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The prophet Jeremiah declared some striking words,  in his marvellous admixture of tender solicitude, ardent challenge and increasing lament as the judgments were discerned more and more, against the recalcitrant spiritual adventurism of the people, from the Spirit of God (Jeremiah 2).
 

"For My people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
And hewn themselves cisterns - broken cisterns that can hold no water.

"Is Israel a servant ?
Is he a homeborn slave ?
Why is he plundered ?
The young lions roared at him and growled:
They made his land waste:
His cities are burned, without inhabitant ...

"Your own wickedness will correct you,
And your backslidings will rebuke you.
Know therefore and see that it is an evil and bitter thing
That you have forsaken the LORD your God,
And the fear of Me is not in you," says the Lord God of hosts.
 

"O LORD, the hope of Israel,
All who forsake You shall be ashamed.

"Those who depart from Me
Shall be written in the earth,
Because they have forsake the LORD,
The fountain of living waters."

In Jeremiah 18, the theme is expanded:

"Will a man leave the snow water of Lebanon,
Which comes from the rock of the field ?
Will the cold flowing waters be forsaken for strange waters "

"For My people have forgotten Me,
They have burned incense to worthless idols,
And they have caused themselves to stumble in their ways,
From the ancient paths,
To walk in pathways and not on a highway,
To make their land desolate and a perpetual hissing;
Everyone who passes by it will be astonished...

"I will show them the back and not the front in the day of their calamity."

Did not Jesus the Christ say this very thing in association with the Samaritan episode ?
"If you know the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, 'Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water."

Again, He declared ... "the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth: for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is a Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

He also said this, "Salvation is of the Jews." This was far from a racial exaltation, for He indicated that they had, in the very day of opportunity, turned their back on their own Saviour, and so would inherit a destruction which was not shown to  end till the Age was well advanced, the Age which was His own, until the Gospel concerning Him had been preached to all nations. It was only then that the end would come. It was then that Jerusalem would no more be "trodden down by the Gentiles." So it was to be and so it is. Our present point however is this: Salvation is of the Jews.

You see that in Romans 9:3-5:
 

"I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart.

"For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God. Amen."

That is the sense of it. First, salvation is in the word of God which was given to them, though as a nation they so far left it that they did not even recognise the Saviour when He came, at the predicted date, in the predicted way, to found the predicted Gospel (cf. SMR Ch. 9, and pp. 886ff.). It was not given to someone else. God chose them for the purpose, and to them was the word of God written for man, provided (Isaiah 43:21, Isaiah 59:21, 34:16, Psalm 119, Deuteronomy 4, 12).

When the great onrush of spiritual waters sounded like a cascade of wonder, and Christ appeared, here was the criterion of the personal God, in person (cf. Isaiah 48:16, Micah 5:1-3, Psalm 45). It then depended, not in contrast to the scriptures already given, but in the most intense fashion, in FULFILMENT of them (cf. Matthew 5:17-19), on HIM. It was HE who was the predicted successor in salvation to the word of Moses, the prophet of finality and authority without limit (as in Isaiah 11). Indeed, it was He who was Himself the SAVIOUR (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6), the covenant in Himself, who would save by BEARING the sins of those who received Him, just precisely as Hosea had forecast that GOD would HIMSELF do, and Ezekiel had forecast, in terms of the divine shepherd who would come and do it all Himself (so John 10's language of relationship to the Good Shepherd and His giving His life for His sheep, and Hosea 13:14, echoed in I Cor. 15).

Paul, finding Christ as Lord and Saviour could all but wish himself accursed in his distress and mourning for his brothers, Jews who did not accept the Saviour so long before committed to come, and indeed predicted to be rejected by His own people (Isaiah 49:7, 52-53, Psalm 2, 22).

While it was a bitter and horrid thing for Christ to have to bear sin, He was most willing (Psalm 40, cf. Joyful Jottings 22), and His passion was the outward expression of love (I John 4:7ff.).

Now the Saviour is openly available to all the world, and the world is playing the part of Israel, the nation, of old when Christ came to be rejected by it. Nation by nation, part of nation by part, they squabble and squall, divide and do not conquer, oppress and distress, leaving trails of inglorious and tumultuous pain, torment and suffering in their wake, like a marauding submarine, subversive of shipping and witless of the woe in which it performs its accursed martial arts.

They leave the things of Christ, as if this were the new passion, they defile, they alter profile, they squander money on arms, arms on bodies and bodies in pangs, agonies and pollutions, they spread famine, they invite plague, arguing for the glorious liberty to pervert the manifest design planted by God in man, and achieving precisely what is to be expected. Things go from weakness to weakness, African having its vast multitudes, to number but one, in the throes of disaster and made into statistics of death, mournful arithmetic, the millions being listed for death by 2010 and the like, from South Africa alone which, seemingly, has gained on freedom to lose another.

Christ is being left to be crucified afresh, as in Hebrews 10, His very name and morals, truth and liberties being defiled as if it were some new form of passion, convoluted and disastrous, confused and like a river of industrial waste, exhibited on high.

In this volume, we shall be looking at what God is doing, as He prescribed in His word, what man is doing, what the remedy is as in the word of the Creator, and where the trend moves. There is always a solution; it is not yet too late, and it is now still, as in Isaiah 55 (bold added):
 

“Ho! Everyone who thirsts,
Come to the waters;
And you who have no money,
Come, buy and eat.
Yes, come, buy wine and milk
Without money and without price.
Why do you spend money for what is not bread,
And your wages for what does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good,
And let your soul delight itself in abundance.
Incline your ear, and come to Me.
Hear, and your soul shall live;
And I will make an everlasting covenant with you—
The sure mercies of David.
 

"Indeed I have given him as a witness to the people,
A leader and commander for the people.
Surely you shall call a nation you do not know,
And nations who do not know you shall run to you,
Because of the Lord your God,
And the Holy One of Israel;
For He has glorified you.”

"Seek the Lord while He may be found,
Call upon Him while He is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way,
And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
Let him return to the Lord,
And He will have mercy on him;
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon.
 

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
 

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
 

“For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven,
And do not return there,
But water the earth,
And make it bring forth and bud,
That it may give seed to the sower
And bread to the eater,
So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth;
It shall not return to Me void,
But it shall accomplish what I please,
And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it."

You will never receive from what you disbelieve. Since God is a Spirit, to disbelieve in Him, or His word, or His work, His atoning work in His Son, the incarnate, the definitively incarnate Christ, is simply to be severed. It is not a form or formality; it is a mercy and a reality, and it is inter-personal. Moreover it deals with One who knows more than we say, about us, and all that we are.

His superabundant water supply, like the rushing mountain water from the mounts of Lebanon in the time of the depiction of Jeremiah, coming over the stability of rock, unpolluted, lofty in origin for man, sourced in splendour, is the supply of His Spirit. His capacity as our Creator is His strength as Redeemer. He knows all about man and what is in Him. HE is the need, for man is created for Him. From HIM comes the resource of redemption, for He created man not in vain, but for deliverance.

Where the thunderous waters pass a man by, they are not the less pure in their beautiful tumult, or magnificent in their refreshing liveliness for that. A man must drink from them, at the invitation of Christ, yes a woman and a child, for there is no disqualification of race, age or stage. It is only those who forbear, who stay thirsty.

In this work, then, it is from the word of God, in terms of the activities of man and the eventualities perceived, that we shall be looking at what man needs, where it is found, what he is doing and what God is doing, has done and will do for man.
 
 

CHAPTER 1

LESSONS THAT GROW,
              AND DO NOT LESSEN (with apologies to Alice)

DW TV March 6, 02
See Also The Impregnable Tower Ch. 8, for other Background
 

CHAPTER 2

NEWS 199

LAGGING FEET, DANCING DILEMMAS
and the MISSING MICROCOSM

The Australian March 8, 2002

CHAPTER 3

News 200
Creation March-May 2002

THE CONFINES OF KNOWLEDGE
 
 

CHAPTER 4

News 201

DW TV March 13, 2002

Inventing a term: Sepulchralise.
It fits with sepulchre as well as sepulchral.
 

CHAPTER 5

THE BEST LAID PLANS
OF MICE AND MAN FAIL,
WHERE GOD TRIUMPHS

 News 202

The Australian, March 14, 2002
 

HELL's THINK TANK -
AN EXCURSION INTO IMAGINATION
BEFORE THE REALITIES SHOULD COME
 

CHAPTER 6
 

THE EVACUATION OF COMMON SENSE

News 103

Technical Journal Vol 16(1), 2002

First, shut your eyes...!
It is sometimes instructive to pursue a scenario in the imagination!
It is however important to realise what IS imagination, and what is science falsely so-called.
 

CHAPTER  7

THIRSTY in the middle of a PURE LAKE ?
 

CHAPTER 8

PRAYER LISTING DIRECTORY
THE LANGUAGE AND LIFE OF PRAYER

CHAPTER 9

STATISTICAL SPIRITUALITY, PSYCHIC SUBJECTIVITY AND
STATISTICAL PREDESTINATION

CHAPTER 10

EUROPE IS WAITING
TIME IS NOT

News Radio, Tuesday March 26, 2002
 

CHAPTER 11

NEWS 205

LARVA FLOWS, PEACEABLE BOMBS AND THE NECESSARY FOUNTAIN, FOUNDATION AND
FLOW BEFORE TRUTH ENTERS

CNN Thursday, March 28, 2002
News Radio March 29
Advertiser, March 27
 

CHAPTER 12

NEWS 206

CNN March 18, 2002
Dec. 28, 2001
March 26, 2002

GALILEO, GPS AND EUROPE