ideas which are a vanity, without ideals, and with
ideals, a dream without vision in the absence of God, and with
vision, a mere name without God.
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THE DESIRE OF THE NATIONS AND
THE CRYSTALLINE FIRE OF THE FAITH
Rev. Dr. Robert E. Donaldson
Published by World Wide Web Witness Inc.
December 2005
©
ISBN 0 9758436 2 1
PREFACE
with which is to be found News 362
DESIRE ? what a medley of magnificence and a profundity of impotence is aroused in the coverage in this world, of such a term!
The nations, you may ask ? How could they have any such desire, who are muddled, muddied, confused, contused with the blood of massive beatings, monstrous betrayals, infamous and degrading deceits, together with horrendous and depraved misuse of resources, not least those of their race, having made many of them into slaves, raped and tortured many thousands of its members, humiliated and abased them, acting with insensitive minds and sensuous souls, lordly arrogance and lawless abandon, yes and often with delirious desires and devilishly dynamised invasions, evasions and interventions ?
God ? Him they have mocked in word, deed or both; and now their mockery returns like a boomerang, to their feet, or raised to match their rebellion, to their heads.
This volume, the 116th. in the series In Praise of Christ Jesus, unmasks the reality and sets it in the scriptural format which alone has stood amid the massifs of the centuries, outlasting all, and foretelling their fall, indeed, often the exact nature of it, and even at times, when it would be (as in Jeremiah 25 of many nations and the extent of it, in Matthew 24 of the temple in that generation, and in Daniel 9 of the year of the fall of Israel into murdering the Messiah, after some 5 centuries from the prophet's time, and so on).
With this, focussing on the Messiah, we look at the crystalline wonders of the faith: pure and devoid of voids, covering all things, showing all, from Him who knows all and shows it with His incandescent light with which He has foretold our ways and our days in great detail. In the midst of it, He has foretold His own coming at the end of the Age, one divinely designed for the spread of the Gospel of salvation: that we might in time go to be with Him, who has prepared a place for each one of us who uses the Lord's Christ as the door, and His salvation as the dynamic providing thereby, guaranteed address to our lot, our inheritance (Daniel 12:13).
Crystalline in clarity is this faith, and are its ingredients, and with this light which flashes and sparkles, there come many who have shown its realities in their lives, its strength in their own personal weakness and the grace of God in their renewed and reborn natures.
The DESIRE OF THE NATIONS, to which they must come: this is the coping stone for civilisation, as also its only stable, sufficient and secure base. Without Him, it neither can nor will survive; and it is well, for a godless culture, glorying in the greatness that nothing and no one but God either does or could create, is merely a ship-wreck, awaiting the time when its last boards become wrack. It is thus at this instant, a time of world rending, because it refuses like refuse to render the glory to Him, to whom it is due.
Thus, the latest attack on the Jew, by the President of Iran as reported, is merely one more ploy of delusion, by which the blame of the race is planned to summit for itself, on a body already proverbial for suffering, that Jewish butt for international hypocrisy to the point that the coming rebuke to the nations is all the more deserved. Obliterate Israel! is the reported cry of that President. Alas, that aim is one of the most sure, for the obfuscation and dim anguish of those who seek it (cf. Isaiah 51:21-23, Ezekiel 39, Micah 7).
Sitting stealthily in the midst of such pogroms and programs, as nation after nation receives the fire of folly, as in the Sudan, in Iran, in Indonesia, in all of which places Christians are persecuted, or in China, where the same ultimate suppressive program is raging from the fires of Communist delusion, made hotter by Communist hypocrisy, as the worst features of capitalism rampage in that land: what is this world like ? it is like the warming one's hands at the fire of a department block, while the cries of those afflicted rend the heavens.
Did the Roman pontiff help the Jewish people in the slaughter of millions in World War II, declaiming, decrying ? It is not so recorded. Did the UN help the Jews in 1948, when many nations began the assault to become a massacre, in the little people not yet a nation, after many had survived the days of Hitler ? It is not so to be noted. Did it in fact bring a plan before this, in 1947, to take much of what was left of the Palestine of which Israel was robbed, in the 1920s, in breach of international agreement, and to add this to the theft ? In effect, yes, it did so decree. Did it want even to internationalise the fabulously famous Jewish capital of Jerusalem ? Certainly it did. Did Britain help at that time ? In fact, it used its navy to make it even harder for the deprived residue of the Jewish people to return after such horrid Nazi slaughter, to reach Israel. OIL was an important feature, as the relevant British minister made clear!
Thus did the nations gather together against Israel, precisely as prescribed in Zechariah 14's prophecy, and it was so in 1948. Any failure to realise this, is like failing to realise you are passing through the Rocky Mountains in broad daylight. Thus have the nations disgraced themselves, and now Iran, adding itself to the former vainglory of Saddam Hussein, who in the first Gulf War, made it clear his nation was STILL at war with Israel, it joins the throng. Since God has appointed the Jewish nation for His varied purposes (cf. Galloping Events Ch. 4), this becomes war on God. It is not a pleasant prospect and its end is sure.
So do the nations war on each other, on individuals, in spirit, in body, in mind, and on Israel, appointed divinely for a destiny of many parts, with an especially interesting flourish at the end (cf. Romans 11). War is in the air, and in the spirits of man; but the Desire of All nations, nevertheless, is anointing millions and bringing home His own.
The vainglorious desires of man, the polluted fragments of a broken image, these obtrude like a wen. They breed with
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Indeed,
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and the calling is of small repute unless it be by faith; |
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and the faith achieves but little and is empty, |
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Even seeking Him without repentance, this is absurd and obnoxious, since as He declared, He came to save sinners, not 'righteous' people; and His opinion of such a delusion is well expressed in one of the most incandescent condemnations of all time, in Matthew 23.
Hence the crystalline fires of the faith need attention, for they do not burn those who attentively watch them, in the Lord, as those who watch a furnace through glazed windows; and the Desire of the Nations cannot be too closely watched, who is the Shepherd whom this race despising, becomes the Judge of those who vomit their own mercy, in the gastronomic mess of unbelief. The faith, it must be held; it must be deployed; and the object of it, the Christ, if not taken, leaves merely a gap, like an untreated wound, awaiting the onset of this, or possibly that, infection.
CONTENTS
"THE DESIRE OF THE NATIONS" :
DESIRE IN MAN ... ITS ORIGIN AND DESTINY, MEANING AND MODE
70,000 to ONE
Crusade against the God of Creation ?
The Advertiser, November 5, 2005
Frank and his Angelic Friend
have More Words on the Wing
A Decidedly Informative Meeting not least
about Information
A NEW DEVELOPMENT
Creation and Evolution
70,000 and the Truth
News 365
The Advertiser, November 19, 2005
HOUSEHOLDS OF FAITH, WHAT ARE THEY ?
Beautiful building blocks in the kingdom of heaven ...
TAKING IT WHERE IT ISNOT IN YOUR MIND
BY YAWNING GAFFES AND CASUAL FOOZLES
The Parliamentary Explosion:
Moses Bombed – Religion Re-Made
News 366
The Australian, November 29, 2005
EPILOGUE to CHAPTER 5:
The DIVINE METHOD, with
COMPREHENSIVENESS, KINDNESS AND CONTINUITY
CONFUSIONS, DIFFUSIONS, DELUSIONS
AND THE BIBLICAL TRUTH
Counter Currents, Dec. 4, Reuters Dec. 8 and World Net Daily Dec. 7.
AND HE SHALL LIVE!
a thrust in
Psalm 72, that Grand Messianic,
Glory Masterpiece of the Millenium
Introduction
The case of Wairau Parish, New Zealand, where the Session in 1966 made an Overture to the apostasising Assembly in Wellington, presented by Rev. Robert E. Donaldson as Assembly representative, is here given in terms of the Bulletin as sent to the congregation in 1967.
The public denial of the bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ by the Principal of the NZ seminary, while one was a New Zealand Presbyterian Minister (ordained as such in 1966), meant that this intolerable situation had to be addressed. Having secured from the Session as assurance before accepting the call to this congregation, that they were convinced of the infallibility of the Bible, one called on them to challenge the evil words against the resurrection, in Assembly. This was done by means of what is called in Presbyterian circles, an Overture, or formal statement to the Assembly by this Church body. This was duly sent, and the matter duly presented in 1966 at Assembly.
Perhaps some slept so long that they did not hear it; or found the SEVEN MINUTES which alone were given for the presentation, to pass while they had other business, but nothing will ever alter this most costly fact!
Many things following, the Lord did not allow that denomination, the PC of NZ, to be without a witness, or without a speaker or one to denounce its God-forsaking ways at that very self-same Assembly.
In due course, as this reproduction of the St Ninian's Church Bulletin of 1967 makes evident, put forth by the Church Session, in June 1967, there was a total confrontation in the Church, just as there had been in the Assembly. While the devil loves to cover up this indisputable fact, the Bulletin itself having been circulated to the entire congregation at the time, and the Overture presented in to the preceding in 1966, one using TRAFFIC LIGHTS, with red for stop, orange for caution and green for go, on its floor, its robust challenge set forth by this Minister in the service of the Session and of Jesus Christ: only slander can seek to distort the fact, or by its blaspheming utterance seek to delete it. You might as well seek to eliminate Auschwitz.
It assuredly occurred; for it was a work of the Lord which was done to and for His necessary and great honour and glory, and it stood, as it will stand for all time as a condemnation of that folly when a formerly great Church in NZ denied the faith, making what is crucial, optional, and hence not a part of the faith. So did it fail on that day, refusing the declaration, the overture but not escaping the denunciation which followed, before one left the land and the Church, joining as noted in 1967, the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod in the USA, in fact, in St Louis, Mo..
In New Zealand, however, the faith, thus denuded, is at that level no faith at all; and the approximately 17,000 word document which was lodged with the 1966 Assembly in NZ, BECAUSE this same Minister, Robert Donaldson, had FORMALLY DISSENTED from the Resurrection Statement as such in that Assembly, and on that ground, is the result of that action.
It is to the greater glory of God first of all to speak the truth, and secondly, not to act as in some alien countries, where the work of Christians is distorted or denied by those who may seek to deface and defame the glory of the Lord. The Lord in His glory first appeared to this same Minister, and then sent Him into many a fray for the faith, as here; and of course this has meant the loss of congregations as they strayed, or as here, a national church where we had two delightful buildings, one in town and one in the country.
The cost is great; the Lord is infinitely greater. Glory be to the Lord, who both gives and takes away; but NOTHING will ever take away from HIS glory or HIS name or HIS power by which He sends and sustains His servants, as this same Minister, to the Lord's glory, solemnly attests.