“..whatever the world is like, God has not abandoned it.” William Barclay on Matthew 24
The Day Of The Lord (Matt 24:6-8,29-31)
24:6-8,29-31 “You will hear of wars and reports of wars. See that you are not disturbed; for these things must happen; for the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.
“Immediately after the affliction of these days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give her light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then there will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the tribes of the earth will lament, and they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and much glory. And he will send his angels with a great trumpet call, and they will gather the elect from the four winds, from one boundary of heaven to the other.” [RSV]
William Barclay 1907-1978
“… an essential part of the Jewish thought of the future was the Day of the Lord that day when God was going to intervene directly in history, and when the present age, with all its incurable evil, would begin to be transformed into the age to come.
Very naturally the New Testament writers to a very great extent identified the Second Coming of Jesus and the Day of the Lord; and they took over all the imagery which had to do with the Day of the Lord and applied them to the Second Coming. None of these pictures is to be taken literally; they are pictures, and they are visions; they are attempts to put the indescribable into human words and to find some kind of picture for happenings for which human language has no picture.
But from all these pictures there emerge certain great truths.
(i) They tell us that God has not abandoned the world; for all its wickedness, the world is still the scene in which God’s purpose is being worked out. It is not abandonment that God contemplates; it is intervention.
(ii) They tell us that even a very crescendo of evil must not discourage us. An essential part of the Jewish picture of the Day of the Lord is that a complete breakdown of all moral standards and an apparent complete disintegration of the world must precede it. But, for all that, this is not the prelude to destruction; it is the prelude to recreation.
(iii) They tell us that both judgment and a new creation are certain. They tell us that God contemplates the world both in justice and in mercy; and that God’s plan is not the obliteration of the world, but the creation of a world which is nearer to his heart’s desire.
The value of these pictures is not in their details, which at best are only symbolic and which use the only pictures which the minds of men could conceive, but in the eternal truth which they conserve; and the basic truth in them is that, whatever the world is like, God has not abandoned it.”
William Barclay, Gospel of Matthew Vol. 2 p. 308-309
Brother Yun ‘Heavenly Man’ Biography and Testimony
Voices of Admiralty – YouTube
A Long Road
Looking down
a long road where
there could be
a place we all belong
beginning each day again
our lives becoming alive
to each other & it is
where we go
on this way to be,
despite a rampant call of noise,
between laughter we could
be roses, or white white
poppies amidst what we
call to be ourselves, alive
beautiful and blended
with time & sorrow
it should be that our
days are long spinning
turns toward light
and that brightness of
& in only ourselves togethered
& amazed with the day as a point of light
& night’s black rest amid these other points of light…
The RELEVANT Story – YouTube
Thomas Merton, The New Man
All men were united in Adam. All were “one image” of God in Adam. “Adam is in us all.” We all sinned in Adam. Adam is saved and redeemed in us all. What does all this mean? It means simply, as St. Bernard says, that man’s creation in the image of God (ad imaginem) constituted all men as created “copies” of the Word Who is the eternal and uncreated Image of the Father. The potentiality in the human soul which makes man capable of being drawn to God is nothing else than a capacity to become more and more like the Word of God, and thus to participate in God’s own vision of Himself. St. Gregory of Nyssa says:
“The whole of human nature, from the first man to the last, is but one image of Him Who is.” When Adam was created in the image and likeness of God, we all were created in him, with a nature capable of being conformed to the Word of God. Therefore Adam, who contains all human nature in himself, and is therefore “humanity,” is created in the image of the Image of God, Who has already decided, from all eternity, to become man in Jesus Christ. Hence in his very creation, Adam is a representation of Christ Who is to come, and we too, from the very moment we come into existence, are potential representations of Christ simply because we possess the human nature which was created in Him and was assumed by Him in the Incarnation, saved by Him on the Cross and glorified by Him in His Ascension.
Thomas Merton, The New Man (Kindle Locations 1203-1214). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.
from The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis
From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of it’self as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it. This sin is committed daily by young children and ignorant peasants as well as by sophisticated persons, by solitaries no less than by those who live in society: it is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to
C.S. Lewis
commit it, or repenting it. We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God’s feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God’s share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of ‘our own’ pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be ‘our own’.
Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). The Problem of Pain (p. 70). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Brief history of South Oregon– for O.C. Applegate
The Cascades are the upstarts
coming out of the East, sunlined with
Shasta and the one they now call Mc Laughlin
for an old Hudson Bay Company man’s
locks of white hair,
& to the north is old Theilsen growing wiser
on its way up toward Three Sisters & brother Hood
But all the Cascades are the upstarts
for everything else had been here before,
when the world began between the coital
fulcrum of two Table Rocks,
left now as lava flow and the dust that washed away
from a volcano much more distant in time than
that giant fat Mazama newcomer
which got too big for its britches &
gave in & puked itself up
over three states and two provinces
before straight lines were drawn in nature
to denote such things,
There were Men here–even then,
hunting Wapiti, Big black tail deer,
and fishing for the Tyee…
The Siskiyou’s were the moving mountains
here long before their eastern newcoming brothers
joined the scene, and that old long gone
nameless mountain that filled up this Valley
even before Hesoid, for sweet rain
to wash away the beginning, which
was not even a vague memory
for the ghosts of pre-Mazama men
whose live forms made Quartz knives and spears
the likes of which were never duplicated
after that mountain blew away
What is left is two Table Rocks,
where before it washed away
the world began,
these flat mesa tops were once this valley’s floor,
& knowing this,
the first post-mazamaman,
called it sacred, as he continued,
hunting Wapiti, Big black tail deer,
and fishing for the Tyee…
The white man came not out of the east,
as he did in so many other places, but from
the North and then the South bringing
evil and innocence in the same wagon
not knowing, he too, was post-Mazama man,
not knowing what was sacred,
and after killing all the men before him,
like them all–he continued,
hunting Wapiti, big black tail deer,
and fishing for the Tyee…
They say now McLaughlin’s most like
its sister upstart Saint Helens,
way up Warshington way
& Mazama’s just a tourist trap called Crater Lake,
the Takilma wouldn’t go there, for they lost
the art of making crystal spears,
& knew the place contained more than fear,
but should old John McLaughlin’s name sake go, I’ll
wish everyone
fare thee well
when it starts to grumble,
for the lands been here before us all,
and my hope would only be, that we really
know what’s sacred, & that
might we could continue,
hunting Wapiti, big black tail deer,
and fishing for the Tyee…
St. John One: One 