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Chapter 3

Angelic Friends and Adventurres

Little Angel was not immune to the normal functions of angelic life. Thus, having enjoyed the zealous interest of Junior Angel, he sought him out to speak further with him.

You seemed so aghast, he shared, at the actual outrages on earth and the lovelessness of the multitudes whose wills are invisibly bound to the will of the bounders, spiritual and human lords over their little, lost lives that I thought we could share some adventures together; for it is good to be reminded like this, of the state of man, since love for his missing life and desire for its restoration can inure one to his actual condition.

You speak like a book, said Junior Angel, somewhat notorious for speaking his mind; but as he would answer, Who else's mind would you expect me to speak, since this is the only one I have!

The reply one Very Senior Angel had given, was this: Why, you could try being invested with the mind of Christ, to which the Junior Angel, not knowing so much, responded, I will if I have a mind to do so.

At that, the VSA, being unargumentative by disposition, merely smiled, and said, I for my own part, wouldn't mind if you did.

JA was not annoyed at this, but appreciative of wit, pondered the saying, and in due time, realising the fact that Christ's atonement is for ALL THINGS, the Greek panta – if you transliterate, as if they would be panting for it, and so was softened, engaged and drawn towards Him.

Yet despite this open-heartedness of God,  as to the salvation in Christ Jesus, many do not even breathe for it, or in-breathe it for that matter. Far was this from being the case with JA, for he became reconciled to God through that same Saviour whose name is neither to be shared nor pared (Acts 4:11-12, Galatians 1, Hebrews 13:8).

This was despite the fact that he had not really thought it would be necessary to be reconciled, for he had no war with God, or with the salvation He provided: it was just that the thought of being a sinful angel held no real appeal for him. Did he not flap his wings with the best, speak his mind with clarity and aplomb, insist on truth, love righteousness ? but then, the thought began to seep in, For WHOM are you doing all this, and in WHOSE name do you flap, and flip your tongue about ? And he had to admit that it was in his own name, for he would say, who else has a name for me to use, and this being mine, I like it.

Self-satisfaction began to appear before him like a huge traffic-light, and self-sufficiency like an accident; and he thought and thought and began to realise that since he was not really self-sufficient, and was far from perfect in disposition, understanding, wise kindness and so forth (for he did not often dwell on his deficiencies, and even now was slow to ponder them long), he was a sinful angel. The very phrase annoyed his soul, replete with a sense of perfection, as if a tree in a forest were to live for itself, with only a generic sense of belonging.

Horrified he sought the Lord. I DO want my individuality, though, he had flapped his words out suddenly in the very presence of the Lord. If you TRY to save it, you lose it; if you give it up for MY sake, the Lord had seemed to speak into his very spirit, then you will find it indeed. Individuality is derivative.

How COULD it be ? he had asked. If I am derivative, what is so original about that ?

It is that fact that you have been derived, and are still YOU, the reply seemed to anoint his wings.

YOU can live for yourself, while even admiring the presence of God, or you can live for Him, while appreciating His life within you.

But if GOD HIMSELF is inside my spirit, is it not a sort of pawn ?

In fact, the response intimated itself to his spirit, you are a pawn to your own self-will, by which vision is occluded, understanding is minced and love is aborted. This your condition until you are friends with your own Maker, so that then and then only can spiritual servicing of your equipment of spirit and form be executed, while also your spiritual growth in wit and understanding can be undertaken.

Yet surely I am I, he argued, and if I belong to someone else infinitely more powerful yet wholly personal, I will simply be swamped.

It was then that he saw it. The Maker does not SWAMP what He cleans and loves, but services it, so that like a horse with its rider, it may be used skilfully and to the uttermost.

To be used ? Yes, used, but as by a friend who is father of spirits and king of eternity and has constructed him for a design and a purpose.

Ah then, he pondered, if I am to be used, is this the same as being made use of ?

Of course, came the intimated response, but for what ? Is is for exploitation of your so wonderful resources, as if God could not have wrought without you, who made you and all things in entirety without omission; or is it rather for the consummation of your capacities and the wonder of the relationship between you and your Maker, so that life being given, it reaches to the uttermost in individuality BECAUSE it is not cut off where it belongs, like a dead branch.

The real question, he then thought to himself, it is this. Do I 1) love God and 2) trust Him ?

To his amazement, he found that he did indeed trust God, but that he did not trust in Him. Oh, he wondered, am I becoming a prober, intent on fine points to no good purpose ?

No, came the voice in his heart, you are rather facing reality. You have a generic trust, with no thrust, for you would not ACT on it, so that it is a form in your imagination, not a fact in your life. This is about your institution as a living being, who can act because connected.

Then do I really LOVE God ? he asked himself. I do not know. Then he realised that there was only one real love in his life, it was 1) for himself as the being in view 2) for whatever he felt love for, as the being who disposed it here or there. This so shocked him that for the moment he was flabbergasted, though the term is translation only, since he had no flab, being a lean, keen angel in form; and then by a divine grace which descended like the dew on the morning grass, he bowed his head, touched his wings in seemly manner by his feet, and acknowledged himself a sinner who loved his Saviour.

From that day, he had not ceased to be outspoken, but he was held in a new love, saw a new truth and was a friend of the Almighty, reconciled by the atonement of Jesus Christ, available for ALL things, yes ALL, as Paul put it in Colossians 1, whether in heaven or on earth. It PLEASED the Father to reconcile all things, though all are far from reconciled; but now, the offer received, the plan conceived became the life abundant. It is like putting a hose to a tap, and turning it on. The structure is available; but until it is acted on, it might as well be a desert. Water does not flow, nor is any transfer made.

It was in fact just days after this transformation that Little A heard him, and it was the exuberance of a free spirit which had anointed the ears of the Little One with joy.

So they conversed.

Junior A had never visited the earth, and had such longing that Little A asked in prayer if that angel might be commissioned to accompany him. JA, summoned and exposed to an irradiance of light so intense as to be fearful, had his heart's desire, and was called also to visit the earth, with JA.

You know, LA mused as they were being transmitted to Earth in a thought capsule, man's creativity is such a staggering thing. He creates daily, has a thousand thoughts, imitates divine creations, though in lesser ways, makes vast space ships without the manoeuvrability of a fly, casts out piercing slivers of material in bombs, without the accuracy of the mosquito's weaponry, so precise, and seeing both in himself and in his world such a veritable prodigy of creation, he even goes further and creates thoughts within himself to the extent that he fools himself to think that creation is the last thing to think about when you come to the question, Where do I come from!

Rather he must have it that he has come from a non-creating nothing, or even a creative nothing, which is of course a sheer contradiction in terms, or that what is so defined, delimited and equipped with any laws to obey is a product of the absence of law, and as if what is so circumscribed, never had anyone to circumscribe it, and in all these ways makes of himself such a donkey that one must wonder when he will bray, just for good measure.

You mean, a stupefied JA responded, that he thinks nothing or nothing increate created, a nothing you cannot define except by the absence of anything and everything including a future ... or made what is so creative as to think imaginatively ? He imagines that imagination has NO source, and that thought has NO basis, when it circumnavigates the globe and seeks an answer to all things ? He has a process from nowhere and a system from nothing do all the works in order to avoid the fact that something which differs from nothing by the power and capacity shown in all that is produced, had to be there eternally in order to be available so to act ? or else logic is lost, accounting is defunct, science is obliterated and knowledge is nothing; and so is his theory with it!

Precisely that, replied LA. He imagines that law is from chance, form is from the formless, existence in delimited premises is a product of nonentity, that the spread of thought to comprehend it is from thoughtlessness and the analytical power to investigate it is from non-analysis as a basis.

But that! cried JA, it is sheer madness. It is to hypothesise in contradiction of the need, and to suggest answers which lack all the ingredients of answer

You are right in that, mused LA, but that is not the worst of it.

I think I know what you are going to say! interrupted JA. You will say that marvellously creative people like artists and musicians are just as bad, and do not see the creator God in their own investment with this creative capacity which thrills in them like running waters, and broods over them like stormy clouds, and are going to reflect that here is ingratitude and ineptitude mixed...

Not at all, interjected LA, for it in some ways the very opposite that I myself had in mind, though the point you make is valid enough. It is this: it is scientists, not all of course, but probably a majority, who say such things.

Yet that is in the most precise violation of scientific method, cried an astounded JA. You are supposed to deal with KNOWN principles, like that of creativity, and KNOWN laws, like that of entropy and the degradation in any closed system such as the universe, the decrease of specificity, as energies become increasingly unavailable and form less specialised; and you are meant to provide ADEQUATE and APPARENT hypotheses, which need special investigation, but are close and allied in some intimate way, by all appearance, to that for which you are trying to give account.

They do, of course, continued LA, the precise opposite to this in all counts. By some amazing miracle of muddle, they still call, those who act like this, the thing they do - science! They IGNORE the known principles of creativity, which they even use in their own lives continually, they CONTRAVENE the known laws, and call on unexampled, unprincipled, unallied imaginary means in contradiction of logic itself, so that what lacks the qualities in view, as such or as basis, becomes the source, 'nature', and what has them, the Creator of form and law and matter and man,  is excluded.

That should be enough to stultify their predictions, create storms of contradictory ideas in their theoretical schools and make a vast hole in forward research concerning the nature of creative development within what the Creator has made, according to the potentialities to be found in each sort of thing. Is that not
so ? JA asseverated in his interrogative manner.

That prediction of yours, mused LA, is very good. indeed, it is fulfilled in each part. Predictions about missing links have become the laughing stock, some of their greatest scholars, without being evolutionists noting these things (I saw something about this in SMR pp. 199ff., indeed in the last chapter of this book about us - makes you feel public, but it's all in a good cause, and in The gods of naturalism have no go!), while one of them Stephen Jay Gould, has been asking how to explain the fact, as he presents it on research of deep rocks, that design was greater in KINDS at an earlier stage - he thinks near the first - than now; and another famed academic asks, How is it that we seek to explain advance in biota when decrease is the rule!

Indeed, I remember from my earlier studies one interesting case. Dr Gary Parker in his Creation: The Facts of Life, p. 91, notes that in the Cambrian System, the "Trilobite Seas", there are found "almost all the major groups of animals, including the most complex invertebrates, the nautiloids, and the highly complex trilobites themselves." How ungradual can you get! How creative must the source be for such explosions! That, it is the very manner and spirit, mode and matrix of creation!

Small wonder, and not entirely ineptly, Stephen Jay Gould asks this question of the Cambrian "explosion" (Wonderful Life  p. 227):

“HOW... COULD SUCH DISPARITY ARISE SO QUICKLY...
HOW IN HEAVEN'S NAME
COULD SUCH DISPARITY HAVE ARISEN IN THE FIRST PLACE,
WHATEVER THE FORTUNES OF ITS EXEMPLARS ?”

You know JA, I studied this sort of thing last time, and to find a hard-headed evolutionist asking of the failed system which so many for so long clung to as a sort of island on which to escape God, How in HEAVEN’S NAME could such an exact opposite of verification come! ... it is gravely amusing. It is, you see, literally true. It is in heaven’s name that heavenly things came, such as inspiration, understanding, rationality, design and purpose, easy and integral thrusts of things so that not only types, as has been noted, but whole groups of sub-varieties of these types, arrive with all the slick ease of a painter making a masterpiece in a day! It is only a matter of power and adequacy for the thing in view. It is quite easy for a bull dozer to destroy buildings in one day, since it has what it takes to do it. On the constructive side, it is no less true: Heaven did it.

So where is the problem ? The problem is pride, irrationality, autonomy, lust for power, disintegration of personality with such enormous pollution, devious dynamics of life, total contest with God in never-ending defeat, a mere prelude to hell for many.

Heaven has shown the outline of HOW it did it, WHY it did it, in what SETTING it did it, with what PROVISIONS for error it did it, should man fall as he did, and with what divine actions God would correct what was fallen, but never by force. That has been exhibited for millenia in the Bible. It sings it, it parades it, it presents it, it intimates it, it predicts it, it revises retrospectively the fact that it did it, it accompanies it with predictions of little things, vast things, near things, far off things, of the coming of the Saviour, of the very date of His death, of His rejection by His own people, acceptance by many of the Gentiles, of the meaning of His atonement from centuries before He accomplished it.  It casts its net over nations for millenia, and history as a mantle - and all this man passes over, like a hang-over.

They ignore the total conformity of empirical fact to divine diction, insist endlessly in inventing ever new, illogical abortions, contrary in KIND to scientific method, the Bible alone in its presentation meeting all the evidential criteria, and lament as they fail, and even express as here amazement at the utter magnitude of the disaster of their hapless and irrelevant hypotheses. They divide into camps, none satisfied.

This too, just as you suggested must happen from such confusion and illegitimacy of method, it has happened.

The schools of evolutionary thought war on each other, just as do the aspirant and pride-maddened nations military. These schools lampoon each other, and small wonder, since people who are wrong, like a class of rather inept mathematics students, can tear to pieces the wrong answers each gives; and when you put this in a tertiary level, then you have the biological 'schools' which war. So the predictions of such theoretical nonenities are like jokes, that are not only failed, but falsified in KIND, in direction even; the laws ignored have special barristers to make them look better, though they are contradicted without evidence, and teaching proceeds dogmatically on the basis of what is never seen to happen.

Indeed, such teaching is cut in pieces not only by contra-prediction nonsense, verifications being negative almost as a matter of course, as shown by Gould, but there arrive anti-verifications in the grand manner. This is not surprising, in view of the fact that this sort of result is precisely what the laws of science indicated in the first place, which these hypotheses transgress with a sort of divine right which, being anything but divine, seems rather a devilish usurpation. You get this sort of thing in TMR Ch. 1, I believe.

The creativity of the creation of man's creativity rarely seems to occur as requiring a creative source, with thought and capacity beyond man's as the master's beyond the pupil. Similarly,  the fact that this basis is not only independently attested by the power of the word of God to produce ALWAYS PRECISELY what it says in empirical, historical fact, but is in precise accord with all scientific laws, and all empirical facts, such as the systematically huge gaps between major living categories, as G.G. Simpson puts it. Such mere unique fits are disdained.

WHY ? asked JA, can they be so foolish as to depart from all their principles, methods and data, breaching their own laws, and ignoring the available and vividly obvious paths of creativity, imagining in ever new whorls and whirls of creative thought, things that never happen, could not happen, have no reason to happen and are against all reason, should they happen ? Here we have the marvellous trilogy of reason, empirical evidence and anti-verification of what offends scientific method, and the only thing such professors of science can do is pursue the forbidden, eat the offal of failure and marvel that they cannot find the truth.

One should have thought that rather obvious, sadly contemplated LA, but I can understand your amazement, which I have shared long enough.

Frankly, JA, though I am so little, yet LIVING is such an education.

It is

	when you have seen and heard what they do on Earth, even sacking or threatening to sack honest teachers who do follow scientific method because their authorities think  it is not convenient to do so for cultural reasons, or cannot abide evidence hostile to their theories or for whatever other unscientific reason;
	It is when you have let the enormity of dishonesty or confusion involved, splay itself like surf against a wall, within your spirit, and have tasted the self-assurance of such opacity of wrong-headedness:

it is then there comes a time when you rather expect it.

In World War II, they had people called Nazis, which meant in the end that the English and German races came near to exterminating each other (above what they had done already when the German Kaiser became obstreperous in Europe), so that the Slavs had a chance to grow strong and threatening, while being helped internationally, the Japanese thought to extract results and the Middle Eastern states become bloated a little later with oil money and started hurling themselves into power play.

While this passionate devastation went on, and pride's racial and rampant rush for supremacy, aided by evolutionary nonsense, sent in its accounts, the usual prelude to a fall, it was this Nazi Party which gave us some instructive exhibits.

Before this destabilising and devastation was complete, that Nazi Party would take millions of Jews and exterminate them, removing gold from their teeth, severing pity from their own forceful minds and all humanity from their devilish desperation. They experimented, by report, with the bodies of Jew and Russian, and their atrocities led to a vast War Crimes trial later on, which is a mere shadow of what is coming when God institutes HIS OWN trials and judgments at the end, not of this only!

If then you had begun to grow accustomed to the conduct of these Nazis, desperados on mission, oblivious of facts, inhuman by an evil transformation of spirit, activated by folly, blown up with the gases of poisonous philosophy, flapping flags of horror dressed in uniform, evolutionary pride of race combining with lust for power, place and privilege: would it surprise you, really, on some succeeding day, to see someone else dressed in that uniform, displaying just those qualities ?

I don't suppose it would, if ever I saw such things! replied JA with a look of mingled horror, contempt and awe. I suppose that the more amazingly rank a thing is, the harder it is to imagine the type departing from its accursed norm.

That is how it is, then, continued LA. That is a parallel in terms of pride and obduracy.

Now there is our present case. Grabbed by a dream, sent on an evil mission, many on this earth insist on indoctrinating the young with their myths, concepts contrary to all known activity reality, and to all empirical science, to all logic and to all verification, and constraining the tertiary teachers by varied rewards and punishments, so that the myth continues, they are creating a sort of Auschwitz of Academic Atrocity.

Auschwitz ? That sounds like a combination of awe and witch ... ?

It does indeed, and it is the name of one of the concentration camps - places in which they would crowd victims in order to torture them, experiment with them, humiliate them, exploit them, starve them, work them, one or all of these, until they were dead or so near to it, that it would seem, if you saw a survivor, as if death had taken legs, though the walking was then most doubtful!

What sort of a degeneration will replace the new Generation, then ? asked JA.

 I pose as no authority, said LA, for I am but a Little Angel; yet it seems to me that it will become even more obsessed with the exploits of the trade of survival for survival's sake (they have the idea that it is good to be tough and survive, forgetful that this merely continues what is. It does not create what is not, as one of their eminent scholars pointed out -  a man called Schützenberger); it gives no benediction to evil for good's sake and extermination for progress' sake, nor does it endorse their delusions, as if every thought of wisdom and knowledge had been permanently banished from their heads!

As to that Parisian professor just mentioned above, and his researches, I happen even to remember the page, it was in SMR - around 157.

Ah! the mental zest of the young! cried JA.

It is just that I immersed myself in some of their literature, continued LA, and I WANTED to do this, since what I saw spiritually, made what happened in Hiroshima physically, almost seem like a pleasant beach holiday. Atrocities of the body are horrendous, atrocities of the spirit on the young, these are a galaxy for grief.

Hiroshima ? queried JA.

It was the place where a city was virtually wiped out, in Japan, by a new bomb which explodes the energic content of matter into impactive force, so wiping out almost any material thing. The stuff having been made, can be unmade.

But why did they do that ?

Oh, Japan had swooped down on US ships at a harbour, Pearl Harbour, ironically enough, and had perhaps the idea that not having declared war, but merely taking out such power in one stroke, they might win a war.

But why did they want a war ?

Oh, it seems they felt they had some superior notions or race or religion or power or combination, and at the best, some wanted to dominate nearby Asia, strictly for its own benefit of course, and have one nice happy family with the Japanese like the father.

But isn't that what Hitler was trying to do with the nice race, if rather more brutally ?

It was his idea of the Aryan race, yes. As to the 'more brutally', I don't really know about that. The Burma railway which prisoners of war had to build in World War II is reputed to have exhibited a brutality which would make some blush to be human.

Why only some ?

But do you not realise, JA, that humans though one in KIND, with the same DNA structure in their cells, effectually one language for the creation of new bodies and brains, as from one Author, along with a typified system for use as human beings, yet have their in spirits a liberty to be at war with reality? They can war against reason, against God Himself; and do you now see that when one is at war with God, there is virtually NO LIMIT to the madness which results.

Oh I suppose I should have realised that, because some of the angels became crazed about the Satan and had to be cast out of heaven - I read about that in Revelation 12.

Yes, their ideas are more spiritual, but not better! It is all a matter of spirit, even if in the case of man, they deploy bodies in the process, torture them, taint them, pollute them, and make a sea of trouble for their disordered factories for action, and those ? they are their own physiques.

Did I not hear that the devil is deploying dynamic on the earth right now in order to seek to make the internalised madness of man, on false missions for his own glory, vainglory, delusion or confusion, to become available for his own DIRECT rule, so that he as a prince could control this Earth ?

You see something of that in Ephesians 6 and John 14:31, I John 5, and it is so; but he has a real devil's nest there, for man's personal madness when he seeks his own glory, infatuated with 'nature' as if it were something or almost someone, for they often talk of it foreseeing or striving or inventing or filling a need and so on - as if appetite were food! as if need were the same as meeting it: it is not readily attuned. This can be so frustrating to a systematic spirit of evil. To be himself, herself, this is a passion with millions,

What can the devil do ? He cannot rebuke their evil, since he is evil himself; and he cannot direct it, since they seem to love an imaginary autonomy, as if doing exactly what they please, and calling it right or acceptable, altered birth, death and payments ...but he is trying!

He loves aggregating power, just as some kings did, making archbishops very popular, since there is a LEVER for control; and so he delights in hierarchical churches, a monstrosity against Christ in Matthew 23:8-10, and I Peter 5, and the entire reality of power in the kingdom of heaven. He loves empires, so that he can control the Emperor, a singularly easy task - by comparison with many other options.

He loves best of all an empire, call it a Union, with a control over all the aspects, religious, social, military, financial, so that then he has only to TILT the tide and before long it comes surging in just as he will.

ONE, this is the aim, and the devil wants to be that one. SInce God is the One who created, will judge, whose word is truth, the devil's meretricious pretences involve endless conflict. He hopes no doubt through fear and catastrophe to humble man at last, and domineer internationally - using of course a man as the puppet, a sort of devil's messiah, but not very bright.

What an Earth! LA, cried an astounded JA. I rather marvel at your courage in revisiting it; for although you have one advantage, in that you have no physical body that they can touch, yet you have a spirit which they can wound.

True, but God is a wonderful Physician, and as I pour my heart out to Him, He heals, He hears, He answers and it is almost a pleasure to be pained, since the restoration is heavenly, and is full of meaning and love and compassion.

I suppose the human people who are good ...

No, no, JA, there is none good, not one, as Paul cites in Romans 1-2, in that great treatise on sin. They are all born in sin, even David, one of the most beautiful members of the race, himself admitted in Psalm 51. It is only by acknowledging the damage that they grow ready for the restoration. The ones who acknowledge it, and desire an end of it, and regret it, pained and horrified, and seek the Lord, and finding by His Spirit the antidote, which He Himself applies, these are new formed beings. But good ? They are born in sin and need to both redeemed and refitted, and surely they are transformed, but yet none of these is yet perfect on Earth, though they are new creations.

How amazing JA! You mean the creation did not finish after six days, after all ?

Oh no! THIS creation is RE-creation, a doing over again, a restoration to the former condition, though of course there is memory of sin, of its cancellation and experience of the victory over it which this power of God in their very hearts provides, together with an assured eternity now. You find this in Colossians 3:10 and I John 5:11ff..

How do you know so much scripture LA ?

Here LA had a problem again. How COULD JA be a Junior Angel when he seemed not as versed as some Little Angels were, in the scriptures ?

I just study it, replied LA, but I suppose you must have specialised on some of it ?

Oh yes, Daniel and Revelation, Matthew and Isaiah were a special field of mine.

I see, responded LA, I am so glad, for it is always valuable to have deep knowledge in some things.

But JA, I find that if I do not have a substantial knowledge, at least, of all of it, I am in danger ... well you know what it is like when people are witnesses of an accident. If only some of the parts of it have been seen, then a false decision is too possible. You need a good coverage of all the aspects.

Of course you are right, my friend, said JA, and I should be delighted if you would point me to some of my still deficient areas, while perhaps I could bring more to bear for you, things on the specialised front.

Done, a deal! chortled LA.

At that moment, they exited their thought capsule and found themselves on a beach.

A vast wave reared itself above them, so that abandoning caution, they flew 200 feet high in a moment, and watched an appalling devastation beneath them.

This, cried LA, was an area I was planning to visit. They have a false religion which they were applying here with considerable force and danger to Christians, with harsh laws called sharia, and it was my hope that I could start a movement of return to reality here, and that churches might be planted newly here and
there.

Stunned, they watched as the waves surged in massive, mad-seeming, teeming violence, as if a monster were eating trees, smashing houses like bits of steak, and smashing the littoral without mercy.

Gliding back in time and space, they watched the beginning near the top of Sumatra, and saw how a heaving earth could make such a splash and crash as to kill 200,000, and they found that perhaps the earth wobbled, just a little, and time of day change slightly. What, though LA, if the bloodied waters of Revelation 8:8 and on, if these were to become bitter with the impact of some asteroid or other
heavenly body on impact on the earth ? what if the waters of one third of the earth were spoiled,
as there indicated ? How simple would this seem by comparison!

How mad is man to inhibit holiness, deride reality, ignore creativity and its Creator, assume language and law and logic and system comes from its absence, reality from nothing to the point, and passing by the God who made both the wonder that is man himself, and the marvel which is his world and universe, to allow scope for rebuke! What if the due removal of protections, orders and spheres of influence proceeds until the world moves backwards towards dissolution, so that they might know the kindness they scorned, and find by absence, the wonders they despised! What if it takes even this to move some to reality and others to cease from godless scorn and meaningless theories, in which truth becomes the topic and its absence is the presupposition!

These were the thoughts of LA, and he shared them with JA. After dwelling on it all for a time, the latter was deeply moved.

I tremble for man! cried JA with a bitterness of spirit, as he saw such devastations. The whole world asked for this, and whoever is most to blame, it is Jesus who pointed out that ALL are at risk, if unrepentant to God Almighty, who sent Him, the Truth to our globe, not from space, but from the creativity which made space, God Himself on earth, they do not even BELIEVE Him!

Yet they talk of 'nature' gone mad and so on, in the breath before, talking of 'Mother nature' as if she were a person, and ignoring the One who is!

We shall, I fear, see greater wonders than this, if we stay long here, advised LA.

Should we stay ?

Of course, since we are sent.

I am just beginning to gain a better perspective, responded JA. If WE, who have so little to lose, being relatively minor creations, can sense the awesome horror of judgment in our midst, by a visit to earth, what must it have required in courage, character and ...

And love! continued LA.

Yes, and love ... for God to send not an angel, not even a VSA, but His only begotten Son, straight from His eternal realms in creativity, through incarnation to this earth.

How much more then, my friend, to send Him to a specialised death, called the crucifixion! As you and I have been pondering the miscreancy of man, in theories, in deeds, in hatreds of truth and of each other, in vainglory in empires and the like, in multiplied murders of reputation, of academic posts, of each other, and have looked at the sheer pit of soot which man invites to become the environment of his soul, his life, his future and his nature: it is no more hard to see why Christ had to die.

Some are too 'good' to require such a death, in other words, too blind to see their own cheap self-sufficiency, their own lack of perception, their own arrogance of self-appraisal, as if the student were his own examiner; and these of course are just like the Pharisees of old, whom Jesus most justly rebuked as in Matthew 23, and Paul exposed in Romans 10.

These are like cancer patients, too good to need an operation. And yet some would even dare to blame God for the eternal penalties of the damned, as if past this mode of time, their arrogant folly in presuming to be their own spiritual auditors should be ignored, and their pride should be made an absentee, their clinging pollutions a non-est.

It is always the same, mused JA, isn't it, with men; and I am afraid that my own life was only spared by the most minute degree, through a grace so infinite that nothing could prevent it, for I was so dead to reality that I simply could not see at all any need to be better or different from what I am, at first.

How is it always the same ? pursued LA.

They will shut their eyes, whether to creation, to their being miscreants, to the nature of this world, of life spiritual, physical, moral, and blow themselves away with the sheer force of wilful enterprise.

It is rather like that tsunami, that tidal wave, is it not ?

It is indeed, for their disordered lives allow such intrusions which destroy what did not bother to state or heed  clearly the risk. Indeed, as for the tsunami,  some state that it was for commercial and tourist reasons that the risk was minimised, and one of its major scientific, meteorological predictors was not heeded. If so, the price is not slight.

How like that is to man in his spirit! He does not like to face his risks, indeed his calamitous certainties, because such words remove some of his glamour of soul, pride of life, disposition for self-sufficiency and the myth of his survivor's skills; and so hell becomes his home.

He is beginning to find something like it on earth, a great mercy, since this is temporary; but that is the end.

Their gaze rested on the twisted relics of humanity's civilisation, and they wept, being the more determined if they could, to warn others, not of impending waves, but of the violations which meant things worse then these; for here temporary life, never able in itself to endure, is lost; but there eternal life, through pride, perjury, wilful deafness and deadly indifference, is what vanishes away.