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CHAPTER  5

DEFAMATION IN AN ANTI-DIVINE DELUGE, or

WALKING IN THE WISDOM OF GOD
 

The unthinkable god-gaffe:
the unsinkable gods that men make,
sink like the coffins of the great, but without honour, to the depths

	The unsinkable ship, that magnificent Titanic,
	the unbeatable foe, that irresistible Nazi panzer and parachutist clutch,
	the all conquering class, moulded to take over from the rich, becoming the new poor,
	the all-liberating Mao, master-mind of the murder of countless millions,
	the all-invasive Alexander, dying in his banquet, inordinate in desire, his gains lost before savoured,
	the all-embracive ‘Science’, mere outreaches into knowledge by man, voicing insults to God and to intelligence, where its ways intersect with religion, on which it becomes an instant expert, knowing nothing on the topic with great detail, a clammy culture invading scientific method with arbitrary presumption,
	the all-sufficient Education, the maestro of youth, teaching how to look out for number one, to rub your fulfilments into the faces of others, and to grab what goes, and so advance into the void with intrepid feet,
	the crazed Canticles to Kant, always refusing to know, and yet knowing what on his own model, you cannot know, and doing so with great enterprise, master magician of the alienation of man from reality, through eloquent antilogies, a squadron of silliness, snapped up like Darwin, and quite as preposterous,
	the Fascist fancifulness of the militant side of Islam, seizing power as if it were a dog shaking its victim to death by some sort of psychic immolation, immune to pity as blind to reality, programmed to kill as if Revelation 6 had been learned by heart, and it had no greater desire than to fulfil it - which of course it does!
	the Altar Music to Man: humanism worshipping with reverence, the man it wants to make, while ignoring the one that is,

it is all^*1 Invocation Amiss, worship in the void,

Provocation's Abyss.

It exalts what is less than lowly, praises what is not even passable, exults in power, lusts in love with its idols, brooding with ebullience, savage in its inane joys.

These things are but examples of the constant arising of the giddy grandeurs of man and the effusion of the follies of it, not a diffusion of fragrance, but sentence on stench, as the world vomits each one of its drinks, intoxicated each time before the fateful falls.

HOPE is continually the guide, reason scrapped, simmering thoughts pressed with detailed scenarios based on nothing, but expansive as the steppes of Russia  in detail. Hope always has the answer, based in man or his productions; happiness is never its benediction. Unhallowed frenzies come and go, the wry smile its funeral oration. They project their gods, who fail to protect them. They await THEIR development, which fails to come. They assert life in thought, in the face of death to their lures, lords and desires. They  ignore the harassment of death, that greatest disease that afflicts man, and hallow the curse as if it were the cure. They seek to live a little longer, but death they do not face.

Even the Egyptians did better than ignore the impact of this harassment - though they looked to their own nation's productions, and so did not DO any better. Indeed, as we have seen with their case, with their famed Exodus Pharaoh,  the Lord and the gods of man came into collision, the supernatural Creator of man with his pestiferous mental productions of what is not God, with the naturalistic gods. He who made man made contemptible, even in pitiful powerlessness, the gods whom He derided in exquisitely deployed plagues, using their august solemnities as a means of mockery, frog, fly, cattle, Nile or other: they fouled on the carpet. They were mere rubbish, literally! This has been seen in The Plagues, and  traced in Dig Deeper ... Ch. 3, *2A.

The result for Pharaoh ? Nothings invented, miasmic gods, naturalistic contrivances of thought, these in their puniness, a plague to the imagination, became something real enough when the land of Egypt was laid waste in the contest of truth and defamation of God, in the idols of imagination (cf. Psalm 96).

This in dramatic form, is but the essentialising of the curves of history, and the conditions for man. Here you see in a number of DAYS, the ways which often are to be perceived over decades or even longer, as seen in some of the cases listed at the outset.

While man's gods become fugitives from  fact, and fail, their histories growing like the solemn bells sounded sometimes, one after the other, for the fallen,  God is by no means inactive or inoperative as these fouls are exhibited for what they are. Alas, there they are, these foolish inventions, littering the littoral of history,  whale-like corpses, with much evil smelling blubber the only sign of sadness to be gained at their finish. But see it again, as in our initial list:   their exhibition of folly, this comes to be seen like stark historical follies - to match any of the 'original' towers built in Britain -  in the plain of events.

Hideous have been their vain exultations, ludicrous have been their commissars, commissioned by greed, tendered by cruelty and tarnished with pride. As they fall, they are like neatly arranged ashes, urns for the dead, in rows; yet not on a green lawn do they appear, but in a melting asphalt surface, like that of Britain, in the latest heat wave.

In forwarding man and his ideas without God, each whether with hand-made human-constructed god, or speaking with god-like assurance, has become a defamation of deity drive, with deliberate glee creating not peace, but havoc, not joy but jousting, not comfort but collision, not justice but a litany of lordliness, taking over divine prerogatives explicitly or implicitly. Each becomes a defamation shrine, dealing with pitiful plenitude with what is not God, as if it were.

Here is defamation of deity in war dress with colour paint inhabiting the faces, while in the wild delusions of animation, grabbing divine prerogatives verbally but not actually, they sail into the wind, only to be overturned by the waves of cold reality. HOW cold it is, when you court its power but do not regard its face!

The opposite way is what has wisdom: founded in wisdom,
it does not because it cannot founder

Micah 6:8, in immense and intense contrast,  shows the actual procedure when you work with the power of the Almighty maker of

that dreamer, man,

whose dreams are never so desultory, as when they exult to the heavens, and make the gods that are not there! It is the God of creation who makes man ABLE to dream; and the abuse of dream-land, as a catchment area for gathering gods is as wise as making a concrete swimming pool, as a catchment area for fish. What then does Micah tell us of the realism of walking with God, the living God ? It is this.

 The LORD

"has shown you, O man, what is good:
And what does the LORD require of you,
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God ?"

 

TO DO JUSTLY

To do justly ? Since God made things as they are, and then added the curse (cf. Beyond the Curse), as a limit, condition and qualification for man, but NOT for a decline still further in righteousness, therefore any failure to treat others as you would like them to do to you, fouls up the created tissue. He has not given a mandate to machinate against the rest of mankind; on the contrary He has given one to DO JUSTLY.

Justice ? to give what is due. If you make an invention, then your intention is not to have it seized by another, and if you do not steal something which another wishes to impute to you, then you do not kill him for his evil efforts, but seek resolution, not glory in tempestuous temper. Indeed, as Christ put it, if you are even angry with your brother WITHOUT a cause, some flare up of internal psychic dimensions which you do not trouble yourself to contain in self-discipline and watchful self-awareness, you are in danger of hell-fire. It is not only what you do, but what you think and are that matters, that is as much for judgment as anything else (cf. Matthew 5:22,45-48).

One reason why the gods of men fail is simple. Man is not made that way; and when he indulges his psyche in substitute gods-made, gods aplenty, this no more meets the case than would an imagination that he had created his own body help him solve its woes. On the contrary, being unreal, it would doom man to more than would otherwise come. Whatever the problem, solving it by imagination based on folly is merely to make it worse; for then not merely does the original folly give you trouble, but the resultant one of proposing a 'solution' based on defamation of truth aggravates the initial madness. One is sin against the law of God; the other, it is specific: defamation against God as He personally is.

To do justly means that you do not acquire by greed, rule by harshness, but regard the realities of the case, and seek to implement them, not opportunistic in power, as if to possess because you CAN, but  sound in thought, to distribute as suits the structure of the situation. By all means, if you find a gold-patch, buy it and mine it; that is not unjust. But to use an army to intimidate a people so that you grab their mine, this is mere riot.

Again, BEING in a place, this does not mean it is yours. GOD made the universe, so that being in a part of it no more gives it to you in justice, than would first finding a car make it yours, if you happened to discover it, sitting by the side of the road.

If however you both investigate and develop the mine, that is undeveloped, and develop it, then your part is far greater, and in justice this is recognised. Still, you are not to be treated as a god because you found treasure which you did not make. Laws and rules about using natural resources can indeed be made to preserve the continuity of things, the purity of the air, the other ingredients of quality of life.

Again, if a nation's use of whales, to slaughter them, ends up by endangering the entire course of whale life for all other nations, then justice requires that this be terminated, rather than whales. No one of mankind made whales in the first place. The approach of many to the provision for all, it means many considerations for the JUSTICE that is needed for all.

To DO JUSTLY is not very common on this earth. Vying people often seek for advantage by misuse of law, even to the point of folly. If then someone slips on the contents of a drink bottle which was released by his own  error on the floor of a shop, is this the fault of the shop-owner ? Not unless in some negligent way he so arranged things that any normal person would be likely to make the same mistake. However, this is not by any means the current trend of things, which increasingly  is not to seek justice, but damages, and to consider the rights of this or that party, according to current thematic emphasis, and often, not what IS just.

Again, someone tries to prevent the get-away of a thief, and so damages the bike of the same. Is it just to treat the one trying to assist the arraignment of the criminal, as if he himself were a criminal ? Obviously not, for the movement of a crime both deals unjustly with property, and invites due satisfaction for such a THOUGHT as well as deed. The theft may not only be DONE, but imagined before it is done.  If it was not an accident, an impetuous error -  and this is the more obvious if steps were taken to prevent detection in advance - then it is aggravated in nature. It is then deliberate, has received deliberation indeed, rather than merely being a matter of grabbing something compulsively.

Yet it is precisely such things that can happen, the just penalised for the sake of the unjust, action to prevent crime treated as if it were crime, deliberate crime treated as if a psychic tic, transferred from face to spirit!

Increasingly, justice is being tortured for the sake of a concept, which by no means protects the innocent, assists the enforcement of justice and rewards those who so help. What if you punish the one who helps, and so disdain the justice due ? If there is an exception in some case, it would need to be based on justice, not the annals of psychic preference.

To do justly, of course, requires not least the awareness of WHO owns all, and HOW to regard others with due regard to the One who made all. Without this, stressed and fractious substitutes for justice are certain; and they are very common.

However, to DO JUSTLY is something deep in the heart of every man, until and unless he becomes so hardened that his psychic stream has become polluted through rationalisation, revenge or exaltation of what is not there, in some idol. Thus it is not so very hard to do justly, in much, if the DESIRE is stronger than any competing desire. However, this is not so very common! Self-interest is often cited; but how just is it to regard yourself as a criterion ? And again, enlightened self-interest, or national interest may be cited. But how just is it to place yourself as the judge of what is right, by erecting a scale of what it does for you, and finding the best fit ? In what way is this even a CONCEPTION of justice! whether for an individual or a nation!

Another part of the way for man, in walking with God, is to be seen from Micah 6:8. It is this.

TO LOVE MERCY

On various occasions, in the life of every one of us, we have acted injudiciously, imprudently, ill-advisedly, without adequate thought, rashly or sluggishly, arrested by injustice or exasperated by evil, and have erred.

The Christian at least does not make a practice of such things (Romans 6), though many are the artifacts attributed to Christians, which are but slander, caricatures of reality. Nevertheless, errors occur.

How would one like to be treated in such a case ? Best of all, of course, would be the understanding mind which did not jump to conclusions, or assume a single occurrence was other than singular, and even in mercy, dismissed what others might seize on as a dog a pet bone, hidden for delectation in its time. Proverbs 11:9 without approval, declares this: "the hypocrite with his mouth destroys his neighbour."

Doing just that to another person would be mercy; for while this is far better than strict justice would allow, it is far better than might be done, if efforts were made to amplify, publicise, or even distortingly present the error. On the other hand: oving to help the case, so that such misadvised assumptions would not have scope for action: this would be mercy indeed.

It is THIS sort of thing which God desires. It is like taking a car: you scrape on something. The one who sees this may 1) make it appear that ipso facto you are unobservant AND careless AND reckless AND do not appreciate the value of your car, and may be dangerous when people are concerned as well ... and the list could extend as evil imagination and the cursed continuum of guilt spreads itself out by pinning its flag on someone else. That is spiritual crime, exaggeration, assumption and presumption, a careless indifference to another's welfare as great as any carelessness attributed to the one who MADE the scrape!

On the other hand, the one who sees the error may note it, comment briefly with displeasure, but measured concern, especially if part owner of the car, and leave it at that. That is justice.

Mercy goes further. It considers what MAY have been the pre-occupations at that moment, the distraction, the event which while not making the scrape any the less, makes it less conspicuous as a fault. Mercy does not lie, or pretend that it could not have been otherwise, because there were extenuating circumstances, nor does it INVENT them; but it does sagely construe the case as lightly as it may, and seek to enable the one who made the error to learn with a minimum of fuss and distraction through bitter tongues  or evil surmisings ('probably drunk!').

Mercy would LIKE to see the oppressed, freed; the callous disenabled, the wretched helped, the opaque clarified, and the down-trodden lifted off the pathway of someone else's adventurism. The Lord, being merciful, hates to have people see people drawn to destruction and totally disregard it (Proverbs 24:11).

Blessed, said Christ, are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Mercy in the heart is one of the signature's of God's presence. It does not at all DIMINISH the ACTUAL fault, but DOES seek for it to be met as kindly as possible, to be corrected as wisely as may be, as deftly as can be imagined. It looks for a means even of covering guilt, or meeting evil to help what is about to succumb to it. It likes to find God's creation blessed, and to find a way to it. Christ shown the epitome of mercy in actually BEARING all the sins which would even be deposited in His negative bank.

Hence Christians point guilty man to Him who as the Creator, knows and shows mercy in the salvation of Christ, the only Saviour and the only sent One, God incarnate, His mission the atonement and the manifestation of God definitively to man. That is mercy where it is to be found, sufficient, efficient, living, personal and protective. Who would not show it, if he comes to know it!

Sin is deposited in the ... Negative Bank ? but of course. You do not deposit in Him YOUR righteousness, but YOUR sin! (Isaiah 53:6, John 8:24, Matthew 20:28). On Him, if you believe and trust in Him, is deposited the apparatus, the destiny and the guilt of it, the spoiling, the squalls and the falls which lurk in it, to display themselves at a 'convenient season'. From Him is the strength to overcome, to walk in joy in His fellowship, not in the usurped decadence of personal defeat (Romans 6-8).

Sin, then, this is what HE receives. Some of course try to deposit their own imagined righteousness in Him, as if it were some kind of cash for interest bearing, and so seek a reward. While God DOES give rewards, the spirit of the thing is part of it, and to SEEK for reward as the motivation is as far from being ... being what ?  from being one who walks humbly with your God as one might well imagine!

This, it focusses one more of the criteria of the godly walk. It is this.

TO DO  WALK HUMBLY WITH YOUR GOD

HOW do you walk humbly with your God ?

You must first of all find the God who, being God, is not an idol.

Having done this, and met the Lord, you must not congratulate Him on having found you, as if such a piece of good fortune must thrill Him! It is HE who pays for your presence, and you might as well congratulate a rich Uncle who had paid for your seat at some operatic spectacular, on having had the privilege of yourself as a nephew, so that he could shell out the cash for your benefit. To say that this would bad taste, would be like saying that rape would be bad taste: it is trash.

If God is pleased at the reception of a sinner, it is because He delights in mercy, and is mighty to save, and loves mankind as Titus 2:11-3:7 so amply declares.

"For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men,
teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts,
we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age,
looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior
Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works.

"Speak these things, exhort, and rebuke with all authority. Let no one despise you.

"Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey,
to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable, gentle,
showing all humility to all men.

"For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived,
serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy,
hateful and hating one another.

"But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared,
not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy
He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior,
that having been justified by His grace
we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life."

The renewed, accepted, received, washed, delivered, dynamised Christian, then walks with that same risen and resurrected Christ, by the power of His Spirit and the mercies of His very present grace. Alive, He acts; acting He delights. What then is the way for you to find ?

It is this. It means that you WAIT on Him to find His will: you do not simply assume it. Take the most exalted case of all, that of the Christ, and even He in the Psalm 40, has this to say (vv.6-12, bold added):

                    For innumerable evils have surrounded me ..."

Even He whose goings are from eternity (Micah 5:1-3), the Christ incarnate at Bethlehem, even He does not invent, but declares "in the volume it is written of Me!" That macro-effort of the crucifixion in which the sins of many were attributed to Him, so that vicariously and justly He could then forgive, having paid... even this was as IN THE VOLUME OF THE BOOK.

	In John 4:24, we find Christ declare this: "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work."
	John 5:30 reveals this of Him : " I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me."
	"For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me," Christ declares as shown in John 6:38.

THIS is walking humbly, when GOD the Word coming to the form and format of flesh, is so KEEN to perform precisely the will of Him who sent Him, and NOT His own will (Isaiah 48:16 and on to Isaiah 54, Philippians 2).

THAT, as to that, it is in importance even before being  in the book concerning Him, for it is IN HIM so to act, when commissioned as Messiah, sent in service to work with His Father. If possible, He cried...  "nevertheless, not My will but Yours, be done" (Luke 22:42). it is not a question at all, the doing of what is the will of God: it is even ... BESIDE THE POINT! Love commends what obedience commands; and what is inscribed in the book of prophecy, is it not what He, the word of God, most willingly does, at whatever cost. If it hurts atrociously when eventually faced in history at the personal level, then this pierces, but there is no equivocation. The will of God, it is this which is done.

THAT, it is to walk humbly, that is set for an example for all men; and if we so act, then indeed we walk humbly with our God. It is not of course that in even the most minute measure, we can at all redeem any, as He did; but rather that in SPIRIT, this is the sort of attitude we should have. WHAT does God want me to do with my talents, my gifts, the opportunities which He brings to the fore for me ? This is not a matter of my preference at all, but of His will.

Naturally, since HE has given gifts and talents, there is RELEVANCE to their existence and their use. We are constrained repeatedly NOT to forget the gift in us, NOT to limit needlessly the fruit of our abilities. It is not a matter of neglecting facts, but making sure that this fact is central, that the manner in which we are to be used, it is for HIS selection. Sometimes a person thinks he or she has certain gifts or talents, and perhaps to a point, to a degree, this is so. However, the reality may be this, that this only appears so, but that there are undeveloped regions of far greater effect which must by faith be stirred to full life. GOD KNOWS; we seek to understand.

If we seek it from HIM, from HIS wisdom by HIS promises (as in James 1, Proverbs 3:5-6), then of course we are in this walking humbly with our God. Thus, firstly, it is to trust Him more than ourselves, the living and operational God who knows what He is doing, and how to have it done. Samuel learnt this very early in life! It is a good lesson. Secondly, when we trust His word, and operate on it more assuredly than we sit on a seat, and do not expect it to collapse as we write or type, then this is putting His power above our own, His provision above our perceptions, and as trust, and that not in ourselves, it is also to walk humbly with our God.

These three aspects , then, shown in Micah 6:8, they are necessary features, they are criteria of divine expectation of man, they are travelling instructions.

Now how near or far are these from the cases we noted first in this Chapter, under the heading, "the unthinkable god-gaffe", that is the spectacularly erroneous gaffe in the direction of God, which man may make ? These things in Micah 6 are INFINITELY far from those things. Why creating gods or virtual gods is as far from walking humbly with God as it would be to sit drinking tea in your aeroplane seat, awaiting arrival, when in fact the seat and the aeroplane are all imagination, vexatious in folly, impudent in conception and deluded in design!

TO LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR AS YOURSELF

When we move to the second commandment in Christ's essentialising^*2, as above, we find this too is most searching, and embraces in ONE aspect, much of Micah 6.

Thus, as we survey the WORKABLE because just and true prescriptions of God, in contrast to shat is destroying man in this world, we find this approach.

We have already seen something of it in terms of doing justly, loving mercy. Now let us address it in its own terms. You might decide that your neighbour should be treated justly, and so not steal his intellectual property, to which you have access. Good, for this is showing some glint of feeling for him, not love, mind you, but restraint, and set in a bouquet of love, it would figure as a petal.

Again, you might decide that though you could get an advantage over your neighbour by using his hard work, by ingenious legal manoeuvres, quite freely as if it were your own. Your move, human laws being most fallible, might pass before the human judge, but in your heart you know that your neighbour had the thought, and you used it without permission, because you found a way in which society would not punish you, for doing that very thing.

However, having an opportunity to do that, you decide against exploiting it, and ... him! Not love yet, but it is at least showing regard for the proper relationship of things; and in the bouquet of love this might figure as a slight perfume.

Yet again, you might see how your neighbour could gain much joy and fulfilment, justly, if only he did such and such a thing with the resources at his disposal. You realise that you are not really as gifted or as experienced in it as he is, and that he has more claim to the thing than you have, but you privately store up your opportunity and then splash into the waters of profit, without a word to him. Now how is this to love your neighbour as yourself ?

If you say, I don't owe him anything, how do you know that ? Perhaps he had opportunities to scalp you in your ways (metaphorically) as you now have concerning him. Oh, you may proceed, DO be reasonable! Life is not like that. If you do not grab what is going, no one else will do it for you. Besides, if we flop around being 'kind', in the end things might not get done at all.

Life, it is then affirmed, is not like that. Thus Christ, the PRINCE of life (Acts 3) - and we are considering the distance between Christian life and the contemporary emphases which are destroying the world - IS like that. Not only does He see what might advantage us, and tell us, at cost to Himself, He actually dies for us, so that at extreme loss to Himself, in the most intense and personal level, He might bring aid to us. Life IS like that!

You might of course offer to share your insight with your neighbour, and suggest a partnership, since your entrepreneurial vision and his substantial contribution might together do much; and this is just, and loving IF you sincerely believe that your neighbour will not lose by this, but rather be as well treated as you are.

On the other hand, you might assess it that your neighbour actually finds you insufferable for some reason, and cannot co-operate; and loving him as yourself, you would bear this in mind in any suggestion and mode you might use. You would not ignore it, since loving one's neighbour as oneself would involve, if one did ignore the point, that you would not mind, yourself, having to tolerate what you find ... insufferable.

How noble we tend to feel, it is, when some man of great kindness, ignoring his personal advantage, moved with pity and goodwill, seeing good for his neighbour, delights to help bring this about, rejoicing in the fruition of much that otherwise the neighbour might not have found.

Love, it is like that, for it does not rejoice in iniquity, but in the truth, bears all things, hopes all things and does not ... SEEK ITS OWN!

This is an entirely different universe, one that works like that ? Yes, but in pockets and packets, in persons and events, in lives and in illustrious beauties of spirit, such things can be done, often are done, and have notoriously been done in magnificent measure...

On the other hand, trying to bring the name of God into the OPPOSITE of these things, it is INFINITELY worse than slandering your neighbour, if he had this kind of love, and pretending that he was a harsh, cruel and self-seeking man. In that case, you would be defiling the truth about a fellow creature; but when you speak thus of God, as if He were cruel, or unfeeling, or unloving, or blessed selfishness and the like, it is of course infinitely slanderous, and if you write, an unbounded libel on the Lord. It is defamation of deity.

This is common; for when people invent a 'nature' which supposedly does all the things we never see it do, and call it 'Mother Nature', then this is robbing God

	firstly of His name
	secondly of its holiness
	thirdly of His truth
	fourthly of His reputation and
	fifthly of the love you and all need, so that many may not seek it.

That is murderous in kind, like not merely distancing someone from help, by not telling where it might be found when you know and his need is great, but pretending or alleging it is NOT to be found anywhere, when the evidence is precisely to the contrary!

This is monstrous defamation of God and virtual hatred of your neighbour, for what MORE evil could you do to him, than that!

When teachers teach such stuff, in whatever field, as the norm or availability for man, this is their heritage, monstrous defamers of God, grossly misleading their neighbours, and sometimes, their very young neighbours.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10). All men are sinners and not one has failed to perform the injudicious, the imprudent, the foolish, on occasion. For my own part, I am exceedingly thankful that He is merciful, for if each sin of indifference, or neglect or insensitivity or frustration, however warranted it might seem or have seemed, were itemised and dealt with, where would anyone be! (Psalm 32:5, 51, 130:3).

Walk humbly with your God, for there is no other way available. It is the truth which warrants and requires it; but if your head is in the clouds, watch out for your feet. The pit is near.

TO LOVE GOD, THE TRUE AND LIVING GOD,
WITH ALL YOUR HEART, MIND AND STRENGTH:
THIS COMES FIRST!

While much is implicit, it is well in our day of vague concoctions of sometimes even consciously irrational thought, posing as wisdom, intellectual deadness play-acting as life and moral abysses presented as peaks, to become explicit where once it might not have been needed.

Moving now to the New Testament, we shall be adding then to Micah 6. We shall find yet more in our exposition of truth that works and ways that are wise, of the word of God as contradistinct to the bastions of hell, the belligerencies of sheep in form, that are wolves in format.

Let us then go back to the first great commandment which Christ declared.

While loving your neighbour as yourself is a vast and beautiful thing, for its full focus one needs to understand the "walk humbly with your God" part as well, and in correlation with this.

Thus in loving your neighbour as yourself, how much better if you have a correct understanding of the love part, and the self part.  Love is defined by GOD, who IS love. It is to be seen in Christ, delineated in I Corinthians 13, expressed in I John at length, and involves at its pinnacle, a willingness to so love (as defined) that you would IN this love go so far as give your life for your friends. Christ sent off His disciples - let these go - when His own death approached. In turn, His own death was sacrificial FOR them to cover them, and with them all who would believe in Him, and THEREFORE accept His expiation and power, as they did.

This love was busy about working for service, for redemption, for accepting the negative while providing the positive, for bringing back to God. Its own cost it felt intensely, as in the Garden of Gethsemane, and it brought to a crisis the point, Not MY will but YOUR will be done,  as Christ put it in relation to doing such an excruciating task, excoriating to all that was pure and perfect, in that it must bear what was foul and evil.

This, Christ indicated in Matthew 20, this was the SORT of service, the the SPIRIT of service in which His disciples should engage. They could not redeem, but their love to God could be such that this lead would be followed in sacrificial grace, providing knowledge of and invitation to the paths of peace in the Prince of Peace, and eternal life in the Prince of Life (Isaiah 9, Acts 3).

Here then is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and gave His Son as a sacrificial entry to His grace (I John 4). WHEN we love God in THAT way, His commandments signals on the road, His spirit of service a mandate for man's orientation and His Spirit a dynamic and grace for man's performance: it is then that loving one's neighbour as oneself is defined on an objective basis, not depending merely on psychic preference, but a foundation of rock, a realisation of truth and an attitude that is informed from the Designer of man.

Then one can have for oneself a spiritual ambition, and so in loving one's neighbour have no less. Then what one OUGHT to seek for oneself becomes also what one would seek for one's neighbour also. Thus one would not want one's neighbour to be under a regime which make a mockery of life if one could help for this not to occur; but as to force, My kingdom is not of this world! said Christ. Otherwise, He continued, My servants would fight.

Why would they fight ? Why, because HE their leader having been taken and prepared for murder by false judicial means, they might well be expected to preserve so precious a resource, a unique healer, one who could answer any challenge, in whom the word of God was a settled establishment, one with authority unspeakable and power that yet came with a humble disposition and a frank waiting on His Father. Yet He did not desire it, expressly forbade it and rectified the result of violence by Peter, precipitously cutting off the ear of the servant of the High Priest in an effort to deflect their capture of Christ. He healed that ear. That shows how explicit was His prohibition of the use of violence for His kingdom.

This of course says nothing about a nation seeking to deliver those who appeal to it; but it says much about individuals trying to use force or its methods in bringing and winning people to the truth. It is ridiculous; it confuses the issue, for the heart does not depend on its discernment, on the arm!

As to the national way of loving God with all one's heart and THEN and THEREFORE loving one's neighbour as oneself, it must show a similar restraint, if it be Christian (no country on earth is known to be Christian in government, to the point the commandments of Christ actually rule). Obviously trying to import democracy is not an adequate aim for force, since the love of God must precede the love of the neighbour, in importance; and where the former is absent, the results of it are not to be imposed by force; and even if they are made available, there is no basis then, that is adequate, since the design for man being obscured, the results of grace are likely to be lost. You see that in Iraq where an Islamic majority might well impose this and that Islamic force or violence on the mass, as a majority, and all talk of freedom be only that.

Does this mean that no nation should ever be at war with another for anything ? No, for if a nation invades you, it is right to defend the helpless, and to prevent lupine avarice from grabbing the nation. It does however mean that you do not invade for gain, or use force to subdue. That is not the kingdom of heaven, and how then is it a part of any national Christianity, if there were anything of this sort!

Using force in the field of the kingdom of heaven is not to the point; but when the time comes for judgment, when the eras have all past, when the liberties have all had their say, when the philosophies of man have all pattered their principles and expatiated on their littlenesses, when millions have died as they have in the last century, as nations and parties and groups have become obsessed with obsolete nonsense parading as principles, disgusting dynamics presented as progressive, when all the rampaging and rapacity of the milling throngs of adventuring man have at last had their day: then it is time for judgment.

You cannot judge a book by its cover, but you can by its author. The Author of man, it is God; and in presenting liberty to man, He has enabled man, having been 'written' or constructed in the first place, to write some chapters in his own book. While there has been much that has been brave, admirable, indeed splendid and enthusing, loving and compassionate, serviceable and saintly, spiritual and godly, there have been vast chasms, and sulphur springs, atrocities innumerable, wealth grasped in wickedness, works wrought in depravity, and as we shall specify in the next chapter DV, murders wrought high-mindedly, as massed millions have died at the pen of some prince of power.

There is then, at the end of the book, another book. It is the book of judgment as in Revelation 20:11ff.. In the end, the world goes. The deeds do not go without a whimper; they go with judgment. If people have received that greatest ever work of love, redemption through the vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ, then their sin is covered. If not, then their follies are apparent, and in judgment, justice without the mercy which is divine, attends to the reeking realities. The judged evils of man need not involve blood; there is an anger which breathes the ire of hell, of which Christ spoke. It can bring to the gates of hell if only WITHOUT A CAUSE. It does not have to engage in shedding blood, but merely to be spiritual. The spiritual attitude affects the emotions, the thoughts, the ideas and the actions. God IS a spirit and those who worship Him know it.

To offend in spirit is still offence. Eating helps; what you eat for is crucial.

God is defamed in being left out of the operation of the first commandment, when EVEN IF people try to love their neighbour as themselves, they fail to know God and so to know what love is, what the principles, the perspectives, the orientation and the spirit of it actually is. They then act as voluntarily blind, and when you are being assessed on performance (as you are when you disdain Christ, neglect or even do not bother to receive Him as Lord and Saviour, God as man, and the way back to God), then what you do with a blindness for which you yourself are responsible, is obviously going to be quite deadly. Imagine a hurdler, voluntarily blind, having his hurdling assessed, or a surgeon!

To mention God, when performing at this level, as if HE were responsible for what you do, is to defame Him. How can you act without sight as if seeing, and if not seeing, how can you know the One who judges, who is the criterion of mercy and the basis of love, the origin of all goodness and the reality of truth! This is the case even if you try; for trying when voluntarily blind may be an asset, but the basis being profound in pollution, not-God being infinitely far from God, the result is a foregone conclusion. From reality an absentee, from truth you are an alien; and aliens have no place in the kingdom.

NOT to mention God, is equally to defame Him. The basis of your very life, thought and rationality, your design (cf. Dig Deeper ... Chs. 1-2), if left in the limbo of the vague, displaced into the mist of the obscure, He is then like the service department for Boeings which are never presented, and the result is not crash hot, but crash cold; and indeed, it is sure to involve, in its flight, descents from performance that are to end in smouldering ruin, at length a cold spiritual spectacle.

Such an elevated response, flighty and fulsome at first,  may be quite close to self-congratulation in the end; but then, the JUDGE is not affected by the opinion of the performer, but by the results.

Pride as a commencement, leading to one's ultimate trust in one's own perspective orientation, read-out if any on God, this is spiritually the super-crash, involving distortion, self-elevation and making of one's own thoughts the criterion for God, the Judge, to face. It is as if one would slip into the Judge's hand as He surveys the case, one's own notations and criteria, and ask Him to act on those!

This is not helped when HIS criteria are quite plain, and have been for millenia, in His written word, the certainties of which are on all sides maintained in unique validity and verification, and critically, in Jesus Christ (cf.  Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host).

Presumption is not grace; arrogance is not humility. Paul expresses it relative to the Jew, but precisely the same principle applies to one as to all (Romans 11), and lack of saving faith is the same blight to the one as to the other. Paul thus exposes this innovative self-deployment in order to live, in its naked intensity of vanity (Romans 10):

^"Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved.
For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God."

THAT righteousness of God is to be received through vicarious suffering as a GIFT, or not at all (Romans 5:17), and walking humbly with one's God means that one makes mention of HIS righteousness, His only (Psalm 71); and as to that, it is not to be generated by the works of man, but received by the gift of the grace of God. Such is the impact of the Gospel, and it will change for no man (Galatians Chs. 1:6-9, and 3-5).

Presumption is not grace; arrogance is not humility. It comes like a refrain.

It is necessary, with God, to walk humbly with HIM, to love mercy and to do justly.

NOTES

*1

The Titanic was vaunted to the skies as man's epic of overcoming, but quickly descended to the depths with precisely that bravado and ambition which it epitomised.

The Nazi at first seemed in its swift mop-up with parachutists in Holland, rush in Russia and manoeuvres in Austria, almost past human power limits; but it ended with amazing speed, a blitzkrieg saddled with insanity and deafened by its own noise, insufferable in fanatical carelessness of reality in practice as in theory, braving the Russian Winter because of absurd delays, needless in Yugoslavia, junked by jubilation that came like a national seizure, before Germany itself was seized.

Meanwhile, our Joe in his Kremlin, satanic shadow of death, able to crush by conspiracy, deal with data at the touch of his fingers, the arch-deacon of ruin by obsession, dispossessing as if possessed, wild to send to Siberia, bring anguish and labour to the scrap heap of junked man, snap the culture of nations like fingers clicked, legislate on world history which would not obey him, and then rely on free nations like England and America to prevent his capital city from being taken by a tardy Germany: he died without glory. By such prodigies, did he and his ilk provide the USSR with the seeds of its intolerant ruin, truth-free knowledgeability, enabling a bankruptcy for the free nations to bank-roll, while the vision ended in ashes, fitting for such an incandescently indecent fire.

On Communism's seizures and militant Islam's folly with other brave belligerence, psychic and politic, see Ch. 2 above, *6 for references. See also The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 10 with the sections: Flight to Reality -     2. Evolution as Religion - 3.Blood Sport. These show the comparisons between spiritual strength and arty cunning and cavalier unrealism. If in the end, man wants to become a fox, the tail may seem beautiful at its peak;  but the tale is not.

On Kant, see Predestination and Freewill Section 4 and SMR Ch. 5; on the scientistic substitute popular for science and scientific method applied conscientiously, see Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, with Scientific Method, Satanic Method and the Model of Science.

*2

This is found for example in Matthew 22:34-40, in a situation as follows.

"But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.

"Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying,

'Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?'

^"Jesus said to him, " ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ "This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

"On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."