W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for Volume What is New
Chapter 13
THE WOE OF COMA AND THE GLOW OF GRACE
Where God has spoken, you have only to look to see the result!
He not merely analyses the
catastrophic case of man,
but verifies the symptoms throughout history,
and
produces the cure,
and at that, this was the predicted cure from millenia ago,
and that, with precision!
In the last Chapter, we saw that the world never wakes up!
Its dreamy, leisurely self-indulgences of thought,
requiring time to create,
harassing incompetence, when creativity is what creates,
meaninglessly modelling in mind systems to invent wholly disparate systems when their limits are their own, and
altogether seeking that what is, should become a nascency production unit,
equipped with the highest level of innovation,
just because of 'need':
this airy and artless sequestration continues.
Logical slides are like a playground populated with the units.
The very 'need' which really does not exist at all, except you want a creation ex-Creator just for the arbitrary kick of it, is no more a directive than is an absent director from a Company. Their desire for profit or production or innovation is a 'need', perhaps, for their purposes; but this does nothing to supply the talent. For what is mindless, there is no need.
The Bible, as the word of God shows an acute awareness of thus human proclivity to produce verbal nothings for actual creation, and to impose thought forms as far from logically apt as is empty space is from the workings of a watch. Even the word for 'idol' can mean 'vanity' or 'nothing' in Hebrew usage in the Bible. It is all make-believe.
There are really two questions in one here, to which, following Ch. 12, we now look.
First, how COULD anyone be so stultified in intellect, confused in mind, laughably lapsable in logic, even though not normally inclined to the moronic ? But the reality is that BOTH those who love to have things made from nothing or nothing to the point, and those who insist on causal capabilities for condign consequences, refusing magic and resisting captiousness, may be either dull or quite brilliant. It is just the same in divorces. Either party may be brilliant, the guilty or the relatively innocent; and at times the very brilliance is used to defy the realities in order to seek what are after all, unjust legal victories.
Truth must motivate before reality can captivate; and truth is not even in existence on the empirical and relativistically humanistic model. There is nothing which HAS it, for ALL is mere interaction. It could not even be known if it were so. Its mouthings are the noises of marbles, not marvels.
Telling us what it is on a model when it isn't knowable may not seem bright; nor is it. But this is spiritual disease, and pathology is as old as biblical records, which go back to the first man and the first woman, fresh from the production line and the creative hand of the Maker of their multi-systematics and spiritual roving capabilities, granted as the dower of power.
HOW on earth could man and woman even have hoped that they could start sitting in at the very level of God, when they were mere derivatives, neither understanding nor capable of their own creation! (Genesis 3:4-5). Would they become competitors in knowledge, artisans of power, freaks to match their Maker ? A school boy might the more readily hope to debate successfully on physics with Einstein, than that! Yet they fell for it, and man has been falling for just such a disparity, although this time in CONTINUATION of the fall, not in initiation, since you can start only once (Romans 5:12-14), ever since.
The Bible is thus verified. Man did precisely that and he still does it, like a lapsed alcoholic, recidivist, regressive, impressive in confusion where his desired place is concerned, and his empty strivings continue.
The word of God is supported in this as in all things, by empirical evidence. Even in the most unlikely scenario, its predictions wear better than those of anything else, including 'modern science', that arrogancy of erudition, which is brought up like vomit, when people want to move from the testable to the failed, as in organic evolution (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., The gods of naturalism have no go!). It has become almost a mental tic, to use such a phrase when people move from the actual field of science, to nonsense, as if knowing the cause of things in particular were ground for ignoring it in general (Causes 1).
Thus Romans 5 tells us of the change of scheduling for sin after Adam, which nevertheless does not alter its guilt, when man continued to sin, but not in the same scale as Adam, in whom it was introduced to mankind. No one can say man started well; and at the same time, he WAS started very well. It is just like the rich, the fruitfully endowed. It is one thing to be placed in recipience of good things; it is another to find a way to ruin it. So it is with all the talents; and it was not other with freedom to choose or abuse God in the beginning, when the as yet unstained and undisqualified spirit of man had this glorious option direct.
Romans 1 however speaks of the nature of the result in man, of sinfulness. It is not merely whether this or that sin occurs once or several times. It is a question of the state of the art of sinning, the condition of the sinner, the pathological dysfunction of what is stricken with sin-fever, a deadly disease which is none the less potent when it is not recognised! Indeed, it is all the better then, for the mordant and mortal result: for if the disease is not realised, then the cure is not sought, and if it be not taken, it is not released!
What however to the point in the Bible may be found concerning the sheer outrageousness of man's god-creation exercises, his God-deleting endeavours, the seemingly all but incredible obtuseness which man generates contrary to all experiment, test and rational analysis, concerning creation, when as often, this is his hobby-horse for more sin ?*1
The first element of the diagnosis leading to the prognosis for the race is the reality-resistance syndrome. In this, there is a banishment of realism, and an enshrinement of alienation at the heart. Thus in Romans 1:18 we find that man is engaged, qua sinner, in an unremitting struggle. We hear of struggles of the poor to become rich, the weak to become strong, the ignorant to become learned; but this is other. It is enshrined in contempt, enabled by arrogance and empowered by evil. Of this we read more in John 8:44, where Christ refers to the devil, indicating that he does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. His fall has meant that the brilliance in his beginning has become an envious clatter of chatter, and he stops at nothing, but the divine limits set (as in Job - see Job 1 and compare I Peter 5).
He is a useful test agent, but this is no official position, but rather the unravelling of his revelling spirit as it seeks to pounce, denounce and deviate from truth. If you want the top, and it is not in you, then this is the way the devious can seek it.
Thus in Romans 1 we find that man is HOLDING DOWN the truth as if a wrestler engaged in a sport or fundamental strength tussle. Truth in such a benighted battle has nothing to do with it; the objective is to win. Since the father of lies has nothing of truth, this is the kind of contest that appeals for him and in his influence, to many who knowingly or other, follow him.
Not only do we find in Romans 1:18 that man in his resistance-to-regeneration play is holding down the truth. He is doing so in unrighteousness. His realm ? it is the unrighteous. If there is reason, he seeks to misuse it, to contravene it, or even as in irrationalism, to dispense with it, even though this stops all argument, since if there is no reason on his model, he cannot use it and is dead on arrival at the logical level.
In Romans 1:19, the diagnostic probe continues. What may be known of God is obvious, says Paul and we have seen this in all 133 volumes of this set, as in SMR, TMR and the works cited above, many times; while it is displayed in systematic scope in major fields, in the two volume work, Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, Who Answers Riddles and where He is, Darkness Departs.
Neither the spirit nor the mind of man can escape it; for God has shown it to them. Even when they seek to deny all truth as a criterion, they are excluding themselves. So manifest is their created yen and yearning for truth, however, it is as if they have taken leave of their minds, in order to tell the truth about their views, having just dispensed with its availability. Here is the syndrome in practical action.
Man however has made it a kind of cosmic pastime to invent gods who are not subject to testing, not available for verification, whose words are not ready to be released for examination in the plain parlance of investigation, indeed whose words are not even of this mind. This is one more mode of assault which is perfectly systematic in its desire, incredibly obtuse, and very frequent. Thus is it verifiably found in the Circular to Principals of the SA Government of January 5, 1988, one of the all-time exhibits of irrationality and fiasco in the arena of religion, that with precisely NO academic background, assertions are made which would place ALL religions in this very box: untestable, unfactual, unverifiable and so forth.
This is rather like saying that all diseases are in the lungs. Some are in fact; but many are not.
Some religions do indeed make themselves of this order, for the truth is not in them. Christianity in its Bible has the differentiation of not only presenting innumerable realms and items for examination, predictions pulsing in every course, retrodictions paraded with aplomb continually, in its c. 3500 year career, but ASKING US TO TEST IT! It stands while a thousand theories fall, often with a sense of the ludicrous (cf. SMR Chs. 2-4, Wake Up World! Chs. 4-6), some as in evolutionary imaginings, writhing with each other in mutual detestation, substantially deserved, and continuing because nothing better is found, that suits the secularist cast, and the anti-aetiological bent.
What kind of malady could affect a Government to ignore these facts in making some of the most casuistical generalisations, in the name of an Education Department of all things! What a shocking example to the students, of careless formulation, rash generalisation and anti-scientific method! Neither exposing the internal secularist dissent nor its resolution, ignoring the empirical when it is relevant, it moves like a giant snow-plough seeking to shape the terrain.
Yet there it is (see y.html, TMR Ch. 8) and such has been its unwavering intolerance of what meets the case of scientific method*1, based in significant measure EXPLICITLY on the rash and ludicrous generalisation which it makes about religion. This merely illustrates what is common in kind, if not in degree of indifference to method.
You see the mythical quality of some religions, which make no secret of it, and then decide to ignore the differentiae and abscond from test, and declare without ground, stated or other, that they are all the same. It reminds one of those men or women who, having had a disastrous-seeming partner, decide that 'men are all the same' or that 'you can never trust a woman.' Understandable in view of alienation ? Of course. Correct in procedure or accuracy, naturally not! This is not how science proceeds, but rather psychic upset. The two are often confused.
Thus Christ castigated the people who wanted to kill Him, that is engage in deicide if it were possible (but you could only kill the human envelope), "a man who told you the truth." (cf. John 8:40ff.) All the king's horses and all the king's men, if we may adapt, could not pull down Christ from the truth (cf. Luke 11, Matthew 22:23-46); so they killed Him.
It was intensely evil, intolerant of truth, but in terms of love of power, position, prestige and security, understandable. Think of it: having a man able to raise the dead, in moments cure the sick, give sight to the blind, remove in a throw, leprosy, feed thousands and who tells you that your religion is failing, your sincerity is omitted, your postures are invalid, your hypocrisy is creeping and that you must repent (sounds heard by Pharisaism for example - cf. Matthew 23, Luke 11), and this is your life which He challenges.
If you want to keep it, whatever it is, because it is yours, then there is little option! If you insist on the lie, you may lie in wait, if sufficiently unprincipled. When the truth is not good enough, what principles indeed remain!
You can see how in many it might have worked: you do not WANT to know GOD but to live as man, with religion as an accessory. You may say you can't or you won't, or make subterfuges aplenty, but it does not matter which. Your heart is set on something else. You wish to be yourself, hold your post, be important or imposing and knowledgeable and have your way remembered. In such a case, with morality already murdered, it is not strange if its Master is given the same treatment!
Why as Caiaphas is reported to have said, if you leave HIM alone, all the world will follow Him (John 11:48ff.)! The point was true, but the implication was false, of what to do about it. The world has paid heavily for its presumption in seeking to be equal with God, to displace Him, to replace Him, to run things its own way, whether in Israel or in USSR.
The way out, for the devious is death. Stalin found the same with Christians, and so did Mao so often. Just remove the protective set of organs as in China, or the whole as in the USSR, or make them slave in underfed scenes of Arctic cruelty and why worry ? It does the job. You can continue with your inane and unproductive experiments, while millions die of hunger, and keep your head clear for more manoeuvres.
So it was, is and has been. It was indeed for envy, we read, that they killed Christ (Mark 15:10).
When therefore it comes to this or that facet or feature, depending on the culture which one finds as a shroud or cloud of content or hope, mankind can simply become irrational as well as irreverent, irrelevant as well as farcical, and seeking to deny the obvious, try to obviate truth. "Professing to be wise, they became fools," Romans sums up (1:22). If something is in the way, says this program, remove it. MANY millions have been removed in China and Russia in such a style. It is precisely as foretold in Revelation 6, where the thrust of the dynamic becomes death, to kill as a profession, as a thrust of passion. The al Qaida movement and some allied, are becoming similar, making the sick pretence that killing and dying is part of the name of the game. Not life but the liabilities of death are glorified, as if destruction were a constructive device, and dying in bits and imposing these on others as weapons, were some great argument.
These sicknesses of spirit among men are not only forecast, but forecast as major movements as the end marches nearer and nearer for this Age, before the return of the Lord in judgment (as shown in sequence, in Revelation 19, following the efflorescence, this time, not of a merely national rule as in the USSR, but of its international counterpart. It is then as if truth lies dead in the streets (Isaiah 59). Man's way is given its head until its tale is told.
Thus the Bible not only analyses the sinful heart of man, but gives the syndrome in its most elemental form; while in II Corinthians 11, it shows efforts to gnaw elsewhere at the ropes of reality, when people try to attack the Christ-signature to salvation, by inventing some 'christ' out of their own minds. All has the same motif: get rid of God, of His express image, of His word, as in liberalism, which has become a mockery like the rest (cf. SMR pp. 377ff., 259ff., ), and use any trick or deceit however devious (as in neo-orthodoxy - cf. Lead Us Not into Temptation Ch. 3, The Biblical Workman, Appendix 3, Light of Dawn Ch. 2).
The fundamental function of raging unbelief is exposed, and the soft tissues of incremental application of the same spirit, no less. The Bible, in other words, has SHOWN in advance of thousands of years of history, the beginning and the end, the trend and the purpose, the syndrome and the soul of unbelief. It is not a logical matter, but pathological; and the assault which is often made on logic, is merely an act of desperation. The fact that you lose by removing in your own model, the only means of defence in argumentation, is simply one more instance of the sheer force of irrationality which such designs have had since the day of Eve, and up to this present time.
In giving such a forecast of the ways of the mind of unconverted man, and such a systematic foretaste, the Bible thus once more shows itself verified, and that most amply, giving not merely the explanation, but the whole character of the syndrome, seen in thousands of instances throughout the turbulent waves of history, as man in vast droves continually seeks to void or avoid the biblical truth, whether in the dismantling of the British Empire*2, or sundry churches, or in any other mode.
The whole movement to the antichrist - that 'mystery of iniquity' spoken of by Paul in II Thessalonians - simply shows the final prognosis. The God-evacuative, man-elevative syndrome comes at length through many avenues, including denial of creation and flood (II Peter 3) to the point where man simply tries to take the role of God direct (II Thess. 2). It is laughable; logically it is fastidious fare for those who love uproarious comedy: a thing born and to die trying to act as God! But yes, it comes, just as papacy came, 'God Almighty on earth' (cf. SMR pp. 915-916), and Maoism, principles enshrined in the head of a mass murderer.
The Bible never goes on vacation; and its words never cease to explain, to indict, to caress, as does a father, depending on the case. Its beauty is that for all its capacity to expose, it loves to cover up sin in the Saviour, and to turn the red-ink of correction, cancelled, into the red blood of substitutionary sacrifice in Christ Jesus. Indeed, it made sure that in time a millenium before Christ died, the cause of this death, the mode of it and the result of it would be clear; and then with many centuries to go, it made manifest the date on which He would die (cf. Highway of Holiness ... Ch. 4), and the whole depiction of the Gospel which His death would liberate, to enable mankind, as many as believed, to be liberated (cf. Isaiah 49-55, SMR pp. 755ff.).
As it said, so God did; and now it is done.
Hard as man is in his misconceptions and furious fulminations and frenzied extravanganzas in which that sublime gift of imagination is prostituted into imagining gods, God immovable, continues in the heavens of mercy, ready to confer the sublime on the sundered, and to adopt the alienated (cf. Isaiah 55) in a majesty of mercy that is as tender as costly (cf. Micah 7:19ff., Romans 5).
This, it too is verification, for as the Gospel WAS to come precisely as prefigured a millenium before it was paid for in redemption at Calvary, and was to continue till the Age ended, and just as many churches were to be infested with error, while the Gospel continued with many more, so all this has all been done*3.
The prescriptions are fulfilled. The redemption is done. The forecasts are verified. The syndrome of sin and its biblical stylisation continues operative and man continues with precision to illustrate its accuracy. Indeed, it is in terms of this analysis from the Lord, that man is explicable at all, in his remarkable obtuseness, just as Christ declared when present,
"Their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes ...
lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
and I should heal them!"
(from Matthew 13:13-15 - where its base in Isaiah is noted in that unchanging declaration of God concerning man and salvation).
None of God's words lapse. He is even willing to find the lapsed, and restore the fallen (Matthew 24:12, Revelation 12, Matthew 5:17-20, Psalm 111-112, II Peter 1, I Corinthians 15, Isaiah 59, Romans 11). Indeed, He delights in it (Luke 15, Micah 7:19ff.)
How great is the God whom we who are bought back by Him, adore, and how ingenious are His ways, infinite in comprehension, irreparable in remedy, immutable in understanding, illimitable in love, undimmed in purity, undeviating, reliable in faithfulness, incomparable in all! Incomparable in heaven or on earth (Psalm 89), He has shown His face (John 14:9, II Corinthians 4:6), ensuring salvation is of and in Himself alone (Isaiah 43:10-11), He has unshrouded the glory in His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, Lord of glory, celestial from eternity, and released on earth not only the redemption which He specifically purchased (Acts 20:28, Matthew 28:20), by His blood, but the light of life, the very Word of God eternal that we might behold Him.
It is God or not God; it is finding Him where He is or imagining Him; it is making images of mind or for the eye, or beholding the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God thought it nothing to be snatched at, to be equal with God, but became a servant that everyone who believes in Him should be redeemed.
It is time to awake. Time itself trembles as its come-uppance draws near and the vital word arrives, Faithful and True is His name (Revelation 19). The truth does not move; but it came that we might be moved back to our Lord (I John 4:14).
NOTES
See:
TMR Ch. 1,
Scientific Method, Satanic Method and the Model of Salvation
Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth Ch. 6.
See Chs. 1 and 2 above. In The Advertiser, February 20, 2007 there is an account of what appears an Anglican-Romanist crusade, involving the Romanist Archbishop of Brisbane, as joint chairman of an international commission of both of these religious bodies. It is directed at total union of Anglicanism with Roman Catholicism, the matter being said to be before the Pope. It is noted that "senior bishops in both churches have already backed the move".
Earlier action in this line has been long exhibited, as seen in A Question of Gifts IV. The EU connection has in turn led to such an imposition of immorality as makes of once Protestant England, the Queen given the Bible as the fount of wisdom, look so far away that it is scarcely visible - as seen in Wake Up World!... Ch. 3, His Wounds ... Ch. 3, Three Anzas and One Answer Ch. 5, News 151.
What is the line which these references attest ? It is this: disestablishment of the Church of England via Charles, or of its nature and mutation into a new religion, removal of biblical righteousness from Britain, ensnaring of that once great land of liberty and resolution, where martyrs aplenty aided the progress to prosperity and power, through helping awaken the population to the intense necessity of finding the Lord where He may be found, not in idolatry but in adoration of Jesus Christ Himself - all leading to loss of identity, new identity, submergence of biblical truth in the seas unchartered of a common destiny in the EU (The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God ... Ch. 6).
In fact, Romanism has been given short shrift by the EU, which is very modest about its religious past, in the midst of dissension, and ennobles its unknown (to it) future in terms of this common destiny, which alas is true, but not descriptive. As in Romans 17, the powers that be, the beast of the day in its aggressive, ingestive dynamism, will not tolerate the archaic traditionalism of Rome any more than the EU Constitution now shows, and using its past powers, will merely usurp it in order to lead once more with that lowest common denominator that finds mankind when he moves far from God: FORCE. Hitler was a prelude; Stalin provided a picture: now comes the end both for Romanism (as in Revelation 17-18 cf. SMR pp. 946ff.), and the final foray of the Beast, the power to push politics, as in Revelation 19.
The last stages, as in all disease, can be gruesome; and as in Revelation 17, do not lack in that now so common sight, pseudo-imperial power of the hour, being used without restraint in order to control and implement some demented picture or vision of vice, glorified with witlessness and enforced without heart. It is good to know it, just as history proceeds to show it. NOTHING is left to see, and eternity will be well equipped with the object lessons of history, when flesh rules, folly is thought, moral midgetry is grasped and spirituality is dumped in the sea, which itself is to suffer (Revelation 8:8ff.).
It is time for mankind to realise more broadly that playing God is not a game!
The Christian naturally, through supernatural grace and the carefully coded word of God, which both instituted man at the level of physical creation in DNA and its allies, and spoke to man in the Bible, that solely verified and validated document from divinity (cf. Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial host), looks forward to the Lord's termination of the times of testing, and His return to rule the planet which rejected Him. Not only is this the summit of spiritual splendour, where that Spirit who engendered man's fallible spirit (because of freedom) is seen face to face (Revelation 21-22, I Corinthians 13), but it is the consummation of the work of the Cross at Calvary, which covered not only the loss of purity of man, but the loss of life eternal which might have been his, and so comes even the redemption of the body in the general resurrection.
History is not for nothing; and its implementation has a cause, a condition and a consummation. When one walks with the Lord, in His Spirit, through the New Covenant in His blood, the path is open if narrow, and the drawing is vast, beyond in magnitude the whole caparison of space; and the end of it like the beginning is this, to KNOW THE LORD, and finding Him where He may be found at the Cross, is to find the beautiful immutable, the graciously liberal and the astutely wise.
For such a beginning (cf. Ephesians 1), heaven is the correlative end; in His favour is life, and out of it is life awash, foundering. Soon the history of this Age will fold its tent. It has been around long enough (Luke 21 cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5).