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THE UNSEARCHABLE RICHES OF JESUS CHRIST,
AND THE AGGREGATING DEBT OF DISMISSAL
Rev. Dr. Robert E. Donaldson
Published by World Wide Web Witness Inc.
July 2009
ISBN 978-0-9806750-2-3
INTRODUCTION
Looking at it, à Deux
A Kindly Conversation
What this world needs, it thinks, is peace and agreement, a combination of religions so that they will be useful to humanity's advance and progress, and a palpably workable role for the nations and peoples, so that something worth-while is attained.
But why ?
So that it can progress.
But where ?
Into material prosperity, non-acerbity, psychologically well-adjusted mutual relations, use of the great power in the universe for mutual benefit ...
Benefit for what purpose ?
Why, to enable this world to be a source of pleasure and contentment, happiness and health.
Happiness on what basis ?
On this basis: that every man can be tolerated, and everyone do his or her own thing in such a way that anyone has no reasonable cause to complain.
What is reasonable ?
What makes these things happen best.
What of justice ?
We'll do our best.
What of truth ?
There isn't any. Just keep them happy - 'like I said'.
That reminds one of the time when a vast computer firm once had a member of Staff talking to me about one of its ingenious programs. Suddenly, the man said this to me, something like this: "This is a once in a life-time offer. Would you like to become a ..." Here the memory does not serve, the title is forgotten: but it meant that I would have had access to this great firm, direct and assured, in making suggestions and voicing opinions.
I thought. One does not really know so much about computers, only a very little bit. How could one be useful or achieve anything good for so technical a group; and if I really said what I mean, they might not appreciate it: who knows ? In any case, it is NOT MY WORK. This is not what I am called to: I must get on with the dangers and the dynamics which are MINE, and not dabble. So I said no thank you! Let me continue about this.
One day, I was speaking to someone else in that organisation. He was telling me that a most useful device in the PC was no longer available: or more precisely, I had not found it working in some program I had, and asked why this would be so ? To my astonishment, he said that this vast organisation had money difficulties or constraints, that it could not be paying all the things necessary to maintain this feature. As the discussion proceeded, he repeated: "Like I said..." thus completing the assured way in which he dismissed this feature as unavailable now.
Later I found that this was not so. It went on being available instead. His 'like I said!' was evidently mere nonsense, apparently founded on the view that since the thing was apparently gone, and it seemed so to me, he had to surmise the reason and state it by repetition with authority. That would perhaps make it look good, reasonable... But it did not really, for the basis was invented. It was still in fact working, when everything settled down.
Yes, this world is good at that. It states a thing with conviction founded on nothing, hoping to resolve in the short term without any adequate ground, what appears to be the problem, applies force, and acts to seek the outcome, so that everything can go ON! But where and why ?
Where ? The older idea, that what is right and true and works well for stated and good purposes, defined in terms of the Maker of the Equipment called mankind, and HIS purposes, which never delete truth or grace or kindness, or preclude from necessary judgment when mercy is dismissed, is what must be done: this departs. Its vapour trail dims in the distance.
True. Pragmatic devices, instant effects, justice far off, truth unknown and not cared about, religious ideas mixed and merged, people's tempers calmed down, their aspirations met in a diminished muddle, survival of something (SS): this becomes the aim, the appetite.
It works as well as you see. Plagues of ideas, inventions, intentions, deceit, duplicity, gain-grasping oblivion to truth, aspirations for human autonomy ...
Autonomy did you say ? What! of those born things that have nappies and are insertions into the scheme of things, and grow and die, and are born without their own permission ? are you kidding!
The very notion is obvious folly; but for all that, they continue seekings for the take-over from God of all these treasures of mind and energy, preferably without admitting it. These are the products and byproducts of delusion, in their adversative philosophies, trying to make themselves NOT responsible for anything (determined) while wanting to be capable of anything (invading all domains with progressive enlightenment), kings and cogs in alternation, like alternating current, but far less productive. Then they seek to defend their way and ideas as right and not reckless, sound and to be followed, often if need be, by force, though on their own basis, right has no meaning and truth is nowhere to be found. These becomes orphans by running away from the realities that contradict nothing but error, and meet all things well, when faced and placed in the heart.
It is well there is some hope, but not for these compulsive progressionists in this antithetical mode. Progress ? Wealth and poverty, the latter as almost unimaginable in Haiti, in the Sudan, for example, mixed with brutal power, these are instruments of progress: to be addressed, oh certainly! It IS unfortunate you know, and we have no way of making people even sound enough to be helped, but what would you! So the chat goes, when it is rather more frank than usual. Progress for some into something, unknown, unevaluable, desirable, obligatory, unseen, the grasping desideratum of alienation from the Maker and former and formulator of it all.
PROGRESS is a keyword. But to what and why and by what means ? well ... as required! Impressive: and this without characterisability of the outcome, except in dream, founded on nothing, shown true in nothing, able to be true in nothing, and notably defective in nearly every phase except perhaps this.
Which ?
Why, in this, that there is power and riches for some, on grounds which tend rapidly to degrade the race to one with survival as an aim, and symptoms to be handled by whatever social anti-biotics may from time to time become available.
Power to do what ?
Get what you want ?
But how does this differ from hedonism ?
It doesn't.
How could it be evaluated as good to have ?
It couldn't.
Why do they not admit their hedonism ?
Because they like to think that somehow, somewhere, in a way contrary to any logic, their wishes will find the right wishing well and all will be well: or at least better.
If there is nothing certifiable as good, how could it ever be even better ?
Only by delusion: this their allusion to delusion. They dream.
Dreams! God is never pleased with these as a replacement for reality. Consider Jeremiah 23. In fact, the owner of ALL land and SOULS (Ezekiel 18:4, Numbers 16:22), does have a way which brings peace with truth, justice with mercy, life with abundance (John 10:10, Philippians 4:4-6).
Why not that ?
It involves the loss of the spiritually inane idea that dispensing with the Owner and Maker, and ignoring the death of His incarnate Son, you just manage, your mannishness your manager, your intuition your guide, your guile your deliverer and your wit your witness to what is to be. NOTHING would induce many to give up that dream! It is nugatory, nubilous, nebulous, an illogical festering of philosophy without logic, hope without reason and wilfulness, which like all that sort of thing, courts judgment as a man courts a maid, seeking her blushing face: but it is no blush there. It is fiery which brings truth where folly is the object! (Hebrews 10-12).
I feel sorry for mankind.
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Are you so sorry that
when they have |
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not only spat
both literally and metaphorically in His face, and never repented –
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viewing with irrational
disdain the realities that He is no nincompoop but author of wisdom and
understanding and demonstrably sole ground of our own, who provides all its
exhibits: |
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but then also recklessly absconded with both their spiritual debts and their own potential for the blighting dreams of their misled mortality. |
Sad ?
For myself, yes, but not so much, no, not too much then. Yet it IS calamity, man's self marring. The cure is there, man in myriads, he does not care.
Manage away, then man! but know that for all this God will surely bring you into judgment (Ecclesiastes 11:9), and with every passing year, you are seeing more of it. That ? it is PRECISELY as predicted, the disease of sin and the syndrome of results being given and now seen before the eyes in agonising detail as a witless world astounds itself with its wisdom, and with a talkative self-help program, puts deliverance to one side, as if the very devil.
How long slumber ? How long legislate that it is light, while blind! Will words make it so ?
Well it is not too much longer, fortunately.
How is that fortunate ?
It is fortunate for the race: for as each successive generation comes only to go (moving to this and that destination, here and there, as it is all appointed - as in Acts 17:28), the trail of vapour is lower till it becomes one of smoke, and the physical earth itself is nearer to its own explosive protest.
I'll go further. His coming is near; the aggravating debt of dismissal of the revealed, the biblical Jesus Christ is mounting, not to the skies, as much as towards the hot centre of the earth; but even there, it cannot be buried. Only God can bury sin (Micah 7:18-19), and He has provided the right pit for it, in the heart of Christ whom it smote like a hydrogen bomb, but whom it could not for all that, contain (Acts 2:23-24).
Yes, it is certainly time to seek the Lord, and to avoid the disaster which makes the current financial stress a mere symptom, like a rash, compared with the mortality which has its come-uppance when it refuses the eternal life for which it was built.
I am in hearty concord with that. Prophecy in the last 60 years has sped into enormous fulfilments, and the test is to see the sliver of light between where it is and where the return of Christ actually occurs.
Meanwhile, there is occasion to rejoice. Far from folly, there is the valid testimony of a kingdom that is pure, a place of peace ineffable, of joy unspeakable (I Peter 1:5-8), of justice and truth; and its King has already given His life, a ransom from the price of sin which is sufficient for all, adapted to all. In principle, it is just as it was when there was the prelude to Christ's cross, that animal sacrifice in Israel, on national offer. IF it was not received in heart by faith, and not all did that (Deuteronomy 29:18ff.), then these thus were receiving curse and not blessing, being like someone fainting instead of receiving a necessary operation.
Certainly there is no cover in absconding while yet in spiritual debt, from the credit offered in Christ (II Corinthians 5:17ff.).
In fact, it is inoperative for those without faith, for without this you CANNOT please God (Hebrews 11:6). It does not apply where the hands of the heart are not placed on the Head of the Lamb, with confession, repentance and faith. It does not apply where the Lamb is not seen as God Himself in human form breaching death so that its very physical claws are blunt, and cannot tear, so in love granting in justice met upon Himself, resurrection in Himself, and for all His people (Romans 10:9, 8:32ff., I Corinthians 15, Acts 2:23-24, Isaiah 26:19).
For whom then does it certainly apply ?
It DOES apply, and by the Spirit of God application is MADE for the one who so receives the King, whose goings are eternal, whose coming provides salvation, whose crucifixion bears the curse of sin and whose resurrection confirms as did His miracles before that, His power to forgive, paying for all whose hearts come and whose lives are surrendered to Him, their Maker and Redeemer.
Nothing else is left standing in moral, logical and spiritual life, background and control. Leaders ? They cannot compete (Ezekiel 21:25ff., John 14:30). This world in autonomy ? it cannot go (James 4:4). It grows wilder and yet wilder.
How would you put it ?
Put it! Man without God is like a cow in the jungle. A fine thing ? undoubtedly, but in the wrong place. Jaguars, leopards, lions there mingle with its misplaced form, which is prey for them.
Man makes himself a prey continually, failing to pray and refusing to work in the kingdom of Christ, or actually seeking to make their own, with their own gods, facilities of the imagination, as empty as a long drought's sky. As Jeremiah declares it, the gods that have not made the heaven and the earth, will perish with it.
In this volume the aggregating debt, and the unsearchable, available riches alike form a core. It is time to apply for the latter, those spiritual riches without which the soul is too impoverished to live as man is made to do. It is time to have annulled the former, that aggregating debt, and this, not by man, but by God (Psalm 49:7,15, II Corinthians 6:1ff., 5:17ff.).
It is available, and it lasts for ever. That, it is just the right time; for what God makes to stand, it does not fall (Ephesians 1:11, John 5:24, I John 5:11-12, Acts 4:11-12).
In this field of our contemporary world, there are many applications. The bases of these things, their grounds and their results, all are given attention in this volume.
CONTENTS
HISTORY THAT RECITES REVELATION
BY FOLLOWING IT
so that we can forget ?
or lest we forget!
The US, the President, the Middle East,
the Chips, and where they have been put ...
Part I
Transplanting into Ashes, No Growth Allowed ?
and Comparison with Biblical Truth
HISTORY THAT RECITES REVELATION
BY FOLLOWING IT
Part II
Religion Out of Wedlock
and the Biblical Road Map of God
News 422, APP
CAIRO AND OBAMA
More to the Point
The Relish of Religion ...`
A Little Mayonnaise ?
News 423
Emanations from Cairo, June 4, 2009
OBAMA SPEECH,
JEREMIAH DECLARATION
and
need for
USA to Signal Better Things Amid its People
than the Annunciation of Cairo
"IS THERE ANY WORD FROM THE LORD ?" –
PARTS I and II
The Negative Side To Open
The
Positive Side to Close
Jeremiah 37:17 with
Jeremiah 23:33ff., 34:8ff.
Isaiah 37:1ff., 38:14ff., II Kings 22:12ff., James 2
In the last Chapter, our concern was with a question:
"IS THERE ANY WORD FROM THE LORD ?" –
Today, we move to the reciprocal question:
Is There any RESPONSE from MAN ?
At the outset, a word on hell!
It is by nature undesirable, and it is well to consider this.
The Gospel Gives
NOT
The Everlasting Destruction of Seduction,
BUT
The Light of Eternal Understanding,
Being Felicitous with Fact
and
Immutably Beautiful:
Index to the Waterfall of Life