HIS TIME IS NEAR

One should have liked to have added magnolias to the rose, in the sub-title, but did not so for two main reasons. Firstly, in all the Lord’s floral creation, what has the crisp suffusing beauty, the delicate, non-aggressive but distinctive perfume, the tidy geometry allied with a luxuriating and indeed friendly expansiveness of … a rose. That is so reminiscent of the friendship of Christ. When His return is near, this is a great symbol, and the season is a great reminder that there is a time for things, and a season for the Saviour’s action.

The other reason for omitting the magnolia in the imagery here, is this. While magnolias, as in the Mount Lofty Botanical Gardens in Adelaide, a superb creation bordering on genius, can be seen massed in their voluminous thousands, with perhaps millions of blooms, some seeming to festoon one tree to the amount of multiplied thousands, soaring to the contrasting blue sky, with all the internal intensity of a kiss, meanwhile disporting themselves with the abandon of a sky-floating aerial aquaplaner (hang-glider perhaps ? they seem almost to have a poetry in their motion): yet perfume is not the magnolia’s forte.

Certainly, some have it, and it can be subtle and fragrant, but in the main, their concentration seems to be in that combination of elegance and exuberance which makes them the masterpiece of divine creation they are, intended for the rational mind, the aesthetic being, apart from mere means of lower performance, and far surpassing any other functionality in the exquisite intimacy of their multiplied charms.

But of what are they speaking ? They bespeak, the roses, in their perfume, the NEAR RETURN of Christ. They do this in Spring, because then, in a little, they come into a fresh and sudden glory, and the scent wafting to the awaiting or even unexpectant nostrils, brings a gladness. It is near. One does not have to wander in garlanded wildernesses to find it. One passes, it salves the respiration, blesses the thought, intimates wonder to the spirit. It is unmistakable, unavoidable, yet not intrusive. The ROSE, it is HERE, or near … very near.

But is it not, the near return of Christ Jesus as Lord, also like the surf. One enters, it is cold; one is drawn, attracted, it is bold. It seeps into the consciousness, it is vast, ennobling in its indifference to reception, but intimate in its joys when one joys freely with it, cast away from the ground, surging with suffusion of light, colour and sensation, motion a glory, progress a delight, abundance of multiplied visual splendours on every side.

How is this like the near return of Christ ? It is because once you enter the ocean of reality, cold as its factual side may be – and often is! there is reward. You begin to realise what it has to offer; and it is not far off, it is lapping by one’s side, distinctive and yet intimate. So is the near return of Christ: stay out of the ocean of reality if you will, but once you open your eyes and heart to the action, it is overpoweringly obvious, and exquisitely near.

Yet enough of imagery. The world is the product of a personal Being, and as a Person He has come, and left us with our mundane response in the form of judicial murder, famed for Calvary. They seem to be doing something rather similar, not this time to the Son of God but rather indifferently to masses of WHITE (horror word ?) people, who perhaps do not really count when it comes to atrocities, in Zimbabwe. One does not notice too many invasions to protect them; too much oration in the UN; but the dim horrors of absolute power and glower mixed continue without much subsidence, it seems, except of the very state and stature of humanity.

That however is not the visit of the Son of God, merely the moral muddle of those who having ignored His presence, His principles and His peace, act the beast.

Acting the beast is not limited to Zimbabwe; and of course the slavery in which the world madly engaged in the 18^th century, and beyond, in Africa in particular, has run its course in surging hatreds and aggressive results, so that peace is far off, payment is near. It is that sad failure to realise that VENGEANCE IS MINE, says the Lord, which helps animate, or rather necrotize the earth in its current downfall. It falls in falling churches (though the church of Jesus Christ, known by its fidelity to His word continues); in falling biota (one estimate in WHO magazine, in September 15, 2003, in the science section, being 100 species animal and plant, lost every DAY), scarcely an empirical exhibition of evolutionary provision which in ludicrous and wallowing shame, many still anti-evidentially seek to imagine to this withered cultural day; in falling morals, for which peek at Chapter Two below; in falling water resources, rising pollution, heaving holes in the ozone level over the massive Antarctic hole, falling patience, rising rhetoric for violence, falling buildings, exploded by malevolent miscreancy, misnamed religion.

But the nearness of the return of the Lord is RISING. It is close. Its conditions are met with a characteristic rush and boundless energy, as all that was to be, as written in the Bible, that uniquely tried and test, vindicated and triumphant the word of God to man, now is. The systematic side of the matter has already been treated in SMR Ch. 8, as in Ch. 9 and in Answers to Questions Ch. 5, but in this volume, the intention is simply to watch developments, to study the word of God, to correlate and consider. After all, when the Armistice was declared in 1918 (and one mentions that occasion since the preliminaries were muddy, with earth sodden with the blood of millions who died in the murky depths of trenches, and their torturous environs, over years of pain and anguish), one did not need merely to write a history of the war, but to see the troop shops arriving, coming home, watching the troops land, return to civilian life, disperse. It had an intimacy which was another story, than the ultimacy of the conflict.

CHAPTER 9

ISAIAH SAYS IT: THE TIME IS NEAR

THE ENVIRONMENT OF TERMS

and

THE TERMS OF THE ENVIRONMENT