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It was quiet. That was pleasant, because of the embracive feeling of the stillness, quiescent, content, alert and yet without passion, for the sun, long slanting, was gone, and the light glimmered without force, over the reducing flourishes, the calming ways and slender remains of the day.
The quietus is calm.

So the day was going, and night with its dark dispassion was bent on arriving, the stars to present themselves uniformed with light, not oppressive, but impressive in their luminosity.
It is not dissimilar at dawn, but the mode varies. Then, again, it is still rather than quiet, with a feeling of light arising, tales to be told, tenderness at advent, light smiling in quiet anticipation, ready to bless, awaiting the event. Its softness can be a splendour of its own, touching with a tenderness that lacks all demand, but presents its face like that of a child for a goodnight kiss, except that it is day, awaiting life.

These events are so continual, and their presentations so constant that many are bemused, and fail to realise, that just as a new car can purr out of your garage, and be laid to rest on your return from the work of the day, and this can long continue (for some 20 years if it is my car, and it was 10 years old when bought!), so this is for our world, not the language of eternity. It proceeds for a time, according to construction. However, dull of heart and limping rather than limpid of understanding would he be who imagined that because of 20 years (for one man) the car had so been in its ways, that THEREFORE it was never made and would never fail!

We know these things because one had to buy the car, and may perhaps, one day have to replace it. Then the cost is an index to the work needed to make so illustrious a conveyance as this thing on wheels, with engine and electrical equipment, tyres and chassis, system and method in its correlation of parts, yet for all that, like the work of an infant just born IN COMPARISON with our own bodies.

• These latter marvels did NOT cost, so that it is easy to imagine that they were never begun, except perhaps that childhood may remind one of this fact. Funerals of course cost, just as hospital expenses at birth may cost (like delivery charges for a car), but this is not a COST OF PRODUCTION, but of mere arrival of a body prepared with preliminary programmatics of immense brilliance of construction, and with a soul of intense opportunities of delight, duty and voluntary action as traced not a little in Ch. 3 above.
   
• When it goes, then the LOSS may speak to the wise, and suggest to the lively mind that
   
• this thing which came without knowledge
   
• (for we do not need to know the genome to have a child, and even now this is far from sufficient for it!)
   
• likewise departs without our permission
   
• (mostly, though Moses being instructed by God that his time had come, went away to die in that beautiful form of discipline which was notable with his life, the ending being a mere transition back to the friendship more closely with the Maker who gave him the physiological premisses in the first place):
   
• and hence IS SOURCED FROM AN ADEQUATE BASE.

That ? It is not we. We are conveyor belts at best, in the affair. In Repent or Perish Ch. 7 and That Magnificent Rock (TMR)   1, and SMR Ch. 2 we consider these things in detail, and in Ch. 1 SMR  indeed, show the necessity of creation. However, for the moment, our concern is simply to see that our bodies, reeking with that intelligence which our minds do not always display, are not sourced in mindlessness, nor is our material property code found from an oblivion and ignorance of symbolic logic. However, our end, like our beginning - and now we move to the creation of the day itself, is in hands most capable, and demonstrably far more so than our own; in fact, as we have shown repeatedly on this site, utterly capable and this without any limit.

It came, was organised, was synthesised, is utilised, and it will go. Anything strange sounding about that ? It is standard for countless millions of our own productions! We understand with the most intimate knowledge just the way of such things, cars, aeroplanes, levers, tyres, the designs are instigated, propagated, illustrated, subjected to variety within style, and then the time has come for them to go. They are gone. We have something else.

There is always the purpose of the thing. We have a large touring car for that age, and another sort of vehicle (as my own case illustrates) when the mighty works of travel are somewhat reduced, and our demands are less. The world has a purpose. It is 'nice' to think about it not at all, and to consider that when the world is, if you like, wheeled out of its garage each morning, and put back in the shed while light whirls elsewhere, but our part is still (in comparison), that this is all there is to it.

It is rather like the son of a rich man, who seeing a three story house under his roaming feet, and noticing maids, does not consider that the funds to purchase the one and pay for the services of the other were not a matter of arriving on the air, with a Summer breeze; and that the work which the funds directed, with the voice of a man, was not made by sitting back and waiting for the house to organise itself, and evolve. Information does not increase without intelligence. That is that.

It started. It will stop. Its energy is limited. Its derivation is not constant. It is ended. These are facts, in this, that the first and second laws of thermodynamics are the scientific formulations of the thing as seen. It runs down, not up; entropy is; it is in a mass-energy multiplicity that does not now increase. You simply cannot do that forever.

It started. It will finish. That is its message.

It is also the message of the Bible, and in this case, we have sourced the source book (SMR), and found its source is ours, namely God, that Spirit who made matter with all its limitations, as we may make houses WITH it, in view of invisible architectural concepts, to limit but also to provide for our spatial rest in this world. It all ends. That is most natural. It is the way things are.

The beginning of things is NOT the same as their maintenance. Housemaids, for instance, are not builder's labourers, and bricks and cement, are not dusting. There are modes of making a house, creating one, and of looking after it. These are not (nearly) the same. Many people feel much the same about money...

The end of a thing is not the same as its still being there. Its dysfunction, its cessation of operation is not at all the same as its normal function. Cessation is something special. When a heart beat stops and the breath discontinues, this too is not at all the same as having both purring away, or wheezing, even, or moving with the fluent grace of youthful health.

Arrivals and departures are most interesting.

For our universe, the first is called creation, and it of course includes the source materials, the units within units and all the peripherals, as in anything else created, this one being the things themselves. The second is called ... termination ? the end ? Peter calls it· "the day of the LORD"
( II Peter 3:10). He indicates the method of it, as does in part, Isaiah 51:6. Matter with its energic correlates, the creation's very matrix, is to depart. We find this that

• "the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat: both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up... all these things will be dissolved ... the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat ..."

These are statements of physical reality, interspersed amongst statements of spiritual reality, like these:

• "The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night ... Therefore ... what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God."

It is most apparent that there is an element of surprise when the dusk comes, for the universe, and it is to be set aside for the last time, not in the slumber of waiting for dawn, but in the cessation of death. It is like "a thief by night", something Christ also confirmed (Matthew 24). It is not a natural process in this, that it is the mastermind making the end of this particular series of natural processes, which underlie some of the happenings in this world, and form a convenient stage for so very many others. Like bodily death, it is not a mild thing. When it is over, all is quite different. It reminds one of the creator, the terminator OF THIS PLAN and PART and CHAPTER and ACT in the way of the life He has created.

However, while it is also noisy and dramatic, this end, as some physical deaths also are, particularly when associated with air travel, it is not THE END. There is no such thing (Isaiah 46:10 shows it is controlled, Psalm 90, that the Maker is Himself endless, not having come from nowhere in order to be, but being from everlasting to everlasting as we have also demonstrated in SMR and TMR, for example). We change garments; He changes universes, or at least this one, for the next work.

This is called "a new heavens and a new earth" by II Peter 3, and we read of such things in Isaiah 2-4, Micah 4, Isaiah 65. The rigour and indeed, beauty of the rule is to be seen in Psalm 2 and 110, as in Isaiah 11. But this ends in heaven as in Revelation 21-22. This is simply the environmental and personally provided matrix or if you prefer, entity, for the cessation of the phenomenon of pilgrimage, the place of perfected peace where all the choices having been made (those of God which are destiny, and those of man, which are medial). With this, is destiny: many having rejected the only way of life, but many having been found, and placed within it, those WITH eternal life, live it. Pleasantly, it has no devil (Revelation 20), and equally delightfully, it has no immorality (Rev. 21), and love is its way, for this is the permanence past all that is temporary, in the presence of God, since HE truly is love (I Corinthians 13, I John 4, II Corinthians 5).

It is a little thing with the Lord to have a thousand years (II Peter 3:9). It appears from all the evidence (cf. TMR Ch. 7, SMR Chs. 1 - 2   and Dr D. Russell Humphreys’ little booklet , Evidence for a Young World) that there have been several days of this length. The initial cyclic days specified in their astral connotations, as noted in SMR Ch. 2, these were what they are recorded to be (cf. also TMR Ch. 7 on dates, The Biblical Workman on sequence), and the history is what it has been, in the order of a few thousand years (cf. also, Divine Symphony, News 87,
End-Note 1, and A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9, with TBW Ch. 7), it not being possible to say precisely how many, but decidedly a few.

History ? To us it is long; to Him it is short, a few days. When I create a chapter, it may be a couple of hours; to read it may be more, and it may last for years. That is the way with creations. The product is produced as the power is or is not lively, needs many or not, is divinely aided or not: the time varies enormously. When the power is great, as when Einstein is fiddling about with E=MC², the time may not be long in comparison with the result!

When God is at work, as Augustine so wisely showed, time is irrelevant in terms of power. It is just a matter of His good pleasure. He used it in fact, as His word shows, to be a model or paradigm for REST on our part (Exodus 20:8-11), and even made this a matter of the covenant expressed to man, in terms of his creation itself, through Moses; and He confirmed it in Ezekiel in no small manner (Ezekiel 20:12-14), while making it a highly specific and specialised signal and means of nearness to the Lord, when taken in spirit as well as in hand and foot, in Isaiah 58! This is discovered for us in Biblical Blessings, Appendix  I,  II and  III.

When God decides it is time to remove our kind of time, this is His decision also.
When He decides to come, as He forecast for several hundreds of years (SMR pp. 886ff., News 87, End-note 1), providing the death date of the sacrificial love's consummation at Calvary with this, in detail, then He comes; and when He decides, having come with salvation and spread it across the globe by determinate plan (as in Matthew 24:14), and determinate content (cf. Galatians 1, Isaiah 52-55 and see Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17), to return in judgment, this too is His affair. The time, timing and rate, spate and pace of things is as He composes who knows and even declares the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10).

His OWN return has its own aspects. For example, it is His purpose (and as you see in Isaiah 46:11, He purposes and performs), to collect those who do NOT prefer darkness to light, whom He has saved indeed, before He brings the drama of history to its outcome, at Armageddon (Revelation 16, 19); and He proceeds to return with them as entourage in due course (after what is called the wedding of the Lamb in Revelation 19:5-9,11ff., I Thess. 3;13, Zechariah 14:5). Light does not always endure darkness, nor truth always tolerate lies.

When however the final end of this universe comes, all the dramatis personae and scenes complete, when as Revelation 20:11 puts it so tidily,

• "Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away. And there was found no place for them...",

and when judgment itself, final and irrevocable is pronounced in terms noted (as in Romans 3:25ff., 5:1ff., 8:1ff. John 5:19ff.), then there is some commotion. There is this thunderous clap of motion and commotion into the immobility of what is no longer there. You CANNOT move when you are not there. The universe vacates and is gone. Unfortunately for the godless, whose hearts could not abide the Lord (John 3:17-19,36), they are not among the nonentities, but the deposed entities whose place is out of the things they have despised. It is most reasonable.

What is not so reasonable is:

• 1) to imagine that the world did not bother to be created and will not be governed in its termination by its Creator.
   
• 2) that it is lovely to be without the source of love, by preference.
   
• 3) to blame God for your preference, since HIS inclination is as in Colossians 1:19-23, for He would have ALL things to be reconciled through Christ, the payor for all who come.
   
• 4) to treat as a tyrant the One who WOULD have all things reconciled, but does not pretend to force them to be, for the heart is not a pressure valve, in the spiritual sense.
   
• 5) lastly, to make your religion a matter of some combination of the Bible and your own thoughts, attribute the whole to God, and then expect Him to implement that!