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Master of disaster, mandate of mercy

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring the proclamation of pardon, who declare, Your God reigns! (Isaiah 52, 40)How lovely is the sound of spirituality in a naturalistically hypnotised world, filled with nothings and sometimes even declaring nothing to be  its sponsor, or making what is worth nothing as its parent, a world no better than Israel in Jeremiah's time, than those in it who would "say to a stone, 'You gave birth to me,' "as in 2:27.

Who gave birth to birth ? to stones that they should keep their geological, chemical and formatted functions ? Who gave birth to something that it should be formulated, formed, fashioned and put into compositions of bits and considerations of aesthetics, masterpieces of mathematically integrated engineering and contribute as accessory to the mentally manufactured ideas of persons, themselves physically composed in their bodies of billions of gloriously integrated bits making a whole fit to execute the dominion of mind, to be agent for the visions of spirit and invite understanding by its dynamic dealings in logic within, and for logic without, as man applies it ?

But who gave birth to love ? to man's common desire to take pleasure in what is caring, comforting, kindly, considerate, thoughtful, aware in sympathy, compassionate in disposition, charitable in thought, realistic in truth, reliable in character, understanding in heart, humble in disposition and fearless in faith ? But which faith ? It is the faith that induces faithfulness to both truth and mercy, and which does not lightly dispossess peace of its place, which finds what operates sufficiently for man neither to truncate what he is, as is cynically nearly normal (cf. SMR Ch. 3), nor expand it, as is abnormal but also common, the one normally leading to the other, or the other to the one: this faith.

How many object to such persons as have these spiritual silhouettes ? Why is there this trend to  respect, or be relatively happy with such persons as these, or at least with what they hold in the abstract ? It is because, despite the originalities of the sin of sedition against what made us, this vapid reliance on other parts of what the Maker made, as if they could help (Jeremiah 10:11, 2:28), the multitude of irrationalities, nothings or futilities as the Bible sometimes calls them (as in Deuteronomy 32:21), there remains a residue. It is felt very often even in spirit.

Let us take, as illustration, the case of ancient Israel, as this the Bible does. They as a nation, to speak in imagery of marriage, are declared to have aroused to a zealous concern in God, by worshipping NOT-GOD, themselves aroused by mere nothings, vanities (hebel, in transliteration). That a form of worship, a formula for worship, a functionary in worship, the idol of heart or hand (cf. Ezekiel 14) should be called NOT-GOD, in a duality of all, that is GOD and NOT-GOD; that it likewise, should be called a nothing, a vacuity or emptiness in the biblical approach, shows the scathing scorn of the God who made it, which hurls itself to ruin. It is shown towards this ruin by mere revolutionary revolt, one that kills.

It is the anguish for the factitious and meretricious meanders, in the spirit of vagrancy, that spoils the people. It is shown in the concern of father or friend of a person tending to go over cliffs while listening to wild music with earphones in and eyes closed, so that all his life, learning, effort, all that was given in the first place in order to BE, is tossed aside like a rose-hip, that forgot it should have flowered and had only the skeletal to show.

ALL that fails to be GOD is NOT-GOD, whatever pretensions apply (cf. Ch. 1 above). God lumps all such into that shameful category of emptiness, void, futility, a multitude of noughts with no number in front,  for the worship of the human race astray, both from the logical reality (cf. SMR, TMR, Romans 1:17ff., Ephesians 4:17ff.) and from the divine declaration in Bible, that divine manual for life.

Such was the predicted path for Israel the nation in its lamentable revolt, foretold and then actualised,  shown first in Deuteronomy and then in history. Such was the shameless situation, for the Israel of Jeremiah's day, just as it has become so, in some  cases to the very WORD, nothing, in the vast sweep of Gentiles in our own. The Hebrew deliciously has NOT-GOD hyphenated, to make its impact the more total as a category! This futile invention of religions that man makes when he tires of his Maker and Master and Redeemer, it is not-God and nothing in God's declaration. But man is not nothing. He is divorced (Ephesians 4:17-19), till restored. Yet there is a residue, even ethically.

With this imprint still showing up in many ways, not only logically but ethically in the tendency just noted for a large proportion of mankind, that is,  to respect or feel attracted to certain characteristics in OTHER PEOPLE (red, above), there is a series of symptoms.

Thus there is

	lostness instead of logos,
	vanity instead of virtue,
	vileness instead of vision,
	preoccupation with particles instead of what made them particular,
	asininity of spirit instead of acuity (Hosea 9:7, Romans 11:20-22),
	lapse instead of life,
	regality of spirit instead of reality,
	wandering instead of wonder,
	stimulus instead of spirituality,
	the fleeting moment as typified in much TV, instead of the consolidated faith.

That is the faith that knows
where it came from, goes to, and why,
and worships with wisdom what alone comes with the authority of the living God,
shown both in the Bible and in the Messiah which pronounced, predicted and confirmed Him

(cf. LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

Bible or Blight, Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God ).

So is man who has not trekked back to truth, lost without the GOD who made mind as well as matter, spirit as well as substance, that spirit by which man tends to operate, whether for ambition or peace or callow  lust or brilliant achievement, for good or for evil, none of which are measurable in material terms since they are not material objects, and are even used in denying the spirit with which they survey or convey it. With the loss of basis, however, comes loss of much more, even the beauty of truth.

The love of which Paul speaks in I Corinthians 13 is also lost. People tend instead to love the latest ideology,  the more useless, futile and empty, the better to  attract their attention, as when frustrated people tend to explode at a mere ... nothing. Mao reputedly killed tens of millions for his, hypocritically or not, yet with undeniable death all the same; Stalin was in the league; Hitler did not fail to disadorn it along with the other futilities that arose to rule the race in its payments of interest on the debt of being indebted to God and yet not caring even to pay attention!

Love, nestling in truth, provides a genesis of feeling, attitude, perspective, concern, involvement, a disposition of desire for the good as of what is so made, and this, living where truth is, and so means and methods to fit, is a beautiful entity. In its absence, there is nothing, brass cymbal in loudness  but without life, just vapid banging, or tinkling noise, pleasant perhaps, but tinny.  Love "rejoices in the truth," and where what is called love does not, then being so far divorced, it can become obsession with part, blindness toward the whole,  distortion not wisely but in addiction to a foreign dynamic, and so spoilt.

The curse cannot conquer love; but rather agitates the mind that sleeps, and the thoughts that scatter, that they might remember reality, and find truth where alone it is or even could be, in the mind of the Maker, whose Logos has created, certified and conquered the life crisis of sin, and brought peace back to fallen humanity, on a selective basis. What is this ? It is an end of revolt from the Redeemer, the pretence of being good enough, of needing no introduction, no restoration to God, and refusing regeneration at the hand of Him who first crafted man, this in the ultimate of all crash repairs, this a living one by the living God (Titus 3:3-7). It is this which leads, empowered, on to life eternal, fitting for man made in the image of God, as derivative but personal, in the first place: though not deserved, it is in Christ Jesus the Lord, freely available (Isaiah 55, John 4:14, 5:24, Romans 3:23ff.)..

But what is it that is needed ? It is repentance for living without His mandate, manual and mercy (Luke 13:1-3, Matthew 22), without His sent Saviour, without Jesus Christ, while manufacturing false hope or even without hope (as in fact, in  Ephesians 2:12). It is that faith that receives because of it, the foundation offered,  the redemption by the cursed sacrifice of Christ, that His substitution might annul justice, and His mercy might restore in regeneration, the lost to the Lord.