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THE TRACK OF TRUTH

MEADOWS OF MERCY

AND PEACE OF PARDON

Published by World Wide Witness Inc.

June 2009

ISBN 978-0-9806 136 8-9

I NTRODUCTION

Rest, like work is a wonderful thing. They are partners in truth.

Relished labour in a chosen field for the glory of God is a summit experience; for to have God work WITH you is choice indeed, and to work FOR Him is privilege in pith and not just in passing; but to have rest from labour in the meadows of His mercy is like the quiet lowing of resting cattle in lush pastures (Isaiah 63:14) after milking, settling down in the growing shadows and quietness of early evening, amid the trees that glisten in the gloaming with the moistures that abound.

There are the tracks along which the cattle move, and there is the hay provided for supplement to maw and spirit; and while they need a quick response if they lose temper or become quarrelsome in the shed as they are milked, yet that is soon over and a mellowness can return and a peace without ill-will can resume. Cattle can be troublesome, but they can be very pleasant, and having often been on a dairy farm, one learns to like cows, and to feel for them.

They are kept, they are kept kempt, they are matters of concern, and due provision is made for them. Horses tend to be more bluntly affectionate and dogs yet more so, perhaps, or at least more readily. With these, a relationship can be brutal, exploitative, with hatred and snarling, or beautiful, accommodating, a matter of fellowship and mutual delight. So it is with man and his Creator.

In blind fulminating or dreamy licence, depending on the case and the day, man can sign off God as if He were an unpaid employe, in such a massive feat of folly as leaves astonishment a mere foothill of the psyche! He can deliver Him, in will, to oblivion or to others. He can crucify Christ afresh, denying His relevance and acting AS IF in love God had not given a more inevitably insistent and persistent account of His love than of anything else in all creation; for all else depends on the undependable, whereas His word depends on its testing and fulfilment, on its logical necessity^*1 as His own, and its magnitude of scope and perspective, avoiding invalidity as no other approach to life has ever done, or could do^*2.

If man denies Christ and the love of God, then in that very act He is implicitly accusing God of having less mercy, less provision, less concern for man than many a man and woman has or would like to show for mankind: an impossible feat for those created^*3by Him, as well as anti-evidential. This proposition, rejecting the love of God in Christ Jesus, as if it were not, is not merely an illogical enormity, but refusing what cannot be refuted, places an unwritten slander squarely at the door of God, a spiritual missile, an implicit charge that would leave Him an inane goof without goodness, inactive before imperious calamity, whereas He is the wise counsellor who making freedom, provides in passion for the goodness to flow to man in a channel, as water is so readily follows, and even adds the massif by its side, which mercy produced to transfer pardon to any confessed sinner who receives it by faith in Him, where man abandons abuse of truth, liberty, love and power, for its pure source.

That channel is the Cross of Christ, one arm receiving, as it were, the mercy from heaven vertically, and the other spreading it abroad as He cried, even to His tormentors, Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing!

Then by His Spirit, He applies this, that Spirit who does not speak on His own authority (John 16:13), but glorifies Him who sent Him (John 16:14, 115:26), as Christ glorified His Father who sent Him (John 17:1-5): for what was created through the Word of God (John 1:1-3, Colossians 1;15), found salvation provided through the personal presence of that Eternal Word (John 1:12-14), and its application by the impelling constraints and creative power of the Spirit of God (cf. Titus 2-3), that blessed link with the sacrificial Saviour, without whose redemption, none can stand before God (Acts 4:11-12, Romans 5:12ff., Hebrews 9:25ff.).

But stand ? In Christ, His servants may also rest, and rejoice for life in Him is what it was meant to be, a work of restoration and animation which brings heart to all His race (Colossians 3:9-10, Ephesians 3:16), that spiritual race found in Him, on whose hearts are written His ways (Hebrews 8): for whom that Rock Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 10) bore the sin, and removed it both prospectively and retrospectively, once and for all, in one day (Zechariah 3:9). The application (of the salvation) comes with application in His name, the reality with realism, the truth with repentance and faith in Him who died and bodily rose in a resurrection, prototype for His own people.

But what of the spirit shown in Jesus the Christ ? It is one thing to forgive those who harass and slander you, but another entirely to have your own body used, the travail of your soul appointed as the MEANS of mercy to those who slay you!

Such is the mercy and the mind of God. He has exposed it in prophecy, in history and in the soul of man in millions for millenia. Exposed it surely is, but not imposed; misused it often is, but its comfort in power and peace, in quietness and confidence, in productiveness and friendship with God for those who love Him, who are the called according to His purpose, is inestimable in beauty. In this way, duty becomes not a chore but a choice, and godliness not an imposition but an aspiration continual, like that of perpetual dawns always heralding the light which shines and makes its presence gloriously felt.

We, mankind, are not so lovely alas; but the potential is there, not to remake ourselves with weird political, social and psychic devices, but to be redeemed and restored, re-created by God to become blessed in the patterns pf peace and not sounding boards for the patter of impudence, impertinence, self-elevation and an abandonment into wilful ignorance

Anyone redeemed is what is marred in ugliness set on the road to spiritual beauty, dissidence restored to understanding and an absentee from the effectual class of truth made member of Truth's Tutorial (John 14:6).

In this volume, the purpose is to conceive and consider divergence from the diversity of error into the singularity of the composition of truth with peace and the mellow fruits of spiritual Autumn. It covers affairs both personal and national, ancient and contemporary, the love of freedom and its meaning, the love of God and its fruit.

NOTES

See for example:

SMR, TMR , Barbs ... 6 -7,

Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4, Swift Witness 6.

The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy.

See:

Deity and Design esp. Ch. 8,

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

with Ch. 7 of Grand Biblical Perspectives, which shows something of the
massiveness of the divine solution to the problems of philosophy in the field of determinism, voluntarism and meaning, with The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy.