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CHAPTER 5

THE GRIEF, THE GOODNESS AND THE JOY

News 286

The Advertiser, September 18, 2003

THE LONG GRIEF

The Jew has long had grief. The Gentile has joined in a queue for more, and more and yet more. Since the British Empire dissolved itself, despite Churchill's apparent disinclination for it to do so,  and since Europe has largely united itself (as he commended), despite its repetitive disinclination to do so, and so fulfilled the biblical picture for the pre-Christ coming situation, and the phases of the finale of anti-God rhetoric and humanistic releases of ever more ludicrous lords (as if Hitler, Mao and Mussolini were not enough): there has been grief.

The Jewish instalment has reached its climax already with such vultures as Hitler's Himmler and (if possible) worse architects of butchery, such as the now judged Eichmann; and the sunset of that European madness might seem to have  arrived, the culmination of centuries of rapacity and ruin inflicted on Jews by the least of lords and the worst of tyrants, including that destroying agent daring to use the name of Christ, Romanism in its Inquisitions (q.v. cf. SMR pp. 946ff., 1032ff.). This devastation for the Jews mentality now lapses a little, but not without some fanfare of fantasy clad in Arab robes, and Islamic turbans. After all, it was not for want of trying that Nasser did not fulfil the then popular crusade to place the Jews in the sea (better than gas ovens, but not ultimately so very diverse after all, in result). Result ? What is in mind here is the INTENDED result; the actual one was that Nasser was snouted and the USSR as his patron ... well, not saint but base, was flouted.

But the EFFORT to ELIMINATE the Jew was there. It did not work at birth (1948), nor in 1967 with Russian tanks. Ah well! The endeavour was there. As in Primary school, A for effort! Then the marvellous idea to attack them on a Holy Day, in 1973. It does not really matter too much, you see, in world eyes, because it is only the removal of the Jews. You do not need to have too much world intervention or red eyes in the UN. After all, in 1947 it was about to give a shallow sprinkle of grain to the Jewish chooks (to use former Premier Bjelke Peterson's beloved sobriquet for reporters), bits of land here and there, and to internationalise Jerusalem. Enough said!

However the US helped Israel then, and the effort to remove the Jew from the land was not merely thwarted, but this in magnificent style, the Egyptians who with others seemed to make a sort of habit of wanting to inhabit the Jewish territories being forced back, the former beyond the Suez Canal. The point is, the world did not cease at least to TRY to subdue the Jew: it was just that it was not nearly as successful now as was Hitler, that peak and epitome of anti-semitism, land grabbing and the other paraphernalia in hand.

On the other hand, it is to be confessed that Hitler, as you see in that excellent coverage of Carlton J. H. Hayes "Contemporary Europe Since 1870", was really in the box seat, surrounded by capitulation like so many bouquets of flowers sent to an opera singer. Yes, use our land, take our port, avail yourself dear Fuhrer of our provisions, condescend to walk over our land. An  alliance ? but of course. The world
indeed seemed at his feet, France falling in that fiasco, the Maginot Line, taken  from behind through Belgium, Italy delighting in joining in the oppression, Japan licking its Pacific but not pacific lips in increasing admiration of the methods of preventing intervention in the East, because of the furore of Hitler in the West, Poland divided between jackboot and bear, before the former thought that bears were unbearable and invaded Russia.

If now the suggestion of Molotov concerning a division of things with Hitler had seemed agreeable to
the crusading German, what might have been ? Hitler however, in the providence of God, became, after one of the most prodigious deployments of lightning force and military crusades in history, dissatisfied. WHY should the bear impose on him! So does pride ruin the greatest prodigies of strength, and passion- wed illusion to produce the children of want ? Meanwhile the pressure on the Jew continued, rose,  mounted, factories of death became the palaces of racial purity,  and for reasons unknown, purity became Aryan, the latter German; and the illusions of unreality proceeded to destroy, as God indicated would be the case, in a lust for Jewish bodies almost unparalleled in history, and certainly in necrotic numbers per annum.

This was indeed the "day of Jacob's trouble" (Jeremiah 30:7), which is the clear and in fact explicit prelude to the coming of the King, the Messiah, to rule in glory - not OFFER to rule, but RULE! This is the 'glory' of which Christ spoke, which had to succeed the suffering phase of His ministry (Luke 24:26), and not even the most cunning contrivances of misdirected 'theology' is able to abate it! As was the suffering (and who would believe that!) so the glory (and few will believe that); but they all come. The word of God goes out, and the history comes in: as in fishing, when the line is out, seemingly far from anything, but then the pull, and the drawing and the fish. It is not an epoch but a 'time', and this is one of its characteristics, that Christ is to rule. It is as in Jeremiah 51:6, when Babylon's 'time' is come! There is a divine timer and it times, and when the time comes, it is here.

Christ's time on earth was some 33 years; the time of the Babylonian exile was 70 years, that of the wandering in the desert on the part of unbelieving Israel, 40 years. It is a characterisable period in which elements are citable. As to the time of Jacob's trouble, there is "none like it". It is categorically unique. In "that day" (30:8), various things happen. One of these is that Israel is liberated from being trodden underfoot, as implied in Zechariah 12, when its capital is all but universally SOUGHT by others, but KEPT for them, the people whom God has designated, amid the triumphs, the pageantry and power, that is triumphs amid other people's pageantry and power, those victories on the part of mini-Israel in the face of maxi-Gentilic incursion, that God foretold. Israel, like a slender mist, passed through the avalanche of thundering snow.

Another feature of this day is the coming of their King to rule. Their king ? THE KING, for HE is the king of the nations and is to rule ALL as emphatically declared endlessly in the Old Testament script for the people of God, to whom He promises the truth concerning their history (Amos 3:7), a thing abundantly fulfilled. Look then at Psalm 67, at Micah 4, at Isaiah 2 and at Romans 15:10,13 with the Isaianic citation there from that prophet's Ch. 11, and that from Moses in Deuteronomy 32, if you can spare the time from Micah 7, Hababkkuk 3, Joel 3.

THE SHORT SUMMONS

Since 1967, Jerusalem has been unbound (cf. Luke 21:24), a NECESSARY and EXPLICIT prelude to the coming of Christ. Israel has it now, and has had it since then! The Gentiles have had their day, and its midnight is near. Arabs, then, are not lax in their EFFORT to exterminate the Jew, take his land, complete the day of Jacob's trouble, so unexampled, undertaken so massively by Hitler. It is merely that they, for all their allegedly almighty Allah, they are not nearly so successful. There was supposed to be a great slaughter and there was; and a great diminution of the vast desire to grab Israel again, and there is.

What then of the jihad against the Jew ? They bite, they snarl, they make multinational trips to exterminate Israel, they pretend 'poor Palestinian', and use the arms and money of many nations to crush the Jew, having a convenient Quisling arm within Israel, Palestinian Place, a nicely placed assassination launching pad for that splendid European pastime of yore, so great among the great for so long: that fabrication of phonies, that assault force of anti-semitic hatred, that dastardly device of the deluded.

They pay in squalor and in blood; but they seek more, more, like some dope addict. They cannot stop, for as their lore has it, the restoration of Jerusalem to the Jew, of the land to that people is 'the catastrophe'; and our so very dear United Nations tries to help them, as if a new Hitler were in numbers now, and a new 'final solution' would take Jerusalem away again, and divide the divided land, with rapacity and round tones alike, destroying the gift of the League of Nations, abrogating the decree of post-World War I with the conveniences of post-World War II.

Now the USA to its perilous folly, proceeds to seek to help the UN to do its fell work. To be sure, it seeks to protect the Jew to a point, refusing some ludicrously styled moral talk from Palestinians who REFUSE to be done with murder as a highway, refuse Abbas, refuse the power to suppress terrorism; and the UN does not seem fazed. It must merely help the Arab more, to take more from the Jew who was given less than the Arab when Palestine was divided, instead of none, as provided internationally, and that provision, it was by Britain in particular. So does the anti-semitic folly continue - although with less success than in the day of the Inquisition, and of Hitler, in Europe's ampler past - now in the Middle East, with UN and indeed EU participation.

As the book of Jeremiah proceeds from the nadir of the Jew however, in the day of Jacob's trouble (cf. The Biblical Workman Ch. 1), to the zenith for the remnant (cf. Isaiah 11:10, Jeremiah 23:3ff.), for the believers to come (cf. Zechariah 12:10) in repentance from their own declivities and follies, we see that there is something rather startling coming en scène. The wheel turns. "There is no one to plead your cause ..." (Jeremiah 30:13).

What then ? It is the same as in Deuteronomy 32:36ff., where,  seeing "that their power is gone",
God of whom it is written,

	"I kill and I make alive, I would and I heal, nor is there any who can deliver from My hand", declares this:
	"For I raise My hand to heaven, and say, 'As I live forever, if I whet My glittering sword, and My hand takes hold on judgment, I will render vengeance to My enemies, and repay those who hate Me. I will make My arrows drunk with blood....' " There is observable a certain malaise for those who have been afflicting Israel (Deuteronomy 32:33, the topic in view), for when the Lord proceeds to "avenge the blood of His servants" (now become so, once more, in the phases shown in Ezekiel 36-37 and Zechariah 12), fulfilling His long time commitment (cf. Ezekiel 36:22), things become unpleasant. After all, it is not good prognosis, if you are an anti-Jew activist, to have this said of you,
	"Therefore all those who devour you shall be devoured, and all your adversaries, every one of them, shall go into captivity. Those who plunder you shall become plunder, and all who prey on you, I I will make a prey" (Jeremiah 30:16).
	Each to his own, but for me, to fight against God is unproductive, unprofitable, a lapse in fealty to the actual Lord, a prize of ingratitude, an acme of rebelliousness, a pandemonium of pride, an acridity of nullity, born of sin, conducted in squalor and assured of doom, unless there be repentance. Let the truth abide, and why bother with the delusions!

INTERRUPTION OF FREE FALL

For the USA, it must this time be said, that despite its commitment to the iniquitously inequitable Road Map, that cutter-up of the limbs of the child of a nation now opposed not only by Arab powers, whose Allah failed them in their earlier extermination pursuits (now groupable with those of Hitler), but by the UN, as if the whole world is needed to bring the Jew to the cutting block: yet this time it has shown some resolve, some courage in the matter. It has VETOED, we learn (The Advertiser, September 18, 2003) the Arab launched endeavour in the United Nations, to get a broader international base for Jewish defoliation from their bough. Amazingly using the term 'moral' for their desires, they sought a stay on anti-Arafat proceedings and did so in terms describing, for some odd reason, Israel as "the occupying power".   

Now it is one thing to seek to bring Arafat to the Hague for examinations on terrorism, or even to seek that his ways be scrutinised closely, in terms of Abbas' express resignation because power to suppress terrorism in PLO territory was DENIED HIM, in his confrontation with Arafat; but this is not sought. No, this is for some reason not in vogue in the view of the United Nations. It is rather a protectorate in Israel for him, kept like a maid for service, of some kind ?

Yet it is one thing to say, NO, not an assassination but an investigation, abroad. It is one thing to say,

Let this terrorist

(if so be it is confirmed in the Abbas matter, for to REFUSE what would REMOVE terrorism is to embrace its presence, when the PM is so refused)

be taken from the land he terrorises;

but it is quite another to have him safe and sound from all trouble, in the midst of the terror factories of the PLO, nestling like some not so benign asp in the bosom of Israel.

Nor is it impartial to refer to the occupied territories of Palestine, at present used by Arabs for war against Israel, as 'occupied territory' as though this were an occupation by Israel, not the Palestinian.

I occupy my own body, but do not normally refer to the situation in those terms. I was born with it, just as for Israel and its promised land, it was sent to it (Genesis 12, 15, 17 cf. Galloping Events Ch. 4).

God has different ways of apportioning things, and if you contest it, it is your Creator whom you confront.

The USA then on this occasion has done well to veto, stating that the document before the UN was unbalanced, would serve no useful purpose, did not require the Palestinian Authority to "take action to remove the threat of terrorist groups" - which after all, is what is a vital pivot even in the Road Map, which broke with Abbas' fall.

There is in this action by the USA, then, a slight alleviation in the massive international major capitulation to Islam, oil and the marshalling of forces perhaps deemed likely to leave the world a few moments of grace in which to inhale its now rasping breath. Such is the wisdom of man. The power of God makes the wisdom of man mousy. The more the effort is made to reduce Israel (so small, so relatively poor), by the large, relatively rich nations which surround it, in an easy final solution for the Jew, under new sponsorship, and in some slight mutation, the more the day of the Almighty who will oppose the opponents and defuse the fuming, approaches. It is all written, as was the rescue of the city of Jerusalem for the Jew (Luke 21:24,  Zechariah 12), IN ITS TIME.

That time is visibly now, Jerusalem being with the Jew; and while there is also coming a short time of delusive 'peace' (I Thessalonians 5) when people who know so much, but not God, will  rejoice, yet it is but the drawing back of the waters before the divinely propelled tsunami.

So the Jew has had (and had asked for) the grief, and the world, mistaking its own importance, has sought to add to it; yet this world is now finding what it is like to enjoy the same as it finishes off its little innings (Romans 11). Israel batted first with the Old Covenant; Gentiles have had the New for millenia now, and tend to mistake time for eternity, and opportunity for lordly loutishness towards the Jew.

To be sure, many Jews became Christians, yes and some apostles, like Paul, Peter and John; and many Gentiles have been kind to the Jews, England not least in some of her history, and the USA had a period of kindness, though it seems at the essence to have been short. Nevertheless, the NATION of Israel has been non-Christian following the execution of their Christ, and the Gentile nations have, overall, and in Europe and Russia in particular, been in their horrible resultant, invaders of Jewry long before there was a new Israel to harass.

So it has come to be , both innings are about closed: many non-Jewish nations have now tasted much of Christianity (cf. Isaiah 52:15, 24:16, 49:6, 42:6), and the end of the Jew  season appears close, and with it, the Gentile one.

Thus the first Jew season was till Christ,  the second was in their persecution till the Spirit should come to their hearts in large numbers (Zechariah 12:10ff., 13:1), unequivocally marked by the deliverance of Jerusalem back to their hands (how the  Gentile world hates this! but the Lord, unlike Allah, almighty, ALWAYS does what He says! with the one, men talk, with Him, He acts - Isaiah 64:5). When that step comes in the midst of assault on Israel (Zechariah 12), then will many of them come back in the hands of the merciful God (cf.  SMR pp. 502 - 516)..

Christ's OWN return (Zechariah 14, Isaiah 59, 66, 11) is the cynosure of mercy, the epitome of praise, the magnificence of goodness. When this world is so transformed that the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea! it will be joyous. It is always good to see good face to face; and it is impossible to see it squarely and fairly, in its supernatural estate of origination and proclamation and purity, except in God, where no dimness of anguish invades, nor diminution of brilliance raids, where wonder is its name and magnitudes fail, for mathematics measures the measurable, but this, it is infinite.

THIS is part of that proclamation of that one everlasting Gospel which has never strayed from the lips of the Lord from Genesis 3:15 to the present  (Galatians 1:6-9), nor will (Ephesians 1:10), which is for Jew and for Gentile  alike^*1; which can curse in its absence (since sin is deadly and this is the only cure), whether for Jew (first) or Gentile (next), and will cure in its receipt, whether for Jew or for Gentile. Patience has waited; judgment will come (II Peter 3:9). When communion occurs (as in I Corinthians 11:23-26), how often in the churches, how many thousands if not millions of times has it been said, that this shows forth the Lord's death UNTIL HE COMES. He will come as in Acts 1:7ff., 3:19ff., I John 3:1ff., and it will not be obscure (as in Matthew 24:29ff.)!

It has been so very clear since Habakkuk 3, since Isaiah 2:19ff., since Haggai 2:6-7, where we find that the Lord will SHAKE THE EARTH, so that what is to remain may do so, and what is unworthy will find its tenure short. For as Haggai there declares,

"I will shake all nations, and they shall come to the Desire of all Nations, and I will fill this temple with glory."

It is no use hoping for something different; this is what is going to happen. As to that "Desire" (cf. Isaiah 11, 28:16, 32:1ff.), it is He whom Isaiah 66 shows, coming as also shown in Deuteronomy 32, coming to deliver His people in a mode of destruction to the renegacy of ruin, fostered by those who seek remorselessly to invalidate His word, defoliate His land, expropriate His people, then many converted to Himself. He is then coming to declare His name, with power and imparting ruin, as in the days of the Exodus (Micah 7:15), when the nations will lick the dust like a serpent and crawl from their holes (7:16-17). It is better to let snakes do their own crawling. They are made for it.

What is the good of being 'united', as nations, when as nations you face and confront your God!

Yet notice the end of Micah, the God of mercy for one and for all, who does what He says to each:

"Who is a God like you,

Pardoning iniquity,

And passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage ?

 

He does not retain His anger forever,

Because He delights mercy.

He will again have compassion on us,

And will subdue our iniquities.
 

"You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.

You will give truth to Jacob,

And mercy to Abraham,

Which you have sown to tour fathers,

From days of old."

 

And remember Jeremiah 16:19-21:

                           And they shall know that My name is the Lord."

NOTE

*1 Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17 deals with this "everlasting gospel" as Revelation 14 calls it.
The Jew must face it, despite his preliminary past in symbolic depictions (Hebrews 8-10 declares it in detail); the Gentile must face it, despite his love of liberty, even from the Lord, to follow the foolish imaginations of his own heart, often dignified by the term 'philosophy' (cf. I Corinthians 1, Colossians 2:8).

What does not face it, will still face it. That is the way of the truth. In the end, there is nothing else.

Israel was given its riot act duly (Isaiah 65:12ff.), and it is only in terms of the redemption provided and so foolishly rejected, that it can come, as may any; and the God who has made this so, has also made the times and seasons, the time to bring to the promised land, and the time to bring back to it, the time to devastate Jerusalem and the time for the nation to re-possess it, the time for their departure to be covenantally enforced, and the climax of horror to explode, and the time for His honour and grace to fulfil His word of old, and to be applied (Ezekiel 36:22) in their return; the time for the heart-break of calamity for the Jew, and for the rejoicing of their own land again, the time for the wars on them, and for His intervention for them.

That ? it is manifold:  first in bringing them back to their land, to the city of Jerusalem as divinely forecast, then in bringing many of them back to Himself, and then in showing the world that when He made the world, it was not for their dictatorship, but for His grace. What He has said, stands, in one thing, in all.

The one everlasting Gospel embraces all (though many run from it); the one everlasting God makes history first in His word, and then in His works. Nothing works without Him; and all things work by His word. This ? it is simple. It is because HE said it. Love does not dither; grace does not pout: He has said His mind and the world can listen or forbear.

If it forbear, it will bear. It does and it will. But for any, the way remains open. It is not necessary to follow the crowd, but it is necessary to believe in and then follow the Christ. There is room there, reality and truth, yes and peace. War is its absence, and war is the name of the unbelieving game of this gammy world, approaching its judgment as a worm, the magpie's beak.