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CHAPTER 8

Not Just People, but JUST People

All people are just people. This is the style of the times, the post-modernist squelch version of squashed humanity. It used to be marvellous just to be people, but now it is a rather de-energised thing in the cultural mode of many, a sort of entertain-me-and-please-me hypothesis rather than actual persons which comes to be in view.

The politicians increasingly seem so void of long-term plans of any practicality, that their lack of vision reeks like a narrow street in former times, when garbage collection was not a work of hygiene but an option. One PM wants to 'handle' the water problem associated with the Murray River, so another contestant comes to the election able to duplicate, by appearance and mouth, almost anything the other does, and we end up with a new government in which one State keeps a vast input of water and is paid a billion too, while another at last takes legal action against THE COMMONWEALTH (both labour entities, allegedly going to have extreme co-operation) because this and that has NOT been done, and the water annexation is still quite unresolved.

Meanwhile others defend rice production because it is jobs and useful, as if a water shortage were a thing of imagination.

The gracioius, spacious, thoughtful, statesmanlike, all-comprehending, where necessary amending principles seem on extended vacation, and not entirely welcome, since instant solutions which appeal now are becoming de rigueur and votes seem better than a clear conscience to many in power while someone in some newspaper announces that conscience is a matter of taste.

Such is the unrighteousness in which the nation, and not this alone in type, is pleased or at any rate willing to wallow. Conscience IS a matter of choice in one respect, that if you reject the Creator who manufactured, or better, created you, so that what NEVER is seen to happen (except in miracles as such, in terms of healing however) happened when HE did it, and that is why you exist: if, then you reject Him, as a horse might eject his rider (they can be rather skilful at this, understandably in some cases), then of course you can train your conscience as a rider might try to train his horse.

Remove the foundations and the people can play, even play, as here, being God. But it does not deal with actuality, the specificity of mind, body and spirit in man; and in taking a holiday from reason, it indulges in treason. It is nothing less: to take yourself off from the truth, you Creator and you destiny-provider is a theft of what you are, which YOU did not make, but HE did.

Thus in self-assertion, which is being pushed now more and more as the predicted anti-Christ ends draws near like a flaming chariot, the toils of which can already be sensed and the approach observed (Answers to Questions Ch. 5), there is a potentially delicious but actually noxious just people approach.

You can now lie, cheat, even kill, you can lay booby traps for anybody if such gets in the way, you can maim children if they are Jewish and seek land if there is some part of it which Islam has not yet got in the Middle East, and you can TALK of justice and even if need be, SQUAWK of power, or sanctions, or upbraid, and speak as if justice where somewhere at least in the visible distance, and PRETEND that you are not a manipulator, seeking peace at anybody's else price, but not your own. You can do all this, and seek to exterminate people who are seeking to exterminate you or what you hold dear, by choice, and wonder why it does not spectacularly work ... but does if you ponder a little, spectacularly fail to do so.

The point is simple. People are NOT in fact just people; they are magnificently manufactured, wrought, contrived, invented objects which happen to have been so made that they are also subjects. These, thinking as they will, taking bounds where there are bonds and ignoring fences as if they were pretences, stride into life for the taking and making momentous doodlings to the effect that the fittest survive, imply that they plan to be fit and so survive and so, in some unknown but theoretical way, benefit the race by populating it with rats and rubbish similar to what you become when you invent your own morals and ignore justice and fail even to examine righteousness and imagine, maybe even truculently, that You are Your Own, in a sort of mini-god manner.

Nowadays it becomes more popular to have just-people groups, and to do things governmentally or corporately, such as repressing free speech in terms of how people FEEL, as came close to be operative recently in the case of the two Dannys^*1 . This becomes a neo-moral but actually amoral proceeding by which if you do not LIKE what someone says, you do not need to worry about whether it is true (if the cap fits, wear it), but you find it repugnant to your inward would-be moral, but perhaps amoral sense to be so treated. So truth becomes a captive among the other mini-god pretensions and protestations of what were formerly people in the image of God, but now residues with accretions, divested of its justice and truth, and invested with the anythingness so dear to many sitting in the bastions of post-modern discontent-cum-complacency which seems to mark it out.

Against all this, as will in the not so far distant future become visible on this earth (cf. Revelation 20, Psalm 72, Isaiah 11, Micah 4), there are those who are JUST persons. Justice is in their bones, life is in their spirits, reality rules and God is their stay. They stay with Him and He stays with them, and is a stay to them (cf. Psalm 18). They do not move. Their tongues do not flatter. They try to comfort but not by lies. Being poor in spirit is not a mere public relations exercise (Matthew 5). TO know what God wants them to do, the God of the sermon on the Mount, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ is their summit enquiry, after first knowing WHO He is and how to know Him, and THEREFORE so acting, finding Him. Does it not say in Isaiah 55 that one should SEEK the Lord.

When ?

Why when He may be found (Isaiah 55:6).

There is a flood in the affairs of men, which taken as it comes, has thing go. That is not really Shakespearian but more modern speak to those who do not like God or the English language (therefore) on the basis that language expresses things and just people are not interested in language and expression since they find that there is nothing particularly great to express, being blind at Niagara and unable to see space, or heed time. Language is, for such persons,  for need, for life, and not to express things that are marvellous with artistry, or horrid with care to avoid them.

If you do not receive God when He calls, or do not care when He invites, if you have 'other things in mind just now' when He knocks, then do not be deceived. You are not just a person in the diminutive sense or more than a person in the exultant mode; you are a creation being sought by the Creator and if you reject HIS way to know Him (even with the Queen you might need - just think of it - an appointment in the place she decides, and in the circumstances, perhaps some corner of the palace), and His place to find Him, which in fact is the Cross of Christ and the resurrection of the One to WHOM you need to come, then you change. If you do not seek Him when you may, you may not want Him when you would. The mind has episodes of its own, and outside of its Maker, what is to be controlled may have its own whims and ways; interest may soar, or seem ridiculous in a little. Self-deception is the name of the game when the God of truth is at all distanced.

Impossible as it might seem to someone who is just a person, and that minus any particular significance to it, though the architecture laid out in code for non-workman type building of the next generation through you surpasses by far the grandest works of modern knowledge (called science in some circumstances, but often changing for all that), there are results for playing the fool with your Maker. It is like not seeing why you should turn the steering wheel when approaching a light pole at 60 miles per hour and coming within 30 yards of it. You can have a philosophy about your just a person importance, but the smash is then inevitable, miracles apart.

An inevitable smash has a feeling of drama; but it can come to something much more important and less attractive: like a falling tree, you are down.

Down without roots any more attached: it is not a very charming picture. In a cartoon, it might seem comic in some circumstances:  remarkable to relate. In reality, it becomes realistic to relay, for life is not a cartoon. It is not something for just people. They do not exist, except in the dissuaded and invaded mind.

It is something for just people. It is to be found as prepared, by people who are justified by grace, that is given the proposition of pardon at a cost which you do not pay, but Christ does, and a presentation of a righteousness within you, since then by His grace by His Spirit,  Christ is in you, and your sins being pardoned on a life-for-life basis (Hebrews 9-10, John 5:24, Romans 3:23ff., 5:1-10), He is there is peace. These who are then HIS people,  are then modelled in grace, moulded in truth and find the meaning that had been avoided, voided or corralled.

First of all, there is a re-creation (Titus 2-3, John 3), which means that so vast WAS the depth of the abyss between you and God, that though you may have had some intimations of Him, there was nothing real or reliable, assured or truly operational in your relationship (if any) with Him. Now this void or avoidance or both being removed, you need, like a plant suddenly moved from shade to light, to have a dynamism of re-invention to enable you to live in such conditions. Soon it will, if you are so moved, become necessary to live where suffering and shame can be cast on you by just people, who have their own morals and love to survive in their religion - even if it is a negative form, irreligiousness, where justice is optional. As one computing Professor once put it: righteousness is fine, provided it is not too dangerous (or was it 'difficult' -  he had some such inventory for it).

You become His (Malachi 3:16-18) ?

Let us pause a moment to savour this part of the word of God.

              And one who does not serve Him."

Then you have been changed into a JUST person. In what way ? Firstly, you are no longer at odds with justice, being pardoned, though a sinner. Secondly, you now love righteousness, since it is the foundation of the throne of God (Psalm 89:14-15), and the basis on which you are made a child of God, His mercy going before His face and appearing to your own (Titus 2-3). Thus though you COME as an alien or enemy (Ephesians 4:17-19), you are by the gift of grace, received in dynamic mutation back to the first (Colossians 3:10),  as a newly fashioned being, one justified (not condemned, declared pardoned and in right standing before God because of the sin-bearing sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God). Moreover, then you are being sanctified (changed in your INNER orientation, principles and procedures as is a non-living statue on the OUTSIDE by the hammering and craft of the sculptor).

While in any circumstances other than these, where your Creator who loves His work and the people He has made, it would be a sort of spiritual suicide to allow anyone ELSE to do this, yet in this case, that of the infinite God dealing with you as now a child of His, it is not merely tolerable but eminently desirable and a huge privilege. More, as you keep His words in your heart and apply them with zest in your quest to grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ (II Peter 3:18), the gift of life comes to be more precious, since it is from Him whose perfections never cease, whose wisdom has no limits and whose fatherly governance of your life is profound. It acts to make it count in love for the body of Christ, His people, and for the rescue of those who are just people, in their own minds but not in His. It places you in a kingdom never to be destroyed (Daniel 7:14,25-27, Isaiah 9:6-7).

But you say, Some think more of themselves than that! Sometimes this is so, and a kind of spiritual paranoia (somewhat different from the case of the mental paranoid, for it does not so disturb the mind, just the destiny) does grip many. Indeed, it is in some way parallel in part, to the mental bipolar case. Some on the one hand want to stress how very much they are just people, and so just like you and to be accepted by you as politicians or business people. On the other hand, they have a very exalted idea of their own importance which is a kind of perverted and distorted residue of the fact that in principle they could have a place as children of the infinitely great God. Being turned from that, they tend to seize some of the glory and have notions of destiny for man or family or themselves, that are quite inordinate. It is a sort of compensatory, residual relic of what could have been. In distortion, it is wonderful, but not great!

Then they die; but this does not seem to occur to many of them in practical terms.

Thus there are ambivalences and complications in the spiritual mess which man becomes when he adjourns any way to the life of God, puts it on hold, in sleep mode, and putting his own spirit to bed, works with might and mind to find whatever he hopes to get for himself, or his party, body or whatever other thing he holds high, as if work were  his god, or pleasure resulting from it or gambling were the god to be desired! or each in its time, while there is time ...

Many refuse to repent though it is a prelude to re-orientation in truth (Luke 13:1-3), and many refuse to forsake all, being like camels which burdened with all they want to take with them, CANNOT pass through the NEEDLE GATE, as it were, into the city of God (cf. Matthew 19:23ff.). They might even try to look down on God, despite the magnificence of His creation and the munificence of His terms of peace (Ephesians 2:16ff., Isaiah 48:16ff.).

In the midst of this magnificent littleness and hopeless assurance is modern man, woman and child. Many stay there, simply outside.

The other way, that of eternal life, is for just people, justified by grace as to status, inhabited by the Spirit of God who is just, as to dynamic, directed in His service as to loyalty, ready for praise because of delight at such amazing love as to bring about such an adoption into the family of God, and they move on, turning neither to the right nor to the left from the Lord. If they sin, there is atonement (I John 1:7-2:2) and discipline may help bring back the spiritual colour to the cheeks and brisk conviction to the heart. There are times when foolishness requires it (cf. Hebrews 12).

If you MUST have God do this or that, you forget something: God. He is gracious but not manipulable, faithful but not a dog, eager to forgive, but not duped, willing to work with you, but on His terms. In this case, they are the opposite of many a contract: it is not for you to give to him this or that, but yourself; and it is for Him to give to you whatever is needed to serve Him with peace of heart, joy of spirit and conviction of mind. This, it includes a donation of life in spirit, borne on by His mercies and upheld by His grace.

While He can give you discipline if you need it, there is help where it is wanting and there is neither limit nor law to prevent the entire fulfilment of HIS will for you, which replaces self-fulfilment.

Myself ? as I prefer Him to myself, and know He made what I am for His own purposes, and in this case only, that of God, am willing and even eager to be transformed more and more into what He would have me to be, in better concert with Himself: then being a just person is a privilege, and His honour is a delight to forward. It is His due.

It is just that He should have it.

NOTE

*1

On the Victorian saga, allegedly costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours, where fact and feeling merged like two vast oceanic streams in the Atlantic, making vast downward drawings and threatening much in the depths: see the following. The inanity of protecting from truth in terms of how one feels, and intruding by government into theological disputation is shown up well by the review panel which overturned the initial judgment.

Wherever feelings are the criterion, it DEPENDS ON WHOSE AND WHY. You can feel aggrieved at the explosion of a pet theory, or at the removal of the underpinning which holds up some idea which, if put into practice, would destroy the lives of many. Is grief to govern, or truth ? Mercy does not need to mangle truth; and in Christ, it meets it as in a kiss of two mouths (cf. Psalm 84).

NEWS 156 (esp. Victoria), 145 (and reasonable adults) CASCADE  10 (freedom, force and faith), FREEDOM document re Victorian pastors and deliverance;

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