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This world is filled increasingly with wild sprees, violent, libidinous, alcoholic, of speed, voyeurism, viciousness, uninspired religious guesswork with blood, of market snatching, house grabbing, and of grasping profit taking, as if this were the essence of living or the goal for humanity.

At the same time, and not only in obverse, it is invaded by anguish, millions visiting psychiatrists who study the body and the brain, and consider statistics and what is desired, and often with no knowledge of the human spirit, its origin or powers, but stuck in the muck of mental reductionism, prescribe drugs, now that the invasive techniques of Freud and the discursive bewilderment of Jung are no longer economically desirable, or perhaps even statistically effective (cf. SMR p. 335, Ch. 4, Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 9 , incl. End-note 1).

But effective for what ? For removing anguish ? Scarcely. For extirpating guilt ? Hopeless. It is useless to be told that you are in the grip of this or that, when many worse placed are not. It is mere assumption, and the conscience in those where it is not annulled, does not witness as the truth, to the concept that one really only does what one has to; for often enough man does precisely what he works out is to his advantage, in spree, fee or feeling, and then does it deliberately and deliberatively (cf. Predestination and Freewill Section I).

In the midst of this bloodshed, of writhing bodies and ruined lives, of hapless imaginings and ruthless wreckage, of reductionist cartoons and repulsive behaviour, touted as good and progressive, there remains what even a debased race can find as the unalterable, immutable and the beautiful, the beginning and the end for all creation, Jesus Christ. His lowly state is the very epitome of contrast to the direct or indirect self-praise of man; His total potency for good is the blessed opposite of the so much desired power of evil which afflicts the contemporary world; His precise prophetic position, making Him unmissable and immiscible alike, resembles His own predictions which arrive like stations on a suburban line, inexorably, naturally and continually (cf. SMR Ch. 8).

His salvation as Messiah, the one anointed to suffer, to die, to cover sin and remove its distressing guilt, to renew a race of individual believers and construct them into His Church, not by pieces of bread or illicit masters (Matthew 23:8-10, John 6:61-63), not by wild surmises using the Bible as a tooth brush to tickle the teeth rather than a covenant creator to purge the soul, but by grace and divine power, in love and divine wisdom: this remains.

It is the word of His heart and the heart of His word; for in this renewed filial relationship with God, man is enabled to overcome not only the guilt, the power and the prerogatives of sin, of disaffection, alienation and disgust, either with himself or his neighbour, in consort with the wreckage of relationships and of goodwill, but the vast desert that lacks goodness in his own spirit, and to plant in the soil of his soul, what grows into towering virtue and ceaseless wonder. Where it is "Christ in you, the hope of glory," as in Colossians 1:27, what more is to be needed, and what less is required!

Man is far too advanced in design, in potential and in construction, in power to imagine and to find, to be satisfied or satisfiable with anything less; and needs nothing more.

God is sufficient; but first He must be found. In the wilderness of wandering, money may be found, prestige or power, egotism's sating or pride's delight, but truth lacks, righteousness is allayed, folly neighs.

In the Messiah who came on time, left in the way prescribed and whose words grip the alienated earth like an electric current through someone caught in a short-circuit, there is peace; because without truth there can be none, and in it, there is this wonder because in all truth, as demonstrated in life and logic (cf. SMR), there is to be found the very love of God. It is rather like a car: if you are in it and with it, it is one thing, and it progresses to the appointed place; but if you are under it, there is a certain discommodity as its wheels splay their wares on your back.

It is not childish to be whole, nor is it immature to be uncynical, nor yet again is it a downfall to be built by God! What is childish is to cease to be what one is, like some belligerent child, of which nowadays there are in supermarkets and public places, a plethora, threatening, asserting, demanding, some almost as if the devil himself were gloating over the parental perambulators who are forced to carry them in their ragings.

If your parent smacks you, tell us! is the report concerning one child, of which one has heard. It appears that for some, the fear of child abuse with violence becomes the sinister setting for intrusion into due discipline, gentle in kind, effective in result, reminding folly before it sets in concrete, of what should be obvious, that children are not rulers, and little ones are not God. If parents are not God also, this is a lesson they have had more time to learn! but there is in all this, no substitute for love, no alternative to reality, and no trite outsourcing for wisdom.

It is not for the broken psychologies of witless States, following their cultural noses and the favoured programs of the minute, to dispense with Biblical wisdom; and increasingly, as if disease were God and the result were pathology in principle, not merely in practice, States come to denigrate the truth and activate folly. It is not just that they are wrong in instilling into the young the fallacious, which cannot stand and does not work; it is that their errors become the very summit of pretentious wisdom, their fruits diseased, and their wry witness the very downfall of nations.

It is increasingly as if Satan were Minister of State, and the programs wrought in hate, founded in fantasy and lacking heart, use psychological warfare on the young, whether academically in the dismal and anti-scientific philosophies of organic evolution (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., 149ff., Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, Wake Up World! ...), or in the tragic tedium of surviving as an art form, and objective for life. While the world busily seeks to gain its life, and so lose it, what loses its life for Christ's sake, and follows the only verified testimony of truth, continues to lose its life and so gain it (Matthew 16:25ff.).

Life is long: it has more meaning than eating and grabbing, parading power and instilling fear, holding self-acclaim meetings or evoking the praise of man. Judgment is short: it has more point than punishment. It is according to truth. Truth is to be found where it is, and not in what denies its presence at the outset, and sets itself as its own truth, masquerading, if not in intent, then in extent, as if God.

It is time to move from the anguish and the ecstasy, those impelling perishables, to the Mastery of the Messiah, whose word, the Bible, covers and resolves all the issues of philosophy, governs all the affairs of history and provides for all the needs of man. It is thus time to come to God where He may be found, where He has set His name, in Jesus Christ; and so to do while He is available. In this volume, we shall plan with the good help of the Lord to see such things in detailed expression, contemporary ways and in blessing-for-blighting exchanges.

CHAPTER 4

A LITTLE MORE ?

Some more West Bank, my dear Abbas ?

It is particularly sweet with our new international dressing...

News 336,

The Australian November 22, 2004

DW TV November 23, 2004