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

CHAPTER  6

THE RUB-OUT OF MAN BY MAN,

WORST SINCE THE WORLD BEGAN

BUT THE GRACE OF GOD DOES NOT MOVE,

NOT DOES ITS FOCUS AT THE CROSS OF CHRIST,

EVER CHANGE

The unthinkable unkindness of man

In the latest edition of the magazine, Israel My Glory, July-August 2006, one sees a picture wherein there appears a sort of holy reverence, a look akin in some ways to one of beatitude. It is on the face of an older man, engaged in the act of kissing the forehead of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Tehran, during Friday prayers.

What, we may ask ourselves, is the occasion of this all but reverential act ? It seemed that there was a most popular response of the general populace to that President's call for a job of wiping, concerning the map. Like a windscreen, it seems, it needed wiping. What kind of wiping might have been the occasion of such jubilation, even as a prospect ? It concerned some elements of the map. Ah then, perhaps what the map represented ? Correct.

If then it is Iran, where Allah the all-compassionate is so much touted, though without verificatory or valid grounds^*1, then perhaps there was something unclean on the map which occasioned the 'need' to wipe it ? away ... Yes, of course, something to do with Israel ?

Correct  again. Israel, was to be "wiped off the map." The United Nations would perhaps be just as concerned at this prospect in the Iranian mind, this national genocide, lavish with anti-semitism as an additive, as at the reported fact that in the Sudan there are others being progressively wiped off the map. Oh, only a few millions, not billions; but then Sudan only HAS millions, not billions. Is it that littler things, just a few millions, are harder to see ?

What then was this other wiping thrust in the Sudan ? We learn that it is twofold, when we turn to the article, They Cry in Silence on p. 9 of the same magazine.

ONE: well known now is the Darfur situation. Even the UN has been known to notice it. It is just a little matter of (estimated) 200,000 massacred, and in this case it seems some Muslims are driving out other Muslims. At least 2 millions of people have been displaced, many seeking refuge in Chad, exist in squalor, imperiously displaced, impecunious or near it.

Naturally, nothing very effective has been done by the world in its BLOOD phase, as in Revelation 6, where death becomes a celebrated mechanism, a lustful passion, as in a Mass, where the allegedly sacred object is lifted up^*2.

KILL! that is the idea here, in Iran; but the point is not this time, a Christ who now once in the end of the world has suffered, once for all, as Hebrews 9 puts it, the event being categorically finished, a matter of blood, not bloodless, of suffering, not without it, and hence unduplicable; for the original and authentic saving action is inseparable from suffering though the Mass seeks to exclude it, hence displacing this, the reality,  also from its own territory. No, it is not that this time, not a focus on Christ, misrepresented^*3, as the One having the blood in view; for in Islam, He is misrepresented differently. Nor is it the Inquisition of Romanism, in which it also showed its compassion in its idolatry, as now do others who seek to rule over the creation of God, with the words of men, indistinguishable in any objective way from a wave of impassioned rule-thrust by the ornate culture of man!

It has happened before, distortion, disturbance, imperiousness and imperial aspirations, using religion as a base, to grab the world: secular religion like Communism, with its 'laws' operating by chance (though of course they do not operate anyway), or sacred religion, with its god or gods as little attested as living worms in the heart of granite. It is happening now. Men speak words; but the murderers do deeds. If GOD were executing justice, that is His prerogative; but to attribute to God what has the evidence only of human passion and distorted cruelty, compassion on vacation, lust as lord, this is mere defamation^*4.

Yet this is not all. Moving into the Moslem midst in the Sudan, as we temporarily abstract from Iran with its delicious-seeming but fateful desire to rub clean the map of the Jew, from t his anti-Semitism run riot to match or even mirror Hitler, making the 21st century parallel to the 20th: we have more to discover.

In fact, looking at THAT African part of the map of the world, we find that these few million are not all. There is more afoot in the Sudan.

There is for example the South of the country, with - once at least - millions of professing Christians. This too, it seems is distressing to some Moslem 'consciences' so that we now have more estimates of blood, that commodity so available that it can stain the desert stains, like water on a garden lawn, which latter, however, has the advantage of not leaving any stain. It is estimated that here 2 millions Nuba Christians ... what, you ask, have these then been displaced as with other people in the North of the Sudan ? Well, not actually; for in the South, it is 2 million SLAIN. Displaced then ? are there yet more in that category ?

How many of those ? The estimate is this: 4.5 million refugees.

That is 6.5 million more, and this is in the South of one country ... Is their Allah pleased ?

These enormities are already beginning to rival the prodigies of Hitler with the Jews, making the 21st century rich in veins of blood. Even the method has 21st century distinctives. Thus we read that the women were asked if they were Muslim or Christian. If the former, Go in peace. If the latter, however, there was the phenomenon of gang-rape: is this to be defined as a sort of compassion and kindness, and mercy such as befits the Allah ?

Strange definition then. Moral ? well one version of Islam does permit more than one wife, while another allows, it is reported, temporary 'marriage' for pleasure (the Sunni, and Shiite kinds, respectively - cf. Israel,  My Glory, Sept. - Dec.2005, pp. 24ff.). This however goes even beyond that, substantially! It is grossness personified, the ghoulish in fashion gear.

It is beyond question that this illegitimate, female-compromising, ferociously motivated phase of a false religion is a judgment, in its new oil enrichment enabling the purchase of what it does not produce, for what has become ludicrous in humanistic self-indulgence. Had the UK and the USA, merely to start, maintained anything remotely like their former overall moral standards, then there would be less scope for a depraved approach to life to start acting as mentor and judge on them!

Is it not as in Deuteronomy 32! There God deplored the failure of Israel to follow Him, displacing Him with their constructions of 'new gods', newly arisen, ground products, naturalistic follies, mental inventions. In judgment, what then would His divine response to this be  ?

God told them what would follow, and He did it way back in the day of Moses. What then would result from such Jewish unfaithfulness ? What did God say ?

It would be, and in fact was, this (for His word never fails).  They would have a foolish nation torment them!

If they forsook wisdom, and turned to follies unthinkable, then would wisdom forsake them, and leave them to the terrors of nations unthinkable, foolish, humiliating as mentors or masters! Unmastered, they would be given a lowly human mastery, the butt end of the follies of another people; unappreciative, they would learn what is there to have, when folly rules and inanity worships its own will! Forsaking God, they would find that other 'husbands' are completely different!
Indeed, this is the very language found in Ezekiel 16:6-43.

It is not a case of filling a vacuum; rather is it one of having flies on unprotected sores. The flies are not so great, to be sure, but if you first get the sores, and then  do not seek to remedy them, what can you expect.  Thus the Middle East is a torment to nations not a few; and power through money through oil (which Islam did not put there) is becoming a means for lesser cultivated nations acting in lordly style to those who, like Israel, in its day, are now as Gentiles giving the God of the Bible increasingly short shrift. Some shed blood as if in sport ('love death' as from the lips of one Islamic militant leader), remorseless, indefatigable in horror, insatiable in suffering.

So Israel continues to suffer, having adorned the  desert that, as predicted, they would make it blossom like the rose, famous as international floral producers, they find strange perfumes from murderers abroad, slavering at their borders. It is as in Song of Solomon Ch. 1, where despite productivity, the one concerned is told this: YOUR OWN VINEYARD YOU HAVE NEGLECTED.

Many productions are afoot, but the personal side is still amiss.  Much is wrought, but the heart has yet to be taught! That day awaits, like a crib, the restoration of the heart of Israel, as in Romans 11, as in Ezekiel 37, and its day, for very many in that land, is near! That however is then; and this is now.

So in many places, by diverse dynamics, does this world gobble like a lion, its prey, making beasts seem pleasant by comparison with its heartlessness and false religious intensities of polluted passions, investing themselves with desultory thought, with the very name of God at times, as if defamation of deity were an added joy, as they invent immoralities unspeakable, for their souls, as judgment awaits them.

It is well for many that the Gospel is still available, for increasingly the whole ship of humanity is awash with blood, consciences stricken, bodies mutilated, passions flinging themselves like misaligned rockets, constant attestation of what happens when what is in the image of God, is in the service of sin.

The thinkable maladies of man

But this is not all. The entire world. while it is increasing its dither and dabbling in the ditches of mud, of naturalism, humanism, ostentatious immorality, is moving to flagrant condemnation of what bids any return to righteousness. Indeed, now it is acting  AS IF those who suggest return to the life of design, the way of truth, the word of God, the paths of restraint, were themselves immoral for even suggesting it! Here is the Isaianic phase, of calling evil good and good evil come to its evil flower (cf. Isaiah 5:7ff., 5:17ff.).

Let us look now at Isaiah 5:15-21:

              And prudent in their own sight!"

The God of the Bible is He who so speaks, who has declared that the gods of the nations are but idols. In THIS conflict, no use of the name of 'God' can help; for that is mere defamation and libel, to use HIS name for what is not His, and to invoke His majesty for what is in misrule!

Thus this case has occurred before, its diagnosis secure; Israel has suffered for it, and the Gentile world refuses to learn. SO be it. This is not an unusual condition for people, that they refuse to learn; but when these are the topics refused, and this is the Name in view, then it is wiser to play with unexploded bombs, than to abuse the word of God with futile words, unattested, unverified, invalid, while the Bible confirms itself in every mode (cf. Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host,    SMR Chs. 5, 8-10).

But what is to be said of this lavishing of lust, this new breed of self-righteous immorality, and this pollution by passion of the very name of God ?

Man likes to condemn what condemns, and does so, whether in Western Parliament, preserving error as if it were sacred, or Islamic bomb, despatching life as if it were a plaything for power.

What clips man's wings is immoral, then, even if it might help him to defer the obviously awaiting disasters which all grossly arrogant neglect of reality and responsibility so readily provide!

THE EXTENT AND PORTENT OF THE PREDICTED SHEDDING OF BLOOD,
THE MURDEROUS FORM IN ULTIMATE, ILLICIT PASSIONS

Thus the National Geographic Magazine, January 2006, provides some figures.

"More than 50 million people were systematically murdered in the past 100 years - the century of mass murder," it declares (p. 28). We could make a ghoulish sort of grocer's list.

First:

	1915-1923, Ottoman Turks slaughtered up to 1.5 million Armenians.
	In mid-century, Nazis liquidated 6 million Jews, 3 millions Soviet POWs, 2 million Poles, and 400,000 'undesirables'. |
	Mao killed 30 millions of Chinese, and
	in the 1970s,  the Soviet government murdered 20 million of its own people.
	In the 1970s, it proceeds, communist Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million of their fellow Cambodians.
	In the 1980s to early 1990s, Hussein Baath Party killed 100,000 Kurds.
	Rwanda's Hutu-led military killed 800,000 members of the  Tutsi minority in the 1990s.
	Now there is ... as above, Sudan, with another 2.2. million massacred in tortures inscrutable, a testimony to the religion of those responsible. .

Reduce these mathematical notations in red, above, to individuals - each one feels, suffers, is tortured, is starved, is shot, is defamed ... as the case may be. Each is removed by an immoral approach to mortality, which makes ghouls look almost pleasant fellows by comparison. Inanity and insanity vie!

Consider one person, say a mother. There she suffers, starved. There her new born babe is malnourished. She is raped. She is killed, the babe uncared for. Older children wander with sores and flies. Now take another... now take 30 million in their own ways demeaned, defaced, deleted on this earth. Consider each one, the family, the affairs, the results, the psychic trauma, the physical ruin.

Take the Kurds, and do the same for each family member unit. Leave some bereft, swept off the  carpet of life, into the gutters.

Now the Tutsis, now the Sudanese, the Cambodians, the Iraqis... consider them, one by one, and for each one, trace the precise results, using examples, in their families.

Hell is almost a preferred option, for darkness. It deprives of light not desired. THIS, it is an unpreferred option, and it provides darkness undesired. It is man acting as God, and man impaling the products of God, like himself, with an ardour which speaks. He would arrest joy with sorrow, nature with perversion, life with death.

Thus there is the arrogance of arrogating the divine judgments without warrant or citable grounds; there is the profanity of thought, in equating life with dust at will; there is the wantonry of life in excising spiritual beings as if they were dirt in formation. There is the shedding of blood by those constructed to love; and the hatreds leading to this are communicated often in vile vengeances and invalid lusts, till the vortices of these adjoining whirl-pools become a commentary on the human race, when out of the control of its Creator.

Thus there is in man a fascinating and fractured combination, at this epoch, or in many governments, some religions, some cultures and some political machinations. There is the desire for truth and goodness, kindness and nurture as in families; and there is the lust for blood, for domineering domination with indomitable lordliness to soothe the seething spirits of ever-new master-religious juntas, political pontiffs and social engineers, cleansing this or that, with the strange fluid of sticky red blood, or its social counterparts.

Man is becoming so abused in spirit, so miseducated in mind, so propagandised in thought, so invaded in virtue, so loosened with grease from the pits, that the power of purpose is beginning to be replaced by the tower of triumphalism, deleting the expendable. Again, the desire for goodness and kindness is becoming translated into lurid plans to purge this or that, until the world becomes ruled by, indoctrinated for, propelled by some machination of some simple-minded philosopher, no more able to understand, than do flies the corrupted carcases they invest.

Call it Islam in the Koran (cf. Ch. 2, *6), the Nazi evolutionary racism, the Communist iconoclastic idol-building (loc. cit.), the dominion by power dynamics, power broking pragmatism, the New Age anaesthesia, isolate its power structures or its abasement procedures, the preliminaries of the debacle of man, or the power structures for their application: but notice one thing. These lusts are the residue of a  spirit divorced from God, misguided because God-less, denatured because not serviced by the Spirit of God. Here lies the end of the wonder called man, mismanaged, misled, moronically instilled with mad machinations from thoughtless thinkers, showing like a steam-roller running down-hill, what can be accomplished when you forget WHAT YOU ARE FOR!

Steam rollers are or were great, for moving things into a becoming flatness, not of the nervous system, but of the surface for traffic. Yet once let them run downhill untended, into a busy road and what can you expect! What is to be found in what is out of control, out of design methodology, care and encompassment, thrust about by dispirited zealots, whose hearts work like stills, intoxicated but passionate at the same time.

The thrust and the bursting, the glory and then the shame

It is not brutishness, for brutes need no slanders. It is devilishness, deplorable depravity, ashes of the fires of man mingled with the juices of new endeavours, in a conflagration of wisdom and madness of spirit which resembles Nagasaki as a site, but the site, it is man!

And how, for that matter did Nagasaki suffer! God is not mocked, and the hinges of history turn. Thus it was there that the shallow-diving aerial bombs which Japan 'needed' in order to sink US battle-ships in a shallow Harbour, through an undeclared war, were developed, manufactured. Nagasaki, in war, it gave. Yet it also received. The wheel turned.

What a return for the trouble! They made, manufactured for murder,  what burst the battleships in this manner; and the return 3 or so years later was also by means of an aerial bomb. This one, however,  did not need to be a shallow diving one such as was made for the purpose in Nagasaki. This new bomb, the atomic,  could explode quite comfortably without any such medium. Nagasaki, farewell! You have reaped what you have sown, the whirlwind for your wind!

This is an illustration. As more and more regimes make these early atrocities seem mild by comparison, and the 21st century becomes in large part a veritable enlargement of the vices of the 20th in country after country, 'crusade' after crusade, almost an abomination of desolating force misused, one after another, with disregard of all humanity and pretended invention of a new humanity, more devil than man, ignorant of truth, maddened in passion, disenchanted with goodness, cruel in religion: what is left!

Judgment of the Maker, this is left. Not BY the made, but OF the made. It is the office of the Creator to judge the creation, not vice versa. It is however done in amazing humility. It is done by the crucified Saviour, who gave all that some might be found, and founded in truth, with everlasting life. His motivation is sacred, His word is pure, His love is not lost.

God, as Paul pointed out, has appointed one man to judge man. As He wrote under the guidance of God: God ...

"commands all men everywhere to repent,
because He has appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness
by the Man whom He has ordained.
He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead" - Acts 17:31.

The case has not changed (cf. SMR Ch. 6). The history foretold is now here. The day approaches (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). The doom is written. What is not smitten with guilt and so repenting, finds salvation, is ready to be smitten with truth, and so judgment!

Ignorant depravities are not really helped by having dreams about maidens in Nirvana or any other sphere manufactured by lust, or sodden with illicit desire. Talk of 'believing' what has no logical or evidential foundation is no excuse for depravity and presumption. Cruelty and death may seem the very coin of life, but they are merely forms of its judgment, and those who preliminary judges, despatch man as a virtual pastime, are themselves merely defaming the actual Judge, as if He would tolerate such cruelties as are commonly practised, as godless -isms lurch into chasms of immorality.

As man is, as the Bible has depicted him, so is his disease. What he lacks is what is now the provision of peace and beauty, holiness and virtue, divine knowledge and wisdom, so that in default of this rejected reality, he swallows devils whole, like oranges uncut, and splutters.

Beauty misused is a bane; power misguided is a curse; mentality misapplied is execration, dynamic misdirected is desolation; and the higher the gift, the worse the rift when it is mismatched to power, polluted, corrupted and misconceived.

God is the Creator; MAN is the desolator, and he now approaches very close to the day of the one whom Christ called the 'abomination of desolation', that idol-leader whose presence is both a source for fatally misled worship, and a prompter for persecutions yet to be credited, which come in the last gasps of anguish of a race becoming demented, because it does not mind the mind of God.

Defaming Him, they invent their gods; deploying them, they invent their desires.

In vain do they seek to make a new earth; the old one is smitten to judgment in its day, and the new one, like the old itself, is to be the product of the God of creation. Failure to realise the terms - GOD and man; Creator and  creature; TRUTH and imagination; ORIGINALITY and copying: it is a fault deadly to man.

Alas, his misadventures are now in the mass grave arena, in vast advance on the most appalling horrors of the Roman Empire, and even of the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither Roman nor Holy, but at least had some limits, though not to depravity, as the Inquisition took its early toll and gave the early lead now so swankingly pursued by its 21st century imitators. These need no inquisition, misplaced in folly as it was, but simply smite, with human bombs, self-destructing while they destroy, marvels of evil, wantonries of woe.

It is not really a question of patching together some 'peace' for those who are so writhing in distortions innumerable. The word of God, the Bible, makes it quite clear that some systematic effort will be made in this direction (I Thessalonians 5, Revelation 13); but these endeavours, rich in misrule,  will pass, as does every other unfounded fiction, seeking by arrogant means to rule men.

Ends and beginnings have much in common
when each is wrought by the same one

The end, as in the beginning, is a work of God. The first, it was creation; in between, there has been desecration and degeneration, depravity and defilement like volcanoes, now proliferating on this earth. In the end, there comes the action of God again. What action is this ? First, there is vindication of the glory of God (Isaiah 11), followed by the judgment, and then ? Then comes the dismissal of the earth with its wicked ways (II Peter 3), an eternal education on freedom misused, man confused and creation at war with God..

The glory of the Gospel, always the antipodean magnificence, it is not merely the place for pardon for the raucous roaring, the ruinous rampage and the other explosions, erosions and slicks of sin that mar the earth. It is also a reminder of the glory of the desecrated, in its origins, the hope for its end, and the power of the God who made persons, to handle them, like runaway horses, to bring them back from endless snortings to useful riding.

Thus Winter and Spring look each other in the face: the Winter of judgment and the salvation of Spring, amazingly renewing the earth, as if nothing had happened; and yet it has. The Cross has happened; and without that, spiritually, there is no Spring. With it, there is no shame. But He who dies on it must be received as the Son of God, the sent Saviour, and there is no Saviour but God (Isaiah 43:10-11, Acts 4:11-12).

Such is the munificent magnificence of the God of creation. To ignore Him who made you, to remanufacture Him in your mind, it is worthless; it is to bustle to hell. Why not ? To be sure, if you like darkness, it is there. The light however is gloriously available, and its kingdom is not of this world, and it is where culture no more rules, than does folly make mind clear. It is where God is, where salvation being sent, is received, where the power of God is working, not to destroy but to save, where grace governs and force is never confounded with faith; where faith works through love, and victory is not measured in fallen foes, but in humble service to God, loving one's neighbour as oneself.

NOTES

*1 See:

More Marvels ... Ch.      4, esp.  *4,  SMR   pp. 829ff. , Dancers Ch.  3, *1A

Lord of Life Ch.   3 (and force),  SMR 1081ff. (and faith),

Outrageous Outages ... Ch.   5; 

His Wounds ... Ch.    4; 

Stepping Out for Christ Ch.    9,  

Tender Times ... Ch.    8 (in perspective), see also *1,

Divine Agenda Ch.     6, Highway to Hell (Koran citations in both, with ideational parallels in perspective,  in the former;  and in the latter,  futile depravities in endless ideologies such as Sudan has shown so significantly, Islam ablaze without glory),

cf. Overflight ... Ch   1 (and the Koran's musings);
News 138, His Wounds ... Ch.    3; 

Divine Agenda Ch.    3 (an overview of religious truancies, including Marx, Darwin and Koran);
Beauty for Ashes Chs.    4,   7
(with the other three major conspiracies
 towards the ultimate).

*2 See SMR pp. 1186A-1188E.

*3

It is a fascinating ground for comment on the human race, that perhaps 2 billions of it, in terms of formal as distinct from functional allegiance, seem to relate in religion to two different misrepresentations of Jesus Christ's sacrifice.

With Romanism, they try in the Mass to make it a bloodless sacrifice, without suffering, and yet actual and with results, as if a re-enactment, even though without the shedding of blood there is statedly a certain remission, as to quantity. That ? NONE! (Hebrews 9:22). The relevance of remission to such an act therefore is ZERO.

In the case of Islam, they deny the remission, so that the quantity of re-creation of Christ from imagination, without history, of God without seeing with the eye and hearing with the ear what He had to say on earth, and contrary to all record, is INFINITE. In this way, they utterly recast His predictions, His records, His actions, His fulfilments, His meaning, His appeal, His ground of action, the testimony of the book of Acts, of the early Church: and the basis for this grand recast of history ?

It is a man who said something which is not testable, except that it is a contradiction of the records to which he appeals, in the Old Testament, and therefore CERTAINLY false, because SELF-CONTRADICTORY (cf. SMR pp.  1080ff.).

One of this erring duo then appeals to the scripture for its existence, and then denies it, and idolatrises a piece of bread; the other does NOT appeal to the scripture, but blasts its way through scripture and history, denying the fact of both, and idolatrises a different god, which it invents, making a different 'christ' out of the One who was, and trying to instal Him among the 'prophets' though denying BOTH those prophets and that Christ.

Let us recall SMR p. 989 on this Muhammad:

So the untenable religions of violence at the faith level create turmoil in a globe which, to be accurate, often asks for just such appalling horrors as scimitar instead of spirit, by its hardened resistance to the claims of Christ. He Himself was far from ignoring this recalcitrance and its consequences, when on earth, or as the Word before His coming. (Cf. Matthew 13:15, 23:36-39, Luke 19:41-44, 17:25-31, Matthew 23-31-36, Amos 4:4-13, Isaiah 24:1-6, Revelation 9:18-21.) The tenderness of His pleadings sought deliverance, He coming not to condemn but to save (John 3:17), and offering Himself, to deliver; yet the grounds of His righteous government and the grounds of His government were intense, and shall be, as we have seen in Chapters 6-9 supra, and may investigate in Appendix B, dealing not least with Matthew 23:37.

Christ's majestic wonder and irrefutable authenticity (which, according to prophecy, required force to assail it, and according to the wisdom of God, blended this force into sacrifice and that into victory for sinners, as predicted also): this leaves at the personal level all comparison not merely wrong, but outrageous. Even His mercy was effective, and even His 'weakness' was triumphant. In fact, in nothing did He fail, all plans proceeding to consummation.

Not only did Christ meet the non-violence criterion (at the level of faith), He gave it precisely that majestic surplus and extraordinary facility of wonder, which we find so consistently as we test the things of the Bible... ''led as a lamb to the slaughter'' (Isaiah 53:7). How far other than this cherishing solicitude were the methods of the religions of violence! How far less are their exhibits in practice, as persons, and as violators of integrity with violence, as well!

Predicted by Christ (Matthew 24:24), such false prophets as Muhammad, indeed such antichrists who would replace Him by force and not reason, by implicit libel on God, by subtlety and not truth, have nothing to predict their own coming as authentic, as He did. They know nothing of the date of their death, as He did (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4 - Daniel 9), or the predicted nature of their work, as did Christ. In fact, they do not give in God's name, to the minds that God made, any rational ground to believed: while they provide acute evidence for their rejection.

Hence they exhibit merely an irksome irrationality. If God were the speaker of such products, He would have failed signally to identify Himself from within the maze and morass of those who can use the name, as almost any other name! Indeed there appear no even plausible grounds to believe more than such as the plundering prophet Muhammad, behind the Koran. Therefore to accept this as divine, provides only more ground of offence against the God who made evidence and reason: a blasphemy against the necessary greatness of the Sovereign Speaker of the universe, it is a arbitrary substitute for reliable grounds, as well as providing inalienable grounds for rejection in terms of force in the area of "conversion" (cf. pp. 50 ff., and 65 ff.; cf. *22, *27, Chapter 1 supra)... to name but one of those shown.

To forsake the authenticated stature of Christ, declared by Muhammad sinless, for the admittedly sinful and actually unverified and unvalidated words of Muhammad via an angel, is to forsake by an act of will the evidence God has been at pains to provide.

As noted, indeed (*2 on pp. 829-832 supra), there is the negative consideration also, that the allegedly almighty Allah does not manage¹ to carry out what devotees organise in the Middle East, under the much-proclaimed massive 'provocation' of the Jews and others, and this despite the unmitigated and passionate favour for the use of force in war, to which Muhammad made commitment for his cause. The Jews' God said He would discipline them; send the Messiah; He foretold the Gospel, said it would reach the Gentiles, and told of the prolonged Jewish rejection of it, all just as we have shown in Chapter 9 supra. He told of the the Jews' return, assisted, from many nations, of their enormously successful wars against disproportionate numbers, the taking of half of Jerusalem and of the Jews being at length back in Jerusalem. It happened.

The Lord God who gives scientific method such scope said it would, and said one reason He was telling it was this: that it could be seen that it would happen. Having false and unreliable prophets receive the death penalty, all as we have seen earlier: He claimed in clearest terms that no other so-called 'god' could or would equal His own prophetic accuracy ² . 

Precisely as He said on that last point, it is also the case; and the Moslem 'faith' falls doubly here. First, the allegedly almighty 'god' back of it does not prevail in alleged causes of concern over the vast tracks of time; and secondly, the Jewish God, the God whom they served in the Old Covenant, foretold all the steps of the scenario to the end. The power of God is seen in this revelation; but also in the timing of this revelation; and here the Koran is one again simply not a competitor.

Thus to dump Jesus Christ for the Moslem beliefs, casts aside the revelation strongly attested as proceeding back to the Flood (see Ebla, and 3. infra, Progressing to Nowhere: Home Like No Place) and in line to earlier background, in favour of a parvenu, a religion with a Koran that arises some 600 years after Christ: not 1500 years before, or equipped with attestation consonant with a backward movement to the dawn of history, in the related records. To say no more, Muhammad is 2000 years too late, in showing the NECESSARY DIVINE REMEDY, to meet the case of sin in a world undestroyed, argued in Chapter 1. That tardiness (cf. p. 50 ff. supra) is reminiscent of Muhammad's tendency to take this and that from other religions, and excludes the Moslem 'faith' just as surely as does its lack both of remedy for sin (pp. 44 ff. supra) and of rational attestation or grounds to exhibit the divine author; while its use of violence at the faith level, with its implicitly blasphemous implications is similarly fatal.

That so many should swallow so much in support of less than nothing, and use the name of Christ in such contradiction of fact, has a meaning. THIS WORLD wants religion - but not its cost,  its reality, nor the God who made it as the basis. It may want it verbally, but not actually. Certainly, what one third of the inhabitants of the earth, by reported alignment,  are doing is not adequate for the description of ALL, for after all, it is but a third. But what a third!

In terms of mutilation of flesh, shedding of blood, contradiction of fact, it is hard to imitate, whether in Inquisition, or later episodes, whether in jihad, or earlier episodes. The ambitions of much of Islam to rule the world, and of the Pope to have princes subject to himself, as in the triple crown, the Unam Sanctam, are precisely what does not because it cannot work. Its may mutate facts into desirable dictions, but man it cannot transmutate. He remains the same, his need the same, God is the same, the truth is not moved by these unratified options, any more than it was in the days of Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10).

The world is not rulable by fraud, folly or unsubstantiated contradictions, even of fact! It may be subjectible to such things, and for a short time will be, but not to these fashionings of futility, and major sources of the spilling of blood on this earth. They have tried, oh HOW they have tried to rule the world with misrule! Yet they have not prevailed. Massive and masterful have been the tortures, the debasements of man accomplished; but they have failed to take the world by the scruff of the neck, by force, and to subjugate it.

The idea however, it persists, and there is one to come whose works will momentarily arise to heights that vanity itself could savour before its due damnation (II Thessalonians 1-2, specifies much concerning the details of the same, as does Revelation 19-20).

When, at some near but future time in the history of this world,  the one who proclaims HIMSELF as God, the master fraud, the anti-christ comes, he will have neither place for Rome^*5, or for Muhammads trying to displace Christ. HE will be IT, himself (II Thessalonians 2), showing himself that he is GOD! with vain talk of the most preposterous type, an advance on anything Muhammad or the Pope ever declared! Here is the abomination of desolation of whom Christ spoke, and he is to be WORSHIPPED at pain of death for default (Revelation 13, Daniel 7, Matthew 24).

Once man becomes accustomed to ignoring the evidence, ANYTHING goes, and it will!

But as to this earth ? While only a third is in this preliminary case, the canyon leading to the abyss, vast are the multitudes who have their own sojourns in sorrow, casting new christs as surely in some Protestant (or formerly Protestant) sectors as Romanism does in its own place, and as Muhammad did in his! (cf. SMR pp. 683ff., 857ff.). They may be esoteric and mystic, imagined into being (cf. SMR pp. 867ff.), or mere descents into popular devotion, where the place of God is warped and worked into some fallen breast of sinful man! They may be synthesised by amalgamations unspeakable (cf. News 121, 122); but they are all founded, precisely as is organic evolution, logically on NOTHING.

That is what was the case with ancient Israel, where the word for 'vanities' is nothings, and these are a name for their idols.

Thus while of course there are millions of exceptions to the failing of this race, as it rushes headlong through the forests of so popular irrationalism, into those of mystic bewilderments, the thrust whether in modern dress, or ancient (cf. SMR   1011ff.), is to imagination, or even nothing as such, couched of course in mystic language!

*4

See SMR pp. 1186Aff. at *3, with Ch. 4 above as marked. In the truth, all things cohere and mutually support and affirm. The power of God in the Exodus and the performance in caring for Israel in the wilderness were all part of the vast historic regimen, including Moses' foretellings of the whole history of Israel (Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 29-32), in its essence, in conjunction with the patience of God before acting in such a way through one nation (cf. Genesis 15:13-16); and the results have been progressively expanded, as the prophets successively wrote, till all things, date of Christ's death and nature of Israel's reception of Him, yes of the Gentile Gospel resulting and its spread.

While God can act as He will - and in using Israel in that way, He has had plans and they have been shown as Israel itself for its own sins has in its own time suffered, just as the Gentiles have tried to extend that time in their own misled passions (as seen in Micah 7): to act without the basis, on the idea of some brain, without logical warrant, evidential testimony, verification or authority from God Himself as He has revealed Himself from the dawn of history: this is to ask for what one gets. It is sad to see nation after nation err, either in seeking vaingloriously to subject another nation or other nations, or in seeking to force its false religious dreams on others (cf. Jeremiah 23). Each must inherit what comes, and one seems willing or wise enough to ponder the case of Israel!

Passion however, while it may as with a volcano erupting, seem very fine at the time, leaves a large quantity of ashes, burning and devastation. Wisdom does not follow her.

*5  See SMR pp. 946ff., and study Revelation 17.