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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 Byzantine Empire or the joys of frequent alcohol, he can usually be found working on his jaded manifesto,” at which it provides a comic’s name. That is, very nearly with minor adjustments for clarity, what is there.

 

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.

 

Doomed to Obscurity

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 Britain in World War II, to avoid the onset of challenging reality.

 

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 10:27-28); and the door to it MUST be entered. Even on an excursion, you need to enter the door of the conveyance.  And this ? It is far more than an  excursion; it is life. But what of the angst that whines, whimpers, is brash for a time, is poignant, which seeks and is ashamed of its seeking, which is both abrasive and evasive ?

 

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 3:20). He is ALIVE, and while He does not change, when you are a friend of the God of infinity and eternity, there is no lack! You love the picture ? Love the artist. This is far better, and unlimited are His powers to create.

 

 

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  4:14, 10:9 and so 10:27-28, Acts 2:36ff., Isaiah 45:22-25. Even the “ends of the earth” are invited to “look to Me, and be saved”*2! Even the spiritually deformed (and all in one sense or another are so, without Christ – Isaiah 53:6) will be straightened, and those who resign as ‘gods’ to become children of God, have at once, by His freely offered grace and prodigiously costly redemption on the Cross (Galatians 3:1-13, II Corinthians 5:17-21), an immediately available Father of perfection, and in Christ, the brother of approach.

 

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

 

*1

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.

 

 

*2 Saved from what ?

 

§ 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!