W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for this Volume What is New
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Fantasy of Lordliness
and the Actuality of the Lord
Matthew 20:25-28
A notable account of bombing missions against Hitler's Germany, with great detail placed on one team, is to be found in Mark Rossiter's Bomber Flight Berlin.
Their background, extensive and continuing training, exploits of endurance and wit in all but endless difficulties, teamwork, mutual understanding and reliance, the interplay of Germany's defence tactics, changing and responding, and the assault forces' manoeuvres, with changing equipment, the total always being reviewed for effectiveness, as inventiveness sought in realism better to secure the task, with indomitable resolve: all these components are featured.
The tension between the philosophy, after brutal assaults on English cities, of overcoming Germany through making their government insupportable, so that it would topple, their industrial and civilisation centres untenable, with dense thousands of bombers using advanced strategies and equipment, was one option pursued by some. The straightforward concentration on military, and factory centres as such, was another. One desire was to win by air, and make invasion unnecessary.
When all is said and done, horror in England and in Germany, whether in select centres or in mass raids of ruin, or both was intense, on a vast scale, many thousands dying constantly, restorations accomplished amazingly, as the war wore on. There were three underlying questions.
Firstly, was the war worth it at all ? The answer did not need overmuch cogitation. If a foul, untrue and brutal racial theory leading on to the mere slaughter of millions were left to flourish, who would be exempt from its ferocities and blasts ? children and youth included!
Secondly, should resistance be kept only to components of the other nation, directly involved in the war ? As anguished torture in the old was added to that in the young in both nations, was there to be an exemption in overcoming the resistance, so that only what directly made the war work was at risk, when many phases in fact contributed! What of government centres, food production, metal works, propaganda works, torture chambers, the entire rambling structure of oppression, whether of Jew or other enemies, not only in Germany, but extended through invasion ?
Thirdly, should the shortest method be sought, and the most likely to gain early victory, if not pian but victory was the aim; or should every effort be made to minimise grief, while thousands of pilots were being wiped out in counter-attacks and efforts to remove the Nazi government, regardless of how man would suffer and how much by such efforts, so as to avoid prolonging the war through various complexities ?
Every way was suffering, and how much was a question of issues, some irresolvable for lack of data.
Nowadays if Israel, fighting those who constantly attempt to invade and delete it, in efforts to secure stoppage of the same, has some small number of civilians killed (hundreds of its own having been directly targetted from Gaza, given to its enemies as a territory in a peace move), then the world all but erupts. Cause and effect seem forgotten; but the grand and final reason for this blindness is simple. To get rid of Jerusalem for the Jews is a necessary item in the devil's war list, since if this could be done God could be made to look small, in view of His historical plans in the Bible, and the devil might seek to make for himself a name, using this or that religion or irreligion deftly for the purpose (cf. Ch. 10, *5 above).
In terms of the word of God written*1, in the Bible, what do we find to the point here ?
At once we learn that war is to be avoided except in defence, or for protection of those callously and chronically afflicted by vicious inhumanity, if a nation be so led. Secondly, you need to be sure that the Almighty is with you, since the death of thousands or millions may be in view, and no secondary purpose is ethically possible. Thirdly, surely suffering should be minimised, but time of overthrow of the evil minimised likewise, in the ultimate countdown. Cruelty is thus ALWAYS out (unlike many cases as in the Japanese prisoner of war cases, for example), but purposeful pursuit of victory is always in, once the decision is justly made to fight at all.
In all of this, consider what Europe, to take a case, has done to itself! What would have been its position without the two wars, the tab for which was partly picked up by the USA, now in horrific debt for whatever reason, but in a situation not helped by those massive outlays in those cases. Now nations without the power and enterprise established, contend with relative ease, their prey being reduced by its own wars. So does man mix infamy with generosity, mercy with abhorrence, insatiable appetite for his own glory and rapture, like flames and petrol mixed, with great - and some imagine, grand combinations, to asphyxiate the earth with insufferable arrogance and profound conceit.
Many follow. Many are simply swept on; many gloat; many suffer in silence; some honour and glorify the Lord in the midst of vast sorrows and sharp griefs as the misled powers find ever new dreams in old settings, with which to persecute the earth, or that portion of it which from time to time they get in their sights, just as towns came within the sights of the Lancaster bombers, seeking to cease the torments, to stop the extinction of races and goodness in a systematic manner, with systematic response.
In such cases, where wickedness sets its sight on binding and blinding the earth, there are limits in response. It must never be for revenge, for as the Lord says, this is His prerogative, and to get mixed up with the exclusive divine affairs with human means can only produce evil in the end (Psalm 94:1, Deuteronomy 32:35), and how often does individual or nation seek not only to overthrow evil but to exact atrocious vengeance, unrestrained, on fire.
Again, response should seek to overthrow the evil without compromising the good, in principle and practice to the uttermost degree. Relief also must figure, as those trodden on in the turmoil are brought agony by devilries, as with the Jews under Hitler, Jews and Christians under the Inquisition, and subjects of experimentation as Nazis invaded Russia as well as for long refusing exits from its spiritually flaming land by the people then without land, Israel.
The establishment of refuge as wars rage is not to be wrought with callous indifference, mere self-will as though to oppose evil obscured good; but resolve, tenderness of heart, determination of will, pursuit of righteousness and not of fads, which must be as surely voided as the avoidance of evil philosophies on the way, and mere reaction as it proceeds. Self-glorification, that overthrow of suppressed worship of God is to be eschewed, whether of a nation or one's own ideas, lest the cure be worse than the disease; but what is wrought should be for the overthrow of such matters as invasion, or the ungodly grossness in spoiling whole peoples with cruelty and self-acclaim, with whatever is needed within this, to secure deliverance and peace.
But what is the underlying cause of war ? James tells us. It is from the desire to please oneself; because you ask and do not have, murder because you cannot obtain; while all the time you do not have because you do not ask - ask whom ? the God of truth and salvation as saved by His Son in the manner given. James shows what is available and it is through this that it is so; but that being so, force to grab replaces faith to gain. And what MUST be gained ? something to fulfil oneself, please oneself, gratify one goals ? but are these of the Lord. Have you even tried to fulfil the Sermon on the Mount, as you proceed ? Lust and envy, desire to find the heart's will or whim or treasure takes off, not a journey to seek God but to seek the desire for itself, in its own way. Rabid and ruinous philosophies indulge themselves in crass mockery of the biblical mode, doted on by so many nations by its absence from their hearts and minds; but such nostrums do not stand even investigation. Thus, if one wants to try out racism, what is the good of doing so against unnumbered enemies ? and on what basis is this done, when this or that race with this or that weapon overcomes thousands of considerations with one blast!
Nietzsche would pour scorn on the meek categorically, whilst indulging emptily his force concepts, but what does force do but suppress what is right or wrong with violence, crush what is precious in facility and functionality with dynamic, and leave its brutal dower for others to clean up! for power does not ultimately come out of the barrel of a gun or the cyclotron, but from the God who knows how to avenge the pride of presumption and the denial of His creation, the torture of His people, and knows how to bring down Tyre, as Sidon, Babylon as Nineveh, Egypt in its long proud day of prominence, yes and Jerusalem with its murder of the Messiah (Micah 3:1-5).
Indeed, the military power of Romanism is brought down, as is the peremptory heartlessness of the USSR*U with its leisurely massacres, sending 'criminals' who dared to own land to Siberia to repent of this evil, while extorting labour from their ill-fed corpses-to-be in a work of which devils might be proud. It came in order that it might go, leaving a dissipating vapour trail of its evils. The entire spirit of the Lord's detestation of these waves of boorishness and brutality, devilishness and twisting of truth is shown well in the book of Nahum, dealing with just one of the wicked nations in their arrogant disdain for what they do not want or esteem.
This whole book should be read for instruction in the woes for such ways, and the abomination which is divinely discerned in their witless use of force as if they were gods inane. Of Nineveh, God pronounces in Nahum in 3:1ff.: "Woe to the bloody city! It is full of lies and robbery. Its victim never departs... It shall come to pass that all who look upon you will flee from you and say, 'Nineveh is laid waster! Who will bemoan her ?' Where shall I seek comforters for you ?" Again in Nahum as it ends, we have this: "Your injury has no healing, your wound is severe. All you hear news of you will clap their hands over you, for upon whom has not your wickedness passed continually ?"
Using man or mankind as an implement for ideas, none of which ever can even rationally stand (cf. SMR esp. Chs. 1, 3-5), as if one were, or some nation were, or some group were God, without reference to His authenticated speech*1, or with contempt for it, resembles but is worse than trying to make apparatus based on laws the direct opposite of those which work their way in this universe in a nightmare of immorality based on a glut of supposition at war with fact on every side. That the word of God is greater than the efforts of human science is shown at once not only by His superior knowledge, but by the glitches which afflict the ideas of man, preoccupations with fancy as in organic evolution, despising design, departing from evidence with lordly assurance as if will were the very heart of science and fact were never to be compared with theories which never act, nor can be made to work for one moment!
This is just one more sphere of human conflict*2 in which force, this time academic, is used in the very fact of truth, and what is to be observed. Absurd theories nestling in the imagination of man and never in the declarations of the natural realm, present endless hopes and pretensions, but never observable confirmation of their proposed breach of natural law*2. This can glorify war, make for efforts to show who is the leader, the path-finder, the most advanced, which can lead to deception, defection, treachery against truth, pretence and pretension, efforts to take the lead and rest on the work of others, as was the case in both Germany and Russia using virtual forced labour from the scientists captured from other nations.
When does the rattle of its chariots cease, as with Nineveh, in the streets of oppression ?
On many fronts, with much froth, man virtually demands of deity the whip and the lash, as he invades lands and hearts and minds and pockets and thoughts as if the devil himself were loosed; and in some respects he is ( I Peter 5:5-6), his own time to come both when his power is nullified in the millenium, and smashed forever after it. The time for everything comes, even for spiritual peace past understanding for the redeemed now (Philippians 4:7), and goodness without evil when the entire scenario of trial and test, liberty, love and hate being past like a storm, the beauty of holiness is no longer an incitement to the kingdoms of this world, to grab more or indulge vanity.
NOTES
See SMR pp. 925ff., News 97, News 99.
On this sphere, concerning the Bible, see for example, Ch. 10 above, at *2.
See Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny, The gods of naturalism have no go! for example. See also SMR pp 140ff., TMR Ch. 1, with The Way of Truth and the Way of Error Ch. 8.