W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc

W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for Volume What is New

CHAPTER 11

The Depth of Sin

is a Measure

of the Urgency of Salvation

The Absolute and the Proportional

There is a proportionality in judgment. Rash betrayal of justice is common, tyrants reacting to small breaches, and indulging intemperate fancies for the sake of over-riding passions, corrupt, equivocal, selective.

However in the justice of God - in which we are born, for He is the Father of our beings, even when men do not receive Him and so become His children in fact rather than origin, being now long corrupted - there is proportion.

Some things deserve death, some rebuke.

All deviation from the line of the road of holiness requires sin's drenching, which could be only in terms of heaven, where the slightest impurity is ruin - you cannot have it both ways; and this means sacrifice. In mercy God sent His Word to become, through a woman, His only begotten Son at a certain time, and this has always been the coming cover, like the case of a mounting bill, at long last paid.

Yet in terms of being made tolerable to God, at least in prospect, because of this provision, there is a proportionality in justice itself; for the coming of Christ is for mercy, not for judgment (John 3:15ff.). What happens, then, when we move from the total, outside mercy, to the particular, inside it ? When Jehu the son of Hanani, the prophet, rebuked Jehoshaphat for his spiritual fornication by fighting alongside a wicked king, Ahab, he first confronted him. What on earth are you doing helping the wicked! What a farce and incipient tragedy: is this your calling ? is this your place ? Have you entirely forgotten yourself!

Such was the tenor of the rebuke to Jehoshaphat, from Hanani. What next ? Nevertheless, said Jehu the prophet, good things are found in you. Thus, once salvation is covered, and the peril is met at the source, then ere is measure, consideration, proportionality. It may occur beyond this, but that is not guaranteed! (cf. Psalm 1:4-6). If you insist on being like chaff, then you are liable to movement by frisky winds ... Let us however return to the rebuke to the outstanding King, Jehoshaphat in one of his all but delirious errors.

Notice however, that before this measure, this limit to the rebuke, there is a flat statement in terms of Jehoshaphat's evil and foolish alliance with Ahab, even to the point of battle, where many lives can be lost, each life no small thing; so that the practical results were profound. "Therefore the wrath of the LORD is upon you!" said Jehu. Before any proportionality, there is the actual situation, and its horror, that lives have been lost, the Lord's name abused in a false liaison, clarity confused, a mixture of aspro and arsenic has been dispensed, the testimony has been mauled! If it were not for mercy, all would now be lost. The question could even be asked, In that you have made crucial differences to other lives (as at another level, couples divorcing without biblical grounds - adultery only - may do at once to their children and even some other relatives), what then of your own! Here however, kindness intervenes.

It is then that the proportionality comes. Mercy is shown; the King is a believer; He has a covenantal relationship with the Lord, and there is apt provision for mercy in a systematic manner. In that day, the animal sacrifices were multiple, the covers vast and varied, and that man is a sinner is part of the basis. Now, in the case of our own day, in one epochal and epic life, in one quintessential act in that life bringing all in feature and focus, namely the crucifixion of the Saviour at Calvary, the sacrificial cover is perfected, once for all (Hebrews 9-10). Thus the cover is enough for complete and overall satisfaction for sin for the entire life. Discipline may be forthcoming, but the household of faith has children born forever (I John 3:9). Once it was in prospect, now it is in retrospect. It is always there, whether operative or not, depending on the case.

The Depth of the Disproportional

What however of the case where there has been straying from the very faith itself ? What of the situation when the covenant has been breached, the very pier of faith demolished, the bollards long gone, the Gospel subverted and only the name left, if that ? What of the individual who, having made some superficial affirmation of faith, now moves to frills and spills, in the sensational, the psychological, the social substitutes for faith ? or to faith in oneself, self-belief, in one's society, as in humanism, or in one's own psyche, as in idolatry of one's own will, and hence imagining oneself as essentially able to deal with any god with complete security, as one to one, as if it were a children's party: what of that! What of the case, moreover, where the person is so self-assured, so trusting in good works and service rendered, that the issue of God is left alone, unnecessary, for the assumption of being able to prevail anywhere and in anything is so strong, even if unconscious, that self-trust leaves no room for any meaningful approach to God ? What of any of these ?

The deeper you have gone beforehand, the worse it is. Yet the principle is the same. If you taste of some of the things of God in a journey of exploration, and have some realisation of what you nevertheless have not quite taken to heart, in a sort of psychological flotation process as in Hebrews 6:4-8^*1, and then like the children of Israel, at Kadesh-Barnea, you DO NOT GO IN, you do not actually enter the kingdom of heaven, though you may be at its borders. This is despite the command of conscience, for then there comes a tapering of truth and an extending of self-will: what then ?

Then the case is one of confusion, or of crushing the spiritual antibiotic in manure and rotting carcases, killed in folly. There is no way on then.

It can affect the individual or the nation or in mounting measure, the race.

The time has been for this, and now is. Increasingly as in Revelation 19:19, war with the Lord, with God is on. It moves from superficial relationships in one generation very often, to sly dissidence to slighting scorn to outright unbelief, retaining all the while whatever one finds convenient. It moves from this or that degree of closeness to the Gospel, to God, to disjunction, with or without the actual name being kept.

The case comes to fruition, of a world which has had whole governments acclaim Christ, the strongest empire perhaps in history, the British, doing so, while this shattered orb now limps into liability control in many lands, financially, but in all lands spiritually, the sheer ugliness of superficial reactions instead of deep responses, all but staggering (cf. Luke 21:11,23). There comes in many formerly more enlightened nations, as an increasing norm, utter spiritual ignorance, laced with distorted relics of religion, like a soured drink with a little poison in the bottom, gradually coming to the service. This way, one which does not work before God, comes spiritually to resemble physically, as in a picture, that in Japan, when the surging morass of devastating, sometimes radioactive ruin, like a molten moraine, swept on with astounding power to harrow the fields of the country, having smashed housing on its way. In other lands, not in memory knowing God but enshrining mystical symbolism in varied pseudo-God or god-seeming terms, did not need to degrade. The memory of God from the first is here long since lost (as in Romans 1:17ff.).

Both have a resemblance, though each has special features for judgment. The whole world is under impending judgment. The chicken roast is mature, ready to serve; but it is more like writhing snakes. And what snakes kill like these!

These elemental forces, then, noted in the earthquake and seething, surging masses of destructive liquids, they are a sort of visual index to the wrath of God. Other nations have suffered other anguish, more and more, now here, now there, with heartless mass murder allied to want, famine, disease and disaster. They indicate the devastations which are able to meet man with justice, in a mere visual! The truth lies deeper.

Has man mounted Romanism, in order to multiply in masses the singularity of the sacrifice of Christ ?^*2 and has he slain multitudes^*2Afor not believing the pseudo-suicide of a Christ who becomes bread and breaks it^*2 and the enormity of such thought ?

Has he named God and then slain millions in confrontations not only lacking brotherhood, but self-control!

Has he been remorseless, pitiless, damaging in deranged relationships, because inventing new gods, gods of war, of forces^*3 as the Bible indicates in Daniel 11:38, gods of our own strength projected in this land and that, or of imaginative wandering; or some illusory gods of systems innumerable^*2B, which are supposed to do this or that, but do not. Yet still they are virtually worshipped as whole peoples as in China, are subordinated to the myths of the illusory massifs of power^*3, to which they become, at least ostensibly, subjected?

Is democracy, on the other hand, to become a cover for gods of empty idealisms, residues from Christianity, based now not on the Son of God, but on satellites, philosophical substitutes, drawing on Him but deviating from His path, and then on satellites of these satellites, taking moral results and leaving out the basis altogether!

	Are these or those or both to invent new morals, new liabilities - such as condemnation for affront to the State, or treachery against it, while the State forgets God and acts as if it were God!
	Are such neo-morals to become gods in their own right, or idols for worship at the humanistic bar, so that to criticise their worship, their emplacement as necessary features in a society, is so vital that to transgress and not obey them, and their whims, is prosecutable at law! Is this coming even to Australia! Is God to be imitated without the wisdom of the Creator and His manifest designs^*3A, or either the power or the honour due to Him ?
	Are people to come to play God who works and shows these in linguistic marvels in DNA and in the creative articulative and cognitive power and logic given to man, parallel to the logical construction which he can investigate in the universe.
	Are they to do this, without having the slightest approximation to His wisdom or power, while increasingly studying His methods in living things, to enhance their own engineering! indeed, are they to show the shocking dereliction of wisdom in their ways, heady, headstrong, high-minded, low moral achievers, seething in mutual hostilities and blind unbeliefs^*3B, in antipathy towards that divine wisdom, as He has defined it (cf. Proverbs 8, I Corinthians 1)!
	Are individuals or nations or international bodies to become surrogates for God, and then omit Him altogether ?

Very well, then, the case becomes, in stages, like that of Israel of old in a way which must be realised.

The Depravity of the Double Dealing

The words of Jeremiah 16, especially 16:17 take hold.

"You have also taken your beautiful jewelry from, My gold and My silver,
which I had given you, and made for yourself male images
and played the harlot with them."

Again, in 16:19: "Also My food which I gave you ... you set it before them as sweet incense:
and as so it was."

What are, interpreted from the figurative speech, the 'male images' ?

They are expressions in the field of sexual depravity, the attraction to what is not God, as if by a wife or one owing Him honour. As foul as such things would be in marriage, in due relationship, to take a husband's gifts and set them as attraction or honour before another man, would be not only unfeeling, feeble-minded and gross altogether, it would represent an atrociously unfeeling outrage, as if compunction were dead, shame lay rotting and conscience had set off on a wild spree of its own.

So is man taking the BODY which is a gift of multiple dimensions, from God, sustained by multiple marks of mentality, imprints of intelligence, government of interlocking, mutually co-ordinated systems, controlled by language - just one in all life. What is he doing with it ?

Is he using it to worship God ? Some do; most do not. Sanctions now multiply and interfere, or jeer at godliness, betray life, man-made contraptions, idols, farcical foci from the mind of man to replace the mind of God, the mentor of man, as well as his Creator. If some person in this or that nation does not do this or that in the field of religion, of God, of the Creator, of the basis of morals, of the minder of truth, and conform to corrupted or merely imposed standards, and often, does not explicitly or implicitly deny His redemption, His free offer to faith, His mountain of grace, then what ?

Then, there is death, stoning, torture, eviction from buildings, from the very building of life, judicial murder by the thousand, that in the tangle of warfare can become that of millions. Immorality becomes required by legislation, and respect for it by the same.

The depth of depravity in all this, though it is only made worse not better by the death of reverence for the Almighty Creator-Redeemer of man, and entire forgetfulness of Him in multiple mental constructions, invisible idols, alien objects in the mind: it is like ten hydrogen bombs exploding simultaneously in a city. It is desperate in direction, fatal in folly, intensive in pollution, destructive in enterprise. If the world did not squirm, as foretold by Christ in Matthew 24 for example, and Luke 21, in the midst of such retrogression, betrayal of God, turning from the ONLY source of mercy, ignoring of God's plan in words of the Gospel, just as in His words that render the body and logic of the mind operable: then that would be number one marvel. How could such sacrilege, irrationality (cf. SMR, TMR), torment of torridity go on without result! Throw sand in the system, and is the lubrication untouched! It would be a marvel indeed if this world continued in such vein, without developments of intensive dynamics in response! Patience is one thing; omission is another!

THAT marvel however does not exist; for the world does squirm, more and more, in war, in disease, in famine, in hostility, in hatreds innumerable, in distortions, in deceits, in devious cunning as nation on nation seeks by nuclear submarines and aerial despatch offices manned by humans or directed (like the human body) by the programmatics of inbuilt language, to destroy others, or stand ready to do so. It was to be and it is.

How deep is the confrontation, the travesty of truth, the wilful arbitrariness, the tragedy of woeful errors which man uses, as he ruins his mind, pollutes his body, sells his soul and anoints his own spirit with the tar of ruin, lest he should be clean, cleansed in the mercy and pardon of peace in Christ. He invents ANYTHING else, and it spoils him, makes his world unmanageable, and he worships his own ideas and calls them gods, and submits to shame as if it were a reverential right.

Man has taken the jewels, as in Ezekiel 16:17, which God has given him, including the Gospel, and set them before his idols, things to be given away as he worships what he has made. So profound is this depravity, so provocative this dalliance and false alliance, that the urgency of meeting personally with Jesus Christ the Redeemer and Faithful Witness from God, with whom before His coming He lived forever, His Word, His expression, is total. Mock Him ? It is a worthy psychological weapon to constitute a rearguard before hell rears up and embraces its increasingly natural inhabitants to be. Mockery is one customary method of ignoring the truth; but there is no ground for mockery, but only for worship, and the more one looks, the more it is found to be so, as in the millions of words concerning such verifications found in works over the ages, including recently, LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST^*4.

The Heartlessness of Transmission

As if this were not enough, there is another unamiable feature of the divine condemnation which was issued against ancient Israel, which is eminently applicable to the Gentile world, so that there is none exempt. It is this. As sin engulfs the parents and the State, then from one or the other or both, there comes a burning of the open fields of the young minds, a fire in the thoughts to incinerate natural thrust to the Maker of it all, with the restraints of conscience, granted but now skewed, removed in terms of interesting options for the conduct of the young.In many lands, it grows in increasing intemperance; and it is as if they were being little sausages, skewered at a cocktail party. The earlier era saw many chidlren actually, physically burnt in the supposed interest of idols. You see this in Ezekiel 23:39.

"For after they had slain their children for their idols,

on the same day they came into My sanctuary to profane it;

and indeed, thus they have done in the midst of My house."

You see UN concern about the liberty from religious discrimination against all, and in Child Rights for the young, and yet they prescribe the brotherhood of all men as a basis for ethical action, as if a lowest common denominator for man would serve, instead of the highest Grant basis, in the God of creation and His word. They act as if they were God, and declare it all without ground, for there is no ground when man simply measures himself by himself^*5.

You see it in many a democracy, and in many a tyranny: the same State apparatus requires obeisance to this or that idol, false prophet, basis for terror, for strewing the world with corpses. You see it in the idolatry of nature, as if it made itself and then everything else by itself, despite its obvious lack of enthusiasm for such fanciful adventures of irrationality^*5A. You see it in the forcible intrusion of such unrealistic rubbish, the fulfilment of its claims never exhibitable, into schools, colleges, universities, and the extrusion as predicted myths (II Timothy 4:3-4), as well as exclusion of the truth of creation and continuation of the power of God over man, not to be thought of, though this alone meets scientific method^*6.

It is deep, this burrowing into the darkness of mystic meanders, and the need for repentance is long and strong and if it were possible, growing in urgency.

There could be some understanding of the unwise wobble of man's ideologies, their skewing and false viewing, if the alternative to all this mayhem, murder, misfeasance and irrationality were some hell, some flaming horror of utter, intense and eternal woe. But it is not so. The alternative to what the Bible calls The Lie (Romans 1) is your own Maker, filled with kindness, even what is rightly called lovingkindness, of mercy and pardon; but this on condition of repentance and receiving His redemption, not as princes or lords, but as sinners, awakened and aware, coming back home (II Corinthians 5:17-21)..

In other words, the chosen option, by much of this world, is precisely this horror which it is ever increasingly inherited. The reality left out, is the desideratum of destiny: it is the direction currently being taken which has the horror that makes aversion almost too little. It is horrendous and it grows.

Thus the actual option, the prescribed change from the Creator Himself in the Bible and in Christ made visible^*6A, is nothing less than the exact opposite of horror: it is justice, mercy, pity, pardon and truth. Instead of making neo-Hitler, or neo-Mao youth camps out of schools, that is fountains of folly which indoctrinate remorselessly, instead of making one race to have fundamental freedom advantages over another, as is now wildly thought of for Australia, as if all knowledge were defunct, and having once lived in a place makes of those doing so, some kind of god, and others, some kind of liberty-harassed excrescence, a nonsensical racism instead of religious awe for the one Author of all, instead of inveterate war: what ? This, peace and purity with purification, love of one's neighbour as oneself, ransom from the judgments due to sin, realisation of the wonder of the awesome truth of our Maker, of the glory of His provision for man, and a return to the celestial base once for all shown, demonstrated and attested by God in Christ.

Impossible for man ? Yes, without God much is impossible; but then that situation is impossible, so there is no real limit in that. There is mercy without limit, love without pollution, glory which is DUE to its Source and Centre, not to wildly and confusedly chosen substitutes. There is worship of what is glorious and eternal, ultimate and irreducible, in truth intractable, in kindness illimitable, in demonstration of the same, irrevocable. There is God, before whom what is impossible for man, becomes possible, who penetrates the seemingly impenetrable heart of man, and moves not at all from a knowledge final from the first, actual to the last, divine and not supercilious. God can penetrate the heart better than the jack-hammer stone, more constructively than the surgeon, more assuredly than atomic weapons, with grace, so that the imperceptive becomes perceptive, the dead alive, and the insulated, rendered responsive.

There is the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, born as foretold, from heaven to earth to become man and so as man to take from man the depth of His folly, bear it as sin, and restore him to grace, one at a time, by mercy and in pity, through faith.

The Reality that has only One Demission

It would sound nice if you could say, Ah well! If you do not want to face the truth, as in mathematics, then there is your effort, a bit of a farce: but still it and you go together.To be sure, it is the wrong answer, but you can do something else and screw up your maths and put it all in the rubbish bin.

But alliance to "the lie" of II Thessalonians 2 is a living thing, with dying results, and the everlasting shame of refusing the remedy, is not so easily put away (Mark 9). The jewelry which God has given to this race, now being offered to myths, as if man were unhappy unless committing spiritual atrocity, and involving as many others as possible in it: this is a matter of everlasting shame (Daniel 12). God has given us an exuberance of creative wonder, including creative capacities and roving and sustained ability to survey and find His law and designations in the universe. We understand, we strain, we labour, we realise then more and more, logic laughing. We take it for granted, like some loopy pilot looping the loop constantly instead of forsaking such immature antics and at length at least, getting on with distance flying.

What has made wanton this earth, this world which goes where it loves to be, without God amid a shame which though conscience has long ceased to regard its reason, is not purged by simple imagination. Like the laws of chemistry and physics, it is not abolished by distaste for them.

This world will pass, it manifestly grows old; the human genome is already sequentially being damaged^*7. Guilt however, psychic reality, this will not pass, except to the one Recipient who as Redeemer is offered by the everlasting wisdom of God, to bear it where faith presents it and repentance releases it. If it is kept (John 8:24), then it is a matter of dying in it and with it, obscuring the truth, forsaking the mode of mercy. So, tragically, in multitudes, man makes his long pilgrimage to the spiritual shrines of impurity, as if afraid of peace.

Urgent therefore is it to find Christ, Jesus the Lord, the plan of salvation of God in Him, in this "day of salvation," for there is no peril like being asleep in the deep, spiritually.

There is no love like that of the One who knowing the penalty, bore the cost, offering it to all, transferring it to those who receive Him (Romans 8:32). If God would like you to do it (Colossians 1:19ff.), then who but you is responsible if you do not ? There is no one and nothing to blame. If you hate what has happened outside His transforming mercy, is that reason to hate yourself and your own future, as if being an orphan is good reason for not becoming attached to the adoptive parent! In fact, man is only an orphan by disfaith, the dynamic disruption of what is natural and true; and in Christ he may find his way home.

It is good to be home. It is good to have a haven, one that belongs naturally, and is now restored because the unnaturalness of sin is covered. It is good to know God. It is good to be at peace (Ephesians 2:17-18, Isaiah 48:18, Philippians 4:4-6). It is great to relish the personal company of God, it is wonderful to receive the salvation of God in Christ, because HE IS wonderful^*8.

NOTES

This is to be compared with Matthew 13:20-21. The hard underlying soil, in this case, below the seed spread, does not accept its germinating roots, the Gospel does not 'take', the heart is not broken in grief at sin, so there is no entry and all is lost. It is similar where there is 'faith' without repentance, the latter being "into life" (Acts 11:18). Without this, the heart may have superficial reactions, but nothing moves.

See SMR pp. 1086ff.. More generally on this topic, see pp.1032-1088H, and 911ff..

*2A

See Ancient Words ... Ch. 14.

*2B

See RELIGION, RELIGIOSITY AND REALITY IN CHRIST.

See:

Aviary of Idolatry, Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 5,

News 37. 44, 69, 97 (the exploiters, the fanciful,
the Communists, the de-godders and the realities), 98,
News 150 - Taiwan,

The Grating Grandeur and Aggrandisement of Man,
and the Meekness of the Majestic Messiah Ch. 2

Beauty for Ashes Ch. 6 (and Hong Kong, and the movement of nations in the last century a concern),

    Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 8;
     SMR pp. 925ff., 971-972;

Beauty of Holiness Ch. 3
(war and force, rising downwards, Tiananmen and truth),
Ch. 4 (liberty, Tiananmen, worship and its direction in time, its terms and code of truth); History, Review and Overview Ch. 1,
Impossible to Men, Open to God Ch. 5