W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for Volume What is New
Chapter 1
No Roof for Truth, nor for Man without It
Prelude
First, let us consider what was presented in the Preface, so that in the actual text, it may be consolidated for thought.
There is nothing more important than this, the divine face, the face of Deity, the expression, definitive, decisive, clear and assured of God Himself.
With men and women, yes and children too, there is a face, there is a heart, there is a spirit, there is honesty or dishonesty with it, and knowledge or confusion with that, and there is articulation or the lack or muddle of it alongside. We have some idea, perhaps of the face of each, the expression, the meaning, the priorities, the pre-requisites, the motivation, the purposes, the ethics and the life; but there are many barriers to certainty, unless God Himself shows the case (as He did, for example, to Samuel the prophet, concerning the choice of David, the young lad whom he anointed to become king - I Samuel 16).
The Lord, He asserted, KNOWS THE HEART. He looks upon it, and sees what lies there. It is not a matter of appearance at all, but of heart. It is the same in Jeremiah 17:9-10.
Who, Paul pursues our issue, knows the man except the spirit of the man, at the human level ? Let us realise with what we are dealing (I Corinthians 2:9ff.). Similarly, who knows the heart of God as the Spirit of God. God in His Spirit KNOWS, as man in his spirit is directly aware. Man in his face expresses (if by that you mean his expressive medium of which face is the physical counterpart) what he is. God in His word expresses what He is, and in the face of Christ Jesus, has expressed Himself definitively. That incarnate eternal Word of God has thus presented definitively who God is. His words as Messiah are declarative, His face shows it just as His Spirit knows it.
Again, the face is the expressive medium where resides mouth from which come words, and in metonymy, but also in bold, direct fashion, this the countenance, it is the declaration visually of who one is.
It is one of the most central mercies of Christianity that God did by incarnation, present His face (cf. II Corinthians 4:6). This reads:
"For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord,
and ourselves your bondservants for Jesus’ sake."For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness,
who has shone in our hearts
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."The wonder of God in His infinitude, definitive character and absolute freedom is the basis for man, who is finite, of varied character and has been granted astonishing freedom (cf. It Bubbles... Ch. 9, Little Things ... Ch. 5, SMR pp. 348ff., Repent or Perish Ch. 7, and Index). Hence comes, in alliance with God and resting in and upon His word and so His salvation, a peace surpassing understanding, but rich in experience; hence come in the outage mode, the psychiatric disturbances, so often found when unmoored, masked, malingering in psyche, man leaves the power and definitive character of God, as if to re-make himself in some mottled medley of mischief or machination of desolate mind: when this he has no power to do.
Then ambition, as with Lady Macbeth, and 'yet here's a spot!' mentalities can collide even with rational thought; though more often, suppression, repression and depression or wild states of escape, can attest the breach birth that didn't make it, for the follies of self-making man.
It is when we consider who God is, and how we relate, and how one must relate to be a child of God, rather than a self-imposed prodigal or even orphan, that results accrue most blessedly.
For this chapter, we move to the realm of the supernally supernatural, the very nature of God, whom Christ definitively expresses. We do this in order to seek to remove confusion concerning man and God which is so often a result of failure to know Him. Since to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent is the condition of eternal life (John 17:1-3), and a clear mandate for spiritual existence rather than a clouded uncertainty, it is helpful to seek understanding about what God is and we are. This is to be looked for, not only in similarity, since we though finite and created are in His image, capable of consorting in fellowship in reason and revelation, in friendship and companionship, but also in difference.
It is to this latter point that we now come. We speak in terms of roofs.
When you come to the ceilings of Tibet or to Everest, and what amazing books are available on the appearance of these vast massifs, and the exploratory rigors suffered by many, then you begin to soar in spirit. What soaring elevations are here, what glories of light and snow, crag and formation, like a verbal formulation expressed in stone, or granite, with symphonies of altitude and illumination now dazzling, now sobering, now lofted with magnitudes unthinkable, now casting dynamic like energy pearls to make storms, as at Mt Ararat, where whole boulders can be tossed, and land where one would not wish...
It is when however you come to the Creator of these things, from whom matter in its exquisite mathematical formulations and formulae was poured out, from whom energy in its particulars and particles came, and was enclosed in matter, but not thereby entirely limited; from whom man came, with his power to investigate the divine prodigies, and limp after His wisdom with effort and travail; in whom man can abide through the face which appeals and invites, that of Jesus Christ: it is then that you move into things glorious. Of these, the created vastnesses and intricacies, as in the speech of DNA (cf. Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4), and the prodigies of man's capacity to realise in himself the correlation between thought and expression in speech (so that if there is no language, he invents one), are a dazzling canvas of artistry and a marvel of creation.
It is so easy to grow up, to become an infant and find words, imitate words, look for words, strive with formulation, discover syntax, seek definitions, and grow into boyhood and youth, that it can readily be forgotten that all of this is as useless and impossible without crafted means, in our case, programmed into the nervous system and correlated with the enabling spirit of man, just as electronic equipment requires its own deliberately designed means, however gifted the operator, in order for the things in mind to be wrought. Then, as we are now seeing in some cases of accident victims with nerve damage, to will can be the only requisite for the maintained establishment, the human body, to secure the desired result: action!
It is necessary however, despite this automated feeling and the wonder of the product, man, who can act like some space vehicle with miles of wire, so readily: not to cavil at conditions. They are there. It is an inalienable need, as inexorable as thought, not to abort logic, or to cavort with a lively disregard of sobering rational necessities; and to consider what the Lord has wrought (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go! SMR Ch. 3, Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4, Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 3).
Our topic however today is WHO GOD IS who has wrought matter, mind, spirit and man, angels and the Bible, and the incarnation for that matter, the resurrection*1 and created reality, so delimited, so confined, and yet in man, so able to soar that at times, intoxicated with his powers, he imagines himself god, or seeks to de-deify the God who is. This he is often found to do in the interests not so much of humility, which always knows its place, but a sort of pseudo-sanctified madness which possesses many, who being given much, imagine that neither bound nor limit comes to their clearly derivative powers, appointed, and often disappointed, arising in birth and ceasing on this earth, at death, a condition which requires neither invitation nor discussion, except one knows God (as for example, in the case of Elijah to a marked degree - II Kings 1, and notably with Moses - Deuteronomy 32:48ff.).
To the wonders of the divine Lord, let us then turn.
The Wonder of His Majesty and the Place of Man
In the title for this volume, there is reference to the divine face as 'unfunded'!
At first, this may seem inappropriate; but it is not so. It is a negation, and in it is a content of great import.
How strange a word for a face! one may say. But consider your face. Is it not supported by genes, water, oils (natural and perhaps additives or both), razor or massage, food for its cells, all costing, costing ... Your genes were a grant, but their growth required support from food, care, concern; and the sources of those genes in your parents, they required such support. None were unfunded. The payment, to be sure, was indirect; but it was sure and it was sustained.
There is if you will, a ROOF for the face of man. It is not made by human imagination (and plastic surgery can leave even in the most exalted cases, strong indications of its imposed artifice), as if our powers were spectacular. It is posited. It has limits. It is what it is and it is not what it is not: it is a thing of derivation. To be sure, the spirit of a man or woman or child can readily bring into it the atmosphere of guile, or goodness, of radiance or despair, of downturned lip or marks about the nostrils which show a sense of flair or hyperactivity, or sluggishness; and the very complexion often speaks, especially when viewed in its composite character, in the whole.
The face of man, that expressive medium of mouth and eyes, form and feature, it speaks, even when the mouth is silent. When it is not, it speaks but the more.
When however you move to the Face Divine, the face of God, and so to the very One who He is, whose expression is thus, and not otherwise, whose word is as it is in the Bible and incarnate in Jesus Christ (I John 1:1-4): then there is no roof. Then it is not yourself but your Maker whom you regard.
There is nothing which is a grant for God. There is no one to grant it. When you come to the ultimate and eternal Being, then there is nothing beyond, and if you envisaged a being past whom there was a beginning and a grant, then to that source you now apply the term 'God', since you had made of the earlier model of your mind, a mere creation.
There are no limits with God. There is no one to limit Him, nor any system, programmatic or otherwise; for if there were, then that system and its Maker (since a system is not auto-derivative, but requires what makes it to be made as it is), ultimately, that One is God.
Thus over God, nothing arches, nothing constrains, and in Him there is as He puts it, the situation that I AM WHAT I AM. There is a self-determining, self-expressing, non-derivative character about Him. Just as, in our created systems and creative capacities, we are derived, and so have limits; so in equal certainty, in Him, there is nothing of this. There is no roof of His internal world, no Tibetan plateau, no Everest maximum elevation, nor yet any limit to expansion or any meaning to contraction; for these are mere physical realities in a system which has impositions and constraints, whether as in DNA, programmatic, or simply instituted by fiat into factuality and mere operation.
Man is forever trying to fly as high; but there is no limit. The famed Icarus case merely symbolises this fact. You cannot fly to the heights of God, and plumb the depths, since neither has any limit. There is no space station in Spirit, nor anything by which to guide yourself; nor is the way so much as open, since God, being personal and author of created and derivative personality, is very much Himself, available not on demand but by grace, by His own will.
Even you, if you are a normal sort of human being, are like that. You do not have people knocking on the door of your personality and demanding audience at the depths and heights of your thought and being. Perhaps an exhibitionist might move in that direction; but even that is by choice.
Man then, has this inveterate tendency to seek to sail into the oceans of God, and perhaps to de-register their names, arrogate them to himself and then seek to control maritime events by power and fury. Such was, either directly or indirectly, the work of Hitler*2, Marx, Freud*3A and all that of the false prophets who, as the Lord indicts, have run without being sent, and spoken without being authorised (cf. Ezekiel 14, Jeremiah 23). These are unauthorised writers of biographies. The divine nature of God is obvious (Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4, SMR Ch. 1, What is the Chaff to the Wheat ... Ch. 3, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9), but the character of His purposes is His own.
It is of the most unsurpassable importance that He has therefore spoken to man, not to merely control him, but to enlighten him. Man is so mixed in his roofless scenarios, that he is like one who soaring through the clouds in some aeroplane, thinks the sky is the limit, yes space is the limit, yes there IS no limit. Invent it, and his imagination dispenses with it, like some glutton who, however many times, Roman-style, he has vomited his food, is yet ready for more. Nevertheless, his stomach has limits, however abused: and so does he, and so does the life which he thus traduces, in contradiction of truth.
When instead of seeking to transmute man or God, one seeks the Lord, then there is NO ROOF. There is no limitation, delimitation, constraint. On the other hand, there is no diffuseness or delinquency. God is who He is and does not change*3 . He knows who are His own, and changes them. He is the same (Psalm 102, Hebrews 1).
Man then needs to see the roof over his own head; but in ignoring it, he merely knocks his head, one of the reasons for the contemporary dizziness. He has a limit, a roof, but when he divorces from the living God, he simply does not recognise it. He invents limits or seeks for the removal of all limits, but acts like a child in the dark, words having little to do with the world, when it is seen.
When however man comes to God, he needs reciprocally to realise that there IS NO ROOF THERE. It is time to stop anthropomorphism. God did the only actuating initiative there, when as Almighty He became in the person of His Eternal Word, man. One can do that when one is God! When one is man, however, this sort of transmutation is not a personal option. One has to realise one's already existing roof, that God has none, and to seek the Lord to provide a SUITABLE ROOF for one's own head, so that instead of bumping, and thumping on the limiting roof that is there, and one the more severely limiting in that the power of God is absent where He is rejected: one can instead find the beautiful roof which is a building for man by God.
Thus in Isaiah 30, one sees the Lord's loathing of farcical pretences and pretension. Fancy seeking to make a covering for one's head, a delimiting security zone for one's life, when the Lord is disdained, or disregarded. What does one think in such a case, that one is doing ?
Playing God ? What play is there in repudiation, and what wisdom in acting as if you are God when you are a mere creation in the disarray of rebellion, perhaps masked by nice phrasings which mean the same, only do not admit it!
\"Woe to the rebellious children, says the LORD,1
On the other hand, in Isaiah 4:4-6, we have the covering which comes forth from the divine initiative:
"When the Lord has
washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion,
and purged the blood of Jerusalem from her midst,
by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning,
then the Lord will create above every dwelling place of Mount Zion,
and above her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day
and the shining of a flaming fire by night.
"For over all the glory there will be a covering.
And there will be a tabernacle for shade in the daytime from the heat,
for a place of refuge, and for a shelter from storm and rain."
This covering is precisely that which continually appears in Leviticus, when an atonement is made, a covering for sin, through sacrifice. Life for life, it is to be a matter of blood; but man for man, animal blood though a true symbol, is a smaller one than is ultimately required.
Hence in Isaiah 49-55, you find the actual one which
 |
in purity is adequate to cover sin with its own glory, to swallow up death in victory (Isaiah 25:8), |
|
|
in justice is adequate to purge the evil (I Peter 3:18, II Corinthians 5:17-21), to atone, |
|
|
in magnitude is ample for any number, |
|
|
in deity is enough to bring man back to God Himself, |
|
|
who having come for him, receives him directly as man receives this, His divine offering. |
This is reflected in I Peter, extensively, as in Hebrews.
It is the call for ransom which Christ met, as in Matthew 20:28.
In this, God has shown His face, and from the roofless lovingkindness which is His, has poured out for the needs of man what is sufficient for all, adapted to all and offered to all, as the Bible Presbyterian Church so rightly put in its 1937 Constitution. It is so.
There then is the Roofless Regality of God, providing a roof within His infinitude, to meet the image of God in man, and to provide for it both form and function, redemption and realisation, and then again, the illimitable, since in God there is no limit; and once man is in God, the skies are once again stretching forth, spiritually, without illiberality, but on the contrary.
It is as Paul says in Romans 8:
"What then shall we say to these things?
"If God is for us, who can be against us?
"He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all,
how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?"Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.
"Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen,
who is even at the right hand of God,
who also makes intercession for us."Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
"Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written:'For Your sake we are killed all day long;
We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.'
"Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers,
nor things present nor things to come,
nor height nor depth,
nor any other created thing,
shall be able to separate us
from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Thus does infinity meet the finite, being personal, and thus is the roving desire for heights unthinkable, find it target, not in imagination, but in truth. In God abiding, one has for one's Father the Almighty, which is strong enough; for one mentor, all wisdom, which is knowledgeable enough; and for one's eternal Guide, the glory of the living God, which is magnificent enough. Indeed man without God is roofed, and rueful; but with God beside Him by appointment made by the mouth, from the face of God, in Jesus Christ who has definitively expressed in word and deed the will of God for man, man has sublimity. His roof is now realism, and His abiding in the Lord brings the unlimited at the option of God, for whatever revelation or reality, whatever zeal of opportunity the Lord may wish.
So is explained man's wantonry, and so is met his spirit; so are seen God's grounds for wrath, in essence, and man's option to find reconciliation. It is best not done by inventing or removing roofs; but by finding the God whose house one is, one designedfor inhabiting by the Spirit of God, that one may be resourced, though derivative, and alive in the magnificent kingdom of God.
NOTES
See on the Resurrection:
Great Execrations .... Greater Grace Ch. 7;
Barbs ... Appendix 3,
Biblical Blessings Ch. 15, Extended Endnote 2,
Acme, Alpha and Omega: Jesus Christ Ch. 11, With Heart ... Ch. 3,
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
Chs 2 and 6 (New Zealand);Spiritual Refreshings Chs. 5, 6,
Ancient Words and Modern Events Ch. 8 (on resurrection and Lazarus, yes and both with Jerusalem);
Let God be God Ch. 2 (contrasting Greek bodily terms);
The Frantic Millenium ... Ch. 4.
*2 From Ancient Words and Modern Events Ch. 14 (q.v.) we have this.
Hitler's actual position is known only to God. It is of interest that Hitler's close ideological companion Alfred Rosenberg by 1930 had written "Myth of the Twentieth Century" while creating one, in a form that sold over one million copies by 1942, it is reported. Of him it is found that
"his writing was more mystical than Hitler's. He also attacked Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism, seeking to replace it with a new specifically Germanic religion, 'the religion of the blood'. He seized on the comment of the Frenchman Lagarde that 'races are God's thoughts', to construct a weird, mystical belief structure that somehow made the Aryan, Nordic or Germanic race (he did not distinguish between them ) something to be revered and worshipped." This interesting description is from Stewart Ross (in his World War Two, Racism in the Third Reich (1992, London), p. 27.
Winston Churchill in his rather brilliant work, The Second World War (abridged) p. 35 declares that Hitler "had conjured up the fearful idol of an all-devouring Moloch of which he was the priest and incarnation."
With such latencies and associations, we cannot by any means be sure what Hitler might have done, or to what his thought and associations might have led; just as much seems to have been done with him earlier by potent and frustrated industrialists, and nationalists whom he in turn had served, and whose thoughts in no small measure he seems perhaps to have projected and polished, while providing a new base. Such bases are not far from deluded humanity, and the papal splendours are most susceptible to such associations, since all put things under one man whose 'faith' is in something far removed from the revelation of God, and directs men with a passion for their obedience which relates to himself, as virtual incarnation, daring to be called "God Almighty on earth", rather than merely a servant, brother and friend (I Peter 5, Matthew 23:8-10 cf. SMR pp. 915-916).
This is by no means the only absolutist system which defying the fact of the revelation of the face of God, seeks to recast things (cf. News 121, 122, SMR 750Bff., 686ff., 1050ff., 1076ff.). They all speak, in one sense, the same language, like some spiritual DNA of their own. In dealing with God, however one must repeat, the first thing to realise is that one is being DEALT WITH!
See:
Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 9, incl. End-note 1 (esp. programmatic psychology and its ilk), Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will Ch. 7, including *1;
News 80; SCOTU 44, SMR 4; Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Extension 1 ;
The True God has Go, Gives Grace and Glory Ch. 2,
See:
Calibrating Myths ... Chs. 6, 8, Three Anzas, One Answer Ch. 3;
Acme ... Chs. 8, 9, 11, Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will Ch. 3,
Of the Earth, Earthy ... Ch. 14, esp. *1,
Worn-Out World and the Coming King Chs. 1, 2, 3,
God who has no restraint or limit, made time as we have it, which precisely focusses these things. Not subject to it, it is a meaningless question to ask if He changes, when you understand His infinitude. Time limits, and change occurs where the limits of this now and that then, apply. Time of this kind is not with God, and hence change is for Him irrelevant as well as inapplicable.
Insatiable desire for this or that unmet and unknown item or entity, what does it mean ? It means a crimping of knowledge and hence the presence of a potential, as yet undeveloped, which implies someone or being to impart this, so that one is then not talking of God but of a mental creation of one's own. With God, there is nothing to be gained, since He lacks nothing, is delimited in nothing.
If He desires to impart, in love, then that is an output of will, not a necessity of need. If He laments for folly in man, it is not that He requires man for his internal needs, but that man's loss is a grievous thing for man. In making man, God made freedom in a delimited setting, and hence entailed this option for man. In selecting His own from amid man, it was not with some superior quality of certain ones in view, as if He needed better company. It was on the basis of what endures and could endure and is true, and hence is freely comportable with Himself.
Since man has fallen, only God can effect the necessary change in man to bring him back to the creation image in which he was made (Colossians 3:10, John 3, 6). Since God is love (nothing contrary to it is permissible, and hatred is of what is divorced from it as autonomously inflicting death on itself, comparable to a physician's 'hatred' of influenza). He has done what is needed to secure in liberty those who are His, and hence the output episode of creating the universe has its future from the past, and the end from the beginning in His mind, plan and Being (Isaiah 46:10, Amos 3:7). Hence He can and does predict.