We are shortly to consider the NEWS on the LOST BOYS of SUDAN, their quite remarkable careers (III B below), and what this signifies in its setting. First however look at these Greek terms which are used in Romans 1, in describing the progressive (or regressive) pathology of the race, as its day of judgment draws near. The relevance of this and of II Timothy will soon be seen, and prepare the way for the story of these young people, just as the story will confirm the Biblical predictions made, accurately indeed, albeit in a rather ghoulish manner.

aspondos astorgos asunqetos asunetos
anelehmos
qeostugos

We shall plan to come back to these, in the Greek of the Bible,  in a little. Meanwhile, there is background, historical and literary to consider, as the word of God and the news inter-relate. It is worthy of a little burrowing.
 
 

1. THE GENERAL TREND
AS FORECAST FOR THE DISEASE

Meanwhile, we note that these Greek words adorn the text of Romans 1
within verses 30-31.

a) there has been some knowledge or revelation of God.
b) they fail to glorify Him as God, departing into their own obfuscations or obscurities.
c) they esteem themselves wise, while exhibiting in reverse mode, mere folly.
d) they turn truth to lie, and worship what is created, or indeed what they create, since this too is a creation, and thus an object of the world or of their own minds, acting as creators as in false religions.

Here we learn that God is wrathful towards a certain kind of provocation which is chronic and audacious.

It is this. All ungodliness and unrighteousness. That is, efforts to avoid God, do without Him, institute one's own standards and call them right (or for that matter, anything else, in installing them or applying them: it is all 'unrighteous', since God being the only POSSIBLE truth, substitutes are not right, but imagination replacing actuality cf. SMR pp. 101-102,  Ch. 3, That Magnificent Rock Ch. 5, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6, and 7, Repent or Perish Ch. 7 ).

Those who indulge in this particular practice are characterised accordingly, in verse 18. They are suppressing the truth.

What makes this the more obvious is the fact cited, that the reality of God is manifest not only TO them but IN them (Romans 1:19).

That is, there is an obvious attestation

through

• reason,
• conscience and
• the sheer force and power of the designs, so profound, so delicate, so liberal in their many millions, so extinguishable in a moment, at sudden death;
  
  and
   
• in their aspirations to truth, and
• in the necessary pre-conditions of ever finding it whether to assert this or that, including the concept that neither this or that is true, so assuming truth in and for its denial;
• in personality and its power of assessment and surveyal and so on,
• as we have so often considered before, but especially in SMR Chs. 1-3,10.

From this institution of man and his awareness of his commencement exercises, on the part of God, to the present is a tortuous course. There are however some basic ingredients, and here they are traced. The direction of slide is observed, and something of the terminus of this action!

The normal progression to a substitute:

• as in atheism, where it is the self which has implied but not supplied, the divine powers to KNOW;

 
• as in agnosticism,
• where it lacks the validity which can make it even a meaningful question so that there is ANY answer at all, however vague,
• and hence bends its victims once again to the self,
• to some object like a Buddha, to some person like a guru,
• all born, all dying, all without start or finish to adorn them into something explanatory,
• mere irrelevances to the giant questions, and substitutes for the only answer:

 
• this has consequences.

In what follows we shall use the following translation abbreviation, where it is not the KJV: C for Conybeare, P for Phillips, T for Thayer's dictionary, G for Goodspeed, W for Weymouth, M for Moffatt, NASB for the New American Standard Bible, ASB American Standard Bible..

Again, there is what is deemed by one 'unmentionable deeds' (P). These are things unbecoming, unseemly, improper, indecent. They are offence to righteousness in bending the rules and making the way without the qualities of right, soundness, seemliness, agreeableness with and adaptation to reality.

Maliciousness, covetousness, envy, murder; contention ... wrangling (T);
with the qualities of being
conscienceless, treacherous (G),
without natural affection or without pity ((Weymouth)
 or callous, merciless (M)
or implacable, unmerciful.

In addition, we find these symptoms: they are characterisable in those who become  -
whisperers; gossips ( G)
ingenious in evil (G), or inventors of wickedness (C),
scoffers at duty to parents (P), or impersuasible, uncompliant, contumacious to parents (T)

which last intractability rhymes ethically with the 'wranglers' notation earlier. With all this, there is yet more in the slithering line, for it is not all bold, but evil:

stabbers in the back, God-haters (P); or slanderers (G), defamers (M), or slanderers, abhorrent to God (G)/ hateful to God or exceptionally impious and wicked (T).

Again, the theme continues: they are insolent, haughty, boastful (ASB). Shame is forgotten, the impudence that despises God, the living and true God, or considers the fear of Him backward, retrogressive, and serves slander and contumacious contempt, it is here.

In all this, we are reminded of Paul in I Timothy 6:5, where those who reject the sound words of Jesus Christ, such as those to whom he specifically refers, are deemed "men of depraved mind and deprived of the truth" (NASB).

This then is the prognosis of giving short-shrift to God in the very midst of His revelation. Who better fit this category of placement, than those who for centuries have heard the gospel, have even had it formally established in their land (however improperly when any kind of force was employed), have had it presented in ever so many translations, languages, by sound waves, by digital mode, on CD-ROM, in books, in explanations and compilations, in defence in exposés, sermons, by coffee shop methods, in tenderness by bed-sides, in robust vigour in Armies, on land, in sea, in air, and to some extent, in space!

Is it happening ? Are such symptoms, now here, now there, now in immoral radio, TV, dance, exposures and dramatisations of exposures, in indecency which it is now being made indecent to CALL indecent, in cover-ups, in shams, in shames, in strident calls to natural conduct, where nature is defined as promiscuously dismissive, in fact a mere fulfilment of "worshipping the creation rather than the Creator" as in the indictment of Paul.

Are there not even some who deem themselves irreligious, at least to the point that it cannot 'touch' them so that they can do what they want, so that they may become self-styled towers of ethical wonder, or self-styled beasts of slush, allegedly at will (though the price tag is there) : are there not some of these, who are beginning to waver and quaver. WE CANNOT HAVE THIS, they cry. The PLACE IS GOING TO THE DOGS.

They want up, but find down, and have dismissed the elevator. It is a quandary indeed for them. It is necessary if you want to fly, to find the craft to take you, since men cannot fly. It is essential if you want the things of God, first to find Him, for He is without imitation or precursor, successor or parallel.

Thus when we read of

the implacability in Palestine that was,
Israel and the Moslem states surrounding that are,
so that Israel is to be muted, commuted, disputed,
while merciless meanderings with diplomacy, money and power are to impress on it that they can, as Arafat seems to feel, go to hell,
an interesting peace proposal:
when we read of the new shoot-a-settler program, as noted in an earlier news, and find that Jerusalem MUST not be really Jewish,
it is then, not surprising.

When we find that Hitler is not enough: Israel MUST be subdued by the many Moslem millions, we do not stagger in unbelief, believing ourselves in another universe, perhaps some lost realm of thought. We can, though at that, with difficulty, credit that yes, perhaps such things could be.

When we find Arab youths sporting stones trying to outface and subdue Israeli protectors of the nation, and that these are heroes because they get hurt, and ponder the lives of these sacrifices so readily made by those who embrace that religion of Islam, indeed submission, we do not weep for the sheer extravaganza of woe and wickedness so to defile the vulnerable and use the weak to overcome, perhaps by world distortions, the Jews.

If force did not work, as according to the divine plan as shown for example in It Bubbles, It Howls... He Calls, then subtlety can implacably be tried, and the price paid, in the flesh of the young, sent like the Iranian boys earlier, feckless into the throng in the interests which seem like that of Mars, for Rome, the god of war. Is this Islam ? It is certainly submission.. Is this Islam ? It is certainly submission.

Or if we find that the UN wants Israel out of control of its little bit of former Palestine, so shamelessly NOT made available according to treaty, by Britain, and understand that that international body is somehow supposedly an international repository of some kind of morality: we do not shudder in unbelief. It is no more impossible to believe that the institution set up AFTER Hitler, should so forward the line of dispossession. It does it differently. It has some of the same sad results.

The misuse of the mouth flourishes as perhaps never before: right is called wrong, weakness strength, conscienceless conduct morality, slander is a way of life, schism is a practice that adorns, as those who insist on the Bible are disregarded in the massive whirlpools of philosophy and convenience, convention and arrogance which draw the deluded to their doom. To add to it, many USE the Bible but do not view it, talk of it, but do not obey. For them, it becomes an ethical status symbol, a thing for the ode, but odious for the performance. In the same theme, many like freemasonry, put it all into some sort of unhallowed vitamiser of opposites, and come out with the sheen on their armour, but its trademark unknown.

If then there were need of seeing the end of the road, to which the highway of the 21st. century so nearly approaches, in terms of the degenerative dynamics so faithfully traced in Romans 1:17ff., we have only to look at our contemporary period of the restoration of Jerusalem to the Jews as in Luke 21:24, which marks the ending of the Gentile period, and the onset of the end, the terminal events. Jews had an innings; Gentiles are about at the end of their own. Furore about Jerusalem is predicted, and it is CERTAINLY OCCURRING with a vengeance bordering on vendetta! It is in the news, the views, the pews, in the papers, in the magazines of the press and the gunners alike just as in Zechariah 12. It is this which likewise traces the triumphs of glory in deliverance, before that epochal event of their SPIRITUAL deliverance and restoration in large numbers, to and of the Messiah.

The Jews, then,  have won their wars, as likewise there predicted before that massive national repentance traced for the end events, both in Romans 11 and in Zechariah 12:10, in that PRECISE CONTEXT. Now the burden of fighting is impacting on all concerned. It is on THEM, because they still do not NATIONALLY recognise their Messiah; it is on the other nations concerned, because THESE still imagine that the land of covenant is THEIRS and has nothing to do with God. The UN merely exemplifies and exhibits the heart of unbelief. It is a symbol of what it stands for, what the nations stand for, and assuredly this is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The religions, as we saw in  It Bubbles, It Howls ... He Calls, are to be in agreement, at peace, not a nuisance while the UN ploughs on. This is its recent call, there documented.

God is not to the point. He is to be put in a container and made if not mute, then to lie down and be quiet.

These then are phenomena on the divine agenda, but two things more remain. They are these: the particular applications, high power microscope version, attributed to our times in II Timothy 3, and the case of the LOST BOYS, the Sudanese who, if ever implacability, if ever remorselessness, if ever murder, mayhem, irreconcilability, if ever wickedness, heartlessness were to be seen, is here displayed!

These ? They have been pursued with troops, planes, bombers, thrust in crocodile and killer hippopotami waters by troops behind, assailed from this nation and that, by Islam so-called fundamentalists with a zeal so arrogant, a heartlessness so inhuman as to make it seem like an Edgar Alan Poe classic, rather than history. They were in many cases children, but all the better for you to die, my dear, so very young. If ever the importunity of the implacable, and the ivory throne of the irreconcilable were to be wed with the inhuman tower of  inveterate malignity, whatever its alleged source and ostensible motive, the desire to do what has been done to these the young of Sudan, is plain irreducible evil.

This irrational thrust of religion to be followed, and of force to be met, it must figure in the annals of time, even this time, as a commissioned classic of the grotesque.
 
 

We have considered this phase of the last days program as predicted in the Bible, before. It is not necessary to repeat this, but it is to the point to specialise for a moment on some features, before telling the story of the Sudanese 'lost boys' as they are called in The Australian article noted above.
For convenience the relevant pages of SMR (pp. 659-664 are supplied in the End-note^*1).

Now however let us consider something of the music of the language deployed through the apostle Paul, in this text, in characterising the abysmal decline of the Age.

This returns us to our start:

The first two of these terms appear likewise in Romans 1, being here specified in particular for what is in that chapter, a more general descent than that of II Timothy, though of course, one ending in precisely the same place! The first four terms occur in two separated pairs in Romans 1, and the first two in a pair in II Timothy 3:3.

The assonance and alliteration is intense: it involves moreover a salient REMOVAL of various good things with the 'a' prefix, leaving the result a sonorous moral wasteland of negation.
It reads and sounds like a death sentence, the sonar spectacular mixed with intellectual denial. In a literary way, they resemble the Churchillian 'on the beaches', though this is undoubtedly, on the breaches, which are virtually of everything.

These terms, then ? They mean:

1) without treaty, contrary to treaty, truce-breaking, hence irreconcilable, implacable;
2) without natural affection, lacking affectionate and cordial relations with kindred;
3) without understanding;
4) merciless, harsh;
5) odious towards God, God-hating, characterised by hate relative to God: hence from the earlier times, hated by God, God-forsaken.

That is a good contour of ethics for association with the events to come. From the NASB, in II Timothy's prophetic of the ethics of the last days, as it strives and arrives, we have this:

• "lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal (or savage), haters of good, treacherous, reckless (or headlong), conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God."


That too seems to set the tone for what is to follow, rather aptly to say no more.

Even in religions, there is FORM rather than FACT, "holding a form of godliness without its power" (II Timothy 3:5). In their religious clothes ... we shall for the moment avoid this extension! WHEN you lack the power of God, the tendency is either to  use your own, ally with others to make your own, or deplore the lack, and perhaps seek to find it, or simply lack power. The last contingency is not so popular, on the world stage today: with independence throbbing like a pulsing head-ache, blocking thought very often as does a thrombosis the blood, hate for those who disagree about territory becoming a butcher of bodies, a strangler of minds, an arrogant detester of peace, fortified with zeal in the irreconcilable, as immune to truth as to reason.

This of course is all part of the DIVINE AGENDA, to descry from the distance these intemperate follies as LIKEWISE TO ASCRIBE THEIR CAUSE, as we have just seen in detail from the general coverage found in Romans 1.

And this ? Not least it described: Alienation from God, from truth, hence peace, from reason, from evidence, from duty to God, to each other, from beauty, with wilfulness and vice disadorning the debased and carrying everything the more rapidly to its illogical but merited conclusion, blind to mercy, merciless.
 
 

To the Moslem situation in the Sudan, where the drama is to be shortly exposed, our investigation and comparison of words with works, of prophecy with performance now takes us.

We have - many at least - heard of that country in Africa where the so-called fundamentalist Moslem NORTH has made raids, taking slaves from Christ-professing households and thrusting them north for 'service', and so on. What we must shortly consider and report, is if possible, much worse. But why is it done ? Perhaps we need preparation before we consider WHAT ELSE has been done in the name of this religion!

It is perhaps felt that this will adorn the Koran, please Allah and that sort of thing. Thus we shall first look at some of the things which  it is saying on such topics.

It is true that in the Koran in Surahs 8 and 9, we do find, as see previously (see Moslem in Indexes) various incitations to violence against those not willing to capitulate to the desires of the being called Allah.

Thus, for example, we find in 8:36-40, these words: "Tell the unbelievers that if they mend their ways their past shall be forgiven; but if they persist in sin, let them reflect upon the fate of their forefathers." Is this then some statistical survey, or was the 'fate' in some way brought forward by human hand ? Ah, but yes!

"Make war on them until idolatry shall cease and God's religion shall reign supreme."
Very, veritable jihad ? ... There is no lack of support for such concepts in the Koran. (Cf. also SMR p. 1081, 987ff..)
 

• Again, "If you fear treachery from any of your allies, you may fairly retaliate by breaking off your treaty with them. God doe snot love the treacherous."

• "Let not the unbelievers think that they will ever get away. They have not the power to do so. Muster against them all the men and cavalry at your command, so that you may strike terror into the enemy of God and your enemy.. If they incline to peace, make peace with them ..."


Peace of course is at the pleasure of this Allah being, whose ways, in this regard, have already had illustration immediately before.
 

• In Surah 9, we find this: "When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters where you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, allow them to go their way, God is forgiving and merciful... But if after coming to terms with you, they break their oaths, and revile your faith, make war on the leaders of unbelief - for no oaths are finding with them - so that they may desist."

 
• "Will you not fight against those who have broken their oaths and conspired to banish the Apostle ? ... Make war on them: God will chastise them at your hands and humble them..."

Thus we likewise find this (Surah 2:190ff.), as a motif: "Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God's religion reigns supreme." Another rendering has this: "Until all aggression ceases and religion is professed for the pleasure of Allah alone" (SRM  p. 91).

In this latter case, it was in retaliation, and the ordained or authorised response shows its length! but in view of the initial attacks so often authorised and on so many grounds, on so many, with faith found entirely intolerable, some sort of search for liberation from oppression was not surprising. In this context, our present point is simply this, IF a reaction or desire for release were to happen, if efforts to secure release from religious oppression, for example, did arise, then the Moslem end did not occur till ENTIRE submission came.

This is turn was to be with respect to this being in the insistence of Allah, who uses it seems such means to secure it in what is strangely, in this case, called the "religion". As a religion of force it has this dichotomy: force for faith. To this we shall return, for it is anomaly personified^*2!

With him all is on sufferance or submission. Avoid it, and be humbled. It is very like jihad, is it not ?
 

• "Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given as believe neither in God nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what God and His apostle have forbidden, and do not embrace true Faith, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued" - from Surah 9:27-30 (emphasis added).

 
• UTTERLY SUBDUED. That was the sort of program in the 8th century, which put Europe at risk, and falsified the Moslem pseudo-divine ambition, with overthrow of its proponents in their world ambition.

 
•  As with many things that are wrong, it tried hard; but did not prevail. God does after all exist, and this is not His testable, His fulfilled, His clinically accurate, His personally fortified, His changeless and effectual word. Indeed the Koran contradicts the whole basis both of the Old and New Testament redemption, rejects and waives it away, while at the same time asserting that the prophets of old were in anticipation of Muhammad (who is statedly no more than an 'apostle' - Surah 3, 140-146), whose religion nevertheless entirely dismisses them, loves what they hate in works, and hates what they love, in redemption (cf. SMR pp. 1081ff.).

• Then we find a development: Speaking of those who have the Messiah, and failing to understand the Trinity, he considers this: "They would extinguish the light of God with their mouths; but God seeks only to perfect His light, though the infidels abhor it."

 
• "It is He who has sent forth His apostle with guidance and the true Faith to make it triumphant over all religions, however much the idolaters may dislike it." With such specifications for triumph, and 'victory' and 'reward', this is no mean task. It does not in fact come to fulfilment; but this has not, over the blood-curdling centuries, been for any lack of trying.

 
• Indeed, there is reward here and now, for this world is very much in view and in vogue with this book:

"Therefore do not falter or sue for peace when you have gained the upper hand. God is on your side and will not grudge you the reward of your labours" - Surah 47:34ff...
 
• In 48:29, we find this: "Muhammad is God's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to unbelievers, but merciful to one another." World dominion is in view, for "If the unbelievers join battle with you, they shall be put to flight. They shall find none to protect or help them." This of course is not scientifically the case. It is however the intention. Whether it is incitation to fight, or to resist; to put to flight, or to parry; to subdue into servile treaties, and then attack if there is effort to escape such subjugation, the result is the same.  And this ?

 
• The case is as follows: Submit or be silenced. There are vagaries and strategies, but this is the end of the matter, repeatedly... in theory, for this religion is not scientific or accurate;  but it is as real as organic evolution, as much desired for various purposes, and as much despised by fact.

 
• Thus the subjugated must be those who have "honoured their treaties with you in every detail and aided none against you..." (9:1); but let them once seek liberty from such second class citizenship and thraldom and then ? "make war on the leaders of unbelief" (9:12).


For how long ? "so that they may desist".
 
• Yes, "Make war on them: God will chastise them at your hands and humble them." SO it goes.


Indeed (9:27), those who once submit (termed unclean idolaters, in that they have not taken the unredemptive ideas of Muhammad and his person as ultimate authority) must do so in all things, and should they determine otherwise, then "fight against" them, those who do not receive Muhammad's writings, and his teaching on the Last Day (where his writings are thought to hold sway), people who do not follow his every religious command. For how long ? Fight till they pay tribute. In this way the discriminatory second class citizen concept moves so that liberation becomes compulsion, and submission becomes conscience and death becomes the option.
 
• Indeed it says, "Fight till they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued." For clarity one adds the point, found in Surah 5:64.

Here Muhammad definitively classes as 'unbelievers' as those who say "God is one of three", though his effort to even articulate the trinity is alien. How is God one of three if He is three in One ? This is a straw man, a new god invented in addition to Allah.

Again, in 9:121-123, we find this: "Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you.  Know that God is with the righteous." Again, in his internecine thrust, he declares this (47:34). Speaking of their undesirable destiny who do not agree with his religion, Muhammad urges this: "Therefore do not falter or sue for peace when you have gained the upper hand." "Muhammad," he pursues it, "is God's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another" (48:29).

So if it were to go, the world would be Muslim, in submission to the untestable words, which contradict the whole essence, substance, spirit and tenor of the Biblical words which are not only testable, but triumphant in EVERY test, and which even in Muhammad are being fulfilled, for there were to be many false prophets and false christs (Matthew 24:24). There is no way to be parasitic upon their unerring and ancient testimony, for the Koran is in the most violent and harsh discord with them, in both Testaments. Muhammad is part of the false prophet parcel, and in view of the liberties he took, false christ also. That, as with all Christ's words, is given and done.

There is neither divorce nor division between Christ's words and the world of fact. What has stood, stands; what is predicted, happens; He who was to come, came; what He has forecast, comes, is coming and is nearly now done. The words of antiquity, given and attested over the ages, these do not alter; their message is always the same, and always contrary to the phenomenon of the 7th century, who, casting all this away, rests only on himself, and his failures to have his words implemented to this day, and nowhere with a more simple and sublime reality than in the failure against Israel, as formerly against Europe.

The special deliciousness of the former  however, is that the ancient and immovable word of God DECLARED that the Jews, though subjected to ENORMOUS humiliation WOULD RETURN to their land, and would be victorious THEN (but not before) against the invaders who would be repelled, but in very troublous circumstances. Indeed, it even gave the reason, in their unbelief; and likewise came the reason for the repulsion, simply that God from the first had appointed this land, this history, this way, this revelation in stages to Jew and Gentile, and would not alter the word which had gone forth out of His mouth (as in Isaiah 55). Hence the calamities, because of Jewish national unbelief; hence the triumph, because of divine plan and strategy (as in Romans 11, Leviticus 26) from the first.

Hence the turmoil, because Israel must return to the Lord, and the false gods must be exposed, scientifically, step by step, layer by layer, loud-mouthed provocation by insult, till the truth is seen without alloy or impediment. GOD is very patient. He does not favour this or that, but truth, and mercy, and lovingkindness. In judgment He does act, but with profound preliminaries and predictive lines which have been available these thousands of years! This, it is mercy not of mere mouth, but of act and fact.

Muhammad, however, there tags Christians - who believe God is not hidden in a mist of untestable words, but expressed in a must, a certainty of testable predictions and manifestation in His living word  as those to be deemed idolaters in this passage noted above. What then  for those who believe in the One who demands we love God with all our mind as well as might ? This:
 

• "Believers, why is it that when it is said to you: 'March in the cause of God,' you linger slothfully in the land ? ... If you do not fight, He will punish you sternly, and replace you by other men... Whether unarmed or well-equipped, march on and fight for the cause of God, with your wealth and with your persons..." "Those who believe in God and the Last Day will not beg you to exempt them from fighting with their wealth and with their persons."


 

Thus force is to be the exhibit, not testable truth; and novelty, innovative dumping of revelation of all, is to be the criterion of acceptance. For that, it would need force, for reason will not and cannot concur. It is force or faith; reason or recklessness; Christ's blood or the blood of men, and how it flows. This, it is no matter of moral or spiritual judgment for depravity, but of insistence with force on a faith which of course, force could never deliver. The terms are as far apart as beauty and misery, sky and pitch.
 

• Faith however is generated by means other than insistence,


persistence, resistance and blood.



• Loyalty is to what is faithful, not forceful. Love is found not in submission but in commission to the lovely, to what is love; and mercy is to be found not in the mire of slain flesh, or else that faithful to the mind of man in every detail, but in God who made us. It is He who has not left Himself without a witness, but has exposed the falsities in advance, the better to assist believers in Him, who gave us that natural affection, a testimony of His supernatural love for us.


 

• Faith does not stride in superiority, by any Biblical commission, over what lacks it; but acts with appeal and entreaty, if by any means the love of God, who HIMSELF does the works, might be found in Christ. And He ? He was crucified, but crucified none.


 

• Judgment is soon enough. Now it is time for patience, not mere penal power, truth, not the tedium of swords and ruthlessness. As a Christian, one is to 'die daily' in the service of Christ with patience; not bring to death the recalcitrant, for one whose word is a law of flesh, to whom resistance brings fighting till all submit themselves, and this ? To what is this ? It is to the thought of someone whose words are untestable, unworkable or both, whose mandates lack power, whose ways are unfulfilled but whose servants can conspire with terrible effect, against the vulnerable protoplasm which God has in His creation, provided.

Remembering that  in Surah 9:121-124, we find: "Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous" and the repeated urgings to war and ruthlessness, and noting 9:73, "Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home, an evil fate," where their assumed destiny is made a basis for aggression, extermination or humiliation, spoliation and condemnation as insincere for reasons unknown: we are equipped to proceed.

That is the book. Now the look, at the Sudan.
 
 

But let us look to the contemporary and the particular, in fact to the Sudan.

Here there has been civil war since  1983, with even a year ago, two million dead.

Why ? What strife, what cause lies behind the atrocious suffering of the poor ? It is religion.
The Moslem north of the country, with its Islamic government, "tried to impose Sharia law on the Christian and animist south", we read in The  Advertiser, October 30, 1999.

Amidst this Islamic engorgement, this fiasco which tries to make 'faith' come by force, came this denial of humanity in the 'holiness' of Faust, the enticement to do it the 'easy' way instead of with patience, with those made in the image of God, the delusions of inhumanity as the way to ennoble humanity. Thus by vile violence and violation of the lives of children, leaving them orphans or making them slaves for the better service of the holy ones who would make it happen this way, in the North, this rushing, crushing crusade of folly has denied the godly realities of faith to the plan of the perpetrators and not induced its desire in the victims in the South. It is not force which can do that; it can only make the tissue of fabrication and the pollution of the possessed.

Christians here have had to suffer invasion and violence in the interests of an anti-faith as ruthless as any of the European variety (after all, the Islamic submit or else concept was from the Middle East).

Whether Mein Kampf or the Koran, or Das Capital, it is all one in this, violence is authorised this way or that, for this reason or that, in the interests of MAKING people hold, affirm and believe what evidently such methods are the best ground you could wish, for making people DISBELIEVE. It is like Father Christmas saying, Come you must believe in my system, for if you do not, I shall break your arm, leg, social place, remove your parents, make you dead or slaves or in any case subdued, and if you are to live with me, you will look up to me and declare me the greatest thing and glorious.

Who on earth would 'believe' in such a travesty of truth and justice! Yet in all these systems, this is either all or a demonstrable PART of their way. (See SMR pp. 65ff., 1163Aff., 1174Dff., and Appendix D, esp. End-notes.)

The boys have become famous, the boys from the Sudan.

Let us trace their plight and deliverance, if this is to be, from the excellent coverage, in this case, of The Australian, Friday Dec. 22, 2000. It came from the pen, typewriter or computer, of Declan Walsh, a Nairobi-based writer.

With an epochally shameless misuse of the term 'fundamentalist', in the setting fundamentalist-Moslem, as if being back to bedrock and finding that rock in the living and loving God were any excuse for such travesties of mercy and love, there began this blind rage against tribes which trampled its way into history, to kill or ‘convert’. Worse, it is all done, for it still continues.

It comes in the name of one innovated into existence in Arabia, long after both the Old Testament and Christ, with a caricature of faith here REQUIRED of many, as shown in this suppression move towards faith, by the vilest of excesses. As if God were some monster and man were some product, instead of God being love and man the monster in his parodies of it, this volcanic steam and burning ash rushed into deplorable existence: in our own time, the North attacked the South. In so doing, ISLAM demanded the submission of Christians, amongst others. They would force it into their mouths, and demand that it be spewed up again in words of acquiescence.
 

• Was faith to become a gullet tic, or spiritual rapine to grow into a faith industry!

 
• Would the Inquisition become born again into the festering rivers of crocodiles ?

 

• Would a new excuse now claim acceptance, in the name of another world-clutching religion ?
   

• Was this to add from another source, to the never repented follies of Rome in its ludicrous assumptions of power and place for a particular sinful man, woman and piece of bread (SMR pp. 923ff., 977ff., 1055ff., 1070ff., 1086, Luke 1:22ff.), when none of them is God;

 
• and would this Arabian imagination now parallel the Roman 'need' to broadcast those three idolatrous inventions (for none of these concepts is authorised by the Bible),  and rule by available means, just the Pope has, for a thousand years, claimed the RIGHT TO RULE  HIS WORLD parish (SMR pp. 903, 1088G, 1070ff.), of whatever name, and never repented!
   
• Would a newly rich Islam now seize again, as in the 8th century and enslave in the name of faith! as not in judgment on immorality but in sacking of souls to clamour into conformity, it came.

 
• Would the earth be besmirched again by such sordid repetition, breaking like successive lightnings from the stormy clouds of man’s mind and devastated heart!

 
• Was grabbing, destruction and force-fed ‘faith’ once more to become the testimony of truth, as if the word were arrestable also:
   
• would theft become pious, would injury become innocence, in the interests of a false 'faith' ?

It was folly itself when Europeans invaded African countries to take slaves from fine and powerfully built men; it was madness of lust. Is this now to be duplicated from Africans against Africans ?
Is a Middle Eastern religion, impregnated with violence to this day, with its jihads and Koran's authorised excesses, to insist, now in the midst of poverty and disease, to use violence as the remedy, this as the release, this as the leadership, this as religion ?

Shortly, yes. These appear the practical testimonies of fact.

In 1987, the article tells us,

some 4 years into
this devastating war,
this disastrous imperialism of religion,
this oppression of the poor,
this rapine of the places of many who knew God and the purpose of His creation, not to subdue but to enlist, not to kill but to bring peace, not to molest but to heal, not to burden but to relief, not to foster imagination, but to present tested reality and bring to the truth:

it was then that the tempest hit for one of the boys, the lost boys.

One of these we follow.

Separated from his parents, he had to flee. He had been sitting with them with suddenly, without warning, bombs and rifle fire alarmed the air. Seeing neighbours being mown down by machine guns, he was helped by a man called Ajak, and walked till his feet were badly blistered. No water was the problem, eating leaves a partial solution. On the way ? Attack from other tribes. They managed to cross to Ethiopia, where there were UN camps. Boys ? The girls might be given preference during attack, we read, since they might be married off ... for a dowry! Boys if not killed, might be used as 'boy soldiers' by the rebels. Such delicacy, such mercy! Was Allah, were he to exist, pleased with this ? If so, what would he resemble!

After 4 years^*3, while Sudanese helped their Education, but alas, through officials of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, which might have simply meant more war, the Ethiopian rule lost place, and anarchy followed, so that the Lost Boys went back to the Sudan. On the way, they were made to feel the need of such movement, since troops now in power pursued them, shot at them, as if to aid their evacuation, if not from this earth, then at least from Ethiopia.

Confronted with the river Gilo, there had a dilemma. Move along the rope across the river, and suffer from crocodile infestation and killer hippopotamus teeth, or face bullets from the crusading army. Some were eaten as they escaped the more certain death to cross the river; some were not. Those not eaten or otherwise killed, continued to move to their post as the LOST BOYS.

Free to live or die across the border, they found after a few months that the Sudanese government showed its continuing interest in its young citizens, by means, strange means to be sure, of bombers droning their way. They became accustomed to the sound of their voice: the sound of the plane seems to stop as the bomb is dropped, and they then realise that they are by no means forgotten by their own government, after all! It is less likable than a Christmas card, but certainly their lives have not lost interest. With nowhere to run, we read, the boys lay flat on the ground and prayed.

But the government, we learn, had a more intense interest than this small explosive dropping. Infantry now attacked. Running was the way on and out, so they ran.

A few mentors were the only adult presence ... their 'uncles'. As they ran the more, so the kindly Sudanese bombed the more. They might walk non-stop for a day, with dirty water and disease as companions. Red Cross piles of food were sometimes met, so that there could be some relief for a little. Finally to Kenya they came, in 1992. In the group in view, this is a time lapse of 5 years, one way to grow up, in vital activities.

Some 12000 boys set about living here, and built houses. For the next 8 years, it is reported, their lives were remarkably orderly. But the camp and climate are harsh, and in an extraordinary gesture, the USA is taking thousands of them to its own land. Only 3800 remain. They are all scheduled to arrive by July 2000. One of them remarked with admiration on both Bush and Gore, because though they differed, they did not kill each other! Little we know about where we are going, said one, but this, that there is no war!

And the glorious domination of submission touting Moslem Sudanese government policy ? Is it at all abashed ? Not really. "The Government in recent months stepped up a deadly bombing campaign against southern villages, often inhabited only by civilians and aid workers."

This ? It is ONE way of acting as a missionary, and one can wonder how the alternative, of worshipping the crucified Saviour has less appeal! Certainly, it closely resembles that infamous RC pronouncement in the days of Hitler's victories (SMR p. 952)! Slaughter as the way of life on earth certainly fits well with the organic evolutionary magic; and this ideological Western propaganda, we see, has its counterpart in the Middle East as in Rome, where the Popes authorising the Inquisition have never been condemned as mass murderers, and the whole concept of force as a conversion mode has not been excluded as diabolical, anti-christian wickedness IN PRINCIPLE!

So the three continue:

1) the Communist derivative, or comrade of Darwinism (Darwin being quite a pin-up preacher, it seems, for Marx), the phantasms of man making himself and so doing a job in re-making which is practised so wildly and erratically in so much of the academic and political West.

2) the Moslem abuse of force which exposes the fatal error of the religion at the outset (cf. SMR pp. 50ff.), and

3) the Romanist purvey with terrors and subtleties in that elemental mix, so admired by Stalin, and not without reason, for he pursued it with the passion of a violent priest of yore. Of the Pope, he is reported to have asked, when told of the need to consider him strategically, How many divisions does he have ?

The new and soon coming antichristian symbol will know better than that. How many props does he employ might be the more suave 21st century approach to ... what is it called, COMMUNICATIONS!

Forget history and learn again: not perhaps the same lessons, but those more advanced, and perhaps to many, fatal.

• its liberties, imperfect to be sure, are a remarkably good thing, and

 
• its tolerances, though now being populously moved into liberties more and more to kill kids freely, in the thing called abortion, and in the thing more mentally oriented, called organic evolution, and in the thing increasingly tolerated officially, unnatural and promiscuous sex,

 
• these when not so intruded upon by  life-defiling devices, have advantage over violence.

Many of these Lost Boys apparently are now very fit (despite things like a bullet found lodged in a lung, which may require surgery in the USA), and in the midst of this outpouring of death, suffering and wantonness against them by so many for so long with so little humanity, care or restraint, with religious interests making a mockery of the very name of God, whom they thus blaspheme, they are so far delivered. Let us hope for them that the enticements of liberty in a decaying civilisation (as by Biblical standards it is, though it still retains much that it lovely and excellent), ensnaring subtleties will not ruin what courage in the past has helped preserve.

Meanwhile, thematically, we have covered ONE CASE of the official remorselessness, the intolerant persecution, the vicious pursuit of evil for many, without authority, without warrant and without cease. It has been harrowing, a litany of wickedness, an orgy and infestation of immorality, a sloughing off of life; for if we have followed those who live, what of the maimed, the scarred, the festering and the fallen!
 
 

Now we have had opportunity to hear the record of our times, predicted in advance, and to see this outstanding example, not only of our tender mercies as a human race at this time, but of the exact relationship of such a series of long time-throbbing events as these, to Biblical prophecy.

It fits like the shoe of Cinderella. The ugly sisters of pretence cannot match it. They might as well have elephant feet and forget the contest.

• It is not merely that there was NOT predicted to be a superman, superhuman race, a breed of glory, and wonder of wonders, a developing series of completed possibilities, heads in heaven, hearts of gold, powers to subdue all things.

 
• Nor is it merely that, quite to the contrary, there WAS predicted to be a falling morally, a suspended animation ethically, a time of brutality, ferocity, savagery, implacability and irreconcilability, selfishness and merely formal religion, tempered by doctrines of devils (as in I Timothy 4:2, II Timothy 3:1-5, II Peter 2:1ff., 3:3ff.).

	Nor, yet again, is it merely that both of these features are focussed in a time schedule and a pantomime programme where many other functions are to happen simultaneously (Answers to Questions Ch. 5). All this we have often seen.
	It is rather that the SYNDROME, the pathological features of our Age at this level are more than merely present.   They pulse, they hurl themselves like burglars at the doors of the mind, they stab their unseemly sights (as in Luke 21:11) on the TV, they plaster them on newsprint pages, they come in technicolour, they are the stuff of commentators; they writhe in wars*4, they incline themselves at all angles, they are increasingly pervasive, so that the godless ask, WHY on earth is all this happening! and the autonomous snap, WHATEVER is wrong with the world! as they consider their most recent stock changes.
	Thus, these fulfilments and contributions to the endless mass of verifications of prophecy do not require to be researched. They make clangour with rumblings like a volcano, sights that soar like the pyro-pulses of acrid sulphurous gases, ash and lumps of rock, that geyser forth, as at Mt St Helens, and in the opinion of some vulcanologists, at Pompeii.
	Pompeii ? That was a city. Coming is the scene for the world!
	So then these worldlings, they have no ground for morals, yet they want them. They see the beauties of Christianity recede as the nations grow more domineeringly secular, vulgarly savage, remorselessly self-interested, and they wonder.

Why the murder and the assaults, the changing of power blocs, the UN with its puniness and the bomb with its power, the radioactivity with its impenitent fouling of atmosphere and earth, the Greenhouse Effect with its new dynamisms and horrors with waters (as predicted - Luke 21:25), the Jews and the Arabs in what may seem a struggle to the death, just as the effort to wrest Jerusalem from the returned and restored Jew was predicted to involve anguish (Zechariah 12); and atomic bombs at the ready in Israel at that! It is too much.

A nice worldling can no longer count his worldly whirls of wealth and contentedly pass it on to the next generation saying, It is worth it! THEY shall have much.

What shall they then have, when the waters rage and the world blares and hatreds belch like ulcerous stomachs, power blocs count their atoms, submarines and planes, and new international 'ethics' mount to the skies with pretension, the distorted wrongs of 'child rights' making parents unpaid State supports for people production, complete with anti-religious guide-lines, straight from the mouth of the god who is not there, the secular, humanist god (cf. Mystery of Iniquity and Lead us Not into Educational Temptation!). As to him (cf. II Corinthians 10:13), he is laughable in all things but one, the ferocity of power which he is predicted to wield, for a little, till his case is exhibited, as in a sting operation, and he, exposed, is finally overcome by the truth. That, it is the next item when this is done, the return of Christ.

Of course, His people have to make an exit. They do not belong in that act. It is a scene not framed with them in view. All the actors, of course, come and go as programme requires. This is so, even though resistance groups itself in its unfounded, boundless ferocity of futility, according to its pleasure, before Him who knows and has foreknown all and disposed it aright. In a little, when the movement of Israel has occurred, and the people of the Lord are readied, they are called home. This world, which is not our home, will writhe the more, till the present seems like a beneficent calm. That, it is the way of crime against God, of ignoring Him and making a nice humanist nest out of His productions^*5.

Reader, whoever you are, YOU are one of those productions. YOU are extraordinary, for all the other 6 billion or so of the race. You are a product that is personal. Your identity is as a potential child of God, or son of hell. If you are already His, your heart is written on by the hand of God, and His laws are in you, and His love runs you, or you are a 'LOST BOY' or 'LOST GIRL', and in a sense far more pathetic than is the case for those oppressed Sudanese children! Their lot is temporal; yours is eternal. It is time to enter, not the USA, but the kingdom of heaven. Air lift is available, and there is no charge for transport.

Nevertheless, it is entirely necessary to be "translated" into "the Kingdom of His dear Son"
(cf. The Kingdom of Heaven... Ch. 2), transported, uplifted, regenerated and restored.

There is no kingdom like it; and for one thing alone, it is unique. It will not end.

Who would want it to ? When Christ is concerned, you may receive or reject; but know this, there is no flaw in Him. He is pure perfection, personal and compassionate, just and gracious, constituting truth with tenderness, valiant, vigorous, virtuous, humble and as intensively knowing as you would expect of your Creator. (Colossians 1:13). The only attack that ever succeeded against Him, was on His body, and that was by His own willing offering, to become an oblation, sacrifice and substitutionary payment for all who receive Him, by the prediction of millenia and the delight of God to deliver His spent creation, fallen man (Titus 2-3, Isaiah 52:13-55:6, Psalm 22 and cf. Joyful Jottings 21-25). The rest fall like Autumn leaves, as dead but less colourful (cf. SMR Ch. 6).
 

Small wonder then, delivered from the dictators to the mind, the body and the flesh, to the spirit of man, and freed both to understand and to rejoice in the practical realities of fellowship with that marvel of mercy and truth, our God and  Saviour, Jesus Christ (cf. Titus 2:13, Jeremiah 9:23-24), the Christians can join with Paul -

"Giving thanks to the Father, who has made us fitting to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; who has delivered us form the power of darkness, and has translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son, in whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins, who is the image of the invisible God" - from Colossians 1:13-15.

In Him, is all the fulness of the godhead in bodily form (Colossians 2:9). There is nothing left to seek for, to gain the equality with the Father which is already His own (Philippians 2:1-10). In Him, you are made complete (Colossians 2:10), "who is the head of all principality and power."
 

In Timothy - II Timothy 3, Paul says:

"This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come..."

As to this word "perilous", apart from scores of wars and pirouetting plagues of new and more fatal means of destruction for more masses of mankind, there is the simple fact that safety at night has diminished, yes even in buses and other public transport till one living in the same part of the same city must adopt quite changed modes of moving about, from those of one's own childhood; and children need ever-increasing protection. The unnecessary, the unnatural and the unsavoury are as common as uncollected garbage during a strike.

A form of social madness has come and is not showing signs of departure. Moral collapse and the collapse of the sense of purpose and power in society is so advanced that self-willed, self-centred manners of men and methods of conduct are all but de rigueur; and men of God can be mistaken and miscalled in the heaving mess or morass of evil, the very love of God a thing of novelty as was Faithful in Vanity Fair, that brilliant construction of John Bunyan.

We interrupted our quotation from the prophecy of Paul concerning the last days or times, sited just before the return of the crucified but resurrected Christ. "For," he continues, "Men shall be lovers of their own selves..."

Consider how terrible an abortion of life this is. They are prepared to have children IN love WITH love, and to have friends with appreciation and joy, despite all the imperfections in each case, with a sense of wonder all about them, and the Almighty to be found with His love of colossal proportions, even willing to send His Son to die, to rescue from the meaningless, irrationalism of magic to the creative power and the rational realities of the eternal Spirit of God, revealed and demonstrated in Christ. What then ?

They are surrounded by all of this, but then ?

Then they CONSENT to have this thing called love, but expend it on THEMSELVES! SELF-love! It is like internal altruism!

It is like finding food amidst the starving, and throwing it into the garbage can, which alas, has no stomach. Its sheer abysmal waste, in prostituting it as selfishness of the order of blind devotion,  unleveled self-adulation, is a short-circuit of a tension which with truth and grace, is the very lustre of beauty.

But let us return simply to the account of this distortion, self-love, in Timothy.

Notice the ascription of cause to the peril; the evil proceeds outward from the heart. Indeed, one sect appears founded on just this folly. More broadly, this emphasis in its extreme social form we have noted, as the torment of moral adversity mounts like a wave over the 'free society'... Good indeed is it to have political freedom; but foul is the folly when moral manacles mar the possibilities, and those who have fought to retain their lives from slavery to other nations, make them bound in senseless servitude to sin.

We are told that men may be as women, women as men, children as adults; all have 'rights' and wrongs seem to be forgotten, except in the doing. Like diminutive godlets, men and women and children increasingly not only err but are taught to err by all sorts of cunning professors of psychology and theology and sociology; and it is now almost a feeble beginning of these things to hear the need never to repress - which means 'love yourself'.

Paul must however be quoted in full:

• Know this: that in the last days, perilous times shall come: for men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection... (i.e. 'without a sense of the normal relations, of warm and natural kinship, of designer's morals' - we might render the sense of the Greek word).

This passage teems with modern fulfilment, and so we may be forgiven for many interruptions to indicate these fulfilments, as we proceed.

Covetousness is so raging that not to seek through any form of strike or disruption or graft or corruption, to gain all one can, while one can, is by some regarded as a sign of weakness - or even lack of fraternity with those of like grasping mind. Blasphemy is a matter of sales it seems - one prominent Australian newspaper seeking to defend its mannerless misuse of the name of Christ for mere emotional adornment of its point! Statistics are invoked to defend the employment of the greatest name in history on earth, as a mere stimulus to emotion, in a way many men would fear or hate to do to the names of their own wives...

'Christ' is often a cry of mere pique. Indeed, the love of self is correlative with the disregard of the Maker of man - to the point of that evil combination of mockery and insolence which seems to want stilts, the better to slap the face of the Crucified Christ. It is however not in the mere multiplication of blasphemy (perilous as is such a path and mindless in the end, as an affront to one's only available saviour); it is in the point of the term 'without natural affection' that we see the fulfilment like a plague of field mice. It creeps, it crawls, it crashes and smashes and writes in the dust, it flaunts... it seems on all sides.

The Greek term means 'cruel, heartless, without kindred feeling, family feeling', and so it comes to have a broad connotation of all that goes with this loss of naturalness, both in brotherly love, and in lust.

'Men' want to be paedophiles to molest children with psychological sanction; or to mistreat one another with the devious departure from explicit design; or women to do likewise to one another, as if the physical construction were not apparent to the merest glance, a marvel of gender correlation on investigation.

All the elements of design are like a library, so great are the components; and now that AIDS has come to the aid of moral awareness - in that male creative power is not found physiologically suitable for other males, but a cause of their death in increasing numbers - what then ? Teachers in some numbers still seem to want to be free to mistreat the minds of adolescents by teaching such things, infamously serving it in the guise of an 'alternative life style'. Merchants market child pornography - and what of the children who participate ? Meanwhile, venereal disease again breaks antibiotic bounds and refuses to be set aside by medical advance.

Natural affection ? No, it is quite unnatural in the modern trend. It gushes and geysers where it does not belong, with painful physical reminders of the folly. Life itself is forfeit before truth is acknowledged in many a paper, many a pulpit. Churchmen indeed in England can meet (as recently as 1985) to declaim that AIDS peril is not to be seen as a judgment of Almighty God. What then do they think He has done ?

Do they not hear the inward wails of the doomed ? Unable to resist sin, they now fail to resist disease or death. Moral resistance broken, they can find physical resistance departed with it - not seeking the mercy of God, many continue in their ways. The inevitable irony is strong, just as the misused body is weak. Sad gaiety and sombre mockery... What more is required to convince men who name the name of God, that the Almighty is not mocked ? (Galatians 6:7).

The combination of the unnatural and the self-centred, morally and physically, is making failing man into a monster, increasingly resembling a sort of civic dragon belching fire and folly, consuming the children and abusing the populace. Ethically, loyalty and in families warmth also, are becoming more unusual; while single mothers and fathers or even metaphorical unnatural ones, make family itself into a prosthetic and halting substitute.

This is of course no reflection on the courage of those who are left without their life partner through calamity; but it turns on those who in principle opt for what ends 'natural affection' in various aspects of its 'natural' place in life. Our point ? That this naturalness is waning, being vexed, folly being even governmentally sanctioned; and that it is thus fulfilling this prophecy with all the pointedness that we have become accustomed to see, where the word of God says what will happen!

It is now timely to remind ourselves that Christ in Matthew 24:7 cites pestilences, a term inclusive of the pernicious - as one more part of the syndrome showing His return draws near. Current plagues or pestilences are social, emotional, venereal, medical, moral; while false religion similarly plagues man, as if a supreme super-market supplied every conceivable poison, as a service to customers. The results of such things are not unexpected.

U.S. psychiatric figures - in millions - show results that are also mental. Since Hiroshima, the pestilence has been radiational; but the literal and the metaphorical mix in one medley of malady. The world is stricken.

The prophecy is sadly but brilliantly and systematically fulfilled.

Paul proceeds in our locus:

• Truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce,
  despisers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying its power.
  And from such people turn away.

Yes, they break the word of God in their own bodies, and then their own words: without natural affection, truce-breakers. (And all of this ? - it is the prescription of the apostle, his designation for 'the last times.')

Indeed, the contempt for the truth of Scripture is reaching, on psychological but not logical grounds, an almost obsessive and compulsive force; its mention can be a cause of disorder, and its defence - of passion on the part of those who hear. Men turn from it more than from death, while some prefer even death to reconciliation with the Almighty or attention to His words - like divorcees who would indeed rather die than live again with their former spouses.

Men loftily call themselves 'Christian atheists' or 'Christian agnostics' or in other ways seek to show, it appears, the glory of their souls... and this in the absence of the One who gave them those same souls, and the power to say or believe anything with significance or truth! The refrigerator for reality has been tossed carelessly onto the garbage heap under searing heat.

Self-proclaimed as meaningless meanders of matter (may we say 'magical meanders'), they make modern twentieth century myths. Where, by their own stated views, there can in fact be no truth - for as nothing is held to be absolute, no reference point is secure, measurable or imaginable: yet they will tell us what can and cannot be, what is and is not the case, with all the aplomb of the intoxicated. A form of logical insanity seems the most socially acceptable, not to say commonplace, way of life for many.

Paul proceeds in our predictive locus:

• Despisers of goodness and of good men (Thayer)

is a dictionary rendering of one more of Paul's predictive words, concerning the last times. Such an attitude is in fact a characteristic of the spirit of this Age as surely as is blasphemy against the true God: good in Himself - and good for man. Man alas who is no good for himself, by himself... turns (to continue Paul's prediction), to be:

• fierce ... heady and highminded,

amidst the puny pushiness of his plashy pretences. This then is also covered in advance by Paul in the same text, like a predictive reporter ... of monumental accuracy.
 

*2
Compare this intrusion, as if designed for the expulsion of the divine image from man by control through violence, with the divine realities of judgment, grace and love, as revealed by God in His ONLY LOGICALLY INDICATED TESTIMONY in word to mankind (cf. SMR Chs. 1-3,10). His course here,  far from depersonalising, intensifies what is human, in the presence of the divine, as might be expected from our own Creator! Cf. SMR pp. 1186A-C, *3 and *4. This is of intense significance and edification, a whole dimension of wonder, for which in more detail, see Predestination and Freewill.

*3
As the years since 1987 have passed, naturally some of these 'children' are turning into young men.

*4 EXCURSION

Wiles, Wars, Woes, Throes, and the Wise Words from the Lord

The Lost Boys account is one of many travesties of justice and tragedies of life, for if these youths remain, yet the ones who fell perhaps in their hundreds or even thousands, do not. These events occur in the midst of multiplied millions of episodes, truncations of bodies, removals of arms or legs, anti-personnel marvel bombs, murder squads (zealots ?) in many lands. Frequently, these are directed to remove offending persons, who should not be believing what they believe, or living with such beliefs where they are, it is felt by some, because that it would be nicer for them if they did not, or for some entity, whether imaginary hypothesis built on irrationalism, like Communism, or god of wars built on aggression, or racial hatred, built on unforgiveness or lust for glory.

Thus in Rwanda with the Hutus and Tutsis, the desolations and plain, raw inhumanity of persecutions have reached with their wails to the moon. In Cambodia, teeming like monsoonal rains have been the anarchistic agonies of death especially to teachers
and academics, all potential leaders so that the vices of ignorance and some synthetic, communist, power hungry lust might vent themselves. And how have they vented
themselves ?  ... in scenes to make the earth tremble with torrential rains of passion, with their sheer black waterfalls of aggressive wildness that lash at all and any trees, and overflow the banks of belligerence to make new floods of swirling, mindless waters.

In China, the Red Guard have shown the heart of man, that civilisation's special remedies whether of Confucius or Communism, are on the one hand lifeless and helpless when the walls are down, and on the other, divertible to turbulence of blood and meanness of heart unspeakable, when the infections of spirit turn minds mad with the manners of sin, which never really had any at all, but often pretends.

In Germany, as if Europe might seek some repose in grandeur or superiority of some sort from such devastating devilishness, it had surging and even surfing waters of its own, on which the momentarily mighty enjoyed their power  in the tunnels of the waves which they created, while they watched the flood overthrow nation after nation, gassing and lashing the Jews, experimenting with their living bodies, treating them like cattle, taking even the gold of their teeth. Naturally, there was some more likely end in view; for Europe had civilisation more obvious and adjusted to the times. It was more industrial than China, more philosophically recent, more educated and more powerful. In particular, Germany was all these things.

Here came the holocaust, here the Hitler, here the rule of force, here the insane gamble to grab greatness and impose a philosophy which meant that some one race was superior, better adapted through the imaginary evolution, always protested, never invested with observable fact, principial possibility or evidential attestation. Nevertheless, this serene example of the Emperor's new clothes was worn by militant millions, who executed other millions so that Europe was a scene of metaphysical and idiotic ideology (cf. Secular Myth and Sacred Truth Chs. 1 and 7), masquerading as science, but in fact a mere molestation of its beauty (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., TMR Chs. 1, 8), and violation of its method; a writhing testimony of passionate madness, educated and philosophic, unbalanced and irrational, phantasmal but not in blood, in torture, in anguish, in agony.

In those matters, like the other 20th century madnesses of mankind in the mass, it was very visible, very practical, very observable. It was just that ...

It was this: that Heaven was not to be made in these terms.

They slaughtered and made light of it, in order to make much of the imaginary discourses that would anticipate the superman, which alas matter, untaught, cannot command. They made provisional hells on earth in the image of the celestial, having first demeaned this to the level that made beasts look benignant in comparison, devils their kin and myth their company. As they misbelieved, so they msconceived, and produced for many, an aborted generation, with fresh impetus of the mutant spiritual bacteria; and the more it changed, the more it was the same, tapping first this and then that other bacterium for transfer of the same level of communication, coded into corruption in advance. Their fruits comment sadly on their wisdom, the proclivity to create woe from blessing and war from peace, demeaning the truth and receiving their due reward.

In the meantime, with this obvious and predictable fact ignored,  with a routine disregard of other people and of the Maker of all, who was either as in Communism requested to go away quite formally, or as in the Nazi version, invested with imaginary features drawn from irrational philosophies of the god of power, a neat extrapolation from the wild confusions of evolutionism: the other possibility came up for view with some degree of precision.

What then was this ? Perhaps, if man was not making his own heaven with the Nature he did not make and which certainly did not make itself, and with his own nature, or part of it that was Aryan or liked hammers and sickles to reap men with some violence: perhaps if he failed in this, at least he could make his own hell ?

Not even that. The war ended and the price was paid in part by the USA in dollars after it, in part by the British in blood during it, and that of many, in part by the humiliation of Germany, whose philosophy tore out the heart of her power and make madness out of her strategies as at Stalingrad, where a sense of glory saw a few hundred thousand troops lost. It was paid partly by the degradation of Japan, which in the Burma railway affair, showed an inhumanity of which the beasts would be ashamed, a sort of devilishness of disregard of human life which had indeed become so natural to the power perversions of the energies of man, that it sat like a black diamond in a dark night in a deep mine, rather like so many other things.

War ? For its part it became a signal of spiritual defeat, a way of death grabbing out of the phrase way of life, its own conundrums and qualities. The love of self predicted, came to be seen in nations, tribes, races, all seeking the spectacular, many the oracular from their own mouths; and the ferocity, likewise predicted, sat like a mascot on the car of a General whose task was simple: Kill and take.

Even when The Shadow of a Mighty Rock was being written, around 10 years ago, the war situation was phenomenal, and in addition to the more specialised qualities we have surveyed in this chapter, there is the phenomenon of war as such, as predicted by Christ, which is on the one hand an outcome of these aggressive, dehumanised and godless thrusts in the spirit of man, and on the other, a detailed invasion of his spirit as to mode. BOTH being predicted, and each being illustrated in our account of the LOST BOYS, a short excerpt from SMR on this topic will repay attention in this setting. It follows (from Ch. 8, SMR).

In this last period, before the return of Christ (Matthew 24), the Gentiles (or 'the nations') were to have terribly troubled times, for their part. "Wars and rumours of wars" were to abound. They do so. They were to be the kind of things characteristic of the period: they are so; and this was to precede the visible return of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 24:24, 29-31).

As to wars (*l): since World War II (not to go back to World War 1 or forward to World War III, as Solzhenitsyn styled the cold-war period - or indeed to World War IV, as the Gulf War of 1991 threatens at least to stimulate), many wars have flared up in our time... a legion of them. They are rather like mines in the track of history, virtually impossible to avoid, at nearly every point on the way, often multiple at one moment. One result : Since World War II ended, 23 million are reported killed in wars; in 1992 alone ¹, 29 wars occurred.

Listed, they appear amazing for so short a period as the last 75 years and especially the last 50.

• If we consider the Boer War
• and then the Balkan wars,
• the World War and its regions of wars,
• the naval wars and the ground wars,
• the trench wars and the tank wars,
• the missile wars and their anti-missile components;
• the satellite enlistment of space, and the submarine use of the depths,
• gas war and radiation war,
• third world wars and second world wars and first world wars,
• and combinations,
• aids, blockades, assaults, terror warfare,
•  depopulation wars like that against Biafra or perhaps Afghanistan or the Kurds;
• Middle East wars,
• religious wars,
• Communist wars,
• South East Asian wars,
• Cambodian crushing wars,
• Baltic nation harassment wars as in Lithuania;
• cold wars, hot wars, medium wars,
• long wars, six day wars, 100 hour wars,
• trade wars;
• revolting, vexatious and disgusting blasts of evil
• and obscenely motivated, hate-ridden cannibalism, as attested by the Chinese patriot, Zheng Yi of the violation of the counties of Guangxi (Reader's Digest, August 1993);
•  internal wars as in 1991 amongst Russians, external wars as against poor Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956, 1968;
• wars on youth as in China (Red Army), wars by youth, as in China earlier (Red Guard),
•  wars of liberation that suppress, as in South East Asia,
• wars of starvation as in Ethiopia, even willing, it seems, to use aid to further the purposes of war;
• propaganda wars as of the Nazis, the Russians, North Korea;
• intelligence wars as in the code breaking by the Allies in World War II;
• technical wars, as recently against the insatiable Iraq,
• nerve gas wars,
• chemical wars,
• wars that ruin lungs, excoriate nerves, that remove cities, that transplant nations:

 

If, I say, we consider wars, we have had a swag of them.

There shall be wars, Jesus said in specifying the build-up of human inhumanity and inadequacy without the Lord, before His return. This too was to be a distinctive sign, nation rising up against nation: a time of turbulence, specific instability and hostilities (... a seething spirit of war cf. pp. 579-580 supra, 707-708). There is more.

It was, this prelude to His coming, assuredly data to be fulfilled, as predicted: moreover it was to be a time of "rumours of wars" also (Matthew 24:6-7).

As to rumours of wars: arms specialists and politicians treat us to ever new variants of possible programs of the military, the space or oceanic terror through various adaptations of nuclear bombs, the danger of missile gaps, or intelligence gaps, or technical leaps, or fifth generation computer break-throughs and so on. The popular media provide novel scenarios of possible wars, when actual ones lull for a little; or of developments in which more nations, perhaps very many nations - for this reason, for that reason, religious, irreligious, economic, defensive, precautionary, predatory - will be drawn into war. It is so now in 1992. Revelation 6:4 so predicted.

Memoirs now published show that Churchill was impressed with the concept of bombing out Russia's nuclear potential in 1948, while there was argument, it seems, in Russia, according to a very high ranking Russian defector, about bombing out China's nuclear strength (Shevchenko, Time magazine, p. 22, 11/2/85). Rumours and fears, scenarios and possible scenarios: these are not always without the spice of reality; but whatever the cause, they abound. They abound: exactly as predicted. Wars and rumours of wars as well: both characteristically abound. The character predictively given the Age for its terminal time, is the character it exactly bears.
 

Meanwhile the Middle East atrocities continue, youth traded for territory being one of the apparent follies of desire, the whole cauldron being a specific WITHIN a specialty, for as to spiritual disease, recent years, indeed the last half-century fulfils in Cold War caresses what the hot war failed quite to manage. Now that it has gone, Africa is in mortal flames of disease, pestilence the name Jesus employed predictively for this epoch, war and desolations of spirit and territory; Burma and Afghanistan are in repressive exactions, the latter specifically against women as noted earlier on this site; China continues its exactions on Christianity; Russia re-adopts the hammer and sickle and looks for glory while on foreign pay; Indonesia is riddled with violence, East Timor the site of horrors unthinkable, terrors ungraded.

While these things continue their grisly attestation of the truth of the predictions of the word of God, in their patterned setting (cf. SMR Ch.8, Answers to Questions Ch. 5), the Middle East crisis which has been one since the end of the last War, flares as predicted, a special contingent of war in a special situation with a special meaning, in this, that the UN has one idea and God is on record with another, His own plan. The Arabs also, of course, have other ideas, and they also have oil; but then, God made that too.

The advantage is with God, for HE MADE THE LAND, and the actors, for that matter; and when the Maker, who has not sold His product, specifies what is to be done with it, justice also makes its demands. God has various appointments with Israel, and has so far from forgetting them, brought them to pass in a series as predicted in the lifetime of this author, to an extent sufficient to arrest the soul, amaze the heart and evoke a profundity of pity.

These things we have considered in the preceding volume, It Bubbles, It Howls ... He Cries, but they fit here as a COMPONENT of the ferocity and wildness of the end of the Age, as part of the total and unique patterns of war, rumours of wars, restoration of Jerusalem to the Jews, wild heat there and elsewhere in a shambling degradation of man as he comes more and more to worship power and glory of his own making, which is both superficial and deadly, rather like other drugs. The final outlet of this devilishness is of course the devil's messiah, the antichrist. Aptly called the man of sin, the executive official concerned confuses himself with God in the end, in an hilarious imposture which is less so when deadly power is in the hands which move from such a heart! We have seen in the last 60 years, the foothills. THIS, it is the Everest, which does not, in this case, last long.

What does last is eternal life and eternal death. Why witless man, intoxicated with his wisdom till his own brightness corrupts and corrodes his mind into heartless delusions, should imagine that the God who made him does not see through him like a plate glass windows is a question more easily answered when one realises the nature of all intoxication. It leads to a divorce from reality, often brought back to the married life of actuality at a lamp post, in a prison or in a hospital.

Hell however is no hospital.

It is well that the Great Physician gave man liberty and love, both, and redemption as available by His own coming to the scene, which He then characterised, invested, and to which He lent glory of compassion and power on the Cross at Calvary; and that He is still available. Operations often make cowards of men, and procrastination can wreck; but this is one operation which is mandatory, repentance to life, return to the Maker, exemption through the Saviour, whose cost-bearing of sin and death, whose resurrection and attestation of eternal life are the axes of life.
 
 

*5  This may be done by theft of God's own creations, which we all are, confusion, the fruits of delusion and the shallow substitutes for thought that litter the globe, eviserating so many spiritually (Hosea 13:9), in the very face of divine deliverance, so cordially offered for so long, with such wonder and witness in profusion.