THE END IS SURE

By Geoffrey T.Bull
(From “God Holds The Key” Chapter 3)

“That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been.” Ecclesiastes

“I am ... the Last.” Revelation

“Then cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the Kingdom of God,
even the Father.” 1Corinthians.

I was in the grip of determined atheists. Men who believed Marx; who held to a vicious materialistic determinism in which the fate of a Communist future was sure for all humanity.
Men who believed that they must win, as geared to ‘irrevocable and inherent’ laws in the universe. They believed that I must be changed into the image of their future man, or perish. They would labour night and day to make me consciously co-operate in the pursuance of that end.

They would ‘instruct’ my mind.

They would 'correct’ my outlook.

They would discipline my attitudes and control my environment.

Not that they loved me, for they hated all that I held dear. Not that they really cared for me. They were trained to care only for that illusive category 'the masses', whose mind they claimed to represent, and to whose mystic judgement I must yield. The relentless machine of the state rolled on. Its prisoners must either be conformed, killed or kept.

If I 'reformed’ myself and put on willingly their inorganic mould of thought, then a place for me might still be found in future days amongst the people. Irrespective, they would spare no effort to place their stamp for ever on my mind.

If unreformable, then my execution would be a token of the people’s might.

If I were changed and made a thought reform 'success', then an evidence of Marxist power.

Dead or alive I would be made to serve their end. So through the years I lived in the lethal air of this atrocious travesty of God’s design.
They spoke good but none is good but God. In His exclusion every ‘virtue’ knows its canker. The sour seed of hate makes even the tender the mercies of the wicked cruel. They claimed happiness for man, yet denied the Fountain of our every joy. All noble character in history, their dialectic maze demands, must be judged within its phase of life and times, to serve the end for which they now were striving. The vaunted onward march of men, must be accredited its vanguards, and unrivalled leaders.
No bliss for men other than their ‘bliss’.
No hope other than their 'hope'.

The fantasy of a world salvation locked up within the Marxist cult and opened only with their key. Into this murky, deathly stream of thought, the years might well have dragged me, caught in their current, carried downstream to the night sea,
where there is no God, no light, no Christ and no chance to choose again.

As a Christian I knew my Lord was the certain End. In ‘the dispensation of the fullness of times’, all things in heaven and in earth would gather together, in one, in Him. Their correlation would become apparent, the unity of the goal unquestioned.
In all things, He would have the ultimate preminence.
There is no possibility of bliss or good, whether for the individual or for society as a whole, in any thought or action independent of the living God.
Gods final good is in the right assignment of the Son.

All that God is was manifested through Him.

All God's delight is centred in Him.

All God's purposes are accomplished by Him.

There is nothing beyond Him. The Father has absolutely nothing external or additional to the Son. In all the infinite capacity of His ageless being, He is everlastingly content in Jesus. When He sent Him, He sent everything. Christ was the Word. Once God had spoken in His Son, He had nothing else that He could say.
Thus his acceptance in our hearts is life eternal and the lasting salvation of our God.
'As many as received Him, to them He gave power to become the sons of God.’
Thus to reject Him, whether it be personally, socially, or nationally, leads only to disaster.
In so doing we place ourselves at last beyond the love of God, for all God’s love is given in His own dear Son. This is the logic of hell, now and in the life beyond. Maintained refusal of an absolute redemption can only mean the fate of an absolute and final ruin.

In returning from the naked terror of the Red prisons, I know there is something worse than the bars, the chains, the firing squads, worse than the heartbreak of confinement and the stench rotting souls with motives going rancid in the dungeons of defeat. In the cells and corridors, in all the many and warders and officials, the interrogators, governors and soldiers, the worst of all was this: I found no unsurped there is no love. Is it not significant that hatred is the great maxim of the revolution? The man who cannot hate can never go high in the Communist hierarchy. It is a basic qualification of the successful revolutionary. The steel of their weapons is cold indeed. I was in their hands, their sword was at my throat, yet how in all their thinking could I find a ray of light to advance my soul? How all their intellectual provender could I find meat? The One in whom I trusted satisfied the Godhead. If God be fed in Christ, shall I be hungry and seek elsewhere? His flesh is meat indeed and to those who trust in Him there is no longer hungering and no longer thirst. It was hard to be a fool for Christ’s sake in the indoctrination classes; to discount their 'law of inevitability’ in the knowledge of God's final word.
Sometimes I failed to rise and claim my God-appointed status. How fatal for our testimony even for a moment to be 'wise', for 'the foolishness of God is wiser than men' and, in my heart, I knew that I was safer in His weakness than in yielding to their vaunted strength.

So through the deserts and the battlefields of the Marxist prisons He appointed me my portion. He would confirm me to the end, blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

From behind the bars of yesterday, the voice of the unfaithful prisoner Paul returns today.
‘He that hath begun a good work in you will go on to perfect it in preparation for the day of Jesus Christ.’
So the inevitable was with my God and not with them. What He would do He would do for ever. His love must triumph. Human hate must fail From day to day the theory of Marxism breathed its aroma of death from cell to cell.
In persistent, relentless, wearing pressure, their doctrine beat upon the gates of human hearts bewildered and fatigued. They were pursuing their ungodly end, trying to bring forth by all the subtle techniques in their power, examples of their spurious 'good', ever trying to prove their 'inevitable conquest' by our personal defeat.
The war was prosecuted in all its intensity. For me it was an hourly agony of contrasts. At times a gladiatorial combat in the lion's den followed maybe, by tempting intimacies in a private and informal conversation' with some young official It was ever the goal of God and the wiles of the devil.
The reality of His destiny; the falsity of Satan’s claims. God working, the dragon resisting.
War in the mind. 'Souls in conflict’. Not flesh and blood but principalities and powers.
The sure purpose of the Almighty confounding the rebel and usurper host.
It was always light and darkness.
Christ and anti-Christ. The battles of earth being fought in the heavens. Stumbling and standing, falling and felling. Undertrodden, yet overcoming, broken but unbeaten in the certain triumph of the end of the Lord.
To the apostles 'the end' was not the petering out of a once dynamic existence. To them 'the. end was the most formative factor of the present; the meaning of death a most powerful influence upon the living of today. It was that to which they moved - the final moment, the last day; a completion to which they longed to attain in the unimpaired continuance, of faith. They saw God moving on to a finish. They were being fashioned by His mighty and tender hand. All
were theirs. Every stripe, every blow, every tear, life and tumult, beatings and despisings, all were theirs in the discipline of God.

Every privation was an opportunity of feasting at His table, every hardship a time for living in His peace, every set-back a means of making progress in the Lord. He had the end in view. He was to conform them to the image of His Son. That which He purchased by blood, regenerated by His Spirit, He was bringing inevitably to glory. In the measure that they would co-operate with Him in fulfilling all that He had planned, in that degree would capacity be given them to enter privileges of rule and joy beyond the tomb. Their light affliction enduring for a moment worked for them that far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

From end to end, the endless walk would fill the hours. From limit to limit and comer to comer, back and forth, my prisoner-steps would go.
Where I was they could never tell. I think it aggravated an official once because he said in a heartless kind of way,
'That won't do you any good.'
He might have been surprised the good it did me. My strongest hidden years were when I walked with God, I sat with them. God said, 'It is not good for man to be alone.’ He always wills our fellowship, yet on the human side solitude is better than bad company. Then it is, as one has said 'the mother country of the strong'. The walk with is always a way of no return. It moves on to the frontier. All life is a going away and the world wonders where you are going, just as they did of the Lord. So Enoch was unaccounted for. He had gone on with God. 'To be accounted for’, this is the Christian’s biggest tragedy.
Once the pilgrim tent is pulled down and we become accepted in the city, then we are categorised on earth, who should be registered in heaven. Blessed is the man who is 'not found'. ‘Fashion not yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
' Let us not be afraid of remaining unexplained.
Even if we speak the language of this world with a foreign accent, what does it matter? We are strangers. We seek another country. It is nothing to be judged of man’s day. They judged Jesus Christ; shall they not judge His followers? ‘The friendship of the world is enmity with God.’
We cannot co-operate with Him in what He wants us to be and simultaneously be what the world desires us. ‘Can two walk together except they be agreed?’ Spiritual adultary is going into God and then trying to beget two kinds of mental children.

In this type of union only the illegitimate survive. Having begun with God, tasted the sweetness of His forgiveness, felt the tender touch of His Almighty hand and seen at least a little of the glories of the Lord, there must remain only the direction of His destined end. In all my moments and all my places He must abide my everlasting portion. In the end that is what He will always be. Should He be a fragment less than this in time?
'As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after Thee O God.'
Why does my heart and my flesh cry out? Is it not for that unutterable union the God who made me, loves me, died for me, and who now embraces me?
‘Take the world but give me Jesus.’
Let Him be the consuming passion of my life. Let me know the grand defiance in the face of bars. 'To me to live is Christ and to die is gain.’ Bring me to the end, dear God, radiant in the morning. ‘I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness.’

I believe, this was the spirit of the early Christians. The hope and longing for the likeness of their Lord, to be granted in their immediate translation to His presence at the moment of departure. It gave each moment here on earth a wonder and significance that spurred them on to a fearful purity of purpose with God. It left the world dumbfound and non-plussed. They were a spectacle. Burning and crucifixion were all discounted in the glory yet to be revealed. They were not concerned in retaining life but in realising it. To hold it fast was only to see it wither in their hand. To lose it, meant they had their every treasure with the Lord. They were not concerned in living for a long time but in dying at the right time. Not in clasping the earth-bound rope but in learning how to let it go and see the ship put to sea. They were not concerned in emphasing their arrival or in pleading honour in descent. They were in Christ, born to a new creation, going where He had gone. To them departure was their special exercise of soul. They looked not for a life that might exceed the allotted span but simply for a life lived to completion, however short it be. If they but lived just long enough to live out all God’s will for them, then they could fall asleep, their generation served. Surely ‘this is the victory that has overcometh the world, even our faith’. We know He lives; He has told us that we shall live also. Then let the factor of departure win. Let that which is to be, be now in me.

O Lord to know, amidst this tangled skein
Of men events and things ‘tis not in vain
I seek that cord of gold, Thy way decreed-
Is comfort to my soul, O God indeed.

To know amidst this maze circumstance,
Dead ends which cruelly stay desired advance
Can turn my feet to tread with surer sense
Thy way of truth - Brings peace when all is tense.

To know that when these floods of grief subside,
Throughout the soul’s poor fields, the ebbing tide
Must leave such silt as shall much fruit ensure-
My soul sustains and says to faith, ‘Endure’.

So Lord I shall not fall, I shall not faint,
Thy grace enough for every baffled saint.
Still through the wind-thrashed seas, I glimpse They form
And know Thou hast Thy footsteps in the storm.

(In solitary confinement in the prison for counter-revolutionaries. Tze Ch’i Kou. 1951.)

By GEOFFREY T.BULL

“GOD HOLDS THE KEY” CHAPTER 3
HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED
LONDON 1959 (OUT OF PRINT)

Go back to the Articles

Home | Sermons | Articles | Illustrations
Contact Us | About Us

What We Believe | Become a Prayer Partner!