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Report comes today on the not wholly delightful shelling of an Israeli settlement by, it seems, that nation's unwilling inhabitants of Arab race - scarcely an invitation to the equal enjoyment of citizenship. This action is deemed by the announcers, a possible stimulus or index, to a coming regional war in the Middle East.

There have been such before.

There ARE lessons to be learnt, and the Lord is a great teacher! He has His own ways, and they
do not change (Habakkuk 3:6, Psalm 102, Malachi 3:6). Some of those lessons occurred in the
almost farcical feeling of the 1948 overthrow of the multi-national assault on the fledging Israel,
really at that time, a sprinkling of people among the Arabs, BY Israel.

It was as if an infant using judo, threw over a brazen bully, equipped with brass knuckles. As to the 'infant', they even took half of Jerusalem. David ? yes. One as a thousand ? Assuredly. It is as it said; it happened as forecast, to the fact and to the feeling. The only fiction was in the enlarged intentions of the assailant.

How 'burdensome' can you get!

In 1967, the heavily endowed Egyptian Air Force was stricken while on ground, the tanks without
their support were likewise stricken en route to Israel, and disaster came to the one seeking
disaster, ruin to the aspirant to deliver doom to Israel. The Israeli sortie into the desert, and to
Elath made military history, a subject of soaring admiration, even amazement. The REST of
Jerusalem was taken by "these miserable Jews" this "catastrophe" for Islam.

In 1973, the surprise attack on a Jewish 'holy day' led to near disaster, but reservists called up,
and allies at work, led to a restoration so total, that we soon found the Egyptian army surrounded
on the far side of the Suez Canal, with Russia diplomatically up in arms, when its other arms in
Egyptian hands, had frankly failed. It was to be sure, a decisive moment in history, when man
sought to overthrow the scriptures, and found the ink red. One sure way to end in the red ink is to
defy the word: defile the heritage of the Lord ? this is pandemic. But the end of it is the red ink, the
defilers being defiled (Proverbs 1 and Psalm 2 alike are eloquent on this process).

In 1991, there was the vast armament of Iraq, for long helped in order to circumvent Iran, by
foreign power ... and that built-up nation was then assailed by a multinational force, so that this
competitor for the 'glorious' position of invader and destroyed of Israel (it DID make it clear that a
war was on, and DID attack Israel), felt the burdensome character of the stone, as did the rest.

Now there is this wonderful charismatic, this religiously admirable and ethically profound work of
killing kids on the streets on Jerusalem, and arming kids in Palestinian occupied territories. It
speaks for itself.

Will the WILL of Israel be broken ? Will the will of George Bush be activated ? Neither is
particularly apparent. Even an Arab Professor in Germany, on the German radio broadcast in
English, this very day in early 2002, was found to be declaring that this 'peace initiative' from
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was not really an initiative of that kind. His view: Arabia was under
pressure, being given various privileges of commerce by the USA, and this 'peace plan'
was a response without heart. Be that as it may, it is certainly not with any undue amount of
concession. It is like saying to some girl, when a thug assails her: Just have intercourse, and
there will be no rape!

Just give half of Jerusalem, and the rest of the lands of course, and mark how the dangers will
subside! Scarcely inspired, at least, not by the Lord!

The same German professor interviewed recently on radio, noted that it was quite essential, and that he as an Arab himself had to say so, that Israel be given assurance of its right to exist.

It is some right, that, is it not ? To exist. It does not inspire with the thought of undue PEACE while
existing, or undue commerce, while persisting, or undue equity while insisting, but just the
permission to retain protoplasmic Jewish flesh without having large amounts of Palestinian flesh
spattered on it in bombs, and the like. It is not sure what MORE would be wanted. It is just the
privilege of existence. Suppose someone is kidnapped: then for the whole bank account of the
father, this person is given right to exist. There may, of course, be further need to 'take care of'
the person; but then, what is it, this life! it may be protested.

So it goes, but it does not come to a halt, this unpacifiable determination to exalt Allah, who is not
there (More Marvels ... Ch. 4), by Islamic arms, and to subdue the Jews of Israel. To be sure, that latter nation have departed from the express and central issue set in their own book (see Biblical Blessings Appendix 1); but God has not departed from it! (cf. Divine Agenda Ch. 8, Galloping Events Ch. 4, Barbs, Arrows and Balms  13,  17 and  20). The arm of  God, as shown in SMR Ch. 9 and The Impregnable Tower Ch. 8, is not in the least limited, restricted, embarrassed or sold in this squalid grab for power on the Islamic side, from the miniscule little sop accorded to - yes, taken by Israel, when the international body whimpered away from the commitments made, duly ratified but not implemented,  following World War I.

The 'burdensome stone' - predicted to be present and conspicuous in the Middle East as the Age comes near to the time of its departure (cf. The Impregnable Tower Ch. 8, Answers to Questions Ch. 5) -  which is the restored Israel (Zech. 12:1ff.), butt of the whim and work of so many, is to remain that way. Moreover, its burden will grow as the international array implied in Zechariah 12, Micah 7:15ff. and Deuteronomy 32,  and express in Ezekiel 38-39 (cf. SMR Appendix A and The Impregnable Tower loc. cit.), makes its ill-omened and fearfully fated insurgency. (Cf. SMR pp. 502ff., and 510ff. in particular.) Grasping, it will fail; arrogant, it will be confronted by the Almighty.

Meanwhile, there is more: as if to put gilt on the picture of guilt of this world, which revolves ever more sadly in its pagan and secular heart, is still shouting Avaunt! Go! to God, while aghast as its own condition, never saying to itself, Avast! Cease! but continuing as if fascinated by its own destruction. Sometimes it seeks to assuage its guilt in new little goddies which it crafts from culture; but it prefers not to have met with meta-religion (A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 15,
*1), objective truth, the word of its God, let the surrogate be what it will.

Now on this very same day, March 7, 2002, that saw reflection in new concerning a regional war in the Middle East, we see on the TV news that there is something to be said by the Chinese Prime Minister, Zhu Rongyi, who seems to be a sort of communist entrepreneur, epitomising the double standards of that commercially active but politically enslaved nation which gobbles up the capital of the West to rebuild its economy for purposes to be seen in due course.

What then is the Chinese message, so that we might not be too occupied with the Middle East ?

It is just this. That paradisiac place of liberty, that fountain of freedom of thought, China under Communism, that attack station for the assault on Christian Churches, the swath from their sword left to lie, that prison placement unit for Christian pastors (it leaves them alone, perhaps, if they submit to the frankly atheistic premisses of the 'State', which it chooses to bind): this palace of librettos has a new dictum. What then has the PM to say ?

Is he going to liberalise the irons ? Will he lift the sanctions ? Will he enable the Tiananmen victims in their desire not to be force-fed by mummy State, even though in late 'teens or twenties, yes or more, to be vindicated ? Will China grow in stature then, to become a nation willing to consider, to think, to meditate, to use logic, to answer questions, to allow people to use their God-given talents, so that if not 100 flowers as Mao so idly prognosticated, then at least 9 or 10 might grow ?

Not a bit of it. There is to be a new era of religious restrictions! Yet, how can you tighten the noose when the victim is already blue ? It is perhaps, possible.

What more ? Ah yes! Like the French before the French Revolution, the new China will not TOLERATE, that beautiful word for politicians, will not suffer dissent. The people are to be robotised, it appears, more and more. Why ? The sale of the soul for the stomach, metaphorically speaking, seems to be the lure. Leave your soul in our hands, deny your Creator, ignore the frank irrationality of such a step, ignore the impossibility of communist rhetoric being anything more, and look, full stomachs, economic progress. We shall have more means to follow our purposeless existence ... ah! but not entirely purposeless it seems, for as far as the GOVERNMENT is concerned, they have a purpose all right, to continue just where they are.

The recent endeavours for a review of Tiananmen, met by the standard Chinese governmental phrase instead of thought - "counter-revolutionary" - are apparently not to dig too deep. What however IS counter-revolutionary, precisely ? The idea, free of its propagandising and irrationalist trappings, appears to be this. Some evils were removed when some people took over and told all the people what they are compelled to think, and to do. Therefore, the ploy seems to be,  it is bad, wrong, detrimental, indeed 'intolerable' if some people would like some new evils, far greater in scope, to be removed.

Instead of welcoming, like rational people, such a removal of what has removed liberty, in the interests of the power of a few abstracted individuals

• whose position is logically indefensible,
• whose power is terrible,
• whose handling of it is dictatorial wherever they feel so inclined
• (and that is the standard for tyrants - you don't have to bow ALL the time, for you need to stand in order to work):
• there is a certain moralistic sounding refusal.

No! That is the word. Negation of liberation, laceration of freedom. What then are they saying, to put it in Australian idiom ? Is it not this: Who do you think you are mate ? Do you want us to take the medicine we gave, to endure removal of evils in our own midst, to hear what is being said, to tolerate people who do not consider our dismal deal to eliminate liberty and set ourselves up with all the pretension of ancient lords: then think again! We are the gods, our position is such that all change is out, unless we make it, all thought is forbidden except we tolerate it, all protest is doomed, except it appears to us not to threaten our position.

In what way, precisely, did Hitler differ ? or Louis XIV, for that matter: "I," said he, "I AM the State!" Actually, he wasn't, but a very intolerant king whose arrogant and devious misuse of some of the people, including Jews, was a self-aggrandisement at the expense of truth, and a prostituting of rectitude, in the interests of glory. It is always in the end a gory glory. France has made to pay, often enough since, for its glory. Russia has paid. China will pay, if not before Armageddon, then at it (cf. Revelation 16:12). It is immediately after this reference in Revelation, to "the kings of the East" coming, amid the "spirits of demons performing signs which go out to all the earth," that we learn of their purpose: "to gather them," namely "all the kings of the earth", "to the battle of that great day of God Almighty."

He is not really excludable. When the core erupts (Rev. 19:19), the end is inglorious. All false and pretentious glory is mere subterfuge and pretence. It amounts to nothing. It tries for long years to place a 1 in place of its zeros, and to some it seems impressive when say, 00000000, has a 1 put in front, making it 100000000; but it is merely a meretricious clowning. There is NO one in atheism, only zeros (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 29, SMR Ch. 10, and on Communism in particular SMR pp. 925ff. and Index). Ignoring the necessities of logic (SMR Chs. 1, 3) does nothing to create man as god, nor does it in the least remove the God who is there, has been and will be, from everlasting to everlasting that anything else might be there.

Sourced however  in nothing, the irrationalists want to make something out of it, and looking at what is made they have nothing with which to account for it, unless it be less than nothing, a desire to depart and be without reason, while with monumental erraticism, giving reason for the departure to unreason; while calling for an 'arising' from nothing, they are but vapid. Ignoring the necessities of a basis for what in matter is to be found -  itself a product with all the laws and furniture of thought, itself equally incapable by even the most potent prodding, to create at all.

They walk by what is not. Ignoble in thought, they become aggressive in ethics, ludicrous in morals, denouncing as immoral what a merely existent system CANNOT judge; and foisting themselves on the people, like lizards on a tree, they ignore what supports them, calling it insupportable.

When the axe is laid to the tree, it is to be hoped that millions of Chinese, like their European counterparts during the wild tyrannies of self-serving Roman tyrants, may have it said that they overcame "by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony" (Rev. 12:11). Thus it is not at all that one likes Chinese less, because of the tyrannical regime which makes children of them, doing the thought work on their behalf as seems to them good, or convenient or empirically functional for their purposes. Rather it is that because one likes the Chinese more, one is the more appalled at their affliction.

It is not China, but rather its heartland in politics which, as in so many tyrannical empires before it, is after the manner of what Biblically is defined as "the beast" (cf. Daniel 7, Revelation 13, 17 and see SMR pp. 845ff., 886ff., Biblical Blessings Ch. 2). Man preys on man as if he had nothing better to do, and playing god, without even the possibiity of absolute truth in its denial of the same, it wallows in self-contradiction, like a car in a bog. It makes the populace either the victim of its harassments, as here, the stuff of its excitements as in Rome of old, the plaything of its theories, as with Hitler and all communism - itself anti-verified as shown above (SMR pp. 925ff.), or the fellow intoxicant of its spiritual inebriation, when a whole civilisation can collapse, like Nineveh of old.

See the comments from God on this in Nahum! or in Isaiah 37-38. There too the ignorance of God was made a fashion of pugnacity, but ended where it belonged. Ignoring truth in all truth, means collision with reality; and that collision in the end can only evoke pity, even for tyrants, and for those who they help to delude, manipulate for their purposes or inter with their theories.

Consider Proverbs 1:11ff.:

"My son, if sinners entice you,
Do not consent.
If they say,

“Come with us,
Let us lie in wait to shed blood;
Let us lurk secretly for the innocent without cause;
Let us swallow them alive like Hell,
And whole, like those who go down to the Pit;
We shall find all kinds of precious possessions,
We shall fill our houses with spoil;
Cast in your lot among us,
Let us all have one purse” -

"Surely, in vain the net is spread
In the sight of any bird;
But they lie in wait for their own blood,
They lurk secretly for their own lives.
So are the ways of everyone who is greedy for gain;
It takes away the life of its owners.

"Wisdom calls aloud outside;
She raises her voice in the open squares.
She cries out in the chief concourses,
At the openings of the gates in the city
She speaks her words:

“How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity?
For scorners delight in their scorning,
And fools hate knowledge.
Turn at my rebuke;
Surely I will pour out my spirit on you;
I will make my words known to you.
 

"Because I have called and you refused,
I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded,
Because you disdained all my counsel,
And would have none of my rebuke,
I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when your terror comes,
When your terror comes like a storm,
And your destruction comes like a whirlwind,
When distress and anguish come upon you.
 

“Then they will call on me, but I will not answer;
They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me.
Because they hated knowledge
And did not choose the fear of the Lord,
They would have none of my counsel
And despised my every rebuke.
 

"Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way,
And be filled to the full with their own fancies.
For the turning away of the simple will slay them,
And the complacency of fools will destroy them;
But whoever listens to me will dwell safely,
And will be secure, without fear of evil.”

And when their odious intrusions and manipulations are over, what then ? One cannot but think of Nineveh that heap as it became, that once proud, arrogant and cruelly self-assertive regime, thrusting its evil image over the peoples it sought to rule, and how the word of God exposes it (Nahum 3:7):

"Nineveh is laid waste!
Who will bemoan her?
Where shall I seek comforters for you ?"

Among the living, who is grateful for her artful tyrannies, and wild presumption!

Earlier the Lord remarks: "Woe to the bloody city!
It is all full of lies and robbery.
Its victim never departs ..." (Nahum 3:1).

More comprehensively,

"All who hear news of you
Will clap their hands overyou,
For upon whom has not your wickedness
passed continually ?" (Nahum 3:19).

Whether Moslem, or Communist (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 30), it is one. The lessons of history are not learned. Fiddling with fantasies ungrounded in logic, they course like logs in a torrent, wherever they are led. Without guidance from God, without reason and without ground for law, their pathway is pure peril, for themselves or any who follow them.

The efforts at tyranny in the name of some unverified power, some irrationalist proposition that does not stand (cf. More Marvels Ch. 4 also, SMR pp. 986ff., 999ff.), merely become one more, another, to add to list of subversion against the human race, by false prophets, such as were predicted by Jesus the Christ, whose word is always verified, whose power is constantly seen, whose word has been there from the first, and whose accuracy is attested to the last, which comes nearer faster and faster.
 
 

Israel suffers; the world suffers in some of its residual estates, while Africa is in anguish with famine and aids, lugubriously counts how many millions are expected, in relatively affluent South Africa alone, to die from Aids in the next decade. Plagues and pestilence come with all diligence, as foretold (Matthew 24:7, Luke 21:11). And there are many like Al Qaeda and Iraq, who threaten to add to them, by devilish diligence, so to fulfil the more the words of Christ, with a tragic irony. Radioactivity is itself a plague, man-made and through carelessness and greed, abounding.

Sadness grows as griefs abound. It is the picture of Christ's mouth in Matthew 24. It is time to repent (Luke 13:1-3), not brandish swords; to seek the Lord, not enjoy the company of nothing in particular, or something in collision with the facts, as with reason and with truth.

Christ declared, "I am the way, the life and  the truth" (John 14:6), and there are no other rational options (SMR Chs. 1-3, 10). His word stands, His ways stood, and reason can only bow to Him (cf. SMR Ch. 6, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium Ch. 16). Whether the heart joins it in submission, as Proverbs 1 above attests, is the most crucial aspect of any human life. To submit to truth is delicious; to be subject to the love of God is delectable; to know His peace is the humane specific, to adore God is to find the way which is never blighted, which may suffer, but is never insufferable. It balms and tunes the human soul, it makes life possible socially, and community an inspiration, because of Him who is in the midst of it.

Does then the heart join the head in the allegiance to Christ, whom the Father sent, not without notice, but with power and grace alike ? (cf. Questions and Answers  1, SMR pp. 582ff., 611ff., That Magnificent Rock Chs.  2 and  3). Its answer is the stuff of destruction or the matrix of wonder. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved (John 3:17). If however it prefers darkness (John 3:19), this IS the condemnation, and the wrath of God abides on such.

In the face of the love which sent Christ, such an end has the double edge, as of a guillotine: not only is their sin uncovered, but theirs is refusal for its only cover, "for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which they must be saved"  (Acts 4:12).