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"The Crossbreed" is a novel by Allan Eckert, and shows a considerable sensitivity to animal ways. In this, a crossbreed cat which is so tufted in facial fur, so truncated in tail that it might for a moment suggest a diminutive bob cat or a minor lynx, is seen in the kitten stage. It is far the best in the brood, the only male, diverse from the others through interbreeding and the genes that reached it.

We see it from a wayless infant of days, thrown by a sudden dam burst from its log home, into the torrential waters that move into the Mississippi, while with its tenacity clinging and clawing into the log, upended because of one heavier, long moist end, it makes its way to ... a boat. Here a child of 12 is alerted to its plight, now severe through lack of food and exhaustion, compounded with exposure and long soaking, and rowing fast, he catches it. Tenderly and sensitively he cares for it, allowing for its natural reactions both to him (the kitten had seen something of 'man' before), and to moisture, and seeing its plight.

Ex-parent, who would teach it to hunt ? Devising an ingenious contraption with string, he simulates hunting and teaches it when to pounce.

Its structured response provision by inheritance, and the boy's patience work together until it can .. just fend for itself. Therefore when his boat is suddenly swept away in a stream, much later, with the cat still in it, the cat has some hope. To the South it goes, and even manages to be carried faster by a train, reaching in due course, vicissitudes of poignancy and opportunities which it utilises, even coming - because of its unusual strength by this time, and size,  to be employed in giving illicit entertainment. Betting on their victor proceeds before excited crowds.

In this blindly cruel situation, hucksters arrange for two creatures to confront each other,  rather like Roman captives and lions, each to be locked with the other, for the death fight. With this and other expressions of human kindness, though not at all of humankindness, the wild cat continues by narrow and repeated margins of deliverance, but in it all, there is a remarkable trait. He is always seeking, always with a peculiar air of mysterious and distant desire, for something, looking upward with almost mystic longing. Escaping here and there, he is found continuing his travels ... north, northward and still further north.

Eventually, as one might well imagine, through perils frequent, and adventures alarming, he comes to the very place where he was lost. It is 4 years since he left the boy in the boat calamity. Here, behold, just as he arrives, is it not the very lad, now more grown, from whom he had been torn! The kitten at the first  had found a great liking for this young foster-parent, whose own life at the former time had been made somewhat perilous by a drunken father, so that they had found comfort and company in each other. Now here the youth was, sitting in a station wagon with his less afflicted mother, for they had prospered and the father, with his own business, was far less dangerous and better occupied than before. Had the lad not come at this very time to have one LAST look at the ramshackle old house in the wild, with his mother, in the hope, so often expressed in the intervening years, of seeing a cat which might - just might return.

We see him saying, No mother, I am satisfied now, I do not wish to return here any more, or some such dictum. Meanwhile the cat, with plenty of time, in an almost miraculous seeming coincidence, is about to bound to the car. But will it ? Had not the father shot at it, in the earlier time, and had not a piece of wood deeply embedded itself in its fur and flesh ? Indeed, the boy had tenderly sought it out, comforted it, removed the splinter and increased the bond of affection through affliction. However, one must be careful ... the young creature muses. Could it be that the dangerous 'man' was there, in that car ?
 

While it waited, however, apprehensive and watchful, the boy and his mother drove off.

Then the author has the cat noted for this, that no more did it lift up its head in that almost mystic fashion and look, look, before continuing its journey. So it lost its desire to find restoration to the young life it had left.

That ending is so sad, that for my own part, I have re-invented another ending. In this, the boy - now a youth of 16 - is already moving in the car which is mother is driving (in South Australia, horrifyingly, he might have been driving it himself, in this considerable remove from maturity, at 16! small wonder the insurance rates for some minors are so high).

His keen eye is caught, in a last swift and searching enquiry, his longing heart making him solicitous and aware, and he notes something move. Turning to his mother, he urges her back. She is reluctant, but after a minute or two, stops. Back they go. By this time, the cat is already beginning to lope off, and is some hundreds of yards from the road. However, hearing the car, it is alerted, following its relentless pursuit, in mystic clouds of pseudo-feiline thought, no doubt, or even in unanalysed desire, which had driven it for years. Back it goes, the boy gets out, calls, calls the last time. Nothing. The cat is still hundreds of yards away, for the road had turned.

Meanwhile the cat is bounding back, and with the desperation of hope, the lad casts a last eye and catches the sight of a tuft, almost indistinguishable from the woods. Out he gets, then there is the reunion.

However, there is a difficulty in this development. The lad is now in a more civilised environment, which they have adopted, nearer to a town, though a little way from its centre. In this, the cat does not have the wilds to which it is now so accustomed. It cannot become a domestic pet, merely, being too full of ideas and thrust. The lad, being sensitive, realises this. When they have been together for a month or two, he begins to resume his boating, and together they walk in the wilds. As he grows older, he has less time, but still enough. By now, the cat comes just once or twice a month, but behold, in a little, there are new children, for the youth has become a man, and is now married. How the cat enjoys the young and vice versa ... the story goes on.

Now the real reason for this recasting is this: it is exhibitive of perspective.
 
 

WHY would one not have a happy ending in the first place ? There are many possible reasons, and now we must leave the story, and consider merely approaches in general.

A happy ending is not de rigueur ? Increasingly, in fashion, it is necessary for sentiment to be severely restricted. This is by order of the Age. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, is distressed, we read in one of his works, at the thought of a loving God, as in his Sunday School days. NOT SO! he thunders.

People get hurt, and being hurt, seem moved to harass the facts with the fictions of the day. It has not just started; it is an age-old process. You had cynics amid the Greeks. They started as visionary and ended as fouled, it seems in many cases.

For such, NOTHING must be just so; and all must be muddled and preferably muddied. How people often all but rejoice when the thing does not work out, when something goes wrong. We read of the FURY of University students, in a recent article in New Life, May 16, 2002, p.6, in which former rocket scientist, Edwin Kerr tells of reactions met. Speaking with technical expertise, he has presented a concept of exhibiting in scientific terms, the correctness of Moses' inspired creation statement in Genesis, invoking data from NASA, inter alia.  "Occasionally," he notes, "people are dissatisfied to learn there is scientific evidence that God does exist. They attack with the same old questions.

• "After one presentation, a doctoral student told me that the next day there was absolute fury among the students because they couldn't trip me up."

Having taught Physics on the Faculty at Costa Rica, Kerr found an opportunity for a spiritual task instead, and so has acted in a land where, we are told, "religious liberty has been guaranteed by the constitution since 1978." That is far from the Spain of old.

How late was Spain in finding the end of the massacring days of yore, before reaching this level of liberty! But better late than never! Now therefore there is more opportunity for the Gospel and the reason for the faith alike, to travel unmolested, and for people to find Christ, where fury does not so plainly  invade their spirits, hardness derail their minds and passion distort their will. It was much the same in the bewildered Greek world, as when Paul came to Athens, or Thessalonica, or Derbe, Lystra and Iconium, as recorded in the book of Acts. On one occasion, he was not only stoned, but left for dead.

Fury, then, because of the intractable truth, the answer! Things MUST NOT go right! The Age says so ... There MUST NOT be a solution. Especially, it MUST not be good! So the jaundiced, prejudiced molestations of sin continue long after the political premises tone down the volume of their oppression.

This present Age, however, it has its own developments, like a particularly virulent version of 'flu, the genetic interchanges (rather like aircraft taking fuel from a tanker) making a great variety available. How adroitly it provides it, this so mortal influenza, and it is more of the same always, only varied with its processive limits: as a curse, quite ingenious! (cf. Beyond the Curse, Biblical Blessings Ch. 7 and News 74). It varies, but it more the same; it alters, but its mutancy but clothes a common spiritual commotion.

Thus in the so (vain)glorious 1960s, they were, the up-and-coming well-nurtured and often well-heeled youth in the US in particular, to be BEYOND LAW. There, it was the delirium of NO LAWS. They, rather like the philosophically stupefied Stalin, would control nature, it would serve the growing powers of man, who atop the crest of his ... well, developments of the past, would now make things spin even faster by putting his mind, that so great mind of his, to the task.

Drugs ? of course, why ever not! Sex, in any form, in live ins, shuffles, gender-indifferent, age-ignoring wallowing. Its physical ingredients would be the mere slave of desire, and volition would rule. If the idea came, follow it. If an urge were present, indulge ? nay, express it. It was to be like an artist, always daubing, always being 'inspired' with something or other, and who knows, something, somehow would come of it. And if not ? Then there was that so (temporarily) satisfying feeling: We have done it!  In doing it, we have won, because we are .. (singing background as in OPEN ROAD! that old song so beautifully sung was it not, by Nelson Eddy or some such artist), on the way.

To what were they then on the way ? It was of course not to anything good, except in the sense only, and of course, that it would serve their fancy, express their beings and allow the indulgence of the concept that they were indeed gods. So AIDS came. It did not help much. Sin has hooks, and has its ways of bringing down the falsely elevated, and exposing supposedly immune. That disease now infects so much of so many lands (as in the exceedingly ironic case of South Africa, not to mention Zimbabwe), that it must surely qualify as one of the great plagues forecast as an accompaniment for the end of the Age, by Christ (cf. Matthew 24:7).

But perhaps we must, after all,  mention Zimbabwe,  where 'liberation' at the political level, has become enslavement at the biological, where murder in new dimensions,  has become murder during death of the murderers, liberation while libation to the illicit gods of passion and insensitivity continues in one mêlée of horror, death and dying, and the band plays on, via courtesy of Mugabe, not least. What a dream scenario for an early Greek passion play. But it is no play, only passion!

So now in the dawning of the morning of the 21st Century, what do we find ? No laws has become this: man is to be a law unto himself. He is to be this, and then pose as law-maker to his peers. Hence evil becomes good, folly becomes authorised, and exposure is disdained, or even persecuted. Diseases of the spirit are rife, and intolerance of truth reaches plague proportions.

What then is this later phase ? Now, it is not that there are NO laws, but they MAN ONLY will make them. They will be of himself, through himself and for himself. Hence the fiascos of the United Nations with its immoral moralisings (cf. Mystery of Iniquity), the ONE LAW for terrorists not found in Jerusalem and Israeli devastations, with another for all the rest. When one is a child and some such hoax occurs, there may be a desire to laugh, and to remove oneself fast from the society of the matter, in order to explode in delighted mirth. The thing is not serious, is fun. However, when man ages, the mirth that might have been when youth was present, cannot ignore the pain which in the more serious situation, obtains.

What then will they do to hide the clouds of thought ? a smoke ? of marijuana perhaps ? or a whisky (that drain of delirium into which man may elect to pour himself ? or champagne, the effervescence that can kill in the car afterwards ? Something to remind one that life is serious, even if its only serious business be self-interest, national or individual, family or societal! So that horror of Age continues on its multi-epicentred way, the screeches of the passion mingling with the screams of torture, as man engages his engaging little self, with his various disengagement's from morality, truth and reality.

Man as a law-maker has been fine to the extent he has consulted reality, finally to be found only in the Maker, the Creator, the Redeemer, and many have been the blessed attempts in this direction by Christian statesmen. However, the nations seldom come very far (Acts 17:26, Romans 1), and the sweep of hope becomes in the long term, the testimony of error, as new faces without wisdom but with desire to implement desire, seek other desiderata, and other data, until doom threatens.
 
 

So has man, with his world, in this his last Age,

• unenlightened despite the Enlightenment of Reason
• (to which he has long served in treason cf. That Magnificent Rock Chs.  1,  8, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9, SMR pp. 422Eff., Ch. 3, Ch. 2 Supplement, Stepping out for Christ Chs. 2, 7-10),
• without dew, despite the Renaissance,
• taking all wisdom to the pawn-shop and all truth to the task-masters of the Age,
• as he indulges his latent follies and seeks crowns for his lawlessness,

Indeed, he even often likes to make a fetish of the point of his procedures and regress. I

t is DOOM ? NO! it is not. Doom and gloom-sayers, acridly chant the (neo-Greek) chorus! Then FATE! Yes, fate, fate, they say, and the Buddhist glow comes to many, in Western clothes, and they continue unblinking, blinkered, to their ways of sublime indifference, combined with existential leaps and other fertile scenarios, for the unknown. It is so hard when you do not know, to know where to go. However, in this case, you proceed, you proceed ... In a car, this would be very expensive! The world IS finding it very expensive, whether in this vein, or another, to follow its more and more protuberant and indeed protrusive nose, to areas neither especially scenic nor nicely scented!

But in fact,  it is no fate! Life is disdained, so do you expect it to applaud ? It still mocks its would-be mockers, its suave and sophisticated life-nappers, who would drive off with it, but
where ? where ?

It does it now as it always did, from Eden on. Man stretched forth his hand and ate the forbidden, even by God his Creator (and what a creation is this liberty loving, indulgence sopping, courage exhibiting, imaginative mine, who may go to hell or heaven: on wings that burn as they go, or with hearts that yearn as they rise, aloft in spirit and in understanding. Man was SO wise, so very wise. Would he not simply BECOME GREAT by lust, taking the forbidden as if by faith! Yes but of course, and he still does, making SPACE ("the heaven, even the heavens are the Lord's, but the earth He has given to children of man" - Psalm 115:16) his new domain for ... For what ?

For what ? Why for GOVERNING himself, or for some one nation gaining the pre-eminence and governing the rest with force and might, superiority and passion! Is not the eye of God enough ? No, man must know it all, hold it all, help himself, while various exuding forces seek to cover all with themselves, their idiot ideologies as they so often are, founded in nothing, operating with no laws, on no grounds, and getting nowhere with great zeal and perhaps suicide bombings and the like, for extra drama! Poor man! How he wounds himself with his self-righteous musings, illicit against God and man alike.

So does man move from feast to beast, festering in faithlessness, calling it courage, to the New Age, which is in fact merely the turning of the page. How does it differ but in pretext ? The context remains. Thus in Psalm 2, it is not altered, and the Age-long thrust continues, as foretold by David some 1000 years before the thrust of lust  happened, to unseat the Redeemer, a mood which continued in much throughout the Age of Christ.

That came, and as an Age of Spiritual Opportunity, it will go. This already nearly 2 millenia of the Gospel Age of Christ,  from crucifixion to return, what does it then become ? In the end of it, when man is QUITE done with all his lip-service by many, and degenerative musings by others even among many (but not all) of the churches, with specious propositions and his shallow profundities, it appears: the Age of the Antichrist. We must at once truncate that however.

It is the Day of the Antichrist, for the Age is long, and his day is short, very short. Indeed, even now he knows, the devil back of it, the Satan, the Adversary, that it is hopeless, yet he hopes (Rev. 12). That is the nature of irrationality, by which the philosophies of this world reason, in delicious and all but delirious exemption of their own cases from the unreason by which they proceed! Plays! who need plays now! The earth is becoming increasingly one very large one! It is already Act V, the only uncertainty being in which Scene it now regresses to its end.

Thus has the dam-bursting thrust continued, the upheaval, not merely of earth in its incessant building (as predicted by Christ in Luke 17:25-37), but of the spirit. Leaving all restraint, despising all constraint (except what appeals), man is in his new dam-bursting phase. The difference ? as in Revelation 6's once dire-seeming predictions - for man's progress in his regress: it is a dam of blood. It immures the earth, it soaks the cities, it circles the globe.

It has long put out its liquid paws, like a fluid tiger, in China, in Russia, in Afghanistan, in Cambodia, in Ceylon, in Israel  - (courtesy of Arabs who find not enough room in Syria, or Jordan, purpose made after World War I, or Morocco, or Libya, or Algeria, or Armenia, or Kazakhstan, or Georgia, or Iran or Iraq - how CRAMPING^*1 !). It stretches out its blood lust into poor Chechnya, and how it has suffered;  nor yet is the lust satisfied, for it jhas surged into  Egypt, famous in Nasser's day,  into  withered and wickedly enslaved Sudan, and it has moved remorselessly with the Hutus or Tutsis, in Biafra as in Finland for that matter, when Russia ... visited it in World War II and it gave hundreds of thousands of its small population. Rather this than be enslaved in its Lutheran stronghold, to such barbarities as Stalin ... achieved. Yes, the dam of blood has moved far since it burst, yes to Europe as to  the islands of the Pacific in that same last World War (official). Millions have died, and then millions more.

After victory, then, they continued to die. Death became routine, augmented by liberations innumerable, tyrannies unspeakable and thoughts often far better dead at birth.

So the festering feast of liberation, librettos of thought, towers of impenitent impatience, Babels of imposing structure and minimal content, the feast of man's architecture of man, not merely for man: it continues, it sinks, it rots, and like all rotting things at length, it stinks.

Thus does it continue to mock the mockers.

Holland, as one reads from the Manchester Guardian, May 16, 2002, has now a significant far-right wing, as of course does Austria. France showed some dalliance with Len Pen for a while. There is some sort of strengthening, then, of desire for something other than the bubbly vanities of effervescent odysseys ? Not so. The 'far right' success, still of course only some 23 strong in a parliament of 150 in Holland, but yet useful for alliances, is not there found in customary quarters. The assassinated leader of the new party was not only AGAINST immigration to a very high extent, but for specific Dutch options. Openly homosexual (why endorse as gay, what is physically chained to such potential glooms ?), he was in favour of soft drug policies, same sex marriages and the like. A floating moral atomic bomb ? Very probably, had his entourage succeeded. The leader is dead, assassinated; but  now if his Party which did so well in Holland's just completed election, merges with others, perhaps it will help ruin to come to this once Calvinist giant, more quickly, enabling corruption to be more pervasive yet - if it be possible, one is almost tempted to add!

Yes, it was Protestant Netherlands which was one of the first European countries to welcome Jews openly, in the 1590s, we learn from Israeli Professor, Daniel J. Elazar in his Fall, 1998 number in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought. As part of the Netherlands struggle against Romanist Spain, their doors opened. Now, however,  the liberators are being enchained, not by Spain but by a liberalism so radical, that it is becoming almost conservative of its vices!

The famous Calvinism for that matter, once so strong in Holland, has always been wonderfully extensive, but hideously expensive. Thus while expanding the sovereignty of God, and this quite justly, yet there was in it an unbiblical contracting of the love of God, and this through a profusion of confusion which ill accords with its marvellous accuracy of Calvin's presentation in so much else. Now, however, the liberators are being enchained, not by Spain, nor by the errors of Calvin (it is always dangerous to play the man, when the Lord is Christ),  but by a liberalism so radical, that it is becoming almost conservative... of its vices!

What would you ? The Calvinistic extreme itself was FORBIDDEN. The Bible forbids one to engage in this sort of virtual hero-worship (cf. I Corinthians 3). One cannot and MUST not name one's thought after any man but Christ. When WILL man realise that neither in theology nor in astronomy, nor yet sociology or psychology, is the school the answer. It is the truth which is the answer, not shorn into straggly fleeces of varied deposits, but whole and in, by, for and through Christ Jesus. How they have all fallen^*2  .  It is here and here alone that the glory lies, and as to Him,it is His word and not another which binds.
 

The truth has been crucified (John 14:6, Galatians 6:14), but retains the glory. It - and since He is personal - the Lord has been bodily resurrected in that glorious intimidation of the intimidatory infirmities of a deluded world, which failed to suffocate God: it merely performed for Him the sacrificial rites which He both planned and bore (cf. Joyful Jottings 22, 25). From this, the world  has never recovered its balance, as if its oblate spheroidal geometry were a mockery of its mockery. It is quite true, that he who laughs last, laughs best, WHEN it is the Lord whose laughter is in question (Psalm 2:4ff., cf. Joyful Jottings 21).

Man's mocking laughter however is at vainglorious, virtueless, rabid, a misalignment, mischief, malice and folly; and it is so because this is this world's response, in principle and in multitudes, in rulers and ruled alike, to truth. With Pilate, why cry: WHAT is truth! and they then proclaim, in its supposed absence, what it is.

It is nothing like insanity of the mind; rather is it  an affliction of the spirit, which precludes the operation of the mind, like a captive denied liberty. Solemnly does philosophy pose its 'unanswerable' problems, and they are so for one reason only, that it perversely ignores the truth (cf. SMR Ch. 5).  Thus when the author was a tertiary Lecturer, the one offence above all was this, that the truth HAD to have place (author's view) but COULD not find a convenient niche (administrative resultant), so that without consideration at all of the facts, the lecturing could not continue (except in chains). Chains gall, and are good neither for flesh nor mind. Integrity is not dispensable, and convenience is not truth!

Freedom is a perquisite of life, when the mind and the spirit is concerned! What is the good of being loquaciously dead! That of course is the biblical picture (Psalm 2 once more, they
"imagine a vain thing" cf. Romans 1 in its entire scope and sweep, man preferring the blind worship of the creation, by a sort of mental tic): a death that speaks and a morbidity that thinks with the deadened thud of things.
 
 

DOOM then, or FATE ? Not at all. It is a selected situation, like overdrive. If you want it, engage it; yet if you engage it, you may move fast, but you will lack power. In this case, that of man in his final writhings in this  Age of Expectation, man, one by o ne,  will either write-off or sign-on. Writing off God, he signs on with creation in the alliance of rebellion; or signing on with the Creator in the alliance that is awesome and splendid, man moves. He proceeds accordingly in lie or in truth, in liberty or in chosen chains (cf. I John 2:22): for there is provision for better things. There is also opportunity to opt for worse.

What is it like ? It is like someone who, hanging desperately by some failing roots from near the top of a cliff over which he has just complacently and knowingly walked, has a rope swung to him.

His pride ignores it; his hope desires it; his hand is paralysed for it. If he cries for help, the evil charm is broken, but in the meantime, the defect is internal to the man, not external to the rope. For its part, it is simply THERE. God is there and always has been; and it is for this reason, that nothing being exempt from all performance, and necessities being always in order, He always has been there. From nothing does anything come, least of all, God and His miniaturised, magnificent, linguistically coded creation; far less the spiritual survey squad called man, or the mental incision corps of the same name,  in the same domain!

What then ? It is will, wandering, pride, vacuity and vanity, with their companions; not at all necessity which looks destructively on man. Left in abandon, these things can mount. If the seed prefers to be chaff, the wind readily blows it (Psalm 1:4). God made necessity for necessitous things, called matter; but even there, He retains perfect liberty. What author does not! although a good author may indeed limit his imaginative enterprises lest they become meaningless blather instead of pregnant with reality, visionary and beautiful in conception. Shakespeare in this is almost peerless among later writers.

That bard ? How his moral machinery looms in the mist, enters deftly into the field, while the discoveries of vagrant man, like some Columbus without an America, hidden in gloom, with rebelling crew, find their due place and their just reward, tragedy decrying the misuse of liberty, and patience enduring its results!

Man seems so keen to make himself into something sublime, and he stirs so many depths of shallow waters, seeking to instal himself into an imaginary universe, which is his very own, like adolescent thieves with a new sports car, prior to the appropriate lamp-post: that he misses the point, though not the post. If you try to cross your physical parentage, after the event, it is a ludicrous operation. You are here already, and such a retrospective regeneration is mere degeneration and comedy, which after farce, becomes low tragedy. Man the crossbreed, the naturalistic myth, exists only in the mind. Such a miscreation as this, may appeal to some; but into reality he does not fit. Meanwhile, these delusive misfits, in their conduct, appear, more and more like some kind of spiritual epilepsy as time goes on. For this, man often blames his actual Creator, but this is mere miscreancy. He is cutting himself off, crying to the nature-gods who cannot hear, as nothing is without hearing or other device.

They do not answer, for they cannot. They have nothing to say. They themselves have been thought, spoken and wrought into existence by the word of God. Throughout their beings, are laws and codes accordingly. Man in his imaginary clothes ? like the priests of Baal before Elijah, before their summary and due death (Deuteronomy 18), he leaps. But he returns to the sod. Nature does not hear, nor does it regard at all!

What is required in fact is simply coming to terms with the Creator, His word, His works, of which man is one, His way for man and the superbly unique majesty of His Son, who came according to His word, at the time specified, to do all the divinely exacting and revelatory deeds, and having confirmed all, went as pre-specified, until the world having had its opportunity to be empirical and scientific, regarded it, or else did not. Then comes the end (Matthew 24:12).

When a person comes to know the Lord (not some in mere verbal formality, but a functional fiducial reality which the words truly attest - cf. Luke 6:46, Romans 10:9), in a relationship of faith: then of course, that person takes up the cross and follows Christ. As the Saviour intimated in Luke 14, UNLESS you do this, you CANNOT be His disciple. Playing with God is not a game to engage in, for it is first necessary to do business. He did it (Hebrews 5:7). So must you; and if you have done it, then it continues. When you come in faith to Christ who is - not Christ who is merely imagined, a mental piracy on the high seas of life - then the thirst is quenched at once, and the action of balm so continues. The guarantee of eternal life is immediate (John 4:14), but the quality of it is continuous, and its Father is present in the heart, active in the life, guiding its contributions, helping its teeming provisions, indicating the way, making the pilgrimage a thing of the heart long before it is one of the steps!

Without faith, YOU CANNOT do this; with it, you cannot fail to do so. It is the objective entry to the objective God which brings the objective power and the objective place.

Matters in this basic aspect, are not at all difficult.

The Cross of Christ cancels guilt for His people, who include ALL who come in faith to Him as He is according to His Gospel, who believe His word (Galatians 3:1-13, II Cor. 5:17-21); but when you cross God with your cancellations of His word, then no more is it the follower of the highway of holiness, so well built that it is impossible to stray when you walk on it (Isaiah 35), that we find. Then rather is it the individual who criss-crosses the way, like an inebriated dog. It may be an excellent dog, and the way is so clear; it is just that it is ... drunk.

The crossbred concept is an inebriated delusion. The manners of man, equipped with facilities, relishing technical knowledge, imagining power, seeking to master an orphan that happened, with the acute understanding of an orphan that refuses parenthood, but does not lack it: these have been a veritable sermon. On what do they preach then ? Is it not in this,  on the spiritual vanity of seeking substitutes, after birth, for one's progenitor. There are those who change their names; who hold their progenitors in contempt, or one of them; but they do not change their genes! Why, when they work, it is WITH their inheritance, and they cannot be disinherited of this, but by death. As to their life, they cannot disinherit it at all. It is given for eternity as it is given for time: by pure donation. The baby no more licenses his mother, than does man his God. God acts. He knows what He is doing.
 

When man believes, it is the very work of God (Ephesians 2:1-12, John 8:29).

Without God, what they have works in them, and when as now they are  in billions, against it, they work against their own works. Naturally enough, that does not work. Yet there IS, as in all action, SOMETHING that it works.
 
 

What is this that works amidst the disassembled relic that is called civilisation, and the woebegone self-immolating device, called this world, set on the cruise control of empty philosophy and the pungent practices of spiritual fraud ?^*2

^{It is the cancellation of the potential for redemption, the installation of the means for judgment, and the recommendation for the removal of riches. The riches ? The "unsearchable riches of Christ"}
(Ephesians 3:8). These include the beauty of His holiness, divinely installed from heaven into man in the format of Christ, the truth of His being, of, from, with and equal to God, and hence personal in prerogative and princely in performance (Isaiah 9:6-7). They comprise no less the wisdom of His way, eternal in stability, infinite in understanding (Micah 5:1-3, Psalm 147:5, Psalm 102:24-28, Hebrews 1, Colossians 1:15ff., Isaiah 33:6). Their offspring is peace, their generation is power, their inspiration is justice and mercy, in truth and that love which being divine, is apt for man, and makes man manly in his aptitudes.

All this is a gift, and unless so received, is a mirage. You can no more take it by your own free will, chained to sin, than by your own works, alloyed with sin. You might as well try to take the moon by a net of gossamer. Rather, you receive it by faith, as donation, without merit of any contribution, by the operation of God who, however, would have all men come to the knowledge of the truth, and takes what is His own.

Not so, now however, for the powers and prince of THIS world, which runs like a glider without power, except to follow the drafts, into the hills of reality, unyielding all the more, since the impact is merely wilful, not fateful.
 
 

*1
Of some interest here, is a site at

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27338
 

*2
See: Spiritual Refreshings ...Ch.  9, incl. End-note 1;
Benevolent Brightness...  80;
Scoop of the Universe 44, SMR4;
Repent or PerishCh.   7, Extension 1.

See also SMR Index under Freud and Jung;
NEWS 51,  52, 152, 166, Lord of Life Ch.   5, Red Alert...Ch.  1.

See further A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3,
Wake Up World ... .Ch 6, Spiritual Refreshings ... Chs. 13 and 16,
That Magnificent RockCh. 7.