GLORY, VAINGLORY AND GOODNESS

GLORY, VAINGLORY AND GOODNESS

Rev. Dr. Robert E. Donaldson

Published by World Wide Web Witness Inc.

April 2007

ISBN 0 9802972 6 7

Glory is one of the main measures of man. It is not that he is glorious, but sensitive to it, susceptible to it, may feel sentenced (rightly or not) by it, and can seek it for himself, his clan, group, city, nation, professional body or political lord syndrome (or mentor, depending on the case).

It is FELT to be glory when in fact, however, it may be like soiled linen, wholly diverse in character from the pure and refreshed type. It has a relationship with it, certainly, but not a salubrious one. It has a kinshp, as does a wreck with the thrusting vessel of aesthetic appeal, grandeur of outline and dynamic motion, manoevrability and architectural felicity.

When glory is misnamed, its work miscarried, its object misnamed, then it readily becomes vainglory. This may be a product of vanity, either in the sense of vacuousness or of pride; or it may be merely the current duping routine, by which misled man finds glory in misleading others, and becomes hostile to the point of mass murder, with those who resist. We have seen this in Mao, in Hitler, in Stalin, in Idi Amin, in Saddam Hussein, and in his own way increasing, in Robert Mugabe. In some cases, they may genuinely feel they are doing good: it is just that those who do not share their irrational dreams and inconsequential notions, need to be removed for the plan to succeed: which of course it does not.

That mankind continually looks for such things, is duped by them, has virtually a sequence to date, so that you get, like old movies or new, your particular version for consumption, is one of the major testimonies to the reality of God. Why ? It is for this reason: to depart from Him is to make yourself so vulnerable to error, as if you foreswore EVER to say 2 plus 2 equals 4, while setting out in a career in mathematics, that the inanities of the race, which plague it like chasms in the midst of a vast highway, with the expected toll, become virtually predictable. In kind, the Bible supplies the details; and despite this, man in the midst of the clear and multiple fulfillments of the predictions of the holy prophets, goes on as if hearing were out of fashion, and sight a menace. It is as Christ indicated, Ears they have, but do not hear, eyes but do not see.

It is a disease which Jew-baiters and haters now freely share, as if epidemic were their desire. In His own day, Christ said this of similarly blinded people, citing from Isaiah:

“For this people’s heart is become gross, and heir ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.”

For all that, man is so made and created in such a grand outgoing exhibition of the grace and love of God, that goodness continually thrusts its head into the very realms of vainglory, and sanity into the domains held in restraint by insanity, rationality attacks irrationalism and virtue seeks the flower that vice loves to dissect.

In this volume, these three features will be given some emphasis, so that the contours of society, the retrenchments of realism and the vast and rapid advance to desolation which this earth is making, may be seen in a keener perspective, one not only found in the Bible, but seen in its fulfilment, one not only desirable, but necessary.

Consciousness, Spirit, Reality and the
Rhythmic Thump of Ridiculous Ruses being Smashed

THE SPIRIT OF MAN, CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONSCIENCE,
their scope and situation, significance and operation

what an uninhibited, divinely inhabited torrent has fallen
freely in this world of man