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It is time. It has long been time. There comes a time, when as Revelation has it, "there will be time no more" - that is, delay no more. You see that in Revelation 10:6: "and swore by Him who lives for ever and ever , who created heaven and the things that are in it, the earth and the things that are in it, and the sea and the things that are in it, that there should be delay no longer..."

When you compare that with Mark 13:19, the words of Jesus the Christ, you find this: "For in those days there will be tribulation such as has not been since the beginning of the creation which God created until this time, nor ever shall be," and it proceeds,

• "and unless the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect's sake whom He chose, He shortened the days. Then if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or 'Look, He is there!' do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and wonders to deceive, if possible even the elect. But take heed; see, I have told you all things beforehand. But in those days after that tribulation, ... Then they will see the Son of Man coming the clouds with great power and glory. And then He will send His angels and gather together His elect..."

It is not pleasant when 'religion' is being made into a sort of cosy accomplice of the satanic desire to evict God, which is not always so simple as that espoused in Russia under Communism, the famous eviction notice to get out, bag and baggage! There is more subtlety now. After all, THAT, it was more of a comedy (though not for those whose blood was shed in their millions), in terms of God. You simply cannot evict the One whose power sustains the settled and established order of the universe, and without whom, just as it could not be created, not being there and without means, so it could not be sustained. There is authority in all these things. A school may be built with authority; but it is (comparatively) easy to demolish it with bulldozers and the various implements of destruction, if you want a new one there instead, for any reason.

It may thus be removed. It is only by authority that it stands; and moreover, as with this universe, its stones wear and its appurtenances grow old (as in Isaiah 51:6). The very energic components in their mutual thrusts and counter-thrusts depend on the orderly channels which are in the keeping of the One who made them (Hebrews 1:3). The visible was NOT made from things that are seen, says Hebrews 11:1-3. We have seen repeatedly why this must be so, the incompetence of the visible to be its own author being obvious, since it has neither power nor provision to do so, EVEN NOW that it is here! Much less did it do so before it was there to have it! The INVISIBLE is the basis of all things, for mere visibility is the output whether in man or in that ultimate and first Spirit, the Lord. It is thought and desire, it is aim and attention, it is plan and purpose which underlies the mere construction of the visible.

But it comes to its end. It is fortunate in some ways that this is so, for it is SUCH a mess down here, and increasing. It is all very well for those in the decreasingly obvious places of RELATIVE peace and order, such as Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, yes and England and some of Europe, to shut the eyes as the sub-Saharan woes of famine, war and AIDS taking millions in misery.

It is easy to ignore the Pacific Islands, threatened by our smoggy carbon dioxide combinations and Greenhouse consequences, for their very submergence. It is possible to forget the Communistic rituals plaguing poor Tibet, and the ferocity of the challenges assailing relatively free Taiwan from the multitudinous Chinese mainland, as if EVEN THAT TINY ISLAND MUST BE CONQUERED by the bestial and faithless, the ruthless and renegade atheism of the powers that arrested China, and have kept it under arrest ever since, while Christians are to be regimented, inspected, aligned, made supine if possible, frequently imprisoned if not, despite the Graham white-wash about Christian churches in China. It is not that such a white-wash was necessarily intended; it is just that the lime was at hand, and made to be so.

It is likewise easy to ignore the hunger crisis now, and the intensification projected as inadequacy becomes gross insufficiency with scarce resources and massively increasing populations. It is easy to forget the wars - there, or there, as on a military map: but it is not so easy to have a leg amputated, relatives seized, children dying all about you by the million.

There IS a great tribulation precisely as shown in Mark 14 from which we have initially quoted. There is a COLUMN OF VAPOUR as signified for these dramatic end times, from Joel (2:20), which, chosen with thrifty words for a quick pen sketch of the era, are amply vindicated in the famous mushroom cloud so popular in the imagination of man since 1945, and as relayed for these last times, by Peter at Pentecost. It was there and in that way that he described, from Joel, the aspects of the era of the Lord and His Gospel, as it grew to its climax. As to that Gospel with its provision of the sacrificial atonement, so that the sin of the  repentant believers is now paid for, with the crucifixion the charge met, is proceeds unabated, ineffaceable, indispensable. Duly confirmed with the resurrection of the body of Christ, whom none could produce, since He took it away, on legs, it is operating in its splendid certainties, according to the predictions which, like all others, are always fulfilled, since what God says He means, and what He means He does, and none can stop it (Isaiah 43:13 cf. SMR pp. 931ff.).

It is all too readily achieved, to say, Ah! mere sensationalism. Yet such is not the spiritual torpor and mental desultoriness of those who are perceive great tribulation in an aching body, and learn that it is cancer. THEY do not shut the eyes as if to open were too much of an effort (as in Matthew 13:14-15). THEY ache too much for that. The world aches. It ignored the Christ (apart from murdering Him, that is),  when the BASIS of the whole matter was WALKING IN THEIR MIDST, and doing what He had to do in miraculous healing, incredibly sublime teaching and works of power and wonder (as in John 15:21-25, Isaiah 35).

As to those aches of this wearying world: it is a phenomenon which IS, after all, happened in precision more than any engineering, which wears out; but this forecast and this result as prepared by God from the first,  this does not wear out in thousands of years, but happens with all the fresh impetus of a prognosis on cancer, just made. It was said then. It happens now.

There is no cure: except to come where the Jewish nation refused to come. There is no remedy but to take Christ, whom they rejected, whom the Pope imitates with sad ineptitude, whom the nations ignore with grievous incompetence, to whom the UN does not relate, with effervescent verbal splendours of its own, whom this world does not know (John 14:30), under its forlornly foolish prince, who, however, for the moment, is sporting his powers and prerogatives of a moment as if they had any basis. These will go; but the word of God does on being what it is, doing what it says, and all is being completed at a great rate, like the flashing of a sports car down the highway of a desert.
 
 

That is the setting.

Now we come to the newest development.

"Killer beam turns science fiction into reality," screams the headline in the Advertiser, p. 28, Friday, September 1. What a way to introduce that ever verdant beauty of vernal tenderness! Spring! It is as if the spring were that of some wild animal, not of flowers and perfumes, zephyrs and grace of cloud and gentle shower.

What now! Is it never enough! No, for that is the character of the insatiable, until it is sated; and it is fated to be sated when it is too late.

So the refusnik Arafat, to be fair, in line with the wishes of his Party, with the Moslem desire BY NO MEANS to let Israel have the Old Jerusalem, and by ALL MEANS to have it for the Moslems (say Arabs, but the motif is Moslem), is forcing the issue. Even President Clinton was not impressed, and he has seemed favourable enough to their desires, if not designs. It was Barak, he - or his people -  indicated, who had been reasonable. Arafat was NOT willing to yield on Jerusalem. They BOTH, intoned the Secretary of State, want the same thing! (Cf. Ch. 7 above.)

GOD however needs to be considered. It is far more impossible to do without God in your calculations, if you are not irrational and want things to be within some sight of reality, than to do without your body when fighting a cancer within it. HE is the One on whom it all depends. You might as well imagine marriage with no partner, or walking with no earth; but no! that would be FAR more reasonable.

GOD has made His wishes, His will known. The Jews (as in Ezekiel 36-39, and implied in Luke 21:44) ARE to return (cf. SMR Appendix A) just as they DID return, and there are more to come.
What was stated, the blooming of the desert as the rose and so forth, it has all happened (cf. Isaiah 35, SMR Ch. 9, and esp. pp. 790ff.). It is sad to see those whose eyes are closed to this, have to watch it all happen in minutest detail, right down to the division of Jerusalem between Jew and enemy, in this day (after Christ's crucifixion, as in Zechariah 12:10), which in fact had to wait 1900 years to occur in 1948 (as in Zechariah 14:1-3). The coming of the Lord is to be seen shortly in train in the context of Zechariah 14, a subject worthy of attention! That is the point. He is not ABSENT at all, but the GOSPEL is PRESENT and until He is satisfied that it has adequately imbued the earth with its glory, He does and will not come.

There is a strategy in these things; and there is a love in it (as in Matthew 23:37, Luke 19:42ff., and in Matthew 24:14). It is the last which says this:

• "And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come."

Very well, the Jews are back, and are to be protected, are to be assailed (as in SMR pp. 510ff., 502ff.), and at the moment we are looking at ENERGY which is being prepared in the United States of America in one of their greater moments.
 
 

A high energy laser beam is being prepared, and indeed has already functioned impressively in shooting down two rockets at once, as the headline divulges. It is being prepared not least with Israel explicitly in mind.

It is to be delivered there in the Middle East, to that nation, according to current plan, next February. It is ... a safety measure.

It is needed since Barak has so nicely yielded in Lebanon and the enemy, both numerous and fierce, is VERY near to a VERY SMALL LAND called Israel. There are tens of millions of Muslims, and there are vast areas and arenas of land for all their exploits, while money in enormous quantities pours in from oil. The possibility that the remnant of Jews left from Hitler, in their narrow necked land (all the better to squeeze you, my dear, as the old grandmother - apparently delicate, but actually wolf - in the Red Riding Hood epic, might have said!), might best be protected, might easily occur to someone. Perhaps it has done so.

At all events, this new weapon, the "TACTICAL HIGH ENERGY LASER"    can evidently manage quite well thank you, against more than one rocket attacking. This beam of ENERGY is indeed, to quote the prediction of Christ, of the order of "wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath", just as was the A-bomb in its time (which remains) and the H-bomb (which remains even more menacing) and the Neutron bomb, not to forget the cobalt variety.

Science fiction into reality ? That is surely some sign. When a lad, I recall seeing a film which purported to depict just that, and it was not a comedy or a fantasy. It was presented AS IF it were happening, in a very sober way. Now it is happening in a still more sober way, without the intervention of art. Quite a sign, like a post pointing to the tip, and saying so. The onset of these wonderful aeroplanes, monoplanes, soaring through the yielding skies, I also remember, when a child, while sitting on the roof, gazing in wonder. It IS a wonder, and this is its development, this RAY tp stay the things in the heavens, which threaten and come ... down, inconveniently.

HOW will this ray help Israel ? It was apparently delayed in deployment not least because the 'peace talks' would not be helped by it. Now they are one more fiasco of passion without precision, then the time for weapons draws nearer, and the tests proceed, and the delivery date is mentioned.

That is all. Israel is being equipped. When the Lord delivers them as in Ezekiel 39 (cf. SMR Appendix A and SMR references just noted), there will however be more power even than this.
HE will ensure the result. He SAYS so (Ezekiel 38:8ff., 18ff.). This is that prodigy of interventions likened to the rescue of the Jews from Egypt, that power house of wonder which led to the establishment of Israel against the will of the greatest forces of that day (as in Hosea 7:11ff., esp. v. 15, where the comparison is explicit).
 
 

We have often looked at the follies performed in the name of 'religion' (as, for example in Repent or Perish 5, especially at the Phantom Flotilla). People intentionally or being self-deceived, so often manipulate the credulities of man, which are the pathological by-product of not believing in and receiving the Lord of creation, that it then becomes a spring board for even more fatal deception, whether of the quaint idiocies of atheism, ignoring the demonstrable, the vague intrusions and invasions of illiterate agnosticism, bypassing the fact that ignorance is not bliss when the evidence is ignored, or of the far more inviting propositions of the high priests of humanism, secularism, New Age investitures, Convenience Religion (from Comte) and Convention Religion (from the aggregation of persons finding out what goes for them).

What is so sedulously being sought ? It is this, to answer this: and this which follows, this is the direction of things.

What will bring

• a reduction of war (as in the Bishop Swing matter, noted earlier in this volume - Ch. 13),
• an increment of personal satisfaction,
• a secular possibility for the continuance of this globe, ex-God of course, but in the presence of some agreed fiddle.

And this ? it is to be, one which will bring in

• the fiasco of faith
• without words,
• or with quasi-assemblages of convenient words (as in Lead Us Not into Educational Temptation!) ,
• or with symbolic significations without power or impact (as in the S.A. Education Department's invasion with its philosophic panzers already with rusty tracks, but still being impelled into antiquated service, as if their imaginations could create, when they manifestly do not - That Magnificent Rock. Ch. 8).

• pseudo-faith (in man, but called God in some cases),

 
• pseudo-religion (in the unknown or the at any rate unobvious, so that you can still do as you please and have the thing as well) and

• pseudo-unity (at least verbally, as in the Lutheresque Romanist combinations noted in Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 4, or the appalling horror of the Anglican submissions proposed  - in Ch. 5 of that work, pp. 60ff., as seen also in The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 7, pp. 135ff. , and revealed more acutely in its underlying dynamics rather later, Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 7) and

• pseudo-peace (as in war, with pleasant words to introduce this interesting feature).

What you do not have is truth. This collision with reality under all these verbal plasters of Paris, these structures to support the broken limb of mankind, has been severe. It is becoming more obviously so. The eyes must be closed more tightly yet for the pampering privilege of disfaith (cf. SMR Index).

Meanwhile, the real process goes on. The Lord is doing what He said. He is still offering what HE DID, in Christ (II Cor. 5:17-21), and the Gospel is still going out, before the lines come in and the matter is concluded.
 
 

One well remembers a student, rather admirable in courage if less so in wisdom, being taken by taxi from a country College where the author was teaching. The Headmaster, who seemed such a splendid and kindly man in many ways, had announced the NECESSITY to stop smoking. Students would get 'six from the lawyer and expulsion' if the offence were repeated.

One student was notorious for his sense of humour and courage before discipline. (That is the pity of this as of so much more, that misplaced courage can conspire to ruin the otherwise fine intensity that will not give in: if only it would be set against evil instead.) When he was asked for his matériel, he produced it. One does not recall whether it included a pipe, but possibly it did. The offence repeated, the discipline proceeded - such an interesting student, one who had the author LAUGHING at about 1 a.m. when correcting his economics paper (which was clever)!

As he went, the rumour has it, he was singing, "Wish me luck as you wave me good-bye!"

THIS WORLD is in some ways rather like that student in this episode. However the tale must be changed to match the fact, in this massive moment of history. It is not the student who is going, but the elect who are to leave. They do not NEED luck, for chance has never been their god, that empty god of verbiage, but God, that full and pleasant God who, having the power, did the things that display it, ourselves not least.

As the elect leave this earth, as they are shortly to do (who knows when ? we are not allowed to know the times OR the seasons the Father has set in His own power  - Acts 1 - but we are REQUIRED to know the criteria of the times, as now - Luke 21:28), the many prodigious works of prophecy in warning, have in this feature, their consummation. ONE of these works, these prophetic words (Luke 21:24) is the deliverance of Jerusalem TO the Jews. That is now over 3 decades OLD. As to Jerusalem, for the present, its drama is unfolding.

One of the ways in which it is being defended is by energy.

This brings us back to the beginning of the article, but also to the near approach to the ending of the reality which is history, in its ultimacies.

Israel will be defended. It will be attacked. These are elements of that ending of the last chapter before Christ comes. This COMING: It is first, as you see, to gather the elect, His chosen ones as Mark relays from the lips of Christ. Then, it is too dramatic to say 'all hell breaks loose', and not really accurate. Nevertheless, there is some element of reality in that. To be sure, the devil and his antichrist who is being constantly prepared for in all this pseudo-religion (a necessary advance from Communism, which was frankly atheistic, even though it had laws and necessities formulable in functions and features impossible without a mind back of it - in all that, confused and erroneous as we have seen at the last as noted at the first): these are at work, sedulously, insistently, persistently: AND THEY are not without mind. They are merely without truth.

Will blinds, but mentality animates.

Hence they have much to do in a short time (we recall the MOOD of the thing in Revelation 12:12). While millions have already been slaughtered, as in China and Russia in the interests of this artificial religion without truth (like artificial sweeteners, to be watched for their indirect results), and many more millions die in the predicted aggravations and extravaganzas of wars and famines, performing like marionettes on strings, many sleep still. They merely gather in groups to the swing of the thing, to make new religions, ever new artificial sweeteners, if by any means they might lull themselves still more in the absence of the inevitable power of God, the inestimable grace of the beauties of His holiness (in the Messiah also, His everlasting Word, as in Psalm 110).

The vultures gather about the body, Christ indicated. They are now doing it.

The Middle East is a heartland. Very special. The energies rise. The tempers flare. The distempers increase. The Roman, the Muslim and the Judaistic religions, all wrong for different reasons, co-exist (cf. SMR Ch.1 pp. 50ff., 91ff., Chs. 9 and Ch. 10,  pp. 829ff., 986ff., 1042ff.). They are not as one. They cannot be. Allah, the creation of Muhammad, has no son. It says so on the Mosque. God has one only-begotten son. The one calls the other a liar. There is no resolution to that. The Son of God is the only Saviour. Without Him, you are therefore without God. The one, and there is only one such (only one is offered from God, as in Acts 4:11-12, all being quiet on the Western religious front from the other mouths that speak on this) : it has the evidence of the Biblical proclamations, fulfilments, IN Christ on earth, and then FROM Christ when on earth, THE ENDLESS VERIFICATIONS (e.g. SMR Chs. 2,4,5-9), THE INCREDIBLE RESONANCES (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 9), as well as the logical necessities (SMR Chs. 1, 3,10), the uniqueness of validation, being the only available source for truth which is VALID.

It is the Bible or invalidity (as in That Magnificent Rock Ch. 5), the Bible of God or the word of man, the religion of reason and revelation, or the religions of creation, man's creation.

You will notice the intense emphasis on CREATION and the CREATOR in the quotation figuring at the first in this article. The concept is repeated by Christ in this scriptural context in Mark (13:20ff.). You have to come back to the beginning in order to face the end. The Creator has had much to say from the first. The creation is magnificent. It has not been left without a witness. It has not been left without salvation. It is that or nothing: nothing, that is, of salvage, only much of damage.
It is then a matter of specialisation in the end,  for that end, which so many, irrationalist specialists, prefer for the beginning.

However, vague as they are (and logically must be in order to seek, however vainly,  some sort of a smoke screen) on the beginning, they are more purposeful about the end. Thieves are ever so. HOW you get it is not to the point for them, so much as what you are GOING TO DO WITH IT! Rapacity prefers wisdom afterwards... But its guilt remains. The 'nothing' referred to above, this then is not absolute nothing, in other words, but nothing to the point. If, indeed,  it is not Christ, then it is contempt (Daniel 12).

However, vague as they are (and logically must be in order to seek, however vainly,  some sort of a smoke screen) on the beginning, they are more purposeful about the end. Thieves are ever so. HOW you get it is not to the point for them, so much as what you are GOING TO DO WITH IT! Rapacity prefers wisdom afterwards... But its guilt remains. The 'nothing' referred to above, this then is not absolute nothing, in other words, but nothing to the point. If, indeed,  it is not Christ, then it is contempt (Daniel 12).

It is however nothing like that at the first, as at the last.

But WHY? why ? the cry goes forth. It is for this reason. Energy, the capacity to do work, comes from an adequate source. Try to make it otherwise. It is CAUSED by what ALWAYS has it invisibly, God, who makes its visible counterpart. The energy is vested in form, likewise made, in rational premises, likewise constructed, in legislated physical and chemical principles, similarly created. The energy and form, the features and facts are created; man is created in particular; the man is desecrated by his own will; he is still further desecrated by the INVISIBLE but powerful forces of evil. For there is, you see, a war on ?

But have you not noticed ? Paul speaks of it in Ephesians 6, needful to read. You see it sometimes in some Hamlet soul, some Macbeth, you see good and evil come to grips. You see it in politics, in literature, in psychology ending often in the psychotic. You see it in religion. You see it in the vain pretences of man who would CREATE his own religion, though as a CREATURE himself, it is obviously NECESSARY for him to gain it from the source, the creator, the One known, yes, as God. But what have we seen and demonstrated ?

God has spoken. There is only one place which is valid, validated, verified; there is only one basis for truth, necessary, inescapable, ineradicable; and there is only one face which is validated as that of His emissary, His word, God the sent. That is Jesus Christ. You can take it or leave it.

But if you leave it, you will be left.

That is all.

He is coming.

He has come.

This is the second coming.
 
 

Let us hope that for you, it will be a good morning when He appears (as in I Thessalonians 4). As for us whom He has already called to be His, and those whom He will call before He comes, even yet, do not wish us luck when we go. It is CHRIST who is our everlasting life, and who is Lord.
He rules. And do not wish yourself luck either if you reject Him, like a cancer patient refusing operation on a rampant cancer (called in by arrant desire, in this case). Chance could do nothing; it is a mere word for the operations of what are not controlled by our purposes, and we have looked at that last time.

Luck ? It will do nothing. The person back of the system which works in ways we do not control, it is He with whom you have to do. He made you. He can remake you. If you are not yet remade, then be remade. You need to repent. You must be born again, not in the verbal neo-evangelical sense of being newly plastic. You need to be born of the word of God (I Peter 1:22ff.) and to be the Lord's. WHEN you are, it is clear that you realise that you must GROW UP, like any other babe, and in particular grow UP into Christ (as in Ephesians 4:15). HE is then your Lord, and it is a luxury incomparable to have as Lord the most tender, the most patient, the most loyal (loyalty ? where is it going, it is becoming harder to find, but not in HIM!), the most sympathetic, the most informed.

There is none better; there is none within a thousand (invisible) miles of Him. He, He is the Lord of Creation who with His Father rejoiced in the beginning in the creation (Colossians 1), and it is to Him, the word of God, that you come; and He, from  God in the first, brings you back there. It is there that you belong. Do not delay in coming!

And you who are His, rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory, for HIS is the truth and the peace, and He has shown it from the first, as He does to the last (I Peter 1:8).

And again, you who are being persecuted ( and those who will live in a godly manner MUST suffer persecution, as Paul declares), yet be patient, for the Lord is coming, and truth does not bend or fracture: you are safe in Him. Indeed, more, "if you are persecuted for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. On their part, He is blasphemed, but on your part, He is glorified" -I Peter 4:14.

Meanwhile, for the unfound, for whom one sorrows as for brothers and sisters lost, hear this:

"Seek the Lord while He may be found,
Call upon Him while He is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way,
And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
Let him return to the LORD,
And He will have mercy on him:
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon" - Isaiah 55:6-7.

It is one of the glories of the gracious Lord's provision of my marriage, that my wife's father had part of that text, printed large and bold, on the visible roof of a shed near the road in Prince Edward Island. Now that, that is testimony, yes from a farmer. Thus does the invisible proclaim in the visible, and thus the unseen appear amidst the visible. We are visible; He will become visible on His return, as on His incarnation. Sin is never invisible, however, to God; for He sees even the invisible, for HIS sight is not limited (cf. Psalm 139). The author sees His characters, even when they see ... but what do they see ? We have the unspeakable advantage of being equipped for sight.

Let us not close our eyes. That is adding insult to injury ... and alas, not least among the injured, there are those who so act.

But as to the text of His word:  It is the word of God. He is our author, authority, beginning and end. His willingness is salvation, His provision the same in Christ, according to His instructions (Matthew 28:19-20). It is this which is proclaimed, has been proclaimed, will be proclaimed. It will not end. But the time will end... That is one component. There is another feature of a very different kind.

Peter was a fisherman. Paul was scholar. John was a youngster at the first. They all worked, as workers for the Lord. Some err here or there, but are restored. God is the great restorer. The wonder is this, that in ADDITION to that, He makes all things new (II Corinthians 5:17). This is the NEW beginning. It has no end. It must however be commenced.