...
LIBRARY
The
Paths of Peace, from
The
Ways, Witness and Word of the Prince of Peace

Volumes 1- 183
183 volumes
published in
which appear over
over 23 million words
For an
overview of the whole apologetic approach throughout
the
ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THREE volume work,
a set, "In
Praise of Christ Jesus,"
given Web presentation,
with approximately 58,000 pages,
in historical perspective: click
here.
For AUTHOR,
click here.
For more detail, use
this
hyperlink.
For background
on the writing of these works, see IV below, That Magnificent Rock.
For the FORMAL LIST of WORKS
WITH DESCRIPTION OF CONTENTS: use this link.
In Preparation
Possess Your Possessions Volume 6
Just Published August 2010
Possess Your Possessions Volume 5
Published July 2010
Possess Your Possessions Volume 4
Published July 2010
Possess Your Possessions Volume 3
Published June 2010
Possess Your Possessions Volume 2
Published May 2010
Studies in the Bible
Published May, 2010
THE LIGHTS AND PERFECTIONS IN THE LORD
178th.
Published April, 2010
FREEDOM, THE NATION, THE INTERNET AND THE NEXT GENERATION
177th.
Published April, 2010
176th.
DISCOUNT THAT
AND YOU'VE GOT A MUDDLE IN THE MIDDLE
If You Don't Grasp That,
Muddled, Befuddled,
You'll be Grasped by the Wrong Party
Published April 2010
ISBN 978-0-9807675-4-4
Just Published, March 2010
Let's Be Reasonable, for God Is!
Just Published, February 2010
Impoverishment, Empowerment and Life in the Light of the Lord
Published January 2010
Adding Things Up, and Getting Things Down
l
Just Published December 2009
CALLED TO BE SAINTS, NOT RECONSTRUCTED TO BE ROBOTS
Published October 2009
LIVELY LESSONS IN SPIRITUAL SERVICE
Friendship, Fervent and not Farcical, with Christ
Published September 2009
The Open Book
Volume Number 170 in this Set,
is now
receiving Chapters as they come
ASPECTS OF THE GLORY OF THE GOD OF ALL GRACE
Published August 2009
RELIGION, RELIGIOSITY AND REALITY IN CHRIST
Published August 2009
Published, July 2009
THE HOLY TRINITY
Also Published, July 2009
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR ?
ISRAEL and
The TWO-EDGED SWORD
FOR and AGAINST -
and the setting is
SIN or SALVATION
related to Waiting for
Wonder, above, with
additions both in introductions to some of the Chapters 1-9,
and currently in Chapters 10 and 11, these chapters not being found in Waiting for Wonder.
Israel IV is an
absorption unit for Israel matters specifically, from other areas, sometimes
with additions, variations and applications.
Also Published, July 2009
Volume 5 of the Pentad
The gods of naturalism have no go!
The Bugle of Creation to the Belligerence of the World
Also Published, July 2009
THE UNSEARCHABLE RICHES OF JESUS CHRIST,
AND THE AGGREGATING DEBT OF DISMISSAL
Published, June 2009
FAITH, FISHBONES, FIASCOS AND THE FAITHFULNESS OF THE LORD
A Contemporary
Inspection and Collection
in the
Inextinguishable Light of the Bible
Published, June 2009
MEADOWS OF MERCY
AND PEACE OF PARDON
Published, May 2009
SPIRITUAL FOOD AND SPIRITUAL DRINK
THIS IS THE REAL MISSING LINK
Published
April 2009
God's Gift of Grace in Jesus Christ
Volume 161 in this theological Set
Published March 2009
THE HOSPITAL, THE ACQUITTAL,
THE CREATOR,
THE RESTORATIVE,
THE CELESTIAL
REGALITY:
LOOK! HE COMES
Published March 2009
THE KINGDOMS OF THIS WORLD
AND THE
KINGDOM OF CHRIST
Published, February 2008
THE UNCOMPREHENDING DARKNESS
AND THE SELF-REVEALING LIGHT
The Duty of Holiness
Published, January 2008
ISRAEL II
ISRAEL: ITS DAY FROM A LONG WAY AWAY
Consider Israel - If You Don't, You May Have to!
Published, December 2008
for the Call of Christ
Published, November 2008
The SECULAR, the SACRED and the SUBLIME
Published, October 2008
AND THE COMING OF CHRIST THE KING
Published, September 2008
Published, August 2008
Bewilderment, Bedazzlement, Bedevilment
or the Beauties of Christ's Holiness
Published, July 2008
NOT THE DECLAMATIONS OR DISTILLATIONS
OF MAN,
BUT THE DOCTRINE OF DEITY
Published
July 2008, No. 149:
THE CHRISTIAN ABIDING: THE LORD PRESIDING
The Brighter Way for the Declining Day
Published, July 2008 (Number 148)
Published, June 2008
HAPLESS HITCHES AND HOLY HEALINGS,
GODLESS GLITCHES AND DIVINE DEALINGS
including Spiritual Sprigs and Biblical Gems
Spiritual Lapses and Restored Synapses
Published, May 2008
BUT NOT FOR THIS WORLD
Published, April 2008
KEYS TO THE COMFORT OF THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST
Published, March 2008
OF THE WORDS OF GOD
TO MAN IN THE WORLD
Published, February 2008
in Retrospect,
In Prospect and
In Bold Relief
Published, January 2008
An Autobiographical Record of Contemporary Life
under the Eternal God 1928-2008
This is presented as usual, with the book file, in which inhere the separate chapter files, assisting rapid download.
However, if anyone for any reason wants to have the whole book as ONE FILE, this also is available as shown.
Published, December 2007
EVIDENCE AND REALITY,
THE PRINCE AND THE PROOF,
CONSTANT CHRISTIAN
FAITH
AND THE FICKLE FRENZY OF FORCE
Published, August 2007
DEITY and DESIGN, DESIGNATION and DESTINY
This is a work of some 2.7 million
words,
partly composite from relevant works
published earlier on this site,
some extended,
to which is appended for consultation,
Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ,
an earlier pair of volumes of some 2.2 million words,
published in 2006
Published, July 2007
in the Celestial Alps of Christ Jesus
Published, June 2007
Published, May 2007
DIVINE MANIFESTO,
THE BIBLE:
DEITY MANIFEST,
JESUS CHRIST, THE LORD
Published, May 2007
MISSION FOR THE MAINLAND
This is work far more extensive in quantity and topic than ...
CELESTIAL HARMONY FOR THE TERRESTRIAL HOST
Omitting the Evanescent Extremes
and
Taking the Picture from the Book
Ministering Peace to His People, His Body, His Church
Published, April 2007
Published, March 2007
The Open Door, the Closed Mind and the Call of Christ
Published, February 2007
How Great is the God we Adore!
Published, December 2006
THE FACE OF GOD, ILLIMITABLE, UNFUNDED
DEFINITIVE, DECISIVE
Published, November 2006
JESUS CHRIST, DEFACED, UNFAZED:
BARRISTER OF BLISS
Published, October 2006
CHRIST INCOMPARABLE, LORD INDOMITABLE
September 2006
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S
CHRIST
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS
Bible or Blight,
Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Written Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God - 2 Vols. approx. 2.2 million words
Published August 2006
DEGRADATION FOR THE HUMAN RACE
through DEFAMATION of DEITY, and
THE GODLY GRANT OF GLORY IN THE GOSPEL
Published July 2006
Dig
Deeper, Higher Soar,
Divine Glory Delights the More
Published June 2006
GRATITUDE FOR HIS GLORIOUS GRACE
Published June 2006
WHAT GOD SAYS, GOES:
CREATION IS FINISHED, BUT GOD REMAINS
This is Volume
4
of the
NOGO TETRAD,
THE GODS OF NATURALISM HAVE NO GO!
Published May 2006
CHRIST'S INEFFABLE PEACE AND GRACE
AMID THE SMOKING CANDLES,
FLAMING FLARES AND POLLUTED PRODUCTS OF MAN
Includes exposure of the rampant folly of the da Vinci Code
Published April 2006
THE SPIRITUAL SAGACITY OF PREDESTINATION IN LOVE
FOREKNOWLEDGE AND CHRISTIAN FAITH
This is the name for the sixth
volume in what is now the Predestination Hexad,
a set of six volumes in this field. It has grown from being the Predestination
Quintet!
Published April 2006
THE PRIDE of LIFE, the PRINCE of LIFE,
and the DESTINY of MAN
Published March 2006
SCALING THE HEIGHTS, SCANNING THE DEPTHS,
SPANNING THE BREADTH:
JESUS CHRIST HAS THE ANSWER
Published February 2006
The Child, the Youth and the Eternal Truth
Published February 2006
NOT around the world
but in Christ, Guided by God, Led by the Lord
Published January 2006
THE WIT AND WISDOM OF THE WORD OF GOD,
THE BIBLE TRUE TO TEST
Better awake to the Bible, than bibulous or blind
Published December 2005
the Crystalline Fire of the Faith
Published November 2005
PROCLAMATION FROM THE WORD OF GOD
Expository Sermons and Sermon Notes
Published November 2005
SEEN BY ANGELS: WORDS FROM THE WINGS
THE CONVERSATION OF ANGELS
AND THE ANGLES OF MEN
Just Published November 2005
THE Majestic Might of the Merciful Messiah: JESUS
Published October 2005
DESERTS AND DESSERTS,
DELICACIES AND DESICCATIONS
Spiritual News, Biblical Truths
Published September 2005
On Translations of the Bible
Words about
Words
Get out of the Way,
To Let the
God of the Bible
Have His Say!
Published August 2005
DANCERS, PRANCERS, LANCERS and ANSWERS
Published August 2005
SATANIC METHOD
AND THE MODEL OF SALVATION
Published July 2005
WALKING IN THE LIGHT AND KEEPING YOUR EYES OPEN
For Eyes fast Closed, Truth is Opposed:
More Humble, less Stumble
Published June 2005
BEYOND THE CRYPT: THE DIVINE SCRIPT AND THE FACE OF GOD
Information, Inflammation,
Conflagration,
Consummation with Comfort, or Inextinguishable Ashes
Published May 2005
THE TRUE GOD HAS GO, GIVES GROWTH AND GLORY
Published May 2005
CELESTIAL HARMONY FOR THE TERRESTRIAL HOST
Omitting the
Evanescent Extremes
and
Taking the Picture from the Book
Ministers Peace to His People, His Body, His Church
Published May 2005
Reset with additions, from July
2003,
now in two volumes
ALLEGORIES, APOLOGUES AND ACRONYMS
Imagery with Verse for Christ the Lord
Just published April 2005
Impossible to Man, Open to God
including the new Mini-Index for quick reference
Published March 2005
HISTORY, REVIEW AND OVERVIEW
HELPS, HINDRANCES AND HOLINESS
Published, March 2005
OR
FANTASY'S FLIGHT TO THE INFERNAL
The Dynamics of Disintegration and
the Delights of Restoration
Sequel to LITTLE ANGEL
Published, February 2005
He speaks for himself
An Allegory
Published, February 2005
DIZZY DASHES
, HEADY CLASHES
AND THE BRILLIANCE HARMONY OF INEVITABLE TRUTH
Penetrating Peace
Published, February 2005
DIZZY DASHES , HEADY CLASHES
AND THE BRILLIANT HARMONY
OF INEVITABLE TRUTH
February 2005
Published Jan. 2005
REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER
Irresistible Reason for Certain Faith,
in 2 volumes,
REASON LEADING TO REVELATION
and the REDEEMERISBN 0 9757291 7 9
and
REASON LEADING FROM FALSE REVELATION
and to VerificationISBN 0 9757291 8 7
Published Jan. 2005
The Grating Grandeur and Aggrandisement of Man
and the Meekness of the Majestic Messiah
Published January 2005, The gods of naturalism have no go!
in
two volumes, to replace the former single volume,
which tends ... to grow.
Published January 2005, Swift Witness, which
sets in a volume
what was formerly a functional site for use merely.
Published, December 2004
two volumes, Numbers 91, and 92 in the set -
THE LOVE OF GRACE AND THE GRACE OF LOVE
Volume 5 in what is now The Predestination Quintet
TRIALS, TESTS and TRIUMPHS in TEMPTATION
with JOB for FOCUS
Also published, December 2004
Volume 90, in the set,
In Praise of Christ Jesus:
Anguish, Ecstasy and
The Mastery of the Messiah
Published, November 2004
THE BRIGHT LIGHT AND THE UNCOMPREHENDING DARKNESS
WILFULLY WITLESS, WOEFULLY DRIVEN,
IT MOANS BY THE REALM OF JOY
Published for personal internet display purposes only
July - October 2004
A Novel of the Era when Time Moves in on Space
©
Restricted publication, available only on screen.
Publishers desiring paper copies may contact us:
Bible-based novel
involving personality development,power play, national ambitions,
ramifying interaction and ideological interchange,
where pathology mounts, drama develops,
intrigue unrolls and lunacy earns its name on the moon,
as some of the predicted events unfold
in the imaginary setting provided
as an introduction to the actual ones predicted soon to come.
Published October 2004
WHAT IS THE CHAFF TO THE WHEAT ?
Explorations in the Obvious
Published September 2004
THAN THE PEAK SNOW-CRESTED,
MORE VITAL THAN ITS DASHING STREAMS:
THE LOVE OF GOD ALONE
Published September 2004
THE MEANING OF LIBERTY
AND THE MESSAGE OF REMEDY
EARLIER PUBLICATIONS
Published August 2004
Published, August 2004
THE GODS OF NATURALISM HAVE NO GO
Published August 2004
THE GLOW OF PREDESTINATIVE POWER
AND THE SHOW OF AUTONOMOUS ANTICS
PHILOSOPHIC PRANCING
AND RENEGADE ROMANCING
This is now the 4th member of the Predestinative Quaterion of Volumes
Predestination and Foreknowledge,
Liberty and Necessity
Responsibility, Duty and Creativity
Published, July 2004
OUTRAGEOUS OUTAGES, AWESOME INPUTS
AND THE COURAGE OF CHRIST
INSIGHT ON SITE, and OVERSIGHT from the LORD
New Edition of
Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will
2nd Member of
Trilogy in this
field (c. 1000 pages)
Published July 2004 (this volume c. 619 pages)
Published, July 2004
EXTRAVAGANZAS, STANZAS, BONANZAS
A HUMBLE HEART
AND THE HOLY GOD
Published, June 2004
IMPORTUNITY, OPPORTUNITY AND PURITY OF HEART
Suffering, Sanctions and Spiritual Sanctification
Published, May 2004
Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination
NEWS IN CONTEMPORARY CONDITIONS
IN THE LIGHT OF ETERNAL REALITIES
Published, March 2004
Worn-Out Earth and Coming King
A Call to Spiritual Arms
Published, February 2004
DELUSIVE DRIFT OR DIVINE DYNAMIC
Desire or Desideratum
Published, January 2004
2 volumes, Published earlier in
January 1st., 2004
and
Sermons and Addresses from the Bible, in the Lord
Published November 2003
Christian Wings
Christian Things
Published October 2003
September 2003
Published, late August 2003
Winding up a Company can have drama ...
What then of a winding up world ? Seek the Lord!
Published, August 2003
Know the Lord, Know the Bible, Know His Will
Manual for Christian Growth
Manual
for Young and Growing Christians
covering many topics and emphasising
the beauty, reasonableness and harmony
of God's word ...
for the work of a life-time
Published, July 2003
THAT YET IT DOES NOT HEAR
News of Earth
in
the Light
of Heaven
Also Published, July 2003
ALLEGORIES, APOLOGUES AND ACRONYMS
Imagery with Verse for Christ the Lord
Published, June 2003
Heritage for Christians
Exile from this World
Published, May 2003
FROM GRACE TRIUMPHANT
TO FACE DIVINE
Published, earlier in May 2003
The Beautiful Face of Biblical Predestination
VOLUME 3 of the PREDESTINATION TRILOGY
Published, Easter 2003
Published
March 2003
Marvels of Predestination and The Ways of Will
Published
February 2003
GREAT
EXECRATIONS
GREAT
ENERVATIONS
Published
January 2003
To Know God, the Power of His
Resurrection
And the Fellowship
of His Sufferings
January 2003
Published
December 2002
TRUTH’S ALIVE -
RESURRECTED AND WRITTEN
Published
November
2002
Gracious
Goodness and This World in Disorder
Published October 2002
Calibrating
Myths, Machining Dreams and Keeping Faith
Published September 2002
Christ
Jesus: the wisdom and the power of God
August 2002
Earth Spasm, Conscience Chasm:
and Renewal of Life
It's Late! but not too Late ...
Published July 2002
Published June 2002
Secular Myths and
Sacred Truth
Published, May-June 2002!
Trust God, Mate! Forget About 'Fate' ...
To go at once to formal list of works, click here.
To see more notices as above, continue on until
you reach the formal list.
Published, May 2002:
Also Published in May 2002:
Red Heart, Dead
Heart and Pure Heart
April 2002:
Cascade of
Truth, Torrent of Mercy
March 2002
Collision with Jesus Christ is calamitous.
Try the door!
February 2002:
Sparkling Life in Jesus Christ
Previous:
Highway of Holiness,
Path of
Peace,
Way of Truth
including
Compilation of the Major Writing on Daniel on this Site
Also in January 2002:
Deliverance from Disorientation
Putting Things in Perspective
with much on Daniel then, the
world now
Late last year:
More Marvels from the Majesty and Mind of the
Almighty
Delights from the Bible, Lights on
Darkness and Light in Christian Life
November 26, 2001
RED ALERT, IN A GREY DAY
AND THE
BRIGHT LIGHT COMING
Preceding in October 2001:
Earlier in September 2001:
the gentle unfolding of light
untouched, untarnished and pure
In August:
The Pitter-Patter of Prophetic Feet
Prophecy: A Light in a Dark Place
This World: A Dark Light in a Place
Further back:
Beauty of Holiness
Glorious Light Amid Uncomprehending
Darkness
June 2001:
Ancient
Words : Modern Deeds
Modern lessons as antique words
livingly fulfil themselves
and instruct our thoughts
One month earlier:
LICENCE FOR LIBERTY
published May 2001
The Parade of man and the Power of God
For the preceding publication, April 2001, find
With Heart, and Soul and Mind and Strength
The Kind Commandment, but how seArching!
A little earlier,
Pall of
Smoke and Diamond of Joy,
considers the contrasts of confusion,
and brilliance from God, the same
as ever
Or would you find fascination in ...
LITTLE
THINGS
starting with the little blooms
in the prophetic garden
and chastely savouring their perfumes,
so delicate, then moving to many things, not all so delightful, though the
divine control never lacks ...
even in little things
Then we come to the earlier one published:
Galloping Events, Jan. 2001,
with access to the hooves,
and the holy hold on the
hullabaloo.
It is coming to be almost a rodeo
show, but with rather less exhilaration!
The race in time is ON! It is high time to watch it,
governed and guided by the
incomparable word of God, the Bible.
Seeing today's doings in yesterday's pages
and rebutting misconceptions
about Jews, Hebrews, Israelis and Israel
Also Published January 2001
DIVINE AGENDA
The Faith, the Facts and the
Fiascos of History Unfolding
NOVEMBER 2000
IT BUBBLES, IT
HOWLS, HE CALLS
(much specialisation on the Middle East episodes, developments, and meaning)
Relatively recently, in terms of the subject!
Things Old and new
Love
with Mercy has Acted
Multiculturalism and sophistry, God's
critics,
sedition by
sects and other aspects of old novelties in new clothes,
with a
wallowing world approaching examination time!
There is some focus on Australiana.
There is no
need for concern if you belong to God:
what needed
to be done has been done, but you must be with Him.
THE EMPHASIS IS ON OLD THINGS, NEW FORMS, ONE UNALTERED TRUTH.
Still most topical, even hyper-topical:
.WAKE UP
WORLD!
Your CREATOR is COMING ...
It was
published in 2000. Would you care to try it ?
Step on the link. It is still most asssuredly
Christian Apologetics.
Looking
for an overview ?
Connect to
WHAT
IS LIFE ?
(revised
May 2000)
Published May 2000
TENDER TIMES FOR TIMELY TRUTHS
July 2000,
Drama, Dramatics and Delight
(including the examination of the topic:
Where
is the promise of His COMING!
THIS IS A CRUCIAL TOPIC.)
For FURTHER DETAIL ON THE ABOVE
ITEMS, and any others,
SEE BELOW in the listings.
I-III)
THE
SHADOW OF A MIGHTY ROCK,
trilogy as noted on home page, now
in 3rd Edition
Its size is estimated at about
890,000 words.
IV) A recently published companion book,
1996 - 2nd Edition August 1997
(revised 1998)
This is a collection of excursions into features which clarify and give decisive answer to problems some have found, as at Adelaide University; and shows the testable wonder of Jesus Christ - the way, the truth and the life, deity definitively incarnate as man, in some detail. In some ways, it specialises in aspects of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock; but it has a literary variety and a scope of its own including specialised work on phases of creation, validity, the constructive power of the gospel, far beyond the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb, of allegory and of models... both academic and governmental. In contrast to the Truth, these are demonstrably and incomparably obtuse and obfuscatory; but yet, they are very much a part of the contemporary scene of confusion where this is actively preferred to clarity.
In the end, you need Him, to know Him, and the testimony is inescapable. Equipped with incisive approaches to cultural assumptions, and allegories for varied fare, That Magnificent Rock shows the way to the majesty of the truth. It may also currently be found by hyperlink through Swift Witness.
V) In the charismatic area, a carefully Biblical appraisal of the situation vis-à-vis the Word God, applying the text of the Bible to the issues at hand.
This is provided in a book, published in 1995:
Revised and Enlarged, 1997 &
January 1998.
If what the Bible says, goes, what is the result in this field ? Since obedience is blessed, understanding is essential. In power and peace, God has His own way.
VI) The fascinating, intriguing and rewarding study of
This also appears in the form of a thesis of that name, slightly revised and adapted for the Web, on which it was published in 1997. Presented to Melbourne University in 1964, it is now accompanied on the Web by the Supplement, The Father of Freedom, also presented in 1964. Both are referred to in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, and their presence on the Web therefore simplifies reference.
Physicists sometimes get tangled in this field (cf. e.g. That Magnificent Rock,Ch.7, SMR pp. 418ff., 422Eff.), partly through inadequate world views, and reductionist tendencies, and it all needs to be seen in an adequate conspectus.
This predestination field is a distinctive Christian Apologetics forte, showing what no other approach to truth can provide here: perfect adequacy and internal harmony, in dealing with all the facets of related human life, and history. Relevant inadequacies of autonomy, monism, voluntarism, humanism, determinism, Arminianism, hidden 'gods' and reductionism are shown, in passing. All the issues are handled in their full integrity and force: possible since it is God who speaks in His word. It is God who made us who in His word provides answer to every phase and facet of logical query, in unblemished integrity, validity and consistency, the more notable in that the failure of all else here, is notorious. Indeed, the conspectus shown from the word of God has elements both necessary and unique for coverage of the elements and harmony of components.
The superlative force, unmatched rationality and comprehensiveness as well as the delicacy of the Biblical presentation is examined in considerable detail: here as ever, the Bible is a priceless gem - to be expected when it is from God, whose understanding is infinite. At last, no degraded, debilitated, wan and weary reductionism!
Specific references to this work from SMR are available currently by hyperlink from the page Index of That Magnificent Rock.
VII) THE OTHER NEWS,
a book of News voyages and discoveries... published 1997. The celestial perspective puts terrestrial things in understandable proportions.
VIII) THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE SPIRIT OF ENVY with OTHER ESSAYS and NEWS, 1997,
is a collection that looks with the illumination of God's revelation in the Bible, on the things that matter, and askance at the matters that merely natter. It has been extended during 1997. The terrain of Biblical translation, including 32 cases of translation, in Old and New Testament (Ch. 9), is included.
IX) QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS - THE WORD THAT SPEAKS
a disquisitive analysis and review,
often using dialogue to investigate
foci of interest or challenge,
was published in 1997.
X) BIBLICAL BLESSINGS -
The word of God has the backing of the God who acts.
Finding Blessings from the Bible in the process of Looking Diligently within it. The blessings FALL from the studies of the word of God, like dew from heaven. They are no more sought than dew is, but freely we search the word, freely they come. Published 1997.
published January 1998.
At times, you may like a potpourri of this and that.
We start with
This becomes the first unit in our 11th work -
where 17 more Chapters follow on three different themes, and may be found through this hyperlink. This has been planned simply as a collection of writings, some already published, some not, which go well together on the one hand, and provide a fascinating sweep of scope and breadth concerning what goes on in the medley of life on this planet, relative to its source, its origin, its procedures, and of course, its destiny.
XII) BARBS, ARROWS, BALMS
published May 1998
Alerts,Warnings and Blessings: this is like a lively spiritual scalpel:
but one probing the mind, the heart and
presenting with care the essential findings from the word of God as it
proceeds. With the severances comes the balm, and with the balm the blessing.
XIII) REPENT OR PERISH
published July 1998
Looking at things with an eye
to their END,
in things National and Personal,
the State of Emergency and the State of the Case, the Middle East and the Final
Call
XIV) THE BIBLICAL WORKMAN
published October 1998
...Here is a work following
with zealous care, what God has said in various fields,
because His word is His, and it
is pure (Psalm 12:6),
avoiding traditionalistic
imposition (Mark 7:7)
and innovative flirtation (II
Timothy 4:3) ,
as a study which is fitting for
those who would be Biblical Workmen (II Timothy 2:15).
From time to time additions may be made to
this on-line Library, and we hope you will enjoy ruminating and
contemplating in it, and indeed sharing your thoughts after reading the general
principles found from point 5, on the Home Page. These are found by going to
the hyperlink, "Swift Witness", and within that reference to
"GROUND RULES". If you wish to send to us, you may find it convenient
to use either the Email hyperlink in Swift Witness, or that at No. 13, on the Home Page. You are very
welcome!
This conveniently collects in one the News Items subsequent to THE OTHER NEWS. It was presented in preliminary format in February 1999, by the Publisher, World Wide Web Witness Inc., and is now published, March 1999. It provides a Christian perspective and a Biblical base for pondering and assessing news, developments and changes as they are reported in various news media.
The vast Biblical scoop of universe history,
news in much reported before it happened, is the ultimate in journalism, a
marvel for orientation, a stimulus to understanding, a joy to those who love
the Lord and a challenge to those who do not regard His works.
XVI)
JOYFUL JOTTINGS,
News and Contemporary Reviews
publ. June 19, 1999 (Book 1), and July 1999 (the whole)
Some of our topics are as grisly as the world, none dwell needlessly on the terrible, all are devoted to the truth, and in all there is shown cause for JOY, when things are seen, tasted, known and experienced in that COGNITIVE place which comes from the Bible, that UNDERSTANDING which comes from the Lord, according to His word, and that SHEER DELIGHT which comes from the privilege of partnership, true one of servant to Lord, but also one of friend to friend, with the Redeemer.
To be IN the Niagara Falls is
one thing; to watch it is another; and to have an understanding of what is
happening there as well, this is better still. The time to act is now, however,
rather than in that free fall which is so popular as a result, and sometimes
even as a cause! Join with us in this survey, sometimes of little things,
sometimes more broadly, always of what is before us.
Here in one site you are able to look at the topics in any of the volumes, as well as seek scriptural references. This is set out in four sections, two each for the trilogy and the other volumes.
1. For
The
Shadow of a Mighty Rock
2.
For the other volumes
TOPICAL, Main
Trilogy
BIBLICAL,
Main Trilogy
TOPICAL,
The Rest
BIBLICAL,
The Rest
THE 161 VOLUME SERIES IS GIVEN THE
NAME
"IN PRAISE OF CHRIST
JESUS" AND IS
DESCRIBED
AS SUCH IN Christian Apologetics Series
The 61st Edition: published,
Feebruary-May 2009
DO YOU HAVE A BASIC TOPIC IN MIND ?
Try the topical index, or survey
some of the selections below.
XVIII BENEVOLENCE OR BROTHY BANE ?
published September-October 1999
This is largely a news volume, but it tends to specialise in what is behind the news, and it constantly looks at the options,
XIX
STEPPING OUT FOR CHRIST
Oct. 1999
Out of pollution into the
pure mountain air of truth, respondent in the light of the Lord. What is to be
left behind, what is to be sought, what won, what is commanded ? Purgation, purification,
empowerment and departure from the detritus of this world, its cultural
clamminess and semi-automatic thought controls, to transformation in the
service of the Lord of both this and the next.
XX
WAKE UP WORLD!
YOUR
CREATOR IS COMING...
Oct. -Dec. 1999
This title is rather self-explanatory, and the details are available at the hyperlink destination, in the Preface.
It relates considerably to News, but to its point and perspective in the light of the word of God; and not to News alone, but rather this is a valley with its own mountain peaks and rivers, alongside.
Focussing on impending
events, it looks to the CONSUMMATION on the one side, and to the CREATION on
the other, seeing their correlation, and lessons to be drawn from both, as
critiques are given on errors in this area, from scientist and religionist
alike, in terms of logic, and Biblical truth.
XXI
SPIRITUAL
REFRESHINGS
FOR THE DIGITAL MILLENIUM
January, 2000
The wonder of the provisions of God is not
only in their profusion, their adequacy, their power, but in their reliability,
their refreshing, their entire aptitude for mankind, and as to that, it is not
only in their prediction and promise, but in their mode of performance. To know
God is far more important than your ABC, and not to know Him is far more
illiterate in life, than this in mind.
XXII
LEAD US
NOT
INTO
EDUCATIONAL TEMPTATION
January 2000
This DOES lead you to something near a summit on the way to the antichrist's declaration, showing himself that he is god (II Thessalonians 2:3-4,8-11). It shows how readily, with perhaps all but complete ignorance of what is being done, a Religion can be formed, formulated and applied with no little force, in our own midst... by the Government. This time the peril has been in Victoria. With the S.A. case, this forms a strong testimony to the sighting and siting of prophetic words on what is to be. It all happens... so naturally!
This is a more specialised
work for those interested in children, youth and education - and their destiny
and souls.
XXIII
THE FRANTIC
MILLENIUM AND THE PEACE OF FAITH
March 2000
Here we find the contrasts between the perfervid tempestuousness and frantic follies of the fast-aging Age, as it approaches the confrontation with its Maker, both the world and the inhabitants, on the one hand, and on the other, the peace that surpasses in grandeur the follies of the earth as the universe surpasses the atom, but more so: for that is mere dimensional diversity, while this is a difference of kind. Again, that is a comparison in the measurable, whereas the Creator of space and time confers in the Lord Jesus Christ a peace which is immeasurable. As the one works to its frenzied climax, the other continues in its oak-like simplicity and its ocean-like profundity, its heights of a magnificence which not only remind of the peaks of the great mountains, but of the power of the One who conceived them.
XXIV
ACME,
ALPHA and OMEGA - JESUS CHRIST
April 2000
There is so much. There are so many
ideologies of hate, lust and political pride, including the pride of
internationalism, which is human race pride, as intense and thirsty for glory
as ever any of the other have been. Amidst the vanity and emptiness of its
overweening ambitions, there is one whose ambition was to die for sin, whose
glory was to be given it from the One who sent Him, and preceded His lowliness
by eternity. The study of His word, in this world, constantly unveils the
splendour of His conceptions, the moral integrity of His passion and the
capacity of His sovereignty to proceed without pulse or tremor, to the end.
XXV
TENDER
TIMES FOR TIMELY TRUTHS
May 2000
There is a time to ponder, to dig deeply, to be encouraged, to gain perspective, to remember keenly that the Lord is personal, dealing with persons, and to heed in receiving His goodness, wisdom and word tenderly, knowing that even in correction there is love, and in soundness there lies growth. Topical, devotional and verificatory, it seeks to bring help in personal and contemporary affairs, from the word of God.
XXVI
ANSWERS
TO QUESTIONS:
Drama, Dramatics and Delight
July 2000
This work may serve some who are wanting
answers to 'slings and arrows' which some cast on the Bible. It also takes up a
challenge of Christ Himself. It is being prepared for publication by World Wide
Web Witness Inc., in whose name it is put forward at this juncture.
XXVII
NEWS, FACTS AND
FORECASTS
News in the area of facts,
facts in the light of forecasts
forecasts in the light of the word of God
These range from music and meaning, myth - biological and philosophical - and symbol, to the wonderland of theology, and a recent invasion, and its story.
They move also to many arenas of action in this realm of news and fact with forecast in view, and these may all be inspected in detailed summary, chapter by chapter, in Bulletin 1.
This work was published in September 2000, with ISBN 0 9578816 1 4
XXVIII
THINGS OLD AND NEW: Love with Mercy has Acted
Chapters include - God's Critics, and Old Heresies in New Clothes are Doubly Rotten: the specialty of sects which may be compared with Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 8. Also Ch. 3, Angelic Aliens and their 'Therapy' and further topics on the theme, including legally dogmatic perversity, spiritual abundance and ecclesiastical erratics with the Robin and the Daffodils.
Published October 2000
ISBN 0 9578816 2 2
XXIX
IT BUBBLES, IT HOWLS, HE CALLS
The Middle East is in wrath and ruin
The Midlands of Mankind are in turmoil
The Mind of God is in writing for our purposes
The Solution is Salvation in Christ
the Lord
whose are all lands,
literal and metaphorical,
rational and spiritual,
and whose is all truth.Alternatives: ZERO
This volume was published in November, 2000
ISBN 0 9578146 6 6
XXX
DIVINE
AGENDA
This volume was published in January 2001
ISBN 0 9578146 9 0
The word of God continues in its orderly,
authoritative way to cover its extraordinary scenario, towards the consummation of events
XXXI -
Galloping
Events -
The
End of the Race and the Face of the King
This volume was published in January 2001
ISBN 0 9578816 3 0
Here is witnessed the sheer exuberance, the gallop of predicted events, announced in news, discerned even in attacks, moving with all the relish of romance, and all the moan of doom as God predicates in history, what He has predestinated in counsel and predicted in His word. Much attention is given to Israel, and specific exegesis of this period of greatness in the annals of the earth.
XXXII
WHEN GOD IS THE SOURCE, EVERY LITTLE THING COUNTS
The Texture of Quality and Test for Truth
Published, Feb. 2001
Such is the discernment and infinite understanding of Christ the Creator with the glory of the Trinity, Himself a member, for there is no other Creator but God, that seemingly little things can broadcast the fame of His name, His attention to detail, show the wisdom that invites, and attest the Lord who alone is Saviour.
ISBN 0 9578816 4 9
XXXIII
Pall of Smoke and Diamond of Joy
Contrasts, Complementarity and Beauty
Published, March 2001
ISBN 0 9578816 5 7
XXXIV With Heart and Soul, Mind and Strength
The Kind Commandment - but how Searching!
It is still the command, the kind command ... to love!
Published April 2001
ISBN 0 9578816 6 5
XXXV LICENCE FOR LIBERTY
Published May 2001
ISBN 0 9578816 9 X
The Parade of man and the
Power of God
For other ISBN's see The Site in the City.
XXXVI ANCIENT WORDS : MODERN DEEDS
Published June 2001
ISBN 0-9579003-0-9
XXXVII BEAUTY OF HOLINESS
Glorious Light Amid Uncomprehending Darkness
Published July 2001
ISBN 0-9579003-2-5
XXXVIII The Pitter-Patter of Prophetic Feet
Prophecy: A Light in a Dark
Place
This World: A Dark Light in a
Place
Published August 2001
ISBN 0-9579003-3-3
XXXIX
Light
of Dawn
the gentle unfolding of light
untouched, untarnished and pure
ISBN 0-9579003-4-1
XL
Lord of
Life
The Lord is the Light of my Life
unphased, unfazed and unfading,
above time, beyond time, in time
always
ISBN 0-9579003-9-2
XL1
Red Alert, in a Grey Day
with the Bright Light Coming
Published October 26, 2001
ISBN 0-9579003-9-2
This brings more, after Lord
of Life, on recent events, ancient words, dramatic and dire
developments, their spiritual significance and the direction of world history,
among spiritual excavations into meaning, with special reference to Romans 5,
and assessment of excursions into the meaningless as an antidote for past ones:
not to be desired, but being wrought anyway. Such is this world, pointed at
disaster, and hurrying itself along.
XLII
More Marvels from the
Majesty and Mind of the Almighty
More on Malachi and Isaiah 66, on Joel, on the Errors of Islam and the divinely pre-published predicament and predicted outcome for Israel
Published November 26, 01
ISBN 0-9580154-0-6
XLIII
Deliverance from Disorientation
Published January 2002
ISBN 0-95801-2-2
Much on Daniel, which does
not move,
and on the world, which does,
but only under divine
surveillance, to that celestial conclusion
which is most apt, and clear
Published January 2, 2002
ISBN pending
XLIV
Highway of Holiness, Path of Peace, Way of Truth
Published January 2002
ISBN 0-9580154-3-0
This provides a compilation on Daniel in its various themes and foci, and an investigation into motivation, where it matters.
XLV Sparkling Life in Jesus Christ
Published February 2002
ISBN 0-9580154-6-5
This is a volume of sharp clarity, dealing
with issues from the Biblical Canon, to World Politics, from Cloning to the
Millenium, Creation, Man as purposive, and the Clarity of the Bible. Its
message is constantly this, that if you want more than mere effectuality, but
certainly not less, if you want not a dim flicker but sparkling light, it is to
be found in one place only, the word of God, living and written, on display and
without rational competitor, or alternative testable revelation for man. It
deals with man as he is, leaves nothing out, puts nothing in, and exposes him,
vulnerable as he is, to the light which also has "healing in its wings", when it is received. That light is Christ,
immutable, immiscible, unrelinquishable to those who know Him, irresistible to
logic, the rock which crushes what rejects it, and needs it as all men do
(Matthew 21:44), but is a secure ground for those who find in Him the truth
XLVI
Published March 2002
ISBN 0-9580154-7-3
In this volume, the words of Micah and Zechariah concerning the Tower of Strength, of the Flock, are pondered, and Zechariah, over some 60 pages, is expounded under the thematic note, The Messiah in Zechariah. Historical phases, current and ancient, are considered as we progress through the swirls of contemporary events, fulfilments and fiascos, all in the light of the word of God, which nothing of these things in the least degree has snuffed, is capable of snuffing, or even makes to flicker.
Quite the contrary, the more the morals of
man flicker, the less the word of God concedes; but the more man looks to the
Lord, the greater the opportunity. It is not gone. It is now for man or nation,
who looks where mercy and power is to be found, purity and truth, in the word
of God, in the living word of God, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
XLVII
Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy
Published April 2002
ISBN
0-9580154-9-X
With much on the Middle East, Current News, Prophecy and Predestination in a personal sense as well as doctrinal, this gives you something like an aerial view, your airplane cruising not far above the tree tops as the end of the Age comes like a magnificent promontory to the gaze.
XLVIII
Red Heart, Dead Heart and Pure Heart
Conspicuous confusions, profusions of prolixity and cordons of righteousness: they do not agree, but all are present. The world is setting on its business of severance from God at prodigious pace, but the connection is ineradicable, indefeasible, and the effort is not only not feasible, but delinquent, abasing to man who is seeking to exalt himself, and fatal. There is however a far better way, far more clearly delineated, more conspicous in its attestation, coherent in its affirmation, which alone stands, and standing acts.
Published April-May 2002
ISBN 0-9580787-1-8
Major Matters in the Book of Revelation, and on the Impact of Revelation
Published May 2002
ISBN 0-9580787-3-4
In this
volume, the Book of Revelation is given focus, materials on this site being
collected in order of Chapter, to give a series on this prophecy of John. More
material is added, and the work commences with some scrutiny of the Middle East
imbroglio. Various aspects of divine revelation cohere in this conspectus of
considerations of the power, work and will of God, both in history and in
writing.
Trust God, Mate!
Forget about 'Fate'...
Published May-June, 2002
ISBN 0-9580787-5-0
This work specialises on the decline from trust to 'fate', that
fortuitous or banal concept which evacuates from the divine realities, and
sadly faces the consequences, unaware that it is in fact a deviation from
responsibility, a departure from God which induces the illusion of 'fate'. Nor
is it entirely without background, when the Lord is mocked by such penury of
logic, and projection of evil into inane philosophic concepts. Like chaff is
the wicked blown (Psalm 1), whilst the Lord KNOWS the way of the righteous; and
who IS righteous, but the one to whom the gift of God in Christ is applied, donating
the truth, covering sin and clothing with a righteousness far from merely
academic: it is brilliant with the dew of truth, happy with the life of God.
Secular Myths and Sacred Truth
Published June 2002
ISBN 0-9580787-8-5
Here, amid current news, is the evacuation of secular myths in favour of sacred truth. Naturalism and other fancies are replaced with reality, the hollowness of humanism with the holiness of deity, and the landscape changes. It looks and is far more wholesome not to say beautiful, without the pock marks of adventurous, dazzling meteorites, which leave holes and dirt. Its past, present and future meaning is then apparent in that far greater adventure, the history of man in the word and works of God Himself.
LII
Published July 2002
ISBN 0-9580787-9-3
By this stage, we are able to engage in more review, covering in scope many things fashioned earlier, to the applications desired. We move often with news of developments in the world that moves like some crooning singer, ever nearer to its audience, but in this case, its audience of judgment from God. Naturalism in some of its evocative intransigencies, especially in Britain where it is considered in terms of 'The New Vikings', child training in Australia, the movements to the international aggregations of political power, the journalistic depredations on Israel, the blind spot in the Middle East, yes the double one, the significance of artistic developments in Russia to the phenomenon of water in the Bible, and its spiritual implications: all these things are covered.
In all this, the key is the
consequence of sin and the advent of the beauty of the Lord, in stark and
solemn contrast, made available at Calvary, wrought by the Spirit of God to
this moment, and brought into life by abiding in Him, who did not fail to abide
His own mission of redemption, resurrection of His body and demonstration of
His power, that to the simple, the Gospel might appear, and to the truth it
might declare itself - yes Himself, saying THIS IS THE WAY.
LIII
Earth Spasm,
Conscience Chasm: and the Renewal of Life
Published August 2002
ISBN 0-9581449-1-5
This is a varied volume, in which the clashes of fiction with fact, delusion with faith, reality with pretence, virtue with vice figure; and it has its historical study, intensively in I and II Kings with special reference to Elijah and Elisha, their words and ministries. These are taken in a survey of scope in the mighty works of the Lord, their significance, their consummation and the perspective of divine intervention in natural affairs.
The concept of Nature is examined, and the supernatural is seen in terms of scientific method, in the actualities of creation, as in the Bible itself.
This is a volume of oversight and insight emphasis.
LIV
Jesus Christ: the
wisdom and the power of God
Published September 2002
ISBN 09581449-4-X
The power
and the wisdom of God is too much forgotten in the slime-covered chains of
naturalism. Those who break free are at times in danger of forgetting the
simple fact that GOD HAS POWER, that it is available for His mission and
purposes, that it is not another way of seeking pleasure but of securing
performance in His love for His mission, church and word, that men, women and
children may find Him, and in Him that resource, recourse,
resourcefulness, wit and wonder that the waterfall merely suggests, the mountains
intimate in their beautiful massiveness and space recalls in its majesty and
grandeur. He has made these. It is vital to know Him, and hence time in this
volume is given to history, focusing Kings and Chronicles as well as more
recent times, to the testimony of Jesus Christ when on earth, and in the whole
panoply of the divine revelation.
Calibrating
Myths, Machining Dreams and Keeping Faith
Published October 2002,
ISBN 0-9581449-5-8
Man is bent on his own
way; secular, transvestite man, is seeking to clothe himself not with merely
male garments, but those divine, and this Age is awaiting the coming
pseudo-apotheosis. In this, the Satan, that master change-imitator charlatan,
leads a man to conceive of himself as God, with this difference, that he has
POWER over men, to a limited but still spectacular extent (II Thess.2:4ff.).
This is no
mini-explosion of human ingenuity awry, such as gas bombs, radioactive
contamination, modified crops, genetically engineered, flowing about the earth
with the wind, inadequately controlled or understood. No, it is categories
apart from that; for here comes that finale of presumption, the acme of
arrogance, that dim brilliance to which modern man for so long has been tending
in his forsaken and misused systems of psychiatries, sociologies,
histories, biologies, undistinguished events in metaphysics (cf. SMR Chs. 3-4), where theory dictates to fact, and fact
refusing to fit, makes the secular preachers all the more vociferous, as if
their very loudness would abash.
Since, however, they
deploy themselves in many but far from all academic posts, there are many who
heed instead of thinking; and the marvels of nothing making all, the material
inventing the mental, or the spiritual, or these thinks in succession, but
first of all itself, though it shows no such capacities, and if it had them,
could not have used them before it was: this is ‘cool’.
Indeed, this sort of delusion has become almost as simple as breathing to
the artfully deluded and the spiritually concluded. The great mercy is that a
new commencement can come to any of them by finding the Saviour, and many
of them do just that, thanking God for deliverance from such mesmeric
obfuscation; but more do not!
The calibration of the
dreams attending these delusions is one of the major comedies of all time, as
if a bankrupt were spending years of time enquiring about the most
sophisticated ways of storing his millions, when alas, he is broke. The machining
of dreams leaves them small and fluttering little things, piled on the dump
truck of history for reprocessing, in the manner normal in secular history, and
philosophy. The measurement of the unknown is not a practical joke, but one of
the major emphases of geology, for one (cf. TMR Ch. 7, Section E). The measure of
man himself is always being vied for, never agreed upon, and never could be, without
the truth, since God is not duplicable, and His image is from Himself. No
genome is available for Him, who makes, but is not made, who composes the
things, necessarily in His status being eternal, self-sufficient and free (cf.
SMR Ch. 1,TMR Ch. 7, Section
D). As Christ put it, “Before Abraham, I am.”
Considering
some of the major misconceptions of our Age and observing their consequences is
a grievous task of pathology; but since it may awaken some, and encourage
others, to find or to advance in the faith of Christ, it is provided here.
LVI
Published November 2002
ISBN 0-9581449-7-4
Gracious
Goodness and This World in Disorder
Disorder is rampant, the
call for discipline is reckless, riots are a way of life, death squads a form
of existence, as Revelation 6 comes into full force; yet this is only a
resultant. There is a cause of it all, and a compassion available.
It is prescribed, not
negotiated. It is free, not meritorious; but its results are delightful and its
dynamic is divine. Patterns in the muck are noticed, power over the resultants
is discerned, provision continues, and the destinies speak volumes, indeed
these are already written, like the rest of the scenario’s outline, in
the word of God, who makes mockery of guru pretensions and fulfils ONLY His OWN
word. No one else is God; no one else can do it. No one else is you, and no one
else can answer for you: except you become Christ’s. Then He by His spirit
is your governance, as in millennia past, and He by His resurrection is your
way-shower and by His cross, your barrister, Himself the payment; for there is
no death in Him.
Considerable exposition of
biblical passages is to be found in this volume as we see the governance of the
word of God.
LVII
Published December, 2002
ISBN 0-9581449-9-0
The Truth is Alive,
Resurrected and Written
Considerable exposition of biblical
passages is to be found in this volume as we see the governance of the word of
God. The whole modern phenomenon of angst, in strong accord with the
astonishingly majestic, extraordinarily direct and wholly reliable predictions
of the book of the Lord. How incisive His ways and how verified His word, which
sits like the spiritual sun in its glory, shining and revealing, in light
dazzling without the softening glory of the Son, leaving nothing to itself,
exposing all things.
In this volume also, there
is opportunity to trace the reply to a questing soul, and to ponder how
elegantly sufficient is the work of God, how clear His word, how alive His
salvation, like riding in a boat on the waves, with the fresh keen salt of
reality and the wonder of the disappearing blue, which yet is there in the
distance, after the droll indifference of this dreamy world.
LVIII
Published Jan 2003
ISBN 0-9750303-2-9
Dastardly Dynamics,
Delirious Daubs, Wandering Woes, Bleary Theories
and Immovable
Faith
This nest of the topical, the current, the newsworthy, the blend of the
ancient and the modern, the scriptural and the contemporary, and the
application of the former in the domain of the latter, keeps you up to date as
the Bible lives on in the history God has prepared, commenting before it comes,
advising after it is here. It includes answers to questions, both provided to
the author, and as old as the days of Paul.
LIX
Published Jan 2003
ISBN 0-9750303-3-7
59th To Know God, the Power of
Christ’s Resurrection and the Fellowship of His Sufferings
In this work, the title delineates the topic. In it, Job is given
substantial treatment - in 3 chapters, as is the unity of the faith over the
ages; Acts is also summoned to attest these things, within its first 12
chapters, whilst Daniel also comes to the bar; and the trilogy of knowing your
God, receiving and using His power for His purposes and the value and victory
of sufferings in His company is focussed constantly.
In this work, the title delineates the topic, always keeping Christ in
focus, without whom is no good thing that lasts, for He who is equal with God
and from eternity, alone can
bring to it in peace. In this
volume, Job is given substantial treatment with special emphasis on suffering -
in 3 chapters, as is the unity of the faith over the ages. The book of Acts is
also summoned to attest these things, within its first 12 chapters, whilst
Daniel too comes to the bar; and the trilogy of knowing your God, receiving and
using His power for His purposes and the value and victory of sufferings in His
company is focussed constantly.
LX
Published Feb 2003
0-9750303-5-3
Great Execrations, Great Enervations, Greater
Grace
Diversity in the current contemporary period, intensity in scriptural
applications, and investigation of the theme make of this a pathway to thought,
challenge to faith to expand and appeal to those who do not yet know their
Creator as the meaning of life, the purpose of destiny and the Lover of His
people, to review their needless omission, lest it become reckless as well.
LXI
Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of
Will
Published March 2003
ISBN 0-9750303-7-X
Second Edition July 2004 (much expanded)
ISBN 0 9752175 7 7
This compilation is rendered from various of the published works on this
topic written earlier, with addition and development where this seems apt,
allowing the reader to visit topic-wise, in different dimensions with
comparative ease.
In yet greater scope, we see the ebullience of these concepts from the Bible, their integration in themselves and their application to reality so broad, so efficient, that the source of this revelation is once again attested in the marvels of coverage, leaving nothing out, embracing everything, but not with clammy arms: rather with an integrity both personal and unchangeable.
LXII
Of the Earth, Earthy, or
Celestial in Christ
Published March 2003
ISBN
0-9750303-9-6
I Corinthians 15 has some wonderful
contrasts: the first man, Adam, the ultimate man, Christ the Lord. The first
man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven.
Now we are finding the funding of nearly everything
imaginable that is earthy, worldly, carnal, rapacious, insolent and demanding;
and hearing nearly everything that is raucous, obtuse and insurgent, from bin
Laden to Communism, from Islamic submission requirements of those subordinated
to these false lords, to the arrant yabber, deemed
funny for some reason, of cartoons which reduce man to a motivated, moulded relic of a meaning no longer to be found.
The celestial is abused, its name
debased whether in the slaughter of people in shopping malls because somebody
called ‘Allah’ allegedly wants it, to the devising of means of
allowing what destroys to become the lord of what builds. And what sort of
destruction would that be ? That is what the Bible has
long called Apollyon, the devil, whose varied
functions include accusing the brethren (normally falsely), contesting
righteousness, inducing fear of death, alienating from God, inducing to love
the means of life more than life (‘Mammon’), tempting and corrupting.
He can come dressed in flowing white robes which do nothing for his heart, but
much for those whom he dupes, surrounded with flowing verbiage, elevating
himself or his false prophets to the heavens, while his ways are earthy.
These two courses, those of the bacteria and those of the
body, those of the creation and those of the desecration, they continue
parallel for a time, until the judgment. In biblical words, these are the wheat
and the tares of Christ’s parable in Matthew13:24ff.,
which grow up together until the harvest, by which time … they are
readily recognised.
In this work, contemporary events, biblical exposition and in all, application for Christian Apologetics abound.
LXIII
The Beautiful Face of Biblical Predestination
Published May, 2003
ISBN 0-9750778-1-3
It is many years (now about 39) since this author first wrote the Master’s thesis on Predestination and Freewill. In March of this year, a second Volume was composed, largely of works on this topic, and applications and developments, since the first work.
Now, a little later in 2003, it seems necessary to present a third volume, to make a trilogy on predestination and the ways of will in the whole field of man, liberty, law, licence and responsibility. In this Preface and in the Introduction to Ch. 7 there is some new material, which may be of special interest for those familiar from times past, with these uncollected items. .
In this volume, there is emphasis on the nature of love, and further exposition on error which has deceived many in the church, for with excellent features from some, there has yet not seldom been conflict for many. Instead, as always, of such things, the only solution, and from the point of view of Christian Apologetics, the DELIGHTFUL solution is to return to the Bible and see the MINE from which sometimes the mimes have been taken, see the realities too often ground down from their original setting to banal substitutes. In this volume, this is done.
It is ONLY THEN that the wonderful exposure of the force of the divine word on this topic can be appreciated. So far from being some strange or exotic kind of concept, predestination with its intimate and ultimate companion, divine foreknowledge (biblically defined) is utterly necessary, wholly harmonious: and this ALONE has these features in the whole field of discussion about freedom and power, force and liberty, determinism and voluntarism. What would one expect ? that philosophy would open its mouth and infect the biblical doctrine with some SARS ? Alas, it has nothing to say to the point, and its morass in this field is one of its historic vulnerabilities. On the contrary, the Bible presents a definitive mass of truth which is coherent, and sound, rational and internally consistent, as well as ample to cover the empirical world.
Not merely so: alone has it the ingredients to make POSSIBLE such a harmony. We have seen much of this in Volume Two of this predestinative trilogy, that is, Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will.
However in this volume, there is emphasis on the particular wonder of the divine love, which is the paradigm, the power and the precept, the personal reality without which man does not and cannot live. He constantly WARPS his ‘love’ into nepotism, or family limitations, or political or personal rampancies or passions of this sort or that, not allied to that kinship and kindred compassion and relationship which in absence, creates such a draught as to create a kind of terrestrial pneumonia, with high temperature, hot breath and pallid face. Such is the affliction of this earth, at war with God, in its basic premisses and many of its most illustrious premises.
The beautiful face of Biblical predestination however shows, in its setting in the jewellery of His word, a beaming loveliness which never fades, never shades, is perennially bright.
LXIV
From Grace Triumphant to Face Divine
Published May 2003
ISBN
0-9750778-3-X
Here you see aspects of the Christian pilgrimage, with special attention to Timothy. Its beginnings precede time, its end is with Him who made time, and you may come to Him at any time in this Age of Grace.
You may be defaced, outfaced, or prefaced in your actions by your way of facing things, your reputation, your character, speaking before you come. People tend to grow in the expressive result of their lives, stooped and sullen, sad and contrite, quiet and reflective, frustrated and patient, or whatever the mark might be.
For the Christian however, there is the pilgrimage. It is not, emphatically NOT, a matter of visiting some town famous for this or that, no not even Jerusalem. The cross of Christ was programmed in heaven, performed on earth, and its contribution of action is past; only its application continues into the future. It is the One who died there, whose face beckons, filled with character, essentially in repose, but lively in light and radiant with beauty, the beauty of holiness (cf. Psalm 110, Daniel 7).
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In this pilgrimage, the defaced
residues of the image of God in man are replaced by the new surface and the new
character which it exhibits. |
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Outfaced is the past, distanced is sin in its regal
clothes and costumes; the face that shines is the One who came and went and
returns. |
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This lends light to one's eye, firmness to one's countenance, balance
to one's responses, passion to one's drive, delight to one's inner resources.
|
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No, it is not a physical journey, though truly one's body has much to endure in the pilgrimage; it is a spiritual journey, just as an aeroplane is indeed physical, but the one who LIVES IN IT, the pilot, gives its endurance meaning and its character purpose. |
It is known to God before the Ages began, or the world commenced, prepared in His grace, and it leads to His face divine (Revelation 22), where the beauty of holiness is like air, and the individuality of His saved ones is like perfume from flowers crushed, for there is no sin left, and the water of life is pure.
LXV
Victory
Heritage of Christians, Exile from this World
Published June, 2003
ISBN
0-9750778-5-6
How manifold are the victories of the Lord, and they need examination, itemisation and consideration, appreciation, application.
In contrast the world has nothing to offer but defeat, more palpable as its own mismanagement of the creation which it loves to disaver, inexorably proceeds. The stultifed human pseudo- 'creation' to come is a mess, but the Creator has a better way. The personal application of victory is examined, and a substantial allegory completes the volume, outlining the heritage of Christians, the victory which is nevertheless, that exile from this world.
LXVI
ALLEGORIES,
APOLOGUES AND ACRONYMS
Imagery with Verse for Christ the Lord
July 2003
ISBN 0-9750778-7-2
It appears that the many allegories, apologues, acronyms, pictures in words, plays in scenes, animal speakers, dialogues and presentations for the imagination hitherto presented on this site, might be put together in one book, allowing comparison and if desired, continual reading in one bloc, rather than through various labours, to and fro with seekings in this and that chapter or work. Hence there is now presented this compendium, yes with some small additions, not entirely insignificant, but still in the very stream of the originals. Largely a selection from earlier works presented on this site, it is however set together with the initial conspectus provided in the Preface, to provide perspective. Moreover, just as the groupings are significant, so the progression is deliberate, as item succeeds item.
LXVII
ISRAEL BLOWS THE TRUMPET THAT YET IT DOES NOT HEAR
News of Earth in the Light of Heaven
July 2003
Here is history under the Written Word of God, the Bible, and the Living Word, Jesus Christ as it Comes to the Light of Common Day, concentrating on contemporary events, with due historical background, in the fast moving world of today. Its focus, for this specialised selection, is Israel, blowing the evidential trumpet, fulfilling the word of God on the one hand, and in so doing, giving testimony that the return of Christ is near.
The News Items given, usually without change, are almost entirely as given from 1997-2003, on this site.
LXVIII
Know the Lord, Know the Bible, Know His Will
Manual for Christian Growth
ISBN 0-9751254 2 7
August 2003
Manual
for Young and Growing Christians
covering many topics and emphasising
the beauty, reasonableness and harmony
of God's word ...
for the work of a life-time
LXIX
ISBN 0-9751254 3 5
September 2003
It is time to see the definition of things that now are, that have been and that are coming. Hence a variety of topics with this thrust is presented, including news items of real portent.
Christians are "looking and hastening for the coming of the day of God" ( II Peter 3:12), as students await their coming holidays, with eager anticipation (Hebrews 9:28), there being no substitute for the ultimate love of their hearts (John 21:5-19, Philippians 1:20-21, 3:20-21, Deuteronomy 6:5); but while they remain, their hearts glow (Isaiah 64:5, John 15:21-23, I Peter 1:4-8) and they act to reflect His light and its suffusing beauty, which the world now needs (Philippians 2:15), desperately, before in this light, He delivers judgment according to truth (Romans 2) on that which has wilfully refused it (John 3:19,36, 5:19-23, Acts 17:31).
Flashpoints of our time, collisions with the word of God, more thought on creation, and on the nature of enquiry and education for the mind of the seeker, together with reflections on the Robotic 'Snake' all appear in Volume 69. It ends with consideration of the Irresolvable Mutiny and the Irresistible Truth, looking into the Middle East. As time moves, definitions sharpen for mankind; those of the word of God are wholly sharp already. Meet the scalpel!
LXX
ISBN 0 9751254 6 X
October 2003
What is joy, that elemental joy which comes from association with the Prince of peace, the Creator of man, the King of eternity, the Crucified Lord of love: how is it marred ? What is that joy which comes in the morning, when His light shines at His return ? What is its pre-emption without purity, and where lies the place for the heart of man!
LXXI
The Awesome Authority, Celestial Love and Impending Judgment
ISBN 0 9751254 7 8
November 2003
Near is the time for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, great are the encompassments of prophecy with precision, to signify this. How near ? It is like pneumonia, while the breath rasps, the temperature soars and the breathing pants. It is time to look at the will ? Well yes, since you are in it. Is it the will of the flesh, written by yourself, or the wisdom of God, to which you have abandoned yourself, as a sinking soul accepts rescue ? Undignified ? Of course. So is cancer. Realism repents. History does not: it proceeds, scurries, for the end is near. Near enough ? Nothing is near enough. Your name sketched in the book of life ? That is not near enough. It is written or not. Be sure of its being written ? How ? Were you present at predestination ? Of course not; but God was. His willingness is the most beautiful thing! Seize salvation like breath in the hole of Calcutta.
Such is the atmosphere of this book, which however surveys multiplied scenes in science, politics, society, international movements and current news, making careful exposition of many related scriptures in the New and Old Testaments.
LXXII
Christian Wings
Christian Things
ISBN 09751254 9 4
December 2003
In Christ, in this volume, we make some overflights, scenic surveys, like the U 2 of old, and to see in Him the ways of peace, of truth and loveliness, even in the midst of a world committed increasingly to the ignoring of those ways, the imposition of useless ways, and the assertion of the human spirit, its words, its culturally imitative religions, its sacrifices and its sententious summits. Alas for man, made by God for God, he is making an ass of himself by braying with words not from God, and moving with a heart not given to God.
What would you expect when you omit all the demonstrated handbook of the Maker, and make up your own! Yet those words are now as from the first, available, and nothing avails without them. This is the way of truth, whether with 'Nature' or the nature of man.
LXXIII
After the Night,
the Day,
the Day of the Lord
ISBN 0 9751761-1-0
January 2004
There is an inimitable comfort in the companionship ON DUTY in the teamwork which the Lord supplies and as we obey Him, His manifest co-operation and strengthening are not merely functional, but felicitious! Moreover, there are numerous facets of the jewel of life in Christ, of His word and of the attestation in history and life before our eyes, which make COMFORT like light in darkness, a beam of blessing shining to the perfect day. This is not only propositional, but personal; not only that but powerful, and not this alone, but practical. It has a beauty which is in strength, and a delight which is in a duty which alone is absorbing, since it reaches to the beginning, and does not end.
LXXIV Hear the Word of God!
Sermons and Addresses from the Bible, in the Lord
ISBN 0 9751761-3-7
January 2004
A number of the sermons in this work have been given while the author was under persecution, whether in New Zealand or Canada, indeed from the USA. They have been presented where snow lies, where heat hazes, where joy rings, where battle rages. One well remembers in one pastorate, which one had to resign because of the direct failure to follow the scripture on the part of those supervising, and this without repentance, being told something quite fascinating about the next sermon. Preach THAT and you are out! seemed to be the general message. It was preached and that did indeed not long precede the departure. Some of these sermons have been published as chapters or sections in a book, most of them have not. Some are outlines, short and ready for overview; others are longer, a few are more lengthy.
Nothing is more important than the word of God, propositional and personal, in the Bible, and according to its word, in the heart of man, in terms of the eternal and death-breaching Jesus Christ, whose return is
LXXV LET GOD BE GOD!
ISBN 0 9751761 4 5
January 2004
In field after field, the call here is to realise and recognise, to operate and act, alike, in the knowledge that there is no other God, that the One who has shown and declared His identity for millenia as nothing and no one else, needs to be returned to, received and indeed found, so that a morass of muddle should become once again, a marvel of hope, a dynamic of destiny and a pellucid pool of wonder in which loveliness is found, as befits those made in God's image: yet only when pardoned, so that despite demerit, they might enjoy and relish the wonder of the reality of the living God through the practical and powerful work of the Saviour, Jesus Christ, sent from eternity to bring man to eternal life.
LXXVI Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic
Desire or Desideratum
The Infernally Lying or the Eternally Divine
ISBN 0 9751761 6 1
February 2004
In this volume, we follow the mixture of delusion and divine dynamic, as the Author of man and history, brings the final touches to the painting which, once a matter of gore and grace at Calvary, now becomes a mixture of human ferocities as man unbalanced and far from his Rock, works out his own damnation, with fear and trembling, with pride and arrogance, with hope misplaced and dreams that are deadly.
For the social dreamers and ecclesiastical play-goers, free of the divine truth, the drift, as in drift wood approaching a whirl pool, increasingly experiences the forces soon not so dream-like, whilst the deliverance which awaits, must come from above; for the wood must be swept out of the sea into a safer place. Neither experience nor association can alter it: it comes or it goes.
LXXVII
ISBN 0 9751761 8 8
Worn-Out World and Coming King
A Call to Spiritual Arms
March 2004
This wayward world, spouting its now great swelling words of vanity more and more speciously, in sonorous hollowness to match the emptied souls, is moving inexorably, dynamised with the desperation of despair, towards an end to this stress and invidious, indeed almost sacred solemnity for the self: the natural, the divorcee from the divine. It is this, or else it makes its own divinities, and then seeks to outlaw the God who created, the Saviour who has shown His face only to have it mashed in madness ...
There is a face to face,
however, and its passion in love has in no way diminished its power in judgment.
Compassion does not annul truth, but makes an avenue for its children that is
safe, spiritual and godly, with no charge for admission and no end to the life
so commmissioned.
LXXVIII
Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination
NEWS IN CONTEMPORARY CONDITIONS
IN THE LIGHT OF ETERNAL REALITIES
ISBN 0 9752175 1 8
May 2004
It is a matter of accumulation, the cumulative, culmination, the quintessential revealed as the end is no more concealed. It is a question of receiving the answers in red ink, as after an examination. It is near. It is approaching, and it is of interest, both for the sake of those who need yet to awake, and those who being awake, can rejoice, lifting up their hearts since their final bodily redemption, even the resurrection is near (Luke 21:28).
The constant testimony of the power and precision of God is needed where blindness is a fashion, deceit is a method, propaganda is a milieu and ignorance is counted bliss, so long as it is of the word of God, the Gospel and the grace and peace in divine mercy, where it is to be found, where it is attested, where God has invested His Son, and performed His ancient works, both for Israel and for all, that some might be His when the test is concluded, and the accumulation of debris is removed.
It is time to think both practically and constructively of the end of the matter, the weighing in of enormously rich variables as they develop to maturity, within the assured certainties of the divine directions and prescribed consummation. To this one moves, as a horse to home after a gallop, and His rest is glorious.
LXXIX
Importunity, Opportunity and Purity of Heart
Suffering, Sanctions and Spiritual Sanctification\
June 2004
ISBN 0 9752175 2 6
Work on Job and Daniel mingles with the topical theme: seeking God with all your heart, the exigencies of sincerity, the opportunities of grace and the delectable consequences in the presence of the Almighty by His own personally appointed Way.
LXXX
July 2004
Extravaganzas, Stanzas, Bonanzas
A Humble Heart and
The Holy God
ISBN 0 9752175 3 4
Man is adept at breaching beauty,
lusting for non-truth, building sand-castles and
watching the tide come in, with a fatal fascination, an intrigued hypnosis, it
would almost seem, to destroy them. One of the latest exemplars is found in
Europe in the clamour on its Constitution, and its consequences; but they
started with Eve. Thrust by the 'must' of necessity, pathologically triumphant
in his fallen heart, he inherits the must of decay, the vitiation wrought by
vainglory. There is, as there has always been, one answer, rather more obvious
than this, that 2 plus 2 equals 4. As man dives for cover at the incoming waves,
it does not seem to occur to him that it is time he built up on higher ground, with the
upper air serene about him.
This is still available, and though
the world follow its woes with passion,
it is well to leave it to its devices, rescuing whom one may, warning all,
awaiting the call of the Christ whose worth is infinite, whose day is eternal,
whose love is practical, whose passion wise.
LXXXI
The Moon Soon
A Novel of the Era when Time Moves in on Space
Restricted publication, available only on screen.
Publishers desiring paper copies may contact us: Email us
July 2004
Bible-based novel involving personality development, interaction and ideological interchange, where pathology mounts, drama develops, intrigue unrolls and lunacy earns its name on the moon, as some of the predicted events unfold in the imaginary setting provided as an introduction to the actual soon to come.
LXXXII
Outrageous Outages, Awesome Inputs and the Courage of Christ
Insight on Site and Oversight from the Lord
ISBN 09752175 6 9
The contemporary scene is filled with absentees, with outages, with outrages, with the outrageous, with voided insights and intrusive oversights, lacking the light of truth which transforms thought within to knowledge from above, and rebellion from reason into the sweetest of harmonies of this instrument of enquiry with the full scope of revelation from God direct, so that the indirect and the direct are there to make for man a complete certainty and a glorious unity in which He rules and overrules, His word the truth.
In this volume, the awesome insights God offers, the outrageous outages in which man persists, the oversight from divinity which never swerves and the outline which He follows for His creation, never servile, but sovereign, never cruel but kind, never manipulable but inviting: these things concern us.
LXXXIII
THE GLOW OF PREDESTINATIVE POWER
and the Show of
Autonomous Antics
Philosophic Prancing and
Renegade Romancing
ISBN 0 9752175 8 5
This is now the 4th member of the Predestinative Quaterion of Volumes
Predestination and Foreknowledge,
Liberty and Necessity
Responsibility, Duty and Creativity
With this new publication, the predestination trilogy (see next item below) has now become a quaternion of volumes, a new quota on predestination, foreknowledge, on liberty and necessity, and in these environs, on responsibility, duty and creativity. How do you they all cohere ? Most readily, if and only if (IFF) you follow the biblical premises.
This is because you need a truth which is there, and able to be conceived within the model you use for understanding life, the universe, time and eternity, man and his place. Mercifully, this model is provided in the Bible. It is – as just one of the innumerable verifications of its truth and source in that Truth who makes truth for man about man possible – also the desideratum which mind must seek, and the solution at which it respires with delight, when it is found. It is like water, long envisaged, often conceived, but never either found or seen as to its composition. The need however is apparent. Thirst is not without harm, too long deferred in its quest. It can even lead to poisons, damaging to the system, and destructive of life.
When you find the truth, you can at last receive the payload of which it is the Father: from a world view which is coherent, rational, harmonious in its elements, uniquely valid, workable and self-verificatory. Since without truth, it is useless to talk of exhibitions of it in overview, we need what is from God without delay. It is not surprising that He has differentiated Himself from philosophic putations by His word, and that by its power, validity and regality. There is but one attestation of this. It needs not to change, since the Creator of time is not subordinate to it, and surrogates are worthless. It is needed from the first, and to the last. There is but one attestation of that also. The Bible as proposition, the Christ as Performer, these in holy alliance are astride history as a colossus over a harbour.
LXXXIV
THE GODS OF NATURALISM HAVE NO GO
Best tell them, Begone!
August 2004
ISBN 0 9752 175 0 3
A universe into a universe goes once, but a universe from nothing does not go at all. Dynamising what shrieks its protests, moreover, at such manhandling, in order to make it achieve what it quite simply is NEVER seen to do, has NEVER shown itself to possess in power, method or principle, in equipment or in process, is simply presumption personified.
It is time that its starvation diet, feeding a stomach that is not there, were made more evident. To such an end, and the glory of the Creator Himself, this book is directed, with the aid in finding the Lord Himself whose word rules all to the last nucleated cell.
There is simply no argument that can begin to stand, all totter: the talk is all air, not even hot, being cold with the ludicrous downfall of the human mind into asininity beyond all belief, while 'science' is humiliated by this philosophic intrusion from arrogant erraticism, so that it is indeed 'science falsely so-called', as one component of the more adequate definition from Timothy 'knowledge falsely so-called'. Despite the clamour of some, whoever on earth imagined that science is not one form of knowledge, so that 'knowledge falsely so-called' would not include it!
As to 'science', it has from early Greek days been precisely that fatuous combination of observation (in part) and philosophy (in the main) which it now is in the establishment, IN THESE METAPHYSICAL AREAS in the contemporary scene.
This error is of course not the pit of all scientists, or all Ph.D. recipients in this field, not by any means, since many realise the folly of OTHER scientists, and by their hundreds hold to biblical creation, and far more scientists of course, to creation itself. It is however that false and foolish abuse of scientific method which this philosophic outrage has perpetrated for some generations now, that constitutes the contribution of the main matrix of modern 'science' to the entire knowledge situation of which it forms one cultural segment, so that this and the rest of culturally domineering human 'knowledge', in delirious combination are giving just what Paul warned Timothy to avoid, which is 'science falsely so-called' as part of 'knowledge falsely so-called'.
To be sure, it is not ONLY what we now call the 'science' element that is in view; but equally surely, it is by no means exclusive of it. The abuse of scientific method, as now defined, is quite as bad as that of the Greek philosophers of their early history. That sodden contribution of the 'classic' times of Greece with its atomic theory and the rest, mixed with doses of philosophy of an arrogant indifference to truth, is precisely what has now come of age. To ignore or to seek to subvert the apostolic warning is no service to God! It is alas, however well-intentioned a work of confusion. It is the TYPE of knowledge of man which is warned against, WHATEVER its contemporary modes, that fusion of confusion with observation which inherits the cultural collapse of faith into fiction, with the pomp and ceremony of ludicrous aspiration towards learning.
There follows then, and for many reasons but above all for the glory of God and the testimony of truth, Jesus Christ, a collection of different parts from among our (currently) 82 volume library on Biblical Christian Apologetics and matters pertaining to this, which put together, increase the ease both for comparison and for development of understanding in this area. The writings concerned, in their published form, have spanned a period of some 11 years.
LXXXV
August 2004
ISBN 0 9756840 0 0
In this volume, this focus on Jesus Christ will be on what it cost, what it gave and what was the divine plan; and it may from time to time consider other plans which the planning committee of pagan humanism, irrational religions and pragmatic desire may propound, so that they who open the eyes can avoid the pit and find the place of eternity.
For my own part, I intensely love eternity, and without it, would not much value life at all: it would be like being a seed that did not germinate (John 12:1ff.). A life ? could you call it that ? It would be a preliminary without its inheritance. HAVING an inheritance in eternity is far more precious than anything this phase of life can contribute, and the beauty of it is this, that it is not by violence and terrorism, of any kind or capacity, that it is found; but it is by the gift of God that it is made available. As for our part, those of us who as Christians receive Him and all His words, we delight to bring this gift to others by that same word, and in the power of His Spirit which He has given to all His own people (Romans 8:9). It was good of God to give, it is delightful to pass it on. It is fitting to reflect on the aspects in the essence of faith, reason for the faith and the wonder of the faith, and this we seek here in no small measure, to do!
LXXXVI
THE MEANING OF LIBERTY AND THE MESSAGE OF REMEDY
Remedy Is - and Victory goes with it
September 2004
ISBN 0 9756840 1 9
Remedy in the domain of man is for sin
selfishness, squalor, suffering,
seediness, silliness,
seduction, servitude,
slavery, subtlety in subversion,
spawn of violence, vileness and viciousness,
species of pride, vanity, degradation, depravity,
socialistic superficiality, splendiferous without spiritual link to the Author,
communistic contempt of truth, pragmatically pursuing unscientific squalor,
spiritual self-aggrandisement, delusion and death,
severity of judgment
certitude of hell
severance
of peace, meaning, mastery, manhood, womanhood and childhood
from virtue,of joy that is inherent, of self-control, certainty,
from the race,
indeed from the entire domain of mankind.
The problem is human,
The solution is divine;
just as the creation was divine,
and the desecration was human.
Now that desecration is systematic
as is the restitution available in
the remedy.
The remedy is as old as man,
as new as AD, in the year of our Lord,
as contemporaneous as the presence of the Spirit of God
in each new child of God.
Man is personal
(cf. It Bubbles... Ch. 9, Little Things
Ch. 5, Overflight in Christ
1),
and so is the remedy.
Man is made able to reason, the remedy is demonstrable
and here demonstrated.
Liberty can opt for slavery,
while love appointed the service that remedy is.
The liberty is human,
the love is divine.
LXXXVII
THAN THE SNOW-CAPPED CREST,
THE EBULLIENT FOUNTAINS FROM ITS WATERS:
THE LOVE OF GOD ALONE
September, 2004
ISBN 0 9756840 3 5
The compilation from earlier works of this author, on the theme of the love of God tends to leave out concentration on the area of predestination as to focus, since this is so abundantly covered in The PQ. (see above). Having there seen divine love's explicatory power for man, and its dominant entry into the resolution of his problems of thought, we now find need to give some compilation of what has been discovered from the word and the ways of God, manifest in flesh, living in life: concerning that ultimate and original of love, the Lord. No book and no man has ever loved like this; for no one is like the Lord; and what He says, goes, so that those who go with Him, find it so.
There is now in measure, relayed in sequence an emphasis on other features of the love of God; for what passes all bounds, releasing all the bonds of harassment and delivering free to the highway of holiness, while yet relating intimately to man, is of surpassing importance. It requires the most assiduous attention, just as it itself summons it. Without this, man is but a shell, hiding a complexity which is ultimately as sad and unpicturesque as an old car, dumped in a distant yard.
LXXXVIII
WHAT IS THE CHAFF TO THE WHEAT ?
October 2004
ISBN 0 9756840 4 3
A constant contrast of the dire realities of vacuous virtuelessness, before God, and the grounded life in Christ, with all the reaches of divinity and sublimity, the diabolical and the devious seen in their space-station outlines from the perspective of the word of God, their credentials in accord with their names.
It includes a review of Christian Apologetic method.
LXXXIX
THE BRIGHT LIGHT AND THE UNCOMPREHENDING DARKNESS ...
WILFULLY WITLESS, WOEFULLY DRIVEN,
IT MOANS BY THE REALM OF JOY
Published November 2004
ISBN 09756840 6 X
As we watch the world developing its final 'birth' pangs, as New Age might think, but its actual death signature on mortality, assigned to the paths written for the godless, it becomes clear on every side that drastically desired darkness, as in a womb which is long past its due date, is merely a cradle of death. If the actual rattle is delayed, the signals are tempestuous, continual and mounting.
The ease with which the bright light solves all things placed in its beam has its obverse. There is no light found shining out of human consciousness, a mere reciprocal of the reality of man's invisible spirit which laughs at law (sometimes in general, hence becoming lawless, with the due results of its misdeeds), construes as it will and wonders at its own baselessness while carefully turning its back on its base, like the wilfully blind, having shut their eyes, marvelling that they cannot see. This light is equally not human knowledge, always baffled at its place since without its source it has none, settling for mere manipulation, nor yet human aspiration, which can be for doom or dictatorship, ease or indifference.
This bright light of which Isaiah spoke (Isaiah 8:22-9:7, Isaiah 42:6, 49:6), which would dispel the darkness of anguish, it is as he declared, the Messiah.
He who came on time (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4), Paul's "due time" in Galatians 4, an intensely mathematical point in history, who did the trial course, not to see if He could but to show that He would, it is He who depicted the scenario to come before He would return in judgment, when having confirmed the Gospel, indeed make it work by His Cross and resurrection, He is to terminate trials in triumph. It is this which Isaiah had shown, centuries before, as had others (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17), centring around Him who revealed to man in visible form, the actual presence of God in incarnation once made for all time, who is as changeless as the tide of human error.
The difference ? His word works, and man's does not; His word is love, the world's is itself; His way is wisdom, the world's is folly. His is an opening in the clouds; the world's ? it is a descent to the pit.
In this volume, with special reference to news and developments, but with such references as become fitting, often from former work to aid brevity, we shall keep a finger on the pulse of our times, use the stethoscope of scripture to cover the condition of man's inhalations, exhalations and condition andand moreover see how our times compare with the predictive cardiograph of our Age (cf. SMR Ch. 8). It will not be pleasant in all things, but it holds always something beyond mere pleasure, power and prestige, performance and manipulative capacity in the instrumentation panel of this world's construction, which is in much available to man. It will continue to expose the sheer wonder of the word of God at work in the world, astride it like a giant Colossus, providing for it like the Great Physician which the Lord in fact is.
It presents health, wholeness, truth and mercy, peace and joy, reality and that rest which comes from reality, since His is the heart that cherishes. If the Lord of glory whom man gashed, according to the divinely announced plan (Isaiah 50-55, Zechariah 12, Psalm 22 cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25) does not cherish the restless godlessness of the renegade, yet He cherishes the call to repent, and has cherished even to the point of a cursed death, the cost of restoration of people to Himself, as many as receive Him (John 1:12). Before all time, which is a mere invention of the deity, there is He whose constructive mantle is seen over all His words (cf. The Defining Drama Ch. 10), and there being no other God (cf. Ephesians 4:4, Isaiah 44-45), it is He who in the beginning was the Word and was God. It is He who has come from the eternities of blessedness to bring eternal life to the otherwise irremediable confines of corruption.
XC
Agony, Ecstasy and the Mastery of the Messiah
Published December 2004
ISBN 0 9756840 7 8
This world is filled increasingly with wild sprees, violent, libidinous, alcoholic, of speed, voyeurism, viciousness, uninspired religious guesswork with blood, of market snatching, house grabbing, and of grasping profit taking, as if this were the essence of living or the goal for humanity.
At the same time, and not only in obverse, it is invaded by anguish, millions visiting psychiatrists who study the body and the brain, and consider statistics and what is desired, and often with no knowledge of the human spirit, its origin or powers, but stuck in the muck of mental reductionism, prescribe drugs, now that the invasive techniques of Freud and the discursive bewilderment of Jung are no longer economically desirable, or perhaps even statistically effective (cf. SMR p. 335, Ch. 4, Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 9, incl. End-note 1).
But effective for what ? For removing anguish ? Scarcely. For extirpating guilt ? Hopeless. It is useless to be told that you are in the grip of this or that, when many worse placed are not. It is mere assumption, and the conscience in those where it is not annulled, does not witness as the truth, to the concept that one really only does what one has to; for often enough man does precisely what he works out is to his advantage, in spree, fee or feeling, and then does it deliberately and deliberatively (cf. Predestination and Freewill Section I).
In the midst of this bloodshed, of writhing bodies and ruined lives, of hapless imaginings and ruthless wreckage, of reductionist cartoons and repulsive behaviour, touted as good and progressive, there remains what even a debased race can find as the unalterable, immutable and the beautiful, the beginning and the end for all creation, Jesus Christ. His lowly state is the very epitome of contrast to the direct or indirect self-praise of man; His total potency for good is the blessed opposite of the so much desired power of evil which afflicts the contemporary world; His precise prophetic position, making Him unmissable and immiscible alike, resembles His own predictions which arrive like stations on a suburban line, inexorably, naturally and continually (cf. SMR Ch. 8).
His salvation as Messiah, the one anointed to suffer, to die, to cover sin and remove its distressing guilt, to renew a race of individual believers and construct them into His Church, not by pieces of bread or illicit masters (Matthew 23:8-10, John 6:61-63), not by wild surmises using the Bible as a tooth brush to tickle the teeth rather than a covenant creator to purge the soul, but by grace and divine power, in love and divine wisdom: this remains. The mastery of his coverage of man's will, spirit and history, and His own procedures in doing so are in the last chapters, considered with the delight they evoke as the only rational answer to the nature of man.
XCI THE LOVE OF GRACE AND THE GRACE OF LOVE
Volume 5 in what is now The Predestination Quintet
Published December 2004
ISBN 0 9756840 9 4
In presenting the fifth volume of the Predestination Quintet (which aptly can still be called THE PQ), one is constrained by two considerations. Firstly, the volume which contained what are now chapters 4-8 below, had grown all but unwieldy in size. Secondly, new material has need of a place, and as the two phases, the old and the new seem suited partly by contrast, the one outlining the wonder of the other, as when a moon is seen sailing over dark clouds, this book has sprung into life.
One of the stimuli to the earlier chapters came from a lively letter to which they in part form the reply, and in part are beyond it; so that there is a more personal element.
The grace of love is one of the major considerations, so that when one looks to God, one is not seeing an eviscerated sovereign, any more than a callow controller; but one of a wisdom which is as beautiful as His love, who knowing all, loses none that love would reach, and reaching, brings in none whom guile works!
He is the God of truth, and loves in truth, but is in nothing moved from the truth; and it is wonderful than in all truth, His mercy is available, so that there is no reason to surrender to this world, when the Maker of it is ready to receive. If you say, But I am not sure of my reception, the beauty of it is this, IF you come, THEN you are WARRANTED the reception of your life, in both senses!
XCII
TRIALS, TESTS and TRIUMPHS in TEMPTATION
with JOB for FOCUS
December 2004
ISBN 0 9756840 8 6
So much is said so often about the evils of this world, and then about the alleged hardness of God, and then about unbelief in Him, or the construction of this or that silly little goddy thing, instead of Him, that it is time to be sober, rational, realistic and attentive to the realities that are in fact His, attested, verified, validated and secure (cf. SMR). This is not so customary!
In unpleasant fact, these goddy things, idolatrous inventions in biblical terminology, a very word for idol in Hebrew signifying vanity, nothings: they may be constructed for diverse reasons. It may be in order to make men prosperous, or vanquishing, or to be sensually replete, perhaps gastronomically, sexually, to secure for them prominence, not of teeth but of tongue, to have place in the purlieus of prestige, or if not, perhaps to be sensitive with a sort of spiritual pining, as if melancholy were the preferred mode, perhaps interspersed with a few wild sprees, morally or in bibulous or spiritual intoxication or the like, to atone. In view of the temper not to say tantrums of our Age, it seems good to focus on a far different thing, the trials and triumph, by the grace of God alone, of Job. He is not precisely a hero; but he is certainly an example, and a very good one, a joy to consider and an education to ponder, as we study his case in the book of Job.
To this end, it has seemed good to collect some of the writings on Job, that have previously been published in the 91 volumes so far presented by this writer on the Web, at webwitness.org.au, and to make a collection in subject progression, of these, with additions to add depth and scope.
Job himself, in his case, eminently clear in scripture, is sometimes made into such a 'mystery' that it is a wonder how the world can continue so long with such misconstructions of a key player in the example department of the Bible. Certainly it is a profound thing, but scarcely difficult to understand if you follow the text, which does not appear the most common procedure.
In this context, the matter of trials and suffering is given focus. Much of the problem here is a determination to treat God as if man were His judge, and events were His unchaste desire. To forget sin is easy, like forgetting smoking when you have lung cancer; but it is equally useless and fantasising to do so. The world is in the grip of sin to the point that its very sanity as a system comes into some manner of question; its misuse of design in the performance and preference of desire is virtually a cult. God is then harangued, or not believed in - sometimes in a childish spirit as if to say, 'Very well then, I just won't believe in you, so there!' as if some statistical fear would operate on the Almighty as rebellion increases.
It is however far otherwise that truth is. When a world is under curse, there are only two options. One is to bear it and this is noble in a Roman sort of way, but futile. Another is to have it waived in your own case; and that is sound and sensible for does the Creator want you cursed ? It is all and only a question of justice. Impudence deserves caning but repentance is relevant to its omission. When however justice is essential, then only mercy can operate; and to do so, God has borne the 'caning' (literally in fact in something worse by far than the undesirable rattan) for those who appeal for mercy. You get those who think He bears it anyway, just because it is apt, appropriate and available to all and is provided on their behalf (I John 2:1-2); and those who do not like it at all, despite Isaiah 53, and Galatians 3 with Romans 3 and Hebrews 7-10.
It is always so, those against the government, in this case, that of the universe, of mankind. It does not alter anything, unless you overthrow the government, and to overthrow your Creator is just as silly piece of childish inanity, since you can be de-created in an instant, for that matter. Liberty however gives you scope, and scope is provided by love from the Creator, along with mercy and free pardon (Titus 3:3-7), and for that matter, with eternal life. While there are profound depths back of sin, there is profound love in God (cf. Colossians 1:19ff.), and in view of this, there is no slightest danger of any being lost who might be found. Pardon is free because its securing by Christ was costly. The knowledge of God removes one from the shape of things where wind blows the chaffing chaff; and if suffering occur, as it will, then the joy of service becomes the restoration of meaning in the presence of the God who acts for those who wait for Him.
XCIII
January 2005
ISBN 0 9757291 1 X
Originally, this volume was produced, step by step, as various challenges were issued to aspects of biblical truth, or otherwise found and met. They have been culled from the work of 8 years.
It now seems good to have these available as a volume for review by many who may have similar thoughts, ideas or difficulties, so that the unique beauty, harmony and validity of the Bible may be savoured, in this case, at times like a war-ship in action, at times like a vessel passing through narrow straits.
Here is the opportunity to see wind-tunnel tests, examine, probe, and give one's mind to these things. Some of these have appeared in such volumes as THAT MAGNIFICENT ROCK.
Number 12 below is of special interest as it formed a three-pronged attack on the Bible, and some may wish to see how profoundly vigorous and stable is the Bible, like a rocky coast, under all attack, there.
As a compilation of numerous answers to challenges put, or found, these items present an opportunity for many who may share the concerns or desires for enquiry which they attest. Their scope is wide, but the answers are on a consistent basis, the only one which is valid in all points and verified at all attempts to test it, that of the Bible. It is its amazing scope of providing light for any angle of interest, in a coherent, consistent fashion which is one of its most total verifications.
XCIV and XCV
ISBNs for the three
separate volumes:
0 9757291 2 8, 0 9757291 3 6
and 0 9757291 4 4 rather then one.
Just published January 2005,
The gods of naturalism have no go!
in a TRILOGY, to replace the former single volume,
which tends ... to grow. These, within the basic title as above,
have their own individual sub-titles, Namely: I Naturally They Don't Go,
II Necessarily They Don't Go and
III Nothing Doesn't Go!
The original single volume was
No. 84.
XCVI
THE GRATING GRANDEUR AND AGGRANDISEMENT OF MAN
AND THE MEEKNESS OF THE MAJESTIC MESSIAH
January 2005
ISBN
He is never done. Let him be bankrupt, like the USSR, and in need, let him have drove of foreign scientists help his perilously undisciplined stocks of nuclear weapons, and let world banking lend massive funds; it is still a matter of boasting of having new inter-continental rockets that will not be matched by the 'enemy' for a long time! Man is inveterate ... it is not just Putin, disputing the dynamics in the lost land that glorified man in Communism and abased mankind to the uttermost in dismal reductionism and defiant devilries, too well documented by one of its own people, Nobel laureate, Solzhenitsyn (cf. SMR pp. 971-972).
It is Europe. It too is a new emblem and has a new ensign to show its glory. In muted terms, they refer to their Christian background, basis or tradition (as on the DW TV documentary here screened on December 16, 2004), and in loud ones to the question whether Turkey can be taken cold turkey, or must be garnished a while. To be sure, it is wise to ensure that the social treatment of man is at least in some discernible way within the confines of some reasonable legal system, and not the resultant of religious dynamics which assume what does not stand, and work on what has fallen and failed these millenia since its foundation (cf. Divine Agenda Ch. 6, More Marvels Ch. 4, SMR pp. 829ff.). Yet to what excellent glory is Turkey seeking entry ?
After all, what has Europe itself been doing ? Let us forget for the moment its two not so glorious world wars of the recent past (in such a perspective as this).
What are these traditions ? those of the Inquisition ? It has failed to affirm so far in its new Constitution all this glorious christianity, spelt here with a small 'c' because it is a small and diminutive edition of the real thing which is actually based on the meek but majestic Messiah, Jesus Christ, not on inquisitions* for centuries, grabbing riches for Rome and Romanism, and torturing bodies whose possessors do not believe in illicit magic and dreamed doctrines which are neither true not biblical (cf. SMR pp. 1032-1088H). There is no glory in shame.
The ONLY GLORY is in the meek Majesty of the Messiah who DIED rather than murdered, who AROSE rather than slithered into ridiculous posturings of 'greatness' reduced constantly to ruin or the deliquescences of pride overruled and dripping into its dank spiritual slums. By contrast, what the Messiah claimed, He demonstrated; what He said He would do, He did, what He asserted, it stood and all the king's horses (such as those of Herod) and all the king's men (such as those of the High Priest), yes and all Rome's audacious imperial aura, reduced to folly indeed by Nero as time passed, could not smash the Holy One, though they tried as much as wit and work could muster.
XCVII and XCVIII
REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER
Irrresistible Reason for Certain Faith
in 2 volumes,
REASON LEADING TO REVELATION
and the REDEEMER
ISBN 0 9757291 7 9
and
REASON LEADING FROM FALSE REVELATION
and to Verification
ISBN 0 9757291 8 7
There are a number of systematic points of basic kind in the nature of providing a reason for the Christian faith. It is unique in that nothing else provides demonstration or can do so, as is shown in these pages. To present these matters both in overview and in specialised coverage of major issues is the purpose of the current two volume work, specialising in the first section rather in the positive, to find the way, in the second, in the negative, to discard what is not.
Naturally, there is a nexus of impacts, but this is the trend.
The approach in method and the successive and accumulating confirmations is
always as startling to mind, as expected by faith. The living God and
Father of Jesus Christ is not distant, except to sin, near to faith, near to
reason, and all that is in man attests Him.
XCIX
DIZZY
DASHES, HEADY CLASHES
AND THE BRILLIANT HARMONY OF INEVITABLE TRUTH
February 2005
ISBN 0 9757291 9 5
Penetrating Peace
Dizziness is a state of mind and consciousness, of perception and appreciation which lacks solidity, soundness, reliability, so that what ought to be stable, whirs or blurs, and what ought to be clear is dimmed or whirling and thought without actually ceasing, is under arrest.
To walk in such a state renders one vulnerable; but to dash when under such constraints is foolish, and could well be deadly.
Dizzy dashes are one of the trade-marks of our times, where passions aroused, with ideologies like dark glasses obscuring vision for millions, if not billions, and lurching revenge and monetary, commercial and national hopes and lusts joining in the whirling throng, there is every opportunity for inane bloodshed, incredible torture, indescribable indignity and inveterate vice.
Power has grown, and idolatry with it. The devils are no better than ever they were, but their devotees now aim at atomic weapons, such as Iran is reputed to be near to having in her grasp, and North Korea, both absolutist States, where a few dominate the many, with or without any measure of acceptance.
To help in the disabuse of many, and the arrival of some to His kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, where the liberty of the Lord is at work, this volume is written: it is presented in the interests of that truth which, verified on every side, does not wait for permission to exist, but manifests itself in the patience of God as His program comes to its peak, in the return of the Prince of peace. It is well to be ready (Matthew 24:1-10, 36-51).
C
February 2005
ISBN 0 9757385 1 8
Here is a work of allegory, showing the adventures of an angel not so sophisticated as some, but with a heart like a child, but a grown mind, seeking to minister to the heirs of salvation, and making to the Throne of Heaven, a surprising request.
CI
OR
FANTASY'S FLIGHT TO THE INFERNAL
The Dynamics of Disintegration and
the Delights of Restoration
March 2005
ISBN 0 9757385 3 4
This is a SEQUEL to LITTLE ANGEL
Volume 101 in the Set
In Praise of Christ Jesus
It is not an excursion into angelology,
nor even merely a visit to their realm, for here the affairs
both of men and of angels, in all their angles, are before us, though we
cannot visit all; and it is with the advantage of a celestial perspective,
which is theirs, and the sublime aid of the entirety of the word of God, the
Bible that we rove and watch.
CII
HISTORY, REVIEW AND OVERVIEW
HELPS, HINDRANCES AND HOLINESS
ISBN 0 9757385 4 2
This volume is intended to expose some of the stories men invent, present in contrast the history which makes no parade, but happens, to provide helps from the eternal word of the everlasting God, to show hindrances in their undressed state, free of phrases that cover gross over-weight, and to see all of this human speeding to corruption, in the light of the holiness which God desires and makes available for man.
It is like looking at a lake of serene splendour, set in the snows of refreshing altitudes, and then from this perspective, considering the dust of delusive dynamisms, below.
CIII
IMPOSSIBLE TO MEN, OPEN TO GOD
April 2005
ISBN 0 9757385 5 0
This volume is intended to bring the contrast, not between man's past and present achievements, a motley lot at best, but between man's power and that of God, man's morals and the principles of deity, man's pride and the divine humility, puny problematics of creation posing as ultimate, and simple solutions found in the Creator, acting as He is.
It does not ameliorate man's position or condition; but it does show the divine way, attested and vindicated, that of salvation in Jesus Christ, which may be omitted as may breath from the nostrils, but with more cost. To omit the power, place and presence of God by attested covenant and promise in one's life, is simply to be partially unmade, unmanned and hence insalubrious in spirit, derelict in destiny, a potential unmet.
CIV
ALLEGORIES, APOLOGUES AND ACRONYMS
Imagery with Verse for Christ the Lord
May 2005
Reset
with additions, from July 2003,
now in two volumes
ISBN for Vol. 1 0 9750778-7-2
for Vol. 2 0 9757385-6-9
CV
CELESTIAL HARMONY FOR THE TERRESTRIAL HOST
Omitting the
Evanescent Extremes
and
Taking the Picture from the Book
Ministers Peace to His People, His Body, His Church
May 2005
ISBN 0 9757385-8-5
Hallowed be Thy name is frequently part of a prayer; hallowed be Thy word is parallel (cf. Isaiah 8:20), and one way to do this is to avoid evanescent extremes, pugnacities of flesh and actually be guided by what it says as to what it means! Names of man's parties in this setting are close to irrelevant, for the name of God is infinitely above all other, and if man does not like to have his name used for the words of other men, or his words used with the names of others, how vastly worse is it to plagiarise or impel one's own thoughts into those of God! When this is avoided and justice done to the word of God, how readily do contentions abate, winds of passion dispel; and valuable unity is ready. I Corinthians 3, Paul's stricture on parties with names, has been ignored by many as if it were the eleventh commandment to do just the opposite! Treasure is available when the word of God is given its place.
Ten areas are examined.
CVI
106th
THE TRUE GOD HAS GO, GIVES GROWTH AND GLORY
May 2005
ISBN 0 9757 385 9 3
The true God is known by what He does, and this is but one of the evidences of who He is. One of the things He does is give growth, a most fascinating reality, and when considered, an all but overwhelming tour de force and bastion of brilliance in itself. To this, attention must be paid, so that its reality is realised, and His action is pondered, as all truth must be for those who do not disdain wisdom.
Before growth of course, is existence, and since there is no mandate for magic, existence requires a source, basis and GO to put it there. Laws do not languish in clouds of vapour, or thought for that matter, but can operate only where a SYSTEM is ALREADY present, in which they have either cognitive or operational significance.
Glory too requires a source. There is in man a desire for it, whether in sport, in architecture, in painting, in politics, in nations and in the multiplicity of man’s aspirations; and although it is frequently, and perhaps most frequently associated with vain, futile, destructive and at times all but whimsical and sick selfishness, there is a positive side, and a healthy one to it.
Such seeking of glory, when healthy and not obsessed with self or its appointees, can be the very essence of reality that is sought, not the pushing of some proud wheel-barrow, thrust by an idiot, seeking a goal of evanescence. When it is to the objectively indicated God of truth, the Lord of the Bible, it is the greatest topic and task, as well as the most fruitful. It can be the adornment of the race, in this, that it is residual from the GO that put man into being, and a seeking for the GOD and not the merely mouthed magic, who is required for his very existence.
When THAT is the glory sought, so that all other gloriousness is merely derivative to the glory of that glory-source, then it is well.
CVII
107th
June 2005
ISBN 0 9757881 0 8
BEYOND THE CRYPT: THE DIVINE SCRIPT AND THE FACE OF GOD
Information, Inflammation,
Conflagration,
Consummation with Comfort, or Inextinguishable Ashes
It is comforting to know in the face and light of this that there is light for man that NOTHING can extinguish, alter, mutate or manipulate; for it is not to a Government House Garden Party but to the grace of the eternal God that each one is invited, and the actual Invitation is provided for you within, and it is found in the script, when you accept what is offered. It is not available for gate crashes really, no, not at all. It is here, in the Redeemer provided, Jesus Christ, and in HIM ALONE (Acts 4:11-12), that you find rest, reality and eternity in which your place comes as one of His own. The thing is sure, and past all surmise, concrete, evidenced and assured. Its perspectives, in the kingdom of heaven, are the most vital element hidden from the eye of wandering man.
CVIII
WALKING IN THE LIGHT AND KEEPING YOUR EYES OPEN
For Eyes Fast Closed, Truth is Opposed:
More Humble, less Stumble
July 2005
ISBN 0 9757881 2 4
It is not the swinging of some pendulum, but the truth which is needed, and it is needed NOW.
Sensationalistic Pentecostalism is just as far astray from actual scripture as is the weak-minded, knobbly-kneed tepidity of the crass humanism of Liberalism, which has driven many to seek something, somewhere, that is far better. Churches have depopulated statistically, through such liberal approaches to the Lord, who is made over by this method, as really as by Muhammad and the sects; and it is not at all surprising to find now an increasing indifference to the prohibition on spiritual fellowship with sects such as Islam or whatever else may have some prospect of 'success'.
Pentecostalism has been the recipient of many who have left straying denominations, just as in large swathes, it also by repeated exhibition of unscriptural emphasis, and de-emphasis of commands, misleads: in its own way, ignoring to such an extent the very scriptures concerning gifts as did the Liberals other scriptures concerning Israel and the power of God. False prophets do indeed abound, and whether it be denial of gifts or sensationalistic focus on them, it is all one: it is ANYTHING but the loving, gracious, believing, faithful reality from which both these extremes move as drift-wood, graying in the sun as they are baked on the river of life, which drives popular appeal. So they drift, moving to the sea and the swamps of meaningless humiliation.
In this volume, therefore, our attention to the bible will be on simply, what it says, where to go, how to go, what is happening and how to treat it, regard it, from a scriptural viewpoint, remembering that just as the 'Jerusalem' of yesterday was destroyed for its depravities, so the 'world' of today parades its pomp and hideous presumption, awaiting a similar end.
KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN! or WATCH AND PRAY, as Christ indicated in the latter part of Matthew 24, as well as in speaking to the disciples before the crucifixion. Such is the underlying message of this volume, which also specialises on Job, exhibiting that what is required is not mere speculative frenzies, focussed on man as if the water explained the heavens, but actual reality, duly confirmed and validated, as nothing else is.
This work also, however, is dealing with the other phase, WALKING IN THE SPIRIT as in Galatians 5, for keeping your eyes open is but half. If you do not know what to make of what you see, how are you advantaged, except in some things; where as in all things you need due care!
If the Spirit of God is not in you, you are not a Christian, says Paul in Romans 8; and to walk in the Spirit means NOT to be
a formalistic substitute for a Christian, or
a sacramentalist version of the idolatrous (cf. Questions and Answers Ch. 2), or
indeed ANYTHING which is not the case required by the Lord.
And that ? It is where Christ is EVERYTHING to you, first and foremost, His life your love, His word your law, His royalty your rule, His deity your inspiration, His power your resource, His wisdom your benison and His grace your basis for reflection as you move with it, of it and in it (cf. I Corinthians 1:29-30).
CIX
ISBN 09757881 3 2
August 2005
Scientific method needs re-affirmation, clarification and application as the devices of delusion, with incredible effrontery, seek to add to their captives, even many in this arena.
CX
DANCERS, PRANCERS, LANCERS AND ANSWERS
ISBN 09757881 4 0
August 2005
Psalm 2 gives the theme, modern history gives the dream, the past provides the depth and the future is frisky, on our doorstep as oblivion takes hold, a bad combination for prancing.
The age-old answer does not change; truth does not do that sort of thing.
CXI
ON TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE
WORDS ABOUT
WORDS
Get out of
the Way,
To Let the
God of the Bible
Have His Say!
ISBN 09757881 5 9
September 2005
Translating is a fascinating task, demanding integrity of thought, spirit and conscience, sensitivity and non-intrusive perceptiveness. While none is without sin, each who translates must seek the ultimate in fidelity to the original, and wonderful have been the works done.
Such matters are dwelt on, as are 53 texts in particular, where the Bible is given scope to express itself in its glorious liberty, so that the Lord may be honoured as is His due. This work has been in progress since 1999, and has gradually expanded to about 500 pages.
There is in the Bible, such a cohesive correlation of the topics, themes, spirit, order, organisation, penetration of one aspect with another, of meanings, that it is like some living skyscraper, some organic whole, synchronised in splendour, moulded in majesty. Thus so far is it from needing 'help', which is very often a name for cultural invasion from baseless premisses, that when with the utmost care, one brings out what is there, in the text for one's own language: then there is a resonance with the rest of the scriptural structure, a clarity which compels, a virtuous verification like that of sunshine on flowers, bringing out the perfumes resident.
CXII
October 2005
ISBN 09757881 7 5
DESERTS AND DESSERTS, DELICACIES AND DESICCATIONS
Spiritual News, Biblical Truths
As the name implies, this volume
deals with the heights and depths, with the light and darkness,
with the beautiful and the horrendous, with the godly and the ungodly, and
covers no small amount of the books of Daniel and Revelation in its scope, to
show the power and wonder, the grief and anguish, the grandeur and the majesty:
the glory in God, and the national, international, personal and social disease,
the disaster of sin.
This brings its predicted fruition, dying vines in the parched desert, for a rebellious race, and abundant vintage from the children of God in the meadows of His Majesty. Attachment to the vine brings forth delicacies, and it is not only emotional, devotional and delighted attachment; it is also a disciplined one, where fidelity flows from faith, and joy from the presence of the Lord in the heart of the redeemed sinner, who looks not back, but on to the glorious and ever nearer intimate reaches of the Highway of Holiness, paved by the Lord from of old, paid for at Calvary, alight with the sheer splendour of the resurrection - from One who paid, died and rose, for all who receive this payment in faith - shining on the way.
CXIII
113th
Just Published November 2005
ISBN 09757881 8 3
The MAJESTIC MIGHT of the MERCIFUL MESSIAH: JESUS
In one sense it is as if the Lord had mobilised His resources, not just to set man free from the wall of Hitler’s Europe, or Stalin’s Iron Curtain, or prospectively from the horrors of Christian persecution behind the bamboo curtain, but from the shame and sequestration from blessedness achieved by sin in co-operation with the devil, a folly worldwide in scope, and with the prospect of a just judgment. How then shall we escape, asks the scriptures of God, if we neglect so great a salvation! (Hebrews 2:1-3).
In this volume, therefore, as the time draws yet closer for the return of Christ as Judge (John 5:19ff.), it is needful for each person to contemplate, attest and reckon with His justice, His mercy, His Gospel, His historical control, His victorious provisions, triumphant truth and majestic oversight, with His wonderful kindness to the human race, when it reaches out for His creation in mankind.
This, as in Titus 3, finding Him where He is (Isaiah 55), may thus close in contract with the Gospel, and then live in and for Him. It is He who is to be found, who as Lord then lives by His Spirit according to His word, in the lives of those who so find Him, who has lived on earth to do His amazing work, and will return, the time being near. There is no other way, God or salvation, procedure or program, life, witness or way; for all falls but He, and nothing rises again, but He.
It is not some procedure to avoid hardship; it is one to find God, and with Him, the beauty of His holiness, the wonder of His new creation of life within, as He by His Spirit lives in and with His children, the privilege of serving Him, and the meaning of His manufacture of man, not for some questionable or querulous purpose, but for the glorious opportunity to become children of the living God.
CXIV
Published November 2005
ISBN 09757881 9 1
SEEN BY ANGELS: WORDS FROM THE WINGS
THE CONVERSATION OF ANGELS
AND THE ANGLES OF MEN
It is thought convenient to have one volume where the conversations of the angels which have been imagined, may be found together.
Sections 1 and 2 represent entire volumes which focus words from the wings, as a major feature.
The last two Sections as at November 2005, 3 and 4, cover, feature and expose what appears to be a crusade against the God of creation, which is shown uncreative, unproductive and invalid.
Since the overall result has some 400 pages, it can readily form one volume, which is number 114 in the set, In Praise of Christ Jesus.
Since He is the Creator (Colossians 1:14ff.), and the Creator is ONE and GOD (Isaiah 44:24, 45:12,18), who is triune (Isaiah 48:16), it is clear how He could say, "I and My Father are one," so inciting the disbelieving the Jews of His day, that they took up stones because, said they, you being man make yourself God (John 10:30-33).
In fact, of course, He being God, had made Himself man, an infinite difference, as in Philippians 2. It is He of whom it is said, "God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the world, receive up into glory" (I Timothy 3:16).
Hence, to the point of our present volume, there is an acute derogation of Jesus Christ in the assault on the Creator, which thing deserves attention from those who know Him, their Prince ? yes but also the Prince of Life, to whom death has bowed not only in His own sacrificial death, but in such deaths as before this, He found it a fitting testimony to overcome with life. The theme 'resurrection' is available in both indexes, and merely a part of His activities for those who receive Him.
The overcoming of death, sickness, sentence on sin, frustration and pollution, poison of the heart and waywardness of the mind is His gift, and salvation is so glorious that the impecunious impieties which seek to adjust Him, cardinally in the Cross but in other ways since, for there is no more life issue than that of your Creator, become like compulsive overdraft retainers.
CXV
Published November 2005
ISBN 0 9758436 0 5
PROCLAMATION FROM THE WORD OF GOD
Expository Sermons and Sermon Notes
These are largely sermon notes, not of the skeletal kind, but although formulated in the normal style one might associate with exposition and application, they are in general two, or three, sometimes four pages long, giving a background to the sermon preached. In all, there is something at least of the order of 200 pages of these.
In this way, one may contact many scriptures in both Testaments, and without hearing a long exposition, find the nature of the message and expand it at one's own leisure, once the fundamentals are established.
Some of the messages have an audio supplement, which is available on the Web at
http://webwitness.org.au/aduioprovision.html
As the pure word of God is ignored, so it must be preached; and as many fail to know its very form and impact, so this provides a speedy way of becoming familiar with many great passages in the word of God, and many of its great themes, by simple exposition, comparison with other scriptures, exposure of themes and thrust, and attention to detail where this is imposing in importance, even for a short summary of the message.
An earlier volume, Hear the Word of God! contains a number of full-length sermons and a variety, and this forms a partner to make a pair of these volumes. Both volumes show the coherence, consistency, harmony and depth of the biblical teaching, often exhibiting its prophecies, always fulfilled, never failing, and its fulfilment in tenor, in spirit, in principle and in practice. Its wisdom makes other options superfluous, and its verification comes both positively and negatively, the latter in the plight of the world in arrears in its debt of obedience to God, in fears in its depth of depravity from God, in tears in its traumas and a variety of gears for violation, vileness and villainy, political, personal, social and international. It is not for nothing that the UK and the US were so great when the Bible had a greater hold on them, apart from human traditions, even a notable and famous grip compared with the present; and the absence of salt is making the stew a study in tastelessness.
The sermons are not arranged in the order of their preaching, but in the order of the books of the Bible, to enable easy reference and selection as need arises.
Remember, also, that a large body of material is available from this link, where various scriptural verses are expounded or applied. Moreover, Bible study provision is made extensively in this site.
CXVI
Published December 2005
ISBN 0 9758436 2 1
THE DESIRE
OF THE NATIONS
AND THE
CRYSTALLINE FIRE OF THE FAITH
The vainglorious desires of man, the polluted fragments of a broken image, these obtrude like a wen.
They breed with
ideas which are a vanity, without ideals, and with
ideals, a dream without vision in the absence of God, and with
vision, a mere name without God.
Indeed,
the name of God of little value to a man or woman or a child, unless it be called on;
and the calling is of small repute unless it be by faith;
and the faith achieves but little and is empty,
unless it is in Him whom God sent as receptacle for the lost,
and Redeemer for the sinners.Even seeking Him without repentance, this is absurd and obnoxious, since as He declared, He came to save sinners, not 'righteous' people; and His opinion of such a delusion is well expressed in one of the most incandescent condemnations of all time, in Matthew 23.
Hence the crystalline fires of the faith need attention, for they do not burn those who attentively watch them, in the Lord, as those who watch a furnace through glazed windows; and the Desire of the Nations cannot be too closely watched, who is the Shepherd whom this race despising, becomes the Judge of those who vomit their own mercy, in the gastronomic mess of unbelief. The faith, it must be held; it must be deployed; and the object of it, the Christ, if not taken, leaves merely a gap, like an untreated wound, awaiting the onset of this, or possibly that, infection.
2006
So far, 14 volumes have been published in 2006
CXVII
Published January 2006
ISBN 0 9758436 3 X
117th
Published January 2006
THE WIT AND WISDOM OF THE WORD OF GOD,
THE BIBLE: TRUE TO TEST
Better awake to the Bible,
than bibulous or blind
WHERE NOW IS MAN ?
In his dominating cultural conditioning, he becomes as a witless word in a wandering world, departing from the wit and wisdom of the word of God, wanting to make all things new in some collision of East and West, Left and Right, explicit and implicit, conscious and unconscious, some clutter and clatter of synthetic syncretism, as if weed killer and weed were mixed with malted milk and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, together with industrial waste, since it has to go somewhere: this becomes the new universal fashion, and it justly finds its way impassable. So the world worries, but it does not act on the Book of the Lord.
What would one expect ? Is it enough to take all the examination papers of all students and mix them up, finding now this way and now that of presenting truth and error, brilliance and the grotesque doltishness of inanimation, as if mixture were a fixture for faith, an answer to conundrums and a way in the wilderness, which comes vainly when you are busy both straying and inventing a false dusk, because you shirk the light.
Of course men’s hearts are failing for fear, as Luke 21 predicted, from fear of atomic bombs in militant Islamic hands, in terrorist hands, of sudden devastation by dirty bombs, and any of a whole array of misguided power with guided missiles or even shoulder mounted rockets, of Iranian devastations to give point to the talk of removing Israel from the map, as they pursue their urge. And what does Islamic tradition abundantly attest of many nations ? It is brutality to women as in some of Islam’s common procedures, inveterate desire to rule from a religion false to verification and a mere dream unsubstantiated in the face of the Bible, which in ALL things come to pass precisely as shown.
Instead, the new Fourth World War comes, seeking a place, using a religion self-contradictory, passing off biblical prophets as forerunners of its own false prophet, and then contradicting their whole sacrificial system of atonement which they propounded in the Bible, where grace gives the pardon, and mercy has feet (cf. More Marvels … Ch. 4, SMR pp. 1080ff.), while inventing a false christ centuries after the true one, without even being consistent in the invention (cf. Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 8, *1 esp., SMR 986, 1088Dff.).
That as one of the tribe of false prophets to come, is just what Christ, His word the testable truth, proclaimed would come (Matthew 24:24). It is like spots in chicken-pox. Once you have the disease, they can be predicted; and here the disease is dismissal of the tried, true and tested word of God (cf. SMR), and pursuit of a review-modelling religion, founded where fruition lacks, verification fails and invention is not sustained (cf. SMR pp. 829ff., Divine Agenda ... Ch. 6).
Like epileptic attacks, man convulses first into Nazism, then Communism, then New Age convolutions of abstruse non-verifications and diffuse thought (cf. SMR pp. 867ff.), then Islamic submission to what is not first submitted to test, then humanism comes to its dark pinnacle, in ever-new Earth Charters, c/- Russia (cf. It Bubbles... Ch. 11 as marked), the bankrupted relic, then pragmatism decides to profit from a China which rustles its silk purse to buy souls, imprisons saints, seeks to supervise Christianity, and having sold the soul in godless materialism which is not even possible (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7), then seeks to help others invest their properties in its prosperity, till it should have enough industrial might and God-forsaking commerce in its vest, to invest Taiwan. Thus appears the trend of things, and if it were not so, who could be happier than this author ? But evidence must be faced.
No in the shinty-towns of fallen faith, not in the slums of scientistic shibboleths, run from the citadels of cultural oppression, but where truth lies, where it is found, where it meets the facts, yes and surpasses them, not merely answering all the questions with sustained and verified answers, but doing so uniquely and with unique validity: this is where man finds meaning, and ceasing to be witless, gains from the wit and wisdom of his Maker, the path for his progress and the joy for his spirit. It is the joy which is founded in truth, not in its loudly declared absence, as if this could be true, it is this which remains; and it is the Jesus Christ whose written word, the Bible, has both the content and coverage, and the predictive power and the retrospective principles which are incapable of demolition, and remain unassailable to any test, thus completing near 3500 years of such revelation: it is He who remains.
CXVIII
NOT
around the world
but in Christ, Guided by God, Led by the Lord
Published Febuary 2006
ISBN 0 9758436 4 8
It used to be quite the thing! Bon voyage! Bon voyage!
There was the shop, a masterpiece of comfort and containment, fitted for the high seas, there was the voyage planned, there the oceanic vastness and there the opportunity. One was off, off to the maritime wilds and the splendour of seascapes, the bitings winds, the crested monsters in water and the flying fish in their day, all part of the way.
Streamers would bring colour to tears, and their eventual snapping would signalise and be symbol of the parting. What would await those left, and those who had just left! History would pulse and ebb, events would muster and men would fluster, but the path of destiny was awakening, as if from a momentary sleep, and what was to be would now unfold.
There is however a better voyage, which has a greater good, and a more exciting way which has vaster magnitudes, that with God. It is not found in ill-expected oddity, like the falling of a star, any more than that other voyage of which we have been considering the details; but like it, is a purposeful expedition, with indeed a better purpose and a better result. This journey too has its objectives, its marvels and its life, and it leads where destiny unfolds and reads like a book.
When that voyage of life is in Christ, then the sadness is rather now the tears of repentance, and the streamers which must break, as they do, are those of attachment to this world and its ways, its cultural fibres and vainglorious adventures in the adventitious. Not now as the chaff which the wind blows is the VOYAGE which one undertakes, but as a discerned, directed, dynamic and at core, delightful thrust, as the Lord puts out His hand to stabilise, secure, send and accompany one in the midst of what may move from high drama and astounding confrontations with this world, its evils and its ballyhoo, to the call for enduring patience in the face of quiet continuation in tasks for the talents given, and projects for the pulsing heart to complete while it is still day, while one still can, while the Age still continues and the engines of predestination still churn towards the assured end.
CXIX
THE CHILD, THE YOUTH AND THE ETERNAL TRUTH
NOT
around the world
but in Christ, Guided by God, Led by the Lord
Published February 2006
ISBN 0 9758436 5 6
For an introduction to this volume, use the PREFACE from the above hyperlink.
CXX
THE SCALING THE HEIGHTS, SCANNING THE DEPTHS, SPANNING THE BREADTH: JESUS CHRIST HAS THE ANSWER
Whether you soar, or plunge, however broadly you span in
mind or by sight, there is harmony, validity and resource, irrefutable truth
and empirical confirmation in one place only; and however high you aspire to
reach, or in whatever depth, the result is always the same.
The airplane of discovery makes only one discovery: Jesus Christ is the Truth, the Life and the Way. Electron microscopes of the mind, find it so, unrestrained searches of the spirit find it so, the testimony of the eye and the ear, show it so. The result ? fear God and keep His commandments, yes but far more.
The sacred fear, the clean fear of God is the beauty of holiness which as in a clean house makes it savoury and fragrant, but the house is built for love and truth, peace and labours of love, and the love of God and His truth are wedded, inseparables, and though often assailed, intentionally or otherwise by confusion, it is this love which has constrained Him to send His only begotten Son that WHOSOEVER believes in Him should not perish, for He did not come to condemn the world but that the world should be saved. GOD IS LOVE!
It is only when you take the word of God as it is, that you find the elixir of life, the full flavour of the bread of heaven, the sovereignty and the grace, the mercy and the breadth of His scope of love, and there is the glorious consistency of His word in all things, a place of delight for the alienated, of scope for the harrowed, of adventure for the still, of relish for the abandoned and of truth for the seeker.
Come and fly! come and sink to the depths in a bathyscope: it is the same. Jesus Christ has it all, the word of God shows it, and the ways of this world reflect it; even though that mundane mirror is shattered, it cannot quite separate itself from the light, which nevertheless condemns it. This, it is not the offer, it is the result of its reckless refusal. The glorious fact is that the scope of the divine offer and grace and love is as broad as mankind (Titus 2-3, Colossians 1), though the foreknown results of grace are as narrow as the way of the Lord.
Published March 2006
ISBN 0 9758436 7 2
CXXI
The Pride of Life, the Prince of Life and the Destiny of Man
These intertwining topics leave a vast clarity to man, a challenge, a confrontation, an opportunity, leading to all that makes man valuable, or to judgment for declining to receive it.
Published April 2006
ISBN 0 9758436 8 0
CXXII
Published April 2006
ISBN 0 9758436 9 9
THE SPIRITUAL SAGACITY OF PREDESTINATION IN LOVE
FOREKNOWLEDGE AND CHRISTIAN FAITH
This is the name for the sixth volume in what is
now the Predestination Hexad,
a set of six volumes in this field. It has grown from being the Predestination
Quintet!
The HEXAD itself
ON PREDESTINATION and FOREKNOWLEDGE,
LIBERTY and NECESSITY,
RESPONSIBILITY, DUTY and CREATIVITY
has ISBN ISBN 0 9775556 0 7
CXXIII
Published May 2006
ISBN 0 9775556 1 5
CHRIST'S INEFFABLE PEACE AND GRACE
AMID THE SMOKING CANDLES,
FLAMING FLARES AND POLLUTED PRODUCTS OF MAN
Man in his own modes invites and sometimes even invokes blessing or cursing. His actions can appeal to nearly all the human race, as with Saddam Hussein, or Hitler, or Idi Amin, as being morally those to be despised, reprobate, ruinous, disjoined from humanity. What then is the humanity ? What is it that makes its discernments in any slight way, at least, valid ?
Similarly, the practical provision of aid to the afflicted often commends itself to the many, especially if through ignorance they suffer, or through a prize-fighting brutality of the oppressor. There is a sense of justice and equity which, however repressed or distorted into a shape convenient to lust or selfishness, still exists.
There can come the smouldering, smoking evidences of error, as with a smoking candle, the flaming flares of deserved evils, like darts descending on a spiritually slovenly people, or those who have swallowed some ideological potassium cyanide without even checking carefully the description on the bottle, or the site of the manufacturer. How often, afterwards, with a few millions of souls departed from their twisted bodies, or tortured corpses, they reflect on their errors!
Man's polluted products, whether in the appallingly horrible and grossly misnamed 'female circumcision', which appears an ultimate in masculinistic oppression and heartlessness, almost to the point of self-serving assault, if not indeed in some ways past it, or in chopping off hands for stealing, or killing for trifles, in mental mists of philosophical fog which obscures vision, till the next one replaces it, these seep in, and sometimes, as if preferring the maritime mode, roar in like giant breakers for which the surfers are unprepared.
Beyond all this, there is the alternative mode. Here a man does not rely on himself, or what others like him relay, on culture or on the current idiocies of thought which will be called so in a following generation, if one is allowed to come, but seeks his Maker. At that there are two ways: he may seek in a cultural vein, or a racist-self-realisation model for a working religion to get you places, or something to bring you advance without tears, choosing carefully as at an ideological super-market, or a pleasure tent; or he may seek God where He may be found. Here reason impels, sin lashes and truth drives. If a man seek the Lord with all his heart, says Jeremiah (29:13), he will find Him!
He is not far to find (Acts 17:22-31), and His word has penetrated all cultures, all ideologies, like light into darkness, being both verified, rationally inevitable and alone valid. All this has been shown often enough, but here we are seeing the applications among men, with special emphasis on the profundity of peace with truth, which God provides.
"And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart."
Ch. 7 provides exposure of the
rampant folly of the
da Vinci Code ?
CXXIV
Published June 2006
ISBN 09775556 2 3
WHAT GOD SAYS, GOES:
CREATION IS FINISHED, BUT GOD REMAINS
This is Volume
4
of the
NOGO TETRAD,
THE GODS OF NATURALISM HAVE NO GO
The TETRAD itself has ISBN 09775556 3 1, as a set.
In this 4th Volume of the Tetrad,
the work as assigned for the set is
as before, in
the Preface.
This last volume deals with matters of history both in the blowing of the soap
bubbles of evolutionism, and in its entanglement with the partial destruction
of the race, overview of developments and reasonings, practicalities and
logical necessities, and is a book of review on the one hand, and application
to society on the other.
CXXV
Published June 2006
ISBN 09775556 5 8
GRATITUDE FOR HIS GLORIOUS GRACE
The Signature Divine
Grace is a delightful thing; to be gracious is an attractive feature; grace with glory is to be found only in God, from whose heart it flows in brilliance unimpaired, in history unreceding, obscure to the obfuscationist, apparent to the purged - the lens of their heart made clear, the delight of His children, the hope of mankind and limit-free source of freedom, in that its love is to redeem what is lost, provide for what is fallen, seek out what is sunk and release what is bound.
It is not indiscriminate: nor is it discriminating in negative gear, but rather in liberality it is like the winds of time, the radiance of stars, coming not from an icy mass but from a spiritual fire in which no dross can remain, indestructible in it issuance, indefatigable in its realm, bringing in many sons and daughters to the family of God, with entry visas signed in blood, that of the Lord Jesus Christ: issued in pardon, conferred in love and confined to faith, in Him, whose image this same Jesus, God as man, exhibited with illimitable fidelity, the criterion of infinity, the cure for infirmity and the ingenuity for kindly development, in the paths of duty and the ways of peace.
Gratitude for such a grace is often forgotten, when contention replaces conviction, aspiration evicts reception and thankfulness disappears like a distant aeroplane on the merging horizons of time and space. It is the task of this volume to confirm on many grounds such gratitude, in the joys of such grace, and to commend the place of grace for salvation for the lost, join with the faithful in this response to Him who is divine and show that reason itself is as lost without such a response, as a tin soldier in a fog, heartless, little, misshapen in mischief, the dim core of what might have been a star.
Gratitude for the Grace in the Glory of the Lord
In this volume, in fact, there are three major stresses. The first is gratitude. To be grateful is sometimes hard for the proud; but in the kingdom of heaven there is no room for these, for blessed are the poor in spirit, and the fate of the proud, as in Isaiah 2:14ff., is not attractive.
HE DID IT: are we who are His not grateful. Is this not to be shown as gratitude is, in fealty and fondness, in joy and pride IN HIM! Is He not the One to be glorified, praised and forwarded, so that the salt is savoury and the light is radiant ?
The second aspect is GLORY. God is glorious, and the foolish efforts to achieve glory when it is not present, or divine glory when it is His, or to be glorified as man, when he is mere creation, is so inglorious as to be perhaps the most obvious noxious element in mankind, making him like a weed, a mere deception, acting like a plant, but invasive, infestive, meretricious and with a shocking smell. It is well to concentrate on the glory of God for it is inspiring, apt for His children to ponder, stirring to the depths and plants deeper depths even as we gaze upon Him (II Corinthians 3:18).
The third emphasis in this work is His grace, already given attention above.
It is not something achieved or deserved, not something grasped or deserved: it just is in His power and in His nature to dispense it, not to the noble or to the wise, not to the beautiful or to the most-performing artisans of devoted toil. It is given where it is received. HOW this comes to be has vexed the minds of many, but it need not. The scripture is perfectly explicit. GRACE is poured out, is effusive, for God WOULD HAVE ALL to be reconciled in heaven or on earth by the blood of the Cross and SAYS SO (Colossians 1:19ff.).
To be sure, man CANNOT grab it, by willing, for he is excluded by sin from perception UNTIL converted (I Corinthians 2:14). Nor is his will irrelevant, for this is the GROUND of exclusion in the face of the divine desire NOT to condemn (as in John 3:17). Indeed, it is the specially denoted REASON for exclusion (John 3:19), even in contrast to the stated divine desire for the world, on the part of Him who has given a propitiation even, not for us only who believe, but for the entire world (I John 2:2).
He does not PAY for all, for that would make payment ineffective and God a goose, and indeed those for whom specifically He has been delivered up ALL go to heaven (Romans 8:32). He DOES however make a payment adequate for all, in sincerity offered to all, so that in HIS KNOWLEDGE (and indeed foreknowledge, not of our deeds or worth, but of the reception of His grace in His own discernment, before all time - Ephesians 1:4, Romans 9): it is given to the recipients only. Equally in His love, it is with desire, pressed on all (Isaiah 48:16ff., Matthew 23:37, Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2, Luke 119:42ff., Jeremiah 48:30-33, 51:8-9, Jeremiah 1-14 cf. Ch. 2).
Thus you CANNOT go to hell without this being deemed of your will, by Him in HIS KNOWLEDGE (in the scriptural action and spiritual circuit, as in Romans 8:29ff.): that you REFUSE or the equivalent, to receive Him, even the only Door to Deity, the Saviour Jesus Christ (John 10:9, 14:6, Isaiah 43:9-10). To be sure it is He who performs the salvation on His own; but it is not wrought without respect to the grounds which HE knows, of the wayward preference, seen past history and time (Ephesians 1:4), psychology and human autonomy, known to God. Unlimited by sin in His sight, who bases it not at all on any human works, of will or other, it is no ground of merit, but an avenue of grace.
THIS grace is so pure, so lacking in limiting factors based on self or selfishness or mere plan or program, is so elemental, is so rich, is so vast in scope, rich in attainment in Calvary and all that went to prepare for that, that it is like teeming rain. Someone asks you, Is it raining ? has the drought broken. You reply: raining ? why it is teeming, God be praised.
But HOW MUCH are you grateful for SUCH grace as this ? It is also elemental, as deep as life, as broad as mind, as high as holiness and as joyful as exuberance. It is like growth in Spring. You cannot contain it, for it is everywhere.
On such things does this volume dwell, and in such joy is it presented in the name of Him in whom one dwells, and who dwells Himself in one's heart (Colossians 1:27, John 14:20).
CXXVI
Published July 2006
ISBN 09775556 6 6
GRATITUDE FOR HIS GLORIOUS GRACE
There have been vast passions roused to investigate the heights of the heavens, the depths of the earth and the sea, the geographical spread of the earth, the meaning of life and the place of man. Religions have spawned as if some great fish had nothing better to do than surround the maritime mysteries of the earth, with its variable but basically kindred ilk.
We have in the preceding 125 volumes considered the realities of the truth, which is to be found in Christ Jesus, and the need to avoid slimy much and slithery substitutes for spirituality, and the glory of God.
In this volume, our task is to look deeper here, if depth may be found in this or that issue, and higher in the other place, if heights avail, and thus to show that the glory of God in these domains and lights is as delightful as ever, soaring with the heights, surpassing the depths, like a light in the oblivion, a guide in the obscure and a joy in the vales of misery which sin donates with the largesse of an emperor, and the perverted joy of a liberal misanthrope.
Here no less than in any other domain or clime available to man, the Lord in His blessed liberality provides wonder for those who seek Him, answers to address and grants to those who ask. His testimony is beyond the heavens, gives to the depths their very name, and removing the enchantments of dreams, provides the consistent reality of truth. His word is very strong, and nothing mars it; and though man marred Him when He came, this was by permission, indeed celestial edict, a predicted part of the divine passion to redeem man, now fulfilled in myriads of those to whom from the uttermost heights, this blessing to the very depths has come.
Nor did it come without pain, nor did it go without triumph; for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is merely one of His works, but it is the one which counts above all, since here is the future history for mankind, as many as receive Him.
In particular, three chapters deal with aspects of suffering and its revelatory rationale, the design for this; and another two cover the design for man, in which as individual or in group, he works as one designate, in rational relationship with the system of the lower creation, and spiritual access on God's own terms, with the deity Himself.
CXXVII
Published August 2006
ISBN 09775556 7 4
DEGRADATION
FOR THE HUMAN
RACE through
DEFAMATION of DEITY, and
THE GODLY GRANT OF GLORY IN THE GOSPEL
Delinquency is not limited to adolescents. Adults can be quite good at it.
Nor is it limited to misuse of one's own life, or that of one's fellows. It can stretch to malignity against God.
Delinquency against the divine is becoming an art form, a propaganda thrust and an educational tool.
It is leading, slowly, quietly, but with more drama as the thing progresses, to the systematic downfall of the human race. This is not a lurking, surreptitious thing, but precisely as in the Bible, an open, a gay, a swaggering, a swashbuckling antic, with its own devious ways; and that there are outbreaks of inflammation and high temperatures, both literal and metaphorical, among mankind, this is merely a routine expression of the advancing nature of the disease.
It is to be expected, like boils in a system adapted to them at a given time; where they come may be surprising, but that they come is not. It is the same with a body infested with cancer: it may come in surprising places when it colonises, as it were, enjoying metastasis. If however the first line of abuse, as for example in excessive and careless sun-baking with a fair skin, is wrought, then the result may be taught. It has ways of its own ? yes, but not without ground.
When you misuse the fundamentals of life, it may bite back; it may in the manner of life, writhe and contort, like a carved up embryo, as may occur in that modern way of life which is abortion for convenience (it may sometimes actually be required for health reasons, or in rape and so on). The life being aborted is like the life being abused in one's own case: it may writhe and its various, magnificent controls being abused, like a steering wheel of a car caught in a rut, may themselves contribute to downfall. When you are not killing en embryo but your own like, slowly, there may be resemblances of note!
The defamation of deity which is one of these abuses not merely severs man from his source, but twists the truth, on which man's very existence as a spiritual and rational being depends, so that man is like a contorted embryo in these circumstances, wondering where next to wince.
In the face of such grandiose plans of wretched wrecking procedures, levelled ultimately against God but often deploying man's own equipment with a combination of vanity in the sense of empty folly, and that of proud self-reliance, on the part of this object, man, neither free to determine birth nor death (except the latter in that way-out called suicide, the resignation of life, not its surmounting or joy): there is a case developing. There is a strident neo-image for man.
Its face is contorted. It readily runs amok, like the ways of Saddam Hussein in his torture camps, where allegedly people new to upper echelons might be brought in order to be taught immunity to compassion or revulsion at the things done to the torture victims, and the quantity of death ensuing. This procedure now being aggrandised and developed for man ? It is this.
It is defamation of deity by perversion, reversion, aspersion, distortion or contortion. This in the current volume will be one of the topics; but the glorious grant of the Gospel will be the way out, the way on, as it in fact is; and the way all this is to be brought together is a major feature.
Within this volume, these very things above will be rehearsed, DV, and the matter resolved as it must be, has been by God, and needs to be internally recognised by man.
CXXVIII - CXXIX
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S
CHRIST
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS
Bible or Blight,
Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God
Published September 2006
ISBN 0 9775556 6 6
Two Volumes: Bible or Blight ISBN 0 9775556 7 4
Christ or Confusion ISBN 0 9775556 8 2
This is a comprehensive compilation with some additions, exhibiting in substantial detail the fact that the resolution of philosophic riddles, demonstration of creation and exhibition of comprehensibility, meaning and scientific integrity rests without loss in the Biblical depiction, or model. It covers life, youth, design, history, philosophy, science, meaning, man in an integrity which the world neither finds elsewhere, nor can duplicate in validity or verification. To reject it is not 'by faith' death, but more: it is to a contemptibility which awaits what awakens to destitution through will misused, and life aborted not in the womb, but in the way.
It may seem hard to some that truth is invariable and life a grant to be washed with grace and restored to the Maker in faith and gratitude, through His chosen way; but then each path in the brain is a chosen way, and each bone, each blood vessel. Life is by gift and by grace; and it is not a horror to be belched at, that the way home is provided, this also, but a matter for marvel. It is best by far to come home, for this is where the God of creation and the Lord of salvation is to be found. What logic requires is what love inspires.
It covers some 2.2 million words or 5200 pages.
CXXXX
CHRIST INCOMPARABLE, LORD INDOMITABLE
Published October 2006
ISBN 09775556 9 0
This world has its flags furled, for its spur and saliency is smitten. It lies broken amidst its fallen dreams, futile ravings and vile ravishings. Its leaders are flawed, its fashions cry for lordship and squabble interminably, its prides are like lions on spree, its follies like children run amok.
Christ Jesus is unravished, unfallen, smitten but this vicariously, risen and that in the power of God, declared the Son of God, corporeally unconquerable, spiritually in peace, triumphant in mission, incorruptible in mind, tender in heart, willing in spirit, great in understanding. He is incomparable and as Lord He is indomitable.
Sin seeks to ravage His people, but He rescues; jealousy seeks to abase His position, but He stands, the Celestial Trade Towers that cannot be lowered, and His trade is in the souls of men, of women, of children, and for these HE pays; and His profit is not gain for coffers, for commerce, to increase Himself, already infinite beyond time and all creation, indeed as a member of the trinity, creator of all (Colossians 1:15ff., John 1:3). It is in purchase of what is smitten, in redeeming what sin has ruined, what life has grieved for; and bringing it to His own kingdom, where life and love, peace and duty, responsibility and realism mount like eagles.
His kingdom is not of this world; but it will at last demonstrate to this fallen world what righteousness is, not only as now, in redeeming freely what is lost (Romans 3:23ff.), but in showing in the glowing testimony of truth, what life is when it is founded in God, and the globe is ruled by it; and this before this whole world, a travesty of truth, though His light be in it, because of sin, is removed as II Peter 3 tells us, and with its works, burnt up.
CXXXXI
JESUS CHRIST, DEFACED, UNFAZED:
BARRISTER OF BLISS
Published November 2006
ISBN 09802972 1 4
There is about the majesty of God - even when it is tabernacled in flesh, tented in an envelope of protoplasm for serviceable purposes, yes for salvation for that element of His creation called mankind, which increasingly becomes less manly and less kind - something which never loses its atmosphere, depth, brilliance and impact of utter reality.
This, it is scarcely surprising in view of who He is: the Creator of all. Yet it is always astounding to see it actually happen before one's eyes, as one reads of His entry into this world and performances, His attitudes and principles, sagacity and insight, oversight and power. It is staggering that a man could be so endued; but not so at all, when one finally grasps the whole point: this IS GOD!
It is not some elevation of human desire, essentialisation of human thought, concentration of human philosophy, arrangement of human power: it is wholly other, not in the Barthian sense, as if it did not belong, far removed as that is from Hebrews 2 with its emphasis on the brotherhood and the Lord's taking of kinship with those in His image. It is rather in the sense of utterly devoid of pride, proficient in dominion and efficient in serviceability, integumental in meekness and illimitable in holiness. This, yes: but as a man!
Again, this is the whole point. Nothing less could bear the brunt of the deaths of millions of sinners, in justice to truth; and nothing less could bear up to the infinite God the race, that special people, who are that section of this human race, which is redeemed (has been, and will be as well).
We are thus to meet EITHER the fancy dress ball of human invention, convention and comedy dressed in the drab robes of approaching doom, well deserved and pursued as relentlessly as recklessly, or God. To meet God, you come where He is available, just as you do to enter a house, using the door provided. You do not rant and rave as if it were an offence to your extended sensibilities to have to lower your important or yes, even imposing self to the designated entry point. You just go there and enter.
CXXXXII
THE FACE OF GOD, ILLIMITABLE, UNFUNDED, DEFINITIVE, DECISIVE
Published December 2006
ISBN 09802972 2 2
There is nothing more important than this, the divine face, the face of Deity, the expression, definitive, decisive, clear and assured of God Himself.
With men and women, yes and children too, there is a face, there is a heart, there is a spirit, there is honesty or dishonesty with it, and knowledge or confusion with that, and there is articulation or the lack or muddle of it alongside. We have some idea, perhaps of the face of each, the expression, the meaning, the priorities, the pre-requisites, the motivation, the purposes, the ethics and the life; but there are many barriers to certainty, unless God Himself shows the case (as He did, for example, to Samuel the prophet, concerning the choice of David, the young lad whom he anointed to become king - I Samuel 16).
The Lord, He asserted, KNOWS THE HEART. He looks upon it, and sees what lies there. It is not a matter of appearance at all, but of heart. It is the same in Jeremiah 17:9-10.
Who, Paul pursues our issue, knows the man except the spirit of the man, at the human level ? Let us realise with what we are dealing (I Corinthians 2:9ff.). Similarly, who knows the heart of God as does the Spirit of God. God in His Spirit KNOWS, as man in his spirit is directly aware. Man in his face expresses (if by that you mean his expressive medium of which face is the physical counterpart) what he is. God in His word expresses what He is, and in the face of Christ Jesus, has expressed Himself definitively. That incarnate, eternal Word of God has thus presented definitively who God is. His words as Messiah are declarative, His face shows it just as His Spirit knows it.
In this volume, the ways of man before God, the ways of His creation are considered in the light of His face, revealed in His word and displayed in Christ Jesus.
2007
9 volumes have been published in 2007
CXXXXIII
THE WORSHIP OF JESUS CHRIST AS DEITY
Published February 2007
ISBN 09802972 3 0
The puny, pusillanimous, defective, de facto and not de jure, the premature, the immature, the merely quaint, the tittivating, the merely titled, these things may be; but they are not for adoration.
The novelties of imagination have their place, and great is the joy of creation; but when the innovative is the execrable, and when the focus is the foolish, then what does man become if not a gash in the cliff face, a vacuity instead of solidity, a ruin in the making to become a relic without joy.
Greatness is in the eye and heart of man, and it is often perverted to his own contemplation, or that of his family, society or mere ideology. People die for such things, vanity, association, respect. It may be of those who are themselves unrespectable, but their respect still enthralls.
Are you a GENUINE child-killing terrorist, who cares nothing for flesh ? Do you QUALIFY, do you have the QUALITY! Can you take the things needed to reach this social level of acceptance!
Such becomes a type of such human offerings to folly, misplaced adoration for what is contemptible, mesmeric motivations that gash into the heart of humanity, and collide with that of the Lord.
Saddam Hussein, we read, used to have close associates, or those intended for such honour, witness tortures unspeakable and death, in order to harden them and make them ready. But for what!
So does power and glory tempt man to become a horror, haunted by folly, of which Hussein was a symbol, for the sake of what ? Acceptance, with funds, paid perhaps as in one parallel case, for killing Jews, so much each, like buying deaths at a supermarket. How perverse are the adoration, the accolades and the abasement before what is base!
It is to God alone that such adoration is due, and since God has shown in only one verified way, where He is, it is to that way alone, that God-given wisdom turns. Who as Christ has been foretold, who as He has given all and had all to give, who but He and the prophets who foretold Him and the apostles who were His, has commanded history, and it turns at His word: His predictions in perfection, as was His life!
It is time to awaken to His perfection and to put to sleep in the psyche, the unruly menagerie of frivols that falsify truth and contribute emptiness; and to the study of such things we proceed.
CXXXXIV
THE OPEN DOOR, THE CLOSED MIND AND THE CALL OF CHRIST
Published March 2007
ISBN 09802972 4 9
When the only barrier is a closed mind, people are in great case. It is not as if tanks or artillery, plutonium capsules force-fed or human-bombs making craters as a sign of a fine religion, near cafés with children in them, were arrayed against one, when it comes to finding God.
It is the closed mind, more aggressive than a tank trap, more potent than an infantry division, more useless than an atomic bomb without radioactive content.
When, in addition, there is no closed door on the part of God, so that granted you do not need to penetrate horrific arms to gain access to it, you even find it open as you knock, then you marvel at the monstrous good fortune of mankind.
It is however only when you consider that the call of God is given to INVITE to this door, and to actually come in through it to His kingdom, and when you realise wisdom and information alike are provided to show the wonders of it and the naturalness of it, sin being the unnatural intruder, already in possession of the human shop, that you can ponder with amazed concern the fact that the carpet is not threadbare at the entrance.
The ready love of God, the ready gun of gurus or mantras of mullahs, the epics of misconstruction and the love of libel and delight in defamation are all assorted in this great affair; and it is thus well worth-while to examine and ponder, consider and become no neutral spectator of the plight of man in the face of this depraved demission of deliverance. It is necessary to be informed.
In this book, this is our aim, and our hope is continual: that some finding through these things, the way home, and experiencing the drawing of the Spirit of God as the truth of Christ is perceived and the grandeur of His mercy, will not short-circuit the opening of the door, by special electro-magnetic interference utensils, lest they should be saved.
CXXXXV
135th.
Published April 2007
ISBN 09802972 5 7
Glory is one of the main measures of man. It is not that he is glorious, but sensitive to it, susceptible to it, may feel sentenced (rightly or not) by it, and can seek it for himself, his clan, group, city, nation, professional body or political lord syndrome (or mentor, depending on the case).
It is FELT to be glory when in fact, however, it may be like soiled linen, wholly diverse in character from the pure and refreshed type. It has a relationship with it, certainly, but not a salubrious one. It has a kinship, as does a wreck with the thrusting vessel of aesthetic appeal, grandeur of outline and dynamic motion, manoevrability and architectural felicity.
There is a relationship; but it is alas far from one of identity.
When glory is misnamed, its work miscarried, its object misnamed, then it readily becomes vainglory. This may be a product of vanity, either in the sense of vacuousness or of pride; or it may be merely the current duping routine, by which misled man finds glory in misleading others, and becomes hostile to the point of mass murder, with those who resist. We have seen this in Mao, in Hitler, in Stalin, in Idi Amin, in Saddam Hussein, and in his own way increasing, in Robert Mugabe. In some cases, they may genuinely feel they are doing good: it is just that those who do not share their irrational dreams and inconsequential notions, need to be removed for the plan to succeed: which of course it does not.
That mankind continually looks for such things, is duped by them, has virtually a sequence to date, so that you get, like old movies or new, your particular version for consumption, is one of the major testimonies to the reality of God. Why ? It is for this reason: to depart from Him is to make yourself so vulnerable to error, as if you foreswore EVER to say 2 plus 2 equals 4, while setting out in a career in mathematics, that the inanities of the race, which plague it like chasms in the midst of a vast highway, with the expected toll, become virtually predictable. In kind, the Bible supplies the details; and despite this, man in the midst of the clear and multiple fulfillments of the predictions of the holy prophets, goes on as if hearing were out of fashion, and sight a menace. It is as Christ indicated, Ears they have, but do not hear, eyes but do not see.
It is a disease which Jew-baiters and haters now freely share, as if epidemic were their desire. In His own day, Christ said this of similarly blinded people, citing from Isaiah:
“For this people’s heart is become gross, and heir ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.”
For all that, man is so made and created in such a grand outgoing exhibition of the grace and love of God, that goodness continually thrusts its head into the very realms of vainglory, and sanity into the domains held in restraint by insanity, rationality attacks irrationalism and virtue seeks the flower that vice loves to dissect.
In this volume, these three features will be given some emphasis, so that the contours of society, the retrenchments of realism and the vast and rapid advance to desolation which this earth is making, may be seen in a keener perspective, one not only found in the Bible, but seen in its fulfilment, one not only desirable, but necessary.
CXXXXVI
136th.
From Evanescent Extremes
Back to the Book of the Lord
Published May 2007
ISBN 09802972 6 5
A far more extensive presentation than an earlier work, CELESTIAL HARMONY FOR THE TERRESTRIAL HOST, this in principle irenic work, points out the marvels of unity which come when the word of God, the Bible, is given absolute sway in the realm of needless matters of dissension. It is the more apposite in an Age where increasingly the existential, or the spiritistic, the spiritual octopus of hedonism, entertainment, hysterics, psychic collations, ideological feastings, traditionalistic adaptions and composite adoptions teems, grabs in its submarine seductions, where the strangling is more than appears.
Sometimes an affliction calls attention to the central realities of life, and ministers comfort in the end. The 14 topics and the contrasting mainland itself, concern form the basic outline. This volume is currently around 280,000 words in extent, being selections, amplifications, extensions and correlations in its field, from books earlier published, showing that extremes frequently mar the sober presentation of the Bible, making for warring parties, as if moving out to islands, from the mainland. It is better with the Bible to stay on that mainland, or if outside, to return.
CXXXXVII
137th.
DEITY MANIFEST, JESUS CHRIST THE LORD
Published May 2007
ISBN 09802972 8 1
The Bible is the Divine Manifesto, antidote to confusion and master for rebellion; the Lord, who as there and in history shown, is the anti-dote to blind servitude and Maker of liberty, even restoring it to its place, this time, in a renewed personal environment, one expressly constructed as a site for the exhibition of truth. Indeed, this same Bible, applicable to man, is verified in all major fields (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ).
Many delight to find the truth, after such a time, and its counterpart, peace, after so much tension and turmoil.
As David declares in Psalm 139, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made." This truth he dwells on.
The powers of corruption are correlative to those of construction; and meanwhile mini-midget man, a few feet in protoplasm at the visible level, at the invisible can comprehend and concur, mischievously run riot, defame, deflate, inflate ideas, people, soar in spectacular pride and stamp on greatness, or cast down, continue burrowing like a flea into truth, to infect it; or else, there he is, moving like an airship majestically, to survey the skies. This is not only wonderful in the scope and amplitude, the contrast and capacity which man has been given; it is fearful.
It evokes a sense of that presence required, so far beyond man in his operational powers, to make it felicitous so to operate in such realms, by providing the logic in the universe and in man, and making both answerable, each in its own way, to His summons or dismissal. All this, relating to the reason of God, has not only mutual coherence, human interpretability, but is penetrable to man until he comes to the utmost power required to create all this in its integrality and liberty combined.
When he comes to God, he must stop and listen.
It is then that the fearful part comes in. What fear is evoked when you realise the wonder of the Maker: for if the made can achieve for good or ill, so much, how far much more can He!
What responsibility lies in man, for where much is given, much is required. Plans pre-made, as in Psalm 139 (Bible Translations Ch. 2 No. 10) show their force as the embryo develops, its multitudes of phases inseparable, an awesome agenda of immediately successive phases with no meaning or pay-load until complete, a deliberate design, a designated portfolio of man's construction agenda, through myriad conceptual turning points and assessment works.
Past a multitude of events constitutive of coherence, it goes, till the child born, it grows, and the end is pursued, at length appearing at the level of maturity, as just one, one person: with inherent potentials correlative with those of the embryonic development, after 20 years or so.
Then is the full-orbed splendour to be found, either to doom itself into deserved oblivion, or to live in the favour of its Creator, not striving, but sent on mission, with commission!
So man may come to comprehend the layers of meaning in the universe, of law and limit, and the skies of imagination and conceptualisation, the load of verification and validation, to know even God; and then to find the facilitation of function and the meaning of all phases stretched out before him. A mind to reason, a Divinely Prescribed Book to reveal and a life to live, all come to man: fearful fabricator of a place in hell, as if craftily copying the ticket to reach there, in the form of a visa, or in realistic weakness, worshipping his divine Benefactor, who made minds to find the truth, and truth to confront the minds, even putting it into words, to inspire the soul, compel the heart and arrest the spirit.
Some however plunge over the cliffs of fantasy instead, with fearful rigour pursuing the rigor mortis, the paralysis of such fragile wonder, into its deserved stale-mate, in which overcome, it abides in the shadows of darkness, self-illumined with a light which is not there.
To all this the Bible speaks, clearly, with vast coverage, with principle, precept, promise and exhortation, with revelation, information concerning the mind and heart of God, for and with which man has been so made that he can READ IT! To read the mind of God as self-portrayed! what a vast panorama of spiritual spectacle is stretched out before him, and lies written.
Man writhes to dispossess it of its truth, and falls, a liar; or else he struggles to express his delight in this one word which never fails, and intimates it from a thousand pulpits. Man can be illuminated with a light sourced in the Divine One, exposing truth as the sun the grass below, as he studies the word that has smitten and blessed, arranged the fall of empires and attested things to come, millenia before their arrival*3. Otherwise, he can smirk, shirk, strive, chide, not abide, and like a car unserviced, put out his oily smoke of discontent, disfaith or other spiritual disease.
The Bible, then, in its own domain of revelation from God, is not only unique in verification and validity (Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer, Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host), as often shown in detail in this site, but in itself, an ordered, organised, multi-dimensional, superbly structured, integrative and purposively presented whole which so speaks. In this, it reminds of the construction of man, of whom this Bible speaks.
Indeed, the Book of the Lord abounds in regulatory rules, order, rationality, inter-folding of principles and concepts, liberty, love and intensively in immensely personal manifestation of will and knowledge; and all of this is a supra-universe of its own. With man, however, it is an intra-universe, but one with allowance for attachment to that supra-universe, or detachment which has led, in the domain of dire rebellion and self-important strutting, to so much vapidity, invalidity and vacuity, that a perpetual cloud hangs over the sulphurous fumings of its exponents. So has it come, as many aspiring for glory, and missing the point, merely inhabit those clouds, which give solid support for nothing. Mistaking them for the earth, they merely fall.
As you examine this Bible with willing mind, however, it positively shouts the obvious, its internal structure giving multiple echoes, as of voices in a huge and majestic structure; then it whispers, intimate, now demonstrates, now appeals. Humbug is summarily axed; weakness is graciously strengthened; confusion is relentlessly unmasked.
CXXXXVIII
138th.
There is in the Bible such an array of majesty, profundity, overview, oversight and magnificence of spectacle, such as the Canadian Rockies and lakes, or the New Zealand scope and marvel of wonderland exhibit, that not to dwell on it as such, would seem either a shame or an omission like that of ignoring the kiss of engagement, or the first day of a new enterprise.
While many have been the exhibits already on this site, this volume is given to seeing features, facets and wonders which claim attention and clamour for it, as it were in their own intrinsic fascination, brilliant points of light, massive modes of splendour, which demand awed observation.
In the main, specific texts, by no means limited to one verse, are taken; and in some cases, groups like alpine clusters of towering, parallel giants, are made a spectacle of joy as we behold their intrinsic beauty and wonder, the meaning and the matrix, the message and the profundity.
Published June 2007
ISBN 09802972 9 X
CXXXXIX
139th.
in the Celestial Alps of Christ Jesus
Published July 2007
ISBN 978-0-9804100-0-6
There are available for a spiritual trip, massifs the view from which is spectacular, showing the form and figure of many lesser but glorious mountains, their very loftiness a sublimity in itself, a close up bringing near to the very face of God.
These take the form of various declarations from God, set in such an altitudinous glory that in their context, they present marvels and wonders, which those who know the Lord can attest, much from their personal experience of His actions, attitudes and atmosphere, for He is a God of power and His righteousness is like the depths, His mercies like the heights and His wonder like the streams which leap from the snow, to convey health to the soul. Much more is from the testimony of truth in the minds, methods, spiritual, moral and aesthetic panoramas of man, in his history and the anguish, in the beauty and the peace, which comes now from sin, now from the Saviour, Jesus Christ. These decisive divine declarations give interpretive passages to the very heavens of divine majesty, meaning to man and wisdom for those who fear not man, but lie.
In Chapter 1, these matters are explained in terms of both their significance and their relevance to Biblical Christian Apologetics.
CXL
140th.
DEITY AND DESIGN, DESIGNATION AND DESTINY
Published August 2007
ISBN 978-0-9804100-1-3
This work is partly composite and partly composition, being a work in which many earlier foci are brought together, listed in sections, with the total theme given sometimes large, sometimes smaller introduction.
Design is shown to be endemic in man and the universe, with the pock-marks of curse for sin, by no means incidental, but fundamental in significance, as with any misused design. Here however, in the case of the life of man, there is an inter-personal episode and outcome, which affects not merely the man himself, and the race, but the environment where his life is lived, and his death continues its condign affront to those who do not know God.
Confrontation always meets this affront, which starting with man, ricochets back to him, in terms of his very design, with conscience and consciousness, guilt and guile, grandeur and splendour, love and hatred, lust and charity, genius and obtuseness, thrust and dynamic, invasion and perversion, all having a place so tangled where truth is avoided, that the self-contradictory concept of a chaotic universe is employed, or deployed by some, only in its sheer irrationality, to be the very base from which the precise opposite may be demonstrated.
Pre-occupation with particles, in this context, is as useful as pre-occupation with one's seat-belt, when driving through a herd of cattle. It is ultimately the personal which is peremptory for man, since person he is, equipped with spirit which fires and misfires, seeks God and seeks autonomy, and flies about like a witless vulture, wondering what to assault, or a twittering canary, potentially beautiful, but ineffective in the hot gases of a wounded earth. It needs its place, near to the heart of God.
The demonstration of the sole validity, certain verification and vital and vitalising force of the Gospel of the grace of God and the final account from Him of man's fall, fault and features, his foci of mind, spirit and body, as appearing in the Bible as the written word of God, that of all writings, the one solely authorised by the Lord for mankind: this remains in every field and feature throughout the approximate 2.5 million word work.
The designations from the Lord to man -
relating
to the design of mankind on the one hand, and
to the spirit of man on the other:
that volatility
which sweeps its sight from high to low,
and shames or stuns with its hopes, blindnesses and awakenings -
whether He makes these
in the authoritative, operative principles of the Bible, or in the applied
events of history,
whether in the sufferings of the martyrs or the aggressions of the persecutors,
seen in the setting
of the constant, passionate divine appeal with the Gospel,
in His knowledge, acumen and assiduity
in the eternal context of His revealed scriptural word and His saving works:
these shape destiny.
So do we find in this work.
True to His revelation, assigned as His word has required, His is a peace past all understanding; but His principles are readily understood. These are and remain as He has guaranteed and granted them in the Bible. He is not of two minds; His word stands and is fulfilled, more certainly than any merely physical law. Those, they relate to the stage: but this to the Director.
His word stands, as the word of God alone can, and alone does. Addition to it, as we see, annuls its simplicity and magnificent resolving power, but also moves as disastrously towards ruin as does subtraction: and in this, science is merely an illustration. Meddling with the facts of His creation or of His word is like taking water from atomic power plants: there is a melt-down, but the word of God is not changed, only those who seek to change it (cf. Revelation 22), just as the laws of His creation do not move, only the minds of those who with a sophisticated blindness, ignore them.
As to the destiny for each of mankind, already known to the Lord, it is found out by man; and repulsion from the divine remedy is as effective a way of mutilating design as may be found anywhere.
In that mutilation, there is philosophy of speech, antinomy of thought with specious results, as of one who insists on having influenza, and cannot see because he will not move to the remedy. Such in major fields without variation of reality, do we find.
CXLI
141st.
EVIDENCE AND REALITY, THE PRINCE
AND THE PROOF
CONSTANT CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE FICKLE FRENZY OF FORCE
Published December 2007
ISBN 978-0-9804100-3-7
Proof ? but of course: read Romans 1, Luke 1. Evidence in the composition of the various logical corollaries leaves no room for doubt or deviousness. Reality is not an option, nor is Jesus Christ a possibility, design a shilly-shally situation. It is all as clear as the nose on your face, or your glasses, when you kiss and clash the latter, or avoid the former. You can leave it; but it will not leave you at your will. Reality is like that.
2008
14 volumes have been published in 2008
CXLII
142nd.
Published January 2008
An Autobiographical Record of Contemporary Life
under the Eternal God 1928-2008
ISBN 978-0-9804100-4-4
Scotch College, Melbourne has an archivist, Dr Jim Mitchell, who in October asked me to consider writing my life story - space no object - for the school archives. The idea caught fire, and now the value of reciting the pilgrimage to and with Jesus Christ over 80 years begins to appear. Much may be learned from the incredible confrontations, the tatterdemalion assaults on the truth, and the Lord's deliverances from numerous conflagrations as now here, now there, the forces of disfaith, disbelief, but not dispassion, sought to fire their wares.
The Lord is a great fire-fighter, a great deliverer, and altogether wonderful, and to see His action in meeting the numerous assaults on the faith and on the person of His servant, however humble, yet called, brings many contemporary issues to light, and their resolution. It is amply provided with detailed references, reasonings and biblical expositions for those who seek these data.
(Incidentally, the use of the plural 'data' in a singular sense with a singular verb or adjective, this particular writer finds like extreme obesity, not appealing to the eye; but when it is deliberately done, it is far worse. 'Datum' is a readily available term if you want only one of them. The data that matter are spiritual first, then mental, then material, for the latter seen apart are scarcely material to any good thing. All in its place is the need of the human race, especially itself, before God. Such emphasis may be seen in this volume. With this is allied the delight in the exuberance of life which God provides, and the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour, consummates; and with this, the necessity to conserve, focus and use it without folly or inhibition from artificial forms of 'correctness'.)
CXLIII
143rd.
MAN, in Retrospect, in Prospect and in Bold Relief
Published February, 2008
ISBN 978-0-9804100-5-1
In this volume, the scope and state, status and due aspiration and undue objectives of man are considered, his past with much promise, for glory, his present with much promise for ruin, and his future with both restoration and damnation for its parameters. Chapter one will trace this in more depth, as the completion of this introduction. Attention to covenant, Israel and Gentiles, now and then, what was and is to be comes in careful collation, seeking to provide biblical perspective to the fast running waters of time, in time, for eternity.
CXLIV
144th.
MESSAGE OF THE WORDS OF GOD TO MAN IN THE WORLD
The Saying
to the Straying,
the Bible to the Braying and
the Truth for its Lovers
ISBN 978-0-9804100-6-8
Published March 2008
The fact is that God has been so munificent in design, so exquisite in declaration, so generous in extrication and so loving in ultimate extradition, with terms of eternal life and not doom available freely, that it is a delight and a duty to bring out these things in context from the beautiful words of coherence, demonstrable truth and masterful cohesion found in the Bible. Their portent concerning the creation are mirrored in it as it functions, both in wonder and curse, in maestro magnificence and in challenge to the chaotic misnomers of increasingly confused man, lacking the controls he sees, and misusing the liberties he has been given.
Thus in the volume, parts of the Bible will be located, visualised, considered, expressed and applied, in order that the magnificence is paraded, the meaning is instilled and the beauty is made manifest so that in this world of man, the management of the Master may come to light. The desing of His word, that is, its intent, and the nature of design in this world, that is, its contrivance, both are reviewed in mutuality.
As to the messages, where they
rest on the word of God as planned, it is not because they are elevated above
the rest of the word of God, that these portions are used, but that they may
become like arrows at this time, to bring different aspects of His truth, from
His written word to His smitten world. That He has salvation for it as in John
3:15-19 is as clear as the fact that He has judgment according to truth where
the remedy is eluded. Salvation, like the DNA of life, is long since written,
and repentance is the bridge to the entry, which is, as the Bible has defined
these nearly 3 and one half millenia, in the Messiah, who came on time as
foretold, to act as foretold, not in DNA but in the Declarations of God, this
same Bible (cf. Highway of Holiness
Ch. 4, SMR
Ch. 9).
If man is lost, it is not because the remedy is not found! When he is found, it is not because he has achieved it, for the initial creation and that of salvation, when a person becomes a new creation (II Corinthians 5:17ff.), both are as freely the work of divine intelligence, desire and decree. It is exquisite that grace is sufficient and that at the same time that love that seeks did not express itself in Christ, eternal word of God, on this earth in order to condemn but that the world might be saved (cf. To Know God ... Ch. 1). That is what is written, and it applies in earth and in heaven alike (cf. Colossians 1:19ff.). Detachment from God is like an embryo detached from the uterus. It is sad and significant and leads to no good thing.
CXLV
145th.
KEYS TO THE COMFORT OF THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST
ISBN 978-0-9804100-7-5
Published April 2008
There is scope in the salvation of Jesus Christ for comfort. The term sometimes so rendered from the Hebrew can signify strength as well, and in the Greek of the New Testament, what is translated 'Comforter', literally meaning one called alongside, one who pleads another's cause before a judge, pleader, counsellor, advocate, helper, succourer. Such is the case in John 16:7, and the words of Christ proceed to indicate that He is also to be called "the Spirit of Truth." The fact is that it is ONLY in the truth that one can take the counsel, courage, strengthening and wisdom jointly which is the need of man. The truth is He who made man, and His Spirit is at work in His people.
Anything less or else runs the risk of being fatuous, foolish, inept, superficial and just plain wrong. In any system of thought or model as it is often called, which omits the absolute personal God there IS no truth, for all is at its height, modelled as reaction. What happens becomes the maximum, and even that is absolved from complicity with truth, since the latter then does not exist. Left only the ruptured mind of the one who invents such self-contradictory systems, in order to enunciate them, and then of course have them at once cancelled in validity.
On the positive side, however, when the Spirit of Truth comes to those FOR WHOM CHRIST PAID THE PENALTY, the ransomed, the redeemed, those reconciled to God, then there is a comfort BECAUSE of that fact. The fact is beautiful as well as practical; it brings healing as well as holiness, truth as well as peace, for God loves to bring peace, though not where war is in the heart, since truth is not double-tongued (cf. Micah 3:5, Revelation 19:19). In the Hebrew, as in Isaiah 40:1, the term used is seen as having a root relating to a deep breath, and hence often is used to relate to comfort, relief, like a huge sigh.
Relief is in redemption and comfort is in Christ, through the Holy Spirit whom He has sent as He foretold, until He comes to collect His own and receive them into His kingdom. Already the kingdom of heaven is in our midst, depending on which 'midst': that is, it is to be found in the background of ambassadors for Christ - which is heaven, God's place - for which they are sent in Christ Jesus (as in Matthew 28:19ff.). Since He is in their hearts and loves His people, it is found in their midst also, operative without deceit, emulation or conceit, but where His rest paired with redemption, is realised by abiding in Him and His words abiding in those hearts no less.
CXLVI
146th.
JESUS CHRIST FOR THE PEOPLE,
BUT NOT FOR THIS WORLD
ISBN 978-0-9804100-8-2
Published May 2008
Australian has been greatly blessed, and in pursuit of its initial biblical principles in its foundation from Britain (ostensibly a Christian nation), it has in many things done well. Now for some years it has performed a desperate rearguard, to re-establish pagan follies, irrational modes and ethical amorality (cf. News 19). More and more rights are to be given to biblical wrongs. Sodom and Gomorrah might almost feel shame if they see what this land is promising to become, including some of the earlier churches, which become instruments of departure.
We remember amidst all this infelicity, feverish philosophical substitute for truth, passions for merely preferred paths and deferred morality, that THIS WORLD is NOT something for which Christ told us to pray.
|
|
I PRAY NOT FOR THE WORLD (John 17), was His
dictum. |
|
|
It is the people in it who are His concern. |
This world is to be banished (Isaiah 51:6, II Peter 3, Matthew 24:35), its works burnt up with their evils. It is unfit to live. It has had a long innings of millenia, and although many times many in it, even nations have veered or even come to the point of honouring the God of creation and redemption, yet its contemporary move is to endless war, subtlety, programmings from corrupt philosophy, often corruptive men, people who like Mugabe, appear more interested in condemning those who did not please them, than pleasing with goodness, those whom ostensibly they serve.
False gods flit in and out of the world like visitors from foreign lands, equipped with prestigious embassies, some with atomic bombs in the basement.
The world is going. It is not fit to provide life. People are coming, in millions, convicted, converted and cleansed, challenged, changed, redeemed, regenerated. The crisis is merely the end of the examination for this earth; and much is the harvest to be gained (cf. Matthew 2:12, 13:30, 24:31). The Gospel of the grace of God persists like lawn amid the weeds, in an aridity caused by constant lack of water, as the outpouring of the Spirit of God is undesired. It is not however without eternal effects, in the hearts, lives and destiny of many.
In this volume, the distinction of what GOD is providing, this WORLD is giving and getting and what is for PEOPLE who care for their Creator and seek His word, face, will and word, is crucial.
CXLVII
147th.
HAPLESS HITCHES AND HOLY HEALINGS,
GODLESS GLITCHES AND DIVINE DEALINGS
including Spiritual Sprigs and Biblical Gems
Spiritual Lapses and Restored Synapses
ISBN 978-0-9804100-9-9
Published June 2008
As one reads Sir Edward Creasy's work, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, the time of writing being mid nineteenth century, there is a certain perspective which appears. Since it is not a recent publication, there is a certain help from distance in time, to seeing the motions of history.
From this book on great battles of the world, it is apparent that the human race often looks up and is cast down, tries to smile and lapses into frown, seeks sheen and finds blood, desires eminence and discovers the grave, scamps grace and saves face, only to be caught in its spiritual twistings and burned in its devious turnings.
In spiritual things, there is also a correlative pathology. Many, like Solomon, do wonderful things even in the name of the Lord, but then lapse, as he did in his old age, into the weakness already apparent when he was younger, but now clutching him like a dying man being rescued, as if to kill his rescuer by uncontrolled holds. Again and again, both in conduct and in doctrine, a person or a church will lapse, and in the cases of the children of God, the healing being available, will find solace and health in repentance and spirituality instead of undirected surges of spirit, and vying in misplaced industry.
The world meanwhile, without the Saviour, finds in its NECESSARY glitches, as it may conceive, them, mere evidence of being on the wrong path, and so beyond these, the passions lurch into wars without just cause, into venom without caution, error without remission, hatred without intermission and industry without point, which in the end beckons to judgment without end.
These things are on the one hand, sicknesses to be healed in the body of the Lord, and on the other, deadly amours with mortality, on the part of those who disdain or disregard the Saviour and hence His healing. His dealings with such are like those of a doctor whose patient does not often come, and when coming, does not often listen, and when listening, does not often do. The result is world history.
In examining elements of these themes, and instances, it is hoped that the biblical perspective in detail will help some to be revived and to look up to the Saviour and to find Him, and others, who already known Him, to abate divisions without grand, to embrace the Saviour with renewed fidelity and to adorn the Gospel without those little glitches which spoil programs so readily. In all things, there is one book, one Lord, on Spirit, one salvation, one Gospel, one grace, one peace, one love, one joy; and what is faithful to the book, in spirit and word, is faithful to the Lord.
TEST all things: it is with this book of the Lord, that Bible, that you test, and when you try the spirits and try your ways, to see if there be any iniquity in them, as David sought the Lord should do with him, you use this His word, to challenge or solace you, and relying on what He has said, look to Him who said it, and does it! Praise His name for ever and ever.
With these things, this volume is also set to itemise various sprigs, spiritual issues or items which may edify, challenge, comfort or contort, depending on the receptor, and biblical gems, since these lie like untouched gold nuggets in the Bible, and need to be discovered or re-discovered or reviewed in awe from time to time, to give strength to the weary and joy to the godly, yes and warning or truth to the straying and hope to the helpless.
Meanwhile, the coherence, cohesion, the brilliant complementarity of all the biblical doctrines is its own apologetics: it fits like the fabrics and materiel of a house-building kit, and here, it is that for the household of faith, for its delectation, presentation and use. As the world whizzes on its predestined path, always imagining great things for itself, except when it is not too disgusted or exhausted for a while, even to think, the great day of His Second Coming, His glory which is to follow (Luke 24:26, Mark 14:62) moves nearer as history zealously is fulfilling the preliminaries required, like a housewife cleaning each room in the morning.
CXLVIII
148th.
ISBN 978-0-9805471-1-5
Published July 2008
Hideous be your templates, horrendous your ethics, blighted your morals, despicable your conceptions and cursed your creations!
That would be another approach to life.
You see this duo repeatedly in the Bible. Thus in Ezekiel 20, there is a veritable litany of error, of grossness, even to the point of putting children through fires in the interests of pagan conceptions of surrounding religions, culture king, calamity the result.
Man has always had a tendency to embrace the pagan, preferably with some admixture of derring do, as in the child burning piquancy to the delectations of the religions exposed to divine fury as seen in Ezekiel. He desire to exclude the supernatural from the natural is wholly parallel to mother cursing, as if one did not need a womb, or father defamation, as if no need was necessary.
But to HALLOW the name of God, rather than seek to blight it, to make light of it, not to sight it, this is something else.
It is the task of this book to make that exceedingly clear; for it is not enough to have goddish sorts of thoughts. With God, His name is to be hallowed.
CXLIX
149th.
ISBN 978-0-9805471-2-2
Published July 2008
THE CHRISTIAN ABIDING: THE LORD PRESIDING
The Brighter Way for the Declining Day
The holy way in this declining day - for in the forecast arena in our Age, a day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and this makes two since Christ (II Peter 3:9): it is much assaulted. We are told that it is better now, though for murderous malice and spiteful confusion, for blighting on sight, for murdering in millions, for overthrowing good things and investing in lust there could have been few like it. Indeed for the power of man to destroy, it is unparalleled; and in this as for the desire, it has no equal. This is bringing our time into complete accord with the precise prediction to the point of Jesus Christ.
It is a spiritual fact of the utmost significance that when FACTS such as these are mentioned, the tendency to scoff at verified spiritual realities, so prominent in our day, seems to surge. Facts in this area as in that of the fraud of organic evolution, seem to be disparaged almost compulsively (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!).
One thing does not change as the fiery embers of the setting sun make ready to appear, scorching broadly and not only in the Middle East as foretold, with Israel the victim proposed and the occasion for the catastrophe to be imposed on her assailants. The pre-occupation of this world with the place set by God for the nation once chosen to bring both the Word of God, in Old Testament writing, and the living Word of God, Jesus Christ, is great. Nor is this surprising; for if God sets a nation in a place, just try to displace it! And if you fail, just start reflecting on what you are doing, and what He is doing, and consider before it is too late.
After all, Israel's former displacements for a time were foretold, as this deliverance is likewise (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 10, Israel Ch. 1, Red Alert ... Ch. 10, Outrageous Outages, Awesome Inputs and the Courage of Christ Ch. 11). How the prophets laboured to warn her of the assault by Assyria, a rod for the discipline of her faithless ways before God over centuries, and of the exile to come through Babylon: but she did not listen. However, with the warning came the hope, and Jeremiah in particular foretold her restoration after a 70 year exile, just as Isaiah foretold that Cyrus, by name, would be a national instrument in the restoration of the exiled nation to her land.
The culmination in the execution of the Christ, the greatest legal fumble of all time, also foretold and in those terms, in Isaiah 53 and Micah 5:1-3, has led to a longer exile; but this too is now past, as the further predictions for her armed successes (noted in Zechariah 12) against wholly disproportionate enemies are now fulfilled (1948, 1966, 1973 with some reference to 1991).
Nor is it a case of a beautiful nation - though I personally greatly admire its frequent humanitarian actions, even towards her oppressors, at the medical level, and her restraint as squabbling nations continually seek her destruction, like dogs fighting for a bone, with cats squawling at the same time - for Israel has yet to repent, as predicted in Zechariah 12, and to acknowledge its error, in crucifying Christ, God as man.
To be sure, this was predicted also (in Psalm 2, 16, 22, Zechariah 12:10, in Isaiah 53, as a bunch with many other items, ranging from a millenium to half a millenium before it happened); but the repentance to come is now at issue, just as the Christ to come was the issue when the date for His death, predicted by Daniel some half a millenium before its occurrence, was coming up (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4). It does not lessen the error of Rome plus Jerusalem in settling upon His death, repaying blight for might shown in healing, help, grace, compassion, words such as no man ever spoke, as He took His place within history.
There He has become the chief focus, and that for millenia; and this is likewise the case in the book most sold since printing began, in Europe, almost 1500 years later. The Bible and the Christ, the Lord's Christ, these are the dominant focus of history to the point that the very dating system of Europe reflected it, at least in intention.
The way of Christ does not change. The world contests it; the Lord invests it.
The kindness and compassion, the pity and the power, the capacity to raise from the dead, this is needed as much now as then, when it was not appreciated by the ruling and contentious, the envious and the blind authorities in Jerusalem, ruler and ruled, at that time. Pilate and priest combined in their awe-ful parallel then, to the coming time now, when the first and the second beast are to unite to seek to eliminate Christianity from this earth. Already the efforts of the devil to this effect have come far to fulfilling the predictions along these lines. Hitler sought to remove the racial evidence, as does not a little of the militant Islamic movement now, making archeology difficult in the sacred sites; and it is not really racial at heart, since it is a matter of what GOD CHOSE to do a job, and what remains, as in Israel the nation, to show the world its failure.
You see this sort of thing, a hostile world rule against Christ and His will and way, foretold at length in the book of Revelation. In Ch. 13, and the two evil dread noughts are there noted, the first and the second beast.
Beast ? that is socio-economic, politico-cultural, militant militarist regime, with its rulers spending the time seeking to annex the world to their cult. The second beast is a religious specialist, seeking glorify the first. It is just like an expanded Hitler-Goebbels regime; but this time not national only, for by then that prototype is international. The devil in Revelation 12 is shown trying to swallow up and drown out the Christians, having sought first, as seen in the earlier part of that Chapter, to extinguish Christ at His birth.
There we find him trying to persecute the Jewish Christians to the death. In that Chapter likewise, we find he extends His desire to all the followers of Christ; but as always, in the ultimate result, he is thwarted. It is not surprising that he gets very angry and, as one with certified and advanced cancer, he knows his end is near (Revelation 12:12:12). The otherwise almost inconceivable wrath and folly is therefore not surprising! If there is one thing which tends to be extreme, it is the wrath shown and extremities imposed by frustrated tyrants, and while their little day lasts, they can exceed all boundaries, to the limit allowed.
The Roman Empire tried hard to pursue this job of extinguishing Christians; but it was thwarted, and fell. The Holy Roman Empire, using Romanism as a dual-cultural club, tried to extinguish with the Inquisition, the Biblical Christian testimony (cf. SMR pp. 902 - 931, 911ff., 1032-1088H); but it likewise failed. It is apparent that there are today forces which would like to 'have another go'. Still there lingers the force of the last fall of the oppressor.
Indeed so far did it fail that the British Empire arose from the ashes of the fires of Smithfield in Britain, where the ashes of saints accumulated (cf. Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 14). This Protestant body ruled much of the world and became the most powerful grouping for many years, but in two World Wars exhausted itself, and now is willing to move if you will, through the Chunnel as a symbolic funnel to be under direction from Brussels, a growing summit for imposition of authority, in the continent where Hitler failed to make it Berlin.
Thus with the passing of the British Empire, together with the white-anting of Anglicanism increasingly and that of many large Protestant Churches (cf. SMR pp. 686-706, 857-876), the stopper in the slaughter of millions of Christians is pulled out, and the race is on for the extinction program by the more modern exemplars of slaughter. This may be found not least in the Sudan, but are ably supported by all reports for decades, by China in its own way and the Laden exercise, laden with desire to re-assert the Islamic heresy (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4, SMR pp. 1080ff., Divine Agenda ... Ch. 6, Lord of Life, Ch. 8, *1).
Accordingly, these movements growingly fulfil both the blood lust theme found recorded in advance of history in the Book of Revelation (not only in Chs. 13, 17 but in Ch. 6 where death is shown in guise as an adventurer and almost ruler), and the false prophet multiplication as a phenomenon on this earth, before Christ returns to rule.
That is the back-drop. In the foreground however, there is the same Christ, the same Holy Spirit, the same Bible, the same word, truth, Gospel, program, in a setting now well advanced from simmer to boil.
In this volume, we seek to concentrate not least on the way of living in Jesus Christ: and this, whether when the people of Jesus Christ are proposed for the slaughter mentally, physically or spiritually, or proceed in peace in the beauty of His holiness. That, it is in contrast to the ghoulish presence now becoming so popular within the confines of the vehement among the human race, while Europe rises to meet its appointed prophetic centrality.
CL
150th.
NOT THE DECLAMATIONS OR DISTILLATIONS
OF MAN,
BUT THE DOCTRINE OF DEITY
Published July 2008
ISBN 978-0-9805471-4-6
Back to the Bible! has come the cry for many years. The Bible! comes the carnal response, why ?
It has been one of the chief purposes of this site to show WHY!
In sum, it is because it is not dated like other works, by the misconceptions of ruling cultures, or fated by the feeble-minded estimates of truth or past or future of seductive seers, nor is it invalidated by models of thought which do not permit truth to exist, or if to exist, to be known, or if to be known, or if to be known by man, not to be communicated, or if communicated, not accurately so ... and so on. The litany of self-destruction for those who seek to tell us WHAT IT IS, is endless, and their models are futile. Here is found the mourning at the coffin of secular man, with the pall-bearers for the funeral, the mystique religions of evanescence and suffusion with the thoughts of man, with or without any tail-ends of truth from another source. But the Bible is not so. All this it avoids, because it is the doctrine of God.
It is because like truth, it describes events, those pulsating with normalcy, to give them perspective, just as it considers those erratic, with judgment on order or confusion found as its masterpiece, in their settings. For each, it gives grounds. It applies them. It gives precise enclosures of what is to be history and not merely grants numerous details, but the dynamic behind it and the reasons for its application. It makes personal the seemingly impersonal, wise what is witless and gives interpretation to the mass, or for some who misunderstand, the morass of events, like an expert reader of space photographs of things on the earth, pointing out now this and now that, so that it may be discerned, and being discerned, acted on for good.
It is because like man, it displays knowledge of hearts, their diseases, spirits and their seductions and force, but unlike man, does not underestimate the power of man or his puniness or fail to provide the grounds and reason why, and grounds for, what happens to him. It is most unlike man in this, that the knowledge of hearts is given not only by One who presents Himself as Creator, and so ABLE to have this wit and wisdom, and omniscient and so reliable. He also speaks as One who gives no congratulation to a perfection which is not here, or to a heart which is in rebellion, nor on the other hand, no rebuttal to a heart which seeks cleansing, and for that matter, no rejection to the plea for purification and the means for it.
It is because it is the charter, not of human rights, but of godly gifts, of the dimensions of our souls, the depths of our spirits, and their superficial claims are rejected just as categorically as their vast aspirations towards their Creator are blessed. It is because it itemises the spiritual sicknesses which lead to false gods, who did not make heaven and earth, and rejecting them, appeals to man to find wisdom where it is, in his Maker and in His Manual, the Bible, which alone has the verifications to endorse it, and of course, the Saviour to apply it, Jesus Christ. It alone has the date for His death (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4) and the prognosis, both for Israel and Gentile nations, all of which have been fulfilled to the letter, and in their own diverse ways.
It alone has provided specifications for salvation, not only in word, but in the person of the predicted Messiah, not awaited, though it was long awaited before He came, but come; not equipped with thought alone, but with power in deeds, in raising the dead, in being raised from the dead, in putting the two together in a short space of never-overthrown challenge, and always fulfilled words. In it alone is the testimony of the types of miracle He would perform (cf. Isaiah 29, 35), the type of death He would suffer, and the salutary and indeed salvation-based reasons for it (cf. SMR Chs. 8 , 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 2, Christ, the Wisdom of God ... Ch. 8), and the grounds for His resurrection with its potent meaning (cf. Going with God Ch. 5, With Heart and Soul ... Ch. 3), which His men proceeded at once to apply world-wide (Matthew 28:19-20).
CLI
151st
BEWILDERMENT, BEDAZZLEMENT, BEDEVILMENT
OR THE BEAUTY OF
CHRIST'S HOLINESS
Published August 2008
ISBN 978-0-9805471-6-0
Blood ? wars seem to arise like evil flowers, cape-weed which bedizens so many fields in blatant colourful contrast of black and yellow in Victoria, or sour-grass which in South Australia looks so 'pretty' in its almost delicate flowerings, as it carpets so much, as if the mere business of living were a bagatelle, a thing of nothing, its flowers finding paths and explorations that might daunt the mighty. But it is a weed.
War with the heady throb of blood is likewise a weed. In this century its talons are cruel, its heart is usually befouled with the grime of crime, political folly, egotism, false glory, inveterate hatred, incestuous spiritual relationships with the evils and the Evil one, as it drives dauntless, like sour grass, sour spirited sallies and gross hearted severances of peace, arms, legs, hands, futures, hopes, its specialty.
As often enough stated, this is not some 'religious bash': it is fact. It is time that the sadly tic-like movement to scratch the itch of conscience by derisively formulated disclaimers of 'doom' by a race given increasingly to wild frenzies and lifeless replies, should be replaced by repentance. Is it really imagined that the Creator of man's power to think, to surmise, to imagine, to investigate, of the fields to which he attends, of life, of death, as shown in recent volumes of this set, is immune to man's antics ?
Is it really thought that man has it all rolled up, wrapped up, parcelled and neat, his answer to the obvious and probing question as God beholds his conduct: WHY! Why are you, this race called mankind, WHY ARE YOU SO ACTING! Do you imagine, says God, or rather you thought that I was one just like you! In crime ? in folly ? Hardly does He whose is all grasp for more! Take care, He says, lest you be destroyed. But the drugged mind is all but past caring, that of mankind in the mass of its degraded movements, demolishing what is right, exploiting what is wrong, and singing with it the song of Man, Man, Man!
Psalm 50 has a caution!
"But to the wicked God says:
'What right have you to declare My statutes,
Or take My covenant in your mouth,
Seeing you hate instruction
And cast My words behind you?
'When you saw a thief, you consented with him,
And have been a partaker with adulterers.
'You give your mouth to evil,
And your tongue frames deceit.
You sit and speak against your brother;
You slander your own mother’s son.
'These things you have done, and I kept silent;
You thought that I was altogether like you;
But I will rebuke you,
And set them in order before your eyes.
'Now consider this, you who forget God,
Lest I tear you in pieces,
And there be none to deliver:
Whoever offers praise glorifies Me;
And to him who orders his conduct aright
I will show the salvation of God.. "
Yet so many want to ask God, WHY ? why do you permit such things ? as if He had not been so gracious and forbearing that it staggers the soul!
The answer is ever obvious in one's own heart. WE have power to choose, love has power to dispose itself, friendship has power to bestow itself, as does hatred and enmity and vying and lust of all kinds, not least the spiritual for autonomous self-will. WE do choose and the results are accordingly to be found. It is the divine brake, and not the accelerator, which amazingly slows down the rate and spate of crashes; but folly mounts, and its results accrue, first of all like the moraine of glaciers, then like the flooding of rivers, then like the rising of seas and the violence of storms.
What do you expect ? Endless folly to be given a grant for eternity! Not likely.
The fact that mercy is so vast and prodigious that this race is not yet exterminated, though it is seemingly doing its very best to achieve this by violation of individuals, races, nations, truth, care, concern, in the interests of having more, dashing into the derring-do extremities that lash the earth and assail its people and imposing this or that erratic or despotic will on others, should not be construed to mean that the RESULTS will simply forget about it. They are so disposable, as if for these too, it were merely a matter of finding a suitable rubbish bin and tossing them into it.
There is a folly in this earth, not least, new look politicians, who promise new things, new ways, change away from old things, and this has appeal to many because old things have been so tarnished in the travails of compromise and falling standards for so long that a new look seems charming to them.
But what is this new look ? more people power, less regard for what is left of standards of purity and truth and distinctiveness for the absolutes of the God who sent Jesus Christ, whose answers remain what they always were, NECESSARY for life! That appears its most popular direction.
Religions and a good dose of dialogue, in the current climate, and for a nation that once might have called itself Christian, this appears nothing more than another name for compromise and despatch somewhere else, of the biblical absolutes of Christ, leaving the memory dim, the standards misty and the new shores as welcome as tarry tarmacs, afflicted by the heat. As they settle on them, the vision goes from the nation, while the option of bottomless depth yaws, or yawns, for it has had many takers.
The way is falling since Britain fell, and it has, to be sure, a long way to go; but it is falling faster as every bulwark against popularist betrayal of divine truth becomes a commonplace, large organisations still illicitly called churches betraying Christ by blatant pushes for pre-eminence in themselves, or for autonomy of morals as if Christ had never been, or arrogance in doctrine, as though a Bible could be written and displayed with new teaching on any street corner at will.
It is as Paul describes such ventures into such areas, into ventriloquism for the voice of God or plagiarism or remoulding relative to the Lord, a fitting work for the devil who loves a different Gospel, another Jesus or another spirit (II Corinthians 11). That proud spirit can specialise in transforming his appearance into that of a false, or falsetto angel of God! Following his leading has never been a good idea. It ruined this earth more than any merely environmental work of man could ever do! It made it FIT for judgment! (cf. Romans 5:1-14, 8:17ff.).
There is payment to come. Let us leave that side.
There is also the beauty of holiness to find. It is in Christ now as it always was. It is not found in grabbing, getting and forgetting what is godly, but by discovery of the truth where it always was and will be, in Him whose it is, in the God of verifiable, validated revelation in Jesus Christ, the doctrinal deposit in the Bible. Abandon that, abandon Him, mould it to your will (in theory - in fact it will never change), use Him for pleasure, profit, a happiness-machine, an investment opportunity, USE Him for ANYTHING, rather than finding in Him life as HE gives it, and what follows ? It is this. You are then merely making HIM a means to your objectives, your life and your will. He is not so available. Christ did not call us to take up our crosses and follow Him, in order to suggest it would be easy, or self-gratifying. Who on earth could find it gratifying or pleasurable or fulfilling to heave on his shoulder a great, heavy, cruel, rough cross, an object on which he is to be crucified! (Galatians 2:20, Luke 14:27ff.).
Life is beautiful IN Christ, but ugly outside. It is not however supine saturation with pleasure but spiritual moulding with truth in mercy. Mere satiation of desire leaves unanswered the question of WHAT desire and WHY! To find God is to find love, truth, pity, beauty of holiness, peace and wonder. It is not for profane hands, which is why so few who name Him, have Him. FEW there are who enter this narrow way, said Christ (Matthew 7). Many are called, but few are chosen! He intimated.
Be like athletes competing for a prize, said Paul! This is not the work of leisurely laziness or pleasurable performances. This world has history and history has point, purpose and meaning, both exposing the weaknesses, giving experience of them and their correction, intimations of their purposes, overcoming of their deviations, exposition of the power of God in the weakness of man and the scintillations of scenarios unspeakable or spiritual, the glitter, the bedazzlement of what blights, or the glory of what has fought and won, and conferred on His own, that victory.
Where is the honest, sincere response to the wonder that God is, with the wonder-reaching aspirations of spirit which finding life through regeneration (Titus 2-3), live anew in the active and dynamic presence of the living, loving God who gave many things ? Let it be in you. To life, where it must be, in Him, He has given the openings of grace, and to this He invites (Matthew 11:29ff.); to mind its open door to truth (Ephesians 1, Psalm 119), and to heart its land of splendour, where sacrifice and conformity to truth are like brilliant alpine resorts, arduous and inspiring, delightful and awesome, to be treated with the utmost care (Philippians 2-3).
May God bless you as you put all your valuables in His spiritual basket, and placing it in His hands, with a will made clean by the blood of Christ, live entirely for Him. You will not find it easy, but it will test faith! However, His hands are sure, and the basketware is His (Ephesians 1:11, I Peter 1).
In this volume, which is not large, the intention is to use things small and large, minor and major, as in a store room. It is hoped you will find what edifies, trusted many will be blessed and recommended that you SEEK the Lord with ALL your heart, and finding Him by faith, eject encumbrances and run well.
The track ? It is called truth. The athletic style ? it is called love.
CLII
152nd
THY WORD IS WONDERFUL
Published September 2008
ISBN 978-0-9805471-7-7
It is often the case that someone with marred face or limp shows a spirit which not merely disguises the defect, but almost seems to make it a prominent thing, a desirable feature, so great is the spirit accompanying it - like a gnarled tree, in some feature of its trunk, which nevertheless sways magnificently in the soughing beauties of its life, and shades deeply in its recesses.
Christ is beyond all in this, since the defect of death was voluntary, the distortion of limbs was resolved on, and the direness of slow torture was willingly adopted. Moreover, it was not for display, important as this can be, of the patience of truth and the magnificence of divine mercy only, as if we should see a moving film. It was for practical action, in history, and by history, to make eternity available.
In this volume, DV, there is to be that simple attestation which reality brings without fanfare or flourish, like a fine rug. It has no profit-seeking rep to signify its wonder, but it is warm. It is like a smile: it has no announcement of its presence, but it warms; or like a fire in the grate, it has nothing but diminution, slow loss to show, but it provides great gain. Such was the Cross of Christ, not a spectacular Olympics to hide distress, but a spectacular distress to demonstrate reality, and bearing the shame of man's now inherent and devastating sin, to void the consequences even to death, by death, vicarious and undeserved, effectual for relief.
The word of God has brought millions over millenia to this same Christ, as the LIVING WORD of God. It is to this WORD as to the written word, alike that we now come, the expression of God Himself, whether in verbal symbol to feed the mind and establish the soul, or in what is written, to break the rock of pretence.
It is who He has borne all to provide for all what only some will accept; but His word is wonderful, that Bible which to jot and tittle as in His own day, when only the Old Testament was there, would conquer history and come to pass. In the New Testament, bound to Him by His own power, of whom it IS the testimony, it is no different (cf. I Peter 1:25, Matthew 4:4, I Corinthians 14:37, 2:9ff., John 14:26). Just as He cannot be added to, nor yet suffer subtraction (though man sought to suck away His very life, the ultimate subtraction, it was in 3 days restored as foretold), neither can the word of His mouth, the thought of His heart, the Gospel of His grace (Galatians 1), no nor even varied.
In this word, we find that testimony in itself, as in the oak or the spirited one who overcomes all, and to witness and enjoy it is in itself, to be taught what is truth, as light teaches what is reality. It makes no sound; but it shows. So is the Bible, and such must be our open heartedness towards it, to appreciate what it is, the very word of God, conveyer of truth, worker of experience, arresting the spirit, deploying the thoughts, inspiring the heart and teaching the mind. We shall allow ourselves to be exposed to it and to sup on its strength, feed on its faithfulness and follow it to its pith, point and path, since this will never vary, nor will it alter at all; for though heaven and earth WILL pass away, His word will not do so! (Matthew 24:25). With God, it is like that ... it is different!
CLIII
153rd
HOLOCAUST OF MORALITY AND THE COMING OF CHRIST THE KING
published October 2008
ISBN 978-0-9805471-4-8
CLIV
154th
THE SECULAR, THE SACRED AND THE SUBLIME
published November 2008
ISBN 978-0-9805471-9-1
An idea of its contents, which are much in creation-salvation-culmination, is to be found below.
The secularity of the secular is just the worldliness of this world. The sacredness of what is sacred is the reflection of the Creator, and the sublimity of the sublime is the manifestation of His power, presence, personal nature, wisdom, brilliance, majesty, holiness, compassion and mercy, wonder and grand creativeness, the anterior to our own passion for it, the ground for it and for as many as receive Him who made them freely, who paid for their restoration and redeemed, the culmination of it.
HERE is the real creativity: GOD who created first man, has created the solution to the sin which is the necessary aptitude of liberty, and in so doing has sent His personal expression, His living word, the exact representation of His being, incarnate as His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to bring the Eternal to the Present, the Everlasting to the Temporal and the Life Eternal to the recipients.
It is part of His creativity and holiness that it is free ... Certain additional emphases are found on this topic in this volume.
2) It also deals with education, that eliciting within creation, and with a broader teaching, even in Chapter 3
CLV
155th.
MINI-MESSAGES WITH MAXI-IMPACT
published December 2008
ISBN 978-0-9806138-0-3
Reviews of some wide-ranging basic
topics of Christianity, with emphasis on pith
and application.
2009
17 volumes have been published in 2009
CLVI
156th.
ISRAEL II
ISRAEL: ITS DAY FROM A LONG WAY AWAY
published January 2009
Consider Israel - If You Don't, You May Have to!
ISBN 978-0-9806138-1-0
Compilation of many earlier presentations on the Bible, Israel, the Church, this world and the next, with additional material, updating or extending the earlier work on ISRAEL.
For Israel I, Israel Blows the Trumpet, and Yet it does not Hear, see 67 above.
CLVII
157th.
THE UNCOMPREHENDING DARKNESS
AND THE SELF-REVEALING LIGHT
The Duty of Holiness
published February 2009
ISBN 978-0-9806138-2-7
Taking over... It is Satan's long-standing desire.
The light of truth, however, unlike the uncomprehending darkness in which it shines (cf. John 1:1ff.), is self-revealing. Darkness merely scarfs up, hides, occludes vision; but self-revealing light has something to show. Light is what exposes and what is truth exposes itself with relentless patience and continuous evidence (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ).
Suppression becomes the answer and oppression the result of the clamouring clangours of the din of darkness, which would sometimes reduce its call from that of blood in the ground to a flood over it, 'managing man'. Thus there is a phase of spiritually illiterate violence, whether by fines or imprisonment (such as occurred to Bunyan and may yet occur in Australia for those who tell what the Bible declares, Victoria having given a strong lead), or bombs or invasion, by raids as in Georgia, or by death camps as by Hitler, it is the way of force that does not favour truth, that answers a challenge ideological or spiritual, by a shower of power.
Where evidence mounts and will not be discounted, then petulant or aspiring force is used; where truth declares, mouths are to be closed. Nothing must betray the powers-that-be in their inordinate lust to take over from God, declaring a new gospel, that of betrayal of Christ, even in the case of many, this in HIS NAME! (as II Peter 1 forecast, and the period from 1900 to the present abundantly fulfils as many of those bodies which were once churches, retain the name, and preach otherwise cf. News 121, 122).
The self-revealing light is not mere illumination, however; it has something within it to reveal. God dwells in light inaccessible, preferring to declare Himself by light, and suffering none to invade; and when His light shines, then the realities which suffer no darkness of confusion, or of incomprehension show themselves, the very nature of the divine Being and His plans, thus attested from antiquity without change, in the Bible, as it grew to total fulfilment in Jesus Christ. Here the propositional became the personal, and instead of servants of God preparing His way, He came in Person (cf. All This Rot about Not Believing).
Without the God who made him, man makes gods, whether of nothing, matter, ideas, power, rule, race, spiritual beings, spiritual powers, a pardoning virgin (cf. SMR pp. 927, 977ff., 1087ff., Jesus Christ , Defaced ... Ch. 5, esp. *2), a mother-earth, a natural force or anything else he happens to think of (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!), whether ransacking the Bible to violate it in its own name, or being more adventurous, basing himself on himself, and so neither knowing nor able to know his basis. You will never find what made the car by worshipping it or its processes of composition.
In this volume then, the assaults of darkness, force, folly and the results, are on the one side and on the other, there is the wonder of a light that shines out from its own basis in God, cluttered by no nonsense, full of illimitable power, which can seem harsh to those who betray it when patience is finished and the case is done, but is gentle to those who use it, without seeking to fuse and confuse it with anything else. The conflict ? it is like having a team of kids opposing a Test side; and far more, the finite poking out its tongue at the infinite. When mercy is despised, what is left is reality, which shuns theft of truth and deals with it as with all estranged scorn: with justice and this ultimately ... means judgment.
God is most gracious and patient; but there was a beginning and there is an end to it all. The reaping is near now (Answers to Questions Ch. 5)and the weeping is already in progress. The Gospel of Jesus Christ was forecast in increasing detail for millenia (cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25), its crucial cost has been covered by on the Cross for more millenia, and the entirety of the divine program is now coming towards its end. Many have their love grow cold as Christ forecast (Matthew 24), because it is so tedious-seeming, and others because of multiple betrayals; but when one's trust and hope is placed in God, then only grace prevails with ineluctable truth, and forgiveness proceeds with an unyielding love which in mercy, shows it. If hope springs eternal (in our season), it is chiefly because the ground for it is still on offer!
Man is on test conditions; it is well not to follow the mob, nor the delinquents, but the only other focus, Jesus Christ while there is yet time (cf. Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8, Repent or Perish Ch. 2, The Magnificence of the Messiah). His is no blemish, all evidence, only validity (cf. Deity and Design ... esp. Section 8). Indeed, in Chapter 11, the matter becomes luminous as Habakkuk asks his famous questions.
Meet Him; He is very pleasant to know. You will then find His word as a resource insuperable, His promises as a course indubitable, His presence a recourse inimitable and His mercy a forest of beauty with the streams of spiritual peace in its midst.
THE KINGDOMS OF THIS WORLD and
THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST
published March 2009
ISBN 978-0-9806138-4-1
First of all, consider Him who is first - and last. There is no competition there for the primacy of position or the outlasting, enduring end of the matter. He is BOTH. Nor is there any emulation within Him, for He delights to give His kingdom to His Christ, He who is the Father, and the Spirit of God is sent by the Son from the Father. Thus when in Revelation it declares the unutterably musical, majestic, simple, solemn sentence:
t