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Manuel
Advanced Member
USA
762 Posts |
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Uncle Buck
Advanced Member
Australia
134 Posts |
 Posted - 21 May 2005 : 03:44:48
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LET GO AND LET GOD
As children bring their broken toys
with tears for us to mend,
I brought my broken dreams to God,
because He was my Friend.
But then, instead of leaving Him
in peace to work alone,
I hung around and tried to help
with ways that were my own.
At last I snatched them back and cried,
“How can you be so slow?”
“My child,” He said, “what could I do?
You never did let go”.
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If I have to be like him who is going to be like me?
James 1:25 The Perfect Law of Liberty |
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Manuel
Advanced Member
USA
762 Posts |
Posted - 29 May 2005 : 19:12:44
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Who was Isaiah?
My questioning of who was Isaiah, is a deep question. I understand that many say that Isaiah revealed of who was to come for the sole purpose of establishing Fathers Kingdom.
The other day, as I was speed reading through information, there was writting saying that Isaiah was cut in half. There are two ways that I can interpret of being "cut in half." One - Isaiah's body was sawed/split in half. Two - Isaiah's seedline/bloodline was divided and spread apart.
Any answers to this topic is greatly appreciated.
I am,
Manuel |
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Manuel
Advanced Member
USA
762 Posts |
Posted - 20 Jun 2005 : 23:46:09
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Isaiah's Job
from: http://www.oldright.net/nock/remnant/
Albert J. Nock
One evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he expounded a political-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness: "I have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the population. What do you think?"
An embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances, because my acquaintance is a very learned man, one of the 3 or 4 really first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I, as one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe...
I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah. (I shall paraphrase the story in our common speech since it has to be pieced out from various sources.)
The prophet's career began at the end of King Uzziah's reign, say about 740 B.C. This reign was uncommonly long, almost half a century, and apparently prosperous. It was one of those prosperous reigns, however -- like the reign of Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the administration of Eubulus at Athens, or of Mr. Coolidge at Washington -- where at the end the prosperity suddenly peters out and things go by the board with a resounding crash.
In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you", He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."
Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job -- in fact, he had asked for it -- but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so -- if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start -- was there any sense in starting it?
"Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it".
What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant?
As the word "masses" is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians. But it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively "the masses". The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable, In his view, the mass-man -- be he high of be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper -- gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak-minded and weak-willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous...
As things now stand, Isaiah's job seems rather to go begging. Everyone with a message nowadays is, like my venerable European friend, eager to take it to the masses. His first, last and only thought is of mass- acceptance and mass-approval. His great care is to put his doctrine in such shape as will capture the masses' attention and interest...
The main trouble with this [mass-man approach] is its reaction upon the mission itself. It necessitates an opportunist sophistication of one's doctrine, which profoundly alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you are a preacher, you wish to attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal to the masses; and this, in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit. If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly. If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician, many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.
Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen.
The Remnant want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have nothing more to worry about.
In a sense, nevertheless, as I have said, it is not a rewarding job. A prophet of the Remnant will not grow purse-proud on the financial returns from his work, nor is it likely that he will get any great renown out of it. Isaiah's case was exceptional to this second rule, and there are others -- but not many.
It may be thought, then, that while taking care of the Remnant is no doubt a good job, it is not an especially interesting job because it is as a rule so poorly paid. I have my doubts about this. There are other compensations to be got out of a job besides money and notoriety, and some of them seem substantial enough to be attractive. Many jobs which do not pay well are yet profoundly interesting, as, for instance, the job of research student in the sciences is said to be; and the job of looking after the Remnant seems to me, as I have surveyed it for many years from my seat in the grandstand, to be as interesting as any that can be found in the world.
What chiefly makes it so, I think, is that in any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than 2 things about them. You can be sure of those-dead sure -- but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. 2 things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these 2 certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.
The fascination -- as well as the despair -- of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah's Jewry, upon Plato's Athens, or upon Rome of the Antonines, is the hope of discovering and laying bare the "substratum of right-thinking and well-doing" which he knows must have existed somewhere in those societies because no kind of collective life can possibly go on without it. He finds tantalizing intimations of it here and there in many places, as in the Greek Anthology, in the scrapbook of Aulus Gellius, in the poems of Ausonius, and in the brief and touching tribute, "Bene merenti", bestowed upon the unknown occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they lead him nowhere in his search for some kind of measure on this substratum, but merely testify to what he already knew a priori -- that the substratum did somewhere exist. Where it was, how substantial it was, what its power of self-assertion and resistance was-of all this they tell him nothing.
Similarly, when the historian of 2,000 years hence, or 200 years, looks over the available testimony to the quality of our civilization and tries to get any kind of clear, competent evidence concerning the substratum of right-thinking and well-doing which he knows must have been here, he will have a devil of a time finding it. When he has assembled all he can and has made even a minimum allowance for speciousness, vagueness, and confusion of motive, he will sadly acknowledge that his net result is simply nothing. A Remnant were here, building a substratum like coral insects; so much he knows, but he will find nothing to put him on the track of who and where and how many they were and what their work was like.
Concerning all this, too, the prophet of the present knows precisely as much and as little as the historian of the future; and that, I repeat, is what makes his job seem to me so profoundly interesting. One of the most suggestive episodes recounted in the Bible is that of prophet's attempt -- the only attempt of the kind on the record, I believe -- to count the Remnant. Elijah had fled from persecution into the desert, where the Lord presently overhauled him and asked what he was doing so far away from his job. He said that he was running away, not because he was a coward, but because all the Remnant had been killed off except himself. He had got away only by the skin of his teeth, and, he being now all the Remnant there was, if he were killed the True Faith would go flat. The Lord replied that he need not worry about that, for even without him the True Faith could probably manage to squeeze along somehow if it had to; "and as for your figures on the Remnant," He said, "I don't mind telling you that there are 7,000 of them back there in Israel whom it seems you have not heard of, but you may take My word for it that there they are."
At that time, probably the population of Israel could not run to much more than a million or so; and a Remnant of 7,000 out of a million is a highly encouraging percentage for any prophet. With 7,000 of the boys on his side, there was no great reason for Elijah to feel lonesome; and incidentally, that would be something for the modern prophet of the Remnant to think of when he has a touch of the blues. But the main point is that if Elijah the Prophet could not make a closer guess on the number of the Remnant than he made when he missed it by 7,000, anyone else who tackled the problem would only waste his time.
The other certainty which the prophet of the Remnant may always have is that the Remnant will find him. He may rely on that with absolute assurance. They will find him without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do anything about it, he is pretty sure to put them off. He does not need to advertise for them nor resort to any schemes of publicity to get their attention. If he is a preacher or a public speaker, for example, he may be quite indifferent to going on show at receptions, getting his picture printed in the newspapers, or furnishing autobiographical material for publication on the side of "human interest". If a writer, he need not make a point of attending any pink teas, autographing books at wholesale, nor entering into any specious freemasonry with reviewers.
All this and much more of the same order lies in the regular and necessary routine laid down for the prophet of the masses. It is, and must be, part of the great general technique of getting the mass-man's ear - - or as our vigorous and excellent publicist, Mr.H.L.Mencken, puts it -- the technique of boob- bumping. The prophet of the Remnant is not bound to this technique. He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is 10 to 1 that they will smell a rat in them and will sheer off.
The certainty that the Remnant will find him, however, leaves the prophet as much in the dark as ever, as helpless as ever in the matter of putting any estimate of any kind upon the Remnant; for, as appears in the case of Elijah, he remains ignorant of who they are that have found him or where they are or how many. They did not write in and tell him about it, after the manner of those who admire the vedettes of Hollywood, nor yet do they seek him out and attach themselves to his person. They are not that kind. They take his message much as drivers take the directions on a roadside signboard -- that is, with very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there, but with every thought about the direction.
This impersonal attitude of the Remnant wonderfully enhances the interest of the imaginative prophet's job. Once in a while, just about often enough to keep his intellectual curiosity in good working order, he will quite accidentally come upon some distinct reflection of his own message in an unsuspected quarter. This enables him to entertain himself in his leisure moments with agreeable speculations about the course his message may have taken in reaching that particular quarter, and about what came of it after it got there. Most interesting of all are those instances, if one could only run them down (but one may always speculate about them), where the recipient himself no longer knows where nor when nor from whom he got the message- or even where, as sometimes happens, he has forgotten that he got it anywhere and imagines that it is all a self-sprung idea of his own.
Such instances as these are probably not infrequent, for, without presuming to enroll ourselves among the Remnant, we can all no doubt remember having found ourselves suddenly under the influence of an idea, the source of which we cannot possibly identify. "It came to us afterward," as we say; that is, we are aware of it only after it has shot up full-grown in our minds, leaving us quite ignorant of how and when and by what agency it was planted there and left to germinate. It seems highly probable that the prophet's message often takes some such course with the Remnant.
If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewusstsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.
This piece was originally published in 1962 by The Foundation For Economic Education (FEE), Irvington-on- Hudson, New York 10533. The author, Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945) was Editor of the monthly publication of FEE the Freeman (1920-1924) and author of Jefferson, Our Enemy The State, and numerous other books and articles on the philosophy of government and human freedom. "Isaiah's Job" is extracted from Chapter 13 of his book, Free Speech and Plain Language, copyright 1937. This book, now out of print, was published by William Morrow & Company, New York, and this extract is printed with their permission.
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Manuel
Advanced Member
USA
762 Posts |
Posted - 21 Jul 2005 : 23:20:19
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THE MARTYRDOM OF ISAIAH
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From-The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament
R.H. Charles
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913
[Chapter 1]
1 And it came to pass in the twenty-sixth year of the reign of Hezekiah king of Judah that he
2 called Manasseh his son. Now he was his only one. And he called him into the presence of Isaiah the son of Amoz the prophet; and into the presence of Josab the son of Isaiah.
6b, 7 And whilst he (Hezekiah) gave commands, Josab the son of Isaiah standing by, Isaiah said to Hezekiah the king, but not in the presence of Manasseh only did he say unto him: 'As the Lord liveth, whose name has not been sent into this world, [and as the Beloved of my Lord liveth], and as the Spirit which speaketh in me liveth, all these commands and these words shall be made of none effect by Manasseh thy son, and through the agency of his hands I shall depart mid the torture of
8 my body. And Sammael Malchira shall serve Manasseh, and execute all his desire, and he shall
9 become a follower of Beliar rather than of me. And many in Jerusalem and in Judaea he shall cause to abandon the true faith, and Beliar shall dwell in Manasseh, and by his hands I shall be
10 sawn asunder.' And when Hezekiah heard these words he wept very bitterly, and rent his garments,
11 and placed earth upon his head, and fell on his face. And Isaiah said unto him: 'The counsel of
12 Sammael against Manasseh is consummated: nought shall avail thee.' And on that day Hezekiah
13 resolved in his heart to slay Manasseh his son. And Isaiah said to Hezekiah: ['The Beloved hath made of none effect thy design, and] the purpose of thy heart shall not be accomplished, for with this calling have I been called [and I shall inherit the heritage of the Beloved].'
[Chapter 2]
1 And it came to pass after that Hezekiah died and Manasseh became king, that he did not remember the commands of Hezekiah his father but forgat them, and Sammael abode in Manasseh
2 and clung fast to him. And Manasseh forsook the service of the God of his father, and he served
3 Satan and his angels and his powers. And he turned aside the house of his father which had been
4 before the face of Hezekiah the words of wisdom and from the service of God. And Manasseh turned aside his heart to serve Beliar; for the angel of lawlessness, who is the ruler of this world, is Beliar, whose name is Matanbuchus. And he delighted in Jerusalem because of Manasseh, and he made him strong in apostatizing (Israel) and in the lawlessness which was spread abroad in Jerusalem
5 And witchcraft and magic increased and divination and augulation, and fornication, [and adultery], and the persecution of the righteous by Manasseh and [Belachira, and] Tobia the Canaanite, and John
6 of Anathoth, and by (Zadok> the chief of the works. And the rest of the acts, behold they are written
7 in the book of the Kings of Judah and Israel. And when Isaiah the soll of Amoz saw the lawlessness which was being perpetratcd in Jerusalem and the worship of Satan and his wantonness, he
8 withdrew from Jerusalem and settled in Bethlehem of Judah. And there also there was much
9 lawlessness, and withdrawing from Bethlehem he settled on a mountain in a desert place. [And Micaiah the prophet, and the aged Ananias, and Joel and Habakkuk, and his son Josab, and many of the faithful who believed in the ascension into heaven, withdrew and settled on the mountain.]
10 They were all clothed with garments of hair, and they were all prophets. And they had nothing with them but were naked, and they all lamented with a great lamentation because of the going
11 astray of Israel. And these eat nothing save wild herbs which they gathered on the mountains, and having cooked them, they lived thereon together with Isaiah the prophet. And they spent two years of
12 days on the mountains and hills. [And after this, whilst they were in thc desert, there was a certain man in Samaria named Belchlra, of the family of Zedekiah, the son of Chenaan, a false prophet whose dwelling was in Bethlehem. Now Hezekiah the son of Chanani, who was the brother of his father, and in the days of Ahab king of Israel had been the teacher of the 400 prophets of Baal,
13 had himself smitten and reproved Micaiah the son of Amada the prophet. And he, Micaiah, had been reproved by Ahab and cast into prison. (And he was) with Zedekiah the prophet: they were
14 with Ahaziah the son of Ahab, king in Samaria. And Elijah the prophet of Tebon of Gilead was reproving Ahaziah and Samaria, and prophesied regarding Ahaziah that he should die on his bed of sickness, and that Samaria should be delivered into the hand of Leba Nasr because he had slain
15 the prophets of God. And when the false prophets, who were with Ahaziah the son of Ahab and
16 their teacher Gemarias of Mount Joel had heard -now he was brother of Zedekiah -when they had heard, they persuaded Ahaziah the king of Aguaron and slew Micaiah.
[Chapter 3]
1 And Belchlra recognized and saw the place of Isaiah and the prophets who were with him; for he dwelt in the region of Bethlehem, and was an adherent of Manasseh. And he prophesied falsely in Jerusalem, and many belonging to Jerusalem were confederate with him, and he was a Samaritan.
2 And it came to pass when Alagar Zagar, king of Assyria, had come and captured Samaria and taken the nine (and a half) tribes captive, and led them away to the mountains of the Medes and the
3 rivers of Tazon; this (Belchira) while still a youth, had escaped and come to Jerusalem in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, but he walked not in the ways of his father of Samaria; for he feared
4 Hezekiah. And he was found in the days of Hezekiah speaking words of lawlessness in Jerusalem.
5 And the servants of Hezekiah accused him, and he made his escape to the region of Bethlehem.
6 And they persuaded . . . And Belchlra accused Isaiah and the prophets who were with him, saying: 'Isaiah and those who are with him prophesy against Jerusalem and against the cities of Judah that they shall be laid waste and (against the children of Judah and) Benjamin also that they shall go into captivity, and also against thee, O lord the king, that thou shalt go (bound) with hooks
8 and iron chains': But they prophesy falsely against Israel and Judah. And Isaiah himself hath
9 said: 'I see more than Moses the prophet.' But Moses said: 'No man can see God and live':
10 and Isaiah hath said: 'I have seen God and behold I live.' Know, therefore, O king, that he is lying. And Jerusalem also he hath called Sodom, and the princes of Judah and Jerusalem he hath declared to be the people of Gomorrah. And he brought many accusations against Isaiah and the
11 prophets before Manasseh. But Beliar dwelt in the heart of Manasseh and in the heart of the
12 princes of Judah and Benjamin and of the eunuchs and of the councillors of the king. And the words of Belchira pleased him [exceedingly], and he sent and seized Isaiah.
[Chapter 5]
1b, 2 And he sawed him asunder with a wood-saw. And when Isaiah was being sawn in sunder Balchlra stood up, accusing him, and all the false prophets stood up, laughing and rejoicing because
3 of Isaiah. And Balchlra, with the aid of Mechembechus, stood up before Isaiah, [laughing]
4 deriding; And Belchlra said to Isaiah: 'Say: "I have lied in all that I have spoken, and likewise
5 the ways of Manasseh are good and right. And the ways also of Balchlra and of his associates are
6, 7 good."' And this he said to him when he began to be sawn in sunder. But Isaiah was (absorbed)
8 in a vision of the Lord, and though his eyes were open, he saw them . And Balchlra spake thus to Isaiah: 'Say what I say unto thee and I will turn their heart, and I will compel Manasseh
9 and the princes of Judah and the people and all Jerusalem to reverence thee.' And Isaiah answered and said: 'So far as I have utterance (I say): Damned and accursed be thou and all thy powers and
10, 11 all thy house. For thou canst not take (from me) aught save the skin of my body.' And they
12 seized and sawed in sunder Isaiah, the son of Amoz, with a wood-saw. And Manasseh and
13 Balchlra and the false prophets and the princes and the people [and] all stood looking on. And to the prophets who were with him he said before he had been sawn in sunder: 'Go ye to the region
14 of Tyre and Sidon; for for me only hath God mingled the cup.' And when Isaiah was being sawn in sunder, he neither cried aloud nor wept, but his lips spake with the Holy Spirit until he was sawn in twain.
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Uncle Buck
Advanced Member
Australia
134 Posts |
Posted - 26 Sep 2005 : 22:38:14
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FOOTPRINTS...A New Version
Imagine you and the Lord Jesus are walking down the road together. For
much of the way, the Lord's footprints go along steadily, consistently,
rarely varying the pace.
But your footprints are a disorganized stream of zigzags, starts, stops,
turnarounds, circles, departures, and returns.
For much of the way, it seems to go like this, but gradually your
footprints come more in line with the Lord's, soon paralleling His
consistently.
You and Jesus are walking as true friends!
This seems perfect, but then an interesting thing happens: Your footprints
that once etched the sand next to Jesus' are now walking precisely in His
steps.
Inside His larger footprints are your smaller ones, you and Jesus are
becoming one.
This goes on for many miles, but gradually you notice another change. The
Footprints inside the large footprints seem to grow larger.
Eventually they disappear altogether. There is only one set of footprints
they have become one.
This goes on for a long time, but suddenly the second set of footprints is
back. This time it seems even worse! Zigzags all over the place. Stops.
Starts. Gashes in the sand. A variable mess of prints.
You are amazed and shocked. Your dream ends. Now you pray:
"Lord, I understand the first scene, with zigzags and fits. I was a new
Christian; I was just learning. But You walked on through the storm and
helped me learn to walk with You."
"That is correct."
"And when the smaller footprints were inside of Yours, I was actually
learning to walk in Your steps , following You very closely."
"Very good.. You have understood everything so far."
When the smaller footprints grew and filled in Yours, I suppose that I was
becoming like You in every way."
"Precisely."
"So, Lord, was there a regression or something? The footprints separated,
and this time it was worse than at first."
There is a pause as the Lord answers, with a smile in His voice.
"You didn't know? It was then that we danced!"
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If I have to be like him who is going to be like me?
James 1:25 The Perfect Law of Liberty |
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Footprints In The Sand
