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CHAPTER 5
The Symbolism of Clanging Symbols
Love Grown Cold
a Signal of Unholy Heat
THE STATED CAUSE
ONE of the marks of the near return of Christ is just this, LOVE HAS GROWN COLD BECAUSE lawlessness will abound! (Matthew 24:10-12). The CAUSE is this, the breach of laws, the disregard of righteousness, the calamitous moral plague of behavioural viruses, sources of evil strength, strutting through the earth with active tongue, listless heart, self-interest dominant. Like philosophic pandemics, psychological pogroms, the evil actions of many, the heartless lawlessness, the vile violence will breed broken emotions, evil surgings for revenge, soaring desire to grab in a doomed world.
Love is growing cold: as it was written for the final syndrome of lost mankind, so it now is.
It is not the first time evil has been blatant and domineering; but it is assuredly the last. In their picturesque pogroms against Christianity, following on from Nietzsche's 'Christianity is weak' program, associated with, Be strong and forget the wrong, concept, in intimate association on the same Board of Directors for Evil Dynamic cluster clutching the globe, together with the Survival is the Real Revival religionists, and the Show You're the Best Quest beauty competitions for the better satisfaction of self-aggrandisement for individual, race or nation: now the conquering concepts of evil blare their bizarre trumpets. It is like resounding brass, to conquer by sheer vehemence of noise, the hearts that are unfounded (I Corinthians 13:1).
Thus do they proceed, whether against Israel, each other, civilisation, with loveless lust and pointless force.
Without foundation, they are soon confounded. In the increasing mêlée of masterful evils, they lunge and lust, or else use pompous and pretentious words, and lust, as in the case of the United Nations, whose evils towards Israel are a very example of discrimination, a vial of vice and a provocation to equity.
GIVE O Jew, the land which belongs to you; GRANT O Semite, from the squalid and slender deal given to you, more and more and more, to the Arab, the Moslem, the practitioner of jihad in many cases, whether it be Syria, or Iraq, or Iran, or Jordan, or Morocco, or Algeria, or Egypt (in no small measure), or Afghanistan (not so distant), or Pakistan (a little further away), or Georgia, or Azerbaijan, or Turkey (not without a strong Islamic thrust).
GRANT, O Israel, more of your tiny plot of land to that Islamic crescent that circles the entire area, so that it may be the better sated, the more precisely suited.
Such is the virtual chant. It proceeds.
Do you have a tiny piece of the Palestine once promised to you ? and usurped by the UN as far as it was able, in 1947 ? though it failed. Very well: to your stolen lands, give more, to those who have gobbled up like Turkey gobblers, what was appointed to you by international decision in the League of Nations, and initially by the British Empire following your war help in WW I, grant a gift to bolster their success, to aid their triumph, to increase the disproportion, and to make your own land indefensible.
O
what noble justice is this! what profound insight, what remarkable international
understanding, and all from the mitre of bishop-like rule, the United Nations!
What brotherly love is here, what realistic assessment of ... precisely what ?
Of the power of oil ? of the power of hundreds of millions of followers of
Islam, for whom multiplied nations and vast quantities of the surface of the
earth, even in the region of Israel, are already their possession ? of the fear
of violence ? Of what is this absurd disposition of land, that Israel should
give of its mite, more for the mighty, supposed to be the result ? Not of reason
assuredly, not of truth, not of biblical determinations in the name of Almighty
God (Galloping Events
Ch. 4), not of wisdom, not of right!
Assuredly, the UN is not the only blaster with its clanging symbols, of the peace that the earth has missed, as if an arrow shot at a bull's eye, not merely missed the entire board, but went in the opposite direction and pierced the heart of the distant judge! The Islamic vehemence, constant jabbing of intended, pretended, extended jihads, a sort of modern form of sabre-rattling, a psychological prompt, like a dagger jutting into one's hip in a crowd, a reminder of the irrational, a pledge of vehemence, a religious enormity, a substitution for morality, this too is an ingredient of some distinction in the LAWLESSNESS predicted in Matthew 24:6-14.
Inter-national and even intra-national disputes and desires, for independence, for revenge, for aspiration, for confrontation, for exhibition of superiority, to attest religion, to claim region, all exempt from reason in greater or lesser degree, these populate the earth, as if some giant ant-queen were popping out the particles that bite, continuously, without undue labour.
It is the very acme and aide of lawlessness, its hinterland, its crescendo, its place for passion: this very earth.
THE STATED CONSEQUENCE
Lawlessness ? It is because of this that statedly love will grow cold.
Such is the word of Christ, in His sublimely accurate prediction; the Christ whom they killed, whom many seek to kill anew with ever more blasphemous oddities, invented and plastered on His face, whether by the earlier intrusions of blatant Islam, or the later ones of other sects (cf. Red Alert... Ch. 10, *4, Ch. 6, Earth Spasm ... Ch. 10, *1, Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 8, *1).
Lawlessness is against Him also; but all in all, it is blinding man still more; and love as predicted, grows cold.
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Your nephew was killed at Bali, |
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your uncle was butchered in Jerusalem, |
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your children were mutilated in a shopping centre new Tel Aviv, |
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your people were dispossessed and injured in Zimbabwe (the UN does not seem
unduly concerned at those little ruinations of farming and wealth, associated
with violence and evils like writhing snakes), |
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children were killed in Chechnya, as Russia seeks to prevent TOO MUCH dismemberment of the USSR, for some reason or other, perhaps fear. |
No but your people die for lack of food in India or Pakistan, while the atomic weaponry is paid for ?
Or did you find your grief in the Solomon Islands of all places, because there was an independence movement ?
Or perhaps it was the Tutus who butchered your tribe, or the Chinese who imprisoned your pastor, harassed your religion, insisting on a materialistic folly with wholly immaterial zeal, based on ideology ?
Again, were you blasted by Islamic insurgency in India, or Kashmir, or did Al Qaeda kill your people in the Twin Towers, or yet, perhaps it was in the Sudan that Islamic warriors grabbed your children, to take them as slaves ? Perhaps in Tibet, you did not relish the trampling on your culture, the vulture vice of Communism striding over the prone cultural corpses of your people ? Did you find that appealing ?
You see, iniquity, lawlessness is indeed abounding, and force slavers over its subjects (cf. Divine Agenda Ch. 6). It is the great expanding pandemic of our day, just as Revelation 6 in parallel predicted; it grasps nations, embroils wars, shakes continents. Our present point is this: IT IS FOR THIS PREDICTED CAUSE that the PREDICTED COLDNESS OF LOVE was to come.
And it has come! and such a cause has operated on aggrieved hearts, lamenting eyes, seared emotions, blasted bodies: it escalates, it ramifies, and it spreads like dust in a storm, hurting the eyes merely to look!
THAT had to happen, both the cause
and the result, and the result FROM this cause; and it has happened on a
prodigious scale; and this it has done in the precise pattern of allied events
forecast in the Bible for the prelude to the return of Christ, which is near ...
(cf. Ch. 3 above, and SMR
Ch. 8, with Answers to Questions
Ch.5 ). Be warned then, it is near! (cf. Matthew
24:43ff.); and be enlightened, for the Lord is
the light of the world, and as He says, so it is. Why dwell in darkness ? it
does not show you anything.
LAWLESSNESS with a profane pollution of the human psyche on an unprecedented scale, operates like a butcher, set up in a surgery, conducting 'operations' at will. It is present theologically, socially, nationally, internationally, religiously, irreligiously, domineeringly, sneeringly, blaringly, uncaringly, continually, with the pride of dominance, the evils of prominence so vastly helped by injudicious press and TV coverage, almost amounting to free advertising.
It is found politically in intensities and immensities of corruption, from Japan to the US, from double dealing arms deals, and atomic proliferation, as from Russian profiteering from the sale of potentially world destroying goods to a nation famed for its intolerance and relentless passion, Iran, already for over a decade embroiled in war with Iraq, in one of the vast violences of the last century.
The present century simply refuses to be left behind the unillustrious but surging violence of the last one, and has already adorned the earth with the craters of the Twin Towers, the invasion of two lands on account of terrorism, the use of an international broadcaster, al Jazeera, to make popular or prominent or both, the work of the Destroying Agency, al Qaeda, for whom violence seems the height of virtue, so long as it is against the civilisation which is not Moslem, or does not supinely lie down to inequity because of it.
Violence, lawlessness is in the air, as if radioactive plagues were already encircling the earth; and this one, it is enough to make the latter a mere EXAMPLE of what it can do. As the prediction of Revelation 6 puts it, that chapter which sweeps to the gravity of the rush of the end (colour added),
"Another horse, a fiery red one, went out.
And it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth;
and that people should kill one another; and there was given to him a great sword."
The fiery red communism is merely one of the sequence; the international rivalries and national lust for pre-eminence in terms of the irrational follies of survival of the fittest evolutionism, as if being fit made new creations! these too worked their woes, killing by the million, yes, by report, in the case of Mao and Stalin alone, by the score of millions.
Each death, say of a kulak taken with inscrutable merciless to a slow death in Siberia, while labouring intensively, or a child for Islamic usage from some Christian family in Sudan: it is an event to the psyche, it is a violence to the body, it is an assault on the mind, it is a declaration of independence from God, it is a theft of His property, an invasion of His creation, when it is done for such religious vendettas, cloaked in philosophy, smuggling in gods of their own! (cf. Highway to Hell, Aviary of Idolatry, Beauty of Holiness Ch. 4 esp. *2, Divine Agenda Ch. 3, SMR pp. 79ff., 267ff. at 5). This is so, whether these be Islamic, Communist or Nationalist, or the consummate product of other lusts, with other licence, other lawlessness.
It all abounds, this iniquity, this disordered dynamic of lust and delusion, high-minded resounding words without scientific force, divested of truth, drudgeries of the swollen mind, like poisoned hands, puffed up and ready to burst.
The COLDNESS of the love which this helps to create through frustration, through self-assertion, through unguided passion, through decline of human kindness, through cynicism, through disfaith (q.v.), through drifting dynamics deciding to settle on self-esteem, self-centredness, self-advancement, through the breach of morality, the outreach of profanity of spirit:
it is as predicted.
The cause and the consequence waltz like accustomed partners, skilfully, marry and have many children.
THE STATED SURROUNDING CIRCUMSTANCE
Let us now pause as we return to our basic text in Matthew 24:5-14.
"HATRED" or "HATE" is mentioned twice in this passage.
Speaking to the Christians, Christ said this:
"For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.
They they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations
for My name's sake. And then many will be offended, will betray one another and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold" (colour added).
It is as if He were describing the sequence AFTER the event! This we have earlier referred to in terms of THE SCOOP OF THE UNIVERSE!
How many Christians have been molested, kidnapped in Sudan! The question is appalling even to the imagination, without even beginning to consider any one case. Children! Is this madness to be for ever ? Not at all. It is for but a short time, for the end is already NEAR (Luke 21:24,28). Yet while it lasts, it is an appalling addition to the history of this world.
Pompous words from the United Nations , which likewise (cf. Mystery of Iniquity) would like to take over children, not so much physically, but religiously as is clear from their printed programs, these mix with painful disasters, as HATRED of God manifests itself. It does so, now in apparent indifference, now with actual jibes and denudations of His law, will and word, as far as this is humanly possible: by omissions as well as by commissions, by scoffing, by vehemence, but suavity, by complicity with evil.
What then has been found ?
When Iran is not assailing Iraq, then Iraq is assailing Iraq, by courtesy of one the world's most torturous and inflexibly wicked tyrants of all time, Saddam Hussein, mixing vast wealth for his faithful with vast and even appalling conditions for his people, flaying them and crushing with fearless and heartless hatred, yet not lamented by all at his political demise. When North Korea is building atomic weaponry (one such bomb has effects almost too appalling in terms of strong, short, long, excruciating, debilitating pain, to conceive), it is impoverishing its people with vain philosophies which do not work, while bringing the hatred of God into its materialist thought*1, even though material is the very thing it has become so short of, in an irony undoubtedly divine!
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As people actively train, become
converted to the perverted irreligions of this day, |
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as the many continue assailing
the Lord's own people and excluding, as in Saudi Arabia most of the liberties
of His worship, while receiving deliverance from the USA, inhibiting His
worship subtly and sometimes violently, with strategic hatred and hearts
immune to the love of God, as they dispossess Christians
of their houses, and herd them, as in Ambon, and Australia is not greatly moved; |
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as they shower in the entire
Islamic portion of this globe, their intense hatred of Jesus the Christ, |
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as Rome continues in its Romanism, to mock at reality, and make bread into
God, as if Christ had committed suicide at the Last Supper, foisting
idolatry on the religious; |
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as sects seethe with the hatred
of the Christ they will not accept, while they remodel Him, |
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so do hatred and loathing, fury and frustration, confusion
of heart and contusion of thought, evoke the emotions of horror that circumnavigate
the globe, like some latter-day Cook, this time better-equipped, |
Thus, precisely as in the words of Christ, does lawlessness thrust its evil force into this world, like stampeding bulls, the global ring becoming more and more limiting as powers of travel increase; and so does love grow cold, being supplanted by personal thrust, national lust, often with the coldness of a Putin, who receives vast help from the USA, but cannot possibly limit sales of potential atomic weaponry to Iran.
With this, comes not mere cold love, but just as Christ put in its place in His prediction, also hatred, seething, romancing with religion; and this too He indicated, completing this section of His address with the reference to false prophets arising. They go together like arms and legs, body and head. They work together; and they do it with abysmal evil, in a sort of pompously goose-stepping display of evil, coldness, cruelty, delusion on a world scale that blasts off into the space of the future, like rockets fitted with nuclear powered engines, waiting to disperse their rampaging garbage on their descent back from the cloud nine of pretence, to the earth of actuality.
Accordingly, the fall-out that will come, not only from the follies now being released, but from the Lord whose rule, though marvellously patient, is nonetheless sure and wise, manifesting the follies of misused liberty, but not the folly of liberty which can lead to love itself, since in liberty is not folly but profundity, when it is well used.
Meanwhile, the Lord in His over-ruling and foreknowing omniscience, is exhibiting by reductio ad absurdum, the fact demonstrable by reason, acceptable to faith, redolent with love, that He who made us, is our King and none other will do. Without Him, all flights are disasters, reason is aborted, truth is defamed, human nature is defiled, cynicism operates like a vulture on the corpses of the dispossessed, while violence rampages, mocking the magnificence of the divine creation that is man, and showing its absurdity and folly, when it is deployed without the deity who made it.
THE STATED TRIUMPH
Dante spoke of the Divine Comedy, but this is the Divine Tragedy. Yet is there hope.
The Divine Tragedy, BECAUSE OF LOVE - that requisite of mankind which is increasingly defiled by the self-possessed, the self-seeking and the self-centred, the ideologically possessed and the politically vagrant - has a TRIUMPH to offer as the alternative ending! Yes, this is a Play where the playwright is not Shakespeare, but God! We are at Act V, often very bloody. How bloody you see, to look again in the predictions of Revelation about this globe!
Once in flamboyant and irrational hope, it was to 'evolve' in the mythical imaginations of the deluded, the irrational and the slaves of philosophic romance, into better and better things; then the artless tune changed quickly, and after two world wars, it was the going thing of unmoored thought for it to evolve into nothing at all, having no direction: and this in terms of an explanation of the arrival of the ordered universe! (cf. Spiritual Refreshings Chs. 6, 13, 16).
The 'laws' once so strident in their enunciation, of progress, development and so forth, then suddenly become as in fact they always were, so much hogwash!
Folly pays, unless it be intercepted; and therefore, the results of these non-existent and despised earlier ramblings, this arrant metaphysical 'laws' of development foisted on science by ideologists abusing their place, they MUST stay around. The 'laws' that never worked, were seen to work, to have bassis, they went; but the price remained. Buy a lemon ? you still pay. The world has paid, is paying and will pay.
So is evolution drowning in its own slush, and many are sucked down with it, for though it is slow thought, it is quick sand.
Into this delusion ditch, we look,
or peer, for it increasingly resembles the bottomless pit,
and we read this in Revelation 6:8:
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"So I looked, and
behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth."
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The pride inherent in the follies of 19-20th century evolutionary philosophy, has come in for the kill, and despite millions of deaths in line with dear Adolf's racial theories, or Joe's Darwinist delusions, all hoping for that assist which did not arrive, the kill presents it vast bill. The world is being invoiced to this day (cf. SMR pp. 127, 307-8, Joy Comes in the Morning, Ch. 7, *2). Whether clad in Marxist clothes, or freakish physiological clown garb, in nationalism or racism, the pride of flesh in the follies of philosophies has bought broadly; and it pays richly for its follies.
Africa with plague and war is almost extinguished; the Middle East contains a nest of vipers, who kill, kill and kill, and hate as once people would love, and the young would befriend one another, gripped in an epidemic that surges like a witch in her abased ways;
India and Pakistan are on the verge of nuclear exchange;
Israel is equipped to protect herself from the next Hitleresque lunge;
China represses as if one of those fathers of old, whose word was law, and whose law was loveless;
Russia disgorges her evil weaponry like a bird feeding her young, but this is radioactive food, and she represses even the free press, presumably not out of love of the light;
Georgians not a few want independence within their independence;
and people fight and fight and fight, and hate, and resent, and puff and plough their neighbour's cities, tribes mutually set about extermination, as if all were mere vermin; and it is done as if it were all routine. Madness and power are mother and father to this generation, which, with still increasing vehemence built on survival of the fittest, is to that extent, unfit to survive.
Nor may it much longer; for as
Christ declared, "Assuredly I tell you, this generation
will by no means pass till all these things take place. Heaven and earth
will pass away, but My words will not pass away"
(bold added).
The generation concerned, filled with hatred, with false prophets, which grows cold in love, where lawlessness abounds, where Jerusalem is back in Jewish hands (Luke 21:24,28 parallel), is unquestionably this one. That is the subject, the context and the issue.
But there is more, in Matthew 24:22,from the lips of Jesus Christ:
"And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved, but for the elect's sake, those days will be shortened." He then proceeds to warn against such things as are exemplified by the Roman Catholic Mass, where it is made to appear that Christ is indeed "in the chamber". Do not believe them! He declares of such claims.
This
mixture of power, hatred, delusion, confusion, coldness, heartlessness, upsets,
reticulating wraths,
wars, resistance, insistence, madness, religious ruins is the very cocktail of
corruption, the inebriation of annihilation. At ever-increasing speed it steers
the world like some crazed, inebriated kid, towards destruction. Only the irruption of God in the
person of Christ, on His return, will arrest it. Then judgment...
That is where the Divine Triumph comes. It is when the JUDGMENT is itself arrested, on the grounds of His grace and the sufferings He faced, the sacrifice He made, the righteousness He confers, with the dynamic He provides, that the triumph of God comes like the dawning, abiding till the day is maximal, and the time is ready to reap (cf. Matthew 13:41ff.). It comes when He, the Christ already Redeemer, now King comes for those who seek to find the rest of God, the reality of God, the verified, validated, unique authority of God. It is found quite simply in the price of peace which is the Provision of the Messiah, who has come on time, who will return in His time, and in time to prevent the entire human destruction of its so ample globe, from which it seeks, in magnificent futility, to find other sites, as if to infect the very cosmos with its crazes.
THE STATED END OF IT
Thus does tragedy turn to triumph. You do not want mercy through truth ? then go without it; and you have only what you want, after all. You do want it ? then take it, and you have only what is given. What is given however ? It is more than millions, more than worlds: it is the Creator of all, it is the Christ who with His Father is the Authority over all, the Holy Spirit bringing even now His glorious resources and rest to His people, who shall never be ashamed (cf. Isaiah 11:10, 28:16, 55:4, Ephesians 1:1-11). The Manufacturer did not need to give this warranty; but He chose to; and it is Himself, not His wealth or possessions. The gift is God. As He declared to Abraham,
"I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward" - Genesis 15:1 (cf. Romans 4:24ff.).
In God, the gift is eternal life (Romans 6:23, 10:9): not the subject of terrorists, not the object of ruin, not available for the rampant surrealists who follow false secular or religious prophets without profit, but instead with a pollution which hell itself is reserved to retain.
THAT is the triumph: go where you will; but if you will to walk with the Lord, thank God He has made you willing and leap with joy. But is your case different ? You would like to do so, but cannot feel the desire kindling the wood of your heart, because its love is cold ? Yet do you wait for the antibiotic until it heals you, or take it in order to be healed!
Take Him then, and remember Hosea:
"Take words with you,
And return to the Lord
{you came from Him in any case!)
Say to Him:'Take away all iniquity:
Receive us graciously,
For we will offer the sacrifices of our lips..."
HIS love never grows cold.
Remember Colossians 1:
"It pleased the
Father than in Him should all fulness dwell,
and having made peace through the blood of the cross,
by Him to reconcile all things to Himself,
by Him,
whether things on earth or things in heaven..."
NOTE
*1 See Repent or Perish Ch. 7.
