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CHAPTER 5
NO LICENCE TO LITTER
We have considered many elements of our created capacities, liberties and licences.
It has been a positive matter. Now it is time to consider a negative one. There is in the whole realm of human creation, and alliance with the universe for viewing, the world for dominion, NO LICENCE to litter. We are NOT permitted, there is no liberty directed to the wearisome, or lightsome, the erratic or erotic delivery to the world, care of rubbish control, of your litter and mine. It is not provided for, it is not asked for, it is not so ordered, so ordained. You are ABLE to litter; and so is a small child able to take a tin of red paint to your mahogany setting in the dining room. But things in your house are not so designed.
DO THAT! and you are if not an outcast, or insane, then in the utmost need of early instruction by diverse means. NOT having dinner may be one of those.
However the case is not so. Sin is not so. Rebellion is so. This is not apt, appropriate or a matter of wisdom. It becomes, it grows in the end like a tedious, tiresome tirade against truth.
Litter is outrageously strewn over the world, and one is not at all considering papers and drink bottles. They are delightfully clean things compared with the litter which ruins the world, attacks its foundations and spoils the race.
The litter is compacted, constantly raining down from the deliriously indifferent, or odiously incensed occupants of fantastically preoccupied aeroplanes which drop it, random, reckless, ruinous; and one is not considering toilet emptyings into mid-air, or mere fuel pollution, or even destruction of some of the ozone layer by ludicrously high invasions of that area and arena of current conflict which may yet prove one of the most disastrous destructions ever made by this race.
It is not moreover a matter
even of atmospheric ruin by incredible hide and indifference, let alone some
'mere' matter of the
The litter being dropped from the aeroplane trips of history, from the individual and corporate, national and ideological denizens of the planet, is of a moral and a spiritual kind, and we are dealing with a figure, which has all the figurative realities of drifting radioactive waste, or its wind or river borne resultants, such as have by report attacked some 3 million USSR citizens, not least the young and not least in the thyroid, and one does not know how many have suffered in Germany and allied countries, beneficiaries, or should one coin it, maleficiaries of the Chernobyl disaster.
WHAT
a comment this has been on the nation which told GOD to GET OUT, bag and
baggage.
It does not seem very bright in His 'absence', at this political level. That
SPIRITUAL LITTER
They have to pay.
That is just ONE EXAMPLE. The world is full of such examples, the communist one simply summing up and putting into the most flamboyantly impudent form, the rebellion in the heart of man. It can be smug; it can be arrogant; it can be cruel; it can be 'cool', serenely self-confident until the next disaster, based on an asinine estimate of capacities which in any case can in one moment, as in the sad case of a Paris magazine publisher or editor, become humbled to the dust. In his case, he was left with only one eye lid by which to write a notable book, before he died.
It is SPIRITUAL LITTER of which one speaks.
The case is this. Mankind
is dropping, as if from the aeroplanes of his transit over the planet, and over
the time scene of history, to use time and space as illustrations, all his
litter, litter of mind, of body but more especially of soul. Yes it is just your LIFE, and
since this life is a product of the creation of God, and has the powers we have
often reviewed (as in Repent or Perish Ch. 7), then it is vain to pretend it just
happened to be lying around and you picked it up. It has been erected, a far
more costly affair than any sarcophagus over the ruin that was the
What you say! Yes, it is a soul: a LIFE SPECIFICALLY HUMAN, with power to invent, imagine, embattle, construe, rove, realise, comprehend, overview things, survey situations, invest thought into means and consider purposes, to be guilty and to be innocent, to divorce from matter by being able therefore to have errors, and to divorce from merely conscious life in being able to experience the reality of them in the mind, and the folly of them in the spirit. For man has a spirit, a capacity to divorce from any culture, time or horizon, and to invent or invest other ones, from other times, or from no times, being merely imagined. We have considered this in SMR pp. 348ff., for example, as well, and shall not linger.
This spirit of man makes
any comparison between him and animals merely ludicrous. What animal was ever
nearly so wicked, so abased, so diabolical, so filled with scheming overviews
based on estimates of another's welfare, so cordially crushed for the lying
affirmation of greatness, the evil paranoia of pretence, the looming illusion
of lordship, over all things. Whoever else ever on earth worked out the
ideologies of evil, sanctifying the scum of spiritual pollution into systems of
thought, and implementing them with a passion to call evil good which makes
Isaiah 5’s rebuke of
How many Hitlers and Stalins have we had! These are merely modern derelicts, given the drunken orgies of power, and the capacity to ruin millions and tens of millions of lives by slow tortures of the soul, provided with unscrupulous hate, ideologically based, absurdly pretentious. Playing god is easy for men invented by HIM, for they have something of the understanding that relates to God; but not BEING God, they make a mess correlative to, comparable to the grandeur of the reality, when they vainly trespass into sin, rebellion, reactionary resistance, pathological programs, called them philosophy or politics or psychiatry (and not all of these are always foolish, since some derive from God explicitly, but seldom indeed), and live the lie.
THIS fatal facility of man is of course just one more verification of his unique place as created in the image of God, not a mere coping stone, not an arch zenith of what is lesser, but a new creation in kind. He has it; he acts it; and his having it is the criterion and the capacity for him to act it. And of course, though it is not all, always evil (though see Genesis 6 for a statement on the closing of the gap, and the consequence!), its genesis in revolt, its generation in disregard and its destiny in ruin make of its nicer appearances, the more treacherous a cover, like rocks just beneath the surface of the ocean.
Some do good. Some are children of God. Some love. Some come as bidden to the salvation of the One who came to provide it. Some are not blind and naked and equipped with suitcases of tatters (cf. Revelation 3:15ff.), which they duly throw out of the aeroplane windows, as they pass their little pilgrimage on this earth. Some have repented and realised the Christ, and taken more than token of His salvation: they have been the recipients of pardon, of power to live in the shadow of the Almighty and of His resources for love and truth and peace (Psalm 91).
They are comparatively few.
Many however, cart their sins after them, so that we read:
And sin as if
with a cart rope,
Who say, 'Let
Him make speed and hasten His work,
That we may see
it,
And let the
counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw near and come,
That we may know
it' " - Isaiah
5:18-19.
This they
do, mirroring the culmination phase of evil in
The fountain has long been opened for many others, including some of the Jewish people who have already found the Lord, such as the apostles! As Titus 3:4-7 has it:
· "But when the kindness and the love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, that having been justified by His grace, we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life."
· Then we find that "death is swallowed up in victory" (I Corinthians
· Yet there are also drops, like bombs through opened bomb release doors, dispersals of hearths and homes, employers and employes, dictators and victims, juntas and junked lives, left littering the psychological histories of many who remain, aggrieved and deprived, those on whom the litter of passion and impenitence fell, tossed out of the aeroplane windows of the pilgrimages of others, impelled by gravity and smashing into the earth.
Suppressed passion, the mood
now is, should be expressed. And so it is, to the point of making brothels
legal; and having drugs injected for the good of those afflicted by them, even
in something called a church; and having children brought up with such
perverted monstrosities of literature, if it could be called that, as one has
seen, that it makes one realise to the full the potential for evil of the human
race.
It has lost the race; and
the only redeemer is forgotten by most, in the thrust and lust of the day; and
not least, the complacencies of achievements and attainments, with or without
wealth recognition, the praise of fellow man (John 5:44ff.,Luke 16:15, ), as if
this could atone for the rubbish recklessly strewn out of the windows of the
noisy machines which traverse the skies; and this is figurative.
It is not an attack on
aeroplanes (except when they recklessly endanger at great heights to any extent,
the residual ozone layer, as Concorde conceivably may have done, and more like
it may do more effectively still). This is merely the pattern of presentation,
not the engines of flight, but the engines of indifference, which noisily burn
the oil of impenitence with the thrust of indifference, as man in the mode of
modern machinery, stalks the planet, very much as if it were some animal, ready
to be stricken.
How long does it take, to come down to earth in our figure, to realise that the 'animal' that he hunts, this earth, is GOING! It is not forever maintained for the maniacally indifferent utilisation programs of a 'lord' who has forgotten the One who gave him his place! We hear talk of this or that indigenous people who 'owned' or were 'caretakers' of the land; and foul have been some of the murders and massacres, although sometimes it was defence. Not at always however has this justification arisen, for offence often preceded it. Actually, however, apart from these evils, there is no people who OWNS a land, except God gives it; and as for those who ignore God, what they own is the results of their rebellion. This gives no one a right to say, Some of my people were in some of the land so that all of the land now 'belongs' to all of our people, and you invaded. HOW can you invade what was not an integral unit, a nation; and is man to replace God also in this, that he 'owns' God's lands.
But man's inhumanity to man is only part of man's inhumanity to himself, to his lands, not as if they were 'native' prerogatives, but human provisions from God for which ALL are responsible, both as to the land itself, and its skies, and the human relationships upon them. There are arrogances and arrogances, but all stem from failure to wait upon the Lord, while using his equipment of body and his provisions of universe.
To be sure, it is to be burnt up, as II Peter 3 in detail, as Isaiah 51:6 and sundry other places show so clearly, but especially that delightful passage in Revelation 20:11 which tells us, in speaking of the judgment by God, this item: "from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away. And there was no place found for them."
That is a day when the rights of mankind will be seen rather more clearly than by many, now.
That is coming. Far nearer is the return of the Owner.
Of this we have spoken in SMR Ch. 8, Answers to Questions Ch. 5 and elsewhere as in the Index. Our point here is that the LITTERING of our history and geography, but especially of our young pilgrims in their 'educational' indoctrinations, which even in this country have reached plague proportions and deserve judgments on which one hesitates even to bring thought (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 8), teachings no one can ever make stand, but which the children must stand, and understand, in slanted examinations, they need to know if they are to go.
Some suffer, my own daughter an example. Some merely slip and slide into the oblivion of fancy and fantasy, because, as in some Communist country, it is required.
Education, philosophical, political, domestic, psychological, cultural, aggressively dispersed, evilly conceived spiritual litter is far more deadly than any radioactive waste, such as has in the past months incited massive demonstrations in Germany, or in Dunkirk, by some literary irony. History is far from illiterate; God controls it. The evils of men are turned this way and that; but the dynamic is their own. The comments come from other sources; and the misled human architect is building on earth, as at the time of the tower of Babel, the inconsequentially styled constructions of intemperance and ill-will. Consider just this: even in a nation with much of Christianity in its past, you can still hear a president talking about what is in our national interest!
What is Christian about that!
IF it is meant that the people have to be cared for; well. But is this to be in some way which dispossessed their procedures from GOOD WILL, GRACE and prudentially careful considerations of doing the best for all!
The selves and the
interests multiply like some computer gone mad. It is not so really. The ONLY WHOLLY
LEGITIMATE interest is in the PROCEDURES, PRINCIPLES AND PURITY of the Creator,
the Redeemer. But this is brushed aside like some flimsy moth too near an
expensive coat. The love of land, of power, of self, of wealth, or even of
survival, that crazed idol of the worshippers of their own flesh, these become
the icons of the 21st century.
BROKEN SPIRITUAL SEALS
Meanwhile, precisely as in Revelation 6, with the seals of the scroll being broken one by one, as the dimensions of the disaster in the sordid scene escalate, unheeded corrections, intimations, yes catastrophes rise like a mist of mustard gas.
What scroll ? That focussed in Rev. 5, in which John weeps since none can open it, the scroll of coming events, the chapters of history, the sweep of developments to the end of the Age, when Christ returns (as in Rev. 19). Why did he weep ? Since none could open it, and history remained as a mute thing, unwilling to come, while the world went on its unsanctified shute to hell. But did he weep no more ? Yes, the Lamb of God, the Saviour, Christ appeared, and He took the scroll, being found worthy. HIS salvation opens the door to destiny, paid, redemption accomplished, certainty displayed; and with the foundation laid, history goes on, being cared for amidst its anguish, mercy interpolating like sunshine through clouds of forboding.
He opened it.
The seals ? Chapters of events were opened. Things could go on. They did. They do. That predicted, this fulfils.
But WHAT fulfils ? History, ours. Thus in Rev. 6:1, you get the white horse, symbol of victory, going forth conquering and to conquer, as it says in 6:2. Thus the white, clean, pure, the horse, action, the work of the Christian Church moved on, was to move on greatly and did so, taking kingdoms and areas, surging like an ocean breaker in its white and glistening thrust. Missionary activity was not stopped by blood, littering the earth as it soaked its sad pollution, residue of pure lives that had left, being mutilated in body, released in spirit, the martyrs who were (and are) many.
That was good. But where the people of Christ are, there is persecution (John 15:20, 16:2, Matthew 10:24). "If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you," said Christ.
Judgments came on an unheeding world, for though much was shown, few in proportion were the yield; and though many peoples were affected, many were the distortions, the pomps and the pretensions which clouded the beauty of the Christian sky; and indeed, the thunders of evil rioted even while the lagoons of peace multiplied, here an enclave, there another.
Thus in Rev. 6:3, we find another seal broken. A fiery red horse now goes out: and "it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, and that people should kill one another; and there was given to him a great sword."
If there is one thing which has been fulfilled in the last century, and not a little in World War I, World War II, The Cold War, the Korean War, the African tribal wars, the Afghanistan War, the Chechnyan War, the Cambodian War, the Middle East wars, the South African internal, civil wars, the Timorese Wars, the Yugoslavian wars and the rest, it is a non-reluctance to shed blood. It is a removal of peace so fundamental, as if life did not matter, the exquisite equipment lodged in each human person were mere trash, the God who made it to be ignored, the plans of man all that mattered, the evil schemes and insanitary ideological schemas which trashed the earth were gods and the thing was a game, to be played with vigour regardless of intervening ... outcomes!
While this scene has simply and amply fulfilled itself before our eyes, taking it culminations in the last 100 years to outrageous proportions, the third seal likewise has been opened.
In Rev. 6:5-6, we find famine and careful measuring of scarce food materials result from the opening of this seal. However the OIL and the WINE are kept. That is the case. Famine is another name for the 20th. century. Deaths in littering loads of children, each one a tragedy, adorn the earth like flowers of evil. Here in India, there in South East Asia, there in North Korea, here in this part of Africa, want waxes, what is left frequently eating itself in war, being eaten by AIDS; and in that, famine rules like an Empress.
In Rev. 6:7-8, a ghoulish development occurs. A pale horse goes out, with the fourth seal broken. "And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and hell followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the little beasts of the earth." It is literally little beasts, and one wonders to what extent this term would be applicable to plagues of those little beasts which enter the blood-stream; but whether or not, active little beasts work in their ways. WILD is the concept, and things multiply, man-made and other, fierce and destructive. The order becomes disorder, and the harmonies of rich design give way to the disorders of cancers of the soul, the body, contaminations of the environment, terrestrial, biological, moral and spiritual.
To kill with death may seem a redundancy, but the import is clear. It is a suppuration of death, a disease of death, a USE OF DEATH AS A DUE UTTERANCE, OR FUNCTION in life, like breathing. It is death in control, in madness, in licence, of which euthanasia is merely a SYMPTOM, many acting as if God, and taking life as if it were banana fritters, to be relished in the seizin, in this and in that, for this and for that, arching above all, superb in understanding*2.
In Rev. 6:8ff., you have the cry of the martyrs, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth!" A white robe is given them, and they are assured of a remarkable thing. It is not that the time remaining is virtually over - it is "a little while longer" that they are to rest; but rather this, that the NUMBER OF THOSE LIKE THEMSELVES TO BE SLAUGHTERED has to be filled.
Who are these who so cry to the Lord, wishing an end to the massacring, the pain and the pandemic of evil ? "the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held". Whether for the Moslem maw, the Roman one or the Communist one, whether the various resplendent descendants of these and other ideologies, seeing all, knowing without wisdom, blank in apprehension, not knowing God, unholy, unjust, whatever the consignments, whatever the variations: the bloods flow. There is more to come. There are as we have seen before, also more sources of what is to come! (cf. Biblical Blessings Ch. 2.)
Thus does the dainty drama proceed, the slaughters and deficiencies of sin, its violence and vileness exposed, till the day of judgment. Hell is not without its antecedents. These things are well fulfilled now. More is to follow, but our present purpose must now disjoin us from this specialised locale of prophecy, and revert to our theme.
Man
is in a pandemonium, and you note the etymological background of that word,
with a 'demon' nestling in its middle. It is not only in blood; it is not only
in hunger; it is in nearly every imaginable diversionary strategy, divorced
from the word of God very often, while affirming it, or as Paul or Peter
indicate of such pathologies, peddling the word of God, or polluting it (II
Cor. 4, II Peter 2). Not only does the disease continue, but the remedy is, as
far as humanly possible, itself being manhandled. While, if you will, some
spread the diseases, if you will, others attack the premises of the chemists!
SPIRITUAL FITTER
There is a solution. We have already met it. The world meanwhile, as if embarking on a great laboratory experiment in which MOST join most willingly, is so violating the Biblical principles, even mocking them in pentecostal extravanganzas to meet the emotional release, the psychological desire and the anti-scriptural non-licence which thrusts itself into I Cor. 14 as if it were on fire, in disdainful manipulations of the word of God as if it were a starting point not an end, or in success Christianity violations of dying daily, that it has come to the point it seems both possessed and obsessed in that the Bible is even mentioned at the same time!
These, they are but examples. The misuse of religion in general, of Christianity in particular, of principles and divinely specified travelling programs for mankind is now not only vast, not merely for great examples, like erratic exceptions, but rather it is pursued with the popularity of an epidemic, with a sort of hypnotic fascination, as if it were some holy grail.
But let us return to the air, as we survey this scene.
In this rebellion now there is a measurable increase in the thrust of the engines, in the air speed. It is not enough to toss the litter out of the windows. It must first be packed into dense compartments, specially built, and dumped in large chunks so that when it falls more will fall with it, when it collides, or thrusts itself into the path of their terrestrial cars, or trains.
There is a DELIGHT in scoffing, a DELIRIUM in speaking offensively against God, in being dismissive without contrition, making an art form of mockery, with universities all but predictably joining in, with degrees the more readily available if you conform.
But wait! It is not just the increase in tempo which is the 'medical' prognosis found in the Bible, and from the lips of Christ in particular, in describing the approach to His return, the end of the little dog's day (but how bathetic to compare it to such a thing, yet how appropriate in view of the catastrophic callowness of the whole act, as low in grade as high in aspiration!). It is not just the word of the Master: "Because lawlessness shall abound, the love of many shall grow cold!" and this, "unless those days were short, no flesh should be saved"! (Matthew 24:12,22). This of course is the nature of our grand new millenium, little as may be left of it for more play in these ingeniously verificatory games of man, at once showing his image of God capacities, through the extremities of their abuse, and his conformity to the divinely predicted program, as he does it.
There is yet more detail.
Thus Paul indicates, as does Peter (II Timothy 3, II Peter 2), the moral declines and the spiritual mockeries, and indeed in II Peter 3, you have the creation-style mockeries in their very precise character, just as we have now inherited them, in the manner of sowing the wind and inheriting the whirl-wind, as Hosea put it. (Peter's prediction covering the precise configuration of contempt in our day, was studied in Joyful Jottings 8, and News 74. )
The word of God fits the work of man, as a medical diagnosis fits a disease. It is different in several ways.
Ch. 8), but NOT ALL!
This is the down side. There is to be a down-sizing of heads so swollen that they would take an ocean liner to contain the hats. Insane ascriptions of deity to a mere sinful man are to become the acme of the devil's messiah copying program (as in II Thessalonians 2). Before then there is to be an upgrading of unholy pretension that might make Hitler seem meek by comparison, or Stalin a humble soul!
But what of the spiritual fitter ? Yes there is a fitting of clothing that is suitable for the meek, sufficient for the clean, harmonious for those who are not spiritually stout. It is called the robes of righteousness and the garments of salvation (as in Isaiah 61:10). It is the occasion of great rejoicing.
After all, you hear of those who have lost 40 kilograms or some enormous slice of flesh. They do not weep at the loss. It is good to be normally human physically, once more. How much better is it to be according to the original creation, spiritually again (at least in principle, for there are residual imperfections, though these do not rule the Christian, being nevertheless sufficient to promote humility!*3). That is just what Paul says in Ephesians 4:23-24:
Here you see the fait accompli. When Christ is your fitter, the entire spirit is altered, and the old rubbish which was a constant source of spiritual litter, fouling the planet where it is far more vulnerable than on the mere surface of the earth, in the hearts and lives of its people: this is placed in the receptacle provided for it. That ? It is a long way off and can never be found, for "as far as the East is from the West, so far has He removed our sins from us" - Psalm 103. In fact, these items were, in their guilt (as for law), in their dynamic (as for life), and in their foulness (as for contamination) placed securely on the Cross of Christ, so that in death He provided life, our debts His bearing, His credits our reception (II Cor. 5:17-21).
That tidies things up.
The beautful thing about considering how far the East is from the West, is this: that the further you pursue it, the longer is your imaginary journey. In short, "your sins and your iniquities, I will remember no more" - Hebrews 8:12. That ? it is because if the blood of bulls was the token and symbol of the death sin brings, covered in sacrifice, "how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God!". Indeed, as Peter puts it, He died, "the just for the unjust to bring us to God" - II Peter 3:18.
There is a place. Litter
needs to be put in it. Sin needs to be put into the capacious cross of Christ,
where the Son of God, in His spiritual infinitude, placed HIMSELF as the
receiver of stolen goods, not for sale, but for destruction. "I," says Paul, "have been
crucified with Christ: it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and
the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved
me and gave Himself for me" - Galatians 2:20.
NOTE
*1
Revelation 16:8ff. makes reference to exposure problems, cancerous invasions, intrusions.
It is of interest to ponder the possibility that the ozone problem may be one
of the etiological enablings! Orderly minds may find satisfaction in
contemplating that things do not come without a cause! The cause of course, as
many forget, may ULTIMATELY be moral, or spiritual, or mental, as well as
physical. A school-teacher may use a cane not present before. The child does
not need to know the mind of the teacher to be aware that the ultimate cause
lies in his need, his conduct and his awareness. Means are subordinate!
Nevertheless, they are often found!
Often far better means of inducing awareness are to be found. Chronic rebellion however is the state of the earth.
*2
In the case of euthanasia, always
facing the extensions through even more sympathy, with even more sorts of cases
of even more baffling questions of how much and when someone so very sick is
REALLY responsible for decisions, there is acute vulnerability to even more
misdeeds. With ever more evil persons, abusing the thoughts of some, there
arises new scope through their own dastardly actions for using the powers to
remove the unwanted, either because they cost too much, CANNOT be accommodated,
cause too much pressure on limited staff or are in the way politically.
Abuse of power has been heard of on earth; and THIS would be simply one more item for its exercise.
What cannot be done, cannot; but the selective removal without the generic is the danger.
This is however not at all to condone the forced use of life-support systems which intrude into the collapse of organs, past all thought of repair, merely extending the appearance of life in the presence of death. In this case, it may be best for people who want the best, to write out their instructions beforehand, that life support systems are to be used, when the case is extreme, only when there is not a bodily failure so unquestionable and total, that life support is misnamed, and it is actually becoming intrusion of means into the absence of life present in itself.
When however this is not
done, extensions of the principle are vulnerability itself, and need no
assistance!
*3
How beautiful a description of
this you find in Zephaniah 3:12:
A meek and
humble people,
And they shall
trust in the name of the LORD.
The remnant of
Israel shall do no unrighteousness
And speak no
lies,
Nor shall a
deceitful tongue be found in their mouth;
for they shall
feed their locks and lie down,
And no one shall
make them afraid."
Even though this vignette touches millenial proportions in its perfections, yet it is indicative of that "hungering and thirsting after righteousness", that relish for "be ye perfect" which Christ articulated in the beginning. Formality never was, nor could it be, a substitute for spirituality.
No wonder we find allied, this jewel of great beauty:
"The
LORD your God in your midst,
The Mighty One
will save.
He will rejoice
over you with gladness,
He will quiet
you with His love,
He will rejoice
over you with singing" - Zeph.3:17.
In the contingent from Israel noted in Romans 11 (cf. The Biblical Workman Ch. 3), this is allied further in this, by way of preliminary:
"The
LORD has taken away your judgments,
He has cast out
your enemey.
The King of
Israel, the LORD, is in your midst:
You will see
disaster no more"
- Zeph. 3:15.
This, of course, in
particular, mirrors the action of Micah 7:15ff., Isaiah 66 and Deuteronomy
32:43.