THE REGRESS OF PRIDE

The advance of mankind is spectacular indeed, notable, impactive and near its end.

It is advancing backwards, its engines roaring, with great enthusiastic leaps and bounds in the cockpit as the hi-tech thrust expands its potencies, ever honed, ever bursting with a sort of undivine rage, a contagion of clustering aims, to own, order, direct or possess the universe, and lord it over all.

Some want in addition to lord it over some of mankind as well, and act on that basis, sometimes as in Communism, by becoming unelected rulers without restraint, above law, but appealing to law as their basis, in a universe allegedly made of chance in one the most ridiculously self-contradictory concoctions of the fevered brow or intellectual desperados ever known.

It is one of these retrograde rockets that this constitutes, and frantic fiction that it is, it is by no means the worst antilogy; for if the contest were for the most disordered thought, the greatest piece of chicanery in consort with incomprehension, there would be many other entrants (cf. Aviary of Idolatry, Stepping Out For Christ Ch. 2), all gifted in their own particular premises. All have in view the infra-red technique to see in the dark, it seems, but lack the equipment; for in this darkness, there IS no light.

The gift of being liberated in order to oppressed in one of the greatest gimmicks of man; and it is the associate of pride, for when such ludicrous options for disorderly thought are invoked, it is always in the name of something MAN has invented.

This is the drift, whether the appeal be to 'Nature', which is merely the name for a set of componencies which are ordered and related, but do not make themselves; or to 'society' which is the name for a set of rules and procedures invented by man with the minds given to them; or to 'history' which is actually the name for the passage of time in the sphere where man's mind can reach, and has nothing to do with the its own creation, which involves the material, mental and spiritual ingredients, and their environment, at the hand of One competent to make such things, far above man, who is merely competent to use them. As to that, man is far the most competent of the array of visible designs, at that. In the nursery, indeed, some are better than others; but unfortunately it tends systematically to be forgotten, that they are all young children...

These processes are noted in Dastardly Dynamics ... Ch. 10 (slightly extended).

Others refuse to have God or gods, and so make themselves or the race into these things, by inventing ethics, inventing causes that do not exist or display themselves, and inventing life, and then living it. They do not succeed, even if they disclaim their goddishness, when acting as gods, but without the power or prerequisites of God.

You get it in biology, with survival playing creator, and chance authorising law (in oblivion of scientific method cf. TMR Ch. 1,SMR pp. 140ff.); you get it in psychology, with humanism’s crypto-divine powers surging from past to present with a meaning which needs the authority of religion for support, as Jung began to see (cf. SMR Ch. 4); in economics at its most expansive, with presumed passions of man hideously limited to one, and made to invent history as if the immaterial prioritisation of the material were in some way relevant to the truth; as in religion, with someone or other having some visions or other without support, validity or ground (cf. More Marvels Ch. 4, SMR pp. 1032ff., Things Old and New Chs. 9, 10, Epilogue, Appendix), and then directing the world with a bomb, or rockets, or a scimitar, or torture screws and so on.

ALL of these things are irrational, without possible validity, founded on the foundling, man without God, without meaning, seeking to surge into the artificially created vacuum with pretended and often pretentious solidity. They are one and all the simple expression of man’s perversion from God, into religious or irreligious objets d’art (metaphysical branch), which are proposed as if taste could invent truth, or preference become the matrix of life. Hence is explained their otherwise inexplicably tenuous, absurdly irrational, continually invalid premisses, which for men to follow without such passion, would amount to absurdity.

The rationale is not too difficult: To deny God is absurd; so finding a substitute, like hunger seeking for grass where no food is, impels man where neither reason nor truth can come; but where vacuity or cruelty love to linger.

What then of such magics and myths, one and all of them ? (cf. Secular Myths…, A Spiritual Potpourr), the metaphysical misfits (SMR Ch. 3), the slavering substitutes for truth, the divorcees from reality ? They do but exhibit in biographical form,

Both are sourced alike; each presents the same face; and neither has ever given nor could ever give man any rest. Denying causality, they use it in the very matrix of speech and logic; using causality, they truncate it, invoking what is delimited and defined as the basis for itself in a way horrendous to contemplate from a logical perspective, for invoking what bears the imprint of the made but not the generic for its genesis, to make itself requires its facility to that end, and this not being the evidential nature of the made, it is merely perfunctory mouthing

Coming from and in the severed frame built by God and for God, from that human life engendered by God, without God they engender gods, trying at times even to suppress awareness of the process itself, and at other times, exalting in prodigies of the irrational, as if mere movement where the idea of God was, must make it acceptable. It is like lost children searching for their parents. Now this adult, now that is seized upon with a zeal and with a hope wholly inexplicable, except for this, that they lack what they need, and being separated, do not find it. They do not look… in the right place.

Moreover, they affirm the truth that there is no truth with gusto; or the relativity of all things that admits no absolute with absolute assurance; and so continue in dark channels in the deep which adorn nothing more than the Extreme Fire Danger Index, if there were one, for the continuance of the race.

Advised of this, they strain to smile, but then wonder if after all an asteroid, or a virus, or a bomb of atomic kind, or a madness, or a martyr or something or other will impede their progress; as to that, forgetting that since it is moral regress, ethical evacuation and rational demolition, its impeding would in the end, be helpful, since it might postpone for a little, the certainly coming judgment day.

While then in these ways, Luke 21:25-26 is being fulfilled, and Revelation 8 with its apparent asteroid impact foretold, is being prepared for, the world continues to seek its own advance, its own name, the nations likewise, and the philosophers of science no less, all without God in the main, maintaining the impossible, adhering to the invalid and continuing in droves to maintain there is no such thing as abstract truth, while in their very affirmation they deny what they affirm.

And all this, it is merely the irrationalism, the Symphony of Alogisms, conducted often by the white-coated or black gowned Maestro of Myth. Myth ? the attribution of inadequate means as the source of a result, rather than severely adequate means, and that in an often incoherent substitute for the demands of reason. This is myth, precisely, inordinately, and continually in the pathologies of philosophy, for some 150 years now, almost pandemic in the arena of science falsely so-called, which makes something of a practice of welcoming this alien.

Like the howls of the dispossessed, myth is the attribution of a reason or ground or cause for something which does not match the need, and draws on magic, muddle or imagination without basis, for its 'solution' in its account. It does not find any source, but continues of course; it insists on its theories, but fails in its practice. Even if it could begin to act, it needs what is to be there, for the beginning of action, for nothing has little to do, and creation of anything from that basis is mere self-contradiction. Yet even what is there, does not co-operate or become self-contriving.

Myth ? It starts with desire, and ends in delirium, determined to find what does not occur, and to impress that into being, which finds no room for its existence. This is precisely what Naturalism does, seeking to make nature shriek out its powers to create itself (cf. Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 3), by all kinds of manipulation, but without any success whatsoever; for as it has manifestly declared through every kind of test, these centuries, it has power to be, not to make itself come into being. For that, neither the equipment nor the function is to be found.

As to that, it is an entirely different order of power. So man worships by myth, or if you like, attributes and seeks to find and attribute the power for the production of mind, matter and spirit to what is deficient in grounds for it; he wants the model without the master, and the material without the maker. Hence in myriad methods, he muddles into an abysmal murkiness of discontinuous thought, aborted philosophies and dismal proceedings, as his philosophies motivate his mind to things disruptive, dispersive and destructive of rationality, reality and truth.

These things we see in Dastardly Dynamics ... Ch. 7, as in Wake Up World! Chs. 4 -6.

Myth made man, then, is the litany, which is simply another way of avoiding the issue, ignoring the scientifically formulable realities (cf. TMR Ch. 1), pursuing the necessities of logic, ruling man by man and for man, and failing to find out what man is: the matter becoming a muddle of shadows in obscurity.

Hence it is a movement in the dark, using darkness for light, confusion for logic and litany for love. Perhaps it is the most forlorn alogism of all time; but then, it HAS to be a suitable preliminary for the antichrist and his self-adulation as if he were god, and this, it is nearly there already.

The point is that this is a pointer; and the point of the pointer is that if you insist on unravelling the chains of thought, then this is for you; but never utter the word logic, or the term, reasonable, or the idea of truth. Simply for the sake of, and on the basis of no truth, do what you are told, and become nice German Shepherds, fit to guard the heels of the antichrist, the man of sin, the man of unreason, the man of supreme, superb authority, whose death before judgment will undo the myth that he is god, as God has said in many ways before, and will show once more (cf. Ezekiel 28:9).

The ultimate pride is what refuses reality; the ultimate reality is what makes the made, the delimited, the defined, instituted. When this resource and recourse of Nature is grounded, rather than being made the ground for man, in the mind of man, then it is not God but man who suffers. Pride is not just a boasting of what one has done; it is a boasting of one's race for what it likes to imagine it is.

"You like to think you are someone, don't you ?" comes the childish challenge to some haughty kid. It is the same with mankind.

"You like to think you are someone, don't you ?" human race. Not all of it ? Of course not; this is merely an index to the drift, the dynamic and the industry of our time, where these oddities which do not cover the case for man, are ostensibly or even actually worshipped, so that man in his imagination becomes a part, a significant part, an originating part, an integral part of ultimate reality.

Then, despite his birth-death cycle, and his written constitution in his non-participatory DNA, he likes to think that in this case, he might as well start directing the universe. This is directive naturalism. However, the universe does not think so, and God does not think so, and man is directing billions of dollars into space in the hope that geometry will disclose the source of space: a rather vain illusion, since it is not the configuration but the capacity to have it which is to the point.

The antichrist thinking he is God, and showing himself that he is so, in his own proud pretension (II Thess. 2) is not so very far from the lusts of humanism, mysticism and arrogance. It is not so very far away, either (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5), in time for the advent of this event!

How very simple are the old morals when applied to the new look. Pride comes before a fall. Why ? It is because it is unrealistic, first of all. If you are not what you think you are, then, it is like a car which thinks it is an aeroplane. Now there is a special ingredient of aspiration and egotism in this; but there is also plain non-realism. If you think you are what you are not, there are going to be consequences, no less obvious and simple than would be the case if you thought a tin-opener was a bomb, or a comb.

Illusion MUST lead in the long run to suffering, inefficiency and upset; and where it is about WHAT YOU ARE, because this affects ALL that you do, not merely what you do by imagining a comb is a tin-opener, merely one particular case where you err: therefore the results may be expected to be rather more spectacular.

That is why it is so refreshing when we come to the multiply indicated, massively confirmed and singularly validated Messiah (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, TMR Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 1, 8, Highway of Holiness Ch. 4, Christ the Wisdom of God ... Ch. 8).

HE was humble. His actions were if possible, ahead of His words. You seemed to find His compassion by His SHOWING it more than knowing it, as an observer. It rushed like water from a spillway, rather than torrents thrown by a pump. It seemed natural, necessary, a fact in nature for man to perceive, glowing with a peculiar deliciousness, an abundance not dependent on ease, but unction (cf. Red Heart ... Ch. 5).

You saw His power continually as a fact of life, multiply applied to any sickness in multiplied masses of people, and with this came carefully presented claims as to the source of the power and the nature of His mission, divulged effectively to give glory where it was due, not to gain it. He humbled Himself to meet the simplest need, to praise the lowliest person (as in the case of the widow's mite), and met the might of the greatest with a severity and simplicity which left no room for manoeuvre. He overthrew them, without pomp, panache or privilege. Majesty declared itself in might, dynamic in deeds, beauty in truth.

He humbled Himself to the point of accepting mockery, suffering and death without the use of power to protect Himself, but rather with the power to continue to the Cross which had been adumbrated, predicted and divinely declared by many for centuries, including Himself in the flesh, in the preceding years before its time arrived. He did not indulge in selfish pre-occupations as He did it, but in a vast grief for those whose burdens He offered to bear (Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff.), and with willingness wrought to the uttermost at Gethsemane, He met the impact of what was to come, nothing less than the impact of the sins, vicariously borne, of all who would give them to Him (John 8:24, Romans 8:32, Isaiah 53:1-6).

"By His knowledge," as Isaiah put it, "shall My righteous servant justify many!"

How ? "for He shall bear their iniquities" - this was the word of the prophet, as of Christ (Matthew 20:28), of Paul (Galatians 3) and of Peter (I Peter 2).

That is humility, to do what it is yours to do, bravely, simply, securely, with depth and understanding, with duty and devotion, before God with love; and with Christ, it was greatly enhanced, indeed infinitely, for from God He came, where He had always been (John 8:58, Micah 5:1-3, John 17), to do the will on earth, in servant-form and formula, of His Father. As man subordinate in this role, by meekness and spiritual stature combined, He wrought all, and so was He given a name above every name, for ever (Philippians 2), not only by nature, but by His deeds, and this, not only by their performance, but by the preliminary process of being in a position to do them, even as a man!

There was with this meekness, a majesty, since to be able to do what no other man could do or has ever done, in myriads of cases in His life on earth, in word and in work, potent to heal the sick and overturn the words of the mighty alike, until His death alone could deliver them. It was no eccentricity that they murdered Him, but a necessity for their pride, their unrealism, of daring to continue in manipulative power in the presence of the predicted prince of peace (Isaiah 9). While they so moved, He continued yet to speak what His Father commanded (John 12:48-50), and attest that the Father did the works: and this was a beautiful melody to substitute for the harsh malady of pride.

This pride, atrocious and outrageous has continued to this day, and it is this not least which now afflicts the culture of unrealistic man, who seeks severance from the Lord, and hence the Saviour, since they are one: for no other one could bear the sin, being sinless, or take its magnitude from so many, being almighty. Disdaining, disjoining or divagating, they seek once more to leave Him whether in the new Constitution of Europe, in the UN, in the programs of power broking in governments, or in the heart of wandering man, more pagan in his bastions of power as even many churches are corrupted. Hence lacking salvation, man invites destruction, damnation, first for himself in individual rebellion, then as nations in competitive crassness and devious devices, then as a race, in corporate confusion.

While to be sure, there are accounts of some movements in missionary fields, the structure of power among the mighty on this earth is as holy as a sieve, as watertight as a pipe and as reliable as a riot. In Australia alone, December 23, 2004, statistics are offered in an article in The Australian, headed with ostensibly suitable ironic intonations, "God's falling from grace". In this, in which the first capital in the title may be given, perhaps, because it is the first word, there are indications of some kind, of trends.

Of course, the church attendance only starts to discover the realities, which involve changing churches in many instances, the Uniting and Lutheran drawing very close to Rome, new affiliations discovering new ties among many churches, including both of these, sharing of resources and the like, with decisive results. Thus the actual biblical faith, based on the word of God, the Bible, as infallible because HE is, and it is HIS, and man's opinions are infinitely less in worth, and man's actions are incomparable to His in relevance: this is far more vastly reduced than the above figures would indicate.

Man is becoming so fascinated with himself, that an observer gains almost the impression that this race increasingly expects, in increasing numbers, any god whom he may wish to contemplate in the midst of his multi-racial pride, to be lost in admiration. There is in all this, both in the development in sects and societies, false prophets and false christs such as the Christ predicted, a certain liberty to man, a certain licence, a pulse of power, a deadly dynamic, a sense of racing to a finishing line where, alas, the prize is doom, though few seem to realise it in the madding crowd. It is an inversion, not of temperature, but of temper; and man untempered seems to want first place, and to give to the author of system, the God of program, the inventor of human liberty, symbolic reference only, preferably in the case of Europe, where one can read in the new Constitution, BETWEEN the lines, inserting as one will!^*1

It is not new, this megalomania, now in multi-racial proportions, swallowing up much of the human race. Though of course millions may be free of it, there is a small percentage who are willing to take up their cross and follow him, not in falsetto pretension, but actual life! cf. Matthew 16:25ff..

It is seen now as in ancient Egypt, where we can observe a trailer, a preview of it, which is instructive – for it is like seeing a case of disease in an earlier patient, in order to realise the better the nature of the pathology which now afflicts.

Now we must turn to Ezekiel 29-32, for here is a case of magnificent similarity to that of the world today, and it is all interpreted, applied and completed in a form that has lasted for millenia.

To be sure, for Egypt, there is more to come (Isaiah 19:18-25); but the present ruling for some 2500 years is sufficient for our purposes of illustration! Egypt from the days of Ezekiel was consigned in conscious and profound contrast to its former history, to mediocrity, to being a 'base kingdom' (Ezekiel 29:14-15), and although it is not to be extinguished, as Tyre and Babylon were (cf. Pitter-Patter ... Ch. 4), it was given a continual edict of reduction from grandeur to ordinariness. This of course has happened, with many nations having control over it over the centuries, and not so long ago, Britain. In this way, Egypt serves as a prototype for the kingdoms of this world which are to become the kingdoms of the Lord, and of His Christ (cf. Revelation 11:15; and in their antagonism, even grouped, even led by the prince of darkness, the false christ, the devil's messiah, they will lose their leader, see their false prophet abased and be rendered inglorious, a wreck of pride and a vacuity of vanity, displayed for all and before all.

Let us then consider this ancient prototype, with its history, then future in the days of Ezekiel, but now in the past for our modern viewpoint, on display!

Egypt's relationship to Israel in ancient times is significant here, so needs to be briefly rehearsed. It was a land as is so profusely shown in many books, of much antiquity, culture, social structure and many gods. In the case of Israel, it favoured this nation greatly because of Joseph's amazing God-given gift of interpreting dreams; and in this case, it not only as it would seem, lowered the Pharaoh's blood pressure to learn the meaning of his dream from the Jew, Joseph. It likewise increased the nation's finances prodigiously, since the boom-drought sequence predicted in terms of the interpreted vision of the king, allowed both deliverance from the drought's stringencies, and wealth in the process to accumulate, as others bought the precious grain in the drought phase of the sequence. For this, following the word of Joseph, they were well prepared.

However, in due time, with a change of dynastic power, Egypt grew afraid of the multiplying Jews, set up in their fine district, and perhaps in a situation where in any case rebellion might occur on other grounds, they decided to curb the threat felt to be too intrusive from that nation still in Egypt. With cruelty and ingratitude in dreadful mix, they did what may even have been their own version of what Hitler later popularised (yes, he was far from the end of the oppression of the Jew cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 11, Defining Drama Ch. 10, Regal Rays of Revelation Ch. 1), as the 'final solution'. Such an approach to removal of a race is even now being noted of other peoples in a modern setting. Now thought is given as to whether the treatment in Sudan or such places, is actually planned as genocide. The question arises: Is it likely in the end so to discourage, decimate and debilitate a people that it is effectual genocide ? Hitler chose the direct method.

Egypt chose the indirect, it appears, or something so like it as to be exceedingly difficult to differentiate from it: hard work, hard taskmasters, hard conditions, and ruthless demands, such as making bricks without provided straw and keeping up the quota.

When Israel was called through Moses to leave their resort, the land of Egypt, to which famine had brought them, and which for its own part as well as for Israel's, had escaped the earlier shortages in their major impact, some centuries after they came, what was then the plight of that people ? It was this. They were severely oppressed.

What was the Lord's action as Pharaoh resisted the divinely directed call for the liberation of the Jews, indeed, rather their EVACUATION ?

in the midst of their oppression by the ongoing Egyptians, there was a display of divine dynamic which mocked Egypt's gods. There is an article in Creation magazine, Vol. 27, No 1, December 2004-Feb. 2005 on pp. 34ff., which itemises the correlation between the plagues which God gave an Egypt reluctant to surrender their Jewish slaves, and the Egyptian naturalistic 'gods, just as there was a similar work by Dr Harry Rimmer in his Frost series of volumes. There is a beautiful exposure of the worship of what are in fact elements of the natural system which God made, so that they become a source of affliction, whether flies or the Nile, or whatever other plague arrived. The very thing called sacred, became a plague!

In this way, the mistaken and misshapen worship became focussed as a place of bane, not blessing, and Israel escaped a wrathful and vacillatory Pharaoh, whose temper and unreliability to keep his word, both seemed of almost cancerous enlargement. Plagues successively bent the Egyptian desire to exploit, to manage, to control, the pride of attainment and the swagger of having its own will. It was so keen to have it, that even when the eldest children of Egypt were slain overnight, when the blood on the door, from sacrifice, demarcated those of the Jewish faith, who escaped, and they let the people go, more followed. In fact, the army of Pharaoh followed, but what did not follow was this: that they got their man, or in this case, their race. The sea opened as God used Moses, and closed on the pursuing Egyptians who lost interest in mortality, in their invidious pursuit. Death closed the door.

In this way, after long patience, God both delivered His people and rebuked their ungrateful oppressors, while deriding their naturalistic sympathies and occult exclusion of His own creation and salvation. He also humbled the might and right complex of the Egyptians, and their religious contrivances. They did not bite the dust but the sea-bed; but the effect was much the same, if anything, indeed, more inglorious, almost ludicrous.

Their puniness and their ineffectuality remind one of the fate of the Spanish Armada, after the soul of England, but blown by tempest and outmanoeuvred by smaller English ships. Thus many galleons went to Ireland, not for fun, but by virtue of impulsion from the storms! This, too, it was ignominious for pride, for pontification, for oppression of a religious kind, in a national setting. After all, in those days, kings could be directed by popes as to whom they should attack (nor is that time altogether so very long ago - cf. SMR pp. 921ff., 968ff.).

After Israel gained Canaan, some years after Moses, under Joshua, it too left the reality of God in the case of many kings, and priests, and allowed the worship of culturally near 'gods', those of foreign and idolatrous nations, to become part of its life. This reached a climax even in Judah, the more conservative section, in the days of Ahaz (Isaiah 7, II Chronicles 28), who in devious and simplistic waywardness, actually was guilty of bringing foolish emblems of still more foolishly misconceived gods to the Temple; and that of Manasseh (II Chronicles 33), who carried things further in literally sacrificing children to such illusory and mythical tokens of man's pride, ignoring reality and inventing gods. Like many, he acted in this as if his mental powers were to be used to invent what cannot invent, and deem this the inventor, or part of it. Nature gods are usurpers of truth, imagination spawning nonsense with vanity the bride.

Worse, children suffered torture by fire, so that the burning might be religiously attractive, their demise a pleasure to the foreign and evil gods to which Israel in spiritual inanity, now turned.

Thus there was a foolish tendency, when Israel came under threat, to seek help from Egypt, rather than from God, for gods were now in residence, and Egypt had many of them; and faith was low, and it was in this sort of escapade, not required!

Isaiah laughs at the mistaken folly, pointing out that Egypt itself was to be largely dismantled and assailed by the king of Babylon (Isaiah 30-31); and that it was in the Lord who had prescribed their salvation and its way, to whom they should be looking, not to the disgraced Egypt, or indeed to any mere component of nature of society in the world.

In Isaiah 30, accordingly, we find this prophetic admonition to the wandering nation.

Amazingly, such was the folly of a largely disbelieving Israel (in fact, the southern portion, now called Judah), that even after they had been demolished with such rigour and horror as Jeremiah shows in his laments in Lamentations, some of those left still desired Egypt. This time it was a matter of wanting to go to Egypt physically, not merely diplomatically; and in a perfect ecstasy of wilfulness, they used words of stiff resistance and callow incomprehension in asserting their unsurrendered wills to their own destruction. Like Pharaoh before them, they WOULD not be told, and they WOULD go to Egypt!

"Now all the captains of the forces, Johanan the son of Kareah, Jezaniah the son of Hoshaiah, and all the people, from the least to the greatest, came near and said to Jeremiah the prophet,

"And it happened after ten days that the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah.
Then he called Johanan the son of Kareah, all the captains of the forces which were with him, and all the people from the least even to the greatest, and said to them,

"Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, to whom you sent me to present your petition before Him:

	Fossils,
	micro-molecular data,
	cells’ structure,
	none support what is the most unscientific theory ever produced by man, that of organic evolution.
	Logic laughs at it,
	equipment is void of its necessities and
	delusive insistence replaces theoretical collaboration with the evidence.
	Scientific method is here in cardiac arrest.

	First, there is the fall from innocence, which means from simply knowing, loving and being friends with the Creator, who is Lord, Creator and King. That is shown in Genesis 1-3.
	Then there is the SECOND FALL, when the Saviour having come to earth, He is speciously and contrivedly captured and slain, slowly for good measure. That is in Matthew 26-27, for example. The first is the fall from innocence, and the second the fall from grace, or in the face of grace.
	The third becomes this, the final determination of the culture and dynamic of this world system to be the captain of its fate, forgetting the problem about 'fate', its own weakness, its obvious derivative status, and the madness of taking the lead when you are yourself led.