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CHAPTER TWO

THE CAPTAINCY OF VICE

A Voyage in Vain

THE MISCREANCY OF DESECRATION AT SEA

and the Necessary Embarkation in Christ

for the BON VOYAGE

News 369

Incorporating ... the Temple, the Mosque and the Cartoons

While the presence of news items is dotted here and there,
there significance is so great as to render this a news item, inter alia

THE DIMNESS

of the Lazy Haze and Mist when the Truth is Missed

"Look among the nations and watch—

Be utterly astounded!

For I will work a work in your days

Which you would not believe, though it were told you.

 

"For indeed I am raising up the Chaldeans,

A bitter and hasty nation

Which marches through the breadth of the earth,

To possess dwelling places that are not theirs.

"They are terrible and dreadful;

Their judgment and their dignity proceed from themselves.

 

"Their horses also are swifter than leopards,

And more fierce than evening wolves.

Their chargers charge ahead;

Their cavalry comes from afar;

They fly as the eagle that hastens to eat.

 

"They all come for violence;

Their faces are set like the east wind.

They gather captives like sand.

They scoff at kings,

And princes are scorned by them.

They deride every stronghold,

For they heap up earthen mounds and seize it.

 

"Then his mind changes, and he transgresses;

He commits offense,

       Ascribing this power to his god."

In Jeremiah 48:2, we see the divine rebuke to the proto-Hamas, to Moab:

"No more praise of Moab.

In Heshbon they have devised evil against her:

'Come, and let us cut her off as a nation.'

You also shall be cut down,

O Madmen!

The sword shall pursue you."

In this verse and indeed in several following, God designates the one with this aspiration to "cut off" Israel "from being a nation": Madman! Arrogance in the face of the divine writ and covenant (Galloping Events ... Ch. 4), including its unconditional elements, is a form of insanity according to the Lord, a spiritual madness!

Many a time has such belligerence been savage, severe and vocal. It was so more conspicuously, but no more certainly, with Hitler, a prime opponent of the Jew; it  has been so in pogroms, in persecutions, in the Inquisition, whether the annihilative mode was religious, political or social; and it has not prevailed. The generation of Israel, the nation and the land, has not failed as Christ said it would not, till He came (Matthew 24:34). The return of Christ with the Jew extinct was not to be; for ALL that He said was to come before He returned is coming like an express train, the rails echoing to its beat. His return is to find that breed, that Israel,  still intact. Indeed, in Luke 21:24, we find that at the time near His return, Israel itself, yes with Jerusalem, will be restored to the Jew.

That, of course, has happened, courtesy of 1948, 1967; and it is small wonder that the devil has the most intense passion to make it otherwise, for he always loves to abort the word of God; and being thwarted EVERY TIME in such endeavours, whether by misrepresenting it, or making ignorant claims contrary to fact, only to be rebutted by fact, he is naturally like someone always defeated in the first round of a tournament. He has ardent, indeed burning aspirations to do rather better. With God, however, no one ever wins the first round, for even when, as in the crucifixion of Christ, the most impressive seeming display of devilry, there seemed to be a vast triumph, yet it was in fact a colossal defeat.

Not merely was He resurrected, not only did Christ arise, but they were wholly unable to display the corpse on the news of His resurrection, neither Rome in its imperial powers not the regalities of the land or the priests, whose intense hatred and envy was a goad imperious to their misled minds, but worse than this, the entire procedure was precisely as predicted: the hatred, the death, the manner of it, the date of it (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4), the result of it in the resurrection, the Gospel resulting from it, the progress of that Gospel and the state of the nations as the time for the next palatial step came, the return of the Crucified One to be King, not only of Israel, but over the entire globe.

These things have often been seen on this site, and notably in SMR Ch. 9, but our current point on the ill-fated voyages of man, is zeroing in on muddled malice among spiritual misfits, and the vanity and frustration of having a devious captain like the devil, in autocratic and presumptuous control, while a spiritual King indeed is available, and will shortly return with the same power with which He created the universe, having tested, tested in all the voyages of man and of men, the heart. It is NECESSARY, if you are to worship the Lord, to do so in spirit and in truth (John 4), so that there is an IMPETUS and an IMPERIAL necessity to that end, which makes men tremble or disdain; but it is a matter which finds man out.

It found out ancient Israel, for God has no favourites, though He uses many to show to others the truth, and keeps covenant with those who come to Him on His own delightfully and indeed gloriously gracious terms. Life shows continually both the magnificent lovingkindness of the Lord, when you stay in the place assigned, and the horrendous results of setting off on voyages of lust and wilfulness, as if you invented the world or it were under your control, as an individual (like Napoleon), a nation (like the USSR), or an Empire (like that of Japan).

But man is slow to learn, like one perpetually in grade one, and never advancing, so that the world is whirling into pressures, problems and portents unspeakable, millions of starving children and slain men and women added to the funeral pyre of the ire of the imprisoned passions, misdirected and now released with increasing power. So sails the pretentious arrogance of man, his own hazard in a world he neither made nor understands, and in which his devious ways destroy the very tissues of wisdom, which might have kept out the diseases of the soul.

In all this, then, as we are seeing in Jeremiah 48 with Moab, a nation lacking even a covenantal relationship, one with NOTHING,  God exposes His heart, while revealing their end, its reason and its pathos.

As to the last, in the very midst of judgment, He declares this, of Moab (red colour added):

                    For the men of Kir Heres."

It is the LORD whose heart shall wail like flutes, and who will mourn! This is uttered in a composure of judgment and heart. Long has the evil been committed, and now its result comes - and the composition of the whole from His word is outlined in SMR pp.  1111.

For Israel too God showed the most intense compassion, but not one which would abort truth or preclude judgment when for centuries they aborted truth, denied mercy and spread evil as if casting sores into wounds among the people (Amos is eloquent on the processes involved, as is Zephaniah, and Isaiah in Ch. 1, 6, 29). Indeed, you see this compassion,  for example, in Jeremiah 31:16-20:

"Thus says the Lord:

                          I will surely have mercy on him, says the Lord.' "

One cannot but notice the prelude to this last point: the repentance of Ephraim, in yearning earnestness of heart, "Restore me and I will return, for You are the Lord my God."

While God is Himself in the ultimate control, this is not the same as assuming He obliterates the very image-of-God status of man. Rather, it shows that knowing it, He interprets it and ensures reality proceeds, not from superficial but in ultimate terms (cf. Predestination and Freewill, Great Execrations, Great Enervations, Greater Grace Chs.    7 and  9, The Kingdom of Heaven Ch.   3).

The realisation of reality is crucial to man before God as indeed for his own part, and its activation is well within the capacity of God, even for the furthest removed from Himself, but not by force does He act, and THEREFORE His heart is so moved as He describes. He would have all (I Timothy 2, Colossians 1, Ezekiel 33:11), but both acts in love with restraint, and takes only His own, citing man for his obduracy (John 3:17,19,36). To seek to desecrate the word of God by distorting these facts is just as hideous a voyage as is the desire to make knowledge a captive to confusion, as if God did not KNOW His own from all eternity (Ephesians 1:4), or as if He did not have open desire for all, or in His own total sovereignty, redeem for ever those who are His.

Many are the false voyages of man, vast is the compassion of God, but in the end, truth is not available for perishing, though it be crucified (John 14:6, Psalm 2), and resurrection is the certain answer, whether with the body of the Lord Himself, restored to life, or with the restored Israel, now back in its land ACCORDING to divine promise, yes in Jerusalem, despite its continuing unbelief. This also is as predicted, Ezekiel 37's two phase restoration a famed exhibit of the dual process (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 10, esp. *1A), first the people coming back physically, and then by a separate action, coming back to spiritual life in the Lord. It is in Ezekiel 36:22 with the sequence of return to the land and to the Lord, as also in Isaiah 42:18ff.) that we see that the whole operation is one of GRACE in the midst of disgrace, since the people as a nation had left the Lord.

Indeed in Ezekiel 36, God in bringing them back to the ultimate restoration, in which comes their vast all but national conversion (Zechariah 12:10), makes strong voice for the fact that it is NOT FOR YOUR SAKES, that the nation is brought back, but because He has pity on His name. The result and cause of it in the heart of God, is seen in Micah 7:19ff.:

                           From days of old."

Having promised, He will do; and knowing all, He does not vary. Merciful in heart (Micah 7:19ff.), He rejoices with relish in the astounding events He brings in the midst of apparent ruin, fulfilling His undertakings, freely made, like a father at last seeing his son come true, not to dream, but in history.

Alas the interim!

THE DIZZINESS

Man too has his perpetual style loves, but not in goodness, for lust covering reality, brings shame.

Thus man loves idols of the mind, or the hand, or the will. Man tends to love the leader who in magnificent disregard of ANYTHING, has his plan, program and practice, though more than 6 million Jews must die, and Europe must writhe. Man in the flesh loves the plans of philosophy no less, so that the long dead and moulding corpse of Darwinism is kept as a shrine, where many still worship 'Nature' as if obsessed. On this, see Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch.   4  - Darwin dead with his ideological corpse, with Ch.    3 - man shrieking for the lost 'nature' idol, and keeping its moribund image in the sanctum, along with Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6, exhibiting misled man with the anguish of the broken-hearted idol worshipper.

In vain does Denton with exquisite thoroughness (EVOLUTION: A Theory in Crisis) declare of the world of generations of living creatures, that

"The concept of the continuity of nature has existed in the mind of man,
never in the facts of nature."

Indeed, from the micro-biological to the macro, he presents the FACTS that "the anti-evolutionary thesis argued in this book, the idea that life might be fundamentally a discontinuous phenomenon, runs counter to the whole thrust of modern biological thought."

There is, he declares,

"nothing in in all the realm of biology, nor in the more fundamental realm of physics,
which calls for the continuity of life on earth to be a necessary law of nature."^*1A  

Never has it been possible, he continues, regarding the aggressive insistence of philosophy in much modern thought, on some kind of transitional mutation of things upward, progressively, the evolutionary stance and posture, "to provide any direct empirical or observational evidence for its support" (as given on p. 353).

The voyage of Darwinianism has been a disaster (cf. SMR pp. 140-150).
That is not the way it happens, as the evidence denounces the desire
with consistent voice, like a choir in full throat (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!).

Indeed, whether we start with

	the early Greek philosophers (Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13), wanting water, fire, air, change, flux, to arise and create or precede and depute, themselves causeless, are found witless arbiters of the arbiter, man. From him,  they are as far as is painting a masterpiece from paints, and these from minerals,  exposing in their dreamings, mere imaginations without legs, stomach or head, principle or power, or exemplification of their chosen ways; or
	with Aristotle, more meaningful but still enshrined in mist, seeking types to be endlessly insistent on coming to be, designs perfected with a dynamic of necessity arising like all else in this distorted realm, from nowhere, his God being too preoccupied with being himself; or
	with the idolatries exposed in the prophets of the Bible in the Old Testament, Phoenician and Canaanite carry-overs and acquisitions, popular and populous gods, going about their imagined adventures and consumption of devotees - for Moloch, this  more literally in the case of burnt up children: exemplars of the butt of lust, not the rule of liberty and law, of ruin, and not of life: the career is the same. It imagines what it does not find, and does not account for what it does find. There is a certain disagreeable dizziness, as if the spirit of man were moribund, floribund, or both, flowering in death, and dying amidst its flowers of the illicit, like narcotic plants, set in damp soil.

Indeed, whether with Hinduism you have the 'roaring silence' where nothing speaks so well that it cannot be heard, or the voices of many gods, arising from a unity from which they are dispossessed (cf. SMR pp. 995ff.), yes or Buddha, despairing and not without reason, of this motley collection, and seeking without any actual knowledge, to give some account of some way or other which would be helpful in navigating life without meaning, basis or cause (cf. SMR pp. 1011ff. ), it is one. They contribute nothing to reason, no ground for life, no testable account to add to a missing logic; and the silence continues amongst a multitude of voices.

Moreover, as noted on p. 999 of SMR, there is a constant strain in the spiritual besottedness that invents the creation, without inventor, invention or conceptual power, imagination or even mind, whether from East or West. It is worse than a death rattle: it is the voice of a somnambulist, rattled by death. He sees, but does not perceive; he considers, but does not think, he invokes causes in his thought, but dismisses them in his operas, which he then sends to 'science' falsely so-called, which with dying flourish, inserts them into the process, and comes back with belligerent nothingnesses, good enough to match the Hindu passion, and the Buddhist nullity.

The navigators have called endlessly on missing ports, which are not there, and their efforts to land in their designated harbours are constantly futile; for these too, they  are not there. Their round the world trips are trips but of imagination; and the ports of call, so fabulous in the creativity of their own minds, are found to be missing on the surface of the practical earth, so that those who pay their fares in colleges and educational sites innumerable for this 'trip' might as well have used marijuana.

Let us recall the points made earlier, in SMR, then, with slight addition..

4. EAST WEST, GOD'S BEST At this point, there are undoubted similarities between this Eastern religion, and the Western dreamtime of evolutionism. On the latter philosophy, questions not dissimiliar to those used here, may be asked.
(Cf. pp. 88, 252Aff. supra.)
Thus, we enquire of it:

Shall ''Chance'' give birth to cytological OR intellectual language,
will Chance form concepts,
grant comprehension,
conceive perspectives
or ascertain its own 'Nature'!

Such an idea is merely a mystic miasma of smuggled and unnamed spirituality,
if not indeed the very heart of a baudy seraglio of illicit mental lust,
an imbroglio of the mind!
And all of this, what does it rest on ?

On Mr Matter, we may call him in such a construction, for 'he' then has all of the habiliments of personality: Matter! which itself is only a theory of mind...

It is remarkable what can be done when logic is captive to language and language to lust.

Children of consciousness, including man, are the spawn of this dream; but daydreams do not account for the birth of the earth and all that is in it. They merely emphasize the gap between raving and reality.

Designers know the value of imagination, indeed, the wonder of moving in a world of thought; but they also know that the translation into the world of reality, of that dream, involves labour, effort, understanding of operations outside the mind: a hard task that requires a very sufficient cause to fulfil! It is time people ceased worshipping the 'paper' on which the language of life is written, and addressed themselves to its writer.

West and East, each in its own way, turn to myths, fables as was predicted for it all
(cf. p. 1025 infra).

It is such a lapse - one both ignominous and unconscionable - to avoid such a brilliant star: yes He made the stars, though men in billions prefer for themselves, a certain dimness! That God in His brilliance has suffered this to be so is part of His immeasurable depth, the creation of personality, and a testimony to the liberty love created for man. It was not however that man might engage in intemperate love of his self, but freely in love of the truth, which rejected,
brings the appalling and the pall, lies the debt for which reality exacts.
 

That God the Creator has provided freely for escape from this dimness, is profound love.
Man has been created with labour, in a real world; and in reality he must repent of his unrealism and his misuse of all that has been divinely accorded him.

By contrast, the living God, the testable God, the verifiable God, the eloquent and unchanging God, the one God of the Bible, both says and does; His adversaries say, and it does not happen.

That is the first observable difference.

Their exploratory voyages - like those of man now into space, which he litters like an impressive litterbug with atomic waste, as if bent on his own destruction, despite the biblical admonition (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3 ) -  come through unending endeavours towards the empty befuddlement of contrary thought consumed with contrariety^{* 1B.}  It has some parallel with the vapid thoughts of  the Neo-Nazis, yet struggling to re-arise in Germany, or the post-impressionistic Communists, as in China, where autocracy and capitalism (justly there, so-called) vie for control of the underprivileged and appallingly mistreated masses, whether in Tibet or the more rural areas (cf. Impossible to Men, Open to God Ch. 5, Journey to God or Fantasy's Flight to the Infernal Ch. 1).

Fantasy's flights are perennial whether her concern is with  God or man, with vice or virtue as a presence, lust or love, reality or rearguard actions for rebellion against the Lord are concerned. Especially is it so when the glory of God and the limitations of man, or his need to love in heart and not in vapour, are concerned.

Lamarck had evident fascination for Darwin, to make his engines start, to gain advance, but it failed^*1 , and neo-Darwinianism continued anyway, without uplift, imagining that a system which was in place, and did not rise by any conceivable means, would do so as if by inadvertence, as if 'chance', which merely is non-purposive action in a given system (without which, there would be no options to 'arise') would 'create'. It would be, for all the world, as if it had a mind and imagination, technical skills with language and command and integrational integrity for making it all work simultaneously, as it must, if it is to work at all.

Indeed, as Jerry Bergman points out in the article noted in *1, Darwin was still influenced by Lamarck; and naturally enough, he liked the concept of inbuilt striving and seeking, as if a deus in machina were at work, sensing need, adapting genes, co-ordinating controls, correlating considerations, writing programs or whatever else would be involved. Yet the present machinery or methodology is never to be found, nor are these adventitious, meretricious and casually ingenious works before the  eye of man.

You can even find someone attempting to argue that although NOTHING is ever to be seen to the point of new design information to make new consequences of the same: yet it is all so slow that it is invisible, we are told, so that the imperceptible is at work with its missing apparatus, uncitable powers of operation, missing methods of creation, and contra-law ideas of construction. Here is reductio ad absurdum unblushing, contra-science with red face orating and irrationality on parade.  In fact, if we are interested in science, not fantasy, as to what are deemed the three basic laws of science, EACH ONE, verifies the Biblical account (cf. TMR Ch. 8).  Professor Barnes, Physics specialist and notable researcher of El Paso University, Texas pointed this out.

Each of these laws denies the roving imagination which, in replacement of scientific method, builds theory on what is NOT seen, where NO means are to be found. Revelation and reason are in tune, because reason is a product of the God who provides revelation, and only distortion of one or both of these domains provides confusion, that rich heritage-listed domain of carnal man, scientist or other.

Thus, in terms of the absurdities of evolutionism, NO principles of law correlate, and NO palaeontological affairs give account of the missing billions of in between somethings which do not appear in the performance, only in the opera notes of the production of fiction and fraud, which does not endure, whereas the diction of God verifies itself, because it does persist as it insists, and insist as it persists. Here as ever, it does so not least because it is right and never wrong, conserving its flight in the midst of the mists of man, unconquerable word to the incontinent heart of the factious creation, abuser of freedom, dissolver of liberty. True disbelievers become accustomed in much to disdaining fact for fancy. However, at times, even the cultural clutter awakes a little!

Small  wonder Gould expostulated at the folly of explaining loss (as he declares the biota to exhibit, to around 90% since earlier days) by imagined methods of gain!

For such 'trips', the fares in all scientific integrity ought to be returned to the vendors; but then, they have had long enough to see the results. These are given attention in Lectures on Creation, TMR Ch. 1, at end-note *2, including the following.

1. Dr Jerry Bergman, in his technical article, Mutations and Evolution (1995, Part 2, Creation-Ex Nihilo Technical Journal), cites Biologist L.R. Donaldson, Director of a study involving artificial selection from radiation-treated animals, after 5 years declaring:

"So far as I know we're not getting any good characteristics. You can't add when you are subtracting."

This is found in the summary from the University of Washington study, which also declares from experiment:

"Five years of tests have shown that radiation produces no abnormalities that do not occasionally show up in nature. But irradiated parents produce a much higher percentage of malformed offspring."

 

·  Of breeding work on forest trees given radiation treatment, Giertych is cited: "All we got were deformed freaks, absolutely useless in forestry." There was doubt if a single useful result occurred.

·  As to Drosophila, Thomas Morgan who started its study, bred about 900 consecutive generations, which Bergman notes as being the equivalent of some 25,000 years of human reproduction, but "ended with nothing more then deformed fruitflies." There is no clear advance anywhere.

Who could employ such a building method, as any of these, such a contender, but the alienated fancies of man!

·  Dr Jay L. Wile in his "Beneficial Mutations" article (op.cit. Vol.1, 1992) made massive computer simulations of chance mutation, allowing by a refinement for advantage to more sensible changes from an interpretive viewpoint. He found, as theoretically normal for information theory, that so far from advance, there was SYSTEMATIC trend to incomprehensibility as he, by random methods altered space, content, sequence, so that a simple sentence resulted in no product that made sense after 10,000 generations, even specious sense (allowable words) being destroyed syntactically for any useful function.

·  This, he noted, was "not surprising to anyone who has studied information theory ... (which) states that any highly-developed system of information will be harmed by the random mutation of any of its components." Of a 30,000 generation approach to his computer simulation result, he noted "the effect of aeons of time (30,000 human generations correspond to approximately 600,000 years ) and natural selection do nothing to damage the conclusions of the theory..."

(Cf. SMR p. 134; and parallel pp, 234-236, 252Aff..)

·  To revert: Bergman cites Rust - "Each of the newly emerged minimal functions [from mutations] must be capable of improvement by random mutations - up to the near-perfection usually found in present organisms... Not even a single "positive" or adaptive mutation, in the sense of an improved function previously unavailable, has been documented in any organism." (Italics added.)

·  He proceeds: "Takeover of functions from other organisms, by means of episomes, transduction, genetic recombination, allele assortment and the like, cannot be counted as an emergence of a new or improved function in the biosphere, nor can regaining a function lost previously, or the display, under stress, of a temporarily unused function." (Cf. SMR pp. 215,116, 121.)

·  Thus the absorption of new material into viruses from existing organisms is irrelevant to organic evolution, as is the defective arrival of genes which limit, for example, the absorption of an antibiotic, by downgrading efficiency in the organism. As Dr Wieland points out, 'superbugs' when given back the competitive situation hospitals tend to reduce by antibiotics, no longer enjoy the advantage of their deformities.

·  DNA can certainly be altered by impact, as can many designs, and this may give temporary advantage in such specialised circumstances, posing a threat to human life: but this is no case of superior function not before present, in the world of design, which is what is relevant to our discussion. Advantage in survival within such special situations may occur; arrival however of more advanced, technically more developed designs, this is another matter. It is not found. (See SMR pp. 148, 214-220; also *1 above.)

 As noted in some detail  Earth Spasm ... Ch. 1, moreover, presuppositions which make computer programs where mathematics slaves in accord with PURPOSE, these are not apt for any program to mimick what lacks it! This is an import from creationism, an attempt to kidnap the power of God in the mindlessness of matter. The point is this: that IF you select what YOU in your 'wisdom' see as moving to improvement, this is precisely what blindness, in its non-wisdom, non-perception, and non-knowledge, and its complete obscuration on design, its preliminaries, pre-dispositions and ingredients, needs and progress, does not KNOW or SELECT. Otherwise, of course, you are simply playing a game BY WISDOM to inject its RESULTS into a system which lacks, on this model, its EXISTENCE!

Accordingly, the absence for any such movement in principle, is paralleled by its absence in practice. In vain do they look for mutant organs, only fully formed and functional types ever being found, for a mutant series of ascending cells, for mutant beasts, equipped with those block-headed consequences of a moronic 'nature' which somehow were imagined to find their way into existence. And this ? even if it were to come, it would be despite their load of the amorphous, ill-formed and unusable, waiting to become useful after or over a few millions of years (cf. SMR p. 208)..

THE REPORTS OF THE PORTS

When they call in at the port of new information for design mutation, or at that of other planets doing the job of creation (by the same absent means - cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3), or X-ray 'help' to effect change of design, through bombardment, finding only devastation or peers often devitalised, or at that of  palaeontological gradualism, so splendidly unwilling to conform (cf. SMR pp. 200ff., 208ff., 160ff.) to their plans, or at that of logical acuity (cf.  SMR pp.  308ff., 312ff., 162ff.) or class-conformity to the theory, in terms of special types of creation (cf. SMR pp.  199ff., 235ff.): there is only failure. What SHOULD be, on the magical theorems of evolutionism, IS NOT. The theory is dead; the pall-bearers refuse to arrive.

Not only is there no 'WELCOME!' sign at these ports of call, in verification or validity-creation, but there is no sign at all, since the ports are not there, for the sand dunes stare back at the repulsed crew, as at the sleepy passengers, who are all set to enjoy the ride in any case, since it was so expensive.

In SMR, we find some of the results of the tour - for example on pp. 159ff.

Thus Dr Duane Gish in his Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record, p. 55 notes the following, of this allegedly near to first step in life:

In Cambrian rocks are found fossils of trilobites, sponges, brachiopods, worms, jellyfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, swimming crustaceans, sea lilies, and other complex invertebrates. The appearance of this great variety of complex creatures is so startlingly sudden-that it is commonly referred to as the "Cambrian explosion" in geological literature.

From single-celled to highly complex creatures is one apparent gradation! Indeed, since Gish wrote, Stephen Jay Gould has researched Canadian shale deposits further, and underlines the explosive magnificence of life in this - on the evolutionary scale - most early 'Age', in his book, Wonderful Life (1991 Penguin - *36, p. 234 infra). Taking say 32 major life phyla or basic categories as the modern earth's quota, Gould finds 15-17 phyla in this Canadian quarry - at the Cambrian level (p. 99 op.cit.)!

Of the 'prior' products which processive evolution would postulate, Gish declares:

Ever since Darwin the rocks have been intensely searched for this record, but to evolutionists the results have been agonizingly disappointing. Nowhere on earth - neither on any continent nor on the bottom of any ocean have we been able to find the intermediates between single-celled organisms and the complex invertebrates. Wherever or whenever we find them, right from the start jellyfish are jellyfish, trilobites are trilobites and sea urchins are sea urchins.

What makes this fact the more ironically delicate - is this. The eye of the trilobite is one of the complexities which in its own right presented so vast a problem to Darwin, as he dramatically acknowledged; and yet here is a complex version of the eye present in the Cambrian explosion, a brilliant and sophisticated product near what is allegedly the beginning phase of life, and its kindergarten, in the Cambrian 'era'!

As Gary Parker puts it (p. 91, Creation The Facts of Life):

The simplest fossil community, the "Trilobite Seas" (Cambrian system) contains almost all the major groups of animals, including the most complex invertebrates, the nautiloids, the highly complex trilobites... and showing a trilobite inset on p. 91, Parker notes: Many trilobites such as the one pictured... had extremely complex eyes- the math to understand the lens was not even worked out until the middle of the last century. (It. added.)

Nautiloids too are featured in the Cambrian fossils (Parker loc.cit.), of which Parker states these things. They are, he declares, 'members' of the most complex group of invertebrates we know anything about... and are part of a group which, he observes, - is equipped with "an eye somewhat like ours." Darwin's 'worst' horror, the eye, that obviously ridiculous proposition (as he with more candour than normal Darwinists, declared its arrival by his means to be), not only comes at all. On this basis, it came very near to the first in time!

A more glamorous crash dive for a test plane... it would be difficult even to imagine. Far from verification, this is justly called anti-verification. The theory is defunct in theory, by scientific method; though very well in psychological practice. Such is the fall of man, that when a desired theory falls, he can let it stand, by falling himself! Indeed, impassioned millions, like older classes of idolaters, virtually fall down before the delusive concepts for virtual worship, though as to science itself, it is not even present, being compatible only with fact, and hence incompatible with such scientistic solecisms. 

(‘Scientistic’ is defined by Webster as seeking to be scientific without being it,  ‘attempting or pretending to be scientific’.)

But of what order is this anti-verification ? Let us consider the ingredients of the matter. It involves and includes:

	a) failure to find what is predicted.
	b) failure to find anything like what is predicted.
	c) success in finding the exact opposite of what is predicted.
	d) success in finding multiplicity, complexity, variety and an extraordinarily wide coverage of living systems, coming both suddenly and 'early' at the very gates... of biological life... a testimony radically and ruinously contrary to all but magical and wholly unscientific auto-creation, in scope and character.

Indeed, the evidence smiles with a quiet and demure disdain on all the bustle of evolutionary theory.

Similarly, in SMR pp. 234ff. (slightly extended) , we discover more findings not in the tour guide's book, a matter of false advertising.

Of recent interest on this ancient topic, is Stephen Jay Gould's book, Wonderful Life. In this, he investigates the 'Burgess Shale' in Canada, one discovered by Charles Walcott, in British Columbia.

In 'checking out' the facts, he gathers data for the interesting declaration that diversity, ''disparity in anatomical design'' of life in these Cambrian rocks exceeds what is in our contemporary oceans. Of gradualistic concepts in the face of this vital profusion of multiply-modelled, hi-tech abounding life, Gould attests this: ''literally incomprehensible''! (Op.cit., pp. 208, 260; cf. p. 160 supra.) This he says well of the findings interpreted in their own naturalistic theories, which suicide repetitively, though none of the devotees duly don the garb of mourning, even naturalistic Gould expostulates about the horror of it all!

Not merely, then, is there a substantial contribution to currently known life immediately in this first basic 'geological age', as the theory has it: it exceeds what we now have in the oceans. A more delightfully sharp rebuke to the evolutionary notion of gradual arrivals could scarcely be constructed by Lewis Carroll, even with all his gifts, even if he set his mind to parody evolutionary pretensions. Here, however, the 'parody' is found... in the facts. Evolution is a parody of a scientific theory, one so gross, that if it were instead a scientific theory, those who hold it could be appalled by the gall of the maker of the parody.

Put more specifically, in terms of form: the theory of gradualism

is
 

a parody of the facts;

a rejection of the evidence;

falsified as a scientific theory by continual confirmation of this contradiction of what it would predict;

and its formally defunct character is re-asserted with the progress of knowledge,
with increasing and now mortifying force and firmness. That is its logical character.

It is like the corpse of Lenin: very dead, but surprising kept on view. In this case, however, wanton devotee work is not interested in acknowledging that the corpse is (scientifically) dead.
 

Indeed, to revert to Denton, he is at pains to point out the non-conformity in terms of evolutionary theory, to gradualism, noting the symmetry and distinctness of micro-biological relationships, underlying much of the grosser features of creatures supposedly merging into one another, but in fact abruptly diverse and divergent (cf. Denton, op. cit. pp. 278-286). Moreover, he refers to the mathematical precision of divisions, with nothing resembling a merger, thus:

"There is a total absence of partially inclusive or intermediate classes, and therefore none of the groups traditionally cited by evolutionary biologists as intermediate gives even the slightest hint of a supposedly transitional character."

He proceeds:

"The molecules give no support to the traditional view of the vertebrates as a series of increasingly advanced classes leading from the cyclostomes to the mammals. In fact, when the vertebrates are compared with the non-vertebrate organisms, all types are equidistant apart" (p. 286).  Groups are "highly specialised and isolated" and nothing is 'primitive' in some 'scale' of vertebrates, in these terms.

He deems these developments a startling and vastly impactive new dimension, and in addition to the mathematical precision underlying divisions of living creatures, and the non-merging characteristics of the specialised types at this protein and molecular level, "the divisions turned out to be more mathematically perfect than even most die-hard typologists would have predicted..." and molecules stubbornly refuse to provide evidence of sequential arrangements in diverse creations over time.

Rather, they

"reaffirm the traditional view that the system of nature conforms fundamentally to a highly ordered hierarchical scheme from which all direct evidence of evolution is emphatically absent."

It is even so in the "incredibly diverse" realm of bacteria. There is, indeed, in groups by evolutionists cited as intermediate in some sense,  nevertheless an empirical failure to give "even the slightest hint of a supposedly transitional character." In fact, (p.  290), molecular divergence, say amongst frogs, can be as great as that between mammals, though very diverse morphologically.

On p. 303, Denton is seen to  marvel at the finding of lungfish, on the evolutionary fantasy, separated by hundreds of millions of years from the present, but without any slightest hint of the changes in the cardiovascular system, for example, dramatic and distinct,  which theory likes to imagine repetitively arriving on some escalator of change, complete with functionality achieved at each dreamed stage.

This is conceived, but never found,  despite large numbers of ineffective changes for aeons to allow what has no power to create, nevertheless to do so, in the brave new world of Vernian imagination, in the very midst of merely unarticulated confusion. Such is the view of evolutionism, things having to progress by mere will of the thinker, despite an increasing  drag existing useless for long, before any even theoretical thought of usefulness can 'arise', in a supposed sea of inchoate indifference.

From this sloppily sub-standard thought in the mind of the theorist,  there is to come in the ways of 'nature', what builds the precise divisions and the unmerging parameters in both gross and minute features, which in living things are the actual FACTS. Rarely in the history of the intellectually hysterical has the equal of this mental malaise been found, except of course in the more and more usual rantings of the anti-God regime, in the various preliminaries of the naturalistic fallacy.

In fact, when it comes to the facts of things living, the rule is the coherent, the paradigm of reality is the cohesive, with the non-transitional things found, exhibiting the phenomena that arise from logical thoughts,  when applied with  their classificatory and specialised creative skills. This, the attested fact emphasised by Denton, is  the precise opposite of unformed and scattered events such are hypothesised to give birth to their opposite.

To try to force the negative and anti-verificatory evidence into evolutionary theory is like trying to force a child's arm into a two ton chain, to lift it. It is absurd, an imposture, thoughtless, irrelevant to systematic thought, an abuse of scientific method, a testimony to the flight from God through the callow obstinacy of breaking the rules of that method.

This is done by not explaining the data with theories to match, but explaining the theories as they grind into the facts, mauling them like a tractor at a Primary School, unable to stop, or with a drunk driver. It is not possible to over-state the folly of this evil theory, which has no passion but to avoid the truth, and seems to hypnotise so many, like some kind of special academic LSD.

It is time scientists en bloc returned to this glorious realm of facts, and became true to them, instead of holding on, like some drunkard with a hang-over, to the delusive bottle with both hands.

Scientific method has never become scientistic method, though many in these areas, insist on the scientistic, like members of some utterly irrational sect, convinced not only without evidence, but despite it.

The nugatory, obscure, the dim, the unformulable, nebulously irrelevant, the obfuscated, the imagery of imagination without the discipline of logic: this has become the farce of pseudo-science, the incubator for 'knowledge', especially the 'assured knowledge of science', which in its blatant self-advertisement, becomes a cover for confusion.

There is on exhibition in science falsely so-called,  in these flouted areas, the presumptuous confusions of frustrated desire, imported into science, under cover of darkness, immune to scientific method, free from verification, mocking at anti-verification, virtue and truth alike, indeed a projectile from regions where truth is in principle denied, a fitting tribute to the nonentity from which it comes.

In fact , there is NO LAW of evolution, says the famed Karl Popper (SMR p. 145), and how could there be, since it declines to occur in the realms of innovative, upgrading-design equivalent FACT for observation ?

What law would describe, in science, facts that are mere fashion, and do not have the boldness to show themselves, ever! Law in science is to cover tested hypothesis, sanctified by constant verification in assorted fields and in diverse conditions over time; it is not for anti-verification in assorted fields, over time, for a negativity so strong, that the very facts themselves do not cease to shrink from observability, from occurrence, but hide away, precisely as if told to do so by the Creator.

After all,  in the Bible, the word of God which never changes or has to, it is declared that His work of creation finished (Genesis 2). That, it is the testimony of the evidence, empirically, and of logic, rationally, and all the king's horses and all the king's men will not induce it to get going. "Its" do not become creators by whatever stimulus, for the imagination, discipline, devoted thought, conceptual fluency and over-riding power with the ingredients to match the concepts are not products of thoughtlessness, nor is the brilliance of the factual display, the result of a more than moronic mind, that does not even have the facility to exist! Such is the problem child of that rebel, evolutionism, with naturalism, its devoted cousin. 

The realm of creation begun and concluded is IGNORED in many rationally paralysed academic settings; and this is common; though this is the apt cover for the empirical attestation: while what is ignored by facts is chosen as 'scientific' in one of the most imperiously perverse obfuscations of science that could be imagined, even if the world were in the process of devastation, as if will be, in a time.

THAT coming end, like the beginning not desired by mere fancy (II Peter 3), that is in fact hidden now, since it is to occur later; just as the creation is hidden now, since it occurred in the past. Moreover, this tenderness to thinking of such things and aversion indeed, it is this which Peter predicts will  be the status quo as the world wanders on to this time of reckoning (II Peter 3:1-5 and following - as in Joyful Jottings  8). It IS the status quo! and the matter is fulfilled, its ludicrous logical solecism and scientistic fallacies making the verification of this prediction, now before our eyes as clearly as creation, the m ore remarkable.

The Bible has and has had it all covered for millenia, in the most precise conformity to fact; and to this valid and careful aspect of creationism, Denton also lends testimony (op. cit. pp. 353-354)! Here is what has been careful to be conformable to facts, he declares, not the myth of the Darwinian idea.

"The overriding supremacy of the myth" of Darwinianism, says Denton (p. 77), along with the assumption that it is shown to be so and merely being confirmed in various fields, is such that

"Nothing could be further from the truth" (p. 77).

He tries in another work to toy outside that myth, as does Gould, but neither provide anything to the point when they dip into these other realms of naturalistic fantasy^*2A . Nothing occurs but thought; for self-production of information does not find itself interested, in nature, which provides nothing. From this misconceived, mindless production unit of the products of mind there is nothing to be said, not a bird stirs, nor cheeps, nor does anything reply. 

 s

THE REPORT AT EACH PORT

IS NOT ONLY NEGATIVE, BUT IT

RAVES, AS THE PRODUCT OF PORT -

NOT THE MARITIME LINE,

BUT WINE

(Hosea 9:7)

Indeed, it is all imagination.  Call at ANY port and there is only BARREN SAND, with nothing written. The only thing written is the distinct, unvarying, never primitive, always precise, protein,  or other microbiological testimony, which like that of the palaeontological and the DNA, is not interested in presented hair or hide, ground or means, evidence or attestation of anything but direct  creation, with its variabilities inbuilt within its kind (cf. The Defining Drama Ch. 10).

Messing about with molecules is assumed,  and specialised exactitude is found; morphological meanders, are imagined, and equidistant arrangements in significant divisions may be found (op. cit. p.  283); what will DO is imagined, and marvels of what Denton conceives as the perfection puzzle, are to be found. If it is to be a port in the storm, it is not to be found. The cruise vessel returns, with ALL negatives reported, and they have a celebration of their success. But in what ? in self-delusion from the flotational ichor, or liquor of stupefaction.

Such is the idly repetitive folly of ignoring contrary and even contradictory facts, that it is as with ancient Israel is a case like this: "Who is blind as he who is perfect!" (Isaiah 42:19). Who see nothing at all, but those with their noses to the stones and their heads in the clouds,

Where the fact-ignoring, anti-verificatory passion mounts, it is there that the scientistic replaces the scientific in method, and modern man flounders in the face of fact, like the newly caught sword fish, in the boat, casting about with its elongated snout, to inflict injury, while itself in a hopeless position.

The results belie the cause imagined.

Whether it be

	the microscopic or the macroscopic, the gross structures or the mini-means,
	the hierarchical organisational mode,
	the protein brilliance and discreteness,
	the arrangement of types,
	the onset of design abundant and varied at what evolutionism deems the most early times,
	the scientific laws in major categories backing creationism to the point of being a virtual re-statement of it (cf. TMR Chs . 1   ,    8, The Wit ... Ch. 2) or
	the absenteeism in fossil records of transitional organs, of gradations in type, rather than variations in kind, which as in the Bible, in fact appear, or
	the stark brilliance of individual designs,
	the singularity of Biblical Creationism in meeting ALL the observed, empirical features and the logical constraints, that evolutionism meets not at all:

there is a vacuum where evolutionism roves.

There is, antithetically,  a fulness and satiety when facts instead, are brought under the surveillance of what is written in the Bible, a specialised approach to creationism, incapable of refutation for millenia.  They meld, the propositions of revelation and the revelations from empirical fact, like two devoted friends, each echoing, each supplementing, each rejoicing in the other.

If naturalism and its evolutionism reaches the F grade, unfit for further consideration until it meets ALL the facts without contradiction by them, then the realm of biblical creationism finds A grade, with nothing contradicted at all, and amazing formulations made available precisely mirroring the established empirical realities. The matter rests; it is only the words which chatter on, as if from disturbed colonies of monkeys, parakeets or hungry lions.

Similarly, in another species of human pseudo-autonomy, the great world religions outside the Bible, are as empty  before test as is naturalism, and as was in particular the vanity of the early Greek philosophers, or the political 'solutions' which working of old and anew, grind a few million to death, now here, now there amidst their ironic neglect of what man is, in their vain postulates for ruling him (cf.   Aviary of Idolatry and Questions and Answers Ch. 7). What is workable and what is in the Bible have a marvellous facility both in science and in human conduct, which currently regarding such things as Christ's words in the Sermon on the Mount as impractical, make a practice of the impossible, so that the nerves of the modern manipulees twitch as the records of cruelty, fraud and deviousness mount, as if to be placed as paper flowers, above the mounds of the corpses that result. Naturalism is dead, and few need mourn her impositions, arrogance and vamping ways.

These consignments of human beings against the facts of their lives (cf. SMR pp. 348ff.) is as bizarre an event in life, as is any other form of erratic naturalism, whether in theories of errant biology or other bigotry, disdaining test, and presenting only conflict with facts, with man and with God to the utter devastation of this planet amid grinding grief and whining whimpers of the young, as those of more mature age push down the accelerator of imagination, and call that science which ignores the contradictions, which in human terms, mean death.

The form of life remains, but its dynamic delights in truth, its virtue in any kind of validity, its humility before any type at all of verification, where man himself is concerned, his meaning, origin and destiny: this is dead amongst all this nugatory idolatry, and like an unraised Lazarus, it stinks.

Even Christ was crucified; but He, He arose from the dead according to long-stated plan which nothing could or empirically nothing did foil; whereas the false and merely imaginary rules of naturalistic  life lie dead, the modern substitute for the corpse that attested that death could not hold it. It stays dead; whereas Christ could never be grasped, walking from the tomb immune, triumphant by the announcement ahead of time, of some 1000 years, galvanising His people by His presence and the fact that He who raised the dead could Himself arise. After all, as He told them, when they asked for a 'sign',

"Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19), speaking of His body (2:21). Just as Abraham saw His day, death could not hold Him (Acts 2:23-24).

There is none to whom God does not give, in the rebellious trantrums of festering imagination, his come-uppance, whether it be life or death, healing or holiness, peace or purity, forecast or history.

That, it is the difference between God and man. Lazarus, and Christ's own body ARISE ON TIME, and meet every test, for nothing can imprison or corrupt them. The theories of naturalism have no power, lacking all go, all credibility, all empirical facade, and are enemies, awry with fact an incubus not to be borne.

Unfortunately for naturalism, and indeed it is the whole point of its folly, there is no deus in machina, continually doing its home-work, and information tends to decrease, not increase as Professor Gitt is at such pains in his field of specialty, to make clear, as if to the blind. Codified, commanded, co-ordinated things do not arise by systems not concerned with them, and chance does not invent new systems, since it is merely a name for the operation of old ones, according to type, specifications and structure. News and information, command and micro-systematics do not create themselves, unless where required to do so by sufficient command and condition. You do nothing by talking of little things or hopes or survival or anything else, other than orate; nor by such means do you or can make anything that simply is not there, act as if it were.

This naturalistic absentee shows none of its means or media, but in fact the exact opposite is empirically attested in editorial devices, brilliant, inbuilt, cellular,  directed at consistency of reproduction in life, as distinct from the fallacious image of it, wrought by liberty amiss, in the minds of that logical creation, to which freedom is conspicuously allied: mankind. Empirically, production at  this level has ceased, and the Producer has attested His word and verified and validated it uniquely, in which He states that this is the case^*2B. 

Yet imagination vexes itself into tantrums.

ALL that is required for basic movement, bits being irrelevant both in palaeontology and functionality alike, is an intensive combination of information, command, inter--systematic capacitation and contrivance, code and executive correlation with the multiplied requirements manifestly needed, to the point of requisition, and of course, what has a requisition notice served on it has to be THERE, at the time and in the place, the amount and the accessibility. All that is required for Shakespearean plays, is Shakespeare. It is simple ... but adequate. Not so in naturalism!

Dream to the contrary  is merely imagination, as if to say,

Well in the construction of a house, ALL you need is cement and concrete, water and labourers, a plan and a program, co-operation of workmen and the like, items and hardware of this type and that, the timing of the insertion, the skill to know how to do it, and really there is virtually nothing in it: it virtually makes itself.

Such might be the raving of some antiquated ex-builder, musing on the clumsiness of apprentices, and thinking back to his prime, and imagining after so long a time since he actually did it with sweat and an array of organisational connections and tradespeople, that it was 'easy'. Easy it may have seemed when the whole structure of information and appliances, people and organisation had been CREATED by his persistent efforts over years. It had, however to be created by intelligence.

It is the same in much investigation: it is ONLY that the DNA and the RNA and the ingredients an the timing and the code and the code carriers, and the modes of cell division, meiotic and mitotic, and the sequence of developmental viabilities for the stages of the coming to be of the embryo; it is ONLY that all this has to be right to the point that making an aircraft  is basically most simple, by comparison. NO system really does this; some systems exhibit it, but they do not invent themselves, but rather as Gitt points out, tend to uncreate themselves, information-wise.

And when life is based in much on commands, information is essential, exquisitely quintessential, and this codification and symbolic setting neither makes itself, nor commands itself, any more than does this page. It is not enough for a word or two to float by now and again; we need the lot and NOW together, for any operation. It is the same with nothing: it is not enough that nothing lies around for a long time, since time is not nothing, and there therefore could not BE any time. Nothing is ever the same. ALWAYS, past any question, SOMETHING has been there, and ALWAYS, to present the end, it must have had - as the all-encompassing ground basis and continuously existent advance on the impossible 'nothing' - ALL that would EVER be required. Otherwise, as inadequate, it would NEVER produce what has come.

The all-sufficient something requires the capacities to create the wholly distinct, but inter-relatable domains of mind, matter and spirit, and to give them their systems. That their systems do not create themselves is resolved at once in the fact that the all-sufficient something does it.

HOW directly ? That is His affair, but it is as directly as the evidence attests. It shows NOTHING EVER creating a KIND, more information as to any DESIGN, nor ANYTHING showing the capacity to do so, so that it s existence would point to such action. It is not a mere statistical monstrosity to imagine nothing doing something or something of one type inventing a system of wholly upgraded parameters^*2, as if systems were God, where in fact they are delimited and assigned phases of existence: it is a logical impossibility.

Permutations and combinations of existing elements in existing systems enable variation within a type and setting. The things that so permute and combine; but they do not make categorically NEW things to combine in efflorescence of art, or design, or NEW arrangement dynamics to perform. The codification of a system is just that: not a licence to create. For that you need imagination and command, code or concept and correlation of these in your field of competency. Man is the creation who has this in singular degree; but he has no slightest ability to create himself, or for that matter, even the basic ingredients of life! These, they are the facts, and what is contrary is as absent as atmosphere on the moon. To imagine it really is fine; for we are built to imagine; but to confuse this with air is simply childish.

Thus have these three, pseudo-autonomy, naturalism and ignorance of God, become the rattle and the dummy of man in his belated infantility. He is like one grabbing at power systematically impossible for him, seeking its emplacement where he can control and manipulate it, like a kid sawing up the furniture which he does not appreciate, while constantly failing to find his parents, far less know them.

Indeed, in the end it is the failure to KNOW GOD which is the funereal tribute to lost man as the 21st century zooms on from the days when EMPTINESS was Jung's call for the problem in fallen man. It is not only what is NOT there; it is what OUGHT to be there, and missing, which leaves man as meaningless and demented in his relationship with reality as a bird which, having gone from the Artic to the Antarctic, forgets, even there, that it needs land. The voyage is no cruise, and all is lost on the wing for the feet, groundless, as the logic of fallen man, find no rest, nothing secure; for all is changing, and even itself, it grows thin and confused with the travel, a sermon in the incessant, a sentence, self-imposed, hovering constantly above it, to press it down, while it stays, like drifting clouds, aloft.

Yet it differs, having a career with death.

In SMR, pp. 422L ff., we see some overview of the wanderings, with heavy and unfounded feet, of man's migratory obsessions. Here it may be seen slightly extended.

Let us summarise a little. God then has many muddled, quasi-suppressants and smugglers (suppressing as they smuggle, smuggling ³ as they suppress - cf. Romans 1:18-21).

 

	Aristotle hid "Him" in a contemplation casket, untouchable, untouching;
	Plato (q.v.) in forms, archetypes with occasional glints from beyond;
	Kant (q.v.) hid "Him" in the unknowable noumena, about which he was so knowledgeable ...
	Bergson (q.v.) in vital force (living what ? "force" accelerates matter, but bears no mind - see 'Potential');
	Davies seems to act similarly with - a vanishing god, as if disassembled - in the multi-faceted monism, which he inspects like a doctor, to see if perchance dissolved mind is somehow secreted in the self-contradictory "it" (pp. 252A-N, 263-270, 284-297, 300 ff, supra; 422Q-W, 425 ff. infra); while -
	Buddha (q.v.) seems as if he really wants to forget "it" (cf. pp. 996-997, 999 infra); in this, being like a primordial version of ...
	David Hume (cf SMR Ch. 3), who for his part proceeds without subject, cause or ground for his "description only", contradicting both his criterion and his results with his procedure. So -
	Hoyle ( cf. SMR pp. 79, 157, 209, 224, 226, 252A, 422H,L ) more consistently put "it" into the system's innate 'intelligence' bureau, complete with virtual information library. But of this nexus, the composer and the cause ? He merely removes the necessities one step, in transit to God. (Cf. pp. 127, 225-226, 112, 207, 80, 302 supra.) Attributing to the universe a facility it does not manifest, he ignores the demands of the creative action it incorporates. (Cf. pp. 80-88, 121, 131, 252C-N, 265, 293-299ff., 313ff. supra.)

The collation of results however with causes (Ch.1 supra) inexorably (Ch. 3)
leads to God, the God of the Bible (Chs.   1, 10).

 

4. There's a Time to be Timely

God then is the One who has time, making both its serial character, as He did the serial character of causality (being beyond this aspect of His creation as an author is beyond the time-line in his book) on the one hand, and its progressive character on the other (cf. pp. 31-35, 422B supra). As to the latter, this includes the unfolding disasters that exhibit motion when will works amiss, and when time is mis-spent on it. Disasters are not reversed into blessing by stagecraft but by God's craft, when He cancels guilt. This can bury sin, but it cannot delete what happened.

It is a sort of cross-word puzzle joy to some, it seems, to fiddle with "possible answers". Alas the mind is not the foundation of the universe but an instrument for its realistic assessment, albeit in frustration without its own Founder. It founders without foundation, and makes unfounded presumptions in intellectual hyper-tension as if to twiddle the speedometer dial were to alter the speed of the car. THAT is on much stronger foundation than unfounded extrapolation of partial comprehension of unbased man in his febrile substitutions of thought for reality. (Cf. Supplement Ch. 2, S1-S33 supra.)

The problem with "possible answers" is enhanced when, as here, they don't work. Distillation of theoretical components of an observable world, worked by the cause of man, of serial causation and of man's mind and spirit in their unique and impervious distinctiveness (though so readily debased when misused); distillation, then followed by splashing this distillate into the fabric of thought, and binding this into patch-work fragments of mental fabrication: this may be fun. When God however is brought in, to be both stripped and bound, this time in aberrant illusion as once in the flesh, the game becomes both blasphemous and confused. It is not with reality either logically, or physically, it then has to do. It is like children playing with dolls' houses, imagining their antics will affect the construction of what they live in. (Cf. pp. 413, 421-422A supra.)

It is all too human how man is mastered by what he thinks he masters; nor is woman exempt. This has occurred with an historical repetition bordering on obsession. When man saw the mechanical side of the University (despite godly Newton, Faraday, Maxwell), he would often act like an adolescent, with small knowledge "mastering" all. So we had the "mechanistic universe" against which Freud, Jung and indeed existentialism reacted with such quite normal exaggeration, into other phases to compensate for the illusory "specialisation"^*3A. The pendulum swings, and nothing it brings, but the need to proceed past commotion.

In such a style has man likewise proceeded in the case also of biology, psychology (cf. Ch. 4 supra), economics and now physics - they ponder a part, exaggerate, distort, extrapolate, possibly with deterministic, anon autonomous display. The clangour and the clash breed inevitable contradiction, confrontations, disputation and dissatisfaction. Alternate extremes exhibit onrush. Confusion, as Shakespeare has it, has then its masterpiece. The philosophers have had their day, now more often, in laboratory dress.

But what if we find two, ten or two thousand new data of the dynamics both of equilibrium (stasis in part) and degeneration (flow in part) of the phenomena of the universe ! Is the human race determined to disgrace itself perpetually before God who made it, by bypassing the Maker and the method, the Almighty and His actual works, now one, now another: some, meanwhile, fascinating an escape clientele with reductionist abstractions, as filled with knowledgeable ignorance as equally empty of rational ground ?

Till the End, when God calls the bluff and gives cause for judgment according to the word of this most Expressive being, it seems it will be so. As the wind moves the waters: so, playing on the mind, philosophy has as little permanent effect - except on the souls of those withered or slaughtered within, by its ... ministrations.

The gods

	of mechanism
	of surmise,
	of unrest and perplexity,
	of mere names,
	of bits of creation, of naturalism,   nomads in invented spiritual soil,
	of roaring silence and dismissed unreality,
	of the Hindu, of Buddha, whether they be held actual or are mere substitute gods,
	holding man in thrall to his own will by imaginary wisdoms,
	of violence and armed force to implement their wishes*3 , empty of evidence, resting on thrust,
	of desire, brought into the realm as if by inadvertence, or bee-like buzz where man shares all with others, or communes with principles, held aloft by his own passion, sundered from reality in advance, like hedge clippings, divorced from their base:

 they have one thing in common.

By these, men do not KNOW GOD.

Empty, they hunger, inflamed, they kill, whether for Islam, the Inquisition, the pride of the religion, transferred like an epithet to new company, by these they do not know. Without God, they and their world disestablish themselves, inciting disruptions, dynamising dispersions, instilling divisions, inviting ruin, requiring judgment.

NO GO WITHOUT KNOWING GOD

When they would find God, in masses men migrate. It is like the days of the Irish famine of the nineteenth century, but in reverse. Incapable of such abundance, in passion they fashion their gods from their own minds, minding one thing only, never to find the mind of the actual God, who has things to say which many neither want to hear, nor hearing, to do. In one of the worst cases, "this people draw near Me with their their lips, but their hearts are far from Me, " (Isaiah 29:13), but more generally, "by deceit they refuse to know Me," (Jeremiah 9:6). Indeed, Romans sums the movement of man from God in his inveterate passion to cut loose (as historically with point in nails as well as mind, in Psalm 2, 22), in 1:18-36:

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.

"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead,
so that they are without excuse,
because,

although they knew God,

they did not glorify Him as God,

nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts,

and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Professing to be wise, they became fools,

and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man - and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.

Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts,

to dishonor their bodies among themselves,

who exchanged the truth of God for the lie,

and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator,

who is blessed forever. Amen."

The latter part of this, with the detail of the following verses, both of the physical and of the spiritual (1:29-32), is alas, fulfilled like a betrothal in its time, in our modern world, where the liberties, the licence and the post-Christian smugness, smack of an indolence impudence against the very name of shame, as if to be shameless were the only saintly way. Indeed, this too needs to be seen as part of the structure of modern society, in the last stages of the predicted syndrome (Romans 1, bold added):

"And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge,
God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting;
being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality,
wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness;
full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness;
they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters,
inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful;

who, knowing the righteous judgment of God,
that those who practice such things are deserving of death,
not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them."

The last line is the present line, the contemporary situation of our times, where it even in some fallen and debased States becomes illegal to to fail to approve, or to pretend to approve of the whole array of devastations of design, contemptible abuse of provisions for procreation and expression of love in the process, as if God were an outlaw, man's manifest appointments, and correlative equipment in gender a nothing, and all who refuse to see its function captured for alien conquest and needless vulnerability to disease, were to be condemned. Thus what God condemns, man approves, and who approves God is condemned by man.

This provides an excellent exemplification of Romans Chapter 1, verses 20-21 (and indeed of Jude's strictures and warnings, with those of II Peter  2:10ff.) with its outcomes as traced both in the succeeding verses of that chapter and the last decades of our epoch, as it squirms its way to exposure by the light which comes, and devastates, as light always does to darkness (II Thessalonians 1:8).

Such approval together with the growing disapproval of those with other morals than these, namely those of the designed creation of the Designer, for the Authorised Product of the Producer, for those who follow HIS word, work and witness, is one of the ugliest and misshapen feats of the re-engineering of man. Iin his prodigiously brilliant capacity as a creation, he creates, as part of the creativity conferred, sticking out his tongue and playing his fingers from his ears, as the more evident signal of the contempt with which he holds his Maker. It is reminiscent of the old-fashionied usage of the word 'creating' to mean 'making a fuss, misbehaving', as applied to children!

Interesting certainly is the historical study of the Great Burial, of which the crucifixion and burial of Christ is a focal expression, wrought when God came to earth in person. Interesting, but sad; poignant, pathetic its tone, term and tenor.

Unfeeling indeed would he/she be, who did not rejoice therefore, in the resurrection which not merely focuses the divine power that humans can molest yet never control; but attests the divine freedom from the follies of man, and the capacity and will to avail our race of this power. This however, it more normally despises, even to the consummation: the end. There is a sense in which the verse 27 of Daniel 9 puts the prospect, prognosis and underlying sadness of these foolish dealings of this misled race.

It is, by contrast - and indeed we ALL have gone astray as Isaiah 53 tells us - and likewise cause for the utmost delight that God has not forsaken man any more than already devastated his current stable, platform, the purlieus for man's performances, with all their inter-relationships, a fact on which we do well to expend careful thought, before the successive perishings at last begin to rock the earth and remind man of the meaning of mercy (Revelation 6ff.). Indeed, it is in Revelation 9:19-20, we see that in the very midst of the coming escalations to match man's follies with his world,

"But the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons and idols of gold ... which can neither see nor hear."

Many ignorantly imagine that because the patience of God is colossal, His kindness is equivalent to making Him irrelevant to action. It is just like the smoker who thinks the advertisements can go to blazes, for he enjoys his little fires in his pipe. Yet to this moment, though some of the coming physical distortions of the order of the earth which will mirror to some slight extent, and then a growing one, the distortions of deity and His designs,  by man, and the twistings of truth and the marring of morality, are beginning to suggest themselves to both eye and reasoned prognosis from changing events: yet the patience of God is profound.

We are being given a little more time in the grace and love of God (II Peter 3:9), as Peter foretold,  and what is to come waits yet a little. Remissions however are no ground for ingratitude or folly.

Meanwhile, it is already a furore that there is a tilt towards the reduction of the stability of our environment, the liberties which we can take with it and the liberties it can take with us, and this reduction is to increase far more as we have seen in the predictions of Revelation, summed up by Christ in Matthew 24:22, and available for inspection for the last 2 millenia or so. It is nothing new; it is the event which will be new!

Yet HE, the Lord, to this hour ? He is as available today as in Paul's, as in the days of Christ on earth. This however is not the case forever. There now is the day of salvation! Then  will be too late to turn back - or to turn the clocks back, these being no accomplices - as if the eventuations which God commands could be annihilated; as if the play were really altered at all by the dismantling of the stage, or the febrile ferments of man "interpreting" it, or seeking to assign from it, a "place" of his own for the actors. For all that there is a prophecy ...

It is found in many places, such as II Timothy 3, 4, I Timothy 4, II Peter 2, Revelation 16,19; for says Paul, they will have 'itching ears', inflammation of the auditory mechanics, an itch for a new pitch; and will they, servants of sin, find it impossible to continue with the word of God, seeking teachers to instruct them in alienations from the truth, as their poisoned milk.

As to that, see A Question of Gifts  6 and Things Old and New Chs.  2, 5 , Appendix; Joyful Jottings  14 (esp. J.W., but many others in category); Acme, Alpha and Omega   9,  Tender Times for Timely Truth Chs.  7, 8 - TTT 8, providing review with reference to Satanic plan. See with it the spread of false prophets and christs foretold in Matthew 24:24.

It all has an end, and the tampering of the temporal, before the truth, is consumed in reality, as it long has been in reason and logic (cf. *2B). In the end, fraud does not live because God does.

THE SCURRYING OF PIRATE VESSELS

Robbery on the High Seas

While the end tarries, and this not for slackness but for pity, as II Peter 3:9 shows, indicating in terms of thousands of years, the time till that day, years now nearly past cf. SMR Ch. 8,  this earth continues with its gem-like precision, showing stability enough to continue till the end, with vulnerability sufficient to induce a sense of awe in man.

As to that, it is just for mankind to be so placed. It is fitting for him who by his very creation is derived and yet so frequently delinquent, subjecting himself irresponsible power surges, from this quarter and that, a practice that has been followed for millenia.

Such surges arrive like mighty oceanic breakers, threatening all, but broken, at last disseminated into the ineffectual, like spray and spume.

They have come and so ended in the past; to come and to go,  they continue in the present!

So it was with Assyria, so ripely condemned and with such soon verified vigour by Nahum ... Nineveh is fallen, who will bemoan her! in his denunciation, one which  left a judgment divine to secure that cruel but once mighty city in ashes with no relief; and so too with Babylon, by Isaiah condemned to be smitten to ignominy, with the mighty realm of Alexander the Great, swift and swiftly fallen, a take-over first for division and then  for Rome, as Daniel so clearly showed^*4.

Rome, in its Empire,  took longer, but was multiply humbled despite its ruthlessness. It fell,  its pseudo-stable empire, riddled with superstition and the religiously surreal, cruel in torment, callow in collusions and deceits innumerable, a city of sighs and segments. The uncultivated took it over like a dog.

So was the outcome with the earthly might of the Papacy,   wielding a derivative power over the manipulated nations, and seizing man's life for torture or snuffing, when he opposed its God-forsaken and inveterate cruelties, inhuman and monstrous, a folly wrought as a measure of hypocrisy for all time^*5, and executed with an indifference wholly contradictory of Christ^*6. The end did not differ for the power of  Napoleon, 'Boney', threatening Europe, but later to die slowly, evidently from arsenical poisoning, gift of his own race. In this feat, he resembled  the Moors and the Moslems more generally a millenium before, their scimitars the sign of a god of forces^*7, not faith itself which knows no admixture of violence in its texture and truth (cf. John 18:36).

So did the ignominy of time smite Hitler the smiter, at the end,  in his suicidal bunker, allegedly but wrongly reflecting on the strength of the Slavic race, whereas British resolve and American power had greatly aided the Communist tyrant, especially as Hitler was about to take Moscow^*8. Nor was the case other with Mao whose little red book is a simplistic hero-worshipping abandonment of thought to power which crushes many millions of souls, as if he were vying with Stalin for title of the greatest mass murderer. These two with Hitler were found in an inveterate trio of absolute vice and viciousness, evil all to the core, which was rotten with follies of fallen philosophy, pan-paranoid pretension and asinine aversions. As to the internally marauding enterprises of Mao, it was not he but an atomic bomb, the final blast of much courage of those who fought Hitler, rather than lurking in security, which made his country free for grabbing, after the exhausting surge onset of foreign war,  in its long tortured existence.

Meanwhile, millions of minions in rural China suffer from the abandonment of man to man, political thought striking the undefended ear, as if man were programmatic, not personal, and life at the very ebb of vitiating want. The land writhes with rapid wealth and devastating poverty, like the best of the tyrannies before it, hypocrisy sitting like a doctor's degree, doctor of deception, on its sullen shoulders. Once more, man is betrayed.

Japan too  in its Asian Empire found no other dust for its loud mouth to chew, and now the Iraqi tyrant barters, bargains or barks for his life, betrayed it may be by his own, and belittled in his grandeur as he awaits what the power he abused, may elect to do with him.

If all of these are vessels, then they have returned to port, ravaged, and if not, to the bottom of the enveloping seas, their voyages leaves in a journal of time, blotted with red, unlovely exhibits of tyranny. All of these, be their time long or short, shout fraud, failure, and history quivers at the divine rebuke.

Justice, mercy, brotherly love and truth, these remain essential to man on this earth. Their violation produces upheavals, as in some new tsunami, scraping the ocean floor before its next surge. Their fracture fractures the force of man in vain strivings, endless tortures, wantonry and viciousness, misdirects what remains to defence to secure more violation and offence to secure more peace, which vanishes like the smile of the Cheshire cat in the wonderland of Alice. Yet this is no wonder, except of folly.

Tyrants and tyrannies innumerable grab and go, reminding one in their unlovely departures, of Ezekiel 32:16-32, where God is introducing Pharaoh by prophecy, to the end of his frays and follies. First you see the predicted devastation for once proud Egypt (1), then the place of its subjugated destiny (II), and finally the plight of its Pharaoh (III). Passages of special relevance here are in red, including some of the ironies of power and its puniness.

(I)

^"It came to pass also in the twelfth year,
on the fifteenth day of the month,
that the word of the Lord came to me, saying:

  (III)

                           Says the Lord God."

THE DISPENSATION THAT AVOIDS THE GOSPEL OF GRACE

 DISPENSES WITH MERCY

ONLY TO FIND GORE AND MORE

Que voulez-vous ? as the French would have it!

Dispense with justice, and judgment looms. Ignore mutual care and concern, and divisions move like cracks in the tail assemblage of an over-used aeroplane. Trifle with mercy and your steel blunts in time. Man is not made for this vile violence or vicious sundering of virtue, and he suffers the more as he learns more of power, but with ever changing, yet oh so similar idols, refusing to know God, and hence his own charter. He is like a charter tour, where a child drives, who will not learn.

He continues on his many ways; yet how is there to be a common purpose for brothers, when their father is not recognised, or his portrait is defiled and distorted as if it were some abstruse but debased game!

Without KNOWING God, the common Father of their very creation, self-orphaned man is trying continually to make himself not illegitimate murderer of the very notion of Father, but fairy child, fallen from matter's prime time, as if slavery invented liberty, structure mind, and conformity by a creative contradiction, manufactured liberty: liberty to denounce and despise the facts. This pseudo-autonomous man does, while denying his liberty as if to say like some aberrant child, 'Who, me!',  while the machining of thoughts by surreal irrationality continues as an option for its brilliantly underwritten, structured mind, a mirror in analysis to its environment, yet one now cracked in chagrin (Ephesians 4:17-19).

The surging spirit of man clashes without their One God as guide, for God and the devil are more apart than plus and minus, as far as infinite and finite, good and evil, knowledge and deviousness. As to unredeemed mankind, they do not know God, therefore do they not understand themselves, and so mutually murder, maim and cohabit like drunken deployments of some rabble that is set on its own ruin; and they call it great, till it falls, and then fallen, they leave it for the next passionate delusion.

Without Him, their fallen state knows no remedy, and history and philosophy alike are but a testament to man's chronic condition of multiple pathological symptoms from one disease: that of not knowing God, where He is to be found. Without knowing Him, what do they know of the Gospel, running from it in myriads, that unique forecast, verified and validated Gospel of the Bible, centred in Christ Jesus the Lord, without whose rule, tyrants are the very stuff of history. How will they hear, their ears closed by the very fingers they waggle at God, with hearts on walkabout mode, alien, alienated, obdurate! Yes the very reminder of the unique truth of the Bible, in some States comes to be crime!

It is only by the grace and mercy of God that any hear, and though their numbers mount, the narrow way is indeed frequented by a small minority, whom this world loves to maul, as Europe mauled, as China mauls, as the USSR mauled before its demise, as Rome mauled and Romanism likewise, as Sudan has mauled, as Islam mangled in its submission-only invasions.

Sin is inveterate, and even when all is resolved and Christ returns (Revelation 19-20) many will rebel at the end, will delectate delinquency and seeking the more to maul, resist to the end.

All this is the dynamic of history, both come and to come till its curtains close on the bloodied stage, inexplicable in folly to all who are involved, great and small, but comprehensible readily when all are seen in place, yes and in making place for the race, finite and infinite, great and small. It is resolved in fine pitch in the light of the divine structures, signals and forecasts, actions, principles and procedures, offers and their rejection over time, now this, now that, and now by this nation, now by these individuals, now in this culture, now in that nation.

It is like a room lit when seen in the light of the Gospel of grace and mercy and peace, summarily removed by nation upon nation, as for this reason and that, it may say what it will, but act ... differently from the design. Man is the great self-molester, spoiling the beautiful even as he creates it, presuming on destiny before he finds it, unwanted, divorcing his creativity into crime, whether of spirit, mind or body, stealing his spirit from the hand of God who made it, and casting his orphaned powers about like one untaught, and wanting no instruction. Great is his power to learn; small is his appetite to use it, when God is concerned. Vast is his power in this tiny body, but vicious is his seizure of it, as if God, making of himself now parody, now comedy, now tragedy, now a very carcass of poignancy, now seeking God and now ashamed of having done so, valiant for disaster, deviant from truth, and that often with a relish as of a resistance movement, which knows nothing of what it resists.

Tolstoy, as we saw in the last Chapter, ended in mere redundancies of words, without finding his quest; for without the actuality of God in the midst of His globe, there is no explanation, as there is none if you insist on avoiding the engine in your car, for its motion.

If you try to explain the body without the head, your case is hard. You then omit the site for direction. If you omit the spirit of man (cf. SMR pp. 348ff.), the spiritual realm of his love for beauty, truth, peace and fellowship, creation in many fields, and that of his will in these milieux; if you abandon moral heights and the depths, and the relation of man's conscience to them, splendour and shame,  glory and guilt, while retaining with magnificent unawareness of your artifice, some of man's baser motivations and pathological lust arrays: then too your explanations are dead on arrival, a case of imagination for the unseeing, logic for the blind.

If you omit further, the Maker of man's matrix, the liberator from mere law,

so that while using this liberty in your thought,

you ignore reality,

forgetful that you have

crooked (and honest ) lawyers, using their liberties diversely, according to the repository
into which they place their spirits, many abandoning His rules,

promises positive and negative ones, and

His presence,

the continually demonstrated power of His word and
His verifiable dealings with individuals, nations and races:

then you will be an exhibitor of your own thoughts,
but voiding what you explain,
provide mere empty talk on an empty stage of your own building.

All present, however, by contrast with that vacuous obfuscation, all is explained - and the final key is not merely the objectivity of all-inclusive basis for explication, but the crystalline principles and tests provided by God Almighty, these millenia, for man, in the Bible, in history, in the heart and spirit of man, in outcomes and in prodigies of wonder and pungencies of shame.

Not often enough to disrupt the processes and tests of man's ways, thoughts and schemas, does God personally and by His own word, intervene; yet not so seldom that man can ever forget; and in His saints, as they know, His interventions are innumerable, as they do His will (Acts 5:32, Psalm 40:5). Not, they know, is it a matter of more pleasure or comfort, as a criterion, but maximisation of doing the will of God (cf. Matthew 7:21ff).

Hear David on this in the Psalm noted^*9A:

                            And Your law is within my heart.' "

You can put a Bunyan in prison, to suppress his mouth, alienate his pastorate, aggravate his sufferings, bring ignominy to what is not the will of the British Establishment of the day; but the result is the Pilgrim's Progress, that marvel of a book, ministering to untold millions for centuries to come. It is the same in principle,  with this author, on whom many arrows, deprivations and slanderous assaults have been cast wickedly from those who cannot answer the Biblical truth which he has long presented, and these from Professor to pastor, from church to school: 

Yet there have resulted 118 volumes on Biblical Apologetics, with all the attendant disciples of theology, as required. It is not that the one of itself produces this result, but that the God who controls history has it so, empowers, provides and enables. It is like Him, for He knows what it is like, He who despising shame, brought many sons to glory: and in the bringing, He uses them by His own power in the midst of the maladies of persecution, devastating as they seek to be.

With God, nothing is impossible, and that empirical fact is routine for the Christian. History melts before Him, not for our pleasure, but for His! Look too how the imprisonment of Solzhenitsyn was a more powerful preliminary than a million bombs, for the overthrow of the USSR; and consider how he addressed a Russian Patriarch, denouncing his sham, before it was all over, seeking for a better and Christian thing for his land.

In practice and divine power,  there is not only a present personal Being  - and many omit man the derivative,  as well as God in this in their endeavour to explain history - the simplistic cancer: but there are testable promises, principles, predictions, retrodictions, analyses and prognoses. As all always in all respects follow this word, the Bible, whether for its ultimate curse or blessing, weal or woe, strength or gift of same,  in its preliminary depictions as in its final results: so we are there given overview^*9B. This covers not only of the ingredients of history but the nature of its direction, its Messiah, the preliminary moulding and later developments of the Jewish race, indispensable in history as in scripture for the plan chosen for the divine work. It traces too the fall of the Gentiles, prelude for the Messiah, and exhibit for His rejection. 

Quite recently, Condoleezza Rice was amazed (by report, The Australian, January 31, 2006) at the news that Hamas won the Palestinian election, opining great change was about, which none could ever understand, until after the event. Yet while God alone can predict the ways of men in their entirety, with all their flamboyant flamings and flamingo flights of fancy and resolve, amid an environment to which some willingly succumb, and which stirs others to diminutive declarations of indomitable resistance: by those who follow His word, the Bible, it is readily seen that there are forces for glory, as also from ancient hatred, founded on truth-and-falsity in religion, expended against God or elements of His creation, a situation complicated by Israel's catastrophic and predicted failure to follow its own revelation (as in Deuteronomy 32, Leviticus 26), its own Lord (Matthew 26). Amidst these perpetual pollutions and statuesque follies, the word of God even intimates the details of the conclusion, and its preliminaries.

Such forces are endemic to sinful man, and involve a combination of hatred of God, of His word, of His will, of His people, and even of those whom, like the Jews, He has used in His declared plan and program for mercy, before judgment.  These evil dynamics and dealings are defined, their tracks traced, the divine response revealed in advance, both in its culmination of salvation in the first coming of Christ to redeem, and the precursors and advent of this same Lord, to rule.

These intemperate forces are annulled neither by democracy nor billions in 'aid', whether from the US or the EU, whether to Israel or to the Palestinian ... now, democratic terrorist land or land you may call it. Man in his spirit, sundered from God, baying at the Gospel, is like a tank out of control, falling down a mountain. Its path however is not unknown entirely, as it moves with what in some respects, is calculable dynamic! There are after all, ingredients in the Middle East which are biblically defined, spiritually dynamised and predictedly arraigned (cf. SMR pp. 502 - 519).

Meanwhile, the false visions of men, whether of Hitler's 'race', Stalin's 'class' or any other misconception^*9 continue to manipulate their minds, while their hands manipulate their guns. Hatred and revenge, muddled heads and muddied hearts continue to be flooded but never flushed, except by the Gospel, which resisted, becomes an indictment (John 3:16ff.).

Man will never 'solve' the Middle East's chronic crisis, though for a time he may seem to do so (I  Thessalonians 5); its burden is too great. It is well to heed from the verified and alone valid word of the living God (*2B  cf. Barbs... 6   -7, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, TMR Ch. 5), rather than obfuscate in the dimness of human desire, construction and fantasy, based on whatever culture, condition or conception.

For Israel the nation, the site for the Cross of Jesus Christ is back with their feet, to feel free on it (as in Luke 21:24 by prediction), but it is still trodden down in spirit, both by Israel's continued renegacy from its Messiah, and the mosque's continued placement in horrendous rebuke, since Israel refuses to find the Cross as the new temple, in Christ. Thus there is allowed to endure this colossal insult from Islam in its very heart, Jerusalem, so astray and led astray to this day. The wars which were to occur, with Israel's astounding mini-mouse defeat of a squad of cats, 1948, 1967, 1973, and with help, 1991, have occurred.  Now the great burden of MANAGING it and DEPLOYING it, on the part of other nations, especially concerning Jerusalem, is only as GOD SAID would be the case, yes, for one and for all these things in their outline (Zechariah 12-14).

Jerusalem is a 'burdensome stone' to them, indeed! (as foretold in Zechariah 12:2-3), a city of pity desired by many, and a site as for so long, for the dealings of God, both in preparation for the Messiah coming to save, and for Him coming to judge (cf. Zechariah 14:5). . In amazing precision for prophecy, it is 'a cup of drunkenness' as claims from the defeated mount like eagles on wings, ready for their prey, praying to the UN to grab more for them, than illicitly and vastly, it has already allowed (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 11,  10, Of the Earth, Earthy ... Ch.   13, Deliverance from Disorientation Ch.   11). Intoxicated with carnal plans, full of effrontery towards God and the continuing persecution which tries or at least acts to remove continuity from Israel, if not by an axe, then by the narrowing slights of a pen, the nations harrow the people in the traditions of Europe, now international, as if  dribbling with venom, injected by others or imbibed, bemused with the fumes of imagination, if not the reek of oil. Though they may not know what they do, they do it!

Carnal man is like a mariner on the deck, who shutting his eyes, yet wonders why the guiding stars have disappeared. Others complain because their eyes ache with searching, but it is the force with which they are closed which makes tired muscles about the eyes.

Israel, now back in Jerusalem, is being shut up to it, and even a wall is appearing, when the wall it needs is that of God, to whom they will come, as the next great step in the pre-announced divine program (Zechariah 12:10) is taken.

As men reject the cross, Rome with its mass a massive and immanent pseudo-substitute, Islam with its reconstructed Christ, thrown into a book 600 years afterwards, and anti-verified, Israel with its plain "NO!" to Christ, are clashing^*10A. Yes they all provide a turmoil in the region, so that they are rejecting both their own good and their own peace. Neither in negatives to the Lord, nor in construction of new lords nor in pageantry with symbols while a pope takes the unique place of Christ and invents new ideas at war with His word (cf. John 18:36, Matthew 23:8-10). Meanwhile, will peace be found while there are armies of alienation, closely watching one another, their hands on their relevant types of weaponry, social, cultural, political, military or manipulative, incited by misconception, allured by culture, ruined by renegade religion.

Rejecting God as He is, they also reject one another as they are.

These things proceed, while the Palestinians, supported by EU, USA and Islamic millions both of persons and funds, rather billions of the latter, wait to prey - and are already well fed with sudden, barbaric slayings in luscious lasciviousness or witless wantonry, of Israeli civilians, not as they seek fighting leaders, but just  as they come, and as they go. The new election of Hamas as majority ruler for the Palestinian body is causing pangs in Europe and concern in the US, but Hamas' intention to obliterate Israel is tongued still in flame, in response, and the sheer enormity of dispossessing ENTIRELY the Israel to which the League of Nations made the gift of the ENTIRETY of Palestine, flashes almost like an incandescent indictment before the Day!

History cannot turn, until the Messiah first sent to suffer for pardon and peace where it belongs, offered to all freely, now comes to rule (Luke 24, Revelation 19, II Thess.1). That time is near (Answers to Questions Ch. 5), so the turmoil is vast. It is as it was to be, in general and in detail.

It is not, this voyaging world of misrule, a sound ship, but one destined for destruction. It wallows - man at liberty to exalt false glory, with fraudulent motives and ineradicable attachments, passionately outside the Gospel itself - to evil. If you delete the only door to good, evil is your hire.

It is, this Gospel denying, God defying culture and condition for man, a voyage de mal, one where this world lies, because its multiple, multiplied and interactive lies, ready to burn with environmental disaster, before the God of truth.

BON VOYAGE - BUT DON'T GO WITHOUT THE SHIP
there IS a rescue vessel!

 

In Lamentations 3:34-42, you see the pathos and the dismal self-deletion focussed in its first outcomes, while the positive option looms like a rescue vessel, by contrast (red is added, to aid the recognition of this). It is the more appealing now, as in our 21st century we have endless wars of attrition, of conviction, under conviction, of harassment, of racial hatred, of religious intensity, of spatial immensity, of freedom to impose itself, yes and wars of democratic aims which tell others this MEANS no violence, for reasons not assigned, for the vile loves violence, almost as a medium, whether against itself, its peers, its world or its God, in the interests of pagan idols.

"The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,

To the soul who seeks Him.

It is good that one should hope and wait quietly

For the salvation of the Lord.

 

^"It is good for a man to bear

The yoke in his youth.

Let him sit alone and keep silent,

Because God has laid it on him;

Let him put his mouth in the dust—

There may yet be hope.

Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes him,

And be full of reproach.

For the Lord will not cast off forever.

 

"Though He causes grief,

Yet He will show compassion

According to the multitude of His mercies.

For He does not afflict willingly,

Nor grieve the children of men.

 

^"To crush under one’s feet

All the prisoners of the earth,

To turn aside the justice due a man

Before the face of the Most High,

Or subvert a man in his cause -

The Lord does not approve.

 

^"Who is he who speaks and it comes to pass,

When the Lord has not commanded it?

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High

That woe and well-being proceed?

Why should a living man complain,

A man for the punishment of his sins?

Let us search out and examine our ways,

And turn back to the Lord;

Let us lift our hearts and hands

To God in heaven.

 

^"We have transgressed and rebelled;

You have not pardoned.

You have covered Yourself with anger

And pursued us;

You have slain and not pitied.

You have covered Yourself with a cloud,

That prayer should not pass through.

You have made us an offscouring and refuse

In the midst of the peoples.

 

^"All our enemies

Have opened their mouths against us.

Fear and a snare have come upon us,

Desolation and destruction.

 

^"My eyes overflow with rivers of water

For the destruction of the daughter of my people.

My eyes flow and do not cease,

Without interruption,

Till the Lord from heaven

                           Looks down and sees."

Israel was warned for centuries, and fell. It was told of what it would do to its Messiah, the Prince of Peace for this entire world (Isaiah 9:6-7, 11, 42:6, 49:6, 66:15ff., Psalms 67ff., Matthew 24, Revelation 19-20); yet it still did it (SMR Ch. 9). It was told that He would arise, that His flesh would not rot: and even His enemies could do nothing to produce Him, despite dedicated desire to delete Him absolutely, as if to show otherwise than was written, were the sacred grail (cf. SMR pp. 931-943, 973A).

Yet all failed, and the tomb, naturally enough carefully marked (Luke 23:55), became the site of the splendour which love, courage and truth have over all deficiencies of the defective desires of man. God triumphed, omitting  not one slightest jot of His forecasts and stated plan. Man could do what he did, NOTHING! Death, man's ubiquitous rebuke for the iniquitous ways he so loves, became as a toy in the hands of truth, since He who is the truth, had satisfied justice' demands, and resplendent in mercy's attire, secured liberty from the like sentence for man, who deserves it, one and all (Romans 3:23ff., 5:1-12).

The Gentiles have been warned (Romans 11) not to be HIGH-MINDED, as if Christianity were in some obscure way theirs, because it was granted to them to find Christ, when the Jewish nation (but by no means all of the race, many of whom founded in Christ, the Christian Church!) failed to do so, and duly pierced His hands and feet, as foretold a millenium before (Psalm 22, cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25).

Now the Gentiles, as also foretold in Matthew 24 in some detail, as in Luke 21, in Micah 7 as in Joel 3, in II Timothy 3 as in many more places in the word of God, are going the same way as did Israel, inflated with knowledge, colts in pastures in Spring, they revolt and kick the heels at the fences.

Having in large segments persecuted the Jews, over the centuries, as more recently for more than half a century,  Israel re-born, both rebirth and persecution as also predicted in Zechariah 12-14, the Gentiles in large numbers are acting as if they seek  a similar come-uppance, one now to become their very own.  Whether the ruffian be the UN or the Inquisition, or the pogrom, or Hitler, or the Road Map and its mentors, the Madrid Quartet, strippers all, but not of themselves, rather of Israel by direct or indirect force, it is one. Israel is to reduce (as if to become anorexic), that is the human plan: and other things with oil, are to increase.

They do not consider that this persecution of the blighted people and the harassed rump of the former large territory of Palestine, all that is left after international robbery of what the League of Nations gave to Israel, is merely a symptom of rapacity, ruined souls and soiled spirits. These likewise congratulate at times the myths available in Islam^*10 while they drink its oil, which brings no peace^*11A, but mere debt to enhance terrorism.

This, in turn, it is but part of the pseudo-autonomy, the naturalistic fallacy and the ignorance of God, His word in the Bible, His will for His people, both by promise to Israel as a geographic illustration of His faithfulness (cf. Ezekiel 36 and SMR Appendix A, with It Bubbles, It Howls, He calls Ch. 10) and by Gospel to one as to all. It is not in diplomatic deviousness for 'peace and prosperity for all' that truth is served, but in fealty to God, His word and ways.

History unfolds not at all by mere arms, but rather

	in the minds of those who use them, or disown them,
	in the consciences of those stricken with remorse, or seeking to suppress it by more acts of derring-do,
	in the vicious phases of self-exaltation and pride,
	in the nature-worship which is so ready a shrine when its Maker is forgotten (Jeremiah 2:14-27),
	in the depositions of deity on such Empires as those of Assyria, Babylon, Rome, according to prediction and program (cf. The Pitter-Patter ... Ch. 4, SMR Chs.  8-10 and see esp. Isaiah 36ff.),
	in the trials the Almighty permits of many approaches, systems, ideas and endeavours, for the exhibition of their vanity, or the attestation of their soundness before Him who calls to man (Proverbs 1),
	in the results He ensures are well reaped, both now, and hereafter (cf. Job*11),
	in the times and seasons granted to many nations if by any means they might seek the Lord (Acts 17:26-31),
	in the rebukes for meanness of spirit and 'grinding the faces of the poor (Isaiah 3:13ff.), and indulging in the wallowing meanders and mazes of personal vanity (Isaiah 3), exploiting the vulnerable (Amos 5:10ff.),
	in the heeding of repentance whether in his saints (as in Isaiah 37, with Hezekiah, who became transported with his own regality, and forgot in one phase, its very source, exposing what was precious and sacred to those who would pillage it), or in the worst of men (II Chronicles 33:12ff.),
	in the fulfilling of the word of the Lord in things great and small (Matthew 5:17ff., 24, cf SMR Ch. 8),
	in the exposure of the evils below the surface (cf. Luke 2:29-35),
	in the appointment of all things to teach and expose, instruct and make clear, a testimony from time to eternity, for judgment day, and for the everlasting attestation of the humbling, bumblings of anti-truth dynamics, directed against deity, His mercy, His love and His salvation (Ephesians 1:10, the parable in Romans 11, Ephesians  3:9-10), whether to men or to angels,
	in the manifestation of His power (as in Romans 9 and Pharaoh) to deliver and to show the vulnerability of mere pretence and pretension.

Yes in myriad ways the PERSONAL GOD, has acted and the milieu has reacted, involved itself and unfolded in liberties infested, judgments invested and wonders attested.

He has done so in history personally, principally, by promise and by prediction fulfilled, towards the persons whom He has made, whether celestial or terrestrial, good or bad.

History has moved before God,
in this totality of enterprise, system, program and personality,
as mankind has adorned and then disadorned the earth:

by the exercise of their liberties:

in the climes and dynamics Deity has brought into existence,

by things geological, astronomical, of abundance or littleness
(cf. Amos 4, Exodus 1-12 cf. The Plagues of Ancient Egypt and the Plight of Modern Earth),

in the fulfilment of His words and the provision of His promises (cf. Isaiah 44:24-45:4), and

the upholding of their operational effectiveness,

in the blessedness of the meek and the merciful, and the abrasion of the abrasive,

in things subtle and plain, in things wise and outwitting,

in things patient and purgative,

in the provision of His Gospel and hence of the Christ to pay for it,

in the sanctity of His plan of salvation, that He might plant the heavens (Isaiah 51:16, Revelation 13:8, Ephesians 1:4),

in the remorselessness of His saving operations,
in implacable sincerity and irremediable resolve (cf. Matthew 26:53, Isaiah 50, Luke 9:51),

in the preparation of preliminaries for His great actions,
whether of the incarnation or the return of Christ
(cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5 and SMR Ch. 9):

for God rules history.

You find it in that variety and composition of major grants of liberty to man, patience, program, participation in what men  call miracle, foretelling, vacancies while man seeks Him vainly in times of listless formalism (Hosea 7:14-16) or extravagant pride (Hosea 5:13-15), leaving behind the outcomes of wonder (Proverbs 1), or effectively with ardent repentance and realism, in times where He is to be found (Psalm 51, II Chronicles 33:10-13). You find it in the liberties of God to speak, to know and to do (cf. Psalm 139, 73). In the very face of man, He has acted, mankind as if by obsession most frequently vagrant and miscreant in itself, and He has wrought things of kindness (Psalm 78:52-65, 106:8,43, Isaiah 38:1ff.), man working in liberties unlovable in their usage, lovable in their original disposition, yet at times flourishing in His knowledge like cascading waterfalls compared with the floods of devastation (Psalm 107:39ff., Luke 2:48ff.).

His presence is seen not only in His supervision, sovereign yet not in tyranny,  with an eye for liberty and reality, for love and mercy, for justice and kindness, and for judgment, often long delayed as man works himself out, like a dispersing catherine wheel on a children's fireworks' night (II Chronicles 36, II Kings 17).

He does so not least in His speaking before vast events and contours of events come to pass, whether by years or centuries or millenia (Isaiah 7, 9); and He attests His power of control, not to make men evil, or to delete entirely their abundantly misused gifts, but to account for all that is done, and to bring all things to their due conclusion (Ezekiel 36-37), a skywriting more than suggestive, but expressive of all that He has said, before the judgment sits and the residue is applied, determinate and sure.

So do things come, so do they pass, and so do the results accrue in accord with His long spoken word. Liberty, like an expiring man on his death bed, shouts a last shout and subsides, and then arouses itself again, in follies innumerable losing its derivative and delimited powers, because it seeks them unlimited, or to delimit them itself, before its last mad plunge to come (cf. The Moon Soon, II Thess. 2), when it would make itself God, with a vacuous virility, a meretricious lordship in a miasmic inanity of self-exaltation.

That, it will be the ultimate in a parade of pride in self-praise, often erupting in history in the callow and exalted heart of man; but in the end to which we move with a fierce determination as a race, it is a mere pre-eminence of human self-pollution. This, it is the pollution most to be feared, for it is not outside the man, but inside him and its curse is worse than that of cancer.

Thus the might of the Protestant British Empire has passed; and the right of truth is dismissed dimly, airily and freely, as if by some nebulous and nugatory necessity. What is necessary in the common pursuit of the ignorance of God, is the calamity of clash with reality, to which all the strains of unbelief are heaving: whether these be those of an indignant earth, so long abused in ludicrous ideas, an unhappy sky, invaded with weaponry and filth unfit for man, or  of woefully warring nations working as if their whole joy were in devastation, or by imposition, the submission of some group or nation or body or people or idea to some other equally vapid or more so. In most of these common lusts and loveless depravities,  God is set apart or being re-invented by the religions of convenience, of naturalism whether in spirit or in substance. Yet He is not apart, and is not a part of these evil ministrations, to which He assigns the times, often explicitly and by name, and the destiny in due disarray, where arrogant braying becomes ardent doom.

God, the revealed God of the Bible, definitively revealed in Jesus Christ, is not apart nor a party to evil, but the donor of liberty, the source of love and the indispensable basis of mercy. This world tried to take its own Messiah, Jesus apart; and failed. Now in its inveterate confusion and listless autonomy, scarcely knowing what to do with its illusory and much vaunted freedoms, it finds the pit unattractive, but still hides its head in the nether sands, which are hot, and red with blood, until this crying out concluded, and the judgment sitting, the test is concluded.

The quest of the test is and the source of the scuffling is the freedom which is actual, which is sought in folly, but to be found in deliverance from dissension from God, in the grace of His love, the power of His Spirit and the pardon of His sacrifice, which this world duly ensured would happen, but this, only in fulfilment of God's previously announced plans. Thus murder became sacrifice and sacrifice the basis of the pardon for those who murdered, would murder by seeking to axe missionaries and debauch nations, when they would seek Him. The plans of God are great and the plan of salvation is sure, simple enough for the child, profound to humble the mighty, clearly enunciated, always performed.

As to those plans, they include (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5), a "near" return of Jesus Christ, who was so often announced before He came the first time, for the Old Testament is full both of His coming to be sacrificed and save, and to rule thereafter. His return is not, unlike His crucifixion, announced as to its date, centuries before (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4). There is reason for that difference. Christ stated this at the end of Matthew 24. It is not His will that people conform by pretence when they know He is about to come: rather He prefers to find who is faithful at His coming.

After all, what teacher would tell a Class from which he intends to be absent for a few minutes, at which precise minute, he would return. What delicious opportunities for mischief, the absence permits, and how consolidated these would be if the moment of his return were pre-announced. Not at all! It was enough that the time of His coming to save was pre-announced, for this merely heightened the exhibition of the power of God, who foretelling when He would do it, including the resurrection, did it as planned in full view of all, in the midst of His murderous enemies, this a testimony to the lively convulsions of human passions and the undeterrable dynamic of the Lord. Thus they could not SEE the 'trap' into which they had fallen, becoming 'servants' of God in fulfilment of His plan, in the very depths of depraved envy and hatred. This of course did NOTHING for their guilt; but it did much for the honour of God.

Similarly now, free from the information of the time of His return, but positively regaled on information concerning the time when it is "NEAR", the fallen 'Class' of man enjoys itself in playing by the very brink of destiny, where history trembles: a class pre-occupied with its war-games, its word-games and its woes.

It is not thus that one should travel. If one is to have BON VOYAGE, one needs another vehicle than this mad excitement of passion and desire, this dedicated unbelief and this blind self-exaltation of the human race, in which to travel. History is pounding and resounding like the movements of the Niagara River to the Falls. A vessel under power is needed to motor upstream, and the power is that of the Spirit of God, the access is that of the name of Jesus Christ, and the ground of the free entry into that vessel is the blood of Jesus Chris, It is He, the One who purchased eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12), ONCE (9:25ff.), at Calvary, as pre-announced.

There is not another (Acts 4:11-12), for God is One, His word is one, His work is one and His travail was one, and man is one, and there is no other way but His, to find Him, and that, where He may be found (Isaiah 55, Galatians 1). The creation by man of his whim and will in pretended salvation, deliverance and destiny, is mere garbage on legs, spitting words of puss, a pathological excitement of the tongue, a stupour of vanity, without evidence, attestation, verification or any validity, the wrecked telling the wrecker it is not time, that it must run, and that it has great potential. Yet it is not alter the case, merely adding sound.

Nor is this all. Thinking of entering that vessel, as with all vessels, is no help whatsoever. Putting one's trust in Him and one's heart into the washing with His blood, the payment for pardon lovingly provided, this is an entry required, and with it, the recollection (Romans 10:9) that if we confess with our lips the Lord Jesus and believe in our hearts that God has raised Him from the dead (I Cor. 15 - what corpse went in, is what body came out cf.  Acts 2:23-31), then we shall be saved.

Is it selfish to be restored to the love of God who has already provided the passage money ? One thinks not, but rather is it selfish to deny Him His own, His own besotted, bedevilled, bedizened and belated creation, the sons of sin and the daughters of pride: yes, that is the very ultimate in selfishness, hard-heartedness, and the vanity of folly. Then many,  floundering by omission, curse in their hearts, for they cannot swim in those waters.

Come then, enter, and then, BON VOYAGE! my friends, bon voyage indeed.

NOTES and EXCURSIONS

*1A

See The gods of naturalism have no go!   17, for more micro-detail, from Denton. 

*1B

See for example, TMR Ch. 7, Sections E and F, Divine Agenda ... Ch.  1 ,
The Kingdom of Heaven Ch.   1, A Spiritual Potpourri Ch.   3,

Red Alert ...Ch.  11, Repent or Perish Ch.  6, Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch.   6,  News  80,  Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch.  4 .

*1

See SMR pp. 231 at *31, ff., 252Cff., Earth Spasm ... Ch. 1, TJ Volume 16 (1), pp. 120ff.), the technical magazine from Answers in Genesis.

*2A

See on Denton with special reference to teleology, News 57, Sparkling Spirituality Ch.   8 on Gould, Wake Up World! ... Chs. 5-6.

See also in this general sphere:

Journey to God, or Fantasy's Flight to the Infernal Ch.    5;
The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God Ch.    7 (and its illogical futility)
and with these, JOY 1.

*2B 

See: 

REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER; also

SCIENTIFIC METHOD, SATANIC METHOD AND THE MODEL OF SALVATION,

CELESTIAL HARMONY FOR THE TERRESTRIAL HOST, and with these,

The gods of naturalism have no go!

The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy

*2 See SMR pp. 15ff., Earth Spasm ... Ch. 1, Ancient Words ... Ch. 4, Organ of Sight; Dancers ... Ch. 6, The Majestic Might ... Ch. 6; The gods of naturalism have no go! Ch. 8, *2.

*3

See SMR pp. 50ff., 91, 1186A, Divine Agenda Ch. 6.

*3A

See:

Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch.  9, incl. End-note 1 (esp. programmatic psychology and its ilk),
Marvels of Predestination and the Wiles of Will Ch.   7,  including *1;

News  80;  44,

SMR 4

 

Spiritual Refreshings ...Ch.  7, Extension 1 ;

 

The True God has Go, Gives Grace and Glory Ch.   2,

On Sartre, often noted, see for  example,  Predestination and  Freewill Section  I.

 

*4 See Daniel 8:5-37, 7:2ff., and consult if required, Highway of Holiness Ch. 10 as marked and Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 10. See Daniel 7:6 and 8:8ff., esp..

*5 See:

Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch.    14

Three Anzas and One Answer  5,

The Frantic Millenium and the Peace of Faith Ch.    6 (News 101);

Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch   8  ,

Highway to Hell.

*6

Matthew 11:28-30, 26:51-56, Luke 22:47-53,John 18:36, with 23:8-10.

*7

See SMR pp. 50ff., 91, 1186A, Divine Agenda Ch. 6 with SMR pp. 707ff., 807ff. and *5 above.

See also Highway to Hell.

*8

See War at the Top, by James Leason, with forward by General Sir Leslie Hollis, at pp. 127-128. There we learn of a timely decision by Churchill re armaments to be sent, which would delay Hitler in his thrust into the heart of Russia. "The delay inflicted upon the Germans by Churchill meant, as he well knew,  that the greatest Russian generals of all - Generals January and February - would throw in their forces against  the invaders. Hitler would never be able to defeat the Russians before the summer ended, but would see his armies freeze..."

*9A

See on Psalm 40 and the Messiah, Joyful Jottings 22.

*9B

See SMR Chs. 8 and 9, It Bubbles ... Chs. 10 and 11, Galloping Events ... Ch. 4, Answers to Questions Ch. 5, Israel ... Ch. 1, for example.

*9

See SMR pp. 925ff., Highway to Hell, Aviary of Idolatry, News 37, 97, 98,

Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch.    14 ,
Beyond the Crypt Ch     1, The True God has Go ... Ch.   4

*10A    EXCURSION

SMR (q.v.)  p. 1075  sums it up, thus:

Let us be candid; there is no point in avoiding the issues. Truth cannot stand by, if peace is to triumph. The Jews as a people crucified Christ (using Roman power, a reluctant agent in Pilate). The Moslems invented a new Christ, some 600 years later, and made someone up who did not die for sin, as the predicted Messiah had to do and did, giving Jesus' name to this mask. The Roman Catholic doctrine, using the name of Christ, killed masses of victims² who did not agree with its worldly pretensions (such as Pope Boniface's claim that popes rule this world's princes), or its masterful direction of a religion of which Jesus Christ said: "Call no man on earth Master, for one is your master³ even Christ" (Matthew 23:8, cf. 1 John 2:27, Luke 6:46).

There you have three of the world's major religions, all relating closely to Christ (whom Muhammad, though changing Him, revered as a prophet): ONE killed Him (at Jerusalem); ONE killed BY 'Him' and still sacrifices (*16) 'Him' (from Rome), and one 'kills' Him by changing Him, and has arrangements including a direction to KILL, in certain circumstances till all opposition to "Allah" ceases, and often met in the unholy call for 'holy wars' (*17).

Now this is killing in the INTERESTS of religion (*18), not for moral rebuke or justice. Disbelief in these transmutations or mock-up's of Jesus Christ, made by managerial man, usurping the place of Christ, plagiarising, stealing His name, and killing in it, false masters, frauds! disbelief in THEIR product ? THIS ? IT can mean to DIE at the hand of sinful man, frequently confused man! to do so in appointed seasons, by this method and that, as seems good to such religionists. Let us examine only one aspect of all this.

What does the world deserve for this! Christ, the Prince of peace, is USED for killing... What hope is there while men use God's provisions so often to change them, while keeping the name, or 'honouring' it; use them to kill, in a perverse misapplication of the very 'weapons' of peace! And this, it is done by those 'leading', mastering and 'explaining' - CHRIST'S divine prerogatives - by those therefore by definition, usurpers... (Matthew 7:26-29). Christ misused to make war... it is worse then grisly! it is historical.

More is found to this point on p. 1078-1079, op cit. :

In motive, men are forever seeking glory where it is not to be found. The glory of the (humanistic) race, of Rome, of Muhammad, of war, of winning, of racial superiority, of Communistic doctrinaire aridities, of the Pope, of Mary, of Aryans, of genes... you name it! This is readily interpreted by the Bible: it is because there IS glory so that it is rational to see it; but they seek it where it is not to be found, through unbounded rebellion which is producing increasingly confounding results! Here is 'Babylon'⁶ ablaze! (Contrast Isaiah 55:2-6.) And what says Jeremiah 13:16-17!

Give glory to the Lord your God
before He causes darkness,
and before your feet stumble on the dark mountains,
and while you are looking for light, He turns it into the shadow of death and makes it dense darkness.
But if you will not hear it, my soul will weep in secret for your pride;
My eyes will weep bitterly and run down with tears...

Four major international systems promote this. The Arab religion, now paraded so that men might perceive the place of force, is one. The Moslem god is not the Christian God. Do you kill the servants of your God as they did, so systematically, nearly taking over Europe in A.D. 732 at the Battle of Tours. This was a matter of the Moslem march, the holy war, the religious fervour, that launched armies and hurled men to glory for the reward of blood, as Muhammad was quick to declare of war in his field, in his own time, and he did this in no vague or uncertain terms (see e.g. pp. 986-989, 91 supra).

Their god is and always has been one of violence, and one for which the use of force to secure religious conversion is in certain cases, in order (Surah IX. 5, and Schaff, as noted). This god is the one Saddam Hussein says he worships; it is in the name of this god that Americans are called devils, doubtless including George Bush when, during the Gulf War, he was fresh from his prayer service, apparently directed to the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now how can the same God have his followers calling Christians devils, as has long appeared the trend ? THEY reject what HE in writing commands! Of course, he is not the same god, but no god at all, except it be as one format for the god of this world, a world which offers its friendship - as James tells us - at the expense of becoming enemies of God, the true God, and not the heretical caricature which the Moslems announce; nor the wafer God of Roman Catholicism, which is no god at all.

The Moslem religion denies that Christ died for the sins of men; the Roman religion denies that eternal salvation is conferred as a gift, entirely through the grace of God, and sets up a schedule of unauthorised priests and actions to intervene between any hope of heaven, and suffering sinners.

The JEWISH religion is separate from the Christian on one basic ground: the nation so acted as to KILL Christ, without accepting Him as the sacrifice for sin for which He came. That is not the ultimate point for this people: it is failure to repent at the national level which still afflicts the nation, in the very midst of divine mercies that are both prodigious and predicted, as we have seen in considerable detail.

The ARAB, the ROMAN and the JEWISH dealings, all international, have Jesus Christ in one way or another changed, rejected, or caricatured. The Russian contribution of a COMMUNISTIC rejection of Christ and most able persecution of His people, makes a fourth - MARXISM. (See p. 862 supra.)

ROME, JERUSALEM, MECCA:
Arab, Jew and Roman all produced an internationalised religion. EACH of these religions is against the Christ of God, declared in the Bible. These religions spread not only where their people were, but through them. Yes, to this add: MOSCOW: Russian, Jewish ... Arab and Roman religious rejections or transformations of Jesus Christ, and this accounts for thousands of millions of the people on this globe! The revolt is systematic; the case is tragic; and so are the results.

But WHY do we need so to cover this case ? It is that men might see verified the word of the ONLY GOD THERE IS, whom reason attests, whom prophecy exhibits, whom history follows, honour His name, accord to Him the honour (Ezekiel 21:26-27, 17:22-24, Revelation 5:9,12-13) which is objectively His due, and come to the only PRINCE OF PEACE that there is; and this, so they might cease their hatred of one another, seemingly an epidemic, and learn to love one another in the God who IS LOVE. Violence in religion is pandemic, but not in religion alone; love for the lost is needed that they might be found... love and not violence. It is neither wise nor Biblical to hate or attack those who are currently misled. It is both Biblical and necessary to show their errors, precisely as does a doctor, though here the physician is Jesus Christ, and the danger is both critical and eternal.

Since ALL have sinned, moreover, there is NO glory for ANY flesh when Christ is received. We must love our enemies and seek that through the Prince of Peace, they may find the reality which, rejected, leads the world swiftly now to its death throes (*19).

The sacrifice of Truth has occurred already (cf. Isaiah 59:14, Luke 23:26, John 8:40,43,46); it is not there that resolution is found. The failure to know or find or use aright the truth, is one of the testimonies to a fallen and systematic Age; for when what IS true is rejected, what is not, will satisfy neither reason nor soul, neither spirit nor nations. Restlessness will assuredly be ruinous, violence pandemic. WITHOUT the Lord, MAN is not an animal but a derelict god; and he acts like it, with a poignancy of pathos allied with a violence or a programmed evil, now callow, now callous, with hints of aborted glory, and vainglorious follies.

Even in dereliction, man is different; and the pangs and spasms of his heart, these are so many display units, dedicated to the description of what he is... but has refused to become, something in the image of God Himself: a creaturely derivative, by grace dowered with longings and hopes, often found intolerable in the abortion.

 

Also to the point, are pp. 842-3, op. cit.:

Christ predicted many false prophets and false Christs (Matthew 24) and Peter in II Peter 2:1-3 many false teachers. Thus the Christian faith, it was predicted, was to be invaded from within (cf. also Acts 20:28-30) - Christ Himself warning of "wolves in sheep's clothing" (Matthew 7:15). It was also to be attacked by the medium of substitute Christs, frankly other. There would in addition be prophetic souls who would bring on, in God's name, confusion and delusion, just as in the Old Testament cases (cf. II Chronicles 18:23), of earlier days.

Has it happened ? Muhammad was an earlier false Christ of massive, even prodigious results. Naming Christ sinless, he gave himself nevertheless an authoritative currency as God's man-on-the-spot, and proceeded to invest Christ with, and to divest Christ of such properties as seemed good to him, taming Him into just a prophet (keen type though), and making biographical additions about 600 years after the time for primary documents! It was not a distinguished effort, had no rational grounds for belief, did not agree with the Old Testament which preceded it by thousands of years, did not cover the rational need for a redemptive statement that we have earlier noted, used violence to procure belief, so as to make freedom meaningless, so implicating God, in so far as his Allah was supposed to relate to God. Much of which we have seen. Our point here is simply this: Muhammad was to be 'nice' to Christ and to supplant Him. Thus he acted instead of Christ, and that is what a false Christ does.

With hundreds of millions of devotees, Muhammad has done Christ this one service: he has figured in a spectacular way in fulfilling Christ's prediction (Matthew 25:5,11, John 16:2). God is reasonable and invites us to reason (Isaiah 1:18, 43:8-10), and the surrender of reason in order to 'believe' is like surrendering the steering on a car, in order to make a quick trip. Such speed may be lethal, and is ill-advised. The Bible however quietly predicts what happens, with a large category for false Christs and false prophets modelled in advance of the action. God is not indifferent to the honest recognition of His word, and has gone to immense pains to contra-distinguish it majestically from all pretence.

 

Finally, relevant and revealing, is what is found from SMR p. 1080ff.:

THE WEAVING OF THE WAYS FOR THE ANTICHRIST. See Extension 4, pp. 1072-1074 infra. What however of Muhammad's early - but continuing - input into this antichrist pattern ? a matter of assertion plus force to overcome ... unbelief in some mock-up, dysfunctional substitute for Christ. In the Koran, Surah 48:29, we find (it. added): ''Muhammad is God's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers'' - and how far? ''Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous'' (Surah 9:123, cf. 2:191); and indeed, (Surah 9:27-31): ''Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given as believe neither in God nor the Last Day ... until they pay tribute out of the hand and are utterly subdued.'' Yes, he decries (in 8:36-41): ''Tell unbelievers ... [to] reflect upon the fate of their forefathers. Make war on them until idolatry cease ...'' Reflect ? Fate ? ... city assault, tribute money, and then servitude - with the provision for death upon its removal. The 'fate' is the alternative to 'faith' is the alternative to force. (Cf. *17 infra.)

And all this force ? with due provision for occasional defeat, yet it is found written (Surah 8:59): ''Let not the unbelievers think that they will ever get away. They have not the power to do so'' ... Indeed, the prayer was to be: ''Lord forgive us ... our excesses; make us firm of foot and give us victory over the unbelievers" ... and the theme, ''If God helps you, none can overcome you'' (Surah 3:148 and 3:160; cf. Surah 48:22 - "If the unbelievers join battle with you, they shall be put to flight"). In fact, since Moslems almost took Europe, they lost at Tours in 732 A.D.; and again when the sprawling Ottoman Empire fell, with World War I; while in the Middle East from 1917 and from 1948 in particular and repeatedly, Moslem military losses have been sustained, spectacular and even proverbial (*18). This is despite enormous numerical advantage (the EXACT opposite of Surah 8:65 - ''If there are twenty steadfast men among you, they shall vanquish two hundred''). There have not been vicissitudes but repetitive overthrows, dominating almost comically the whole period of the Jew's return (as God predicted, Zechariah 12:6 ff. - cf. pp. 779-822, 851-857 supra.)

The force of evidence overthrows indeed the force of mere utterance. Proclaiming himself ''no more than an apostle'' (Surah 3:140-147), such that ''other apostles have come before me'' (Surah 3:183), Muhammad refers to Abraham and others, to the Jewish Torah (law) - Surah 2:135), and the ''earlier scriptures'' of ''Abraham and Moses'' (Surah 87:179), bowing to history by acknowledging, ''the prophets who surrendered themselves judged the Jews ... according to God's Book which had been committed to their keeping and to which they themselves were witnesses'' (Surah 5:44).

Witness! Dismiss evidence and what does 'history' become but the unholy butt of romance? While Muhammad says his book ''confirms the Scriptures which came before it'' (5:48), in fact the Messiah is as we have shown with dense-packed scriptures (cf. pp. 768-777 et al. supra), the eternal King irreplaceable, unsucceedable, whose word is final and, if rejected, fatal; and one need only cite words such as Isaiah 9:6-7, 42:1-4, 49:6, 53:11-12, 54:5,10, 55:3-11, Deuteronomy 18:15-18, Daniel 7:13-14, Psalm 72. Not merely is there no successor, this is so because the Son (Psalm 2:5-7) is God (Psalm 45, Isaiah 48:16, Micah 5:1-3), as shown earlier in great detail from many scriptures of which only the Jews were in fact - to use Muhammad's term - 'witnesses'. Successors, declares Christ, are false Christs (Matthew 24:24).

To fortify the contradiction: Muhammad wrote material wholly alien to that of the 'apostles' - such on his own admission - who 'went before' him, on the method of salvation, on redemption, on the place of grace and on the work of the Messiah (not really killed, says he - Surah 4:157, despite Daniel 9:25-26, Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Leviticus 16). To aggravate the impossible, Muhammad has the prior 'apostles' sent by ONE GOD! (Surah 3:40 and 3:21). Should one God send prophets opposed to the very core of Muhammad's words ? Why He gave His 'servants the prophets' among the Jews, such wholly, consistently and persistently clangorous contradiction of Muhammad, the prophet does not manage to attest!

The whole superabundantly attested, textually ancient, intense, immense, detailed racial systematics and salvation dynamics of the interlocking Old and New Testaments (cf. pp. 735-836 supra) are airily dismissed for the infinitely divergent dogmas (cf. Surahs 4,5,9,24 and 48) of the anti-verified Koran. To thunder the point home, God, having disciplined the Jews as Chapter 9 has shown His word predicted He would do, has given them the power He also predicted, abolishing the pretences of the Koran to its very face (cf. pp. 814, 830-834, 989 supra). Of a certainty, the Jews had less than no reason to add the scriptures on the Messiah, whom they murdered, but rather honestly retained them in fear. (See also *4 infra.)

The Koran is not merely unverified, but anti-verified and this with a divine mirth as God's predictive word ploughs through the field of history with the majestic insouciance of a tank in an agricultural field (cf. Psalm 2:8-12, Jeremiah 23:29; and Psalm 111:7-8, Isaiah 59:21 and p. 564 supra). See also pp. 1176-1186C infra for treatment of Joshua as an instrument of theocratic MORAL judgment, not contrary to the love or liberty God gives. Christ categorically did not subject physically, do violence at all to remedy unbelief. Truly He upbraided morally, cleansed, lamented (Matthew 23:37, Luke 19:42) and was subjected. Faith and force have divorce.

Of interest in this regard is news of an interview in which was featured Nicholas Garland of the Daily Telegraph, London (broadcast on ABC News Radio, February 5, 2006). The topic was the cartoons of Allah which have proved so upsetting to some in Denmark. The invasively demanding protests of many in Europe led to the government's response that it was a matter of concern in Denmark, to guard free speech. In England, it was indicated that there has been no reprint of the cartoons to this point. Nicholas Garland indeed deemed it unfortunate, or rather indicated that he would not have wished to be involved in such a method of illustration in such a case; but for all that, he insisted that the principle of freedom of speech was more vital than that of not offending people in various proclivities.

Christianity, he indicated, is almost as a modern tradition being attacked and insulted in Britain. It is necessary to allow liberty lest something of the utmost horror arrive in its place. That was his persistent position in that great land of liberty, now in such danger of using force to fashion thought.

Then in no small display of concern and emotion, he asked the question, What is happening in this country ... ? is it that force is belittling our liberty ? are we afraid of being bombed or bashed, is this the last line in this prospective demise of what is so dear ?

While those were not his precise words, it was his precise thought as conveyed by his own words.

 

 

*10

See *10 A above.

That is myth which ignoring facts, presents powers to interpret which do not evidence themselves and explanations which do not face the facts, and advises of powers which do not perform as required. See More Marvels ... Ch. 4 and associated references, SMR pp.  829ff., 1080ff., and Divine Agenda Ch. 6 and indexes. As shown in these references, it uses a religion which denies what it affirms and fails to find what it claims.

President Bush, perhaps heeding somewhat the recent blandishments of a visiting Prince Charles of England, with the reported mission to elevate Islam's books or looks with the US President, most recently has called Islam (as distinct from terrorists, ignoring the Koran's call) "a noble faith" - news from The Australian,  February 2, p. 8. While this may be politically savvy, and strategically appealing, it is, as a testimony, a betrayal of Jesus Christ who declared that many false prophets would arise (Matthew 24:24) and that no man comes to the Father but by Him (John 14:6).

If there is one thing the Islamic Koran most dominantly forgets, it is CALVARY, the place of the blood shed to cancel the guilt of sin, of which Paul declares this, "God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of Christ by which the world is crucified to me and I to the world," Galatians 6:14. There is no nobility in preaching another gospel; in fact, as Paul declares in Galatians 1, ANYONE, even an angel, yes the apostle himself, preaching another gospel is accursed. How noble is that!

Anti-prophetic teaching, contrary to the decisive depictions of the almost verified Bible,  may be deemed profitable, but profits from prophets are not obtained in that manner, and the subterfuges of Satan, contrary to fact  and reality alike, need no caresses.

All astray, whether in physical or spiritual malpractice, are to be pitied, but not to be congratulated! Would a doctor call smoking a noble practice! It is time to deal with truth as one would be dealt with it, truly. If it is not to be ashamed of Christ, to congratulate His enemies, it is not easy to find how it could be done!

*11A                                 EXCURSION

The LACK OF PEACE WITH ISLAM ...  (see *10A and 10, above

and

The LIBERTY OF LOVE IN CHRIST, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE.

What of the Temple, the Mosque and the Cartoon ?

Islam without doubt relates to Muhammad who without doubt relates to the use of sustained force, armed might, submission on the part of Meccans after a long and involved campaign of propaganda, robbery, intrigue and diplomacy, in a military phase including the assault on a Jewish settlement and the take-over of Mecca. Subordinate peoples might be permitted to exist if they gave a large contribution to sustain Muhammad's forces while they went on to their submission exercise.

It is useless to pretend it is other, and the Encyclopedia Britannica has the gen. Nor is it unusual in supplying it. FORCE has been the ally of, and weapon of invading with RELIGION in this case, from the first. The Koran has much of it quite explicitly as detailed in SMR pp. 50ff., 90ff., and in Divine Agenda Ch. 6, Lord of LIFE Ch. 3, for example (see Indexes).

When, by contrast, ancient Israel invaded Canaan, it was already a voluntary body, NOT secured or constituted or instituted in part or whole by force, and its exercise was NOT to secure more Israelities but to bring JUDGMENT on Canaanites who, after a predicted 400 years (Genesis 15) were at last ready for the rebuke to their depravity which God had prepared, foretold and then used Israel as instrumental in applying.

This point is made in LORD  of LIFE Ch. 3 ,SMR pp. 1186Aff., and in 1175ff., part of the former being reproduced below:

*3 'Dire judgments' and religion by force - a distinction.

It is of the utmost importance to realise acutely a certain distinction here. It is one thing to use violence of lust and hate, of desire and self-aggrandisement or fulfilment, of substitution for truth, and of will, to use all this as a MEANS of forcing people to accept a religion. In this case, as has been constantly reasoned, the essential, though now heavily polluted freedom, inbuilt into man at his creation in the image of God (not autonomy, but not slavishness), would be aborted. Neither callow fear nor crushing force occasions belief, or removes grounds for disbelief. We use the concept even in law: this was done under duress, we say, and hence we may question the validity of any such act.

Very well: THAT is one thing, and religions of this character fold quietly, before their obvious misuse of reality to secure their blatant ends; are excluded as coming from God, are of man, not divine. The other point, to be carefully distinguished, is this. IF God desires to exercise judgment, and rebuke immorality, that is His pre-rogative. Before our own desires, He rules. If we are inclined to be foolish, then a minor judgment may alert us to the truth we wilfully neglected. Obviously the misuse of one of God's creations, merely to advance the wilful and irrational desires of another, is contrary to truth and reality. A rebuke, therefore, in the form of judgment is part of that - we might say - moral climate which so constantly limits the wildest sprees of the human race, its kings, empires and persons.

IF nothing could be done that was evil, where would freedom be ? If nothing were done to rebuke its misuse, where would justice be ? If men refuse to relate to God, then much injustice may for a time constitute a rebuke; and then those responsible may themselves be rebuked. In Nahum we see the divine loathing for this grossly oppressive empire, that of Nineveh, the Assyrians in their cruelty; and the eventual fall, like that of the Canaanites before the army of Joshua, is a matter of necessity.

In the case of the Assyrians, it is perfectly explicit. First, however, they were used as an agent of judgment, and then, passing beyond their scope, they were dealt with IN judgment (Isaiah 37:26-35). But what of repentance in all this, amid the judgments which may come, though God be patient ?

This neither must nor need induce any repentance. It does not force anyone to come to God. It is not a substitute for faith. It is a part of the sometimes slow or gradual, sometimes sudden because long awaited, judgment of a moral person who has indeed made freedom, but who has not made it...'God'! It is He who is God.

Within the textures of reality, then, man is set. His freedom is not aborted by divine dealings of moral judgment, but increased, to this extent: that man is not left with witless grounds for imagining that freedom is indeed divine, that man's whole task is to please himself, and invent what gods he pleases (cf. Psalm 50:20-23). The plays of Shakespeare have often this sombre note, as do some of the works of Dickens, and this is not the least of the reasons for the greatness and impact of these authors.

Religions of violence seek to force people to conform, either by violence as a substitute for faith, or as a ground for it; they may attack the person - as in the Moslem case so notoriously and as in the Roman Catholic rather similarly - saying: Believe whatever I say, or face death or horror because you don't! The Christian however is not authorised so to do; for Christ was crucified, but crucified none, saying rather,

My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight ... but now My kingdom is not from here (John 18:36).

While moral realities are indeed brought to light, and the Old Testament is filled with references to the obvious hypocrisy of a nation which said it believed God but showed, very often, that much of it did not (Isaiah 29:13), this area is a matter of honesty. Appeals and overtures, pathos and endurance, forbearance and tenderness all mix, as God appeals to them to honour their commitments.

How long He gave the Canaanites to repent, we have already noted, before His judgment was executed on their chosen way - a way both irrational and evil, debasing and demeaning ... exposing what it in fact was.

If such a vicious culture continued endlessly, then not only should it mightily blight those whom it seized, young and old, devastating to its own, anguished, injured and inured; but it would be an infectious devastation - rather like nuclear waste, at another level, blighting to all who pass by, like a moral Chernobyl by prevailing winds fouling Europe. (Cf. pp. 445-451, 1163A-1164, 1174A-D supra.) One might compare His long extended mercy to Israel (II Chronicles 36:15-17).

With those of no commitment, the process of letting them learn can be long; and the opportunities many: God may mock ( Psalm 82) their pretences at being 'gods', but they are permitted to follow them to their logical and physiological conclusions.

Having so used Israel to bring judgment, God also, being no respecter of persons, had them for their own part in a covenant with sanctions for following the same immoral course as did the Canaanites (Leviticus 26 for example), and when after centuries, they persisted, first in the Northern and then in the Southern Kingdom, Israel and Judah respectively, they were themselves subjected to dispersion in the former case, and severe discipline in the latter. Israel thus became a famous test case, and its latter segments of history having been predicted, with its piercing of God-as-man as one ignoble part of it, it became a blackboard demonstration case for the even-handedness of God, who is the God of justice and truth.

Yet even here, He is also the God of sovereignty and triumph, in the very midst of patience, for the death of Christ was one which yet constituted the sacrificial grounds for pardon for any! Meanwhile, the soon to come loss by Israel of its temple and of Jerusalem indeed, unutterably destroyed as Christ had foretold (Matthew 24, Luke 19:42ff.), followed by its dispersion and this world's mockery of it, and then at last, after so long a time (as in Hosea 3, Ezekiel 36, Zechariah 12,14), its regaining of Jerusalem in a vast comeback with amazing military victories over much vaster armies, this too has come as predicted, and not only predicted, but declared with divine oversight and grounds provided. Then has come the international throb which its presence creates, as now, all is foretold (cf. SMR Ch. 9).

God, who is very deep and of infinite understanding, not only shows His hand in His book by its unique and verifiable cover of history, both to come and past, but by His people. In Christ, He has outlawed all use of force for His kingdom, which in any case, with Israel was to to SECURE a kingdom but to judge a nation. You see this in Matthew 26 and John 18:36. Such use ignores Christ as LORD, and without that, there is nothing Christian at all (cf. Luke 14, 6:46, Romans 10:9, John 14:21ff.).

If you look, you may also see what Islam is doing not only in the systematic slaughter of Jewish civilians, without there even being the slender 'justification' of military pursuit, involved publicly, by numerous declarations, by arisings, by revilings, by cartoons, by lampoons,  in the war of intimidation being fought, in principle at least, precisely as in the case of Muhammad as he sought to invade and suppress, so bringing people to SUBMISSION at Mecca.

Since the religion is not rationally sustainable, as shown above, in the references given,  and in SMR (see also Index), and involves itself in the use of force for religion, so removing freedom as man's prerogative and thus making 'god' or Allah as they say it, responsible, whether this be the intention or not: they have no ACTUAL escape from the defilement of the divine in the painful horrors of man. Yet He who IS God does not willingly afflict the children of men (Lamentations 3:33), to the point that He prefers to come AS man and DIE on the Cross, to even allowing their sins to bring to them, their due retribution. In this, justice is served by the Judge becoming the victim, and so paying the fine (Matthew 20:28, Galatians 3).

It is indeed only when you have man both loved and sought by God, so that his state is not in his own control, but capable of being changed freely and by sovereign divine power, so that what he is does not constitute his end but his beginning, and what God is becomes his resource, that freedom CAN exist as we have often seen (see Predestination Quintet, including Great Execrations ... Chs.   7 and  9).

The God of freedom thus ensures that liberty is not violated, even for love, that the image of God in man is not superseded, but actualised, so that love takes what it may, and sovereignty ensures there is no error. Without this, the self of man becomes the limit, and whatever may operate ON it, it IS until changed, as Paul puts it in I Corinthians 1, attributing to these spiritual things, the concept that they are FOOLISH. What you deem foolish is not shat you choose, so that it is not of him who wills (Romans 9, John 1:12), but of God; yet in this, it is not of force, but of freedom, for He liberates what He has foreknown (Romans 8:29ff.), and knows the truth, even where the limits and sins of man preclude it.

Thus is freedom vindicated by love, restraint and knowledge in deity, and enabled by payment to justice, which has no further claim, to mitigate against freedom or to contain it.

Without freedom is determinism which involves forced errors, not so determined after all, for what program programs error; and this must be so, for if it is SUPPOSED to happen, or constrained, HOW COULD IT BE ERROR! It is law. If it is not, on the other hand, MADE to happen, then how is it not free ? You cannot have it both ways. The errors of determinism are considered in Repent or Perish Ch. 7 and SMR pp. 439ff., 422Eff., as in pp. 23ff., 348ff., and Ch. 3, together with It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Little Things Ch. 5, in diverse aspects, for example. 

The reductionist fantasy of man is appealing to guilt, attractive to guile, but contrary to reality; and in practice, people who vehemently assert that one is wrong in this or that word or conception of mind in abstract thought, are merely showing that man has purpose, has fickleness or dysfunction, has motives true or false, and is a being amenable to truth or else to be found declining from it at will, for thrill, or by some spiritual swill, which needs attention and correction by forces of understanding or other enlightenment. So far from being determined by the argumentation, many may delight in seeing its justice and avoiding its point. This is the empirical fact. You CANNOT be wrong if determinism is your master, and guilt and appeal to it, as if truth were dominant, would become a lie in action.

But such appeal is constantly in action, and by none more vehemently than by those who discard its grounds! Truth is indeed dominant in the end, when the Source, explanation and ground of man and his conduct, reviews the misuses and abuses of rationality as given, as will as deployed and of cunning deviationism from realised truth.

No ground for the same errors is to be found in what cannot err, being determined; nor can any escape be found from the moral desire to 'correct', except in the underlying assumption of access to truth as a corrective, realisable and capable of implementation. Nothing erroneous CAN be determined, and nothing determined can be 'corrected'. It simply is what it is.

Not so is man, whose fantasising fictions are a large part of the basis of his entire history (cf. Ch. 2 above). Indeed, if man were in the control of various dynamics of merely natural kind, and not a person at all but a harassment victim merely, then it would be impossible for him to make an exterior for this process, and avoiding its alleged reality, view it from outside and so put it into a perspective which in that case, would not be there to find, to access or to employ!

Having your cake and eating it is not at all a solution to the famines of man, whether of stomach or spirit.

The resolutions, dissolutions, distillations, dispositions of will in conformity or non-conformity to pressures, or rebellion against them, the discernments and deliberations in principles opted or distanced, on the part of man are no myth, and his sense of guilt is, to no small degree,  their counterpart. No wonder Dr Carl Jung could find no solution for it but in authority on the one hand, and some believed in basis on the other. Since he did not know God, he had to invent a meretricious substitute, for any hope of systematic result; and at that, fraud was to play the fool for the duped.

So far from being insane in this intractable self-charge, man’s culpability is as obvious as the glint in his eyes or the machinations of his mind. Indeed,  in awareness of guilt, his sanity is nowhere better illustrated; for he has awareness both of laws and principles, models and systems, and may choose this or that, and choose to apply it in a slovenly or rigorous fashion, become slave to its defects or seek to make others so! Of all this, guilt is the correlate; and the concept that he HAD to do it, while true to the point that sinful cohesions can, like caught ligaments destroying free movement, thrust into habits of mind, body or spirit, is not the penetrating testimony of truth. Indeed, it cannot even appear so, except perhaps where rationalising has crept in to soothe the non-broken heart with false remedy and illusory dispersal of known facts.

The grown tree has the sown seed, and here there have been many opportunities to fly this way or that.

Slave at times to desire, man is capable of realisation, and seeking stability in planes of understanding beyond the impact of the moment or the temporal, he often finds it, where it may be found, in the source of his deliberation capacity, and in the origin of his self-review. This is its ground, source and explanation and it being Truth (John 14:6), basis of his very systematic existence and cause of it, has explication powers correlative to its creative supremacy.

Seeking to fly in the face of this wind, such is man’s complexity that he also often discovers new veins of drugging for his spirit, and reeling with these, whether in humanism or relativism or other false religion, he declares the absolute with complete blindness to the fact that he has deleted it, and so has no contact for communication of it! Indeed, in such cases, man will quite freely use and display the whole domain of the personal, while either ignorant of it or bent on denying it. He will even in a fluster and flurry of irrationality, deploy the vitality and dynamism of this psychic domain, this realm of understanding, whilst denying the very features which enable him to deny it. He will show you the sure understanding that understanding is denied to man, or impossible, or a mere phantom, while using what he denies to establish what he affirms.

This is not sick, it is more than slick, it is logical insanity, brought on by the stereotyping of sin, and the blindness of revolt. To affirm what he is not, man denies himself, the whole sphere of the personal in its access to truth, responsibility and guilt, its liberties and its dispositions of the will, its disposabilities of thought and the REASON why this or that decision was taken, through a distinct opting for the result, in the very face of an awareness that the way to it is neither good nor right, nor sustainable. Man’s heart is, as Jeremiah 17:9ff. tells us, desperately wicked and deceitful above all things.

Dispensing with the logically indispensable God, man cannot explain why he finds reason so indispensable, and so irresolvable in its conflicts, while maintaining his view is true, with appalling frequency despite the self-contradiction, as you go from one philosophy to another.  As if in a fit, he then denies himself, making of himself organised flotsam and jetsam, before using this same dispirited mess, by his spirit, to declare that its results are good and viable, but merely suffer from a few intractables which, despite the testimony of millennia in such pits, will surely become amenable to … labour.

Such self-denial denies its own validity; for were it not true that man can have access to truth past the devices of manipulative or deterministic powers, or indeed past its imaginary non-existence, then his denials would be but the passing soughing of the wind. The power needed to give him truth is truth itself, and self-revealing truth at that, and hence personally propositional in power, since in the endeavour to find it, his own limitations and desires would disenable it as much as using a hand with arsenic on it, to dispense flour would do. Moreover, if it were not there, absolute truth, who could find it, or if it were not willing to tell, who could profit! Thus does the Christian Gospel answer the intractable problems of man at the outset, just as determinism, for its part makes them irresolvable at the end. But let us consider further.

Moreover, apart from the usual use of magic instead of God, to those who like the nursery, though mature, on what would the imaginary determinations rest, if there were none with the power and penetration, the disposability of will and the skill to make them ? The delimited has ot be made so; it is only the non-delimited which requires no beginning, for there is nothing to be done, for it to be. Eternity in existence is always the necessity of the temporarily delimited, and since nothing has no future, the eternal basis, source of delimited commencement and sufficiency must always be both there and capable of what is to come. It is not man, nor is it any part of ‘nature’ which having the need, needs first the feed, the ground for both its being and its delimitation.

On the other hand, denying himself, because denying his God, man merely makes of himself a despot, making statements from the mist, into it; except that often enough, it is statement from the mist to the must, in order vaguely and viciously, to control his fellows.  What then of this self-denial ?

This would simply illustrate that if you deny the validity of the conditions of your own discourse, you might as well save yourself the trouble: you are broken by reason at the outset. It also denies the awareness of man’s perceptions of decision, determinations of his own, based not on necessity, but on a critical evaluation of possibilities, and sometimes, at that, a rejection of the result because of a desire to BE ONESELF.   This is entirely personal, and no amount of blame shifting will alter that: THIS psyche loves itself to distraction. Others may hate themselves, and not without reason, and that too is an option, as guilt and guile, honesty and striving conscience join battle in the spirit of man.

The awareness of the options, and of the grounds for each, and of the force of one’s own will, and of the power to redirect it from one possibility to another, and of using it or not for a reason capable of evaluation and acute evaluation, on the grounds of laziness or pride, in seeking slyly or honestly, in selfless roving or in senseless enjoyment: this is one of the main ingredients in the psyche of man. Possible only logically if grounded in God, outside and standard beyond oneself, truth in spite of or in blight of or in the sight of oneself, it is the correlative of guilt, the primary datum of experience; and this at once slits the hope of determinism, since the denial of both the primary and the rational is mere intellectual suicide, no small fault for one seeking to use intellect to establish anything. This is rational disestablishmentarianism, and however much a man may dislike reason, it invalidates all his reasoning, whether about reason or about its consequences.

If it were invalid, all other discourse using it would have the same feature, and hence need no further argument. It would be like a runner breaking his leg on purpose, before the race. There is no point then in watching it. It is already over. Even those saying, There is non truth are affirming that it is true that this is so, and so insist on self-contradiction at the outset. There is no way of avoiding your Maker, since His marks of determination and freedom and meaning are without cessation, on all sides, always demanding His hand, always leaving contrariness as irrational rebellion.

Further,  man’s candour, captivities, awarenesses of the same are the product of conscience, the dower of God, of the penetration of the Spirit of God, like rushing waters into the worst of the swamps; and he cannot leave alone either God, or the invisible, by which he opines at will or even whim, there is no God! or that there are no morals, while rejoicing (as in Psalm 1), in their apparent overthrow, he merely invents more, as if to overthrow all restraint were a binding moral, and those who failed to do so were immoral! Whether the basis for some eccentric belief system be explicit or implicit, the thing does not alter. If reason is withheld, it is not therefore dispatched; and if it is used, then it refuses redress except in God.

In freedom, man is bound by the severance from God, which becomes like a loose tangling rope, what binds him to the resultant poverty, to what is inept,  which makes of his soul a pathetic residue, or flailing him, his spirit a flaming stallion, proud and with nowhere to go, so going anywhere, often with great pomp and no little ceremony. It is this susceptibility in man, because of his construction as an image-bearer of God, which makes him at once reasonable and ludicrous in many of his ways, the latter where the Lord is concerned, since with many there is a seemingly absolute necessity to void Him and avoid His ways, in the interests of flesh, power and the grabbing of the same from whatever source.

 A world with such to lead it, goes where it must, to the destruction it deserves, like a riderless horse intent on going, void of knowledge of its purpose.

Force is justly seen as a vast gulf and even  abyss for man, quitting meaning with might, gutting beauty with strength, ruining responsibility with metal; and to use it in religion is merely a contradiction in terms, since faith - and none can belief a religion without some variety of this - is a conviction, not a constraint.

Force in the matrix of religion as a determinant, submission as an injunction backed by it, is futile and a contradiction in terms for those whose response MATTERS BECAUSE it is free. We are not automatons, and indeed many pour scorn on their construction and expect us to believe them though they invalidate their sentences with their sentence on themselves.

To what war of intimidation however does one refer ? It alludes for example to the effort to dissuade Israel from existing as a nation, as in the Teheran Conference of 1991, when the devices for the overthrow of Israel were quite clear, and in the lament of Dr Mahathir, at the failure of the masses of Islamic peoples to overthrow for so long the tiny nation of Israel, a just observation. He conceived what might be a more effective way of DEALING with Israel SUCCESSFULLY, that small residue for a people. Let us face it, the long effort to delete Israel which the President of Iran recently voiced once more, is in the last analysis, GENOCIDE, albeit political, and is OLD, very old.

We must indeed ask this question, if truth matters (and it matters infinitely, for its absence makes of man a spiritual abortion,  and its presence, a meaningful, purpose-built person), then WHY did not the Islamic religion, to the full 97% of it who are (we hear repeatedly) so non-violent and peaceable, rise up as one man and using every one of the (97% ?) of representative peaceable mullahs and other Islamic authorities, condemn this President, and short of his vocal and public repentance, demand that all the Islamic clerics in his country exclude him from the faith, and show by a mixture of courage and consistency that they REALLY detest terrorism! Was there some reason for this conspicuous absence ?

Would it not, if it non-violence of method were a factual matter, be the case that hardly ONE religious cleric in Iran would fail publicly to condemn such an outrage, and the vast mass of Moslems in the country would be cutting off the President from all religious places, thus requiring of him to find the 3% (if it applied in that land) of warlike persons to which to attach himself, a virtual outcast! What does power matter ? Religion is faith in something, and if you believe it, do you not do it ? Do you believe it so long as it does not hurt ? Why then have the millions of Christian martyrs acted as if their FAITH is where their feet are, when on crosses or in stocks!

Indeed, do we find Muslim clerics on all sides, be they mullas, ayatollahs or whatever, in posts exalted or humble, in every way condemning these acts of violence against those who do not follow their behests, demands, those intimidations by violence, those insistences that this or that will become theirs and be under Allah and so forth ? Indeed as so many Muslims make their 'offensive' - to use their term, proclamations when they call to worship, concerning their god, Allah, are they then hastening to tell the faithful that these outrageous distortions of Islam must cease, that those who make them, whoever they be, and in whatever way they come to use the name of Allah in such respects, are unworthy of the faith, that they are betraying it, need sharp rebuke or else, if this be not received, excision from the body of Islam? \

One does not notice it, if it is happening... nor its virtually universal exhibition on behalf of the ...
97% is it ?

Do we find of the latest use of the Moslem religious term 'jihad' against some citadel of resistance, where force is now the criterion for the result and submission or worse the result desired, that all with one voice (or at least 97% voice overall, to take the case ...) arise as one man, mosque leaders, mullahs, leaders of all types, men of weight, those in politics and those out of it in this religion, to call for the punishment of those responsible for the defilement of truth by force as a means for the religion ?

Is President and commoner alike, guilty of it, brought before councils national or international, for censure, loss of authority, excommunication ? Does the religion have no court ? is this the result in its places of decision ?

One has not noticed it.

Are notices of condemnation read out in all mosques (or some 97% of them, a fair swag) ? Is 'offence' to the Jews by similar cartoons as those which have in February 2006, aroused such international crusades, against vileness, violations and suffering for many non-Moslems, and is this also treated as major crime, so that those responsible whether in Palestine or elsewhere are the objects of horror, regarding as prostitutes might be by the strenuously moral ? One does not find it printed. Are the leaders of Moslem nations who openly seek Israel's destruction subjected to spiritual ostracism by all leading clerics in their own countries ? Is the manifest and OFTEN stated desire to remove Israel, the special emphasis only of Hamas ?

Is this not MORE than offensive ? Is it not a weapon of far more grievous proportions as Israel in its tiny relic of the Palestine internationally promised, is invaded time and again, with indiscriminate violence against its people, called 'jihad', and lives of suffering result among the younger victims, which they are thereby caused to endure ? Has this no 'offense' ? If a drawing is offensive, is redrawing a body by nails inoffensive ?

Is the world about to witness the greatest hypocrisy of all time, or a mismatch of proportions which would be a sound entry in any international competition for hypocrisy ?

Once again, you cannot have it both ways! Is it similar with the PLO ? When Hamas is elected to government and pertinaciously refuses to remove the use of force for outstandingly RELIGIOUS purposes, from its MOST ISLAMIC agenda, being elected overwhelmingly by the people of an overwhelmingly Islamic land in a democratic or near democratic fashion, with the deletion, the destruction of Israel, a consuming objective, what then ? Where then  is the 97% who voted NO being mainstream Islamic people and so PREVENTED Hamas from getting in ? If it is not there, where is it then ?

They are of course as always, it seems, nowhere to be seen. Where is the universal condemnation from all accepted Moslem sources ? Where is the outrage dissociating from those nations, those leaders, those rulers, be they religious authorities or other, who claim to be Islamic, condemning them as anti-Islamic and using the full power of the religion, if it has it, to do so ? Where is this found being so used to dissociate them and indicate where Islam, in that case, is to be found and OPERATIONAL ?

It is not seen. Soft voices and varied and assorted little words creep along, perhaps;  but the soul of the religion is not found in incandescent outrage and practically effective action to remove from its concourse, from visits to Mecca, from participation in international councils, to detach from Islam, those who insist on such actions ? and if 3% (to take the figure found) are to separate and continue with jihads and the like, what is that to the many ? Is this what is found in places of power, in places of international concourse, as a ground for using the very NAME of Islam ? It is not so. It is not to be found.

When the Teheran Conference made its pan-Islamic crusade against Israel, the non-Islamic, was it, were the leaders in it instantly outcast by the 97% of the peaceable Islamics, as rebels against Islam ? I think not.

It is not the mere GRAB of the rest of Palestine, given by the League of Nations to Israel in ENTIRETY, which is their quest. If it were all, it would still be rather more than 'offensive', for it would involve a deliberate offensive operation of military, psychological and social dimensions!

It is far worse even than that.

They want Israel to CEASE to exist, to devastate and destroy it; and they are acting very definitely in the name of ALLAH, and MUHAMMAD and we find, are using the technical term 'jihad' which is required as orthodox in Islam generally, for their efforts. It is a RELIGIOUS mission of force to remove what is not of their own kind, to require Islam in ALL the area and this BY MIGHT of hand.

Thus when the affair of the cartoons arose, depicting Muhammad as a terrorist, there was a feeling of being incensed on the part of many Moslems, since there appeared an attribution of 'terrorism' to Muhammad, who in fact is a false prophet so often cited by terrorists (*10A, Lord of Life Ch.3, Ch. 8, More Marvels ... Ch. 4). Now while there may be some care required with the term involved, the basic contention that it is a religion freely using FORCE to gain its RELIGIOUS objectives, is simply a fact.

When Suleiman around the year 1535 A.D. rebuilt the walls and gates of Jerusalem, and when he had placed and built his MOSQUE right on the site of the Jewish Temple (or approximately so), was this perhaps, just conceivably, 'offensive' to the Jews ? Might their sensibilities have been ... shall we say, compromised just a little! Is blindness to become a way of life, then, in all this conflict, and pretence a pre-condition of speech!

Would it be possible that some might feel 'hurt', and their faith 'assailed', or 'attacked' when such a site was chosen for such a building of such a religion which denied the heart and basis of the God of Israel (SMR pp. 1080ff.)? One could, perhaps, without having an over-active imagination consider that some Jews might feel that the selection of THAT site for the Mosque, as that of the destroyed Jewish Temple, well... lacked a certain sensibility, not to say sensitivity. Was Suleiman the Magnificent universally condemned for this obviously unfeeling, this ... offensive act ? and that by Islam. One does not notice it.

Why then is this hypocritical seeming upset about being unfeeling, offensive ? Why IS VIOLENCE, already involving scores of people, and destruction of national property, being used to INTIMIDATE nations and peoples, so that what Islam has done so freely to others, might not, even in gravely limited fashions and without bloodshed, so vastly used by them, must not be done to it! even if it be for instruction and illumination ?

Is not the use of violence, when it is now made in reply to an implicit critique of the torture inflicted by undisciplined Islamic persons, as a retort to the jihads of the century and some of that preceding, a confirmation of the charge ? If violence is vile, and terrorism is terrible, why is it used to intimidate those who by satire or conclusion are showing up what many claim is its source, and that not without the clearest intimations from the Koran! (cf. Lord of Life Ch. 3, and *7 above) ?

Why is this found, and rather than a purge of iniquity, do we hear those responsible for it more often lauded to the skies, surrounded by demonstrations of peculiar intensity and immensity, buttressed by national leaders, with no use of the power of the religion, if it has it, to shatter the evil with discipline and by this,  showing that this is all heresy and folly, and must be cut off at any cost! Why then is the intimation shown in the cartoon, only in large part, verified by this response ? If the term could rather have been 'user of force in religion', is not the point
important ?

Is it not VIOLENCE in religion which is being used to FORCE religion and acquiescence in religion on people, with the real or assumed threat of killing, or torture, or capture, or destruction of property or mangling death to the leaders involved! If criticism is to be the object of violence, is truth able to stand ? and what does not stand is not truth in the end! This is a time of testing, and let what is to be, show what it is by what it does.

If someone is accused of being a thief, and in his outrage at the tag, steals money in order to intimidate the one who dared to call him a thief, is it not a contradiction in terms, and is not his very response a confirmation of the indictment ? Would his friends who disagreed, simply say, Oh I say, old chap, you really are going a little far in stealing, and should stop now, really you should ? Or would it be CRIME!

If some religion in its vast expression over a long period of history, especially modern, and especially ancient alike, is accused of using violence to secure itself and force itself on people, and those who object to such a description of it then use violence to secure their point and force it on people anyway, is this not a demonstration of the accuracy of the accusation! It appears that with many, with very small rebuke from within the religion, as distinct from soft words of reassurance by some, to those OUTSIDE IT, there is an apparent need of violence to bring their religion the bacon, and that this is so endemic and that for so long and with such a traditional background of it, that it does not occur to them that the best way to eliminate a reputation for religious violence is NOT to use it!

Instead they confirm it by using it as an implement of objection to the accusation. And 'brothers' are kindly cautioned to cool it, as by Annan (ABC News Radio, February 6, 2005), instead of being told, for their part, with strength and conviction that the entire program of violence to secure religious objectives
is wrong, heartless and meaningless, a desecration of religion and a horror to behold. Is this 'inflammatory' ? Then why are such strong words used of the other faults deemed to exist in other nations for other wrongs announced ? Is it inflammatory for a judge to indite with vigour and conviction a foul crime ? and if it comes to thousands slain, does this make it less ? If you put out a fire, do you suggest it tone down the flames, or do you pour the opposite, water, on it with vigour and marshall your forces AS IF YOU MEANT TO PUT IT OUT!

It would be difficult, certainly, in view of the Koran, of Muhammad's own way of taking Mecca and using it for religious purposes, subordinating Jews and others to second class citizen state by FORCE, to speak too strongly; but if it were true, why is it not done ? If Islam is to reform, where are the steps ?

WHENEVER  a Muslim mosque has the prayer call and states or shouts publicly that there is no God but Allah, is this perhaps 'offensive' to some ? Is shooting to be outlawed by those who specialise in it ?

Why is it that the desire is so lop-sided ? Actually, when reason can find nothing to use for the defence of ANYTHING, VIOLENCE (subtle or other) is the norm. So it is here.*10A, Lord of Life Ch.3, More Marvels ... Ch. 4, Divine Agenda Ch. 6, SMR pp. 50ff., 91, 1186A. It is because such ways are so often found in the Koran and used by the founding Muhammad for the establishment of his religion, that it is not easy for any Muslim to condemn its use, while having  it used on all sides in the very construction and usage of the religion. With Christ, such things are roundly condemned and there is no tension; and if some want to violate His words, what has this to do with Him ? He declared, EXCEPT you FORSAKE all that you have you CANNOT be My disciple! (Luke 14).  When Rome outrageously violated that, the Protestant Reformation courageously left them and took the consequences. THAT is what faith does. It does not talk and talk and do the opposite as if by a tic; it acts.

Meanwhile jihad mentality continues, is official, is widely acclaimed and proclaimed in Islam and has brought no reformation from its follies.

Peace is not to be found by such methods, whether by invasion of Europe as in the 8th century, or now, by seeking to intimidate with the USE and the THREAT of force, peoples who AS PEOPLE, are not satisfied that the thing is true, or rational, or desirable, or just or to man (or woman) or to God alike!

Now at last we are seeing some of the fruit of the inane desire to blend wholly diverse religions at their SOURCE (saying variously: redemption, NOT redemption, Christ the only begotten Son of God, NOT so, NO force to shove religion into arenas of liberty, MUCH force to do so and ... so on and on).

The world religions do not blend in force, or in fact. The delusion of attempting to achieve this starts with the assumption that GOD IS NOT KNOWN, and is available for diplomatic, devious and phraseologically perverse pretence. When, however,  man has at last passed this Islamic power push, growing somewhat closer to a power putsch, such as in effect Muhammad engineered for Mecca at the outset, with no more to do with the actual God than force has with faith, and decided what to BE and to what to MOVE (something still denied to Europe, but it will come), then force will indeed take control for a time. There is to be, biblically, an international sort of Hitleresque time to come (cf. The Moon Soon and its sequel).

It will not then be bound by pope or Muhammad, nor by communistic atheism; for the big three power corrupters will be gone, sunk - Revelation 17 recording the end at the power putsch level for the papacy (cf. SMR pp. 946ff.). It will be more informed, and even less tolerant, if possible, than any of these for it will insist on complete conformity by ALL to ONE, and this not being God, will be the very end of all the irrational endeavours to trade freedom for force, and faith for conformity.

This current surge of terrorism for this and for that reason, it is but a gambit. In the end, the reaction and response will look for something better, more universal, more rational, but dreaming its own dreams of ultimate power for man, will end as they all did, or do, and must, where error always ends, in judgment. It will be in and with the judgment of the One who assures us that all will be judged on that Day by one man (Acts 17:33), whose words as a matter of empirical and biblical fact, are always fulfilled. who is not man calling himself God, but God who used man's format to grant pardon, where His name is received. He will not judge what He does not intimately and personally know, for He has been through it, through temptation and through vilification and through the outrageous use of force to seek to establish a religion allegedly of faith. He has been on the receiving end, and in love, bore this to free those who receive His pardon from His own hand.

Pardon is not available where it is not received; it is not given where it is not accepted, and it is not conferred where He who grants it is subjected to ideological and theological mutation, which changes nothing but gives the wrong address to the suppliant! To call on British PM at home, you need No. 10 Downing St., not a bazaar in Iran or an office in the Kremlin. To call on the Lord, you need to go where He is to be found, to Jesus Christ as biblically given, and not as moulded by a mind 6 centuries later, for a book which does not verify itself; and if you elect not to do so, it is like trying to visit the bank by floating listless on a raft in the middle of a lake.

It is as simple as that.

There is no place where mercy is not needed, and no other place than Christ, as a matter of simple empirical fact, where it may be found (John 14:6). He alone is verifiably, validly attested in the Bible which claims the source which operates history, and shows it as history unfolds, century by century, event by event, as the grand and divine disposition of history becomes not only predicted, but experienced (cf. SMR, REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER).

When coming to that virtuous, vicariously saving, vigorous and divine and eternal Being, Jesus Christ, and entering into Him as your vessel of voyage, it is necessary to step onto the actual ship, not to fall deadly into the adjacent wharf water, so intent on your will that you fail to find the One to whom you go; and subject to no illusion, it is required for each to find Him where He is wharfed and ready, for those who come must come to Him, the Lord’s Christ (Luke 2:26), and not to another (II Corinthians 11).

It is crucial to come to Him who came and left His word in attestation (John 14:26), His works in evidence and His predictions to guide the lost and the weary (II Peter 1:19), away from all the false christs which obediently come and go as He foretold (Matthew 24:24), to the One who died, redeemed and delivered, so that to enter HIS vessel is to gain eternal life, the free gift by grace from God (Romans 3:22ff.), whatever the past, so long as you COME, be you Moslem, or follower of other sects, or atheist or agnostic. You leave where you are and go where He is!

It is covered if you come (John 6:37), in repentance to Him as divinely sent and eternally secure Saviour and Lord, alive from the dead (Romans 10:9), for death has no dominion over God (Acts 2:24, Hosea 13:14). It is to Him who having come to this world to save (John 3:17)., comes now to judge.

Yet always remember, He would have ALL ( I Timothy 2, Colossians 1:19ff.), His word crying … WHY will you die (Ezekiel 33:11), and will you not be made clean ? when once will it be (Jeremiah 13:27).

*11

See TRIALS, TESTS and TRIUMPHS in TEMPTATION, with substantial treatment of Job.