GALLOPING EVENTS 5

NEWS 141
The Advertiser Jan 23, 2001
 

A MATTER OF SCALE, SCALES AND SCALING

 

 It is like Richter Scale 5. It is not what it could be, and in this case, what it is going to be, but it is ascending towards it.

One might be excused for asking WHAT is a matter of scale, and to what we are ascending.

One might not be excused for failing to answer.

Take for example the report in The Advertiser,  Tuesday, January 23, 2001, our 32nd. wedding anniversary. After reading that Rev. Jackson's wife is standing by him despite his lapse into an affair of an  illegitimate child some time back, and that it was he who counselled President Clinton, we turn to "UN climate change study 'alarming' ".

WE are getting the tone. Precisely what is so alarming in the eyes of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ?

It is just that, the report declares, "weather changes will raise global sea levels and temperatures, putting pressure on agricultural production and straining already scarce water resources"*1.

What is worth noting about this ? It is just that this UN report presents the informed view that the IMPACT OF GLOBAL WARMING IS MORE SEVERE than first thought, and, it avers, the aftershocks will have a profound impact for centuries. That is the report in action.

To be sure, the rising of sea levels, the increased sharpness of the affair beyond initial thought, the water depletion on the one hand, and the sea water increments on the other, the warming with all the new levels of energy released and unleashed on the earth for storms and meteorological ballistic missiles, the ballast being the water plus energy in the cloud formations, poised and heated: all these things are old hat, provided your head was big enough to contain this in a hat. That is the problem precisely.

The head is too big. The hat is so capacious. So much can be contained so urbanely with pretty grimaces or moues,  and more money seeking, world grabbing exercises, among smug smiles while world losing exercises among drab conditions live riotously together. There is of course one irony. The more of this world the British Israelite concept for some Empire or other, in an increasingly drably unspiritual seeming kingdom, as far from Jewry's end-time exercise from lapse-to-Lord as anything well could be, or the Communist concept, less lordly, or the Socialist concept, more earthy, or the New Age concept, a spirit as fast as Puck without the luck: the more active all or any or several or new varieties are to GAIN of this world, the LESS it matters. It is only the world. It has no guarantee but two, seasons continue, disorder increases, and it will end.

It has been great. Let there be no doubt about that. Its fascinating and construction-wise, fastidiously perfect ways (as per Denton in his Evolution: A Theory on Crisis)  are a cause of grief to the ungodly, except when they HAVE and POSSESS more of it. It is for this world's citizens of heart,  an embarrassment to contemplate the construction of divine power. They try to hold it, hold on to it, gain it, have it. Yet it makes mercury seem easy to hold by comparison, for it is not a mere object. It is a creation and the creator is near. In one element it is rather like a trap-door spider. It looks like something interesting, but under the little cap, behold, there is the spider who makes his valiant little excursions to grab. The one who thought to GRAB is then grabbed. The presumption of ignorance becomes the grief of learning exercises, which are then, in massive numbers of cases, shrugged off, with bruises and bites, until next time.

It is so little, the possession for possessiveness, that it is like many things we study lately, rather comical. A good laugh ? Why not! It is so sad that not to see the comical aspect is almost not to live!

It is the LORD who declares that He will laugh. In part only, this laugh is now past. In Psalm 2 it was laughter about the intentions (and actions)  of the ungodly, seeking to BREAK those spiritual and moral CORDS - as Psalm 2 shows to be their conception of moral explosions of beauty into our midst from the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments - and to cast them away. The LORD and His Messiah, indeed! they chide. But the Lord laughs at their folly and pride. Their hat is too big. It hides too much. Their world is someone else's.

It is on the other hand sad to see the distorted attitude so much canvassed from many non-aboriginal people for the aborigines. The LAND, they say, it was YOURS. This is simply untrue. Parts of it were inhabited by aborigines, it is true. Other parts, it appears as noted previously,  were not subject to any co-ordinated control at all. If you squat in someone else's house, in one room or in two, do you then claim the lot ? Very possibly, but not wisely.

It is neither white nor coloured who made it; and it is white which made it one, though with many evils attached, just as the coloured did NOT make it one, with many evils attached. The modish desire of many non-aborigines to glorify aboriginal religion, to the extent it is one, though it varies, is a testimony to the hat also, and to the cords. Thus the urbane and secular society in its unspiritual pursuits seeks some relief in something from the past. NOT the Bible! they may cry as in Psalm 2, heaven forbid, though to be sure, such an idiom scarcely fits the intention! No, no, let us have New Age, or ANYTHING, Old Age, you name it,  which has no apparent strings, and has only broken cords available, which cannot tie our hands or make us do anything which might not take, at any given moment, our fancy.

So they go for something spiritistic, with dream time or other tilts at the past (a great deal better than the futile and magical follies of organic evolution, it may be, but that is merely to say tar may be better than fowl manure, for without God revealed in and as Christ, it is all twilight at best, moving to the dark - Romans 1:17ff.), and they consider how 'nice' it all is, which in some aboriginal cases as reported earlier, leaves no soul for the servile woman: and yet this is not to be noticed, for this is relaxation.

The world is too big in its own eyes. Its worldliness is the philosophy of theft from God, and the distribution as from man, of what is the Lord's. It is an intensity of grief to hear stories, first hand, of aboriginal families such as that where one member, a mere 'teen-ager' or little more, gets his pension, and then spends it on gambling. Oh no! says his relative, not on drink; he has not gone that way; or woman. It is on gambling that he spends his resources kindly provided by the Government in its wisdom, and the lady of the house, in aboriginal territory ? she manages somehow, and charges her daughter when she comes with her family, while the 'boy' spends, and eats not a little, and pays, it is said, nothing at all.

It is THIS sort of indulged folly into which the society which BREAKS HIS CORDS ASUNDER and does not want the Lord, drifts. It is not for one colour only; it is for white people likewise, for nothing may be 'wrong', the wrong word (and do not point out the logical contradiction in this, for it may disturb the governmental blood pressure); and so the money is really to be handed out, and as one social worker pointed out, if your approach does not succeed the first time, as you seek to remedy some ridiculous folly, well you simply continue and do it again, and again, and again. That is it in black and white, and together, as you see, they make print. BOTH show the same thing.

Great stuff. Meanwhile, with the social whirled conditions in this State, and the whirling energy conditions in their appointed and increasingly 'alarming' state, and new electricity generation being built near to sea level for Adelaide, so that one inventor of comedy noted that perhaps this would be to enable our noted submarine making capacities to come to the fore, at the shore, should the seas, rising, cover the construction: there is time to ponder.
 

MORALS ARE OUT. TROUBLE IS IN. THIS IS SIN.
 

• That is the Biblical prediction. Israel is in. That too is the Biblical prediction.

Water is becoming less available, looking soon to become too available, and
 

• the great IMPETUS of the industrial revolution, and
• the predicted knowledge explosion (Daniel 12), and
• the D-generation at dot com, and
• the degenerate generation as at II Timothy 3, Matthew 24

(cf. Generation of the Dispossessed) ,

• and the X-generation at no known address, and
• the baby boomers, the flower children with less and less world apiece for their flowers, and
• the regeneration of forests as predicted in Israel, with
• the turmoil in the Middle East as predicted, amid these amazing signs, like
• the turning of that portion of desert to blossom like the rose, as predicted,
• and the non-regeneration of society, world-wide, and
• the use of 'born again', increasingly as a cruel joke by the ungodly for their ungodly ways, when they have a lift of some kind in the psyche, ignoring the realities of God, pure and purposeful, clear and propositional in His speech in the Bible:

all this tangles itself along, until it is tossed like a futile storm over the cliff into the sea. It is like that ... except that the fulfilments of the word of God are not futile; they merely make it the more apparent how futile ignorance becomes, when life is ignored by life, as if comedy and irony and paradox and various and sundry other sophisticated things, were worth dying for.

The hat is too big. It is a question of scale. There is the head which God made, and there is the capacity for thought, which God made, and there is the misuse of thought, which man made, and there is the fulfilment of the degeneracy predictions, in style and type, concerning spiritual and sexual perversion in Romans 1, and in detail and disposition as the end draws near - as in II Peter 2 and Matthew 24 -  and the return of the Lord approaches.

It is not that we are neglected. The program card for our very own Opera (Terra Incognita, and Terror Too Well Known, with various singers and instrumentalists on the harpsichord of philosophy and the piano of pianissimo religion). The head is becoming bigger than the capacity for thought.
It is making itself into a divine (not creation, oh là, oh no no) prodigy, and it has all the answers, without exception, except that they do not work, without exception. The scale of the spirit of man (which he tends to forget he has cf. SMR pp. 348ff., 316Dff., 333ff.) is becoming so divine that it is merely a delusion for lost dignity, proceeding from lost status, coming from lost understanding in a lost world which is going so quickly in highly approved ways to the garbage tin.

But not yet!

There is much more on the program card. The Lord is to come soon. We have studied this prediction in the light of events in some detail more than once (e.g. SMR Ch. 8 and Answers to Questions 5). Israel is to be attacked on a massive scale (SMR pp. 510ff.). The conditions of our environment are to tumble violently, as if suggesting what is like for a whirlwind of folly to fly over the cliff, when the time is due (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 6). Of course, it is not a literal cliff; for actually it is Armageddon followed by judgment of the nations and rule of the Lord, until - His point made, and His righteousness exhibited in the very face of cynics with their CAT turbulences at the high altitudes of philosophic drama, and sophisticates, surly sceptics susceptible to every draught and draft - the world goes.

That is the irony. The more of it some people get, the less enduring it shows itself to be. It is not, after all, as President Theodore Roosevelt is reported to have indicated, the manifest destiny of the White Race to take over America, and then in principle, of whoever is manifestly destined enough to take over whatever is manifestly overtakable, in a sort of updraft of hot air. NO RACE, and it is not at all a question of race except when race is made an excuse for degradation, supported or not by any government, and a substitute for remedy needed for and by EVERY MAN: no race is the answer, or has the answer. CHRIST is for all races. All need Him, absolutely, as does every individual (John 1:12-14, 3:1ff., Titus 3:5). No ATTITUDE is the answer. NO PHILOSOPHY is the answer. NO ENVIRONMENT is the answer. No POWER GRAB is the answer.
 

DO YOU LIKE ANSWERS ?

GOD ONLY is the answer. It is in the front of the book, from Genesis on, and is found in the back of the book, in Revelation which was careful to note that NO MORE of these spiritual things were to be written down, are to be believed. The world loves novelty, but the only novelty ahead now is judgment.

Laugh of course. Ignore, but naturally. We have heard all this, as the so patient neighbours of Noah had heard it all, and perhaps, they also, with trouble from the hatter, knew it all (Matthew 24:37ff.). It did not alter what it is (in principle) or was (in fact). The flood came as organised and arranged, and predicted. They had long warning.

But God! As Psalm 2 shows so clearly of the secular attitude, HE IS INTOLERABLE! So they say.

What! tell us something... WHO, just who does He think He is! - so they jibe. This is the chime of the times. Not listening is the essence of bravado, the sign of the sophisticate and the way to worldly success. So it chews on organic evolution like bakky to keep the mouth occupied and to produce that so nice strong feeling of sensation in the throat, till cancer comes, and continues in its wisdom.

Strange thing the world. It is alarming, this sea rise, so build a new power plant near sea level. Strange is the wisdom of this world, so bring up children moral-free, with only one moral, that it is immoral to have morals, and make this morality count, while they drug themselves into more work opportunities for social workers, and incriminate themselves into more road rages, soul rages, rock rages, fancy footing dances, and dance into the twilight with that magnificent futility which forgets that the night comes (John 9:4).

Events, they gallop, and they even keep step, a very unusual thing for a pack of wild horses.

When young, if you will suffer the reminiscence, one remembers once the favourite horse suddenly, at a very early stage of my riding experience, 'took off', surged with equine effort. Enjoying the quietness of this new form of co-existence, the writer found himself launched in sudden change, up a slight incline without warning, on the back of this less than equable equine warrior beneath him. The rising ground led directly beneath an overspreading pine branch, which was not far above the height of the horse's back. The strategy would appear to have been relatively simple. Was not the rider upon the back of the horse, and would not the horse neatly fit under the pine branch, and would not the rider fail to fit under it, so that if the horse went under it, would not distressing circumstances induce the rider to dismount, and would that not be an interesting equine experience... That, is it not horse sense ?

The force of this military concept hit the rider before the pine branch, in one of the prevenient mercies^*2 of the Lord. It occurred to the rider that if he leant back in line with the horse's back, and down by its rump, then there would be a significant diminution of the space required above the horse's back, and that this might prove a sufficient REDUCTION of requirement for togetherness, enabling that desirable state to continue unchanged. This worked, and the author continued intact. The branch passed by above, the rider was not dislodged or even struck, having a new horizontal experience of the horse's rump!

The point ? When the world is busily heading for the pine branch of its polluted destiny, and the word of the Lord is busily heading for its appointed rendez-vous with man, in PERSON, that of the Son of God the only Saviour, whose splendid and magnificent works make such an escape so easy, if hard to the larger head, it is time to adapt.  It is in fact time to seek the removal of scales from the eyes, by the Lord. It is time to bend*. It is time to reduce the space requirements for the exalted and enthroned spirit of man, sitting on the saddle, and to avoid collision. It is time to repent. It is time to believe and receive Christ. There is a time for many things as Solomon indicated; but THIS, it is time to find the Lord, and to be regaled in His mercy, and to find that underneath all these foolish ways of flesh, there is the source of Spirit, the maker of flesh, that exquisite but polluted field of man, and the fabricator of mind. "SEEK the LORD while He may be found!"  declares Isaiah, from the Lord. Look it up. It is in Isaiah 55.

WHEN He is found, that is infinitely beyond and incomparably better than this world. What is a painting when you know the painter! He has many more, and this world is but one of them, marred like its Lord, in the hands of its denizens.

Let this serve as an introduction, and Christ as the key to the kingdom of heaven. He is King there. There is no such king!
 
 

NOTES

*1

Events teem. In the same newspaper, one day later, Wedn. Jan. 24, 01, we find this:
"Millions of people may be forced from their homes because of global warming, leading climate scientists warn."

Again, the reference is to the United Nations Report, "the most comprehensive so far on global warming". "Vast swaths" of "low-lying land, including much of the UK, predict the experts" could be flooded through polar ice melting, it adds.

This is up-to-date consortium news on the sound of hooves is drumming on the ears of the world. Such events and trends, impending changes and spoliations come, only too well fulfilling the words of Luke 21:25, referring to "the sea and the waves roaring" amongst the defining criteria of the period leading to Christ's return, duly adorned with what since the days of Jesus Christ on earth, is the unique and epochal restoration of Jerusalem to the Jews, as Israel becomes once more an assailable nation; and an assailed one.

It is no small wonder, apart from all else, that this is to be a period of "distress of nations, with perplexity", and this is still less surprising in view of that vague and haunting feeling as millions of 'kids' are routinely murdered for convenience, pre-natally, and morals are outlawed by moral laws called by another name, such as human rights, which must make God wrong, since man is then the god of his own heart (Matthew 24:12).

Since this is contrary to fact, perplexity and distress MUST, as they do, feature. The proliferation of wars which coincides, both actual and virtual, reports of and ruin in, is partly a symptom of this state, and partly a predictive product of the word of God, as one more identifying tissue in the membrane of events, this cancerous membrane which has been so prominent in diagnostic chartings of the race, for some 50 years. While this proceeds, quite naturally, and again as supernaturally predicted, vast cancers of the spiritual establishment are likewise predicted, as in Matthew 24:24, while at the same time, the Gospel spreads throughout the earth.

You can hear the sound of the hooves, even above the roaring of the waves.
 
 

*2
You  want to know what are these things, pre-venient mercies (hyphen helps ?. It simply means that when the Lord has set His mind on the salvation of someone, and is going to save that person from his sin so that he finds God and knows the Lord and walks with Him in His kingdom, and is a child of God adopted and sealed, then He takes steps as He sees fit to this end.

Thus for example, if the person is going to die before salvation, He can intervene to prevent this. If the person is going to be crippled and it seems better to prevent this so that a better result can be obtained in some way, then He can act to assure this. It is not a question of the best possible beginning, but a beginning limited to what is not going to remove the end. Since none of us deserves ANY mercy (that is its nature, and what makes it what it is), for sin has a death warrant out for it (Romans 6:23, and it is fitting for ALL  - Ecclesiastes 7:20), then any such loving limitation becomes mercy, and since it happens before the covenant in the blood of Christ, through the sacrificial substitutionary death of Christ for all who will ever come to Him, before the conversion of the person concerned, relative to conversion and covenant, it is BEFORE. Hence PRE-; so that such mercies are pre-venient.

There is one thing about age, at least in one's own case. The older one is, the more amazing it seems that HE can be bothered. But that! it is the nature of love, to be bothered. In fact, GOD so loved this world! that He GAVE His only-begotten SON. It is if anything ever were beyond words, in that category. The prodigality of virtue, the profundity of wit, the resourceful of love, the decisiveness of wisdom, the irrelevance of cost, the deployment of intense and immense power in the miracles, the resurrection and the resistance to sin in that format: these things endear beyond anything this world has.
 
 
  * On another occasion, the author was galloping to catch a bus, and rejoicing in the delights of such abundant mobility of the horse, the passage of fast moving events on all sides as one flitted past, when the horse slipped on the green turf. Concerned lest the animal should roll with oneself UNDERNEATH, it seemed good to the rider to remove feet from the stirrups, to facilitate quick get away on the ground ... if it came to that.

It did not come to that. The horse did not fall. Hence, with feet out of stirrups and a sudden jolt to the horse's motion as it sought to recover its footing, one sailed delightedly into the air. Still fresh to one's mind is the sensation of blue sky above in the empyrean, green fields, the lovely contrast of the gravel in orange, with the sailing experience, a new horse sensation! The fall mercifully was only on a padded shoulder in one of the sports coats of that day, and no significant damage at all was suffered.

Yet the point is there. Galloping is to be in the right direction, attached to the proper means of locomotion, and slips at too great a speed can be costly. It is necessary in life to be on the right horse at the right speed in the right direction, with the right care. It is necessay to be with the Lord, abiding in Him, moving for His purposes, not rejoicing in motion, but in Him.