THE PITTER-PATTER OF LITTLE FEET

W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page What is New

THE PITTER-PATTER OF PROPHETIC FEET

Prophecy: A Light in a Dark Place
This World: A Place in a Dark Light

Rev Dr Robert E. Donaldson

Published by
World Wide Web Witness Inc.

August 2001

ISBN 0-9579003-3-3

CONTENTS

Preface

The pitter-patter of little feet is - or can be - rather delightful. The eager intelligence of the (relatively) newly made, alert with fresh enquiry, keen for this or that development, bursting with little life ... So is the wonder of prophecy. It daring tendrils of verbal light awake the enquiring intelligence, stir the mind, make one feel again like a child, finding the unthinkable, experiencing the unknown, alert to the developments that are at once reasonable and discovery, an affront to mere custom and yet ... a customary affront!

Jesus declared that unless one HUMBLED oneself like a little child, there was no great affinity with the kingdom of heaven. One has to be able to be called, to find, to discover without the strenuous assurances of a little mind grown too great to learn, a little heart too self-assured to love freely, and a little life to enlarged to fit into the spiritual space available for being a friend of God!

He went further. Unless a person is CONVERTED and (in the process) becomes as little children, that person CANNOT so much as ENTER the kingdom of heaven. It is a very delightful place. There is really nothing like it. It is a kingdom of real meaning, purity of heart, kindliness of thought, love of aweful authority, because its purpose is love and its nature is personal, with a King whose sacrifice and not whose surly sovereignty is the key to His nature. GOD SO LOVED that He gave. He is like that. He gave His ONLY begotten Son: love is like that when it is found at its source. He gave His only begotten Son, because that being ONE person who was His eternal word, there could be but one incarnation. That done, there was neither place, nor grace nor face for another. The work of identification of His expresssion was complete. There it was and it could be nowhere else.

However Christ said even more than this. Unless a person is converted and becomes as little children, that one can BY NO MEANS enter the kingdom of heaven. There would be a gulf, an estrangement total and impervious, a dissonance more than cacaphonous: it would be unbearable, like darkness trying to swallow up light, when light was all there was in that dimension - total, unending and uncompromised, interminable light.

The pitter-patter of little feet, it is our own. We must eagerly watch these wonders of the eternal Father of mankind (in the sense that He created them on purpose, with the point in view that they could be friends of God, correlates of His infinity, in finite bundles of personality, persons to know Him and to love and to be loved, in an atmosphere where love was not only coridal, keen, but real and basic to the entire kingdom, just as in a fine family, it undergirds all activity, purpose and desire.

There is NOTHING selfish in love. That is WHOLLY beside the point. I Cor. 13 tells us not merely this, that love does not seek its own, and is not puffed up (dealing a death blow to acquisitiveness, whether financial, emotional or mental, in fact even moral, in the self-display sense), but rather that it bears (all things) and hopes (all things).

Loving God one finds that God is lovely: the knowledge of Him is like a Spring morning, when a combination of freshness, dew and greeness of grass, and dawn in its firstling lights of colour with gentleness and awakening with discovery addresses the eye and kindles the heart (and Hosea 6:1-3 gives just an indication, as indeed does Psalm 72:6, with Hosea 14 adding to the picture in botanical glory). In the knowledge of God, there is knowledge of His word, for He has spoken. IN His word there is knowledge of His will and way. In His way, there is wonder. It is sometimes sharply rising, as when massive blessings are outpoured on a person, a nation or an Age (as in that of Christ's birth, when so much prophecy was completed to the very eyes of the observers, yes the date and place of birth amongst it).

It is sometimes sharply falling, as now, but still, even as one descends from the mountains of perfection, in communion with the Lord, and His word, His intelligence naked like a drawn sword, His truth dazzling but clear, like the light on the barrels of the guns of a mighty ship, or on the surface of the ocean, as the sun declines in Summer: there is glory. It reminds one of that in Canada, where countless seeming miles of Maples and other of their florid ilk cover the earth in woodlands that seem never to count the number or care, with shades so varied, yet about as single theme of yellow, orange, brown with tan, lights of scarlet, glints of blushing red, anointings of green, dabs of ochre, that what is not glorious seems another world.

In this current fall, there is a kind of beauty. It is HIS PRESENCE from so long ago, fulfilling to the very joy and tittle all that He has said. It is done in such a sort of Raphael-like dignity and majesty of composition; and yet for all that, such a Turneresque sheer splendour, that the sheer and utter tragedy of the events bathed in its light at first does not fully realise itself in one's thought, as it really is. This is a world in rebellion, in battle, against God, against His truth, against His salvation, against His love, and yes, as Jonah (2:8) puts it, it FORSAKES ITS OWN MERCY.

That, it is tragedy in the womb. Then as it develops in the whole gamut of the inglorious (as shown in SMR Ch. 8, Ch. 9, in Answers to Questions Ch. 5 and so very many other places on this site), it becomes a sort of parody of love, a puffing and straining, a selfish sanctimony of self-glorifying words, in which if you will, examination presentations worth NOTHING are paraded as Exhibitions with General Honours. Then as they slay one another, and their diseases of intemperance, not softened when divine judgment on sustained folly comes, there is tragedy of the tomb; except that it is less individual in appearance (but not in fact!). Millions die, starve, are bathed in inadequacies as they toil wantonly in vast arrays of the cases, in departure from the mercy of God as if there were not better thing to do, than like an Autumn leaf, drop to the ground from the height of the earlier elevation. Alas, when this occurs in Autum, it IS beautiful; but when human life, and not a mere item on a branch of it, itself dies; when an individual altogether lies forsaken in unbelief, fallen from the opportunities that are now gone, there is the third tragedy.

The tragedy of gloom anoints the earth, while some smiling brightly fight back the facts and anoint the vision with more efforts to do more on the basis of man's incredible self-confidence, which the teachers keep telling the students, means self-belief and self-confidence and self-seeking and survival. Love is then put in the shade, like a beacon interred, while the gloom is given labels, and increases in depth, and decreases not only in beauty, long since not related, but in any kind of excellence, unless it be to darken with false counsel the ways of light and truth, liberty and love.

Let us then like children find what the word of the Lord is doing in our midst, and as events continue to unfold, watch the way and glorify God.

The beauty about that, is that it is JUST. HE is glorious; you do not need to speak about missing links between the pages, the thoughts, the mind of God in His word; it is all inter-connected in such a commanding tissue of woven wonder that to FAIL to glorify Him is really in essence to live in the love of lie. That is the way it is to end, and as lies are an affront to reality, to truth, and truth being Jesus Christ the direct expression of God, they are presented in their willing hearts, with a shame interminable, intolerable to truth, but where truth has no place (Daniel 12).

Seeing these things and discovering the way the word of God fulfils itself, bent on love, but by no means dreaming about the realities of rebellion, the seductive spurnings of glamorous and silly substitutes for what alone is and can be eternal, let us not forbear, but RUN after these things, and unlike the rich young ruler, having done so, NOT turn away sorrowing, because of real or imaginary riches of our dreams or desires, possessions or attainments, but come to Him, and having come, walk with Him.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

SOBER REVELLING IN THE REVELATION OF JOHN

CHAPTER TWO

RAIN ? IT COMES LIKE RAIN, THE REIGN OF TRUTH

CHAPTER THREE

THE RAIN REFRESHES WHERE IT DOES NOT FLOOD

New Life c. March 2000

CHAPTER FOUR

THE PROBING BLUE HEELER

CHAPTER FIVE

PADS HAVE OWNERS AND DOGS MUST BARK