Gill On Nations Not Serving The Lord Christ

Isaiah 60:12

“For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish.”

(The Nation) “that will not serve the Lord Christ, and worship him with his church and people; that will not be obedient to the laws and ordinances of his house; but appoint another head over them, the pope of Rome; and make other laws, and set up other ordinances, rejecting the authority of Christ, the rule of his word, and the order of his churches: yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted; even all the antichristian states, when the vials of God’s wrath will be poured out upon them;

John Gill — Legendary Baptist Divine
Exposition of the Bible Isaiah 60

Random Notes & Thoughts on Ecclesiastes 3

The Teacher searches for meaning but he realizes in Chapter 3 that his search for meaning is a search that is conditioned by God’s sovereignty over the affairs of men. Man is a limited being and his search for meaning comes in the context of understanding that God has set the times and seasons.

3:1 picks up where 2:24-26 leaves off. In 2:24 The Teacher admits that his eating and drinking and enjoying his labor is from the hand of God. In 3:1 he expands that thought so as to communicate that all of our living comes from the hand of God as God has designated times and seasons under the sun for His purposes. As pure enjoyment stands not in the power of man, much rather is a gift of God (2:24). God bestows or denies man according to God’s will, so in general all happens when and how God wills, according to His own ordained plan comprehending all things which man can neither completely understand nor in any respect change. God does this so that man should sense his dependence upon God and learn to fear God.

To often 3:1-8 has been taught as a text that communicates our needing to order our own lives according to what we determine are proper times. Also it has been taught that we have to determine when the proper times are ourselves. Before my study of this passage I was guilty of this misreading. Indeed, in the notes of my Bible I have inscribed,

“Our prayer should be that God would give us wisdom to be able to discern the appropriate times.”

But 3:1-8 is not about us. These are not prescriptions but descriptions of God’s work. To read the text as if this is a list of prescriptions is to miss the whole thrust of what the Teacher is conveying. The Teacher is communicating that there is one who has ordered the Universe in such a way that all that comes to us as covenant keepers can have meaning. It is not a totally random world where we are the ones imposing meaning on the world. The world comes with ordered meaning because God has given everything a season and all times a purpose.

We can take great encouragement from this. There is a structured order to the life of man, even when it involves
sickness (3), death (2), and war (8); for, in spite of the curse, God does not permit the world, and man’s life in it, to fall into complete chaos. He makes sure there are times for birth (2), health (3) and peace (8) as well.

So while man is to learn from this and order his days aright because of this description of God’s ordering the Teachers primary purpose is to emphasize the perspective of the God Who “orders” every single aspect of man’s life and actions.

I submit to you that the fact that 3:1-8 is not about us — about our needing to order our own lives according to what we determine are proper times is seen in vs.2.

“A time to born … a time to die.”

All would agree that none of us determine the time of our birth, and I would contend that not even the person who commits suicide and rushes into God’s presence un-summoned determines the time of their death.

Vs. 1 then makes it clear that what is said in vs. 1-8 is not about our necessity to figure out when we need to do one thing or another but is about how God ordains all things.

So in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 we find words which covenant-keeping man may read for understanding and encouragement, while covenant-rejecting man in his state of alienation from God is estranged from their meaning.

“… To every purpose under the sun”

The purpose here being spoken of is not man’s purpose but God’s purpose. God marries times and seasons to His purposes and the Teacher recalls here that God is the one who has ordained the times and seasons to accomplish His purposes.

Man has very little control over the comings and goings of God’s seasons. From verses 2-8 we have God’s time stamp; indicating His times of change, of direction, of progress, and no man can touch the clock on whose minute and hour hand these times are marked.

Covenant keeping man finds these words comforting because it reminds us that our times are in God’s hands. These words remind us that there is rhythm and meaning to life because God is the one who is purposing the times under heaven. Life is not coming to us by time plus chance plus circumstance and life is not spinning out of control when our purposing under heaven does not come to fruition.

The Teacher saw that, notwithstanding the vanity which so broadly marked all human life, there was a partially discovered method underlying everything. Things that seemed to come by chance really came by arrangement, and all the irregularity of life was only on the outside. Considered from a macro point of view all of life comes to us by the hand of God who is the one who regulates all of our times. The covenant keeper finds his sense of equilibrium and stability in this truth in the seasons that we mark off as adversity.

However, Covenant rejecting man finds these words exasperating and hateful to his desired sovereignty. These words stand as a rebuke to men who would be as God, — men who would structure all reality according to their fiat word. These words are hateful to the covenant rejecter because they remind him that they live in a world that is conditioned and controlled by God. Their times are not in their own hands but remain in God’s hands.

In these words the teacher provides comfort for the covenant keeper but at the same time these words are a javelin slung at the heart of the Idolatrous worldview of the covenant rejecter. He must live his life in submission to God’s ordering.

Still, the covenant rejecter as always tried to ascend to the most high in this matter of controlling the times.

Rushdoony reminds us,

“In ancient paganism…humanistic man sought to govern time by means of rites whose purpose was to control time and nature. In fertility and chaos cults, men believed that they could make nature fruitful again, wipe out past history and sins, reverse time and order, and regenerate themselves, nature, and history.”

That this remains a goal of modern covenant rejecting man is seen in Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Brave New World,” where man seeks to take up God’s predestinating purposes in regard to running the world. Huxley reveals to us that man wants to be the one who determines the “time to be born.”

“The Director of the Centre (the D.H.C.) conducts a group of new students, as well as the reader, on a tour of the facility and its operations — a biological version of the assembly line, with test-tube births as the product. They begin at the Fertilizing Room, move on to the Bottling Room, the Social Predestination Room, and the Decanting Room. Along the way, the D.H.C. explains the basic operation of the plant — Bokanovsky’s Process — in which one fertilized egg produces from 8 to 96 “buds” that will grow into identical human beings.

The conditioning that goes along with this process aims to make the people accept and even like their “inescapable social destiny.”

The Social Engineering done today by way of science and politics is just another example of covenant rejecting man seeking to throw off the reality that God is the one who has given everything a season and God is the one who has given a time for His every purpose under the Sun.

As we consider the list in 1-8 we would do well to remember that these are not listed from a moral point of view. The vantage point that is taken up is of the God who disposes all things and who can take even the adversity that He ordains and makes it subservient to his plan.

1-8 also reminds us that as there are God ordained times so there are fitting human reaction to those times. God has made us in such a way that no one emotion is in and of itself evil.

God has made the time to weep, and the time to laugh. He has made the time to mourn and the time to dance. He has made the time to embrace and the time to be aloof. The time to speak and the time to remain silent. The time to love and yes even the time to hate. No human feeling is in and of itself wrong. The error lies not in the emotion but in the marriage of the wrong emotion to the wrong time that God has ordained.

Ill. — Nietzsche’s lie that Christianity is a killjoy religion is a demonstrable falsehood because God gives times to laugh.

In vs. 9 we see a repeated idea from back in Chapter 1:3 where the search was to find meaning in work. 3:10 returns to the theme of 1:3 — The Burden of God and points mnen to God’s covenant faithfulness with a reference back to God’s doing in God’s time (vs. 10). So, the profit that a worker does or does not have from his labor as part of the God given task that God has given can be anchored in the reality that God has made everything beautiful in its time. God has made it beautiful in its time. However, if we cannot find the satisfying good in the events and affairs of life, that is because God has put eternity in our hearts. (vs. 11)

This idea of eternity in our hearts is the Teacher reminding us that God has placed in each one of us a impulse that leads us beyond the temporal to the eternal; it lies in our nature not to be contented with the temporal, but to break through the limits which it draws around us, to escape from the bondage and the disquietude within which we are held, and amid the ceaseless changes of time to console himself by directing his thoughts to eternity.

The idea of eternity in our hearts reveals that for men created as the Image of God that which is temporal cannot satisfy. We are made for something higher and grander than the temporal, though having a place, cannot ultimately satisfy what we thirst for. We are beings limited by time but in our innermost nature we were made for eternity. That which is temporal has just enough of the eternal in it to cause us to sigh for the eternal which will remind us of the Temporal.

So, everything is beautiful and appropriate in its season from birth to death, from war to peace (11). If we cannot find the satisfying Good in the events and affairs of life, that is not because we could devise a happier order for those events (though we often think we could) but it is because God hath put “Eternity in our hearts,” as well as time, and did not intend that we should be satisfied until we attain an eternal good.

The fact that we are time bound is emphasized again in 11b. We are creatures that are created in time. We can not get out of our time to know what God has done from beginning to end. We want to know. We are like people who are in a long play. We have our part and we think we know where the play is going but the curtain falls on our part before we can see all that God as the producer and director of the play is doing.

So, while we can’t know God’s beginning to end, we are called to rejoice and do good in our lives. We can not control the times. That is God’s doing. But we can enjoy the times that God gives and do good. We can live our lives then in light of eternity. This is what we are called to do throughout Scripture. Since our times are in God’s hands (Ps. 31:15) we are to bless the Lord at all times Ps. 34:1.

And in terms of the doing good … well, as we say repeatedly that is found in God’s law,

David could say,

“My soul is consumed with longing for your law at all times.” (Ps. 119:20)

“Blessed are they who maintain justice, who constantly [i.e., at all times] do what is
right.” (Ps. 106:3)

With this in mind Paul writes, “Be careful, then, how you live —not
as unwise – but as wise, making the most of every opportunity [i.e., redeeming the time]….” (Eph. 5:15)

In 14-16 the teacher makes some concluding remarks for this section.

Implicit contrast between God and Man — vs. 14
One purpose of God’s doing — vs. 14 (Fear God)
Nothing new under the sun — vs. 15 (cmp. 1:9)
God will judge

The covenant keeper has been judged in Christ.

Owen On God’s Inscrutable Purposes

“The not sending of the gospel to any people, is an act regulated by that eternal purpose of God whereby he determineth to advance the glory of his justice, by permitting some men to sin, to continue in their sin, and for sin to send them to their own place;—as a king’s not sending a pardon to condemned malefactors is an issue of his purpose that they shall die for their faults. When you see the gospel strangely, and through wonderful varieties and unexpected providences, carried away from a people, know that the spirit which moves in those wheels is that purpose of God.”

~John Owen

Obama … Lincoln Redux

Years ago, H. L. Mencken exposed the fact that Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, used poetry as opposed to logic to reinvent these united States of America into a National Union from a Confederated Union. Lincoln, by the poetry as expressed in the Gettysburg hijacked these united States vision of itself and largely reinvented the country with that speech. As stated earlier, H.L. Mencken pointed this out in his own illimitable way,

“The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history…the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.”

The reason I bring this up is I believe that Barack Obama was trying to do much the same thing in his 2013 Inauguration speech.

First, Obama has always tried to channel Lincoln. In point of fact Obama used Lincoln’s Bible (along with MLK’s) to take his oath of office. Could this be a indicator that Obama understands what Lincoln accomplished in changing America via his Gettysburg Address, and so aspired to do the same with his Inaugural address?

Second in his Inauguration Obama made more then one reference to the ability of America to reinvent itself. Early on in the Inaugural address Obama said,

“America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: …. an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention.”

Even earlier in his address Obama even refers how the Nation re-made itself in the context of the Lincoln Regime,

“Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.”

Elsewhere we find,

“But we have always understood that when times change, so must we;”

When you combine these quotes it is clear that Obama’s intent is to remake America and my premise is that this Inauguration Address was to Obama what the Gettysberg was to Lincoln in the sense that both speeches, by way of poetry, glommed on to some honored American idea, only to twist it by poetry in a direction that contradicted the original intent of the Founders. For Lincoln, his appeal was to the the American time honored notion of self-determination in order to justify denying the South the opportunity of self-determination. Lincoln, by poetry, was able to justify his crushing of the South in the name of self-determination. Lincoln’s poetry, coloring his brutal use of the sword and the canon, remade the Nation and set it on a different trajectory from which it would never recover.

What Obama is appealing to, by way of poetry, is a twisted idea of equality in order to overturn liberty. In his Inaugural speech Obama returned to the theme of equality over and over again.

… ” what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

“We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher …”

“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well….”

Obama’s constant appeal to the traditional American virtue of equality is being used to set the nation on a new trajectory that will overturn the original understanding of equality. It is obvious that the Founders did not believe in the kind of Jacobin equality for which Obama champions. Just the fact that the Founders allowed the individual states to determine who would have the franchise proves that they were not interested in the kind of Marxist equality for which Obama is advocating. The fact that the Founders crafted a document of negative rights where the Federal Government was restricted to very specific enumerated and delegated powers — powers that did not include forcing equality on the population and did allow the people to maintain their cherished liberty — suggest that the Founders “equality” is not the “equality” to which Obama constantly returned.

In Obama’s America, the phrase in the Declaration of Independence that mentions that “all men are created equal, is being used as a talisman in order to reinterpret America. The problem is that the US War for American Independence was not posited on the same premises of the French Revolution where equality as Egalitarianism was the leitmotif. America did not have the watch word of “Equality, Liberty, and Fraternity.” America did not mention “Equality” in her primary document (Constitution), or her Bill of Rights. America was not hung up about addressing everyone as “Citoyen,” (Citizen) in order to reveal a mad allegiance to equality as we find in the French Revolution was. America did not come up with a “Declaration of the Rights of Men,” and enshrine “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights” in its first point. America’s concern was Liberty not equality.

In the twentieth century, scholars like Hayek and Friedman maintain that equality is in conflict with and incompatible with liberty. They maintained that speaking of social justice in a society where individuals are free, any attempt to establish social justice or equality will deprive the people of their freedom because such an attempt requires government intervention to the end of denying liberty in pursuit of equality. A true notion of liberty understands that it includes the liberty to be different, and so unequal, due to the pursuit of individual interests. Obama’s version of “Equality” stands in contradiction to any vision of “Liberty” that isn’t Jacobin at its core. Obama’s equality is a demand for equality of outcome that always achieves a dull, ugly, drab sameness and the only way that can be achieved is by Obama taking away the liberty of American People.

Obama, in his Inauguration Speech is trying to deceptively change America much like Lincoln did at Gettysburg. If Obama is able to foist his vision of equality on America, by sentimentally appealing to the historic American notion of equality, he will succeed in changing the USA into the USSA.

Thinking About Women In Combat

On the last Panetta Announcement we were informed women would war
(We were assured that woman would manage and our power would be even more)
They would battle till broken and crippled, while our men carried the shame
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “In war ye shall list only male names”

1.) A 6’5″ 220 pound Marine is injured in combat. Is his 130 pound female colleague going to carry or even drag him out of danger?

Consider that the average American female soldier is five inches shorter than her male counterpart. She has half the upper-body strength and 37 percent less muscle mass. Women also have 25 to 30 percent less aerobic capacity, which reduces their endurance.

2.) A female soldier is captured. Her cries of anguish while being repeatedly raped by the enemy is heard by her male colleagues across enemy lines. Will the male soldiers successfully repress the normal male urge to protect the woman or will they cast caution aside and go to their deaths in a vain but noble attempt to rescue the maiden in distress?

Israel is the only nation with real-world experience putting women in combat. Having gained that experience, Israel has banned women from combat units since 1950. Israel’s lessons were hard-won; the feminists in Congress have yet to learn them.

The first lesson is that men could be taught to kill strangers, but they would not stop caring for women. That is as it should be: civilized countries want to create soldiers, not savages. During the 1948 War of Liberation Israeli men would abandon their missions to come to the aid of women in distress, thereby endangering their missions, their units and themselves.

3.) And what of this normal male urge to protect the female? What will this mean in the context of battle? In the context of training?

In his insightful essay “Women Can’t Fight,” James Webb retells the story of how a naval-academy first-classman was reprimanded by his company commander during the first week of the academic year, the week that was traditionally the most rigorous week of the academic year for plebes. His offense? He had “upset” a female plebe. He had repeatedly corrected her table manners to no effect. In frustration, the upperclassman had ordered her to eat her next meal with oversized utensils, which was an extremely mild reproach. Her response was to burst into tears. Her female roommate hastened to the company commander and protested her friend’s punishment because it would be embarrassing. The upperclassman was ordered to stop harassing the girl.

4.) How will women be treated by Muslims when taken as POW’s when the Muslim believes that the Woman is a lower being? Will the insult of a having a woman killing Muslim men lead to tortures unknown once women are captured?

When the Muslim opposition discovered that they were fighting women in battle with Israel, the Arabs spontaneously chose to fight to the death. The very thought of being defeated by a band of women was so shameful to them that it made them implacable. They would not surrender to women. Every encounter became bitter and protracted.

5.) Are women, who are on the whole physically weaker then men, going to reduce the fighting capacity of front line units?

Consider that women assigned to artillery units are often too weak to lift the ammunition. These are tasks that are expected for these military occupational specialties so, clearly, standards are being dumbed down to accommodate women.

Also consider a study of military personnel who have reached the rank of colonel revealed that 5 to 6 percent of men had permanent orthopedic damage due to the rigors of military life. The number for women was thirty percent. As a Nation are we good with abusing women like this?

6.) Will surprise attacks on front line units find troops not being alert because those troops are having sex? At the very least jealousies between troops could easily wreck front line combat units as they have their morale deteriorated because of competing competition for the female troops affections.

All of this is just another example of the Jacobin insistence that reality must conform to their preconceived worldview. This progressive worldview insists, quite despite the evidence, that men and women are the same and are interchangeable cogs where no difference is discovered when one is replaced with the other. All of this is in worship of the philosophy of Egalitarianism. Egalitarianism teaches that sex roles are mere social constructs that can be changed at will and that men and women are not really different. And so, many women will be sacrificed to support this lie and our Military will exchange male testosterone for Female Breasts.

In closing, make no mistake. This is not an agenda being pushed by people who do not know the above stated facts. Oh sure, there are always the useful idiots who are the true believers in such lunacy. However, the NWO oligarchy, who are at the top of the Bureaucratic food chain, full well know that women can neither be men nor fight like men. The push for equality is merely a tool towards a larger goal and higher end. Equality is being used as a tool to eliminate Biblical Christianity and the Historic West. All of this is about overturning a Christian social order and dethroning God in favor of humanistic dark chaos and old night and the enthronement of soul-less misogynist misanthropic humanistic man.

But the God’s of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.

A great deal of the statistics and accounts are drawn from,

http://www.weirdrepublic.com/episode123.htm