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BULLETIN FIFTY ONE

EXPOSITION March 5, 2017

THE AUSTRALIAN PRESBYTERIAN BIBLE CHURCH

IN AGREEMENT WITH THE THRUST OF THE
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF AUSTRALIA CONSTITUTION, 1901

The Glory that Excels in II Cor. 3:7-18 (10)

 and the Flower that Fades (I Peter 1:24) or falls away.

Laws, Lore and the LORD

Vagrancy or Victory for Australia ? other religions ...

I THE FLOWER THAT FADES

How can so many Western civilisations which have seen something of Jesus Christ the Liberator, the source of love, the height of mercy, the prince of power, the scion of the supernatural, the Son of God, the incarnation of God Almighty, the tender-hearted who would not even send home His following students without food, possibly be willing even to think of such things.

What things ?

	The thought of having indebted (common failing) subservience to what has side-tracked or ignored Jesus Christ,
	the tired glamour of the carnal and
	the sickly spoor of disobedience, self-gratification and self-indulgence which now looks for some kind of a flag!

With the loving patriotism of many poured out in agony amid mud and blood in World War I, to preserve freedom and security, as the nation was officially billed as depending on God, and in many ways acted like it, and the desperations of World War II where enslavement to tyrannies and empty superiorities were held contemptible, and rejected with spirit and thrust, is this land now to let sin rule its weakened flesh, and various weak heraldries flap their specious flags or tap their demands! whether secular, or increasingly a danger, religious.

Do you hear even talk of Sharia Law. What does it resemble or portend in part, this approach ? It is as if the Nazis or the Communists had asked us, just to be sure, you know, if we would really like to start negotiations on their Teutonic superiority and become servile, second rate citizens of their friendly rule, just a matter of a culture change really ? or to be under  billowing Communist commissars, inflated with air and airiness as the masses inherited not land but law and disorder, amounting in that case even to the physical death of tens of millions ?

Are we indeed content even to TALK of the subordinations and the laws of those who come, seeking mercy, to our land ? or act as if it was only natural and certainly desirable for the inheritance for their pleasure, of what this people has done, their part in making the land so attractive, to become their own, is routine ? Is this some kind of madness ? Are the emplaced bases quite forgotten in unconscionable history classes ?

To achieve capitulation status, what a vision! Such talk is subversive,  now internal, and this from such religious entities as Islam, with its capital talk of submission, sometimes of women to the most UN-partnership extreme, of other religions, at times with a death option for you, of other nations, to be rendered something MOST submissive, whether in tone, treatment of Islamic lords, finance or threat of death if any seek to annul any victory in force, or escape continuing submission status.

This is merely an example, with centuries of aggressive invasion linked, as are those words to the deeds we witness from many militant missions, some endorsed by current nations, as they seek to dominate over others. It is NOT personal, since many may be far different; it is statistical, since comparatively this is the action spot that most resembles Kim's brouhaha, as he tries to make himself god.

Are those who seek to immigrate from wherever, some kind of lords ? Are some of them to tell us, though a tiny percentage of our population, on what conditions they will consent to be with us ? while millions are poured from the tax-payer for some reason, to help the culturally distinct schools of some, with their facility to bow for their part, to the impartation of violence! What does it matter if many have some idea of taking over a country with their at best archaic rules and female humiliation, where one woman even in the Quran, can count for half a man! and male 'rights' can be so one-sided as to cause a blushing sense of shame and even horror to inform one's eyes!

On such matters, see the following from the Koran and closely related and revered collections.

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/articles/sharia.aspx

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/women-worth-less.aspx

See with this, the extensive  Chapter 4: More Marvels ... and the especially informative Divine Agenda Chapter 6.

See also Robert Spencer's work, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). Being dizzily deemed inflammatory
through watchful exposure of trends, is one thing;
yet seeking to enforce a submissive attitude to crucial matters
is like pouring oil on the current blaze.

Courage somewhere other than when it is needed, has not been an Australian custom. It is not good to begin it now. 

Then there is the little matter of the payment of a poll-tax, mentioned in Reliance of the Traveller (o9.7) and of course when imposed, as when "the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax "in accordance with the word of Allah Most High", it is all one - kind of thing. It points to a currency hand-over to the intimidated, beaten, flouted and clouted, subordinated and subject.

Indeed, one direction found is in their chief book: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and forbid not what Allah and His messenger have forbidden,  - who do not practice the religion of truth...  ... until they pay the poll tax out of hand and are humbled" (Quran 9:29).

So blood, which often follows fighting, is not so much sacrificial to God, as an animal sacrifice, as sacrificial of man, as a victory prelude. There is a significant difference.

2. CORRUPTION TO DUST

The emphasis on SUBSERVIENCE of other religions under threat of the alternative of being killed is irrelevant to logic, reason and the making of man. Force is always irrelevant to conviction; for it moves objects; conviction moves hearts.

	These
	are not available to crudities but may well be the more alienated by their boorish presence and application. This is so, whether from Nazis, Communists, Islam or other religions, philosophies or parades of human power, using whatever names, since only Christianity of the Bible and the Christ of the Bible have the stunning record of standing unmoved over millenia against all rational challenge (cf. SMR, TMR). Indeed, the Holy Bible
	mocks the use of force as a course for any genuine knowledge of God (Isaiah 38, Ezekiel 28:9).

On the other hand, the eagerness of religions that have no warrant,
what Deuteronomy deems (32:19-32) new boy religions
that spring up with no testimony that has stood over time,
(Isaiah 48:16ff.) freely designating what is not the God of the Bible
to function, biblically idols, is notorious.
It is just as Romans 1-3 makes it clear that embarkation on journeys from the Trinity
is a wrestling with God, a strangulation-by-sin program,
a folly which God in mercy is prepared on repentance,
in tender-heartedness to break and in mercy,
dismiss and pardon (Isaiah 55).

	To be subservient to man instead of a friend of God (James 2:23), not only to the heartless seeming rules to which sharia subjects, requiring SUBMISSION and various mutilations, but
	to be in subjection to  all manner of rigours and oversights;
	to have women in rank and clear degradation, often not far differentiated from possessions, to the heartless seeming MEN who have such disproportionate power over their servant bodies (adding others at their pleasure) and testimony and inheritance and so on ? at what do we arrive!
	To designate women who are often referred to even in revered texts, in the most demeaning of terms, as if not entirely equal to man but more to lower orders, as if submission to their god who makes no sacrifice for man, who has no remedy in this world, to man's waywardness but laws and punishments, as if love were some specious thing and fidelity to one another, a sham:

What is this ? 

It is a reminder of Hosea 8:7: sow the wind and reap the whirl-wind!

it has a dimension of surrender and contempt for the strangling, stripped down
substitute for Jesus Christ and His work, which needs to be seen to be believed even possible.
as in the Quran. But then, the Bible has so much to disclose of almost incredible departures from the Lord (as for example in Isaiah 1, 59, II Kings 17 and II Chronicles 36, Amos 4:7ff.) that the practice of subordination to sin instead of victory OVER it, in the Saviour's presence, becomes almost a norm.
 

Here in extreme, it is like moving from a private cold to an international  pneumonia epidemic.
It is far more than any cartoon: it is a re-creation, in the Quran, almost a type of spoof concerning
Jesus Christ.

Narrow indeed is the way to eternal life (Matthew 7:13ff., and for it; and broad the options for any  enslavement to whatever defines, defiles and deludes, so that good is called evil and evil good (Isaiah 5): and whole nations dive downwards as if passionate for extinction or overthrow,  for many reasons and in many ways, as the Bible predicts, into oblivion or worse.

Again,

that sharia law should even be named in any serious conversation on the development of this blessed nation, one now acting in so many fields with a seemingly reckless abandon and harum-scarum unholiness, that drugs of mind or spirit or body are becoming as usual as thankless in contempt for what has been a major principle in the foundation of this country, by a formally Protestant country which for all its faults, showed under duress often a courage, character and as at Dunkirk, a willingness nationally to pray to the God who hears and acts, and knows faith in Him when He sees it:

it is more staggering to this people than the atomic bomb, and more dangerous than this, to its continuing welfare.

3. THE GLORY THAT EXCELS

But all of this ? The Bible soars to Christ the Redeemer, and compares even the Old Testament preludes, preliminaries and pageantry to the fulfilment in Him, who envelops all of this preparation in Himself (cf. Isaiah 22:22-25, Hebrews 8) to the status of lesser glory because of what ? It is so not only less, but rendered obsolete, it declares, because of the "GLORY THAT EXCELS" (II Cor. 3:10). It is like a rocket which excels not only some preliminary firing, but actually GETS to its destination and performs magnificently all that had been held in mind.

Moses' face shone after he had been with the Lord in the holy place, and a veil was then needed to cover his face, to prevent dazzlement with the glory residual. That alas, says Paul, is still figuratively in place for those who have failed to turn to the Lord. But for those who do, there is a liberation in the human heart, in the spirit, in the part and essence which matters more than any force or power or bombast. It is a liberation that politics and philosophy, idolatry and imagination have long sought to duplicate, but failing, have come unstuck and fragmentary, always warring. For says Paul, "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

Not only so - together with liberty to think, meditate, realise, refine, attain, but it is a glorious thing, the more so when you have the divine assistance which clarifies thought and inspires the spirit.
When you find the Lord of creation and redemption, who died that we might live, you have what is like taking the veil away from the face, and seeing Christ as in a glass, you become by His presence and action within you, always creative, subject to a change that goes "from glory to glory", moving towards His image.

That is liberty such: love with liberty and the wisdom of the Lord with love. No wonder He, the Son of God, has a name which is above all names (Philippians 2).