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CHAPTER  6

WEARY WANTONRY and WOEFUL WICKEDNESS

THE SIGN-POST to the DOWN-TOWN CITY OF LIGHT

FOR THE LIGHT WILL COME, IN PERSON

News 303,

The Australian, March 19, 2004

MIXED UP METHODS

You may be inclined to yawn: Oh yes, so ... "Large majorities in Morocco, where the Madrid train bombers are suspected to have come from, and Jordan believe suicide bombings against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justified, the survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre found."

Perhaps a little weary of it all, some may hear: "Almost half the Pakistanis agree, despite the Bush administration considering Pakistan a key ally in the war on terror. Even in Turkey, a NATO ally, 31 per cent said suicide attacks on the US were justifiable." Where was that ? Oh in The Australian, Friday March 19, 2004 - they may listlessly enquire.

Some might stretch forth the expository hand, and add words like these:

Well you see, a lot of people feel the US made an error in ridding Iraq of the fate they deserved with that appalling dictator, what was his name - Hussein wasn't it, so many with their foreign names - and proceed,

So you see, I suppose they might want to see Americans agonise, and expire in shambles for the sake of their rescue. They wanted to be rescued, it may be, except for those living on the gains of internal oppression who don't want anything or anyone else, but they do not want to have the United States around for too long.

Thus does culture capture the imagination of many.

Now let us consider this situation a little more sharply. Many people in different countries, not all in any direct sense involved, feel that it is a good idea to kill people in the United States whose opinions may be loving and kind, thoughtful and compassionate in the extreme, who may have parted with large amounts of tax in order to help remove the last dictator, Hitler, and now more to remove this one, Saddam Hussein, whose monumental tortures and sadistic squalor oppressed countless thousands of agonising humans. They now feel it good to exercise unbridled savagery towards US people, old and young, with charming indifference,  because things are not quite what they should be.

Here is the descent in the drab darkness of amoral apathy which so readily leads to wars, since almost anything in the form of atrocity and agony, becomes 'suitable'. When humans become so lifeless and listless in their empathies and sympathies, we are already in the midst of a worn-out world, a world of dimmed spirits where intractable passions are endorsed for the violent, for flayers of justice and the actors as if God.

Now we have the program: to kill kids may be fine; to mutilate teen-agers for life may be a good plan. To squash whole families may be 'justified' because you think that, on balance, the ridding of a fiendish dictator from the reddened earth of suffering Iraq could have been done differently, better. Who then is playing God, the violators of the sanctity of human life, or those who lazily 'endorse' this unthinkable baseness of the human spirit, and so participate in such ghoulish monstrosities ?  Both ?

In this well of dying black waters from the pits of the deep, we find the red colour seeping through from the burdened earth above. 31% in NATO ally Turkey think suicide attacks on the US are justified, we read in the news report! Here is alliance indeed, here is trust, here the target for US funds, here the entrant into the European Union, here is peaceableness. IF the US should get out of Iraq, having removed a cluster centre for terrorists, real or potential, and for the works in view, an agent provocateur of the past in simple invasion of an adjoining country and tyrannies hard to shadow with any worse case in known history, very well. Nevertheless, let the country be given an opportunity to learn two things. 

There is more to life than profiting when ruthless people in power can give you some share of the loot, psychological or monetary.

There is far more to living than agreeing with unthinkable inhumanity in gloating folly, or enduring untold molestation, instead of possessing the liberty of spirit the Lord gave, and with it finding life, not as someone's asset, a virtual cultural slave to some domineering dictator or religion, but at liberty to find God. This, again, not by prescription from flowing robes, from robbers of liberty, setters up of God, but where HE IS TO BE FOUND (cf. Isaiah 55 and see Ch. 5  above).

If a group of countries can show more restraint and pay more than the US does, for the deliverance of this country from being an ideological base for efforts to bring horror to its culmination, then let it be so. WILL THEY ? WILL the UN pay more and show more restraint ? Possibly it will pay more if it gets hold of US funds from the bankrolling of their organisation!

As to showing more patience, this will need to be measured in terms of how many atrocities are committed against them by those who desire to abort freedom in Iraq, and enforce conditions allowing tyrannical rule of religion, as so acutely exhibited in the recent Iranian 'elections' with its crass removal of hundreds of candidates not to the religious palate of absolutist 'spiritual' rulers. Will the UN actually seek to secure freedom and not merely mouth words to cover the crimes of religious dictators who oppress, and make this oppression a shattering of the very earth beneath their autocratic ways ?

Even if it does, will it pay troops as the US has done, for the blood they shed and the war mangling they take home with them ? and will it use lots of other troops to secure this benefit for Iraq, so expensively started by the US, and carry it to the end, not using funds and prestige to 'negotiate' for more atrocity, to provide hollowly for no real liberty;  and will they call it cultural acclimitisation, or even sensitivity!

We shall see.

Has the US refused to have Europeans mix in the forces, or is it being blackmailed by al Qaeda, so that its allies leave in fear, as may have occurred in Spain, for the sake of some militant Islamic mutilations, the new way of seeking world power ? Is there no end to folly, no terminus to the mangling of truth ? Certainly, the US is no Christian country, for its power-broking Kissenger has long exhibited a wholly divergent view, and many have followed him, and such ways have come from many decadent sources in what used to be Christian churches, from those who are not seen as angels in ascent, such as Nixon and Clinton.

Yet in this same land,  there appear to be yet millions of Christians, and from it there has been payment extraordinary to salve the wounds of Europe, if not actually to rebuiled it, more than once within the last century. Yet it must be terrorised by agents of a criminal, amoral, intolerant, bloodthirsty, confused, religious body of professional assassins, who appear from their own words, to be close to religious imperialists, or imperial religionists, determined to conquer and return to Islam, lands once held by terror in the past, to enslave once more by terror in the present!

Have the people who suffered under Hitler - and many countries knew the intolerance of blighting bigotry - and those who fought against him, forgotten so soon ? Is religious mania coloured in agony and living by injury, inflicting life-times of anguish on people of kindly hearts and compassionate natures (among the rest), in super-markets and trains, to become a form of sanctity!

REVELATION 6,
LIKE THE REST OF THE BOOK OF THE LORD,
IS UNREVISED

Let us face it. The predictions of Revelation 6 are emphatically with us, the predicted passion to kill, the sovereignty of killing, its insane and prodigious scale, its self-congratulation, it is all fulfilled (Revelation 6:4 cf. 6:7-8). This worn-out world, the kindest thing one can say of such atrocities of terror and of those who congratulate them, does not know what it is doing. Its insensitivity is becoming almost a religion of its own. Seeking freedom in the last century, it now gives endorsement for tyranny,  with its squalid ways, in this one.

Revelation 6 is a glint of light proceeding right to the final phases of our age, where the kings of the earth "the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, 'Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb' "
(Rev. 6:15-16).

In other words, it brings us in its overflight perspective, right to the coming domain of a terror not created by man, but coloured with the very judgment of God. It comes to the terminus.

In this rapid review, we see in Revelation 6:4, these words: "And it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, and that people should kill one another, and there was given to him a great sword." So it was to come; so it comes; so it goes. It is so with the word of God. In the relatively settled nineteenth century, in its later stages, one would have thought it hard for the British Empire to allow such disorder. But it has paid richly in two wars, and now it seems that the rats creep on the pile of devastation.

KILLING as a MODE OF LIVING is the prediction as the end of the Age comes suddenly like a robber (cf. Matthew 23:29-30,50, I Thessalonians 5:2), and it is brought to light from the darkness of September 11, 2001, as in the many massacres and madnesses of religious despots, to whom the value of liberty is as nothing compared with their own ruthless rule. They are not alone; people for different delusions have often sought as much. Murderers however, who use the sword instead of the pen, and candidly seek to take over large portions of the world for one of the most oppressive irrationalities of all time, where women are frequently subjugated as if minions, and violence is diet for those not conforming: these like to give to their vicious enticements and desires, a certain sanctity. It is however as sanctified as death, and as reasonable as terror as the means of exhibiting concern.

Was the Taliban in its triumph, so desirable that professional women had to hide in the cloisters of retreat because of male sexual depravity, men insisting on demeaning 'women' for their own show of primacy and pre-eminence, and their own mode of handling things according to their preference ? Was its insistence on autocratic dominion without reason, but in terms of someone's visions, themselves lacking all verification and validity, to be sanctified in other lucky nations, like Afghanistan, who would become freed with this other Communism, this other totalitarianism, this other crushing of life, with the drab potency of death, threatened or actual ? (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4, SMR Ch. 1, pp. 50-65, 1080ff.).

But no, so many per cent think it good to bless the efforts of such as these, and to see the blood of the young added to that required by Iraq earlier, as if to maximise the carnage. So the horse of Revelation goes out (6:4), and it has authority in its message, for men to kill one another! It was to be and it is.

Revelation 6:8 is likewise moving now towards its disastrous fruition. Starvation in a large part of the earth leaps like a preying lynx on the carcass, while the "pale horse", with its rider "Death"  with Hell following, proceed.

	Is God to be mocked by an ageing and tiring world, with its morals dipped in blood as if for some sacrifice, not of animals, but of men!
	Are men and children, yes and babes to become the new human sacrificial pyre to be approved by such and such a percentage in this country, and in that, like men looking at horses before a race and saying, Yes, he might win, and putting on him a bet!

MANY will be ... something, and these will DECEIVE MANY. What is that something ? It is this: FALSE PROPHETS. It is this which many will predicted to be, and now are; and their number is legion.

We are seeing them in their new sacrificial mode, using kids not of goats but of men for their rites and sacred rituals, and calling it ... what is then its name ? Oh yes, it is terrorism. Bravo! How many millions then now approve of it ? Yes, if the reported percentages are right, MILLIONS! SO we see in this newspaper account.

Together with this revelation, there are the words of Christ  in Matthew 24:12:

"And because lawlessnes will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved."

A CERTAIN PROPORTIONALITY

The lawless antics in the realm of perverted parchments, formalised mismatches, occurring in San Francisco and Seattle merely expound the text in practical terms, while the removal of the Old Testament statue in a US civic centre is another index, and the work to remove the Lord's prayer from schools, another, as the paganisation of the nation asks for precisely what it is getting.

It wishes to make Liberty king, not the mercy of kindness in Christ, who dictates not to the heart, but appeals to it (Matthew 23:37, Luke 19:42ff.), in terms of faith ? It is growing increasingly ashamed of its more godly past ? Very well, then there is liberty to the sword, and it is being used (cf. Jeremiah 34:17). The folly of the assault through terrorism is not isolated from the follies of the US in its continuing decline in morals and religion; but the latter does not excuse other sinners for their inane judgmentalism, and their triumphalism for terror.

Very soon, this tiring world will realise again, and with more rigour than occurred last time, that the Belsens and Auschwitzes of the past, may, if it were possible,  be as playthings compared with the UNIVERSAL callousness of absolute rule by the most absolute of fools, those who not only do not believe in God, but begin to confuse themselves WITH HIM (Psalm 53:1, II Thess. 2:4)! Stalin went far in this direction; but the coming one, styled the 'man of sin'  is to go further, as II Thessalonians 2 and Daniel 7 make so clear, Revelation 13,17 carrying to its conclusion the vision of things to come.

They always incline to abortion of truth in the interests of the child of pride, and they will amply fulfil all this, just as its preludes have gone far in the past century. Such delusions in high places have done much, and they will yet do more as this wearying world's defences against such madness, progressively erode in the midst of relativism, humanism, secularism, married to mysticism and exaltation of man.

The present apathy and antipathy to sensitivity is becoming so gross that one can almost see it written on the sand already, as if children had written it with their playful castles. Finance of course will be controlled, for how else can one control terrorism, it will be said by those not wishing for their own part, at least, to experience it, however much they may like to endorse it when it is on US soil. That is quite clear in Revelation (13:16ff.).

Financial transaction will be SO controlled that with international means and technical modes, the new control will be ghoulish as well as ghastly, and it will last a little while. People are inviting such things by their increasingly aged insensitivity; and there are times when the world PAYS for such things. They come the practices, and they come, the judgmernts when the whirl continues long. (Cf. SMR pp. 906ff., 967ff..)

Alas for this world, but Hallelujah to the Coming King, Jesus Christ! It has been long, and the song has almost seemed like a dirge very often, as furious despots in many lands grind their odious ways into the teeth of their opponents, furrowing their backs with their lordly ways; and Romanism like its brother in arms, Islamic terrorism, has long lived from the fat of the fleeces of the shorn sheep which it pastored so ... differently.

How like this was to the prophetically denounced follies at one time in ancient, as exposed and denounced by Ezekiel in Ch. 34. It was there that he also predicted the utterly contrasting King to come, God in person, who indicated that "I MYSELF WILL SEARCH FOR MY SHEEP AND SEEK THEM OUT" (Isaiah 34:14), which He did when He sent His Son and equal, as forecast (Micah 5:1-3), paying with His own blood (Isaiah 53).

There, there is a King! to command in kindness, to deliver with His own blood, to be crucified and not to crucify, to do it personally and to provide His power to His people, and yet give a world of freedom to follow or revile! Not as with the Islamic death parties, who want to kill if they feel someone freely does not agree! The world has had two millenia to receive this King, and none like Him;  but when the truth at last ties up the curtains for the last Act, and all stands revealed, those who have PREFERRED DARKNESS, can HAVE IT! (John  3:19).

Is it delicious irony, or an assailing poignancy ? It is almost unbearable to think that the stark preferences for folly, for pride, for arrogance against God, for playing God, for mutilating man for religious punch to make him believe and the like, will have that for which they ask, in the end! Like darkness ? very well, turn out the light.

For my own part, give me light any day. The secret habitations of the earth are filled with cruelty (Psalm 74:20), and who could know their depths, which descend to the very pit of hell!

Light brings all things to become manifest, and when that LIGHT comes, how will the earth wriggle in its shame, for its darkness is unfathomable in horror, unthinkable in terror, and incalculable in its requital in the just judgments of God.

The Coming King ? It is not only a forecast, but a necessity. That, after all, is what Christ made so clear. IF He did not return, the world would become unfit for human habitation (Matthew 24:22). Did it seem likely then to the contemporary agents of terror ? Not at all, were they not in glorious power and enabled to kill, slowly, the King of the Jews ? Does it seem likely now! So we progress to the end, which arrives like the wharf, as a giant liner comes near to docking.