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CHAPTER 8

 

DEADLY DYNAMICS and the PERSONAL PROVISION

Jeremiah,  the Jousts of the Adversary,
and the Joy of the Lord:


Modern Man in Perspective

 

             JEREMIAH, the JOUSTS of the ADVERSARY
           and the JOY of the LORD

You like tests, such as climbing to 19,000 feet as our physiotherapist appears to have done, in Africa recently ? Very well, consider those of Jeremiah, and ponder your own, for it is instructive, and best to profit by the examples of other, when these can prevent falling, incline to resolution or assist your sitting in peace in heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6), your heart at rest with the Lord, your hand at His tasks.

 

We shall consider the plea of Jeremiah, the reply of God, the promiscuity of the people, the division of the forces and the personal part in the life of the prophet, in this spiritual saga, and impactive history.

 

 

1.        The PLEA  (Jeremiah 14:19-22)

 

What have we done ? asks the stricken prophet, his heart for the people (14:9). It is not that there is any pretence of righteousness, but this, this utter abhorrence from the Lord (16:19)! The people are later seen even more directly asking, "What have we done wrong" (16:10). The response is not ambiguous! but clear, incisive and historic. They have served other gods, forsaken the Lord, not kept His law and each one has so obeyed the dictates of his own heart, "that no one listens to Me."

 

The case is not small, but all too familiar in our own day, this trend to sporadic spirituality, synthetic unities and specious disobedience, clad in contemptible sophistries.

 

Jeremiah here proceeds: We know we are sinners, even against You, so please do not break your covenant with us. Idols have nothing to show, it is only you: so we will wait for your response to our plea. Thus spoke one with a heart not duplicated at all readily among the people (cf. Jeremiah 5:1ff.!), for in 11:6-10, a spiritual conspiracy is exposed. “They have turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers.”

 

How hard it is at times to find those who wholeheartedly will follow the Lord, whose desire is to do the will of God from the heart, not to follow some dream of their own, some will, some aspiration (as in Jeremiah 23:23-29), but in all things and in all ways, having capitulated gladly to such a Lord as this, to abide in Him, as He also abides. Consider however John 15:7.

 

How many cry, shriek, assert, using the name of the Lord, but following other gods as well, precisely as did the stricken Samaria, even after it was little more than a name, its actual Jewish inhabitants removed by crusading, invading Sennacherib of Assyria, that the abominations of their hearts should no more populate the land, according to the will of the Lord (II Kings 17:16-18, 24-33).

 

The last verse cited above tells us that they feared the Lord and served other gods, a cocktail to make the famed Molotov cocktail seem like a blessing by comparison; for that destroys the body, but this the soul! What is the good of being religious, if your religion is not the Lord! What is the good of seeking fruit and gifts, if you do not ABIDE IN CHRIST, and therefore do not follow His word which tells you that HE appoints the gifts, according as HE will! (I Cor. 12:11)...

 

What is the good of seeking this and that in prayer, if you yourself are not first of all a seeker, capitulated to Christ, a servant for HIS direction, walking in the Spirit, abiding in His word (Luke 6:46)!

 

We are all sinners, but if this is not your objective, then your objective is spiritually objectionable and scripturally unsound. It is necessary to be watered by the spring of salvation (Jeremiah 2:13, 18:14), not the drain of desire!

 

“Will a man leave the snow water of Lebanon,

Which comes from the rock of the field  “

 

“Will the cold flowing waters be forsaken for strange waters ?”

 

What had they done! Even at the time of the brutal removal of Israel to the North, the southern sector, a separate nation now, Judah, was under no small condemnation. In II Kings 17, in the very midst of the judgments shown for Israel to the North, there is this statement (17:19):

 

"Also Judah did not keep the commandments of the LORD their God,
but walked in the statutes of Israel which they made.
And the LORD rejected all the descendants of Israel..."

 

Often enough was Judah warned, but it did not heed what had befallen its northern neighbour, or the reasons for it, and this is exposed in depth in II Chronicles 36.

 

What have we done! Indeed, what had they NOT done, might appear the better question. It is therefore not surprising to hear that the LORD will NOT remove the impending affliction to Judah, given over a century to change its ways, to seek the Lord and follow Him. Indeed, Hezekiah and Josiah, great kings of Judah had led great reformations, but like bright stars they shed light for a season, while the people sank and descended, till there was no remedy.


II Chronicles 36:14-16 shows it with detailed and dramatic intensity.

Hear but one excerpt! (bold added).

 

"Moreover all the leaders of the priests
and the people transgressed more and more,
according to all the abominations of the nations,
and defiled the house of the Lord
which He had consecrated in
Jerusalem.

"And the Lord God of their fathers sent warnings to them by His messengers,
rising up early and sending them,
because He had compassion on His people and on His dwelling place.

 

"But they mocked the messengers of God,
despised His words, and scoffed at His prophets,
until the wrath of the Lord arose against His people,
till there was no remedy."

The curse causeless does not come! declares Proverbs 26:2:

"As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying,
so the curse causeless shall not come."  

 

 2.        The REPLY (Jeremiah 15:1)

  

Accordingly, when we come to listen to the reply from God to Jeremiah's plea, we find a finality. The mercy is this, that there would certainly be an exile, yet that it would (as we find in Jeremiah 25), not be for ever but for 70 years. In the meantime, death, devastation and destruction awaited the remorselessly sinning people, often warned, now heedless and reckless.

 

Thus God, knowing that the covenant was for blessing, to faith with its accompanying practices, which it engenders, and for cursing, when the covenant becomes a mere stepping stone for sanctified sin, had not failed to warn of the blunt rebuttal to the covenant, which they had breached in empty words of religion, and heartless deeds of rebellion.

 

The reply is SHORT:  Though MOSES and SAMUEL were pleading, He told Jeremiah, there could be no other result for this people. Cast them out of My sight!

 

 

3.        The PROMISCUITY (Jeremiah 15:2-9)


Where should we go ? they might ask. Then tell them, was the divine message, those to die, to death, those for sword, to that point, those to famine to that lack, and those to be captives, to that end. THAT is where they belong. Trouble is to be their mentor and recipient, because of their long sustained iniquity, idolatry, hypocrisy, injustice and fraud, things summed up in Manasseh, the king whose ways were as good at keeping the law of the Lord as a sieve for keeping water. He cast children into idol fires, brought idols into the temple and practicing witchcraft and sorcery, worshipped the whole host of heaven, like the naturalists of today, whose gods are without minds, and whose minds are without truth for they announce ‘truth’ while excluding it, and proclaim their charms, as if by magic.

 

There comes a time when such confused delusion takes its toll, as indeed it has in two World Wars in the last century, where strife and superiority were taken as if mother’s milk would give place to rotten vegetables! Thus for Israel, the divine decision, after some centuries, was irrevocable; but lest you should think it hard, even in Jer. 17, you see a simple, practical offer for entire deliverance, a matter of rest on the day of rest; but they would not. So does man abandon hope, and blame God, while God abandons not even the abandoned, when and IF they return whole-heartedly to him.

 

Even Manasseh, that king from age 12, and centre of the grotesque, he himself at last sought and obtained mercy from the Lord, before he died. It is never too late, if you in faith CALL, and do so with your HEART.

Thus there is a certain terseness in the matter of the format of punishment. Now however comes appeal.

 

4.        The DIVISION  (Jeremiah 15:10-14)



At this point, Jeremiah feels downcast, as if he were some sort of spiritual pugilist, always complaining to the people, challenging and chiding them,

 

“Woe to me, my mother, that you have borne me,
a man of contention to the whole earth!”

 

Oh how he would have loved just to be at peace with all. However, he had been given a mandate to speak from the Lord to many nations (Jeremiah 1:9-10), to labour.

Indeed, not the least part of this often punitive expedition into requitement for iniquities and oblivion of truth and reality, righteousness and mercy, is an opposite aspect. While all the work of judgment proceeded, there was a more distant prediction, already vastly fulfilled, both for Israel and for the Gentiles, by name, and for the world as well, as one. As to the first two of these, see*1 Jeremiah 30-31 and The Biblical Workman Ch. 1, and as to the second, the link above. Fascinating as these are, are present interest however is the GENTILE prediction so named, in this Jewish prophet's wide-ranging coverage. Moreover, it is in the contrast where blessing effulges on that body, all indeed except the Jew, whose place in the ultimate blessing is not thereby diminished, but has its chronological place, because of unbelief, as Paul in Romans 11 expounds in magnificent force and clarity, in terms of the olive tree figure, simplifying to a marvellous extent (see The Biblical Workman Chs.   1, *3, and     3, *1 and at dry bones).

As to the Gentiles, then, in Jeremiah 16:19-21, we see with that grand indifference to favouritism, partisan exclusiveness, justice and truth, with mercy, which is one of the mightiest testimonies of the glory of God, that not only is there in this chapter a gruesome account of the coming judgment on a remorselessly and blatantly, a chronically and captiously unrepentant Israel, but there is a contrast to the woe which the rejection of divine mercy is occasioning for Israel at that time.

" 'Because your fathers have forsaken Me,' says the Lord,
'they have walked after other gods,
and have served them and worshipped them,
and have forsaken Me and not kept My law;

'and you have done worse than your fathers,
for behold, each one follows  the dictates of his own evil heart
so that no one listens to Me:

'Therefore I will cast you out into a land that you do now know, and there you will serve other gods day and night, where I will not show you favour.' "

 

 The desire to flirt with folly, to amplify with futile philosophy and inert mysteries of man's machination chucked to the heavens as if they would receive such inventions (cf. Jeremiah 2:22ff.) ...

"For though you wash yourself with lye, and use much soap,

Yet your iniquity is marked before Me," says the Lord God.

 

"How can you say, ‘I am not polluted,

I have not gone after the Baals’?

{naturalistic false 'lords' with various inept mysteries}
 

"See your way in the valley;

Know what you have done:

You are a swift dromedary breaking loose in her ways,

A wild donkey used to the wilderness,

That sniffs at the wind in her desire;

In her time of mating, who can turn her away?

All those who seek her will not weary themselves;

In her month they will find her.

 

"Withhold your foot from being unshod, and your throat from thirst.

But you said, ‘There is no hope.

No! For I have loved aliens, and after them I will go.’

 

"As the thief is ashamed when he is found out,

So is the house of Israel ashamed;

They and their kings and their princes, and their priests and their prophets,

Saying to a tree, ‘You are my father,’

And to a stone, ‘You gave birth to me.’ "



MODERN MAN IN PERSPECTIVE

In this, they are like today's naturalists in essence, for this folly is endemic in all delusion at the level of reality, creation and rationality. It re-appears like a bad dream, in ever new dress*2  - as if man COULD not learn, despite every scientific, logical, rational, historic and metaphysical fact and principle in the book of life itself, in the scope of thought. He MUST decline, like a ball on an inclined slope, when it being merely round, and smooth, seems to have no option.

But man has option, which he will not take. To be sure his sin closes his eyes, but eyes, they are still there. It is indeed in the very face of the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus that he continues so to act, the solution staring him so gravely in the face, that he seems only by some kind of mental tic to avoid observing that fact (cf. Christ, the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8, SMR Ch. 6, Repent or Perish Ch. 2, SMR Ch. 8). If Jeremiah felt it sad in his day for his Jewish people, does not the Gentile feel the same sorrow, not only for the Jew, but for his fellow Gentiles!

What profit for any man or woman, for any child or youth is there in such a dismantlement of mercy, provided at such cost! It is not that God does not incline HIS heart to receive fallen man (Colossians 1:19-21, John 3:16, I Timothy 2 cf. SMR Appendix B, The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 4), but on the contrary, the winds of appeal are fair, and the power to save is great (Isaiah 63), nor is there any barrier which any can erect, for the God Almighty is not baulked by obstacle (Isaiah 14:27), though in love He neither forces nor awaits the verdict of mere pathology (cf. Great Execrations, Greater Enervations, Greater Grace ... Chs.   7 and   9).

Even then at the time of eventual judgment, after centuries of spiritual sloth and pollution, for ancient Israel, that to be as foretold by Isaiah and Jeremiah, at the hand of Babylon (cf. Jeremiah 25, Isaiah 13-14), then, the love of God is seen like sunlight bursting from behind dark and stormy clouds:

"O Lord, my strength and my fortress,

My refuge in the day of affliction,

The Gentiles shall come to You

From the ends of the earth and say,

 

'Surely our fathers have inherited lies,

Worthlessness and unprofitable things.'
 

"Will a man make gods for himself,

Which are not gods?

Therefore behold, I will this once cause them to know,

I will cause them to know

My hand and My might;

                          And they shall know that My name is the Lord."

 

There is the light and the shadow, that the light is seen to be coming to shine on the Gentiles in this, that in their time, many will turn from the follies of absurd and inconsequential naturalism to the supernatural God who instituted the painfully precise and conceptually carved realities which constitute the natural realm, in their integrity of integration and their marvel of joint operation in the conspectus of thought which drives their designs into being and their kinds into confines.

It is, says Jeremiah, to come. There will be MANY Gentiles, and that all OVER THE EARTH, who will see the folly of such idolatries as afflict so much of modern man's thought, making it both base and vapid, so that they never agree, for in error there both is and can be no agreement, facts always jarring at unpleasantly situated spots, making a farce of philosophy and a comedy of pseudo-science*2 which solemnly breaches the most fundamental principles of scientific method, as if intoxicated, but it is a spiritual phenomenon, invading the mind.

As he foretold for Israel, so to the letter, to the jot and tittle, as Jesus put it (Matthew 5:17-20), it came to pass, even to the name of the Cyrus, who would RESTORE the Jews from Babylon, after they had been sent there, over a century after Isaiah foretold it, only to return when Jeremiah said they would (Jeremiah 25). As he foretold for the Gentile world, so to the letter it has come to pass, and this author is one of the MILLIONS to the ends of the earth, who have been part of that most blessed fulfilment, which Paul expounds in Romans 11.

There is then an divine ebullience, so that although the Lord does not in sickening indulgence forsake judgment, yet there is the incandescent pathway for ever new ways of showing mercy, in the only design available, through mercy which faces facts and pays, with love which is will so to act at sacrifice, and in sacrifice, the sending of the eternal Word of God as man, so that as man, man might have met his unmanly and often inhuman maladies and madnesses, sins and seditions.

Small wonder, then, that Jeremiah, as we see in 15:10-14, is almost overwhelmed as almost endlessly postponed judgment, at last sits. As the Lord said, "I am weary of relenting", and the time comes, and it came. Yet in the midst of his expostulation and sadness, there is a light, even here. Thus the prophet, as we were seeing, soliloquises, and  yet that so as to be heard above, no doubt:

"Woe is me my mother, that you have borne me, a man of strife and of contention ...".

God is far from unapproachable, and indeed has encouragement for those who seek Him (cf. Isaiah 64:5, Psalm 145).

 

At this prophetic lament from Jeremiah, the Lord gives him a mercy: there will be a REMNANT, a remnant of faith (as in a remnant sale!), among the people whom he so loves and for whom he feels such intense compassion; for not all of them will die, not all will be obliterated from the earth, and indeed, for this remnant there will be blessing. It was to come in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, and there you see the zeal when, after the ordained 70 years of exile (foretold in Jeremiah 25), they duly came back on time, and rebuilt, released by Cyrus, just as Isaiah had forecast over a century beforehand, so naming that King from the outset. When that time came, then there was purging of spirit, work of hand and zeal of spirit.

 

It was, as it is, time to rebuild. Are YOU part of the remnant of faith ? Then trusting Him, return and work!  For the rest, then, exile is the best to be found, just as now, unbelief invades what fades. Those who are the Lord’s, these do not fail, for HE, He does not fail (John 10:9,27-28).

 

 

5.        The PERSONAL PART (Jeremiah 15:15-21)

  

Jeremiah then makes request to the Lord not to be taken away, pleading,

 

“O LORD, You know … In Your enduring patience, do not take me away.
Know that for Your sake I have suffered rebuke.
Your words were found, and I ate them,
and Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart;
for I am called by Your name, O LORD God of hosts.”

 

He had not sat with mockers, but alone, like an outcast.

 

Despite such zeal and concentration on the things of the Lord, he asks:


“Why is my pain perpetual … ?”

 

Pained and grieved for his people, and longing to be with them, not seemingly against them, he is as one who would turn his head to a fountain (Jeremiah 9:1), as a reservoir for tears to be shed for the horrors to come for the unremitting sin and horrible hypocrisies of his exuberantly erratic people.

 

What then of the prophet himself ? for he also is human, even though dedicated without limit, consecrated without compromise, and seeking to fulfil all the word of God with integrity.

 

 “IF YOU WILL RETURN, THEN I WILL BRING YOU BACK.”

 That was the divine message to the troubled soul of the longsuffering prophet. THEN you will stand before ME! What then ? What is the instruction to him: then SEPARATE the profane from the pure, the secular from the sacred, the spiritual from the godless, the true from the false, the word of God from the words of men, and

 

“you will be as My mouth.

The advice that follows is what many have ignored. Temporarily stirred by some vast departure from the faith, they often go with the wandering ‘church’, that no more honours the word of the Lord, but substitutes its own wherever it wants it. It is like an employee saying to the boss,

 

Oh yes, I will do ALL that you say, only there may be one little oddity. For example, I have special indulgence on cheques over 100,000, and it may be that on this, I will depart from your wishes. But that! it is only one thing! In all else, rely on me!  

Who can find a faithful man! If you do, keep to him! 

Accordingly, the LORD told this to Jeremiah:

 

“Let them return to you,

But you must not return to them!”

 

That is a thing especially hard to do when you love them, seeking only their good, while they neither listen, reform, nor return. Then, whatever the prophet must suffer, yet he MUST not rejoin them; for it is no help to assemble with what moves in direct OPPOSITION to the Lord’s command. That does not help any church, nor was it permitted to the prophet; for to announce the way is not to follow another.

 

However, as he fights for the truth, valiant for the truth, obedient to God, the Lord undertakes to make him a “fortified bronze wall”.

 

Fight ? yes they will fight against you, but not prevail,

“for I am with you to save you!”

the Lord announced to the restored prophet. Wicked or fearsome alike, they will not prevail against Jeremiah, whose own path will be faithfulness, with power in the presence of the Lord. The fire in his bones which could not be subdued had its necessary outlet in faithfulness, and in this was mercy, since his prescription for Judah, if followed would have delivered them entirely (Jeremiah 17), and even now, it would leave them free to return in 70 years.

Faithfulness in power, mercy in truth: It is there for one and for all, each ascertaining his or her own call from the Lord. Be faithful then, and do not subordinate His wishes, commands and works, to yours.

 

But if you do ? What then do you resemble! What did Israel, did Judah resemble ? a wandering star!

 

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 Watch therefore your way, and keep your eyes open,
for the Lord is wise in His ways and knows His own (II Timothy 2:19).
Walk in the light of His word, in the power of His Spirit
and in the love of His life.

 

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 Love ? Infinite love, for love is infinitely important,
and the love of God in Jesus Christ has broken death,
irrupting in the body’s resurrection, a grant to each believer.
.

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In, with, by and through Him, life is both abundant and eternal
 

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 To BE a fortified bronze wall for us who have returned,
to bring us back to His protection, where justice smiles because mercy has paid,
God has relentlessly at the time appointed,
ransomed us by His own blood, penetrating death, suffering judgment in Himself,
to provide impenetrable peace

(Hosea 13:14, Galatians 3:1-13,
Romans 5:1-11, 8:32, Isaiah 53:3-6,10-11,
Acts 20:28, Revelation 1:5, 5:13).

 

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The tears of the prophet (Jeremiah 9:1), reflect the heart of the Lord,
who has triumphed where tears did not avail.
Let us now share in that triumph,
as recipients, by living the life which He empowers.

 

 MODERN MAN in PERSPECTIVE

 

INGLORIOUS GLORYING and

REPENTING and RETURNING

 

To the Lord is return needed.

HIS is the glory and the majesty and the power, the peace and the profit, not for selfish aspiration, but for the culmination of creation in its intent, man in God's image, to be in God's presence, not in the devilish desperation of making himself a little god, or a little better. It is not this, but the radical uplift and transformation that comes when God once more comes into fellowship with this, His creation, that is needed (Titus 3:5-7, Romans 5:1-12). It is for the lack of it that this world, with increased power, makes its hearty corruption not only so very clear, but so completely intolerable. What will man do ? continue in corrupted cultures as if they were sacred because something was once done amiss, and continue in them, like automated destruction units, bemused into imagining their littleness great, or their corruption in need of continuity! There is such a way, and it has always been very broad, like any other folly that lacks understanding in the midst of precision equipment. 

 Tears may multiply, and who would not weep for modern man in his rejection of his own  beginnings in splendour, as if God left something out. It is not this, but rather than man has come to make it increasingly profitable to the pride and passion of mere flesh, divorced from its crisply magnificent commencement from the power of the divine imagination, to look to himself and the creation, instead of to the Creator. It is not new (Isaiah 22:12-14), but its corruption and its results are as cumulative as Romans 1 discloses in its analysis.

 The case for man is so far worse having a good product tampered with, through the corrupt offices of some third-rate firm instead of going back to the manufacturer, and finding the conditions of warranty. For in that case, it is mere folly; in this, however, it is a veritable passion for corruption; and not surprisingly, it corrupts, as man without due service, and without giving due service to his Maker, corrodes. The folly of heart transforms itself into the fact of history, as man more and more literally explodes.

 Such in principle is the outline in Romans 1, and in a fresh phase of folly, the occurrence in modern history. When you turn out the light, you are in darkness; and when you avoid the light of this world (John 9:4-5), alone attested, verified and validated to explain all, be adequate for all*3, being in the beginning with God and God (for there are no gods but God - Exodus 20, Ephesians 4:4, John 1:1), and who as God created in the presence of God (Colossians 1:15), that we all might be, as well as our environment both of terms, concepts and body: then,  you are in a darkness, and it is one that may be felt.

 As the subtle intrigues against God continue, now in this false philosophy,  in the unending confusions of futile flesh, and when as always that fails, now in some other confused vanity of irrational imagination, then you find what you expect. This, it is found in two dimensions: first, incredible MUTUAL failure among flesh, amongst the human race, and secondly highly credibly PREDICTED failure in the furores and heaps of quickly accumulating religious rubbish and seduced state-craft, as outlined in the predictions of Christ Jesus the Lord,  in Matthew 24, Luke 21 and seen in detail as fulfilled, in Answers to Questions Ch. 5, as in SMR Ch. 8.

 

These are the deadly dynamics of THIS generation, and in our next volume,  Lord willing, we shall see something of their dancing, prancing and irrelevance to righteousness and reality with the answers staring and almost blaring in the face of man, professionally hard of hearing, and blasting his ear-drums with such vanities of pride and lust, that he cannot hear, just as he in vast numbers, will not seek where truth is to be found, but rather seeks where desire, intellectual, physical, immoral, or inane,  may be sated.

As to God, He remains (Zechariah 9:7, Psalm 90); and  as to His salvation, it remains available (Matthew 24:12, Galatians 1). The light has long come; it is merely the undivine tendency of man to turn it out and shout violence to mind, body or environment, that makes for the currently, passionately increasing darkness (Matthew14ff.).

It was so for Israel in the bulk, when the Lord came; and they killed Him.

It is so for the Gentile world in vast proportions now; and they seek to kill what they misname the 'culture' but what is in fact the testimony of truth, as they go, as Israel of old did, in their case before Sennacherib of Assyria. This time, however, they go even more directly before the push and putsch of the devil, many glorying in his demonic power and calling evil good, and good evil, just as was done in Israel at its worst (Isaiah 5).

Israel of that day was dismissed in the end, peremptorily and deported; this world is having its statuesque substitutes for spirituality dismissed, and when the time comes, it will itself be deported, indeed finished (II Peter 3, Isaiah 51:6, Matthew 23:35). It is vain to hope in what is temporary; the temporal goes, the truth remains. It remained because it is undismissible; and it continues for the same reason,  indispensable as alone attested, Jesus Christ (John 14:6). That name is the only one given to man (Acts 4:11-12), for salvation, and without salvation, there is desecration, a dynamic so deadly that cancer is a mere image, and one not merely of the body, but of the soul. Illusion becomes delusion and delusion dynamite, literal or metaphorical, but in either case, endlessly destructive when, the childish pranks of mass murderers past, people whose consciences are sunk with the Titanic, unless they repent, they take their place with the discards of righteousness in the eternal confines that substitute for everlasting life.

It is high time to avoid this. It is the day for calling on the Lord (I Corinthians 6, Isaiah 55).

In calling, as in eating, it is necessary to DO IT, not merely to think about it. Otherwise ? it is not done!

 

NOTES

 

*1    Concerning Israel, consult the following.

Ezekiel 36-39, and in particular, 36:22, Luke 21:24; and see Appendix A, Ch. 9, SMR, Galloping Events Ch. 4, Of the Earth ... Ch. 10, It Bubbles ... Ch. 10.

Concerning the world, see Jeremiah 30-31, and for reference to that and its environs,  The Biblical Workman Chs.   1,    3.

Our present interest is the GENTILES as such, and to this the text attends.

 

*2

For scientific method, see the earlier, particular references.

See for example,

The gods of naturalism have no go!

and in particular:

SMR pp.  140-151

Earth Spasm ... Chs.    1,   7,

Deliverance from Disorientation Ch.   7

Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch.     7
 

Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch.      7


 Cascade of Truth ... Ch.   3.   

 

together with

 

SMR pp. 179-195, 234,

Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Chs.   4,    5,    6

The gods of naturalism ... Ch. 9

Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13, 16,

Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3,

News 57, 59, SMR pp. 159, 315Bff.,

A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3,

Earth Spasm ... Ch. 1, News 81,

Calibrating Myths ... Ch. 1 incl. *1,

Stepping out for Christ Ch. 10 ;

Christ, the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8

Repent or Perish Ch. 2.

 

*3

See Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer, and in particular

What is the Chaff to the Wheat ?
Chs.    3 and    4, TMR hatmagrock/validity, SMR Chs. 3, 5, 10.