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Chapter 6

 

THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH

 

THE FATE OF THE KINGDOMS OF THIS WORLD

AND THE GRACE AND DESTINY OF THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST

 

THE NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST

"My kingdom is not of this world.
If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight,
so that I should not be delivered to the Jews,
but now My kingdom is not from here."

"You say rightly that I am a king.

"For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world,
that I should bear witness to the truth.
Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice."

Such is the divine enunciation in John 19:36-37.

HIS kingdom is the kingdom of truth. He bears witness to it, and for He came into this world.

In what way did He bear witness to it:

bullet 1) by being it in human format (John 14:6).
 
bullet 2) by being clad in humility, so that AS MAN though yet God,
He might show to man what is required of man and available to Him (Philippians 2).
 
bullet 3) by being placed on a cross, courtesy of nails held there, so that as man
He might bear the penalty for those of this race who are willing for Him to
take their place, through grace only, without works,
being the Creator who alone made (Isaiah 45) and who alone saved (Isaiah 43:10-11, Ephesians 2:1-10).
 
bullet 4) by healing ANY disease, of ANY power, and removing evil spirits of ANY number,
and this, including the ultimate disease of decease, with Lazarus most notoriously,
allowing him four days before acting on purpose, to make the point clear,
before being raised Himself after being the willing sacrifice for sin,
so that man might know that this is not philosophy or mere power,
but the ultimate for life, that eternal life
which philosophers chat about or against,
which aspirants desire in this way or that,
but which God gives as it is, a life which is individual:

personal, preserved, cleansed, completed,
emplaced by His side who made the race,
consummated in resurrection just as was Christ's work
culminated in resurrection of His body, one
never located,
never accounted for by rational means, except in His own following use of it,
lied about in the case of soldiers,
breaching death by decree (Psalm 1),
innocent in its prelude,
effective in its accomplishment.
 
bullet 5) by speaking words of immense, immediate and perfected purity,
deep, practical, pursuing evil without relenting,
donating good without limit,
controlling history as did His actions as required,
to testify of the truth.
 
bullet 6) by BEING HIMSELF, compassionate and majesty,
pure and holy,
humble and mixing with the people,
near to decadence and far from decadent,
illimitable in grace and truth,
drawing all men to Himself,
though many resist,

when lifted up on the Cross (John 12:32-33).

The kingdom of truth does not need pomp, and Christ denounced it in this setting (Matthew 23);

it does not need lies, and Christ denounced and placed the source of that in Satan (John 8:44-47), while being impervious to any assault to show Him a sinner.

It bears all, and suffers long, but is surrounded by a sense of majesty, the shower of power
as needed, like rain given in season, is articulated in words of God, activated by His Spirit,
fulfilled by His grace, moves in His presence (Luke 17:20-22).

 

THE SUDDENNESS OF ITS OUTWARD COMING

 

"Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come,
He answered them and said,

'The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say,
‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.'

"Then He said to the disciples,

'The days will come when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man,
and you will not see it.
And they will say to you, ‘Look here!’ or ‘Look there!’
Do not go after them or follow them.

'For as the lightning that flashes out of one part under heaven shines to the other part under heaven, so also the Son of Man will be in His day.
But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.

'And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man:

'They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage,
until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise as it was also in the days of Lot:
They ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built;
but on the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.

"Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.' "

Here is a tracery, like that of bullets seen in their trajectory, from issuance to impact.
First, the kingdom is not an outward affair in nature, but starts as and is essentially and inward thing, Christ in their midst, inward and intimated. God is with His people and they are aware IN SPIRIT of His presence and in POWER of His action.

Secondly, there is to be an outward form, but not an outward 'show'.

Certainly, it will be sudden, as was the flood, as was the fate of Sodom. Flames did not idle about for few years; the flood did not lap around for a decade or two, far less for a century.

These events were spectacularly sudden and as Christ's words indicate, hit an unprepared people with a furore of judgment, disruptive of their complacency, impactive in its completeness, transformative in its refashioning, whether to flood or thud.

IN this outward form , it is a matter of the SUDDEN appearance of Jesus Christ in the second phase of His mission, that of POWER (as in Luke 24:26).

What is long within and spiritual not without power, but without pomp or ceremony, becomes suddenly with outward power, and associated with judgment on the one hand and monumental deliverance on the other (Acts 17:31, Matthew 13:39-43). WHEN that happens, there is a completion of the mystery of God. Let us look at this in a series of points.

It is at the time of the resurrection of His people (I Thess. 4), that we find this,
in Revelation 11:15) as we shall see in more detail shortly:

"The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ,
and He shall reign forever and ever."

How beautiful it is, when the outward consummation comes! It is not development, but transmutation, not at the sound of the sonorous, but of the trumpet (Revelation 10:7), not in in instillation but in a distillation, leaving a residue for removal. He will destroy the destroyer (Revelation 11:18), which He has typified as evil in so many ways, both directly in words, and by the craft, devices, cruelty and menace often seen in the animal kingdom (Romans 8:17ff., 5:1-12): a standing rebuke to man who has developed this side of things into pure bedevilment, roaring hatreds, anaesthetised morals, murderous maraudings and mixed this with devious complacency, horrendous hypocrisy and ideals so unlike their proponents, in life, as to become an oral substitute for the beauty of holiness.

This to be replaced ? THOSE kingdoms to BECOME HIS! Wheel it on. Wheel it ? No, it is a trumpet which at a point in time demands it, announces it. When ? It is when the mystery of God is finished (Revelation 11:7). How fabulous, to know not only the end of that mystery but what it is in full, for we who are His, will, being resurrected, know as we are known (I Corinthians 13) and see Him face to face as Job so long ago was assured (Job 19:24ff.), John attested (Revelation 22:4),  and we are reminded in so many lands every Christmas and not that only, through Handel's magnificent and amazingly popular "Messiah".

 

RESURRECTION AND REALISATION,
TERMINUS OF THE MYSTERY OF GOD

What, however, you may ask, in the Book of Revelation and its particular presentation, has the resurrection to do with it ? We learn of the end of the mystery of God in 10:7, of the seventh trumpet signalling that this will have happened by that time, and of the two witnesses be raised just before that 7th trumpet, but what does Revelation in that context, say of resurrection ?

Firstly, the mystery of God will not be finished before that time, since until then we do NOT know as we are known; it is only when what is perfect has come that this is the case, and what is perfect is not death of the body, rampant disease and multiplied, multi-formatted suffered.

Hence this must be the resurrection, and since it is when it BEGINS to sound, that the finish lies, therefore this is the signal. They arise, it sounds. It does not sound before; it is afterwards in sequence.

Secondly, there is the nature of the witnesses. We come to that.

Thus in looking at the fact that in our context for "the mystery of God shall be finished" comes at a designated point, we are in Revelation 10, and there we are waiting for it, following the 6th trumpet (Revelation 9:13).

In this, then, the Chapter following 10:7,  there are the two witnesses, which as before shown (Acme, Alpha and Omega: Jesus Christ Ch. 5), are the Church, in both its Jewish and Gentile components, though this is by no means the only way to designate the division, for two witnesses are in the Old Testament required to establish a matter  (as in John 8:17), and in the presentation concerning the two, in  Zechariah 4, there is a focus with this, on two parties: the high priest and the prince.

In this grand sort of setting (Zechariah 3-4), one focus fell on the high priest (Ch. 3)and the other on the prince (Ch. 4), each of which had been shown in a dress-up or symbolic sartorial setting, in terms of the Messiah to come. Because they were merely men, it was a symbol; because it was a cleansing from sin and an overturning of opposition, it represented the Messiah who is directly presented in adjacent setting (Zechariah 6:12)as bearing the glory and possessing both parts, the princely and the priestly, though this was in ordinary affairs excluded most vigorously (as in II Chronicles 26:16ff.). This was one of the badges to betoken the Messiah, being above all and over all in all.

Thus on the one hand, foretold is the Messiah, and on the other, these two representatives among men, concerning spiritual things, have been displayed and then two witnesses are immediately implanted in a setting where two olive trees are giving  oil, which is the signal of the Holy Spirit, from which light may come. They receive it, as an expression of the power and provision of the Lord, even for those who are NOT the Messiah but made by elaborate imagery in these two Chapters, symbolic of Him.


THE TWO WITNESSES, A STUDY IN NON-DEATH AND IN RESURRECTION

The two witnesses in Zechariah ? Here then is the body of Christ, His people, and in the New Testament setting used by John in Revelation 11, it is the relevant spiritual body, the Church (cf. Isaiah 65:13-15, 62:2), and as in Revelation 7, it has two massive components; for just as their are two phases to which to bear witness, the salvation and the rule of the Lord, of the Messiah, of Jesus Christ, so there are two phases in which mankind represents these, in symbol in the sartorial matter, in spirit in the olive tree one.

Thus in Revelation 11:2-3, we read first of the Gentiles taking over the court of the Temple, and of measurement in the Temple. The courtyard of it is not to be measured BECAUSE it is given to the Gentiles, an immeasurable multitude compared with Israel. Why is the temple itself however measured ? It is because the symbolism is to be satisfied in perfect fulfilment of what it represents, Christ to become the priest who made the offering, the victim vicariously to actually bear the sin now that He came as man instead of being sighted through symbol. Thus the requirements are specific, the end in consummation is specific and there is measurement; but in the case of the Gentile period, the thing is finished in payment, the people are not limited as to terrestrial scope and the thing is not in this case measured (cf. Revelation 7:9).

What however of the time during which this Court of the Temple is given to the Gentiles ? It is for 42 months (Revelation 11:2). What however has this significant symbol in a book of many symbols,  to do with time ? It is the time during which the Gentiles will have the area for themselves, and what it signifies for themselves, before Israel as a nation returns in its second coming (that is the second restoration for that country), not that to the land (the first coming back), but the coming to the Lord (the consummation of that culmination as in Zech. 12:10-13:1).

This is then  (as in Luke 21:24), the entire Gentile era, relative to the Gospel, and hence it is the court of the symbolic temple which is given them. They in this, these Gentiles relevant to the point, the Church, are not an innovation, but a dissemination; not a new religion, but a culmination of the Old; or to put it differently what they have to set forth (as the Temple symbolically set forth the law, the Lord and His ways, including salvation and sanctification), was now in its consummate form and immeasurable scope.

There was no measurement there, therefore.

There is no reference to the rapture of the saints (as in I Thess. 4 and Matthew 24) in the Book of Revelation, a book specialising in things to come, except here. To be sure, there is a confirmatory reference in Revelation14:14, in terms of harvest, first of the justified (Revelation 7:14) and then of the wicked; but there is nothing in clear-cut event form, with indication of its impact and wonder, in a way co-ordinate with the detail of the Book,  except here.

"COME UP HERE!" the two witnesses are told, at whose power some may wonder; but this is in effect an essentialising of what the Church has had, though its formalisation and corruption in so many pseudo-spiritual substitutes has made for many the concept of such power illusory. It has been far worse, the often misled body which masquerades as the Church from time to time; for when the devil changes something, it can be utterly disastrous. Yet when he lays hands on what pretends to be the Church of Jesus Christ, you can even get such anti-Christian horrors as the Roman Catholic Inquisition (Ancient Words and Modern Events Ch. 14, cf. SMR pp. 1032-1008H, 911ff.), and such inverted substitutes as Communism.

 

VERY DIFFERENT WITNESSES ABOUND

In the latter,  the proletariat is the (ostensible) saviour (but actual victim at the hands of the rulers, not subject to election, but engineers of force), class division is the sin and illusory laws that do not happen to happen (cf. SMR pp. 925ff.), are lord. The heaven is the result of the removal of the 'sin', say to Siberia in the case of the 'class' not desired, such as the agriculatural 'haves' and the hell is the parallel to the actuality of what indeed happened, something which as Solzhenitsyn pointed out has been far worse in oppression than what the Czars managed to accomplish. As to them,  they varied and were not without effort for reformation.

The replacement, however, Communism,  this, it has been systematic horror of absolute power in tiny breasts, ruling with ludicrous pomp a people dead in oppression, the directive aristocrats in Kremlin exultation, exalting when in power, though many are those depressed when under a depraved rule.

Millions died, ten millions under Stalin, who played the role of the devil, though not formally.

The Church however is not represented AT ALL by those who use its place and Lord in order to wage wars; for in His name relative to His Church NO force is to be used. If HIS kingdom were the kingdom of this world, then His servants would fight (even for HIM personally and directly when on this earth); and this He pointed out to Pilate (John 18:36). This matter is categorical, propositionalised and clear. Arms are not an arm of the Lord in the Church: put up your sword, He told Peter, just as Muhammad, in endless seeming ways, told his disciples, with exhortations and promises of havens in some heaven, how vital it was to use force to gain objectives (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4).

The contrast is clear. A nation may of course defend itself from invasion, but the topic in this case is what is done in His name, and it is His Church, His people as such, so gathered.

 

VIOLENCE IS VILE IN THIS TEMPLE OF TRUTH, THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST

This is the body of Christ. He is the Speaker, the Head, and this as to Pilate and to Peter, is what He said. Abuse of power is surrender to some other lord.

However

bullet WHEN such  power as Christ gives  is NOT used,
but the spiritual power of the Lord is presented while if need be His servants suffer,
filling up in this exhibition of His love and endurance, "what remains of the sufferings of Christ" (Colossians 1:24, the burden of testimony in life and deed), and
 
bullet WHEN faith is the operative facility and
 
bullet WHEN through salvation the Spirit of God is at work,
 
bullet THEN there has indeed been staggering exhibition of the power of God,
DURING persecution and presentation of the Gospel,
and some of the heroics of the matter are to be seen summarised in Hebrews 11.

One has found during a very varied ministry in four nations, that there is indeed power, one cannot say proportional to one's suffering, since to become mathematical in spiritual matters is not readily wise, but which is as large as necessary: to operate gifts, to present testimony, to endure sufferings, to resist compromise, to present the Gospel, or to write it, or use whatever method of communication is needed (cf. Luke 10:19, John 14:12).

There are moments of high drama in which He does not let one down, and times of large perseverance in which His tender mercies multiply like Autumn leaves; but one is aware throughout it all of a wind, of a movement, an impulsion, a dynamisation, not necessarily dramatic, almost as if one were wired up and receiving an other worldly leading with longing and impulsion, like a yacht with a sail, the sail of faith, receiving what the Lord sends; but one has to keep the sail up, as in Nehemiah 9 and Daniel 10, and Ephesians 6:19. The wind blows (as it lists, or wills), but it surely blows.

The two witnesses, the Church, then as in Matthew 24:  are told to COME UP HERE! Glorious summons to what was left on this earth for the testimony to man! The witnesses had been 'dead in the streets' for a short time while their adversaries wallowed in rejoicing at their seeming demise (as in Revelation 13), giving each other presents. However, this moment of flexed, satanic power over the testimony of Christ and amid His goodness,  is merely to demonstrate to the uttermost the heart and the evil, the murderous impulse and mere reliance on force and system of the unspiritual hordes under Satan (who figures in the next Chapter of Revelation in a major way, where the Gentile Age is reviewed in terms moving from the incarnation to the ascension).

Thus these witnesses, in fact the Church, including the Jewish arm (as specified in Romans 11:25), who joined it in its Commission, repenting (as in Zechariah 12-13) of its slaying of its Prince, the Messiah (as also in Daniel 9), are ordered just when seemingly they are at last overcome, by the divine and delightful, the ordered and sequential words, the script coming to life in a major way:  "COME UP HERE!"

 

THE COMPLEXION OF POST-RESURRECTION LIFE

 

HERE is out of this earth, the tribulations of which then mount to the insurmountable.

It is THEN (Revelation 11:12), that the people of the Lord being summoned to their time with the Lord (as in Revelation 19:7ff.), the earth is left bereft, not in sorrow at the departure, but at  the results. It is then that Jerusalem suffers earthquake (being shaken to its very religious foundations in this, the abstraction of the people, its two-component significance now fulfilled: Jew in the Temple and Gentile in the Court).

Now comes the glorious message:


"The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ,
and He shall reign forever and ever."

THEY NOW HAVE BECOME IT. In one moment, this was anything but the case, but an envisagement as in 10:7. Then the trumpet sounds, the Church being lifted out of the perilous predicament of the ultimate rebels. THEN it is true, as had been announced in 10:7 of the mystery being ended, that the kingdoms of this world HAVE BECOME His. He rules. It is His day.

While all things became new SPIRITUALLY (II Corinthians 5:17ff.), at conversion,  now it is the resurrection. That is how Revelation 11 chimes in in a chime concerto, with Luke 24 and I Corinthians 15, with I Thessalonians 4 and Isaiah 11, 32, with Psalm 72 and with Matthew 13.

What then have we found ? It is NOW that the mystery of God is ended (Revelation 10:7). How is this to be known ? It is because at 11:15, immediately after the removal of the witnesses, the seventh trumpet sounds, and 10:7 had told us that at this signal, not tendentious but specific and an episode, the mystery of God would be ended. Thus when it happened, it did.

But you may ask, Might not this be merely an indication of an onset over time ? Far from it. The text is this: "in the days of the sounding of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound," the mystery of God is finished. He was told: when the 7th angel is about to sound, the mystery would be finished. NOW THAT HE HAS sounded, it IS finished.

Now the times of suffering, incandescent suffering, unspeakable wrath from the devil (as specified in sum in Revelation 12:4-15), catastrophes on earth (as in Amos 4), coming in swathes and increments as needed, though still leaving much RELATIVE peace for long periods,  compared with what MIGHT have impacted on a rebellious race who seek to continue,  with shameless miseducation of its children for the next generation, and worship of power and flammable glories that fade and turn to ashes, false and spurious, popular and penurious. This, it is over at this point. It does not run on like a motor that refuses to quit when the key is turned off.

The entire BODY of the saints (Christ's body is not segmented, He does not take a leg at a time, but has the consummation of togetherness of Jew and Gentile AFTER a national crusade in Israel is effective, a thing Paul celebrates in Romans 11): it is this which has now come to heaven'

NOW its sufferings in testimony of truth, Gospel, salvation, amid sin in its coruscating defilements, defiling and defacing, but accompanied by the power and wonder of God, His love and His saving action, these conclude. Hated, mocked, speared, mimicked, calumniated, neither they nor their pains abated: but now, now with the resurrection as in this Chapter accomplished, now they are over.

What they had to do, what they had to endure, to procure, to ensure, as many were won to the Lord out of this vast test which history constituted, this lecture theatre manifestation of reality, the good and the evil, the divine and the soiled, the sublime and the sordid, the majestic and the minimal: this is done. The mystery is now finished, and now in heaven, to them it is all revealed, for then they know as they are known (I Corinthians 13).

No more is theology to hand out help, let alone devious substitutes and specious speech; we SEE now directly. The photographs of faith have become the personal presence with the Lord Himself, whom we see face to face (Revelation 22:4).

It is in Revelation 12 that we find Satan had sought to take over heaven and being cast out, was wrathful on an earth which saw his humiliation, to which Christ referred in its entailment in Luke 10:1-19. The disciples were given power over his tramplings and truthless parades, but as children in the midst of evil powers (Luke 10:17-20). So it has been as in Revelation  12:10-11, that they overcame by the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony. NO war could ultimately be successful against their spirits, since the basis of accusation is sin, and this is covered by the blood of the Lamb, so that that inveterate accuser, the Satan is blunted and confronted with those who have been discharged from debt, and has no lien on them.

Moreover, his power to make subservient (as when the borrower tends to fall to the lender) is gone, for nothing is lent, all is paid for in the ransom of the Redeemer (Matthew 20:28).

Nevertheless, until that time on which we have dwelt, in which the mystery  of God is finished, it is indeed true that while being so empowered and with such provisions, the saints "love not their lives unto death" (Revelation 12:11).

There is death as a testimony; there is truth as a word; there is a combination as a conquest by charity, and a look from love, and whether as with Stephen, some lament, or some stand by to guard the clothes of that martyr, like Saul, the job is done, the work continues till it is done.

 

THE SALLIES OF SATAN, THEIR IMPACT AT THE FIRST,
DOOM AT THE LAST

The Removal of Bonds

Thus the fraudulent non-faith of Satan has its day, though it is suddenly finished. The saints pray on their way for their trouble, truth and testimony, and the victory already secured, provides the merits of Christ for all who come from this confrontation, while the time must wait till the resurrection abstracts from this earth the agents of the Gospel, the people of the Lord of life.  That is now, in our own piece of history, 2009.

As shown in Revelation 12, which places its own vignette and phase of the work of God, this season, now some 2000 years in length, in time is that  following the incarnation (12:4) and ascension (12:5) of Christ: it is one in which the naked power of an aroused Satan (12:10-12) is deployed in endeavour to overthrow, indeed to swallow up, like a python engorging a pig, the people of the Lord. This is the time when the devil pours out flood of his evil persuation into the desert after the saints, the surging waters of his endeavour to engulf them (12:15).

WHEN the seventh trumpet sounds, as in the earlier phase of presentation, THAT is ALL over. The kingdoms of this world are over.

Meanwhile, in Revelation 13, we see another aspect, of the matter, the final organisation of the Beast, the military-manufacturing-financial-political engorgement of sin into structure, as it seeks to finish off the saints in another way. This is another arm, if you will, of the 'flood' just mentioned. Financial compression is to be so intense that buying and selling control are used as a cattle prod with which to induce ALL to worship the beast (which is much helped by the evolutionary epic, the biological saga, the psychological illusion and the sociological controls, all an effrontery to reality and a drug to truth - cf. SMR Chs. 4,   9, and Ch. 5 above, with The gods of naturalism have no go!).

By that stage, all restraint is gone, as it is even now rapidly going, and the spiritual scenario is frank and rank prostitution of the spirit of man, as many as fall for it, to the seductions of pompous pretension and arrogant power, of which Hitler, Mao and Stalin were mere regional preludes: but impactive ones!

In a later vignette, coverage in oversight, review and exposure of things to come by the Lord through this His book of Revelation, we find the final assault on mankind by satanic rulers: this in Revelation 17.

This depicts the end of Romanism (cf. SMR pp; 946ff.), with the city itself in a conflagration as in ONE HOUR, its 'eternal' claims abolished, demolished, disrelished, turned to ashes. In Revelation 18 comes the consummation of this relegation, and in 19 there appears the arrival of Christ with His saints (19:8, 14), for the final thrust in His indefectible light to end the faded glory and pulverised pulp of what dared to misuse His name, His saints and His word, this world's version of Christianity, daring to supplement His book with man's words and sacrifices, post and position despite Matthew 23:8-10, a ludicrous display of falsity.

Small wonder there is such immense, intense exultancy at the removal of this mistress of mischief (as in Revelation 17), this evil so long endured in its myriad manifestations, and now categorically judged. Yet this is by no means all.

In Revelation 16 we were introduced to the false prophets and his three hopping spirits, seeking to deceive the earth (an interesting parallel with Freud, Darwin and Marx cf. News 44, SMR pp. 611ff., News 132, TMR Ch. 8 as marked);  and now in Revelation 19 they reach the end of the road. By that time, Rome has been demobbed from service, sent from the beast, removed from its back (as in Revelation 17:16), with considerable vehemence, before her destruction. Small wonder  the warning is given: Revelation 18:4 cries:

"Come out of her My people, lest you share in her sins,
and lest you receive of her  plagues.
For her sins have reached to heaven and God has remembered her  iniquities."

The central female figure of Revelation 17 is indeed the city of the seven hills! (cf. SMR pp. 946ff.).

That time past, as in 17-18, it is on a broader scale that judgment comes. In 19: both the false prophet and the beast consumed (19:15,20). The spiritual chaos of their endless calumnies gnaws at their diseased hearts, while time endures, and never is their shame to be forgotten, an endless declension and a dismal destiny.

Now comes the manifestation with power that is not suffering in type, but glorious in majesty, that phase two of which Christ spoke, as seen in Luke 24:25-26, 46ff.. Now we reach that blessed point in history when the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (and you see the Messianic might in Isaiah 11, which with Habakkuk 2:14 provides this testimony of things to come, as do Psalm 72 and Micah 7 in diverse aspects).

 

THAT BLESSED NEWNESS PURCHASED WITH THAT GLORIOUS GIFT,
CHRIST CRUCIFIED, YEA RATHER RISEN

A new heavens and a new earth complete the picture, just as the resurrection of His people completed the mystery.

Thank God for His kingdom, and that it WILL COME at a certain time, as it has come in the inward manifestation and necessary impulsion and propulsion, in the hearts of His own already. Now is the preparation; then is the consummation.

The saying is: TRUTH WILL OUT. First however it must come in, and those who drink of the water  which HE gives, will never thirst again. Truth has no anterior or derivative: IT IS. When you know Him who constitutes it, by receiving Him and His atonement and power, knowing of His body's resurrection and glorying in Him who did it, when you so come to Him that it is neither fraud nor empirical pragmatism, but by faith with love, then the truth will in; and when HE COMES later, then the truth will out.

Meanwhile, it is demonstrable, but like a clear mountain stream which people rush past in order to get to the pub before closing time, which others drink at leisure, without haste, it must still be drunk; and as Revelation 22:17 tells us, just 5 verses before the entirety of the Bible, the Book of God, ends, "Whoever desires, let him take of the water of life freely." It is precisely as in the foretaste of Isaiah 55, without money and without price; and as in Romans 3:27ff., without works. It is HIS water, HIS stream and HIS gift. It needs simply to be received in the only way possible, BY FAITH!