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CHAPTER ONE
THE THEME OF THIS VOLUME:
THE BOUNTIFUL GOD, THE ACCOUNTABLE MAN
AND SURMOUNTABLE SITUATION WHICH FACES HIM,
BUT NOT SO IN HIMSELF
AWESOME DEVELOPMENTS BEFORE THE LIVING GOD
Long has it been since there was a feeling in the social community, that what you do is accountable to God. Even accountable to man ? to the extent you cannot avoid his peering, perhaps. Accountable to angry powers ? to the extent you cannot tame them, perhaps. To international writhings with hunger, climate, industrial pollution, vast actions of incredible inhumanity, child abuse, macho ruin of women and the like: accountable to or for these ? What appears to be a large part of the current answer to this question. It is this: accountable for those things ? just possibly, especially if they destroy your towers or your children. Such appears at least the direction of flow of the debilitating thought of the spirit of the Age, and it has many adherents.
Moreover, there is a certain degree if not of indifference
(for passions CAN be aroused even now, at times not for selfish advantage, deftly applied superiority or menace to others, but for environment or air or space or race, whether to make racism worse, as remedial efforts often do, or to deliver some race),
then of vacillation.
What are its canons, in terms of which it writhes and wonders ? Often this is their nature: Does it really matter so much if children are raped in aboriginal lands, as testimony especially of aboriginal women repeatedly has it, and data from individuals attest ? This is a question which many seem to ask. Does it matter, so long as the peculiar heritage of special people is not disturbed. That is the depth to which such adherents of futility and naturalism naturally sink. Not fearing God, they fear something or other, and in this case, the loss of whatever it was that was, since it is unlikely to stay forever.
Failing to believe actively in God, many now are not quite sure whether natural habitats for peoples and their ways are more important than any morals, and interference with their traditions is not worse than any even of the most vicious misuses of little children and others as they grow, so long as it is accepted by some and has a traditional place. Vile passions can then rest in gruesome horror, while others talk about it with knowing social perception, as if individuals were really not so important as all that, and what people do, sometimes called culture, had some special sanction, so that like a dwindling natural species in the animal realm, it just MUST continue as it is.
Crocodiles coming into suburbs, and sharks permitted their habitat near the shore if it occur to them, are other examples. Man is becoming a thing in the midst of things, in a fate self-induced. Indeed, as his tortures and torments increase in indecision and false decision, so does his accountability, even if the follies become hypnotically forceful, and some seem to surrender what has been given to man, in favour of fatuities without warrant or basis.
Such confusion of morals and naturalism is leading to more uncorrected abuse, more imaginary segregation of races IN PRACTICE, so that there is no real expansive expectation that some be delivered, even in this land. Indeed, it can be made to appear grossly unethical to seek to deliver anybody from anything if some special race is their natural habitat. Morals become exercises in ideas, and what works becomes for the greedy hand and the reedy soul, in the ascendant for many, and seeking merely to survive, what matters. It is almost as if this survival of whatever it is, untouched, were some kind of elevated moral duty, whether for oneself or any other. While the values one has are important, their basis is more so. While dictators are two-a-penny, and their pretexts baseless, man is not made to be either wimp or whip, but accountable to God and this not only for what he does, but for what he does NOT do, for what he thinks, and why he thinks it.
It is ONLY to God he is so accountable, though he invents many ingenious if not ingenuous methods of torturing himself, through government, philosophy or segments of his race.
Indeed, whether it be the individual, the family, the city, the nation, the international body, each one is accountable, as are all aggregations. What you do remains ready to be scorched, scalded, inset, inscribed in your heart and mind, as the case may be, even if by loud and evil music and degenerate actions, effort be made to intimidate conscience and ruin memory, till modern man becomes a mess of pottage, an assembly of a smorgasbord where what is laid before him is good to grab and to experience, so long as it does not bite too hard, or is not too unusual. Even in that case, it is felt that it may do, if it is particularly satisfactory to the seduced spirit of man. Such is the trend of obliterative immorality, man judging, now in this body, field, or that, himself by himself, and being in this case exceedingly unwise (cf. II Corinthians 10:12).
God is for the time, still exceedingly bountiful, as are some parents to warped and even vicious children, even if morally degenerate and denuded of all character, playthings of passion and sites for events, just as Psalm 1 describes it, like chaff when the wind blows. This indulgence may apply even if they exhibit nothing of resistance to ruin, of character, or of understanding or the fear of God. Others have vague psychiatric fears which are treated by the millions; for they have in vast numbers of cases, forsaken not only the God who constructed their multiply aware mind, body and spirit, in its synthesis as one being with scope and opportunities immense, but even their own souls as subjectible to anything and to anyone, but to themselves.
On top of that, MOST understandably, they may even have identity crises, being unaware in this confusion of delusion, of what they are and why and what is to be done. Leave the Rock of revelation and redemption, and the sand is available (Matthew 7:24-27); and again, in the ocean man is out of his depth. He is not made as an item in space and spare bits of the earth, but as in the image of God, the bountiful, accountable and gifted. As such, he is not met with the insurmountable but with the mercy of God, on invitation to faith, available through grace, confirmed in history, on show for millenia.
Whether in Jesus Christ or the book He endorsed, in the Messiah or in the Bible, it is manifest, and His words always prevail.
Since a neat and magnificently constructed car owes the one who takes it, no subservience, he having merely come upon it and having access, so the human body, mind and spirit is not without its own sanctions. These apply readily for those who play the fool with it, misuse it, destroy it or lay waste by neglect or effrontery, to the sites of their own or of other souls, or to the equipment of other spirits, whether by mental, social, physical or spiritual means.
God does not merely leave the situation. He invests it, knows it, has spoken to it in predictions aplenty, warnings numerous and appeals incisive.
With Sodom and Gomorrah, perversion of mind and spirit and body was so intense that He did indeed obliterate them; and some in this land seem unaware of the fruits of wrath, or not to care, as if God were unaware of them, lost in their sea of circumstance, and breach of design specifications so obvious that the race could not continue without them, except by various substitutes in this way and that, for what is there. So wonderful liberties become effectual licence, neither applied for, nor granted. In the case of the flood, God did much the same as with Sodom and Gomorrah, later - very nearly. The world by a narrow margin, our life in it, escaped; those cities, however, they did not.
As you see in Amos 4, He is by no means without particular warnings!
Modern man, as predicted through the apostle Peter, loves to do the same as those in the days of that flood: ignore the evidence and the basics for man as provided before, and act as if the sky were the limit, and the stars the place (II Peter 3). Indeed, ignoring the flood is one of the natural disasters of our time, likely to lead to more, as if a dull student could not be bothered considering what he is actually doing!*1
The bounty of beauty and lovely actions by some, of the grace of the Gospel and the power of God available through it, the wonder of mercy both divine and human in concert, the magnificence of the wonder of His divine creation, now seen in much to be governed by words and cognate programmatic symbols, just as these relate to spirits and mind which can use the same in variable sorts of ways, whether for themselves or otherwise: these yet remain. So too does the kindness of God to this race to spare it in such hideous abuses as breed like mould in its increasingly polluted midst.For a time, all these things continue.
As with debt and its interest, however, the results also are being compounded; and at times, many are astounded at the level of human confusion and folly, such as seen in the climate debate, which seems unable to face realities and deal with them, in a way not for political advantage or specialised national interest, but for the solution of the problem. Since it goes deep into the very heart and ambitions of man, for the race as it is, there is no obvious solution; but there is an obvious reason for that. It is this: the depth of sin itself makes clear thought difficult, just as it is not easy to find ideas undisturbed by national and personal imperatives, which either beckon the belligerent, or make insistent noises in the individual heart. Peace and accord have, if not brawling insistences, then smarting fears and watchful bargaining to match, while this and that nation, slave either to excess spending or magnified national ambition, continues in what it MUST have, till what must follow, unless yet more divine mercy be shown, brings in its own necessity.
Before however you seek to surmount the follies resulting from man, and the wrath inherited from the curse of God on the devious deliberations and awful actions of rebellion, airiness and self-elevation in the hearts of individuals, families and races, bodies and organisations which abound like flies, one thing is in wisdom required.It is necessary to remedy the condition which brings this to be. Coughing may be a problem, but the lung cancer below it needs address for the remedy to be effectual.
So with man. The sin needs address, and each sinner needs to find that its address includes his or her own. The Lord needs address, and sin needs redress, for which mercifully, He has provided, but not by a blank cheque. Required is due repentance for folly and unfaithfulness, even mockery or minimisation of God who made us; indeed disregard of the divine, this needs to find its address for each, where life is, at the home of each. Self-made moral paragons need to find the folly of their delusion, and sunken moral heaps need to find His mercy; and all need to realise that it is not whether sin is there, but in what form it has found its target, that is the question. It is not its existence in each heart, which challenges sober thought, but whether it lurks in pride and self-congratulation, with self-assurance that compared with others, one is so 'good' that there surely can be nothing to fear, or otherwise.
Being accountable is so much the more vast in its results, when God is so eminently bountiful even for such as we all are, sinners needing grace, that He would not permit it to be overlooked as if flies in the woods. Instead, He but took action to meet it (Acts 17:30-31, Romans 5:1-18). It was taken so that it is offered to all with a delicious facility, contrasted with the necessities of repentance of heart. It enables the surmounting of the liabilities of those who without the Rock who made us, slip in sands of the psyche without root, meaning or purpose, except what is self-chosen, like someone taking that sports car and driving it for all it is worth, which is not much in the end! And these all ? they are as broad as the human race where now for imaginary humility, now for a surfeit of self-declaratory pride, now in desolation of a beleaguered and drugged spirit, now in anxious roving mind, darting hither and thither, like a beserk butterfly settling nowhere, go each one on his, on her preferred way,
In such a context, let us then be aware of the word of the living God, as of His actions, and re-orient as necessary, to what He has to say in His manual, the Bible (cf. SMR), and in history in accord with it; and so find our current location in His schema and act not as those who sleep, tossing here and there, but as people awake to reality and not hiding from it, or Him who made it.
In this, we have an ambassador from God, who makes us all the more accountable: Jesus Christ, who not only is the personal expression of God, as if all possible words of Him were in personal format, and so expressed as the very Word of God (Hebrews 1:1-3, 2:1-3, John 1:1-14, Philippians 2), but is the testimony of His mercy and lovingkindness (Titus 2-3). This He has done in coming to show the truth in personal form (cf. Psalm 40, Isaiah 40, Ezekiel 34), to show its shame and sham in the definitive personal expression of God Himself. Such has He shown, as others assailed Him, seeking to erase this expression as He delivered many in mind and body, yes and in heart and spirit. As if this bounty were not enough, He even took the vulnerable form of man so that He could die as the express and terminal exhibit of sin, the substitutionary sacrifice for any who so received Him, and the laboratory spectacle of the death of death for those who consign their guilt and sin to Him, breaching its barrier as the aircraft first broke the sound barrier.
In all these things, then it is time to heed God, before mere events speak so loudly, that the din deafens.
NOTE
*1 See News 1, and works such as Dr Stephen Austin's Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe, and videos such as his on the show of natural force seen in the relatively Mt St Helen's thrust, with results available to see, in Washington State in the USA. Works done in hours or days have striking resemblance to many rock strata, often imagined to have happened in infinitesimal stages, while conserving the specimens they bear by sheer miracle! Works such as Professor Nilsson's eminently practical Synthetische Artbilding are not hard to find. The evidence does not hesitate, and both radioactive testimony and geological measurement, planation surfaces and trees sitting happily through strata illicitly argued as taking millions of years to develop, are not only common: the rootless trees are a geological show for those willing to take tickets to the concerted testimony.
See also, TMR Ch. 7, Section E at such sites as these, on this and related topics in detail, as also TMR Ch. 2, with Downloads of Divine Divine Divulgement in the Bible, Ch. 8.