CHAPTER 4

 

Iraq and Israel

Among all the Chattering

 

News Radio September-October 2002

The Australian Sept 13, The Advertiser Sept 11, 12, Guardian Unlimited March 28, Reuters Sept 16

 

 IRAQ WOULD LIKE SCORES OF SQUARE KILOMETERS
FREE FROM OBSERVATION

 

There must be compliance, says Kofi Annan in one of the UN’s relatively rare seeming moves into action for non-Israel ‘offenders’ in this arena. That much was refreshing (The Australian, Sept 13, 2002). Iraq must “face its responsibilities”.

 

Then while France appears ready to acquiesce in UN action, Germany declares itself not even in that (as election comes just giving Shroeder the needed boost to unite after it, with another minor party). Italy for its part (Reuters Sept 16, 2002) via Prime Minister Berlusconi said after talks with President Bush that Iraq might face action in early 2003 if it continued to bar the inspectors. Meanwhile, Saddam in Iraq decides unconditional entry for inspectors is all right after all, but then it required definition: entry into the land (you can land here from an aircraft) or entry into the areas where evidence is sought of mass destruction weapons. After much verbal parrying not suggestive of transparency, it becomes clear at last that unconditional access is in view, but not SO unconditional that it is more than used to apply, in the days when Iraq was at least ostensibly compliant with the peace conditions following the Gulf War.

 

In fact, a few square kilometers which bask in the glory of being palace grounds, are not included in the unconditional, and of course if, as the US indicates, there is definite evidence of some Iraqi co-operation with Al Qaeda people, though not necessarily with the September 11 debacle in New York, then a few square kilometers should be enough to house even the most robust of the denizens of international exploitation, terrorists and their equipage. That should well suffice for those interested in using destruction as a means of menacing civilization, to bring it into fearful obedience to the militant dictates of a few.

 

One of those militant dictates has been stated clearly by bin Laden, and echoed elsewhere in the Arab world. Perhaps, the contention was, US will realise that something is wrong after September 11; and perhaps it will seek to understand just what this might be; and perhaps it might see fit to change its ways. In other words, when you get to the other statement of bin Laden and his allies, both ideological and military, both covert and overt, there is a need to stop HELPING ISRAEL. That is both passionate and explicit from bin Laden as we saw (Red Alert … Ch. 8, Lord of Life Ch. 8). They want the Middle East to be as pure from Jewish power as Hitler wanted Europe to be, so that this is becoming, really, when you cease the flight from fact that social conformity demands and political correctness requires in its lunge to the lie, what ?

 

 

BLACKMAILING THE US! PROFITABLE ? THE WORLD WAITS …

Will it tilt a ship already oddly poised ?

 

It appears as a case of blackmail, to get rid of the Jew in Israel, rid of his power, rid of his position^*1. Lose buildings or change your ideology, is the message to America; and with it, this: do not forget the principle of the first instalment!

 

America has failed the Jews considerably, and not more than in this recent pronouncement from Bush, in stark favour of an independent Palestinian State (June 25 speech, that the US would support an independent Palestinian State alongside Israel, but only with a changed leadership for the Palestinians – CNN). Yet even more is needed to sate the appetite of the terrorist. From Nasser on, there is but one destination for Israel, it seems!

 

To be sure, at times the more temperate among the Arabs, the Moslems, will allow that perhaps after all Israel might be permitted to exist – just give me the West Bank (part of the core of ancient Israel) and half Jerusalem, and Gaza, and independence right in your tiny, tidied up midst of what is left of Palestine after Jordan took most  of it in the 1920s, and this desired West Bank is taken as by some sublime, divine right: and then, perhaps,  we MAY, repeat MAY (remember the lessons the US had to learn by the World Trade Centre devastation, and tremble) put up with Israel.

 

After all, if this monstrosity of injustice and this travesty of the Balfour Declaration and its subsequent international acceptance after World War I, in return not least for services rendered, is permitted to transpire, and the after-glow of Hitler is to have this added purge on the Jew, when the lands of the Arabs stretch for thousands of miles and their so-called holy cities abound, then justice is so far broken that the concept of it may be lost altogether in the area, by such contenders.

 

Lost ?  lost, that is for the Jew. And if for one, then for all, for its loss is no one’s gain.

 

However, though as noted with stark concern in the setting (cf. The Pitter-Patter of Prophetic Feet Ch. 4, End-note 2, Red Alert … Ch. 6, cf. The Impregnable Tower Ch. 8, Heart and Soul … Ch. 6, News 195),  the USA in its growing trend to sacrifice its support of Israel in significant measure, at one stage NOT seeing the terrorist horror and maelstrom of evil as such (before September 11), asked for trouble, and got it; there is more to it, than that. Far are we from being able to state categorically that this was the cause (gross insensitivity), and that the consequence (loss of symbolic towers); but equally clear is it that if Israel is to be set up  for grabs, then yes, you can do it; but YOU WILL PAY unless your repentance comes.

 

God is not pleased with people forwarding His own disciplines on Israel, by means of their own roaring seizures and ethical disregards! This we have often seen (e.g. Isaiah 41:11-12, Zechariah 12:3, Isaiah 49:25-26, Obadiah 10-17, Genesis 12:3, Micah 7:17ff.). These divine repayments to predators may be retarded in mercy, but then mercy is not a Gentile monopoly! God also has mercy for Israel, though it has offended against Him; and indeed, this mercy He shows as we have studied repeatedly, not least is this in the very return of Israel to its land, as for millennia promised, indeed since Moses (Deuteronomy 32, Leviticus 26, SMR Appendix A).

 

Alas, the US, as seen in the above references, has decided to unite in a war on terrorism with expressly Moslem partners, and we have surveyed this error. In this way, the tilt towards insensitivity in the US, earlier, relative to terrorism practised on Israel, is now burdened with a further thrust, the combination of the forbidden, for this thing has had joint prayer as well as plans! The tilt increases thereby. As such things occur and the single-mindedness of the USA is reduced, the rest of the scenario proceeds. Culminating forces are already operative.

 

 

HAWKS CIRCLE, VULTURES EYE,

GOD WATCHES and has HIS OWN RESPONSE PREPARED

 

In fact, PART of the promises is this, that JERUSALEM’s restitution to Israel is ONE SIGNAL for the growingly near and impactively looming RETURN OF CHRIST, that Jew who was God as man, God having chosen many things for His people of old, not only the Magnificent Microcosm (as in Ch. 2 above), but the coming first of Christ with the loss of Jerusalem; but then also, the restoration of that Jerusalem to Israel (cf. Luke 21:24 cf. SMR pp. 819-820). Indeed, it is THIS which is one of the signals wrought and taught by Christ as in Luke 21, concerning the approach of His return. It is categorical, unique and fulfilled. There is nothing symbolic about it; the church has been around for millennia. It is the Jerusalem of stone upon stone, the one from which stone would be dismantled from stone when it fell as Christ predicted, which also is to be restored, and has been now restored to Israel. In that restoration pivots the turn of the Age to its last chapters.

 

Small wonder then that the hawks circle around, that the Arabs declare the necessity of its restoration in part at least to themselves (they had it for hundreds of years, as did Israel). This desire among the Islamic meetings, it is nothing that you have to hypothesise. On Thursday, March 28, 2002, what did you find in the Crown Prince Abdullah’s speech to the Arab League summit in Beirut ? It was this. “It is clear in our minds and in the minds of our brethren in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, that the only acceptable objective of the peace process is the full Israeli withdrawal form all the occupied Arab territories, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds al-Sharif (East Jerusalem) as its capital,  and the return of the refugees.” That is very clear.

 

The ‘occupied’ Arab territories do not refer to Jordan, which occupies a very large part of what was Jordan in non-compliance with the Balfour Declaration. This royal speech is not suggesting that it is high time this was returned to Israel, thus multiplying the size of that nation, on a grand scale. No, this is not the ‘occupied territory’ that the Crown Prince had in mind, nor was its restoration to Israel his concern.

 

Rather, the preoccupation of the speaker in this case was less peaceful. Instead, he is considering a theme more of this kind. The area of thought is that when – not for the first time – a united Arab front sought to destroy Israel, despite its early treatment from Hitler on the part of Europe’s last legacy of hatred to this people – and Israel, despite this obstruction, took back some of the land which had illegally been denied them, part of their original inheritance still affirmed for them in the 20^th century internationally: there should be a result. That result ? In his view as reported, Israel should re-yield this land.

 

It should, then, be restored to the aggressors, who had been seeking to use a naval blockade to subdue Israel, direly determined on its detriment, constricting the Jewish commercial throat and breathing line to the world,  thereby. This is not his framework of thought;  but it is his fact. He wants MORE and MORE of Israel, and by peace to secure what, despite an exterminatory if aborted war on Israel, the Arabs earlier failed to get.

 

In Sum: They want back what was taken back by Israel under threat of extermination, when it was theirs by earlier international settlement. It is, to be sure, also true that they want back something which they DID NOT TAKE, at least in large part, when it was being freely offered in 1947. They REFUSED the gift when the UN made it (Jerusalem an international city, and small segments of Israel for the Jew, much for the Arab). It is also true that the UN has sought repeatedly to confine Israel EVEN MORE than to that relatively small part which she has taken, following 1967. It is even the case that a European statement outraged the Netanyahu administration in March 1999, concerning NO PART of Jerusalem being accreditable to Israel, as in the report in News 53.

 

Again, despite all the provocations, it is correct to say that Israel gave back to Egypt much of the land which she took in 1973, and has even allowed for the possibility – at Camp David in Clinton’s day – of various allowances for the Palestinians, even in Jerusalem, which smacked of no small degree of co-operation and concession. Yes the UN pursues the Jew in Israel, not with the acrid contempt of the Arab, but with a show of justice and a pragmatism at best, which disregards various things: the concessions of earlier law, the concessions already by the Jew in addition to that, the small size of the currently residual Jewish State and … ah yes, the copula!

 

 

THINGS OLD AND NEW MAKE THE WATCHING EASIER

 

And ? It disregards the word of God to Israel and through it, to all mankind, and expressly, decisively,  in the Christ who came  and fulfilled that word, at the time, in the way, with the power predicted, from first to last. Nothing has ever equalled this, and nothing compares in power of revelation, attestation by reason, program unbared and unbarred (cf. Isaiah 48).

 

Disregarding God, in terms of gods without verification, validation and testimony, contrary to fact and to Him who has shown Himself for so long in so many ways that the world now trembles on the verge of  annihilation in its rebellion: this is just what Israel did so monstrously, as recorded in its own history in Kings and Chronicles (see Christ Jesus: the Wisdom and the Power of God Appendix). Now it is what is being done by blocs of Israel’s detractors and enemies. Yet it is not alone in this.

 

Thus the Arab-Moslem posture (not all are Moslems but a vast majority appears to follow this religion) is simply a pagan counterpart to the errors of the Jews (cf. More Marvels Ch. 4, where this is shown), who were sent by God to the land to replace religious corruption and testify to the truth (Genesis 15:13-17, Isaiah 43:21). In this, at length, Israel failed, and even killed the Christ, Himself in Jewish format, when He came.

 

This ? Yes, yes, we know; but the Arabs are, like Samaria of old, dedicated to what biblically is FALSE RELIGION, unattested, not invested with demonstrable divine power, precept, prediction and fulfiment. It started from early times with violence to suppress obstruction, and take a town captive in Muhammad’s day, and it has continued very frequently in the same vein (cf. SMR pp. 50ff., 65ff.). The whole Arab-Muslim world, that cultural combination of some in the race and many in the religion – is parallel to Samaria which God judged utterly through Assyria, even when He spared Judah. The professional adversaries of Israel are likewise to come to judgment for their avaricious pertinacity (cf. Ezekiel 38ff.), and their illicit detestation (Micah 7).

 

Here then is the claim of the prophets of Baal such as were met and overcome by Elijah at Mt Carmel (I Kings 17-19), in terms of the parallel. It has thus its modern counterpart, and Israel is in much the counterpart of its failure of old, to follow the Lord; BUT this time, the prediction is of a massive conversion (Deuteronomy 32, Romans 11, Zech. 12:10ff.), which is epochal in nature. This is the other side of the rebellion that killed Christ.

 

On the one hand, this all but resembles the invasion under Joshua; and in this it does, that although this is no invasion BY Israel, it is to be a movement of many of Israel to the promised land of faith in Christ, that spiritual regeneration which makes of the very soil of the heart, a new thing (II Corinthians 5:17ff.). In the terrestrial side, again, it is a REPULSE to an invasion, and how perfect is the complementarity here. Israel was SENT to represent God in a day of judgment, and at last failed; now others are to come, NOT SENT, but to invade Israel, and just as the LORD helped their invasion in Joshua’s day, wrought on spiritual grounds according to promise, so now He is to repel the invasion of Israel, again according to promise. 

 

So does He evidence, now here now there, in this way, and in that, the heart of man and the judgment of God, the hope for man, and the grace of God.

 

… BUT DO NOT MAKE THE GUILT OF THE GENTILES ANY LESS,

NOR IS THE FAULT OF ISRAEL, THE EXONERATION OF HER DETRACTORS!

 

If the one led on to judgment for Israel’s eventual failure, then the other leads on to judgment for the presumption of the Gentile forces seeking to exploit Israel, after its return, having suffered already from the hand of the Lord such diverse and dire disciplines. Indeed, let us realise to the full  and understand with precision that the Arabs are but Gentiles, their religion but one more of the thronging cultural accomplishments of man in the dire and direct face of the God of the Bible, who, if He has disciplined Israel for joining in those errors of old (as in the day of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah – cf. II Kings 21:11, Isaiah 30, Ezekiel 16, 23), did not allow the Gentiles to abscond with their vanities of heart any more than He did Israel.

 

Ponder a moment the force and scope of the judgments on the Gentile nations, for example, in Ezekiel 25-32, on the way to Ezekiel 33’s announcement of the necessity to be awake and to repent, and  on the presence of a divine mercy both vast and tender, for those  who come in contrition and faith, where He IS to be found (cf. Isaiah 55), and you will appreciate the fact. Israel was in focus as a window exhibit to help the confused nations to return to the divine grace of the living God (cf. Isaiah 43:21), and her  failures are excoriated in Ezekiel 21-23, but see what follows for the nations! Nor is the case different in the New Testament, for behold Romans 11.

 

DO NOT BE HIGHMINDED BUT FEAR, is Paul’s advice to the Gentiles who, seeing the desolation of Israel which indeed came, her bypassing in the Gospel which (temporarily, but for a long time) she was to  reject, may feel uplifted. Arabs are ONE part of the Gentiles; the USA is another;  Europe (percentage  wise as an aggregate as with the others) is Gentilic. To one, to all the word of God rings clear: IF GOD took out Israel for a TIME, because of her vile and desperate  sins against Himself,  even in the form of man as Jesus Christ, do not imagine that the rest go  free.

 

Do not think that you are, being Moslem or in some  pseudo-Christian sect, or atheist, or whatever may be your idol of the heart (cf. Ezekiel 14:6-11, 21:3-27, 29:17-21, 30:26, 37:26-28 cf. SMR  pp. 623ff., 976-1018), the substitute, irrational, irreverent for all your worship, because it is as with Israel of old, an alternative that is not there, and a provocation  to the living God which IS there, that you may indulge your anti-Jewish lust and be free. To be sure, they too as a NATION have  gone astray, but you in this then join them! Is not their history a taunt to pride, an axe to  arrogance, a chain-saw to spiritual waywardness ? Paul quite expressly gives the WARNING (Romans 11:17-27, emphasis added):

 

v           “And if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and with them became a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches. But if you do boast, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, “Branches were broken off that I might be grafted in.” Well said. Because of unbelief they were broken off, and you stand by faith.

 

v           “Do not be haughty, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, He may not spare you either. Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God: on those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness. Otherwise you also will be cut off. And they also, if they do not continue in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again.

 

v           “For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, who are natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written:

§      ‘The Deliverer will come out of Zion,

§      And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob …’”

It is one of the great attributes of folly in the sinful heart of man, that the most explicit warnings can be ignored, even despised, yes resented, as those of Churchill concerning Germany in the 1930s, till it was almost too late! By how narrow a margin did the Lord deliver Great Britain! In those days, it was no oddity for the British to swell the churches! If then Britain warned of Hitler is an example of man  warning man, a man his nation, how  much more is God to be heeded, and Moslem and European technocrat alike, American and Communist together, heed the warnings given by the prophets to the Gentile nations.  If Israel has EXHIBITED the wrath of God, are the other nations too dull to learn that it is ONE GOD with ONE RACE, mankind, which though shown in series in sequence, has the SAME LESSON to learn in this. God is not mocked. To ignore mercy is no way to receive it. BE NOT HIGHMINDED BUT FEAR, says Paul to the Gentile peoples.

 

All have sinned, and all need to repent. There are no exclusions for cultural convenience, political correctness, oil salvation or the like.  Israel is ONE illustration; the Gentile nations have BEFORE constituted as in Ezekiel’s prophecies, another. Israel is now coming to the final culmination of the prophetic words concerning her, having long rejected the long-announced Christ, and ignored the prediction of His death date (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4); and the Gentile world is coming now to its final throes (cf. SMR Ch. 8).

 

v           Let culture be god, let oily arithmetic submerge the ship of faith, let combinations of the USA  and the Moslem assault on the name of the God of the Bible continue even in “war on terror”, let the war on evil include those whose assault is first of all, quite explicitly, on the  name of the living God of the Bible, on the testimony of Jesus Christ, but let no one be deceived. There is neither excuse nor wisdom in such a course; and the price is higher than the skies. Let not mercy and delay in kindness be construed as divine impotence (II Peter 3:9); merely as judicious wisdom. Read Revelation 6 and begin to assess the cost of imperious impenitent impertinence against the only God, He who is both Creator and Saviour.

 

 

THE GOD OF HONOUR

 

How complex it may seem, but it is not so in fact.  ISRAEL is on God’s honour list for restoration^*2  . Thus, as He said, SO He has done, right down to the prodigiously successful wars (SMR Ch. 9 details the whole matter  at considerable length, with textual  attestation), the bringing in of the Jew in part from this nation,  from that, over time,  all in a flurry of sudden activity after so long a time, and this with the crowning fulfillment of prophecy in the restoration of Jerusalem itself,  to Israel.

 

That, it is very simple. However, Israel the nation has even been playing in recent years with the idea of making religious testimony (as from Christians to Israeli citizens) very hard, and in fact a number of religious people (Biblical Blessings Appendix-News, cf. Heart and Soul…  Ch. 6) even went so far as  to  respond to Jewish pressure in making inadmissible admissions, concerning their Christian testimony,  to restrict it foolishly. They would use velvet gloves in Israel, concerning Christ. It was an appalling failure and it did not pass without rebuke.

 

Thus Israel, although it hesitated on that brink wisely, is still provocative to the Lord. It is NOT some other religion; it is ITS OWN as shown from the prophets, that it has rejected AS ALSO SHOWN from the prophets (cf. Isaiah 49:7, Zechariah 12:10ff., Isaiah 53, Psalm 2, 22 cf. Joyful Jottings 21, 22, 25). It is its own which it is sensitive to hear about, now as in the days of the former prophets, though now its obstruction is less dramatic! It is beginning perhaps to learn ?

 

 

Thus God in HONOUR insists on their restoration while in JUDGMENT, He continues His chastisement of them. This however is mistakenly now taken to mean, by some, if not theologically at least then pragmatically, that Israel is fair game, that God has deserted her, that the strong nations, the strong Moslem followers of what biblically and manifestly is the god who is not there, as always in the Israel scene, the opposition, may now act, spring, leap, bound upon her. It is felt, it seems from the many hostile pronouncements from Islamic sources, that Israel may now be pushed and poked, prodded and expatriated bit by bit in devious ways, in inhuman ways, just as Hitler used inhuman ways to defy God  and remove the Jew altogether.

 

They machine their dream; with the implements of war, they mechanise it; with the calibrations of imagination, they present the myth of occupied territory, making it appear as if it were Israel’s occupation, and not their own! It is indeed occupied by the occupant, but then, it is the land given first by God, and then confirmed internationally, though unconscionably withheld.

 

That presents two elements in this case. The next is this, that it is PREDICTED that the burden on those who so seek to manipulate and distress Israel and Jerusalem on her return, has a power so far greater than that of any nation, opposed to them, that they may well  quiver (cf. Habakkuk 3, Micah 7:15ff., Isaiah 66, Ezekiel 38-39,36:22); and this is the third element. There is a BURDEN on those who seek to take the pickings, or arrange for them to be taken. This is shown in many ways, and without again, making it a SIMPLE cause and effect situation, since divine mercy can operate to retard judgment, yet one can discern certain appositions of facts.

 

Thus, Germany has been inundated as rarely before, the US has been hit as never before, Iraq, insisting it is still at war with Israel, has been all but devastated, and yet it comes back for more.

 

God is not dependent on man, or his inventions; but man is dependent on God, whatever his own little inventions of pride, arrogance, folly, religion as a weapon of power, as so often seen, and God takes vengeance on man’s little inventions of this sort (Psalm 99:7-9) –

 

v           “… they kept his testimonies, and the ordinance that He gave them. You answered them, O LORD our God: You were a God that forgave them, though You took vengeance of their inventions. Exalt the LORD our God, and worship at his holy hill; for the LORD our God is holy.”

This burden HAS BEEN FELT by the US, by Germany (not least in World War II, but since also), by Iraq (not least in the Gulf War, but since also), by the UN, made to look ludicrous when making way for Nasser’s invasion in 1967, and ineffectual since, by England in its failure to honour its commitment, in ways past mention (cf. The Other News 13), in the Arab world in its complete humiliation, not once, but repeatedly, as the eminent provocateur, repulsed by the tiny remnant of the long persecuted, little Israel, and worse, this as predicted precisely! (SMR Ch. 9). It will be felt further, you may be sure, for the lust for the kills seems to motivate the hyena mentality and it is this together with the false religious thrust which makes the confrontation with the Almighty eminent and manifest. He has undertaken to respond, has already responded, and all is on course for the more terminal aspects of the Age.  

 

Iraq ? It is just one of the agents provocateurs, the entrepreneurs of Israel’s oblivion, the task-masters for its ruin, which sent missiles  demolishing many apartments last time, in the Gulf War. It is the country which pays via Hussein according to report, a considerable sum to those who extinguish in the intifada, the lives of Israeli citizens, indeed via that ruler who makes himself IN THIS WAY such an ogre of malignity, that he has a special place amid the contestants for the place of “those who would heave it away” (Zech. 12:3). “It” in this textual case, is Jerusalem for the Jew.

 

The ends of these things have not been pretty so far, as even Egypt has found out in its own pseudo-Hussein days under Colonel and then President Nasser, as Syria has found, as has likewise,  Lebanon, that semi-permanent  harbour for murderers of Israelis, via various terrorist groups.

                                                                                                       

This grisly unpleasantness is small compared with what is to be faced in the time to come (cf. SMR Appendix A, pp. 502ff., *1); for when God acts, we read that His action will be decisive and deadly to multitudes (Joel 3, Ezekiel 38-39).One can only lament for the folly which fervently throws lives into recess certainly temporal, and in vogue and way to be eternal, before the living God. To be sure, Israel asks for much; but did it not GET IT, and has it not already supped to the full on the exceedingly unholy Gentile pretensions in armed religious monstrosities, masquerading as Christian, in the days of pogrom and Inquisition,  when even Christ Himself refused physical protection and stated that IF (contrary to fact) His kingdom  WERE of this world, then His servants would fight!  THESE fought for such matters; HIS do not! The division is categorical and complete. No such approach should ever even be contemplated!

 

What then is to be seen ? It is this. God is just and faithful (Deuteronomy 32:1-4, Ezekiel 36:22, Genesis 12:1-8,15 cf. Galloping Events Ch. 4); and while in Isaiah 30 and indeed Chs. 1, 28-30, you see something of what was coming to Israel (much evil but eventual good through the Messiah), the affliction for Israel HAS come; and in Micah 7 you see something of what is coming to these protracted protagonists who, not satisfied with their poor efforts in Palestine for so long, and being surpassed prodigiously by the Jews working their divinely appointed land, yet must harass and annoy, plague and war, seek to exterminate Israel en masse, and then  one by one.

 

One cannot but fear for them, for they are all men, all human, who thus provoke the God who has so long disciplined the Jew, that many seem to think that this people is here for their pleasure, and for the sating of their pride.  Alas, pride and humiliation are often juxtaposed, and when God is the butt beyond the immediate prey, sad is the plight of those too darkened in soul to find the light which is still offering, to one, to all, the  redemption which is in Christ Jesus (Romans 2:23ff.).

 

To be sure, the Jew is ONE of these parties, the nation that is, and Israel, it is still ONE of those who need the same Saviour, in their case, the salvation of the same God who sent their deliverer, whom they have yet to embrace (cf. Romans 11:25ff.), and WILL, in no small measure (Zechariah 12:10ff.) embrace at last, as their new divine intervention duly arrives, comparable with that of the Exodus (Micah; 7:15ff.). Past however all the wheels of history,  before it and after it, there is, neither in Jew nor Gentile, any merit at all efficient to impress the God of salvation.  We are not to enter by fruit, but freely (Romans 5:15, 6:23), and THEN to bear the fruit with joy, not with terror, triumphalism or in the form of a ticket (Matthew 15:13, Galatians 3, Matthew 7).

 

Each party in his or her own domain, with the history, culture, prides and pitfalls to which a sinner is heir; each must consider NOT just what is happening to THEM and to US, but where is the place which alone, on which God will look.  

 

And that ? It is the place of Christ on the cross, the ransoming Redeemer, Christ in the heart, the president of the person, Christ risen, the power of the life, Christ the covering, the expiating Prince (Isaiah 61:10, Galatians 3). It is IN HIM that we find grace (Ephesians 1:6) and useless is it to die for this or that cause, nation or race for sinners can redeem none (Psalm 49), and it is Christ who has died with merit enough to cover any.

 

It is pride or a paid price, given by another. Otherwise, it is all vanity, accomplishing nothing, the terrifyingly and hideously arrogant presentation of fouled goods as sufficient ground of acceptance. It is only in Christ that wisdom abides for man. It is only perfection which is acceptable with God, the sin has wages,  and their name is death. In Him, it is already given. Without Him, it is absent, whether wisdom or redemption or acceptance; for without God, you are a mere husk, perhaps better than some, but unseeded.

 

 

The work of history for the Age is almost done in biblical criteria, for all the preliminaries sit in place like children called back from play, to Class (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). The teacher is at the door, even the teacher of righteousness, whose great lesson is not only in word, but in deed, when He passed on His love in life, and His life in death, and His death in satisfaction for sin, that those, be they Jew or Arab, who seek God, may find a just pardon, and not just pardon, for THIS pardon is the preliminary to life eternal, vigorous in beauty, peaceful in truth, merciful in disposition and  knowing neither breach nor cessation, the very life of God (I John 1:1-4, 5:11ff.).

 

 

NOTES

 

 

*1

See News  53, It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls … Ch. 10, Divine Agenda Ch. 8.

 

*2

 

As seen in SMR Appendix A, The Biblical Workman Chs. 1 , 8, TBW 8, pp. 140ff., SMR pp. 510ff., 814-815; It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls  10; Galloping Events Chs.  1, 2 , 3;  More Marvels… Ch  3; The Impregnable Tower
Ch.  6,    8),