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EARTHLY POWERS PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Anthony Burgess | 656 pages | 06 May 2004 | Vintage Publishing | 9780099468646 | English | London, United Kingdom Earthly Powers - The International Anthony Burgess Foundation It is one thing to hear God's Word. It is another to fear it, which means heeding all of God's warnings, trusting all of God's promises, and obeying all of God's commands. To fear the Word is to confess that you really are the sinner the Bible says you are; it is to trust that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead the way the Bible says he did; it is to live the rest of your life the way the Bible says you ought to live it. This is all part of receiving the Word by faith. But there is more. Anyone who really receives the Word wants to share it. When Micaiah heard the words of divine judgment, he just couldn't keep them to himself: "He went down to the king's house, into the secretary's chamber," where "all the officials were sitting," and he "told them all the words that he had heard. They said, "We must report all these words to the king" When they went to the king, they begged him to receive the Word as respectfully as they had. These men were passionate evangelists. What makes this all the more impressive is that what these men shared was not good news. Rather, it was all about God's judgment against sin. I find that too much of our contemporary evangelism fails to take seriously the wrath of God. Many Christians testify to the goodness of God, but how often do we explain how much God hates sin and how severely he intends to deal with it? News of divine judgment has an essential place in evangelism. People have to hear the bad news about sin and death before they can receive the good news about life and forgiveness in Christ. If we receive the Word by faith, we will listen to it thoroughly and share it generously. One place we are called to do that is in our families, and here I want to point out something that would be easy to miss. We know from verse 11 that Micaiah was the grandson of Shaphan. Second Kings describes how, when the Law was rediscovered in the temple in the days of Josiah, Shaphan was the man who read it and reread it for the king. He was committed to the Word. Apparently Shaphan was a good father and grandfather. In Jeremiah 26, Shaphan's son Ahikam protected Jeremiah. Then in chapter 29, Shaphan's son Elasah carried Jeremiah's letter to the exiles in Babylon. Shaphan's godly influence also extended to his grandchildren. His grandson Micaiah was the one who first heard Baruch read Jeremiah's prophecy and shared it with the king's royal cabinet. His cousin Gedaliah, another of Shaphan's grandsons, rescued Jeremiah and brought him into his own home when the city of Jerusalem fell at the hands of the Babylonians, as recorded in Jeremiah The whole family was committed to publishing the Word of God. They received the Word by faith. They listened to its saving message. They shared it with others and carried copies to faraway places. They supported and defended faithful ministers of the Word of God. What kind of legacy are you leaving for your children and grandchildren? Are you receiving the Word and sharing it with others? Give your family the Bible. Read it to them. Share its truths, so they can see it work in their lives. If you do this, then your sons and daughters will go anywhere and do anything to proclaim the gospel of God, and not even the darkest powers will be able to extinguish its flame. We see in this passage, however, that not every family leaves such a legacy. Jehoikim's blasphemous book burning leads to the awful consequences of rejecting God's Word. Jehoiakim had never been a godly king. It is evident from this story that his cabinet members rarely knew exactly how he would react but were always prepared for the worst. Verses 19 and 20 tell us that on this occasion, they took the precaution of sending Jeremiah and Baruch into hiding and concealing the sacred scroll. What happened next is one of the most memorable scenes in the Bible. One of the king's servants fetched the scroll and read it to the royal court: "It was the ninth month, and the king was sitting in the winter house, and there was a fire burning in the fire pot before him. As Jehudi read three or four columns, the king would cut them off with a knife and throw them into the fire in the fire pot, until the entire scroll was consumed in the fire. As soon as he unrolled another section of the scroll, the king methodically used a knife to cut and to burn Holy Scripture. We don't know why Jehoiakim did this terrible deed. Maybe he doubted the reality of divine wrath; later in chapter 36 he questioned Jeremiah's motives for prophesying judgment. Or perhaps Jehoiakim thought that burning God's Word would prevent his doom. If so, he failed to understand that the power of the Word is the power of God himself. Packer once commented that burning God's Word and ignoring its warnings is like "getting out of a car to destroy a 'Bridge Out' sign: done at one's own peril. The shocking thing was not so much Jehoiakim's stupidity as his audacity. The Bible tells us "neither the king nor any of his servants who heard all these words was afraid, nor did they tear their garments. Then he added injury to insult by asking for Baruch and Jeremiah to be arrested. Things were very different when the Scripture was rediscovered in the days of King Josiah. When Josiah heard the Word in 2 Kings , he did not tear the scroll; he tore his clothes as a sign of repentance. How are you receiving the Word of God? These are the only two ways to respond to the Word of God: either to receive it by faith, or to reject it in defiant disbelief. Either we hear the Word, or we ignore it. Moody once explained the difference like this: "Either the Bible will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from the Bible. Sadly there are many people like Jehoiakim in the world today: sinners who will not be still to hear a biblical sermon; scholars who cut and paste the Bible rather than receiving it as a Word from God; church-goers who only open their Bibles on Sundays; ministers who spend all their time thinking about how a passage will preach instead of letting it preach. Are you more like Jehoiakim or more like Micaiah? Of course you want to say you're more like Micaiah, but what would your Bible say if its pages could talk? Works by Anthony Burgess. The Devil's Mode. Moses: A Narrative Revolutionary Sonnets. Blooms of Dublin. Sinfoni Melayu. Categories : British novels Books about popes Hutchinson publisher books Novels by Anthony Burgess Novels set in the 20th century Catholicism in fiction. Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata Articles needing additional references from February All articles needing additional references EngvarB from September Use dmy dates from September Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. First edition. Historical novel. A teenage defector from the enemy camp turns out to have vital information — and a hidden agenda of his own. From the French Revolution to the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, Earthly Powers is a uniquely powerful portrait of one of the great tensions of modern history—one that continues to be played out on the world stage today. Wells Publisher : Wm. God and Earthly Power Author : J. Popular Books. Deadly Cross by James Patterson. The Great Gatsby by F. How to read Earthly Powers - The International Anthony Burgess Foundation Jones outlines a French story about St Nicholas by Anatole France, in which the three resurrected boys grow up to become great sinners. We can see how Burgess integrated this material, discovered in the Jones biography, into Earthly Powers. Summarizing his opera in Chapter 61, Toomey says:. At the end the ravaged corpse of a child is brought in. With the child in his arms he [Nicholas] raises his eyes to the invisible God and asks: What is this all about? Why did you let me bring these bastards back to life if you knew what they were going to do? And then the curtain p. One other influence is worth mentioning. This episode from the cantata is reversed in Earthly Powers , which begins with Toomey near the end of his life, his earlier story being told in flashback from Chapter 11 onward. This structural mirror-effect between Britten and Burgess may be a coincidence. Since it is an integral theme of the novel that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator , [6] the work highlights the fallibility of memory by including many deliberate factual errors, as explained by Burgess in the second volume of his autobiography, You've Had Your Time. These may be found on almost every page of the novel, and vary in subtlety from inaccuracies of German grammar to deliberately contrary re-writings of history.