end time

His gait was paced and his muscles tight,
You could isolate him in the crowd as they split left and split right.
He tried to be a normal guy on any normal night.
But it wasn't a normal night that night.
It was the end of their time.

He called out like a man possessed, a man obsessed,
Loud shouts with his words, terse at best,
Calling for a city-sized hearse to wrest,
Our lives from our grips.
That judgment would shut our wicked lips - no more quips.
It was the end of our time.

For a few days he didn't stop, he just kept on,
Calling out over and over, as the truth started to dawn
On us, that his words weren't wrong, no fuss
Would resist, as our hearts started to insist
That his words did consist of all we had missed.
And it was the end of the time.

So from east to west, we broke and wept,
The power of the Almighty swept
Over and made us fear,
That the judge man was coming near,
The coming judgment was clear,
And it was the appointed time.

But God showed great patience,
He didn't do away with the wrath, but reserved it for the Ancient.
That in our stead would stand one day on That Occasion,
The King would die for enemy-subjects, Amazing!
So why wasn't the judge man more elated?
It was the end of that time.

He thought God's judgment was already too belated.
But, God had known that the man and they were related.
The judge man sulked, but God's word wouldn't be debated.
God is good, all the time, too great to be graded.
His mercy in Christ, would you degrade it?
Just be-aware that we near the end of time.

God wins.

Ill-dippin', cloud-equippin', sight-spittin' phenom,
Squelchin' waves with a blaze that doesn't die with the dawn.
He makes wolves lie with the fawns,
Brings back the dead when they're gone,
Flexing His brawn, crushing all injustice,
Yo, He's never been wrong.
Even His weakest is strong,
The meekest wait, for His coming is never too long,
By the word of His power upholding this planet we're on,
Until it's time for the song,
As from the hearts of the saints His praises prolong.
No more cries for judgment will spawn, It's done.
Like a theft, with the offer withdrawn,
He was but casting for a moment, but now His show goes on. He won.

Truth matters

This discussion has ignited the zeal (good and bad) of some and is revealing the positions of many.

1. Why do we defend people before defending the truth? Which is more valuable in God's eyes: His name and the truth, or men? Are they always/never/sometimes mutually exclusive?
   
2. Jesus said He is the truth, and so when we suggest the truth matters, but not enough to separate people, we must then ask if we're also saying that not standing with Jesus and thus opposing Him would result from standing with men who teach what Jesus did not and especially teach that which Jesus opposed.
3. If facts about one's teaching have already presented themselves from which a man will not separate himself, shouldn't that be admitted evidence that what a man will teach about on the same subject can be surmised until proven contrary? If not, why not?
   

Who

A man is small, weak, and wears out like a garment.
His bones break, his skin sags, and his eyes fail.
Sound eludes him, the earth shakes him, life flees him.
Gone is his vigor, his insight, his power.
Death approaches, the sun sets, man's love fades.

God is great, strong, and eternal.
He is Spirit, He is from everlasting to everlasting, and He knows all.
He hears all, He is God and there is no other, He is life.
He strengthens the faint and weary with infinite supply, wisdom is His whose power is abundant.
He has approached death and done away with it, and He deals justly with this creation, as He makes all things new.
His love endures forever

C.S. Lewis - Miracles

Miracles

Only lightly quoted for the first reading

Page 62

A nation’s moral outlook is just so much of its share in eternal Moral Wisdom as its history, economics etc. lets through. In the same way the voice of the Announcer is just so much of a human voice as the receiving set lets through. Of course it varies with the sate of the receiving set, and deteriorates as the set wears out and vanishes altogether if I throw a brick at it.

Page 131-132

Pantheism certainly is (as its advocates would say) congenial to the modern mind; but the fact that a shoe slips on easily does not prove that it is a new shoe—much less that it will keep your feet dry. Pantheism is congenial to our minds not because it is the final stage in a slow process of enlightenment, but because it is almost as old as we are. It may even be the most primitive of all religions, and the orenda of a savage tribe has been interpreted by some to be an ‘all-pervasive spirit’. It is immemorial in India. The Greeks rose above it only at their peak, in the thought of Plato and Aristotle; their successors relapsed into the great Pantheistic system of the Stoics. Modern Europe escaped it only while she remained predominantly Christian; with Giordano Bruno and Spinoza it returned. With Hegel it became almost he agreed philosophy of highly educated people, while the more popular Pantheism of Wordsworth, Carlyle and Emerson conveyed the same doctrine to those on a slightly lower cultural level. So far from being the final religious refinement, Pantheism is in fact the permanent natural bent of the human mind; the permanent ordinary level below which man sometimes sinks, under the influence of priestcraft and superstition, but above which his own unaided efforts can never raise him for very long. Platonism and Judaism, and Christianity (which has incorporated both [only the undiscerning have taken the whole system of Plato - D.S.]) have proved the only things capable of resisting it. It is the attitude into which the human mind automatically falls when left to itself. No wonder we find it congenial. If ‘religion’ means simply what man says about God, and not what God does about man, then Pantheism almost is religion. And ‘religion’ in that sense has, in the long run, only on really formidable opponent—namely Christianity.

Cup standing straight, power tower, take a drink,
Of the lust that world is swimming in to sink.
Not aware, to think, that we're skating the con's rink.

Madness that the lie will perpetuate a truth,
A man's heart cannot earn what it's never been due.
Naive because its allegiance has been squandered on fools.


Conned men nurse the lie that they have what they want,
But instead of sweet endings they settled for the means at the front.
Con men nurse the lie that they will get what they want,
But instead of sweet endings they'll wakeup where devils haunt.

Subtle snares: mistaking means for ends

C.S. Lewis: The Great Divorce

Page 73-74

There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself...as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Ye see it in small matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares.