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CHAPTER FOUR
you can't
escape
if you neglect
The Criteria
of Love and the Conduct of Responsibility
It is not a love of a merely sentimental kind, though it has some of the elements romance. It too involves integrity, responsibility and action. It does not linger or languish. What it is, it does.
It acted.
In it, the very Word of God, that cause of all, that enduement and expression of God Himself, definitive image and eternal companion of His majesty, HE came to act.
His actions were straightforward. There was nothing abstruse about it, though the depth of love behind it is staggering. Man went wrong, He came to put him right. It is surely not difficult to understand. The One who made man, being necessarily all-knowing, having all things in His hand and all wisdom, seeing the end from the beginning, growing in nothing, without potential like man, dowered and developed, since none is to dower the Almighty, has eternally provided (hence "the everlasting Gospel" of Revelation 14, acted in due time, at the appointed date in fact (SMR pp. 886ff.). He has come to remedy things.
He did not create in vain,
or have man seek Him in vain. It works. He is responsible, and from Him it
is that man can even understand such a thing as responsibility, acting responsibly
and having in the heart the awareness of this beauty of moral splendour. Hence we read in Isaiah 45:19: "I
have not spoken in a dark place of the earth: I did not say to the seed of
Jacob, Seek Me in vain. I the LORD speak righteousness, I declare things
that are right."
THE FACT OF JUDGMENT
However the realm of mankind is largely one of irresponsibility. One of the best lurks, from a schoolboy point of view, escapes combined with escapades (one well remembers a future captain of Scotch College crawling out of an undesired concert hall lecture on hands and knees, without being seen, the better to employ the afternoon) ? It is to create another god, so that with a sense of duty (as in the above case, to use the time better!), which does not lack presumption,. Having created a new 'duty', a person can speak and think more felicitously of one's life. Yet with all that, one can still do what one wants. The delicious delusion of pride, however, does not fail to turn sour.
Thus in the Moslem case, one can cut off hands for stealing, as if this were not maiming in gross violation of any proportion. It is an eye for an eye, justice, that the law teaches, before the mercy is equally stressed in Christ's eye for ours, Christ's life for ours, to show the intensity of the lovingkindness of God. However so vast is the folly that has come to dwell in man, as he experiments with life, with gods, with cities, with morals, and calls it good, that SIN, the direct departure from the ascertainable will of God, and indeed, since He does not change, the regress from His morals at all, has become not merely an epidemic, but endemic.
It lives within man, and it is the source, with satanic aid, social reinforcement and international declarations to aid it, of the wild follies both of having aeroplanes soar downwards instead of upwards, to doom instead of deliver, of knowledge being bent to subvert nations, instead of convert them, so that the earth is becoming more and more imbued with radioactivity, since due spiritual activity does not appeal. Indeed, kill for the Gospel, this is not a new Islamic feature; but it is being more and more stressed as whole nations insulate themselves like rebellious children from the Gospel.
It is rather like killing doctors, as one of the symptoms of a particular disease.
Naturally this does not appeal to the Almighty, and equally naturally, there is an end. The details we have often pondered (SMR Ch. 8 with 9, Answers to Questions Ch. 5), and although as to the coming of Christ, the Lord being reasonable, there was a specification of His death date, there is no specification of the date - not of the fall of the Twin Towers in New York, but of the fall of the scope for salvation, the removal from reach of that tower of truth, when the people of God are to be removed from this sphere and taken to God (I Thessalonians 4, Matthew 24). However there is outline of the attendant conditions before this is to occur. This is so specific and specialised that it is impossible to miss it if you scientifically consider the data and align it over history with possible times of equation ( Answers to Questions. Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 8). It is now that it is "near", in the sense of impending, if not imminent (Luke 21:28). Christians thus "look up and lift up your hearts".
How would any rational being consider it conceivable that there would not be judgment from the God of intelligence, the source of imagination, the donor of the dower of freedom, the Lord of morality, the initiator of intellect, the owner of the universe and its constructor, the Creator of all things, when having knowledge of good and evil, they abort it., when it is He who has made! They distend it, they amend it, they glower with hate and call it 'good' and 'moral' and the 'will of Allah' or of Nazism, or of Communism, or of some sect or other, or 'the necessities for survival' as doubtless in some part the cry will come, when the evil rises like a boil to a head, and its sulphurous assertions come into final place.
This is not all. There is naturally a Judge. There is no question of airy-fairy oddities, or of hidden things. Everything is to become manifest, words in the bedroom to be shouted from the housetops is the order of the day. Thus Christ declared:
“Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have spoken in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have spoken in the ear in inner rooms will be proclaimed on the housetops.
“And I tell you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him! "
You will see the combination of openness and judgment, of gravity and reality. Atoms are inspectable by an increasing variety of means. Man is inspectable by God. He is not well inspectable by his brothers and sisters, because of limitations of data (and even the experient may forget), and incursions of sin. Judging is not a wise move for man, in assessing his fellows' character and state. God is good at it (Jeremiah 17:9ff.): He never fails, knowing all and having no vested interests, without need and with no compulsions. Truth is His child, mercy is the only thing that has stopped the world from going already, since it well deserves it. It is not a matter of some Moslem balance of good and evil and tipping it for eternity by some percentage achievement. Heaven is God's and perfection is the ONLY POSSIBLE entrant for it. The cover of the Word of God is perfect. Hence those covered may enter.
It is a blood covering. God is realistic, having made our whole reality. We have that element irreparably within our physical beings, which He made; it is necessary for them to be covered. In other words, blood here symbolises as well as being essential for physical life in man, and its pouring out is the symbol as well as a sure entry to physical death. Christ died. Hence we who are His live, for ever. Death is an insult and an intrusion; except for this, that it is judgment!
Yet this is covered. That is why the resurrection of Christ is so essential and central, that if you irrationally*1 reject it, then you have no part in God. You are rejecting His responsibility, rationality and power, or some element of this, and hence are alien to Him, despising His mercy and imagining (by implication if not in flitting symbols of thought) that you could be even ALLOWED to live, if there were no cover. This, that Gospel of God's grace, it was in mind kept for consideration beforehand, and in fact provided in its time, always the source of continuance for man (Acts 17:27-31, Galatians 4:4-6, Revelation 14:1-3 cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17, That Magnificent Rock Ch. 3).
Hence you read in Romans 10:9, this gem that sparkles:
But the righteousness of faith speaks in this way,
"Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ”
(that is, to bring Christ down from above) or,
“ ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ”
(that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).
But what does it say?
“The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”
(that is, the word of faith which we preach):
that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus
and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead,
you will be saved.For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says,
“Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.”
It is all responsible. God
has made, known, perceived the folly to come, provided, acted, and does no
violence to faith. It is real not artificial, factual not factitious, truth
not frenzy, whether of scimitar or multitudes of tongues thrashing away in
some public assembly, aas forbidden by God (I
Cor. 1:2, 14:27ff.,
12:20ff. cf. A Question of Gifts).
It is time to return to earth: the Twin Towers did, and this is emphasised here because it is symbolic, not only of
the weakness of man (who considers his steel indomitable, and erects in trust
in that untrustworthy because sinful thing, 'the human race'), but of his
wickedness. It is this in which he delights to ram them down in a séance
of unspirituality, as if wreckage of the race
were the way to promote its welfare: judgment is for God, not man, but for
man, and from God, be assured, it is coming! HIS towers are indestructible!
SELECTING AIR HAS LITTLE WEIGHT
It is time to forget
the fancy that you can 'select' your religion, and that it is culturally
acceptable to do so. What is culture but the compress of the thoughts and
ideas, the ambitions and conditions of thought of man, filtered by convenience
and summarised by sinful institutions ... YOU
are an object from God, who in His wonderful love and grace has the unique
feature of being a PERSON. As such you can love, think wisely or craftily,
lovingly or nastily, and act responsibly or irresponsibly. For all this,
you are brought to account. The bill is long and it is not blocked by computer
trashing. It is with God. When 'the books are opened' (Revelation
God knows. You are accountable. It is necessary to find God, to stay with Him, and for this you are most fortunate, for the Word of God has found us and come to us, and declared His mind, shown His ways, exhibited His power, shunned all sin, acted in our format, assumed our features, yet without sin, and having shown healing, raised the dead. Then He met the scorn of sin institutionalised in man, and being executed, executed resurrection upon the execution by overthrowing it, to deliver man from death. This, it was a laboratory demonstration, dated, delivered and predicted in detail, and through this was to come the appointed and anointed Gospel, as predicted, which has circled the globe, as predicted, and been receive by many in many lands, though it was rejected by Israel, the nation, as predicted. It is this Gospel, predicted in content and basis with precision, which now continues while the world roars with pain, so that it is hard for it any longer to hear.
What is that pain ? It is the pain of rebellion, sanctified by UN
names, or Moslem jihads, routine ritual killings in
God elects man; man does not elect God. Yet in His profound responsibility, soaring to a love which as we have seen, has made the world able to continue at all by having the remedy, the cover available for man, God has laid out for man the entry to the airport to heaven. There is a covered way. It is easy to enter, except for the heart of man! There are no steps or stairs. You just have to dump all your luggage to get in (Luke 14:27ff.). Sin is a major part of it. You simply have to trust the engineer who made it, His redemption which cost Him His life, to believe His word which, after all, is His (John 12:48-50). That redemption, ransom, so adequate, also satisfied the justice of your release. It is in HIM that your fruit is found, in HIM your root is provided, from HIM your resources all flow. HE is sufficient and YOU are sufficient in HIM (Ephesians 1:6, II Cor. 3:5, 12:9).
GOD ELECTS! someone storms. Yes, you see He IS God.
However man may come. If
you elect not to come, then you go. It is as simple as that. The interstices
and substance of your sin-sedated spirit, if you do not yet have the cover
in Christ, the appointed way, these are for God to consider. For man, it
is this: GOD states that He would have all to be saved, so that beyond all
quibble or question, the RESPONSIBILITY IS ONE HUNDRED PER CENT YOURS if you
do not come. That is what matters.
THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS
People often like to revisit their childhood. This, they say, is where it began. That is individual, but it is also well to consider the beginnings of the revelation of God to the race. Now we are not going to the first, as we have done (cf. News 87, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 6 -9, The Biblical Workman Ch. 7, Biblical Blessings Ch. 7, SMR Ch. 2, 422Eff., Supplement to Ch. 2). Our current concern is to see some of the beauty (for divine love is beautiful, being free from self-seeking and self-satisfaction, mundane matters of grasping and comparison within the creation cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 -7, SMR pp. 25ff.), to behold some of the wonder of the divulgement of these things, as they were written BEFORE HE CAME.
It is good so to do, rather than merely talk of the coming of events BEFORE HE RETURNS. This gives perspective, like actually going on a geological excursion, rather than being confined to the constructions in books. Here the book IS the primary material, but it is truly ancient.
Let us then go back some 2500 years and watch it coming.
In Hosea 6, you find an amazing revelation. God, in 5:14-15, having shown His detestation of the embedded sins and recalcitrant unrepentance of His nation, declared: "I will go and return to My place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek My face: in their affliction they will seek Me early."
Immediately after this, with this impress on action, He indicates that there will indeed be a returning to Himself, "Come and let us return to the LORD; for He has torn, and He will heal us." Not only, therefore, do they come, they seek His face. They are now in real earnest. "He has smitten and He will bind us up," they continue. HE has waited as He said, UNTIL they acknowledge, and then has COME, the next step after waiting (cf. Psalm 102:13-21). So do they speak freely in their repentance. As for God, HE has withdrawn, as for man, he has repented, as for program, God has relented and COME, come to bind up.
But HOW will He do
this ? In what will the binding consist ? We have seen that remarkable development
in Isaiah whereby there is depicted a tent, or temple if you will,
a religious construction which is to HIDE and COVER and PROVIDE SHELTER for
a people made naked by sin (Isaiah 4:6). We have noted before how in Isaiah
32 it is a MAN, indeed a KING who will possess precisely these coded qualities.
He then is to BE the temple, as in Isaiah 53, where He conducts His own sacrifice
of Himself to satisfy sin's just requirements before pardon. In Isaiah 25,
not satisfied with this, the Lord declares further wonder concerning this
crucial matter.
A strength to
the needy in his distress,
A
refuge from the storm,
A
shade from the heat;
For
the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall.
You
will reduce the noise of aliens,
As heat
in a dry place;
As
heat in the shadow of a cloud,
The
song of the terrible ones will be diminished.
The
Lord of hosts will make for all people
A feast
of choice pieces,
A
feast of wines on the lees,
Of
fat things full of marrow,
Of
well-refined wines on the lees.
And
He will destroy on this mountain
The surface
of the covering cast over all people,
And
the veil that is spread over all nations.
He
will swallow up death forever,
And the
Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces;
The
rebuke of His people
He
will take away from all the earth;
For
the Lord has spoken.
'Behold,
this is our God;
We have
waited for Him, and He will save us.
This
is the Lord;
We have
waited for Him;
We
will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.' ”
Here as in Isaiah 32, we find it is a King who is to be the Saviour, the COVER from storm and tempest, the glory and the defence, the shadow of a mighty rock, who will give sight to the blind and understanding to the rash. But it is more. It is the LORD. He specifically, HIMSELF, is to depute Himself, indeed His Word (Isaiah 48:16), the sent One, to "swallow up death in victory" or "forever" or both! The thing is categorical, final and total. It ends the era of mortality in its grasp of judgment and confers the everlasting epoch of life that is immortal (as in I Cor.15). He will wipe away all tears, says Isaiah 25:8. Indeed, "the rebuke of the people, He will take away."
But how ? It is shown in detail in Isaiah 53. Where else ? Why of course in Hosea where we began today. In Hosea 13:14, God declares this, and it is well to hear His own words:
“I will ransom them from the power of the grave;
I will redeem them from death.
O Death, I will be your plagues!
O Grave, I will be your destruction!
Pity is hidden from My eyes."
Thus God who withdrew,
exactly as in Psalm 102, announces that "the set time is come" and looks down,
declares His name in Zion and redeems (102:13-22, cf. Zechariah 3:9),
at once, in a day.
It is quite clear.
Nothing will deter Him. Even the love to His companion, the word of God,
dying as man for the provision for children, a ransom: this will not deter
Him. Such is the intimacy of the infinite God, that the Son likewise will
not let this deter HIM (Psalm 40 cf. Joyful Jottings
Thus in Hosea 6,
we are looking at the fact that He will bind them up, and here we see how
it is done. It is done by being rendered vulnerable in man and for man, as
many as receive Him (John
Hence in Hosea 6
we are seeing the arithmetical component of His death: in three days, He
being the ransom, His people are raised in, for and by HIM. That as seen
in SMR Ch. 6 was also figuratively indicated in Leviticus. But there is still
more. In Isaiah 26:19, we find this, that as to HIS people, "My
dead body they shall arise". There is this delicious mutuality,
this infinite intimacy. What He has done, they receive (as in Romans 6, replete
with figures, but substantial in portent).
He arises from His
death as ransom, and "because
I live, you will live also" (John
Accordingly in Ephesians 1:17-23, we find this:
"that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come.
"And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all."
(Bold added.)
THE COMING
OF THE CONSUMMATION
It is just as it
was for
He rose and there was nothing but contempt for the plan, the ruse of mankind to deliver Him to death and end Him: for they could not even produce the body which would show it. He was gone. (Cf. SMR pp. 931ff.)
It is now that He has gone, and we await: not like the Jews of old, when His coming was to culmiante in this, that He should die.
Now His coming is to rule.
This has always been so close that sometimes these two features could occur as at one glance, when one sees many mountain ranges as if one. You see this intimacy of suffering and sovereignty in such sites as Isaiah 53, where the suffering indubitably is dominant. Yet even there, it leads to His receiving the spoils, the souls of men whom He ransoms, like a mother who sees in her dash into the flames of her burning home, the rescue of her children almost as if done already! It is in her inward eye secure, just as physically she sees the smoke, impure. It is clear in its inscription on her heart, past any obscuration of smoke. This does not affect it; it merely contrasts.
The one is the end,
the other is the way. They are intimate in her heart, visible later in her
body which, scarred, yet has eyes with which to see her rescued children
(as in Isaiah 53:10--12, which we should see with our OWN eyes):
"Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him;
He has put Him to grief.
When You make His soul an offering for sin,
He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days,
And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.
He shall see the labour of His soul, and be satisfied.
"By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many,
For He shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great,
And He shall divide the spoil with the strong,
Because He poured out His soul unto death,
And He was numbered with the transgressors,
And He bore the sin of many,
And made intercession for the transgressors."
You see it in Isaiah 22:23-25, where though there is to be One who will have all the glory laden on Him, yet He will be cut down in one moment. For all that, the WHOLE OPERATION results, in that very place, in His establishment. In Isaiah 42, it reaches a climax of intimacy. In the Hebrew the words echo: thus just as He will not be BROKEN, so those who He fosters will not be BROKEN. There is the divine strength which ensures both.
To be sure, both
will be tested. HE was tested in being secured so that despite the manifest
trials, "He
shall not fail or be discouraged". They are likewise,so that "the
bruised reed He shall not break." Unlike the case of the Islamic
outrages, He does not break His people, but has come to build; He does not
hate them, but has come to love them. He has come not to judge the world,
but that the world through Him might be saved (John
But let us look further at the intimacy of the suffering and the sovereignty in the delightful tracings in the word of God, the Bible concerning this matter. In Isaiah 49:4, we find Him saying this:
"Then I said, ‘I have laboured in vain,
I have spent my strength for nothing and in vain;
Yet surely my just reward is with the Lord,
And my work with my God.’ "
Then in Isaiah 49:5-6, the very next verses, you find the gleam of triumph in the very midst of the massif of suffering, like light in the clouds overshadowing the peak you are climbing, as you look UP: