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CHAPTER 6
MICAH AND MAJESTY
that is not his own
DECLINE and its CAUSES
It is one of the most felicitous depictions, said LL, the Luminous Lyre-Bird.
I was naturally interested to learn what had achieved this encomium.
What is ? I asked, quite simply, for when LL is ruminative, it is best to be unintrusive.
Why Chapters 4-7 of Micah! Micah 7 of course is a resurgence of the believing Jewish remnant, and is one of the most appealing and poignant to be found. Rejoice not over me, mine enemy, for when I fall, I shall arise. You see there a certain realism which culture on earth is reluctant to admit through its gates, let alone to its heart.
Spengler, for example, he had a naturalistic idea that civilisations had stages, reached maturity and then declined. The Decline of the West is the translation of his title, 1918-1922, two volume affair. You can't help noticing the date, and thinking of All Quiet on the Western Front, and works like that, when you contemplate his ideas.
Decline ? I should think there was. Contrast the passionate fervour with those young men in the scouting movement of Baden Powell (a 'lord' who often did spying work for the British), consider what happened to much of an entire young generation in trenches for four years, gassed, betrayed by conflict of world powers, their lives in many cases made calamitous in confrontation, their bare humanity all but breached. For them, there was a sickening martial, anti-collaboration when many, as you see in various little episodes on the front lines, would have liked rather to be working with their German cousins.
Yet pride and uproar had come into play, glory and greatness were apparent. After the war, what a desolation, with even little influenza, some say, taking more in new deaths in 1919 than the war had consumed in passionate pilgrimages to the portals that leave this earth. What humiliation, what unconditional surrender, what an end to folly, a puncture to pride, and you could all but hear the hissing of deflation, which was but a prelude financially to inflation, and more national inflation with Hitler, whose grotesque work with the Jews was another vast dehumanising decline in ... Western civilisation ?
It was not there alone, for consider the Japanese and the Burma rail-road, not to mention those prolonged atrocities in China, now the subject of so much flap, as the Chinese, on the path to power and glory now themselves, by combining opposite systems and snaring vast amounts of foreign capital, protest the new Japanese text books.
Which texts ? I asked, with his continuance in mind.
The school texts to attempt to show how visionary the Japanese cause was, I suppose, he said, abstractedly, as if he had just heard one of his own thoughts vocalised by his neighbour.
Now one must admit that it was rather thrilling to be speaking personally to LL, because before I had merely been a more or less accepted observer, and LL is NOT AT ALL averse to observers. Indeed there is one account of the Dandenong Ranges in Melbourne hinterland, where a bird used to come and perform on a structure by a window, to the delight of the one who opened it.
Thus being engaged in such a conversation, one attempted was a delicate probe.
You know how the Japanese violated and brutalised China, very much as the Chinese now are violating and brutalising China, the bird continued.
You mean a sort of self-immolation, Tiananmen, Falun Gong, imprisonment of Christians, false charges against them, terror tactics reminiscent of the Nazi secret police, disappearances of persons to be un-personed and so on ?
Just so, responded LL with that distant look in his alert eye. That is not to say that he had only one eye, or that the other was not alert, but it is a thing like a painting: you catch the gleam and see the eye, and the description is not just a stylistic affectation or device.
Actually, he said, Spengler is a bit like Plato, with the idea of a succession of phases in a society, leading to ruin. There is some justification for the concept, though not as a naturalistic rule, or necessary principle. People do sometimes gain some kind of vision, often partially or totally wrong, and act on it with vigour and address, build and find some semblance of progress : Rome did in its day, Assyria, Babylon, Britain, France, Holland and so on. Some more, some less in result. Take Britain.
Where do you want me to take it ? I replied facetiously, wishing for a little more personal interchange.
You will not take it very far the way it is going, he replied sombrely. It had James Cook, one of the most determined, resolute, enduring and enterprising, willing for cramped conditions and using his wits and intellect in physical duress to achieve things noble and fine; but he died in a caper in Hawaii, because the natives apparently realised there was nothing divine about the English, and allowed their instincts and desires to cause offence, which caused conflict, which led to the murder of Cook by natives. Before that, there had been massive co-operation and much food had been given them.
It just shows that the realities must always be borne in mind, and people must be awakened to reality, not allowing any misconceptions, I mused.
It shows more than that, I think replied LL; and if his mouth had been so disposed that a smile could occur physically, I am sure that he would have smiled. Yet, as it was, his eyes had to perform the task, and they did it surpassingly well. He was a brilliant bird, not so witty and chatty as Maggie, but deep, definitely deep.
You see, Britain made a mint out of the forsaken horrors of the slave trade, a world decadence and degeneracy in which millions of human beings found horror freely not least from that great Empire, as a sheer gift. It was the same in the Industrial Revolution, in manufacturing, especially for the young, in vast numbers of cases. On the other hand, there was a definite and powerful leaven of Christianity working, to the point that the nation became formally a Christian nation, although not really. Nevertheless, this gave scope for vast impacts of the Gospel, which eventually through such Christians as Wilberforce, a dedicated foe of that soulless slave trading, and Lord Shaftesbury, a friend of the oppressed in England itself, and through such ministries as those of John Wesley and Whitfield, leavened the spirit of the place, avoiding the French Revolution sort of outburst, and bringing more peace.
It rose as these principles began to bite, and fell as they began to disappear. That happened partly after WW I and more after WW II, so that now the idea of the sort of national thrust in prayer such as happened at certain phases of the latter war, seem almost inconceivable. Social economics and change became a watch-word, comfort now became the cry, and the vision began to be lost, the national church becoming so white-anted with liberalism and later unscriptural versions of ecumenism, that what it believed became most uncertain.
It is doubtful in the end, if much of it even believed in itself, which any case from the Christian perspective, would have been fatal. Thus it is no accident, that decline in the Church and nation. Not least, there was disillusion that the greatest fight for freedom in history, as King George had nominated it, had led to something less. It led to the Cold War, and then a spirit of compromise.
So it fell! Was Spengler then right ? Of course not. He was inventing a general principle when it is a matter of individual dynamics and forces of some complexity, and the impact and outcome is unpredictable. After all, if the Lord sends revival as He did in great measure in the USA in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and at numbers of times in England, including those mentioned, then there is no cycle. You cannot read the mind of the Lord with your drivel of social dynamics.
Again, hundreds of years may pass with relative stability, but power and greed, usefulness instead of vision, enjoyment instead of wisdom, these things become distorting forces, and without God, the lost will in the end look like it. How long it takes, it is no cyclical affair, but a question of the effectiveness of Gospel preaching, the nature of leadership, the purity of motives at very levels nationally, such as in WW I, and how mixed those motives are. It concerns not only the weapons, but far more, the thrust and zest for knowledge in order to be consistent with truth and goodness that is to be found: not survival and strength.
Strength, as with some physical fitness fanatics, can be merely delusive. It is good to maintain your own body and your national body with some sort of capacity, to be sure, but to be drooling about your greatness is a merely selfish pre-occupation, lacking vision. It is the Lord who is wonderful, and to delight in the life He has given, and thus to have genuine goodwill to seek good and not evil for the rest of the human race, this is the way of purity, truth and beauty.
Here is what exalts a nation. But when the glorious things God does for it when it seeks Him, become a ground of pride, the British character in this case, and all that sort of unhumble bumble, then the realities are dismissed and it is only a matter of time before they assert their actual power and the place dives into the dismal, once more. Iniquity is after all, a shame to any people.
The pathology is neither West nor East: it is universal. It is not maturation, but degradation.
Pride comes before a fall, and self-exaltation before humiliation; but the most horrible self-exaltation is exultation without the God who gave you the wit to appreciate things.
It is not nearly enough to rise; it is with whom you arise that matters,
It is not enough to grow; it is for and in whom you grow, for we are all dependent creatures, it is this that is crucial.
At that point, there was a very considerable growth in our near vicinity, and as you may have guessed, it was Peacock, whose tail had slowly risen and spread itself like a glorious mini-galaxy of colour, and as he did so, he looked us to keenly in the eye, as if to check that we were properly appreciative, so that it had something of the feeling of a game. The thought passed through my mind, that just as that tail arose, so the tale of its fall might arise; that here was a glory which could intoxicate as well as delight, both Peacock and onlookers; for if you failed to seek the Maker of the incredibly complex basis for luminous phenomena, reflection, refraction, interaction, method of siting the feathers, the physiological apparatus back of it, the anatomical provisions for its massive erection into display mode, what then ?
Why, then you would just be participating in a vainglory. That falls.
Looking at Peacock, I was moved to ask him directly. Peak, I said, almost at once regretting any implication in the nick-name, do you feel any glory about your tail ?
I have been listening to LL, said Peak, and yes, I have found some sort of pompous pride in what after all is only a gift from God; but I do so no longer. It is true that I had an eye to see if you were noticing this creation of wonder, this advent of artistry and complexity above all that any could hope to see or be prepared to admire functionally, because you see its artistry is a ground for aesthetics, and this is merely the appreciation of the texture and truth of beauty. If you did not, then the effort might not have been worthwhile. When instead you thank God for what He has done, and rejoice in such a Creator, there is a falling of the curtain on the pantomime of pride.
It was so good to hear commonsense and spiritual perception at work in Peak that I almost wept.
Great! I said.
If only the nations had such wisdom, said LL, they would last much longer; and if only they would not exalt themselves, dynamically in insane self-glorification, or nervously in order to survive or some such stuff and nonsense, as if just to be were any sound reason for being: to be what!
If only, then what ? I asked, seeking the completion of the thought.
Why then, replied LL, you would see less WW I and WW II phenomena, jitteriness about failure, and rebounding enthusiasms about oppressing others to keep them in order, or to display your own greatness.
Was it not this which happened to Israel, then, I asked, of which you were speaking in terms of Micah 4-7, but especially just then, Micah 7, with its poignancy and desolation mixed ?
IDOLATRIES AND THEIR RESULTS
Partly, he said, partly. But then, there was idolatry, certainly an aspect of power-seeking and puniness, the polluted plan to make things up, from the materials which God had made, in order to be subject to them, or to be dependent on other things, and at that, imaginary ones: and this, when the living God was there! How COULD they be so foolish!
How could men of the Gentile world today, be as foolish! exclaimed Peacock! After all, look at the Hitler bombast about race, and the Communist bombast about classes and classlessness, as if humanity were some kind of stratification in rocks, to be understood in terms of the marks, not the substance. It is all the pride of humanism, more or less infesting the realism of creation-status, so that people think up absurd theorems which do not even work, and base themselves on motion in matter, as if that were the mind in mentality or the spirit in will; and, indeed, as if it could construct dynamics distant from its nature and institute scenarios contrary to its imposed limits. It is they who imagine that such things who construct, and in this mythical dream, they construct their own downfall.
You might as well ask bricks to build without an architect.
But Micah 7, yes, there is the repentance in the believing remnant, seeing the reasons for the degradation of their nation, whose heights of ingratitude and self-glorification, alas not entirely unlike a former trend in Great Britain, brought low their greatness. Greatness ? it is never so small as when it is 'realised', when it is lapped up, taken into the heart, as if it were not a byproduct of divine work, but some kind of entertainment centre, for self-gratification or adulation, before the mirror parade.
We will arise ?
"When I fall, I will arise, when I sit in darkness, the LORD will be a light to me" (Micah 7:8).
It is not because of some law that the believing Jewish remnant would arise, but because of repentance and faith (Micah 7:9:
"I will bear the indignation of the LORD, because I have sinned against Him,
until He pleads My cause."
You see that in Zechariah 12:10, Deuteronomy 32, where the people at the end of their own strength, thus leaving the sort of pathology of spirit of which Paul speaks in Romans 10, receive the DIVINE DELIVERANCE. Based on the sacrificial offering up of the Messiah, it is all the mercy of God in profundity and His lovingkindness without limit.
It is for the individual in Christ; it is for the nation, or at least the remnant (Micah 7:18), in the fulfilment of the divine promises as in Galloping Events Ch. 4, for example, those from Genesis on.
How beautiful is the end of Micah 7, where the delight which God has in mercy is seen as the ground of their restoration, as also the faithfulness He has in fulfilling His promises, and these things, in the milieu of return to faith in Him, on the part of many in the new nation of restored Israel. This is also at last, the place of power; for God delivers.
But it was really of MIcah 4-6, I was thinking. You see ...
Uncharacteristically, it is true, LL was becoming perhaps just a little ponderous, so Maggy darted in.
You see there, in Micah 4, he continued for LL, the central Jerusalem establishment of the rule of the Regal, the Direction of Deity, the power of the King. The law of God, the righteousness which is His, will rule, and His word will be delivered with dynamic. It is HE Himself who shall judge among the nations (Micah 4:1-3). It is just as in Ezekiel 37, where the Messiah, the descendant in the flesh, of King David, is to rule, and as in Isaiah 11, where the Lord in flesh, the shoot from the stock of David, is to have the very power of God in disposing things on earth, precisely as in Psalm 2.
It is not surprising: since they killed the Lord, God in flesh available to be sure as a sacrifice, but not for that reason any the less MURDERED, and did it in Jerusalem, then in Jerusalem it is that He bears rule. It is He who founded the place for the earlier symbolism of the temple, the prelude to Christ who was the ultimate sacrifice; and we here learn that it is there that He cares to show His majesty. People will come to it, just as He was sent from it!
The former dominion will then come to Jerusalem (Micah 4:8). But mark HOW it comes! The weak the Lord gathers, and the lost He finds. Then Micah moves back to the contemporary scene and notes the mini-discipline in Babylon, from which they would return, before moving on to the ultimate crux of things, which he had already expressed in the earlier verses of Ch. 4. Thus, now in Micah 5:1-3, we see some of the most amazing verses in the Bible.
You are right, resumed LL, who was nothing if not good-natured, and it is so first because they are so brief and cover so much, and secondly because the One of whom they speak is loving, and forgives so much, and thirdly because He is so great, being none less than the eternal God, coming in His word to deliver His people, as in Isaiah 28:16 and 48:16, where deity sends His very Messiah from His own eternal midst to earth.
Looking up into the air in a luminous sort of way, LL now broke forth into a new song, and his words followed when he was ready, and had satisfied his choral instincts and internal joy at the prospect of what he was about to say. It is inset to keep it distinct.
What then is the status of this Jerusalem, this restored city ? It is certainly not a place of praise for man, for in Micah 5:1 we read that they will strike the judge of Israel upon the cheek, and that with a rod. Since the Judge, the lawgiver already introduced in Ch. 4 is the Lord, and that as man, then it is clear that this is the same line of forecast as comes in Isaiah 49-55. God will lay siege to them, says Micah 5:1; or in other words, He will begin to act as an enemy, precisely as Leviticus 26 specified in STAGES of adversity, and Deuteronomy showed from 30-33, until they are ready to return and seek Him where He MAY be found.
This last is the lustrous message in Isaiah 55.
The FIRST 'place' where He may be found is in the unrighteous repenting, forsaking his evil ways and trusting in Him. "On this man will I look," the LORD says in Isaiah 66:2, "on him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word."
It is, Micah 5 continues, in Bethlehem that His incarnate self is going to be found, yes, that there will be found that Being who has from all eternity been active, as in 5:3. His ways are from everlasting, we read, and His ways do not change, as in Malachi 3:6, and and Habakkuk 3:6. Man's ways DO change, but God's do NOT! Thus when man is to revive, he has to return. He does not have to return to pride, power or arrogance, but to the LORD!
There is no other way to go. Since, therefore, they chose, as the prediction of Micah shows, to assault their lawgiver, instead of seeking His pardon (as in Mark 2, where it WAS received by one ex-paralytic), then we read this from Micah 5:3-5.
"Therefore He shall give them up,
Until ..."
There is a chronology here. Let us pursue it.
"He will give them up,
Until the time that she who is in labor has given birth;
Then the remnant of His brethren
Shall return to the children of Israel.
And He shall stand and feed His flock
In the strength of the Lord,
In the majesty of the name of the Lord His God;
And they shall abide,
For now He shall be great
To the ends of the earth;
And this One shall be peace..."
You see the same in Isaiah 30:18ff., where there is to be much desolation in an offending and haughty people, who make a business out of rebelling against the Lord who brought them from the slave-pen of Egypt (Isaiah 30:1-5,8-11).
"Therefore the LORD will wait, that He may be gracious to you,
And therefore He will be exalted, that He may have mercy on you:
For the LORD is a God of justice,
Blessed are all those who wait for Him."
REPENTANCE AND REALISM
And what will He do when the time is ready, and the situation ripe ? It is this. You find it in Isaiah 32:13ff.
"People shall mourn upon their breasts
For the pleasant fields, for the fruitful vine.
"On the land of my people will come up thorns and briers,
Yes, on all the happy homes in the joyous city;
Because the palaces will be forsaken,
The bustling city will be deserted.
The forts and towers will become lairs forever,
A joy of wild donkeys, a pasture of flocks—
Until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high,
And the wilderness becomes a fruitful field,
And the fruitful field is counted as a forest.
"Then justice will dwell in the wilderness,
And righteousness remain in the fruitful field.
The work of righteousness will be peace,
And the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever.
My people will dwell in a peaceful habitation,
In secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places ..."
Notice how there is to be a WORK of righteousness (as in Isaiah 53:6-10), and it is a strange and wonderful work, as we read in Isaiah 28-29, ending the self-exaltation of this or that man or method. It is only then that there will be peace; and the Middle East has much to say on this forecast, this principle and this reality! As to that region, war is all but its very name!
Biblically the restoration of Israel is a multi-stage thing, as given in detail in Ezekiel 37's parable, where first the people are brought back to their land, and only then, at a subsequent time, are they given that vital spiritual reality which comes from God, the Spirit to enliven them. With what does He enliven them ? It is with what is life indeed, and not merely existence, such as the dead seek to maintain in terms of 'survival' - that magnificent irony! (It Bubbles ... Ch. 10, Galloping Events Ch. 3).
Even now, with the first stage complete, Israel awaits this outpouring. Desolation is a frequent reminder that all is not finished; and while the Messiah finished His work as in Isaiah 53, WHEN it was predicted to be done as in Daniel 9 (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4), Israel has yet as a nation in great measure to find it! What is the good of a lost/unvalued cheque, if you do not cash it! What a glorious thing of mercy it will be when they do (as in Romans 11, Deuteronomy 32:31-43, Micah 7). It will be, as Paul declares, "life from the dead"! (Romans 11:15).
So it suffers yet, but the first things are done (SMR Ch. 9), the restoration, the amazing and overwhelmingly astonishing victories over multi-national armies, and the desert now beginning to blossom as the rose (Isaiah 35): the Messiah has come and wrought His miracles (Isaiah 29,35), His redemption, and yet "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved," is still the tale! (Jeremiah 8:20).
"UNTIL... "! That is the time specified by Paul in Romans 11:25ff., when at last the national blindness lifts, like a morning fog (yes, it has been a long morning ...) and they find the Redeemer in massive numbers, and the vast, predicted plan of God is seen in that advanced stage. "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!" cries Paul at this interlocking historical drama, Jew and Gentile (Romans 11:33). At last its end comes.
WHEN this happens, then the rule of the King is near: "He shall stand and feed His flock in the strength of the LORD" (Micah 5:4), even He of eternity to whom we were introduced in Micah 5:1-3. It is He whom they struck, and who waited for their due time, when He would restore them, and in doing so, be restored TO them!
Traced next in Micah 5 is the divine protection to be apportioned to Israel so restored, which had so disgraced itself in striking the lawgiver with the rod (as also parallel to Isaiah 50); and no more will they worship the work of their own hands, that is, their own power, and this applies as much to organic evolutionary myths as to physical objects, to national pride or racial pride or intellectual pride, as to any other diversification from the worship of the divine, by worship simply of other things that He has made, or imaginations that He has not, but rather sin has implanted in the deluded minds of man. (Cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, Chs. 1 and 7 and The gods of naturalism have no go!, with Ch. 5 above).
In Micah 6, as a prelude to the great restoration, repentance dynamics of Micah 7, God apostrophises them.
"O My people, what have I done to you ?
And how have I wearied you ?
Testify against Me ?
For I brought you out of the land of Egypt,
I redeemed you from the house of nod age,
And I sent before eye Moses, Aaron and Miriam ...
"With what shall I come before he LORD,
And bow myself before ether High God ?
Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings ...
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ?
He has shown you, O man, what is good,
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy
And to walk humbly with your God."
Following this, there comes the current indictment of the nation because of slackness, laxity, gross and rampant injustice, the love of the lie, just as we have it now (cf. II Thessalonians 2:10). It is from this background that the beautiful lambency of Ch. 7 arises. It is from this desolation that the rehabilitation comes, from this indictment that the reunion arises, and from this darkness that they come to the light at last, the light of the Lord.
Nations, licking their lips at the opportunities given to them, in the weakness of Israel derivative from departure from the Lord, which even victories do not remove in the end, now are thwarted. Aborted are their assaults as in Isaiah 59, and Ezekiel 38-39, for the Lord acts as in Joel 3, Habakkuk 3.
"The nations shall see and be ashamed of all their might.
They shall put their hand over their mouth;
Their ears shall be deaf.
They shall lick the dust like a serpent,
They shall crawl form their holes like snakes of the earth.
They shall be afraid of the LORD our God,
And fear because of You."
The nation once more delivered, Israel, categorically identified throughout, that of Moses and Aaron and earlier Egyptian slavery, it comes now in Micah 7, to its maturity. It is growth. It is not growth in some naturalistic conception, or necessary circle. It is not growth on a sound base, for their very basis had been denied. It is however growth in this, that life is an advance on death, pardon on condemnation and restoration on decimation.
Thus we return from our travels in Micah 5-7, to Micah 4, which exhibits the new status quo, the time of centrality not of the Jew, who as a national entity is disgraced (cf. Isaiah 65:13-15), but of the place which the LORD saw from His personal observation car, His body: the Cross!
Israel at this eventual stage now becomes a new people, and many are those of them who at this time worship the Lord, and find their own Messiah. God chose them for a purpose which they disdained, God rejected them for a long vacation, since they did not desire Him; God restored them with eminent pathos, with the love He had always cherished (as in Jeremiah 31:20-34).
Now that, said Maggie, is something I just love. Listen to it, everybody, and he carolled as if he were 10 Christmas choirs, long and exuberantly, till his sharp eye was misted with emotion.
He then gave what is here reproduced, with that extraordinary memory which was his.
EVERLASTING MERCY
"Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spoke against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore My bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, says the LORD.
"Set thee up signposts, make high heaps: set your heart toward the highway, even the way on which you went: turn again, O virgin of Israel, turn again to these your cities.
"How long wilt thou gad about, O you backsliding daughter? for the LORD has created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man.
"Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; As yet they shall use this speech in the land of Judah and in its cities, when I shall bring again their captivity:
The LORD bless thee, O habitation of justice, and mountain of holiness.
"And there will dwell in Judah itself, and in all its cities together, farmers, and those going out with flocks. For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul.
"At this I awakened, and looked around; and my sleep was sweet to me.
"Behold, the days come, says the LORD, that I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man, and with the seed of beast. And it shall come to pass, that just as I have watched over them, to pluck up, and to break down, and to throw down, and to destroy, and to afflict; so will I watch over them, to build, and to plant, says the LORD.
"In those days they will no more say,
The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.
"But every one will die for his own iniquity: every man who eats the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge.
"Behold, the days come, says the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah:
"Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; my covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them, says the LORD:
"But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel:
"After those days, says the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD:
for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, says the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."
Truly magnificent is the mercy of our God, resumed LL. I must say that I personally delighted in this happy interplay between the birds, and wished one could see far more of it among humans!
There is the love, the tenderness, the triumph of love at last, not without truth, but IN TRUTH, and there is the millenium as in Revelation 20. It is seen in detail in Isaiah 59 as well as Micah 4 and Isaiah 2, 11, 32 and its purpose must never be forgotten. GOD WILL BE VINDICATED, HIS TRUTH EXHIBITED, HIS POWER EXPOSED ONCE LIBERTY HAS HAD ITS CHATTERING SAY, and folly has exposed in detail over the millenia, its complete vanity, vainglory and emptiness.
Israel is a vast blackboard on which the Lord over time has written. It has nothing to do with glorifying it, that He has acted; but rather it is has been from the very first, the objective that they should be a hub, centre and station for displaying to all mankind the praises of the true and living, the powerful and wise, the tender and merciful, the just and gracious God. They failed, but He did not. The Gentile nations have failed also as predicted; but God has fulfilled His promises:
1) of the Gospel as seen in Genesis 3 and Genesis 12,
2) of the stationing, removal and restoration of the Jew, a parable in history, really,
so that His righteousness and mercy is shown in action,
to give, to deliver, to exclude, to restore,
to bring to the New Covenant where those who believe have eternal life.
I looked at LL. He was much moved, and his song was a sad one which after passing through notes of lyrical splendour reminding me of Jeremiah 31 above, took on a solemnity just as in Micah 7, which I now knew he loved, and then a rich exuberance, not witless or merely meretricious, but exuding a joy which like perfume, enticed and fulfilled simultaneously.
A delightful bird, the Lyre, and his harp like David's could certainly speak.
NOTE:
For further reading on that growth of beauty and effulgence of majesty, the millenium, one might consult:
Regal Rays of Revelation Ch. 8;
Repent or Perish Ch. 6, pp. 128ff.,
Little Things Ch. 1;
The Biblical Workman Ch. 1 , esp. Excursion at End-note 3;Idem, Appendix on Faith, pp. 165-172;
SMR pp. 506ff.; TMR 4, AQ 7, End-note 1, Allegory 7;
LIGHT 3; LIT 1; GALEV 8 esp. *2, SS 10;
TOWER 8; JOY 7; BRIGHTLIGHT 5;
SMR pp. 506ff.,
TBW 1, p. 20ff.;SMR Appendix A; SCOTU 45, JJ 17,18;
see also amillenial
