disciplined in dealings,
controlled in purpose,
watchful in enterprise,
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Epilogue
THE BREADTH AND DEPTH OF THE REGAL RULE
AND ROYAL LOVE OF GOD
IN THE MESSIAH
Introduction
In dealing with the theme of the Rod of God, and its implications, we have aroused a field of applications. As these tend to give orientation by example, let us follow and peruse them. As in all truth, but pre-eminently so in divinely articulated truth, themes cohere just as the programmatic verbal designs in DNA do, for what is designed has this feature, when it is eminent in degree, that the codes, concepts, correlations whether in meta-information or comprehensive overviews, not only agree with each other, but with other features in similar designs, as in architecture from a prominent artist. Not only do the designs have a certain flair or spirit or set of characteristic and prevailing thrusts, limited by the divergence of purpose, but there is a sweep or lack of it, an originality or lack of it, a coverage of detail or lack of it, comparatively.
You learn to value the designs and see increasingly the hand of the designer, when that labourer is eminent. Ah yes! that is the work of Smith, or Oberon or Nightingale, they say.
So it is with our very bodies, the
body of our minds and the body of the Bible; and for that matter, so it has been
with the body of Christ, which by the spirit which was back of it, was
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disciplined in dealings, |
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controlled in purpose, |
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watchful in enterprise, |
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purposive in procedure, |
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impassioned in spirit, |
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fearless in vocation, |
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prudent in method, |
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outrageous in the eyes of would-be religious designers, |
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eminent in wisdom, |
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unbeatable in debate, |
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patient in trial, |
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uninhibited in speech, |
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cast like a projectile into a destiny superficially of doom, |
and like a rocket at last seen distancing itself aloft above the clouds, unlike the human Challenger,
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arising from the dead, undiscoverable by any to parade, and |
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traced by the evidence of the women,
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and no less pithy in debate, |
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penetrating in discernment, |
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incomparable in wisdom, |
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possessing the power to be an avenue to peace, |
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a grant to healing and |
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a testimony to the Ages. |
This is the source of design, and the basis for personality, a view of the Rock in its stability and strength that took on the fragile form of man that its strength might support our weakness, through our assault and insult, which became the method of redemption, using evil for good. Here He is seen in offer, appeal, without judgment as His role (John 3:17), but salvation, so that confusion of the two being discarded by observation, the profusion of pity might be perceived without the astigmatism of resentment or the slander of unruly tongues; so that many might be saved through His sacrifice, endorsed for resurrection of the just by His gift. Thus did His love find target without force, or the imperialism of excited flesh, which for so long has so disadorned the history of our race. "Behold the Man!" as Pilate announced, during the chastisement phase of the corrupt trial.
His loss is incomparable and till it is made good at His second coming (cf. Ch. 4 above), the world will have war, arising, aroused by impudent and imprudent passion, to a crescendo of anti-celestial hate when He does return, as if peace were a disease, distress of nations a joy and obsession with strife and might, a riot of the thankless and the big-headed were the desideratum of the human race. More than many seem to realise, this is near to the current position, the delusive non-dynamics of the dead Darwinian, counter-evidential crusade a mere sop to it. Indeed, this bemused antipathy to God appears to have provided the main reason for the irrational adoption of such, along with hatred of moral limitation and of any lord over the ebullient and often cruelly misdirected human spirit (cf. Secular Myths ... Ch. 8 and Divine Dynamic ... Ch. 4 with Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6).
Indeed, it seems more than a little probable that the three evil and lying spirits of Revelation 16 are closely related to the assault of Darwin on Design, Marx on Morality and Freud on the Meaning of Mind. It is as if the criteria of design by definition, being met eminently, were therefore defunct; the incapacity of human inability to remove morality, however distorted and disordered, despite every suggestion box for its origin, were both meaningless in operation and consequence; and a disordered mind could tell how it could be ordered from its chaotic subversion: as if these things made any sense at all. WHATEVER subverts man as operative with truth accessible, CANNOT be true. So man makes for himself philosophic problems, which are there ONLY if you reject the answers by will.
Features of the Divine Rod
The rule of God, however,
in the interim to the end, to which we are now rapidly drawing near to the point that some try to point the finger at God, because of the death rattle being too loud in the dissident and revolutionary human race which breeds revolt against God, like a spiritual cyclotron (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5) and moves with less than majesty to its self-tormenting confrontation with truth, which varies not at all:
this does not absent itself. That rule, on the contrary, continues as it did before the Deity became man in the Person of the Word of God made flesh; but now, in an epoch of the Gospel of divine grace, where the fall of man is now double, both to fall into sin and to fall away from deliverance, with increasing passion, there is an especially hideous spiritual cacophony.
It is convenient to display aspects of the Rod of God, in its most generic form as
1) The judicial,
2) the jubilatory,
3) the justifying,
4) the jurisdictive and
5) the judgmental
Within the jubilatory, moreover we see many components, such as:
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the joy in the aspects of triumph
over death |
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victory over evil in the overthrow of
the devices of the devil |
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an entirely sinless account in
the personal presentation of Christ to bear sin, |
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assured achievement of eternal life
for those who freely receive it by grace, |
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the gift of the Spirit of Truth (John
16, Luke 24, Acts 2), |
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the fruit of the Spirit in godly
desire and function (Galatians 5:22, Ephesians 3:16); |
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availability of the Spirit of Christ,
of God, Christ in you (Romans 8:9, Colossians 1:27) |
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the patient grace of God to deliver
from falling, |
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the sublimity of the resurrection of
the body Christ; |
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the savaged and the scarred, the
broken and the drained fleshly ruin, |
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the exhibit of this in One, for all
who are and are to be His, |
1) The judicial
God deals with us like Headmasters, with the judicious eye and the discerning thought, as He without the flaws of mankind, in the compassions of Christ, covers cases of recklessness (as in Psalm 51, in the life of David, otherwise so different), fecklessness (as in the case of the praying saints asking for the release of Peter, who called the servant girl foolish who reported that he was at the very door of the house where they prayed) and like errors. The little ironies match the iron of determination and the gracious goodness which knows our feebleness and helps our weakness.
2) the jubilatory
The joy of the Lord no man takes from you (John 16:22), and it bubbles up (John 15:11,16:24) with life surrounding (John 4:14), and cannot be contained (John 7:37-38) as the Spirit of God, as with the shepherds at Christ's birth day, moves in the heart. Features, as noted above, abound.
3) the justifying
Justification is no mere inward state, as if what one felt were the criterion. It is a guaranteed output of grace (Romans 5:1,9, 8:30-36, II Timothy 1:7-10, the last as below).
"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear;
but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."Do not be therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord,
nor of me his prisoner:
but be partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God;
Who has saved us, and called us with a holy calling,
not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace,
which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began,
but is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who hath abolished death,
and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel ..."
Whom He justified He glorified, says Romans 8, and justification is a grant to faith (Romans 5:1, 9), by which people are saved (Titus 3:8), through "regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit", that "having been justified by faith, we should become heirs," as is echoed in Ephesians 1:11, where we are seen already to have obtained (such is the efficacy of faith in the free gift of the living God) an inheritance, being sealed by the Spirit, guaranteed by God as goods that are His.
It is the rod and not the sod which speaks louder, for the sod is the mere repository for the broken and redeemed (or else for the broken and rebelliously unredeemed or the ignorantly uninformed - cf. John 15:22ff.), and its portent is the dust part, that of chemistry and physiology; but the spirit component, it is this which "will return to God who gave it" (Ecclesiastes 12:7). The very body awaits His return for His saints (I Corinthians 15), the new display unit of the redeemed creation being available (II Corinthians 5:1ff.), because He who has gone, comes and all is prepared.
Life is not lived with earth, for this is a mere assemblage co-ordinate: as bricks to a house, so with the body. The spiritual life of man is lived with God who gave it and came to save it, and vitality is His grace, and His gift, while eternity is its illimitable duration. Avoid it and you are as one who thinks he drinks, but is parched and shows it. Take the salvation and then, what God parents as a child, has the freedom of the household, and endures with it. Indeed, a new heavens and a new earth are merely in the work load, self-given, of the Maker and Creator of the first (Revelation 20-21).
4) the jurisdictive
In this interim (cf. Isaiah 26:19), as generations of the saints go in spirit to be with Christ and the resurrection with the return of Christ with the Judgmental Rod draws near, there is more than a judicial role for the Shepherd of spirits, the Saviour of man, especially of those who believe (I Timothy 4:10). There is a jurisdictive one. The Shepherd's crook, it can move wild beasts, image of God relics who are ruinous, like wolves (Acts 20), who seek to do wolf-pack work against the flock of Christ; it can bring near a wandering one, rescue a fallen one.
There are enemies from whom to be delivered, graces to which to be delivered, miracles in which to be rescued, solemnities of passion for Christ, by which many triumph like fallen soldiers who yet will rise, battlers who contribute by being crushed at the first, to be congratulated at the last, persecutions to be endured, harassments to be overcome. Indeed, in all this, the conclusion of the matter on this earth, whether as for James to death or as for Peter, to a life which waited a time before such a death, or as for John, who endured till both John's Gospel and Revelation were written, in varying circumstances: there is the jurisdictive hand of God.
In this, all of His are set, and what wonders of joy unspeakable and full of glory (leaving pleasure as a dead Autumn leaf by comparison - I Peter 1:3ff.)), of truth spoken and full of inspiration, of comfort and consolation intimate and lasting arise like the sun in its daily course!
"And whether we be afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation, which is effectual in the enduring of the same sufferings
which we also suffer: or whether we be comforted,
it is for your consolation and salvation," (II Cor 1:6)
and again,
"Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God, even our Father,
who has loved us, and given us everlasting consolation and good hope
through grace, comfort you hearts
and establish you in every good word and work - (II Thessalonians 2:16).
5) the judgmental
The rod of God, the judicial one, that of Psalm 2 which at the end of the Gospel Age, breaks the brittle and resistant pottery which does not know its own fragility, and has as it were, been surrendered to self-elevating thoughts through the very forbearance of God, grows in solemn finality. Its use, at the end, appears far from its work at the beginning, At the start of human life on earth, new born, and fallen, it excluded only from the wonders of intimate creation made in joy for joyful life, leaving man to work amid adversities; at the end, however, it excludes from the glory of eternal life, made available at illimitable cost by God, on whom in Christ incarnate, His own judgmental rod fell in vicarious atonement, the just dying for the unjust to bring us to God (II Peter3:18).
As that inordinate end approaches, surrounded as if by hives of maddened bees, stinging each other, the human race finds more and more problems insoluble, like those who are outplayed in chess, and can find no solution because their foundational moves were wrong; or like prisoners who cannot evacuate from prison because having found a key, they disdained to use it, and being confined, their minds continue what their bodies could avoid.
Today, as illustration, we find in The Australian, Friday, January 21, 2011, in World Coverage, that there is a dual sense of frustrated uselessness for discussion and détente between India and Pakistan, two powers equipped with nuclear devices of summary destruction, each mistrusting the other, one holding Kashmir, both disputing it, one Islamic, one more of a residue in kind of the run-off when the two were made into two countries, one in danger of terrorists perhaps even gaining access (most readily by mere treachery by some) to their nuclear resources. The Islamic 'brotherhood' as in Iraq meanwhile, is showing again its pain as Shiites allegedly run close to wanting to punish the minority Sunnis, who with Hussein oppressed, while Sunnis may become unco-operative if grounds appear for such suspicions, in the realm of employment, or conceivably even if apparent grounds are manufactured by parties with wayward and devious motives.
Of the thriving-India, rattled-Pakistan confrontation, with a sense of defeated diplomacy and powers hidden, dubious kind and dynamic in operation, the article in The Australian declares that the box is heating, the box for fire. It is as in tennis, now in politics, often when the sense of hopelessness is aroused, that much more is lost with all but unbelievable rapidity.
These are mere examples. The Rod of God rules amid the continuing laboratory exercises of mankind, consistently showing that there is no solution but Christ, no going but that of the triune, revealed God, His Bible ratified, His power realised, His pardon available, His word verified, His approaches validated as nothing else is (cf. SMR, TMR, Deity and Design 8). His testimony continues according to plan, the nations ruinous in unbelief.
One of these nations was even concerned to remove a hidden testimony to God of the Bible, on rifle sights, and indulging in the praise of Islam, through two Presidents, though that religion*1 defiles the biblical Christ with repeated unbelief based on nothing, made and formulated 600 or so years after He formulated deliverance in His own Being. Militant into Mecca, it did not rest without for centuries, seeking dominion over Europe, leading amiss, far from Him who did what no other man could, would do or has done, and speaking as no other, whose words embrace history before it comes and depict the world which was to be, as it now is (cf. SMR Chs. 8-9).
The rod to smash in the finale of that incandescent and almost devilishly incarnate horror which assaulted Christ in flailing violence when He showed His face on this rebellious earth (Psalm 2, Acts 4:25ff.), has so far been withheld. This divine patience (cf. II Peter 3:19, in the field of prediction) has been the case, while full generations of assailed Christians have testified to the truth without which neither the wicked, nor exemplification of the same in this world, can rest. In this they have both shown the love of God (cf. Colossians 1:23), and the grace of government of the Most High; for HE will not use force in place of faith, where room still is! (John 18:36), and the book is not yet closed.
Faith has both bloomed in many and been given opportunity to do so in many more; but the aspirations of the divine mercy (Micah 7:19ff., Isaiah 48:16ff., Ezekiel 33:11ff.) have not breached the requirements of holiness, repentance, regeneration and the knowledge of God, and none can enter who do not see the door, nor see who are not first new born by the power of God through faith (John 3). As Christ pithily pointed out, how do they see whose eyes are closed! (Matthew 15:13ff.). Indeed, how are they opened when the passion of closing them and closure on whatever the heart desires and designs, refuses to relax that closing, even to peep at the light of day in the Lord!
For so long the rod of God has been gracious; and just as at the end, it spoils the finale and stills the furore of the powers that desire to govern this earth (Revelation 19), which they did not make, in the very power of God, an earth which He did make, so now the time speaks like a royal herald: Take care, His time is near (cf. Luke 21:24). Not every year, but once in some two millenia does Israel return to control Jerusalem!
The powers-that-be are to be engulfed, just as they have engulfed much, world government to be abused and distorted into a Beast of political and oppressive power over mankind (Revelation 13, 17), and this hastens. Meanwhile, the jurisdictive rod, operates for His people, not to deliver from suffering but from snuffing out, from subversion, from annihilation, though may act to subvert, treacherous, traitorous, unreliable, mouth-Christians with hearts elsewhere.
It is that jurisdictive rod in this interim, this Age of the Gospel, which gives relief to the redeemed as they pursue like paratroopers, the work in enemy territory as heirs of grace and missionaries of mercy (cf. John 14:30). The prince of this world, said Jesus the Christ, has nothing in Me! The way of the world which leads to this finale, this flourishing torment against truth: It is barren, unbelief. It is blind, It binds like handcuffs, it holds the key far off, while the people of God bring it near.
The time of the Rod of Judgment is coming, and now is near. When the finale reached, it is that Ro which will strike the waters, not this time of the pulsing waves of a maritime body, but the predatory paths of a malevolent body of misled humans. It is time to escape (Hebrews 6:19), the whirl-pool of unbelief and find the peace of reality in the truth of the Bible and the Son of God who having shown Himself categorically, prophetically and His word pre-emptively over all history, remains available. It is well to HEED Proverbs 1, and to realise the release of wonder, beauty and truth in the hand of God, to those who heed Him.
NOTE
*1 See More Marvels ... Ch. 4, Divine Agenda ... Ch. 6, Highway to Hell, for example, and index.