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CHAPTER
THREE
The Desolation of the Desolate
the
Desire of the Desolator
and the Destiny Beyond Desolation
Naturalism is the concept that what we have is all, that is the material and whatever 'nature' is. That is it. The car has no factory. The thesis has no writer (and NEVER such a thesis as our DNA, with all the conceivable constraints, orders, definitions of terms in active sense, meta-information, provision for activation and implementation in simultaneity ordered according to the laws of mathematics and logic). You never see it being written, other than adjustments of the text exposed to the cosmos; but it cannot have been written.
Oh no, that concept is rational and not mystic, and for such there is reserved a social, professional or anti-scholarly auto-da-fé, as has been the foul prescription of other religions in other times, professional death being the least of it then, just as vilification is the nest of it now.
NO! It is an item of faith, to defile the term, an unaccountable lust for illogical surmise based on nothing, often quite literally, or else mere begging of the question, importing without a rational import licence from nowhere in particular all the ingenuirty of concept, perspicuity of method and facility of mind which such multiple, inter-dependent, command-type systems normally and naturally evoke. It is just a question of not confusing your car with its factory, your body with its pre-prepared mode of genesis, and that with what is there but does not write it out, merely keeping to its normal, analysable confines.
It, like Topsy, just was. Nature, DNA, mind, spirit, what you will, just was. This is an item of defoliated doctrine, intense, immense, awesome, not even indirectly related to reason
.No law maker is postulated for law, no substance conceiver for substance, no mathematician for mathematics of the highest order, no machinist for engineering of the most elaborate and elegant facility, nothing but nothing is the basis, and everything else is brought in by casual labourers, over time, as needed, such as minds that can work in a mind-oriented field with its mind-invested laws and forms, open to intellectual research, and spirits than can imagine.
Logically, disdaining cause for it all, they are left with nothing so that the whole creation becomes much ado about nothing, quite literally, or just a school-boy howler of begging the question by importing at once, or in bits, what you need from nowhere. Disdaining logic, it is left bereft empirically likewise (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!).
What is the reality of this pseudo-scientific, this scientistic religion ? What are some of their irritated responses to scientific method ? Do not harass me with reason, it says, if not openly then at the end of its defence. No, do not expect that or that I should have to find cognate considerations such as those where things are created through our own minds daily, in a cause and effect manner; nor seek anything which is founded on observation. Why, their line of thought goes, don't expect too much of our science, for observation is - well - just you might say, a form of casuistry. The REAL work of assembling theories assumes what it must find, detests what it does not find, and ignores test methods for hypotheses as a religion, because if you descend to that level, where will you end!
Whether told more frankly as with Harvard's Lewontin (as below), or less so, in the obscurantist mode of rational shrugging more common, It is neo-science, the precise opposite of actual scientific method, and indeed some are even trying to amend scientific method, to accord with these myths.
Such is naturalism. One of its agencies is organic evolution.
The theory of organic evolution is a contra-evidential, illusionist concept which seeks to account for the opposite of what is found, more basic designs despite its own assertion of less (cf. Ch. 2 above re Stephen Jay Gould development), by methods are never observed to be functional for the task in hand, and assumes an elevating process the opposite of what is observable: that is, to take a case, the deterioration of the human genome, which is the crown of it all at the physical level. Thus an-aetiological concepts - that is a-causal, might be fulfilled in terms of a presentation which in its initial presentation, itself acts on a causal basis, even for its own argumentation.
What it uses, it then abuses, and that on which it argumentatiely depends, it then abstractly deletes.
It is therefore the most mixed-up, misleading, mis-taught mischief and must rank with the concepts of the early Greek philosophers (Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13), which have much in common with this more recent but not more logically decent mythology, in their sheer disregard of conceptual fidelity to reason and empirical concern for operational interfaces for their thought. They work on what you don't see, but that is not all. What you don't see! why it is the very opposite of what you do see, the degeneration of the human genome no less, over time (Waiting or Wonder, Appendix).
Thus they entice with that total species of unfettered imagination bordering on fairy stories, which the solemn Greek philosophers depicted in their ever changing ideas that it all came from water or fire, that it is really immovable, or on the other hand kinetic, that nothing is change, or everything, in wild adversative excesses, till Aristotle brought a little more actuality into things, in insisting on the type which is to come, and have fruition in fulfilment, with something that at least looked at things, even if not with the fidelity required at this point. Still it was a move away from fiction towards something that incorporated a sense of idea, of kind, of fixity to be. Like Einstein, he was not fond of mindless muddle.
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But what of naturalism in its enriched activity ? In this impassioned persecutory mania, which is now most manifest in the media, many governments and a plurality of universities, it is insisted, where reason ostensibly has its hallowed halls, that there be no rational consideration of contending concepts and hypotheses on origins, no scientific method in their consideration. I myself, on this topic when lecturing, was told blatantly that the issue was one of convenience, and although no answer was given to my direct challenge to SHOW any POINT where I had erred in teaching, the expedient, as in the death of Christ, was what concerned the authorities (John 11:48ff.). This alone was the answer. As my tongue is not for hire, but for truth (John 14:6) where it is found, and reason was evacuated, there was no possibility of continuing, something that surprised one who appeared the union representative present at the time. A tongue without truth is an ocean without land.
This is merely one of the many such instances, and indeed, the matter was made an issue in the video work, EXPELLED, wrought by Ben Stein. Further, in such works as Faith Despite the KGB, by Hermann Hartfeld, you find the same SORT of intolerance, though in that case, political duress is added to professional decline, and the means of obliteration of anything to do with God are admitted quite often, and made, as in socialised naturalism, into a creed at any cost, which stops at nothing available! The devotion and dedication to such religion, negative though it be, and the staunch self-affirmation of State and man, that is back of it, is one with all such things over time: an impassioned hatred, an oligarchic odium, made the more feverish, heartless and at last mindless by its very vacuity.
This approach, even in our own national form, is objectively in perfect parallel with Nazi methods to inculcate concepts into the relatively plastic minds of servile youth, occupied with finding an occupation in life; and with the Communist Youth League in its presentation of rewards to those bending to mere reductionist theory which is never found to confirm itself empirically, just as is fails rationally (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7). It is like these again, in this, that those who insist on logic and scientific method, and on not making the State, ex officio God for the purpose of its good favour, are ignored, mocked, didactically unfed, untaught in the relevant aspects of comparison of the results of organic-evolution or rational creationist coverage.
Most manifestly the UN "THE DECLARATION ON THE ELIMINATION OF ALL FORMS OF INTOLERANCE AND OF DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RELIGION OR BELIEF," (cf. Mystery of Iniquity) is ignored in this discrimination based on religion, and it appears that national law therefore, is recklessly broken, as well as scientific method, rationality and evidential sensitivity. What can nations involved in such discrimination socially, and failure to discern intellectually, expect for such pains to corrupt, whether it be by religious fanaticism, mystic romance or other!
This may not be presented, being given a place of discredit by decree, rather like that for golden staph in hospitals; but whereas that tends wisely to life, this tends unwisely to death of reason, of the soul and ignorance of reality, which is always courting the fatal.
Indeed there is afoot a new fervour, to remove the very name of creationism from the curriculum, from mention; and in this it is precisely like the Communist abrasiveness of Albania that was, and the all too well attested actions of the KGB in the USSR, as they long sought to dismantle, deprive, defame or delete churches, church leaders, the Bible, anything to hand for their anti-purpose, and imprison at best, slowly kill at worst, any who might assail the wonderful bounty of the all competent State, which in fact, the USSR, to descend from such broken dreams to fact, simply failed. Such is the way of delusions.
The US, increasingly like Australia and Europe, is moving towards agnosticism, atheism and logical lapse, as in a spiritual cardiac arrest, Lacking inspiration and ceasing more and more to provide it, it is engaging in power politics and various non-biblical morality concepts which being what it more and more nationally DOES, like non-faith without works, makes it characterisable. Results flow from causes, and capitulation in myriads of class-rooms to naturalistic, irrational folly, brought in with intolerance, cannot be disguised any more than can its amorphous, degraded, emotional and spiritual results.
We have in South Australia a now notorious 'gang of 49', a group of young and apparently dedicated persons, which careers about in violence as a trade, and whom some regard explicitly as utterly evil. What is to be done, they ask ? One policeman reflected that their early release from prison meant what ? that one person (a hope often contrary to reality) MIGHT reform, but that MANY would be hurt in the early liberation. Where, he asked, is the sense in that ?
You can reflect on the naturalistic manner of the approach to these individuals, the normal guilt-minimisation, moral-minimisation, cultural maximisation (what they do is sacred to themselves, and like other natural phenomena, must not be made mobile); but in the end, it is failure in vision as in virtue, in morals as in discipline, in inspiration, in real anticipation and expectation from an early age which all contribute to this demoralised lassitude and activation for evil. Exclusion of God from practical affairs more and more makes for the debasement of man, and there is no solution, but force or faith; and the former has been used by many in the last 50 years, and doubtless, as foretold, will be expanded as a solution for this and many allied driftings which take on their own dynamic, as evil glowers and emptiness imbibes strange passions. The empty heart, as Christ pointed out, now so gloriously FREE of its troubles, evil exempted, now awaits the possessive possession of seven worse devils (Luke 11:26). Playing with God or His name is not only inane; it is deadly.
While country after country falls for this folly, embraces it, sows its seed in such fields, so do whole generations grow up in the grip of the fever and fervour of surviving, ignoring the entirety of life, in order to concentrate by a mythical, anti-empirical and irrational theory, on base-level considerations, void of all ideal, reality and wisdom, so that man might have reductionist life in all its deprivation, and so break out in martial passions, internationally, socially and nationally, as has happened in increasing measure in France, Britain and in Australia. In the last, such models as the so-called Gang of 49, ebbing and flowing, but apt for growing, one which rejoices in destruction, tends to illustrate the weaknesss of moral-oblivion, not only in young hearts, but in operational reality in their State-restrained teachers. So do the methods grow infamously ineffective, as many merely wallow in cultural-camp concepts, preserving the natural: which do nothing to correct, having neither moral basis nor religious reality.
The spirit and direction of the thing, to be sure, just as it is foretold in II Timothy 3, II Peter 2, and Matthew 24, as well as in II Thessalonians 2 for its later stages; and it accords entirely with prognosis for doing without God, as found in Romans 1:17ff., which it follows as if this were a medical procedure: and that it is, one for the mind and soul of man, just as sometimes medical practitioners seek to show the prognosis for a syndrome at the physical level.
There is no mystery in this, except the "mystery of iniquity" as the Bible depicts it (II Thessalonians 2:7), a depraved mode of depriving man of God, in which numerous forces collaborate and oppressive violence extends to the earth, in what is now seen to be merely an extension of the vast territorial oppressions of similar type, more abrasively performed by Mao, Hitler and Stalin. The spirit of the thing is tenacious, vacuous, blindly learned, empirically numb; and its progress is by mystic religion, recognised or not. At State level, it has had its fruits, ready for export, in the millions of its victims to torture, degradation, persecution, deprivation, slow starving and social alienation, these reported to be in the tens of millions. Like the world of Alice, the strange things take different forms, as opportunity arrives; but its victims know one thing: intolerant, pseudo-religious manipulation that is disjoined from reason, fashioned in dreams, bitter in manner, intolerant of truth, a mockery of reason. It so resembles the Pharisees of old (cf. Matthew 23), whose religion omitted such trifles as justice and mercy, but was most chuffed in its chosen conformities, whatever the associated enormities.
Eyes they have.
Yet the eyes are closed, as Christ noted in Israel before its dispersion for 1900 years (Matthew 13:15ff.). We move however. This time, it is an increasing blindness of the Gentiles. This time, the Israel being back in place as Christ indicated would come (Luke 21:24), we move to what He described as the times of the Gentiles being fulfilled. That is what the Israeli return denotes. THEY had their season and killed Christ; the Gentiles have THEIR season, and indirectly, as far as may be, increasingly are doing spiritually just the same thing. Not only is this in State suppression as noted, but in ecclesiastical betrayal at its own level as also foretold (cf. Matthew 24:24, II Peter 2, II Thessalonians 2).
Thus liberated from much of what had restrained (as foretold in II Thess. 2:7), indeed until "that which restrains is taken out of the way," the thing takes on internationally what had been merely national.
Thus, it is not a nation but the nations themselves who are so to subject themselves to vanity, futility, worshipping increasing a combination of creation, or things in it - like this or that imaginary force or power, and people, who actually are but part of the same creation by the same Creator. As Romans 1 tells us, "Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of God into an image made like corruptible man," concerning themselves not with the Maker but the made, like 'teen-agers, temporarily bereft of wisdom, worshipping their trendy car as if its making were entirely beside the point: though in fact they are never SEEN making themselves, nor are means for it found except where minds apply themselves to the task. Man's mind certainly did not do so with himself, before he was there!
'So is there now growingly, the tendency to idolise in popularity, things mystic and counter-rational, before the grim realities of corrupted power become apparent, as has happened so often, amid the surging blood of millions and the oppression of multiplied more millions. Why can people be so foolish, academically, politically, or in the latter enforcing the former: it is merely a perversion of the natural and innate proclivity of man to WORSHIP GOD. With such a dynamic, rational, religious, psychic, it is small wonder that - like a stream dammed, it mounts as it is held back, till the banks overflow.
Abort that reality concerning God, and you have in man an unstable being, prone to the terrorist by State or Camp, or sector or race, caring nothing for ideals, as they talk of them, and tearing down what is built up as they have already done in heart, with their hands, proceed to capture souls. Deprived and depraved, either worshipping forces or fictions in nature, or making up gods which do not save (as in Jeremiah 10:11), its underlying tenor is in the end historically, often merely to order, oppress, kill, maim, whether they be babes or adolescents, young or old, male or female whom they seek to delete with passionate odium, and red hands and white hearts, surrendered to the demolition of manhood, whatever the words which may be employed. Such is one of the current modes - terrorism, and it readily becomes national, and will become international, to the extent required to requite its negative neology, and give rein to its ambition. It cannot happen ? It is almost a NORM!
Nations which have long bowed in ideological and academic terms to the vacuities created by their intellectual idolatries and vanities, vacuities and follies of ideas like the wonderful explanation of what is never found to occur or verify itself, organic evolution, as in the naturalistic imaginations always baulked, usually arrogant, but frequently finding useful their militant offshoots, these prepare themselves for what is to come. In the kaleidoscope of human nostrums when God is denied, and His word is side-tracked, many are now beginning to find the fruit of their minimalist labours, as of the moral-free realities of all their empty talk, amid the type of construction they have forged in misdirected, mistaught and what is often spiritually bought youth.
The increasing desire for a much more united Europe, amid its apparently self-indulgent recent past, as it moves further from the Gospel realities of the case facing man, is a necessary prescription for the fulfilment of biblical prophecy (Daniel 2, 7-8, SMR Chs. 8 - 9), as has been the European Union as a regional format, likewise.
Desperate means to overcome desperate people in a deserted moral globe, where pretence inhabits more and more what morality is left, become more and more popular, 'indicated' by the pundits (cf. the man of sin " to come, as in II Thessalonians 2), while the delusion to be poured out on those who do not receive the love of the truth (2:10). It is like that in the human psyche: you often find that when what is natural, the created norm, is ignored or despoiled, so tht the thrust finds its own place. In this way, where elevation to creation and the Creator is denied, deprivation breeds depravity through perversion of dynamic. It can be in power, lust, paranoid self-importance, but the seams burst and the coat leaving, exposes only naked folly.
You find something of this in Daniel 9, also, where in vv. 24-27 we read of the coming Messiah, who is not to receive what is His due honour and place, but is cut off, so that "there is nothing for Him," this leading on to the "people of the prince who will come," who will destroy Jerusalem and its temple, as was fulfilled by Rome with Titus. That was phase I.
It moves on. The END of this sweep of things, moving to the entire fulfilment of prophecy (Daniel 9:24), will be with a flood, with ruins, for desolations are determined until the end of the war. There IS war, spiritual war, often manifested in physical concentrations of the passionate. In this, there is the sense of the tsunami, of the overwhelming overthrow and destruction, devastation and appointed thrust in this horrendous negation of what negated God in human form, come as Saviour. What else is left! Such is what is found in Daniel 9 in its prescription concerning the end of our Age, as judgment day comes nearer.
But it is not yet. The text of Daniel 9 then continues in verse 27, with the commanding character of the Messiah*1 (as is Isaiah 7, 9, 11, 22, 32, 49-55 and so forth) who is to build up or reinforce a covenant, as Professor E. J. Young stresses, with many for one unit of the prophetic time scale (one 'seven' cf. .SMR pp. 959ff.), so that in the midst of this seven (that is after three and one half years, the length of Christ's active, Messianic ministry, thus at the time of His death), sacrifices in any ordained sense, will cease. What is this covenant which He will confirm ? It is the Old Testament covenant which was the bud for the flower of the New Covenant (as in Jeremiah 31:31), the New Covenant in His own blood (Matthew 26:28-29). So does God in His sovereign continue to the end with His own mandate, though stricken and despised in the format of the Messiah, when righteousness as in Daniel 9:24 is indeed fulfilled. It is no romance of evil that is in view, but the plenary performance of righteousness that is predicted here.
What then ? The animal provision is past. The human option is present. The Lord has become man and deleted the forms with the fact: He died for us. The rest of animal sacrifices, it is mere history (cf. Isaiah 66:3).
The following language is the most acrid and acute, as befits the desolation of what saves, and the institution of what ruins in response to this desolation, the unvirtuous void being now clammy with horror.
As in a vision, we suddenly see in the text (v. 27), "one who makes desolate" introduced by no verb, a sudden flash, like that of an atomic bomb, announced in awe and horror. This travesty of truth and acme of unholiness proceeds "even until the consummation"; and as to that it is one "which is determined", all these things having their appointed times and stages, responses and resolutions, rebukes and realities in the hands of God Almighty from the first (cf. Isaiah 46:10, Ephesians 1:11). This consummation, this last stage, this finale (cf. Revelation 19:20, II Thessalonians 1:9) is an end which as a determinate thing, like a negative anointing, will be "poured out" on what is translated either "on the desolator" or "on the desolation."
What is appointed is what is anointed on the desolator, on the desolation, according to long prepared scenario. You cannot outwit God: it is useless to try; but they do, and so the results mount in desolation from the world-wide flood to this new flood of evil overthrown in judgment both direct and appalling, as it is in its own heart.
Both are one, the cause and the effect, as in Stalin's days, one horrid, writhing work of cause and effect, almost beyond conception in their godless remains and their fallen domains. It is this on which the determined desolation will be poured, its end like its nature!
Thus in Daniel 9, you have the two messiahs. One is the Messiah of God, who makes a covenant that lasts till the end and judgment, which leads to the cessation of sacrifice after three and one half sevens, or in this case, years, when Christ's ministry ended. The other is in effect, the devil's fake messiah, the man of force and called the desolator, who both brings in desolation and suffers it, in a flood of horror. There are, in the end, no other options, despite all the vague romancing, whether academic or political.
You go with God, or you are gone without Him.
NOTE
Thus you have this announcement by Daniel:
"After the sixty-two sevens Messiah shall be cut-off, and His apportionment is nothing.
The people of a coming prince will destroy the city and the sanctuary.
Its end shall come overwhelmingly
and till the end there shall be warfare; desolations are determined.
In one seven, He will make the covenant prevail with many,
and in the midst of the seven He will cause sacrifice and offering to cease.
On the wing of abominations, there is a desolator, this even to the consummation,
and that determined will be poured on the desolation."
In this way, you have the two heads, the one despised as in Isaiah 53, the other self-exaltative. This latter one is he who is filled with desolation, embodies it, rises in aspiration to the very heavens, as if in himself, above the temple; and on him and his works, on the entire desolate ruin, man and method, the clusters of evil results and the evil-doer combined, on the exultantly contemptible there will be poured out the long foreknown, just and inevitable ruin. It is this which will make of him and of his works, allies and counterparts, subordinates and followers, a set of desolated desolators, flooded with folly and filled with judgment.
Thus, the prediction declares, the eternal and all victorious God in Christ will be cut off, but so will be man who does so to His Messiah; and as the height of glory is bypassed, indeed sought to be deleted entirely, in the Messiah, so the depths of depravity will be both experienced and judged to the uttermost in the continuing aftermath. What has made desolate will be led by the desolator, who, with all his desolations will become a desolation in himself.
As shown in Christ the Citadel... Ch. 2 and elsewhere, the 70 7s concept came from 70 years in exile on the part of Judah (as foretold in Jremiah 25), and to Daniel it was given to make a larger scope for the seventy years. To him, as often before, there came a divine revelation of detailed things to come. Indeed, his scope was expanded tenfold, so that instead of seventy years (in exile as happened), his palette now saw seventy sevens, a colossal account detailed from the divinity, covering man and his proud history, effortless for a vast period to come.
Not seventy years, each a unit, but seventy sevens would follow to the fulfilment of prophecy and righteousness. After 69 of these (and at this point as shown in Ch. 2 as just noted, there is the verified death-date of Christ as here predicted), you have one of the sevens left. This becomes the Messianic Seven, that apportioned to the One to whom man accorded NOTHING, but whom God has appointed all, as in Isaiah 11, Philippians 2, the eternal expression of God (as in Hebrews 1, Micah 5). Taking control of history as God always does, it is this Messiah who strengthens and confirms the Old Testament Covenant in the New Covenant in His blood (Daniel 9:27), and this takes effect after half the last seven, that is, the time of His Messianic ministry which led to His crucifixion as in Psalm 22's prediction.
It is of necessity He who does this, since this sweep takes us to the end, the fulfilment of righteousness, which requires not only the negative, but the positive, and the covenant which endures for ever in the very midst of the parody and burlesque, the odious obloquy of the doomed, holds fast despite the 'nothing' accorded to Him who confirmed it. It is He, the Messiah, whose grip on history continues with apportionments and appointments till the end of the evils is met with its own desolation, divinely exposed for what it is. Only He who has made this covenant remains in control as in Revelation 19-20.
One relevant point is this. The residual part of the last seven, being a SEVEN as distinct from a week, in fact, is expansible as Acts 1 shows it to be; and the Messiah having come and offered all and been accorded nothing, He takes His time for its completion in the terms described above in Daniel 9. It is not for you, he told the disciples intent on knowing when the kingdom would come to consummation, to know the times and seasons the Father has in His own hand. Instead, the Holy Spirit was to come, as it did, while the Gospel concerning Him occupied the time till His return as in Acts 1:7ff., 3:19ff.. HE is received, welcomed into heaven UNTIL the time of the restitution of all things arrives (Acts 3:19-22), and HE came as real man, incarnate form of true God, so with one body, not any subject to masses of masses or anything else in any way controlled by man.
His covenant would endure, His presence continue, His Spirit enable, till the end (as in Matthew 28:19-20). When it DOES come it will take many by surprise which is His intention (Matthew 24:40-51, I Thessalonians 5:1ff.).
II Peter 3:9 tells us more: a thousand years in such a setting of the divine patience toward man, and His love, as this, is like a day, making it in that sense, two days so far! But the items on the agenda to warn us of NEAR approach (Luke 21:24-28) are mounting up (Answers to Questions Ch. 5). It has been no short spurt, and has extended, for God yearns to win more, and as we saw in Ch. 1 above, earnestly desires the liberation and restoration of mankind. Yet the time comes, as in all exams. Thus the end is no meek and feeble thing, but being the judgment residual to man when Christ's bearing of sin is ignored, or rejected, it is so momentous that time is appointed and make large (but by no means endless) before He comes.
Then not only is it to terminate the desolation, by desolating the desolator and his works. It is to consummate the consecration of His people, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to fulfil all residual prophecy, to dismiss and dispense at length with the very earth and heavens (Matthew 24:35), and lay down one in which, oh relief, dwells righteousness, and most importantly (Revelation 22), both Himself and His people, freer than air, more blessed than the purest mountain stream, not only regenerated, but resurrected, and better than repatriated, placed where He is, children of God.