Chapter 6
THE AGE OF ANGST …
OR RATHER,
THE FINAL ANAEMIA OF ANGST
FINDINGS
IN what do
you find the meaning of the term ‘angst’ ?
Is it from a Webster’s massive dictionary of the
1930s ? No, for the term is not there. Is it from a Webster’s College
dictionary of the late 1960s ? No, for the term is not there. What about a
Webster derivative of 1988 ? Here the word is briefly covered. “feeling or
outlook of fear, dread etc.”.
We see elsewhere
that it has come from the German
In the
early 1940s. That is interesting. The war encouraged its export, then … ?
Angst, again, can be seen in an English usage as
concerning itself with the negative, the
anxious. What about another mode of enquiry, since the usage of the term is
now appearing to involve little less than a cult ? We could survey many
offerings under or using this name on the internet, and see to what they refer,
to what they appeal, in what way they gain popularity, visitors, with this name
plate on their door. What does this begin to reveal ?
We find from this inductive approach that the term
is commonly associated with a spread of concepts which it is not hard to
essentialise, but which at the outset, may better be simply listed. Thus, it is
involved repeatedly in considerations such as these:
Fear,
apprehension, anxiety, uncertainty, depression, neurotic weakness, paralysis
through uncertainty, frustration, humiliation with a sense of the meaningless
combined, aspiration for something that is felt not to be there, allied with a
dim and dark consciousness that maybe something will come from somewhere, but
nothing soon or clearly.
In that sense, it lends itself to sensations close
to spanking the universe for not being more forthcoming, and at the same time,
exulting in what it might provide; and this, though not so obviously, can lead
subtly to some sense of MAKING it or the world or people somehow provide what
is wanted, in terms of greatness, security, pleasantness, pleasure, ground for
being, motive for living, whether it will or not. This perhaps or its
antecedents of psychic thrust is associated with some sense of the grim, the
gaunt and the unappealing. In one sense, the essence is close to some kind of
appeal, which being frustrated, is set on a course which is not appealing!
This can lead to the strong TERRORISM application
of the term, in which sophisticated SOUNDING remarks can be made along the
lines of fear management under the psychologically mischievous Taliban hype,
the longing for things better amid the sourish survey of things worse, with
varied critical commentaries on many, without much release or realization, so
leaving one with the generic taste of angst. Thus what near the first seems a
weak and even devastated concoction of desire and frustration, yearning and dim
anguish of disappointed hope which yet scans the universe in blinking search,
can become all but a parade, grim and ghastly.
You get films and comics about characters such as boy angst, where the disease appears to
be found in the very young. It matches
concepts of – not quite debauchery, but the sort of listless
depravity which is readily associated with verveless, but not nerveless living,
while some seek to take the mood on some
kind of trip by reaction, for
this or that purpose. The term ‘dark’ seems to be used, and ‘gloom’, associated
with some aspect of a spiritual ‘black hole’. Grandeurs that “do not help me”
are spread abroad, intimidations without apparent intimations from galaxies and
the like, as a mood of anxious disquietude and all but belligerent weakness
thrashes about like some dinosaur with better tail than teeth, bashing anything
it can hit, in its frustration, while it lumbers heavily in the mud, foreseeing
with dim apprehension that the phenomenon of death by murky drowning is not an
alien one, nor perhaps, a distant one.
Such is the inductive survey to this point.
THE PROPHETIC
EMPLACEMENT
Of interest is the fact that this new vogue for
‘angst’ is precisely in its ramifications what Christ spoke about, as recorded
in Luke 21:26, “men’s hearts failing them for fear,
and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the
powers of the heavens will be shaken.”
The array of things fulfilling with the normal
precision, the prophetic depiction from millennia ago, to precede the return of
Jesus Christ, this time as King (as in the succeeding verse, Luke 21:27), has
been noted before (SMR Ch. 8, Answers
to Questions Ch.
5), but our present interest in much more specialised.
It is in this one aspect that we move: fear,
anxiety, apprehension, dismal dullness, uncertainty, marring in prospect,
darkness of mood, with potential for neurosis, glimmers of hope, of
desperation, engulfed in the surrounding sense of stricken awe and jaded,
joyless movements of heart this way and that, as if a shadow were moving over
one’s head, from an unknown source, but one which has some elements of clarity.
These, in fact may appear just enough to be suggestive to the conscience which,
being probably deeply buried, resounds with such uncertain vocality, that it
merely adds to the turgidity of the scene.
This pressed and depressed sense of fear of heart
and distress amid mounting flurries of events, it is in the Bible expressly
indicated as what was to be as one index of Christ’s return; and it is what is
to be found in particular, in the domain of popularized, fictionalized,
comic-strip treated, filmed enchantments of ANGST.
The sophistication of the psychological romancing,
inspirations of awe, desperations and evasions merely portrays the thing that
had to be, in view of the things that are to
come, and to come quite surely with no speck of uncertainty, no ground
for anxiety, nil prospect of gloom and doom, if you do not unabashed, still
stand in the way of the approaching wave of judgment, both terrestrial for our
globe, and spiritual for its
inhabitants. There is NO ground for angst provided you have awakened to the
message of the ages, the truth of the Age, the Gospel of the millennia, to the
Despatch of Deity, the Saviour of this world (Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17), not supping on its jaded glory but finding its
glorious Founder by faith, to which reason can only say, Amen and Amen (cf. SMR Chs.
1-10).
Yet for the souls of each of those who prefer to
angst, they receive their unavoidable void, in large measure merely the
attestation of emptiness, the wake of presumption or the lappings of the
voiding of the unavoidable, like the surgings of waves from some vast rock,
ignored but not without its results.
Again, to each, as the pressure mounts, comes its
due for lacking the dew of truth, the awe of reality and the God of glory.
As to God, He has not stopped being around because a
mass of mesmerised people, the butt either of their own or the various media’s
constant manipulation, or the lethal source of both, have stopped believing in
Him; and as in all truth, His will and word and way is in no slightest respect aborted or
converted by the presentation of terror, anguish or vacuous and undirected awe (cf. Revelation 1:7, Matthew 24:30), itself merely
the experience of voluntary negation of the stability and strength of truth, so
the sundry attestations do not abort because they are avoided, as some mothers
avoid their children, left on doorsteps, conveniently, but with results
nonetheless, both emotional and legal.
Someone recently told this author what he thought
of Jesus Christ, and of His ‘failure’.
Asked in what He was supposed to have failed, he presented such a
concoction of contra-historical material (against both secular and religious
records), with no vestige of evidence and with every conceivable clash with established records of the ancient
past, and necessary implications from the same, that one had to point out that
this was irrational. It was irrational first in being contra-historical;
secondly in assuming things contrary to necessary implication; and thirdly in
being a statement of what truth is, when the preliminary presuppositions of the
person speaking excluded its availability, if not its very existence!
The word ‘damn’ or giving one, occurred*1; but it had to be
pointed out that the provision of such feelings was perfectly irrelevant to the
facts; and the opting for a view is just as meaningless when the facts are out,
as is the thought that 2 + 2 equals anything one feels like. It is a sound, but
not sense; it is statement but not reasoned. It does not alter facts, or excuse
folly.
The current, the contemporary desires of many seem
very like this in their BEGINNING, but combined with a different mind set, proceed
towards fear and dark moods, just as in this case, it tended only to angry
frustration and the sense of a nearer and nearer approach of personal
meaningless, salved only by a hope for glory through one’s wealth and children.
Yet underneath all this, the same person once spoke of rising blood pressure
when share prices moved; and the price of attainment in the emptiness of its
security is more readily annealed verbally than healed personally.
What does wealth or even family provide ? The one yields
purchasing power and the other may yield company and human love, yes even
tenderness and joyful co-operation. But in the final assizes no man can save
his brother, can alter the facts, can vicariously receive mercy for another,
can act as broker for the soul: this is the divine prerogative, for only God
can change the facts concerned by providing pardon on the basis of redemption
paid for in the past and accredited in the present (Psalm 49, Ephesians 1-2).
What does enrichment do, whether in honour, in
money or in land ? Now that more is present, there is no less threat; for
whatever the amassed, the routines of destruction are nearer also; and that of
eternal destruction is not distant. God does not change (cf. SMR Ch. 1), and mere amassings do not alter the
quality, calibre or condition, the character or position of the soul of any
man. Thus, as the muted realities are ignored, they also amass, and their case
is just.
So does fear, whether in frustrated anger in or
gloomy forebodings, in darkened morals combining with harassed conscience,
prompted by an overcast international and environmental sky, have its day. The
stark fact that “the powers of the heavens shall be
shaken” is already fulfilled with the atomic bomb; and its varieties and developments, dirty, cobalt,
neutron, hydrogen, with combinations, developments, with dispositions strategic,
ICBMs, missile defences, star war contrivances, energy against energy,
breaching the casings of matter’s form with the violence of upsetting force,
utilising what appears the very mode of heating that the sun deploys for the
solar system … these do not help angst at all.
Not only is the phenomenon what was prescribed by
the prophecies of the Bible; but the very environment in which it happens is
so, no less. The jewel of destruction is soundly placed in its predicted and very
black setting.
So fear propels confusion, since the contemporary
fashion is this, that to understand is unfavoured, while to learn the
perspective of truth is unattractive to many, their own coffin bearers in the
cemetery of sorrow, anxiety and gloom, with brittle hope like cast iron thrust into the furnace, continuing its
poignant if futile exercises. If brightened at times by the evil flowers of
assertion, with more venom than virtue, glared out like a cornered serpent, its
eye agleam with the malice of baneful desire, yet is it no less tense, or apprehensive
for that. Underneath the skin, the heart beats just the same.
This, our contemporary era, it is not only the Age
of Misunderstanding, but the Age of No Standing. Angst is its
undertaker; but the grave is not yet. It takes a little while, and while it
comes, angst flourishes, if such depraved denials, haunted by helplessness and
scented with insecurity, can be said to flourish, rather than simply vacuously
to abound.
FURTHER INDUCTION
FROM WEB PRODUCTION
EXAMPLES
One hears of
someone, “PROUD TO BE A NEUROTIC” – as if the emptiness were, being
recognised, a sign or signal, a symptom or access to some kind of superiority!
“Where has the passion
and ideal gone? Is the future drab and grey. "whatever happened to the
heroes..."
So does the thought proceed. ‘Whatever …’ indeed, when selfishness and squalor of spirit allied
make for such a scenario of spiritual underprivilege, that the physically poor
are rich by comparison.
Another
angst example mixes wry humour with drabness.
The hero, or anti-hero, we are advised “lives in a very deep
dark hole. The few who know him live in a very deep dark hole. The few who know
him would say he's a very nice person, but they’re probably lying. A
personality skewed by a strong diet of anima, indie music, and brown sugar pop
tarts. When not babbling endlessly about the
What
however appears to be here ? a troubled mind, with pressing anxieties for which
you do not have a solution, dressed in drab black wear with a touch of a front
of bravado. Poignant ? yes. All but incomparably grievous, like solidified tears
of grief ? Apparently. Powerful attestation of the swing to the subverted
spirit in the grip of the hopeless ? alas, it appears only too clear.
Then
from Switzerland, we find this concerning the type which “suffers not even from a fear
or a panic disturbance,” and “cannot introduce itself.” How large, it reflects
“the suffering pressure is”, and in such cases, in fact must be. Often
preferring to hide their problem, we read, they yet can have consequences which
are often “engraving”. Thus we are instructed that partnerships can break, and
social problems devolve on the results. People tend to hide, and strengthless,
repine in financial loss, contraction or danger.
This is the more psychological side of the issue,
and its rebounds and echoes are not always strictly to type, since from
depression can come elevation, from elevation folly, from folly thrust, from
thrust manipulation, leading to repetitive circuits, or to the dread cynics of
the age who can proceed with pomp in their weakness, pride in their depravity,
collecting spiritual cadavers (Ephesians 2), but not helping the soul in its
anguish for which death is both the desire and the dread.
No ground is there, and nothing is sound.
The air is the basis, and it cannot bear the
weight. So the atrocities of depression and expression alike, come with
facility as the severed branch of humanity shows itself in the forms natural to
a starving age, surrounded by fatness, a
skinny situation, in which voluntary anorexia is the spiritual estate.
Naturally, it is prey to fears, both justly, both in dampened spirit and in
disordered mind. You cannot live by death; and death in these circumstances
takes a while to become fully manifest.
Again,
we read on the internet about global angst, and see surveys, rather like the old
“Intelligence Digest”, surveying the field of terrorism, anxiety, manipulation,
hope, with insider knowledge, real meanings of different powers in their ploys
and hopes, in the grim, gaunt setting of psychological tension and
uncertainty. So do we have the
situational angst.
In another case, we have this excerpt:
“In his pungent new book War of the Worlds, Mark Slouka joins the rising chorus of resistance. Slouka finds it all a "kind of lie." Like a "speech of Ronald Reagan" or a spiritual vision from the "religious right," the virtual world is increasingly usurping reality and identity itself. "Rather than doing away with the couch potato, the telecomputer has actually created a new, more tenacious variety of tuber: the individual who swivels from the television screen to computer monitor without missing a beat. . ." The contribution, under angst, here, is this: there is that denigratory approach to truth, the fearful and almost awe-stricken feeling for the virtual as distinct from the virtuous, the feeling of a sort of psychological depravity, with engineered assessments of this and that, which are really some other thing, as the vast scope of mutual stimulus with verbal and pictorial symbols continues its non-august way. Writhing is like that. In one sense, it all has something of the architectural feeling conveyed by skid row, something of the height of a toadstool and the depth of a puddle. In another aspect, it provides a sense of profound frustration, almost at times as if the denizens were already in hell, so that specious seeming hopes are promoted, with brave fixations on this or that cloud as foundation. A combination of affliction, infliction and despising, is provided with pseudo-objects of admiration, anti-heroes of depravity or dark designs, while all the time, the tornado is just over the horizon. Thus do we find, and
thus it was to be; and as it was to be, so it comes to be in its predicted
SETTING: with such a mode, such a vogue,
such an appeal, the very word ANGST highlighted in profusion, confusion and
exuberance, strangely allied to a such species of joyous sorrow, the latter the
sovereign, the former the slave, that it is more like a storm than a norm.
Yet here, it is the
storm which IS the norm.
As Jesus Christ
predicted would be the case in the elaborate prophetic scenario provided (cf.
Luke 21, Matthew 24), men’s hearts are indeed failing them for fear, flailing
in the meaningless, wandering into the gloom, specializing in the tomb of hope,
the absence of joy and the presence of negative affirmations, wry and askew.
Again, ONE EXAMPLE in the field of angst takes a more positive tack. It ASKS you to realise “why youth is king” – it
sounds like eat, drink and be merry psychologically, for tomorrow, you can forget
it …! What can you do! Hollow, it resounds with emptiness; empty it hurts the
ear, for it lacks all tune, being untuned to its pitch, unturned to its source,
like a wayward soldier straying through the fields, not marching where he belongs,
because he has never even found his unit. He may drink while he walks in the
mine-field, but his oblivion is neither natural nor wise.
But let us proceed a
little further in this case.
In this case, we find
these words (slightly adjusted):
"Have you ever felt
alone? have you ever wondered if others think the same things as you? have you
ever wanted to say something, but you just didn't know how to express it? does
anger ever coarse through your veins? does love ever touch your lips? do you
see the world in beautiful, bright colors some days, but in a darker shade of
grey other days? when you wake up, do you wish for a loving, caring person to
be in your bathroom, only to find cockroaches? does life sometimes seem like a
video game, only you can't ever win this one? do you want to know why you're here?
do you know why youth is king? do you ever feel hapless in the hands of a
lesser god? if you answered yes to any of these questions, do is the zine for
you."
Here even “course” is
spelt “coarse”, presumably inadvertently, but it tends to signal the sense of
the scene. There is the sense of tension in hopelessness, frustration and
despair, hope in the ephemeral and religious confusion in profusion, as if
taut, tense words of disallegiance could substitute for the place of peace.
Here is the starkness of solitude which though shared, borders on despair and
breaches hope with haplessness, the energy of despair seeking to despoil forms
or deny principles, like a passing jab with a dagger.
More of the varieties of
angst, this is the message of rounding up the hapless, for whatever purpose. The
testimony ? it appears one of human
terrains in tension, spiritually dyspeptic, hopeless in frustration, staccato
in breach.
Then, in an excerpt from
The
German Way, by Hyde Flippo,
Passport, we have this contribution to our survey. It is helpful in directly
addressing the term at which we are looking!
Angst
“The German word Angst, fear,
came into the English language in the early 1940s. In its English, psychiatric
sense, "angst" signifies a feeling of insecurity, anxiety, or
apprehension. So it is only appropriate that the word comes to us from German,
a language spoken by people who are constantly wracked by angst, and who almost
seem to enjoy it.
Germans like to worry.
They worry about politics. They worry about the environment. They worry about
their national identity and their image abroad. They worry about the economy.
They worry about worrying. It's not that Germans don't like to have a good
time. It's just that they seem to be able to have a good time worrying. They
enjoy discussing their worries. Criticism is a national pastime. Journalists do
this on the editorial pages of newspapers and magazines. The average German
does so in letters to the editor or over a beer at the local Gastwirtschaft.
This Germanic trait is also carried on, to a lesser degree, by the Austrians
and the German-speaking Swiss.
Opinion polls conducted
in the German-speaking world tend to show a more pessimistic view of things
than might generally be the case in many other countries. But, if challenged,
the Germans, Austrians, and Swiss would tend to respond that they are merely
being more realistic than the overly optimistic Pollyannas in other countries.”
This then is a German
specialization, but what of angst does it show ? It is the testament of worry, dissatisfaction, nervous reaction,
where ‘realism’ is another name for nameless woe.”
ANOTHER case is interesting in
approaching space in its angst.
Here we find this
(slightly adjusted here, for ease of understanding, but the paucity of original
punctuation provided does tend to suggest a sort of unstyled residue of feeling,
a desire for expression without form):
“The vastness of outerspace
is humanly ungraspable. There are billions of humans on earth; there are
billions of stars in a galaxy; and there are billions of galaxies in the
universe.
“NASA aimed the Hubble
space telescope at a small black patch of seemingly black sky, the deep field
south observation. Each one of those little fuzzy things is a galaxy.”
He proceeds:
“It all leads to the
feeling of triviality, which leads to apathy. You are so small. So small. There
are all those galaxies out there and you are just this little thing on one
planet next to one star in one of them. And you are only one of six billion
plus.
“Isn't it overwhelming?
all those people you will never know, will never meet. I've spent years at MIT.
Everyone has a username… I hardly know
any of these people, and this is my environment…”
NOT ANGST BUT AWE, NOT PROVOCATION BUT PARDON
Here what
do we find ?
It is poignancy indeed, a sense of sincerity allied
with a wandering wondering which finds no slacking of its thirst, nor any
slaking. The sheer size of God’s inventions in space, like the sheer
microscopic accuracy of His inventions in our own DNA, the precision of code
stunning in its felicity, the marvel of there being only one biological
language for creating new buildings of life on the established pattern basis, the
whole staggering in its performance, this does not evoke here the realities of
its sufficient and necessary cause.
It feels like the case of a child lost in the vast
wonders of a ducal castle, where the Duke is not acknowledged, and the purpose
of his power is not received. What is the more stable, becomes the very
rumbling of inner instability, and what is the more glorious becomes the
seething source of divorce from splendour, one calling the ducal grounds an
enigma, and his own place a worry instead of a wonder. Clearly, he should meet
the Duke, or in the interim, read what he has written about his grounds, so
finding the map and the meaning, and verifying these, seek the relish of
reality.
Wonder in woe if you wish, but here we are,
individually POSSESSED of this protoplasmic prototype in our own persons, this
mental acumen, this spiritual telescope of survey, this profundity of synthesis
of all of this in our own persons, this energy of logic, this soaring rationale
of reason, this universe of confirmation, verification and homogenous
attestation, which some ignoring, lean towards angst, impoverished amidst
riches, willfully enduring the anxieties of an oblivion which fails to occur,
for there is a limit to drunkenness while life endures.
While space signals (to our observation) an endless
majesty of grandeur, like the footprints of an elephant, examined by a virus
(if it could do so!), people try to fit a face on God which does not fit, since
it is His own, made manifest in Jesus Christ (SMR Chs.
1-3, 5-9). They take faces from philosophic corpses which will not live, and
seek to apply these to the living God, as if the new technologies of surgery
were applicable to the Eternal Spirit who made man. They spend time with their
techniques, but fail to consider what they do. It is not with the dead, one has
to do, but with the living, whose energetic word has told of all of this (cf.
II Timothy 3, II Peter 2-3), this evanescent evasiveness, this love of form not
function in the spiritual realm, where man makes folly rule which, lacking
regality, leaves mere misrule of thought and endless confusion. Does not hell
have its ante-rooms!
To all of this is allied the sense of personal
space, large but vacuous, that of people lacking the power to identify with
themselves or each other in any depth. This is what the feeling seems to be, in
such a case as this: neither can they identify themselves nor identify with each
other, for they use ‘names’ but know no
faces; or it could be even
extended, in this way, that they meet exterior and even engineered forms,
but do not meet the person under the mask. How COULD they find meaning when
they carefully evacuate it by their assumptions, foundling thoughts that have
no base, basis or ground in reason! (cf. SMR Ch.
3)! Of this phase, the word of God in II Timothy declares that many will
have a FORM of godliness, but DENY its power.
Remove the principle and you remove the
comprehension. Turn personality in ‘principle’, ignoring the construction of
the principle and its impotence, and what do you expect ? You expect to find
what is found, and this too, it is verification of the biblical analysis. You
find emptiness, for the house IS empty (except of memory and of periodic return)
when you send the children to the country, as in
When however adults do these things to themselves
for their own reasons, it is only to the
land of wandering , of Nod, that they come,
like the children of Israel in that fateful failure after they were
afraid to enter the promised land. There was indeed a meaning to their
wandering in those ancient days (around 1400 B.C.): it RESULTED from a failure
to do what they had to do.
Fortunately we have an answer at hand, the antidote
to wandering, the path of wisdom and of holiness, of the knowledge of God, and
it is not to be found in 40 years, but now (II Corinthians 6:1); not in endless
rebuke but in the Redeemer. Neither this world nor Christ’s salvation is
offered for ever (Matthew 25), though once taken, it lasts for eternity (Isaiah
51:6, John
This is so like a personality vitamin deficiency
that it almost is sad enough for tears. The liberation of the understanding to
appreciate the necessary minimal causation of all of these magnitudes and
marvels is only one step; the pursuit of
truth to its source the next; of His word to its application, a third, the personal realisation
in the application of the presence of the
Lord, the next, and what follows ?
In His presence,
there is the understanding of the nature of the creation of persons; in
His wealth is the abortion of all sense of poverty; in His grace, of any sense
of denudation; in His pardon the understanding of His love; in His payment for
sin, the awareness of His delicious divine determination; in Him is the
experience of the Father, in mind, in heart and in spirit; in the Saviour, the Redeemer,
Jesus Christ, is the finding of the favour of the Almighty, so that unappalled by His splendour, one may worship
Him (John 20:27-29, Revelation 1-2) in the beauty of His holiness.
In Him and in His word, all intellectual problems are demitted (cf.
SMR Ch. 5 et al), all moral uncertainties
find their light to define the truth, all spiritual weakness finds strength,
the past is endued with the dew of understanding, the present with the clarity
of truth, the future with the certainty of continuity; in Him, the mortal gains
grant of immortality, and the unseen yearning of the spirit of man, finds rest.
Why ? IT IS restful to know God. These are the things needed by man, and these
it is which are given.
But in God there is always more (Ephesians
AN EXPECTED END
(Jeremiah 29:11)
Remove from sight this natural and normative
necessity for man, and what do you find ?
What would you EXPECT to find ? They are one.
Here then, since this too is allied in its
organisational presentation to angst, in our inductive approach, is the failing
of the heart in the vastness of the structure of which one forms, in body, a
part, and for which one’s freely given mind is an analytical instrument, one’s
spirit a site for survey. Once however THIS SPIRIT OF MAN is sited on its
foundation, it works well; and joy replaces the tension and the disillusion,
the sense of denial and the tension of being invalided away without validity,
while yet sensing the meaning is not far, and the purpose is yet there.
Sites without a situation are by their very nature
oppressed, and when the disjunction of much of the order of this world, both
progressive and predicted (cf. Revelation 6ff.), as it comes near to its due
date, arrives on the scene, there is but naturally an intensification of a
sense of being alien, meaningless or threatened, or some combination. Angst is
in its very terminology and meaning, a signal as a vogue, of this predicted
distress; and again, it is a form of involuntary predication by many of its
denizens of precisely the emotion, the wave of feeling, the state of heart and
mind and spirit, which Jesus Christ predicted. From biblical principles,
rational necessities, divine words alike, it has comes as it must
come. It is indeed, this new acme to angst with all its ramifications, rather like a retinue to announce His coming;
and if this be but drably dressed, yet it is intensely poignant, a matter which
makes one realise afresh the intensity of the feeling of Christ, when He wept
for Jerusalem (Luke 19:42ff.).
Could not one weep for the denizens of this world!
so anxious in their angst, whether it be superficial or hidden, clandestine,
covered or uncouth, that they voluntary sail into the sea of hopelessness, that
spiritual Sargasso, in which their being confounded is only a matter of time,
and the consequences an issue of eternity.
Yet there is NO LACK of mooring, of harbour, of
time for coming, of invitation, of love for the lost, of grace for pardon, of
power for purpose in life. It is now, the time, when the Lord must be found
(Isaiah 55:6). He is not fish available at the market for choice. You must take
Him if you find Him, in contrition, thankful that it is time, rejoicing in the
return of reality in its Spiritual Source, the Maker of Creation, the Redeemer
for man. His universal love is not a ground for individual fecklessness. If He
is to be sought when He may be found, it is implied that some might have wished
to seek Him, but lost in confusion, seek no more (cf. Predestination
and Freewill, Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 11).
Sailing around in the sweltering psychological
humidity is neither wise nor necessary. It is this which is cause for joy, that
any ship may come to harbour speedily, without even having to fill in any
papers! Submitting the papers of the heart, one finds written the handwriting
of God (cf. Ephesians 1:11-13, Hebrews 8:8ff.)
In such a way speaks Isaiah 55, so Isaiah 61:10, so
John
From heaven to heaven has come to the saving Son of
God; His elevation is but where He was before, but adorned with action both
adequate and the very epitome of a love both practical and prevailing. By His
Holy Spirit, sent in His name, those who by faith receive Him, His work and His
Lorship, have likewise the bond of
communion and the application of His governance, guidance, grace and
comradeship (John 16:8-12, 14:15-17, Ephesians 3:16, Galatians 5:16,25, Romans
8:9, 14,16,28, Ephesians 5:8).
NOTES
The evacuative expletive ? ‘Damn’ as verb or
adjective does not really change things, any more than such a reference to a
baby’s nappie would change it, or help the child.
§ From not belonging,
§ from the doom of deserved gloom,
§ from the realities of judgment,
§ from the grieving of God your Creator,
§ from the dismissal from the ranks of His people,
§ from being a stray on the way,
§
without hope (Ephesians 2:3,12),
§
without meaning, except as with old parts of some
vehicle long disused (Psalm 1),
§
without a way, and witless of your place, giving
neglect to the grace which the sovereign Father had provided for your
acceptance;
§ from negligence
o
towards the
necessities of pardon,
o
the need of
emplacement in your family, the people of God,
o
dismissal of
the work of the Saviour, who paid enough for all but forces none;
§ from the perplexities of the unworkable,
§ from the hollowness of pretence, from the
ingratitude of the impious and
§ the severance of the soul.
That ? It is merely a beginning, but without making
a litany, let us be realists!