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The time has been especially ferocious in the last few days.

The World Trade Centre disaster has led to all sorts of Moslem noises about death to America, the Jews and so on, making a broader chorus of hate and detestation than has been with us for decades, where the Jews alone, or most commonly,  were the victim. Jihads of course have been proposed, propounded or pursued elsewhere, and stark terrors imposed; but Israel was the preferred butt.

Pointing out the horror of even criticising the nation for its exceedingly non-NATO, non-world alliance response to this attack sponsored by forces OUTSIDE the country, one expressed deep concern for the USA on the occasion of its remonstration with Israel, following years of talk of negotiation for the tiny oppressed land. Now the USA has learned at first hand, deplorably and tragically, but alas graphically, what these jihad movements can do, consolidated hate, aggression and fanaticism in combination, stopping it seems virtually at nothing. It has learned what it is like to have such things near the seat of government, threatening the very corridors of power; and in Israel, the corridor towards the North, between itself and sea and alien lands, is narrow indeed!

There have of course been other wars, and other statistics of vainglory; though assuredly WW II was in defence against world aggression. This now however is a constant seething, dominion and submission (the one for the jihad maker, the other for the target people), wrought with money, fought with a virtually entire disregard of any human restraint.

Indeed, it is notable that the New York disaster has been followed by still further attacks on the Jews in Israel, as if to scar even more, that tiny piece of land, a poor substitute for the place promised during and at the end of World War II, with special regard to the help Dr Weizmann gave to Britain in the war, and to the need of a homeland for them,  in any sort of justice and concern for this displaced people.

Moslem Arabs have attacked civilians there,  and now, as if in efforts to be even more expository of the Islamic 'faith', Moslem expatriate from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden and others with loud voices, have attacked America. Was not America the 'Satan' in the Iranian declamations of many years before this time ? Is this then so very new ? Even now,  Sept. 26, 2001 The Advertiser reports are filled with numbers of Islamic thunders concerning America with rattling  jihad and the like. Thus, if oil gives worldly power to such Islamic words, it is not apparent in their tone.

What has stood in the way of the ambitions of many such Islamic peoples and rulers has been so characterised. It is not unknown in this world so to do, but this something in which a world religion is making its passions known in the process, indeed is appealed to as the driving force, with a nation of some power savagely, stridently and at times almost sedately lashed with words. Now the process has extended.

Thus, the campaign to rehabilitate Allah appears to be in full swing. He is to be the new lord of much of the world, one from the Taliban says, and jihads blossom like weeds, like poisonous mushroom clouds, as if this world were for the burning, as if it had no limit to its powers of recuperation and the God-given message of peace in Christ were a positive enemy. In fact, in the Taliban administration in Afghanistan, so GREAT an enemy is Jesus Christ and His Gospel, that people are under threat of murder, judicially contrived, simply for allegedly preaching Him.

Have not many others been attacked in Moslem countries for just such an 'offence'! One advantage of this assault on Christ, made in the Koran in its caricature of Him drawn from the mind of Muhammad centuries after the evidence (cf. Lord of Life Ch. 3), and then in Moslem countries which support this attack with words that lack all rational basis, is clear.

What possible advantage then could there be in such a calamity ? It is this. It helps people to realise a comparison.

• It is that
• just as Islam has,  for many centuries and in many countries, used the sword to enforce its will, if possible, concerning religion - and that is not to say that no countries of this kind ever do anything else, but that it has been a world-wide, historically much travelled path which has threatened the world before Tours in 732A.D. and often in various ways, but without success,  since that time:
• so other attacks on Christ and Christians, are raging.

Again, just as Muhammad tried to graft his work onto the Old Testament, which it utterly contradicts as it does logic, as we have shown (cf. SMR pp. 1080ff., Lord of Life Ch. 9, Divine Agenda Ch. 6 ),  so many calling themselves Christians, have sought to graft wholly disparate teaching onto the Old Testament, and to carry their abandon into the New, without ground or success, but with their own kind of intemperate following, surging in combat into many unsuspecting churches, sometime carrying on the assault at university level, even when it is so discarded from evidence, as to a mockery of academic precision. One has personally experienced this, and further examples, parallels or evidences may be seen in News, Facts and Forecasts Ch. 3, SMR pp. 1185, 1080ff., 68ff., 377ff., Biblical Blessings Ch. 11.

This violation of logic has been no less a war, because waged in another way. The logos (John 1:1, Ephesians 4:4, Isaiah 45:18, Colossians 1:15ff., John 8:58, Exodus 3:14) which by reason of power and intelligence, purpose and will created the world, is back both of its workings and of life. His life is the basis, and His life is the judge (John 5:19-23, Acts 17:31). Similarly, it is His word which explicates, intimates and directs, not only in our genes, but in Genesis to Revelation, that continuing testimony of the divine mind to man. With intelligence manifest in works, is direction clear in word: both are written, each proceeds on its course, nothing daunted. This is the testimony, the evidence and the provision:  but it is not being heeded. It is not as if it were hidden in heaven, it has come to earth; it is not as if it had been shrouded in secrecy, it is published these centuries, throughout the earth. It is not as if it were a shrinking flower; it contemplates nations and apportions history. Nothing escapes it; it rules. To ignore it, is worse than being ignorant of the sun, the stars or the atom.

It is time for the nations to realise that the issue beyond terrorism, is irrationalist intrigue in modern myths against the unmanufacturable mission of Christ, its supernatural attestation in evidence, performance, before He came, when He came and since He came, the only valid logical approach to life and truth, the only self-attesting religion, invading scientific method with ease, allying itself with logic as by divine right, untouchable by millions with anything but ... rejection (cf. That Magnificent Rock Chs. 5, 1,  7 and 8, SMR Chs. 1-3, 10, 8-9, Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 11, Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium Chs. 13, 16, Repent or Perish Chs.  2,7 for example).

It does not seem attractive to madam, to sir ? Love does not seem desirable, and salvation is to be despised ?

This extravagance of misused life has its consequences. These are growing in many nations long before the terrorism of body afflicted them!

Of course, it is as II Peter 3 tells us, but not until God is ready. The prelude is as the earlier part of that chapter announces (cf. Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 74, p. 103,  Joyful Jottings   8, Divine Agenda Ch.   4; Answers to Questions Ch. 5    ), and the event to follow at the end as the latter part describes.

• How man, with death continually stalking him, as he rebels from his Maker and makes up gods without evidence or ground, following these with proud claims and warlike assaults, continues in such a lethal mission is always a mystery, until one understands sin. Its hatred of God, its subtlety, its ruses and delusions, its pretences and pains, its pangs and wrangles within and without, its wars on truth and its evasions concerning judgment: this is the menu for sin!


Small wonder Isaiah declares from the Lord:
 

• "Cease from man whose breath is in his nostrils, for of what account is he!"


Viewed as a race, and in terms of trend, it is almost like saying, Let's worship me, my knowledge (science), my will (diplomacy), my hopes (philosophy), my importance (social psychology), my power (the myth of organic evolution, communism, gods of man's manufacture), my attainments (industry); and let's make a tower for ourselves (cf. Genesis 11). A tower ? The World Trade Centre had two of them, not more glorious than some others, and not noticeably different perhaps in their declaration, though notable was a statement near the first, that it displayed one's trust in MAN!

There, trust is always misplaced. MAN is NOT trustworthy (cf. John 2:24-25). An individual man may be so; the race is not. It is at war with God with its myths of the West, of the Middle East and the East (cf. SMR Ch. 10). It will not rest in its restlessness, and cannot rest.

What does the prophet Isaiah say ? This:
 

1) "In returning and rest you shall be saved;

In quietness and confidence shall be our strength.
But you would not" - 30:15.
2)  " I create the fruit of the lips:

      'Peace, peace to him who is far off and to him who is near,'
       Says the LORD,

And I will heal him.'

"But the wicked are like the troubled sea,
When it cannot rest,
Whose waters cast up mire and dirt.

" 'There is no peace,'
Says my God, 'for the wicked. ' "

When belief in himself, on the part of man, is coupled with a spurious 'faith' in a false god, then it is even more deadly, and far more than the World Trade Centre is threatened by that. Revelation 6 has long told us of the delight in death, the deadly lusts that will conquer the hearts of many in this earth, and lead to appalling catastrophes (cf. Matthew 24, lUKE 18, 21). That is flat prediction of the epoch of the end, and it is assuredly happening, just as all else in the book of the Lord happens, has happened or is poised to complete the designated picture from the hand of the Creator to the people He has made.

We are seeing this now, and that is found not only as in Russia since 1917 and in China since the end of World War II, in the forms of absolutist and tyrannical Communism, not hesitating to kill millions who get in the way of an allegedly non-religious, but actually fully religious program of a nature-god who is supposed to run the world in a special way, but does not; for nature gods do not exist, but are really the extrapolation, the imagination and the hope of man, to look beneath him and not above, at the God who made him.

It is so very much easier. YOU make the program, the principles, the rules and the theories; and though they never work, since God has no replacement, yet they are pushed for a while, until some change or other comes in. Thus, to take but one illustration: organic evolution for long pushed the self-defeating concept of gradualism, now felt too ridiculously dysfunctional and contra-evidential for words, so that punctuated equilibrium came in, which as Professor Denton rightly points out, is more a descriptive term than an explanation; and then various other ways are thrust in to try to cover the fact that the MOST designs are found at the level supposed to the MOST EARLY or around that period, and that we have less even now, as Professor Gould pointed out.

What a theory: the EXACT opposite of its predictions languishes in its theoretical vaults, and it continues in the face of rejections so numerous that if they were rejection slips they might begin to exceed the writing itself!

Likewise, Communism, that ally of the nature myth,  so far from leading to a sort of heaven on earth, led to a hell on earth. Quite in parallel, organic evolution instead of leading to wonderful confirmation, has led to total departure of all verification in all realms. Everywhere there is contrivance, the ordered attribute of intelligence of the highest order, its product far beyond the product of the greatest of man. Man however in this world, as a fatal trend, contrives to avoid it as if his very life depended on it, so that some of the brilliant merely evade, their works like butterflies that cannot last, because they are not made that way.

We have had these sorts of folly, sometimes philosophical, political, social, international and sometimes religious,  as noted for example in SMR pp. 422E ff.,  Ch. 2 Supplement, Scoop of the Universe   45  in  With Heart and Soul, Mind and Strength Ch. 11, and in many other areas on this site. Now our concern is not merely the folly of it, but  the end of it all.

We are currently on red alert. There is more power in more unrestrained hands with more folly and oil money just setting petrol on the papers; so that the world with its great cities is no longer safe.
It is not that it once was; but its precarious hold is now more obvious even to the blind.

Red alerts are somehow hard to consider as a thing for the blind; for though they are a visual thing in terminology, they often have the auditory accompaniments such as in WW II, where the wail of the prelude to utter destruction, as in London, was like a child crying; and many did cry.

The world is moving to its terminus for this Age. It is like death: rather dramatic. It is so strange that sin misleads and dulls so many that they continue to look to gods which cannot talk, nor can they reason,  nor do they act.

It does not look to the God who made it and man, in the first place (Isaiah 51:1, 45:12,18), even when all that one has to do is call in faith upon the name of the Lord, that Lord Jesus the Christ who came two millenia ago in order that the world might be saved. HE has built a way, at His own cost, one which cannot be bombed out of existence. Since however most will not, but refuse, then the case is simply this, that whoever believes in Him, and so orders and presents life to Him as Lord (for that is what He is, His very name), and finds in Him both standards glorious and pardon for the inglorious, may be saved. May be ? Will be, for that is what is written (Acts 21, I Thess. 5:9-10, Romans 5:1-11, John 10:9,27-28).

FAITH is the way of receiving His ransoming death (Romans 3;23-27), GRACE is the freedom of the offer as in Isaiah 55 (cf. Ephesians 2;1-12), and gift is the character of the acquisition (Romans 6:23, 5:15), here depicted both as to substance and style. NO MAN enters in here, for Christ is infinitely unique among men, being sinless, all-powerful and the only possible redeemer, in view of His deity on the one hand, and His taking the format of His quarry for salvation, man (Matthew 23:8-10, Titus 2-3). Eternal life, the gift in the righteousness of God who sent Christ from heaven to die, the just for the unjust, the cover for the naked, the prince of pardon and the place of sacrifice for sin: it is free (Isaiah 61:10, 55, Romans 5:15, 6:23, 3:23-27).

Free likewise is the seat to watch the end of the Age. It is best to go back to the beginning before you face the end: your Creator, and His works to make it all, His sending of the Saviour to take the penalty for all who come in faith to Him by grace, to know Him as Lord, and His sending of His Spirit to enable you to KNOW Him while the time comes for His return.

Meanwhile, let us consider some of the red alert signals, some of the grey day tumbles and with the presence both now in Spirit and soon in body, of the Redeemer, look upon the ways of this world and the will of God as the scene further develops.