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Chapter 9
Crass Inhumanity is so
very Human ?
No More than is
Rubbish…
But
rubbishing what is not rubbish is most undivine!
News 252
Failure in
Romanticising Ruin and
Ignoring Restoration
There is no
slightest nuance of evolution in the application of pre-existing standards to
the results of ruinous misuse of them, in order to bring them into effect. Yet
it is such unthinkable irrationality as this which enables people to talk of
the vigorous, often sacrificial labours of man to
deliver others from the impact of denatured follies, in so meticulously absurd
fashion. Such events are MADE to happen, to REDRESS what was lax, slack and
evil, and this by intelligence, and that through things man has known and shown
from ages past, but not so often done!
Rather is
such reformation in religion, in industry, in human relations, the application of the divine root and
basis in man, not as gods, but as from God, that enables things like the
appalling horrors of British industrialism in the 18th century, yes
and in the 19th in measure, to become the kinder, more understanding
thing that it now is; and the godless hoaxes of ruffians to be overthrown so that
humans may once more act somewhere nearer their true design potential.
Certainly,
as
In
“Chinese workers are
enduring a wrenching transition from socialism to capitalism. While economic
reforms have brought prosperity to millions, the Communist Party's reluctance
to pursue political reform has left workers without strong courts, unions or
other institutions that might protect them.”
One case in point: the leader of one of the underground
churches (noted in
News 250) sentenced to life imprisonment during a
much observed trial, is now on hunger strike. Why ? It
is because he wishes to protest his “jailers’
refusal to allow him to write letters and file an appeal”, reports a
religious activist. Leader of a Church which has dispatched missionaries
throughout China, active in at least 10 provinces, he is faced with the charge
of breaking the law, the law which is to protect the core of corruption which
promotes power in place of principle, and uses the spirit of a man to deny the
spirit of a man in such a calamitous breach of all reason as to leave this
nearer to Gulliver’s Travels than
real life. It is like some pretty little play in which comedy and burlesque
compete with excitement; except that though drama, it is no play.
The STATE is what matters then ? as proclaimed. The individual is not really there in some
excruciating way ? individuals
think so. Such fraud is one of the worst features of that verbal chicanery
associated with Marxism. Clever policies bring in foreign billions, expertise,
technology, and things happen, being substantially built from another system.
Very well, but when we read of things which in positive corruption,
inconsistency even with the impoverished laws which obtain, harshness almost
unimaginable, disregard of humanity to the last degree, systematic and
polished, applied with principle and thrust, it is clear that Christianity, as
noted on the increase in China earlier, is indeed needed to bring back reality
from the baseless and corroded vision which has gripped this doubly unfortunate
land.
Doubly unfortunate ? Yes, it is
held up by foreign incursions, which it benevolently, for the time being,
receives, and so the system continues without the proper application of its own
folly, bringing it low the sooner. Multiplied stories such as provided by the Washington Post are, if possible, worse
than sadism; they incorporate a disregard so total as to astonish, and remind
one of the Japanese treatment of many war prisoners.
Culture without Christ does it in different ways, with
astute hypocrisy of this or that kind, with artful devices, with sullen disregard;
but what it does without the living God, does not even grace the grave. If it
not pride of mind, or pride of life, or pride of nation, or pride of culture,
if it is not lust of flesh or of ideology to control, conquer and overturn,
then it is likely to be simple cruelty, power lust, ambition, seeking spiritual
sedition in the kingdom lest it become that of God.
What then ? The application of
Christian principles elevated Britain, so that in much it now falls upon
itself, as its own source; while their militant and irrational exclusion has
prostrated China from elements of restraint, gentleness and self-control which
once were highly prized there; but being without adequate basis in Confucius,
they fly like the wind before the desires of profit, power, importance,
survival, success and other misnamed anomalies of godless lust.
There is not always anything wrong with some of these things
IF THEY ARE NOT GODS, but mere elements of due and just concern. It is not
wrong to make a profit; it is entirely wrong to live for it; to survive need
not fashion shame, but wrong it is to seek it at the cost of what it is that
survives; to be successful need arouse no guilt, if the ‘success’ is in things for which you
are designed by your Designer. Even a school child can be ‘successful’ if his
aim is to burn down the school, and he does so!
People may prefer profit to principle, as appears to have happened in part to the
Harry Wu protestations concerning China: those of gross corruption and deceit in the employments of political and
religious ‘slaves’, under pretence of propriety, in commercial operations, in
prison conditions.
Ø Who are these human
beings who are above the human, who so consign their fellows
?
Ø Who are those who
judge, being humans, humanity as unfit to receive what they themselves secure ?
Ø who make little of the
contents of the human capsule, and speak askance BY their own spirits, of the
operations of the spirit of man ?
Ø Who ARE these reductionists who have debased what man is in order to make
man survive, or some men do rather better than that,
and themselves among them!
Ø Whose are they ?
Ø What is their destiny
who so treat the human design and so unchastely dispatch the Designer from
their considerations, as they manipulate, manoeuvre
and mash His products ? (cf. Little Things Ch. 5, Christ Jesus: the Wisdom and the Power of God
Ch. 7, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Chs. 1, 9, 13).
Is not the application of good to industry already stretched
out for all to see, if not in perfection, then in such a spread of developments
of principle and compassion, concern and realism, that to be blind to it is
like insisting on torch-light under covers, when the sun is up!
“Worked Till They
Drop” is one of the
multiple stories provided to the Post by Philip P. Pan, from the Post’s Foreign Service. The accounts of
indifference, greed, thrust, push, love of appearance, disregard of fact, eyes
averted, officialdom ignoring its own bases, the game going on at all costs,
some of these being merely individual and purely human: they astonish and appal in equal measures; for though man is no angel, alas,
this is a very different domain, providing a sense of spiritual squalor without
interest, concern or direction! “China
Church Leader on Hunger Strike in Jail” brings out that old Chinese method
of bringing in ill-repute and irrelevant attack, or official-sounding jargon in
making attack on any sort of liberty, indeed on God, arresting, assailing,
assaulting with gross impeachments, those who do not disregard their design,
their Designer or worship flesh, or for that matter, its products. It reminds
one of John Bunyan’s Lord Hate-Good, whose zeal in justice is to be unjust.
The Knowledgeable
Ignoramus Situation
There are in fact, manifest in mankind, here more, there
less, not what could by any arrival of orderly imagination be called
‘evolution’, but devolution, and indeed devilution,
if you want to combine devilry and devolution. Man comes equipped in a
spectacular way in his resources of mind, body and spirit; and then does this! and it is evolution!
What sort of intellectual suicide, moral pretence and spiritual blindness could
say this ?
It comes in wonder, it works in woe. It goes …
down, down and down, and this is up? It disgraces what it already has and this
is progress ? this relates in
any way at all to development ? unless it be the
dénouement of evil, the devastation of products, the defilement of hope. Why
the very bases of this devastating dereliction are denied by its operation as
well as by its resources.
If knowledge increase, that is testimony to the equipment
which, given time, can make it so. It is not created by this; it is merely
cognized. The ordered and orderly array of conceptually formatted realities did
not come with the mind that found them, but were there that they might be
found. It was, all of it,
there in order that it might be known, all along.
But knowledge of what is it that increases
? Daniel foresaw the mere accumulation of data (Daniel 12:1-4) for the
times to which, limping and lordly, the world has now come, as its senescence
arrives. He conjoined in this prophecy the awefulness
of sickening sin and the increase of awareness of the universe’s composition:
it was not moral, this knowledge, merely procedural, for such evil as could
scarcely be contemplated, was revealed for this time (Daniel 11:40ff.), and it
is no coincidence that the end looms to terminate this terminal disease in the
ways of man (Daniel 12:1ff.).
But what of knowledge such as is more necessary
? for knowledge of what man is, has been so ruthlessly suppressed by so
many for so long, in philosophy, in commerce, in ideologies opaque to light of
any sort, that to refer to man as knowledgeable is like calling a moron a
genius. It is worse; for in this case, the knowledge of truth is decreasingly
even sought, and cynical pragmatism rules the hearts of many, the very zenith
of obfuscatory affairs, active in telling the ‘truth’
that there is no truth as if man had lost his very wits among his spiritual
woes. Yet as to operation and possession in this world ?
With man putting his wits to own the world, he strives and perspires, murders
and mutters, mutinies and desolates.
Man in vast array ? he knows, but is himself unknown by mere blindness,
passionate wrestling with truth, without cease, without result except his own
exclusion from it (cf. Romans 1:17ff.).
Not knowing even himself, he knows nothing as it ought to be
known, like a spanner being used as a camera. He does not perceive where he
fits, because he has loved the unfitting, and in fits and starts, he brandishes
and crashes, arises and falls; but of evolution, one sees less than nothing,
for it is as wealth dispersed, not at all relevant to saving, but to shaving.
It starts intact; it ends dispersed. It comes in beauty; it goes in horror.
Where it accumulates in quietness, so soon this world wishes to seize, to
attack, to gain, to enforce, to assume power, to take the human race for rides,
like children to the
Not only is man persistently and in vast measure untrue to
his own self, he makes images of it which are untrue to the point of delirium,
and makes them reflect the churn of the moment, the desire of the times, the
spirit of the Age, as if there were some craft in such wresting of the factual
basis of things, always a failure, always dismissed in the next generation or
two, with that magnificent exception, the One who did not come from man, but to
man, whom no man can deter or rationally
dismiss; but who can dismiss in truth what is irretrievably lost (cf. Acts 17:29-31).
This ? It was primarily and in effectual
operation Jesus Christ, but in parallel triumph, it was alsoHis
scriptural credentials so that the two, mutually correlative but wholly
unaccommodating to any change, like twin stars, could shine in constancy,
consistency and without flicker. (Cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, esp. Part II.)
The word foretold Him; He fulfilled it.
As to His work to come, not to secure salvation, already
done (Hebrews 9:12ff.), but judgment, consider these words:
v
I perceive that in all
things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and considering the
objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE
UNKNOWN GOD.
v
“Therefore, the One whom you
worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: God, who made the world and
everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in
temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He
needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has
made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth,
and has determined their preappointed times and the
boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope
that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one
of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own
poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’
v
“Therefore, since we are the
offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or
silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising. Truly, these times
of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent,
because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in
righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this
to all by raising Him from the dead.”
Time is running out; but man is running on: yet not all are
doing so. Some come running as did the rich young ruler, to Christ, but unlike
him, they find
the point, pith, purpose, plan and provision for man. Without the Sent and
Anointed One, the Messiah, history shows merely the folly of wits without
worth, misusing either His name in contrary walk, or confusing man with god, or
god with God, culture with truth or effusions with reality. (Cf.
SMR Ch. 3, Predestination and Freewill.)
The Beauty of being
Reasonable
when He who Reasons is
Beautiful
As to God, He is most reasonable, but never lies. Our
construction reflects it and His word manifests it, just as His coming to this
earth epitomized it. Thus His foes could never overthrow even one argument,
when they sought to seize the world, and dispense with its Creator.
Hence there is always conflict with what lies and indeed
drinks in the Lie (II Thess. 2:4-10), as if it were
mother’s milk, and grows upon it as the lie would, from its own basis in hell,
lead one to expect. In that, and that alone, the lie is not disappointing. What
it points to, it is this which comes, gathering speed, noise and whirring
vibration among mankind, like some giant express; and it is on time, all the
carriages in order as prescribed in prophecy.
Listen however to this reasoning from Isaiah 1, and consider
the sort of industrial relations between God and the workers among men, for it
is based on providence, on purpose and on price paid. If in some things, such
as temple worship, that time is past, yet in principle it continues, man often
making his own temples, flawed from the first, obscene in their carvings,
whether they honour his body, mind or heart.
§ “Hear, O heavens, and
give ear, O earth!
§
For the Lord has
spoken:
§
“I have nourished and brought up children,
§
And they have rebelled against Me;
§ “The ox knows its owner
§
And the donkey its master’s crib;
§
But
§
My people do not consider.”
§ “Alas, sinful nation,
§
A people laden with iniquity,
§
A brood of evildoers,
§
Children who are corrupters!
§
They have forsaken the Lord,
§
They have provoked to anger
§
The Holy One of
§
They have turned away backward.
§ “Why should you be stricken
again?
§
You will revolt more and more.
§
The whole head is sick,
§
And the whole heart faints.
§ “From the sole of the
foot even to the head,
§
There is no soundness in it,
§
But wounds and bruises and putrefying sores;
§
They have not been closed or bound up,
§
Or soothed with ointment.
§ “Your country is
desolate,
§
Your cities are burned with fire;
§
Strangers devour your land in your presence;
§
And it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.
§ “So the daughter of
§
As a hut in a garden of cucumbers,
§
As a besieged city.
§
§ “Unless the Lord of hosts
§
Had left to us a very small remnant,
§
We would have become like
§
We would have been made like
§ Hear the word of the Lord,
§
You rulers of
§
Give ear to the law of our God,
§
You people of
§
§ “To what purpose is
the multitude of your sacrifices to Me?”
§
Says the Lord.
§
“I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
§
And the fat of fed cattle.
§
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
§
Or of lambs or goats.
§ “When you come to appear
before Me,
§
Who has required this from your hand,
§
To trample My courts?
§
§ “Bring no more futile
sacrifices;
§
Incense is an abomination to Me.
§
The New Moons, the Sabbaths, and the calling of assemblies—
§
I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting.
§ “Your New Moons and your
appointed feasts
§
My soul hates;
§
They are a trouble to Me,
§
I am weary of bearing them.
§ When you spread out your
hands,
§
I will hide My eyes from you;
§
Even though you make many prayers,
§
I will not hear.
§
Your hands are full of blood.
§
§ “Wash yourselves, make
yourselves clean;
§
Put away the evil of your doings from before My
eyes.
§
Cease to do evil,
§ Learn to do good;
§
Seek justice,
§
Rebuke the oppressor;
§
Defend the fatherless,
§
Plead for the widow.
§ “Come now, and let us
reason together,”
§
Says the Lord,
§
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
§
They shall be as white as snow;
§
Though they are red like crimson,
§
They shall be as wool.
§ “If you are willing and
obedient,
§
You shall eat the good of the land;
§ “But if you refuse and
rebel,
§
You shall be devoured by the sword”;
§ For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
It was
As this citation from Isaiah reveals, and reason confirms,
it is not enough to TALK of justice, to SPEAK of liberation, to CONDEMN what is
faulty: it is necessary to SHOW and DO justice, LIBERATE from oppression and to
AVOID what is faulty. Thus Isaiah 61:1-3 shows Christ on this very commission,
and Isaiah 54-55 as does II Corinthians 5:17-618 exhibit the WAY to work
aright, by first being reconciled to God, and so activated that in being and
doing, there is essential harmony. If you want ethics, they are there, and have
been for millennia in the Bible. In Christ, there is commitment to doing: not
for mere acclaim, but for conformity to Him who has died to save, lives to
deliver and acts to bring to account.
The world has nothing else that has demonstrated power,
being duly verified, achieves validity and works truth
v
(cf.
SMR pp. 88ff., 92ff., Chs. 3, 10,
v
TMR Chs. 1, 5,
6, 7, 8,
v
Tender Times for Timely Truths
v
Ancient Words, Modern Deeds, Chs.
1, 9, 11,
v
Earth Spasm… Ch. 1,
v
Wake Up World!... Chs. 1, 2,
5,
v
Sparkling Life … Ch. 4, Little Things Ch. 5,
v
News
122,
v
Secular Myths .. Chs. 1, 8,
v
Calibrating Myths … Ch. 6, TMR Chs. 1, 5, 6, 7, 8,
v
Christ Jesus, the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8
v
Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 -7,
v
Repent or Perish Chs.
2, 7,
v
Spiritual Refreshings 13,
News 19).
It is time to return, not to partial verbal acclaims of this
or that, but to God and ALL of it, the full-orbed splendour
of total, coherent, integral moral and spiritual reality, pure and celestial,
as is fitting for man made in His image, able to see many things, and needing
to DO THEM. Pretext is not enough. The whole text and context is needed, just
as surely as the whole DNA is required for the operating equipment of our
bodies.
How then ? Not as self-praising,
but as raised in Christ from the CONDITION of spirit which loves such partial,
debased or evil things, to that which loves Him, whose we are, like it or not. And
as to not liking it, the case is to be found nowhere but in this, that they
want to be God, or to make their own gods, but cannot, and so fall, fail and
flounder, the more bitterly to attack Him whose products they use in their own
selves, and whose will they transgress for fabricated dreams, based on nothing,
achieving nothing but much sound and fury, with duress and death.
To be sure, being a Christian is challenging, and can
involve hardness; but with it, there is not that which is governed by evil, but
seeks good; not what hardens against others, but against adversity, affliction
and efforts to disrupt, disperse or decimate what God has done, that man might
live. In giving a reason for faith, then, we also present what is the faith;
for without it, man is merely a muddler, spending an
inheritance he did not create, and now lamenting more and more, what is
becoming of it, like someone, widowed,
who once was rich, but now is appalled by her own rate of spending.