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CHAPTER 10
GRATIFICATION OR GOVERNMENT
from Mark 14:60 - 15:20
PART I
THE PRELIMINARY QUESTION
Government ? In The Australian, Feb. 22, 2011, there is an article taken from HAARETZ, the Israeli newspaper. In this, it is alleged that so slight is the margin for Netanyahu to continue to govern, with various segments making up his government, that if he thinks a measure will fail (to be passed in the Knesset), then he does not push it. It states that lacking backing, he moved away from the idea of a fence in the South, near Egypt, and that he would move from some removal of settlers, on the way to a Two State solution to the Palestinian problem, IF he did not find a sure way to get it through. He does not wish to fall in government, the thrust of the article seems to be.
Whatever may be his actual reasons, this is the sort of thing that the Rudd government faces at times, as it deals with Greens in the Senate. Would this or that party sacrifice something RIGHT in order to a void a wrong ? It is said that politics is the art of compromise (when of course, it is not the artifices of heedless and reckless power thirst, with shove); but what SHOULD be compromised ?
Certainly not, any matter of principle. The title 'unprincipled' is not avidly sought. But WHICH principle should one sacrifice (if any) ? If it is personal preference sanctified by the word 'principle', then it may be. If it is something fundamental, basic, a matter of due belief and true faith, then it can never be sacrificed. Which of us does not vastly prefer the man who loses his opportunities of power and riches, fame or name, in order to stick to his principles ? unless of course, they are heedless and reckless, not a matter of faith but pure psychic determination.
When Pilate was examining Christ, before resolving whether or not to sacrifice Him, by allowing the crafty callowness of the priests to over-rule, he asked some questions, and stated some principles.
'Do you want me to release to you, the King of the Jews ?' (15:9).
PROPOSITIONS IN THE PRELUDE
Now we read in 15:15, that Pilate was wanting to gratify the crowd. That is government by gratification (of whatever wild lusts, feckless aims, or unscrupulous means the crowd - statistically estimated now - may wish).
Not dealing in actual federal force with the Murray arrangements in Australia, merely making very distant plans and agreements, may be one of these; for these do not nurture the thousands of dying trees. Seeking submarine building for South Australia may be one of these, for employment purposes, without undue concern as to what is the use of submarines so far in the future, with admittedly inadequate means to make them here, and uncertainties about the date, if any, of their eventuation, when despite your vast cost of the existing 6, by last statement left but one fit for action! Years of unprotection are like a chin left without a guard from one of your fists, while the other hand does what is convenient. A knock-out blow is not normally invited, by plans for the future whenever it may come.
When you ask a question, as with Pilate, the question is this, On what criteria will you heed an answer ? When I wished as a Lecturer, to teach scientific method in a tertiary institution in this State, and insisted when brought to task, that I stood by what I had said, and that there was needed more exposure to suppressed areas, such as its application to creation, the answer to my challenge and exhortation was this: "It is not convenient."
This SHOULD be heresy in any reputable university! It is the open door to culture culture cliques, academia-chiks, rule by rote and rearguard from evidence! Did they have data to constrain me, to show me in any sense false ? Could they point to anything whatever amiss ? Not at all; it was not even relevant. The criterion was convenience. Truth AS SUCH was not to the point. There are more deaths than those biological!
PRESSING QUESTIONS FOR PILATE
Thus when Pilate asked the people what they wanted him to do (a strange request, in view of the force shown him, in the reply, if justice or truth were to have even any bearing) and the WHAT related to with the One called King of the Jews, one would have thought that the reply would have to contain both principles and reasonings, data and defensible modes of assessment. It did not.
What makes it the worse, is this, that Pilate was not altogether lacking in discernment. We find, in Mark 15:10, that the priests had put Christ in the death-dock because of envy. Pilate knew the distorting motivation, the twisted desire, and yet still simply asked for what was sought! To be sure, he first asked if they would like him to release to them, the King of the Jews. In this he may have intended to indicate in the 'to you' that they would still have liberty (short of death penalty), and this was considerable, as they even had a Temple Guard. He may have thought that the possibly popular title, King of the Jews, would appeal to them, and show his interest in their inventions, ideas and culture.
Now we find that the chief priests were stirring up the people, manipulating the mob to express a lustful desire for a murderer to fit the annual privilege of having someone delivered to them, at their request. The one to be chosen, named Barabbas, appears (from Luke 23:19, Acts 3:14, John 18:40) to have been an insurrectionist, a murderer and a robber. Therefore Pilate may have wished to appease dissatisfaction with his administration in Rome's name, the government of the defeated nation, by yielding to their request even though it was for one who had attacked public order, conceivably even Rome's rule, to some extent.
He was successful so far. When the crowd, so manipulated by corrupt, worldly priests, as to cry to Barabbus, not Christ, for the released prisoner, Pilate asked another question. Remember he had military power and an appointment to execute justice rather than to please crowds or release criminals; rather than to execute One whose miracles were legion, had never been refuted.. They were not here subjected to contest, but rather to priestly envy, the release of popular desire, even though Jesus the Christ had provided profound nurture to the people. Indeed, such irrational action, inequitable judgment, careering away from evidence even as a criterion, led to an additional error: that of repaying evil for good; and for this, the crowd in effect lusted, if ever anyone did!
This new question voiced by Pilate ? It was this (Mark 15:12):
"What
then do you want me to do with him
whom you call the King of the Jews ?"
The 'then' in this question was to cover the point that Barabbus, insurrectionist, murderer, had already seemed more to be desired than was Christ; and this world has, in symbol, had him ever since, and Israel in particular, a banner for belligerence, to be received again and again.
Pilate was as putty in their hands. Crucify him! was their opinion on the matter. Barabbus, murderer, being chosen for life, Christ, One who raised from the dead, was chosen for death. A sense of the power of Israel, defiant in defeat by the arms of Rome, of its priests and Temple, still standing in defeat, of suppressed animus and lust and thrust to assert themselves may have contributed to the decision which was to haunt Israel from that time to this, if not always in conscience, then in consequences.
For Pilate's government, the criterion of his 'justice' was just this: what did the people want, what would gratify them, what would make the misdirected malice of the priests, harmless to himself, so restraining them from distorting issues with his home base in Rome. They could, perhaps he feared, even make him appear at court, to have allowed some king other than Caesar, to go free in Jerusalem. If this was obviously false, and should properly have been disregarded, yet how many false things have led to victims being dethroned, delivered to death and numbers slaughtered, both people and reputations, though evidence was lacking and mere attraction to evil words was present! This twist concerning the possible anger of Caesar, though irrelevant, was not left out (John 19:12).
THE PIVOTAL QUESTION
The people were not mollified. Crucify Him! they cried out again (Mark 15:13). Then Pilate asked the pivotal question: "Why, what evil has He done ?"
This question enshrined a proposition, a principle, a pivotal consideration. If, after all, you are going to malign or wound or kill someone, as you see in principle in II Corinthians 12-13, it is not enough to open your mouth and act as if nothing was between your ears, hearing slander or evil, and your mouth, pronouncing judgment. That is government by gossip, which alas can occur in slack churches, especially if they want to preserve themselves or their importance, and not the relationship, through obedience and equity, with Christ.
The answer was neither cogent nor even coherent. Loudness of noise, intensity of desire, crowd dynamics, football match (as it now is) type of crowd power, and soccer match (as it now is) type of crooning, almost like hymns of hate in the case of Pilate's court, crusaded into the court rheum, the clouded vision and the intemperate racket. Crucify him! they chanted.
Had He done evil ? Now when a case is tried, the answer is not made in just circumstances by this, simply repeating the charge, only speaking more loudly. Instead, it is found in one of two ways; EITHER the alleged culprit or criminal is PROVEN to have done what gossip or slander says (the game Simon says, can in this way become Slander says, a variant, when Slander is the liar); or else he is not. If not, he remains innocent in conception. To be sure, he must be willing to answer reasonable questions, as Christ did, in telling Pilate why His servants did not fight for Him, which in turn was answer to the question, What sort of a king are you, or what type of kingdom is yours ?
"My kingdom is NOT of this world," said Christ (John 18:36). How then could it concern Caesar, who was nothing if not of this world!
Did justice heed what it heard ? No, it heard what it heeded in one thing only, the voice of the imperious, roused crowd, and that had much to say, for it also was kind enough to tell him, not only the answer to the question of guilt, without grounds, but the sentence to be passed. In this, the crowd, stirred by priests, was as if omnicompetent: no evidence, no grounds, no reason, none of this was needed - just a decision, a determination to find guilty was required. This being granted, a decision as to the penalty for this purely notional guilt, this too was gratuitously and freely provided. What generosity there was on that night, what lavish giving!
Kill Him ? No more, the very method of it. CRUCIFY HIM. All was provided. One might have hoped that Pilate, having statedly found no evil, would not like a wounded hawk before the huntsman, cry, Why, what evil have I done ? (in his case, acting for the victim), but answered like this: If you do not both present the case, and the verification of the evidence, to validate your claim overwhelmingly, I as judge have neither right nor power, mandate nor reason to act as you request. How dare you affront justice and pretend loyalty, when justice itself is to fly away before desire!
True, for this, he might just possibly have been killed; but he had troops. After all, if priests (as in John 11) were afraid to provoke Rome, what better way to do this, than by injuring or killing the Governor! Had he spoken thus, Pilate might, on the other hand, have gained respect for his even-handedness, and even admiration for his passion for justice, not alas present; and this might have served as a basis for a new popularity because of reliability.
In any case, the criterion would have been principles. For any man, powerful or weak, to abandon principles of truth and equity, righteousness and reason, mercy and kindness is the utmost folly, for it sets a man above men, and it degrades the Creator's products, to the level of pathological passion, both its domineering and the graves it digs. It pre-empts His preference for His creation, and is mere theft, brazen, belligerent, profoundly arrogant. Lust would replace liberty and crown truth with thorns.
For this, there is only one escape, the mercy of God through Christ crucified; and it is this which Christ with MORE THAN justice, made available, by NOT having His servants fight and having a kingdom NOT of this world, to which all, even one of the thieves on one of the other crosses, could come without effort or works, by mere faith in Him. And this ? it was in Him, who provided the payment for sin, meeting the wrath of God with the mercy of mandate as foretold and now wrought (Romans 1:17ff., 3:23ff., Galatians 3). The thief crossed the line by faith, and set a standard in this, to follow!
In the next part, we will consider the outcomes, not only for Israel, but for the Gentiles.
GRATIFICATION OR GOVERNMENT
from Mark 14:60 - 15:20
Part II
CONSEQUENCES FOR JEW AND GENTILE
LOOKING AHEAD
CONSEQUENCES FOR JEW AND GENTILE
LOOKING AHEAD
In Part I, we were considering the climax of casuistry, where Pilate washes his hands of the condemnation he makes, to crucify Christ, fearful of not sating the lust of the crowd, stirred by the priests. Ludicrously, he washes his hands of what is in part, his own doing: miscarriage of justice, so acknowledged by his own mouth! The crowd savoured the triumph over peace and power, grace and goodness, with a lustful killing about to follow.
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In this way, all concerned provided |
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a scourge for their own souls, in their consequences, |
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a testimony to their own blatancy; and |
it was this which was in response to Pilate's hand-washing performance. Did he want to wash his hands of the whole thing, in a comic opera style abrogation of his authority, as if water could wash off blood from the heart, or judicial murder could be excused by not watching it done, once it was fraudulently commissioned. There was the very model of a modern major criminal!
Of course, he would never have heard of Lady Macbeth, but there are spots which no mere water can wash! As for the crowd, they committed not only the city (destroyed in a generation), but their offspring (marred and murdered in millions over time), without limit, as if this were the purchasing power for the crushing on the one hand, of justice, and on the other, of the body of Christ. It was a price which multiplied millions of people and billions of lost property over thousands of years would continue to acknowledge. But does this mean that forthcoming generations, for no fault of their own, no personal participation in this most famous of all judicial murders, would be paying for the pollution of their seniors ?
In the same vein, one might ask, does the fault of a driver, in not turning from the path of an oncoming car, have to crush the passengers ? Not if they can call out and cry: Look, see that car, swerve at once to avoid it! and elect not to do so.
·
Look, we have sinned!
We have killed our own mercy, had no pity on our own King of Compassion,
and have elected both in the day of His crucifixion and since that day,
to confirm in our ways
that Christ is NOT Lord,
that we do NOT receive His crucified form and Person as atonement for sin,
that we WILL continue in our way of exclusion against all evidence,
all prophecy which even predicted the date of His death*1
from centuries beforehand;
nor will we call on His mercy, as all others who attest they know Him do,
nor cry for redemption and restoration of our living before Him,
through His Son (Psalm 2),
that His power once more might protect us,
His grace once more might be projected upon us (Hosea 1:10, 2:23, Micah 5:1ff.,
7),
and we might have rest in the truth.
The Lord has already
said what the position is,
in that most evangelical of prophets, Isaiah,
in 30:15-18, as the text moves once more back to the Messiah in Isaiah 32, to
resume this theme in Isaiah 40, 42, 49-55, 61, 62:1-3,13-15, 65-66, and focus it
further before that. Let us hear from it.
· "For thus says the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel;
'In returning and rest you will be saved;
in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength:
and you were not willing. But you said, 'No; for we will flee
upon horses;
therefore you will flee:
and, 'We will ride upon the swift';
therefore shall they that pursue you be swift.
'One thousand shall flee at the rebuke of one;
at the rebuke of five
shall ye flee:
till you be left as a beacon upon the top of a mountain,
and as an ensign on an hill.
'And therefore will the LORD wait, that He may be gracious unto you,
and therefore will He be exalted,
that He may have mercy upon you: for the LORD is a God of judgment:
blessed are all they that wait for Him. 1
For the people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem:
you will weep no more:
He will be very gracious unto thee at the voice of your cry;
when he shall hear it, he will answer you.' "
As in Zechariah 12, that day will come; and when it does come, then those passengers who, if you will, up to then, were travelling in the car of the government, and not differentiating themselves from it, will change, their hearts will be moved, and they will cry out to the Lord, and to the driver, that at last he will avoid the impact with reality, and swerve away from destruction, and finding wisdom, acknowledge that the Lord is God, as in the day of Elijah. Then at last a large portion of the population will acknowledge, and in Jerusalem itself it will be confessed that He has indeed come to this earth, is the only Saviour, that all that He has said in the prophets has indeed come to pass. They will acknowledge that they, Israel, are His people and that He is their God, the God who made heaven and earth. In His mercy and in His grace for salvation, only, in His redemption in Jesus Christ and in no other, do they rest.
Then it will be as in Zechariah 13:1, and a fountain will be opened in Jerusalem for cleansing from sin. But that day is not yet. Soon it will be, as this precedes the return of the Lord in judgment (as in Zechariah 14, Micah 7, II Thessalonians 1-2) and that, it comes, but only after His call home, to His own (Matthew 24, I Thessalonians 4, Acts 1:7ff.). This, it is not far away (as shown in Luke 21:24-28, Answers to Questions Ch. 5).
What then of the current and continuing consequences for Israel and for the nations, for the latter of which the Roman Empire of that day was a fitting symbol ?
This area shows two resultants at once. Firstly, Jerusalem, given a generation before its own destruction (A.D. 70) and the reported crucifixion of many who were in it, by Rome's power, which after all they had not appeased, would labour under this burden, whether in this way or in that (Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 32), until it would repent.
It must be stressed that this is an event soon to come (as in Zechariah 12-13), and that this generation so long set in the dust, despite its marvellous agricultural feats and vast enterprises to ward off destruction by lusting Gentiles, Semitic or other, faces an impending rescue from the only armament that avails. That is the Lord Himself, who hears the cry for mercy, and the faith that repents of His crucifixion, and says of them who were divorced and 'not My people,' those blessed words, 'My people!' - Hosea 1:1-10, Romans 9:2-26, 11:15,21,24). This as Paul there shows, is both to Jew and to Gentile! Thus the alienated Israel and the alien Gentiles will come, whether from this or that past, all in sin, that many of both might, obtain mercy in one Lord, whose one offering, once for all, obtained eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12-10:14, Romans 11:30-36, Revelation 7).
LOOKING TO UNDERSTAND
After all, if you kill your King, what would you ? It is the profundity of the Lord's mercy that He is willing to pardon at all! But He is like that.
Consequences ? It meant that the hostility of many, from whom the Lord would have shielded them (Deuteronomy 32:21,28-32), was not diverted, so that, in one sweep, some six and one half million of their 'children' now often grown to manhood and womanhood, would die in a swelter of philosophic infection and self-affirmation (Romans 10), as spurious as their own. Though Jews in Ph.D. percentage alone, and in major eminent discoverers in science and among leaders of thought, have more than played their part, yet they have been scorned, scourged, disrupted with contempt, overthrown in pogroms, robbed, assailed, shown little mercy. All this followed for lack of divine protection. Indeed, God declared it in Deuteronomy 32, exclaiming in exhortation, and asseverating this. HOW WOULD OR COULD a few overthrow many, as happened in His deliverances of old, in their very midst, and
"how
could one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight,
unless their rock had sold them, and the LORD had surrendered them ?
For their rock is not as our Rock ..."
( from Deuteronomy 32:30-31).
Yes the rock, the false reliance of misled peoples would indeed 'sell them' when Israel was relying on the Lord, of whom He said (Psalm 2), "Kiss the Son lest He be angry and your perish in the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little ..." and adding, "Blessed are they who put their trust in Him," though to be sure, were He a mere man this would have been fatal (Jeremiah 17). Since however this vindicated Christ, the Son of God, IS deity itself (as in Isaiah 48:16, Psalm 45, 72, Isaiah 9, 52-55), and the Gospel gives free access to His grace, pardon and peace, it is as spurious NOT to trust in Him as to TRUST in what is not God! (as Israel is shown to have done in Deuteronomy 32:19-21).
THIS Son of God is the Messiah, the anointed One, whom God sent from His eternal place by Him. HE is His word (Isaiah 49, John 1), whom He will vindicate utterly and absolutely as in Psalm 2, where this is expressed in the most forceful possible terms. He adds this also, that He will laugh at those who seek to arise, kings though they be, against Him. It is not good to be laughed at by God, and this is not easily provoked, by Jew or Gentile, King or commoner! But it can happen when His august and solemn salvation in One who for this permitted Himself to be numbered amongst the transgressors (Isaiah 53), and to have the sin of all believers placed upon Him (Isaiah 53:1-6), is neglected. It is no better when He and His salvation is despised! Kings ? they but magnify the folly (Psalm 2:10-12).
Indeed, the whole Christian era has been filled not only with Jews, hunted in horror, in pogroms, by terrorists, whose consciences seem already to have found their place in the grave, by expulsion last century from Arab communities, by compulsions to give back land gained when threatened with extinction, but also with Gentiles in mutual hot pursuit. Some have indeed pursued Jews with ferocity, but often they have pursued each other, to their own destruction, despising in concert what matters most, as a Gentile contingent to the chorus of hatred, that of rejection, of odium for Christ, and therefore reaping in kind, the same reward for their spurious pains.
The same violence and injustice, often with exultant complacency, haunting indifference to truth, has led to a surfeit of wars among the Gentiles, while the Christ whom Israel executed in one action, by a Cross, has been executed in millions of minds, both amid the Gentiles and the Jews, while the clap-trap of today, the naturalism, the secularism, the sects, old and new, the false prophets WITHOUT ANY EVIDENCE AT ALL, the allegedly almighty Allah not even managing to throw out the tiny nation of the Jews, a failure of Moslems which the PM of Malaysia once noted: all this unadmirable thronging continues.
As what then does it continue ? It proceeds to become a sort of post-Cross catapult of the curse, past history to the present. One rejected Him ? then so did another, and another, one a Jew, one a Gentile, millions of Jews, millions of Gentiles, and perhaps billions of them; and their mutual ruin or devastation, sorrow of heart and sentences of death, are quickly showing that without the Prince of Peace, who has already paid the price of peace, there IS no peace. There is none for Jew. There is none for Gentile, or for the world.
LOOKING WHERE THE LORD IS
The NO PEACE FOR THE WICKED dictum
(Isaiah 57:17-21, Psalm 2, John 3:36, Matthew 25),
it is not only for individuals, but for nations and for this world!
Indeed, this is the Age of Withdrawal, not from drugs but from truth,
one of passion against Christ masquerading as religious fervour,
even to the point of re-inventing Christ, and using His name in sect, recent in the USA, or old as in Islam*2,
like a forged cheque, not this time backed by force
like the Temple guard,
and Pilate's soldiers,
to kill Him, but backed by those who chooseor are thrust witlessly into the fray,
to become terrorists, or virtual terrorists,
using force and exclusion, cliques and clicks,
to despise, to deplore, to abhor what they do not and cannot answer,
whether in universities, schools or jihads,
to name but one contingent of the assault troops.
Political and ecclesiastical kings join in this.
Mockery of the word of God has become increasingly standard,
whether by addition to it, subtraction from it,
or shunting it into poetry, or things of that kind,
as happened in my own former denomination, PC in America*3,
teaching as acceptable
what is neither written nor deducible in the slightest measure from it,
and so breaking the covenant to keep to what is written in its entire authority,
and for this reason
simultaneously voiding the validity of all judgment, passed by it in this treachery.The Gospel has no troops, while spiritual soldiers are slain (Ephesians 6),
no guns, while genocides are incited, all evidence
while empty falsehoods are followed by wandering minstrels,
feckless without saving faith.But what of Rome ? Pilate's Rome!
It writhed, moved to formalism following Constantine, fell,
came to continue its Eastern Empire in Julian the Apostate with new follies,
founded a fraudulent false Gospel with popes covered in a spurious glory
(Matthew 23:8-10),
stretched itself out into the Holy Roman Empire,
which also fell (1806) in the day of Napoleon.And now ? the Europe which Rome ruled, now the EU,
has given the 'harlot' of Revelation 17, a shove,
the beginning of that predicted in Revelation 17:14-15,
refusing to recognise any religion in its move to a new Constitution.
It is Rome and not some sublimate*4, which is in view in Revelation 18-19,
the city of seven hills, itself the focus.
Yet even this is bypassed, surpassed in wickedness,
both that earlier and in Rome's day as Babylon (Revelation 17:5-11),
in that beast to come, in its one devastating hour (Revelation 17:12-18:17):
that aggregate of proud intemperance, this wounded beast
restored in its riotous renegacy (Revelation 13:3),
consummated in controls,
disinclined to any mercy,
destined for judgment (Revelation 19).Now the world is going its way. Cross-roads as with Pilate open before you.
It is time to align, far from anxious panderings to authority with its witless ways and false calls,
far from the passions of the flesh, from murder of reputations and men,
far from the fraying of truth with fallacy,
far from mockery of Christ, double-mindedness, light morals and heavy hearts,
dipped in spiritual tar, exposed like Judas to the blackness of the night.The night is coming in which no man can work (John 9:4).
It is time now to close with Christ,
to walk with humility for self and boldness for the faith, pursuing in Christ the secure Redeemer, lifting the heart in Christ to godliness while seeking grace, patience and sincere faith - this last, part of the basic objectives as Paul declares in I Timothy 1:5.It is folly or faith, false principles or truth, Christ or corruption; and it is not a tissue of issues but action which is required; for the issue of truth is settled already, these several millenia; for God has spoken, to creation as to history, and in both cases it is now done, and now finished. The next for this world is judgment; and for His people, their restoration to Him, who comes for them, without whom they will never be, for whom He has the place prepared, whether they be converted Jew or convicted Gentile, just as He prepared this earth in the first place, by creation. He creates man; He works out His plan of salvation; He performs the works as in II Cor. 5:17ff., He deletes the guilt by grace for those who receive it. Offering the Gospel to the world, He saves many, judges all, but as barrister dismisses charges against those whom His death covered, for whom His life lives (Hebrews 7:25).
For the ship of Truth, of the Gospel, of the Kingdom of Heaven, of believers, He is the harbour, and it is He who brings it there, none lost, all to whom the visas were given through faith by grace, the "having been saved" people (Ephesians 2:8,Titus 3:5-8, Hebrews 6:19, 9:12 -10:14), those whose is the inheritance, with eternal life (John 10:9,27-28), who entered this vessel at invitation of the Gospel, at entry received by Him who saves to the uttermost those who come to God by Him. He sends for the ship and receives it at last, one in the field taken, one left, for it is not a maritime ship. It is the ship of faith, for those who act as seeing Him who is invisible. These are they who are on the ship, an assembly known to God, often meeting each other, scattered on the earth. Aboard by faith, they are enrolled in heaven (I Peter 1:5ff.). This transport it is free, indeed, and it is a matter also of bring transported for the joy of the Lord, as you see in I Peter 1:5-8,
"Whom having not seen, you love;
in whom, though now ye see him not,
yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory:
receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls."
NOTES
See Christ the Citadel The Hospital, The Acquittal, The Creator, The Restorative, The Celestial Regality ... Ch. 2,
Highway of Holiness Ch. 4...\gbg12.html
See More Marvels ... Ch. 4, SMR pp.1080ff., and associated references.
*3 See Let God be God! Ch. 12, See this in the entire context of events.
See SMR pp. 911ff., 946ff.,1032-1088H. Mystery 'Babylon' (Revelation 17), goes back to Jeremiah 50-51, type of all to come in this line.
The death mask put on this mystery Babylon (Revelation 17:1-9), the city of the 7 hills, Rome,
the one still standing like a statue, is clearly marked with the imprint of the seven-hilled city.
That is the site of the fateful finale for mystery Babylon. When
the fall comes as in Revelation 18-19, there is a flash of the grotesque.
The identification of mystery 'Babylon', as often in butts of this type, with a
line of spiritual kind through a long period of time, in no way
removes its designation so intensively clear at the time
of the end of the whole side-show of unspiritual decline.
Headquarters and summit: it is now Rome itself. So does the pointing biblical
finger infallibly declare.
The follies of the Babylonian type have become a show so vast that it thrusts to take over the whole spiritual realm, just as Babylon's inclusivism tended to do in its own day, when it would have swallowed up the people of God (Jeremiah 51:4-10). In its eventual downfall as a 'mystery', there is found not only that of a prototype of the destiny for such things, but the stark removal of its culminating site and city centre. The text in Revelation 18-19 is concerned with the religion of the famous city, certainly with the centre for its practice, therein contained. It is to this, named harbour for this culminating feature of infamy, to this outward display, this geographical centre, that the end of the entire spiritual phenomenon, duly comes. One phase is for all; but that one as stated for the time of the devastation, it is marked as ROME, and not another, a city to be burnt in one hour, or its spiritual crescent and famed centre, and that by a fire the flames of which are not only spiritual but physical, though the former be worse than the latter, as you find in the denunciations in two chapters of Revelation, 17-18.