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CHAPTER THREE
THINGS TO BE AS IF THEY HAD NOT BEEN
THE PRODUCTION OF GUILT
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If it had not occurred, then I should have been free, or unharassed, or untroubled, or blessed indeed.
As free and responsible beings, not by any means determined by mere chemical equations or physical laws, but merely thus provided for in personality and spirit, that the designs and projects, thoughts and ideas, ideals and constructions of our hearts might be implemented, the members of mankind even from within, from time to time, are forced to face things. This is so, whether for good or for evil, for help or for hindrance, so foolish are the visions of viciousness or diverse those of weal, leading to our behaving as heroes or heels, so that we are properly and intensely subject to guilt.
We may feel it acutely, continually, occasionally, episodically dependent on our own performance, or even ideas, when they have betrayed us. If this is extrapolated in some, especially when proud, yet the people of our human race have often followed woeful decisions, exalted concepts, ignorant assurance, self-assured negligences of spirit, with an imperious arrogance or a tenacious doggedness, despite their calamitous nature, which hides itself for a time.
Whichever way, however, it is there. In the case of 'Yes Minister,' the comedy political satire, you have the bumbling but astute Sir Humphrey most fastidiously hiding himself as far as he could, from the fact that when 'young and foolish,' as he cautiously is brought to admit, he had made a Public Service decision which, as Hacker his boss put it, might have cost the State as much as his entire salary for many years. Whatever financial good he may have achieved was cancelled out in advance at the outset. Some such presentation was made with a mordant mirth from the Minister, provoking an intensively unusual feeling of gaffe and guilt in Sir Humphrey, though indeed he tried to mitigate, but not remove, his own responsibility for this overall financial aspect of his calling. It had consequences for tax-payers. He had not unduly suffered.
Guilt is often intensely sought on the part of competitors in ideology or professional practice, to be displayed on their colleagues in a profession. It can grip a man as if he were in a fit of madness, as he seeks to expose another. This can be widely spaced. Thus one medical doctor whom I once visited, my own being not so readily available, for the first and last time, took advantage of the visit on a simply medical matter, at the request of a specialist. He proceeded to utter such a tirade as if he were a provocateur, or a madman, a Communist confronting a cut-throat employer, a judge on his judicial throne ascribing the nature of a fault Indeed, such was his bluster in a religious area, that one could but pity and marvel. He arose from his seat, he came alongside, blasting with descriptive assessments, speaking with an ignorance more pitiable than engaging, a partisan folly more bubbly than rational, so that one wondered what he might have done as a spy-master or a Commissar. Judgmentalism without knowledge is one of the most arresting aspects of guilt work, whether from oneself inward or set upon from another in a blither and blather of intemperate, coiled up emotion, given release from the prison of privacy into a bushfire-like episode.
While that appeared religious renegacy, brilliantly careless breach of 'judge not that you be not judged,' a substitute of emotion for relevance, a jumping into generalisation without understanding, a movement into irrelevance without thought, yet just because it was such a breach of wisdom and abuse of privilege, it stands out as one of a type. How many judges, official or not, statesmen, commentators, people's courts, exemplars of odium as this was, have unleashed their tongues similarly on what is deemed a 'class' of beings, assuming that what applies to some applies to all, inventing motives that do not even exist, slamming people into death, injury, torture, dismissal or the wrath of the people, led like lambs shepherded by wolves.
May the Lord forgive the doctor for his ignorant judgmentalism and frenzied seeming actions in a near vacuum of knowledge! But let him at least be useful in one thing: the expression of the strength of the passion for exporting guilt to the point almost of madness, as if it were so sore in their hearts as an issue, that all self-control is lost, and a seething desire to slam some subject into moral or physical oblivion proceeds to take over, like a fit.
It happens thousands of times in Communist places, or with Islam, if someone is deemed, even if perhaps unintentionally or incidentally, to have insulted someone deemed a prophet. To differ is deemed by many, a mortal offence, and guilt is ascribed even when undeniable truth is uttered, because that truth could be conceived as inhibitive to glory in some system of thought, or belief or morality, itself unfounded either in logic or authority.
The Roman Catholic Inquisition is a vast field for this type of thing, as displayed in cases almost innumerable in Fox's Book of Martyrs, and many are the testimonies of such inveterate and often vicious, grievous and even inhuman wrath in a passion of guilt diagnosis, on the part of men. It is not enough to condemn the murderer, they must condemn the saint, the lover of God, the one who sacrifices himself or herself for the good of many, acting with courage, conviction and well-reasoned ground. Hatred swamps all thought, condemnation takes over like seizure of paralysis, only in this case, it is the opposite, a volcano of hyper-activism, controlled by hatred, activated by a surge of the repressed or a vain desire to rule a class of beings (such as Christians), repress them though they may have done only good with goodwill in the case, because not disputation but death has become a lust.
Indeed it can become as Christ foretold in John 16, that case, both ludicrous and unlovely, but far from uncommon, when someone deems himself to be doing God a service, by killing someone of a different view, another faith or disposition.
So-called honour killings in some Islamic circles can become excruciating expressions of unnaturalism, a perfervid hostility which acts as independent judge and arbiter of religions with force, amounting to murder. How MANY millions were slain in both China and USSR, in just such a manner of perverse pre-occupation with illusory philosophy, without humanity or justice!
GUILT! they exclaim, you have done this, or you are the other, whereas you ought to have been something else, assumed some presuppositions held by the murderers, who for no better reason, consign their victims to fast or slow death, even with morose thrift, extracting labour from them as they die of slow starvation. Yet there is one who has presided over Russia, cited as saying that the fall of the USSR was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Is it tragic if wolves cease to destroy lambs ? or if gloating passion against presumed guilt replaces rational accounts on the part of those who acting as gods, behave as devils!
The glamour and stammer or hammer of guilt, obsessively engaged in, when it is in fact mere ideological confusion laced with intemperate emotion and estrangement from the God of all truth and equity, is so vast a business, in things private and public, that the guilt of man, real or imagined, is one of the largest trade-marks of his spiritual distempers and abased nature that could be imagined.
THEREFORE, it is small wonder when former addicts to such abasements of human nature, feel a guilt overpowering, or are charged with it, or charge others with it, or even continue in their conduct when only a form of adherence to the former passion is left, as if a motor stutters on when the keys are turned off.
Guilt is the obverse of prior pondering of principles, belief systems, cultural conditioning, subjected to superficial analysis, of estimates of outcomes, consideration of options, and thus is a rebound from an inwardly known liberty, power of assessment, choice of principle that cannot be erased. It is in this case, not someone else's imagination that is in view, perhaps with ponderous and bumptious folly, but ONE'S OWN!
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone! came the challenge of Jesus Christ to people wanting to stone someone for sexual immorality!
Guilt was allowed to be felt, and it led feet away from this moral tower, Jesus Christ, in whom sinlessness led to a mordancy toward it, when it presumed, that could scarcely be met at all. Of course, He was killed in part for it, when scenes of intemperate and passionate verbal assault as in Luke 11, failed to move Him, and so the reproaches of those who hated God (though perhaps engaging in formal worship in name), fell upon Him who in unfailing bearing, bore all for many (Psalm 69:9,19, I Peter 2:21-24), Matthew 26:;28, Romans 8:32)
Death is the ultimate solution of weak and woeful sin, to the truth. For many, it is felt as a release from guilt to the extent that one trumpet of their sin, at least, specifying it to their faces, is now silenced for a while, till perhaps the day of judgment. How much more evil can be wrought in the interim! That passion and the guilt that is proportionate wreak their havoc, and storm in the scenes of responsible man, when behaving irresponsibly, like hydrogen sulphide emanating from seaweed after a storm, leaving a testimony both lingering and a foul.
EXEMPLAR OF GUILT
In the book of Obadiah, you see Edom, a nation of that day, one with considerable Hebraic relationship to Israel, brought before the bar of divine judgment, as sometimes occurs in the Bible, prior to the final judgment, when God condemns condignly, and assessing justice, either brings an end to some body, or a reduction or rebuke of a vast quality. That is the alternative to procured pardon, duly received. Thus judgment can precede its time, and act over all scurry, flurry and worry, by divine appointment, resolved as reward for unrelieved wickedness.
Edom was such a case. This neighbour of Israel had actually gloated at the tragedy which befell that divinely disciplined nation, EVEN IF Israel had itself asked for trouble by ignoring repetitively the counsel and the word of God, to which it had been freely committed (Joshua 24, Ezekiel 20), and ging formal approval to the theocracy. Did divine discipline MEAN heartlessness in Israel's neighbours was sanctioned ? Each man, woman and each nation has its own guilt, and the morality applies to one and to all. Thus,when Israel was being slaughtered by its enemies, did not Edom like a jackal come for the pickings, though so close as a race to Israel ? (Obadiah 10-13). In judgment, the Lord would so plan that they would themselves experience inhuman seeming indifference and a travesty of trustworthiness on the part of their comrades or allies, for their own part.
"The men at peace with you shall deceive you and prevail against you.
Those who eat your bread will lay a trap for you."
Edom was divested of power in steps, commercially and politically, till but a memory. Further, as to Israel, "saviours will come to Mount Zion, to judge the mountains of Esau, and the kingdom shall be the LORD's," verse 21. The Maccabees in their day, indeed made quite a competent empire out of Israel, occupying what had occupied itself with increasing Israel's devastation. These things are broadly realised by man, as seen in numerous trials and exposés, documents of armistice, for war, and in review.
DISMEMBERMENT OF GUILT
Therefore, with principles of justice so deeply carved into the human heart and deliberative capacities, small wonder is it, though they may indeed be distorted, distempered and abuse, that Lady Macbeth's "Yet here's a spot," has an echo in an audience, when they hear that Shakespearian drama. The surge of troubling emotion continues into action, for she was a lady of action: "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" she continued, having found the thing in the midst of the mists of her now disordered mind, as far eclipsed as were her morals in the murder, which catapaulated her into collapse.
Thus it is of the utmost importance, not only for disordered but for residually ordered minds, not only for cold and calculating machine-type desolations of humanity, but also for the smoothly repressive, self-sanctioning elevators of the unlovely to formal heights of self-deception, among mankind, for the paragons of polluting pride, to find that there is a solution. It is not a resolution, in the sense of some explanation in a puzzle, which removes the problem. It is a solution in the sense that the trouble may be healed, by intelligence, by effort, by application, by realisation and in the end, by redemption, all on the part of God.
What a wonder of goodness is thus seen in Zechariah 10:6:
"I will bring them back because I will have mercy on them. They shall be as though I had not cast them aside, for I am the LORD their God, and I will hear them."
The rebuke has now taken effect, and is stilled. The devastation has occurred, and now blessing ensues. The resultants of recklessness are now fulfilled, and the enduring desire for good on the part of God, for restoration, takes over. It is as in Isaiah 40:1ff.,
" 'Comfort, yes, comfort My people!' says your God. Speak comfort to Jerusalem,
and cry out to her, that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned;
for she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins."
God does not lose His temper, and tempers judgment with mercy; but a time comes when mercy has itself been defaced, or culture has so worshipped itself and its wracked and unwise ways that it is more merciful, as apparently with the flood, to extinguish the coming generation with the old, before the fiery follies of living without God become so horrid, that thousands of new sacrifices to depravity are annulled. Instead of endless seeming corruptions of newly arising generations, a kind of mass murder of the soul, all are removed from the earth, the arrogant with their would-be victims.
Where guilt is mocked at, it does not depart for that reason. When God is also mocked at, He does not depart for that reason. In the exemplar of Christ, God as man, though He DID depart for judicial reasons, and for a testimony of the folly and depth of that depravity, sin against God, yet He speedily returned, blatanttly and brazenly in body, a small matter of three days: to illustrate the reality of death on the one hand, and of the power of God not only to raise swiftly, but according to a specified time schedule, as foretold from both the Old and the New Testament times (cf. SMR Ch. 6).
Thus the glorious plan of a glorious character, brilliant in aptitude, entire in effectiveness, was implemented. It was that Christ should die not only for but with sin (Isaiah 53:3-6), an incarceration of it in the prison of His now justly dying body, heavily laden with it like a ship which has taken on a cargo, a container vessel onto which for hours, grain has been poured coming off the land. Foretold and made functional, it was thus available where received, as the pit for guilt. Not in the barbaric smoothness of bureaucratic speech, tomfoolery with words, nor in the impassioned call to a people over microphones was this done, but in Christ's own bearing with the slander of the judiciary, as a Lamb to the slaughter, with the buffering physically of the culturally disordered soldiers, those embracing outrage with passion.
Crushed with the death desired by the agents and agencies of sin, wrought by slowly galling means, despising in public display, the victorious victim yet achieved the work for pardon, while evil to the uttermost was wrought. Small wonder that Christ continued to exclaim, 'Father, forgive them, they do not know what they do." Here was the rain of mercy on the parched territories, though much would run off when it hit the hardened outcrops of imposing rocks! There, nothing could soak in, nothing was therefore given; but even there, at odd places, some base was found...
Sin was given its expression, its deceitfulness exposed in the trial, its unthankfulness made derisory in the elimination of the greatest personal despatch office for good even seen on this earth, even Jesus Christ. Its work was taken on as death, and evacuated with its guilt for the life of those who cast it upon Him, even for those repentant, at last receiving Him, who had helped in the murder. Such is the unvindictive and pure love of God. He LOVES to show mercy, and is not intemperate as sin is!
Of a certainty, there is no other way, for none other has been sinless to bear it, deity to cover it, empowered to arise physically from the dead, to exhibit the victory, not in poetry or fancy, but in fact and wounds intact, in fealty to reality. Of ways back from sin and its products, byproducts and end, there is one. There is no more God to invoke, no more mercy to seek, no more pardon to find. According to the mind of God it is, and from there it may be found as in Isaiah 55.
Thus, just as there is one God, so there is one way out of guilt from the mind of the God who created in ONE WAY, indeed with ONE LANGUAGE, all of life. It is in THIS new language of mercy, that He removes what desecrates in terms of RESPONSIBILITY. What first considers amid sin,to act or not to act, is now exposed to God's decision, HE HAS ACTED. He forces none, forms all, and having made man in His own image, Himself declares the outcome, His Spirit attesting with the spirit of the converted, that they are His. In history this may come in a moment; but its roots were shown before time began, when God knew who preferred darkness, this before darkness had come, or the light, or the earth had formed. There is no injustice in God: what He offers, He ensures reaches the reachable, teaches the teachable, and not only is this entire gift of salvation with NO work of man as a constituent to its coming for any, as to any, free, but its posting to one's door is no less so (Romans 5:15). It is a gift OF grace BY grace (Ephesians 2).
GOD has acted. If man does not act, when shown the way, then that IS action, irresponsible in the second degree. It is one thing to sin in the light; it is another to sin against it, even when it is the light of life, putting death to shame, and bringing immortality both to light and to life.
Thus vast is the relief that redemption sunders guilt as the surgeon's blade does a cancerous tumour or some growth like a football, horrid in appearance, gross in intrusion, disruptive in function!
Israel then would be as if not cast off (Zechariah 10:6), a conscience-demise case where disjunction is required. So did the world slowly recover after the flood, when guilt became almost like breathing, and distemper as in a dog, pitiful but in this case, a responsible reality realised through responsiveness to sin. Even its depth is met by a far greater depth, and man's digging of the pit is covered when he finds in Christ the epitome of truth, the essence of mercy and the very critierion of the deliverance by and in Deity!
It is then as in Psalm 103 when
"as far as the East is from the West, so far has He removed our transgressions from us."
This is an ongoing matter: you can go east without limit, as far as space is there, or west. The more you go, the less they meet. Such is the unbounded directional image. There is no recurrence of this load, for it is indefinitely estranged from its partner, the man whose it was (I John 3:9, Ephesians 1:11,14).
So too
"as the heavens are high above the earth,
so great is His mercy towards those who fear Him."
Now we move from a particular case in Zechariah 10, to a generic case.
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IF you are one of those who fear God, |
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imbibe His instructions, to repent, |
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His call to be redeemed, |
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His presentation of mercy as in a father's hug to a child, or a cheque in the mail, |
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have faith in Him, so opening a channel for
transmission: |
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then the mercy which dissevers guilt as if you had not been cast off, |
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with shame your counsellor, |
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death your new friend, |
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troubled waters your inheritance - |
this felicity is for you.
A spot ? then have it cleansed (Titus 3:3-7), a slip or slither, then have it covered, and do not let pride or self-deception limit your appetite for cleanliness. Now is the burden, a mere blast from fires of hell, long ago extinguished as relevant reference to the redeemed, removed like runaway slag. From this learn, from that depart, and indeed "the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses from all sin," I John 1:7. His purchase ? eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12). His coverage by ONE sacrifice ONCE made "has perfected for ever those who are being saved," Hebrews 10:14. Here is mercy's culmination and consummation.
It is no myth, no meander, no emotional turbulence from a disordered mind, this conviction which comes from within and without, even from God; for just as we have had opportunity, and evaluated, prioritised, pondered, ordered and applied in our thoughts, and then acted, so also is our psychic history as imprinted on a tape. We are all answerable, surveyable not only each by his own heart, but by God in His infinity. To have a friend at Court, who is also the Judge, who is also aware of the outcome of His offer before the books are opened, so that indeed what has been done by Him John 6:29) is already written in the book (Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:30ff.), this is like a tranquil voyage on a glorious ocean; for the Lord IS glorious, and that is His way.
DISMEMBERMENT FROM LIFE
Dismemberment from guilt is great, for it does not occur in a turmoil of evil, but to still it, nor in an unamended mind, but to give it new birth, nor in a ruptured soul, but in one redeemed, nor in a degenerate dump of spiritually radioactive soil, but in a regenerate building of spiritually active life. But what of that which prefers the fill, and finds pleasure in the radioactivity, and will not repent ? Let us consider some examples.
Babylon, as seen in Isaiah 13:19-20, 47:7-11, where its fate is compared with that of Sodom and Gomorrah (Jeremiah 50:40), with parallels in Jeremiah 50:11,24, 28-31, 45-46 and 51:9, 20-26,44,49, for her work on the destruction of the Temple, as for her violent crushing of Israel, her idolatry, her magnificently proud domain of independence and height, her entire elevation of her role: for all this, is marked down. Indeed, it is marked for perpetual abasement, never to gain power again. For being "proud against the Lord", a revolutionary, exulting, self-exalting, fiercely destructive, a temple-destroying, viciously devastating, idolatrous body without pity, her end draws near, though she does not know it.
She who had said:
"I shall be a lady forever, so that you did not take these things to heart,
nor remember the latter end of them,"
would then "sit in silence and go into darkness."
"I was angry with My inheritance," the Lord notes concerning Israle, butt of Babylon, and proceeds, " I have profaned My inheritance, and given them into your hand. You showed them no mercy; on the elderly you laid your yoke very heavily." Now, the liberty to loot and oppress being grasped with exaggerated relish, the liberty to sit in silence is granted in return to bulging Babylon, engorged!
Against her, instead of her sins being forgotten, in the midst of her recalcitrant obstinacy, every purpose of the Lord will be fulfilled (Jeremiah 51:36-39), she will sleep "a perpetual sleep (Jeremiah 51:8). Yet the Lord explicitly states that HE WOULD HAVE HEALED HER, such is His universal desire (Colossians 1:19ff.), "but she is not healed," (Jeremiah 51:9), just as was the case with Jerusalem in the day of Christ (Matthew 23:37ff.). It is as in Jeremiah 8:20: "The harvest is past, the Summer is ended, and we are not saved."
God will not take, therefore, from Babylon any foundation for the true faith (Jeremiah 51:26), the reliance on the God of creation and redemption, "but you shall be desolate forever," comes the divine verdict. It is not at all to be like the situation granted Israel, covered from the first by covenant which though including reward and penalty, did not forfeit the grandeur of the end of it all, with a place in grace assured for a swath of the people, and a place under the sun (Genesis 17:7-8, Amos 9, Romans 11, Isaiah 49:15-26,Micah 7, Zechariah 12*1).
It was however ONLY for Israel that there came the "sure foundation", as a national repository, and this even though the Lord both knew that in that very land He would be betrayed (Isaiah 49:7); for indeed, that was part of the plan by which the Lord would bring all nations, sinners, and all people, likewise astray, to a place at the base of the cross of Calvary, emblematic and emphatic both, of His mode of mercy. Thus the Lord would bring to nothing all human glory (Isaiah 2:11), which is where it belongs in its fallen pride and vainglory, and play the themes of mercy, peace and pardon precisely as pre-announced, with wit and wisdom, as so clear also in the very construction of creation itself!
ALL play with fire who divorce either formally or functionally from the Lord, who is not just any lord, but the ONE infinite Creator of one utterly disparate mode of salvation in which
HE ONLY is the basis, the foundation, the functionary and the power, and where
He ONLY is the peace and
He ONLY provides the justification (Ephesians 2, Romans 5:1,Galatians 1), from whom comes every good and perfect gift, so that addition to this profound simplicity and deep plainness, is the price of betrayal and pall of conditions imposed apart from direct dealings with Him. This, as He made covenant with the instruments of light physically (Jeremiah 33:25), is also by His covenant, and thus and thus only is it to be contained! Not so is it with Babylon, though He WOULD have healed it; for the covenant there is with death (in parallel with Isaiah 28:15-18). Thus then is the perpetual exclusion for Babylon, itself vexatious and provocative to the uttermost, harbouring an implicit lèse-majesté, even (Galatians 1:6ff. ), with an execrable distension to divine desire, insufferable to God (Isaiah 47:4-10).
Instead of having her sins, through faith in the Lord, who WOULD HAVE HEALED her, forgotten for ever, her follies, being retained, mean she will be "desolate forever." It was not HIS intolerance, but Babylon's own intolerance of the mode of toleration installed in truth, activated in mercy and provided to repentance!
What would never be remembered, is now given eternal result.
Babylon is dismembered from life, a city select, like souls select, who similarly abused the truth, maintained their insolent spiritual insolvency, and were bereft of regard for the work of God, even His intimate work.
So too was the parallel case in Tyre, as in Nineveh, the prospect of unrelieved desolation. Of the former, you see Ezekiel 26:19,21, fulfilled to the uttermost. As to Tyre, in Ezekiel 27, is imaged as a great ship, her varied marvels supplied by the nations with which she plied her famed trades, but
"Your riches, wars, and merchandise, your mariners and pilot, your caulkers and merchandisers, all your men of war who are in you, and the entire company
which is in your midst, will fall into the midst of the seas on at rhe day of your ruin.
The common-land will shake at the sound of the cry of your pilots," and
"you are broken in the seas," 27:34,
so that "you will become a horror, and be no more forever."
Of the latter, Nineveh, as in Nahum 3:7, you see that the city is "laid waste", the question put,
"Who will bemoan her!"
For here there is no healing (3:17), 1:8,14-15.
"All who hear news of you will clap their hands over you,
for upon whom has not your wickedness passed continually ?"
the Lord acclaims of their judgment.
It will be like grass-hoppers, their iniquities rewarded, "When the sun rises they flee away, and the place where they are in not known."
If she is remembered, it is for ruin after vainglory.
THE PARALLEL COMPLETE
So is the way of the Lord among the haughty, politically, nationally, in cities, in families, in individuals (John 3:19,36), and so is the contrast vast and precise with the alternative:
"their sins and their lawless deeds, I will remember no more," Hebrews 8:12,
as likewise in the predictive format of Jeremiah 31. It will be as if "you had not transgressed," for such is the infinite majesty of the LORD who is glorious; for in Him, even against Himself, even when the sin smites Him personally, even when in love He has specially provided for just this divine exhibit of love and purging of pollution, there is a profuse pardon, an abundant one. It is as in Isaiah 55. All evil that one endures comes from the folly of man, whether or not augmented by Satan, judgments whittled by mercy, or divergent into the place of pardon in Christ. What continues impenitent before the prospect of pardon, it comes from the added folly of rejecting the Gospel, squinting at the God of grace.
HOW glorious is this grace, which provides in due season for all seasons (Galatians 4:4) and makes man inexcusable who exposed to it, yet rejects it. But not with all is this so; for though none can arrive into the kingdom of heaven without guilt to the point of death, leanness of soul and a merit-free status in his or her own right, many are they who have so arrived, putting aside contrivance as waste, and finding in Christ the free gift, freely made, of eternal life.
Alas, tempestuous, as with the ' boat' of Tyre, which imaged it, is the season of sailing when the wind was not consulted, even the wind of the Spirit which blows where it will (John 3); and this may become a mark of 'always resisting the Holy Spirit,' (Acts 7:51),instead of a blessed capitulation to truth, and a gracious grant of reality without whimper, but with joy unspeakable.
When the fog is gone, how bright is the sun!
NOTE
See
SMR Appendix A,