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CHAPTER  FIVE

THE CONCEPT OF AN END

GETTING PAST THE FANCY FOOTWORK TO FACTUAL REALITY

Time, Tide and Truth

The sea admittedly has its churnings as the giant propellers work their way across the Atlantic, and the sense of order and organisation is complete, to the last elaborate painting and brilliant stairway; but there is an end. To the Titanic, as to much of man's magnificent seeming achievements, the conclusion comes. There is confidence and their is glamour, riches and fame, business and blending, but there is an end.

As with that vast ship, confidence does not alter the ice; power does not remove the perils, but rather accentuates them because of speed; blind ambition does not bring sight to the captaincy, nor does modern science change the temperature of the waters into which they sink, when the end comes, as come it will and does.

The options do not change, though the form of some of them may. There is the Maker of the oceans and the temperature gradients, the atmosphere and its organisation, the narrowly missing asteroids and the safety situation, of the freedom which readily brings foul play and the beauty of holiness which does not require continuity in the first creation, but admits of defilement There is all of this;  and there are the consequences.

There is the fight of fatuity for acknowledgement,  power, name and fame, and there is the fact of spirituality with God, whose almighty power alone could or did make the universe of matter, mind and spirit, giving to man the sweet capacity to know his Maker, and the saccharine substitute of knowing his own power, lust, desire to rule, aspirations for autonomy. It is the same, but the latter has many philandering philosophies, contrived theologies with which to confuse man, now this way and now that; but there is an end. To all this, it is well that it is so.

What was begun in pirating insolence leads to privation and insolvency. Ask Europe for a modern mini-example; ask the USA for a maxi-deprivation issue as more and more officially, it mindlessly embraces empty religiosity and in Obama at times, even acts as an apologist as one writer put it, for Islam. This, one of the swag of human wisdoms on the religious side, peeping through the port-hole of the Titanic impostures of man, at passing vistas, with neither verification (it rose to fall), nor confirmation, multiply is using force in this world, to bring conversion, capitulation or control. But force in the end, becomes featureless, movement of matter without point, by man whose mind becomes blind and whose ambition becomes out of control (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4 and SMR pp. 1080ff., for example).

Trying to Overthrow What is Instituted by the Divine,
Disciplined by the Same,
but Kept in Relentless Plan for Mercy

Thus Israel, these 60 and more years, has defied by the power of the God of all pity, the impetuous Islamic and allied haste to bring to its tiny shores ruin and disaster, with all the might and main of tens of millions of enemies, in multiplied lands surrounding it. They do not however surround the sea, a mercy strand, while the dust rarely seems to settle for all this annihilatory energy starting before Israel restored,  even became a State once more, in 1948. It was then, in that blessed May, that the plan of God conspicuously began to unfold in its restoration as so often and so brilliantly signalled in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Zechariah and the Psalms (cf. SMR Appendix A, SMR Chs. 8  -   9, Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 5, It Bubbles, It Screams, He Calls ... Ch. 10.)

There is an end. By incitative proclamation, Israel is to be set in the sea (not much land there) by its enemies, specifically by the mouth of Colonel Nasser of Egypt (whose word had an end). Then it was by Arafat (whose corpse constituted an end of his flamboyant and inflexible style, which would not even accept monumental opportunities for his people, as made at Cape David in the day of President Clinton). Now it is by the word of Ahmadinejad, whose islamic delusion would have a coming celestial power become susceptible to a parade through Teheran, while Israel is exterminated as one might smash a squad of lice. To all this, and this type of hype, there is an end. The end of the final array against Israel is specified in Micah 7 with great precision, including the fulfiment of the covenant with Abraham (cf. It Bubbles, It Screams, He calls  Ch. 10, Galloping Events Ch. 4). God began Israel for a purpose, leading to covenant, land, law, prophecy, Christ, their betrayal of Him, their return, the Gospel to the Gentiles, the oneness in Christ toward all and for all, the overthrow of the nations and the resurrection to judgment or glory, all hinging on One Man, this being God who became man to do it. The conversion of many in Israel in one lump sum toward the end of our Age in one part of the end, as shown in Zechariah 12 before 14. The confrontation with the nations by this same Christ, is another.

He began it, and this schema will end, this world will end, this conniving with corruption will end, and while shame will not end for the rambunctious and the renegades who reject even the redemption, yet their active power to confront does do so, and the entirety of futility does so.

While one end is beautiful, the other is not. Tests are like that; but what a test when 100% is available by gift where the reception is there, the repentance, and so the regeneration, the bodily resurrection and the very righteousness of God not only is accounted to one's bankrupt spiritual estate, but plays on one's heart like hoses in Summer on the body (Romans 8).

But what of the enduring preference for darkness, known from the first (Romans 8:30ff.), and kept to the last ? The overall picture there, as in Isaiah 34, 65, Deuteronomy 32 and Joel 3 is not a pretty one, and the Lord's attitude to the overweening, never cleansed, always impenitently impetuous enemies of sinning Israel, still not repentant concerning the State's treatment of Jesus the Christ, is always clear. It is a type of a broader end to contest with the truth, made in the splenetic splendour of self-deception.

CONFUSIONS MULTIPLY
BUT ISRAEL CONTINUES TILL THE CONSUMMATION

You see the case regarding oppressed Israel in such biblical sites as Isaiah 51:21-23, Ezekiel 38-39 where it is not only a desolatory divine act on the surrounding invaders, but a teaching lesson from deity (Ezekiel 39:21ff.); and this, not only for Israel in final deliverance, but for the nations in utter ruin. Some confuse the issue as if it means an exaltation for Israel in its Age-long particularities, but this is not so as Isaiah 19 makes most clear; and alas, as Isaiah 65:13-15 makes more than clear, even conspicuously obvious. Others confuse it differently, as if this extradition of Israel in its subversion of salvation marks it for inconsequence. Never does the Bible make such presentations; it is ALWAYS to be judged and restored, whether in Deuteronomy 28ff., in Micah 5-7, in Romans 11, in Isaiah 48-55, and where in the end, divine action is NEEDED (when God sees that the nation's strength is gone - Deut. 32:36), then it is given.
 

Others like to imagine that a special Israeli religion will take root, but that is resolved in the negative once and for all in Isaiah 65's lamentable but piercingly clear divine detestation of their chosen way, against Messiah, mercy and salvation, set in mere symbols when reality has come. all that preceded in symbolism now obsolete (Hebrews 8:13, Jeremiah 3:16).

As so often, it is both simple and many-sided. Israel is to be restored to divine grace and to the common place of all in spirit, for God is ONE Spirit with ONE Gospel and ONE plan for man (Galatians 1, 3), though it has many avenues of access, as does a SINGLE river from many streams. Gentile conversion is one, Israel's large-scale conversion yet to come, is another; national contributions as engines of awakening has been another; international false accords have been indirectly another, as these have stirred many to see the devious and indeed devilish diplomatic designs of man and peoples. These would strip this world of the Gospel, sometimes even in the name of the Gospel, and of the truth, and that in the name of tolerance as of peace, in the name of agreement outside God, as if trying to reflect Babel once more! It does not learn, so in the end, it must be, and will be taught. There is an end. There is always an end.
 

THE UNEXCEPTIONABLE EXCEPTION

There is only one exception, and this requires a specific touch to the generalisation. There is an end for everything without God! With God Himself there is neither beginning nor end, and it is exactly for this reason that there ever could have been a beginning for anything: for if ever NOTHING has been all, that would always have been all, a manifestly untrue proposition. It is defined as lacking anything specifiable or identifiable or even actual (otherwise subversion of meaning becomes an entry gate for confused thinking and double meanings). The future of potential is merely one of these: if it had this, it would not be nothing. Hence nothing was never the case.

What was, was sufficient for the results, or logic is gone, and hence power to validly argue, which silences any such point of view. What is eternally sufficient for the results of time, space, matter, mind and spirit is called God, and the term has no need of alteration, since it is clear. It is what is not the temporary, the affixed, the imposed, the constrained and the non-nothing movement from the realm of the eventless to the actual, to the stage of propulsion and repulsion, generality and particularity, extinguishability and creation. Thus does space, like that on new library shelves, come into being, and this world of eventualities, with beginnings and with ends.

The Source can be mentally squashed into a part of the creation, like an author compressed and then inserted like a speck into one of his books; but this is merely to misuse terminology, as is common in the religious as in the ethical sphere. Again, God may be drowned in human minds, as if as extended into a sea of circumstances, which is precisely the same mistake. As to the very nature of God, it may be made unthinkable, which merely removes it from rationality and hence imposes a preconception without ground and contrary to any possible ground. In the end, however, there is an end of all this. The realities of reason remain that there is the eternal adequacy, the all sufficient, and there are the results which show verification and validation, conspicuous in the Bible which reaches back to the beginning and on to the end, including the arousal of the wonder of the substitute for all that, namely what in God because of God, has no end. This, God being a Spirit, is spiritual and hearty and filled with free accord, neither that of dictation nor of mutability, but happy-hearted in the reality differentially desired, where hell could be the feeling of rebels, for such things, but endless joy in on the heads of the redeemed.

Deception from the prince of liars (John  8:44) is however continual despite this simplicity, and convoluted perplexities await the lustful, loose and vulnerable, wandering as if in a passion not to sail a boat around the seas of this world, but a soul around the swamps.

These terminological trumperies begin and these end. Time is a species of instituted boundary which delimits their course and career and brings a sense of realism to any conceptions of man, manners, mores, morals and might. All power outside God,  is a dowered thing. As to mankind, all man's ideas are subject to corrosive criticism and what is valid must show it, as is the case with the Bible, the Christ and His salvation (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, esp. *1A, Serenity ... Ch. 6, What is the Chaff to the Wheat ?  Chs. 3-4, Christ Not Culture ... Ch. 1 for example, with SMR and TMR esp. Ch. 5), uniquely.

To the interference statics of the nations, in their pulsations of power and enterprise and enervations as they wander ever anew, always on similar lines, there is an end (as in Psalm 2 conspicuously but also as in Micah 7 and II Peter 3); and indeed there must be, since to this universe, as Peter shows and Christ in Matthew 24:35, there is an end, and the nations are part of all that, and a quarrelsome part at that, very often. The avoidance of this for any, is in intervention that is divine, merciful, extraditing from corruption, corrosion and deception, into truth, peace and continuity in charitable clarity and unquestionable grace, that would mar its very face rather than simply let man go.

But the nations ? They will not and cannot agree for a reason transcendently simple: they are normally ALL wrong. It is like students of doubtful ability (but here the ability is there, but seconded to wilful confusion) after a mathematics examination, who are comparing notes on the work they have done. They are found arguing strenuously without enlightenment, since no one saw the point. Exalt them to nations and they argue, they attack, they are offended, their pride/dignity/integrity is offended, insufferable things are done, and insufferable words are spoken, and impatience becomes impenitence as they war. To all this, there is an end, and it is not a happy landing as Psalm 2 makes so transparently clear, and Isaiah 24 shows so dramatically, as Isaiah 51:6 proclaims and as Matthew 25 exhibits in the assembly of nations for judgment, not BY them, as if an endless Nuremburg, but OF them as by Christ, their former assassination point, whether physical as once, or spiritual as now.

Never imagine that Israel is the only specialist in this at Calvary; for it is a spirit which gained access, in fact becoming merely a contributor to the conditions which made the glorious plan of salvation come about with enemies active in its conclusion, so wise is God. It was forwarded by Rome in Pilate as well as by specious priests in their false lairs. It is seen in grabbing, grasping, seething, deceiving, lying, writhing, contorting, disporting power, intimidating, envying and refusing either to relent or to repent, as this and that nations seeks hegemony, the GREAT Russia so appealing it seems to Putin, or the great Iran, conceived as a leader in the nations, or the great anything else made and marketed by man.

It replaces Christ with anything to hand, whether in spurious visions or furious assaults not this time on the mind, but on the bodies of mankind. It seeks to rub out Christians here or there, to discredit them or to imprison or to torment or to make to transfer elsewhere, or to be subject to taxes or to be stopped in worship, or to be accused of blasphemy when they speak the truth. It is found in the hearts of many as it was in the establishment in ancient Israel. It is a modern continuation of the same thing which has the hide to condemn Israel for what it is itself doing, and to add intemperance and loathing, attacks and assaults even on the young, to its miserable mandates and man-fashioned contests.

To all this, the end comes.

Yes, mercifully, to this, there is an end. To fraud there is an end, and a judgment, to liars, to perversion exponents and to adulterers who do not repent (I Corinthians 6:9, Revelation 21:8), to the rapacious and the renegades from religious truth, because this CANNOT go on; for though truth can be allied with mercy, it cannot be aligned with error, a simple and flat contradiction. It is sinners who contradicted Christ (Hebrews 12:3), and it is Christ who in the END, contradicts sinners in their judgment (Hebrews 12:22-29), like a celestial Nuremburg, but one of solemn and not as they, often of merely specious dignity. Indeed, in spiritual purity "our God is a consuming fire," and as in any good establishment, there has to be a place for rubbish, for what had a beginning, but also an end; for there IS an end.

What endures does so for one reason only, that it is, in that case, born of God, bought by God, confirmed by God and used by God: rotted pears go, dragging salads go, meat relics go, and what stays is rather what furnishes the house, but beyond this, the provision of a house, where there is a street location left, and where there is a world left, and where there is what is willing to inhabit it left, and where pardon therefore is present, for truth cuts. What remains is what stays with God, and it is an illustrious and gracious mercy to the uttermost, that God has not only provided this earth, but a new heavens and a new earth is to come in which not possibility but actuality resides, in which righteousness is not only mentioned, but rules, where morality is not made the flip side of the coin of possibilities, and life is not made a curtain for shame, behind which rodents ready themselves for savage attacks, crawling over  the beds without shame.

In beginning anything, remember then that there is an end, but that the work of the Lord, this endures, and truth endures, and peace within endures when it is not a mere placebo, because and when it is of God. So too the Gospel endures, when it is not merely a name, while tedious torturers, who twist the truth, and tepid triflers who try to bend it, and its way, come to cease. Some may be found and pardoned, but what continues in its alien and alienated way, ceases in eternal shame (Daniel 12), not more efficient in the service of evil. Those calamities conclude; those test results are sent to the pit, no more on fire and ready to consume all about them.

God has been most gracious, but many wayward, have singed the paper on which pardon is written.

Man did not even have to create the universe, or participate in that labour, or the creation of his own type, with DNA leading to trillions of connections of nerve items in his brain, and capacity to have more of the same without even understanding how it is made, with the advent of each child. Nor did he have to create salvation for his race and kind, nor to invent kindness itself for that matter, or sacrificial love; for it was all there, provided for his spirit, as was liberty to lose it in confusion through beginning things which have an end, like rebellion and false rationalisations instead of reason, the tedium of propaganda instead of truth, and the media of false mediation, instead of the reality of revelation.

Creation, his own typing, salvation: the threesome is all made for him, and his part of it is emphasised in the puniness of every birth which however appreciated, is scarcely a tour de force of current competence. That is the start; but there is an end. An endless end may appear a contradiction formally, but when the application is realised, it is not so. There is an END insofar as the corrupt activism is concerned; and there is a judgment which assigns it to its place, with no restoration.

Thus to the fallen, and the fraudulent there is an end; but to truth there is no end. Thus again,  when the end of the twisted comes, of the lie and all its cohorts of fraudulent religions and philosophies, then there is a contrast. There is what is LEFT when that is all gone; and to this residue, there is accorded, when it is ALSO found in the salvation of Jesus the Christ, that eternal life of which He has spoken.

This embraces the endless nature of what has ended IN THE FLESH but continues in the RESURRECTION, where the mortal is superseded by the immortal (II Cor. 4-5, I Cor. 15)l, the carnal by the spiritual, the gushing by the glory, the corrupt by the incorruption, the past by the present in peace. Here the future comes with vastly more regularity than the sun every morning, for there is a stability which the ROCK, Christ's title (I Corinthians 10), and the word which is like a rock (Matthew 7:24ff.) symbolise, and eternal life in God in found in the presence of His glory in His individually made lodging places (John 14:1ff.). Then is exhibited what beginnings portended, without the ruins which rationality permitted, spirit enabled and folly acquired. Then is man in the image of God made into a site, each individual, for immortality not immorality, for spirituality and not spiritual sleep, for illumination and not dehumanisation, whether by distortive arrogance or abortive abasement.

To all that, there is an end; but ending the temporary, there is the eternal. To that, there is no end; and as man is made in particular, so is his resurrection, even of the body, MOST particular, and what is not lost in refusal of redemption, is gained for evermore, not in a sea of forgetfulness but in that divine remembrance which communion services embrace, and the individuality of Christ exhibits. I have prepared a place for you, said the Saviour, and if it were not so I would have told you.

That is the sheer magnificence of it: there is triumph in the truth. What God made, created, what He put into a new creation through conversion and salvation, becomes immortal, and the whole facility of the diverse faculties of man becomes consummated, not in mere mouthing of phrases of religiosity, but in an earned, merited and conferred everlasting life, not from the will and ways of man, but from the will and work of God (Ephesians 2:1-12), who having made, redeems, but not with duress, rather through confession, not with agile deception, as if to make the beloved love by altering it, but with ample expression, bringing to life what is foreknown to be His own.

Only what prefers darkness, beyond this present orb, known to God before it began, inhabits it. To false lights, little luminaries in their own minds, to all this, there is an end. To what beings in divine grace, in dowered salvation, in perfected pardon, an eternity from an historic performance not of man, but of God in the form of man, there is no end. That is the end of the matter, but the beginning of what is endless, the actualisation of what began as an opening, and the closure of what began as defilement, ending as ruin and renegacy. Give thanks for grace, for divine lovingkindness, for without this, all the works of man would come to nothing; for he has nothing to offer, but himself, and that for entire reformation and reformulation, but not for extermination, but consummation.

What a wonderful God is this, who deserves eternal praise, to which there is no end.