THE UNCOMPREHENDING DARKNESS AND THE SELF

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THE UNCOMPREHENDING DARKNESS
AND THE SELF-REVEALING LIGHT

The Duty of Holiness

Rev. Dr. Robert E. Donaldson

Published by World Wide Web Witness

February 2009

ISBN 978-0-9806138-2-7

PREFACE

The tides of woe, the suns that glow: here are the contrasts which even in the visible realms call to a mind not idle to find the basis of things.

WHY is so much exquisite order, beauty abounding, and why with it is there so much odium and dereliction of duty of the most elemental kinds, why such confusion, why such profusion of spiritual blood-clots in the arteries of human life ? Why is there such slowness to understand the whole purpose of man and so much conflict about it that millions die from Communism's sickle, Islam's scimitar, and have died from Romanism's Inquisition, to forget any of which is an insult to the human race, a violation of the tombs (where such were to be found for the remnants of the bodies) of the afflicted and a taunt to the spirit of man!

Why do conflicts arise as if routinely, as if independence MUST be gained though bodies racked with pain and societies brought to the dust: as if some aspiration or desperation considered this for its fulfilment, a fair price ? Why is independence from God sought by so many while dependence on human inventions in His place is becoming also, almost routine, as if it were to be taken for granted that the truth is first to be interred, and then its surrogate shouted from the house-tops, in its absence, and so replaced with passions so vile that now we have announcements that children will be targeted, in the last development of the Palestinian hatred of Israel and desire for its extermination, backed by Iran and the pan-Islamic thrusts of various meetings.

How often has one race desired by force to exterminate another, for its own glory, for the vengeance to be wrought, because its own follies make it headstrong and immune to truth ?

Has not Africa in the case of Biafra been a huge example, is not the Rwanda affair another, and is not the Sudan a third ? Thus the Middle East is one among many, and now Russia tangles with the Ukraine, a State cutting off gas supplies to another instead of resolving a simple price dispute ? Or is it the desire to have an excuse for invading the Ukraine, as Georgia was invaded, so that the Russian version of Islam, SUBJECTION of others to its own power (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4, Divine Agenda Ch. 6), should become satiated ? or is a power play to use intimidation to achieve subtle ends more readily, like rain softening the earth for ploughing ?

Is not the desire for human glory grown hoary, amidst self-elevating, idol-worshipping mankind, making idols out of matter in stark evolutionism, out of systems in Communism, neither with anything but anti-verification of the crassest kind and reductionism of the callow extremes! (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go! and SMR pp. 925, News 37, 97, 98). Power, money, glory, self-satisfaction (of oneself, one's nation, one's idol worship, of one's construction of things, one's destruction of what opposes, of one's suppositions) with unruly requisitions and treacherous manipulation: these things shine like black lights, dispersing darkness, in the tarry depths. Even the starry heavens become mere objects for self-construction starting from nothing, the only causal possibility without adequacy available before anything, a self-contradictory nonsense, so leading man to a type of mania!

Beguiled by this nothing, he comes to nothing, yet he comes also to something worse! It is something terrible as in Revelation 6 in its now fulfilled prophecy of the jaunt of death as a dynamic to seize man. You see it in the Sudan, in the Middle East, in the Islamic thrust of suicide bombers who can even wait for some to help those provided with atrocious anguish by their bombs, and then as in a recent case, throw a new body, once alive, now a bomb, onto those who help, thus doubling the agony and the dealings with death with macabre ferocity.

What more could Satan do ... except continue his desire (John 14:20, Ezekiel 28:11ff., Revelation 12) to rule this world, God his antipathy, guile his method, brutality his litter! This proceeds. Even in Australia now, there is threat of foiling freedom of speech in favour of insipid surrender to vile forces which can equate truth with the intolerable, and would make of Australia a place of oppression in terms of removal of pollution, as they enforce their own. This comes ultimately from those who would be as gods, determining right and wrong by cultural accretion, like so many drains having a confluence, as they pour their muddled muck into the river of life.

Taking over... It is Satan's long-standing desire.

The light of truth, however, unlike the uncomprehending darkness in which it shines (cf. John 1:1ff.), is self-revealing. Darkness merely scarfs up, hides, occludes vision; but self-revealing light has something to show. Light is what exposes and what is truth exposes itself with relentless patience and continuous evidence (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ).

Suppression becomes the answer and oppression the result of the clamouring clangours of the din of darkness, which would sometimes reduce its call from that of blood in the ground to a flood over it, 'managing man'. Thus there is a phase of spiritually illiterate violence, whether by fines or imprisonment (such as occurred to Bunyan and may yet occur in Australia for those who tell what the Bible declares, Victoria having given a strong lead), or bombs or invasion, by raids as in Georgia, or by death camps as by Hitler, it is the way of force that does not favour truth, that answers a challenge ideological or spiritual, by a shower of power.

Where evidence mounts and will not be discounted, then petulant or aspiring force is used; where truth declares, mouths are to be closed. Nothing must betray the powers-that-be in their inordinate lust to take over from God, declaring a new gospel, that of betrayal of Christ, even in the case of many, this in HIS NAME! (as II Peter 1 forecast, and the period from 1900 to the present abundantly fulfils as many of those bodies which were once churches, retain the name, and preach otherwise cf. News 121, 122).

The self-revealing light is not mere illumination, however; it has something within it to reveal. God dwells in light inaccessible, preferring to declare Himself by light, and suffering none to invade; and when His light shines, then the realities which suffer no darkness of confusion, or of incomprehension show themselves, the very nature of the divine Being and His plans, thus attested from antiquity without change, in the Bible, as it grew to total fulfilment in Jesus Christ. Here the propositional became the personal, and instead of servants of God preparing His way, He came in Person (cf. All This Rot about Not Believing).

Without the God who made him, man makes gods, whether of nothing, matter, ideas, power, rule, race, spiritual beings, spiritual powers, a pardoning virgin (cf. SMR pp. 927, 977ff., 1087ff., Jesus Christ , Defaced ... Ch. 5, esp. *2), a mother-earth, a natural force or anything else he happens to think of (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!), whether ransacking the Bible to violate it in its own name, or being more adventurous, basing himself on himself, and so neither knowing nor able to know his basis. You will never find what made the car by worshipping it or its processes of composition.

In this volume then, the assaults of darkness, force, folly and the results, are on the one side and on the other, there is the wonder of a light that shines out from its own basis in God, cluttered by no nonsense, full of illimitable power, which can seem harsh to those who betray it when patience is finished and the case is done, but is gentle to those who use it, without seeking to fuse and confuse it with anything else. The conflict ? it is like having a team of kids opposing a Test side; and far more, the finite poking out its tongue at the infinite. When mercy is despised, what is left is reality, which shuns theft of truth and deals with it as with all estranged scorn: with justice and this ultimately ... means judgment.

God is most gracious and patient; but there was a beginning and there is an end to it all. The reaping is near now (Answers to Questions Ch. 5)and the weeping is already in progress. The Gospel of Jesus Christ was forecast in increasing detail for millenia (cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25), its crucial cost has been covered by on the Cross for more millenia, and the entirety of the divine program is now coming towards its end. Many have their love grow cold as Christ forecast (Matthew 24), because it is so tedious-seeming, and others because of multiple betrayals; but when one's trust and hope is placed in God, then only grace prevails with ineluctable truth, and forgiveness proceeds with an unyielding love which in mercy, shows it. If hope springs eternal (in our season), it is chiefly because the ground for it is still on offer!

Man is on test conditions; it is well not to follow the mob, nor the delinquents, but the only other focus, Jesus Christ while there is yet time (cf. Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8, Repent or Perish Ch. 2, The Magnificence of the Messiah). His is no blemish, all evidence, only validity (cf. Deity and Design ... esp. Section 8). Indeed, in Chapter 11, the matter becomes luminous as Habakkuk asks his famous questions.

Meet Him; He is very pleasant to know. You will then find His word as a resource insuperable, His promises as a course indubitable, His presence a recourse inimitable and His mercy a forest of beauty with the streams of spiritual peace in its midst.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

THE BOUNTY OF TRUTH:

IN THE BIBLE, THERE LIES NOT ONLY THE ANSWER

TO MAN'S VEXED PHILOSOPHY

BUT TO HIS SPIRITUAL DISEASE

Chapter 2

Assertions against the Lord become

Adventures in Asininity when Biblical Truth is Kept True to Model

Chapter 3

THE VINEYARD PARABLE,

THE FACT and the FORECAST