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SECTION 2
THE CRITERIA AND CONCEPTS OF CREATION GROUP
Modes, Models, Methods,
Machinations, Intimations and Concatenations;
Incarnation of the Creator in His creation, and image of God in His design
for man, in his physical, mental and spiritual conferments,
thus providing freely
the panoply of the plan of salvation
for the cover of those among mankind who receive Him
Requirements and Findings, Empty Bins for
Drastic Designs
Creative Criteria and Omitted Payloads
Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of
Inevitable Truth
6
(listing of critical failures in reductionist methodology and
result, and
includes rank and file failure of naturalism, at every chief philosophic turn,
a mere outcast that casts out data to live it vagabond death)
Dig Deeper 2 (unity of creation, history, past, present and future before God, and survey of design as scientifically required, with reference to the definition of design, on which also see Ch. 8 below)
Glory, Vainglory and Goodness Ch 1
(tracing elements of creation that are benchmarks in
unison)
Note that this GVG chapter
has been increased with new material
for our present purpose, so that it forms
an integral part of the section.
See also Ch. 5 and Ch. 6 of Evidence and Reality, the Prince and the Proof, Constant Christian Faith and the Fickle Frenzy of Force, concerning design, creation and culling of inconsistent concepts, muddled thought and evacuative hypnosis. .
The list proceeds.
Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 3 Appendix (the exuberant vitality and discipline of creativity displayed in creation's masterpiece of precision, division and display)
Glory, Vainglory and Goodness Ch. 4,
Mini-Messages with Maxi-Point for the Call of Christ Ch. 6 and Ch. 9
The Glow of Predestinative Power Ch. 7
Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6
Jesus Christ, Defaced,
Unfazed ... Ch. 9 (survey in the light
of the answers in Christ,
of the ludicrous character of the non-answers that answer worse than silence
would, including a look at books)
Modes of Learning and Deploying, Institution and Constitution Compared
Repent or Perish Ch. 7 (criteria and concepts of creation),
Defining Drama 2 (modes of learning and contribution to knowledge)
History, Review and Overview Ch. 4, Ch. 5
Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4
Dancers, Prancers ...
3,
5
(includes
the devastating spread of coverage, required for any workable theory -
criteria of creativity),
The Bible: Not the Declamations of Distillations of Man,
but the Doctrine of Deity Chs. 4, 5 (in dialogue: consideration
of definitions of intelligence, creation, design, the justification of models
and the need for 'infanticide' for the concept of magic, fabric of childhood);
Bewilderment, Bedazzlement, Bedevilment, or the Beauty of Christ's Holiness
Ch. 3, on creation and exuberance, as The Bible ... Ch. 5 is on perspicuity,
in association with History, Review and Overview Ch. 5 on the initial creation list
of criteria.amplified by the ingredients noted in ROP 7.
Meta-Design is found in BBBCH Ch. 6 , in some ways a confluence, in some a summit
for earlier Chapters cited in the paragraph above; and it is mentioned inThe Secular, the Sacred and the Sublime Ch. 4.
The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God 2,
Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 6
The Desire of the Nations 2,
Epilogue
Secular Myths and
Sacred Truth Ch.
8
(broad conceptual
coverage)
Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13
Swift Witness Ch. 6
See also from the perspective side on design in particular, and its definition. Ch. 8 below.
Particularities,
Peculiarities of Non-Design Models and Empirical Odes to Impartiality in Perspective:
Creation is Incomparably Indicated
Resolutely Relatively Recent and Neither Distanced nor Divorced by Desire
The Divine Drama Ch. 3, Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch. 9,
Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch. 6,
Divine Agenda Ch. 1,
Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch 9,
Calibrating Myths, Machining Dreams and Keeping Faith. Ch. 1,
The Defining Drama Ch. 3,
Deliverance from Disorientation Ch. 6.
TMR Chs. 1, 6, 7, and
SMR pp. 140ff..
Creative Design in History: Designs of Destiny
Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 3
News 1, Joyful Jottings 22-25
Answers to Questions Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 8
Red Heart, Dead Heart, and Pure Heart Ch. 6
Barbs, Arrows and Barbs 30
The Lord is the Light of My Life Ch. 3, Ch. 8, incl. *1
Cascade ... Ch. 12, pp.
155ff., The
Impregnable Tower Ch. 1
Cascade of Truth ... Ch.
4;
Dastardly Dynamics ... Ch.
10
News 87, Biblical Blessings Ch. 2, Regal Rays of Revelation Ch. 12.
INTRODUCTION
PRESENTING MAN CLAD IN PANDEMONIUM
BY HIS OWN DRESSING
Art, Arts and Artistry
It is not only in the division of the indivisible, as if thought were the scalpel of life, nor merely in the ignoring of the fundamental, as if logic were the lap-dog of convention, nor again just in the abortion of scientific method in the reversal of order in systematic thought, namely from observation to theory to the illicit alternative, theory as the director and observation as the slave*1.
It is not only in these ways that design has become a tool of the trade of cynicism and an artifice for the task-master of a tedium of magical irrationality doing full justice to the Greek myths and the Roman gods as precursors*2.
We have been asked to ignore what is the construction of life in its teeming finesse, vast originalities, violently abrupt advances and eruptive innovations as if achieving something in twenty ways but with one language were the very essence of life (cf. Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 3, Appendix).
Artlessness,
Nescience
and the Metaphysics of Blah and Bah,
Bathed in and Creating the Politics of Abuse
Man is required by a kind of French Revolution of 1789 in the citadels of thought, to embrace liberty from logic, equality with nothing and fraternity with folly. The summit of system (cf. SMR Ch. 2) is to be equated with the imperial rule of chance; the height of brilliance is attributed to the depth of a stupidity which lacks intelligence altogether (a point not lost of Cambridge's so brilliant Professor Hoyle - SMR pp. 224-231), while the starry marvels of beauty in intricacy of colour combinations, harmony of artistic evocations in form and feature and functional felicities staggering even to the imagination, are to be set as based, in tragic dereliction of intellection, on nothing at all.
When products would stir a Raphael to emulation, what of the producer ? What insect can appreciate such profundities of art or what consignee of brute character, the finesse and felicities of art; and what need is there for such an army of innovation, using multiplied systems in creative sweep, and then deploying similar methods or units, in varied combinations, all conceptually assiduous in precision! It is as with the artist and the writer: why bother! It is because of the creative thrust, the sweep of power into wonder and of knowledge into its domain. If then this be the result of nothing, of no direction, no creativity, then is result the divorcee of cause, and production the art form of nullity.
If ever there were a folly, this is it. Culture has closed its eyes so firmly, it gains not merely a head-ache, but a heart-ache. What then is the cultural calamity concerning the origin of life ? The opposite of what is apposite is de rigueur, and one can almost see the multiplied Jacques of the French uproar, like their Communist successors in 1917, muttering hatred of institutions while erecting the guillotine of truth. That is not BY truth, but of truth as victim, though it never loses its force, and arises at last to destroy what seeks to end it.
To be sure, in the French case, as least, the abuse had been epochal, ludicrous and odious, preceding the final fracas; but the revolution's principles to be used instead of aristocratic and autocratic 'church' rule by Romanism, these were as empty in phrase as later, were those of the Communists*3 (cf. SMR pp. 832ff., 912ff., Ancient Words, Modern Events Ch. 14, . These, both of them, were dreams without substance, words without the means for their own fulfilment, taken from heaven and mutated in hell.
Nevertheless, though in the French case of 1789-1791, there was superabundant abuse leading to reactionary abuse, as indeed to a lesser extent in Russia (where as Solzhenitsyn, that careful observer, points out the death rate from law under the former Tsar was less than that under the later Commissar), the principle is the same. There is an uprising and ALL must fall to the abortive thrust of unchained distemper.
What then, to revert to our own immediate interest in creation, is the abuse which has led to anti-design in the midst of its definitional realities of design, as a theory for the abuse of logic by man ? or many of the race ? Why has such a contradiction in terms arisen ? It is, infamously, in this case, the abuse of God. Such is the passion which in this case precludes clarity. To be sure, it may be the love of money or the love for the love of many, but underneath, something is being used to displace reality, like an incentive to the spirit to divert.
It is not that HE, the Lord Himself, has been cruel, Rather man, having sampled the inflamed medicines of humanism and the inglorious taste of utter power in the midst of what might once have been called civilisation rather than psychic intoxication, is insatiable for more. He will not stop, like Eve, till the throne of God is in his sight, and the rule is accorded, not to the Messiah, but to himself.
There is design in man's intellect, in his logic, in his artistic composition in himself, and (except for contemporary and recent aberrations of all but comic drollery) in many of his own works, in his social aspirations and political hopes: albeit without God, these are destined to certain failure.
This present world and generation is a text book on failure in political dynamics, international brigandage, confused ideals, loading troops here and there without the necessary vision or purity of heart (cf. Dastardly Dynamics Ch. 10), and bombarding these or those, sometimes by mistake, while internecine warfare from local souls abuses all; of seeking to build up heart where there is none, by troops, or purity where false religion has already sold its soul. It is a scene of famine and revolt, oppression and indifference to the fate of millions: it erupts like lava storms, and oozes like force dismantled, till it erupts again.
This generation is apt as illustration of the wounded spirit, the closed mind, the shut eye and the visionary exultation which like a Lear Jet with unconscious pilots, soaring ever upward in its flight setting, only to dash itself down through its failure to control. Thus is the wonder of creation turned into ruin by the brutality of desecration, first of spirit and then of mind and then of bodies innumerable, the sediment of the seething liquids of disbelief in the Lord of creation and the God of truth, who does not change.
Thus is the negative reversal of man's gifts, by failure to use them UNDER GOD, attestation with the positive, of their scope. Little is more searchingly devastating than designs of high magnitude and power, when out of control. Even their order seems bent to disorder, and their prepared power to devastate, like armies of lemmings, proceeding with all their misdirected finesse, to their own doom.
Man's design is exemplified in his soaring products, in the bridges of his own vast earth work and soaring constructions, fit product for one who in himself shows those brilliant linkages between psyche, consciousness, will, thought and accomplishment in his inner being, without which he could not even operate. So magnificent is man's design, indeed, that is dwarfs every visible design, despite genuine magnificence in some cases, in his own power to produce.
Without the subtle, peremptory and suffusive devices which enable man's correlation of spirit with will and vision, mind with logic and discipline, and body with power to implement, the most apt object for the fulfilment of the definition of design known to man, there could be no designation of thought, including arguments concerning design.
Casting out
his Basis in Belligerence
Does not Adorn Man,
but is Self-Mockery
as if a Logical Death were a Liberation from Life
Without God there could be no truth in any of such argumentation, since it is to be found only in that absolute which transcends the merely procedural and knowing more than empirical resultants, is accessible for the ascertainment of actuality concerning our systems.
Without the knowledge of God, the case would be just as bad, since the endeavours to mine the truth from the mind of God would be as ludicrous as any to mine diamonds in the tonsils of a baby. For truth to be found, it must first be there; and for it to abound in man, you need what has it, to release it, lest man's obvious limitations, diverse control mechanisms and multiple programmatics become in their very reception of 'truth', its demise.
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Ignoring the necessities |
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of the presence of something, before anything could be; and
those |
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of rejecting that no-go dreadnought,
nothing as a basis for anything, |
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man becomes an
orphan to rationality and a victim for disorientation, |
Equipped as he is with those designations which enable him to design thought and bridges, skyscrapers and philosophies, as their basis,
man is required by logic to think not in detached units of virtually indescribable irrelevance. Yet he has constant passion to opt for this blind alley of darkness and anguish.
He has to be coherent, and far more, to be valid, to move into the realm of actual accounting in logic, and actual empirical basis in science. Yet he turns like silly sheep at the gateway, and unheeding to the shepherd and dog of help alike, he finds the ruin he achieves with such panache, scarcely to his tormented taste.
It is not that the many masterful and astounding designs are not apparent, from the savvy marvels of electronic and atomic power structures, the sagacious laws whether the big three*4 or the multitudes which fill volumes in the material sciences and are the basis of much of man's own constructions. That a child could see, before culture created confusion on creation. It is that design is present from the geometrics of space, and the intellections of geometry, from the logical exquisiteness of algebra to the brilliant law-ruling structures of calculus, so enabling the very achievements which led to the race to the moon, without any thought of lunacy, but rather of actually landing on the thing.
What is there is what is used, and the accord of nature with law and man's mind with both, in its power to ruminate and construct, is basic to the implementation of the thoughts of his own design, by which he designates the ways which work.
MAN IS DESIGN, and his designs are so potent that he even has designs on God.
What is meant by this, that man is design ?
It is
that correlation
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of order and effectuality, |
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of realms of correlative commands and physical
means, |
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of symbol and meaning, |
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of meaning and method, |
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of special method and resources which is integral to
life |
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from the architecture-bearing DNA in each
living and nucleated cell, |
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from the realities of need and the designations
of correlative powers, |
which is so thoroughgoing in KIND
that to
ignore this
is like saying that air is not in a gaseous form.
You can, to be sure, gain precipitations from air, and these are not gaseous. However, this illustrative of mere adaptation of its design, not denial of its essential nature, a case parallel to that of crystallisation, inherent in the chemistry of the substances and conditions concerned; and with the design even in the material realities of man, the case is not different.
Moreover, it is meant that the same KIND of felicitous functionality of multiplied elements, coherent in categories, synthetic in sum, unitary in final fabrication and designable capacities, is to be found not only in the mind of man, but in his spirit as well; and that the very cogency or even rationality of his musings is conditional on THIS design - which enables man to designate ANYTHING, with word or other symbol, and construct thought and its products - being itself valid*5!
RETURN TO REASON, REVELATION, INFORMATION AND COUNSEL
Gives to Man Place, but No Place for Pride
How can this be ? It is only by following reason where it leads and as shown in SMR and TMR, for example, and confirmed in Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ and kindred sets of volumes on this site, accepting the God whom it demands, and the word which this demonstrates, the Bible, as His, and so the Christ Jesus, as the matrix, meaning and method for man to live and the truth of his life: it is only thus that man can think validly. Otherwise, his thought is modelled on illusion, improvident without basis, an exercise in invalidity, an affirmation from a model of denial, whether of meaning, truth, testability, verification or of due assignability of reality. Logic has far greater requirements than statability. For stability it needs also precision and a testimony which only the living God CAN give.
Religion, unlike much philosophy, is not for flirtation and feeling, as if they were the gods of some kind, but for truth and life, for judgment and reality, for the needs of this slight but staggering creator, man, rationality for the mind, alignment with truth, a foundation for it, covering no less than his origin, destiny, life and ways. Let us however pursue the positive, which is rationally required. It is exquisite that the need and the feed available are the same, as for sheep willing to graze, rather than stampede down canyons, or drift into icy heights. Such a validation of method is like the water of mountain streams rather than industrial waste.
FIRST, it is only thus that he can be rational in progress to what is impossible to avoid, the God of creation; and SECONDLY, it is only thus that he can find what validates itself from its testable realities, those of the Bible, thus confirming reason and its integrity and enabling verification to become the handmaid of validity.
But let us not depart this scene without doing more justice to more varied and particular design.
Thus there is design in much that encompasses man like a universe of its own:
there is the design
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of life*6, |
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of liberty*7, |
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of conscience and of consciousness*8, |
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of the incarnation*9, |
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of the temptation of Christ*10, |
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of the resurrection*11, |
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of the presence and scope of the devil*11A, |
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of the divine strategy of God in the plan of salvation*12, |
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in the exposure of the nations and the utilisation of Israel*13, |
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in the abandon of this world as it nears its judgment and |
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in the judgment to fit it*14; |
There is design
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in the unheeding, unfeeding frustration of
all philosophy, psychology and politics, |
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In prophecy*16
there is design, to expose folly with precision in advance, |
DESIGNS UPON DESIGNS,
LIKE THE SUCCESSIVE RANGES
THAT MOVE TO THE HORIZON IN GREAT MOUNTAIN CHAINS
The stage is made, a setting majestic and worthy of the infinitude of wisdom, surrounding the home, like that on a sheep station, but here with territories astronomical, sheer prodigies of energy given form as little lights, and their adjuncts, as wonders of magnetism, of energy dispersal, all bespeaking the magnitude of conception for that wonder far past all stages and foci of energy and light, power and wonder, namely man who can think about, speak to and receive commands from the God of all order, all design, all wisdom and all creativity.
Its design evokes admiration, awe and wonder, as is most fitting; its scale being prodigious evinces glories of conception; but its array of life makes of it a worthy if dumb spectator, one as the Psalmist is moved to point out, though without speech or language, yet declaring in mute wonder and eloquent address, the glory of God.
Up we go, as shown in Life, What is it ? from the single cell, always most complex, to the multi-cellular, from designs only comparatively simple, because they are in themselves art work in energic economy, mathematical skill and integrating wisdom for a multi-partite singularity that works as one to even more. Through batteries of vicissitudes, like letters written by a mathematical engineer to an architect friend, go KINDS, whether of dinosaurs or ferns, of flowers of eminent aesthetic design specifications, or of waste disposal functionality, like bacteria or fungi. The spectacular varieties within KINDS are like the pyramids of Egypt, wonder to challenge the practical understanding, as to how it was done. Versatility of imagination and ingenuity of intellect are exposed on all sides and ready to be appreciated only by what has the correlative capacity.
This, it is creation by Creator of presiding capacities adequate for the conceptions implicit in the product, and exhibited by it, those of the world where such ideas formulate what matter is used to foster and bidden in explicit and observable commands, to do; and it is for whoever is created with what it takes to savour it! Such is the way of creation, and when it is God who creates, the limits are not by licence!
We come to man. Here is the power to know truth, so often ludicrously welded to models of thought which evacuate truth, decrying its very possibility, while announcing that this particular theory is not only possible but the only possible one! We become aware that the potential of man is one thing, like a car in the garage; but that the works of man are quite another, being as variable as those of 1000 cyclists, 900 of whom all crash in oblivion, not for the want of legs, but of wisdom in their use. Freedom is indicated, along with moody rebelliousness against all truth, and wilful entreaties to destruction, whether through smoking tobacco or marijuana, or taking ice or pep for continuity of stress with alertness.
Wisdom is evidently not automatic; although its vast prodigies are to be found scattered through the earth, whether in the abstruse formulations which control material itself, or in diverse living architectures, where words abide in the thought back of it and forms reside in the displays evincing it, whether in the intellectual, in profound inscriptions of words for their own directly symbolic sake, or in the morals seen in gracious actions of deep nobility that need no aristocracy for their declaration, in the production of beauty, or in the awareness of duty or the realisation of responsibility: and this last, it is not only WITH the use made of gifts dowered, but FOR their upkeep and maintenance.
Man moves to the heights of awareness of the Creator of his designations, his liberties, his design, his capacities for disposition, dispersion or disposal. He wanders to the depths of crude irrationalities, dreaming of being gods while practising the arts of devilry. Communism has been precisely so, while many a religion is merely farce facing lust, and making absurd concoctions without so much as coherence, consistency, validity or verifiability, except in the negative (cf. SMR Ch. 10).
The plan is clear, that God has made man apt to be melded in fellowship, separate but able to be conjoined in closeness of affinity; or else, fractured in confusion. It is this which follows remorselessly and empirically throughout history, since God does not mutate, knowing all things and needing to be none but what does not alter its depth and dignity, its nobility and its power, its place and its apprehension made before time, of all the things time has in store, in storage or in hand for His attention and action at will. All of this emplacement is the product of His power, first in creation, and then either in placement or in principle, as in the case of liberty.
We move over the earth, its fractures, its frictions, geological, astronomical, cultural, military, botanical, with plagues, curses and disruptive thrust apparent in the midst of what by contrast is magnificent machinery, surpassed in mental and spiritual splendour by nothing man can even begin to make.
We look to the Creator and there is plan. It is for conjunction or regression, for order or for confusion, it is for corruption or confession. He provides, He casts into the lap.
It is the significance of sin, and the siting of curse on this earth, which gives to much the look of a magnificent stallion, first wildly coursing and then whipped for its futile sprees and endless neighing and kicking. Now comes judgment in the universal flood (cf. News 1), and now mercy in the divinely assigned message of the rainbow - there has been no other such flood, though the very inventiveness of man has known few restraints and little concession; for mankind is upward bent in hope with downward thoughts in motion. His mind has a marvel of liberty in the material world, being designed to engineer with it, to activate it or produce wonders with it and from it, like children given some exalted kind of leggo blocks, but ones fit for the intelligence granted to man. With what then is he instructed ?
We find that so far from there being no word, other than those in the DNA*16A , there has been word from the first. Made with words as stated in Genesis and found in architectural commands to his body, man was told AS A BEING NOW CREATED, of the saviour to come (Genesis 3:15), and needed none to tell of his need.
God planned an Abraham to carry the covenant of divine speech to a whirling disorder inflicting the earth, an earth cursed for contempt of conditions, and given pause for its advocacy of illicit passion of ambition.
God sent the nation of Israel to bring both blessing to all, through One to come through it and in it, and to be placed in a chosen site, one justly famed and always contested, since God is contested by pundit and philosopher, by the erratic and the erotic, to such an extent that when His design to come was put into incarnate actuality, naturally He was killed. God's plan being deep, and His design for man as an operative unit being as profound as the gifts given to man so that he might be and exist, therefore this killing was not only an operative unit but a triumphant achievement (as implied in Luke 9:31) in His thought.
It was prepared as a sacrifice for sin, conceived in love, executed with courage, wrought in power, achieved BY the very enemies who hated Him, foretold in detail (cf. Psalm 22, 40, 16, Isaiah 49-55), fulfilled with a precision which none has EVER been able to fault. If it had been possible, such was the acumen and motivation of His enemies that the whole crusade for salvation would have sunk like a torpedoed ship.
But it achieved the control by an Emperor of the Roman Empire, which one though flitting amid the realms of politics and power, was a testimony to its grandeur.
Breaking death as foretold in Psalm 16, 22, 40, Isaiah 26:19, Hosea 13:14, Psalm 118, Isaiah 53-55 (cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25), He launched a crusade which nothing could stop, for truth, which is He (John 14:6), though it may be murdered, mangled, tangled, tossed and spun, lives in the very nurture of reality and the more it is killed, the more it lives. This is so ONLY because God being omnipotent, HIS traces never die, and truth is His preserve - an operative one!
Though lies abound, they are found; and though judgment seems far off, it comes; and if it comes in these early instalments of the designs of God for man, it will come with enhanced splendour when the purpose of the design, and the designations for those people who have the advantage of being designed, find the bite or blessing of their ways.
The thrust of the book of Acts, people called continuing the very work of Christ with the same dynamic though not the identical purity or wisdom, yet in the power of the Spirit enabling people to perform things indistinguishable from the very works of God, shows the tide of truth accruing, just as history soon shows the satanic forces which seek to masquerade, to copy, to malign, to re-create just as did Eve, in her misconceptions so evilly allowed, and leading to corruption.
The test in the grand and divine design continues, as the designed brain of man and the created spirit move to a culmination of copying, ignoring and mandating proud follies which like the Titanic, merely the worse fail because of their eminence. Individuals, cities, races, civilisations, empires, all have their day and way, each showing this or that folly and fabrication, pride or spiritual fornication, flustering with non-faith, bustling with brutality, declining in inertia based on exploitation, or whatever the case might be.
God designated several of these in Daniel, their order and sequence, in specifying in which, the last of four foretold including the initial one and its sure fall, was the coming of the Messiah. Its date was forecast (cf. Christ the Citadel Ch. 2), for death, and its outcome for judgment and divine rule.
As in the fourth of the empires, there is a continuity (SMR pp. 886ff., 902ff.), and a series of situations is traced in Daniel, which to the looming end of the Age, have duly happened (cf. Highway of Holiness Chs. 4, 7, 10).
Destitute rather than Repentant,
or
Regenerate because of the Focus on Fall
and the Function of Redemption:
The Class of the Individual, the Empire, the Society and the Soul
These have come and only the last of the empires announced remains, as this it does as divinely predicted (Highway of Holiness Ch. 10, SMR pp. 886ff., 902ff., 912ff.). It now is coming on its foretold way, partly strong and partly fragile, as also prophesied of it in Daniel 2:42.
This, it is the Roman one, the European entity which it launched, and how strong - pictured as iron in the 'feet' of the image of which this was the fourth and last - it was! It took over vast areas of Europe and pushed beyond to the East, and past the Mediterranean to Britain. It fluctuated somewhat in the days of various emperors, and in the height of its extravagance, under Augustus, it suffered a quite major reverse from Arminius with the German hosts, who so cleverly entrapped a major army in 9 A.D.. Emperors occasionally however could be captured or killed, some in succession suffering from internal violence, and multiple efforts to subjugate the Germanic peoples were rarely successful and often repulsed.
Here lay a source of trouble to come, when in 410 A.D. a vast number of peoples having repulsed the decaying self-indulgence of Rome, and allies becoming unreliable, the city fell. Yet the Eastern arm continued, and had its own troubles and triumphs with Constantinople as base or capital, and when Attila the Hun with his hordes threatened to subjugate Europe, the battle of CHALONS in 451 A.D. saw his defeat, not to eliminate him - he lived a couple of years more - but to eliminate the terror of the 'scourge' as one called him and he evidently loved to be perceived in his atheistic thrust, even a famous sword having a specious ring of religion in his wild but brilliant battles.
Our point in this context from all of this is simple: Europe was continuing that astonishing testimony of being partly fragile and partly strong. Its power rang like the ring of an axe; its failures morally, in virtue and in religion, in battle and internecine strife and follies were enough to see it fall where once it had been the chief, in Rome itself, that formalised, pseudo-religious setting which was to become a new scourge for Europe, from 1100-1600 especially.
However in some ways, the Holy Roman Empire had a carnal power of its own, with directions as far from Christian refusal to fight for religious rule as possible (John 18:36), this being a new disease incurring ultimate fragility in its lust and licence for power and primacy in religion, yes and in political power as well. It distempered and divided Europe, but it did so long after Muhammad had made his own religious renegacy (he featured Christ in a positive but ludicrous distortion of all known historical facts, making a new product of his own mind - cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4, SMR pp. 1080ff.). Moreover, he made his own elevation a matter of zero evidence, but as later with Romanism, he tried very hard with the sword or scimitar, to make it a reality, and in continued parallel, did so in a way that had its impact.
Yet as with Attila and the Germanic tribes, while major defeat stalked the Empire, continued existence made it notable if not notorious. Here the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D. put an end to the real danger of Muslim hegemony in Europe, which ever since has failed, so that when al-Qaida with its new Attila, bin Laden, a man with few troops but many troupes, recalled former 'glories' of territorial accomplishment and spoke of desire for restoration*, it brought a memory of the utter ruthlessness of power, which made all subject with a subjection intolerable, inhuman and contrived, while speaking of mercy and such things more glibly than graciously. Meanwhile Africa had been invaded in no small measure, and this effort to capture Europe had the renewed exhibit of its fragility, while the failure of the endeavour to subdue it, showed the strength.
Together, therefore, these double features of strength and fragility in what Daniel designated the last Empire in the spiritually discerned succession, were abundantly and exceedingly clearly exhibited.
When Romanism tried to make itself synonymous with Europe, it failed to subdue Britain in the famous Spanish Armada, the divine assistance with tempest, yes and other winds, being especially notable (cf. Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 3). Indeed, Sweden, then a major power, was active against its maraudings, and Germany became divided, both in war and in its results, in different regions for Protestantism and Romanism. When Hitler tried again, he NEARLY succeeded, but like Napoleon, in the French arm, he failed - came so close, but failed. Many were the outposts of empire, of nations in Europe, throughout the world, the pope at one stage even presuming to put a line which would divide for the world, the Spanish and Portugese domains!
The various efforts to localise power arose, and fell in Europe, while the reverse image of Nazism, Communism (*3), displayed a like intemperance for human nature, nurture or truth, proclaiming its impotence in the very voice of power, its theories in ruins until in 1991, its finances in the USSR met the hand of reality and it failed. It too, holding much of Eastern Europe, had tried to overcome, and make something alien the father and feature; but merely adding to the failures of Hun, Islam, Romanism, Nazism, its own special pride and fall.
So did Europe continue in its buffeted course, till the Common Market founded in the Treaty of Rome, becoming the European Union, its ten-fold predicted nature having been shown not a little even at this phase (cf. SMR pp. 917-923), the concept of ONE EUROPE proceeded, one so prominent in Churchill's thoughts as dangers receded and need approached.
It continued. It reaches now to perhaps 350 millions of people, and is incremental in its thrusts.
Yet Russia in this 21st century, can turn off the gas amid European cold, in his little conflicts with the Ukraine, and remind it of its fragility! As both these features were notable in prophecy, so are they notorious in history.
Let us survey it a little more broadly, in less detail.
The fourth Empire of Daniel, then, this has moved from Rome in its harbour of Italy to the civilised world, to defeat, to its Eastern arm in Constantinople, to resurrection in the Holy Roman Empire, to defeat of that after molesting centuries in alliance with Romanism as a religion, to resurrection in Napoleon's failed endeavours, profound in scope and fascinating in conception, but fragile in the end, to Hitler's parallel for Germany, of much the same kind, to the dawning recovery of the Common Market and the now dynamising advances of the vastly growing European Union.
In all of this, a continuity has thus been provided, together precisely with the predicted fragility. It all moves with the stately progress through the waves and storms, of some great liner.
Yet what power and what cruelty has been shown in the totality of the thing, this mutating Empire, both on the religious side, in the heresy of ROMAN-ISM (cf. SMR pp. 1032-1088H), and throughout the various forms of the imperial power which held off the end, by continuing on this or that foot, like a prancing horse. Thus has the phenomenon been phased in, the desired phenomenon, the foretold one, the deployed one, like a stalking horse, the strategically significant case of Europe, and so has it duly proceeded*17.
God has not tempted man, but man has flouted the ways of God, and God who knows man, has disposed the dynamics, and used them, making of them a means of giving the message to man, that though he be outside grace and out of his place, he is not beyond either the power or the mercy of God. Pride of face, place, mace more recently, of space, vicious authorities, girded by inanely manufactured gods in the throbbing imagination and the vaunting heart of man, every kind of cruelty and lust: these things stand empty in their ghoulish ghastliness as man has 'progressed' to the pit. The lecture of the Lord has its pointer in history, its text in the Bible. The designs of man as he grasps the design of God for man, become the designations of deity, as power passes to the dust, but not its record.
So has He acted and does He act (Psalm 99:8, Deuteronomy 32:15-21, Romans 1:17ff.), though His mercy is ever near, like a rescue vessel bobbing up and down on the nearby waves, as the impenitent in their preoccupations and fears, simply drown (Ezekiel 20:9,14,22, Micah 7:19ff.). The designs of God are multiple and marvellous*17A, in the interstices of creation, in the avenues to the soul of man, for the spirit of man, for his instruction and redemption, for the rebuke of evil, and the emptiness of power without glory.
The Gentile world (SMR Ch. 8), its heart its own, its reactions constrained not into immorality, though this is insistently and the more frequently chosen, but into their apt and due clefts, bears its own witness. It proceeds as the sovereign God completes His program, consummates His designs for that design called man, in whom is that precious adjunct, spirit, and that highly precious jewel, cognitive power to commune with God: indeed, it continues with its miraculous way.
In what is it then miraculous which is so grimed into squalid machinations, evil machines, foolish wit and spoiled splendour ? It is in this: that God is able to move those with so bountiful an initial display of liberty and reality in their creation, so that for most of this fallen race, as they will amiss, so they but move to the confines He has resolved for such a thing. Rebellion is foreknown, its paths researched and proclaimed, predicted and depicted.
To those who are fallen, and do not arise, those of the race not redeemed even yet, truth may still seem obtainable, and they act in their declarations very often on that premiss, whether or not they declare IN ITS NAME, that it cannot be found; and in these things also, it proceeds to the point that his precise predictions APPLY! (II Timothy 3:1-5).
Predictions apply! the bill might have read thus, in terms parallel to those of the verbiage and phrasings of modern commerce! (with its conditions apply). They worked*18 on Tyre, Babylon, Nineveh and have worked in Rome in its own paradigm, they worked in Europe, and have been fulfilled in Iraq, where remorselessly the word of God destroyed Nineveh and has stricken Iraq, the Assyrian legatee, in its depredations, to this very day. Such are His predictions, who knows.
They work.
They are sharp and also keen, these predictions (as in Revelation 6, Matthew 24) like the edge of Cambodia's evil sword in its day, of that in Vietnam, in China, in Russia, in Sudan, in Biafra, in Europe, both Western and Eastern, itself quivering as Putin puts his hand on the carefully monopolised power supply in gas, for that same Europe, and thinks about the weapons in the war that was lost. They are seen also as the US seeks to plant missiles where they speak security which last time, Europe in the East at least, did not know or find! and Putin fusses the more.
While the great powers play and work, the multitudes in distress are slaughtered physically in deserts and civilisation alike, and many in mind and spirit as the propagandas of the three spirits like frogs hopping from the mouth of the false prophet continue their cane toad-like spree (Revelation 16 cf. News 121, 122 and see Matthew 24:24, II Peter 2).
So was it in Revelation 6 where the very breath and smell, the vision and thrust for DEATH is so dramatically revealed. It is as if the combined follies of Islam (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4), and Communism*3 together with the brutalities remembered in Romanism's earlier inquisitions were unleashed without limit or control, this very thing being the ultimate of the chaff blowing for the wicked as defined and declared in Psalm 1.
This is the designation for the wicked, the anti-Messiah, the axe the Messiah thrust, with force or mere mental contrivance: chaff blown, not souls known to the Lord. They reached in their vainglory and puffing once, to the Messiah as in Psalm 2, just as they now reach into judgment, as most graphically foretold in the end of Psalm 2, and to the end of this Age, which advances like an express train, to its condign ultimate sanctions (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 8).
The grand design for designs, as well as in them, that design for the spirit of man as well as in its amazing construction, that construction for the capacity of man to commune with the meaning of nature and its laws, as with that of his own mind and some of its ways, indeed within his own spirit, though for many it is lost in confusion as in psychiatry and psychology (cf. SMR Ch. 4): that design enabling if it so will, the liberty of man to rebel, providing for the frugality of God in replying in kind but with restraint, and then with the functionality of replying at length as the case requires: it operates as the wind that moves. It flows as the river that flows; it continues as a symphony that knows its end, and indeed, the script for it is already written (Amos 3:7, Revelation 1, 22).
It is this self-same design, in fact supra-design as explained below, which provides for the whole to be contained in its explanation, declarations, definitions, diagnosis, prognosis and judgments in the book of the Lord, the Bible which alone justifies that title empirically or rationally*19: this proceeds like a vast space ship. It is not however merely moving into space, for it moves space itself, till the time comes when it rolls away, as indeed Einstein feared it might do in the midst of atomic explosions (II Peter 2).
The design of a new heavens and a new earth (Revelation 20, Isaiah 65, II Peter 3) is small compared with that designated and performed in the plan of salvation by the Messiah, due for murder as His yielding love provided. Thus was He to in plan, and did He in performance achieve redemption for those who receive it by faith in simplicity like that of a little child, which in its own wisdom is like that from the Lord Himself (when milk is replaced by meat, as in Paul), whose it is.
It is this eternal wisdom which proceeds, and is never replaced.
The plan of it, the design for man has been stated from the first, proceeds to the last*19, is listed and certified, proceeds and consummates without fuss or failure. Accordingly, how zealous was His passion, amidst His compassion, to fulfil all that He had given in the predictions of the Bible that then was (Matthew 26). What would you expect ? HOW THEN, He asked, if He had used power to pre-empt the arrest, how then would the scripture be fulfilled that THUS IT MUST BE!
Design ? It is the way God has chosen. When He creates, as He did, He knows what He is doing, and the millenia show it to be so, and to be known to be so, according to His written word. Rebellion is part of the option in the design; and ruin is one of the fantastically apt results of voluntary abuse of the equipment by the folly of spirit in its fantasies, one which may be pursued by man, as some pursue profit in gambolling and death in smoking, yes and madness in drugs.
The design and the designs for it, this is profound; but in the end, the issue is simple, so simple that not only MAY a little child receive the Redeemer and know the power of God arisen from the dead, by violating the vile and accepting the guilt and paying for it; but a child is precisely the one who often does so! It is as Christ demonstrated so tellingly in Matthew 18, one of the conditions of becoming a child of God that one remembers what childhood is, and towards God acts not the master, but the learner, not the adult in wonder, but the babe in arms, ready for instruction, for growth and for friendship at last.
At last, abandoning the clever claptrap and the benighted mesmerisms of the impossible, and receiving the intimations of profundity, the disinterment of truth from its grave in popular culture, there is need to realise the situation thoroughly. It is precisely as depicted in the eloquent symbolism of Ezekiel 1 (as explicated in First Vision of Ezekiel). It is there that there are eyes, eyes in conspicuous places, roving, open and active, seeing, throughout the complexities of the created elements in the vision. It is however not only in vision that the checking, knowing, measuring, alert awareness and productive procedures of God are apparent.
There are in all places by this and that means, atomic, electronic, sensory, neurones, memory banks, survey of mind, awareness of spirit, systems within and for systems, sub-systems and directions for such, programs and personal volitional provision to adjust, in conscience and impact from the Spirit of God, in energic displays and elementary distortions through the complexities of corrupted will and their survey in mind and heart. It is just what Ezekiel shows. There are 'eyes' which not only are directed, but can gaze into the haze of activity to control it, to perceive it, to report on it. As the Psalmist puts it, His eyes behold, His eyelids try the children of men! (Psalm 11:4).
The most important eye of this kind for immediate access and trial, is the spirit of man, which as Proverbs announces, is the candle of the Lord by which He investigates the innermost parts of the heart of man (Proverbs 20:27).
The Spirit of the Lord also, when in or moving upon the heart of His creation, man, a matter of much design before it can happen because of the estrangement and alienation which so aptly resembles the condition and position of Iraq at this date of August 200: this divine person also sees. Indeed, He not only sees but reproves of sin, because man has not believed in his remedy, Jesus Christ and judgment, because of the atrocious imposters to whom man is always applying for 'deliverance', fairy follies which lead routinely to the death of millions and the deprivation of far more (John 16).
In fact, in the heart of the redeemed, this very Spirit of God labours with intensity, in the beauty of holiness in prayer, so that there are in the midst of the imperfections of even the best or most tempered of the Lord's people, groans and travails beyond the expression of man, amidst which it appears the Spirit of God is bringing in abundant grace from and back again to the Lord, yielding the report of the heart and need, the bestowals and receptions, the prayers and the seekings of man (Romans 8:26-28). Thus does the Spirit, sent by Christ from the Father (John 15:26) participate in the intercessions of the Lord Jesus Christ for man (cf. Hebrews 7:25).
All of this, it is MORE than design. It is DEITY at work in His mandated mankind, inter-personal in complexion, factual in orientation, yearning in love, profound in pity, unrelenting in expectation and powerful in motivation.
Design is a mere precursor; counsel and compassion, intercession and participation, these are the motions within what is made. It is like the driver and the car, except far more profound in this, that the 'car', that is man, is itself personal, and has the capacity to move with the Lord. If however it moves against Him, then like any design, it is merely misplayed, faulty in execution, and here in addition, crumbling in antipathies which at the material level might be fricative forces, but in man become spiritual quiddities, uncertainties, angst and unhappiness. This includes that species of inert 'life' which continues to congratulate itself as it truncates life, and lives a death of spirit which is like a visit to the grave on a trick cycle (Ephesians 2).
Such is Deity and such is Design, and such are the designations in the creation called man, and such is his destiny, in or out of the Regal Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Because of the amplitude of His provision and love (Colossians 1:19ff.), it is most mercifully quite impossible for anyone to find accidentally or merely incidentally that hell which is the final exclusion zone of the irremediably lost; and its character is this, that only over the dead body of Christ can one get there (cf. *17A, *11). That is, only by the divinely known ultimate rejection of Christ as Redeemer, alive in the heart, dead on the Cross, once, and now alive for ever is there scope for inhabiting this hopeless mess: and what is worse than the hopeless... and what, with false hope, is to consign itself thither!
Yet man, the creation, infested with devilish pride, or its counterpart in reaction, melancholic indifference, or a spectrum of oddities spraying like water at the foot of vast falls, will often parade his impotence, with panache rising into the atmosphere like spray, or smouldering rebellion like smoke, rather than be, what in fact he is, a creation of God: one of the uttermost felicity of design, in whom liberty and love have meaning, and death in its advent is an invention already covered (cf. I Corinthians 15:42ff.).
Thus do Creation and Counsel in the cosmoi of power and thought, evince the creativity of God. He creates the physical structure in its ultimacies of material contrivance, command, correlation, as also the mind in its analytical and relevant prowess to contain and gain significant control over the lower order, and the spirit, source of insight and dreaming, good or bad, understanding and will. With this, He creates the synthesis by which these three work in staggering co-operation, so that the sublime is near to the deadly, and man cannot stand without folly, except in the continued creativity of God, who having made this witty invention, knows how to maintain it! (Psalm 1, 139) according to its exceedingly special kind.
There is no guarantee or warranty in it, but only from the Manufacturer, to whom one must return in the form and function of faith, when the Plan of Salvation is heard. This procedure for pardon has been created by God for man in his abuse of truth and reason, his own life and his destiny , and the Gospel is the sublime way known and credited, that good news made available from God.
Created likewise is not only the resolution of the sin, in redemption (Romans 3:23ff.), when God Himself bears it, as only He can, being infinitely pure and powerful alike, offering this to all, receiving what is given Him (Isaiah 53:1-6, Romans 8:32), but also the resurrection of the body. This, created in a form fit for eternity from which it comes, though in itself as created now fallen, is in this life, merely temporary. Created no less is the regeneration of the heart of man, soiled beyond repair and requiring entire re-manufacture (Titus 3:3-7), and the coming re-casting of the body in a way not only designed, but suitable for eternity, exemplified in the resurrection of Christ, when God despatched death, exhibiting immortality in the Saviour (Hosea 13:14, Titus 3:3-7, II Timothy 1:10).
All these things has He created, even the gloriously free imagination which misused becomes the power of man to make myths, foretold as a specialty for the end of his Age since Christ (II Timothy 4), and duly fulfilled in creative fantasies which would be admirable for fairy stories for children, if they were not taken seriously, but kept in the category of Cinderella and the like, where they belong.
How is this that man tries to avoid the creation of his very kind by God in mythical formulations which lack causative validity (cf. TMR, Wake Up World... Chs. 4-6, The gods of naturalism have no go! Causes) ? He dreams unification grounds for a cascade of inter-related systems, based on concepts, effected through causes, inter-connected by devices, all literally talking the same language; he dries up truth while proclaiming it, making a universe of precursors which never show their grounds for precursion, in a place of curse, which does show multiple grounds for that curse.
He eliminates counsel and uses it to eliminate it from his ground, source and basis in a world model so mottled with mockery that there is no room at all for thought.
What sort of a model does man machinate, or or in what sort does his punctured thought place him ?
It seems like this. He wants nothing to aspire to the level of genius, rather than a sub-moron, yet the more he finds of intricacy, ingenuity and mutuality in the affairs of life's construction in the material aspect, the more he dismisses any ground or reason, talking of inherent powers of a matter which is so marvellous that it needs no ground, though it is delimited on all sides, and yet is so poor in production, that it provides neither mind nor spirit to imagine. Ask it as man has asked it for generations. It does not make mind, and if you mind the facts that is the end of the matter. It has its own ways, the cogency of concepts is fitted in, not fitted out by it! That is what is found both in principle and in practice. But man loves to worship, or give the features and foci of worship to something, to almost anything else. After all, the universe is a great thing to grab.
Matter can indeed be troubled, tested, whacked, its investigators can whinny, cajole, but it stays steadfastly inert to all. It is a sub-stratum of creation, knows nothing of mind and spirit, and almost grins, if it could, as the mayday marvels of man’s artless art attest the frustrated fury and slurry of his distemper.
Why, these concepts of fantasy and thingummy theories, cast in ideational robes without reason or empirical support, neither SHOW themselves in ANY action, nor conform to the laws of Information science or any other; nor are they duplicable in any research, nor do they find satisfaction in any logic, nor leave their credentials in things past, where abortive 'attempts' should litter the earth, nor does manufacture of command appear without intelligence, nor does the cosmos of thought find visible or available outlet in matter, except by inscribed command, not being written, but ... there.
That is the attestation of creation, negatively, positively in a moment. Indeed, with it is to be found the most exquisite aesthetics in floral and landscape, seascape, cloudscape, and the power to appreciate it, the most inspiring moralities, sometimes actually followed to the plaudits of many whom they inspire, and the combination of surging intelligence and conscious and analytical memory for its application which makes of man a viewer and doer, be his enterprise despicable and his perception jaundiced or not.
Meanwhile, mind, matter, spirit, logic, imagination, plan of salvation, redemption, regeneration, prophecy, fulfilment - exhibits of the same innumerable, being inscribed for millenia in the Bible, together with power for healing, help for wisdom, all are created; but a clean heart ? (Psalm 51). For fallen man, this is the most important, one which can love with truth instead of despising, deleting or invading with venom and confusion, instead of devising the devilries of hatred, the atrocities of distortion, the pretences of hypocritical formalism or the vague religiosities of warlike competition. A humble and a contrite heart which returns to Him on His only appointed path, this God will not despise. The case however for the bulk of mankind is otherwise, as foretold in Psalm 2 and 110, in Isaiah 24, 59, in Matthew 24, Luke 21, in Revelation 6ff., in II Peter 2-3, II Thessalonians and in so many places it might confound merely to list.
It comes. It is created, and God who knows the foolish dynamisms and devilries of pride in man, of listless faithlessness alike, knows how to direct its blundering follies, since it insists on being, into foretold paths whether for judgment, for deliverance or for a watchful waiting. These apply for society, empire, nation and culture, till the destiny created for man being lost, it is inhabited by those few who in faith apprehend it, and are apprehended for it (Philippians 2).
Creativity and design, they are twins. They work from God and in man in His image, together. That is the way it is, is attested and comes to be. Shutting the eyes never removes the object of vision, only the power to assess it (Matthew 13:14).
Some of these things will be given more attention later in this volume, but they are conveniently lodged here, as they have come from creation as it surges on its appointed course, man choosing the evil, God providing for the result, in mercy through the infliction of murder on His own Son, the Saviour, or judgment when this is despised, ignored, flitted from or made subject of divorce: to the end.
DESIGNS for DESTINY
Passing by
the Eunuchs of Irrationalism
to the Seed of Faith and the Wonder of Truth
There follows an excerpt from an Extended Version of Ch. 1 of Glory, Vainglory and Goodness, with an adjunct for our present concern. The words and works of irrationalism, that ignoramus approach to design which inherits a defunct destiny, indeed a judged one, we turn not only to design, but from this to the ultra-systematic and the supra-design realm, following this to the meta-design dynamism of actual life for man. It starts with an allusion to earlier work.
An excerpt from Dip Deeper, Higher Soar … Ch. 2 gives a broad perspective in the logical and the realm of alogism, where irrationality rules and dissociation of ideas is the criterion.
The various ‘books’ mentioned below are design co-ordinates, reaching outward, upward, inward and downward, and their integrality is part of the design. In this, rationality replaces the magic of finding total pointedness with conscious symbolic logic associated with implicit symbolic logic, and written species of the same in the DNA, where order and command, symbol and significance, signification and execution vie for mastery, and find none, there being only the quietus of design, and the facility of inter-connected function overlaid with understanding, and just as amazing, the capacity purposefully to misunderstand if that is the demand of the conscious driver of all this!
Consciousness is simply a co-ordinate of personality functional in spirit, co-ordinate with a material contrivance for application to the physical, a mental composition for the interpretation and understanding and a direct spiritual functionality for purposing, imaging and willing. The ability to act in this realm requires for personality an awareness which allows it to illustrate what it is, perform what it is constructed to do and be responsible for its actualisation of what it perceives.
Morality is no less and no more remarkable and demanding than consciousness, being an aspect of the instructive construction of the spirit of man, in the image of God. The defilements of evil willing, self-aggrandising or self-glorifying lusts, mental compulsions born of fallacious fictions which pander to the pride of man, and the like, impinge on this construction, partly subduing it, but never deleting it entirely. Thus even a prominent al Qaeda leader admitted that he did not LIKE killing kids and that sort of thing, but look, it is war, he declared, with the spiritual shrug of the immoral and immobilised conscience. It is not the deaths alone, but the mode of it which brings to light the darkness for examination! And when it is examined in the light, it flees.
Hence the wounded consciences, the ludicrous rationalisations to salve it, the irrational use of the concept of right and wrong, good and bad by materialists, in their exhortations to others (and this includes the exhortation not to look at morals, for it is WRONG to do so!), the popularity of psychiatrists, so often used as Lady Macbeth comfort stations, to remove the spot which signifies, and the rash denunciations of many, who with their own morals mixed, muddled and broken, are quick to assert the same of others, hence entering into those squalid judgment sessions, which almost seem to be intended to usurp the last judgment; but they are no more this, than is a burp, a speech.
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Thus
introduced, the Dig Deeper ... excerpt follows, |
AMID ALL THIS TRAFFIC SURGING AROUND MANKIND,
LET US BE BOOKEDAt the outset in our site, we have first noted and then examined two "books" - and it is very close to LITERALLY two books. They are both exceptionally well-known, the Bible for the mind and the heart of man, and the DNA for his structure. Each is inscribed with efficiency, profound symbolic coherence and cohesion, intimate capacity for correlation with command, system to the finest point, and just that combination of meaning and symbolic method which constitutes design, direction and communication. If this is not communication, nothing could be.
This however is not all. There are two additional books, somewhat more figurative, but not in the least imaginary. The FUNCTIONS to which EACH OF THESE EXTRA 'BOOKS' REFERS is as real as any between two covers in our ambit and purvey of scholars.
The third then, or the first of the two extra books is this: the co-ordination of mental world and physical world, auditory reception and command execution, between the man whose bodily equipment is programmed, and the world which has its physical and botanical, biological equipment programmed. The programs intermesh well; their symbolic sub-structures are unitary in kind, so that the efforts of the one, avail in the other, the impacts of the one are understood in the other, and (cf. Predestination and Freewill, Part 4), there are no alogisms to be found: the logic is unitary. The conceptual correlation of symbol and its significance, meaningless without mental method, continues with all the adroit certainty that appointing mind controls.
More, the mind of man, using programmed sub-structures for its ultra-programmatic progressions and pursuits, can understand the products that surround him. His mind and the mind that made are in unison, the one being, though merely created, in the image of the other.
There is therefore, and this is the fourth book, this second unit in our second series: and this is the comprehension-combination that transcends. It goes far beyond the mere structural logical cohesion and synthesis. To emit and receive in terms of a common system is one thing, extremely magnificent though this created product undoubtedly is; but to be so prepared in spirit and mind, so that the raw materials, themselves coherent and cohesive between the two systems, within and without, are able to be grasped, intuited, subjected to imaginative incursions, brought into the scope of thought and will and analysis, yes of understanding for action by the non-material, purpose-proposing, imaginative dimension of the being called man, his spirit, this is the next generation of marvel. (Cf. SMR pp. 348ff..)
Yet it would seem indeed scapegrace in gratitude to God who performed this production with the necessary linguistic, mathematical, comprehensive, analytical skill to manufacture symbols and significances (symbol targets), intimations and executions, thought sub-structures in logic and meaning, and interaction with a subject also formed, if we did not notice a fifth book. This is the power to ruminate concerning the Maker Himself. This naturally is the copestone, to which the imaginary relationship of Pinocchio to his craftsman corresponds in reality. Right through to the inward realisation of the thrust of the logic, the communality of the communication, the direction of the design, the strategy of the construction, man can peer toward the God who made him.
He can do more. It is not necessary in this field to speak of a 5th book, although it would be perfectly meaningful. One prefers not to do so, as at the level we have now reached, the affair is inter-personal to such an extent that the term 'book', so fitting earlier, is somewhat distanced. Rather this is the intimacy-provision for creator and creature when that creature is man. This is what book No. 1 provides for (the Bible), book No.2 is sub-structured to enable (the cells DNA and allied phenomena, atomic parameters and provisions), book No. 3 ascends to substantiate, book No. 4 arises to confirm. We shall however give it a name: there is in this fifth dimension, a correlation that is spiritual in kind, so that it may be termed scope for spiritual communication, and for concord. We are moving from the concept of 'book' to that of 'look', or inter-personal interchange.
This allows testing of promises, assimilation of pronouncements, reaction to orders, comprehension of commands, in a SETTING of illumination of conspectus, like a search-light revealing from the nose of an aeroplane, the configuration of the land far below, and something of the ways of those who live there. This is an ultra-programmatic conspectus, and an inter-personal opening. It is a vista on the divine.
It is complicated by just one vital feature, which is equally a vital failure, such as one may get in a damaged automobile, or TV. There is a perverse streak which surfaces in man, so that the more the promises of God in the Bible are fulfilled, and objectively they all are always found to be of this kind, the less they are wanted; the more the prophecies are brought into history, like obedient little lambs in a fenced paddock, the more is the distaste; the more the disciplines for folly, the more the folly, or the less the concern. While this is not like rectilinear motion, a mere reciprocity, and is complicated by the resilience and capacity granted to the immaterial spirit of man, happily able to divorce itself in imagination and purposes proposed for itself, from almost anything real, at will, it nevertheless is a thrust, an historical trend.
These preliminaries allow our minds to realise the UNDERLYING design, before we consider the externally more obvious examples of it. We can now proceed, this base work done, with what is gained from The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test Ch. 2 .
On design definition, the case is clear. You need what has integrity, or better integrality, oneness in multiplicity, so that many things minister to one result. You need the power to imagine it, since commands do not imagine themselves; the capacity to codify it if you want to use, as in DNA, programmatic devices, the comprehension to make code articulate with command, and command with the raw material for its implementation; you need a series and sequence so that the correct data come with the correct matériel and the correct provision of it at the correct time, and the correct concept with which to edit any errors and rectify any oddments. So is it with the embryo, and indeed in much of the following growth, outside the womb.
This of course is precisely what is found in design, to make it so; and nowhere on earth is that of man surpassed in any visible realm. How is this so ? It is a question of
complexity for the unity,
differential divisions
of mind, spirit and matter for the components,
inextricably interwoven for normal function,
operational sufficiency and efficiency for the command centre
or operational agent to secure the results which are to be gained
from comprehensive USE of all the equipment and connections
and phases of life involved.Nothing comes near such versatility, power and combination, synthesis of dynamic diversity in KIND, as this. Fulfilling the specifications for the definition of design, it yet surpasses all other visible examples. To remove this example, this exemplar indeed, man, from design, would have to remove the concept; but the concept is based on billions of examples, systematically found and implemented by the designed unit himself, man. It is just that his observable case surpasses all in the various elements that constitute what is defined to be design.
There follow three citations from earlier works, to illustrate the ludicrous results which come when man tries to ignore the data, and invent by magical moments in thought (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9), what no moments in nature contrive to produce; for you may watch forever, for what lacks what it takes, to take what it has not got. Cars do not produce cars; you need the extra features to imagine and purpose, to contrive and to make them arrive. Man-maker has to have all of this, and for such a thing as man, inventor, creator and imaginer, comprehender and amender, you need as it were the machine tools correlative to that; but it is not machinery: it is imagination and all else that the formation and formulation of command exacts.
Correlative with this again is the obvious fact that INFORMATION does not arrive, but in information science as seen below, we find that information tends to dissipate, like other design. What is based on its autonomous arrival, when the law directs that the natural course of information is its dissipation: this is not only UN-scientific; it is ANTI-scientific, and justly put into the realm of magic, where causes inadequate posited, with no evidence, are imagined to go with the results desired.
This may be pursued at The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test Ch. 2 .
Pursuing yet further the integuments, the integralities and the implications of empirical reality, we turn to History, Review and Overview Ch. 5. For our present purpose, this is re-arranged somewhat and extended.
HISTORY, REVIEW AND OVERVIEW Ch. 5
It is all or nothing. It is not only
irreducible complexity, but
indivisible integrity,
indissoluble co-operation,
inter-and intra-systematic proliferation,
coherence of logic and symbolic notation with
executive receptors, skilled to catch meaning and execute orders,continuity of sequence from
connotation, to denotation, to implementation,
in a series of systematics incomprehensible except in totality
(indeed see SMR pp. 332Gff., Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, in End-notes, and for further considerations!).
The path of true reductionism*20, false to science, of course, is always to ignore what you have got, and to explain what is not there. It is however the essence of the challenge to meet the case as it is, in all of its sequential, symbolic, integral and mutually intimate and pervasively singular procedures, whether in code type, implementation, co-ordination or exuberance of methodology; and to do so in a world which likes energy for construction and time for destruction. The other point about the construction ? it is direction. The third ? something to do as directed. In this world, and by any form of valid logic, the specifications of life parallel the requisites of intelligence with available power.
The result, life, it matches nothing but mind, requires nothing less than something as far beyond mere genius as the heavens above the earth, requisitions an artist, artificer and maker down to the last electron and the least of the biota. Paintings do not paint themselves, Raphaels do not come by omission of the artist, and life is as far beyond these things in what it demands, as a genius beyond a talented toddler.
The perspectives and nuances of art, its undertones and its overtones, its sentiments and its modes of communications to receptors called human beings, who may decide to pretend not to like it as a competitive device, such is their programmatic liberty of will in certain arenas: these do not arise from what does not cognise them; but only in what goes far further than that. It must with enterprise not only appreciate but perform, and not only perform, but meaningfully perform, and activate the executive elements of the body of the artist to ensure that the result actually appears; and that the way in which it does so can be 'read'. Art is merely one facet of life. ALL functions must be accounted for in any reputable endeavour to present its basis.
As soon as one discovers one phase, feature or facet of human life in particular, there are realities within, meanings beyond, there is all the grooming of a thorough-bred horse, all the intestinal reality of a cathedral, the coherence of a great speech, the intricacy of superb mathematics, the intimacies as of love, such is the subtlety and the inter-dimensional as well as intra-dimensional sophistication, as if intelligence were easy, and brilliance a manner of life.
As if ? THIS is the testimony. If someone places a new Boeing 747 on your drive-way, it is not as if it had been built! It is not the nature of life, or logic, to give output without input; and what we see now as the centuries progress, is no more input, but the same residual decrement. In design terms, there is to be found, as Gould emphasises, DECREASING residue. The progress of centuries in this system is the regress of design types. What is needed is simply NOT NATURE. It needs its author.
There is vast loss of the remains of output, one not now to be found, as is natural in creations, which tend to dissipate. As with creation in this world generally, on the part of human participants, this decrease follows the vast effort of bringing things to be; and as that is distanced, forces work to the detriment of what one has made. All this is precisely as the Bible depicts (Isaiah 51:6 for example), and it is simply anti-scientific to dismiss the enduringly correct, and uniquely present solution, while appealing to the calamitously non-verified imaginations of the heart, which dismiss the eyes and dispense with their testimony.
That is quite literally anti-science, what is biblically called knowledge falsely so-called, one of the chief dimensions of that falsetto spuriousness, which infects much of modern 'science' to its profound detriment and everlasting shame. Do not misunderstand, science has not done this, for on its method as shown in SMR pp. 149ff. and TMR Ch. 1, this is the result: creation is indicated irrevocably by all the criteria of scientific method. It is the work of some who name 'science' as their trade or profession.
Scientific method is clear, and delightfully sure in its results in creation; but since science lives in culture, a pathological culture can even constrain it till the point comes that argument is substituted for admission, non-reality is explained by reductionism and pathetic propositions are constantly presented, which neither logic nor observation ever sanctioned.
In the intimacies of ever-more unravelled marvels in life's visible provisions, we find increasingly that everything provides for something else, and the more we dispense with ignorance, the more simplistic substitutes for empirical observation surge into the farcical.
For centuries now, man in his growing secularistic conceit, sham imaginations and shameful self-fulfilments, mere ferments of disorderly imagination, has tended to under-estimate all of creation, except himself.
What we are facing then, is not only all the above. It is also directional dynamic with integral meaning, once exceedingly fast-moving, now long arrested. As well have spare tyres and spanners and gear levers in incomprehensible confusion lying about, as think of this or that chemical as if this were at all to the point. The electrons have their partitions and procedures; the atoms likewise; as do the molecules; the compounds are characterisable; the genes have their task and the DNA its blueprint. Each is a construction. Each has required the art of the artifice and the power for the presentation. ALL require a totality of systematisation to render coherent their interaction, univocal their meaning and practical their interaction.
In the light of our other concerns with excerpts and text above, we may now add to the above list, so that to preserve it all in one we repeat it:
irreducible complexity, but
indivisible integrity,
indissoluble co-operation,
inter-and intra-systematic proliferation,
coherence of logic and symbolic notation with
executive receptors, skilled to catch meaning and execute orders,continuity of sequence from
connotation, to denotation, to implementation,
in a series of systematics incomprehensible except in totality
To this we may now add:
physical, ethical, moral, aesthetic, discursive, ruminative, intellectually integrative, spiritually imaginative and metaphysically cohesive unity of perspective, operation and concentration,
unitary understanding explicative of all,
derived from the summit of experience and
comprehension in the Creator.
The last is as demonstrated in an earlier work, which it is pertinent to provide in its full dress on this occasion. It is -
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES
AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS
Bible or Blight,
Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God
A Pair of Volumes: Opus 128 and 129, of some 2.3 million words
In fact, the concept that not only does
an integral unit
of multi-tasking capacities,
dirigible from an intellectual base in what is purposive, lying in a
stupendous system of semi-or wholly programmatic means in what is structurally
supportive,
contrive to be alive and operative,
but to possess structural additives for this purpose -
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such as an intricate, multi-layered defence system,
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all integrated in turn, |
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a nervous system which can
correlate and co-ordinate |
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this structure, basis for
personal action, is presented in code |
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intelligible, perusable, commanding, executable,
executed, |
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not only all of this, but a spirit to will and a character individually to develop, |
while for all that, this is not a design:
what shall be said of it ?
What is the genus of such a concept as that ?
It is one that constitutes far more than a breach of definition.
It is as if meeting infinity, it is so overwhelmed that it declares it zero in self-defence.
In fact, these things meet to perfection one of the most obvious definitions of design:
that assimilation of numerous complexities into integrality,
that solution to numerous procedural problems
with ingenuity of mode not to be found per se in the constituent materials,
that subsumption of multiplied processes to ordered,
salient and sequentially sustained results,
whether for comprehension as in art, or action as in engineering,
with overall meaning for a stateable whole.
Again, what do we now find ?
It is, viewed from diverse aspects and different thrusts in mind:
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integrality, |
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multiple cosmoi
consisting as components not simply subsumed but mutually serviceable, |
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sequential
layering to establish scope for |
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codes and
controls to establish the feasibility and operability of underlying
structure |
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correlative
creative composition of disparate parts and systems, mind, body and spirit |
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(such that the
naturally internal, intrinsic is never found to have the power, |
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hierarchical
mode of establishment from matter through mind to spirit to directive power, |
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penetrative
thought to probe all layers, |
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will to be
asinine or wise, to relate to the Creator as verified, |
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freedom
to fulminate against construction, an unprogrammatic liberty, |
It is the work of LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST ... to exhibit the continuum of verification in contrast to any other option, not merely of the Creator, but of His specific scripture, the Bible, in which He makes so vast an array of what in principle are refutable premises of a multitude of kinds, that it is pure scientific joy to test them, just as the validation of the premises makes meaningful even the discussion of truth, while confirming its nature.
Here are the interstices of design on the grand scale, and it is as if the majesty of the compilation, its complexity in mode and simplicity in theme abashes many, so prompting them to engage in endless futile warfares amongst themselves, as ever new 'theories' of how what is denied systematically and multiply, could naturalistically have occasioned the universe.
These competing naturalistic theories are of course as irrevocable and irreducible as the tension between Jew and Arab in the Middle East, to the extent that one departs from the living God (per national religion (cf. Ch. 7 below, SMR Ch. 9) who is there, and the other invents an unattested an anti-verified God who is not there (cf. SMR pp.1080ff., More Marvels ... Ch. 4). Only crisis can result from such mutually erroneous principles; and it does. The case is no different in principle at the natural level. Whipping a horse that is not there, or killing one that is, in neither case, has constructive effect.
What thus is found displayed ? Because of the NATURE of the aspects, the case is brought to the realm of what is not only beyond man, but correlatively beyond him, so that appreciation of the work is possible on an analytical basis, which truth in absolute existence permits and its absence precludes, just as logical necessity drives to the same conclusion.
What then of the denial of this particular design, to be such ?
It is an exercise in antinomy so profound as to constitute an hiatus of reason.
When however we learn that
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among the other systems (and two further will be
added later), |
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integrated and available in unison for purposes of
the spirit |
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is a reproductive system |
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which is capable, |
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without any but the most minimal knowledge of
program or nervous system, |
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integration or correlation in all of these systems,
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of producing a new multi-design, pan-designating,
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in short, a baby, |
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which will have all the ingredients of the preliminary provision for speech, walking and understanding lodged in it, so that work produces results in the desired fields: |
then not merely do we have the very accolade of designer's design, the art work beyond design which gives it name and glory, but unique work of the hand of God becomes both apt and appropriate.
Here is what is beyond man, in miniaturisation, in method, in time, in unprogrammed purpose, in imagination-provision and original conceptualisation capacity, to name but a few. Moreover, not only this so, but what is in man, beyond his capacities to create, is the ability to discern what is beyond him, as being in him! This is the image of God, the ability to see what is required while not having it, and to look intelligently for it, and to find it where it or rather He, has attested Himself (cf. The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy).
Not only is there successively no other source for the various outré features of such a result, rationally, but there is no other basis revealed to reason, sourced in validity and verification, than the Bible; nor person, as there specified, than Jesus Christ who incarnate, is shown to be He whose handiwork, as life in eternity, brought to pass in time, itself also created ( cf. Reason. Revelation and the Redeemer) both what we are and our capacities to deny it, ourselves, Him or whatever else takes our fancy, or rationally rules our will.
One of the features of this pan-operative profusion, girded with personality and alive with reason, is the moral, and one of the correlatives of that is consciousness, as indeed of other elements of the personality and its objects of application, research or action. Some of these are noted in *2A below, and they include such features as the:
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1. PSYCHIC |
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2. PHYSICAL |
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3. INTERPERSONAL (including
friendship, hostility, and the political, social, economic) |
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4. RATIONAL |
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5. EMPIRICAL |
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6. AESTHETIC |
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7. MORAL |
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8. SPIRITUAL |
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9. EMOTIONAL |
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10. NOETIC and INTELLIGENT |
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10. ASPIRATIONAL |
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12. IMAGINATIVE (including
both the creative and creativity itself) |
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13. METAPHYSICAL |
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14. DESIGN DOMAIN |
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15. MEMORY FIELD |
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16. DIVINE |
In fact as seen in various ways in Christ Incomparable, Lord Indomitable Ch. 2, Downfall from Defamation Ch. 1 and our Preliminary Canter at the outset in this volume, in the most general and broad terms, nothing cannot contribute, either in steps, as if one were drawing on 'monies' in various bank accounts, or altogether, ANYTHING. So far much less, can it provide such multiple marvels, integrated works of awe, modes of access to truth, such as is needed even to formulate any philosophy, as those found teeming above, in mutual functionalities awash, but never washed away, only wrought as if in iron. It is not seas which convey realities, such as the seas which move themselves, but the season of creation by what has the functionalities, felicities, febrilities and pan-performing effusion to be found in the most articulate of designs on this earth, mankind. Abort magic and return to reason.
As to man, his own words are articulated with reason (when they are right) or in it, commended in truth (when they find it, rather than exclude it by muddled model choice) and functional in design (when it is made), so that man and mind, method and logic, reason and truth, understanding and action, word and deed are comrades in arms. Damage one and you afflict all.
As put in Downfall from Defamation Ch. 1, concerning but one aspect, in its endnote 3A ...
Gould in his "Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness," Natural History, 1988, p. 14, has this to say:
"This extraordinary abundance of some fossils
illustrates something important about the history of life.
Evolution is a theory about change through time --
"descent with modification," in Darwin's words.
Yet when fossils are most abundant during substantial stretches of time,
well-represented species are usually stable throughout their temporal range
or alter so little and in such superficial ways (usually in size alone)
that an extrapolation of observed change into longer periods of geological time
could not possibly yield the extensive modifications
that mark general pathways of evolution in larger groups.
Most of the time, when the evidence is best, nothing much happens to most species."In other words, gradual evolution, such as that Darwin imagined, is dismissed by Gould as a contra-evidential extrapolation; evolution is assumed as an invisible action; the dynamic and the drive with the creative power is likewise assumed by Gould, as it was by Darwin, who for his part was making slow movement a way of importing skilled movement; and when the assumptions are done, nothing of science is to be seen in such ramblings, any more than of the fossil change envisaged in any observable reality relating to either vacuous model.
You see no series of carefully continuous movements for any transmutation, all so small, so varied, so variable in progress, so deft to the end, so multitudinous in erratic ends and byways as well; they do not come to the light, hidden in darkness, obscure in the imagination of man. Nor for Gould do you see any vast mistakes, hideous happenstances of inglorious folly, named in the fossils, naked misnomers, sudden and spectacular in folly, as the non-existent power in his model makes the prodigies of abandon, as well as the prodigious steps at which it is so ostensibly gifted, although on his presentation, it is not there.
Verification vomits; method faints; only myth remains. This is the way of death, with the scientistic, the fantastic and the fantasising in one inglorious realm where the real gradations are from arbitrary antinomy, through ascending antilogy to alogistic vacuity.
It is all 'in the mind', never in the facts. What Gould said, precisely of Darwin, must be said of Gouldism (why not ? you have Darwinism ? and he is much nearer to the facts than was Darwin)!
Gould's 'punctuated equilibrium' that emperor's new clothes phrasing into the phasing of existence, is so pathetic that it seems better in such a case not to mention it!
Gould's superiority lay in better regard for facts, however, not in superior theory; for all such theorists have a vacancy notice when it comes to the real work. This ? It is that of constructing delimited material things, setting their bounds, making myriads of inferior systems, subordinating them one to the other (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7), integrating their coding for language with the laws for what they must command, correlating command with automation, by programmatic devices, and importing rationality as a conscious facility for man, so that he might conceive the work, be instructed and worship the God of creation, and investigate with delight the depths of His constructions, creations and devisings.
Thus man also had to be so made as to become a fitting co-worker with the rationality of the system, so that he in turn was equipped with the linguistic and logical ability to find out the language of life in DNA, and to see the hand of God in command, which like other specialised works of precision, requires precision to make it, imagination to blend it with its various components systematically, cohesively and with an integrality which in the end, with the spirit added, becomes that one thing, a person, who is MAN, who thinks, who ponders.
Thus with the language for life,
and that of man and the provisions for thought for man,
together with the laws of matter,
the forms of the inanimate and the animated,
the forces to run what is according to the laws made operative, and with
the provision
for maintenance as in living things, reproduction where applicable,
and later than that, at the fall of man,
for the nature and scope of the curse which reminds man of his fallen state
and so blessedly helps him awaken from his dogmatic stupour of unbelief
in the One who has made him (cf. Beyond the Curse):
it is all done.
The constructive creation is so forged that it all WORKS, in integrality, according to design as is always the case with such conceptual, commanding, programmatic, synthetically forged, cohesively combined works.
This is merely one of the arenas of the empirical. It is what happens when by gradual or immediate means you try to vacate causation and improvise selection as the instrument of having anything to select (as if selecting a Jaguar from a line up of cars were a way to buy it - you have to have BOTH what it takes BOTH to MAKE it and MAKE IT AVAILABLE, BEFORE you CAN select, and what is needed to buy it as well). It is no different whatever is the endeavour to void nothing of some gift and institute it in the mind and might, the marvel and integrality that is man. There is no valid source, but that adequate in every cosmos of action, and over all the cosmoi, to integrate and correlate them, fashioning them into one multi-functional, unitarily operational body (cf. Causes).
With this, all reason, causation, each empirical field, and the very validity of man's thoughts agree, the former as to requirements, and the latter in its spurning of any alternative in invalidity, which makes a mockery of any theory before it is even uttered. Where no truth is, no truth may be stated; and where the model is such, antinomy in breach of ingredient laws, and antilogy in breach of coherent thought agree in one, and the vapidity vanishes.
Creation however does not vanish; only the madness of method which seeks to jilt God, and become the matrix of truth, the wonder that can breach every arena of logic and truth, of fact and functionality, and hope to live. Its death may be slow, as war after war wilts man, still arrogant in pursuit of the impossible, as if the feasibility study reported the concepts but wildly luminous cases of mental sport, and the receiver of the critique replied, Good! good enough. We'll beat it all yet.
Man beats nothing, but himself.
It is himself which needs attention, in the ascending order of magnitudes which are the correlative cosmoi of his operation, and the ultimate necessities for which his liberty may be friend or enemy. In view of the extensive sources and realms in which man moves, as detailed in several analyses above. It is time to see further into the nature of the array and its meaning, source and significance without the sedation of hopes based on demolition of the rational, empirical and valid alike.
Enough of the errors; let us pursue that stands. Let us look past what we have found to be there, to its import.
Design is irrefutable, its avoidance mere aversion to definition mixed with dominating decease of rationality. What however of the NATURE of design, its heights and universe of action, genesis and destiny.
THE ULTRA-SYSTEMATIC,
SUPRA-DESIGN FIELD,
WITH THE MEGA-DESIGN PERSPECTIVE AND THE
META-DESIGN DEALINGS OF DEITY
We are now in the realm of mega-design, where the designations of deity are so numerous, in the physical, the inorganic, the organic chemical world, the physiological, the psychological, the mental, the spiritual, that it is past mere design as such. We are in design not in increments but in massive inflows, such as might be found (and sometimes are), when vast ice-bergs come sailing toward New Zealand from the Arctic, as its ice-cap duly melts before the final melt-down to meet irrational efforts to conquer the terrain of God's creation with mere impudence and imitation.
Not only so, we are no less in the ultra-systematic, for consciousness (cf. Glory, Vainglory and Goodness Ch. 1) brings awareness at the personal level of all these things, according to capacity, and this varies enormously. Here the person can do, often does, and sometimes confesses to having done such things as would raise the hair on the head of the bald, were it possible. Guilt is not least, an awareness of truth and of deed when the two do not accord, such as in lie, inward or outward, self-deceptive or devious to mislead others.
The devious interweaving of the desires of spiritual lust, personal acclaim, the desiderata of ambition, and for the world indeed not seldom, this can so fry truth as to make its very cinders the offering of the mighty, as they exchange ludicrous world plans which kill millions, and mutual congratulations, before making war on each other. It is not limited to war in politics or in the machinery of armaments, but moves into science with equal facility, where absurd ambitions move men from the method of science with a facility which would be admirable were it merely the dexterity of this disgraceful illusion that was in view, but which in fact is merely part of the fires of human destruction. It is bent on killing integrity without the participants even realising this, so great is the intoxication, in the ultra-systematic, spiritual realm of personal choice and the generation of perspectives which is man's capability.
It moves through this to the site of ultra-design, for not merely does man interfere with truth by desire and application of various programs for himself, but he does so in that site for displacement of truth, or emplacement, called his spirit. Past mere design, but not excluding it, this plateau of final perception, this is the ground for CHOOSING perspective and MAKING plans, rather than merely implementing them. Here is to be found the ultra-design spiritual work which is neither controlled as to its rights of rejection, nor coerced in its thrust.
We come beyond this to meta-design, that realm of the bases and resultants of this work of ultra-design in man's spirit. Here we think not merely of the APPLICATION of generated perspectives, or even only of their generation, but of the discourse of the spirit of man with his ilk, his friends, be they spirits or man, or with his enemies, where these be the finesse and finalities of man's freedom, his bondage to confusion, delusion and contempt for truth, or his liberation is to be found. Here there is more than generation of other gods in the mind, and their worship in direct or indirect modes; there is the GROUND for this generation, the movement to or from it, as when a State makes plans before submitting them.
Here is the realm of the spirit at large; and here is life slammed into the wall of woe, freely, or delivered for the work of God, freely. We consider this in some more detail in Ch. 10 below. Here we conceive what is happening.
The spirit of man has origination capacity, his mind has creativity of concepts, his origin provides residues of creation, and the Bible, that verified Book of the Lord has the answers for life which, being fallen, needs redemption to bring it back to its liberty of relationship with its Creator. For this, in turn it needs repentance that it be in the way of it, and faith, that it receive the restoration of soul which is a pre-condition of knowing the God. This is the way to the God who made, for the man who marred it, that the marvel of friendship with God could proceed. WHY however does man proceed to ruminate infelicitously in ORDER to CONCEIVE grand perspectives of delusion, obviously wrong at the outset, as attested empirically in endless purgation power for man, as he moves restless, bound in rebellion against his Maker, from one disaster to the next, using now the gilt of glamour, now the chrome of glistening hope ?
It is the nature of sin, once like cancer it nestles in the spirit of man, to MAKE him unsettled, and of the power given man, to ENABLE him so to conceive; it is in the nature of his will to NURTURE such opportunities, as of his creativity to keep making new ones when the old ones are too obviously the ludicrous stuff of dreams, an initial thought which he sought to suppress (cf. Romans 1).
HEALING, DIRECTLY DIVINE
But let us revert to mega-design, that massive complexity of provisions, all ordered, organised, some subsumed to others. In this field, last we were considering the wonder of BIRTH, the arrival of new designs by the design-provisions in the original design, things called human babies. Now we turn to the realm of HEALING, one of the mega-design specifications, in some ways similar to birth, since in each case a new product is formed along the lines of the old, with either a direct or indirect work of the power of the Creator.
In the case of the direct work, it is often found, though disease in the nature of the case is far more frequent in operations of the cultures and conditions of this world (as when you have your car serviced by those who do not know that it has wheels, or your personality by those who do not know of the existence of the spirit of man ...), whether in their impact, or you try to work on such a basis in yourself.
Thus Elsie Salmon (cf. SMR p. 339), a Methodist missionary's wife in South Africa around the time of the end of WW II, and somewhat after this, is credited with perhaps 10,000 healings and the work is attested in such works as HE HEALS TODAY, recommended by the then leader of the Methodist Conference in England, Dr. W.E. Sangster. She was moved by compassion to pray for healing, as devastations lay around, and this started the setting for specialisation in incurable diseases, in the medical field, and various medical or legal testimonies of the facts appear.
In England, later, she found the healing success rate fell from near perfect, to around 50%. Now that a miracle is still one whether the incurables are straightly healed always or mostly, is obvious. Salmon explained the change in England in Christ Still Healing. In this volume, we see that the inoculation against faith in England had already then reached something like plague proportions, the people having their traditional Church (State run contrary to the Bible), which sometimes had done well, and was in fact divided into Biblical and anti-biblical segments, with various historical oddities. This movement IN the official religion far from the Bible on the part of many, had created a harsh varnish on the skin of the life, so that to penetrate this became a double work: first the vaccination with its hardening of resistance to simple faith had to be overcome, and then the disease!
Still, dealing with the incurable, and providing in massive numbers, even in a rate falling to 50% is a work of healing. Complexities of disfaith do not alter enormities of design skill to make virtually instantaneous results. Rather does this simply illustrate the necessary attention in man, to his spirit and its jaundice, jollity, dubieties and plethora of pathologies. It is like having cancer: WHERE it comes is interesting. It has many roads, BECAUSE it is there.
God does so act in healing.
Nevertheless, it is not plain gift to any sinner, however sanctified, to cure anyone at any time. There was even in South Africa, one case where Mrs Salmon felt excluded by complexities which had arisen, from further participation. Moreover, the gifts of God are not deity, they are divinely granted within limits, according to the proportion of faith as Paul declares (Romans 12:3). Further, the operation of this gift can create a diversion instead of a confirmation, since many want healing and do not worry about the method or the Master. It is doubtless for some such reason as this that Christ sometimes instructed those whose diseases He had healed, to be quiet about it and not spread the news abroad (Matthew 8:4, Mark 8:30, Luke 5:14, 8:56).
He did not die to defeat disease, a relatively simple task for the Almighty, but to deliver from sin so that the soul could relate to God as a friend in faith. In covering guilt for those who received Him by faith, He did of course remove a whole dimension of disease; but the category was not obliterated any more than death was in the interim before the general resurrection, though He showed Himself as Creator-incarnate, Master of both death and disease. Tests are not finished till He returns, nor reproofs, nor the entire concatenation of sin and sequences from it! The operative power in every dimension, this is continually illustrated in depth and dimensions of God's own choice.
As to healing and the Gospel however: the former is useful, and gracious, but the latter is essential and indispensable. The former must minister to the latter in wisdom, not supplant it in folly. God in our Age, does give divine healing, and the writer has experienced it more than once in amazing ways, though just as a personal mercy (James 5:16), not in terms of the special gift of healing. Yet it does appear as a special gift, one not given to most; and in that magnitude, it is even kept for use at the times and through the gifted people whom God anoints, provided at such points in history and in church situation, that He pleases, who is the General in charge of perspective.
Another quite spectacular, though very quietly run, instance of successive, systematic but still divinely discreet healings on a large scale over a long time is to be found in what started in German Lutheran missionary work in Africa. The name of the site, well-attested, where people have been allowed freely to stay while their spirits were blessed, refreshed, and the Lord was sought, one which started in farming work is this: Kwa Sizabantu.
This famous case in South Africa, now continuing for decades, of healings in a Gospel preaching, Bible teaching milieu for many, now thousands, persists in its remarkable and available course (cf. God's Grace, The revival at Kwa Sizabantu, by Welly due Toit, published 1988 and Revival among the Zulus, 1998, by Erlo Stegan). Indeed, let us interpolate, this special work of witness proceeds to the present, 2016. From time to time, as need arises, God may elect even in private cases, as my own, to heal (cf. James 5:14-15), not so as to remove discipline and care, but to enable works in mind. He is moreover exceedingly gracious and to be entreated in terms of His kingdom and call (cf. Isaiah 38, in the case of Hezekiah).
With this clarification, we return to the point of healing in man, both the programmatic type and its parallels, which for all that, are not MERELY programmatic, for the heart can interfere more or less in many such instances. Thus there is the physiological norm on the one hand, and the spiritually direct on the other. What of the former ?
HEALING, PARTLY-PROGRAMMATIC, OR DIRECTLY SO
Here is one more sub-system of the mega-systematic which we were considering above.
We are in the realm of mega-design, grandly conceived, magnificently wrought, brilliantly achieved, articulately commanded for centuries in the divine depositions of DNA to astonish the world, apparent in the spiritual facilities to breed its Statesmen, resolve its marvels, understand His ways, read His word, find His peace, accept His pardon, be cleansed, reinforced with His power who made them.
Design greets the new-born babe, and healing amazes the great. Whole systems of succouring not only fight disease but restore torn tissue, as by the lamp of the Creator, who even designated the micro-systems on which healing depends, the move from mere maintenance to restoring muscle, skin layers and bone, not to say tone, to shape and function to an extent reminiscent at times of creation itself.
But this is simply restorative as if a bombed city were rebuilt by prior program, now activated till its gardens arise before our eyes, amidst the former desolations.
Minor medical gardeners can help the process, but they do not create it; they seek to supplement it.
By contrast, as we have already seen, the Lord may act in ways yet more manifestly nearer to the creation, frequently restoring tissue or health where no one else could, as in the case of medically 'incurable' diseases. At times, for a little while, perhaps to restore the flagging faith of man, the Lord adds on a large scale, as with Elsie Salmon whose works spread from Africa to England. giving her a name famous for such works of healing. Aptly, she would stress that this was a mere aspect of the important work of Gospel proclamation, and had nothing to do with her as such, she being merely an agent.
PAST THE MEGA-DESIGN FOCUS
Yet God is ultra-systematic, just as He is supra-design in His final movements, being personal and dealing with persons as such. Systematically, designs are His designated handiwork, but MEANING is matrix to the method of His approach to man.
This no power over matter in itself produces, though it can be used as in parables or in cases where the very action is parallel to one, as in the case of the Roman officer who professed himself unworthy to have Christ come into his house, affirming that if Christ would simply SPEAK THE WORD, death would be removed from its onset in the sick person in his home. Christ marvelled at such faith; but the soldier indicated he was accustomed to command, and attached His faith in Christ in a way that was clearly absolute, the opposite of the decline in the English case, mentioned above, re the work of Elsie Salmon.
Design is for purpose, and man is its head on earth, both as being creatively designed and executing design creatively, that being whose stubborn self-will despises design, in masses even affecting not to see it, though none of his own designs come near to being equal to it, and even if, contrary to reality, they were, this would the more exhibit the mega-design marvels of the Creator who makes the powers of imagination and conception, so that man is not merely the REPOSITORY of design and its DNA commands, able to proceed from birth to new generations of man over time, and grasping power and material, continue the race.
Not this alone is he, but the AUTHOR of designs from the designations of deity to allow him to rove conceptually, physically and programmatically in his own pursuits and creations!
The purpose for man is communion with the Maker, friendship with God, with all the works of wisdom associated with so vast a liberty in the ultra-design level, and moving in the meta-design arena.
The divine designation at the meta-design level, includes the bridge back to the Maker. There is no forced march over it, nor does man have to construct it, in the order of the Burma Railway horror of WW II, at the hands of Japan. This Bridge sacrificed itself that it might stand, and was resurrected that it might not fall.
Man is the car. Sometimes he approaches this bridge rapidly, but then there is a screech of brakes and he stops (Hebrews 6:3 is the finale when such spiritual pranks progress too far). Sometimes he sledges off the side, just at the entrance, being entranced with the view of meta-things, and deciding to try for himself. He is very inventive, man, but this does not help here. You would be better off trying to make a new kind of body, than a new way to God! Paul demolished this innovative folly applied to Jesus Christ, from the first (II Corinthians 11, cf. I Cor. 15). Playing God is hard work, and quite futile. Trying to tell Him how and why to pardon is a mere affront which even in dealings with man, were one at fault, could be arrogant: how much more when being dealt with by God!
As to man, as constantly brought out and wrought out before our eyes, not merely in wars inside and outside his heart, but in mockeries of goodness in practice and in word, in miseries inconceivable, sufferings endorsed as if they were prodigies, in senseless acts of pride and peremptory passion, in ignorances by ignoring the obvious (Romans 1:17ff., Ephesians 4:17ff.), and complaints at the consequences, as if blindness were a virtue, and twisted truth were an accessory: in all these dimensions he acts.
His heart is diseased, and as a race, for his chief purpose, deceased. This is the word of the Bible (Ephesians 2, 4), for he is alienated from God, from His life. For his own inception by creation, increasingly, as foretold by Peter (II Peter 3:1-5), for this Age and its end (Answers to Questions Ch. 5), man has increasing contempt. He can hardly choke out his deluded endeavours, as if to massacre truth in the hearts of children by clear refusal to examine the issues freely (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 8, Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3). He becomes an artisan in desecration, distortion of information, suppression of reality, and in murders an exemplar as in Cambodia, USSR (in tens of millions, this or its equivalent), China and the Sudan, to name but few.
While he seeks in this delusive theory or that, the pre-eminence, position, place, pride or dominion, he kills such masses in wars as to make one wonder if death is his master, as indeed in such rebellion can happen, this being PRECISELY what Revelation 6 predicted as man's sin marches on to its ... destiny and he riotously shows the power of God by doing precisely what was foretold.
He clangs his sword, frowns, and even President Putin appears to have ordered a half-dozen Bear bombers to harass Great Britain, as if the Cold War taught nothing very much. Fail to learn, and repeat the lesson; and then repeat it long enough, and the earth becomes uninhabitable. When man is uninhibited, why then the planet becomes more than uninhabited, as Christ indicated (Matthew 24:21-22). It moves to its terminus.
Is it now surprising, that two millenia have past, that His words are coming true in general as in detail ?
UNLESS He intervened, the Lord declared, man's life could no longer endure on this planet. But the prince of this world has other ideas (John 14:30), which are another war, the Bold War on Christ. This too will prove costly, but too much so. Deluded by the diabolical, often assuming the appearance of an angel (as in II Corinthians 11:2-15), found in things called 'churches' long after they have ceased to bear any real resemblance to the what the word biblically means, man makes war on the engines of peace, and assaults the place of mercy. This sort of invasion is seen as in 'synagogues of satan' in Revelation 2:5,9,16,23 as in II Corinthians, while by contrast, a true church, as in I Thessalonians 1-2!, allows Paul to dilate on the differentiae, where there is no other foundation but the LORD'S CHRIST (I Cor. 3:10-11, Luke 2:26).
Man combines his thoughts at the level of meta-design and ultra-design, he makes his gods in and of this world, with the aid of devilish delusion: but the way of peace he has not known. The wars merely verify it, as to their genesis, grounds and results. The Jews had the same disease and it was roundly exposed by Moses as he surveyed the errors into which they would fall (cf. Deuteronomy 32:15-20, and the false gods, newly arisen, steaming into the fray)!
Such did God declare would be the folly of Israel, and such does the New Testament declare was and would be the folly of the Gentiles (cf. II Timothy 3, 4, II Peter 2). What a parallel of disaster to be prelude to the power of grace that comes and will come for many, Jew and Gentile, the former in a sudden reaping! (Ephesians 2:1-12, Zechariah 12:10-13:1).
Man in the 21st century is indeed rather special, for with all his other cultural commotions and demotions of truth, he is even unwilling to consider the history of Israel, where it came from, where it went, what God said would be the reason and the result, and what happened. He imitates ancient Israel in its worse dimensions, as if honour bound not to be left out of things! But Israel, it did not have such an example before it, as the Gentile world now does!
The way of peace they have not known!
It is broadcast by the Bible, whose words that could be blessing to another driver, in another car coming to the Bridge of Truth (John 14:6), millions spurn, though myriads find them. Yet in stirring rebellion, man seeks to obliterate the truth as he seeks to blow up the bridge, which is Jesus Christ, whom it killed. Yet the Lord mocked its empty pride and callow conceptions, by both predicting this action and setting its date (Psalm 2 cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4), and declaring that it was a part of His design, and even specifying in what way this was so, centuries before it so much as happened (Isaiah 49-55). This then became the essence of the Gospel, as predicted (cf. SMR Ch. 9) from the first (cf. Barbs ... 17).
Some of mankind, obeying the supra-design in ways ultra-systematic, have found their Creator, now their Redeemer, their divinely directed exploits testimonies to the power of God from the book of Acts onward. Most will, lost in machinations inglorious, seeking man over man or dream over dream to be drably victorious, each in his spiritual ignominy, mere evidences of power pathological, design ignorance and purpose blindness.
But God has the destiny of man as a race, of his world, and for individuals who cross the bridge, as clear as the design for the structure of persons who prefer their own design and life to that of the Almighty. Each destiny is clear, each in foretaste. That of exclusion, exempt from wisdom, adorns already the earth with miseries unspeakable, machinations detestable and criminal acts against the law and love of God, horrendous as a nightmare, while they bemoan the state of the earth.
Obviously, it must go - in fact it will depart with the heavens, with a loud noise and great heat as II Peter 3 advises, its wicked works, like a factory burnt down, to be disposed of in ignominy and contempt. What remains in consummated life is God Himself, and that astonishing crew who love Him, who found the design of salvation, who were foreknown, who met the Person who is the heart of its plan, and are redeemed by His act. Meta-design is in the personal realm, propositionally clear, structurally abundant, millenium by millenium unchanged; and here beyond the merely made matters of design, passing all its phases is the Creator who made man and creates a new heart in those who return to Him, Creator in construction as in redemption (II Corinthians 4:6).
He in all things is the Marvel and the Wonder, instituting and restoring man by His own wisdom, power and grace, the former from the first, the latter directly by His Spirit, in a gift from above as utter as that of man in His image at the first (Colossians 3:10, John 3, II Corinthians 5:17ff), for all who receive His salvation, Jesus Christ. Thus God is to be found by His people, and the marvel is this, that despite the damage of sin to the work of creation of man, ALL who call upon His own name by faith through grace, and put their trust in them will be saved. Creating gods is a waste of time, a useless excursion into futility, whether they have names or are games of misled gumption and arrogant pretension; but being created by God, regenerated by the One who first generated man, this is the work of truth, the fund of mercy and the finale for life, reaching its consummation, in much now, in more to come. So He takes back His people freely; but none is forced.
These in supra-design concourse, with their Captain (Hebrews 2), one God who is the Saviour, do not trust in His works by themselves, but in Him who does them, In His word and works in delightsome definition, mutually definitive, and they worship Him.
Nor do they praise His curse (cf. Beyond the Curse), but escape it (Hebrews 6:19), by His generosity. This implies pardon and regeneration, which is as free as creation and as abrupt (II Corinthians 4:6, 3:17, Titus 3:4ff.). Its basis is a judicial matter of Christ crucified, as likewise a physical one, His body the badge of power, the testimony of truth (cf. Romans 1:4), that body which none could retain, which He whose it was, took and openly displayed (I Corinthians 15:1-4ff.), as bodies may be displayed. There was the design for destiny, and there was the purity of the program, the giant-hearted centre of free salvation (Romans 3:23ff.).
That it was not spirit but flesh and bones (Luke 24:38-39), Christ was both piercing and penetrating in pointing out! The nails pierced, and the result of resurrection had to pierce the poetic mind or the allegorical attitude no less, to bring it back to fact. Life is in bodies, on this earth, and bodies are the locale for judgment; and His was the lift for the guilt. Reject that and you are as welcome as a fake or fraud in heaven, imagining in arrogance an acceptability which shunts the word and work of Christ into the pit, in order that you might escape it. Not so! This is one of the two impossible to ignore criteria of any salvation (Romans 10:9), and it is biblically defined. Revisionists of God's program may imagine a race for whom their new gospel can apply: it is assuredly, as surely as the word of God and the God whose word it is, that it will never fit this one! (cf. Galatians 1-3, II Corinthians 11, I Cor. 15).
God broke death not in poems, but in physique; God pardoned sinners not in laxity but in agony. As God created, so has He recreated, by power and action determinate and overwhelming; as He was pierced, so are we pardoned; as He was raised so is our inheritance defined in advance and assured in guarantee (Philippians 3:20-21).
It is no puzzle that as His body, of which He is the spiritual Head, His people when all personal trials and tests are over, will arise likewise, from the tomb of this dying world (Isaiah 26:19, I Thessalonians 4), as it is interred, they moved to the finale of eternal life (cf. Daniel 12) in bodies of which His is the prototype and principal portrayal; and it is one now glorified ( I John 3).
This ultra-systematic, supra-design reality supervenes, and so man is led to the supernal, where Christ Himself is to be met at the meta-design level, yes beyond it, sweeping His people past all structure of creation to the very heart of God (Revelation 21-22, I Corinthians 13:12)); and no more will man worship the walls of the temple of life; but the One who made them, Him will His people eternally worship in peace with love.
NOTES
See - SCIENTIFIC METHOD, SATANIC METHOD
AND THE MODEL OF SALVATION
See Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13.
See on relevant Romanism: SMR pp. 832ff., 912ff.,
Ancient Words, Modern Events Ch. 14.
On Communism, see for example:
Tender Times for Timely Truth
Ch.
8;
The Grating Grandeur ... Ch.
2; SMR pp.
925ff.;
Beauty for Ashes Ch. 6 (and Hong Kong, and the movement of nations in the last century a concern),
See TMR Ch. 8 at this point.
*5 See on this topic, for example, the following.
Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13
Swift Witness Ch. 6
Barbs ... 6, 7,
Repent or Perish Ch. 7,
The Bright Light and the Uncomprehending Darkness Ch. 7,
It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls Ch. 9, esp. *1A
Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 7,
SMR pp. 939ff..
See:
Christ's Ineffable Peace Ch. 1,
Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 7
Glory, Vainglory and Goodness Ch. 2, Ch. 6, Ch. 7
SMR pp. 582ff.
Deliverance from Disorientation Ch. 1
See:
A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 12 - All this Rot about Not Believing.
Let God be God Ch. 5
SMR pp. 582ff.
See Dastardly Dynamics ... Ch. 6, and The Temptations of Job for the lustre of temptation for man. This too has application to God as man, since man indeed He became!
By experiencing in the vulnerability and relative weakness of flesh, the chalice of temptation, the attraction of sin to the point of perspective which alternative modes might suggest, Christ showed a multitude of things. Some are listed here.
Firstly, He showed that God is not a bully, but is willing to take on His own part precisely the duress which sin, in its overall licence, calls for and engages. He was willing not only to DIE for the penalty, in mercy, to save some, all who come in faith, but to be TRIED for His own purity of purpose and life, in a form where this was even POSSIBLE!
Secondly, it showed the purity of heart of God, even when tried by human standards.
Thirdly, it showed in particular that when God is put into a form where want and patience are required in a time setting, He does cry out about unfortunate circumstances, such as poverty, but endures and does not bend, yield or commit equivocation or alternation. There is no shadow of turning in Him, not merely because He has no need, but because He is true, sound, and without impediment or error. It is intrinsic, not merely extrinsic.
Fourthly, it provided a sense of brotherhood as in Hebrews 2, for man. Thus His Saviour, though infinite and perfect in glory, yet KNOWS in a practical and unequivocal sense, just what it is to be confronted with unworthy options and quick release, and despatch it with the word of God, as Christ did (Matthew 4).
Fifthly, it showed that Christ was not in His incarnation, made of some special immunity by an unfair motion for test, as if in a cycle race His was the perfectly light bike. He had to endure the weight of things, and could envisage what the devil presented, discern its portent and experience its force, and still jilt it long before the altar!
Sixthly, it allowed the temptation to have intrinsic duress, as with those who long suffer, in that it was not with six beef steaks He came fortified, or in the apathy of wine, but with fasting for 40 days, so that nothing of mere comfort in the flesh enabled a pallid exposure to take its leisurely course. His was an endurance BEFORE temptation, of an exquisite order. Purity has its tests; and those who seek it in Christ therefore have found it.
All this is part of that grand design through which God becoming incarnate, definitively, showed decisively both His own purity, and the necessary purity indeed for sacrifice for sin which He came to provide, in this way attesting that the captain of salvation was worthy before all contest, of taking that place of Saviour which is His by power and eternity.
On the topic of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, its manner, meaning, its implications and applications, see:
Great Execrations ... 7;
Barbs Appendix 3, Ch. 15, Extended Endnote 2,
BIBLE
TRANSLATIONS
33
Acme ...Ch.
11, With
Heart ...Ch.
3,
Spiritual Refreshings ...Ch. 5
The Magnificence of the Messiah, Endnote 1,
Dastardly Dynamics ... Ch. 11, SMR Ch. 6 and Index,
The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 9, Section 14,
Joyful Jottings 25, A Spiritual Potpourri 15, 16,
Stepping out for Christ Ch. 5, Things Old and New Ch. 2, Excursion 2A;
Light of Dawn Ch. 3,
Beyond the Crypt ...Ch. 2;
Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth Ch. 2;
and New Zealand Ch. 6,
The Frantic Millenium ... Ch. 4
Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 5, 6,
Ancient Words, Modern Events Ch.
8 (on resurrection and Lazarus, yes and both with
Jerusalem); contrasting Greek bodily terms -
Let God be God Ch.
2 ;
From Great Execrations, Great Enervations, Greater Grace Ch. 7, somewhat extended here for our present purpose, we have this.
GREATER GRACE THAN
THIS WORLD
HAS EVER SEEN
OR COULD*1
SEE,
COMES FROM ITS KING
He COULD have removed
the earth (and will – Isaiah 51:6, Matthew
He COULD have PLANNED
to remove the earth as part of the entire strategy from the first, when He
CHOSE who would be His (Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:29ff.), at some early stage,
without the patient prodigy of procedure which led to the Messiah and His
costly remedy.
He COULD have chosen
on the basis of simple preference in order to fulfil His wishes, say the
bravest or most choice people, and made this part of His plan. He did not.
He chose many who are low in
intellect – some mighty, to be sure (I Corinthians
He chose many who had been mere
swellings, as far as could be seen, in the river and currents of selfish life,
like Zacchaeus (Luke 19). Indeed,
He COULD have been
remorseless and merciless WITH His people, even after they received Him, but He
was not, forgiving Peter in magnificent style, with tenderness, grace and
goodness.
Of course,
to be fair to Peter, he HAD tried to defend Christ with a sword from His
betrayers, first of all, but apparently confused with the rebuke to put away
his sword, he fled, and then in the multitude of commotions, found himself
declaring THREE times that he did not so much as know Christ, and that in the
very palace of the High Priest!
This was
a lie
a breach of friendship
a disloyalty of the most extreme
degree and
susceptible to the charge of nervous
fear, whether or not this was the actual case.
Christ,
then, gave Peter a mere look as He was being led to judgment: He did not shout
or take derisory action. Then He SAW Peter on the first day of the
resurrection (I Corinthians 15:5), and again as in John 21, days later when
Peter, rich in repentance and desire, discerned Him on the shore, after the
miraculous catch such as had occurred at the beginning of his time with Christ;
and it was then that he rushed to meet Him. We do not know, to be sure, what
was said between them on that first day after the resurrection, but we do know
what happened on this last occasion.
Three times
Christ asked Peter, using the word for friendship as well as religious love,
whether he loved Him. This covered the three denials! It was serenely parallel.
What grace and gentility was here.
Thus we see that while Christ could be vigorous in denunciation to false shepherds (as in Matthew 23! for there few more scorching words have adorned the earth – yet scorching because their scathing exposures were just), this is a Shepherd’s natural fire! Thus, we are not surprised when we find the gracious Martin Luther strong in denunciation of those who caused countless heart-aches among the German people (of which Luther was one). How did they do this ? It was, as Luther began to point out, by twisting the truth and masquerading their system with a pope as if he sat in the very chair and seat of Christ, when He had expressly forbidden having any human masters (Matthew 23:8-10).
How was this
shepherding folly performed then ? It was by the use of a system of such
severity and indeed forcible violence as would make Peter’s thought of using
the sword, a mere trifle by comparison (in the Inquisition, over its centuries
of moral cess). Tender to a point, Luther was most truculent and even
denunciatory to those who caused such human torment.
Did not God
Himself state that He would come down and DO IT HIMSELF, while castigating the
neglect, selfishness, soulless heartlessness and ruinous neglect of priests in
Ezekiel’s day, relative to the people. You can read it in detail in Ezekiel 34
from which an excerpt is here given:
“Son of man, prophesy
against the shepherds of
‘Thus says the Lord God to the shepherds:
“Woe to the shepherds of
“So they were scattered
because there was no shepherd; and they became food for all the
beasts of the field when they were scattered. My sheep wandered through all the
mountains, and on every high hill; yes, My flock was scattered over the whole
face of the earth, and no one was seeking or searching for them.”
‘Therefore, you
shepherds, hear the word of the Lord:
“As I live,” says
the Lord God, “surely because My
flock became a prey, and My flock became food for every beast of the field,
because there was no shepherd, nor did My shepherds search for My
flock, but the shepherds fed themselves and did not feed My flock— therefore, O
shepherds, hear the word of the Lord!
Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I am
against the shepherds, and I will require My flock at their hand; I will cause
them to cease feeding the sheep, and the shepherds shall feed themselves no
more; for I will deliver My flock from their mouths, that they may no longer be
food for them.”
“For thus says the Lord God:
“Indeed I Myself will
search for My sheep and seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock on the
day he is among his scattered sheep, so will I seek out My sheep and deliver
them from all the places where they were scattered on a cloudy and dark day.
And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries,
and will bring them to their own land; I will feed them on the mountains of
“I will feed them in good
pasture, and their fold shall be on the high mountains of
“I will seek what was
lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen
what was sick; but I will destroy the fat and the strong, and feed them in
judgment.
“And as for
you, O My flock,’ thus says the Lord God:
Behold, I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats. Is
it too little for you to have eaten up the good pasture, that you must
tread down with your feet the residue of your pasture—and to have drunk of the
clear waters, that you must foul the residue with your feet?” ’ ”
You see the
love and compassion, the outrage at its abuse by those supposedly caring but in
fact caring largely for themselves. As here, so in Christ, the incarnate Word
of God.
Tender to a
point, like an exquisite doctor with patients, He could caress the very hearts
of his people, and with sympathy excel; yet when they were mauled by false
words and false shepherds, did He not react like any shepherd.
Do you not
find something of this in Luther in his caressing strength towards the
afflicted Germans of his day, in the churches, and his scornful exposure, even
with satire, though he did not at first rush into it, of the recalcitrance of
the unholy squanderers of the divine testimony.
What would
you expect ? That Luther would call wolves ‘different sheep’, with all the
finagling and wangling wrangling of the WCC ? or that their teeth he would
smile at!
So and much
more was the compassion of Christ, who was tender where truth was revered, and
could even understand, with finesse and beauty of holiness, the movements of
the heart of man: He was denunciatory of the fakes and frauds who acted
to take over His sheep in His name by their own methods and self-glorifying and
money-hoarding methods as if personally addressing a spiritual plague! He did all
this full well knowing from the prophecies, that it would assuredly lead
to His death in an agony and anguish vastly more intense, because as for
Him, God as man, sin was wholly alien to His own nature!
|
|
Thus God
did not resent and remove the world because of its treatment of His Son. |
We should
be clear here: since God knows all things in advance, this being like a book to
an author, but one equipped with free characters, who though dimmed and
diminished by sin, are yet able to rebel with the hearts and spirits which HE
made free, He COULD have planned to resent it, what they did to
Christ. He COULD indeed have decided to have some other plan, and to have
nothing to resent. To go further, He COULD have decided that it wasn’t worth
it, and this in either of two ways.
God could
have decided in His own counsel that it was not worth sending His eternal Word
as His Son via a virgin, equipping Him with a visible life that was beautiful
and distinctive of the wonder of deity, though such a plan undoubtedly is what
He pursued. He NEED not; there was no force.
It could
have seemed disproportionate, even gross, to allow such human grossness,
tormented and twisted with lies and folly for thousands of years, to visit
itself on His Son, made vulnerable as a sacrifice to bear the very sin of which
these evils were examples only!
The
Almighty could have resolved, instead, and even more drastically, that it was
not worth while to MAKE MAN AT ALL, thus removing “the problem” altogether. In
this latter case, there would have been no human heart with which to love, no
capacity for divine friendship, no eternal life in which to dwell delightedly
for ever, no fascinated admiration of the intriguing works of His hands, no
provision for creativity among man: for there would be not one of them, no, not
one.
This, quite
astonishingly, He did not do.
|
|
Instead, He
made man, if so inclined, able to swank |
|
|
His DESIGN was to designate the impossible-seeming love in action |
He made mankind, with persons able to persecute and even torture and kill those who love God, as man has done for centuries and more, just as indeed Christ predicted; and He even gave to man such liberty that he could, if he wished, KILL people in CHRIST’s name, as Romanism has done, asserting that this was to the glory of God, with a mendacity and a profanity that must reach to the very depths of the pit (John 16:2).
Further, He knew all this and foretold the scenario; but He pursued the
eternal purpose (cf. Ephesians 1:4, Revelation 14:3) without stinting in His
own sacrifice, and allowing those who would follow Him, to follow in this spirit, even indeed
ensuring that through no error, no misconception, no ruse, would anything ever
separate any one of His own people from His love. These things may be pursued
in their beauty further in
Predestination
and Freewill, and Tender Times for Timely Truths
Ch. 11.
For all
that might have been thought and said, in fact, God did NOT resolve not to make
man, or even to make him instead with only programmable functions, which would
satisfy some, but give no scope for love or the knowledge of truth, or the
infinitely delightful comradeship of man with God (cf. A Spiritual
Potpourri
Ch. 16 – Flashing
Falls of Freedom). Instead, God made man, equipping him duly with a
constructed marvel of magnificent facility, his body and brain, and with his
spirit.
What a
wonder and a glorying in the Lord this permitted, for many! What a maestro of
muddle and confusion, pride and vainglory, vanity and idiocy, brilliant folly
and fallacious frenzy many of the race nevertheless have elected to become.
ALL have
sinned, and adding to this, many proceed by ignoring, twisting or denying God’s
word, and their conceptions of His being, though in His book, it is very clear,
valid, verified and minutely left standing after all attack on it and assault
is finished. It is the same with the Son whom God sent.
Yet the
cost was penetrating, piercing, in His Son. When they had QUITE finished
tormenting His flesh, mocking His Spirit, mauling His body, pretending His
guilt (despite Pilate’s formally washed hands!), attacking His doctrine (with
never any success), assaulting His healing ministry when it happened on a
Sabbath (though quite willing to pull out a cow if it fell on a Sabbath into a
pit), vehemently arguing against Him (Luke 11:52ff.), interring His body after
exposing it to the skies with the blood dripping off, and the breath being
depressed as the arms sagged over the hours of the crucifixion: THEN they still
failed.
What they
could not prevent was quite simply the FAILURE to produce His body after the 3
days which He set as the term for its being dead, before it would rise. HE was
unable to be shown wrong even when State and Religious Power, in inglorious
communion, had done their worst.
WHERE was
the body, since they had been TOLD from ancient times and repeatedly from the
lips of Christ that NOT ONLY would He rise from the dead (which, incidentally
does NOT mean, NOT rise – cf. Luke 24:38-39), but would do so at an
arithmetically distinct time, precisely THREE days after the burial.
To the delight of His friends, the joy of His apostles, the
wonder of many, the turning of the tables on fraud, lying and deceit, the
overturning of the power of the devil, the dealing of death to death and
destruction to destruction, the elevation of mercy in glad glory over judgment,
He met judgment and ruined its results by gladly bearing them. Convinced, His
disciples spoke; oppressed they spoke; in prison, they sang; in torments of
whipping, they praised God for the privilege (Acts 3-10), in confrontation,
they fearlessly noted the murder and resurrection; told to cease, they
continued; rescued from prison, they spoke again in the face of their
tormentors; at peace they knew no weakness, in prayer, they abounded in
endurance (Acts 4:22ff.).
How then
did God do it ? We know why; but how ?
One obvious
reason is this: the maximum planning of man, with soldiers and tombs, with the
stark and customary reality of death in his face, is not adequate to displace
the intention and planning of God; and this does not cease to be so,
EVEN WHEN GOD ANNOUNCES this in advance, as He very frequently does! (cf. SMR
p.
743). There is no limit to God.
The
experimental test is clear: man failed, God succeeded. As to the rest of the
resurrection*3, His eating in their
presence, His calling to them in their boats, His conversation with Peter in
the midst of the other disciples, His differentiation about the different death
modes to come for Peter and for John (accurate as always – John 21), His
invitation to Thomas to try out the substantial character of His wounds by
using fingers (a fitting rebuke, both personally and procedurally!), and to the
disciples as in Luke 24, to verify for themselves that a SPIRIT does not have
FLESH and BONES as He did: it is one long narrative of simplicity and
testimony, of data and procedure according to plan.
In John 14,
16-17, you see Him telling that after His death, He will be going to be with
His Father (John 14:2, 25ff., 16:7, 16:29, 32ff.), when He is ready, and in His
own time returning in JUDGMENT so that all should be judged as the case
requires.
In Matthew
24, you see Him telling of what would happen after His death and return to His
Father, over long periods involving much international commotion and
development, in which the Gospel would be preached to all nations. He would
then RETURN to judge (24:29 to the end).
In Luke 24,
you find Him telling them,
“O foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all
that the prophets have spoken! Ought not the Christ to have suffered these
things and to enter into His glory ?”
In all
things the plan went according to plan, and the words, whether ancient or from
Christ’s own lips, were to be fulfilled without any exemption or exception, any
cavil or qualification, as always is the case with the word of God (cf. Isaiah
44:25ff., 48:6ff., 41:21ff.). If it were otherwise, there would be no
Christianity, and Christ would have been a mockery (as in Mark 2!) long before
it was found necessary to deprive Him of life on this earth (to the point of
killing His formatted frame), as an exasperated and guileful grasp on life and
national power was held out (John 11:49ff.), for the taking. HE goes, WE say.
ONE goes, the nation stays.
They have
merely inherited infamy. The nation inherited devastation, and the continuation
of its unbelief, brings it untold suffering to this day; and who cannot lament
for such things, so unnecessary in the very face of the love of God, so
slighted, with such sad results.
The highest
minds of His day, these could not answer His answers, taint His power, spoil
His ministrations, exhibit any weakness. They could not stop Him raising
the dead (John 11), nor when His time came, could they find the body,
since He was freely walking about with it. The greatest Empire on earth could
not keep His body, since God has His own ways of moving things and removing
things, which depends on His entire comprehension of, and planning for what is
to be. The author has great rights over His book, though in the events before
us, THIS AUTHOR who is DEITY HIMSELF, is careful not to make of the test which
we all face, a farce, by removing the suffering or obscuring the issue.
So Christ
suffered in the grandeur of grace, performed in the illimitability of power, and
did so in a body so frail that, like those we have ourselves, it could be
snuffed in hours, and rose in the reliability of deity, allowing no rest for
Rome or for Jerusalem alike, so that thousands came in short measure, after His
death, knowing His return was to come, and seeing His Spirit (as in Acts 2) had
come already as He promised (John 14, 16).
“I now rejoice in my
sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions
of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church.”
(See for
exposition of this,
To Know God …
Ch. 1.)
Carefully
marking the place of the tomb (they were not mad! Luke 23:35, or inhuman in
their grief!), they returned to find the action of deity, not in destroying
Twin Towers, but in raising the twin towers of Truth and Mercy in His Son, so
that those who would believe in Him would see both the suffering and the sense
of glory. NO ONE CAN BEAT GOD, but God does not simply beat man; for man is not
so made: rather, He provides for Him astutely, even in the very MIDST of his
sin, by exposing Himself to evils untold, by plan, and overcoming them in
suffering, by plan, and overturning them in ignominious defeat, by plan, so
that in all things man might see the work for himself as image-bearer of God,
and might savour the victory.
It is not
to suffering-free selfishness, like some slug leaving its silver trail on the
surface of the earth, that man is called; for man is not the centre, but a
derivative from deity’s creation. It is not in vainglorious self-affirmation,
for the selves which do so, are merely blind to the glory of the God who made
them. It is however WITH suffering and in the MIDST of the glory of God that
the children of God work, with the same power which raised Christ from the dead*4available, and the same sharing of ignominy as
the case may require, as the Prince of this World blows his horns, and
arrogantly asserts his place.
Yet it is
not his place, and so brings judgment. Hence there is CONVICTION OF JUDGMENT
for those who disbelieve in this ONLY PROVISION of Almighty God for mankind.
Consider
then the multiplying graces which, accelerating in speed before our astonished
eyes, present themselves as they pass. Let us look at just some glimpse of a
few of them, as tokens.
He cares
ENOUGH TO CREATE, and having created enough to PROVIDE, and having provided,
enough to be AVAILABLE, by His Spirit (I Peter 5:7, Ephesians 3:16,
Romans 5:5, 8:10ff..)
His is
LOVING. There is really nothing to equal that. A mother, imperfectly but even
passionately may care for her child, even to old age in one sense. My own
devoted and blessed mother lived to 99 years, and her solicitude did not cease,
nor her kindness. But God created the SYSTEM in which love might appear, and
could have ignored this, and done otherwise.
Love in Him is ORIGINAL and ULTIMATE: God is love (I John 4:7ff.). This, we must always realise, does not mean that LOVE IS GOD. That is nonsense. Principles do not make themselves and kick about the universe. God whose omni-competence is the basis of all thought and order, IS LOVE. NOTHING contrary appears in Him. Nothing compromising to it is with Him. There is no quality which dispenses with it, censures it or withholds it, in Him.
Love is practical. It does not merely teem with thought, abound in purpose and then fold its hands. It acts. It has concern for its object, for outcomes.
That is why the plan of salvation was no mere plan, but involved the Planner providing in Himself what only HE could provide: absolute purity for the standards of heaven, absolute immolation for the burial and blight of impurity, absolute eviction from all society, for the exhibition of the nature of sin and its judgment, absolute blight for its bite, absolute power for its triumphant exposure as the assessment of God on man, transferred to Himself, who being absolutely pure becomes absolutely potent in the provision of bodily resurrection, where the action is, where man is, where need is, giving absolutely no rational excuse for unbelief, and every witness from a millenium before, to two after it, of the inexpungeable inability of man to alter the predicted course, falsify the divinely inscribed power or interfere with the divinely executed mission of salvation, to the uttermost point of the actual Gospel of grace, integrating all these things in one, to the last detail, as it was foretold.
Thus love and Lordship, power and precision, words and outcomes, plans and performance all match like the elements of some exquisite tartan. The Creator has become the Saviour, the inventor of practicalities has been practical and the make of man has shown in the form and format of man, the outcome for man, not based on the power it took, but placed where it operates: so does love love, not in power as the mode, but in power as the emplacement, not in detail as its mode, but in detail as its expression. Creation from first to fall, from fall to fact in the impugning of Christ and His evacuation from the tomb (I Cor. 15:1-4), from curse to blessing, from damnation's demands to salvation's conferments, is in the heart of God, and it is brought to its end in what was foreseen from the beginning.
See for example, Dastardly Dynamics Ch. 10, and the broader context of News 87.
See *10 above and *16 below. Consult also Glory, Vainglory and Goodness Ch. 4
See
Israel Ch. 1, Let God be God
Ch. 4,
Outrageous Outages ...
Ch. 11,
Gracious Goodness
Epilogue,
Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch.
2,
Journey to God Ch.
6 (angelic overview), BB
Appendix-News; and
verse
in it;
The Divine Drama
Ch. 10
SMR
Chs.
8-9, It Bubbles ... Ch. 10,
Galloping Events Ch. 4.
Grand Biblical Perspectives Chs.
3, 4, 5
See *13 above and *16 below. See also John 12:35-40.
"Jesus heard that they had cast him out; and when He had found him,
He said to him,'Do you believe in the Son of God?'
"He answered and said, 'Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him?'
"And Jesus said to him,
'You have both seen Him and it is He who is talking with you.'
"Then he said, 'Lord, I believe!' And he worshiped Him.
"And Jesus said,
'For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.'
"Then some of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these words, and said to Him,
'Are we blind also?'
Jesus said to them,
'If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say,
"We see." Therefore your sin remains.' "With this see John 3:16-19. The love of God for the world (and not this alone, cf. Colossians 1:19ff.) does not obviate liberty which in its absence, would obviate love. HIS own liberty is to come NOT to judge the world, but that it might be saved. The liberty, which in His own wisdom He ensures is valid and operative in HIS sight, though it be lost in man's sin, is not massaged into nullity, but honoured, so giving man responsibility (Col. 1:19ff. with John 3:17 and 3:19). This means irrational, disorderly and self-centred or sundering preference for what is contra-creation and contra-light and truth is its own seal.
See *13 above. See also SMR pp. 422Eff., 422Qff., Chs. 3, 4,
It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls Ch. 9.
See II Peter 1:19, Isaiah 44:24-45:8.
In the most general nature of prophecy, and its overall portent, including the functionality of the plan of salvation, consult the following.
That God who created rather than abandoning the delight of wonder inherent in having those in His image, as a gift for them to experience in the felicities of divine fellowship, is wise and powerful enough to perform this, is the first ingredient in the plan. That God so loved that it deemed to worth while is the equal first.
That He cared to endure the Cross to redeem the vast enterprise of having created human freedom, is the third. That He did not quash man but delivered by His own pangs, is the fourth.
That He used the power of creation to resurrect the corpse of His eternal Son from the grave, so that He might fulfil all the predictions concerning Him, which validated and verified Him (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4, SMR Chs. 8-9), including the three days of the interment, the date around 30 A.D. for the resurrection and before that climax, and might consummate the many healings wrought before that by the Messiah (cf. Isaiah 29,35), as required: this was the fifth. Christ evidently hallowed this (Matthew 26:52-56).
That He faced easy 'escape' from the duress that sin created in the face of divine enterprise and love, this was the sixth; for He could have slaughtered with the power that resurrected Lazarus and healed thousands; but did not. His aim and means are constructive (John 3:17); and only in the ultimate does judgment according to truth come (John 3:19), when man by mismanagement and folly strips off all access to mercy, and God sees it so.
In this He gives WITHIN His plan of salvation FOR man, an example IN man of life that lives, instead of dying wickedly or woefully, in Iraq, in China, in Sudan, in South African and allied Aids epidemics, whether from sin or in its entrails, without escape. He gives the everlasting triumph of life over death, mercy over judgment and kindness over corruption.
Plagues are in the plan of salvation (cf. Member Notes 1), but only as accessories to remind those who fail, of the price of success and to stir to seek it, and that in and from Christ Jesus who alone has shown the power to overcome evil and manifest truth with mercy and grace apt for the needs of man (cf. TItus 2-3).
If you stay in a poisoned balloon, you need good respirators surrounding your body. Suffering is not sin, but sin causes it, and God does not evacuate it, preferring in His divine PLAN OF SALVATION Himself to endure infinitely, as sin encroached on the divine being, shattering for a time the eternal fellowship in the format on earth of the Christ who came in love. As planned, He rose to eliminate the death and proclaim the access to eternal life of those who repent from the brink of ruin; and so has He made things simple.
In His power, as shown in the above excerpt, He continually and constantly then exhibited His life through the Holy Spirit as shown extensively in the Book of Acts.
All this was planned, predicted in substance and done. Indeed, if it had not been in mind, then God would not have created man at all; but being both loving and wise, omnipotent and creative of all and not just some of the ingredients of beauty and wonder, He proclaimed it and did it, and did it in detail as pre-announced, as fitting with such majesty and needed for such as man!
Isaiah 51:16 confirms to us just such an insight, as the Lord having identified as the Messiah, the One 'an Israel in whom I will be glorified', the redeeming Messiah (49:3,6), victorious where the other Israel failed (as in Isaiah 30:8ff.), He then discloses of this ultimate Israel, this final prevailing One with God, His mind concerning the condition of creation, the ground for its arrival. He has called that hidden 'Israel', the Christ, the Messiah into incarnation that He might plant the earth and the heavens. Without this, as in Colossians 1:19ff., God in His passion for mercy (cf. Micah 7:;19ff.) would not have acted. Only with the solution in mind, did He create the wonder which man having fouled in his fall, would require redemption.
Love does not act without wisdom, when God is concerned, not wisdom without power, nor is there fanfare, but function, nor horror but felicity overcomes.
So has God planned, designed devices and instituted procedures, knowing the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46) as is normal in grand designs and profound perspectives.
His plan is to return and abstract His church at last from its sufferings and testimony, as the tides of divinely appointed destiny reach their neap, and wickedness does in the whole earth more of what is happening now in the Sudan: clashes with God and man as man makes for his own end.
Then in God's designed program, He thwarts the foolish false prophecies that flesh man invents, inveterately dissatisfied with truth and incontinently awry from love (cf. Isaiah 44:24ff.), with overwhelming power and unquenchable truth, and judging gives the earth its true due. This grand development arrives at length like Spring after the rigours of Winter and blizzard. Then is peace found, and the earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). Yet does this satisfy the censorious, remedy the rebellious or assuage the activist ? Not at all, for a last vast effort to dethrone God lusts into being.
Judgment then proceeds inexorably (cf. *14 above) after the millenia of opportunity and testimony as in Revelation 19-20. Who are its recipient and to whom does judgment come ? It is to those who hate the light, whose inveterate hostility to truth, to the fact that ONLY GOD CAN BE GOD, being eternal omniscient and almighty, as well as loving to the ultimate and the uttermost, would make even of heaven a hell indeed of frustrated rage and folly!
In this design for history (cf. News 87, *10 above, Dastardly Dynamics Ch. 10), God exhibits His power, love, patience and wisdom, achieving as available for eternity the results of the laboratory of human freedom in the presence of evil powers (see ); and He relieves into eternal life those who are found in His offer of wonder in the Person who, from eternity, is His own eternal word and who, declaring this truth, does what truly is divine.
This He does in granting absolutely free access to eternity with the God of all comfort and peace, vitality and ability, power and glory (cf. Revelation 5, 21-22), without the use of force to achieve it. On the contrary, born of love, those who are His are granted what they love. Liberty that requires love, now has it; and love that desires liberty, finds its source in recourse to the divine plan of salvation, the DESIGN of God for man.
On DNA and language, and the word of God speaking matter into life (Genesis 1),
consult, for example:
The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test Ch. 2,
Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed: Barrister of Bliss ... Ch. 4,
The Wisdom and the Wit ... Ch. 2,
The Desire of the Nations, Ch. 2, Epilogue,
SMR pp. 131-145.
The work of words, symbolic of concepts, elements of understanding, gear for commands, objects of expression on agreed lines, or intuited ones, is the product of what has what it takes to conceptualise, order, imagine, construe and share, which is at least intelligence, and since this is useless without an operational medium, being otherwise merely an abstract thought which does not act, of mind. Symbol and its interpretation, interpretation and performance of the same, performance and facilities for such action, these are interwoven like the limbs of a tree with the trunk, mutual requisites, co-operative functionalities (Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed: Barrister of Bliss ... Ch. 4),
What is to address which with this quality of intelligence ? Why, what can use it, deploy it, for its function is the essence of our task to determine... What can deploy intelligence but what is cognisant of the enterprise and can requisition the ingredients for its fulfilment, and what can do this but will and what with will but power and what with power but apposite power and what with that but application of it, and with that but creative facility!
Find in what lacks it, the power to do it, the equipment and the resource, and you have empirical science developing where it has never done, using what it has never found, exhibiting what has neither structure to behold nor result to contemplate in all observation, and thus you would have matter making new excursions where it by no means ever consents to go, stimulate it as you will; for its milieu, while causatively the product of startling, systematically efficacious imagination, does not possess it (cf. SMR p. 80 ). It insists on relying on the domain which it does not inhabit, that of legislating creativity, the etiological entrant required. It does not rely on its own intelligence, information production, ultra-systematic production of systems, for it lacks these as a thistle lacks figs.
As it is, in evolutionary romancing, modern mythological reformulations of the old Greek efforts to have creation make itself by itself, when missing (Spiritual Refreshings... Ch. 13): you have monstrous imposition on poor old matter, to make a grandmother act as a strongman! or an infant as a genius, paper as poet or aerodrome as producer of planes, since they are often found together (Secular Myths and Sacred Truth).
From Red Heart, Dead Heart, and Pure Heart Ch. 6, we have this on the bin Laden episode (slightly adapted and considerably extended, for our present purpose). .
Now, it is stated, Judge Bruguière is acting more like a professor. He is enlightening American law enforcement agencies from his results of years of ardent pursuit of the al-Qaeda complex, which proved so arresting to him earlier, apparently because of its ultra-mundane destructiveness; for indeed it seems to act as if all on the planet but itself and its allies, were encroaching on a life better extinguished; but if not entirely this, then at least this should be the 'fate' of its symbols, power and panache which dares to diverge from the hostilities of the disenthroned Islamic militancy!
SUBMIT! is its cry, but to what is this delight applied ? It is to a vision that is derelict in derivation, anti-verified in application and the work of a false prophet by the simple and empirical biblical criteria which requires fulfilment, not failure! (cf. Deuteronomy 18:19-22).
This is, after all, most reasonable, and the more so when the alleged 'god' is given the imperial position of being almighty! as in Islam! (cf. SMR pp. 829-831); nor should factual error and contradiction be the work of the all-knowing! (cf. SMR pp. 1080ff.). Religion does not becomingly cease to be rational; for it is no part of being creative to simply fail in factuality!
Thus as earlier reported, bin Laden pines, according to evidence collected, for a world in which the 'glories' of Moslem possessions will be restored (cf. The Lord is the Light of My Life Ch. 8, *1). In view, however, of the way it has shown in many past instances of 'possessing' things, it is clear that this would be an assault on God Himself, securing for an idol of vulpine appetite for the souls and often the substance of men, a glory which is illusory (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Barbs 30).
That of course is one reason why it has not worked: what is not true may for a little surge by mere force, but in the end, despite all its writhings and contrivings, it does not because it cannot work. (Cf. SMR pp. 840, 829-831, More Marvels ... Ch. 4, The Lord is the Light of My Life Ch. 3). Currently, it lies exposed in its dereliction, stunningly for all to see. Small wonder a certain madness grips many, who want to MAKE it work! as if to operate a steam-shovel by hand effort alone, while the thing is shut off.
It will not work ( Cascade ... Ch. 12, pp. 155ff., The Impregnable Tower Ch. 1
Cascade of Truth ... Ch. 4; Dastardly Dynamics ... Ch. 10 ); and this is the testimony and tale of all the acrid totalitarian graspings either to end Israel on the one hand, this being a guaranteed site for the Lord's action, on its return, or to make mere force the sceptre, however much the effort continues, till the time comes.What time is that ? It comes when the prophetic key comes. When is that ? It is when the antichrist in Europe makes his wishes known amid the vast rule he now estimates to be without control or limit, monetary and military power enshrined in vainglory (cf. Revelation 13). What are these wishes ?Poor devoted devil, his wish is to be as God, and he is destroyed in the brightness of the Lord's coming (II Thessalonians 1 and 2:4ff., cf. *13 above and Biblical Blessings Ch. 2, Dastardly Dynamics ... Ch. 10, Regal Rays of Revelation Ch. 12.)
But what now ? what is the next step in the devolution of man, that profound regress to the diabolical digression of Eden, that lust with the words, 'Has God said!' ringing in the aspirant ears of the now yet more decisively deviating human race ? It is the parody of life, known as the DANCE OF THE SUBSTITUTES!
*17 See Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 8.
From Predestination and Freewill Section III, we have this which follows inset below, on the simple complexities and designed marvels of the mind of God as it works on the creation, and especially on man.
No simplistic situation vexes the grandeur of His movements, or erases the monuments of His actions. Predestination is His realm of certitude, where nothing is missed; the Cross is His tool of selection, where none are ignored and all are invited (Luke 14, Colossians 1:19ff.); eternity is the site of His wisdom and time the barometer of events. Neither specious hypocrisy, trying to extract good things from God as an instrument for self, nor pompous pronunciamentos, as if to steal the mouth of God for the mind of a man (Matthew 23:9-10), neither invincible-seeming powers that love to strut but end the mut, nor helpless-seeming weakness, which calls on God and leaves an astral path in the midst of a world below in its muck, neither Stephens (Acts 7) nor Pauls (I Corinthians 4, II Corinthians 4, II Timothy 4), nor Davids nor Zechariahs (Matthew 23:35-37) are in vain.
Their sufferings speak, their endurance counts, their spiritual sustaining by God glorifies Him and exhibits His love, while their messages of reproof, of mercy, of power in God and of goodness and lovingkindness in His heart to those who take heart and receive Him as Saviour and as Lord, as God indeed, echo and rebound, accrue and do not die. Their lives are ransomed, are restored by His eternal redemption, which achieved at a point in time, in Jesus Christ, covers all time and is offered to all persons separated from Himself.
Even where time demits, love remits, God having foreknown His own, able to find them from the beginning who are His in the end (John 3:17, II Timothy 1:9-10, Ephesians 1:4, Colossians 1:19ff., John 15:24 with Matthew 11:21, The Glow of Predestinative Power Ch 4, Ch. 10 below). On no account is any lost who might be won, does force become a criterion (Luke 19:42ff.), though the divine yearning be profound, nor does mercy find rebuttal in the irrelevant in the face of the Almighty.
Nevertheless, what rejects the Lord in time has no other way, and what fouls His Fatherhood with folly to the end, ignores His Gospel and evades His provisions by perilous preferences of darkness, is condemned already (John 3:19). Heaven is hell to such, and the journey is not forced! (cf. The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy Ch. 11). The passion of love is too profound to be contained in time, but not so profound that time does not display it when its parameters are present, the Gospel is sounded and the case is clear. The men of Tyre would indeed rise up in judgment on some cities of Christ's day, not because they were moral, but because the FINAL REALITY was directly presented to them, God seen in the face of Christ Jesus, incarnate Deity, and directly at work (cf. John 5:19ff.), and yet they failed to believe.
Tyre is cited as a place where repentance WOULD have come 'with sackcloth and ashes' IF the mighty works of Christ had been done then (Matthew 11:21-22). Since He asserted that those in confronted in Jerusalem would have had 'no sin', that is no sin relevant to judgment and condemnation as in the context, if He, Christ had not both done and spoken what no other had ever done, it is indicated that this is a superior situation that the Judaeans enjoyed, compared to that of Tyre. They, confronted by the truth in Person, did not repent. IF Tyre had been, however, so conftroned, by contrast, it WOULD have repented. That is the empirical fact, stated by Christ.
Based on equitable comparison, this is an indication that some in Tyre may be the Lord's when the final foreknowledge and predestination annals are open.
The case cannot be conceived as incomparable, as if the appearance of the Messiah out of time and in this place rather than first in Israel, would make it an astral act of amazing impact: that would not by comparison bring shame to the Jerusalem of Christ's day. If this were in mind, then reference to a hypothetical Tyrian repentance, as an example of the guilt of the Israel of Christ's day by contrast, would simply not be applicable. Yet it is applied relentlessly by the King of Truth. Tyre may indeed, therefore contain some who will in that day be found to be His, disclosed in the celestial record from divine foreknowledge, not based on works, but on the finding of the lost through the Gospel, with all that love and power have to present.
Similarly, as in Romans 2, some of the ignorant Gentiles, at that same day, may be found to be His, people who IF so confronted as Bethsaida had been, would have repented. All are open and liable to judgment under the Law of God (Romans 3:19), but these times of ignorance God has passed over to the point of appointing one Man to be judge in that Day (Acts 17:30-31). Therefore came the command to repent as Paul applied it. Now had come the day of salvation (II Corinthians 6:1-2). The Gospel presented in the power of the Spirit and the truth of the word does not need further. The case closes on this, like the caress of a mother to a child; whereas the judgment closes on this, when it is rejected, like the jaws of a shark. Ignore mercy and judgment sits, indeed has sat already (John 3:18).
It is not what they did in their works or would do; it is their reception or otherwise of Christ, which counts. The question is what with the same presence and power direct, of Christ, would have resulted in them, in the grace of God as foreknown in entirety, when a parallel impact was made to that in Judea in the day of the Lord.
The Gospel is the ONLY way and Christ is the ONLY door, but this very fact means that what WOULD repent in HIS presence is passing a final test. To be sure, it is not a simple matter of human will choosing God for this is precluded by the Bible repeatedly (John 1:12, Romans 9:16, John 15:1-7, Ephesians 2:1-12, I Corinthians 2:14); it is God who sovereignly chooses. Yet neither is it a matter of opaque mystery, for while God does the choosing, He also does the stipulation of His principles, preferences and priorities, which are these: that He WOULD HAVE ALL to be reconciled to Himself.
Not merely is it Tyre, but all, whom He WOULD have (Colossians 1, I Timothy 2, I John 2:1-2). This, in Christ who has definitively displayed the divine nature, is as operative in foreknowledge as on earth, in predestination as in history. Predestination is not a bogeyman, but a blessing; not a blight but an assurance that the high principles of divine love will not be lost in circumstance. They are found in Him and applied to the world as HE WILL. Not circumstance which may preclude the Gospel, but Christ is the criterion. What then of salvation ? The work of God is personal, His designs systematic, His rule regal in knowledge, perfect in mercy, passionate in love, irrevocable in judgment, invincible in seeking, glorious in accuracy.
Hence this part of that foreknowledge which leads on to predestination does not differ in PRINCIPLE from what Christ showed when on earth, where indeed he who had seen Him had seen the Father (John 14). In principle, He explains the result: I would but YOU would not! It is negative preference as read by God which is CITED (John 3:19). It is this: despite the DIVINE DESIGN in sending the Christ to earth (John 3:16), NOT to condemn but that the world might be saved (John 3:17), there is met nevertheless in many, this clearest of outcomes, in simple negation (John 3:19 cf. Christ's Ineffable Peace and Grace Ch. 2).
As in Colossians 1, I Timothy 2, John 3, it is the same. There is ONE GOD, there is ONE WORLD, there is ONE LOVE for it which has ONE positive desire, that whosoever believes be saved, and one negation, any divine motive to condemn. With this by contrast, there is affirmed the divine motive that the world might be saved. He did not say that He came into this world that a segment might be saved, through the love of the segment; but that He came into the world that it might be saved, expressly without judgment in mind.
How are these ingredients stated ? They are categorical between man in the world and God in heaven. What is the motive for all ? Love. What is the non-motive for God ? Judgment. What is the cause of the same when it nevertheless hits man ? It is man's preference for darkness, despite the divine motive, power and plan. Trying to reconstruct some deity who thinks otherwise is indeed mysterious; but mutant. God however does not change! He says what He means and does so not only in principle but in practice (Christ's Ineffable Peace... loc. cit.). God has always known the eternal outcomes, but here we are dealing, He is dealing with the incomes, the will and mind of God as to love.
Those who think they know better than God may have it their way, but for us, what He says, goes. Not only is this always so with God, it is the more so where love is concerned! Who can know the mind of God, so let His word teach us!
God has comprehended all that He might save some; and seeking for all, ignored none. His wisdom astounds and His depth is infinite, no height lies beyond Him whose designs are a delight and whose deployments decisive, nor does any depth elude His penetration. Past system but not without it, personal in profundity, glorious in wisdom, God who made man personal, soars over mere system like a bird over the valley, and yet uses it, as when it lands, where it belongs.
EXCERPT
God can allow the chains of continuity to confine a situation, to mar it economically, psychologically. He can allow events to preach through His systematic nonintervention where appropriate, in one sense. He can, to use a figure, allow the nature of things to "talk" to the nature of men who will not talk to God.
He can allow this over the centuries; over a family history; over an organisation; in State relations.
He can test and judge a generation by its opportunities and undertakings in using available means not least, divine aid on divine terms to focus the Gospel. He could send angels to 'preach; He could have a celestial television service. All this defeats a purpose of humility, service, testing, law, cause and effect; it defeats a grace and quality of God: and He does not do it.
God is not an individualist any more than He is a socialist. He prizes and can set infinite power about one individual; but He who made families doesn't stop there. There are certain types of group histories; and He tries, tests and judges these too. There are componential histories, series of correlated events at one level of a personality or society; and in His own way, He can try these too.
There is a sense in which the stones can talk. There is an order that bespeaks unaltered resolves. But with all this there is still God, greater than and still giant over His system. Indeed, without His will, purposes and creation, there is and can be no system.
The blind appearance of the orderly execution of vast moral principles comes from the blind disbelief which prevents seeing 'eye to eye' at the creaturely level, with God.
When God is known on His sovereign terms, He can conduct a man, a family, a tribe, a nation, a society through a series of events; and if we are to speak of System, then these are now interwoven into the coterie of express purposes, shall we say determined plans which move in the area of that prepermeated, prepenetrated and now instituted and activated system.
An author can allow his characters the 'grace' of active investigation and vivid involvement within him; or he may give them subordinate place, allowing more elemental forces155* to shape and fashion them in various ways not guarding their integrity.
Now when we come to history as a vehicle of election, the situation is in one respect quite similar. We may ask why He does not apply the Cross test in some bureaucratic bustle (or regal rustle) that ensures that mathematically specifiable conditions are met in the efficient challenge, conditioning, consignment program; we may ask why infant and cannibal are not alike in the embrace of this severely rigid system, allowing no anomalies.
The thought savours of the febrile abstractionism of which we first spoke. God is not an agent for the specialist whose limited conception of some part of His work is suggested as the rationale for His whole procedure.
He has the past to consider. There has been much sown. He it is who instituted the relationship between sowing and harvest. There is little more obviously and acutely awesome in historical procedure than that relationship at the moral level. Do not the deepest dramas so often leave us aghast and yet morally replete as we see the vast consequences most subtly stealing into position the results of intemperate acts, immoderate attitudes to things moderately known, arrogant autonomy or servile pretence? And is not He most of all involved? And is not He in fact most of all' as He is, in such cases forgotten?
Can we legislate by some intellectual censorship that God should not do this? Can the offended and neglected Father remain personal in appearance to those who choose system; or to put it more exactly' should He wish so to do Is not system fine fare for those who want it?
And may He not redemptively in particular, wish by the mixture of the quietness (and prophetic predictability) of His strategic movementls156* and the power of His eventual involvements157* ; the frailty of His messengers158* and the resources of the message159* for those who take recourse, in living style, to the Author of it; the suffering of His evangelising missionaries160* , and the replenishment others find through them161* ; through these and a myriad other considerations162* : may He not wish thus to reprove, to teach, to conciliate or to test by that very method of spread (in terms of a supplemental but intrinsically fitting impact) which He selects for His Gospel!
It would seem somewhat arbitrary to negate this; on the other hand, it would seem somewhat unintelligent if this were not so, for Someone with all the resources of infinitely delicate and perfect control at all stages and phases of history, as outlined in partly hypothetical terms, but substantially Scriptural elements. Redemptively, socially, personally, He has counsels which wonder may explore163* in the mutual revelations of history and Scripture; but which reason cannot condemn. {It is not merely that it has no propriety; it has not even any ground!}
Now perhaps some strong test tries the fault plane of someone's character. Has he not meanwhile been able to call on God? Or some servant of God is pinpointed in error and hurled to the dust164* . Is he not able to learn? There is solidity at ground level where professedly his feet abide165* . The ignorant falls in his way; he calls on his idols (physical, moral or mental) to help, and he is not helped. Frequently he and his hearers are being prepared to hear what God is preparing to bring to them or to their people. Sometimes the preparation is long: meanwhile the senders are judged and tested (in their relation to the Godless (this rendering of the term seems more expressive), and to the evangelising command of Christ).
There is a deep involvement of many causes; history, personality, braggart, rebel, weakling, the immoral, the warlike, the nation, the family, individual or clique; there are biological, intellectual, spiritual, moral components with past and future; there are laws acridly objective to those glorying in the objective166* , but personally interpreted and deployed 166 with mercy and discretion to those glorying in God167* ; there is challenge and opportunity, the Gospel and missionary response or neglect the last in the sent or the sender, nation, denomination' Congregation or individual saint: in the sought or the challenged.
There are high profession and small deeds and there is the reverse 168* ; and there are both available at most levels: there is time and there is eternity; there is judgment for those who know and there is judgment for those who do not know and in this welter of test, challenge, sin and truth, mercy and malady, there is a comprehensive and determinate, a just and omniscient judgment for all.
On Iraq, see Isaiah 30:30ff., Nahum, Micah 5:1-6, and compare SMR pp.874-875. More broadly, see SMR 713, The Pitter-Patter of Prophetic Feet Ch. 4, SMR Chs. 8-9.
See on this:
REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST
THE MEANING OF LIBERTY AND THE MESSAGE OF REMEDY.
See also Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17 with TMR Ch. 3.
Thus a note from The Biblical Workman, Appendix 2, suitably extended for our present purpose, is apt here. It is dealing with the phenomenon of alogisms, to which are linked antilogies and antinomies in the grand larceny of logic to which anti-God movements necessarily move. It is interesting here because of its aspect of consciousness, and for its ramification into the background of this functionality. It notes that these matters are exposed in the following references, and then makes an application in what follows, before reaching on to the work Dip Deeper, loc. cit...
Reductionism and Redemption
On the topic of reductionism, that failure to face factual realities in the interests of some obsessive theory which omits what is not desired, and seeks to solve what is a mere sub-section of the case, the better to mulch the garden of reality with the straw of pretence, note that this is treated to our present point, in Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth Ch. 6.
An excerpt, slightly adapted, follows.
What on any naturalistic or monistic ground
in aesthetics mere mumble (cf. SMR Ch. 5),
in ethics platitude without meaning (News 19),
in epistemology mere vacuity (cf. TMR Ch. 5),
in politics defeatism (cf. Questions and Answers Ch. 7),
or else towers built on invisible clouds,
all reductionist, irrational or both
(cf. What is the Chaff to the Wheat Chs. 3 and 4 ),
now on the supernatural origin of the regimented and volitional natural, becomes the opposite. Then it becomes:
meaningful,
in essence predictable,
and assuredly verifiable on the ground of the creator, whose verified word is without inhibition
exhibiting the fitting conclusion, like a thunder-clap to a murder.
In all things on such a basis, it leaves nothing in the least difficult, whereas on the other model, there is nothing but failure, for there is never explanation for knowledge, existence, division, beauty or morals, but only tired reductionisms, without power, without ground and without the necessary result.
It is simple fact that creationism in general, but more specifically biblical creationism with the creator who has acted and declared Himself verifiably in the Bible (cf. SMR Chs. 1-3, 10, 8-9, 5), accounts for everything as nothing else either does or can (cf. Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer, SMR Ch. 5). As part of the total biblical deposition, it is verified in the total context as well, with the rest of biblical teaching (Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ). Another part however indicates the restless waywardness of the human race without its Creator-Redeemer (Isaiah 57:14-21, Ch. 24, Ephesians 4, John 14:30, James 4:4, 5:19, Romans 5:1-11).
Thus created man, in one mould but with spirit in an actual universe of knowable kind with a Creator who made him, rather than some glorified incapacity, can believe in culturally sanctified myths (cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, Delusive Drift or DIvine Dynamic 7, 3, SMR p. 252I)) without too much trouble. Severed wilfully from truth, he is creative, and so fashions fiction.
This phenomenon can come from the consequences of will in his mind and in his spirit, so that he can readily believe the deluded and childish concept of organic evolution, by which he affirms whatever it is that he thinks he is in order to become more of it, whatever that is, though he never finds it making the substance of what-is, that great experimental absentee in any naturalistic viewing, nor does he discover the grounds of it, nor the way of it, nor the presentations of the advances in it; but rather, he explores delusion in battling camps*1B, each accusing the other of platitude or ineptitude, and both with good reason!
He may even talk of principles*1 as if they were powers to do, not mental conceptions to cover with words what actually happens - which, sadly for naturalistic man, this does not manage to do*1.
When you leave reductionism, face facts, then you are logically brought back to the Redeemer, as shown in detail in the above references.
