W W W W  World Wide Web Witness Inc.  Home Page   Contents Page for Volume  What is New

CHAPTER 9

TRANSCULTURE, TRUCULENCE AND THE TRUTH

News 312,

The Australian May 17,  2004

THE SAD DAY, THE GLAD DAY AND THE NEED OF LIGHT

It is not all that sodden mess, with soiled sexuality or red-soaked soil, marred minds with the dagger of godless desire stuck in them, as if their lives were forfeit to the kingdom of culture, for the better preservation of the pride of the human race, that ultimate racism towards which man is racing.

I say, it is not all like that. There is some residue of that delightful image of God in man which is the chief ground of man's attractiveness and the height which makes him crack his head, when he falls.

We see, for example, irrespective of which nationality we may have in mind – a certain function of person, glint of understanding, form of meaning and appearance of imaginative constructions in man: though conditions of corruption in the races not being identical, there are large variations. Nevertheless, large though they may be, the transcultural analogies of ALL men to each other are far greater than any diversities.

In Chinese and English alike, one can begin to fathom a humour, an irony, a playful mood, a longing for emotional stability, family graces, tender carefulness for those loved, protection of the weak from those who assail, detestation of corruption. To be sure, this is often made ludicrous by calling good evil, and evil good, as Isaiah pointed out in Ch. 5 some 2800 years ago. Indeed, he declares in the name of the Lord WOE, devastation to those who do this, making their own petty principles insubordinate and those of God, the inordinate, subordinate to their own.

Despite this, again, there is a transcultural identification which it is both a pleasure and a delight to recognise. One speaks to an Iranian who compares our two countries, strongly approving of the geographical features, the livability of both. Yet, he says, the government ... Ah yes, the government of that land was not easy to stomach, this was the point!

One can speak to a young man from China, and his mind is not different, his thoughts are not alien, he is able to consider, to contemplate whether it be architecture, philosophy, theology or music, and the milieu is not far from common. To be sure, in this case that one has in mind, he is a Christian. Hence there is already a KINGDOM and a PURPOSE and a PLAN and a PURITY and a VISION and indeed a word from God to both of us, the God who is the Creator of all, and it strikes that common chord, like a musical piece for two pianos, which echoes now in one, now in the other, and really the race makes then very little difference at all.

Considering the prodigious quality of the depth of artistry, appreciation, consideration, logical perception, humour, happiness, seeking, finding, meaning involved in humans when they find their proper base and leave the deadly dreams of delusion that are so common and so unproductive (unless hatred and blood on the ground be deemed productive, and to be sure, in one very limited sense, they are so, that is of evil): it is amazing how that same mould applies to all. Like a transcontinental railway, the line of the divine thought moves across all boundaries, and does not stop till all races are covered.

He has, as Paul declared in Athens, indeed made man of one race (Acts 17:26). As usual, one may notice incidentally, that the biblical concept prevails: for the concept of man as of ONE STARTING POINT is now quite commonly accepted, the precise geographical point being in discussion, depending on assumptions initially made; and material considering such points in detail has appeared in Creation Magazine on occasion (June-August, 1992, p. 7). It related to DNA analysis of mitochondrial material, indicative of one origin for the human race in toto. 

Here the advanced technicalities of the scientific concentration on just one commencement to the human race are considered, with this strong index to ONE START. One God at ONE TIME made ONE race! That is what God stated some three thousand, 5 hundred years ago in Genesis. 

What never dates is the Bible; but as to scientific dates on remote antiquity, often darlings of this or that philosophical dream as presuppositional base, they vary as the winds, That in turn merely verifies further the irrationality of their philosophical premises, constantly revised and always in need of revision because of efforts to achieve the impossible, ignoring the assured (cf. Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13, 16, Worn-Out World, Coming King Ch. 5, Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4, 5, Secular Myths and Sacred Truth).

The only sure thing being the concentration of MANY indexes for a date of thousands of years only, and the intense variability of theoretical findings in the radioactive field, only one of which is that propounded by Dr Robert Humphreys, with further refinements proposed with the same young earth result by the brilliant scientist, Dr John G. Hartnett Creation, Technical Journal, Volume 17(2), 2003.  He also concentrates on the work of Arp (cf. treatments on this, in Divine Agenda Ch. 1, Deliverance from Disorientation Ch. 6), who shows enormous geometrical regularities in the starry azure, wholly contrary to any 'Big Bang' theory as is a whole battalion of evidence for the ludicrous theory (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7, Section E).

In truculence, many seek to disperse this unity of race, in terms of philosophic trails for the superior race, the incipient superman and other images of conditioned thought based on the same premises as those which wish to institute man without God: namely, nothing. Either nothing or God produced it all; and God is far more able than what is logically disowned from ANYTHING as soon as it is defined (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms   29).

It came from ... nothing ? That may be put: or, It always was. Yet this is the same in the end, as nothing would in that case be what was needed to put it there! It would constitute quite a work for something so slight as what is not even there, which being nothing, and not able to operate at all by definition, has such a lot to do.  It is nothing or God; and the difficulty so many seem to have is a testimony to the truculence which has so marked and marred man from the days of the  Greek philosophers to the present^*1, aspects being viewed as creators of all, as if an aircraft were to be conceived as having conceived itself, well ... by its wheels, or engine, or flight control unit, or ANYTHING; so long as the engineer can be ignored (cf. Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13, Worn-Out Earth and Coming King Ch. 5).

What a sire, then, is this nothing, a verbal pretence, a cipher as all the worlds come to their culmination in the denudation of protection, like the dismissal of conception, just as the exaltation of death invades, as cults and choirs worshipping a nothing, zapped by a zero (what the Bible calls a VANITY, a thing conceived by man, not what conceived man by creation), blast their praises into the witless air! Based, in his own mind, on nothing, yet expecting everything, man becomes the philosophical plutocrat, exalting himself in a human magnificat, seeking like Hitler, to plunder what he has not built.

Yet while this spiritual insanity (Hosea 9) proceeds like events on stage as shown in the Opera Program, there, is in this empty accolade,  at least the attestation of this requirement in man: that he worship. If he denies God, what he chooses for his ultimate is ultimate in folly, in superficiality, in confusion, in perfect uselessness where it is not in fact the very quintessence of demolition, as in al Qaeda and other delusives.

So inane are man's choices for the worshipful adulation - this soccer team, that politician, this sport, this car, this boat, this race, this culture, this civilisation, himself ... the things which stir the sense of worship and colour the soul red -  that he stands exposed. One can for all that fiasco, and indeed because of that, the inherent, inescapable, pervertible but inalienable thrust in man. If he WILL not worship his Creator, then he WILL worship some sort of creation, and he is addicted very often simply to himself.

Thus, if it is not pointed to what is worth it, being the Creator, then the instinct to worship will be diverted to emptiness, the trivial, sensuous, the merely sensational, to something, anything. Exasperation, frustration and inclination here combine to make towers in the natural skies, as at Babel, filled with hopes and empty of foundation.

This indeed accounts perfectly for the ludicrous character of so many religions; for it shows how a wholly untested phenomenon, without logical or scientific basis can sweep man to 'anything' (cf. The Christian Pilgrimage Chs.   6,   7).  It is in some ways parallel when a youth, disdaining the hard work which would bring to him a fascinating profession, drifts in a 'meaningless' world, where he is simply out of sorts with what sorts, not having sought. When not a mere profession, but the perspective of life itself is not ardently pursued, and man is ruptured from reality, then too, the cynic and the pragmatist come in their sports cars, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but this:  how noisy a thing is theft, when a man ex-God becomes but a weather-cock, to be blown by whatever wind is strongest.

It is not at all that the sweeping motion of wind is so successful or productive; rather is it that man like dust in the wind, is moving there anyway, to the destination of dust, blown as it moans, and moaning as it groans. That is the pathology of spiritual promiscuity and nullity, a form of divorce; and it is increasingly pervasive in this damaged race. Yet in all this,  there is, once again, a transcultural identity for man, so that be he German or American, Spanish or Austrian, he can both rise above the limitations of specific background to the common heritage, and worship God as has been done by so many millions, from Abraham to Isaiah, from David to Thomas; but if not finding the common Lord for the common link, he can fall by his very specious wisdom.

SPIRITUAL DELINQUENCIES HAVE THEIR DAY
BUT FOR ALL THAT, HOPE IS NOT DEAD, YET ...

LIKE A RIVER

IT STILL COURSES THE DRAMATIC DOMAIN OF MANKIND

What of such a spiritual delinquent as this which we depict ? Exulting in strength while the butt of circumstance, whether intellectual, moral, physical, social, financial or whatever other seduction of the spirit, affront to the heart or indictment of the strategies of life he may adopt, his arrogance may find him out sooner, or preferring to wait for its pay, then later when the devious duplicities of manufactured doubts dissipate at death. Darkness is always vulnerable to the light, and the light will find it out; for then it cannot stand, but falls in its innate devastation.

Thus in Psalm 1 as in life itself, the wicked are as chaff, whether pompous and bloated fragments of disordered and cut-up personality, or more obviously light and dusty ware: and the wind blows them away, whether this be the wind of their own pride, or of their abasement. Death does not receive them graciously nor are their graves harbours of content (Psalm 9, Mark 9). The Lord however KNOWS the way of those who are His, imbued with HIS righteousness, covered by His care, whose death is precious in His sight (Psalm 116:15), since He has carved their ways from the wood of His will, and blessed them with the savour of His Spirit (Psalm 1, Isaiah 61:3, Romans 5:17, 8:29).

Then they become, if you will, an aromatic wood, so distinctive and so attractive (II Corinthians 2:16), though some dread its aroma and flee from its texture, the touch of truth! They become as Paul puts it, a savour of life to the living and of death to the dying. But what of those dead in spirit, and dying in heart ?

This we have found: that in the cultures of this world, mere ways and histories with current accounts, you still find across all this defilement, that touch of commonality, that trade-mark of image-bearing stamp, that willingness to reason, that astuteness of logic, that perception of heart, that sensitivity to implication, that awareness of inference, that intuition of inter-personal realities, like a great continent on which one walks, the other and all.

The longings may be muted, the ways disputed, the thrusts commuted, the thoughts diluted; but their base is obvious. Darkness may obscure the light, distortion may twist the contexts, agonies disturb the peace and obsessions defile the desires; but underneath, sometimes like a carpet dusty under a pile of books laid upon it, there is a texture of covering, and below that, a plank of plain similarity. Man has an amazing unity in part, like so many Holden cars, some utilities, some all wheel drive, some sedans, some four wheel drive. You see the underlying stamp and style of it all.

With many, however, even the foundations are stricken, and the house of life has wandered to angles of skew remarkable to behold. Yet for all that, there is the house, rickety and unrelished, but a testimony to what has at least been an abode, and one that COULD be reconstructed on a sound base, indeed on its only proper base.

Beyond the trans-continental cultures, then, showing an accessibility each to the heart of the other, even if some are often defiled to the point that it is like looking for a track in a storm of sand, and without doubt not one is perfect, there is a common thrusting power, sensitivity and purposeful thought. Then, beyond this common pattern, this universal patois of purpose and planning, hope and longing, however gravely it is commuted into corruption unthinkable until met: there is ground for it. Even the ground is not groundless, and what occurs upon it is no less so.

Not for nothing do you find rows of houses with similar flowers, trees and skies, ground and windows, chimneys and back yards. It is a pattern of purpose. So with man: despite his trends in some races - and they DO differ, not integrally but in purposefulness and consolidation in method and labour - there is a Director of Design and a Dynamic of Dealing in common.

The trans-cultural, like a trans-continental railway, we remind ourselves, has an ultra-cultural source and matrix, with a meta-cultural cause and control. This is the Lord of the meta-religion,  which alone is testable at the level of its own statements, and ascertainable with ALL the faculties of man, logic included, scientific method to boot, alone meeting the standards of validity and showing the hall-marks of validity with a virtue and an assurance which turns the test into a triumph and the examiner into an examinee before the majesty of the Most High God.

He,  having spoken but once in this way, in one Book, the Book of the Lord (Isaiah 34), has confirmed it once and for all in just One Person, Jesus Christ whose credentials cannot be compared^*2 with any other, since they are as far above it as are the Rockies in their thousands of metres, above the piles of dirt in a back London street - perhaps three inches at worst ...

It is not just that the power and purpose of God are both stated and confirmed over thousands of years, in terms of His word, the Bible and His work, creation, salvation and maintenance, bringing things through the midst of plans to an end through cumulative consequences to a culminating thrust, as light grows from dawn to mid-day; for this is just a beginning. His written word focusses one principle, one passion, one precept, one seeking person, one method, one way, one provision, one power, one grant, one goodness above all.

The case is that God WILLS that all should be found, re-discovered, delivered from the accumulated dirt of diverse wilful cultures. You see that most emphatically  in I Corinthians 1, with the abrupt dismissal of ALL the wisdoms of man, and the divine action taken that He might  restore man to Himself. It is that man should find there in the Creator of his commencement, the place of the peace in purpose, that consummation which meets with God as friend and worshipper. Now re-derived from the Divine Donor, who first gave him life and then offers its restoration from misuse: man finds the power in grace and the love in tenderness and lovingkindness which is available when the deserts of folly are forsaken for the lush green pastures of his Lord's own provision.

Few there be, however, who find it! as Christ declared (Matthew 7:13-14).

Man is so wilful that he even spends billions on explicitly forbidden space (Psalm 115), to emphasise his own manfulness (manliness is too cosy for this extravaganza, so we invent a word which is fuller of fiasco for the purpose cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3). It is as if this world, this earth, this blessed planet and canopied container for man were not large enough for his perpetual vagrancies, and space  alone would symbolise his alienation from the cosy and costly corner of the universe appointed for him, as when a sheep station puts its home in one small corner of its vast area, making this the arena of life.
 

No, for him must now be the barren heights of wind-screeching mountains, and the depths of abysmal valleys. In general, man will not and is not willing to learn from God (cf. Matthew 11:28-30), and he seeks instead to satisfy his own godless mind or escapist energies in many of his cultures, some quite expressly. Such wanderings are to be seen in the Darwinian fiasco and the Gould oblivion, the Marxist delusion and the Romanist cult, the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity excursion to blood soaking fields, and the Statue of Liberty, increasingly now being soiled by the addition which seems to hit the air, "Yes, liberty even from God, the God of the Bible!"^*3.

Not thus was that proud nation begun, and if this is to be the signal for an end of its vast fortunes, sad is the day. Others have ended, and their number has been called. Africa is already conversing with its end, while Asia is seeking a resurgence with Western wit and power, of its life, so that with China's billions, those once blessed democracies might be subverted in strength, ready for the grave-yard of stricken spiritual servitude, settled under inane powers that equate man with animated dust, not lively spirit. To the dust by which you live, to that your dulled spirits then go! Is this to be the way of it ? The scenario progresses with a defilement so reminiscent of Israel's former iniquities against the Lord (cf. Isaiah 1, 59, Hosea 1), that once again, it shows even in transgression the vast unification force operative on man, on all races.

USSR has already shown the way down, and the pitiless squalors which man invents, to unman himself completely, these become the records of his disaster, like court cases coming with boring repetition, this driver having been killed in this way, those maimed in that. The cases mount; the court is amid squalor of spirit.

Man has been given a space to repent, but deems it a space to invent, and abusing his glorious gift of mental freedom and spiritual thrust, he reaches for the stars, quite literally, staring blankly into the roof, forgetful of the need of foundation. What does it resemble ? It is like some tower of Babel, newly being built, to find how high you can go by sheer ingenuity, before the gravity of gravity at least reaches the errant mind!

It is as it has been. Now its squalor invites the entire globe. Not this time, however, the mere dismantlement of the unity of the language of the race, is the penalty for this finale of the Anti-Christ Cacaphony, Bitter No. 13, Opus the Last; rather is it the blight of the miscreant builder himself, whose rod and staff can bring comfort to no more vain imagination till the earth itself is folded away, and replaced, and its polluted prince with it by the Builder and Maker of Man, the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:7, 51:6, Revelation 20-22).

Apart from Babel itself, there have been various cacophonic occasions of note in the dire dynamics of evil romancing in this world. 

THE PRIDE OF FLESH IS ITS OWN MESH -

but GOD has provided an answer

Thus also did the spirit behind the Tyrian prince soar in his own glory, and in his own pride.

Ezekiel 28 reveals his spiritual navel for inspection (28:14ff. below).

                           You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor ..."

More affecting is the beautiful rendering,

"Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty,
 You have corrupted your wisdom by reason of your brightness."

How poignant is this inherent evil, when as here, the very magnificence of the creation is its downfall, and the soaring power of the understanding was its own ruin, like electric wires overcharged with electric current, melting! How is it a lesson in opprobrium, that gifts being glorified without the Giver, they become a stricken ruin; and it is ever so when wisdom is received only as a bauble for corruption, not an instrument of goodness with delighted glory given to God. Two wonderful gifts, wisdom and brightness, in combination with soaring silliness, give birth at last to an only child,  to grievous and catastrophic devastation!
 

If this is relieved in our minds by the thought that such leadership has brought ruin and squalor, yes agony and drab destiny to many who followed it, yet is its glory remembered but in shame, with sham its name. Such is the terminus of all who defile the truth, warping their wisdom and wandering rebellious from truth, mistaking man for God, and gods of their own creation or preference, for reality.

Necessarily sad, it is however sadly necessary - for the antithesis of truth is its own answer, the crash site of all the pagan philosophies or regal dreams of those disordered minds and realms who wed ashes, instead of actuality. Before the blaze is over, the brilliance may attract; but not when the end is floating particles of dimness, set in ashen blends amidst the grey.

Is it not always grievous when greatness is gutted, as it seeks to be more intimate, or on a vaster scale, on its own authority with the direction of our race or components of it! Man's energies of enterprise against the divine throughout the centuries, soaring like the Challenger rocket, these come in determinate descent to a different end; and that arrests the heart of pity as all is seen disintegrating into echoing oblivion. Oblivious of God ? it is then destitute of deliverance, and meets what was long announced for it. Gone is the apparent greatness of devious duplicity. Its funeral is as when splendour is splashed into the segments and drops no longer dynamised, into the crash of roaring billows^*4.

So wasted is the day of all this futility: festering in delusive arrogance, it explodes its own myth^*5. What then is the biblical result for this evil-gripped prince of Tyre ?

"I will cast you to the ground,

I will lay you before kings,
that they may look upon you.

You have defiled your sanctuary by the multitude of your iniquities..."

Some might  prefer these days, perhaps, some sort of rendering like this:

"You have defiled your place of holiness by the masses of your sins ...",

but what would you! The result is very much the same.

The reality of the meta-religion, of the God whose it is, of the objective God (TMR Ch. 5, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, esp. *1A), the objective Creator, the objective Saviour, the only God and only Saviour, the God who calls, who has spoken, who has come, whose work has been done not only in creation but for redemption, resolution and restoration for man: this remains.

It is He, absolute in knowledge and power, the truth beyond cavil and reaction, the Maker of reaction-apparatus and response enablement. It is He who calls man to repentance and to restoration to realism by realisation of the truth. This CANNOT even be meaningful for contest,  when HE is dismissed in that perennial misuse of the glory of freedom for the glory of man, which leaves him talking from and of himself, with no option to understand, to truth in existence to discover, only interaction, and even that he cannot affirm, since on his model, what is the truth, is not present. Like a babe despising in the womb, its own umbilical cord, man in increasing masses mangles himself in strange rebellions and strangulating discords, opining with flamboyance as if god, whilst denying anything such!

Like a wild infant, inflamed with passion, he becomes but a drab abortion. Long has he striven to avoid it; but the final hours draw near for his entanglements, for the antics of our fallen race. The worse are they who continue in revolt from their Maker, because the Lord has been most patient, most kind, most merciful (II Peter 3:9), and has paid the ultimate of all prices that purity can, that justice exacts (Romans 3:23ff., I Peter 2:22ff.).

And this ? How was it done ? It was in His bearing as man, the sheer brutality and sophisticated wildness of sin with a magnanimous offer open to all, sufficient for all, effective for those who receive it (II Corinthians 5:17ff., John 3:16, Colossians 1:19ff.). He has offered Himself as an offering, sacrificial in its kind, infinite in its intensity, constructive in its outcome, that of wisdom uncorrupted by its brightness, but issuing in all its everlasting brilliance, and bringing peace for ever (Isaiah 53, Ephesians 2).

The decision of the judge shall be final; and it is He who has so presented Himself in love and compassion without limit. This is staggering presentation: not in robes of regality, but of mockery from His errant subjects; not in flaming beauty, but mashed in countenance by the gross engravings of the fists and whips of man; not in elegance but in elegiac sadness, telling the 'daughters of Jerusalem', those saddened by the sight, not to weep for Him, but for themselves. HIS presentation was the depiction of our sin in His own person, not to pollute its purity, but to display our guilt.

Truth has acted and for these results, there is no part given for mere competition; though as to that,  such stimulus to creation and attainment can be good if done in love, not shove. In this domain, dimension and dealing however, it is HE who has decided to act and the action is His own, neither duplicable by deceit, nor prone to caricature by cunning in the inveterate wickedness of many. His action is irrevocable and complete (Hebrews 9); it is the offering of Him who declared,

	"The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep" (John 10:11), and this (10:17-18):
	"Therefore does my Father love me, because I lay down my life, so that I might take it again. No man takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father."

Undissuasible is He who has done it, and there is no other route provided to the divine heart of our Creator. There are things done which can neither be undone nor countermanded; and the gift of God in the person of His only begotten Son has just that indelibility.

Thus the PROVISION OF THE JUDGE is also final, and that is the Gospel of God's grace. It is not competition in inanity which is the proper and ultimate goal of man, but return to reality in the mind and mission, the method and the Messiah of God. The fraud of false gods is but dying bubbles, drably exploding into air. The finality of the gift of deity is by that remarkable marvel past all comparison - just as is God Himself - the Rock of Ages in Person, exposed to cover man, as many as come to Him.

What is left,  it is an opportunity for access where the door is not too crowded, the path is not over-run with weeds, where truth resides, deep in the heart of God whose it is: just as the skies are for man but not space (Psalm 115), so is this crucified Saviour for man, but not the prince of this world, popular though that renegade be...

His words are clear: 

"I am the door, by Me if any man enter, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture" - John 10:9. Done by the Eternal God (Deuteronomy 33:27, Genesis 21:33), it is eternal (John 10:27-28).

What then do we find ? It is this.

Without the absolute, there is none available; and without God there is only mutual impact and impression, temporary measurement of current interaction modes, and nothing on any horizon; for what has man done but wilfully cut it off, like wild and arbitrary-minded children, exploding nukes on all sides, to see if the skies would collapse. What DOES collapse is the time for more folly; and what does happen is judgment, first in stages as Christ so clearly depicts in Matthew 24, even signalising what was to be (and now is) "the beginning of sorrows", and then with the end of the matter.

Imagine a doctor ignored as he seeks deliverance for his obstinate patient, then dying in efforts to make available what is needed, his words living on to rebuke the still inveterately indifferent man of disease!

Christ however has done infinitely more than this, first meeting justice, not mere circumstance, then meeting sin in His purity, which none other has, then satisfying all payments without limit, and covering all costs without stint, then breaking the blight of death openly, and that when He said He would, after three days, and as to that, moreover, at the date when Daniel had predicted it would be (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4), so that life, like dawn forever banishing the last night, might rule in exuberance and all whose eyes are not resolutely shut, lest they should see, might participate!

The end, as at the beginning, is the truth, the light which abides no darkness at all in it (John 1, James 1:17, Luke 11:34-36, Revelation 21-22), the reality of the rule of God, the lovingkindness of the tender mercies of God, the call to realism, not rearguard, to striking safety and striding in the light, not skulking and scurrying where neither reason nor repentance abide, in the fallen towers that litter the earth. There the rubble of pride and the desiccation of desires that once were fired, finds itself self-mocked. There erring ends unmet, meet an end that nothing now amends.

Yet man as a transcultural entity, cutting off the horizons of truth, and investigating the extent of creation, in godless ecstasy is becoming too excited to worry about the indictment.

Too blighted to find the peace, godless man is becoming too hallowed in his own sight, to find the realities of worship of his Maker, too busy with nothing, to think about Origin,  too original to worry about logical necessities^*5, indeed too flighty with fancy to face the obvious and too lordly to face humility, viewed as delusion by his delusive imagination.

This, alas, excites his mind and abuses his spirit until oblivion is too kind an end
(cf. Proverbs 1, 8, Mark 9)

.
Did Christ weep in vain ? did His pity exercise its infinite power for destitution ?

No, it experienced it that it might deliver from it! It was stated that it would be, when it would be, why it would be, over and over again, that all might know, when it happened, who was behind it! (cf. TMR Ch. 3, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17).

It was in love toward all and with remedy for any accepting it, that He has come (cf. Beauty for Ashes Ch. 4); and its triumph is in those who are gathered from the ruin, and this at whatever stage, with whatever burden of folly, where pride to the end does not blind, and passion in its rancour or rabid misbeliefs ceases to impel past the Cross of the God of all comfort to what is not there, to the virtueless emptiness of gods living only in the mind, whether shrouded in devil, drivel or the appearance of angels (II Corinthians 11, Deuteronomy 32).

Man marches to the end of this Age, often deliberately oblivious that God having done all, all is the more readily required of man (Hebrews 2:1-3).

POLLUTION, NOT PREVAILING, IS PREVALENT

So in Iraq, in the religiously-smitten obsessions of the false prophet, Muhammad, they cut the throat of an American as a part of the procedure of cutting off his head. Ghoulish ? godless ? Of course, it is an abuse of the property of God for which answer will be given, not so much now, as then, when the Maker and Owner calls to account the defilement of liberty by lust, and the misuse of passion for power-play and empty inanities.

These are such as come where long and vain has been this proud call for the dynamics of delusion to outwit the donation of testable and tried truth  and where false prophecy, as if by its own irrational inertia, continues in its graceless deeds (cf. More Marvels ...Ch. 4 and refs.). By force did Islam enter Mecca, and by force masses of its adherents continue this career.

So in Sudan, they kill masses of despised minions, while the United Nations, that bastion of compassion, does not really find the time or the resources, don't you know, to do too much about it; and one African leader is reported recently to have said that it is just tribal warfare of long standing, and not too important a matter, not one for international action. Are Christians, in Sudan the deliberate butt of the Islamic zeal of voracious force,  so to be raped by rapacity, made servants by satanicity ?  are slave-drivers to raid families and is an arrogant Islamically-oriented seizure to be sanctified by such talk!

Whatever the theory, little is done by the UN itself. While they here appear rather inactive, however, their salaries do not seem to be forgotten in their towered magnificence. Sadly, little is to be found in their droning and intoning words of a justice which again and again we do not see forwarded, but often degraded, as they seek to disestablish Israel and invade its tiny dominion with the Moslem masses, as if these needed their assistance! (cf. Red Heart ... Ch. 10, It Bubbles ... Ch. 11). If the nations of the world are thus, what is the key to its spirit ? In the references above concerning Israel, this too we find: ample assurances of vanity looking up, while the cargo of the pit-basket proceeds to the blighting depths.

Such transcultural oblivions of hope and  mis-majesties of arrogance, however, trusting in their own ways and will in the midst of flesh: they will meet its Assessor in time. Like the other dominions, these will answer, which did not answer, and will give account, which took no account of the directive word and determinate will of God, the God of compassion, love and truth. Quite literally, such Middle East decisions would take the world from God, and having made none of it, seize whatever part they wish of it, breach His word as if Jews only could possibly suffer for such things! (cf. Galloping Events Ch. 4, It Bubbles … Ch. 1, Great Execrations …Ch. 4, Divine Agenda Ch. 6).

His will is not so readily blighted by buildings, or broken by the yapping, howling pack of angry growlers, who would govern without God.

Let us consider further one such case.

So the United Nations did not choose to worry about Iraq's breach of sanctions, or the power of those concerned, to act if it did not! It felt... a certain quiescence about Iraq's statutory failure, after the 1991 Gulf War. Ho hum, let it be done. So it is criminal for the US to do it ? Whatever may or may not have been the wisdom of the USA's strangely singular act, it was assuredly provoked by the inaction of the great body of humanity, that UN of impotence! Now the madness of Moslem-based inveterate hatred, and the grand hopes, as with Tyre, of its well-clad rulers is set like a rabid dog to the destruction of anything and everything which stands in its own way. It has money. It has weaponry, bought in the main, from others. IT WILL HAVE ITS WAY. Such is the verbal furniture of its passion.

Such spiritual lapses and insanities are by no means limited to the day of ancient Israel (Hosea 9:7), and are as recent as today. Indeed, they show no necessary linkage whatever to the actual mental prowess or intelligence of those concerned. Spiritual disease is like physical degradation in this, that what is in principle sound, may in practice become inoperable! Thus, a broken leg does not deny the presence of the body; but it prevents its functioning! Blindness of spirit was long Israel's special disease (cf. Isaiah 1, 43); but the Gentiles are no less diligent in straying than was that ancient nation! Mere mind does not restore direction when spirit is enchanted with exotic excrescences, teeming tirades without truth.

Thus once more does the word of God  find its mark, Christ's signal of the dynamic of false prophets and false christs multiplying for the end of this Age, and this, as John indicates (Revelation 13) is towards one civilisation, one earth in our wonderfully produced and gloriously seduced liberty without God, equality without justice. It is a specious fraternity without a Father.  Similarly, iniquity does abound, and so does the love of many grow cold, and so does the time come when except those days were shortened, no flesh at all would be spared (Matthew 24:11-14,22,24). As Christ declared it would be, so it comes to be.

WE WILL prevail, says the Moslem, the Communist, the Humanist, and as they mutually prevail, each finds he is countervailed; and as they proceed, each is corrupted. Even US soldiers by now multiplied reports, perhaps stung by the shameless and unnatural dismemberment of some of their own citizens, appear to be beginning to practice, perhaps not the ghoulish ghastliness of the obsessed, but at least an inglorious and degraded humiliation of those captured.

They prevail ? in what then ? in iniquity, so that they might add to that already produced by those who statedly would act for Allah; or for some combination of religions, as Bush seems to indicate in his fiasco of food, that prayer breakfast, where it was found convenient for those of different 'faiths' to commune and to pray ? (cf. Red Alert ... Ch. 6, Dastardly Dynamics ... Ch.10).

This mixture of the immiscible and the condemned prevails ? What prevails is a confusion so ample that the day of Elijah seems all but re-enacted, not this time simply with Israel, but with the powers of this world, and its spiritual prince. As to that most grievous Breakfast,  Billy Graham reportedly was present in the midst of the parallel to the prophets of Baal. Yet unfortunately, neither did he nor any other there, appear as Elijah: but seemingly all were happy in their forbidden totality (cf.  Red Alert Ch. 13, II Corinthians 6:14, Romans 16:17, Ephesians 5, II John).

Specious plans of survival, as in Caiaphas' day (John 11), so now, seem to justify the breach of the prohibitions of the Bible; but the Bible's word breaks rock. Alas for America, that nationally it should so ineptly and foolishly combine in such ways^*6 with what is as gall to God (cf. Isaiah 5, 7, II Kings 17:32-41, Jeremiah 23).

This theme is so topical that one includes its prototype from II Kings, at this point.

	"So they feared the Lord, and from every class they appointed for themselves priests of the high places, who sacrificed for them in the shrines of the high places. They feared the Lord, yet served their own gods - according to the rituals of the nations from among whom they were carried away.
	"To this day they continue practicing the former rituals; they do not fear the Lord, nor do they follow their statutes or their ordinances, or the law and commandment which the Lord had commanded the children of Jacob, whom He named Israel, with whom the Lord had made a covenant and charged them, saying:
	'You shall not fear other gods, nor bow down to them nor serve them nor sacrifice to them; but the Lord, who brought you up from the land of Egypt with great power and an outstretched arm, Him you shall fear, Him you shall worship, and to Him you shall offer sacrifice. And the statutes, the ordinances, the law, and the commandment which He wrote for you, you shall be careful to observe forever; you shall not fear other gods. 'And the covenant that I have made with you, you shall not forget, nor shall you fear other gods. But the Lord your God you shall fear; and He will deliver you from the hand of all your enemies.'
	"However they did not obey, but they followed their former rituals. So these nations feared the Lord, yet served their carved images; also their children and their children’s children have continued doing as their fathers did, even to this day."

The result for the Northern Kingdom of that ancient day, was their defeat, their dispersal to Babylon,  on which this passage of Kings is commenting, with reflection. Not just one, but each nation needs to  repent; for this is no option!

The coming godless kingdom, for which the world waits, as one waits for the news of an infant mortality,
is being prepared for in such vast declivities as this. Its bed is being made with assiduity and address!

The Gentiles, busy to this day in persecution of Israel, are too busy to learn, it seems; and if as in ancient Israel, some of the blinded by mercy escape into light, yet the grinding of the wheels was not stopped by this. What tragedy hit the ancient land when they too were impervious to correction. This we see in Ezekiel 14:20:

"Though Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, as I live, says the Lord GOD, they will deliver neither son nor daughter; they will but deliver their own souls by their righteousness."

NOTHING AVAILS BUT GOD PREVAILS

Nothing avails where all fails, and all must fail where God is not found, His word is not followed, with the winds and billows of transcultural 'beliefs' the governor, and man himself guide. As it was to be, was predicted to be, logically must be in such lèse-majesté: so now it is. Man is becoming ungovernable because of that masterly combination of delusion and hatred, action and reaction, a sort of pantomime or parade of corruption, like a university of pathology, spiritual pathology, doing its opening exercises, which in this case are now becoming so blatant, that they mimic and seem ready to coalesce with the End of Term speeches and the awards  ... of whatever is now due!

Culminations can be caressive; but devilish developments have the hug of death.

What then is the way ? It is deliciously simple, for you remember as a child, perhaps, in your culture, or better yet, in your church, and in your home ? Right is right and wrong is wrong, and there is no room for some counter-song! Repent! Is it too dramatic for the saturated heart ? Is the soul dripping from his or her swim in the oceanic depths, now unable to absorb ANYTHING any more ? Is the very idea of a meta-cultural, meta-religious GOD too much ?

Is God to be submerged with you in your swim, a companion in this world, rather than its Lord ? Very well, HE HAS ALREADY DONE THAT!! He has come and experienced the desolatory horror of sin in its dispatch (cf. Isaiah 53:6-11). He does not come for this a second time, but for just judgment, by mercy with pardon in redemption thus obtained, or without mercy where mercy is despised.

Consider man as one, musing.

You feel lonely, then He came. You feel orphaned, then He sent His Spirit where His word is followed. What would you ? Do you wish to have a house and for light and power, have a new universe, not an electrician and the sources and resources already present ?

Is anything that IS, too much like the same old thing ? It is YOU, if you are an unbeliever, who need to realise that it is yourself which is the same old thing, and it needs the nascency and purity, the power and the performance of its MAKER, just as a beaten car does of the restorer in crash repairs.

But you are not crashed ? This says musing man ? Then continue in your grandeur, like the Prince of Tyre, like the god of this world (John 14:29ff.), and become so by judgment, having preferred darkness for light. What is the good of that ? In gaining your desire, you lose yourself.

But is faith too much ? you cannot BELIEVE in anything, be it never so sure, so logically necessary, so verification-rich, so unique in majesty and given with such wisdom to meet the very needs of which your own are but an example ? Then you believe in yourself. Inaction is one of the drugs of mortality, and it is SO easy, so temptingly easy to continue in your own way, as if habit were holiness, and past were authority.

One has seen a (once) young man, equipped with intellect, able to become a partner in an architectural firm, who suddenly WOULD NOT ACT. He lay on his bed, and became a sight sad to see: soon in a mental asylum,  his bluish fingers and stricken countenance became testimony to the shrivelling of life that WILL not be lived. Schizophrenic he may have been, but it is not necessary to descend to the depths of that acme of asthenia, in order to partake of its discomforts.

Inaction when another car is about to strike you is NOT to be commended. If you will not listen to your ears, look with your eyes, consider with your own mentality, act within your spirit, for otherwise, what then is the point of calling yourself alive ?

To be sure, it is only GOD Himself who can move your spirit, since paralysis of will is only one of the symptoms of the pathology which purges man from this planet, and will in the end, render its own purge apt and appropriate (Isaiah 51:6, Matthew 24:35), when the ground literally departs on which feet once were wont to stand. Yet SINCE the Bible advises you that you with all of mankind are to be desired by God the Creator, who is not willing that any should perish and who, having matched His work with His word, has no desire for the abasement of the one and judgment by the other: then you need not worry about power or position. There is no actual impediment there to be found at all.

His heart seeks, but His judgment is pure (cf. Matthew 23:37ff., cf. SMR Appendix B, The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 4). If HE is looking, then you are not the criterion of the power or the aptitude. In the end, it is YOU and you alone who will pay, if HE does not; for justice will assuredly be done from the least to the greatest, since God's creation has His own principles in it, both the purity and the rebuke. HE HAS PAID what is infinitely sufficient, and whether or not YOU are included does not depend on His love, except in its restraint with persons. It depends on this and this alone: on whether He has chosen you (Romans 8:30ff., Ephesians 1:4).

Ah! the elect you think^*4, ready to run. Not so, not so at all! Elect they are but HOW and in what way ? HIS choice is not a rejection, as if the arbitrary removal of what He would not have, since HE would have all (Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2ff., Ezekiel 33:11ff., John 3). HE cites man's unwillingness as HIS OWN GROUND, despite His love; and though YOU CANNOT indeed have the moral virtue and spiritual sense to see it (I Corinthians 2:14, John 1:12, Romans 9:16), yet HE is able to take you. You have, in short, even here, to trust Him, as a child. If you will not, never complain; for then you have precisely what you wish, and all the power of God has been unwilling to breach your wildness. Heaven is for the happy in God, not for those harassed into it! Then heaven were no more heaven, not a haven but a prison. The love of God is free, like all love that is not misnamed; and neither force nor seduction are in its ways.

NOTES

*1

See Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13,

The Christian Pilgrimage Chs.   6,    7,

Worn-Out World  and Coming King Chs.   3,   5

 

*2

SMR Ch. 6, Appendix C

Biblical Blessings Appendix 1V ,

 Barbs, Arrows and Balms,  Appendix 1, esp. pp. 279ff., 27, 31,
Repent or Perish Ch.  2, pp. 41ff.,  5, 7, 4,

Red Heart ... Ch.   5, Trust God, Mate! ... Ch.  9, Lord of Life Ch.   9, 

It Bubbles ... Ch.   8, Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch.   8,

Of the Earth, Earthy ... Ch.   6; Red Heart ... Ch.  9;
Joy Comes in the Morning Ch.   1 ,  Biblical Blessings Chs. 16, 13; 

A Spiritual Potpourri 12, BB 13, Repent or Perish Chs.  2, 7,

SMR pp. 532ff., Acme, Alpha and Omega: Jesus Christ Chs.   6,  8,  
The Power of Christ's Resurrection Ch.  7.

 

*3 See for example Of the Earth, Earthy ... Ch. 4; and from *2 in that Chapter, we take the following for this purpose no less than that. Here it is adapted.

These gentlemen, Marx and Darwin, were crypto- as well as pseudo-prophets, in this,
that their words were meaningless in the intensity of their sheer irrationalism,
except in terms of a Maker and a Meaning, both of which do not inhere in the meaningless:
just as these two wanted to make a freedom from God, so have their ways crashed into uninspired oblivion, tested a failure, in reason a myth.

(Cf. SMR Ch. 3, pp. 422Eff., Christ, the Wisdom and the Power of  God  Ch. 6, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 9, esp. *1, et     al., News 94, TMR  1,   7,  8, Three Fogs, Little Things Ch. 5, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 19, 29. See also News 37, Secular Myth and Sacred Truth Ch. 8, News 100, Wake up World!... Ch. 6, SMR pp. 315Cff., 925ff., Coming King ... Ch. 3, Ch. 4. )

Storming into being, their theories rested on a support logically necessary, but in their models absent, in a welter of that spurious combination of invisible imports and impossible exports (cf. esp.TMR 8, Three Fogs). Wonderful things were to be wrought by a sufficient power in absentia from the scene! What was wrought was such a defilement of the spirit of man that the madness of wars of pride has not yet ceased to gather force from such banalities. Less banal is the blood shed, the anguish suffered in a creative methodology which creates agony.

On the papacy,  see SMR 946ff., 1032-1088H. On Islam, see More Marvels Ch. 4, and Red Alert Ch. 10, *4.

On France's aspect here, see Highway of Holiness Ch. 6, *18g.

On the Statue of Liberty and the Statute of Liberty, see Trappings for Potpourri. USA is in danger: for having using liberty as an escape from man-made religion, as at the first, it then begins to deploy it as an escape from man's Maker, God, until the desire of vanity stains the seas of the beauty of holiness and the lust of autonomy makes prisoners of all.

*4

Ezekiel gives a scene reminiscent of this in 32:17ff.. The poignant defoliation of misspent power has a grisly grandeur that nothing relieves in its interment.

The picture here of The Challenger is a physical depiction of our spiritual theme.

 

*5

Cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth. See also SMR Chs. 1, 3, 5, 10, TMR, pp. 378-385, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6  -7, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Swift Witness  6.

 

*6

In The Australian, May 17, 2004,  p. 13, one sees what one would rather not have seen. It is a further component in the composition of a post-graduate USA, one having graduated in the purity of Puritanism in no small measure in its early days following the 1620 Mayflower arrival, and all the endeavours to bring the kingdom of God on earth, or at least live according to it in a godly nation, has now taken a new national course such that appalling abominations, worthy of death under the law, and of exclusion from the kingdom of heaven as Paul declares (II Corinthians 5:11, 6:8-10, I Timothy 1:10, Leviticus 20:13), are to become popular among the populous, cute among the compromised and lovely to the law.

Certainly, there are appeals yet; but in the interim, as before for one stunned moment in California - properly quashed for the time by Schwartzenberger, so now for rather longer there is this approximation to Sodom and Gomorrah, which as Jude points out, God overthrew.

Now in Massachusetts, yes so elevated Boston indeed of such reputation, has come this legislation to authorise as marriage what is sodomy on site, and the Isle of Lesbos within the continental USA. Ridiculous language you say ? One must match.

Not only so, but we learn in this same newspaper that Vermont is already in the same sort of state, in that it is giving authority for "full civil unions" of this type. What sort of a state then is for America when two of its States so state!

God is merciful, compassionate and kind; but pour red paint on someone's new car and you are unlikely to be well received; nor for that matter is the car to be aided.

He utterly abominates such follies. Not only, in fact, does this sort of thing thumb its nose most lawfully, in ostensible ostentation,  at the law of God (and what sort of a national confrontation is that!), but it puts man in the centre: whatever he wishes. The idea is not novel; nor are the results. It is just that one is reluctant to see them occur in the USA which, to be fair, has been a fair hope and help with its largesse and deeds for a good century in horrible wars, and in helping the rebuilding of appalling desolations in Europe.

Does one like to see a good student take up drugs and fail his final exams ? For my part, I do not!

Is then the national profile in the USA to be not only, as one Indian commentator pointed out some years ago, religiously not Christian but Christian-Judaeo-Islamic: but is it in a pointless excercise in the proliferation of confusion, to be humanist and anti-biblical as well ?

Unquestionably, the question deserves an answer, and it is time for people who love God to look well to their nation, lest it become a sink for sodomy and a site for inclusivistic god-alliances such as wrecked Israel so much, and desolated it more than once. Will Auschwitz not yet speak!