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 CHAPTER 5

"WHERE IS THE PROMISE OF HIS COMING..." ? (II Peter 3:4)

1

THE CHARACTER OF HIS COMING
IN TERMS OF TIMING AND MUNDANE ATTITUDE,
EVIDENT IN THE BIBLE

THIS is a question put by mockers in the terminal velocity area of world development. As this predicted phase, the end is coming like an asteroid, sighted and sited by astronomers, too late to alter its course, converging with earth. In fact, it is Jesus Christ who is coming, but a rocket would be more desirable for many, who will, Revelation instructs us (Revelation 6:16-17), reach the point of saying "to the mountains, and to the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb."

It is like the question of a school-child, mocking and performing in some class, and on the whole, getting away with it, and beginning indeed to think of himself as quite a lad, somewhat assured, a touch of devilry, until ... at last the teacher perceives the situation as inveterate, the child as intrigued with his own derring-do, and not merely the victim of uncontrolled high-spirits, disruptive, inattentive and lacking self-control ... and ACTS! The child would never have believed, but when the time came, he soon learned to believe what he then saw!

In our mini-parable, THEN it is too late! When the Lord in fact returns, and calls His own for the very good reason that they are His, and they have an appointment with Him ELSEWHERE, those left are to be left in no doubt of their position, in preferred UNBELIEF. Matthew 25's parable dramatises it in incisive style. The 5 virgins, waiting in their irresponsible sleep for the bride-groom, whose coming SEEMS delayed, are caught unready. It is no vindictive passion of a frustrated and disappointed bridegroom which seizes on their sleepiness, like a disciplinarian.

Rather it is simply the fact that their lights had gone out through lack of oil, through

a) lack of care and
b) lack of foresight and
c) lack of wakefulness.

It meant that when the bridegroom of the parable did (at last!) arrive, that they had to GO and try to GET oil so that they could FILL their lamps and so be OPERATIONAL as they ought to be, with their lights. THAT was a proper and due function! WHEN they had at last found the merchants who would provide, the occasion was past. The doors were closed. They COULD not do what they slackly did not BOTHER to be prepared to do. They were not ready. He was. They missed.

But there is more to teach us the nature of the case concerning Christ's return, the promise of HIS COMING, to use the words predicted in the text's depiction. The sleepy bridesmaids were not girded by HOPE, but by sight. He was not there YET, so that their own form of expectation led them to use their eyes of the flesh, not of the spirit or even of the mind.

Again, they thought the time long to the point that they ceased to be operational, ceased to consider the realities and requirements of FUNCTION, and allowed themselves to be in disrepair. Hence the thrust is that the return is to SEEM long to some. II Peter 3:9 makes the same point. We are not, says that apostle, to forget that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years; that He is not slack; that He will come on time (as in fact He did the first time in incarnation definitively of the godhead - cf. SMR pp. 886ff.).

What does this imply ? Even in A.D. 60 or 70 or so, there was a need to realise that the actual coming of Christ was not a matter of immediacy. Even at that time, perhaps 40 years after the resurrection and ascension of Christ back to where He came from, the thought world was in the region of a thousand years as to type. It was not a thousand days or weeks; the order of magnitude which was, admittedly merely in an image, but nevertheless in a selected image, such that 1000 years was not an alien option. It was not outré, bizarre to think in that style, but realistic, practical and temperate.

Hence from these two sources, as elsewhere from the study of Matthew 24 which made so many of the signs and signals to be indicative (and which are now operative in historical fact) of His coming being NEAR (as in Luke 21:27) to be merely "the BEGINNING OF SORROWS" (like the end of the beginning as distinct from the beginning of the end) as in Matthew 24:8. Indeed, "the end is not yet" (Matthew 24:6) is the designation of Christ, even at that advanced stage of the scenario, as set forth by Him in answer to the disciples' question concerning the end of the AGE.

Another phase of truth to be drawn from Christ's parable of the virgin is this.

The doors are to be CLOSED. Now this is obviously of intensely parallel nature to the SEALING OF THE ARK in the case of Noah and family, when the floods came. It was not left to sundry human initiatives of varied motivational source, when the time was actually come. It would seem that decade after wearisome decade of heavy toil, enormous financial expenditure (not so terribly sacrificial when you consider what would have happened to Noah's possible investments if he had used the money in some other way, right up to and into the FLOOD!) had passed, and people had been decidedly unimpressed. This is shown by their ACTIONS. Did they besiege him as he built a vessel so apparently far from actual WATER! Did the NATURALISTIC considerations not make it so very 'clear', not to put too fine a point on it, that he was nuts! Was it not apparent that only what had happened in the past would happen now! It was so terribly and obtrusively obvious.

In retrospect, we see that their very naturalism was unnatural, for nature is not its own maker, for the simple reason that neither in its interstices of power nor in its operational expressions of any such thing, does it do so! The ONE who DID make it would do as He pleased. Just because some executive has used his company car for ten years never to go beyond Adelaide, does this by REASON SHOW that he will not drive to Darwin twice a month in the succeeding year! What someone in power chooses to do may have order and uniformity of some sort, WHILE and PROVIDED this meets HIS SCENARIO and PLAN. It is more than unwise to assume that his car did not need to be made, or that he has it without reason, or that it is subject to no constraints! It is mere irrational folly so to do.

The bridesmaids were inclined, apparently, to feel that -

1) it was getting so late that one might as well not be concerned about the ... what, silly 
thing ? impediment to comfort, intrusive religious necessity, optional expectancy for service ?

 

2) it did not matter so very much anyway
(were they then opportunists, like the Vicar of Bray, in the English rhyme, who could change his 'doctrine' to match the sources of power, prestige and income in the varying 'church' structure of England in persecution days - days not a few actually, but mercifully not inscribed for ever ?).

Such 'bridesmaids' help to insult the name of Christ, annul the teamwork in the church, betray the ardent flame of the cause of Christ, and bring into the realm of spiritual things, an anaesthesia of spirit which many, not realising, follow. Still going to 'church', they sleep while night comes, infiltrate its voting, and where a particular church is lax to allow such things, derail its progress, while securing their own doom (Matthew 25:11-12 cf. Matthew 7:23; Revelation 2:20ff., 2:16).

Let us be clear, that is the issuance of this matter. There is no way that God who "must" be worshipped in spirit and in truth (John 4:23-24) is worshipped in comfortable compromise; for faith does not follow some other Lord (cf. Isaiah 26:13), and this one has issued His command as well as  His reason for it. The Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) requires both the proclamation of the Gospel and the inculcation of the keeping of ALL the commandments. This second feature DOES NOT SAVE, but it issues from salvation. Faith does not loot the treasures of Christ for self, or group or voting bodies, but works by love (Galatians 5:6): and love ? "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My words," says Christ
(from John 14:21-23).

Dedication ? in these sleeping bridesmaids ? The word does not apply. Conviction ? It is not apparent.  Faith in their Lord ? It is no more evident than is trustworthiness towards Him!

So is the coming of the Lord, in the Scriptural revelation. Many are surprised as by a thief in the night, even those who 'go to church', and others sleep in the night which requires rather alert action, and godly enterprise. Where is it then ? WHERE is HIS COMING! THIS is our question, and this is our answer.

 

(On this side of things, you may care to read A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 18,
and for more detail on Christ’s preliminaries to His return, SMR Ch. 8, pp. 644ff..)
 
 


THE CHARACTER OF THE MOCKERY

(cf. Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 74, pp. 103ff.)

II Peter 3 tells us much concerning the specific character of the attitude to be developed before the Lord comes, and as a sort of receptor site for it. It is not at all more conducive to comfort than the first coming in the incarnation at Bethlehem. Few will be those who receive Him now, as then. However, in the aggregate there will be many (Revelation 7,14), indeed an innumerable multitude; though the percentage appears to be small! (Matthew 7:13ff., 21ff.).

A) The Attitude of the Lord who is Coming

One must note that Peter in II Peter 3:9 makes it clear that there is a qualitative as well as a quantitative side the matter of when the Lord actually comes. It is a special characteristic of  God that He is compassionate, not willing that any should perish, and that the word should go as a testimony bringing the Gospel to all the earth (Matthew 24:14). It is only then that we hear from Him, these words: "Then shall the end come!" There is arrest until this geographical distribution of the Gospel is accomplished. Peter gives light on why.

First, as stated, it is for a testimony; for as the Bible states through the apostle Paul, God has not left Himself without a testimony, He is not mute; as Isaiah 45:18-10 declares from the Lord, He, the Creator of all has not spoken in a secret place ... I declare things that are right!"

Secondly, the compassion acts as a constraint, a restraint on terminating things, the long-suffering holds back the finale until it must wait no longer. That is what II Peter 3:9 makes so very clear. In the context of HOW LONG, the apostle Peter makes an indication that for the Lord, 1000 years is as a day. THAT is the immediate context (I Peter 3:8). A delay of 1000 years is not at all to be gasped at, therefore, should it arise. There is, then, MUCH TO BE DONE and for a LONG TIME, before the Lord comes.

That, of course, was THEN. NOW, nearly all is done already.

b) The Predicted Prevailing Attitude of those to whom He comes

What however is to be one of the foremost spiritual syndromes of this terminal phase of the cancer of disfaith, before Christ comes ? It is this: sardonic mockery. We had this experience when two elders went to a University radio station in order to present something (as they offered), and what we chose was the certainty of the truth in Christ, relative to the follies of magical evolution. The interviewer grew agitated, interrupted, seemed to want no answer, but mere scope for mockery, so that the only answer appeared to be to ANSWER ALL that he in fact put, even though it appeared to be his desire to hop about like a flea, stinging here and there, never consequential, but flitting in fanciful pursuits. After the interview, mocking music was played. It was the only 'card' that could be played!

The poor man had, in the abyss of ignorance, advised us that one had only to go to the University across the road and behold, all would be solved. Evolution would appear there. It would certainly make South Australia not the Festival State, but the Wonder State if his words had any relationship to reality. Alas, organic evolution is as conspicuous by its absence, as grace in a bull. As to being SEEN, the thought is delusion. It is more invisible than the sanity of Hitler.

Our point in this context however, is simply this: mockery is the EXPECTED agency of assault. It is one choice. Reason has nothing to offer. Mockery is in training in the absence of logic.
 

 

 

 

 


"For if we died with Him,
We shall also live with Him.
If we endure,
We shall also reign with Him.
If we deny Him,
He also will deny us.
If we are faithless,
He remains faithful.
He cannot deny Himself."

 

Faithful even in our weakness (as with Peter who swore when he should have testified, marvellously restored, as in John 21:15ff., He keeps what is committed to Him against that day (II Timothy 1:12).
 

What then do we find to our point ?

 

WHERE IS THE PROMISE OF HIS COMING! they chant. It is all just as it always was. Nothing is being done. It is all just the same old thing.

It is this chant which constitutes them mockers, as predicted for a pathological phenomenon for the end of the Age, by Peter.

 

 


This then is the Biblical depiction of this last phase of the race before the impending judgment and the Lord's return to His earth, with all His saints.

Is this the historic picture which we have developed on this site in many places ? Assuredly it is. It has the panache of proprietary contempt, establishmentarian oppression, ignorant mockery, blind allegiance, mixed with barren naturalism, epic evolutionism replete with all the magic Israel ever mustered in its naturalistic idols (Jeremiah 2:27), and while it changes the images and imagery, it does not change the blind devotion to the creation as its own creator, even if nothing has to become productive for the purpose.

This being so, we have a primary fulfilment; but in our present context, a precise index to the near return of the Lord, as if you were on a journey from Moscow to London, and had identified Paris as your train passed through.
 

3

THE CHARACTER OF OUR TIMES IN FULFILMENT OF THE PREDICTION ABOUT IT

Clearly this will relate to the above, but it has its own particulars,
and they are many. Hence prepare for the trip!

A) PERSONAL

There is just that masterful and compulsive contamination with evil of which Christ speaks (Matthew 24:11-3), and which Paul amplifies (II Timothy 3), and also particularises (I Timothy 4:1ff.), both of which enlargements are also abundantly fulfilled (cf. SMR pp. 660-674., 699ff., 1041, 578ff.). Even this week, a case of preoccupation with the 'occult' revealed a man in serious crime in consequence; and naturally, as evil views and news aggregate, mutually confirmatory, so lacerations of society compound with original sin, which is highly unoriginal, but quite inveterate until cured, so that the immoral teachings freely preached as if history or sociology or even science, to our young, augment their infelicities and direct their errors with even more force.

Further the fears of the impending, even from the viewpoint of overcrowding, food, disease, greatly aided by Aids and immorality, which can lacerate the pocket of any democratic society, and radiation, both actual and impending irradiates the race, whether in body or in mind, the fears being the more feasible when nations erode and erupt into ever new tiny bits, and terrorists of yesteryear adorn Parliaments. This too is just as in Luke 21:26, with "men's hearts failing them for fear".
 
 

B) EDUCATIONAL

The teaching has already been mentioned, is attested both in fact (That Magnificent Rock Ch.8) and in prospect (Lead Us Not into Temptation) in many places. (See Youth, Education in Indexes.)

Its impact on the young (SMR pp. 125ff.), and on those who in due course are no longer so young, but no less contaminated by pseudo-science witlessly masquerading as if knowledge (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1, and A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3), has been traced at great detail on this site. Our present point is this: it is as PREDICTED. The "disobedient to parents", "unthankful", "unholy" elements shout from the streets, call from the class-rooms, while in New York the gun in the corridor expresses the level of social dissolution, attested in schools.

The outcry in Kansas because they made an exceedingly mild law to inhibit a little the religion of evolutionism from swaggering monopoly is itself an adequate testimony to the gravity of the disease, being officially administered to the young (Creation Magazine Dec. Feb. 2000, p. 8)... The breed of disloyal and unthankful, disobedient and without natural affection (II Timothy 3:3) implies a loosening of kinship ties, and what goes with it. No longer the pattern of propriety, but with errant affections loose, there is soon to be found (as expounded in Romans 1:21-32), that perversity not only of temperament in wilfulness, but of morals, sexually or other, which is a major component of the abstruse rebellion of our time. The young age, and the Age ages with them.

The point is simply that this aspect of family, morals, education, aggravation, intemperance is THE code word for the times, at the moral and structured level. This is what it had to be; this is what it is.

But while on education, it may prove beneficial to survey some scenes of practical kind. These, excerpted with minor editing from News 51, and adapted, follow in indented format. After all, it is useful to be able to show that those who live in a godly way, MUST suffer persecution, and that one's information is not merely by reading of things! As a Christian, one is a laboratory of the love of God, the truth of the Lord, and with whatever sundry imperfections, one should be able to indicate something of the RESULTS in a practical way, which ILLUSTRATE and VERIFY the principles which one proclaims, which indeed are from the Bible and which the Lord pronounces. Below there is a part of the various elements in this work, which do just this (inset).

If never was so much owed by so many to so few is one side of recent history in England; here rarely was so much credulity forced on so many young human beings by so small a percentage of the population, with such manifest obeisance to a philosophy at once vacuous and irrational.

Such however is and has long been the froth of frivolity of thought, which has been like a party paraphernalia, where custom rules and the magnificent and impenetrable perfections of the result of scientific method applied to the evidence, are systematically refused. Its very perfection seems to create offence. That is about as near to creation as some of the obstructionists will come. If it is not always so, it is always interesting to hear of an exception to the trend at any University.

An excellent but intriguing example came in Monash University, some years ago, reported in the Press, in which a Medical Lecturer decried the high percentage of 1st year medical students who did NOT believe in what is in fact an unscientific philosophy, called organic evolution. Intelligent students! If after all the endless propaganda, by repetition and assumption shown on TV and appearing in the Press, they had not bowed to this irrational idol, there was an independence of thought that might well bring credit to the medical profession. However, ungrateful, the lecturer bemoaned his plight, and falsified as rather customary, the state of the case.

The author found in Sydney University a Lecturer who advised any student in his course, who did not believe in this fantasy, though he did not use this accurate term, to 'jump in the lake'. Beneficial as such an exercise might be to the travailing student, its academic relevance was rather harder to define.

Again, as noted elsewhere, when lecturing in Communications in what is now a University in S.A., the author gave organic evolution, with many reasons, as an example of what scientific method is not, in its selection over other approaches. This was done in order to warn of illicit thinking and improper understanding of the observational, factual basis for such theories, as distinct from a philosophic poseur approach, in which 'science' is made the mother of imagination. It was to be a challenge to thought, and an opportunity for discovery, a stretching out of information often suppressed, allowing students the luxury of liberty and scope for understanding, so that ignorance would not be their guide, or mere propaganda their inheritance.

The place of imagination is great; but it is NOT in this sphere, to create the facts; and then interpret what is so created. It is rather to proceed with the deliberate dignity of scientific method and to assess the result. Facts are before, not after theories; and results are found, not propounded!

Hauled up to explain my position, I explained that some things which had been challenged were of a type best answered at student option out of Class, as had been the case; but that in Class the need to use such examples (of scientific method)  was important. They had with restraint and care been presented, and any error in the process should (in effect) be documented! Without that, how could this differ from a divergence from academic integrity, that it be suppressed!

In so important a phase of communications, it was imperative that students arise from the pit of mere cultural conformity, to think for themselves. If an example of misuse of scientific method in the grasp of current culture and contemporary desire, could be examined, one of wide appeal and vast propagation, then this was in the interests of the students to examine.

The BEST case, the most impactive, arresting, was not something lightly to disregard, as a matter of teaching method. In a University, where presumably truth  and knowledge had some position, I indicated, there was no room, not even possibly, for entrenched prejudice. Such was shown, it was explained, in the tertiary body's own treatment of this topic of creation elsewhere. What balance was there to be found in this! Only one monopolistic approach to such a topic was permitted ? This would be disastrous, when it did not even meet scientific method criteria. I Challenge was presented for an indication of error on my part, for a disestablishment of what was presented. None came. It was "inconvenient" to have me proceed in this way. Logic played no part, as is usual, in answer to me in such cases, whether as student or lecturer, in such cases.

Never can I recall that anything remotely resembling reason appeared in that cultural conditioning process, which often appears instead of lecturing, but bearing the same name, when challenge has been permitted. Nor has the situation been essentially different elsewhere, or from any who in turn, have been encouraged to challenge my own presentations in free University discussion situations or elsewhere. The truth is ineradicable by the most brilliant minds; after all, it fashioned them at the first! Further, the Lord of His word is alive and powerful (cf. Luke 21:15 - where an irresistible "mouth and tongue" against "your adversaries" in the faith is proffered by the Lord).

Such opportunity to continue my Lecturing without the scope for wisdom was as unattractive as unreasonable, and could only be rejected, once the current needs were met in examinations. Shackled with illogical and unethical bonds, unable to evoke truth, a social convenience, what a fiasco that would be,  as trite and trivial as insipid soup, a soul sale in which I for one could not participate, a denial of student needs for which I could have no sympathy.

'Inconvenient'! Also inconvenient, it appears, is any answer to several challenges to debate at Adelaide University, made to Staff or Student Body; and activated over years of offering in The Truth and Life Club, to whom some came, but where none could overthrow the simple proposition that Almighty God is, and has revealed His word in one only authoritative declaration, the Bible, for mankind. None came near to doing so.

Moreover, the presentation made in the presentation was to the effect that this proposition, this statement was demonstrable. We must try to remember that not so long ago, such a presentation at a school or university would not have seemed at all strange. Ad hominem and so invalid attacks have rained like hail; but there has been no logical answer on any common ground, though by now, debate, writing and attendance have all been offered to Adelaide University. The same 'tenderness' was found in a Shadow Minister of Education, who, having asked for some re-writing for him,  of an opprobrious and jejune Departmental Circular (by our deputation which waited on him), and having himself declined debate as unable  ("I can't argue with you!"), then ignored the material sent. Nor, moreover, did he alter the official errors and evils when he became Minister, neither die he curb the State's religious pronunciamento, dictation and direction.

This, then,  was in contrast with his initial position, in which  at first he showed some readiness, merely failing to reply when the work which he requested was presented to him in writing.
So silence shrouds the darkness, and no light appears for many. How crucial at such a time is a faithful church! Yet when you consider the courtesy and construction of this woeful chaos of words versus needs, it is no meagre thing. It is a gross failure to meet challenge, and then, to act according to the step proposed. It is as if a vast paralysis occurs, when reason invades the dark sanctums of doctrinally directive silence!

(End of adapted excerpt. If you want more such testimony it is available at Scoop of the Universe51, and the immediate context continues on pp. 249ff., and this takes you into the secondary school level for this phenomenon, with no less drama and decisiveness.)
 

Education is not merely slanted: it is on precipitous terrain; and its manner is as far from objective as was the fire of Rome. Such is the trend, only the gods invented changing. Meanwhile, the true God predicted just such constraints and ideological insistences; and as He said, so they come. To the point, this is the extreme reaching even into what is reputedly FREE and democratic: there is little left that is not tarred with the blackness of social control, be it academically or politically enforced. It is precisely in such a milieu as this, that the Bible depicts the end of the Age in Revelation 13:4, 8-10, 15-16, when the trend thickens, and becomes concrete.
 
 

C) ECCLESIASTICAL

The failure of many churches, the dissolution of much that was stable and fine (as in Isaiah 33:6) into polluted remnants as of a remnant sale, in a fast-moving and ill-organised emporium, such that an Anglican archbishop can advise that in our times, it is no longer apt to insist that Christ is the only way to God ( Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 7 cf. allied departure, noted in Stepping out for Christ Chs. 1 and 5, cf. 6, and more at the moral level in The Frantic Millenium and the Peace of Truth Ch. 1 as also in Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Ch. 3): this has been largely treated on this site. Again the failure of Lutheranism in large measure to keep pace even with the early flushes of reformation in Luther, is notorious (cf. News 88) , and if not amusing, as apt to the case of the history of that body, as is the amorphous in the crystalline, and a broken wing in an aircraft supposed to lift a rocket body to its aerial launch (cf. for parallel data, Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 4 and The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 3). The Uniting Church is focussed in a similar regard in News 15 and 24.

For convenience, News 107 is reproduced below, to give the tang of the occasion, in that case. Yet it merely amplifies the action in the Uniting Church as noted in The Kingdom of Heaven (loc.cit.), in the Anglican and of course in the Presbyterian field abundantly in the USA in particular (where a major church is now looking into having homosexual pastors*2, and not for the first time). But to the Lutheran case in this country, let us now turn.

The forecast celebrations in Australia, of the apostate consensus on major
justification matters, between the Church of Rome and that of Luther, have now
happened (The Australian, May 29, 2000, p. 21). Talking of justice, the
announcement is just cause for mourning, that such a beginning in stepping out of
the quagmire of Romanism, as Luther was helped to make for this people, should
halt in this sinking slough of despond, nearly 500 years later.

For the full background see News 88, which took up the matter in some due detail,
when the forecast celebrations, and their occasion, were earlier in the news.

What aggravates this defeat of enlightenment in the second dark ages to be so
concentrated in the 21st century, while it lasts, and before the Lord Himself returns
(A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 18), is this report...

    Christians abiding in His word: do not be disappointed, discouraged or downcast about this
    disenchanting development!

    Rather, rejoice in this, that it is one more index to the fact that the TIME of His coming is
    NIGH as Christ depicts it in Luke 21:28 (and look back on 21:24, 21:10ff.). If these things
    did not happen, His coming would be further off, but now it is near.

    It is time to re-unite about the word of God, leaving past things to their place, and in accord
    with His words,  striving  towards the high mark of the calling in Christ,
    whom no can conquer, nor any pollution impair. In Him,  you can be restful in heart while
    energetic in spirit!

The broader coverage of such things occurs in such places as SMR pp. 686ff., 857ff., 844ff.. Some of the more personal aspects appear in Biblical Blessings Ch. 11, as in The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 7, pp. 123ff., and these similarly illustrate the vehemence with which anti-Biblical animus can be pursued, the more so when reason lacks. Here this figures simply as further attestation, added in placed, of the predicted trends. As was one of the author's joys at that time to reflect: if they did not (in the Church) assault the Bible, they would in the end falsify the Bible, for it declared that they would assault it. In so doing, however, they in fact merely verify it; and the more reason lacks, the better is the verification (cf. I Timothy 4).

The Bible pointedly attests this grave phase of degeneration of the church, Biblically assessed, in such passages as II Thessalonians 2, II Peter 1 and Matthew 24;24. Notice that it is FROM AMONG YOU, that Peter indicates, the plague will come.
 
 

D) THEOLOGICAL

The above references in SMR also cover some of this aspect, with suitable indications and examples.

The CHURCH is increasingly subverted (that part of it which is falsified, not the true and enduring one against which the gates of hell will not prevail - Matthew 16). The articulation of this subversion in theology is one of the dynamics of the putsch. The panzer divisions of false theology noted in these references are as conspicuous as the actual fall of the structure of the churches.

Thus in a good illustration, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Presbyterian Church US, for the first time refused the duly nominated professorship for Princeton of a claimant, one Dr Machen. His staunch adherence to the Bible was at issue, and his articulate defence of it in public interchange in the press was famous. Princeton did not want to retain the Bible in its former role as sole source of doctrine, as illustrated by the circumstance that it did not in fact do this. This naturally occurred in teaching appropriate to such a view. Machen therefore insisted that if missionaries were to be sent abroad for the gospel, the gospel was what  they must preach, and not the false doctrine being promulgated. His own missionary society was founded to ensure this, and this led to a cleavage and his dismissal, just as there was a refusal of his full Professorship, despite his nomination.

Hence the church concerned proceeded till the Confession of 1967 indicated its relativistic and non-doctrinal move towards theological agnosticism: clear  Biblical teaching being relegated to the role of theory. In this way, doctrine preceded, but so did attenuation of the Biblical doctrine, since the Assembly had allowed Auburn confession adherences, earlier, to have success in NOT requiring minimal doctrinal subscription in ministers. Orthodox sounding people said they would hold doctrine, but that to insist on this in others was intrusive.

Thus the church tottered. Then it split, just as doctrine was also officially made remote from authority, of a Biblical kind, splitting off from that like a splinter. It was the 'CHURCH' which decided these things; but the church of the Lord Jesus Christ has HIS words, not its own; and indeed even He did not teach His OWN doctrine, as He said (John 12:48-50), but what His Father gave Him. Gave ? 'Commanded'. Also commanded is Biblical morality, which not unexpectedly, has begun significant and almost incredible decline in other pulpit aspects, in this case! (Cf. SMR pp. 704-705, and from p. 699 for things germane. The most recent developments in the Presbyterian Church US are still more amazing at the same level. (One feature nowadays to be found is an ecclesiastical approach with reticence simply reaching to terminology of same sex 'marriage' as distinct from other approaches; nor is it necessary to travel abroad to find such a thing. Delinquency at the ecclesiastical level, from the Biblical heights, is now reaching below the Dead Sea, and alas, how doubly dead is the departure from the faith once for all delivered to the saints - Jude 1-3, cf. News 43, 88).

It was to HIS words that one had to abide (Matthew 7, John 14:21-23), and if one did not, then this merely signified departure from the love of Him. The love of God does not at all exclude His mouth! How then would you abide in His word if it were on vacation! But as it is prescribed, so it is enabled; and the church prescribed what it would, and proscribed the Biblical basis. With doctrine clashing like cymbals, and the structure falling like a lava flow, the progress was from laxity to licence, licence to fall, and fall to new doctrines, which after the fall, made their own way further, like a burst dam flowing down a small valley, and then, having done this, issuing onto the highways and byways.

Similarly, the World Lutheran Federation, having for many years broken the commandment (Romans 16:17 and see Separation, Ch. 7 in The Kingdom of Heaven) concerning AVOIDING heretical company, fellowship, and hence having in this very thing,  debased doctrine, was weakened as a CHURCH in the process. This weakening led on to the formulation that they basically agreed on justification by faith, with Romanism, even thought the Biblical notation is specifically condemned in Roman formal teaching (cf. SMR pp. 1042-1088H, esp. 1045 ). Theological is gaining new ambivalence, while clear abhorrence for Biblical teaching becomes irrelevant, because of the felicity of phrasing. In this way the dynamics of doom and the romance of words, building and beliefs, structure of church and structure of words, move as one, in forbidden alliance, and in increasingly free fall, they go down together.

There is warfare which must in all integrity and probity be waged;  and in this case, the error is as if one makes friends with one's enemy - not at all the same as loving them. Indeed, to love one's enemy, one can do no better than introduce him to his deliverer: not join him in rebellion from that necessary source of aid!

For further PERSONAL ILLUSTRATION and CONFIRMATION in actual life of these things, see Biblical Blessings Ch. 12. This has been as sharp and repetitive as one could wish in any experiment, and not at all lacking in two things: DRAMA and DELIVERANCE, for just as evil is being given its unleashed but not uncontrolled opportunity to SHOW ITS STUFF, so that all may wisely consider, and the Lord is vindicated by its actual awfulness, so the Lord is still in majestic control of the testings, and His triumphs as in the resurrection, while not without suffering, are without parallel. One MUST praise the Lord because HE IS faithful. Such faithfulness is ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL, and in Him, it is also wonderful because of His eminence, His grand holiness and unending beauty, who never declines, has never begun and brings things to their alpha and their omega, knowing both from the beginning, before our serial time, where one WAITS for it, had even begun.

There is indeed a spiritual warfare, and one must learn to love one's enemies and realise that the underlying enemy of souls is he, the prince of this world, who afflicts those whose attacks one faces, for whose deliverance one also seeks, if by any means they too may be rescued.
 
 

E) MILITARY

This may seem a strange component for 'spiritual' things as some may deem them, but so it is. The war gears, fears and tears are at a summit these several decades, with nations being spawned and adorned with blood, as they strive, sometimes amid famine, with one another, with super-powers or with tribes, or against domination, or in order to achieve it, or for ideological purposes, or to prevent them, so that the world is fast becoming a garden of blood. The Bible indicates that not merely would there be a manifestation of war that would be symptomatic, but it would occur in a syndrome which would be infested with fear of the same and rumours as well.

This horrid trilogy is found now in the fullest measure, if not conceivable, at least for any but a profoundly stirred imagination.

For the super-race of man coming of Age it is a decisive refutation of grim humour, as is often found with vaunting pride, whether or not expressed, as here, in philosophic terms such as organic evolution and controlling it and other paranoid leaps without bound in either sense. Thus the words of Christ master history as usual, and it follows with the same degree of subservience, as man is showing in rebellion. The irony is this: the more he rebels, the more history is subservient to Christ, and the more man is himself correctly predicted by Christ in the highest possible contrast with all 'developmental' dreams, as if things just ... did it of themselves. "And you will hear of wars and rumours of wars" - Matthew 24:6, while fear abounds just as shown it would do, in Luke 21.
 
 

F) PSYCHOLOGICAL


 


next generation with
 

The tearing of the fabric of the personality is accelerated by such delusive materialisms, mystical mistakes and the results are not hard to find. One such example appears in Scoop of the Universe 51, and the condition is articulated in some depth in Generation of the Dispossessed, Appendix 1 in Barbs, Arrows and Balms.

Meanwhile the new nurseries abound from TV and news alike, on "the flood of blood" as expressed in Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 84, which examines a news item on the saturation point of violence and blood which our last century has invested in this race.

These things all tend to work both interactively and cumulatively, so that mood swings are like common colds, tablet mentalities are always under construction, the millions of mental patients in the USA alone, are subjects of surveys and computations, and the energy of termination manifests itself with all the reality, which the dream worlds of the visionary mystics, wed to materialism and unknowables, with all the fervour and propaganda of the inarticulate (which yet speaks) declare, but are equally unable to find. The psyche begins to resemble a tornado in irons: the irons are very strong, but not very relevant. The answer of repentance in faith, by the Gospel of Christ, is a narrow way, and the way to destruction being broad, it is not normally taken; though millions take something parallel and bearing the name. This too is predicted (Matthew 24:24, II Peter 2:1ff.).
 

G) HEBRAIC
The Jews are back. It is as simple as  that.

No longer are they the wanderers of the nations. They were consigned to this from Deuteronomy 28ff.,  Leviticus 26, in terms of covenant breaking, finally breach in Christ's death (cf. Zechariah 11). They were to have their civilisation rampantly overturned (Daniel 9:27), their temple destroyed (Matthew 24), even till not stone on stone would stay. Then they are depicted in Luke 21:24 as having a time LIMIT to this ousting. They would be out until the 'times of the Gentiles' (a term no doubt reflecting the Gentile predictions of Daniel) were fulfilled. In other words, as in Romans 11, they had their innings and lost, and then the Gentiles had to have theirs (as in Isaiah 49:6), and lost (as in Matthew 24:6-13), except that as they are not ONE RACE, their BELIEVERS are distinguished from their UNBELIEVERS (as implied in Matthew 24:13) : "He who endures to the end will be saved."
 
 

H) CIVIC - special case of JERUSALEM

The Jews in fact now ARE BACK in Jerusalem, so the times of the Gentiles either are or are in the final touch of being fulfilled. As in Zechariah 12, 14, there had to be wars of enormous disproportionate for the Jews following their return, a return to post-date the resurrection (Zechariah 12:10), and the Jews had to win such wars. This has been done before our eyes in these last 40 odd years. Being back in Jerusalem has happened ONE time in the last 1900 or so years. It is not a dim or uncertain signal. It has happened. It had to happen. It is finished. The station is near the end of the line.  It is clearly marked. Ignore it at your peril.
 
 

I) VISUAL

Meanwhile, and in view of the flood of blood, this is a generation of horrible sights and scenes.

TV has ensured that, partly while they made the case for abandoning Vietnam to the joys of Communist murderers, along with neighbouring countries, which could not suffer, for the domino effect, as it was called, could not happen. They said so, the people who know, so that was why it had to be like that. It did not turn out like that, which shows you how easy it is for those who play god, to be shown to be of a different ... quality! In the Bible, there are prophecies innumerable in quality and detail; one is enough to dismiss it. There is not such a one. Note the difference.

But more relevantly at this point, note the fact that this all turns into a fulfilment likewise of "distress of nations with perplexity" (Luke 21:25), and "fearful sights" (Luke 21:11), which is not so surprising with the 'god of forces' in full sway (SMR 707ff., and see Index), immune to morals, full of morality, prone to preach, empty of spirituality.
 
 

J) SOCIAL

Accordingly, there is a social centrifugal force, tending to disperse, disrupt and destroy the peace and order of society, as illustrated so valiantly with the British soccer phenomenon, deemed so grave that even England, that former leader in much of morality, is threatened with national exclusion from the game. But it is not England alone, for German 'thugs' or addicts of violence or inordinate public displays are vying for the honour of the utmost expression.

The distress of nations, and men's hearts failing for fear in apprehension of the things to come, allied with the moral ditching already noted as in II Timothy 3's prediction, and the indoctrination with the tender mercies of survival of the fittest, in direct antithesis to the former teaching in England, for example: these things make for a social milieu so beautiful and glorious, that even the Pacific Islands, Fiji and the Solomon's, disturb their vaunted idylls, to disrupt their rulers, disperse their order and lose their reputation no small amount. Unemployment helps society to ruminate on its intense wisdom without God, as it proceeds with other things in mind, manufacturing inter alia, the mindless mischiefs of desperation, disturbed hearts and frustrated wills.

It is NOT ONLY the physical and the medical which are to stretch society to breaking point: it is likewise the moral, the behavioural and the violent. Thus indeed, if those times were not shortened, the WORLD OF MAN would not continue. "Because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold" - Matthew 24:12. Note for the moment however, that LAWLESSNESS is to ABOUND. It even reaches to the behaviour of children to parents, and parents to children, many of whom they will betray one another as they often did in World War II (cf. Luke 21:16), and of course this is only one case: "you will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death" - Luke 21:16.

The symptoms are there, are mounting in gravity, and the social temperature is rising, as it had to do.
 
 

K) The IDEOLOGICAL

Natural affection as we noted from the prediction of II Timothy 3, being low, the families being components of society, and education being ideologically invasive, debasing and pushed with the full putsch propulsion of propaganda (mounting to the predicted climax of Revelation 13:14-17): there is an aura of intrusive manipulation. In China, on one occasion, Time magazine dealt with the interesting phenomenon of loud speakers even in rural areas, to ensure that the mind was ... activated in the desired route.

In more and more countries, freedom of speech is quite real, so long as you do not wish your head to remain in close association with your body. In other places, like Government schools in South Australia, it is your head in close association with your education, possible salary, 'success' and academic advancement which is in question. This divorce from truth is more subtle, but in its way, as brazen as the fallen woman, practising her charms under licence, as is now the move for such things; for this step is merely  reflecting its principial and long practised base in the spiritual and educational follies which misdirect the young, divorce them from liberty and educate them in a social and ideological milieu too grotesque to dwell on, but not too unapparent to escape detection and just rebuke (see That Magnificent Rock Ch. 8 for appalling detail).

But whether it be by seduction, miseducation, mistraining, chains on thought, authoritarian political intrusion, denial of scientific method by making theory not fact the starting point, or excluding views not desired by feverish authoritarian fiat instead by due debate, and installing what endures, after that:
the result is the same. The ideology of debasement rules; the prince of this world is swaggering in the enormity of his delusions and many follow as if iron was in their hearts instead of flesh, and a magnetic field instead of due thought, were their instruction. It is as Christ indicated (John 14:30) and predicted (Matthew 24:11-14,24).

It is becoming increasingly clear, that there is more than a mere national establishment, barren in logic, evanescent in life, propagandising in tone, controlling in mode, intrusive in platform, projecting the surreal image of the beast. It is an international assemblage of ideological cohesion, irrational, irrelevant and fanciful in the realm of facts and scientific method, which infects and invests universities, schools and mass media. (Cf. Mystery of Iniquity, Appendix I in The Other NewsThat Magnificent Rock Ch. 1 with Barbs, Arrows and Balms  5, Appendix 1, Joyful Jottings  5 and 14, and SMR pp. 727ff., 732Bff., 750Bff.). This is nothing to be concerned about, for it is predicted in type and power; and indeed the climax of Rev. 13 is precisely the nature of the culminating case to which we churn; but, for all that,  it is something to ACT AGAINST, for the Bible is perfectly clear about that :

 

 

If you are not burned (as some missionary children were with their father), or imprisoned (for daring to speak against Muhammad or whoever - maybe, Stalin, as in the case of Solzhenitsyn, though it was ... only for a decade or so), or hunted (like the youthful Chinese leader), then perhaps you may be turned. The reported cases of evolutionary doctrine being required or a post lost ... or at least no sustained criticism, have been noted earlier, as also the case of the author in his own lecturing program (as in Questions and Answers 7, pp. 72ff.). While the point is closely related to the EDUCATIONAL one, it is not identical.

The ideological basis and bias is as strong as a dark gospel of evil, and is pushed with passion that will know no contradiction. Facts become irrelevant and hopes become the substance of the philosophy, which, though always dashed, continue to arise like odour from sewers. This, mingled with the blood and cruelty, slaughter and ends being justified by means, means meanness is in the ascendant for millions. The ideology is its own commentator. It sometimes adds for us, as shown in Lead us Not into Educational Temptation, its own formulations and even codifies them. This is convenient, but not necessary, as the codes begin to appear when the radio, TV, lecturer, teacher, news caster all join in a voice of thunder, signifying the same ludicrous myth, like obsessive, compulsive religious deviationists, intent on 'converting' some poor people who are not yet 'hooked'.

On this topic, it may prove instructive to specialise a little, and to review some of the ideological compulsions which obtain, the standards of naturalistic orthodoxy, but equally, the nadir of logic, the downfall of science and the advance of beast-ideology, effectively (whether or not in name) making the world stand on its head, and then removing the head.

Shortly, we shall consider many things from Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming ... Ch. 5, from end-note 1 in this respect. It will be available in our Appendix to this, our present Chapter. The different type-face will be left, in order to make it easier to distinguish the excerpt from the rest of the text of this chapter, and there is an indent, further to identify this largely imported section, from the source just noted. (You may then wish also to consult Models and Marvels Ch. 7, in That Magnificent Rock, esp. Section E, which brings in more detail again in this fascinating excursion into intellectual and spiritual pathology, so distinctive of, as predicted for our times.)

Here we see a conspicuous example of false knowledge being claimed with such a clamorous and contemptuous certainty, in the face of scientific reality, that the ignorance - scientifically - of


as blusteringly and bucolically asserted with false assurance,
 

What is found is that this arrogance plethora of assumptions is merely a technical parallel to the other arrogances of the flesh, which despise what is clear and confuse what is known with what is not, to the destruction of truth, if it were possible, just as it was to the nailing of Christ (cf. Repent or Perish 7). In this case, as in all in science, what is not known is best left in that category; whilst what is known, is better left to declare its integrity, than become subject to the schemas of assumption and the dilemmas of self-contradiction.

As to what IS known, in all simplicity and directness, the multitude of processes attest a relatively young earth; and the multiplicity of ignorances attest things so varied in so much so often, that it is almost a joke to compare the finality of the flourishes with the virtual infantility of the assumptions needed to gain them and the contradictions obtained when they are gained.

So man, once again, ignoring the obvious, and trumpeting what he does not know, ends in a turmoil of sophisticated confusion, to which any the scribes who sought to trap Jesus, might lend their admiration.

However, as we have seen and shall review in the Appendix added, the facts remain.

Degradation of energy, diminution of information in living creatures and non-formulation of new information sources and new creation, together with enormous clarity in numerous fields on the stricken youthfulness of this earth, are merely one side of the equation. On the other there is the degradation of morals, of churches, the infestation of the gospel with moronic and other pseudo-angelic, quasi-scriptural substitutes precisely as predicted with such a time (cf. SMR pp. 837ff., 857ff., 864ff.). With this, is the insertion of JUST that sort of ignorant and unwieldy scorn for the REALITY of the Creator's power and the factuality of its exercise negatively in the universal terrestrial flood which was predicted for the end of the Age epoch to Timothy by Paul, and to all  (II Timothy 3, II Peter 2, II Peter 3 - see L below ), in the revelation of Paul to the Thessalonians (II Thess. 2) and the scenario of Christ's own lips (Matthew 24), and

As the call of lust in immorality and perversion, socially, politically, sexually, psychologically and spiritually fulfils its ancient plans, as predicted by the Lord, and the confusion in pseudo-science with its ever new expressions of anguish*2A and bluster mixed continue, so the simple fact of the return of the Creator, the Word Incarnate, God manifest in the flesh continues, like a smoke alarm, on its step by step way.

Now read first the Appendix below , at the end of this chapter, for the verification, validation and information relating to the above, and if your appetite is not sated, then Ch. 7 E of That Magnificent Rock.

You have finished this ? Then you may reflect...

v           Ideologically, this is the way it is,
and that is the way it is predicted to become. This attests that: this condition is one more part of that syndrome, and that is the index to His coming ... soon.

v           But let us turn now from mere age and creation outset,  to intensity and development in this ultimately spiritual field of the earth, its history and its coming history.
 

 
L ) MANDATORY MYTHS

THE CHARACTER OF RELIGIOUS CULTURE,
NOW NEAR THE END, WHEN,
CREATION, FINISHED, and its PRODUCTS PASSING,
the SUPERNATURAL SELECTION BY GRACE COMES TO ITS CULMINATION THROUGH THE GOSPEL, in a WEARIED WORLD.

1) The Predicted Situation

muqos is the Greek term of interest to us here, found in II Timothy 4:3. The time - "the time will come". In II Timothy 3 we have already in parallel exposure (like a pair of  X-ray plates, developed from different angles, of the chest, here cancerous) seen the reference to "the last days", when there will be "perilous times" and have considered the interstices.

These in II Timothy 4 are very similar. The time will come, when what ?

When the fruit is ripe, when the plucking is near, then: "the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have  itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers, and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to myths" -
II Tim. 4:3-4 (emphasis added).

This is just as II Peter 2 tells us, in terms of "damnable heresies" from many who would arise, in the church's own midst! For example, the onset of organic evolutionary teaching into the seminaries of many major denominations, not to say church schools, has been so intense as to be virtually assumed, one Sydney RC body being governmentally reported as preferring to teach this in their schools, in order to reduce shock when they leave them (cf. That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 8, where the Circular to Principals of South Australia, is analysed - and this is part of its 'testimony')!

What of this ? It is hardly the testimony of the giants of courage, the zealots of truth, not at all what would have won the Battle of Britain: and of course, the pope has made his peace with Darwin, just as the follies of the latter's theories (as shown in That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1 and SMR Ch.2 et al.) have reached the very climax of exposure as unvalidated scientific guesswork, imposture and intrusion of ill-disciplined philosophy! Hence they writhe and squirm and suggest 'other' ways, which similarly, are already past, mere tags for events which they neither begin nor proceed to explain. In fact, these like other myths are closely related to magic. Let us consider their definition.

MYTH has been defined in SMR p. 252I, as "the imagination of result without adequate cause, for the satisfaction of desire". Such has organic evolution been exposed to be in the references noted, with emphatic and continual detail to match. Similarly the estrangement from the word of God is such that in vehemence (cf. Biblical Blessing 11, SMR pp. 1082ff.) and all but pervasively, religious and irreligious bodies alike, cast it from them.  (As to that, the Anglican situation in Australia is merely ONE highly dramatic example at the top level! and it is readily paralleled with Lutheran and other basic movement cf. Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 7 with News 99 and A Question of Gifts Section 6 STEP 5, pp. 249ff., STEP  1 4, News 107).

Accordingly,  this is the PREDICTION, and it is predicted to be so pervasive and powerful a psychological slant, that the general character of the time is indicated in terms of "they will not endure". This was thus  to be the nature of major churches as in II Peter, and major civic organisations like universities; and this is now fulfilled. As such, by its very DEGREE and PENETRATION, it is one of the testimonies of the approaching return of Christ. To be sure, such vagrant theories are in acute logical discomfort; they change like clothes in a coal mine. Yet the social sway, of these alienations and myths alike, is in inverse proportion to their logical validity: for the former is vast and the latter is non-existent.

This therefore is a perfect match, prediction to performance. In what then would the 'myth' consist in the context of Paul ? In the RELIGIOUS domain, in competition with sound doctrine. And in what would this consist ? In inventing (as Christ indicated in Matthew 24:24), other gods, other christs, other prophets, therefore other perspectives, views trivialising God and investing trivia with grandeur, and in view of the nature of decline in man, whether in the Jewish time or the present, the parallel to worshipping the CREATION rather than the CREATOR (as Paul spells out the basic syndrome in Romans 1:25). It is moreover in the type of II Peter 3, already investigated in this chapter, with its emphasis, both specialised and specific, on mockery of the flood and the personal intervention of God, in creation and judgment.

Intemperate, it is derisory, dismissive, soigné, sophisticated in jaundiced disdain and inveterate implacability. Thus 1) its nature 2) its widespread incidence and 3) its quality are predicted with admirable precision and punctilious care. He whose care is for us, has cared enough to show His care not in thin air, but in a non-rotting body on the one hand in the resurrection, and in a rotting body, on the other, in the decay of much that, having left the Lord but not the name, stinks to high heaven! Body odour for the unwashed may not be blameworthy; but when a bathroom is refused, it is another matter. So more also is it, when life is refused, and the sallow odour of corruption enters into mere wilfulness of desire. It is worse when the name above all names is adventitiously employed, almost as if a play-thing. It is not wise to so use the name of the Lord in vain, as the book of Jude superabundantly attests!... yet it is not superabundant for those who will not listen.

Further, the total fulfilment of these things IN SIMULTANEOUS profligacy and company with all the rest is marvellous to behold, directive as to diagnosis. Its impact:  the coming of Christ is near. What makes it the more staggering is specifically the sense of NECESSITY, of DRUG ADDICTIVE TYPE OBSESSION, which is to accompany this reaching into myth: cynicism vying with scepticism, while mockery is here as much a behavioural mode as is blinking the eyes, when one is in bright light!

Thus they are unable to "endure" sound teaching. First, there is total incapacity, as in a drunkard. Second, there is the sense of UTTER INTOLERANCE of teaching, provided only it is sound. It is an all but comic compulsion to receive the objectionable, and dismiss the true. Indeed, this is so precisely what we ourselves have found as to make it practically straight out of our diaries!

Let us now contrast these spiritual vortices with the factual realities, in overview at the most basic level.
 
 

2) The Picture in Actual Overview

Nature and the word of God express in unison, and with deliberate constancy, the exact opposite, as does likewise all experience (SMR Chs. 1-3, That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1, Ch.8, pp. 252ff.)

In reality, the universe does not answer to these who like the rulers of Sodom, add field after field to their conflict with nature. As to the latter, they even lusted after angels, in their abuse of the supernatural and preoccupation with nature - Genesis 19:1-5, and the two go handsomely together, like a drawfed couple, underfed and underprivileged, delighting in each other (cf. Romans 1:19ff.). Here the tie-up of these joint evils is clearly depicted, and the reason for their being so often found as twins...
 

Thus whole denominations either dabble or immerse themselves in organic evolution, and homosexual proclivities alike, sometimes for pulpit wear. Moreover, governments rival or possibly surpass Sodom, in making it an offence to be concerned whether perverted employes appear on the pay-roll, or not; and preferably, would like in many cases to inflict such things on the Christian organisations, as if Communists should BY LEGISLATION have been required to serve in the White House, by legislation, during the Cold War. THIS! it is the finesse of corruption.

Not, however, in the tedium of the trivial have these grand and supervised creations of incandescent brilliance been performed, nor does the articulated record so attest. Nor is it in abuse of the Creator or His creations or their functions, that glory is to be found.

Blind matter has not invented cogitation, nor has purpose 'arisen' from this purpose built product.
The 'handling' of our affairs is as clear in logical necessity as in evidential attestation.

Thus, for example, the Canyon is not merely the monument to catastrophe, but as we shall see, much more. It is however eloquent in attesting the vast forces required for the River to

bullet cut directly through a most extensive plateau instead of simply moving around it,
 
bullet erode and cut deep into enormous terrains, leaving only sample heights, such as buttes,
 
bullet move boulders of huge weight in their course for good distances, as if they were stones, 
 
bullet burrow hard into bedrock, traverse limestone segments
with the precision and sense of incision of a knife (cf. Austin, op.cit. p. 68), and
 
bullet settle disparities into strata, with the reckless seeming profusion of  of enormous power,
without either leaving evidence of time (supposed to exist between the disparities)
in suitable pitting and erosion between the surfaces, or even more deeply eroding
the anterior section of the river  (Austin, op.cit. pp. 42ff, 47, 48, 77ff. ,84ff., 98ff.).

Efforts more generally to explain sedimentary and marine deposits 'misplaced' repeatedly, as also found in Grand Canyon rocks, imply stress and strain so great that their comparative absence evidentially, for the vast plain and relatively undisturbed flat surfaces often  left in various environments, is all but comic. At the small and minute, as likewise at the large and expansive likewise, at the lowest of levels as at the highest of created testimonies in matter, causality is not so mocked. It mocks back with incisive bite, and true contempt (SMR Ch. 3, Repent or Perish Ch. 7).

Accordingly, in this vast Canyon, the "underfit" of gradualistic mechanisms, and invisibility of implicated deposits from their proposed erosive mechanisms are fatal to the credibility of that approach. Morris (The Genesis Flood, pp. 150ff., 180ff., 209) similarly in other locations indicates the necessities of vast forces and direct laying down of the numerous exceedingly extensive  sedimentary deposits of the earth, and so often, moreover, the abrupt appearance of 'older' on 'younger' domains of rock, with no coherent indications of method, other than direct.

What else then is found in the Canyon ? Evidence both cohesive and consistent, for post deluge breach of once existing capacious lakes, resulting in an enormous drainage system with eloquent relicts (Cf. Austin, op. cit. Ch. 5). Yet it speaks far more than even this.

Austin's multiply authored treatise - rather more than a symposium - shows carefully  and with acute consideration, the evidence both of creation strata and their deluge denotation, with attestation of mighty deposits provided, not with the interfaces of gradualism, but the abrupt tectonics of suddenness. Fossils come without the not-so-sweet dream of gradual 'improvements', but with the torrential suddenness of deposition, types intact,  resistant to the end to gradual improvement no less than to gradual burial or gradual arrival of the utter technical brilliance which in fact is indicated from the very early  times (by conventional geology), in the fascinating symbolic wonders of the DNA and related structures in the living cell.

Nilsson in not dissimilar vein (as in SMR p. 245) showed the out of place deposition of numerous massed fossils, drawn from all over the world, and settled in deep beds. The fossils arrive, world-wide, rather like the post-war remains of Berlin, glamour and sophistication and rubble alike, abundantly attested, with oddments from various lands: alteration of mode not so visible as merely variation of model. Transitions were on holiday, located only in the inventive mind of man (cf. Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 353-354, That Magnificent Rock Ch.8, pp. 252ff.).  The interfaces both of function and stratification tend to be abrupt. Creation and disaster have that quality.

Amazingly ''early' come the elaborately ingenious eye of the trilobite, even evidences of pollen (Austin, op.cit. pp. 137ff.). We read indeed:

"... evidences of higher plants have been reported elsewhere from "Cambrian",
or from strata beneath the "Cambrian". Fossils of vascular plants have been
documented in strata conformably overlain by early Cambrian strata
in the
Salt Range in Punjab, India, and in the Middle Cambrian of eastern Siberia14."

·       These things occur as though they had never heard of organic evolutionism, so that the whole ugly deception is laid bare, as if by a better probe than that to Mars. This one, moreover, in the Canyon case, is excavated already. Neither the Darwin-refuting theory of punctuated equilibrium, nor the frolics of Darwin himself, can account - far less, logically - for the joint evidence of creative profusion, effusion, efflux into rock strata which, as indifferent to these theories as to all human pretension, layer themselves with abrupt and 'misplaced' configurations, immune to relevant weathering that did not happen, as to 'steps' which were not needed in the launching of the already mature realms of vigorously abundant created kinds, and in the deluge of judgment on the earth.

·       As we find (Austin op.cit. Ch. 7, pp. 148-9), the architectural diversity came suddenly, not in lines of accumulated littleness, but in itself first, a kind, only then followed by the proliferation of species.


In other words, to use that author's terms, disparity preceded diversity, so that the concept, however 'sudden' as in punctuated equilibrium, is reversed. The DESIGN comes in comparative fewness, and then the VARIATIONS come in comparative abundance. Even magic has its limits, and an architect in absentia is not helped by having his main designs appear before the supposed doodlings which inspired matter to do without him in a way many a householder would be thrilled to behold, and likewise his bank manager.

Nothing works! Not even magic. It is necessary to return from the fiction of pretence and pretension, to the power of God, from insufficiency to sufficiency, from causative, conceptual, formal and functional absence, to its presence, in order to gain what you have, find what you discover and enable what you 'possess'.

In a way, it is rather like the apology theory concerning aborigines in various countries: they were here first, so they OWN the land, which they however did not create. This does nothing to reduce any atrocities performed, or mercy required; but it does illustrate the extent of the myth, as if occupancy constitutes ownership, while possession in its 'justice' is compared to creation! Creation of land ? It is ignored, like modesty, in bikinis.

So in his racial imagination as a whole, it is the same in pretension.

Man 'OWNS' God's creation, as a race, and has 'right' to dispose of it; as if God Himself had not provided the whole instrument of habitation, and the cogitation powers as well, not to mention that existence of mankind so that they might be, the most advanced design by far ever seen with these mortal eyes (cf.SMR pp. 113-116, 211, 224, 252E-G).

The most notable of these situations concerns the Jews, where the ONE who DID make the organised magnificences and masterpieces of the universe, DID assign to a nation, under certain conditions, and with certain eventuations, a piece of land which all the world seems intent of compromising, either driving them out, or making them so minuscule in their possessions, that it is a comedy!

God has other ideas, and has shown it with His usual precision, in our own life times (cf. SMR Ch. 9), since both the return of the Jews and their restoration to a Jerusalem lusted after by the world, are UNCONDITIONAL (cf. SMR Appendix A and Ch. 9, from the outset).

They have similarly happened, unconditionally. As in science, ignoring the attestation does nothing to remove it. It was planned as an exhibit, statedly so, by the will of God; and comes in the same way (cf. Ezekiel 37:28, Isaiah 41,48). Proposed as a test, it is invested in factual history, as a test product; and duly appears. It is not possible to over-emphasise the fact that this is always the case with the word of God. For millenia, it is the same. In things great and small, it is the same; in things personal and impersonal, it applies as always.

Thus God has also employed His power, that with which He created the universe and raised His only begotten Son from the dead (cf. SMR Ch.6, Stepping out for Christ Ch. 5, Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium Chs.  5,  6 ); so that precisely what He said, is what has happened in this racial case, as in all other matters of which he has spoken. The power with which the universe works (which had to be created since nothing has no resources, and eternity is not the nature of the expendable) : this is the same as that with which the word of God works. God CAN speak; and things DO happen as He says. This is that other science, genuine, authentic and uncorrupted, which like the true form of our own science, watches reality and consorts with facts. It is indeed, even more testable than is material science, since the thing which is to happen is stated, and then happens. It is first pronounced, and then performed. It is explicit, it is eloquent; it is invariable.
 


 

 

 

 

To the Jews the free simplicity of the faith (cf. I Corinthians 1:23, Romans 10:1ff.) was a 'stumbling block', as to the philosophic Greeks (cf. Acts 17), it appeared to be foolishness. Nevertheless, this user-friendly grace of the Gospel of Christ is "the power of God and the wisdom of God" (I Corinthians 1:24).
 

 

 


 

 

(For a development of the sheer pretension of the myth, in its various phases and viral-like assaults, see such sites as

SMR pp. 374-385, 252Hff., 422Eff.,

A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3, 7,

That Magnificent Rock Chs.1 and 8, not least, pp. 252ff.,

The Kingdom of Heaven Chs. 8 and 10 - Sections A,   B and   C,

Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium Ch. 4,

and myth , man and meaning, in SMR Index.)
 
 

3) II Peter 3 with I Timothy 4 have a joint and special message into the midst of this vainly creative mess, the myths of the 20th century, now the amoral flood of the 21st that inundates the young with the debris of the old.

II Peter 3 therefore provides in its celestial scope, a rapid traversal from the comedy of those ignoring the Sovereign of symbols who both made the ingenious array of them in their bodies, and the soaring capacity to organise them in their minds, as well indeed, as their unadmirable facility to misuse the same in their spirits, to the end.

What do these mockers mock ? the beginning. What do they trivialise ? the end. This is the standard way of errant and erratic youth: it would ignore its parents as far as may be, and dream into mere abstraction, both the rigour of reality and the appointed end of folly.
 

Thus Peter in II Peter 3, depicts the mockers of the beginning, who despise the end;
and then depicts the end which is not distressed by their mockery,
but comes in any case.

This, the word of God (cf. I Peter 1:10-11,22, II Peter 1:21, I Cor. 2:9-13) presents accordingly, not only a rebuke to high-flown fancy and intellectual rebellion, exposing the logical irrelevance of the inept mockery of reality, but a testimony to triviality. Indeed, Romans exposes the very kernel of worship which lies within (Romans 1:25), which exalts the creation of the Architect to worship, while denuding the architect as if some phantasm: but it is not so with the bill! In fact, this worship is exhibited in some little detail in The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 10, Part 2.

Not thus will the God of creation be treated by His conspiring creation. He has come and done all that may be done; and past this, there is mere, simplistic rebellion. There is an end, not less than there was a beginning, and to this II Peter 3 diligently proceeds (vv. 7-10). Nor does it stop even, at the final dissolution, in divine judgment, of the universe.

Instead, the apostle adds two features.

1) The whole arena of the end will open suddenly (v. 10), like a thief opening a window at night. Jesus Himself indicated precisely  this (Matthew 24:42-46).

2) We are exhorted to be awake, and to this effect: "What manner of persons ought you to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hastening to the coming of the day of God."
 

As with Noah, and his derided doings in a land without sufficient scope for sailing, as he built the ark which ministered in the end, to his deliverance; so now, before the typhoons of judgment, while insolent presumption, blind in its pride, refuses to batten down, there is a space. It is a time given for repentance and the giving of the Gospel (Matthew 24:14, II Peter 3:9). IT will be preached, said Christ, and THEN shall the end come.

God loves - so much that He sent His everlasting word, clad in incarnation garment of humanity, for the deliverance of all who receive Him. It is time to get into the ark, and it is not, this time, the family of Noah, but the family of God who are there. CHRIST is that ark (II Peter 3:19-21).

The 'baptism' that saves is not that of deluge, as in the flood or in baths or sprinklings, but, says the word of the apostle, it is that of "the answer of a good conscience toward God... by the resurrection fo Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven" (II Peter 3:21), but will return (Acts 1:7ff.).

How deftly the apostle arouses the sacramental delusion in order to dash it on the rocks of the objective Christ, the actual source of salvation in and by Himself! Saved by baptism ? Oh yes. BUT NOT the washing of flesh, but the witness ... (cf. The Kingdom of Heaven, Appendix, and Barbs, Arrows and Balms 30). He effortless but vigorously moves in one step from sacramentalist sidetracks, to the substance of the faith in the resurrection of Christ, and a good conscience (as in Romans 10:9).

What then is to come ? Not flood but fire is the end in its ultimacy, in destruction (II Peter 3:10), but that, it is the garbage collection, a witness to weeds (Matthew 13:41-43)... wees, in this case, so by desire and not by design! (Matthew 23:37, I Timothy 2:1-3).  That, it is the negative, though even this has that glint of the love light of His eyes. The affirmative ? "Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father" - Matthew 13:43.

God is righteous. In love He cancels sin in the log book of the lost, when they are found , entering by faith with repentance (Luke 13:1-3), the domain of His redemption. Indeed, He has known them from the first (Ephesians 1:4).

In purity, He dims and diminishes no whit of His wisdom, His light, His wonder, His incandescent purity Neither a dictator (if so, no world of vilely misused liberties), nor a mere witness, HE has become a participant (Philippians 2:1-10), and provided escape from the artful wiles of depravity in naturalistic pride or hedonistic weakness, or any form or format, into utter freedom (as in John 8:34-36).  Without charge (Isaiah 55:1-3, I Peter 1:18-19, Romans 6:23), He has done it Himself, just as He created also by Himself (as in Isaiah 44:24): one Trinity, without beginning or end (Psalm 90:2, Isaiah 48:16, Matthew 28:19, II Corinthians 3:18).

 


In Christ "God was reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them... For He made Him who knew no sin to become sin for us" - and with what result ? "that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (from II Cor. 5:19-21). It is not the washing of the flesh baptism ((I Peter 3:21), but the enmembering through faith into the body of Christ (II Cor. 12:13) which is needed.

Small wonder, then, as we see in *4 below, that Paul declaims, in the very next chapter  of II Corinthians: "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation" ( II Cor. 6:2).

The way is narrow ?

Assuredly - as in all thing wonderful, there is a way and transgression is not it (Matthew 7:13-15). False prophets declares Jesus the Christ, are those of whom to beware.
What then ?

It is necessary to do business with God - and  HE has written the contract already (Isaiah 42:6), in the blood of His Son (Matthew 26:28), for without blood there is no remission (Hebrews 9:22), even of Him who died ONCE FOR ALL, and does not suffer a second time, as, we are assured (Hebrews 9:28, 10:10-14) He would do if the sacrifice were ever repeated.

It is ONLY SACRIFICE WITH SUFFERING which is His, and only SACRIFICE WITH HIS BLOOD which is His, and when it is offered by HIM (John 10:17-18) that it counts, and only when it is received from Him by faith (Romans 3:25ff.) that it counts. It is only when you count on HIM ALONE, that it counts (Galatians 6:14, Psalm 2:10-12, Jeremiah 17:5, 9-10), since there is provided no other SAVIOUR but GOD HIMSELF, in the person of His eternal life, His eternal word incarnate (Acts 4:11-12, Hosea 13:14, Psalm 49).

It is deity alone who alone knows the hearts of men... and who justifies without works (Roman 3:23ff., Ephesians 2:1-10).

That is the way it is, and the way it is going to be (Ephesians 1:10, Revelation 5:12-13). Thank God for that! We do not have to depend on the devious sinfulness of man, or the corruptible notions of flesh, or the variable credibility or credulities of our race. It is on GOD ONLY we depend, just as GOD ONLY is our shield. HE ONLY is my rock (Psalm 62:1-3, Deuteronomy 32:4, 15-18, 31, II Samuel 22:2,32,47, Isaiah 44:8), as prophets and the redeemed alike attest with glowing assurance and utter peace.

The covenant then has been written by God Himself in the blood of His only begotten Son (Isaiah 42:6, Matthew 26:28), by death (vicariously) and resurrection (imperially) breaking the fate and blessing the faith of those who receive Him (John 1:12ff.).

The deluge ripped up much of this earth, but there is a greater deluge of judgment according to just dues, even than this! What then is needed ? Each living person on this earth needs to be planted, like a tree, in the soil of Christ (Isaiah 61:-13, Matthew 15:13), through the work of graciously granted faith (John 6;:29).

What did Christ say:

"Every plant which My heavenly Father has not planted, shall be rooted up."

But what ? It is some other master, some other prince, some other presence, some other gospel, some other spirit which is continually invoked by the many: it is  'we' (some select imagined group), or 'mankind', nature, gods unthinkable without heart or power, what have you: dream it up, it will not help you.

"The gods which have not made the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under these heavens" - Jeremiah 10:11.

Ideological gods are no more a rock than naturalistic ones: they are all the mere contorted projections of confused flesh, ignoring its Maker, and exercising some of its own components in order to fall down and worship them, saying, this, this, it is the way, before the body dies, and the mind which so declared, is eternally cut off from its source, proud like cancer in its disorder, lethal in its progress.

We have not made, but God has, ourselves, our environment, our universe or the things of destiny.
We, as a race, have made sin, and in the glaze of glamour or pride, have sketched in monstrosities of irrationality, unspirituality, ungodlinesss and disorder of mind, soul and body, spirit and structure, as our source, sovereign or ultimate desire.

Man has sinned, and his sin reaches to the heavens; nor has he repented, as a race, any more than has Israel as yet, as a nation: though the heavens have reached to him. While thousands come to Him, in Christ the only way, millions more invent ways that are not there, and drive their new Holdens, Fords or convenient Mini-Minors on highways that do not exist, and complain and joust at God, in mind or spirit, for their own part or that of others,

Centuries, yes millenia have seen the foolish musings of philosophy (cf. for some, SMR pp. 422Eff.) - sometimes in borrowed party clothes, imitating science, but frivolous in method, fatuous in philosophy, doctrinaire in presuppositions and empty-headed in demands, as if the source had to be the result, and the effect had to be the cause. We, this race, have made these things, these ideological, these mythical fantasies, kaleidoscopically changing them in a virtual ecstasy of impudence, impenitence and reckless self-indulgence of an imagination both disordered and astray.

From what we have made, in life, in heart and thought, whatever its 'moral' pretensions, we need to repent so that we might have accord with the God who DID make us. As Jeremiah put it, these 'gods' will perish before the God who DID make earth and the heavens. It is a fitting funeral, divested of celebrant.


as if the first particular race that comes to a country, made it,
as if those who have history have plenary right;
 


as if those who have come in this fair orb,  to the place of being in the image of God, to think and construe, imagine and masterfully make use of symbols in science and thought, in short, this human race, have made the universe,
or are its masters, keepers and beneficiaries,
without more ado, to use it, employ and deploy it,
and if necessary, remove any other pretenders to the throne,
such as its Creator.

This we have seen, and here for diagnostic emphasis, re-iterate.
 


as are rats from a high-rise apartment building, by the owners.
Whatever else is to be said, absolute truth is outré
(as in Lead Us Not into Educational Temptation, on the grand and quasi-governmental level, and as in spirit and reality, in the work surveyed in That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 8).

The tail wags the dog, and the leash is ignored.


Nevertheless, the amplitude of God's own provisions is immense, starting with matter and order, law and organisation, and ending with spirit for man and imagination and logic, love and liberty with which to hate Him, if so be. This is done now,  especially with that undramatic comedy of urbane quietude which, with the predicted miasma of secular mythology,  dismisses Him like a suitor, even the One who made the ground on which we stand, both logically (SMR Ch.3, Repent or Perish Ch. 7) and terrestrially.

His divinely granted gifts and opportunities, even His paid for trip in redemption to His presence in Christ(Colossians 1:13, Ephesians 2:5-6), wrought in love, built in kindness, governed by sacrifice, surfaced with pardon: these are as narrow as necessity, the principles of purity and peace, justice and truth. They resemble the rope to a helicopter, lifting the occupants of a wreck to safety. Presented in beauty, outlined in glory, they are replete with challenge.


 


 

M) PERIPATETIC - tourism and commerce
TECHNICAL AND TRAVEL

Daniel is notable here, as in Daniel 12:4

Just as the world is the obsessive focus of the naturalist,

The globe-trotting, nation-shrinking community of peoples is seen today: the travel touchstone is predicted before. The significance of knowledge, its enduement, procurement, is one of the features of our current civilisation - even if, in the normal heights of frustration and vortices of contradiction, the knowledgeable emphasise knowledgeably that they know nothing. Yet they grab for the controls, and seek to specify where they are to be found, how moved, like a child in dad's car, not quite knowing at the tender age of 14, what each of the levers will do, as he move down the drive-way in a virtual ecstasy of power of impudence. In the penning of prophecy these features are plain. It is not some superman who comes, but man in his moral misery, vaunting pride, selfish squalor of soul. It is not that all are such; but that this is the culture of the times. And so it is, adorned by the hi-tech, multi-movement symptoms predicted. Let us hear Daniel:

"And there shall be a time of trouble,
Such as never was since there was a nation,
Even to that time.
And at that time your people shall be delivered.
Every one who is found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, these to everlasting life; these  to shame and everlasting contempt."

Love of this world ideationally, as if its own maker, ideologically as if its own basis, and idiotically, as if one should make the means of life their end, and forsake entirely the ascertainment, with all one's knowledge, of what it is for, the designs of the Designer for His design: these three constitute a fatal mixture. Its end is shame and everlasting contempt. Its Rescuer is the redeemer, and His terms are not different. Until one receives His wounds for one's own transgressions, transgressions rule and ruin the purity which alone can be received in heaven. Flesh is not fit for the kingdom: it must capitulate to the Spirit, to the Lord who made it, and concerned and coming, healed its woes with His work (Romans 8:1ff.). Like all other healing, it must be received, not cast to the dogs.
 
 

OUR FINDINGS
ON THE SURE AND SIGNALLED COMING OF THE LORD,
SO  ENORMOUSLY OBVIOUS
THAT EVEN TO THE BLIND THE IMPACT IS ON THE VERY FACE

What we have found is this: that not merely is the TIME for the return of the Lord, by implication, LONG after the time of  His coming - and incidentally, immensely important is the transfer of the GOSPEL "in all the world as a witness to all the nations"  - it is written "and THEN shall the end come" (caps. added); but there are more ingredients.

It is to be a time when ISRAEL is back in place (1948, and 1967 in segments, the latter date completing Jerusalem's recapture, so that as in Luke 21;24 it is no longer "trodden down by the nations". It is a time when JERUSALEM is in Jewish control. It is one when the GOSPEL has been preached in all the world to the NATIONS (and this site is one such medium, reaching to some small and some great places, just as thousands have gone for thousands of years). It is one when MORALS are in blatant decline, CHURCHES are in significant retreat (but NOT ALL, for THE CHURCH OF CHRIST, which is neither the denomination of that name nor Rome by its claims, for these are but names, but what abides in Him and in His word, being bought by His redemption, enlivened by the faith in His bodily resurrection - Romans 10:9, I Cor. 15:1-3, Luke 24, and enabled by the presence of His power through His Spirit but in HIS name: THIS will ALWAYS live). It is one likewise in which the FAITHFUL are acting with holy boldness, and fidelity, though tested (as in Matthew 24, Daniel 12:10).

Time, Gentleman, Time Ladies, Time Children

It is a time when KNOWLEDGE will be NOTABLE in terms of its  INCREASE, and TRAVEL throughout the world will be like an epidemic, when fear for the future will engulf, stress fractures will appear in society, militant and military turbulence will be like CAT disturbance to air-craft in the heights, but this on the surface, when signs in the heavens (such as aeroplanes and space stations but much more) will abound, when water levels will be such, and energy distribution, that roaring waves and seas will impound distinctively on the coastlines (as has been documented and is now most notable, through the greenhouse effect, the el nino, the la ninia or whatever other cause, the result is the same).

It is a time of MUTLIPLE fraud and falsity in terms of prophets, or gurus, or false denominations, pretenders to being the Messiah or the Christ or from Christ, like the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the New Age and the whole host of anti-Biblical 'dreamers' to use the Biblical term, which are to be so multiplied that this will be a SYMPTOM of the phase of the Age. And what phase is that ? It is this: "THEN SHALL THE END COME".

For all that, there is also to be a certain hidden character, to the extent that it will catch the many by surprise, lulled with a sense of false security, false hope and the entertainment of false conceptions, just as in the last days Judah before the captivity (I Thessalonians 5:1-2, Revelation 9:20, Matthew 25:1ff., 24:45ff., 24:24, II Peter 3:3-4).


(apart from some marvels and wonders of purity, self-control and order which have arisen
when the ways of the Lord have supervened from time to time)
will reach a zenith (Matthew 24:12),


will wreak havoc on the decaying planet.

It is a day in which inane hopes for a happy future will constantly underlie vain vexations for the actual present. It is, this COMING OF CHRIST, to be preceded, indeed introduced by such an increase of tempo, a writhing and contriving that the very continuance of the earth will come to be threatened, even before its time (which is of majestic proportions in REMOVAL drama, just as was the CREATION in ARRIVAL drama - Genesis 1-3).

In World War II, there was, especially near the end, such a tempo and trading, such commerce and action, such planning and devices, such wholesale organisation and arrangement, as before the SECOND FRONT, that years of labour, which had seemed all but interminable, were suddenly frenzied in months of marvel. Things happened as at LAST (cf. II Peter 3:9), the long endurance was being replaced with growing speed, by the last ambition, the final deployments and the incredible seeming thing came into being. The troops landed, dramatic reports rifled from the front to the homelands, famous names of Generals appeared, encirclings, overcomings, combinations of carefully laid plans occurred, and then - Berlin in sight... and so on.

It was a time of rockets being busily deployed by the Germans, and one in which their atomic endeavours, not least through the daring raid in Norway, showed what MIGHT have been. The enemy (not so much Germany as Nazism which had infected it, and was draining it in its fateful fraud) thus put on a fierce display; but ruin was sure. For all that, there were times ... yet they past.

So here. There is not only the pattern, the tartan of strange, significant and in some cases UNIQUE events which must  be simultaneous, but there is the increasing RATE and spate, flow and glow of development. It is in some ways like a cancer which having been on some physical site, has now reached other organs, and in a simultaneous way, is grabbing now this one, now that one, and organising its fateful grip into that of death.

All this we now see, the rate, the relationships, the items and the coherence spirit and character of the whole, ecclesiastically, philosophically, educationally, psychologically, militarily, economically as the cashless society prepares for the final manipulations and control, politically as the nations squirm into existence and fight into confusion, developmentally as the whole becomes

·       a mass of mess,

·       inhabited by false hope and oratorical fraud,

·       such as the magic of organic evolution, the myth of materialism (which itself is constructed only by mental powers which have their own ways, and are related to purpose and possibility of error, not program and simple occurrence),

·       idealisms of fervent falsity,

·       'spiritual' wonders of intense iniquity, money grabbing, soul grubbing excursions in many cases


(II Peter 2:1ff. specifies it).

It is to be a time to be completed after the millenium (the length of which is wholly unknown - II Peter 3:9, but adequate for the manifestation of the stated qualities - millenium q.v., and the vindication of the Lord as shown), by the absolute removal of the universe in panting horror, as its clashing, super-heated clangours at last are still (II Peter 3:10-13).

Indeed there is a certain poignancy which the love of Christ alone allays, since it is a PRACTICAL LOVE, and has behind it the CURSE OF CALVARY where HE took it, before He GAVE it. Sin is abhorrent and the attribution of its penal horrors to Christ is the beauty of His holiness. He does not compassionless contrive these ends and terminal conditions that crush and exhume the awfulness of iniquity from the hidden depths of the hearts of mankind.

Nothing could be further from the truth. HIS EXPEDITION (so beautifully described in Colossians 1:19ff., and extended in consideration in I Peter 3:18ff., with the intimations also of I Peter 4:6) into this universe, His creation (like that of an author into his own library) has been the greatest love song of all time, the most massive sacrificial splendour, dedicated devotion, empathetic involvement, nobility of majesty, tender-hearted concern, agonising anguish of rescue that could ever be conceived. It is because GOD in purity and wonder of heart, did it, from majesty unspeakable in light of an unblemished intensity, holiness of enveloping power and intensity of knowledge and power beyond all number, to depravity unspeakable and decline beyond all comprehension, the Lord to the lepers of this world, not to condemn but to save (John 3:17): it is for this reason that it is augmented in wonder to infinity.

That HE, whose magnificence is beyond the heights and flights of the most agile mind, should so lower Himself and do it in love (because 'charity' can be cold, but the love of God is to blood and bone, to face crumpled and beard ripped out, to being nailed by criminals and mocked by meddlers), and should act with sharp and incisive effectiveness, this makes it clear that WHAT HE SUFFERED is an INDEX to what the WORLD DESERVES. IF it gets it, it is not as if HE DID NOT GET IT FIRST!

What aweful action it is then, to ignore or even blame God in the end, as the landing, as it were, on the beaches of this world comes near, and like seething Nazis, to despise the deliverance from their evil hands which 'threatens'. For those of you who ARE Christians, in whom Christ resides (Colossians 1:27), well then THIS is deliverance. It is not as if you are some elite aristocracy of privilege by a history which is not yours, as if born into slavery, while many are born to opulence.

In THIS CASE, it is YOU who refuse the aristocracy of meritless salvation, the special people situation of the Christian children of God. YOU are the agent of your own destruction, your own humiliation and it is not only this, you do this in the very FACE of the LOVE OF GOD, which distinctively, individually and personally you SPURN. It is only in THIS way that you could find the END irksome, instead of deliverance, rest and delight, restoration to the very face of God, from whose mouth the creation itself derived.

4

LOOKING AHEAD after LOOKING ON

This then is the reality: the return of the Lord is to be found in its itinerary of preparation. This is as sure and in train, as a dam with thousands of tons of concrete pouring in and setting. It is in the hearts and spirits of those whose actions and rebellions, cultural, educational, social, personal, make for the conditions required for His advent.
 

It is NOT where is the promise of His coming ?
"for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation", in actual fact.

Rather: Here is the promise of His coming -all things progress as they have been required to do by the word of God, these several millenia, and the promise of His coming, like that of royalty on a yacht, its points of approach being chartered, is so precisely being brought into fulfilment, that it virtually requires blindness, in order that one should not see... unless of course, one simply closes one's eyes.

This is an ocular procedure much in vogue in Christ's own day, and it is not losing its popularity (cf. Christ's own diagnosis, as the Truth,  in Matthew 13:15). It is far better to keep one's eyes open, and best of all to see the Lord (John 6:40), without whom, in the end, it would be better never to have had eyes, or life at all.
 
 

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER FIVE
from k) above

ADAPTED and EXPANDED EXCERPT
from WAKE UP WORLD! YOUR CREATOR IS COMING ...

 
1a) A CAMBRIAN CONCEPT
 
 

The Cambrian
The Bang

The  Demonstration
 

It is not to be desired, that the righteous should bow before the wicked, says the Proverb.  Nor is it, when as ambassador for truth, he/she is on commission.

Thus the FACT of the Cambrian "Age" (admittedly a philosophical construct, but then, we are showing on THEIR territory, their prodigious failure, no righteous holds barred) is evidencing an explosion so vast that Gould wallows in it, glories in it, expostulates in it, admonishes concerning it, uses public address systems to embrace the ear concerning it, details it, lists it, loves it: this has to be faced level-headedly.

It is everything that Gould says, and more, in the dimension of novelty, innovation, prodigious spread of engineering design impact, streams of PHYLA not now around, EARLY rock profusion leaving current biotic levels LESS! How can one say this ? Simply because the innovations back of the innovations, those of constructive thought and executive means require MORE than what appears. This is merely the aircraft, as it were, in motion, watched by the buyers. BEFORE THAT, the thing has to be ENVISAGED, and put together in mind, in thought, in the domains which, like it or not, are the necessary field of activities which are their speciality.

Hence the suggestion one has recently read, that the astute Christian Apologist no more really STRESSES the Cambrian situation is not to the point. This is to yield to propaganda, to go with the flow of frothy philosophy. Gould's endeavour to philosophise with irrational modes, on the basis of his actual scientific observations have no more validity than the expositions in this volume attest. It is what he has SEEN that is important. His exuberance in attestation of the facts is delightful.

That is not to be countermanded by philosophy, far less acceptable philosophy.

On the basic premiss that the rock record and its piles, strata, modes and manners, IS a RECORD in a TIME dimension BASICALLY and one with supreme importance in DATING, which has NOT AT ALL ceased to play this pirate's role, then the RESULTS of the CAMBRIAN explosion, which on Gould's attestation is in effect in the atomic dimension, after using merely conventional explosives, MUST be stressed ALL THE MORE, by those for whom evidence is critical, vital, crucial, and not merely a prelude to tiresome philosophy.

IF the rock strata are to be abandoned in the above role; well. Let us hear it. If not, very well, let us draw conclusions in terms of the philosophical parameters imposed by the organic evolutionists.

On those bases, it is all that has been said. It is outrageous, as incredible as to Nilsson, were the flood evidences (see SMR Index Nilsson), or the mutational NON-PROGRESS to LØvtrup; and indeed with these senses of profound outrage, that of the paleontological, the fossil gaping and unredeemed gaps to Director W.R. Thompson (Index, Thompson) . These with Gould are protesting in a furore of disgust, a clamour of incredulity at the REALLY VAST GAP, the one between two precipices, those of theory and evidence. What they do is one thing; that they have been outraged is another. Folly is at the helm in these philosophic substitutes for theories relating to data, for the most simple reason that they not merely lack finesse in adroitly handling the data for an explanation, they would NEVER BE THOUGHT OF, to use Gould's masterpiece of phrasing. Further one should indeed go: they are the OPPOSITE of apt theories for the evidence. They are philosophically propelled like warships against the tide of evidence. There mission is not scientific AT ALL!

Hence all these outrages are justified. They ALL hit gradualism. Various as are the suggestions for 'resolution' in reform and change of theory, NONE has been acceptable to all, for the very good reason that NONE is really based on fact and indications and known laws or logic any more than the original! With ONE exception: that of W.R. Thompson, who justly and clearly adduces the fields of evidence and those them all utterly devastated by the alien theory superimposed on them, whereas one, which is neither new nor at all difficult, creationism merely IS VERIFIED; and in THIS, it is WHOLLY UNIQUE.

By no means, therefore, let us supinely , or indeed in any other way, accept the concept that the Cambrian excursion is no longer on the tourist guide list for travellers to these realms, in Christian Apologetics. It is as devastating as ever; and Gould's desire to distance himself from its clear cut impact, with an immersion in detail is just what he said it was at the outset in WONDERFUL LIFE, an alternative to addressing the real issue of HOW did it happen. In the end he seems to return rather shame-facedly, or at least almost surreptitiously, with some reference to some particular corpus of characteristics found, like so very many others, in an interesting combination of the same. Novelty is almost the name of the game.

Its sheer profusion SCIENTIFICALLY ADDRESSED in terms of known phenomena, known laws and causal stringency REQUIRES innovative capacity correlative, and that is FAR more, and not at all less, than that of any man, or indeed, than that of the ENTIRE human race for SEVERAL generations, working in the growing tip of its super-abundant research!
 
 

1 b) The CONFORMITY CONCEPT

The Grotesqueries of Unreason, and
Drying out from the Drugs Drunk

at that
Blind DATE,
from the Cup of Continuity...

or

CONQUERING THE EARTH WITHOUT GUNS - IN ORDER TO LOSE IT

OVERVIEW concerning TIME, RATES, SPATES, DATES
and the APPROPRIATE CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC APPROACH

At the heart of the discordant deviations from reality inherent in the reconstruction of time

·  by what after all, is geologically not least a vast array of sedimentary rock with all the earmarks of catastrophe, violence and tumult, covering much of the globe,

·  with the presumption of unobserved changes in ludicrous extensions of time which would even have fossil DNA kept contrary to reality, for millions of years past its due date:

·  there is a simple assumption.
 

·  It is this:
 

All things go on as they have since the foundation of the world... from the "beginning of creation" as we saw in  Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 74, pp. 103ff., from II Peter 3:3-4. Indeed, the very term 'creation' as there noted, is modishly used of what is not creation but mere permutation and combination,
 

·  sometimes of nothing, which therefore does very well to manage (as in Barbs, Arrows and Balms 29), as it might well in that other fantasy of so much greater depth, Alice in Wonderland, and
 

·  sometimes of what is unthinkable, but still thought, which does even better to be thought about.

The unthinkable does the unverbalisable with what is not there. 


It is quite a roar, as of a drunken party, uproarious, hilarious and irreverent, irrational, inveterate.

 Even though a start of what is here, is inherent in limited supplies and rates of usage, it is normally deemed, nowadays, not nice to think of it in any real way, since this is disruptive of continuity, conformity to the present, peace of mind and power over all things. It deals a death blow to the delusive desire to manage without ... interruption, interference or direction from the Maker. It is therefore psychologically mandatory, spiritually compulsive and socially necessary to get rid of God and replace Him with various fictions, depending on the fiction and faction desired, all inadequate, none observably operational in the least degree, and to fall on one's knees and start building.

It was the same at Babel (Genesis 11). The results linger. The more recent results are not fond of departing, in their immoral mayhem, irrational destruction of youth by armour piercing propaganda, delivered with the baby's milk, and political props, which normally result in massive murder, as in Communism, Survival-of-the-Fittestism, Nazism, One World-ism and other idiotic ideologies, shorn of evidence, bereft of reason, but mighty in blood.

Thus we proceed with the dogmas of nothing (nihilism is not different except in name) leading to something which is very apt, but rather witless in wisdom, which has by a superb strategy, decided to invest itself in us, though it is not there. So is the twenty first century race of man filled to the brim with madness, like a deprived youth suddenly winning Tatts, or a cow re-united with its calf. WE WILL NOT HAVE THIS MAN TO RULE OVER US, resounds with the new cathedral bells, as in terms of the new Anglican moves in the hierarchical eminences of its Australian settings, where Christ is fitted into the pantheon of possibilities, and God is smudged into unrecognisability, rather the way it was done to Jesus Christ. You recall ?

"Behold My servant shall deal prudently;
He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.
Just as many were astonished at you,
So his visage was marred more than any man,
And His form more than the sons of men:
So shall He sprinkle many nations.
Kings shall shut their mouths at Him ..." (from Isaiah 52:13-15).

Many kings have been converted, but as in Psalm 2, there is an inveterate confederacy to "cast their bonds asunder" and its end is rule by a Majesty which having created, and provided for redemption with the utmost humility and attestation, institutes a judgment as realistic as creation, and as detailed as salvation (as in John 3:15-36).

So the century looks from its dismal doom of contemporary disaster, mounting to no very distant climax (as in Matthew 24:22), to its night life of the spirit. Dressed with nothing, built by nothing, it has far from nothing to say; and having pilloried Christ in contempt, it bypasses Him as if exempt.

This nihilistic crusade for nothing and its ghostly counterparts in oblivion: It may not seem that this is a very rational ground for life, but how often is reason consulted in these things! The mere fact that actuality requires reality to propound it in thought as in visible format, is of no consequence. Why be scientific ? It is more fun to talk in the mathematics of science and the jargon of the nursery, because it has that dashing, erratic air of importance. Again, it has nothing to do with reason; it is merely rationalised desire.

·  As Denton points out, DISCONTINUITY is what is found in Nature; CONTINUITY is what is found in the mind of man (That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 8, pp. 257ff.), in abstraction from the attestation of what in fact is there.
 

·  (That is, it is a frequent product of the poseurs of this world, the philosophers and their Mars Hill - Acts 17 - ponderers, for whom every new thing ALONE is desirable. Some even try to dignify their delinquency from reason by styling their new thing 'anti-philosophy' and duly arguing for it by reason, while in breach of it.)
 

·  Facts are fictions in this realm, where the impossible is the only coin of value. Nothing must produce something, or nothing in particular anyway, and above all, nothing adequate. THIS is the necessary conscript for creation. Then for nothing of reason, and from nothing of reason, it must diversify and create itself in the most wonderful of ways. It is, as Shakespeare penetratingly put it in an allied area of human life, much ado about nothing.
 

·  The something however remains. The much ado about nothing has nothing to do with it.

As to the date of its formulation, the exact date of the creation of the material realm from the immaterial, the visible from the invisible (after the manner of poetry and all vast conceptions), that is unknowable, for it is lost in the form of God, for whom OUR serial, event by event limitations of 'time' are a mere invention (Romans 8:38-39). It is meaningless in the best sense, since it assumes what is not so, and then asks questions of what it would be if it were so. It is all a question of when God invented creation-style time. Creation-style time is a result, not a cause, of that. It does not trace its origins any more than does a baby, but rather less, since its beginning is absolute.

As to the events of its formation, this universe, when matter poured forth from the cauldron of creation in the will of God, instituting its domain and thrusting it into being: they are found in inference and in the Bible, as logically demonstrated to be the word of the God of truth (SMR Chs. 1-3,10). As to the scientific formulations which are justly to be made concerning the evidence, these are teased out in That Magnificent Rock Ch.1, in just and precise format.

As to the dates of these initiating events, they are scientifically not obtainable. Many essentially concordant data imply a short history of the earth (cf. Professor E. H. Andrews, God, Science and Evolution pp. 114ff., Dr John Morris, Scientific Creationism pp. 149ff., Dr Harold Slusher as in SMR pp. 237, 243ff.), and no known method can harmonise these with vast ages. These things are dealt with in some detail in places which would be wise to use as preliminary reading in this case. They are: SMR pp.159-179,  235ff., 246-250, That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7E. , and perhaps Spiritual Refreshings in the Digital Millenium Ch. 13. Methods do not exist for their conquest. The ONLY way is to make assumptions and see what happens.

What happens is not too good. As Snelling points out in Creation, Technical Journal, Vol. Nine, Part 1, in considerable detail, many of the results even of the isochron methods of dating are meaningless.

·  "As with all the other apparent isochron 'ages', these results from the weathered rocks and soils have no apparent geological meaning, because there is no geological event to which these 'ages' might correlated." Further, he exhibits at length the diversification causes in rock structures, components, exits, additions by this means and that, making the concept of closed system rather like that of a jigsaw puzzle, with different source pictures as base. The incredibly diverse results tend to suggest such a concept, apart from theoretical considerations!

Professor E.H. Andrews (op.cit. p. 122) likewise indicates after review of discordant dating results liberally attested, from radio-isochron methods: "All the examples cited above, where ages were obtained exceeding the supposed age of the earth, were deduced from Rb-Sr isochrons and it appears that isochrons are just as likely to give geologically meaningless ages as are straightforward calculations."


·  "The present writer," he declares, "has ... found that any whole rock containing two or more minerals with different initial Sr87/Sr86 ratios must automatically give a false isochron, possibly of several hundred million years, even at zero age. The assumption that Sr87/Sr86 ratios are identical at zero age for all closely associated minerals lies at the heart of the method and is questionable both theoretically (because of the differential mobility of the two isotopes) and experientially (because the isotopic ratio varies widely in nature). "


By their fruits you shall know them!

They do not accord with confirmatory events, verificatory happenings.

They appear like will-o'-the-wisp happenings, elusive, illusory. As the distinguished Professor E.H. Andrews similarly insists, they do not find confirmation in uniformity of result, or result agreeable to confirmatory considerations. Snelling even goes further and brings up dating horrors of such magnitude that one wonders almost if one is seeing Gilbert and Sullivan in HMS Pinafore, where not the British establishment of that day, but the Evolutionary Establishment of this one, is being pilloried! Events within LIVING MEMORY get dates of billions of years. Time has very little meaning in the wake of such expansiveness: dreams appear as realities, and realities as dreams; pantomime rules and drama displaced discipline.

Moreover, the appearance of these dating resultants, from the diverse but philosophically concordant assumptions, is so antagonistic to unity, as in the trunk of a tree from which the branches sprout, that it rather resembles an uprooted tree, set on its head. This is essentially the parallel image given in Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe pp. 148-149. Instead, it is noted there of apparent entry of species of life: instead of a family tree of diversifying creatures, coming from a basal stock which transforms itself into major diversity, as is philosophically postulated, the actual evidence is the opposite. It is of the branches starting, and the trunk gradually growing. "It would seem the 'family tree' of life gets wider toward the base!" It would seem that this obsessive philosophy creates a prodigy of fun, like Comic Home Videos aired on national TV; but in this case, fun is not the aim!

·  Again, from Grand Canyon, we read -  "The pattern of geological succession predicted by evolution is from bottom to top: species to genera; genera to families; families to orders; orders to classes; classes to phyla.
 

·  "The dominant pattern of geological succession, as evidenced by the fossils, especially those of Grand Canyon, is in contradiction to evolutionary theory.  Disparity precedes diversity! The initial appearance of virtually all phyla occurs with very low species diversity."
 

·  "Scientists are beginning to recognise that the order of appearances is backwards... It appears that the living world is in a state of decay, rather than in a metamorphosis of evolutionary progression. As a result animals have become, and continue to become extinct."
 

In other words, the idea of the theory was for little things (whether fussed up slowly or miraculously created by 'nature') to grow in bulk and form, until total systems were devised, and then diversified. You would get the main structures in due course, after the little fiddlings, whether bigger or smaller in dimension; the new species would cluster into families and so in, IN DUE COURSE.

Those larger segmentations would come later, following much fussing about, or fishing about,  and after biological efforts made by what, of course, was not there to make it, but still made, for so the theory says. In fact, however, and in view of such logic, not surprisingly, you get the main structures (on the geological dating theory in vogue) evidentially at once, and the little fiddlings follow with them. It then all decreases in disparity as Gould so vigorously points out (cf. SMR p. 234), in terms of his 'decimation' which brings the initial prodigies of brilliance of design disparity, into happy contrast with the later declines and decreases. Professor Giertych, Head of the Genetics Department of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kornik, stresses just this point.

 

·  "Is nature moving from chaos to ever-increasing organization, or from an organized state, towards ever-increasing chaos ?" he asks. What are we finding ? he interrogates, "An increase in information in nature or loss
of it ?" (cf. SMR pp. 252Hff.). The laments of the 'greens' dramatise the answer.

It is then striking that the error of evolutionary theory (both Gould's and Darwinian, as Austin's work points out - op.cit.) relative to fossil reality in its mode of apparent occurrence, in REVERSING the entry scenario of new life forms, resembles so closely the DATING FIASCO, which likewise reverses the proper  expectation for any sound theory, in this area of chronology. It would be expected that the many concordant dates, mathematically determined from data,  would point back to an initial unity, harmoniously indicative of actual, decoded events.

In fact, however, the many datings from our one present time result in many discordant and branching oddities and sometimes seeming idiocies of clangour and clash, for beginnings. The branches so determined in vacuo, appear to spread out for the beginning, while  the only root that is one remains ... the present, which not being subject to naturalistic manipulation, is indeed ... one! It is essentially a philosophy in reverse, whether in its biota, or chronological conception, and this turning of things upon their head is indeed to give head to that racy filly, mankind; but alas, it is not all so placed, and the generations to come are drafted to pay for their pleasure, as are all who sideswipe and act to invert truth must find, except they find mercy where it IS to be found.

Generation to come ? Indeed, this one is not doing too badly in that domain; and the very potential for that which remains is already a stress setting for many! They fear what they see, envisage as in process of coming, fraught with peril. If that, then,  is the thought, what then is the reality, when it comes! Unlike evolving self-generated marvels of myriad concepts unified into action, which do NOT come, cannot be COAXED to come, but must recede into the creative canyons of the past, THIS THING WILL COME. It always has come, always does, and the word of God is NEVER falsified.

What it says, is what happens with the same prolific constancy, indeed consistency, with which what evolutionary naturalism and its implications, fail to appear. But let us proceed to further illustration of the shame of sham. Alas as for so many in so much, sham is not the name by which it goes, even in the minds of many of those caught in its sphere of influence.

We noted above Professor Andrews stricture of the abysmal performance so readily found in dating by presumption. The gifted geologist, Dr Steven Austin in his GRAND CANYON: Monument to Disaster goes better. He points out that some of the materials  taken for test, are dated as older (6 billion years) than the assumption-girt idea that the material universe is around 4 billion years old! (p. 128).  This is perhaps the ultimate in scientific El Greco elongation, where fire meets fire, and imagination runs dissatisfied away, from its own mother!

If necessity were the mother of invention, the 'necessity' to avoid the times and orders of the creation would seem here indicated; and as with many other personal relations, the last thing that may enter the minds of some, is that they have 'family' problems. In this case, however, it is the families of mankind, derivatives from God, but no part of Him, which in their created protrusions,
seek ? or act as if to invest the very heavens by making them descend, to a more manipulable level.

But what! We find also from Austin's very detailed, and heuristic Grand Canyon presentation, this:

·  "However we notice that the oldest Rb-Sr dates come from Uinkaret Plateau basaltic rocks, which are the youngest rocks in the Canyon" (op.cit. p. 127)..."If we embrace the popular assumptions of radioisotope dating for Grand Canyon rocks, we can make a case for the youngest rocks being deeply buried within the Precambrian strata and the oldest rocks being on the surface among the Quaternary strata. Such interpretation is, of course, contrary to the fundamental superposition of Grand Canyon rocks worked out by geologists!" (op.cit. p. 129).

 

What a further upside down cake*2B is this!

Indeed, the careful and heavily field-backed presentation, in a select screening of hypotheses on the Grand Canyon, that grand spectacular of action, delivers the cohesive conclusion that vast lakes in a catastrophic situation managed the erosion, which sits still now in the form of the Canyon, leaving the relicts and providing the scenes frequently comparable with other such catastrophes that have been documented - except in scale.

More generally, as we have seen, where catastrophe and creation, or vast upheavals and changes are in view, the very concept of deploying the smooth assumptions of simple extrapolation backwards (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3), easy-going assurances that all things have gone on as now, is as precipitous as the walls of the rocks of many of the canyons, and as eroded as they by the force of reality. It is rather like imagining you are sitting down to a well-prepared lunch, when you are in the midst of a tangled litter of remains of those who have already eaten. Not merely the processes of devastation, but the provisions of what could BE devastated, in the creation of the world, these are the necessities to be faced; and not with such means as these of nihilism, naturalism and gradualism either should, or logically and experimentally, CAN these be met.

·  When, then,  the RESULTS  of assumptions are found to be
 

a) meaningless

b) irrational

c) discordant with results from other methods as Austin, Snelling and Andrews point out, even to the point that numbers of specialists in the field are cited as being satisfied that the only safe dating method is that of fossil bent thoughts (which are based on dating assumptions for their stratification in time),
we would not be attracted to them.


When the ASSUMPTIONS THEMSELVES are grounded on concepts of continuity, whereas nature provides discontinuity and continuity of discontinuity as its manifest thrust and genius, then we would be somewhat repelled.

When however the ASSUMPTIONS are UNIFORMITARIAN in concept, and the very issue is the nature of things early (cf. Professor Harold Slusher, Critique of Radiometric Dating pp. 22-23, Dr John Morris, The Genesis Flood pp. 354ff.); when indeed the whole question is where did they come from, then this is simple arguing in a circle. If it does not make your head go round, then regrettably, and indeed in some ways poignantly, it appears you are dizzy. Circular argument NEEDS to be detected, and if it is not, you are deluded. If this is your condition,  it is not entirely your own fault; for culture and society and establishment are in a huge propaganda putsch to subdue your intellect; and even then, pitifully, many of these are similarly subdued by other and earlier thrusts, which, in the end have only the Prince of this world for its base, and as to him, as Christ noted, he is a liar and a murderer (John 8:44ff., 14:30).

Rich you say ? Murderer. Liar, to be sure, but murderer ?

Do you then not realise the full EXTENT of Hitler enslavement to the concept of organic evolution, survival of the fittest, the master race to be evolution's masterpiece, and the god of forces ? ... (see references below), anon pale and bleached, anon red with the rush of blood! (cf. Revelation 6:4,8).

 Or do you not understand Communism's worship at the same shrine of forces moving sure-footed to their prey ? ...

Or do you overlook blandly the whole concept of SURVIVAL as god (cf. SMR pp. 809ff., 708-709, 611f., 127ff., That Magnificent Rock Ch. 6, Barbs, Arrows and Balms Appendix 1, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, End-Note I, Part II), or for some god,  being planted in the minds of the young who, likewise, are shown the wonders of self-esteem, self-advancement, self-regard, self-fulfilment, endurance without loveliness, and 'love' without responsibility ?

The essence of the philosophy of Nietzsche (who of course went literally mad), tastable in his Thus Spake Zarathrusta,  is very much dominant today, and the concept of force, even in sport, power as the plenitude of admiration, continues way past any thought of law and order, grace and beauty, nobility and the admirable.

Some dating accordingly simply makes the assumption that we RULE OUT the creation, or any of its COMPONENTS in our thinking, in working out age. That is rather like saying,

I do not know where this youth has come from, he is obviously a high-tech production; but one thing we can rule out when thinking about the way he has arrived, is any concept of a beginning. That is ridiculous. He just grew out of ... well nothing in the beginning, and oh! yes, of course there wasn't one.

 

IF we are right, then we are right, comes to be the logical status of this mode of 'dating'. It has no scientific validity at all. Its gruesome horrors of discordant results from different such methods, irrational results and meaningless ones, are not at all surprising. It must be so; and it is; and that, it is verification of the analysis and the error. What happens thus, is just the fuss one would expect to happen when means so arbitrary and irrational are its bases. It is not the technical procedures, fundamentally which are awry, but the principles they are set, like cruise control, to maintain!

ASSUME that THIS was the BEGINNING amount of this or that radio-active material, and these were the BEGINNING RATIOS, and then ? Why not assume the date direct ? It is all the negativing of logic,  and the mere fulfilment of philosophical postulates on which no science can be built. It is simply the weary and wearisome religion of irrational negativity (see Repent or Perish Ch. 7), having a status with 'science', and in this case, necessarily, science not properly so-called (I Timothy 6:20 cf. II Peter 3:4-7).

Ah! but, some say, you mistake, Our isochron method of dating is wonderful, truly marvellous.

Why we simply take various amounts of daughter product of radioactive action (like argon) and mother material (like potassium) and we find that there is some degree of relationship of these amounts, so that they mirror a decline from state A to state B, with production of gas. The bigger the amount, the more the gas. We can even graph some of it, and show that they point back to an initial state in which the gas at the start and the mother amount, are both known. From there we simply work down the line to the present, and we know without guessing at all. Steve Austin's work (op.cit.) presents the procedure in mathematical detail, just as it presents, as did Professor Slusher of Texas University, other grounds for the occurrence of such correlations (Austin, op.cit. pp. 127-128 cf. SMR p. 239).
 

ASSUMING that

·  1) the rate of decay is known, is constant, is not violated, manipulated, transmuted in any way by any force, astral, cosmic, chemical or physical (multiply violated cf. Morris, The Genesis Flood, pp. 346-355, Slusher op.cit. pp. 18ff., SMR 78 - including the implied variation of rate in terms of pleochroic haloes made by particles emitted in certain rock formations, radioactively, and the implications of Tom Barnes's finding on magnetic field decrease over time, and its rate - SMR p. 170That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7, End-note 2)
 

·  2) the initial conditions are known in all necessary ratios (as seen Andrews, op. cit. p. 122, violated cf. Morris, The Genesis Flood pp. 366ff., Slusher op. cit., p. 22, 31ff., SMR pp. 169-171)
 

·  3) the initial dispersion of the argon is uniform (unknown)
 

·  4) there is no addition or subtraction of mother or daughter material in the (billions ? of ) years from the 'beginning' (exceedingly improbable over such venues and conditions, with such variabilities of permeability and diffusion, leaching and transmigration - cf. Andrews op. cit. pp. 118ff.)
 

·  5) no unknown processes or procedures intervened or were initially operative (... unknown)
 

·  6) the rock is one unit, and not a composite from different sources (may appear so when in fact there have been various interactions)
 

·  7) we have a closed system (a brilliant imagination - Andrews op.cit. pp. 120-122, Austin, Ed. op.cit., Ch.6, Slusher pp. 22ff.)
 

·  8) energic impulses or procedures (p. 6, Creation Technical Journal, Vol. 9, Part 1, 1995), in particular, were not active at any stage of which we have no knowledge, or in any manner of which we have no knowledge, either at the start or in the (billions of unchartered years of) time in-between... (an assumption shocking to the meekness of science),
 

·  9) the ratios of relevant materials taken from the field are in fact derivative from radioactivity in toto! not from other sources (contra, Austin op.cit. pp. 127ff., Slusher, op.cit. pp. 33-34):

we can then arrive at a date, which has only the irrational, meaningless and discordant problems to face! (See also the presentation in Dr Steve Austin's Grand Canyon, pp. 119ff..)

Assumptions about the original mixture may be wrong; mixtures may have come from lower areas, beneath the rocks, and be differential in combinations of minerals from the outset; differential melting points may drain off some items allowing various resultant complexes, and more complex materials may thus be drained of some of their constituents, and be mixed with those less complex from the outset, while differential heats can do the same. 'Drainage' may be by erosion subsequently, so too may insertions, with their own variabilities, and decay rates may vary in ways neither known nor fully understood, but beginning to be experimentally ratified.

Provided then that we know what we do not know, and can assess what is not assessable, and could reconstruct what happened, which is our investigation, not our assumption, we could do something useful here.

As it is, if we make assumptions we can get results. For that matter, we could assume the dates in the first place, rather than assuming the data and then working on it mathematically. It is rather reminiscent of some economic mathematics. If you KNOW the realities of man and his changes, you could predict, provided again in his case, they were of the kind that is assessable mathematically. How nice! assume what you are trying to show,  and you can show it.  So could a child!

If we say, But of course there have to be errors! yet we are not really in the arena of "the limits of normal procedural error", such as normally lead to approximation with the + and - symbol to indicate the limits of accuracy.

We are dealing with a batch of unknowns not dissimilar to this imaginary pep talk:

"I am sure that your bank account will swell by something of the order of magnitude of 50% in 50 years, says the Bank Manager, on the basis of the market activities of the last 41/2 years, the existing commercial law structure, the inflationary movements and their known and current dynamics, the Bank rate internationally in its relationship to Tokyo, Washington and Europe, the trade cycle and international wars which may break out!"

THANKS! you say. This is marvellous! OR do you smile inwardly at the excessively pompous pronouncement of figures obviously ludicrous even to contemplate in such a series of unknowns, dependent on considerations beyond the highest discernment, immersed in a sea of troubles which make mathematics a mere henchman, reflecting principles to which it does not relate, but merely quantifies if they occur!

This is not a matter of errors! It is a matter of a multitude of forces and realities of unknown kind, whether in principle or in practice, piling up like snow in a blasting storm, along the drive-way.
Will we be able to drive out ? It all depends on ...

When again, we now find that

·  the velocity of light is PRECISELY what depends on the STATUS QUO (cf. p. 6, Creation Technical Journal, Vol. 9, Part 1, 1995, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 15, Calibrating Myths ... Ch. 1), and
 

·  the status quo is precisely the question in relation to the origin of things; that
 

·  neutrino impact on atoms can alter their rate of decay (Morris, Scientific Creationism pp. 142ff.), and precisely such impacts are of the very fabric of commencement, even now in the maintenance phase of the universe being variable,
 

·  and that
 

·  rates of decay can indeed vary with (even currently observable) pressures and environmental forces (Creation, Technical Journal Volume 14, No. 1, 2000, pp. 4ff. - Dr Tas Walker) -
 

then the circularity of the reasoning, the pomposity of the pronouncements and the discord of the results are all of one piece.

Presumption has begotten irrationality, and irrationality has begotten discord and discord has begotten expensive ignorance. It is a unitary, self-verifying fabric, like the skin. Rational errors and irrational results cohere like skin and cancer. Their correlation is expressive!

Certainly nearer events have more opportunity to relate accurately to assumptions which are well within current menus of events; but even then, the simple fact that there is not yet even an equilibrium as between C12 and C14 (SMR p. 164, 238, Scientific Studies in Special Creation, article on radiometric dating, by Melvin Cook, pp. 79ff.) - this in itself strongly suggesting other things equal, 10,000 years as the maximal age - in agreement with another maximum index, the magnetic SMR p. 171), and the other simple fact that this C02 disequilibrium was DISREGARDED in many applications of the carbon dating method, is warning enough of the philosophic character of ignorance, inventing too much with the mind, too little with the observations for which science is properly, but not always actually, justly famous.

Indeed, the fact that Dr Cook can make an adjustment through reasonings based on the divergence between atmospheric nitrogen and that in compounds, relative to the N14/N15 ratio, such that it "effectively wipes out all geological time", (SMR p. 236) when that factor is presented to the chronological equations, speaks more than enough. The factor concerns cosmic ray penetration and alteration of nuclei, and such causes, whether affected by magnetic or atmospheric, solar or diluvial (and hence atmospheric and associated) causes, or indeed supernova explosions, provide as Morris in no small part cites (Scientific Creationism pp. 142-143 and  The Genesis Flood pp. 352-3.).

Such is the magnification, stressed by Professor Andrews, inherent in the nature of the equations, that results of millions of years is a natural correlative of their use, at all (God, Science and Evolution, p. 119). Hence these absurdities - billions, thousands, occur as freely as the presumption of the assumptions would suggest in theory, in practice also! (Cf. Let there be Light, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 15).

As inchoate as are the dreams in the air of the imagination, in principle, so when it comes to practice, and if possible the more obviously, there is exposed the more rampancy of assumptions made concerning what is frankly in various significant aspects, quite unknown, subject to intrusions not witnessed, prone to occur in the dimensions of past events, let alone in the immediate succession of events, from the institution of matter itself. In expanding rims of the vortex, force on force, the dragging swirl of suggestion has replaced the contrite concepts of patient science.

The results are as docile as a bull on speed drugs.

Thus Morris in Scientific Creationism cites (p. 143), a Russian case of uranium ages of over one billion years being accorded to known materials of living memory production.

Snelling has by his own research in co-operation with separate laboratories, shown similarly that materials taken from a new New South Wales site,
assigned a fossil date of some 250 myrs, was found by radio carbon methods,
to be around 34,000 years (cf. That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 7, Section E, End-note 2 ). Both methods being so ill-founded in objectivity, and so rich in the subjectivity of preferred assumptions, their discordance with one another is scarcely surprising, but the richness of such discord as attested by Andrews, Snelling and Morris in detail, is of the normal scientific anti-verification dimension. As soon as the systematic enters into things, beyond odd casual errors, the assumptions are presumptions, one or all, and fallen.  Sources of living memory production, is scaled into hundreds of thousands of years of age, by radiometric method, even when carefully checked (see Let there be Light, in Barbs, Arrows and Balms 15).

As noted in That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 7 E, able and original geologist, Dr Andrew Snelling, refers to Mt Ngauruhoe as New Zealand's newest volcano - and one of the most active. The case is somewhat scenic and of use in exemplifying further the much attested point of dilemmas, confusion and inordinate errors based on fanciful assumptions, not subjected to the rigours of reality, as should occur in science.

Rising to some 7500 feet, the volcano noted erupted in 1948, with a lava flow proceeding thereafter down the north-western slopes, in 1949. About 20 million cubic feet was the estimated volume of lava. In 1954 an eruption hurling blocks with ash, occurred with some 8 million cubic metres of lava. Further activity occurred in 1974, with an ash column soaring into the atmosphere. Blocks of some 1000 tons were hurled hundreds of metres. Then in 1975, a huge violence occurred, with blocks up to 100 ft across catapulted almost 2 miles.

11 samples were collected from the five recent and conspicuous lava flows during field work in 1996 - from the flows of 1954, 1975 and 1954. All with maps were clearly identified. Various carefully checked samples were sent to an eminent laboratory for dating. The dates for the age of the ROCKS were of the order of millions of years. The laboratory manager re-checked his equipment and tested again.  The results were similar.

Since the rocks are KNOWN to be of the order of 50 years old, the apparent 'age' is assumed to have come from 'excess' argon, radiogenic inclusion, in the lava, before the rocks formed. This sort of failure is "also known to occur in many other rocks, including both recent volcanics and ancient crustal rocks," Snelling adds, giving references.

Here the INITIAL SITUATION assumptions are wrong, but confidently made (cf. SMR pp. .240ff), just as the VARIABLE RATE can be merely a theory based on philosophical preference, abstracting from the ages to the present, or to the ages from concepts of choice.

Similarly the lead factor for neutrino allowance, as devised by Cook, makes enormous inroads on time. Such things are OBVIOUSLY of the matrix of the matter, and while assumption is the answer to actuality, the reality of the result MUST be as ludicrous. What is NOT at all unknown is the rate question in much simpler situations which abound, such as noted in SMR pp. 235ff., 246-250, That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7E;  and these are not merely discordant with the results of our philosophic assumptions as noted above, but wholly diverse.

The comparative concordance of the rates noted (as in 1) in assumptions made, above) on the contrary is neither illusory nor irrational, but balanced work moving to minimal consequences of current rates, providing a time frame far more congenial to residual DNA still being found, despite its limited life span, and limited erosion on the surface of the earth in terms EVEN of current mild procedures and precedents (as distinct from an eroded and humbled earth surface, given time*3), non-equilibrium of C12 and C14 in the earth's atmosphere, the cooling rate of the earth's surface*4, the reformation rate of moon rocks, and such various matters as have been noted above, or in the references to other works on this site, above.

This composure of comprehensive concord on the one hand, and this dissolute seeming diversity of self-contradictory and even irrational results found on the radiometric array of mere assumptions, begging the question in the process, leaves no option for the steely face of verificatory procedure. The earth is young or reason is odd! If reason were odd, we could not validly assert the earth to be young OR old. If we are to reason, THIS is the reasonable result. The earth is young, but presumption is not.

What then ? Dates ? Commencements ? If you know all the answers, then you can set out the elements in your mathematics, and these will reflect the accuracy of your knowledge. If, however, your ignorance of these things is the problem, mathematics will not because it cannot help you. It is the servant of knowledge, indicating what it implies. It cannot supply the knowledge, when its own derivation is one of the questions. It is necessary to subject one's thought not to the discipline of mathematical consequences of self-defeating assumptions, but to the unexotic and assessable, making for proper maxima.

The area of 10,000 years is suggestive; realms far beyond it run into problems which have all the countenance of the insuperable. As with the expectation of aliens in space, life on Mars, missing links on earth, information increase in forthcoming generations and the like, however, these things are still taught, because it is the desire that it be so. Rationally, they are indefensible as a preferred option.

For more detail on dating see SMR  and That Magnificent Rock 7 as cited above,  with Let there be Light (Barbs, Arrows and Balms 15).
 

This is the end of the adapted except from Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming, Ch. 5.).

We have surveyed things ideologically, with this latter emphasis on the ignorance on the dating of these creative magnificences, and the assiduous acclamations for its, like the emperor's new clothes, with all the passion of the unfounded. We have considered the folly of mere romancing, with anti-evidential, irrational, or self-inventing universes, chance made laws and other antinomies, and continue to watch the record not in imagination, but in current observation, of the word of God and the unfolding of history, in perfect, testable accord.

Ideologically, this is the way it is,
and that is the way it is predicted to become. This attests that: this condition is one more part of that syndrome, and that is the index to His coming ... soon.

But let us turn now from mere age and creation outset,  to intensity and development in this ultimately spiritual field of the earth, its history and its coming history.


 

End-Notes

1* This includes the relevant volumes in general and in particular, of

    Modern Science and the Genesis Record  Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan

    The Harmony of Science and Scripture

    The Theory of Evolution and the Facts of Science

    Dead Men Tell Tales
 

*2

In fact, one learns from United Press International, early June 2000, that this "church's Permanent Judicial Commission decided to allow ministers to bless same sex unions". "Religious ceremonies recognizing homosexual unions are permissible, as long as they are distinctly different from marriages." From the same report, and in its words, "The commission also declared that it would not automatically turn down a gay man's application to become a minister." More amazing still, a minister is cited who  "said the rulings leave intact the church's opposition to same-sex marriages." Such changes are rather like an inverted natural decay curve. In it, the fast decline is near the first, and it moves until it may become almost imperceptible (as often now), when all the fizz and energy of the initial creation is more distant.

In this, however, in the church noted, the fizz of fast decay is near the end. THIS is the nature of the ecclesiastical situation as predicted, and it is coming along on time, like a skilled athlete.

That ? It is always the way with the word of God, whether it predicts this quality or calibre, pattern or date, rate or conspectus, or that: what it says, the situation provides. How beautiful is this for solace and comfort to the Christian, who knows that he battles not alone, nor in any uncertain events, but that the irresistible God, perfect in restraint, is also perfect in power, precision and hearing prayer. How precise it is in telling one and telling all: IT IS NEARLY TIME.

It is like an examination in which after hours of toil, one hears the sonorous voice of the supervisor: There are ten minutes to go! It is the nature of examinations that they do not end until the scheduled finish; but in them as in this, it is wise to be prepared for the end. It involves getting to know the One who was there in the beginning (Revelation 2:8, Isaiah 44:6); and as to Him, when He is in you and with you, it is indeed "God with us". But "if God be for us, who shall be against us ?" (Romans 8:31).

*2A

See for example That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7, p. 180Iff., 256, 257,  and SMR pp. 109, 132, 162.

2B
The coincidence of the impact from various findings is as overwhelmingly positive as is the discord negative from the gradualistic option.

Thus on pp. 57ff. (Creation's Tiny Mystery), Gentry details his findings both of and about coalified wood, along with other colleagues, in the Colorado Plateau (cf. That Magnificent Rock, TMR, Ch. 7, Section E). Pieces from what in the cultural preference for 'ages' of the Jurassic, Triassic and Eocene were collected, supposedly separated in time by millions of years, and all packed into the never-never past almost beyond comprehension. Nevertheless, a fellow scientist's report included the statement in this regard, that although some specimens of the material were so small that magnification was needed for close identification, entire tree trunks were also to be found, which, Gentry observes, is clear attestation of rapid burial. It is, after all, for a supposed time of many millions of years, not at all bad preservation! Further, flexibility in some wood specimens was attested in the report of his fellow scientist's published account of his discoveries (p.58)! This rather reminds one of the presence of haemoglobin in material by inadequately prepared time postulations, assessed as millions of years old! (cf. TMR Ch. 7, End-note 2).

It is therefore scarcely surprising that the corroborative report published in Science  (1978a, Appendix, Gentry et al. ) attests likewise that "Uranium to lead ratios were found suggesting that various Colorado plateau formations are only several thousand years old instead of the 60 to 200 million-year-age required by the evolutionary time scale" (p. 59, Gentry, op.cit.).

In line with the work of the Nobel scientist, Dr Cook, in his observations on a corrective radiometric factor, bringing ages down to just such a time scale, already noted, the CO2 lack of equilibrium also noted (That Magnificent Rock - TMR, Ch. 7, End-note 2), the various concentration rates in oceanic chemicals, the Slusher attestations on the heat age, the moon rock age and the galaxy implications, as well as the comet indications of age, magnetic field decline for the earth, its measured rate and associated predictions, these things all cohere (cf. SMR pp. 238ff.). What is still more impressive than the more evident aspects of Gentry's and others' wood work, in coal, attesting its rapid formation (in terms of elliptical radio halos, evidently from compression from radioactive intrusion - TMR loc.cit., Gentry, Creation's Tiny Mystery pp. 54ff.) is yet to come, and we now relate it. This arises from the fact, already noted, that specimens were collected from the Jurassic, Triassic and Eocene imagined epochs as noted above. These 3 highly chronologically diverse beds, in terms of geological culture, prevalent in our time, gave but one result in relevant halos observed.

The evidences in Gentry's own highly specialised field of polonium radio-halos shows an alignment for all the three geological 'ages' noted above, so that the conditions seem identical or nearly so. There were the same two halos, the same combination or duality, the same elliptical and circular assemblages. The conditions - intrusion or permeation by radioactive solution, emission before the wood hardened, leading to compression of the circular track, later emission without distortion - are eminently alignable with a vast assemblage of rapid events, with rapid depositions. Prevailing conditions allowed coincident contemporary results (misnamed, for various depositions, 'ages').

It fits like a claret glass in a set. In itself, it is merely a remarkable series of repetitions, this similarity for the three 'ages', in the highly specialised regard of the double radio halo, common geometrical pattern.
In its setting of other data, it is one more confirmation.


 


 


 

 


Where 5000 supernovas might be projected on the nature  myth basis, NONE are found (TMR Ch. 7, pp. 180Pff.).


Where a (relatively) recent earth's magnetic field is seen dispersing with some speed, in terms of observation, predictions are fulfilled (as with Professor Barnes specialisation)...

 

But let us return to the Gentry case and rehearse it. We have noted the quick formation data for the coal, but let us re-examine the three age situation involved in one aspect.

At issue in the coalified wood case,  are ' "dual" 210Po halos',  (p. 57). On the basis of  the radioactive decay products, one earlier and one later emission can be expected and their tracks in the wood residue,  investigable. In view of the nature of the reactions, the time for the second track would be in the vicinity of 20 years after the commencement. For the double and geometrically similar halos to form in the wood, extreme parallels of formative forces is implied. Advanced scientific equipment was used, in collaboration with colleagues, just as it had been in the granitic materials earlier, to attest the data. The result then suggested that only one uranium solution had infiltrated the specimens taken from each 'age'. That in turn would suggest a similar 'age' for all the specimens, despite the geological mythology. Elliptical (from compression) halos in particular,  are met by the hypothesis that in each case, the wood specimens were in the same "gel like condition", enabling such penetration of the solution and that a special parallel applied in each case. The phenomenon occurred alike to specimens from all 'ages'. However double halos in each case involve what appears a constraint.

Thus if the emissions (in various types) were to occur before the wood hardened, then BOTH sets would be distorted, or rendered elliptical by compression. If compression  in fact did not occur, then there would be expected to be NO ellipse at all, merely a circular display. This however is not the case. There is something in-between. It is an elliptical halo with a circular one, a double effect. If the hardening occurred WITHIN the twenty years relevant to the double emissions, then  one would escape the distortion, the later emission, and one would not, the earlier one, hence the actual result, an ellipse with a circular product, would be expected to occur. Moreover, on this basis, the wood hardened to a coal-like or parallel condition in that time, around two decades. It is notably short, conforming to other experimental results.

Moreover,  the parallel conditions met in each case multiply. The 'ages' have a decidedly contemporaneous look, just as the coal formation has a hurried appearance, precisely in line with the conclusions of Austin in the Grand Canyon case.

This is merely one of the interesting indices to be considered in the anguish of the 'dating system' which is so sovereignly imposed in the cultural clique of the Age (ours, not a geological one).  Many others come from what is also noted by Dr Steve Austin in his specialised and extensive Grand Canyon investigations which are also covered in our treatment above, in some detail. As to that, Gentry for his part observes that (p.53), "uniform layering of successive formations can be seen in the Grand Canyon". If, he indicates, these were really separated by epochs, then "one would expect to find deep irregular cuts and other signs of erosion within the different layers" . These natural products of naturally changing circumstances in such vast periods do not however make themselves readily available. They are comparatively rare, not the norm; so that

·       the formations do not conform to expectations,

·       any more than does the rapid coalilfication attested by Gentry as above, or the prima facie indication of a similar time for what are represented as vastly different 'ages',

·       or the Austin concept of the forces required and evidence available, relative to the construction of the Grand Canyon,

which is indicative of catastrophic might, not gradualistic formation in the way reviewed earlier.

Nor do the zircon results ally themselves to gradualistic expectations, as noted, but to much less time (cf. TMR Ch. 7, End-note 2). .

Moreover, these data conform to the oddity of vastly different results from radioactivity dating to the point verified by Professor E.H. Andrews, the whole array of theoretical assumptions which presuppose a world view which the facts do not attest when it comes to the character of formations on which it is visited. Nor is it merely that such results frequently differ depending on which dating method  is used, of 'bad dates' thrown out, ones which do not conform to theory, but of dates which provide millions of years of age to recent occurrences.

Clearly we are in the area and arena of theory invading fact. It is better to acknowledge the presuppositions, and make the realm philosophy; and for science, keep to observations and what they actually imply, with due reserve and respect for primary data. It is far, far better to proceed from fact to theory, than from theory to fact. Theories must WORK, be UNIFORMLY attested, CONSISTENTLY verified and harmonise with their results, as with other WORKING THEORIES, themselves duly attested, and not aborted by rebellious non-verifications. Calamity, catastrophe, immense forces, rapid actions, variable rates, inadequate theories are all consistently and insistently attested. The gradualistic, uniformitarian theories therefore have nothing to do with science. They are fact-abusing philosophy. From a religious, a specifically Biblical perspective, this would be the prediction for such a case of philosophical intrusion. It is verified.

That ? It is simply one more verification of two things: the error of the nature-made-itself scenario empirically as well as logically; and the serene contempt of the Biblical certitudes for such rash, rushed theories as for far too long assailed the mind of man with the inventions of unverified imagination. Philosophy ? it is vain. This, it is but one example of what Paul calls (I Cor. 1: 21) the "wisdom of this world" which through its own version of "wisdom did not know God". What is needed is a return to that wisdom which is amply verified, consistently affirmed and confirmed, and with it, to the 'foolishness', from the viewpoint of the witless witiness of this world, of the truth. Foolish it may appear to the devious, to the discounters by psychic tic, but its persistent consistency without parallel, is but one element of the indefeasibility of the Bible's attestation concerning the necessity of salvation, and its provision in Jesus Christ.

And this ? it is as the divine gift for this purpose, neither duplicable nor dismissible (cf. Acts 4:11ff.) . As to the world, it is as for man: God is, made it, maintains it;  as to mankind, He presented for it , its redemption; yet it wallows in rebellion even against this; and God determined the outcomes, forecasted them. They still happen, and He still invites.
 

*3

Michael Oard, Creation Technical Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2000, pp.35ff.. The same is found in special deposits at the foot of some harsh cliff land forms (talus deposits) in the Grand Canyon (Austin, Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe), making light work in small volumes of large dates and great pretensions (pp. 98, 100ff.). Continual consequences fitting abrupt action and not slow accretions are presented by Austin in this area of his work.

The results of long ages of crumbling are replaced, says Austin in his researches of various locations, by the bareness or near bareness of surrounds which attests a very different scenario. It is concordant with the deep cuttings and vast scouring effects so often seen. "Most major cliffs in Grand Canyon have only a small amount of talus ...", but "If such rocks are the result of slow erosion over hundreds of thousands of years, we might expect a progressive increase in the decomposition of talus on the benches away from the cliffs.. This, he notes, has not been demonstrated, but "Instead we see shale benches which appear to have been swept clear of large rocks by extensive flooding" (p. 102).

In the process of acute investigation, Austin, the writer of this particular chapter in the anthology of Ph.D. and other specialists, perceptively treats the numerous relict results relating to catastrophic acceleration of 'normal' processes, removing the whole rationality of gradualism over millions of years in this canyon exposure. This is merely one of the endless parade of exposure of non-conformity of theory with fact, based on philosophic bias, where theoretical dates are liberally inserted into unfriendly factual environments!

One of the most appealing parts of the demonstration is the simple matter thus summarised, and in the chapter searchingly appraised, as the origin of the canyon is considered:


(0p.cit. p. 107).

The paraconformities so conspicuous in the canyon, rock types embedded on others without evidence of intervening years of deposition, though the rock types are theoretically perhaps millions of years apart, do not need mere admissions, any more than the huge 'uplifts' of sedimentary rock without evidence of the same, by stress fracture or allied mechanical attestation, over hundreds of square miles in other locations as attested in Morris' Genesis Flood pp. 144ff.), but material for conclusions to be drawn, which are feasible for the explanation of the facts. Magic is not one of the means available to science, but creation in short order, on the other hand, is. The deluge contributes, as well as post-flood deluges of more limited type. To seek to interpret such materials by current processes is in all reality, like attempting to explain how a man arrived, by assuming current processes, and becoming 'unaware' of youth, and far more so, of infancy!

 

In parallel to such considerations, in Ch. 6 (op. cit., e.g. pp. 126ff.) Austin shows with great detail in the dating arena, that with an array of dating methods at hand, including isochron, not all in agreement with each other, the youngest rocks in the Canyon are given the oldest ages. This is found by the fact that in the type of areas concerned, the rocks assessed as oldest "overlie virtually all the Grand Canyon strata". Indeed, these, by radioactive means deemed the oldest, appear to be, says Austin, the youngest rocks in Arizona.

 

The presuppositions for radioactive dating as so often, are shown for what they are in reliability by their contradictions of normal geological reasoning, as well as of each other. The actual grounds of the rocks and the actual dates are but two of the assumptions which, unlike the rocks, ultimately rest on air. What floats in such airy theories, can only fall; and it does. Austin however gives close and integrated reasoning on large cross-sections of relevant evidence and produces an elegant harmony for all.

What then do we find ? Rankly presuppositional geology writhes in torment as the dating errors complicate the sedate concepts of the rocks; that is, not the concepts held by the rocks, if that were possible, but concerning them.

While the dating collides with itself, therefore, it does so no less with the rocks; and the turmoil is perhaps as good an example as the incredible fascination with the theory of phlogiston GOING to make oxidized things weigh more, rather than oxygen COMING. Lavoisier in this case did not have such an establishment as now is, to fight; but it was still formidable in its empty assurance, and psychic lack of solace, when the ground was being removed from under its feet. Here, however, it is the very ground under our feet which is talking!

Non-gradualism is the attestation of evidence, and CONFORMITY of the structures in the canyon with numerous other structure TYPES where the origin IS known, is as outstanding in its exhibition in this volume edited by Dr Austin, as are the querulous quiddities of contrary suppositions.
 

*4
A beautifully elegant attestation of young earth age by this means is provided by Harold Slusher and Thomas Gamwell in Age of the Earth, publ. Institute for Creation Research. Dr Slusher in the tradition of Professor Barnes of the same El Paso University has been an accomplished professor, and deft writer in these fields.

This with the work of Barnes himself on magnetism (see That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 7 E), so well confirmed later by further work of Dr Humphreys, the rate of accumulation of minerals in ocean water, the fast spending energies and configurations found in astronomy, erosion rates on the earth's surface, rate of reformation of deformed moon rocks (as there attested, again the work of Slusher), limitations on age through helium production rates, the declining availability of information in biota, the measurement of pleochroic halos and numerous other aspects of the evidence as attested in this site (see as above and SMR pp. 73-87, 159-166, 171, 234-252N and S1-S34 and Index in Other Works) presents overall a requirement on both the method and timing of earth's origin, which is stringent.

It is not time but God who invented the earth, its systems, sub-systems, structures, ingenuities, codes, operational symbols, power and wonder. God is so much more capable, while time merely allows what has what it takes to do it, to do it. It does not substitute for the power to do it! As to time, it is running out of being run in for such tasks, and neither for the future to the coming of the Creator to His disobedient orb, nor in the past, scarred with the catastrophes of former judgments, is it any solace to unbelief, but rather a very proper threat in life and mind alike.

Ø        "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation" - II Cor. 6:2. One does well to remember that the Creator is not an object in a super-market, but as His codes show conceptual precision and imaginative brilliance, so His other codes of integrity and faith are necessary and not optional, for the finding not of ore, but of truth. As Hebrews 11:1 has it: "Faith is the confident realisation of things hoped for, the evidential assurance of things not seen". Its object is the One revealed in the word of God, demonstrated to be His in SMR Chs. 1-3,10, and verified constantly over the 3 million or so words on this site, in field after field, with that beautiful consistency which is a hall-mark of truth, and the depth which is the attestation of reality when it is discovered.

Ø        That One is Jesus the Christ, ordained and sent from eternity to time, the sublime sovereign who neither bullies nor merely placates, but in truth by love performed what was needed to allay justice with sacrifice, so that peace with integrity could prevail:

"He made Him to be sin, who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him," as Paul declares (II Cor. 5:21, cf. Galatians 3:1-13).