Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones on Aberfan, in Iain Murray's biography

Aberfan is much in the news and I wanted to put something else online about it. Much of the commentary is, as one might expect, godless. Before anyone counters that 'God should have stopped the Aberfan disaster', please consider that,

1. The human causes, based in greed and callous negligence are well documented. Last night I was talking to someone who was very close to the disaster, part of the actual community. They said with a heavy heart that the most moving programme of all the recent coverage for them was the one about the causes of the disaster... When will 'we' own our God given responsibilities/duties to carry on life on earth with the princely dignity, equity and righteousness we have been invested with? Your conscience screams at you 'do not do it' - so, do not do it. If you ignore your conscience for long enough you simply harden your heart and confound your moral compass, making you unfit to discern right from wrong, still less act on that.
2. God, by any meaningful definition of that word, has a perfect right to run the universe as he sees fit and that might mean picking up the pieces after suffering and death have done their worst. You might have a problem with that? Take it up with him while you still can. Meet your Judge on the way, not at the trial. Rather that than take it as a pretext for denying his existence. Ah but that would involve humbling yourself... and there's the real rub...
3. When you 'blame' God, you follow a long line of infamy all the way back to the first sin, amply demonstrating your infernal nature. Man was created to be 'like God', in love and holiness, yet in falling from these attributes, he blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. Nothing new or daringly clever about blaming God then. It's just the same old slander.
4. Any conception of 'suffering' must invoke the point that an extremely horrific amount of suffering leading to an abject death was endured by Christ in crucifixion and yet this achieved the overwhelming benefit of salvation. Tremendous suffering entails overwhelming blessedness. Which chimes in with the text mentioned below in an extended quote from Iain Murray's 1990 biography (p570-572)...

2 pics and 2 quotes

Pads plus Jack at Knapp

He comes to us as of old by the lakeside. He speaks to us the same words, "follow me", and sets us the task which he has to fulfil for our time and those who obey him shall learn in their own experience who he is. 

Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones on John 21:19

The decay of the outward man in the godless is a melancholy spectacle, for it is the decay of everything; in the Christian it does not touch that life which is hid with Christ in God, and which is in the soul itself a well of water springing up to life eternal.

James Denny on 2 Corinthians 4:16

We've had a couple of disturbed nights but Pads has been coping pretty well - he was up for a while today to meet his English cousins although he did fall asleep in the chair at one point. 

Half-term puzzleball mania