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CHAPTER EIGHT

THE HUMAN AND THE DIVINE:

THE ULTIMATE IN REBELLION

MEETS THE ULTIMATUM OF MERCY

 LIFE AND DEATH,

TRUTH AND BREATH

THE BLEEDING ITEM

WHEN the Lord did it, came and died; and when it was finished, the blood shed, the muscles torn, the tendons galled, seemingly the very organs of sight washed in sweat and the shoulders drawn to dislocation, then the opinion that man in power held, concerning the God of creation, was clarified.

The Empire of Rome, the Imperial majesty of the vast, civilised conundrum of massive culture and shameless power, had expressed itself on a spiritual topic through its Governor, Pilate. This brutal power and erratic force, allied with policies to quieten unrest and spread the scholarship and ambition, the stateliness and literary finesse, the administrative genius and engineering vitality of Rome,  into this world as an emblem, had expressed itself. Christ died at the hand of Rome as much as at that of the priests and mesmerised populace of Jerusalem.

The place for the eagle, it was there, its talons exposed, its beak poised, it had acted. In its inglorious representative, Pilate in Palestine, it had thrown justice explicitly to the winds, yielded to a mob, and with classic deliberation had insisted it had no blame. In Pilate, it washed its hands quite literally, but no less metaphorically, in intention, of the whole thing. Did Rome repent ? Not noticeably. When you murder the Son of God, it is good to be ... clear about repentance. However the kingdoms of this world have not yet become the kingdom "of our Lord and of His Christ" (Revelation 11:15). Now that time sweeps inexorably forward, not by naturalistic power or imaginary theories contradicted by facts, inane convolutions of the human mind, but by the word of God, which brings to light the declarations of millenia ago, to this day, and will do so, putting into time the counsels of eternity.

But then, then in Jerusalem, when Rome and that city both showed their will, the thing stayed on for a time.

The thing ? that which had been killed, slain, subjected to agony and rejected from the light of very common day.

It was still on the Cross after some 6 hours of the torture to truth which is the inveterate will of the mighty, of the heights of human civilisation; and though this world may yield for a little space, as in components and aspects of the British Empire, nominally Christian and mixing wonderful actions with horrible deeds, from time to time, and although whole States could seek to glorify this same thing, Jesus Christ on occasion, yet the political plague continued, and the spiritual slaughter did not cease. The servant is not greater than his master, and if they did it to Christ, to His servants they pay out death also, as sailors pay out rope (John 15:20-21, 16:1-2).

Jesus Christ is for the people, but He is not for this world.

THE MUNDANE BELLIGERENCE CONTINUES

Rome continued in one form or another, its unspiritual sway from that day. To be sure, it fell in 410 A.D. with many features and foci taken in invasion; but the centre of it Empire moved to the East, to Constantinople and while that fell in 1453 A.D., yet its power and resource moved on to the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, with its invasions and execrations, its papacy vying with the Emperor and its godless domination. Thus it continued the world dominion rites that so wronged mankind from earlier initiations in Egypt to thrusts in Persia, to vast catapulted forces in Alexander the Great, to the works of Napoleon for France, even to those of Hitler for Germany. Russia made its contribution in kind at least, in Stalin with the USSR, as did Mao for China, Tojo for Japan.

In all of this,  there has been an unblessed, vested interest in unhallowed force, with secular odysseys of unreason, or spiritual tempests storming into truth, like a blitzkrieg. Either way, the word of God has been assaulted or ignored, smashed and yet it continues, as by strikes of military power, so that in one thing or another, this world has shaken itself and prepared for its dismal future of dismissal (Revelation 20:11).

Let us however return to the European side of things, epitomised in Rome. To this, the ministrations of the Roman Catholic Inquisition, torturing Christian and Jew alike (cf. Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 14), the imperial Spanish forces of that most 'catholic' land, removing Inca and Aztec without financial loss as gold was swept in like a harvest, and bodies out of vital life like dust, while many were enslaved: this proceeded with unholy impetus.

It was not alone. Matched by the depredations of the Turks in the Moslem invasion of Europe rebutted in the 8th century at Tours, it was one vast pulse in the arm of power. That where Islam features continued in the modern enlargements in the Sudan when virtual genocide if not of race, then in religious terms seems entangled with other murderous machinations and multiplications, while Israel is threatened in one of this world's enormous jokes, though it be grave humour, for its tiny littoral and often reducing pittance from the promised Palestine, is bombarded both politically and militarily. It is so treated in terms of a religion which has much of Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, has Iran and Iraq, has Pakistan and Afghanistan in large measure, and yet is not sated (cf. Israel Ch. 1, It Bubbles ... Chs.   7,   7-2,  10, 11, Repent or Perish Ch. 3, Bay of Retractable Islands Chs. 18,    19, The Biblical Workman Ch.  3). 

This world is not complete in that. Its octopus strands, like those of hundreds of feet which can emanate from those oceanic monsters, include those of Communism, a possessive ideology^*1 of brandished power, in appearance playfully exterminating millions in Cambodia, and  now in its mutated form, subduing Tibet and menacing Taiwan where a residue escaped its godless brutalities and inhuman estimates of man: these too must be added.

THE SPIRITUAL ASSAULT SQUADS

But if you add, where do you stop ? Certainly, when our survey is spiritual, it cannot exclude the ministrations of death which have sacked Europe, exporting themselves through scholars of spiritual sedition into the USA over the last few centuries, as they have lusted to make  new bibles out of the old one, new christs aplenty,  clowns and revolutionaries amongst them, seeking to secularise or at least plagiarise the word of God into their own philosophic mashing machines, to make ever new idols and ever new impositions. Not satisfied with a defiled culture of belief in almost anything so long as it is illogical, culturally rampant and absurd, philosophers and theologians have tormented the truth with incessant mockery and deliberate defilement, as if the lusts of godless passion could not contain themselves, until whole nations were corrupted.

This world has many strands of invasive suckers from its octopus arms, sucking out the heart, while the armies abuse the constructions of man, making rubble out of creation, and ruin out of enterprise.

The irrationalities of their endeavours, always changing because always exposed in their follies, have seemed merely to emphasise the attitude behind it all, as if to thumb the nose the more obviously at God, the only One who has demonstrated and validated, verified and applied His work consummately, consistently and TESTABLY amongst all those who claim to speak the truth (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ).

With the Book now, it was with the Christ then.

As with Him then, it is with the word of the living God now.

There arises  no abuse of power, reason-defying rummaging and lashing with tongues when the other whips would not do, that seems to satisfy, until

	children miseducated, with
	even private schools increasingly subject to the squalor of such nations as a condition of permission to educate, and
	mass media in submission with relish to their cultural masters,
	universities enthralled,

the nations crumble into desolatory confusion.

What is wrong with our youth! they cry, as drugs and intoxication, wild sprees and empty hearts drive empty heads to be filled with something or other, without too much concern, but with results that are.

They will have compassion ? and give thousands of dollars to people who in some cases hasten to have children, one nursing worker reporting of one island in this our own land, where with religious T-shirts aplenty are displayed on the young, children become vehicles of sexual abuse, down to 7 years of age, and babes are sought for the cash income. How COULD such a program ever have been started, and how now could it now be extended! Whether guns or cash be given, discretion is here at least, a better part of valour!

It is not the financial need of those who receive it, currently irrespective of income, but the moral degradation to which in multiplied instances it leads, which represents merely one more hapless extension of the 'no morals' approach, which leaves man worse than decadent, virtually deceased while he lives.

Fulfil yourself, be the first, do not let anyone push you around, they cry. Indeed, one church course was on the topic of how to assert yourself!  Blessed are the assertive, for they shall delight Darwin ? It is not this that appears in the Sermon on the Mount and in blessed peoples who practice it, but rather (Matthew 5), Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth!

That lust, however, and not the thrust of truth appears the kind of thing desired by many, with survival thrust or bust moral technologies, though Darwin has been so long dead ideologically, that even some Universities seem to be beginning to realise that fact (cf. Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 4, Trappings for Potpourri). The reality of Christianity some swallow up in making it a prosperity religion, as if to demean still further the King of glory of the Cross of non-prosperity. To be sure, His resurrection made it only a staging post on which to hang the flesh, but the anguish was not prosperous, nor the shame vested in Him by religious shams.

Idiocies of a spiritual kind, as in Hosea 9:7,  seem to become the ideology of many, for optic obstruction if not wilful blindness seems in vogue (cf. Ephesians 4:17-19); and over the centuries, if it is not some naturalistic, animistic, mystic squalor without ground, ludicrous imagination made compelling like men or even mystic figures from space (cf. Secular Myths ... Chs.   1,   7, News 57), when the God of creation has already come with luminous letters giving the evidence which none can ever subdue or match, in DNA and Bible alike, then it is the passion for compassion built on nothing, emanating in meaningless mentors without hope, desired destiny failing like a motor without petrol, and meaning placed like some pot plant, wherever one will amid the rambling tangles of a disordered land.

THE CRUCIAL RESULT IS ALREADY IN PLACE
AND HAS BEEN FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS

While man is in the ultimate rebellion, mercy has provided the ultimatum of truth, with free access to it, for everyone who will (cf. Revelation 22:1;7).

Take the prediction of the death date of Christ, dwelt on in the preceding Chapter. Having sent prophets aplenty, God Himself came.

Aptly and appropriately giving data in reams, provided testable truth in mountains, He has moved nations at will and foretold their eclipse over millenia (cf. The Pitter-Patter ... Ch. 4). He has brought climax as in Mark 12, with the Son who independently in verification, but intimate in co-operation with predictions, brought a second file of authority to the word of God: by BEING it. Hi word commanded, and things happened accordingly, from deletion of disease to destruction of death. When He went, His word continued to work as before, this time in association with all that He had said before He came.

This endless directorship, fulfilment, is placarded to all. This God has done over the thousands of impactive years,  as in Egypt, never again to be a prominent nation, as in Babylon, bequeathing its glory to the dust, as in Nineveh, of like destiny, all foretold, as is the case in detail with Tyre, while the tireless expeditions of lust and vainglory of mankind are in themselves also foretold in the flurry of wars, the hurry of immorality and the glorying in shame which is their scooped history told in advance, together with their increasing preoccupation with religion, provided it be false, and fables, provided they be popular as in organic evolution and the various imaginary gods brought up by imagination and no more real, reliable or testable than dreams which fade in a moment.

He said, He did, He came, He continued to do, and now He has continued to the end of the Age, which He has defined and these definitions are being fulfilled so that even over the last 60 years, the results have been adequate to convict the most perverse, whatever the mouth of man may say.

All this has come, while more force and less faith have joined hands like a pair of criminals. These extremes make of mankind an able expositor of death by voluntary destiny-disfigurement. Man is set to be  making radioactivity the alternative to oil, thus extending the opportunity for a few to ruin a whole land in a few moments, while the wealth from this,  pouring into the Middle East to mingle with the blood pouring out, enables Islamic fanatics to plot the subjugation of this human race^*2; and the increase of the realms of force in shame become major means of assault on the Lord Jesus Christ and the Book of the Lord, with cunning contrivances of mutuality, the better to liaise with the unremitting abuse of force. Meanwhile, women are invaded by surgical skills, to mutilate their God-given genitalia, and people are mutilated or killed in many places, simply because they prefer to find peace in the God of redemption rather than lurk in the corridors of force masquerading as faith.

If not all of Islam are like that, nevertheless the history is more than marred, for it has been a marketable commodity, the subjugation of whole nations by force and the subordination of peoples by taxes and discrimination^*2.

Communist, Muslim, secularist reductionist allied to naturalism, some with law, against law, some moving by dictators, some by manipulation, by education, by instillation: they move towards the night of which Christ spoke when He declared (John 8:4):

^"I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day:
the night comes, when no man can work.
As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."

So does any lord do for millions (Matthew 24:24, II Timothy 3, I Timothy 4, II Timothy 4), if not billions, infatuated or engrossed with any-one-other-than the One who foretold His coming, its meaning, its method, His works, their point, His death, its reason, His resurrection, its results, His Gospel of grace, its travelling through a world precisely as it has done, with many receiving it, while at last an unrepentant world the more deeply moves to deceive itself in almost any sort of sickly substitute which stands neither to reason nor liberty.

Small wonder is it therefore that

WHEN God had done His wonderful work (Isaiah 29:14, 28:21 cf. Ch. 2 above), and completed His passion,

	not of inordinate lust but of immutable love,
	not to subjugate in fear by force, but
	to educate and animate,
	to recreate and regenerate a heart of love in polluted man;

and when He had shown

	by power and word, prophecy and truth the way of life,
	and in particular,
	fulfilled with precision the death date (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4)
	for His wonderful work,
	His creative act,
	His banishment of the guilt of sin freely,
	by vicarious sacrifice and abundant love:

that He declined to predict the date of His regal return to rule on this earth.

IT IS NOT TO BE until this world is filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

Theologies, even these, have sought to make man the mediator of this wonder; but it is not so, for the world is doing precisely what God said it would (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5), as if it were programmed. However,  it is foreseen sin which programs it increasingly. This world is to go to the snarling, snapping dogs, to the deadly, diffuse dreams, to the inordinate fancies, to the inveterate filth which comes when wonder is immersed in poison, and to do so with such rigour and continuity, the Bible teaches (cf. Romans 1:21-32), that ONLY BY the coming again of Jesus Christ COULD it continue to support human habitation (Matthew 24).

WHEN will your kingdom come and be set up ? asked the disciples (as shown in Acts 1). It is NOT for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father has set up, the Lord replied. It is not for a further precision work, to become a pantomime so that hypocrites can wait for it and repent neatly just before the day: it is not for that that the wisdom of God has acted.

He foretold the death, for vice would see to that; but the COMING AGAIN He foretold in one way only, and dynamically declined to date it, just as He had dynamically insisted, through Daniel on giving the date for the death (cf. Daniel 9, I Peter 1:11-12).

How many love to hang on successful sovereigns, swelling with acceptance,  and enjoy the perks of their positions! but few are as happy to accompany Christ to His Cross. That was self-testing. This world's nod, it is not.

NOT FOR YOU to know, is the return date, said Christ. As noted in the last Chapter, the last half seven of the final 70 sevens for the age of testing and Gospel to be complete,  were recalibrated in such a style that the change is not given in measure. It is given instead in FUNCTION on the one hand, and in FRUITION on the other.

What then is the point ? let us examine these things in question form.

Do you really think that God would enable man to know just what HE was doing in times set for judgment, to the point that man could try to manipulate His second coming as he sought to do to the first! In the Lord's counsel and man's besotted foolishness of spirit, the whole wit of man was spent on seeking to kill the Christ; and often in the New Testament do you meet these machinations when neither word of mouth nor power of hand could even begin to match the matchless exuberance of the Son of God. It was His own national religionists, polluted past all recognition in their abuses, who plotted His death; but if they had known that in so doing they were merely fulfilling His prophecies and causing the foretold sacrifice of the centuries to become fact, they might indeed not have so acted (I Corinthians 2:8).

Some doubt His love ? What would you expect ? That Christ as a clown would disport Himself before you, in contortions and exhibitions of muscular power or athletic finesse ? Would you ? Perhaps Herod did, and seek that Christ would add a miracle or two, for better sport.

Would you wish Him to charm you with ever better offers of what He would do if only you blessed God with your most precious presence? Would you, like a political host, have Him encroaching on your time with more and more exploitation of His soon to be denied gifts, for your entertainment ?

With God, wisdom is before works, and love is in them. In the end, even judgment arresting lives beyond all form and destitute of the mercy they reject (rather like the Burmese Generals rejecting the mercy FOR many of those in the 2008 catastrophe, for quite a time - but this, it is for eternity), has a better reality than a morbidity that knows no bounds, and is bound only to imperiously desired bondage, by whatever name it may go...

Or do you not notice His exhortations, His endeavours without limit, His healings without loss, His intimations of love, His exhibitions of mercy, even if on the Sabbath, so great was His kindness, when they were sometimes performed. While this would the better meet the exorbitant need, yet no less would it lead to some of the hatred which demanded His blood! He did it anyway. Love is like that. Violence in place of faith has its modes, scimitars, death-chambers, torturous inquisitions; and love has its own ways, which neither threat nor vile violence can overcome, when it is the love of God: He is LIKE that!

Did you want Him to dance for you, or sing with lustrous voice, or impress with survival skills in tanks of water or beer, or warn you ? But this last He did.

Or would you like Him to exhort you over and again in this and that point and situation, till it all overflowed and then have this recorded, how in love, humility, compassion and power without self-imposed limit or self-exhibiting lordliness of manner, He had so acted, so that the record could be read ?

HOW He has exhorted and pled over the ages! Yet His is discretion, being without manipulability or control by quirks or enticement!

Would you expect this then ? Well you have it! It is the New Testament. Would you expect Him to be so sincere, that like a noble solder at the front, He would die for His comrades ? Just so, this in fact He did. Or perhaps you would wish Him, if so good, as Messiah to intercede with God, His Father,  and have a freeway constructed back to Him, so that anyone could come, without wealth, power or merit, and yet be accepted ? This He did, precisely as in Matthew 22, in history and in fact.

What more could anyone possibly want ?

To BE God ? Impossible, you were born, and He has a long, indeed an infinite start on you, and what would YOUR wisdom do to create a universe so profound in law and brilliance, that the utmost scholars come (when not intoxicated with pride) as children to be taught its ever increasing wonders, as you see in Hartnett's most recent book, Starlight, Time and the New Physics ?

Or would you like someone to point out that

	in writing, in  the book of the Lord alone, as
	in life, in the Lord of the Book, Jesus Christ,

the only begotten Son of the living God, becoming man
that we might be brought back freely to God:

	there only,  in all religion, is to be found
	either systematic testability or
	relentless verifiability, and with that crucial addition,
	verification itself;  or for that matter,
	validity -  and these, in any field of the writing you name, provide not only the detail, but the consistent application of its own principles in truth itself, harmonious where philosophy jars within itself, comprehensive in the nature of man and matter, mind and reality, standing where all else falls, in all things providing the confirmation of its claims, so that it stands alone!*3

It is not the product of man's wit, but the concurrent contributions through many over millenia, of the will and word of God, its own witness! It could not be less, nor does it claim less, for such consistency is not found from what is alien, but what is cognate.

Thus indeed do we read also precisely  in I Peter 1:20-21, as the divine claim. NO prophecy, says Peter, has come from an individual's perception, in put, but all from the moving power of the Lord Himself.

In other words: NO scripture is of any individual interpretation, released by the mind of man from his own depths of wisdom, but the words of God came by the power and thrust of the Holy Spirit, which bore along those commissioned so to write as He willed. THEREFORE it is a light, for this LIGHT is the light which lightens the world, or if you prefer, the truth which enables understanding of all things, since from it they have come.

This has nothing whatever to do with human authority, but with the divine which so GAVE to man, naked of his own wisdom, so that therefore it is a light in a dark place, therefore it is reliable, to be trusted, being not a thing of man at all, in what it provides, but of the God whose is history and whose is life. Man neither does nor can provide this; God only can, and in this, He does. As the claim is, so is the result.

 It is BECAUSE the prophecy did NOT come by the will of man, who can and does err, a fatal navigator in pride and limitation if you trust in him,  that it is reliable. That is the force of the "for" in I Peter 1:21. SO far from a human being acting as the sure governor and guide, it is this individuality and limitation which is removed so that the power of God, without any sinner in the way, in THIS, acts; and in this is light that never dims, grabs, falls into sin, fails in brightness or lacks lustre. Even Solomon, credited with divine wisdom, failed in much as he grew old; but the Lord Himself NEVER fails, and NO individual is EVER to be trusted for life, if you want certainty (cf. Matthew 23:8-10).

That , then, is what is actually stated in I Peter 1, and that is the fact: for the whole world is like a glass to the scripture, history released in stages, as by commission from what God has said, and as the end of the Age nears, the criteria are blindingly obvious.

Thus in whatever realm, the point is God, is the Lord Himself, is His word, is His life as Christ, is His confirmation, validation, verification, confirmation, and what He does, He does fluently, regally and with that glorious exuberance that fears nothing and declares what He will.

Thus even this proof and demonstration you have, that of the singular written word and the living Christ, the Word incarnate; and it is, for one instance, to be found precisely as such on this very site (Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ). The application of these things is considered and found just^*3.

Would you then have scholars show its truth in debates in Universities ? As the Conservapedia points out, this is precisely what has happened; and these who in Christ have so presented have enjoyed extraordinary success against debating opposition, whether lawyer or scientist. To be fair, a barrister presenting a case which is true has enormous advantage over one who has a lie to defend (I John 2:22); but that is the very point, for this being truth, has facility for its demonstration

But again, what would you  ? Would you have God demean Himself not only physically and in the humiliation of sharing our concerns and limits, as He in fact did, but lacking in His relationship of eternity to His Father, so that the result is mere imposture ? or have Him share our sins, like a dilettante school teacher with no discipline ? Then heaven would be as distant as ever: for truth cannot bend without ceasing to be itself, and love that honours itself by defiling its object is mere exploitation and degradation combined.

Do you wish then to be exploited ?

But if you want

	purity and truth,
	peace within and power to perform the will of God,
	pardon for your sins and rejoicing in your heart,
	reason validated in your mind and
	revelation verified to show you the way on all sides, together with
	a Shepherd above all ministers and priests, psychiatrists and doctors, physicians and prelates,
	that One who came, who in infinite knowledge and integrity mixed with a love and compassion that almost hurts the human eyes to behold:

then you have this too in Jesus Christ. It is He who not only shared sufferings but found what you have not found, and cannot, namely the pangs of death as if guilty, while breaking this mortality  by purity and deity. Thus bounding out of the other side of death, He has presented the death of  death to the guilty when redeemed,  and His innocence to His people (Romans 5:17, II Corinthians 5:17-21, Hosea 13:14, I Corinthians 15, Romans 3:23ff.).

If there is anything good that God could have done, He has done it; and if there is anything simple that the unsaved soul might do, it also is there: Believe the Gospel, accept the Lord by His grace alone, rejoice in His love, receive of His mercy, have your guilt obliterated and your place enumerated so that as one of His sheep, you might bleat not in vain, and as one of His brethren, might find your source, recourse and resource all in one. Here, in God Himself made manifest and available to man freely, here is  a one shop Gift Shop, better than any emporium, where all your needs are satisfied. If this were not enough, here in Him also, all your duties, point and meaning are articulated,  and by His Spirit your nearness to Him is made intimate,

Leave this out, and it is like leaving out a plus sign in front of a figure, except for one thing, THAT figure already has a minus sign. It is one to be replaced as in II Corinthians 5:21, Romans 5:17. But as Proverbs 1 puts it, if you will not hear, there are results. Exclude light and what CAN you expect but darkness. What then ? (John 3:19,36).

Folly then becomes the wisdom of the Age, and in large measure has been so ever since His sacrifice, wrought by those who removed Him in unbelief, and with Him, peace from this world (Isaiah 9:6-7). Indeed as Christ put it, the prince of this world is coming and he has NOTHING IN ME! (John 14:30).

So it was to be, and this prediction, like all the other words, is fulfilled in its distressing and stressful intensity as power is wielded as if by a besotted, drunken 'teen-ager on the rampage, among the nations, for the Gentiles are as a group of nations no better than was Israel. They surge and converge, they fail and falter, they become smug and saunter, they grow fat and they kick ... (cf. Deuteronomy 32:15).

Threats multiply, weapons surge with excruciating devilishness of concept, nations wipe their brows as they roll up their sleeves.

With atomic submarines and airplanes coming off the drawing board to the sea and the air, as if mankind in culture were possessed, he speaks of peace and slanders, of solution and grabs, of understanding and majors in its opposite. International affairs come now to vary more and more from asinine to outrageous.

Indeed, this world in its increasingly transparent culture is so possessed by the lust to survive (equals - do what it takes to keep going, forget morals, meaning and truth), to arrive, to subdue, to be the one left standing, that the nations spend themselves while millions starve, and millions more are starved of liberty, where lust displaces love as one metal another in electrolysis.

Love! In the mercy of God, He refuses to tell the time of His coming. Does not this world have seemingly unlimited time to the minds of many ? but for what ? for a slow extermination, a gradual extinction, as if to mock the inane slander of truth, which has time an inventor, and an age a master of design such as in fact, by any sustainable definition^*4, man cannot equal! From time comes wit, wisdom, mathematical genius, collocation of harmonious concepts, systematic wonders of co-ordination, co-operation and consequential ordinance, to fit the bill, the word of power. It is however, in fact, but the passing of an extent in which whatever is may operate. It is what is which matters. A moron has nothing to contribute, and a mindless concept, even less.

Thus as the Age declines like a setting sun, the time comes for the stop of the infestation of philosophy and the arrival of truth once more, this time with ruling power and judgmental finality; for the opportunity is for truth, in truth and for the truth, and in truth, when mercy is despised, judgment is co-ordinate with contempt.

As in any exam, the clock is now  nearly at the point of stoppage for the test!

Unfazed and foolish on the outside, rampant with turbulent realities within, man continues his rambling  ramifications in inordinate disfaith. With elaborate distempers, man moves to demonstrate that NOTHING ELSE will so much as work, far less be able to demonstrate truth, which is the logical prerogative of the word of God (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, SMR Ch. 1, Ch. 10). It is becoming more and more like the LABORATORY OF TIME. Time does NOT produce, given ANY time, without intelligence, more than  morons do in ingenuity, but rather, since they have SOME intelligence, rather less.  It is time to think a little.

What time does do, given large quantities, is illustrate the parameters of any system, and expose its type by function, and its capacities by results. Even at that, you have to have the system as a given, which is no explanation at all, but a mere begging of the question.

It does not create gods; it is merely the opportunity for what is there to show it.

What OUR time is doing is showing what the SYSTEM OF SIN can do, and we are seeing in the blood-stained pages of history the full parameters of its power. It is exquisitely unimpressive.

Now louts do not need to loiter; for you need only watch the newspapers to find sub-loutish behaviour among the nations in lies, deceits, deviousness, false diplomacy, torture of citizens who do not conform, abuse of education to make meaningless midgets out of those near to ready to become children of God. What an accomplishment!

It is, with some variation of content, but little of spirit, now more and more universally, as in the days which Jesus met in His own time on this earth,  in the form of a man. At that time, did He not confront some of the leaders of the day, people who should know, equipped with privileges of learning and law, and tell them that they were hypocrites,

NEITHER ENTERING INTO TRUTH THEMSELVES,
NOR FAILING TO HINDER THOSE
WHO WERE ON THE POINT OF DOING SO! (Luke 11).

In this, man has not changed, but like people gulping fresh air in great lungfuls, after lacking air, man is doing this in reverse, gulping great lungfuls of poisonous pollution in philosophies and theologies, mouthing hatred or hollowing hindrance, dashing in dream or intellectual fibrillation, as if to fail to do so were death: when in fact, it is the doing of it which is deadly.

It is this false passion, exhibited over the ages, but now appearing the dynamism more and more universally of our Age,

which extorts truth and imports lies.

It is this which

	makes meaninglessness like a factory in dynamic commotion,
	makes cartoons of cynicism, exporting them wholesale to the impressionable minds of children,
	teaches groundless philosophies of force and
	commends actions of compassion, while frequently distorting even this, to make manipulees of government, at its will, recipients of 'help' to become educatees who are like those disjointed, learning how to creep as cripples, because of the lie ( I John 2:22).

Thus it is to the point, and a vast point, that the Lord WOULD NOT GIVE THE DATE of His return.

He will find, as He said, many ostensibly His, engaging in actions vastly removed from His choice and their charter. Unbelief in power will be masquerading in force (as when the 'abomination of desolation' has the effrontery to appear in the temple - Matthew 24:15). In masterful realism, Jesus Christ would not apply to heaven to provide this datum, this date for return;  but He did make it most clear, that it was to be hidden, and that it was no part of His messianic mission to bring it to light on this earth. His return would speak; of its time, He would not; but of its parameters, when it drew near, He made eloquent and adequate account (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5).

Contemporary life more and more fully contains this account, uniquely for all time.

Indeed, it would be in the darkness of this world's desires that the dynamic would unfold which by signs aplenty, would soon enough show when the end was NEAR (Luke 21). This prediction by signals, this indication by developments was the new method, the King's own control of the data. The SEVENS of Daniel 9, would remain sevens, but the unit would change. This ? it occurred with the grave of Christ, when crucified, He held back the onset of return till the fulfilment of all things, the Gospel to all nations, the futility of mere utility without God were all exposed.

THEN, and then only is He who is invisible, to become visible once more (Revelation 19), this time with the gravamen of the charges against the creatures, mankind, where sundered from the Creator. Then the silence which did not speak, would be the booming indictments which do.

There would be then, no answer to this question of time, of which man is so fond, except the enumeration of the symptoms of mortality as the race eventually managed to rocket, as it does rocket, to the total exposure situation of its folly and incompetence. The time ? it is when you have exposed your ignorance with false knowledge, your heedlessness with the ignorance of true knowledge, and misapplied your wonderful God-given liberties by a combination of freakish tyrannies and foolish lusts, till the race becomes not a rat-race but a ruined one.

It is pitiful. Love sent the answer with all data and demonstration. Mercy now has given the ultimatum. If you do not come now, you go then. It is ever so simple. Man's ultimate rebellion, even against the Lord of love and the sacrifice of agony, the anguish of substitution of the Lord for the sinner in something infinitely greater than mere empathy, is met by mercy's ultimatum. There is nothing else, it decrees.

	When death for you is unimpressive,
	when guilt's cancellation freely is as poison and grace's submission to your low estate is scorned,
	when salvation is met with shut eyes and its words with shut ears,
	when the nations exhibit hatred and hypocrisy, and ideologies are invented as if novels, with results not so novel,
	when man continues insistently and persistently and more and more consistently to trust in himself, and make gods at will, as if truth were a stranger and holiness an outlaw:

THEN you are helpless.

What then of those who are such ? THEN in your false lordliness is your true subjugation; and you have insisted on it for yourself. Such is the option for which so many strain.

As to this, It is not visited by others, who though they seek to ensnare you,  cannot control you without your consent: you, and you yourself alone. YOU avoid truth and YOU confront mercy,  and you forget that this is for your life (cf. Proverbs 1, 8:35-36).

This is the verified word of God and the glorious work of God, better far than creation, and you want it not ? Very well, says mercy, since this is the uttermost both obviously and historically that could even be conceived for people made in the wonderful image of God, with such powers of invention and contention that you conceive yourself as if gods, when not in the alternating fits of depression and its philosophies, and you reject it: what then ? Then,  eat the fruits of your own faithlessness.

What worse exists than to be sundered from spiritual sanity in sin, and to gain slowly the agricultural results of such plantings, until fruit comes; and you HAVE to eat it because then you are surrounded by NOTHING ELSE. It is ALL YOURS! What a self-fulfilment ...

Of all the derelict horrors which one can imagine, this is the worst. It is so, provided this is the end, that this is the hopeless result of the spiritual scenario.

At present it is not. While it is not for us to know the times or the seasons which the Father has set in His own hands for the return of Christ, it IS for us to OPEN the eyes and observe the precise coming of ALL that Christ declared would be the adequate pattern for realisation that the time for it is NEAR. The return of Israel of course is something which, since Christ, has happened how many times ? It has been ONCE in two thousand years, so that it is quite beyond question, unique. It is now, and has been so since 1967 at least (Luke 21:24).

THE ULTIMATUM OF MERCY

The ultimatum of mercy! Let us seek to formulate the sort of thing that is involved.

 Very well, since you will not heed dates, you will have none.

How is it to be put ? It may be written like this.

Since you will not face Christ, you will face the fruit of your own evils.

Since you do not desire the Messiah, then deal with your fire, fire of mind, heart, body and lusts of the spirit till you find extermination meaningful and life a burden.

Lavish luxury on yourselves until the whole world creaks like a second story about to crash, and you realise that building without foundation is a sandy pastime, and being creative with gods is a manic mischief of the spirit.

Find your wonderful world by your witless hastes and wastages of truth, and ... enjoy.
Is this not the child of your dreams  ? THEN live your dreams.

 

Such is the ultimatum of merciful, not because it ceases to be merciful, but because it is wedded to truth, and will not lie. MAN, says the word of God, would fail if the contest continued forever, the spirit of man would fail (Isaiah 57:15-16).

Hear now how Proverbs put it, when at that early stage, the coming of this same Messiah was merely a future event. Yet it put it for the same Lord who would come, said He would, finished His work and went, only to return in His time. Hear this.

"Wisdom calls aloud outside;

She raises her voice in the open squares.

She cries out in the chief concourses,

At the openings of the gates in the city

She speaks her words:

 

'How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity?

For scorners delight in their scorning,

And fools hate knowledge.

 

'Turn at my rebuke;

Surely I will pour out my spirit on you;

I will make my words known to you.

 

'Because I have called and you refused,

I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded,

Because you disdained all my counsel,

And would have none of my rebuke,

I also will laugh at your calamity;

I will mock when your terror comes,

When your terror comes like a storm,

And your destruction comes like a whirlwind,

When distress and anguish come upon you.

 

'Then they will call on me, but I will not answer;

They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me.

Because they hated knowledge

And did not choose the fear of the Lord,

They would have none of my counsel

And despised my every rebuke.

Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way,

And be filled to the full with their own fancies.

For the turning away of the simple will slay them,

And the complacency of fools will destroy them;

But whoever listens to me will dwell safely,

                           And will be secure, without fear of evil.' "

 

Thus there is an end. Created things are not by that fact eternal; for eternity is a matter of truth and liberty, love and mercy in the living God whose eternal existence is the basis of all things, for with nothing at any time, there is nothing for all time, and we are not nothing. We begin, and come to the conclusion of the matter, of life, that it be eternal, for those BOTH made in His image and redeemed from sin, or a ceaseless round of shame.

This sunset in time that becomes dawn in eternity,  Gospel provides it; but this scorned, the pollutions of the present become the clothes of the future, even eternal contempt. And what else for a shambles ? one freely chosen in the very face of the love of God who expressly would like to have ALL reconciled to Himself, but WILL NOT use force to achieve it. You see that so clearly in Proverbs 1 above as in Luke 19:42ff., Jeremiah 9, 17 and Ezekiel 20; and indeed it is a cardinal expression of His revealed nature ^*5.  But let us once more apply these facts, once more in the realm of force, as if used, where love belongs. .

After all, even if this were done, the things forced would no more be men than is a forced damsel married, for she is then but misrepresented and marred by illicit, meaningless, horrid compulsion. Man must come freely, in the inventory of the wonders of God, who knows how to interpret reality and find His own (Romans 8:29ff., Ephesians 1:4) ^*5.

An ultimatum from MERCY ? How glorious! Love does not answer its call, but calls for an answer, even if God alone knows for the sickened spiritual syndrome of man, what in truth it is (I Corinthians 2:14). Judgment is not for rejecting His love alone, but for rejecting His mercy which brings back to the consummate reality of love. We are made both for and by Him, and to break with the life of love is to break with the love of life. It is not judgment that surely follows until the grace from mercy is rejected! Disease is not healed by ignoring it, nor is rebelliousness restored to reality by distorting its actuality or ignoring its fact.

The love of God is not imperiousness, for both Christ and the prophets lamented for its oversight; nor is it compulsion, for the tender appeals echo throughout the entire Bible, and the grief at their rejection. It is not lust, for God is complete and as He would be, without giving grants of grace. It is the sharing of Himself and His eternity with those who being created for it, may be graced with it. No lie distorts its brow, nor any grabbing its grace; nor does any impersonal administration confine its personal beauty.

Consider Him whom it offers, as in Proverbs 8.

                          All those who hate me love death."

Thus did the Lord speak, pre-incarnate, He who is the wisdom of God and the truth (cf. John 14:6, I Corinthians 1:30).

So He spoke on arrival (Matthew 23:37, Luke 3 19:42ff.). Did any man speak like this! (cf. John 7:45ff.)! By His speech He arrested the very people who came formally to arrest Him!

His love and truth, His mercy and peace, His realism and understanding  are arresting, but also liberating, for they strike the chord of actuality in our made beings, which though not manipulable by nature, are responsive by kind; and though they should repress the response, it is natural, normal and valid for man. This love does not end, as God Himself does not; for here is eternal life. Thus is the yearning even in yesteryear, before He came, as in Proverb 8.

Jesus Christ is for the people, but He is not for this world. His love is extensive and expensive, but it is not realised by this world, in a darkness which does not comprehend, amend or bend to the light, to part its ways to the incoming vision of virtue and love, kindness and the Cross, power and the resurrection, of a Shepherd for the soul, One who being God, at last is that ONE who KNOWS it, and treats it as it needs (John 10).

It is this and not ignorance which is bliss, because here is that beauty of holiness without which man is an alien amidst aliens, alienated amidst the divorcees of spirit, from his own God! Man ? his design does not work without God, though it works many things. It is misplaced without this placement, though its will sing praises to itself in vainglory.

FROM VAINGLORY TO GLORY IS TO BE FOUND IN GOD ONLY,

NOT IN THE PUBLICATIONS OF IMAGINATION

What a beautiful prior note, then, has come from the publisher of truth! You MAY HAVE MERCY NOW. If you do not, there is nothing else. Come imperious man, come desolatory man, come repentant man, come man the miserable, the vainglorious, the proud, the arrogant, the arrogating predator of the glory of God, which is however not available for theft! Come the lowly and the lordly alike, for the ultimatum is NOT that you must now pay, but that the One who long ago paid, is still ready for pardon, to impart it. When that, His final seven of Daniel 9 is finished, then there is judgment. Now there is opportunity. If God is love, and He is, then there is no room for evasion. One loves, one does not. One comes, one does not. Love is, or is not; and where it is, it is and not where it lacks. Postulating it is no m ore finding it than postulating water in the desert or money for the wallet.

There is no room for manipulation, intellectual, moral or psychic. God is and has spoken. In His speech He TELLS us that He SO loved the world that He SENT His only begotten Son SO THAT anyone believing should not perish and ADDS this, that He did NOT come to judge but that the world might be saved, TELLING us further that He would have all to be reconciled to Him, even in heaven as well as on earth! It is HIS love which is aborted when the faithless foetus dies, in an image; and it is MAN'S responsibility for calling the Truth a lie, or the declaration of deity a thing to be passed by in specious philosophy, founded on figments of fiction, as he neologises with benumbing "great swelling words of emptiness",  these needless, and he heedless to the glorious truth and exacting realities (II Peter 2:18).

Repent or perish remains true for all time!

Repent ? Believe ? Receive the Lord's Christ ? (Luke 2:36). It is useless to try to make the mysteries of infinity and omniscience an excuse for not doing so. It is enough, quite enough, more than enough, that we are TOLD again and again that He would like ALL to come, and He does not lie (). The final ground of exclusion is categorically placed in motivation and consummation, in ourselves (John 3:19). No philosophy can demean or diminish the love of God, nor can constructions of its wares, remove His sincerity. He would LIKE ALL reconciled (Colossians 1:19ff.).

If you do what you like and do not come, it is therefore no deficiency in God, but in yourself which is the eminent and dominant cause. OF COURSE, God knows what He is doing and He has done it. OF COURSE He knows the outcomes; but He has not cheated. He would like you ? Will you not come ? You have come already, then follow His word, the test and the truth, for then are you His disciple indeed (John 8:31). Then you know the truth, and the truth sets you free.

NOTES

*1

See for example:

Aviary of Idolatry,  Delusive Drift ... Ch.   5,

News 37  44,  69, 97,  98,

Tender Times ... Ch.    8;

The Grating Grandeur ... Ch.   2;

SMR  pp. 925ff..

In particular, note News 97 (the exploiters, the fanciful,
the Communists, the de-godders and the realities);
 

Beauty for Ashes Ch.    6 (and Hong Kong, and the movement of nations in the last century a concern).

Consult further,

Beauty of Holiness Ch.  3 (war and force, rising downwards, Tiananmen and truth),
4 (liberty, Tiananmen, worship and its direction in time, its terms and code of truth).

See also re TAIWAN  News 150;

and History, Review and Overview Ch.   1,

Impossible for Men, Open to God Ch.   5.

*2

See

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), by Robert Spencer;

see also The Divine Agenda ... Ch. 6, More Marvels ... Ch. 4 and indexes on Islam.

*3

See for example:

Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ).

Scientific Method, Satanic Method and the Model of Salvation,

Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny,

Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer,

The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy,

THE NECESSITY OF THE LOCATION

OF THE DIVINE REMEDY

FOR MAN.

 

*4 See:

Glory, Vainglory and Goodness ... Ch. 1,

Dig Deeper  ... Ch.   2  

The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test Ch.  2. 

*5

See, for example,  on this intensity, immensity, extent and marvel of the love of God and the scriptural basis:

The Glow of Predestinative Power Ch.    4, 
The Christian Pilgrimage Ch.  3, 
Great Execrations, Great Enervations,
Greater Grace Chs.   7 and   9,
To Know God ... Ch. 1,
Keys ...  Ch. 7).