20. To his honour

20. To His honour

They give up everything precious and dear, and dare a wild and cruel wilderness to find freedom for total availability for the honour of God alone.

They sacrifice things and blood and ultimately present themselves, father, mother, wife and child, on the altar, rather than to bend soft and tender before - or flee for - the tyranny of injustice, treason, deceit and violence.

From such a faith comes, according to human judgement, the doomed and foolish, but afterwards seen as unnamed merciful journey of the last handful able-bodied men, to the hart of Zululand, with the women and children defenseless far behind in spread laagers. Not for the sake of revenge: after the triumph they let the Zulu People in full possession and full use of what belonged to them; but not let the supremacy of the injustice, the evil, avail.

Of the calling privilege to be freed of all earthly ties to be unconditionally available for the honour of God alone, there is no more eloquent token as the sabbath. Get rid of all worrying and trouble, and be full-out available for the honour to Him to Whom everyone and all belong.

The Sabbath Commandment invites thereto the Vow People of the Lord. In December 1838 the Vow People promised to honour Him in this way and their “upcoming generations” reconfirm it yearly on Vow Day.

“A thanksgiving day,” therefore, spent like a Sabbath “to his honour” as the hallmark of a Vow People, bonded and accepted to a peoplehood who will all the days, years, generations, centuries, millennia of his existence on the earth, totally and without reserve be available for the Honour to God alone.

Let nobody, however, associates a people’s existence to the honour of God alone with gloominess, sourness, pettiness! He who gives such an interpretation thereto, confuses the true God of the Bible with an illusion that the sinner man has made for himself, so that he can have a reason to flee away from it. Such a flight could well have salvation for him if he would flee from that monster of his own doing to the true God. Because to show honour to such an illusion, would be the most blasphemous thinkable dishonouring of the God of the Bible.