, impersonate or operate as He. His is not the gift of authority: HE IS AUTHORITY, and "ALL AUTHORITY," says Christ, "is GIVEN TO ME IN HEAVEN AND ON EARTH".

How much is left then ? Is not the papal language as far as possible from this: not merely contrary, but contradictory! (cf. SMR pp. 913-916). Even Paul could act only FOR the faith, not against it (II Cor. 13:8), and even Peter was "also an elder", and elders ? "examples to the flock" not those with dominion over your faith, or lords over His heritage (I Peter 5:3), while Paul again with his company, is so acting that they do not "have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy" (II Cor. 1:24). This is personal provision direct from the Judge, and those won through it have NO OTHER GLORY, NO OTHER NAME (Galatians 6:14, Acts 4:11-12).

FORGET THAT and you are right back in the inestimable presumptions of self-appointed grace, making self-appointed ways to a self-appointed ‘Christ’, who is bogus and not the true one, ‘another Jesus’ and not the crucified one, who appointed no such thing, but "appointed us to obtain salvation"
(I Thessalonians 5:9-10), "not of yourselves, it is the gift of God", for what ? "For by grace are you saved through faith" - a cycle "not of yourselves" (Ephesians 2:8-10).

How can anything be "not of yourselves" which depends on yourself, pray tell, and while you tell, tell yourself the need to avoid this misalliance like the plague, for innocent is any plague compared with this arrogant assemblage (Ephesians 2:9 - "not of works lest any man should boast") which amongst its own polluted flesh - for all are sinners - would cross in company the very threshold of heaven. IF it depends in ANY way on flesh, on man as worker not as gift recipient, in any way on the manner of his receiving it, or the force of it or the durability of it, or the people from whom (but Christ only is our high priest - Hebrews 2-9) this is work, on the contribution of flesh, in one or many, from high or from low, then it is foreign to the scripture, alien to the gospel, removed from the face of God (cf. Matthew 21:11-13).

If it is the variable input of man which determines the issue - and of course that could be boasted of - for what may not be that one does; if it be this which MAKES ALL THE PRACTICAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL, then Paul is wrong (Romans 3:27-29, Ephesians 2:8-10), Rome is right and salvation is not apart from works. But if God is the source of the Gospel and the Cross ALONE is to be gloried in, then God being the sovereign, sovereignly acts and sovereignly says:

NO! NO! ALL AUTHORITY is given to Christ, as far from ANY MAN as sin from perfection, eternity from commencement (Matthew 11:27, John 6:40, 4:14). Justified by faith APART from works##, says Paul in Romans 3:23ff., and so it is. God forgives that He may be just; God justifies rather than condemns, that He may be just (I John 1:9, Romans 3:25-26). It is HIS WORKS. There is no ‘if’, no ‘maybe’ nor is there a qualification by attainment. It is JUST, for to fail to provide what HE has paid for and so paid PERFECTLY (Romans 3:25) would be unjust. He paid so much in justice; He cared to pay in mercy.

The position of Rome in justification is wrong##, unreasonable, unbiblical, anti-gospel, duplicitous and misconceived. BUT it is ALSO predicted (as in I Timothy 4:1ff.), as is the ROMAN site for BABYLON’s last days, a site glorious and commercialised, with pomp and arrogance as in Revelation 13,17-19. This TOO is prophesied, so that all the clerics currently conceiving their holy communions with Rome are in fact like comedians in a play, their gravity ironic, their presumption foretold, their stresses exposed as in Tartuffe much was exposed by Molière.

THE WORD OF GOD AND THE WORD OF FLESH

How accurate is the word of God. It is to become a vast mystery of iniquity, a multitudinous phenomenon, one moving to Rome, back to Babylon, with human unity therefore to the fore, and divine truth therefore to the rear. It is to take place at the end of the Age (Matthew 24, II Peter 1, I Timothy 4, II Timothy 3 and cf. SMR Chs.8-9). As to that, it is declared in detail for identification. It is now. That is now. It is all as it should be. It always is. That is the way with the word of God.

Thus, not only the massive crowds in the WCC from long ago, but the Lutheran, the Baptist joins in this unholy cavalcade back to Rome, and Rome and the Church of England are in mutual recognition. In this total setting of prophesied decline (Matthew 24:24, II Thessalonians 2:3-9) is a movement centred in the WCC, but extending far beyond it, in the same direction, smiling at Rome, like a gargoyle come to life. Exalting himself above God, the lawless one is to stand as Paul declares, in the temple. Already, he is in its porch, requiring in the midst of all this adulation and emotion, the capture of Christ’s people by prelates, priests, masses and mockery, by works and church determination of your salvation or otherwise, while you await your foreign and alien master, the pope and his servants, to decide on where you are, as a substitute for the faith which can say with Paul,

"For I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him against that day!"

As to Paul, STAND FAST, he cries, in the liberty to which you have attained (Galatians 5:1), lashing their dangerous scuttlings about (Galatians 3) with incisive challenge:

"O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth...

Are you so foolish ? ... Have you suffered so many things in vain ...?"

"STAND FAST in the Lord," he cries to those to whom he says also this: "Stand fast in one spirit, with one mind, striving together for the faith of the gospel, and not in any way terrified by your adversaries, which is to them a proof of perdition, but to you of salvation, and that from God" (from Philippians 1:27ff.)

They, standing fast, confronted, opposed and fought against the adversaries. THEY DID NOT JOIN THEM!

ANY CHURCH belonging to, having fellowship with, tied into the dock by this WCC is in the same position as the Anglicans with their resurrection laxity, re-introducing a NEW AUTHORITY, that of the Church, here the Council, to destroy the integrity of the faith by ALLOWING AS THE WORK OF FELLOWS IN THE FAITH, what is devastatingly, obviously, grossly and outrageously contrary to it.
If, dear reader, you are drawn to this death, let me warn you keenly against it. What worker likes to see the team in leprosy, in syphilis, and who can see a church or its people drawn to false and spurious alliances, to devious grotesqueries of doctrine as in the WCC, without an appeal, a warning and an exhortation: "COME OUT OF HER!" (Revelation 18:4).

"Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues. For her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities" -

from Revelation 18:4-5.

IF for ANY reason, you prefer the ways of flesh to those of God, consider whose you are, what you and where you are, and why others can sacrifice life itself for the Lord, while you dally in this Sodom of unspirituality, this spiritual city to be destroyed, its very acme and place marked out, against which the apostles warned in greatest detail and dynamic, repeatedly. Its forbears reach back to Babylon, its face of death to the 7 hills of Rome, and its fate is sealed. It is here now. It is time for you to leave, and take up your Cross and follow HIM!

There is no other leader, and no church which so presumes is worthy of respect, let alone fidelity (cf. Revelation 2:5, 3:2-3,16-18). Unless you HATE YOUR OWN LIFE ALSO, YOU CANNOT BE MY DISCIPLE - SAID THE LORD JESUS (LUKE 14:26); AND REMEMBER THIS, JESUS IS LORD, HOWEVER LORDLY MEN AND THEIR INSTITUTIONS MAY BECOME; AND WHAT DOES NOT FOLLOW HIM IS THE BUTT OF ANOTHER.

SEEING THINGS IN THE WORD

#First:

It is valuable to hear the word of God,
here Jeremiah 23:16-29:

Thus says the Lord of hosts:

"Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you.
They make you worthless.
They speak a vision of their own heart,
Not from the mouth of the LORD.
They continually say to those who despise Me,
The LORD has said,
'You shall have peace';
And to everyone who walks according to the dictates of his own heart, they say,
'No evil shall come upon you.'

"For who has stood in the counsel of the LORD,
And has perceived and heard His word ?
Who has marked His word and heard it ?
A whirlwind of the LORD has gone forth in fury -
A violent whirlwind!
It will fall violently on the head of the wicked.
The anger of the LORD will not turn back
Until He has executed and performed the thoughts of His heart.
In the latter days you will understand it perfectly.

"I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran.
I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied.
But if they had stood in My counsel,
And had caused My people to hear My words,
Then they would have turned them from their evil way
And from the evil of their doings.

"Am I a God near at hand," says the LORD,
"And not a God afar off ?
Can anyone hid himself in secret places,
So I shall not see him ?
Do I not fill heaven and earth," says the LORD.

"I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name, saying,
'I have dreamed, I have dreamed!'

"How long will this be in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies ?
Indeed, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart,
who try to make My people forget My name by their dreams,
which everyone tells his neighbour, as their fathers forgot My name for Baal.

"The prophet who has a dream, let him tell a dream;
And he who has My word, let him speak My word faithfully.
What is the chaff to the wheat," says the LORD.
"Is not My word like a fire ," says the LORD,
"And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces."

Christianity is not a social game but a spiritual calling.

## Second, the placement and path of the just

For James and Justification, first see SMR pp. 521 (background) and 525, dealing with Luther, Rome and the inspired concepts throughout the Bible.

The case is basically simple: James' topic is bogus and true faith. His concern is authenticity in what is claimed as one's own, that is, faith. Faith has to be authenticated, made manifest, vindicated, expressed sui generis in the works which, for what is a living function, are perfectly sure to follow, to happen, given time. Paul deals with justifying the man; James with justifying the faith. James is against purely (or impurely) nominal faith. Paul is concerned at the transition which faith that is alive, will bring. One is about status, one about function.

One is about a man before God, the other about faith before men, and indeed, before God.
One is about getting what it brings; the other about bringing what it gets.

One is to justify the man (named sinner); the other is justify the claim (of faith), to allocate the expectations. Accordingly, with supreme and withering satire, James makes it clear that while the gift, like all good and perfect gifts, is from God alone (James 1:17), yet just since it is so perfect, its work will be impossible to hide. The car given you will drive well. You can go places in it. If you call a wheel barrow a car, it will not take you on vacation. That is nominal. If you get a good car, it will go: that is phenomenal. One is verbal, the other vital, one is confusion, the other profusion.

In the claim of his name (as Christian), says James, a man will be justified, or vindicated, or attested - as indeed was Job, though only when he was scarified to the point of total reliance on his divine redeemer (Job 19).

In the fame of His name (as Saviour), says Paul, a man will be justified, being redeemed. Redemption is free (Romans 3:25ff.), says Paul; free redemption is functional, says James.

Their topics are only marginally related, but where they intersect (verbally), one has to realise the beautiful liberty of the word of God.

Thus:

James uses the example of
Abraham being justified by faith (as per Paul)
as an exhibit of authentic faith (as per James),
in view of what Abraham did subsequent to this stated justification - as Genesis 22:9.

Not withholding his only son,
a subsequent event to his being justified by God in His sight, as the Bible shows explicitly,
was justifying its nominee as genuine.

But as to that nominee, that child and servant of God, that friend of God, that justified man as he was announced to be by God Himself (Genesis 15:6), he first was planted, then grew (cf. Isaiah 61:3, Matthew 15:13). He first was accounted righteous, and then acted it. His was a faith that works. Faith, says James, always works, because living things have this feature: they function as alive.

Indeed, Christ Himself was speaking just on this, stating that good trees bring forth good fruit, though to be planted, that is an act of the Father Himself on the one concerned (Matthew 15:13, 7:17-18): you are planted, grow and bear in that order. And you do the last because God did the first. Christ is quite emphatic: A GOOD TREE CANNOT bring forth evil fruit. So its genesis is one thing; its execution is another. It is not planted because it bears fruit; it bears fruit because it is planted. It does not achieve status through results, it achieves results through the dynamic actualities of what IT IS, and that is a product (or in the negative case, NOT a product) of the Father's own work in planting.

So John shows this word of Christ: "ALL whom the Father gives me will COME to me" -John 6:37, while he who SEES the Son and believes HAS eternal life (6:40), and as to that, "No man knows the Son except the Father, and no man knows the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son will reveal him" - and the "will reveal" is "wills to reveal", in the Greek. See The Kingdom of Heaven 4, and SMR Appendix B. These things are GIVEN, by determination from above. That does not evacuate Christ from predestination (I Timothy 2:1-6), or predestination from love (I John 4:77-8); but it does mean that sin is not a reagent in salvation
(I Cor. 2:14).

This being so, we can see how basically simple it is. Topics intersect, phrases focus various elements. Understand the substance and the phrases are simple. Like a parrot, concentrate on the phrases, and like a parrot, you will understand little. God has given us understanding in order to use it. The very charm of this feature is its lordly simplicity.

Faith, says James, is fulfilled in works; and indeed, it is started in them. It is just a question of whose works.

It is started in the heart of the believer by the works of Christ, which brings to him the salvation whereby he can know anything of the power and face of God, a salvation status ineffable, certain, ineffaceable (I John 4:14).

It is effected in the works of the believer, dynamised by the Lord within His child, in the new and ineradicable position now accorded him (I John 3:9), as a child of God.

THAT is how the children behave (I John 3:7-10).
THIS is how they become children (John 3:1-19).

God in Genesis speaks of Abraham.

Of ABRAHAM, first it is shown how he became a true, justified child of God;
and then it is revealed how he went on to show how a non-bogus faith lives up to its Lord, since it trusts in Him.

John declares just the same. Practising sin is not an option for the child of God: SIN he will, live by it, he will not (I John 1:7-2:22). Accidents happen, but no reasonable drive will DRIVE BY ACCIDENTS.

WHY does the Christian not LIVE IN SIN, why does righteousness become like a front lawn in suburbia, something normally well-kept: well because he lives there.

WHOEVER IS BORN OF GOD, says John perfectly directly, DOES NOT PRACTISE SIN.
Why ? John at once in 6 words answers: BECAUSE HIS SEED REMAINS IN HIM.
And that ? It is BECAUSE HE IS BORN OF GOD.

It is a question of operational reality, not conditional ground for being planted!

God's 'seed', spiritual operations in a person, to change the soul and life into that of a Christian person, child of God, sealed by the Spirit (Ephesians 1:13), with certain inheritance in Christ (1:11) already obtained, justified by faith, brought by one Spirit in one body in Christ (I Cor. 12:13): this gives the person a name. As a result, says John the apostle, HE CANNOT PRACTISE SIN.

Confusing cause and effect is a relatively simple error. There is a highly complex reason for it in this case. It is necessary if Rome is to live. However, since it is wholly wrong, and has been shown so, these 400 years and more, for the reasons given for centuries, and such as are provided briefly here and in SMR pp. 525ff., it is sure that Rome as the Roman Catholic base will end, just as Revelation 17ff. says will be the case. On this, see SMR pp. 946ff., Biblical Blessings Ch.2, pp.21ff..

See also on the bodily resurrection, the following.

Great Execrations, Great Enervations, Greater Grace Ch. 7;

Barbs, Arrows and Balms Appendix 3,

Biblical Blessings Ch. 15, Extended Endnote 2,

Acme, Alpha and Omega: Jesus Christ 11,

With Heart and Soul, Mind and Strength Ch. 3,

The Magnificence of the Messiah, Endnote 1,

Dastardly Dynamics, Delirious Daubs,
Wandering Woes, Bleary Theories and Immovable Faith Ch. 11,

SMR Ch. 6,

Bible Translations, Section 14,

Joyful Jottings 25,

Things Old and New Ch. 2, Excursion 2A;

Light of Dawn Ch. 3,

Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes
and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth Ch. 2;

Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 5, 6,

Ancient Words, Modern Events Ch. 8 (on resurrection and Lazarus, yes and both with Jerusalem);

contrasting Greek bodily terms - Let God be God! Ch. 2

is

unlimited in love,
limited in attainment,
pure in disposition,
unselfish in satisfaction
glorious in liberty,
the drastic donation of God

It is intensely sad that some do not realise what is so plain in the word of God, that HE has paid entirely, remorselessly, adequately, eternal in His eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12), that He became a curse for us who believe, was offered to all as a curse for those who would believe (Galatians 3), so fulfilling the Old Testament specifications and providing a cover for what had no cover (Matthew 20:28), and a satisfaction for what being irreconciled, was unredeemed, and being lost in its lassitudes, was naked of divine protection. They do not see that in Him is the anchor for the soul, set in the glory of God His Father, on which all salvation rests, and that He is such for each one of His children (Hebrews 6:19), any one of whom, chose whom you will of these, has eternal life and will not perish (John 10:9,27-28).

While there is NO substitute for grace (Ephesians 2:8), there IS a substitute for every one who receives Him (John 1:12, John 3:15-17), and He so becomes a substitute not for the believing sinner who sins, for sin has no part in Him, but as sin bearer for the guilt and disgrace, the contempt and the contumely, the desecration and the dumping, to which sin brings anyone who is not covered before the aweful face of the holy God. For those healed, Isaiah indicates, the sin of ALL of them is laid upon Him, and it is HE who justifies by His knowledge, He who was cut off from the land of the living, by whose stripes our alienation and rejection as sinners is covered. In our discovery is His disgrace, and in His disgrace is our glory, for "God forbid that I should glory except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world!" (Galatians 6:14).

When it says of His people, that He became a curse for them (Galatians 3), that He paid the ransom for them (Matthew 20:28), that He provided eternal redemption for them (Hebrews 9:12), that He bore our sins on the tree (I Peter 2), that He died the just for the unjust (I Peter 3:18), that He laid down His life for the sheep (John 10), that He delivered Him up for us all, who thus receive all things, that it is God Himself who ransoms (Hosea 13:14), and that as Moses help up the bronze serpent to cover the poison through mercy and faith, for those who looked believing, so that Christ covered the poison of sin for those who look by faith to Him: it means it.

For in this context , we are merely seeing what the Bible says, and this is indisputable. If you want to have a theory about what you deem that it ought to have said, or would have said or could have said or even should have said, this is not here even relevant. This is what it DID say in language so intensely focussed, that not in one, not in two but in multiple manners it conveys many things, but one thing continually: He died, substitute, target, victim, receptor of the curse for sin, guilt bearer, for man; and man who has nothing to contribute (Ephesians 2), receives THEREFORE all things and eternal life among them, since it is CONDITIONAL on nothing, and it is received by faith AS A GIFT (Romans 6:23) of an eternal character (Hebrews 9:12, John 5:24, 6:50ff., I John 5:12ff.).

The island can be made by pouring sand in the sea from some far-off mound, perhaps; but that is another story of man making his own religion. Here we are simply looking at God showing HIS religion for man, by prescription, and this is it. The ONE GOD who will HIMSELF pay the ransom, and BECOME the plague of death as He says in Hosea, has done so. BEING trinity, He is able to do this. Christ BEING divine, is able to bear this and breach birth from death, which could not hold that eternal being to whom eternity is the inalienable birth rite (Acts 2).

While His grace does not extend to what fidgets and fusses, and does not believe, for faith is not fuss but confidence, any more than waters rushing down a stream's bed, inexorably flush out every low lying swamp: yet where He goes there is health and salvation, as you see in Ezekiel 47 (cf. Biblical Blessings Ch. 5).

Thus, in that symbolism of the waters of the Spirit of God proceeding from the altar of the Temple, "everything will live, wherever the water goes", and again, where the waters go, "they shall be healed".

It is as in John 4:14, where the water of the Spirit may be received through faith in the Messiah, and the one who drinks of that water will never thirst again: nor is the tense present continuous. If you once so drink, you will never thirst again; if you once come to THIS water, the case is consciously utterly contrary to the former coming and going: drink of this, and no more of that.

There is a certain abundance. Indeed, to revert to the woman of Samaria as in John 4, the one who drinks of the water which Christ will not only never thirst again,

The abundance is even in the midst of exuberance. The water springs up to eternal life; it does not trickle up. The case is this, that NOT ONLY will there be this abundance IN life, it is TO ETERNAL LIFE; and not only will this water if once taken, by a thirst quencher but NEVER AGAIN will the one who so drinks thirst. Hell is thirsty.

Time to Satisfy the Thirst in Truth,
not Vaporise Water in the Heat of Unholy Desire

It is time therefore now to satisfy this thirst by faith in Him, not opinion-making, not insurance practice, but faith!

Thus in Isaiah 53, we find not only that the "all" who are healed are called "we", but that this same "we" in the accusative case becoming "us" appears in verse 6: "And the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all." ALL who are healed, are those in their entirety, whose iniquity is laid on Him. IF it is, THEN you are healed. Not only, moreover, is this so. In Isaiah 53:11, the same chapter, we find that there is a reason for all of this.

What knowledge ? It has just before declared that "He shall see the labour of His soul and be satisfied." What IS the labour of His soul ? It has been described above, in His being rejected, despised, chastised, and becoming the butt for sin, stricken for the transgression of His people. In this there is experience, paid in the coin of life. Thus does He justify many: not all, for not all are healed, and as to those who are healed, it is STATED that it is these whose iniquity is laid on Him.

But what is the mode by which, the ground on which He justifies. To be sure, it is by His knowledge, and all that He suffered is part of this.

It is thus established that it is by bearing their iniquities that He justifies many. They are both healed and justified whose iniquities He bears. They indeed become children of God, for those who become His are said to be His 'seed', in lieu of ordinary children. To be a child of God in this spiritual sense, which is the express and explicit context, is to be made back into His image, and to be subject to His ownership, as active Father and eternal God. It is as in I John 3:9: the one begotten of God has His seed remain in him. There can be no alteration is this.

Thus does Romans 8:30ff. tell us this: that whom He justified, those He glorified, this being spelled out in Romans 8:17, those to be heirs and glorified together with Christ.

The method, then, by which Christ is declared to justify is that of bearing iniquities of those concerned, whose justification is the result of this. There is no other means, method or criterion. IF He bears your iniquities, THEN you are justified. Nothing of that kind can occur without that result. Payment in reality without this product is excluded. The REASON for the justification of many is the bearing of their iniquities by the Messiah. This is what accounts for it. It is the sufficient cause.

It is also the necessary cause (Isaiah 55), for there is no other way (cf. Acts 4:11-12). Nor is it an option, but a necessity, as Peter declares on that same occasion.

Healing, then, and justification alike are the certain consequences of His bearing of iniquities, and this is stated in its coverage on each point, once and then again. It is a double barreled fire to unbelief.

Therefore, it is in accord with this that we read in Romans 8:32, that IF it can be said of anyone that Christ was delivered up for His offences, THEN it is true that ALL THINGS are His, including Christ. This would of course include heaven, not the least of things, peace and pardon. While the offering of sacrifice had always been FOR all the people, but by no means assumed to reach all (cf. Deuteronomy 29:19ff.). It is FOR and TO FAITH! It always is, must be; for the just shall live by faith.

Thus in I John 2, there is the generic for the sacrificial offering as on the day of the atonement, when the lamb is the propitiation not only for one but for all; but for none except by faith, being an offering sufficient and apt and adapted, but not valid until received, as Deuteronomy makes so clear. The transaction is null except to faith, is provided for and to faith, outrageously sufficient in divine gracious liberality, but utterly irrelevant to non-faith, being then like the singing of the nightingale to the deaf ear.

When however it is truly said that He has been offered up for the deliverance of some soul, so that it is not a present possibility but a past fact, and when it is to the people, the church of God defined by faith, to which reference is made, then Christ being delivered up for us all, MUST bring with Him ALL things, as in Romans 8:32. How would it be otherwise! Paul exclaims.

That is the simple distinction between the general relevance and power of the offering, and the particular application with results of the same. It is this which Paul is using, and which Isaiah in exact parallel proclaims. It is MANY who are justified; it is ALL whose sins He has borne who are justified. It is "we" who are healed; and as to "us", He bears our iniquities. Healing, bearing, justification are one venue, and nothing but rejection of the word of God written, the Bible, can split them.

If you can say, "He was delivered up for my offences" in truth, then all things are yours.

If you mean that He is the sacrificial offering, this implies nothing for you; for it is an objective historical fact that He was so offered, according to the forecast Gospel in its forecast mould, means and data. The general is then irrelevant till faith comes. When you mean that He was delivered up for your sins, then the general becomes applied, and the application has all of heaven entailed.

Thus the PAYMENT is the assurance; it is not some mighty faith which is to fight it out for it. A grain of mustard seed faith is enough to move mountains, Christ has assured us (Mark 11). It is simply the actual reception by faith of the reality of His being delivered up for your sins, as the Saviour sent from the Father, and resurrected in authentication, His very body becoming sin for you, and His raising the attestation of the acceptance of the same (as in Romans 10:9 with I Corinthians 15, Luke 24), of who He is, the Son of the living God, His very equal (John 8:58, Philippians 2), so that in HIM your trust is in GOD, and none less: it is this which is the basis of all salvation, which neither stutters nor fails. For HIS sheep do not, assuredly not perish (John 10:27-28), and who are these sheep ?

Why so liberal, with such a keen edge for eternal gratitude is His grace, that these are those who ENTER by HIM as the door into the fold! (John 10:9).

It is not some special selection of favour for the likeable or the mighty; ALL who so enter are His, paid for and eternally kept. It is not that God failed to love some enough to save them, for the word of God explicitly rejects such a proposition (Colossians 1:19ff., John 3:16ff., I Timothy 2, Jeremiah 1-13 cf. Ch. 2 above); it is rather that He who would have all to be healed, does not use force, nor does He rely on the active work of the will of man (John 1:12). Knowing who are His, though desiring all, He brings them home.

Knowing this love, then, a man or woman or child has only so to COME, and that attests the eternal fact of salvation known before the world so much as commenced (Ephesians 1:4).

There is neither excuse for equivocation (as with Ahaz - Isaiah 7:1ff., not wanting to 'tempt' the Lord by accepting His free offer!), nor ground for fear, for He does not extinguish the smoking flax, in love conserving the smallest flame that burns with faith.

Some may pipe up about their being saved, and nauseously seek to bring others into their same condemnation, by tuning their lyre to such words, being liars and frauds, false teachers and prophets, who deny this Lord 'who bought them' (cf. Psalm 82:6-7). Woeful are such words of unfaith as one might find in one famous evangelist who having told many others of his flaming life in the Lord, then denies Him utterly. These bring, as II Peter 2:1 tells us, upon themselves swift destruction, bringing in destructive heresies. Such may indeed be blotted out from the book of life, the contemporary files of the visible church; and never were they entered into that eternal book, which is determinative, which was written before time, and from which nothing either is or could ever be eradicated (II Timothy 1, Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:29ff.).

This is the way of Balaam, who could scarcely SAY enough about his relationship to the Lord, his fidelity and his faith; but who did not believe, and HENCE was prone to fall into the fraudulent position of seeking to prophesy against what he found to be blessed, namely Israel. Let not such imagine any blessing for themselves (cf. James 1:7-8). Near with their lips, they are far in their hearts (Isaiah 29:13).

Their resounding words may well be remembered in contrast to their foul deeds and devious doctrines. As to them, the word of the Lord applies,

Thus, sins are either with you, by faith, or with Him, by faith, and if with you, you bear them, carry them, have the weight of them, like a super-fat person of 40 stone, and as if by your own bequest to your own self, die with them. That is the word of the Lord, to those who are faced with the Gospel, as were those noted here, in the case of John 8:24.

Sin is transferred by faith, is met by His knowledge, covered by His bearing, through which HE justifies ALL such, who are many; and these, it is they who are healed, who come with everlasting joy upon their heads (as in Isaiah 51:11), having received everlasting redemption (Hebrews 9:12), secured to them by the One within the veil, or more directly, in heaven who is their anchorage, to whom they have fled for refuge (Hebrews 6:18-20).

"Both sure and steadfast" is this anchor, who in Person is the Shepherd who declares, "they will never perish", for they are "the heirs of promise" (Hebrews 6:17, Romans 15, Isaiah 49:6, 42:6, Psalm 67), to whom His promise is confirmed by an oath as Hebrews demonstrates.

Moreover, it is for all, as in the Melchizedek symbolism following, for this man is seen as having no Levitical background, ensuring for all the entire blessing of God, through His reception. It is those who eagerly await His appearing for whom He comes a second time (Hebrews 9:27-28), apart from sin for salvation; it is those who have loved His appearing (II Timothy 4:8): it is these who by ONE OFFERING are both sanctified and perfected forever (Hebrews 10,10,14), heirs of salvation, irrevocably attached to their anchor who is higher than the heavens, enabling those who are called to receive the promise of the eternal inheritance (Hebrews 9:15). .

By no means heirs are those who seek to hijack the faith, invent destructive heresies, even denying the Lord to whom they otherwise would wish to appear akin. You apply to or deny the Lord, in the end. Some have no faith, but only fickleness.

The one who believes and has believed in Him, however, as I Peter 1:5ff. tells us, where fickleness is not the point, but actual faith, where false prophets are not in view but true disciples, simple believers and receivers of the Lord according to His word by the power of His Spirit, born: these are KEPT by the POWER of GOD to salvation, having a place in heaven RESERVED for them. Eagerly therefore await this, for this is the final marvel of grace, that it KEEPS those who have come by faith to Him, these being even predestinated.

^"Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me His prisoner,
but share with me in the sufferings for the gospel according to the power of God,
who has saved us and called us with a holy calling,
not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace
which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began,
but has now been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ,
who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel,
to which I was appointed a preacher, an apostle, and a teacher of the Gentiles.

^"For this reason I also suffer these things; nevertheless I am not ashamed,
for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded
that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day."

To the believing Timothy, and of those who believe, Paul declares here that they have been saved, and that their holy calling was given to them in Christ before time began, one according to His own purpose and grace. Rooted in foreknowledge by His own infinite penetration of all things, realised in present salvation, it is a matter of a predestined called where grace is triumphant. The abolition of death is its inheritance, immortality is its place, the work of redemption is its foundation, being everlasting and obtained, so that human works are irrelevant, whether in trying or striving or training; but they DO result.

Thus we “suffer these things”, as athletes in training, but knowing the establishment full well to which they belong, where time is eclipsed, which reaches into time, and takes its own with it, to eternity where the image of man knows its consummation, death being no longer relevant, just as the curse (Revelation 21-22), is dismissed from the entirety of life, whether as internal or external environment (cf. Romans 8:17ff.). So does this consistency and harmony, this love and irony, this repudiation and consolation, this brilliant truth in all its fountains, this heartland of inspiration, this veritable word of God disclose itself in its purity, apply itself in its Messiah, and then apply again in all His words, which build people, direct His church, fulfil promises, perform in history like a daring acrobat, never at a loss, doing the impossible.

Gratitude for this rush of grace, is like wonder at the abundant thrust of the vast waterfalls which surge in splendour, dazzling in magnificence, delightful in exuberance, untamed and untouched, launched by power, manifestly the delight of the creation. If this is delight to the soul, what then is that at the spectacle and the power, the presence and the friendship found in the faith of Christ, the Christ of faith, the jutting joy of the Lord, who communicates His own joy, which no man can take from the child of God (John 16:22).

Small wonder John is dynamic in his response in I John 1, and that he insists that we realise to the full, that eternity is now ours (I John 5:11-12), from Him who gave what it took, and takes us to be with Him, now as companions in the march of faith. Now we walk; then we proceed as pilgrims come home to a better city on better foundations, having seen with the eye of faith, what then becomes the visibility for which vision sought, guaranteed by God, governed by grace, where His people see His face (I Corinthians 13, Revelation 21-22).

The atonement by God for man is implacable in clarity, immovable in charity and indefeasible in certainty

It is as clear as a vast ocean liner pulling into the wharf, and only those who will not look, do not see, for it is looming in lordliness, clear in expression and moving with power to the point.

Nevertheless, it is not obtained by routine, ceremony or psychic thrust,
but by the will of God to faith (John 1:12 - cf. Questions and Answers 2).

The harmony is to avoid the lassitude of mere form, and the inexactitude of mere symbols self-invented, but to receive Christ, as symbolised but in FACT, and to believe in Him, not by proxy of persons or positions, but as He has promised, and in His terms; for these are as necessary as it is to marry the person, and not the ceremony, and to love and trust that person, and not the popular beliefs this way or that.

With God, proxy persons are outrageous (I Timothy 2, John 10), for as HE DID IT HIMSELF, so we must BELIEVE OURSELVES, and not let a tradition, a church, a government, a book, believe for us. We entrust ourselves to Him who died and rose again in body, creating a regenerated spirit in His people, now born with His spiritual genetics as a gift, in created form, and we actively trust Him to BE and to DO what He has said. Others may introduce us, teach us, train us, but ONLY HE can save us (Acts 4:11-12).

In Hosea 13:14 we see that God determined that in this matter of redemption and accounting for death in meeting its impact in His own Being, He would do it Himself, PERSONALLY. NONE OTHER would suffice. HE would do it, and on Him would the impact come. When Jesus Christ came, God manifest, in the flesh, in the form of a servant, as foretold and predicted (Isaiah 48:16, Psalm 45, Zechariah 12:10, Psalm 2), now present, He declared something which accorded intimately with this. "I lay down My life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again."

As Hosea indicated, it is God who declared to death, that HE would be its plagues, and to the grave, that He would be its destruction. In this way, Christ, who as seen in John 8:58, declared this of Himself, "Before Abraham, I am!", noting that Abraham rejoiced to see the day of His advent, is showing that same absolute irresistibility and liberty of God. Sent as Saviour, He humbles Himself as man; coming to save, He is delighted to give (cf. Psalm 40). Bearing in heart before the sin burden hits, He shudders in horror (Hebrews 5:7, Luke 22:39ff.); bearing in historic fact, He finds the severance sin brings, vicariously but none the less for that (Matthew 27:46). In that usual supreme sufficiency of God, He had taken pains to exhibit these pangs, that we might believe, a millenium before in Psalm 22 through the mouth of David the regal prophet. "My God, My God why have You forsaken Me!)

This illustrates the point that foreknowledge on the part of deity in no ways reduces the agony, the delight, the reality of the actual, the historical when as last time ushers it into the space of this earth. Rather it ensures the utterness of that reality.

In no way did Christ suffer the less, just as an actual operation is not less painful because you knew it would be agonising, for foreknowing; but for all that, with the precision of the horror well known beforehand, in regal justice, He took the rap, the reality of the guilt of sin vicariously, substituting for sinners and enabling their release from debt, condemnation and exclusion alike by His just action in dying the just, for the unjust, to bring us to God (I Peter 3:18). The price of ransom was thus twofold, indeed threefold.

First, there is the actual fact of His taking the form of a servant, though Himself by nature in the form of God, and doing the work, which involved living without sin (I Peter 2:22-25), and then acting as a sacrifice for the sins of others. Then there is the experience of it, both in prelude, at Gethsemane and in finality, at Golgotha (cf. Hebrews 9:12,22-28). Thirdly, there is the determination and anguish of the Father, who so sends His most beloved Son, incarnate, the Word eternal into the world temporal, to secure sons and daughters for eternity.

It is for this reason that in this same Hosea 13:14, God declares, as He pledges Himself in person to meet the requirements of REDEMPTION, that "pity will be hidden from My eyes." Now for whom is this prospective pity, to which He will not yield, to be shown ? It is not something He avoids for MAN, since to man is the whole gift being made! It is therefore for His own heart and that of His Son incarnate; for He will not leave the love which being His own essential being, moves Him to sacrifice for sinners, even to the point of BEING the ransom made available for all (Matthew 20:28), as in I John 2:2. What sort of a ransom ? It is that of the "Lamb which takes away the sin of the world," as John the Baptist declared, as seen in John 1:29.

It is that of Him who knew no sin, but became sin for us (II Corinthians 5:17ff., I Peter 2), so that He might reconcile many to Himself, "not imputing their trespasses to them" (II Corl. 5:19), but to Himself (II Cor. 5:21, Isaiah 53:6). So did He bring many children to glory (Hebrews 2). In a figure He was like the bronze serpent, held up as a sign for faith, that by it God might heal the poison, in that case physical, of snake bite as in Numbers. Not in themselves, but through faith in what this signified did pardon come for the sin which brought the bite into play and into place in their lives! He became, as Galatians 3 tells us, a curse for us. His righrteouenss, as Romans 5 tells us, is a gift to us, and our sin is a deposit with Him who was delivered up for all (Romans 8:32), and this as a substitionary offering, a ransom (I Timothy 2:6). In this last verse, the term is even stronger, being in Greek antilutron.

All this was most clear from Moses, and indeed presented from the first. Thus the goat on which the sin of the people, typical of the Redeemer, the one on which even by laying on of hands the sin was placed as pictorial repository for it, was sent into the wilderness, an accursed thing. The presenter of sin gained the pardon, the goat the place of sin-bearer. The bull also used in this ceremonial situation, was slain as a sin-offering, so that the sending away of the redeeming one is on the one hand a separation, and the burning of the bull on the other, is a cremation for sin. Thus does the evil of iniquity move in symbol form sinner to sacrifice; the one loses it, that the other might gain.(Leviticus 16:22-27).

As to the goat sent away, ""The goat shall bear on itself all the iniquities to an uninhabited land,: while the blood of the creatures slain is sprinkled, the manner for purification (as in John 3, Hebrews 10) on the mercy seat. That was a marvel in gold where the blood was put, over which the wings of heavenly creatures indicated that mercy sent from heaven could thus arrive, at the sight of the blood, of the imputation of sin to a sacrifice, so enabling those who believed in Israel, to escape. It did not of course apply to hypocrites (Deuteronomy 29:19ff.).

This was the pictorial presentation for more than a millenium, which Isaiah interpreted so readily in Isaiah 49-55, and in particular in his dissertation of Isaiah 53, indicating that although Christ was disesteemed, conceived of as smitten by God, by unbelieving Israel, "yet He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement for our peace was upon Him." In Hebrews, in great depth, the matter is presented that now ONCE in the end of the age, Christ was presented, NOT that He should suffer often, but now ONCE was He given to "put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself". Just as man in general has death and then judgment, so Christ died for us, to bear the sins of many. Just as He rose, however, so will He return, apart from sin, in glorious majesty and holiness, for His people (cf. I Thessalonians 4, Matthew 24).

Sin bearing is not new; it is not merely figurative, but a build-up to the time when its message was applied by and upon the Message-Bearer, who became the SIN-BEARER, partaking of the penal consequences of man's sin in an agony and horror so terrible that once for all it makes the palsy-walsy rubbish which some seek to have replace the abysmal turpitude of sin and the abhorrent flagrancy of it, an insult of the highest order to the God who gave, who bore and who experienced the entirety of its ruin in His passion and through His compassion. Thus "through His knowledge He shall justify many!" And what knowledge is that ? It is this: it is a knowledged attributed to Him in this focus, on one ground: "He shall bear their iniquities."

There is a beauty in the friendship of God, such as Abraham had, and Christ spoke of to the apostles (John 15:15). It is however not a piety of presumption but purging, and not a focus for inane fellowship, but chaste grace.

THE JUDGE SUMMING UP FOR JUDGMENT:
IT IS GOOD TO LISTEN,
LEAVING SHOVE FOR LOVE,
AND SHAN’T FOR WILL!

The Indolent Vineyard, Rapacity for Riches,
Dreamy Delinquents, Ignorant Savants,
Sin Breeders, God Mockers and Moral Transvestites

For some, it is perhaps difficult to remember the office of love, and in particular, the love of God. We hear so much about number 1, oneself, one’s State or one’s firm or nation, as if to be FIRST was better than to make a good fist of something, that it is almost forgotten that the love of God is far from love-ins, and is the very strength of the fibre and function of mankind. Without it, we would long ago simply have been deleted.

Thus in Isaiah 5 we find, even in the midst of incredible seeming hypocrisy and self-seeking injustice in Israel, the fact that God had “A Song of my Beloved, regarding His vineyard.” It is to His well beloved the vineyard is given, and it is He who now has it, and has it AS the well-beloved! Alas, as to His people, who ARE the vineyard (5:7), He declares this:

"Because they have rejected the law of he LORD of hosts,
and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel,
therefore the anger of the LORD is aroused against His people..."

We are reminded of Isaiah 30:8ff., indeed where the very essence of the nation has become one of rebellion!

To be sure, the Beloved whose vineyard it is, is the Well-Beloved, the Son of God (Mark 12:1ff., Isaiah 42:1ff), the covenant to come (Isaiah 49:6), and the King of Israel, as even Pilate began to see. It is He who as Jehovah had brought Israel to greatness, under David. But in that very love had He done it, to which the nation in so much and so many, had not responded.

It had been offered, pressed, presented, in appeals innumerable. Indeed, as you read in the day of Moses writing from the Lord in Deuteronomy 7: “You are .. a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people…”

The grace of God found Abraham and in His truth He made promises (Genesis 12, 17). Moses presented the two sides even though Israel had already equivocated, as seen in Deuteronomy 27-29, where blessings and curses were read from two different mounts, to distinguish them categorically. But nothing ever breaks the promises of God (cf. Ezekiel 36:22).

In Isaiah 5, then, long after those earlier times, God traces the enormous labours and planning to make an excellent vineyard – and ISRAEL WAS that vineyard; and then declares this:

“What will I do with My vineyard ?” He rhetorically asks. The results for poor Israel are increasingly like, in kind at least, what that recidivist Gentile world is now finding as it makes endless endeavours to minimise its well-structured rebuke, as the wrath of God increases. Look at Darfur: is that not enough! Is there not "a cry!" Do they imagine that God is deaf, that do such things ? Do they ignore the humbling of Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein ? Does the grinding of the mill of God deceive them, that they think it has now grating!

Darfur ? It however is merely a token of Islamic persecution, of corruption and hearts which have something to teach granite for hardness! What of the rest of this writhing, striving, sin-sodden series of salacious, seized, diseased sites where tyranny rules, as in Zimbabwe, where folly raises its head like a Gorgon monster, as in some Western nations, which make morals a malady, and untruth a requirement, whether by law, or by false teaching times. Instead of asking, Why are we smitten ? this world needs to ask, When will we cease in indolent religious arrogance, ethical disasters and insensitivity as a virtual cult, while personal comfort is a quest, to ask for judgments of which the present series is merely a preliminary!

At times, it is found, yes it proclaims itself boldly to be its own, and none shall master it. In what were once churches (just as Israel was, in ancient times, once a nation of glory in the Lord), at times in what had the semblance of righteous nations, there is a shuffling off of spirituality, a scuffing of autonomous feet. Holland once so religious, is now a leader in immorality, where even euthanasia is taking the wings so long foreseen. England is taking orders from a morally diseased Europe (cf. Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Ch. 3). In Canada, male marriages appear part of the fabric, while an Episcopal Church in the USA is finding it rather too much to abstain from blessing male unions, and to desist from making homosexual BISHOPS!

So with ancient Israel a prototype, the Gentile world avidly follows that corruption, seemingly indifferent to the plight which followed for Israel, when it reached its climax in their killing of their King; which, in spirit, is wrought by so many in so many lands now, as they drift with remorseless indifference, to a moral vacuum, filled now increasingly with legal violence to subdue all objection, and hearts that stone might envy.

Thus we see in the prototype situation, in Isaiah, some withering words, few here, but deeply incisive.

Indeed, the Lord says this: “He looked for justice, but behold, oppression; for righteousness, but behold, a cry” (Isaiah 5:7). And what a cry ascends to heaven as man destroys every bridge he can see, to reach it. The results, the Lord indicated in that day, were coming. They came… ! He is no respecter of persons. That is the prototype.

Some make a sport of adding field to field, callowly increasing their net wealth, but their affliction comes.

This reminds us of recent statements about the possible time when seaside residences will become virtually worthless, because of salt and rising tides, storms and general disorder. What is to be found ? This: “The harp and the strings … wine in their flasks, but they do not regard the work of the Lord, nor the operation of His hands.”

They see chances for pleasure and profit, but not the integral meaning of designs, in the artful and brilliant contrivances of which, in the flight of birds, their migration or our own intricate anatomy, there is need to consider: WHY did God make it ? WHAT am I supposed to do ? Find God and live in Him, that is what, and cease pretending. England loved to pretend that Hitler didn’t really ‘mean it’, until the bombs fell. He did. They found out. They did not consider the operation of his hands. Now as then, there are millions, billions, who do not consider what God has done, is doing and what is to come and WHY! Hitler ? He went; God remains (Zechariah 9:7, Psalm 90:1, 102:25-28).

Already in Israel, by Isaiah’s day, there had been defeats and captivity. Indeed, Israel in the North had already gone into another land, beaten, broken, and not merely exiled from their land, but removed to outposts of an empire, not their own! So have peace and purity, righteousness and morality in this our land been far removed; and stress, tension, inward fatigue because of soiled intentions and aspirations, boldness of appetite, and disregard of God, in name or even more in commandments and design specifications: these have come like self-induced fog.

Depression becomes a major disease, and confusion is like a cloud cover to cut out the light of the sun, that spiritual sun, Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace and Counsellor for man, who without Him, is as lively in wisdom as rampaging buffalo herd. How many nations seem keen to imitate the same rampaging heedlessness, in the ferment of vinous spirits, and seething ignorance of heart!

What did God say about this, in Isaiah’s day ? It was this. “Therefore My people have gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge…” That is one reason why your pastor has put up on the Web his 135 volume work on the word and work of the Lord, on His truth and the assurance of its magnificence and necessity for man. Ignorance festers, like a wound not anointed with oil! While this lèse-majesté, this disregard of the sovereign strength and startling love of God in word, in the Bible, in deed, in Christ Jesus our Lord, proceeds like a racing pulse, there are results that begin not only to mimic the offence, but to mock it. Thus the Lord declares (Isaiah 5:14-16):

“Therefore hell has enlarged itself and opened its mouth beyond measure:
their glory and their multitude and their pomp, and he who is jubilant,
shall descend into it. People shall be brought down, each man shall be humbled,
and the eyes of the lofty shall be humbled, but the Lord of hosts
shall be exalted in judgment, and God who is holy shall be hallowed in righteousness.”

People rarely contain themselves when on lust, passion bent, whether it be physical, mental or spiritual. How can they MOCK God ? Isaiah mimics them. First he discloses the quality of their fallen lives:

“Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as if with a cart rope…”

“… that say, ‘Let Him make speed and hasten His work, that we may see it, and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw near and come, that we may know it.”

They summon God in their spiritual intoxication, in order to mock Him, as did the soldiers manufacture diabolical means to bring torment to the captured Christ! They did not realise that He had allowed them to seize Him, though He had said just that (Matthew 26:52-56); and they did not think that they would answer for their additions of contempt to injustice, mockery to madness. But for every statement, act of man, there is an answer from Him who is divine.

Nor is this all. They begin to say it is GOOD to do EVIL, to call DARKNESS some kind of LIGHT, BITTERNESS a SWEET thing (Isaiah 5:20). Woe to them, says the Lord, and to those who “are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!”

If some want to change their clothes to look like those of the gender they do not have, what is to be said of those who want to change their very humanity, to look like some abortion, instead of the creation of God, some self-made thing, nothing its mentor and no-wisdom its manufacturer, where they lay down the morals! This is all, and to themselves they commit themselves: they do not lay down their lives for the brethren, as I John 3:16 advises for the love which drives the people of God, but they lay down the law, their own, the opposite of goodness and mercy, for themselves.

Thus does even a government become a party to the little legalism of moral transvestism. They change the clothes of morality, dress it up differently, calling good evil, and evil good, confusing such things as gender, while even affronting truth or making its declaration illegal, as if a moral system founded on desire, could take over judgment from one founded in God and His word over the millennia, applied as He has spoken: and it will be applied. It is like drug-taking, where no amount of reason will be heard; for the lust is on… How terrible are those who speak of health and danger, is the immoral mouthing of many This, they say: It deserves fines, or even imprisonment. Such is life in the day of death! In Israel, it was nothing less as you see in Isaiah 6:10-13.

They declare it for others, their own rebellious immorality: they make it legal to be illegal, and illegal to be lawful. They torment truth and make sexual relationships a pleasure item, or cruise, an experiment, and family life a trifle to be torn apart for the sake of hedonistic satisfaction. Such is the direction of our own country, and this, our own State very nearly went in this very direction a month or so ago; and while resistance came from many, and an Upper House majority was able for the time to stop it, yet while the will was there, we must not assume it will not once more try to surface. In this, it is like an alien submarine in the peaceful waters of the State, or like a tanker, about to rip asunder, and deposit its gigantic bad oil slick, with careless stupor, upon our coasts.

“Make the heart of this people dull,
and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes;

That, blindness, like that of those who stare at the sun, was the first instalment for their wilful closing of the eyes! Then there came the result of it all, seen as we complete Isaiah 6:10-13:

“Then I said, ‘Lord, how long?’
And He answered:

Consider the extent of this judgment. A beautiful tree – like many now in Adelaide, some of which already suffer, but through the mercy of the Lord, are not yet spoiled – is cut down. That stands for the fall of the land. It is not removed entirely ? No, for though, as with an oak, its tendrils of Spring lace, and its leaves of tender green and beautiful craft no longer appear, though the acorns no more cry out concerning the wisdom implanted in them, and as small, no more signal for the grand things to come from so little by the wisdom of the God who made all: there is some residue! Though the tree is cut down: yet its stump is there. God did not use a stump remover on it. Not at that time …

Now for the beautiful part … In Isaiah 7, there is the prophecy of the Virgin, in an event beyond all mere human conception, comparable with any miracle, staggering; for she is to bear a Son in whom we will have this: GOD WITH US, Immanuel. Then in Isaiah 8:21-9:7, we find that in the very midst of torment and anguish (and Isaiah 6 has shown enough of it, with Isaiah 5 the cause of it!), there is to come light, with peace and gladness, and the dominion of the mighty God, in the very person, amazing as it is, of His own Son, one also to be called the Mighty God. Here is the Messiah, the one sent from heaven to earth, bringing the holiness of heaven with Him, and its pardon. For ever is His time, without end is His kingdom (Isaiah 9:7).

We have just experienced one more blessed Easter, and praise God, in our State, they even stopped trading on Easter Monday, one of the most encouraging signals for a long time! Perhaps we will get a little more rain now! Already God has been merciful. That is the season in which the climax of this Son, this Prince of Peace’s coming was commemorated, His death and resurrection proclaimed. His return is the next vast index of judgment, when the ills foretold before it, will recede: for in these evils, there is hope; but when that comes, for those who have rejected Him, there is none.

What is worst in all life ? It is this: the INABILITY to be saved, the FINALITY of judgment and the REMOVAL from the light! This is what is most horrible, awesome, but what ? If in this time, in this clime, the light of Christ is rejected, though His words control the earth and invent history before its time, and will judge (John 12:48-50, Acts 17:31), is there no result ? Far from it.

Recently, we were talking to someone who spoke of having some belief, some faith, but when it came to hell – indeed there was another even more emphatic – this held less appeal. But why should a god be invented, to replace the living God, so that heaven is permissible from His mouth and power, but not hell, the crucifixion of Christ, but not of one’s own life in obedience to His will; resurrection, but not realisation of the way that does not live in, with and by, yes and for Christ, in its end ? Will a man begin and not end, aim and not fire, call evil good and good evil, say - Let God hasten His work that we may see it! and not find where mockery belongs, and live there! Is bounty to be received, and judgment omitted ? Is truth to be loved, but its impact negated!

Is a man to invent his own god ? Why then talk of Christ; but if Christ be followed, let hell not be lost in the middle of some muddle of vain words, as if cancer were a myth, and reality a dream. Is a person to make sin a mere flummery, and not a foulness which disrupts and brings death by just assignment! It is this justice which is the companion of holiness, infinite in God, besought for Christians, which axes everything which will not bow to it, which would but foul heaven and inset inanity, profanity, and hideous proclivities into heaven. But not thus is that haven, heaven!

It is not the Gospel which removes the curse, and it is not the cure, which ignores the disease. The blight of Christ, this was an index of the disease, that it MEANT death, not mere dislike, that it meant CURSING, not mere chastening, that it was INTOLERABLE, not merely not so good. WHEN and only when sin is realised, is repentance possible. Its curse on Christ is the disease; and not before it is sent away onto Him, required in reality to bear it, is its reality sent.

Otherwise, what is it from which a person is seeking deliverance ? imperfection ? not being quite good enough ? this is nonsense. It is quite good enough to bring separation of the Messiah from His own eternal Father, who sent Him to bear it. It is the law which shows the EXCEEDING SINFULNESS of sin, and it is the law of God which in its severity and spirituality is part of the Gospel. To be sure, the figurative features are now fulfilled in the finalities of history; but this merely the more underlines them, for the cost was infinite in this same history, for that same holiness, in the Person of that same and only Saviour, Jesus Christ (Romans 7:7-13).

THE JUDGE SUMMING UP FOR JUDGMENT:
IT IS GOOD TO LISTEN,
LEAVING SHOVE FOR LOVE,
AND SHAN’T FOR WILL!

The Indolent Vineyard, Rapacity for Riches,
Dreamy Delinquents, Ignorant Savants,
Sin Breeders, God Mockers and Moral Transvestites

Let us review a little, before reaching the grand finale of this theme. First, we need to see yet more deeply, in using Israel as a spiritual example in the heart, for all, the extent to which God deplored their sin. They are an illustration, for they not merely excused sins in inequity, but abused righteousness and tampered with truth, while not at all being sorry for their folly, but rather exalting in it. Thus in Jeremiah 2:35, we have this not for the Jew only, but for any and all mankind that lives.

Nothing is altered by self-confidence; and self-belief as a basis is merely a lie in psychological dress. A confidence-booster is no more value when judgment sits, than a dream when exam results are published.

Thus in Isaiah 5 we find, even in the midst of incredible seeming hypocrisy and self-seeking injustice in Israel, the fact that God had “A Song of my Beloved, regarding His vineyard.” It is to His well beloved the vineyard is given, and it is He who now has it, and has it AS the well-beloved! It is He who is the King of Israel, as even Pilate began to see. It is He who, as Jehovah, the everlasting "I AM" (Exodus 3:14) had brought Israel to greatness, under David.

But it was in that very love had He done it, to which the nation in so much and so many, had not responded.

It is He who as in Isaiah 42:1ff., 49:6 IS the covenant, and it is He for whom covering the chosen in Israel is not enough: He has no less a work of redemption to apply to the Gentiles, that He might BE in this highly personal setting, the salvation of God (cf. Luke 2:30-32). It covers NOTHING for those who do not believe, for as Isaiah 53:3-6 shows, those whose sin is actually borne, are those whose hearts are HEALED! There is no operation of pardon without regeneration. Yet the love of God does not in anything alter: those who come to faith, it is these who receive, and all are invited. Does the angry fighter plane which ignores the tanker, extract any fuel ? I think not. Is the tanker reduced at all by this by-pass ? Obviously not!

Never doubt the intensity and immensity of the love of God, or seek some scape-goat, not for your sin - for that is provided already in the Messiah, Jesus Christ, but for your rejecting the Lord!

That, it is YOUR responsibility as before God who would have ALL. Love ? It does not force, and wisdom, it KNOWS who are its own (Romans 8:29ff.); and these, they have ONLY one righteousness, that of Christ, to render them acceptable to God (Psalm 71:15, Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2, Romans 10). Try to add your own works to that, and you are like someone attempting to BE a tyre, so that his car might run better. It is ... unfitting, and illusory. At that level, the purity of God, you are not satisfactory at all. You are tiresome and no tyre at all. Retire from this, and do not attempt to make of yourself a spare tyre; as well use a bike tyre on a tractor.

Who then is satisfactory in the canons of perfection, and powerful in the functions that fail ? This is that Lord, God the sent, as seen in Isaiah 48:16, who as God does the work of God, in the format of man! His is the vineyard and He is heir to it (as in Mark 12); but what of the vineyard itself ?

It was then in Israel, as it is now in the Gentile world. Not repentance but rebellion, not faith but fidgets were occupying it.

Alas, as to His people, they ARE the vineyard (Isaiah 5:7), and of them He declares this:

"Because they have rejected the law of he LORD of hosts,
and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel,
therefore the anger of the LORD is aroused against His people..."

What then does the Lord say of Israel at the spiritual level ? It had been offered peace, pardon and power in the truth, pressed, presented with opportunity and hope, in appeals innumerable (cf. Hosea 12:10).

Then, indeed, as you read in the day of Moses writing from the Lord in Deuteronomy 7:

"Now go, write it before them on a tablet, and note it on a scroll,
that it may be for time to come, forever and ever:
that this is a rebellious people,
lying children,
children who will not hear the law of the LORD,
who say to the seers, 'Do not see!'
and to the prophets, 'Do not prophesy to us right things;
speak to us smooth things, prophesy deceits."

The grace of God found Abraham, and in His truth He made promises (Genesis 12, 17). This included both the land of Israel, and exile from it if they successively sundered from the Lord; indeed mockery among the nations if they did so.

Moses presented the two sides even though Israel had already equivocated, as seen in Deuteronomy 27-29, where blessings and curses were read from two different mounts, to distinguish them categorically. But nothing ever breaks the promises of God (cf. Ezekiel 36:22).
To be sure, as Ezekiel shows, the promise remains (as in Genesis 17:7-8 and foretold in Deuteronomy 30, 32, Micah 7), and in His own honour, God will honour it (as He already has been active in doing, for Israel is now restored to its land but not to its Lord).

These amazing facts appear less so, but more ‘normal’ for God, who is ALWAYS reliable, and never fails (Zechariah 3:5) or changes (Psalm 102:26-28). These last two millennia have verified the word of God vastly, both in its positive and negative promises, and this last half-century has shown a prodigious fulfilment of ancient prophecies in magnified detail, for Israel (cf. SMR Ch. 9).

In Isaiah 5, then, long after those earlier times, God traces the enormous labours and planning that had been wrought to make an excellent vineyard – and ISRAEL WAS that vineyard; and then declares this:

A CHOICE vine, carefully planted and surrounded, protected and cared for; and now the fruit: wildness and littleness: wild grapes.

This then brings in more detail to us the Messianic mission in high contrast to the national failure. This it is for Jew and Gentile, man and nation, as many as come to Him (as in Israel, to come, seen in Zechariah 12:10-13:1, Romans 11:25ff.).

As Isaiah 41 passes into 42, and 51 into 52, you see it. THEY had NO ONE to fill the gap, take the weight, achieve deliverance. THEREFORE GOD did it. In Isaiah 42 and 49 you see the total contrast between Israel's total and complete failure, and the due and true Servant of God, the Lord Himself, who secured what they spoiled, and recast what they had blasted. In Isaiah 53, you see HOW He secured it, and WHY, their sin intolerable, His love implacable, He took the one to fulfil the other.

It is He, and it is in Him, and not in mere man, in whom they must put their trust (Psalm 2 proclaims this). Just as ONLY GOD is to be the One trusted in (Jeremiah 17), so ONLY IN HIM, is trust to be placed, the very face of God in incarnate form, the brightness of His glory. It is He, in perfect purity, who alone can redeem; for debts do not cancel debts, and negatives, added to positives, do not make things better, but rather worse!

Their blindness has been long, Paul shows, but it is have a follow-up in faith which will come to many in Israel as Spring to Winter snow: suddenly, and in massive spread! Thus the composite congregation, Jew and Gentile, assembles at last (Romans 11:30-32), one 'tree' their base, one Lord their gardener, one Gospel their call, one power their provision.

Towards the end of Part I above, we were noting the wonder of the answer of God to sin, judgment apart. This is not something provided for this world, which sins into judgment at increasing speed, but not for those elected to salvation from within it; for Christ having transferred the choice payment of redemption to those to whom it belonged, they are covered.

Their overdraft is annulled, their debt is cancelled, their deficiencies are met by the gift of righteousness, and their peace is beyond all understanding (Romans 5, 8, Philippians 4).

Here then appears the Messiah, and in Him is neither guile nor deceit (Isaiah 53:9, I Peter 2:22ff.), nor did sin achieve even calling card approval. How vast the gulf between Him and the practice in the nation, of calling evil good and good evil, this being just one of the divine accusations against Israel which we noted in Section I above. How wonderful apt and accurate, ample and majestic is the remedy for such confusion!

It is precisely because the horrid disjointing crushing and crumpling of the Cross of Christ is so anti-design in its depressive dynamic, that it is so apt. Here is the very picture of sin and its due judgment, in the very milieu of the Master, bearing it without deformation of character, declination of commitment or deviation from duty; and with that, there is the love which surges into forgiveness to the last, saving souls as He dies to save souls, summoning one of His companions in crucifixion, to the kingdom the man was seeking.

Behold the Messiah, the One sent from heaven to earth, bringing the holiness of heaven with Him, and its pardon. For ever is His time, without end is His kingdom (Isaiah 9:7).

We see now the Lord, in princely and priceless peace, poured into human form to achieve divine transformation and redemption for man; and in terms of calling evil good and good evil, consider the remedy for such confusion.

Here shines like the sun arising on a misty morning, the magnificence of the Messiah. Now are we moving to the domain of the Messiah of Isaiah 7, 9 as indeed of 11, 22, 32, 40, 42, 49-55, 60-61 and so on.

All is expounded, expressed with a sympathy (to those loved), an antipathy (to what defiles them) and an empathy (in bearing sin where it is discarded onto Him freely), which processes impurity, and restores a healed heart at peace with the purity of God through this same Lord Jesus Christ.

It is a double transformation: of Him to sin bearer and slain Messiah, and of those who seek Him, His body arisen and His word fulfilled, to purged premises and people with promises, even children of God, equipped with the very spiritual genes of His generation, which is for ever (I John 3:9).

As sin estranged man, by its spread, so God's righteousness spreads like a saving net, to bring back fallen man. As the one brought devastation, loss, negation, a spendthrift spirit, so this beings reconstruction, through a vast endeavour, a rebuilding as of Europe with Marshall Aid after World War II.

That, a temporal boon, was courtesy of the United States in no small measure. This is an eternal blessing, courtesy not of some part of creation, but of the Creator, here turned Himself, into the Redeemer. What He had been in love, now He has wrought in practice.

As one destroyed, the other restores; as one lent on the wall to break it, the other constructed the wall, to make it serve. As the one defiled beauty, the other was defiled, to remove the ruin in Himself, and provide the beauty of holiness to the now redeemed, covered in the Cross of Christ by the blood of the New Covenant (Matthew 26).

This is the blessed "child" which is "born", the counsellor, the mighty God, the chief among all and the master not of mere ceremonies, but of salvation (Isaiah 9, 53). Here purity from heaven, brings the celestial to the terrestrial, and the cultural proclivities and declivities of man are surpassed, as the moon by the sun. Here is righteousness that has "healing in His wings" (Malachi 4:2).

“But the free gift is not like the offense.
For if by the one man’s offense many died,
much more the grace of God and
the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many.”

Here the action of Christ and Adam is seen, the latter to confound, the former to restore, and the restoration (like Europe with NEW equipment when rebuilt after World War II) is even more prodigious than the loss.

Again, as sin brought extension, like a plague, the spiritual sedition and sedation moving by birth and environment, moral, social, intellectual and physical, to many others, so salvation brought intensity, EACH one being revived to life on an individual basis, by the power of the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus, like so many polluted streams, each renewed at its source, and then all allowed to flow into one huge river of life.

Romans 5:20 gives the keynote to this: “Moreover, the law entered that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more…” Here the contrast is in the atmosphere, the kindness, the grace that floods the drought stricken deserts of sin. The whole area is green not with wilted hope to conserve species, but with a regenerated life that abounds, and binds.

This is fitting, for as Christ is one, so is His body; and hence we who receive the Biblical Gospel should seek fellowship, not with falsely named rebels, pretending, but with those of like precious faith (Ephesians 2:14-22, Jude). Such is the power of achievement in the Messiah; and those who seek Him, find, and those who desire Him, are free to come; and His call is categorical (Matthew 11:28ff.), and heartfelt (Matthew 23:27), and seeks for all that they might avoid judgment (John 3:17, Luke 19:42ff.).

There is nothing merely verbal in it, as if a politician make loose statement. God would have all come to a knowledge of the truth, and in this One mediator, He seeks all to be reconciled to Himself (Colossians 1, I Timothy 2). It is this ONLY MEDIATOR who as GOD ALTOGETHER is to take SIN ALONE, and do so, using it as a substitution that avails, a ransom in substitution, a payment in person, an embassy in One, an ambassador who in Himself takes the fulness of the Godhead, and the destiny of sin alike! (Colossians 1:19ff., 2:9, I Timothy 3:16, Philippians 2).

He does not carry on in lachrymose lassitude instead of action, though His heart wept for us: He DESIRES, and all the power of God is available. Desire Him ? Trust Him, for the wind and window of opportunity alike are present. The way ? it is there. The entry ? it is there (John 10:9).

“For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one,
and has broken down the middle wall of separation,
having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace,
and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross,
thereby putting to death the enmity.

“And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near.
For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father.

“Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners,
but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,
having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone,
in whom the whole building, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord,
in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

Just as sin spread by its evil news, so the Gospel is spread by lively 'epistles' as Paul says of one church (II Corinthians 3:2ff.), those whose lives and words attest the truth of which they speak. Instead of infecting others, the Christian is called not to inspect them - God's affair - but to bring anti-biotic to their infection. Thus the Gospel of God's grace is death to sin and life to those afflicted, as surely as small pox was virtually wiped out years ago, through the vaccination program. Although life in Christ does not mean NO sin can enter; it DOES mean that no sin can stay (cf. Romans 8:8ff., 12-16).

Sin shall not have dominion over you (Romans 6), so that by the Spirit of God you put to death the deeds of the erratic freedom of fancy (Romans 8:11-13), that makes body, mind and spirit a plaything for sin, and a course for carrier disease (Romans 8:13). There is no room for two sovereigns in the Christian life, and though many try it, none surmount it. With the deity, there can be no duplicity: He knows your heart and spirit better than you do. It is Christ who reigns (Romans 5:17ff.).

Thus as we began to see last time, in the most amazing fashion, as if to search for height to heaven (as Isaiah offered Ahaz in Isaiah 7), and to hell for depth, and then apply the solution to the nation's troubles, we find a virgin is to be the encompassing one (as in Jeremiah 31:22-31), providing the human form for the irruption of God into humanity, which brings in the New Covenant. How ? Why she is to bear one who is to be “the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,” and in His coming what do we have ? It is this: "God with us” (Isaiah 7, 9 Jeremiah 31).

From her is to be born into mankind, the ONLY ONE who can heal it, save it, bring it peace in man or nations, women or wisdom, heal its sores and govern it in goodness.

Thus does God taking flesh, deliver all in it, who seek Him, and seeking find. In Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, we find that the Gentiles have NO LESS NEED than the Jew, that all need the same salvation and the same gift, with the same overdraft to be annulled, each in its own form (Isaiah 53:6), but all with the same eventual result.

It is when, and only when many have found this irresistible, as will come at the return of Christ, all drawn and Christ in command of this world as it flies to judgment, that the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14, Isaiah 11). It is then that Christ has world-wide, conquering impact, before the world itself is removed from the scene and scenario (Isaiah 51:6, Matthew 23:35).

Even now the Gospel calls; then it leads to the day of divine JUDGMENT, when its neglect finally condemns. What IS the condemnation ? It is this as John 3 tells us. The true LIGHT has come into the world (John 1:9-10), but "this is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."

Christ did not come to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved (John 3:17). He SAYS so. He came that anyone believing might be saved. That is the positive and negative of it. The divine motivation is stated here as in Colossians 1. It is the human motivation which is subject to sentence.

This is the reason: reject salvation, and there is no other; ignore the appeal, and truth executes judgment. Keep your sin under wraps, and on the show day, its sentence is sure, just and certain.

The Prince of Peace is the ONLY way to avoid war, both personal, national and international. It is the only way to find God. It is the only way the vineyard, yours or that of Israel, being replanted with regenerated stock, can grow in grace.

“Behold, the days come, says the LORD, that I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man, and with the seed of beast.

"And it shall come to pass, that as I have watched over them, to pluck up, and to break down, and to throw down, and to destroy, and to afflict; so will I watch over them, to build, and to plant, says the LORD.”

Otherwise mildew is mandatory. There is no sun, the Sun of Righteousness, and disease is rampant; and there is no heart to fight for the right. Morals become topsy-turvy, and men act as their own auditors. But audit rather the world of the living God:

"Of the increase of His government and peace, there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice."

As Romans 6 declares, “…if we have been planted together with Christ, in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection.”

Eternal life has no end; the eternal Lord neither had beginning nor does He have end. Therefore find Him, do business with Him, and follow Him. His is the love and He is lovely.