DISTORTING THE BIBLE, DEFILING ZIONISM AND CANNING CHRISTMAS

There are now so many ludicrous mistakes, misadventures, subordinations of demonstrable truth for desired fiction, that the world is becoming more and more like some propaganda institute, where the degrees go to the most adventurous. There are however no degrees in the milling multitudes who suffer as a result, as the bombs reign blood both from themselves and their victims, while on the ground man's sin makes all the more accursed, so that only in Christ comes any release from its mounting guilt. It is not only violence in deed, but in distortion which strides through the world as if blessed with some left-over Nazi jack-boots.

Indeed, an attempt to minimise the vastly documented holocaust is merely one of the mischiefs which the assault on truth continues to make, as if not satisfied with the death of the Messiah through whom alone may mercy be found, they must now also seek to seduce history, to crucify the Judge of all afresh, and so make themselves of this world, a mud-pie of squelchy suppurations, instead of a design for truth.

Truth however is not to be conquered, and the Judgment that turned to mercy is unique, on offer once, not as a mode of living! for the word of God continually is being shown true as this exorbitantly rebellious generation makes clear that in being presumably the last before Christ's foretold return, by numerous evidences, they will leave their mark.

In this regard, there comes to hand a short series of points of view presented in one news source, which whether in error or not, depending on the case, are worth study as we consider the death of the nations amid the desire of the nations, Jesus Christ, who alone presents peace, purity, self-control, absolute truth and absolute mercy through absolute love wrought in absolute fulfilment of absolute prediction, as to when, where and why it would occur, and with what results.

THE INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW AS OF DECEMBER 15, 2006 HAS THE INFORMATION IN PART I, THE DISCERNING POINT INCORPORATED IN PART II AND THE DISTORTION, however unintentional, IN PART III.

These may be found separately, by the hyperlinks, at Counter Currents, Dec. 4, Reuters Dec. 8 and World Net Daily Dec. 7.

Here a writer puts the proposition that some Christians want to use any war or some method to crush all who are opposed to Zionism, regard Christianity fanatically as absolute truth, and deem Jews racially superior. Certainly, however, there can be NO SUCH BIBLICAL CHRISTIANS, and as to any claim that they are such, this would be furthered by finding one such species. In fact, the biblical picture is entirely diverse, but it is what it is, and it is well to substitute facts for such fictions as here shown.

There is no scriptural foundation for the concept that the Jew is racially superior, and it is acutely and pointedly contradicted in such passages as Deuteronomy 4 and 7:7 and Ezekiel 36:22, with Isaiah 30, 42. Not merely was greatness NOT the ground, but it is DENIED explicitly, while GRACE is the only sufficient ground of their acceptance, and until the grace of their own Messiah is theirs, wars are for them (Zechariah 12:10).

It is true that restored Israel, in its short time during which it has been heavily persecuted by Arab militants and nations of enormous size in population and territory, has been enormously productive in its own land, since 1948 has utterly transformed the country. For all that, this is no sufficient sign of their greatness; for if you are wilfully blind, what is in it ? That is stressed in Isaiah 42:19ff., while in Isaiah 30:8ff. the nation is indicted divinely in the most dire terms.

It is part of the divine plan that they are chosen (Isaiah 43:21, Genesis 17, Galloping Events Ch. 4), and it is useless to distort this biblical information or to transgress by misrepresenting the reasons why some Christians make great emphasis on Israel; for its place and purpose in history is not least to show the faithfulness and the mercy and grace of God in HIS OWN WAY. Thus, as in Romans 9:1ff., the ways of the nation were used to bring to the entire world (as also in Romans 11), the Gospel of grace, even though at their own most climacteric time, they for their own part chose to slay instead of stay on their Messiah, so in Romans 11 we find the coherent and complex plan. Thus has God outplayed it all; and knowing the end, He has implemented it for them, with every phase, even as for others, in a vast and majestic composite plan.

As for Israel, they have paid! and this they have done precisely as foretold of them in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 32. As those who imagine that distortion of the biblical case will help, these are mistaken, even as much as is Israel the nation. It will not help themselves - merely providing mirror reflections of the perversity which was in Israel through solemn and unfading ignorance, nor will it aid their cause; for God is not mocked, and is not propagandised, nor does He bow to the wisdom of distortion, the glee of vengeance nor to the frenzies of calumny, whether of Himself or of others.

It must also be noted that Israel is also one element of the divine insistence that the world is HIS, and if HE chooses to put a race somewhere, that is His business, since ALL THE WORLD is His, and if He chooses to remove them for their sin, and replace them in His mercy, as He has done, this too is His choice. Thus it is God with whom they fight who seek to legislate for Him and ignore His control of history, as if grace were weakness. In Psalm 2 we find the end of such intolerance of the Messiah. If the Jewish nation has suffered for such, they are not alone (Romans 11:18) subject to divine rebuke.

In fact, it was Jews who were used to FOUND, from Christ, the Christian Church. Imagining however that this, or indeed the appointment of Israel for the purposes outlined by Paul in Romans 9, means that man rather than God will fulfil His own specifications is to ignore the fact, among all the rest, that it is the LORD who shows His indignation at the efforts to grab Israel or exterminate it as suggested increasingly, according to reports, by Iran’s President. Thus did He most effectually rebuke Pharaoh of Egypt, Sennacherib of Assyria, the pride of Babylon, and so more recently, the asinine splendours of Hitler and the empty seizures of Stalin. This we see in solemn engraving for the heart of wandering man, in such places as Micah 4:11-13...

When at the end, the Lord sees the vengeful contrivings of man against Israel, now duly punished, replaced in its land and being sought, there will be such events as parallel the Exodus (Micah 7:15ff., Ezekiel 38ff.). NO MAN will be exalted in that day, so those who ARE exalted can only feel it the more as they are felled!

It is the LORD who will ALONE be glorified in the end (Isaiah 2). His procedures are His own, and the wisdom required is to be willing to see, and to recognise both Him and His plans and ways, while ceasing the ludicrous efforts as in Psalm 2, so accurately foretold and quoted in Acts 4, to overturn. And what to overturn ? These infatuated maladies of man seek to overturn what God has done in using that nation, Israel, in exposing its errors, in rebuking it, in dispersing it, in bringing them back as promised and in challenging Gentiles who seem at times to imagine that they have some divine or other right, of kings or wings or things. It is a spurious right to scorn, scoff at the Jewish people, as if pogroms were only a beginning, and inhumanity the end. Such malice is possible, but not permissible; is potent, but not omnipotent; is confrontation, but not conquest! God has other ideas and has declared them, while doing them each in its time, as always.

Meanwhile, for a larger treatment of the Jewish place in history, see Calibrating Myths… Ch. 5, Let God be God Ch. 4, It Bubbles … Chs. 10, 11. In reviewing the many methods of divine rebuke to the nations, including the flood and the Exodus, and the eventual taking of the judgment in Himself, for those who receive Him and His salvation, see Ch. 5 above, especially at Member, with its Epilogue in Ch. 6. .

As to PART I: it may be found from the hyperlink below.

Iran President Expresses Doubt About Holocaust

This article may be found through the hyperlink, and includes the point that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed doubt on the Holocaust, a denial which has fired and ired a number of international authorities. The comments were statedly reported by Iran’s official IRNA news agency and were made at a news conference given in Mecca, after the President's earlier suggestion that Israel be "wiped off the map,” made earlier this year. He thinks that he knows better than Germany what Hitler did, but naturally enough the German Chancellor has utterly condemned his contra-historical blindness.

It does however give lively expression to what is no mere undercurrent in the Middle East, a well-oiled track on which the trains of turmoil slither, and will slither, while their devious designs and absurd hopes continue, based on illusion, confusion and despotism, and the desire for power, lusting for what lacks all evidence, all credentials of validity and any hope of truth. With such allies, is not disorder ensured ?

While this is by no means the only attack on truth, being merely one of that most famous orchestra of disorientation which some call music, where infamy is the conductor, and the name of the cacophonic symphony, delusion, yet by this and all such means the world is positively asking, and that passionately, for what is to come to it. When its evil works are as Peter declares (II Peter 3), 'burnt up', it will be cleaner. Meanwhile man tries to perform what only God can do, and the results are not incarnation but carnage, while the incarnation which came was rendered incarceration and crucifixion, though death had to be disappointed in the end, because of resurrection.

For this race, mankind, becoming so unkind to his Creator, to the Redeemer, and to His modes of operation, including that vast and intricate means of dealing with Israel HIS way, there is in such modes only one result. It is failure, and it is humiliation. Better far to be meek with the humble, who after all will possess the earth, than to parade calumnies against truth, and to use force to wipe this or that nation from the earth.

That, to be sure, has become more and more of a practice since the days of Hitler, and it has occurred in Africa, freely, just as in the Middle East repeatedly (where to a large extent, other than the Kurds, who are not a nation, it is Israel all the time who is to be felled). It looms for Taiwan (to be invaded or whatever if it insists on being the only freed part of the Chinese nation). This it faces, this small land a conveyor belt for that larger China which had so notable a past, but possesses so inglorious a current welter of industrial and spiritual smog, forcibly thrust upon the people and being made ready for forcible export to the thriving escapees.

So does calumny join hands with force: just as in Hitler's own day, not merely were Jews, by the million killed, experimented upon, herded, de-toothed, despatched, used horrendously as is so well documented by Corrie ten Boom, but Stalinesque crusades crushed in slow mode, many millions more, made economic pawns very much like Chinese forced labour, misnamed re-education. To all this folly would be given further additions from certain 'portions' of Cambodia, a few million, and so on, when the world had time to draw its breath from its earlier atrocities of mind, spirit and body.

The mills are grinding with the teeth of hate-pervading man, and while the wonders of divine mercy continue to be preached, it is now a matter of how many will be reached as the Gospel is preached.

It always was so, since Christ came; but now, the end is near, and the last lap appears to be hearing the bell, as the tape draws to itself, more and more attention.

At such times, it is neither wise nor wonderful to let the attention wander, but wisdom eagerly anticipates and expects the coming of the Lord who gave to man his whole heart which, when not passionately vexed, indeed looks for justice and truth and kindness and pity, such as each needed when first born (Hebrews 9:28). The desire of the nations, Jesus Christ, alone has no reputation soiled, no acts of renown foiled, neither spiritual declivities, nor atom of heart wandering; for Him, all is in order, all as predicted, as prescribed. When He arrived, it was in pity and in mercy, to be reduced to human form; when He returns, it will not be simply to a sinful human race, to present power to heal, to raise the dead and to live and present truth. At length, it will be to act as King, and so will the brilliant darkness subside into its gathering ashes, and truth girdle the globe, till its time come, and as in II Peter 3, it goes, with great noise, much flushing of energy, its day over, its time past.

This news item points out that schools are being forced to abandon Christmas break for Winter break, that carols, even instrumental versions are being banned in some places, that a major postal delivery service has removed the symbolic Santa caps from their drivers’ heads, ordering them not to give Christmas decorations to their trucks, and it asks WHY ? If the overwhelming majority, it posits, of the land are of one religion, and if it be a Christian nation, why does this happen ?

In considering this, let us first examine the idea of a "Christian nation". While the US could not in terms of the national COMMITMENT be called Christian, and the national DIRECTION is by now far from this, the point being made is that there is much that has been Christian, much that remains Christian and that it is becoming a fetish to distance this reality even from cultural expression. In fact, that writer says this, that "the dirty little secret in America" is to this effect: it is not now "anti-Semitism" but "anti-Christianity", and this as rampant, which is the problem. That of course is precisely as predicted in II Thessalonians 2 and in accord with the words of Jesus Christ in Matthew 24:24 and 24:11-12.

What then is the point of the author concerned, regarding anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity. The one, he considers, has been replaced by the other! The former now yields to the latter in the USA! Thaat is his contention, and there is indeed much in that direction.

For example, Christmas celebrations and expressions, and the stentorian opposition to them are therefore becoming more and more of an epidemic. Thus, his point is the background of the majority, and the invasion of the foreground to contend with this background, to diminish it, to erode it away, and this in a most active manner. Atheism, he considers, is now appearing as 'a calling'!

Indeed, while churches are leaving the Bible like an express- train, one may add, and many make anti-biblical sects their unvalidated resting place, where there is no rest, the reproach to Christmas, which is becoming modish in USA and some other places, is at least in its case, out of all proportion to the cultural background and even to the ostensible commitment of many.

In fact, much the same direction of flow from Christ is apparent elsewhere, and in Australia it took someone who is not Australian, but a foreigner, to ask us why we are so non-affirmative of our heritage. Part of the reason, in some cases, may be fear of the bombs which some substitute for reason, making a farce of a religious approach that impels it; but more generally and for far longer, Australians have been taught by many of their own race to downgrade Christianity, as we may seen in the news approach portrayed on this site here, and this has often been quite systematic and even governmental, as that article shows.

It has been a case of confusing tolerance, which in terms of being gracious and kind even to enemies, is good, with relativism, which simply means that you are irrationally wanting to ignore the realities of what is true. Thus if all things were relative, then the concept that this is so likewise would not be absolute truth, which by definition would be excluded. It takes more than definition however to exclude the truth, and it is by no means fanaticism to believe the Bible, since reason itself plainly requires this (cf. SMR). It is fanaticism NOT to do so, in face of the evidence, rather than the opposite! Fanaticism is where reason is left stranded, not where it stands.

Such things are also given particular emphasis in the analysis of a strongly invested religious approach to be found in the Australian State of Victoria, as early as the thesis written upon it for Melbourne University, in 1977!

It is not tolerance to leave your roots without and contrary to reason, but slackness which in history, finds its riposte in loss. Confused ideals and humanism trying to live without the love of Christ, which alone gives to man his place, are like cosmetics on the corpse. You need life and reason and truth and testing and verification and validation, not foolish simpers and elaborate confusions of decline with kindness.

You CAN and SHOULD be kind, you should love your enemies, but first love God with all you have: this is the Biblical Teaching. Love is not something which ignores the truth, as Paul presents it in I Corinthians 13, but what rejoices in the truth. It is the truth that God is love (I John 4:7ff.), and without this truth, opinions and sentiments are like the whine of distant shells as they approach. They merely clutter the air and prepare for doom, ignoring and defying God, and seeking to surpass the glorious liberty available in His love, by remaking truth, and slaughtering it in the process, no less than did the authorities in Jerusalem, slaughter Christ (cf. I John 2:22ff.).

That violence to God in His form of humiliation for salvation, it was done as predicted and the result was the resurrection with the outthrust of the Christian Church with the predicted Gospel, until it should cover the globe. This was to be, as it will be, prior to the other part of Psalm 2 coming into operation: God’s response in judgment to the recklessness of imagining that kindness to people means cruelty to truth! Truth still judges and will not be belayed, betrayed or upbraided without result - in ANY field, and above all in this, its source and meaning, which alone gives man logical right to call ANYTHING truth. For that you need not only the EXISTENCE of the absolute, but its availability AS SUCH, and since man's mind can squash or distort on arrival whatever comes, it is necessary that absolute truth be both personal and willing to make itself available, which as the Bible indicates, and reason requires (cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3, 5, 10), is fortunately the case.

Fortunately ? It is certainly good fortune from the point of view of those who do not know, but in fact it is the need which comes from the creation of man, and the result is that both spiritually and morally, psychologically and actually, and logically and rationally it must be so. Divorced from this, he is a car on various auto-drivers, which do not always even converse, slamming into this war, amidst nations or persons or domesticities ... or that. It becomes like the grumbling of a disintegrating automatic transmission on a car, a signal; but it is not heeded. Hence the wars proliferating, which Christ foretold in Matthew 24 are coming to a culmination of horror as millions lie slain at now this, now that absurd, provocative, grasping, devious or defensive posture or program. That is precisely what Revelation 6:4ff.. Power to take peace from the earth, there portrayed, is indeed a part of the scenario, and what cold be more expected.

That our globe would become, unless this same Christ who returns as ruler, intervened, uninhabitable is the other aspect, since there is a strict limit to our gloriously designed globe, but little limit to the anti-God and anti-Christ elective follies. They gobble up what grace has provided till their very ground under their feet laughs as their inflated lordliness, and absent reason.

That is the payment for the satiety of self-indulgent sin. It is the result; but the remedy is as always, the one God has provided, validated and verified and there is no other, nor has there even been one, nor could there be, since it must have been present from the first to be available at any time, and to the last, when the provocation is to God and the option is immediate removal of the rubbish so created, miscreancy!

This remedy is the exact counterpart of the ruin and its basis in sin, which makes it both necessary and beautiful, like a necessary operation for a cancer which defiling all, makes its colonising journeys throughout the physical body. Its application shows the total contrast at the level of grace between Islam and Christianity, when you go by the book of both. What then is the biblical approach, and the Christian requirement sent down by the apostles who worked with or know Christ, to this day ?

So far from slaughtering your enemies because they are your enemies, you should seek their good; and this is a sheer abyss between militant Islam such as Muhammad practised in taking Mecca and in many of his incitements, which many use to this day, and the Christ of Calvary who took all the long manifested judgments of God, in their application to believing and receiving sinners, upon HIMSELF, once and for all (Hebrews Chs.2 , 9 -10). .

It is certainly unfortunate that some are made the religious prey of others by devious means, while these deeply embedded Australian virtues of regard for the sick, the weak, the old and the distressed, predictable offshoots of its Christian foundations (officially so, indeed!), here finding willing soil, as many in this land were most distressed on their initial deposit here, are abused to provoke prejudice and folly.

Thus by a perversity of unreason, it becomes all but acceptable to USE these Christian virtues to CONFUSE the people, as if it were some kind of holocaust of holiness to dare to speak of Christ as the TRUTH, which is His claim, fulfilled in every respect with no alternative whatever at any point, evidentially attested, far less logically valid^*1A , or to expect our past to have more bearing on the present, than the objections of a relatively minuscule and recent addition to the population. The Australian toleration which permits forms of worship, so long as they do not advocate or practise physical violence, is thus made a ground for NOT permitting truth to be declared, except by those who can induce fear from violence itself, or who make a suitable fuss about it.

It becomes impolite, if not impolitic, to act as one is convinced is true, or to expect SCOPE for such public actions as mirror what many, like our forebears, with rigorous reason, conceive to be true. This denial of character, past, foundation facts is becoming a soiled substitute for allowance for others to have liberty of expression in religion, in ways far short of anything even approaching physical violence. Indeed, unless this slide, now both in Victoria^*1and in SA^*2 given no small governmental aid, should stop, this land will soon enough find the vileness of the denial of the source of kindness through Calvary, mercy through the manger and power through the resurrection. Other nations have done it, and the substitution in whatever name, even of the liberty to speak the truth, by social or political inventions or conventions, with a swathe of irrational relativism, knowing it is right while denying any such knowledge to be possible as truth, becomes the foggy smog of the spirit which befits not just the death of an individual, but the decease of a land of renown.

It is easy to create indifferent nations, sliding into defiled relics. No particular talent is needed, only passion and determination, preferably well mixed with confusion and perhaps some delusion: this does it like a spark in a petrol dump.

There is still time to return to reason, to validated revelation, to Christ, and to give by grace liberty to others while steadfastly putting truth in its place for one's own part. If this land follows the way of many others, then with this difference from some, that it does it as if it were a virtue, the well reported and horrendous ways of many others may be gained, just as Israel gained things all but unspeakable in its own lapse, so long ago.

God warned Israel in Deuteronomy 32, and Leviticus 26, would be their lot if they forsook Him. The case is not in essence different for Gentile nations which depart from what made them great, and smile at the God who delivered them in their earlier distresses.

The past is clear; the present is pollution; the future is being earned. Let us hope that in this land, there will be many sufficiently cleared from confusion, to practice love of enemies, grace to those who afflict one, and at the same time, dependability and liberty of life and tongue in the service of what alone has stood over the millenia, and never bows, the sovereign Lord Jesus Christ, who having exercised pity and mercy, is assuredly coming to rule in righteousness. Pity is no more weakness than is a mother's love, and the crass assumption that the God of all grace who showed His hand for millenia, and then did what He said, will make the judgment on folly somehow insipid, is like assuming that because an operation healed cancer, the disease does not really hurt! Play with it and it may not play with you!

See: Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 15 (spirit of the Age, and undistinguished unities, the last including Victoria, as also post-modernism cf. GBG 4)