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CHAPTER 6
HISTORY NASCENT, NATURAL, SUPERNATURAL
There is a path of glorious light from above, and the darkness does not swallow
it up.
It must be followed if you want the light; and its name is Jesus Christ.
Britain, Arafat, and the Rose of Sharon ? Coming to terms with history
News 311
The Australian, April 28, 2004
In this Chapter, we will plan to look at the setting for the maturing of history; and in the next at vignettes and their placement in the mainstream of coming history, with these things in mind. For perspective, there is one section of update for 2019.
THE SETTING
I
THE POTENTIAL
What! you may say, what on earth is this ?
History on earth, control in heaven, outcome for heaven, genesis in heaven, destiny ... variously.
In other words, we have been looking in our last chapter at the concept of nascency and potential, things being formed, being constructed, in process, at the impact of program, of the supervening power of the supernatural, the God of creation, who understanding all things, disposes, while man's injections bring the colour and texture, yes and the responsibility to the case, with the outcomes sovereignly disposed as is good.
When you read in such sites as that of Ussher's massive and highly detailed tome, The Annals of the World, something of the period in history when Rome was flapping its eagle's wings over the Middle East, you find travesty and treachery. If you move, say from Cleopatra's last wallowings back to Pompey's invasion of Palestine, and reported slaughter of resisting priests, though he left temple and treasury intact, and then on to the elaborate conquests, clashes and frustrations culminating in the death of Pompey and of Caesar, the latter starting the spreading Herods' rule in their Palestinian eyrie, gifted with various kinds of Roman patronage, including that to Herod Agrippa I, friend of emperors Caligula and Claudius, who killed James and imprisoned Peter, and of Herod Agrippa II who sent support to Vespasian, attacking the Jews: you find capacity and travesty well wed. You see such deceptions, the hypocrisy, the aspirations, ambitions, double dealing, mercenary endeavours, mock-turtle soups of pretension, disregard of all natural feeling, inter-family murders, grand designs and little hearts, that it is amazing that the world is still here.
When you read of Christ's coming, BY CONTRAST, it is a relief unspeakable, for then at the royal level, at the level of power such as no man ever had, of an inscripturated journey to earth for a declared purpose to be wrought by a series of miraculous dealings, not mere episodes, but integral with the Man and His work, and find the purity, the self-sacrifice, the purpose, the consummate skill with words, the utter devotion to truth, and begin then to realise that this IS the truth (John 14:6), walking in our midst, THEN the rest is all but indescribable. In fact, this is true in both senses, but it is the first, that of relieved restorative freshness in place, sited in God's sight as friend and in this world as place of mission, opportunity and wonder, that is here intended. Christ's word, "you will find rest for your souls" is not merely episodic; it is a question of the STATE OF LIFE! (Matthew 11:28-30).
The world may be as much as mad in its disparate visions in philosophy and politics, and certainly maddened; but the madness is a by-product of misused liberty, misused majesty for man as lord over creation, who forgets that over the one given such lordship IN creation's paddock, is the One who is Lord to and over him! Obviously, man's little deeds and vast inventions, insolent contentions and calamitous clashes are predictable in principle, when redemption is ignored and restoration is despised; and he retrogresses as he makes of this wonderful world, his sty, adorned with filth, reeking to heaven.
When you realise, whether then or now, the resistance to cleansing, then it is grossly abhorrent and leads to one almost reeling in despair at its audacious antics, so like a drunken and besotted 'teen-ager,
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sick of life before he lives, |
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rushing in a sports car, indulging in sexual licences |
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for a lustful substitute for living, which he does not understand, |
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and in ambitious nonsenses |
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in case he ever found life. |
History discloses itself, the increase of knowledge over time showing merely the development of the nascent powers of thought in man, shown in the early Greeks, for example, and disposed over time for the destruction in his impoverished spirit, of his world, and the rendering ludicrous of his pompous pretensions: for he sees a pen, and KNOWS its manufacture is incontestable, and yet SEES himself and knows only that he is lord of creation, and will tell all how to live, while he dies. Such autonomy is too wonderful, and such delusion is too damnable to be seen without a profound sorrow for those who see today, and forget tomorrow, see desire, and forget delight, see an image and scorn reality, grasp with the hand and forget the feet are founded on the abyss.
As history is poured out like liquid, rendered functional like oil, yet there are stains in its midst, and there is reek in the air, for the passions of men appear as froth, and the deeds of man as red and iridescent flashes within it; and while honesty is taken captive on the oily surface, truth is subjected to the black light of hatred, while wisdom is despised, and man writhes in his contorted world, and talks of the wonders of man, his ways and his future.
II
IT IS A TWO-WAY POTENTIAL
It is all there in the Bible from the first. The situation prior to the flood was not too dissimilar as you see the imagination of man from his youth being dynamised with evil and filled with passionate futility (Genesis 6 covers the case). The comparison indeed is explicit from the mouth of Christ, between THAT ERA and THIS ONE! Hear Christ now speaking of the two eras, from Luke 17:26-37:
They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all."And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man:
"Likewise as it was also in the days of Lot: They ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built; but on the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.
"Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.
"In that day, he who is on the housetop, and his goods are in the house, let him not come down to take them away. And likewise the one who is in the field, let him not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.
"I tell you, in that night there will be two men in one bed: the one will be taken and the other will be left. Two women will be grinding together: the one will be taken and the other left. Two men will be in the field: the one will be taken and the other left."
"And they answered and said to Him, 'Where, Lord?' So He said to them, 'Wherever the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together.' "
Of course, you may say this: That does not mean we in our generation are really as bad as Sodom or as the world subjected to inundation, the flooded fiasco of things continually thought and wrought in the domain of evil.
God however is just, and the comparison of the PARTIAL devastation of those two cases, with the TOTAL mundane smash that is to come, leaves no doubt as to the direction of flow of the hot lava stream of man's flushing torrent. Before it, what is lush quickly becomes what is lost; and if the earth is longsuffering, and the Lord even more so, the rank reek of the malodorous cruelties, follies and ponderous oppressions of the rushing race of man leave no doubt of what is coming, and where it is going (cf. SMR Ch. 8, Answers to Questions Ch. 5).
Moreover, in Matthew 24 you read that "iniquity shall abound" as a prelude to the coming of Christ for His elect (Mathew 24:31), His own people, with false messiahs and prophets like a mice plague covering the ground (Matthew 24:24). It was to be so, and the earth is all but inundated with their fantasies (cf. Things Old and New Chs. 9, 10, Appendix, News 121, 122, Divine Agenda Ch. 6).
III
SOME HIDEOUS POTENTIALS ACTUALISED
Indeed, when you first consider the much published manias of the Hitler era, their oppression, their controlled exterminations, dehumanisations, uncontrolled eroticisms of mind and body, their corruption and their ideals becoming visions becoming man, in the form of Hitler, a man of belligerence without basis, without understanding and intoxicated with survival and racist speculations, vacuous and arrogant, with those much less publicised of the other extreme, the Communists of Russia and of China, you see politics in servitude, right and left, to the Great Leap Backwards, or else the Minor Race, made small by pretension, not genes.
In China, as in part in Russia, the abundance of iniquity under Mao went far past mere greed, desire, pride and poverty. It was thrust into the face of comparative plenty, by impoverishment, that gaunt spectre that crushes intentionally and at direction, making famine a mode of governance, crass want a species of control, and the inhuman to take leave of the inhumane, in order in new extremities, to explore new territories of the splendour of oppression and the sovereignty of delusion. This was done with every species of pettiness combined with the gaunt phraseologies of vacuity, thrust by loudspeakers into the ears of the afflicted for hours, in public places.
When these rulers of billions so act, and many facilitate their opprobrium with glowing eyes and visionary devotion, then the condition of the race is that of ravishment. Communism in its godless puerility consumes much of the human race, using force to frighten, injustice to assault, privilege to oppress, and its waste products disadorn nature from the radio-active afflictions of the Arctic waters which the USSR wantonly spoiled, to the fresh water wonders of Lake Baikal, scarcely less ruined. Its human husks, spat out from its ogrish mouth, made interesting spectacles, as Solzhenitsyn so splendidly detailed in his Gulag Archipelago, and scorned in his First Circle, painting its dreary madness in his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in all this showing not a little of its appetite and its results.
Add the Cambodian massacres, the hatred of the scholar, the teacher, the doctor, the workers of mind, the Chinese Reform by Labour, and all the carnage of cynicism such as Lenin showed (cf. SMR Ch. 9, pp. 965ff. ), the hatred of the race as a 'new man' was manufactured in ulcers, driven in dysentery and debilitated with devilries, and add again the demolition of what could be crushed with ideological mania; and with this put the Russian impoverishment of Eastern Europe, and its vast mess left for Germany (who asked for it, but the USSR merely collided with reality in providing it, a vengeance far past realism, in those whose light is darkness, and whose earth is expendable) and where are you ?
For much of mankind, you have arrived at the New Enlightenment, where the word 'light' is its only evidence (cf. Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 8!).
Not with delight, but with degradation; not with progress, but with degeneration; not with hope, but with heartlessness, is the spirit of the leaders intoxicated. Jung Chang delivers the background in detail in her Wild Swans, and here you see the pit of intrigue, the abyss of wantonry and the art of devilry sanctified by leadership strifes and winning teams nobly overthrowing their less heartless opponents.
While many in America and Europe wallow in the liberal and liberated irrationalities of debasement, they provide as spawn some of the inept radicalisms of the mind which mate with human racism, that inhuman ideology, which helps to fill the earth with the inveterate pomposities and degraded obscurities which manifest themselves in the revered domain of King Culture*1. The scene is like that engendered by a madman, throwing paint in Art Galleries, and grinning in a haunted skull, from which the flesh has been carved off. The naturalness of life is outmoded; the reality of the divine is to be divested; the world becomes a pit for vipers, and they have desire to destroy just as we see in Revelation 6. Death becomes the leader, and devastation its testimony.
Then comes the subsequent judgment, like the guillotine for the godless, transfixed with their vicious vagaries, ready for execution: and this is first as in Armageddon (Revelation 16, and 19), which being just, is a terror to the despisers of truth. What worse than judgment according to truth (Romans 2:1ff.), for those who have despised it, if not in so many words, then in so many dabbles in unreason, flirtations with feckless fancies, derogations of deity, inventions of gods or their ilk, indifferences to reality and self-consignments to their own thoughts, wisdom and ways, as if, being mere products, they were gods themselves, liable for nothing, responsible to nothing (cf. I Corinthians 1:20-25, Romans 1:17ff.)!
Yet it does not all come to nothing, but to that God who made it.
Later at the resurrection of all, comes finality for all (Revelation 20). It is good to be covered in that day (Hebrews 2:1-4, 6:19-20, Isaiah 2:20-22). Baptism by immersion in many of the churches of today, immersion in false doctrine, exotic sweet-smelling waters of spiritual oblivion, it becomes merely an adjunct to the other pole of reductionism, as the Second Beast and the False Prophet make clear their pathways, just as Revelation 13 and 16 have specified.
Like all evil, it ends. In its ending there is a time, and a place; there is a meeting, and it is with the Lord when He evacuates His people before the flashing fire of the assured outcome, delayed by divine patience, but not deleted by human folly (II Peter 3:9, I Thessalonians 1). Do not desire the day of the Lord! this was a significant part of the message of Amos; and it still is relevant for the self-funded spirits who grab the grace of creation and despise the Lord of redemption. It is so for Gentile as for Jew, where the Lord is not known, and the provocation of irrational rebellion is the way chosen (cf. *2, *3, slightly below).
IV THE POWER OF THE ACTUAL
How cordially and with what consummate kindness does John advise participation in the FIRST RESURRECTION as he himself is given to call it (Revelation 20:4-5 - cf. Bible Translation, Ch. 9, No. 16 in The Kingdom of Heaven, or Bible Translations 2, at No. 52 in a biblically sequential list)! Here is the fruit of Christ's coming, and in this is the gathering of His elect from the "four winds", by His angels, those spiritual servants of strength: taking one from the closest association with another, leaving one for the worse-than-flood horrors that duly, and after so long, await man's endeavours to take history for himself (II Peter 3:5-7).
When history is fully mature, does not the Lord take this once embryonic commencement as He created the earth, this child as He made Adam in His own image for fellowship, this now fully grown person as it wilted in unwisdom, this site of savagery that is devilish and contrived with mental might and spiritual lust, and in its veteran years, shameless in its assumed ignorances and abysmal ways, and judge! Yes it is GOD who is the judge, as the very name of Daniel indicates, and it is Christ who, having been man and suffered as man, for mankind, an ever available avenue till that great day, will do the judging. Man, made child in history, will with his history be judged.
Does not the blood even now cry out from the ground ? And is this not only literal but metaphorical, the blood of oppressions, of excisions, of prejudice given iron heels, of exclusions, of parleys with evil powers, fun with evil forces, self-indulgence leading to crass oppression ?
Did not Amos say it all! (cf. Amos Ch. 4-5, 6:3ff.), and did not Isaiah exhibit the role of evil in its call for judgment, as in Isaiah 1! Did not Jeremiah spell out further detail of the divine abhorrence of cardinal hypocrisy (cf. Jeremiah 7), just as Isaiah removed the crutch of the conception of religious forms as a stay against religious unreality! Is the day of the Lord, of judgment then to be courted by those unprepared for disaster! (Amos 5:18 with 4:13, cf. Matthew 24:45ff.).
Judgment comes, and mercy has made her provisions, just as wisdom her depositions. Has not God for these millenia in His tangible but irrefrangible word sent philosophy on unpaid vacation for its unutterable weakness in the sight of his word in both the Old and the New Testament! (cf. SMR Chs. 8 - 9, Pitter-Patter ... Ch. 4)!
But when this judgment comes, what is it for those unprepared in repentance (Luke 13:1-3), too high for the vicarious death of Christ for their sins (Matthew 20:28), too knowledgeable for divine truth (John 14:6, Romans 1:17ff.), too damning of the divine wisdom to receive His initiative into this whirl of sin, and His redemption in this plague of personality, savaging of liberty and rank disregard of His integrity! It is this: Prepare to meet your God! (Amos 4:12).
Is He so despised a man's sin can hope to insinuate itself into His blazing purity! It needs no cover ? no pardon ? Is presumption to garb itself with arrogance and use as footwear, its follies!
So judgment comes at length. It has come in part often enough (cf. Amos 4, Jeremiah 25, Isaiah 14, Jeremiah 50-51, cf. Pitter-Patter Ch. 4), and it has come by now, long since on the Messiah, ever eager to dispense with justice by bearing it, and to accord mercy by showing it (cf. Psalm 40, 22 with Joyful Jottings 22-25). In this, what happens to the child of history, who has never been born again ? In this, man aborts, of course, like any other failed mission. Like a child not born in the happy pleasantness of normal birth, but rather cast out in untimely fashion by abortion, he is divested of cover, and invested with judgment.
Abortion ? This one, however, it is of his own making.
But judgment, is it not like a fire, for our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29). Ought not then a man, a woman and a child, to repent and seek reconciliation with God through His ONLY APPOINTED SALVATION (cf. Acts 4:11-12), the only valid revelation and only verified testimony (cf. TMR Ch. 5, Tender Times... Ch. 8, Divine Agenda Ch. 6).
You see in Revelation especially 6, and 8, some of the preludes to this fulmination,
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where nature being no more kept in such bounds
as man needs, |
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laughs back at man's deification of it,
in the presence of untamed asteroids, plagues and |
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and the magnificent provisions for
man on this earth are enough divinely dismantled |
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Thus do they find the destiny of his idolatries of the mind,
plasmas of philosophy, |
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as so mindlessly wrought in the China of Mao (ruthlessly
exposed in the matchingly ruthless |
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as so seductively secured in the Russia of Stalin where millions
could die |
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As to the various dictators OF the
proletariat gloriously dismissing these minions,
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cut down at the lust of the unruly rulers,
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In their mordant, morbid slayings,
they ruled, smitten erratically in decaying conscience, |
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the very air reeking with the boastings of hell and the decay of justice, love and realism ... |
How well they have provided for the very epitome and culmination of "great swelling words of vanity" and evil speeches about "whatever they do not know" of Jude 10 and II Peter 2:18, with their gaunt gods, unnamed but installed, impersonating deity, imparting not life but death! With such preparations does man make his way to the ultimate pretension of II Thessalonians 2, and the ultimate Gehenna, ignoring the glory of the Calvary which, collecting human garbage, makes such an end needless! (II Corinthians 5:17-21):
"Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ,
and has given us the ministry of reconciliation,
that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself,
not imputing their trespasses to them,
and has committed to us the word of reconciliation."Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us:
we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.
"For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us,
that we might become the righteousness of God in Him."
Instead, the mass of mankind proceeds like a Red Setter, washed towards Niagara Falls, spluttering on the River, unwilling to find the boat which would deliver him, unwilling to trust, impelled instead by mere thrust.
With North Korea still possessed like an old pipe by one smoking, the United Nations*2 filled with erraticism and anomaly, many of the formerly sound churches becoming little more than spiritual satellites of the Spirit of the Age, convicts in striped garb, minions of culture, with hearts slain by the spirit of the Age: the world seems to have become dizzy, but not from its own spin*3. Rather is it so from the hypnosis of its hypocrisy, the talk of its own tongue, its rising hopes and reeling realities. Whether to worship what is not God, to invent gods, to make itself god, it ponders*4; and as it wanders, witless, it achieves the final result of revolt, the end-time Babel of babble, with judgment coming roaring like an express train, while they ask, What is that noise that we hear!
Ah! say the leaders, bereft of both sight and the realisation of this fact, It is nothing but the roaring of the waves in the eternal seas! Yet never a neap like this one! Thus do we see the culmination of all this preparation in Mark 13:19-26.
"For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created till this time, neither shall be. And except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh should be saved: but for the elect’s sake, whom He has chosen, He hath shortened the days. And then if any man shall say to you, Look, here is Christ; or, Look, he is there: do not believe him. For false Christs and false prophets will rise, and show signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect. But take heed: behold, I have foretold you all things.
"But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory."
How like the case of Isaiah 59 for Israel such ghoulish works of the Gentile world became, with death stalking like a fox among the rabbits, a hawk among the pigeons, an eagle among the lambs. They were elevated, and no God could know! (cf. Malachi 2:17 and Isaiah 29:15
"Woe to those who seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD,
and their works are in the dark, and they say, 'Who sees us? and who knows us?' ").
Yet for all that, God acted: His patience is neither witlessness, the province of rebellious man (Ephesians 4:17-19), nor weakness, but when He acts, it is known, and so it has been, empirically as you compare His predictions and instructions with His actions throughout the ages of the book of the Lord. For Israel of the , it meant virtual obliteration, though some filtered in time to the South. For the South, Judah, it meant first 70 years in exile, then some 1900 ... All as foretold in principle and often in much detail as well (cf. SMR Chs. 8-9).
Let us then be instructed by fact. What of Israel of old when it was warned for so long ? Did it stop its woes and wanderings, fickle deeds and inveterate romancings, far from reality, worshipping gods who were simply not there (Deuteronomy 32:17ff.), as man does today (cf. Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4,5, Tender Times ... Ch. 8, Spiritual Refreshings Chs. 13, 16)! Alas, they continued their spiritual ramblings and social scramblings.
V THE
CONTEMPORARY QUIVERS, QUAVERS,
CACOPHONIES AND CULMINATIONS
What then of our own modern enormities, and the great leaders of mental, social, anthropological, philosophically seduced or culturally collated, human racist lust! Worshipping himself, at first inferentially and then deferentially through inane leaders, man prepares for his own apotheosis, in an unfancy dress ball to come (II Thessalonians 2:4-10). When such delusions meet the devastation of truth, what would you expect! (II Thessalonians 1:8, 2:8).
What of our Maos, Stalins, Hitlers, Idi Amins, Arafats*4A, Mugabes, bin Ladens*4B, al Qaedas, Pan-Islamic jihads, UN moral pseudo-Moses mouthings*2, yes and others who declare to Israel her minimisation and to the world its conditions for life, increasingly to this day, not under God but under their own so social sway ? Many of these and such as these, they had no pity, or had it but episodically as a dream in the night, and less than these were these maleficent commanders, in their bombastic utterances, unkempt thought with illicit thunders, like boastful boys by some omission become murderous men, buoyed up on the amassed corpses, softening the earth, temporarily, for their feet.
These vast movements are modern reflections of the career of the developing Rome noted above, that feisty imperialism of old, in its earlier phases even before Christ, approaching those vain magnificences, when a man grimed with sin, if not governed by insanity, had to be worshipped or else .. where people had to be murdered, preferably with ferocity. Such an image of the Emperor was precisely like that of Mao in his latter day reigns, one of whose words was supposedly worth 1000 words. Was he to be deified for power, to be pressing for control, uprooting for ambition, impressing unspeakable pain wherever most convenient for ideas, the height of banality, and often of crudity unspeakable!*6
How wise is the man of today ...
Yet before that intra-communist cult, and indeed the Inquisition's exemplary exhibition of hatred and gore for folly and vanity, the Christ had already shown Himself, not some murderer, but the Saviour of the world. Himself, the summit of sacrifice, His was the place of power and the gift of mercy, grace and love. There is the only image to be portrayed with and by reason; and here alone is the testimony of truth (cf. It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls ... Ch. 9, with *3, *4, *5 below).
Man without God may congratulate himself for his created mind, for his created world, as if he had made it; but it is a mess and a mangling, a tornado and a tangling, a ruin and a wrangling that he is creating out of the wonders of order and composition. Grasping with gluttonous desire, modern man is increasingly lusting for the product of God, the creation of His Spirit, while despising the witness of His Word, incarnate as Jesus Christ, who showed peace its place, truth its source and power its due use. Man is putting himself in place by acting as if to exclude the One who put not only him in his place, but his place in readiness for him to he put! It is desecration in deed, matched by words, and there is much of both.
The contrast between this Lord of all, in POWER and MEEKNESS, GOODNESS and HEALING, LIFE and TRUTH, and the mass of miscreancies which to so large an extent constitute the developing embryo of history, dead to creation, as man works his own ways and God supplies the results, what is it like ? It is like that of light and darkness. Not pride but performance; not smashing but saving; not self-elevation but self-sacrifice is His gift and exhibition; not for self-adulation but for rescue, not for dominance but for deliverance, not to achieve deity, but as deity to relieve man: as this, He came.
Never was One like Him*7, in every phase and facet, more than adequate, He came. In Person, arrived that definitive celestial donation for man, smashed like the rest, as far as man could, and then ineradiicable, towering over the odium of sin, providing in resurrection a life which not the worst paranoid bullies of the race could touch. With the infinite God comes the despatch to man in his finitude, from the immovable God comes the answer to man in his littleness, not of body but of spirit. He in a magnificent grace took body, which as a category He had made and used it to provide answer to iniquity and folly alike, evacuating ruin with redemption and providing this wonder not with force or farce, but to faith (cf. Hosea 13:14).
With this body, assigned to earth for salvation, consigned by man to hell for blasphemy (Mark 14:62-65), He for His part broke mortality through the power of the God who created man in the first place, taunting the murderers with the irrefragable truth, as apparent to the eye as investigable by the finger, as triumphant as truth itself, so that even Thomas, convicted by tangible fact, the truth that walked, could only look up and worship Him as my Lord and my God (the God of me, literally). Christ who predicted it repeatedly, did it but once (Matthew 17:22-23, Mark 10:34, John 19:30, Hebrews 2, 7-10), but once! More was unnecessary, less was inadequate. Yet that prediction was repeated, again and again; and then fulfilled on earth (cf. Matthew 17:12,21-23, 20:28, Luke 18:31ff.).
Here was faith with function, personality with power, meaning with majesty, victory with verification (Psalm 22:22-26, John 20:24-29, Luke 24:36-42), mortality overcome by immortality, the One who raised the dead now Himself risen, triumphant, His work vicarious, its timing arithmetic (Matthew 12:40), its date predicted (Christ the Citadel Ch. 2). All this was foretold (Psalm 16 as in Psalm 22, Isaiah 52-55), its reward freely granted, its recognition both integral and crucial to the faith (Romans 10:9), without which there is none! Christ does not change (Hebrews 13:8). Man does, downwards, yet Christ calls upwards (Colossians 3:1-10, Philippians 3:17-20, II Peter 3:18).
The race is ageing. It has done much, and aspires to more. It is grey-headed and wrinkled, like an over-ripe apple.
As Christ put it, concerning His own approach to crucifixion: If they do this in the green tree, what will they do in the dry! If to murder the Son of God was an early version of human odium and arrogance, what will be their later works!
You find this in Luke 23:28-30
"But Jesus turning unto them said,
'Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.
'Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.
For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?' "
V THE RADICAL RESULTS FOR UNREALISM
A dry tree ? When the tree is dry, when maturation is indisputable, when ageing is obvious, when the dominion of man over a world he did not create becomes exposed for the wrinkling, hand-wringing folly that it has been because of sin, and when to complete all this, the elect are removed, the children of God are abstracted, leaving godless man alone, what then ? Then as in the flood, it will surely be turbulent.
You see something of it in II Thessalonians 1:3-10. This may be translated as follows.
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"We
are bound to thank God always for you, brethren, as it is fitting, because your faith grows exceedingly, and the love of every one of you all abounds toward each other, so that we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations that you endure, which is manifest evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you also suffer; |
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since it is a righteous thing with God to repay with tribulation those who
trouble you, and to give you who are troubled rest with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God, even on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. |
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These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power, when He comes, in that Day, to be glorified in His saints and to be admired among all those who believe, because our testimony among you was believed." |
Not OBEYING, not HEEDING the Gospel implies its rejection and this is scripturally THE principle of condemnation (John 3:19), that light has come, and darkness is preferred*8. God HAS come to man; man needs to return to the Lord; and God has made Himself more than available, for in Christ He gave of His blood in the form of a man, that to the uttermost the case for man could be covered (Hebrews 7:25, 9:12ff.). Not however in lordly distance did He act, but in intimate dealing does He restore, by faith; for without faith you CANNOT please God (Hebrews 11:6).
So has the race grown in its love of the throne, and grown old in its antics and ambits, its perennial perambulations, its peripatetic lecturings and evil imaginations, till it comes to the end of its Age, that of the Gospel, that of the grace of God making its way in definitive form, fully orbed, totally paid up for all who come, and for any.
God KNOWS His own and those who are not; there is no confusion in heaven; but on earth, what a bounty, that if someone COMES in faith to receive from the living Christ, His redemption, which He paid for, so that He may be Lord, not in word but in fact (Romans 14:9, Matthew 7:21ff.), and HE should be Saviour, not in word or Siberian sentences but in celestial grace and kindness: then the work of grace restores man to the Lord! (I Thessalonians 1:1-7). When a person comes in repentance at unrealism and sin, in desire for God and for His grace, in accepting the Redeemer as Lord and only Saviour, then come he has, and he comes in and out and finds the relief of rest in reality, in the Lord Himself, who being personal, becomes friend (John 10 and 15).
It is one course to the King of Peace and the God of love for man or woman, for child. The world is old, because of ageing in its few millenia, undue through sin; but life is ever new, ever fresh, ever eternal in the presence of God, for His children (John 10:9,27-28). It is exuberant, it flows, it bubbles up, it spreads (cf. John 4:24, 7:37).
VIGNETTES: COME AND SHARE
In the meantime, while the Age aches its way, is chastened, chastised, chastises itself, becomes spiritually geriatric, finds judgment and laughs, there are things to be done. There are as we noted in the last chapter, certain vignettes as the Child of History grows OLD. Let us look at some of these in the next Chapter.
NOTES
King Culture ? See SMR pp. 422Q ff.. Cf. News 82, 118, 122, Red Alert Ch. 13,
See
Mystery of Iniquity,
SMR pp.
750Bff.,
It Bubbles ... Ch. 11,
Ch. 10, Divine Agenda
Ch. 6,
Lord of Life Ch. 8, *1 .
See also *5 below.
See
Ch. 3,
with Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4,
5, Stepping Out for Christ Ch.
10,
Ch. 9,
Secular
Myths and Sacred Truth
Ch. 3, Tender
Times for Timely Truth
Ch. 8. See also *4 below.
It is not God who is lax in seeking, but man in
coming
(Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2, Ezekiel 33:11, Matthew 23:37, Luke
19:42ff.).
See Great Execrations, Great Desecrations, Greater Grace
Ch. 9,
Ch. 7, Gracious Goodness ...
Ch. 6, *1.
Man's monumental babels are mere babble, and he invents them with all the passion of the drunkard in his tankards and his dreams. See SMR pp. 422E, Highway to Hell, Divine Agenda Ch. 6, News 82.
EXCURSION ON JEWISH OUTAGE
RUSSIAN NYET
AND BRITISH OUTRAGE
On Arafat see for example:
Ch. 3 above,
It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls... Ch. 10, Ch. 2,
Divine Agenda Ch. 8,
Earth Spasm ... Ch. 5,
The Frantic Millenium ... Ch. 10,
Galloping Events Ch. 4,
More Marvels ... Ch. 3,
Overflight Ch. 1,
The Christian Pilgrimage Ch. 6
and scores more references on this site.
The exit of Israeli P.M., Barak, reminded that in his own terms he had made it clear that Arafat would NOT, repeat not in actuality consent to cease terrorism, or to use effective force to subdue the multi-assassination terrorists, (such as Hamas): every Israeli child through their folly being an assassin's target, together with the denizens of every supermarket, as likewise those chatting in every street cafe exploded or imploded, with those living in the site of every housing demolition, as no less every busload of school-children spattered with steel.
Bulk assassination is not less assassination.
Every demand for part of what was Israel's only and historic capital, long before Islam awakened, indeed millenia before it, is not only a new land grab, but allied to this is the misuse of the asylum permitted already for its enemies by Israel, thus disengaging from the Gaza Strip, though it was territory as surely won in war or national consent as was New Mexico, or Canada or the Ukraine, the last gaining independence in the days of Gorbachev.
That last site, once viciously starved and subdued by the USSR, as we now know (update 2019) was to be later betrayed by Russia which gave it anything but the virtual autonomy once agreed for it. Having used terror, deceptive manoeuvres multiplied purges and intimidation in its Communist and neo-communist rule, while recklessly ruling or seeking to rule various nations, this power grabbed what it wanted of the place. Having gulped Crimea with deception, it invaded part of industrial Ukraine, thus breaking a multi-national guarantee of independence that had been made for the Ukraine by Russia and others, as the Ukraine for its part gave up its vast supply of atomic weaponry.
This guarantee, now obviously worthless (2004), glides into the past like smoke. (It is of interest to observe such developments, as in Ezekiel 38-39. In the depiction of the vast return of Israel to its place, there is exhibited with it, a multinational assault on Israel by a leading nation of the far reaches of the North, and it is difficult to go further North from Israel in finding any such power, than Russia, With the invading assemblage predicted there appears also to be Iran (Persia). It is God Himself who through that prophecy indicates a personal intervention in that episode to come, to obliterate the powers invading the Israel that is re-established in its assigned place after so long.
This series of events is irremediable and undeterrable, a roar of restoration and devastation on aggressors, near the end of the Age. On the consequences of such things, see also Isaiah 66:16-18, and the sermon of October 21, 2012, entitled Worlds Apart. But let us return to the things that have already occurred.
In current Israel there is a total contrast here. If it voluntarily has even made provisions for those peoples who have been attacking it continually, some now wishing like Iran more than to mar, almost to murder it through the donated site so granted, or to cause it to cease to exist: if it has done this not least by granting to its enemies a piece of war-won territory enabling a degree of independence for them, is this to become a mere beginning ?
Should they now perhaps give away more of their land, so letting the recipients harbour more of this national assassination movement, with more rockets indiscriminately seeking Israeli blood ? Should they do this in yet more territory so that in effect, national obliteration movements against Israel might proliferate, and more scope yet be given to the unfailing CLAIM and CLAMOUR for the entire removal of Israel on the part of Hamas, and those whom Arafat refused to use force to subdue, in any notable effort to impose order in the place!
As the prophet Micah declared of this type of abandoned negativity concerning Israel on the part of nations,
"Now many nations have gathered against us, who say,
'Let her be defiled!
and let our eye look upon Zion.'"But they do not know the thoughts of the Lord, nor do they understand His counsel; for He will gather them like sheaves to the threshing floor."
And no less clear is His denunciation in Jeremiah 48:2, Isaiah 51:21-23, Psalm 83:1-4,9.
Have a group of British 'lords', or savants, also decided to protest because of the Ukraine! Is their cry generalised ? Is Israel an only child of artless execution by words, to be segregated into obscurity, in some new national ghetto, if indeed permitted to survive at all! How terrible that anyone such as PM Blair should resist such a consignment, such a destiny for Israel, together with President Bush, now more clearly since the visit of Sharon this year! Surely they slate him for this, this angry group of British elite.
If this is not anti-semitism, perhaps a new definition could be crafted. The USSR did it with 'democracy', which came to include millions of forced severances from the Ukraine and its surrounds, for example, in favour of their oh so convenient abode in Siberia, as well as an unelected government and a rule of nationally instituted terror by often dehumanising ruffians who had made war with effect on a demoralised country, following their appalling performance in World War I.
When dealing with Israel, the lords of society need to realise that in addition to so simple a consideration as honour, justice and equity, in terms of which Israel must exist and exist abundantly, having been granted in 1917 and 1920 ALL of Palestine, not the present small portion, there is God with whom God to contend, as illustrated in 1948, 1967 and 1973 (fulfilling the war predictions in Zechariah 12). In this matter, God has declared Himself available for help to the pragmatically minded (cf. God's challenge in Isaiah 41,48, 51, and Micah 7 with Deuteronomy 32, concerning His intention to PERFORM what He assigns to history, as unique in fulfilment and in kind.).
This divine allocation of the land according to His stated will and covenant (Genesis 17), and its pattern divinely pronounced for the ages, has been traced in some detail in predictive and performance aspects in SMR Ch. 9. War with God (cf. Galloping Events Ch. 4). War either earlier to deliver the Jew from the promised exile or latterly to deliver the land from the promised return is quite futile. God has disciplined and has not resigned to British elements, some among many and varied in that land, or to what is now seen from the vantage point of 2019 as coming Russian supports for its enemies, Iranian threats, abuse or proxy war, or any other.
That is the point and one can but pity those who try to outface Him in His consignments of tasks, territories, missions and commissions. How many, alas, face divine confrontation, as one more land comes under totalitarian rule, with its appalling result and for how many of them does one seek salvation in time! Certainly, the very varied components of those who hate, or seek the deletion of Israel - both present and prospective, are more to be pitied than feared.
War with Him is never going to be won, any more than assault on justice. It may endure, such assault on equity, for a season, but ... there is a reckoning as the USA found with its slavery, not least in the Civil War where many SUFFERED as the slaves had earlier suffered; and Britain found after its deplorable misuse of labour, including that of children, in the Industrial Revolution, in the anguish of two world wars, which tended to remove that wealth.
There is also the coming, cumulative, culminating reckoning to come as in Revelation 19, when God as always, fulfils the final phases of the Age.
Meanwhile, let us review an earlier historical phase of the case, noted in Regal Rays of Revelation Ch. 1:
v
Evidently, he is not entirely a Chairman without hands,
power or authority!
v
While that barbarism went on, the pseudo-State Authority, the PLO,
could only be held contemptibly responsible, for not crushing
the criminals who performed these cumulative, cowardly
and revolting provocations, while arming children
who in turn were hurt when the Israelis sought to resume order,
so that then they could be given as 'evidence' of Israeli brutality.
Taunts, arms and throwing of stones,
which could find their mark in someone’s temple,
went before; incitations to the young as if their lives were for fun,
not godly
development, and taunts, arms
and upsets
went afterwards,
as if provocation were to be friend of provocation, murder of mayhem and hatred
allied with hollowness.
v
The situation indeed seems more than a little comparable to that
in which the burglar comes to inherit your inheritance,
invades your home, starts taking what appeals, and trips,
or in some way is incommoded
by your house's layout; and then successfully sues you.
v
It is questionable whether any world in which such monstrosities
of distortion COULD occur could be in some way sane; but then,
there are
billions, and it is not all of them from whom justice has fled,
meaning has
departed and understanding moves out, decayed.
It is just some of the law makers/enforcers. It is similar with Israel,
as it is not denounced for measures of self-defence
by a crowing causcus of critics.
Fancy taking ACTION against merciless marauders!
How COULD
Israel
do such a thing ?
v
Why after all, should Israel act for its own defence,
why not abandon its citizens, expose its children,
offer its youth on funereal pyres,
presented without charge by Hamas and its aweful allies,
inhuman, inhumane and
hapless!
Should not the ‘international community’
express outrage at such a thing...
What! to DEFEND ITSELF ?
Who in all history, one might almost hear the protest, has heard
of such a thing, that a nation should defend its people,
young and old, and not
allow someone who does not enjoy them,
to slaughter them freely, one hundred here, two hundred there!
Astonishing and alarming
v
Anti-Israel forces, now the norm in the cultures of the superior,
are shocked, it seems,
at such national self-defence.
Israel
however is shocked at the marvels of contrivance,
to torture its people, slam human waste into their faces,
shrapnel into their bodies!
v
It is a weird world these days, when provocations are to be endorsed,
or at
least EFFECTIVELY bypassed, and protections are to displayed,
before all
knowledge, and all outrage apart,
as if men were anaesthetised by desire,
as if vile in advance of all knowledge.
v
Perhaps however if the Palestinian Authority
had not suffered assassins to hide in its lairs,
and had removed murderers rather than protecting them,
there would have been no seeking,
and Israel need not have sought to remove the
human removalists
of terror’s persuasion ?
Is it not reported, for example, that it is in Arafat’s own compound
that 6 accused of the murder of the Israeli Minister of State, are hiding ?
v
But no! it is WRONG to remove mass murderers,
wrong to wait months for their extradition,
wrong to insist on an end
to systematic murder, and wrong to take action in the end,
after so long a time, to seek them out!
Perhaps they should have waited for ever, or acted mildly
so that war was not declared!
However, how could it not be WAR
when war was practised, professed,
when no assurance was given in word and deed that the actions
of some were the abomination of all in the Palestinian Authority,
and that they would not rest till it ceased ?
v
Was the release, many months ago, of some of those already
held in the prisons of the Palestinian Authority, allowing them
to practise their black arts, or rather red ones, unrestrainedly again,
an indication of remorse ?
Does the world HAVE TO cease to think, when Israel is
the butt of its ire,
the pond of its fishing or the bird of its netting ?
v
Has martial ardour and rancid rejoicing
been the presentation from the PLO,
or provocations innumerable ?
Has it forgotten the ravaging
of Jewish shrines and worship places
when
Jordan had
control of the other half of Jerusalem,
before Israel
regained it in 1967 ?
Does it forget the Mosque sitting unbombed,
while Israeli lives are offered in the name of this very same religion ?
Does it congratulate devilry,
and ignore realities of the land, God chiefly, but man’s own agreements
likewise,
so that it might cry, ‘Peace! Peace!’
Turning now to the present, yes the immediate present, we find a new British development, not mercifully that land, and not as yet at least, NATIONAL, but it is to be found in the declaration of a group of prominence in that land.
Thus we come to the not so divinely British revolt against Mr Blair reported in The Australian, for April 29, 2004. In this, a large number of the diplomatic Establishment, no doubt not least those retired, saw fit to issue a condemnation of his actions re the USA and President Bush in their duet on the Middle East.
Their extensive condemnation included a word for the Middle East, which affronts the saddened eye. This was indeed an interesting exhibit in their Philippic. They were so very assuredly condemnatory on the very idea, or is it ideah! of seeking to salvage SOME of the land granted for Israel in 1917 and internationally in the 1920s, but later robbed by the UN. Give the Jews ANY of it! This was not properly British it seemed. No the West Bank was to be Arab. What the Jews had given from their territories gained in war, to Arabs with some measure of independence for Palestinian affairs, was only a beginning. ALL of the West Bank, Israel's ancient heartland, was to be TAKEN.
How wonderful is this world in Jew-bashing! It may be made to look illegal to inhabit your own, or illiberal to give to a declared enemy some of the fruit of your victories; and it may become a fashion for the Jew to give back all, as if in some international strip-tease to please the patrons, but let us be assured, that such deprivations are not going unnoticed, and it is not with the governments of man that justice finds its basis or its epitome.
Let us put it from another aspect. These initiated cognoscenti were appalled almost, it seems, beyond measure that Israel should be allowed to have back an 'illegal' amount of the land subjected to UN confiscation of the League of Nations grant of some 80 years before. Naturally, on that grant, much has been built. Built by Israel; but this too, forget about it lest justice be heeded. No, Israel, we hear, should not retain what it took in war, constituting a small part of that formerly internationally made the subject of a total grant of Palestine as a Jewish homeland, with provision for restraint in its administration. They should not retain even a crucial part of a grant earlier made and shamelessly despoiled for acceptance by others! Such negatives thunder, constituting wonder! The invitation: Let the Jews, if to survive at all, do some more wandering while others take its classical site into their outstretched hands. Do they relent ?
No! we find, the reneging must stand; the welching must not be permitted to be overthrown. Certainly not! Israel should not have ANY of this heartland of the West Bank. How appalling to give to the Jew, what both God and the League of Nations, following the earlier British Balfour proclamation during World War I, had assigned. What wickedness, they seemed to affirm, what crassness, what incredible lèse-majesté ...
Lèse-majesté ? but to what ? to the Arabs, to Allah, to the sheer vastness of Arab owned land and Moslem controlled territories surrounding Israel, or nearby ? or to oil as in the case of Bevin after World War II who was EXPLICIT that oil must oil the way to helping the Arabs in the Middle East! Oil, he indicated, really mattered.
Is Britain then deemed by these lords of power and position, of post and prestige, to be an Islamic country, that they should so fawn on Allah, or is it Lord Oil who smooths what seems to be the sound of arrogant tongues and arrant thoughts ? or some other distorting influence ?
Is the Jew still to be a nonentity, and are the nations to become total frauds in assigning what they then re-consign, and is it to be right to wrong those wronged in pogrom, concentration camp and Inquisition, so that a certain ... shall we say consistency towards the Jew from Europe might be obtained ? so that they might be ... where is that button ... ah yes! here it is, should it BE more or less DELETED! Various voices go various distances towards this, but ah! how the press presses, and how pressures build as for the Jew. The idea grows: for Israel, only outage is not outrageous.
And yet they cry out in astonishment or horror or resentment, when the Lord brings predicted judgments in terms of predicted rebellions in this world, against equity, against truth, against fealty to its Founder, against His words, against justice and responsibility to His ordinances and commands, against His ways and His good pleasure! In ancient Israel, you see the divine restoration of due perspective, in Amos 4, ending with this: "PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD".
Now defiling this people, now that, now this person, now that, much of mankind in masses as if one, stares feckless at the face of God. Assured in his sombre little announcements, erratic pronouncements and pronunciamentos, while in words depicting with the tar of the tedious triumphalisms of error, he uses the very equipment of God to affront His word that has called to all the generations of man, and not once failed. Then he laments, and wonders why artless rebellion at length finds the collision with the realities of truth.
In all truth, it is amazing the Lord is so patient.
But that, it is just like Him (cf. II Peter 3:9, II Chronicles 36).
See Lord of Life Ch. 8, *1 esp..
Below are provided references: For such as these asterisked here, and allied rebellions, what might be said ? These being humanistic, are ungodly; and being arrogant against God, show no effectual pity for those who so misled (cf. Jeremiah 10:11); and indeed often little to be confused with it at all.
The thrust or trend here is to forsake heavenly mindedness, for earth charters, peace in the kingdom of heaven for partisan procurement, hope for emptiness and the might of the tested word of the God of the Bible, the justice of the will of God, for the slave-driven consensus of calumniating humanity, despising the integrity of God, His witness and His truth. Thus go their ways and wares, as in Israel when it was rebuked by the prophets of old. As if to conform to that pattern, now among the Gentile dominions and would-be dominions they go, setting His word aside for new gods, come newly up, often masked, but equipped with larger than average mouths (Deuteronomy 32).
See SMR pp. 99ff., 92ff., Swift Witness 6. Consult Mystery of Iniquity, It Bubbles ... Ch. 11, Ch. 10, Divine Agenda Ch. 6, Lord of Life Ch. 8, *1 .
On this, see. News 37 and see Wild Swans! e.g. pp. 434ff., 442ff., 496ff., 502ff., 521ff., 531ff., 513, and especially p. 471, including this gloriously revealing ascription of love of the 'god of forces', noted in Daniel. She writes that the great leader had declared that it was not a bad thing to let the young have some practice using arms, since they, the people, hadn't had a war for a long time.
See Repent or Perish Ch. 2, It Bubbles ... Ch. 8, Christ, the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8, Lord of Life ... Ch. 9, SMR Ch. 6 for example.
Preferred ...
The preference of man is of great interest. More on this topic, in this realm, to research it, may be found in
Great Execrations, Great Enervations, Greater Grace Chs. 7 and 9, in
SMR Appendix B, in
The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 4, and of course in
Predestination and Freewill, as indeed in
that trilogy in which it forms a part.