These words, found in Luke 13:1-3, are taken from the declaration of Jesus Christ. It was one given where, asked what was the special sin which people on whom a tower had fallen, must have committed, or what their parents ... Christ replied this:

"Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish" - Luke 13:2.

• 1. BETTER THAN GOD! BLIGHT OF THE SUPERB...

There are nowadays disasters and devastations, mass murder and mayhem, folly and fiasco of dauntless visionaries, whose vision is death, though they call it life.

London is like one of many cities in an allegory which we could map, on the face of the earth. Here, capital of the country which spawned Charles Darwin, with whom they visited the world, near where he studied, they are as the national centre which proceeded in his name, to MASK THE INVISIBLE. Small wonder Darwin became so blind to beauty that he mourned the decline. Imagining what does not happen, and happening to declare what is never found, with doubts and admissions he formulated a faith which is founded on nothing but blasphemy or unbelief or both, as if God were guilty of making a world by such means as he, Darwin envisaged; or as if he, Darwin could know it if He did.

How would a man be better than God, or see through the vile violences of his Maker, who with excruciating horrors in that model, invented a world by means of vice, viciousness and folly, where those who pride themselves on their being better, are better than God! How could you even know God when you were yourself a part of His violences and idiocies, while PRETENDING to be better, a cog in His mechano set, a unit in His atomic structurings, a pulse in His contrivances? Did He tell you? Alas, He has told something very different!

Will God create a world of madness by sobriety? Or will you be sober and He mad? Or will you be good and He bad? Can you have knowledge which He lacks? Or has God evolved? And by what system and who made it? Could you penetrate to the heart of the Most High, and tell Him? or are you part of this world and its ways, and have you come to even exist by the whole parody of surviving first, and doing the worst as the case may require? And if so how are you better? and if you are better, where did you obtain it? and if you are better than God, how did it grow? And how could anything be good if God were bad? Or are you enlightened while He is in the dark? Has His handiwork outwitted Him, left Him wallowing in stupidity and aridity and vacuity and outlandish follies which simply do not work, and threaten this benighted globe, while the world has such as you who both see and know better?

Better than God? It is no small assumption. It is to make of yourself your God, and to fail to have the advantage of being divine! It is to be your own maker, and to assess favourably what you have made, or your family or your school, your nation, your race or your culture, of which you are so fine a member! Do you remember the story of the publican (quisling tax-gatherer on behalf of the Romans, grabbing from your defeated co-nationals for gain, as administrator) and the Pharisee? This also is found in Luke. In 7:29ff. we see that many publicans repented and "justified God", being baptised.

What does this mean? It shows that they acknowledged their sins, in that being baptised is symbolic of washing, a sprinkling such as the Bible prescribed to "cover", formerly in blood but now in water, since the only blood that counts was that of Christ, now once for all shed (see Questions and Answers 11, 9).

But how did they JUSTIFY God? It was this: THEY had sinned, not God! They were RESPONSIBLE for their sins, not God. GOD had acted for their deliverance, not they! God in Christ had PROVIDED for their relief from the mischiefs of flesh, carnal imaginings, gainless profit and selfish advantage. Their insane putting of themselves in the cockpit of life, to drive the aeroplane of their selves as if they made it, making themselves the centre of operations and imagining and imaging what they would, clearly irrational and contrary to reality, was not the end. God had not created them mad and then turned His back on them. HE HAD ACTED.

CHRIST was the culmination of the action, and His salvation was the heart of the culmination, His self-declaration being the exposition of God, the manifestation of truth (John 14:6). As to that, they received Him for who He was and for what He had done.

Hence in acknowledging their OWN sin, they justified God. They did not blame HIM for their own faults, or the world's follies, but admitting their own errors, they acknowledged God, that He had provided not only the power to sin, a part of the power to love, something which arose by their own misuse of freedom, not as a gift, but as a molestation of His gifts: but He had provided equally the power of salvation.

They were not Darwinists, and this not only because he had not as yet managed to arrive on the scene. They justified God, not by blaming Him for the calamities, personal or national, processive or philosophic, judgments and warnings: but blaming themselves for their own sin, acknowledged the purity of Him who forgave sin, and His provisions.

In A Spiritual Potpourri Chs.1-9, and That Magnificent Rock Ch.1 as in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Chs.1-3, we show the IMPOSSIBILITY of the Darwinian concept, and any like it, of the whole organic evolutionary concept for the making of life and its basic forms and formats; as equally the necessity of the righteous God, by logic. Here however, our concern is to see some of the moral follies of the application of the truth to the personal life of man, to the arrogance and spiritual idiocy (Hosea 9:7, Psalm 53) when God is not justified, but people instead would justify themselves. Indeed, let us revisit the last named book, p. 100, and consider the matter a little further. We shall somewhat adapt it and let it appear indented below. Perhaps it may not hurt if we toss it this aspect this way and that, the better to appreciate what may be obvious to many, since it is for many, critical to life itself to realise what is happening.

• One further element, which follows from the others, is this. If it were felt that God, the Almighty, the Creator had in fact not spoken, it would not merely be contrary to the justice which is from Him, who made all things in their relationships as they ought to be, according to His desire.
  
• It would not merely similarly conflict with His truth, by which all reality has an owner and a word, called into being by His direction which constitutes it as it is, so that for Him to lie is self-affront, and self-affront is conflict and conflict is warring between what is desired, and what is: which is only for beings who have some endowment from outside.
• Indeed, to be in internal conflict is not to be God, whose nature is eternal and without intrusion from without, who is as He would be, whom nothing can hinder and who gains nothing from what is His construction; who lacks nothing, and for whom nothing is required.  
• For man to lie or be unjust is thus also assault on the Almighty's ways and on His constructions, which move and live and act and interact, some of which love and desire Him, some seeking to disrupt the same! It is assault on Him, whether on the part of those who so lie to one another and to Him - or indeed ABOUT HIM. Ignorant of nothing, alert to the alive, sustaining all things, it is to Him the invasion of His property, His principles and His power mounts its thrust. A contrary spirit as well as a contrary quest proceeds. Not merely is it contrary; it is antagonistic, militant and machinates. Of this, He knows the end, before it begins, and He? He has no place for the learning by misfortune who invented events.

• And yet the world has abundance of it: of injustice, suffering as a result, of disruption of justice, disturbance of truth, seizing by violence of what is due, of lies and fraud, religious pretension, often for gain; and being His, is it then left senseless and dead with no correction?

• If this did not disturb Him, those principles are not His; and if not His, then he is not God, but rather is it He whose principles they are, and whose concern is not divorced from reality.

• What then? To accept and disregard in silence, all this, it is not God, who in such a case would be One who voluntarily invents His assailant, creates His caricaturist and the violator of His principles, and then "ignores" it all, as if He were dead, though it attacks His system, abuses His provisions and usurps His prerogatives.  Not dead, but a miasmic myth is such a profound minister of His own overthrow, defilement of His own purpose-built property and mutilation of His own operational name, invasion of His own realm. Since He is, then His silence is impossible.
• He has no need to "learn", since He invented our learning-growth devices, whose is all; has no potential to develop, since there is none to endow Him with it, nor growth membrane to confer, nor is there deception to assist who needs no assistance, nor abuse to misuse, who has all, and for whom what is arises from He who is, so that it is in itself, His desire. Moreover, if He were deficient, and needed the
  sight of suffering for His comfort, deficiency is the lack of what is needed for a purpose, and such a lack at once entails an endowment of what does not match in one thing, what is present in another.
• That however is the nature of creation which comes to be, and is not its own self-sufficiency. Again, had He ignorance of developments, so that He needed to find out, and hence suffered things to 'go awry', this is merely one of the endless seeming contradictory propositions which might be made, all irrelevant, for they all start by assuming what the necessities of the case have been shown to require: HE HAS NO NEED. HE IS FREE ENTIRELY. Knowledge moreover takes derivation from Him, and strictly, without Him, is not possible, merely instead leaving the vacancy to reaction-response involvement. Exhaustively, utterly and always, He knows all that is, having invented all that is, with no other place from which anything at all could be drawn.
• Let us consider further. No constraints could have required anything of Him, no system could have contained Him whose is the beginning the cause of it all (SMR Chs.1,3), and no character or desire within is capable of frustrating Him, either in itself or in any combination or synthesis with other desires; for nothing is, with precision, what He cannot deal with, and nothing, again with precision, is His inheritance from before, for there is no 'before' for the ground and cause of what is.
  
• He is stopped and curtailed... by NOTHING! HE IS, curbed by NOTHING, constrained and controlled by NOTHING, has need of NOTHING, inventing as He will and dealing with His inventions in entire accord with what is His desire. HE IS FREE. If it is hard for warped souls to construe purity, this is not to the point, except for the advancement of those who have learning difficulties. The matter remains the same. Such beings as those, are not God. Since at this point our interest however our interest is with the Almighty, they need not concern us.

• Some, then, may wish a schizophrenic 'god', but the demonstrated logical need is for an operative one, whom

• a) nothing can embarrass,
• b) nothing resist in the end, in the fulfilment of His plans for His purposes, and
• c) none may disregard, to the abortion of His ways,
  • to the submersion of His principles,
  • the harassment of His nature,
  • the compromise of His operations,
  • the invasion of His purity
  • or to the abuse of His desires, designs and deliverances.
• It is not He who is left as if dead while His creations are free to insult Him who made it all, free to scarify His productions, and distort with lies and fraud about Himself, this also, cheating, abetting what is contrary to Him, and that while even acting in His name.  In such a situation, in principle, and according to the One who He is, action is sure. The fact that the Bible indicates that this is the case, does not alter the logical certainty which attaches to such an action in such a case as this current world represents (cf. Psalm 50:21-23, Isaiah 59:14-19; That Magnificent Rock Ch. 5, SMR pp. 25ff.).

• The Being, then, who would sit about or lounge in spirit while such incredible abuse of His principles, properties and name occurred, is not God. Since God, as we have demonstrated as noted above, IS, then HE HAS ACTED to REMEDY the situation, and since it is so contrary to Him in so much in deed, then the action must include words. Where man has spoken, HE HAS SPOKEN; where man has acted, HE HAS ACTED. Where false principles are in view, He has produced pure and adequate ones, ones including remedy, so that reality is realised. As we traced in detail in Ch. 1 SMR, that is definitively in the Bible, operationally in Jesus Christ, its focus, history's paragon...

To create liberty is wonderful, though its results can be strong. It implies the possible expression of things contrary to Him, blatantly or wantonly; and it enables the securing of persons in His image, who can love and respond to Him, to each other and to trial, test and reality. (Cf. Job 1.) Liberty is readily understandable, and for my part, intensely desirable, a massif of life, profound like the heavens, deep like the lakes, a magnificence in His image, astonishing to the mind, stirring to the heart, enlivening to the spirit.

To let such liberty play 'God', however: that is something else; and since He lives, it is He who is God, that infinite all-surveying Spirit, so that the confused whirring of contrary procedures and principles as the status quo, in the established pattern of what lives and relates to Him, would compromise Him, contradict His speech, annul His provisions, would meld with His plans, meddle with His life-projects and master the performances of Him who knows all things - unless He acts to invest it with His being, to qualify it with His power. And He lives forever.

Indeed, He who has created liberty has known its exercise and provided for its abuse, His principles upheld, His procedures ample, His remedy for this foreknown development, in place (see The Everlasting Gospel, Item 17, Barbs, Arrows and Balms), so that His people are within its hold, His enemies within its control and His plans perfect. At the direction of His word, which brings authority into the melee, all is accounted for without remainder, and the love of liberty with the liberty of love, His own sacrifice the make-weight, His own Being the source and the focus, is consummated in a redemption which leaves the original liberty a mere preliminary here perfected (cf. Hebrews 12:23-29).

Further: Death indeed is not apt for the Almighty whose life made it all, whose knowledge sees the end and creates the beginning, and who is always as He would be, nothing delaying or compromising: the "I am" behind all that grows and goes. Ever what He would be, He is without end, as without beginning; and as to death - it would be... a change!

But not for Him: who being always what He would be, and knowing all things, subject to no plans for Him (for there is none to make them), all depending on Him - has no change. Plans are from Him, not for Him. Things of process change, limited, conditioned; but the Inventor of process, for whom all process which moves on the way somewhere is creation, He does not change and arranges all things after the counsel of His own will.

Neither does He change for the better, being always what in all knowledge, is best; nor does it occur for the worse, lest being the best, He acknowledge it was not so, who yet knows all. Both change and death are simply self-contradictory for God, but those who contradict Him, it is they who will change.  

THEREFORE:

• Alive and judge, God sees the contradiction of His being and of His principles and of His provisions: He from whom life is a gift, and for whom death is merely the intrusive penalty He imposes on life astray.  

• Speak? If God did not then SPEAK to this race, not only would justice and truth lie dead, while injustice and lies and fraud abounded.*1 If possible, worse would be implied.

• If, then, it were conceived that God had not spoken, while the world remained as it is, then God would also be insulted by the very thought that He would remain inactive in speech to direct and resolve the problems in His world, leaving in silence the insolence and madness of man, assaulting and offending each one the other.  

• It is not only blasphemy, that is, a misuse of the very assured, minimal character of His glory; it would also be a denigration, a travesty and a direct personal offence so to speak or to think. A problem out of the power of God! a problem in the very world which He created, out of His depth, beyond His scope, when He had freely created all things, the whole set of abilities and of circumstances for all created life! It would be like telling a film star that she had no face, or a financier that he had no funds, or a real estate agent that he would not know a house if he saw one! Since God Almighty has been shown a logical necessity, this is not merely insulting, blasphemous, but impossible.

• The concept that He would be willing, moreover, to let be such folly and filth, such wilful, wanton pain as we have just seen in Kuwait and with the Kurds, when, having a solution, He did not use it: this would be like telling a social hostess that she couldn't care less if her guests starved!  

• Thus there is not only the metaphysical madness of such assertions, such views, such positions (cf. SMR Chs.1, 3, 10, That Magnificent Rock, Ch.5): there is also the moral assault on God which is involved. If, indeed, we his creatures would be amazed at the madness of anyone suggesting such things about us, how much more should we be ashamed even to think such things about God, who gave us the power to think and the knowledge with which to know (cf. Psalm 94:8-11; SMR Ch.3), without whom we are merely reactors, for whom truth is not an option, though it be 'spouted' and views upon Him latheringly expressed.  

• A solution He has indeed shown, and evidenced it so voluminously that even the greatest tomes can scarcely do justice to the overwhelming grandeur and scope of His verifications (SMR is merely ONE of the works by this one author, on that topic!). But man ignoring God in vast numbers, disdaining His word and wanting to hear and know nothing of His speech, indeed even often denying it, so willing to move the blame for undoubtedly high-level immorality and actual agony, often sustained, onto God, wants Him a dumb dog, lying down and snoozing. It wants Him so, or it implies Him so; or else it is in conscious and manifest rebellion. Either way, it is much the same: arrogant disregard or rebellion.

• Thus we, whom He created, are active, we think, we look for solutions,
  we can feel the horror of so much pain for others...
  but He, who made our hearts and our feelings and our moral thoughts in the beginning
  (however we misuse this PART OF OUR equipment, yet it is there, in our hearts - however spoiled, leaving its residue at the worst),
  He does not feel ? God who made the heart, does He not feel? God who made the mouth, does not speak ? God who made the mind, does not think? He is incompetent who contrived creatures with the power! To ask is to answer.
   
• We have considered, and elsewhere in depth traced the impossibility ontologically, the frank contradiction in having the all-powerful author of justice and ground of truth needlessly allowing flat and continual contradiction, when merely to apply His power removes the problem, the violation in principle as well as in practice, by removing the people who make it! Now we dwell on the incredible cheek, the irrational implicit assumptions on which any such notion is built.  
  

• The solution is available; has been shown from the first, predicted for centuries, performed by Jesus Christ, published, proclaimed and preached for thousands of years concerning this same Jesus Christ, concerning whom no one has been able to show even one sin, and of whom even Muhammad had to admit the righteousness.
  

• Moreover, to suggest that God has not spoken when His word circles the earth, His predictions noticeably control the whole direction and character of history, uniquely and utterly, and His Son went to the pain and anguish of bearing the sins of those who will forsake their own: this is to sustain, reinforce and add to the insults of the Cross, the calumnies of Calvary, the madness of the priests. It is to stand, arrogant and upright, in the presence of love, and call it hate or indifference; it is to look, princely and pure, at one's Creator and call Him dumb; compassionate and sensitive (courtesy of being created by one's Creator) and to call Him heartless... this while all the time, ignoring the solution which He has constructed, the sacrifice which He has made, the pardon which is so needed, but so ignored.

• What is it like ? It is like prisoners in a prison, cut-throats, immoral and dead in spirit, raging at their victims, buried as a result of their crimes against them. Thus Jesus Christ was made a sin-offering to take the burden, the blight and the bane of sin from all who come by faith to receive Him. But He is not dead, and this insult to the moral nature of God is similar to the studious blindness which also slanders His power, by which His people have for centuries lived, their hearts in His peace and their persons alight with His love and presence.

• It is therefore one more sin, that God is so 'sentenced', as C.S. Lewis phrases it, God in the Dock, at the hands of man, His judges. But let us add this: He is being `sentenced' by those sinners to whom He is offering pardon, who are meanwhile slandering His sacrifice and sentencing themselves. In their hearts, truth is contaminated twice: once by sin, and then by sneering at its solution! For all this, the Bible has provided.

• 2. LEAVE HIM ALONE: ILLUSION OF THE DELUDED

But some may want to leave God 'alone', or simply disregard Him, discount or even deny Him. Will they then instruct us in their 'truth'? Let us quote again, this time from SMR p. 101:

It is unwise and indeed the utmost in arrogant presumption if derivative man, with unmoored mind, man who does not accept the specific, identified and rationally necessary revelation of God, comes to pontificate on `truth', on the reality of things.

Will a conditioned or limited man, reacting and being able to do only what has been given him to do, erect himself as a founder of truth, a source of criticism of the God who made his little mind ? Will a cog discuss the design with the designer ? Will a man without the revelation of God, tell Him what it would be ? Will man show God His own mind!

Will a limited and sinful man without knowledge of absolute truth, even as a perspective, say that something is absolutely true, or work on bases and ideas as if they were valid and worth arguing from, when he does not yet have the knowledge of absolute truth, on which to start and on which to proceed: either not knowing God, or if knowing something of that, not believing it; or in any case, not having access to this absolute truth in the mind of God, who speaks when He will, as He will...

The case is hardly improved if man does not believe there is such a thing as absolute truth, while making various statements in which such a property is assumed to inhere, or presumed to be possible! Surely the Primary School student is scarcely guilty in his first beginnings of such enormities, through sheer immaturity, as beset the mind of mature man, through rebellion. (Cf. SMR Chs. 3-4; pp. 292-315, 934-936 esp., infra.) 

• 3. ABSTRACT ONESELF

• LIKE AN ATOM ?

But some may say, I neither deny God nor affirm ANYTHING. But this is self-contradictory. In so stating what you are and are not doing, you are indeed making 'meaningful' affirmation, and as shown in SMR Ch.1, in so doing you invoke logic which in turn requires the God who has made both it and you.

IGNORING, DENYING or EVADING GOD is alike useless and irrational. REPENTING is both necessary and provided for, BY GOD. The publicans justified God, do you! or are you His critic by ignoring what He is and has done, not responding to the most complete and staggering attestations which he has provided in Nature, in the Bible and in Christ!

(See The Aviary of Idolatry, Highway to Hell, The Everlasting Gospel, Generation of the Dispossessed - Barbs, Arrows and Balms; Magnificence of the Messiah - Biblical Blessings; A&F Schools - A Spiritual Potpourri.)

• 4. FACE CHRIST LIKE A REALIST ?

• As to the Bible, it is full of its own verifications as shown in SMR Chs.4-5,8-9 (see back for cartoons).

• As to Christ, there is nothing even slightly to suggest the incandescent, infallible, confirmed and constantly historically verified life:

• the purity,
  the pronouncements,
  the prophecies, from Jerusalem's fall, as also foretold by Daniel in Ch.9, to the restoration of the Jews (Luke 21:44), to the profusion of His slithering and serpentine substitutes who were to - and do abundantly now, misuse His name or His fame, and hence to our own times, in their specialised and specific forecast as a contour of events and characteristics (SMR Ch.8),
  
• the profundity,
  the panoply of power whether over sickness, demons or the weather,
  the historical provision which led from long before, to His exposure to the world in hundreds of fulfilled prophecies ranging in topic from His date to His death, His healing to His joy, from His words to His Gospel, to its spread and to its extent throughout the world,
  the program which He followed as laid down both in the OldTestament and in His own words,
  
• the compassion,
  the penalty-bearing and
  the precision of His answers in all matters with which He was confronted, and
  His performance, never aborted, never failing and never out of His depth whether with words, disease or events of any kind;
  
• His penetration into the depths of hell, as bearing the alienation which sin brings, as also predicted,
  His predication of His power to the presence and His place with His Father (John 8:29) ....

We could go on, for where can one stop with perfection. The Bible, the Creation and the Lord Jesus Christ all speak with one voice. Sin speaks with quite another, whether in the judgments Nature has received (Romans 8) or those which man successfully pleads for, from the Almighty, although He is all but incredibly patient (II Peter 3:9). As to the judgments on this world, they roll up like a crowd to a circus at the booming of the drum, and the drum? It is the sins of this world which neither diminish nor depart, its failure to repent of its wooden worship of nature, like the fallen Israelite parties of old (Jeremiah 2), of the world and of themselves as altogether the greatest there can be, or at least satisfactory and acceptable to anyone anywhere: and IF NOT, where then is their repentance! And if so, where then is their Lord? NOT in their hearts, or else they would be His and say so (Romans 10:9).

Will you then justify GOD or justify YOURSELF? And if yourself, then you are your own cause, your own centre and your own power, all manifestly absurd if reality is in view, fantasy and pride in abominable distortion! Publicans did better than that.

• 5. THE PROVISION FOR REPENTANCE: place of those who 'justify God'...and are justified

Let us then think again of London. It was a type of topographic allegory, but it is not without a shadow of reality which it casts on the world.

London, then, the capital of the nation which was famed for Darwin, the land or site of his fame: what in our allegory does it represent? What of it? Here is the invisible masked.  

• Or what of Moscow, where the invisible is marred, as millions were tortured for not believing pseudo-scientific palaver concerning what is not there (cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Index on Communism) .
  
  Or of Peking, where the invisible was shot, the yearnings for freedom and for things beyond this blighted orb, on the part of a youth who were to be buried with bullets or tanks, their probing pushed like so many rats into the river.

• Or of Rome, where the invisible is imagined in the Mass, and God is made movable by man (see The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 1042ff., as also Barbs, Arrows and Balms, Highway to Hell).
  
  Or of Mecca, where the invisible is imagined, where God is imagined, and His Son subordinated to His 'creator', Mohammed, made Him anew in writing, who had made history with blood, who was not baulked in his reconstruction of Christ by a few hundred years, and had none of His powers (cf. SMR pp. 50ff., 989ff., 1080ff., and Barbs, Arrows and Balms, Highway to Hell ).

• Or of Jerusalem where the invisible was crucified, by joint favour of the Establishment and Rome, and the very SON of GOD was so treated that "His visage was marred more than any man, And His form more than the sons of men" (Isaiah 52:14).

But there, it is there that there is provision for repentance. It goes on in Isaiah at once:

• "So shall He sprinkle many nations,
• Kings shall shut their mouths at Him;
• For what had not been told them they shall see,
• And what they had not heard, they shall consider."

The sprinkling is the cover with blood, once portrayed through that of animals, now in Christ whose death is signified by the blood, whose cover by the sprinkling, whose pardon by His substitution of His own life for that of the sinners who repenting, not only 'justify God', but are themselves justified (Romans 5:1), for He the Lord, died the

• "just for the unjust that He might bring us to God" ( I Peter 3:18).
• Indeed, as to those "healed" by His stripes, pardoned for His provision, "On Him was laid the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:6).

By contrast, look at the superior strutting of being BETTER than others as shown in Luke 18, where the PHARISEE and the PUBLICAN both went to pray, and the former rejoicing at his superior estate, the latter downcast without even lifting his eyes, since his awareness of his shortcomings before God and man was like a mountain on his head. One asked God to have mercy on him, a sinner; the other thanked God that he was not as other men. The PUBLICAN, public folly though he had committed, went away JUSTIFIED RATHER THAN THE OTHER, declared Jesus Christ.

Jeremiah tells us this (2:35):

"Yet you say, 'Because I am innocent,

Surely His anger shall turn from me.'

Behold, I will plead My case against you,

Because you say, 'I have not sinned.' "

In Australia, as is the case in many other countries, we have had the Gospel

so much, the Christian institutions, the 'preferred religion' in Victoria at first, in the very Constitution, being declared as Christian; we have had the fruits of His goodness

so long in

so many things that the current wildness both

in many Bible-suppressing churches and elsewhere, that this question must be asked.

Is THIS result after SO MUCH FOR SO LONG, not as extraordinarily insulting and provocative to God, blind and feckless for this people, as it was for the Jewish people in Jeremiah's time!

Moreover, if there is any difference, it is not helped by the fact that this, our own Australian people, like much of America and Europe, has had CHRIST preached to them, while the Jewish people, though profoundly covered with His graces and testimonies including the prediction of His coming, have not had so much preaching. It is nevertheless true that LATER the nation of Israel became involved in His acute rejection at Calvary, just as this nation seems now to be moving in the same direction with His word and ways, with His visible testimonies indeed. History is not yawning, but watching as they ponder.

But let us revert, and contemplate the case of the publican, that is the quisling tax-collector, and the Pharisee. Where are they fitting in, who having o much for so long, now so treat Him! It is to be observed that it is one thing, like the Pharisee, to thank God for being better than other men: something not impressive to the Lord as we have seen. It is however another when it is taken even further. And is this not done when the pleasure or predilection felt is this: that one seems better than God! or that one is ignoring Him, or disdaining Him or even caricaturing Him as in organic evolution, Communism and Romanism (see Aviary of Idolatry, "Barbs, Arrows and Balms", and SMR Index).

It is then, at least in principle, that the real acme is reached in terms of the syndrome of superiority. The spirit of it, however, in each case, is so strong that doubtless only God could distinguish. Formally, however, the modern much-preached-to Gentile case is provocative! Forgiveness is certainly, and with astonishing grace, available; but to ignore even that, this is to engage the ultimate (Hebrews 2:1ff., 12:18ff., John 3:15-36). Hell yawns as if in anticipation at such folly. But it is not to be desired, being the stuff of evil and the terrible mismatched tartan of depravity confirmed by desire.

God is good and the failure to repent and receive His salvation is no pleasure to Him (Ezekiel 33;11), and in the face of the cost of Calvary and of sending Christ into the world (I John4:7-10), it is a blindness*² and an assertiveness that then leaves the national dictators with their private parallels, of which there are therefore many. It is not pretty; and that is WHY its results are not becoming in the end; for judgment is according to truth, the truth of the God of truth, in whom alone can truth be found, and from whom it is applied in judgment. That His judgment has been pre-applied in and to the Lord Jesus Christ is the one magnificent reality in the midst of this world's perishing course, which continually moves further into the domain of the forecast disestablishments, both in space and in people, which are the just rebuke to its arrogance in the face of the One who created it and ballasted it with blessing.

What then is to be done?

EXCEPT YOU REPENT YOU WILL PERISH - was the thrust of Christ's remarks on the tragedy of the falling tower, shown in Luke 13. It is not that you cannot suffer if you are a Christian, but that if you refuse Him, then your suffering is monumentally meaningless in this sense, that you are like the chaff that the wind blows away (Psalm 1), whereas the Lord KNOWS the way of the righteous, the justified, those who, rightly 'justifying God', are themselves justified by grace, receiving pardon (Titus 3:5-7).

NOTES
 

A BIBLE READING TO THE POINT - Isaiah 59:14-20.  
 

*1 Cf. Isaiah 59:14-15, as to the provocation, and the divine sequel in 59:16-19, as to judgment; noting that in Isaiah 51:16 is the preparation of the remedy, 51:6 its endurance and power, in 52:13-53:12 its mode, and in 55:1ff. its offer. Here the scripture also implies by revelation, and concerning revelation, that to which we have reasoned in terms of His manifest, divine nature. God has assuredly SPOKEN!

Isaiah declares in the Lord's name:

• "Justice is turned back,
  And righteousness stand afar off;
  For truth is fallen in the street,
  And equity cannot enter.
   
   
• So truth fails,
  And he who departs from evil makes Himself a prey.
   
   
• Then the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him
  That there as no justice.
   
   
• He saw that there was no man,
  And wondered that here was no intercessor:
   
   
• Therefore His own arm brought salvation for Him;
  And His own righteousness, it sustained Him.
  For He put on righteousness as a breastplate,
  And a helmet of salvation on His head,
  He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing,
  And was clad with zeal as a cloak.
   
   
• According to their deeds, accordingly He will repay,
  Fury to His adversaries,
  Recompense to His enemies,
  The coastlands He will fully repay.
   
   
• So shall they fear
  The name of the Lord from the west,
  And His glory from the rising of the sun.
   
   
• When the enemy comes in like a flood,
  The Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him.
   
   
• The Redeemer will come to Zion,
  And to those who turn form transgression in Jacob,
   
  Says the Lord."
  

• *2 Cf. SMR Ch.5, pp.423ff.. All philosophic "problems" that chronically pester the secular flesh are so readily resolved in Biblical terms, those which Christ endorsed and provided, that failure to accept this is like a student who KNOWING or SEEING that 2+2=4, nevertheless pertinaciously REFUSES to use this IDENTITY, because he does not feel attracted to it.