The Advertiser, October 30, 1999, put out a two page presentation covering in note form what it called "The Deadly Cost of Forgotten Wars". In this, it itemised wars which, despite the end of the Cold  War (to all appearance!), nevertheless contuse and confuse the world of mankind. It mentioned Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Burundi, China, Colombia, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Egypt, Guinea-Bissau, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Myanmaar (Burma), Pakistan, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Uganda.

In this coverage, it noted a total of some 7 million killed (without counting some cases where estimates are not available).  Refugees from these wars are observed to be  more than 25 million. Examples of the not very publicised character of some of these wars include such features as these:

• 1) Sierra Leone is reported to have had 2 million refugees resulting from a civil war commenced in 1991 with a rebel incursion from Liberia. About half of the population fled.
• 2) Since the overthrow of Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991, clan warlords have fought with resulting disorder, which added to drought, has led to a listed 2 million refugees.
• 3) Sudan's civil war, beginning in 1983, with the effort of Islamic elements to impose their ways on the South, has led, with drought, to a massive death list: around a million civilians dead from the conflict and the deprivation, 2 million persons killed, 4 million refugees.
  
  

Many and subtle are the causes of the wars; muted are millions; in anguish many more millions, and the world marches on. As the World War II News in the theatres would say, TIME MARCHES ON. It is not however to the rosy evolutionary future of science and wisdom which so many imagined, as man conquered all around. It was to fascist and communist dreams of racial or class dominance, which resulted in a scene of madness fully the equal of the irrational fabrications on which the dreams rested. It was like building on gossamer, and using jack-hammers on dreams. It did not work, and was worse than ludicrous, mere imagination making race or matter god, when BOTH were obviously not their own masters, or origins.(A Spiritual Potpourri Chs.1-9, That Magnificent Rock 1, SMR Index, Communism).

Nor is this all. The Moslem heresy, which downgrades Christ but would like to keep him in a sort of hinterland of imagination invented by Muhammed without the advantage of either history or being a witness of these things, has added its ancient sting to the illusions of mankind (SMR pp. 987-990), and with this, and New Age mythologies about the human race (SMR pp. 866ff.), a sort of human racism which is just as unbased and biased as the other forms of racism, more selective but no worse, there has been a cumulatively fulsome and fermenting stew, with poison in the pot. The globe trembles as the spiritually induced ramblings and ravings (Ephesians 4:17ff., Hosea 9:7) of the irrational (Romans 1:18ff.) seek to outshout the voice of  the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, who left, unlike all other religions, the indisputable grounds for faith.
 

This systematic, virtually demonic sense of DRIVEN and DRIVING wars, like a compulsive obsession, has already been seen to fulfil utterly the amazing forecast in Revelation 6:4 and 6:8, as already seen in Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 17 (News 84). This is by no means all. The wars and rumours of wars, allied to men's hearts failing them for fear, and plagues and famines are precisely what Christ predicted in the following respects:

1) as a pattern to occur at the one time.

2) as a growing pattern to develop.

3) as a pattern to occur near the due date for His return as Lord of Lord and King of Kings (Luke 21:28,33).

4) as a pattern to include the restoration of Jerusalem to the Jews, as an event  of contemporary history, FOR THAT TIME (Luke 21:24, Romans 11:25ff. - this occurred in 1948, 1967 with political confirmation in 1981 and 1999 in the latest election in Israel).

5) in the historical landscape of growth in immorality, treachery, religious profusion and confusion, including many false Christs and false prophets, together

6) with an ecclesiastical explosion of folly and betrayal of trust, implied in false prophets (as also in II Peter 2:1ff. - cf. Stepping Out for Christ1, 4 - News 88, and 5 - News 85, with SMR 840ff., 857ff., 699ff.).

These and many allied prophecies of Christ have been reviewed in detail in SMR Ch.8.

While these things are happening, as they do in scientific experiments for students in chemistry or physics, for example, when the journal indications duly come to pass as the rigours of the experiment are addressed, so one ought in any sort of wisdom, to consider the end of the "experiment".  This, though in one sense it is just that, in another is already long covered in the "book", the word of God, the Bible, always infallible in view of the Speaker (cf. SMR  Appendix D), and the adulation history constantly gives to Him, even when its participants seem otherwise inclined! THAT does not spare them, but merely illustrates the Lord's most magnificent gift of freedom. While computer analysts struggle with imitations of the ACTIONS of man, as in robots, to imitate them: this is utterly beyond all that, for here the MIND that directs the computer is already at work in tandem with the WILL! Try that for size... a will quite as capable at working consciously with reason, as against it; for its own healthy interests, or against them: and the latter without realising it, or with various philosophic aims, or psychic ones.

What the END of this "experiment" - as it appears to some who do not know the Lord - is approaching, then, let us ask: WHAT IS IT THEN ?
 

Titus 2:13ff. has already been a focus for some little attention in Stepping Out for Christ10. Let us use and extend this for our present purpose.
 

So great is the infinite affinity of God the Father and His word, that we even read in Titus 2:13-14 of this great expression: We are, says Paul and oh so rightly! "looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous of good works." The Greek has: the great God and Saviour of us. It is not the great God and the Saviour: it is one identity, with only one introductory 'the'.
This is obvious enough when you realise that in Titus 2:10 we find written, "God our Saviour", which in turn is not surprising, since Isaiah 43:10 tells us that besides GOD there IS NO SAVIOUR. Whatever is the saviour in this highest, most eminent, final way is God; and of course this is precisely what Jesus Christ was called from the first (Luke 2:11, 2:30,38). Redeemer, Saviour from sin, the Christ is of necessity God, who acknowledges no other Saviour. Hence that it is God, even the great God and our Saviour who is to appear, is merely a reflection of all these things. It is HIS WORD which acts, and delivers the salvation in His own name, which naturally is above every name  (Philippians 2:9-11), AND does so, with the result that all whether in heaven or on earth should bow to Him, the Christ, confessing Him as Lord to the glory of God the Father.
This is the specific data on His return, result, reality.

• "This is 'the stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone.' Nor is there  salvation in any other name; for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" - Acts 4:11-12.

Look at again in Titus 2:13ff., therefore. For what are we waiting, among all this political flotsam and jetsam, this abominable and appalling generation of death, and degeneration of the race in war of mind and soul and spirit and flesh, notion and nation ! It is the due end. And that: "the glorious appearing of our great God, even our Saviour, Jesus Christ who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all lawlessness". And as to this LOOKING, ANTICIPATING, EXPECTATION of which Paul here speaks ? It is one which results from one fact, this - "the grace of God which brings salvation has appeared to all men" (2:11). So much has it appeared that the dating system of the world has been altered to acknowledge it. It is not a private party. Millions of books have doubtless been written on it, of broadcast made about it, and some of the most inventive of scientists have been entirely assured of it.

Where without Kelvin, without Faraday, without von Braun, without Newton, foremost originator of calculus, physicist of profound genius, without Maxwell, Hooke in physics, Boyle in chemistry, to name merely a handful of the great inventive generators of scientific thought, in history, would we be!

What profound omissions would have been made without their testimony as indeed, that in realms like the area and arena of Shakespeare, whose works are almost a living glowing sermon in morals, and exposition of doctrine, apart from their famous drama; of Browning, Wordsworth, Tennyson; of  Bacon moreover in his instructions on scientific method itself, of Kepler, Herschel in astronomy, Gladstone in our history, Dalton in chemistry's atomic theory, Joule in physics, Babbage in profound mathematical and engineering preliminaries to modern day computing, Lister or Fleming in medicine, the latter in his amazing work in penicillin.

Their talent and testimony, in logic and thought, in work and resolutions, concerning Christ and concerning His works, it has aided in vast domains the extension of the knowledge of the Saviour.
 

Our point is this: Christ is well known, more famous than any, as well as demonstrably the Son of God as we have shown (SMR Chs.1-3,10). The KINDNESS of GOD has been shown, definitively and for ever:
"But when the kindness and the love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us: through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit".

How NOT, does it say ? NOT by works. They are excluded as Paul explicitly states (Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2:1-10).

HOW SO ? Saved by GRACE through the performance based program, that of Christ; through FAITH as the receptor, and this ACCORDING to MERCY!

Faith (Hebrews 1:1) is ASSURANCE and CONVICTION, ATTESTATION AND ACCEPTANCE; and its OBJECT ? It is Christ, crucified, yes rather risen (Romans 3:23ff., 4:23-25, 8:31ff., Galatians 3:1-13, 5:1, 6:14, John 3:16, 6:47, 6:40). Its GIFT also is by GRACE (Romans 5:15). Neither the content nor the mode is anything but by grace, and if by grace, then how of works (Romans 11:6). The very words cannot be twisted. NOT works BUT grace, and that in MERCY, by KINDNESS, and that a gift, and that BY grace. There is no language which can be more definitive, no declaration more guarded from erosion and confusion.

How NOT ? NOT by works. They are excluded as Paul explicitly states (Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2:1-10). HOW SO ? Saved by GRACE as the performance based program, that of Christ; through FAITH as the receptor, and this ACCORDING to MERCY! Faith (Hebrews 1:1) is ASSURANCE and CONVICTION, ATTESTATION AND ACCEPTANCE, and its OBJECT ? Its GIFT also is by GRACE (Romans 5:15). Neither the content nor the mode is anything but by grace, and if by grace, then how of works (Romans 11:6). The very words cannot be twisted. NOT works BUT grace, and that in MERCY, by KINDNESS, and that a gift BY grace. There is no language which can be more definitive, no declaration more guarded from erosion and confusion.
 

He is CHRIST, this one and not another (II Corinthians 11). HIS NAME ONLY is that of Saviour. There is no co-adjutor, no collaborator, no being, but He: the Redeemer sent by His father, who has returned to the same UNTIL the time of the regeneration of all things (Acts 3:19-22). It is this coming time, in its restorative wonder, to which we look, and its great initial thrust is simply the return as KING of the CRUCIFIED and risen, ascended and triumphant CHRIST. WE have had a long time. The residue from these Biblical means we know, is short.

CHRIST, the ONLY name and ONLY Saviour has acted in HIS APPOINTED and EXCLUSIVE ROLE.
THERE, then,  is HOW He DID IT, for those who are in that position, are SAVED, by Him they have been saved (as we have just read in Titus 3:5) : not merely to be saved. It is already the case, as in Ephesians 2:8, where it is yet more emphatic, if possible, for there those who have been saved by faith through grace, are the HAVING BEEN SAVED PEOPLE, AND THE GREEK INDICATES A STATE OF BEING, NOT A MERE ACTION! these are those who are the saved ones! As in Ephesians 1:11, they have obtained an inheritance.

In Titus 3:5, then, we  indeed find declared is the WAY HE DID IT, but it is also expressive of WHY HE DID IT! Kindness and mercy.

The kindness of God our saviour HAS BEEN SHOWN in definitive action by Christ, and in extraordinarily profuse testimony on earth, and by its media: as the pounding of the waves on the rocks of the coastline, so is the impact of these words on the ears of man.

His kindness has been UNVEILED in STAGGERING MEASURE in this world, in sacrificial missionary living, in broadcast, in books, in scientific, in philosophic and logical power and force, it has swept over the earth like a tidal wave, not with scimitar or dictatorship of the proletariat (in fact, dictatorship of the bureaucrats, so that First Secretary Stalin could perform the hideous work of clerk of the party in killing many millions in paranoid profusion, suspecting, removing and betraying himself, whilst exposing the nature of his beliefs, as history has since Gorbachev, been able to expose the duplicity of Lenin)!

Not like that did Jesus Christ act ... for His command is truth, logic and reality, and in the very institution of modern day science, His has been the inspiration of many of the most profound, original and epochal geniuses who have developed the actualities of what  science is, the science properly so-called, which finds facts and formulates hypotheses, only to verify them and aid them to the higher post of law - as for example, was so dear to the heart of Christian Lord Kelvin, whose work on the first and second laws of thermodynamics has been so exquisite and extensive: laws of the FIRST importance to all science.

THIS GOSPEL had to be preached to all the nations, and by these various interlocking means, and moreover through the greatest Empire of thousands of years, if not of all time, the British, which, for all its formalistic errors, has at last professedly held in office a royalty, a ruler, a sovereign, with the most impressive COMMITMENT to the BIBLE as the source of written WISDOM. This is brilliantly portrayed in the coronation. So have many means of various depths and dimensions forwarded and constantly sounded the gospel and the word of God in a world as resistant as water-logged wood to fire; but for all that, a site for the salvation of many millions. As it has begun, so it has continued to the end, through the very subtleties of Satan, in his investment in falsification as a device for defeat, one overcome as the prophecy itself indicated would be the case, through the word of testimony and the blood of Christ, the Lamb of God (Revelation 12:11).

When this universal proclamation is done to the satisfaction of God Almighty, and the GOSPEL HAS BEEN SO PREACHED to the world: "THEN SHALL THE END COME," (Matthew 24:14).Then shall Christ come (Matthew 24:25-31, I Thessalonians 4). THAT ends this Age. Now we find revealed:
Christ

• 1)  bringing the Church - actual believers in Him by faith without works as a component (Romans 3:23ff.), to Himself, and then with His saints,

• 2)  coming to judge the writhing, wrathful mess of belligerent, seething, rebellious mankind (Revelation 19;19), arrayed against Him: then more openly, as now in the system of this world, in fact and inferentially. Thus the UN has no place for HIM, without whom there is NO PEACE (Isaiah 55:1-4, 57:19-21, 9:6-7).


What a hilarity of folly: they SEEK with so much weakness, and so much failure, and so much cost, to bring a peace to a planet which as we have just been itemising in a little, is at war in a lot! It breaks into war as some teen-agers do into acne, pimples, or self-doubt (the last, frequently simply a substitute for conviction of sin and repentance into the buoyant faith in the Saviour, who is able to remove the cause, and bring on the abundance of life that is lacking).

THIS, it is the ONLY name. ANY name therefore added to it in little or in much, which places thoughts or views or doctrines or philosophies as ANYTHING WHATEVER to do with salvation, which is not founded on and bounded in HIM, and in the GOSPEL as PAUL HAD ALREADY PREACHED IT, at the time of Galatians 1, is a charlatan, or impostor, a deceiver or a false prophet. PAUL himself could not alter it.

Conscious or unconscious may be the deception, the misrepresentation, the error: this is not the point. There is such a thing as delusion (II Thessalonians 2:10). Regardless of all such personal equations and dilations, it is the Gospel, efficient, effective, the power of God to salvation for those who believe (Romans 1:16), that of which Paul was not ashamed, which he had preached, THIS was the ONLY ONE. Its SOLE authority is Christ, and the Church, His body, recognised the New Testament in simple sobriety with agreement in its council, while the Jews are the authorised providers of the Old Testament, and as they have handed it on, so it is (Romans 10:1ff.; cf. SMR Appendix C).

But to CHRIST is the NAME ALONE. The mere placement near or next to HIS of ANY other name is blasphemy at the outset. It is rebellion in the onset. It is fraud in terms of Peter and Paul, of the whole apostolate (Ephesians 2:20ff.). It is ON HIM and HIS APOSTLES and PROPHETS as testimony, that the Church is built, there we read: HAS BEEN BUILT (2:20), indeed. It is on CHRIST ALONE that faith may rest (Romans 3:23ff.), even faith in His blood. What then of the Christ WHO ACTUALLY DID THE DYING AND RISING and who is TO RULE in HIS NAME ?

For Him, as such, it is for HIM, for His appearing, that of the great God and our Saviour, Jesus Christ, that we look, and that we are to look. That is the program, the message, the injunction, the warning and the way. Indeed, for those who look for His coming, "who eagerly wait for Him, He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation" - as in Matthew 25:1-10. The CALL is made. The CRUCIFIXION is accomplished accomplished (Luke 9:31), according to plan (Joyful Jottings 25, Balms, Arrows and Balms 17),  that of a millenium on the record (from 1000 B.C.); the resurrection is performed, in the face of all force and authority of the powers that be, who are now the powers that have been, for they are past and He continues to control history according to His stated program (SMR Ch.8), about to reach the culmination of His own, personal return (Acts 1:11).