Because Belief Is More Than A Nod That God Exists!

Isaiah 28:16 So this is what the Lord GOD says: "See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation; the one who believes will never be shaken.  The rest of the above poem(one of my top ten favs) is posted below. It is the poem through which this poem was inspired. There runs through erring human of a very rebel blade Matters where more than opinion must Crux of Thought persuade For Belief is the bedrock that composes Choice’s swell Where Choice is the Chief voice that sets the course that Time will tell As consequence of action rolls and rolls where its seed fell Belief is far more than mere mortal nod that God exists Thought wrestles with an angel that Understanding resists Yet one and all must reckon with and one and all must choose There is no half-way in-between when Death collects its dues And Unbelief is belief where deception’s lies confuse Oh, it would take a miracle to tame This rebel-race It did; and through God’s Son He gave grand purpose to life’s chase The grace whereby mankind is saved (and we all may receive) Fixes the Crux of Thought on what no mortal can achieve That Light and love of God bestows if we truly believe The wars that were and will be were foretold in days of old But Christ, the overcomer, makes Belief secure and bold Where freedom that we fight for is no one’s inherent right But bequeaths battlefields for a far more important fight Against powers of darkness, not of flesh-blood, black or white All that we see and touch and hold is fashioned for demise There is a soul that none can prove that never, ever dies Where only through belief can we survive The Judgement Day Spared of the awful penalty that Unbelief must pay Because they heard and saw Him but they chose to turn away Within earth’s gorgeous four-season foray of firth and field Trembles A Great Awareness in this berth of skin concealed No surgeon can extract it and no Scientist can prove A fact both Fully Certain and yet, as abstract as Love The Soul; for all man’s argument no power can remove Unless we return to the faith of our Fathers of yore History holds no candle to the future’s godless gore Where, what Believer’s cling to like a lifeline in the grind Has frayed in modern days that left Faith’s olden ways behind Because the fool is wise in his own eyes with his own kind Truth cannot be dismantled by the tongues of Ignorance Grace is a life-long offer; the grave holds no second chance Yet scoffers laugh and jeer and boast no fear for He who sees And holds in nail-scarred hands of love both Heaven and hell’s keys The Keeper of its Gates still waits; He loves His enemies What shall we say then, in the face of what will come to BE And never pass; ah, who can fathom the enormity Of Forever; what if a bird came, ev’ry thousand years And took a grain of sand til this world’s last beach disappears Eternity would still have barely begun, oh my dears! Thus everything we fight for should be hinged upon the Worth Of He, who by-through-for Himself created Heaven and earth And came, not to condemn the world but so we may be saved Knowing the victory He won through the Horror He braved …that all may have His name across their sin and shame engraved Someday each knee will bow and every last tongue will confess That Jesus Christ is Lord, is love; His Judgement, righteousness Then all the world will weep as they behold Foretold Empire And everyone will worship Him, their One and True desire When time is rolled up in a scroll and tossed into the fire Ah, where then can we turn to, oh, and how then can we know And who can show and tell us the true way we ought to go God did not leave us Guide-less; He gave us His Living Word It will not pass away even when Time’s end has occurred He is the Way, the truth, the Life, the one and only Lord The Crux of Thought must grapple with what dust-to-dust must choose Man's last breath like a gavel that falls and seals Choice's dues Hark; Holy, holy, holy, tolls the slowly ebbing chime Where dark and light compose the day and night that we call time And no one knows the height or breath of its ladder we climb © Janet Martin WHEN a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west, And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.         5 Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe, When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro; At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start, Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart, And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart.         10 So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill, Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill, And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod, Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.         15 For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along, Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;— In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.         20 Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.         25 Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.         30 Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion’s sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God’s stern winnowers, from whose feet earth’s chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.         35 Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness ’twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.         40 We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great, Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate, But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din, List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,— ‘They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.’         45 Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;— Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?         50 Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.         55 Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design.         60 By the light of burning heretics Christ’s bleeding feet I track, Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.         65 For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History’s golden urn.         70 ’Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves Of a legendary virtue carved upon our father’s graves, Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;— Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time? Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make Plymouth Rock sublime?         75 They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past’s; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.         80 They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom’s new-lit altar-fires; Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?         85 New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.         90

English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman. The Harvard Classics.  1909–14.

805. The Present Crisis

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)