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CHAPTER 8
The FAVOUR of DIVINE FATHERHOOD and
The FATE of the UNWILLING
(no blind 'fate' but an induced restlessness)
ALERT TO ACTUALITY
George W. Bush initiated the coalition of the willing. Alas, it failed in large measure because misconceived. It is not enough to be willing; you have to be right as well. You cannot even formulate what is good and right, without a standard which is independent of the flurries and worries, the ambitions and inane aspirations of man: for then it is merely a matter of using a name, which is far from being the item itself! If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a name without a rose is just as bereft. You need the reality if you want lasting results.
You will assuredly never gain a spiritual synthesis by the invention of a phrase in itself, and far less if it is intended to compose opposites, such as those of Islam which denies the Son of God and His mission, His redemption and resurrection, and Christianity, in which God reveals, exposes, extends, precisely foretells, acts on and accomplishes the same. Indeed, the Koran even has two wholly diverse accounts of His death, composed over half a millenium after the realities of what He did (Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 8, *1 ). This religion came and arose several millenia after the account of why THE MESSIAH WOULD come! (Genesis 3:15*1), on the one hand, and on the other, the Book of the Lord (Isaiah 34:16), which from first to last deals with redemption by supernatural act in the Messiah (cf. SMR pp. 1080ff. *3).
Mixing the immiscible, trying to make coherence out of contradictories, binding together the evidentially superb and that without such a basis: this is not the work for an everlasting construction; and without vision of truth, aspirations of virtue quickly degenerate into pragmatic expediency, and precisely such ruses and devices as lead to torture and inhumanity, whether of the left or the right.
There are many unities in man, in the creation and in the book of the Lord. It is time to consider and conceive something of this dominion of deity, enhanced incomparably by the provision of liberties far from the creative power of man to instal, but which, being given, he may utilise*2 .
Take the salamander, a unity, a self-deployable entity, with multi-construction design elements!
Here is magnificence of imagination! Here is brilliance of programming to stun and astound! Here is a wonder past all genius, in the institution, abundant and exotic, as in principle in the plays of Shakespeare, in sheer exuberance of a SERIES of deployments of wit and working.
Not only in this salamander realm, do we find such things as larva stage gills in the fish mode, and adult recession of the same in favour of an alternative mode of ingesting oxygen, namely lungs, but there is capacity, depending on need, to remain in the fish form for years; and one has seen talk of the resumption of the larva form! Here is a car that becomes a duck, but more, a space craft that resumes as a tractor, or sedan! It is even more demanding: for as to life in the flesh, it can be snuffed in a few seconds for lack of oxygen, of workability, of functionality; and in this, there is nothing of leisure. It must be perfect in its transition, the recession of the gills, the possession and functionality of the lungs: it must all happen in the manner of turning on and off the air-conditioner in a car. It all needs its working realities and relationships, in this mode and in that, and in the transition mode.
What then of the salamander transition in its cycle ? Not merely in its day (cf. Psalm 139:16) does it stretch forth a probing or sailing device, a swimming method, but when it makes its transition, it is thorough, or rather the program is highly particular and superb in its authenticity, providing for limbs to accompany the newly functioning lungs, and finger type projections to adorn the limbs! It is a conscientious transition, and its multiple capacities that seem to be present for the suitable and demanding occasion, are the more amazing.
It is one thing to INVENT something which forced by devices, does this and that; but it is quite another to invent life that does it, and cannot proceed unless it does it well, in superb programmatic modes and transitions, features and functions, multitudinously operative and coherently poised both to be, and then, to be again, whether as this or as that. It does not happen by a dream: it is contrived by code.
The salamander, then, in its adult capacities is reported to revert to a wholly integral alternative, to cover need, just like the frog's multi-programmatic procedures for arriving as an adult at all: the latter more amazing in this, that it is susceptible to sensible reversion. These give together a sense of the overall directive power which makes of MEANS just that, a way to an END, and that ? It is the entire working organism, not a collection or even a collation of parts, but device for destiny, always not only prominent but dominant.
To fail to utilise this fact is mere prejudice; for it is the very core and centre of the whole proceeding: of what it is capable and AS what! To continue to drool over nuts and bolts, or seams and structures, when the space-craft is about to take off, its mission and its meaning, its power and its purpose all clear, and everything subordinate veiled now in the totality of which they are unwitting components: this is mere obscurantism. There is a a time to construct according to vision, and a time to implement the vision and to consider and admire or despise it.
What of such an 'arising' as the space-craft, notable for its end, then ? Even if you could not speak to construction workers or directors or read, you could still see the same as you watched the feverish endeavours and saw the processive results and the final arrival, and then its function. Here is directed activity and here is result, and the former is not postulated but observable. Similarly when it is all done by program (as car manufacture increasing is), so far from mitigating the reality of the purpose, this stresses it; for it is more work intellectually to subordinate your relevant thought to programs, without denying its genesis, than merely to execute it by independent or serial commands as they occur to you.
There is an END, a DESTINY, a CONSUMMATION, a prelude and a FINALE. There are subordinate and subordinating strictures for structures, and there are overall inordinate resultants which move as one, with overall powers which give meaning to their unity and effect to their causation: disciplined, directed, consistent, insistent, set down in code and completed with assiduous and brilliant methodology. Matter does not do this; program with products meet for it, does, and the causation necessary for BOTH of these features, AND their practical synthesis is not to be equated either with magic (for the romantic) or nothing (for the pedantic*3), but with directing power and imagination, intelligence and sufficient causation.
It cannot be less. It certainly is more than we ever held or had, since man merely limps in these arenas, at best a copy-cat, at worst a stunned mullet; and if he improves, given time, in finding out the wonders that made such things and his own powers to investigate, and the correlation between these and what he investigates, so making the same fruitful, then it is still as a child learning from his father. It is the apportionment of particulars in various phases, either of alternation for an adult form, or embryonically as the young matures, that requires meaning past a current tableau of any one stage in the formation, or in the retrospective alternation to an earlier stage.
It is rather like scenes in a play: they do not arrive with a totality of integrality in meaning and mission, by the lack of it. The entire endeavour to ignore the END of a given movement is an atrocity against scientific method. It INSISTS on a reason for every event, a causal sufficiency for every arrival, development and item. It does not imagine in a vacuum, or level thought at vacuity; when it does so, it has degenerated into mere woolly philosophy, living on the capital of its past, and in melt-down phase.
To insist that certain areas are philosophically excluded is mere non-science, better spelt nonsense. It is not slow learning but whoa learning, the calling of a halt by wilfulness.
Let us then ignoring such transvestite apparitions of a science itself in mutation, and returning to logical and scientific method, examine something of the actualities with due respect for them.
The interaction of nerve and muscle cells,
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of multiple
impulses from various senses and precise effects in the resultant, the electrically co-ordinated balance through the operation of relevant muscles for their toning, |
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the movement of
the winds upon the waters in the oceans, with the various reflections of clouds and light forms an amazing synthesis for viewing, |
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the multiple
features of a flower, a leaf or a tree, of individual personality and personal spiritual history, and the current motion of the soul, or again of a team voluntarily moving with its leader, or again, |
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a human being with the multiple desires of his heart and the will of the Lord: |
these are basic facts which demand regard.
To ignore them is ultimately to ignore the very one who is thinking this ...and that, it is no part of meaning, but of waywardness*4.
INTENT ON WHAT IS MEANT
It is not accidents (that is, elemental features) inhering in a substance, but composed elements constituting an enterprise which is the reality. There is not in life a certain indolence, but a driving force, formulation and aggregation of units and results. There is no pseudo-mystical heart in things, whether mystically or materialistically misconceived, by those who rely on the validity of mind to conceive it (a thing not granted by matter, but which can grant it TO matter, when it has
finished its labours on perspective*5)
There is an integrality of the creation
the purpose, design, meaning and method,
and in varying ways, its message.
There is nothing ultimate in breaking up particles
into ever smaller fragments (cf. Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13)
and even a limit that shuns at last enterprise
by such misjudged missions*6.
It is not a produce accelerator which is the basic need, but a meaning inventory,
found not by boring into the bricks
of a construction
but by moving into its meaning,
the implications of the industry it exhibits,
the correlatives it has in further creations.
The matrix of man
is not
his infinitesimal bits
scrutinised by electron microscopes
(though such knowledge has its place when directed therapeutically!),
but that integral operational facility,
his spirit which directs thought, spurs imagination,
investigates with reason, and reason itself,
abhorring self-contradictory premises,
such as materialism*6
and considering what it is, the spirit
investing the personal soul of man,
which not only masters realms of thought,
in their interstices and their modes,
but seeks often inordinately
to mastermind the very nature of the creation
as if its creativity were comparable
with that of its own Creator,
who both inspired and instilled its own working capacity.
In so doing, it sputters haplessly and hopelessly, like the Challenger rocket,
that was to inspire a future generation, teacher aboard
and falls into the sea of incoherent
thought*7.
Indeed the mutinous efforts to debar
the creativity which made it
By the very creativity which
that supervening and eternal Spirit,
ultimate beyond the time delimitations which He specified, applied and invented.
Man needs to come back to earth
on his way out of such inveterate irrationality
and pompous pretension
to harass and refuse to investigate the evidential certainties and validating necessities
of God*8 .
As you survey a book such as "The Orion Mystery" (Bauval and Gilbert)
concerning ancient Egypt and its
vastly expensive searches for immortality,
and related researches in that distant thrust of mankind,
you can see signals of just such a search for God,
but one controlled by misconception,
debased by irrelevancies of spiritual presumption,
by ardent but erratic guesses and creations of the mind of man
chucked upward into the realm of God,
who deposited downward His doctrine, His word and His truth
from His overall power and provisions,
without which, man is stranded amidst overwhelming evidence,
for he is characteristically moved by spluttering misconceptions,
not because deity is not clear, but because man is fallen.
It is like looking at an anthill when trying to discover the sight of
an overflying aircraft;
only infinitely worse,
for this is not a spatial mistake, that a mere emblem of creation,
but ideational and an ultimate one.
Small wonder that the true, living
all-powerful, aptly attested and absolutely verified,
uniquely validated God of the 3500 year old Bible,
(this book of books coming in integrally linked growth states,
just like the body of flesh from a person's infancy)
shows in the stage by stage outcomes,
the essential nature of the overall incomes,
in their final plan, for man.
Flush with fact from the first,
this, being spiritual,
comes flush in the mind of God who made us:
it is like a spiritual DNA,
not programmed as for the physical base for physical life,
but naked in its cognitive reality
(for the program is always secondary from the primary conceptual reality of the programmer:
there are no exceptions, nor could
there be
cf. Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 2,
Ch. 3 Appendix,
Spiritual Refreshings
Ch. 9, incl.
End-note 1
).
But where is THIS SOURCE to be found
for the collision of the maestro magnificence -
of the concepts embedded cryptically but with controlling force and majesty
in the living creation
both in the physical basics and the mental, moral,
spiritual operational controls, on the one side,
and the growling, even howling, squalling spoiling,
seductive productions of man at ALL levels,
which mar and misdirect the prodigious capacities of man
and the productive and exquisite harmonies
of his multi-layered, splendid environment ?
Where is the God of the Bible to be found ? and how are His ways to be known ?
WHERE IT IS TO BE FOUND, AND WHERE NOT FOUND
It is not to be found, the knowledge of God,
in man-like particles of water in the sea,
far less in this militant display
of mischief and falsetto imagination
when drugged by puny powers,
he towers like a lion over prey
among the nations:
only to be striped for his absurd strutting and
in due course, left among the incinerates
of history, a barren token of man's complicity
in folly and seduced simplicity.
Mirrored
in the curse which covers creation is man's sin,
like a flea-ridden blanket on a distracted dog,
which yet craves it, and will not give it up:
so in general, man continues to seek reflections, rather than their base.
It is to be found
where reason reveals
by pointing uniquely to the Bible
and in it by its pointing uniquely to Jesus the Christ,
Himself sent to make a final display of truth that does not vary,
of meaning
before judgment,
with a message of purpose for design
and destiny for personality -
itself not summation but consummation for co-ordinates -
and an end for commencements.
He is the first and the last, and
He comes from the only place or site
that COULD so serve in creation,
from heaven and eternity itself,
to mankind,
itself pressed into being,
by the God who made him.
From patriarch to Israel,
Israel to the Christ,
flood to incarnation,
crucifixion to the final corruption
of rebels who deny God,
the living and biblically revealed God,
to the end of this Age,
He has in Him, this same Jesus Christ and His word,
shown all we need to know.
To do what ? ...
To answer all life's ultimate questions, reasons and quests,
with response both intimate and expansive,
concerning the creation of the design and form for matter
(itself, though the least of creation, an exquisite delicacy in plan),
mind with its staggering and amazingly validated capacities*8,
and spirit with its utter and ultimate responsibilities.
All is set in meaning, in perspective, in the hand of divine power,
in the developments of divine dynamic, and we are told its destiny and our own,
which to a single race
is yet twofold,
dependent on our relationship with
this same Jesus Christ and His word, which is His!
Nor was this all, for in so doing, He confirmed and used the millenial display
of the Bible (as in principle seen in Matthew 5:17-20),
adding not only His consummation of testimony as Truth,
but His Cross as performance of power for salvation,
and His resurrection as its validation past all things temporal,
into eternity itself.
These answers in one way
resemble the creation in that
they are integral in their overall arrangement,
and here lies the entrance to their meaning, the perspicuity for perspicacity;
and these being imparted direct from the light of God,
interpret all,
as might an architect,
an expansive estate which he has contrived,
created through a plan,
with various desiderate and intentions.
While at times this might become apparent from His works,
there are reaches of His intentions
for which He has made
which go back to His own mind,
and which without being told, are not to be known.
If this is so with man, much more with God! (I Corinthians 2:9ff.).
When as here, one of the inventions
of the Divine super-natural, meta-material Lord,
in His envisagements
and building,
is mankind,
then the explanations of purpose, meaning,
internal spiritual composites like those in man himself,
and the designation of derivatives ... second derivates ... from him,
in his own creativity,
of usage requirements
and of opportunities: these are of infinite importance.
They are so because they directly concern the infinite One Himself,
who having spoken and told His mind,
suffers vast loss when it is left barren in man.
To ignore it is a spiritual madness (Hosea 9:7, Ephesians 4:17-19),
a personal rebellion and a moral wickedness,
an alienation from life while still living,
an anti-aphrodisiac to the love of God,
odious and a maelstrom of mesmeric delusion.
The tendency among mankind to do just this
in a thousand ways,
to distort, bypass or foul this Plan of his Producer and Call of his Creator,
to disjoin this explanation and correlative expectation, from its source:
this is the fiend to replace the Friend,
the occasion and first cause
of the curse (Genesis 3, Romans 8:17ff.).
It cannot be overcome by the creation,
which itself is as one whole,
made SUBJECT through this means and in this development
to futility, vacuity, travail and suffering
by the Creator.
Man may seek diffusely or more pointedly for God,
but out of his plight, there is for him no hope except in one more work of God,
as in his first creation.
This it is
through the mind and plan and perspective and directive
of this same God who made him, his Creator
who now may become
his Redeemer.
This, it is useless to bypass,
impossible for man to displace or to defer.
He has been given opportunity, and now as a rebel race
is given with importunity (II Corinthians 6:1ff.)
occasion to relent, repent, return, receive Remedy, be redeemed
and restored.
With the creation, there has come for the fall of man,
a solution.
He who made him, does have a remedial heart, mind and arm.
It is called the Gospel of salvation, part of the plan of salvation,
integral in its nature, applicable in its form,
empowered in its effects,
the opposite of antibiotics;
for these, in seeking to preserve, take lower life,
but this from God, it gave the highest life, that of God incarnate, Jesus Christ,
to present as a gift to our fallen estate,
paying back capital and interest,
redemption for the cost of default,
and reprieve from the judgment,
through pardon.
The divine solution, then,
it is a little like a car recall by the manufacturer;
but in this case, it is not from a faulty making,
but a misuse of the glorious gift of liberty.
Yet it is like it in one thing,
that the fault to be fixed is identified,
and here it is the Creator Himself who both
instituted the method and offers
the plan, the product and the power.
Made in the image of God,
and hence able to commune, communicate and relate or connive apart,
man has had the liberty, now subdued and derelict,
but yet with some residual dynamic,
to take wings of air and fly into the abyss;
but his need is to be carried to the Rock and established.
This glorious liberty, this gracious access,
man has possessed and misused,
at times possessive of what is a grant,
obsessive in what is a result of power provided
for relationship with God.
Severing this, man has abused his status and injured both
his state and his station.
Mankind even seeks at times
to imagine
he does not have this liberty*9
and to be sure, sin foils it, spoils it, distorts it, denudes it (John 8:30-31),
a necessary consequence of spiritual war with his spiritual source,
with or without formalistic pretensions of peace.
Liberty for man is a byproduct of his creation,
and while using it, in that very imagination gifted by God,
he has initially fallen into self-assertion and self-will,
only the more implicating himself
as the rebellion progressed, but did not prosper;
for the end is showing precisely that rottenness
which is the summary exposure of folly,
fabricated by man from the first.
So profound is the gift abused,
by a necessarily unlimited Creator (cf. SMR Ch. 1),
that man himself, though within strictly appointed limits,
can seek to determine, to construct
himself into this or that spiritual format*10,and in so doing,
to mock or mar his potential destiny with his Creator.
That One integral reality that dynamises him
into an assured and eternal felicity of meaning
is beyond himself; but within himself
he bears a derivative animation,
a spirit able to survey, consider, relate and seek restoration
to his so grand beginning (cf. Colossians 3:10).
Then, when first he was created,
he had no option, being without consultation
made and caused to be;
but now he has a very decided option,
and may use it to misplace
the given mission of mercy,
and lose his soul,
mangle his mind,
temporise his eternity,
brutally wound his own spirit,
none the less horrid for being non-gory,
and lie languishing in ostensible meaningless,
a broken shard of history,
a detached fragment.
Self-immunised to the promises of God,
removed from the functionalities of spiritual creation,
the point of history,
the occasions of personality,
he becomes like sand blown from a garden arrangement,
now no more piece of support
for the magnificent rose,
but a mere byproduct of abrasion.
Soil has no option but to be blown away;
Man however does exercise an ultimate option
as a parallel wandering, rendering himself
vulnerable and often vicious
as he clings tenaciously to a stripped down life
of flight for himself and his delusion.
That is the negative shown to mercy. But it is not all...
Man does not have to harass the heaven
in order to find God, as if to bring Him down;
for He has already come down (cf. Romans 10:4-9);
nor does He need to break particles to find
why the Designer designed,
then
invent 'meanings' including the negative variety
called meaninglessness,
in order to escape it.
He has to receive the remedy, as is normal in disease,
and this, it is spiritual disease (Ephesians 2, 4:17ff., Romans 1:17ff.).
There are no excuses, for the love of God is as broad as mankind (Colossians 1:19-21),
yes broader,
and His provisions do not limit His attainments,
for He seeks all, would have all, and will lose none
where love could come, as known to Him,
even before creation,
whose books were foreknown, before the deeds,
who knows freedom as some known their own faces.
As Christ was in His weeping for those who WOULD NOT,
repeatedly WOULD NOT COME to Him to find God,
so was He before time,
when foreknowledge displayed,
and predestination made concrete
the people of God*12,
the love of God seeking all, finding His own.
It is this same Jesus Christ,
the format God used in coming down to earth (as in Psalm 102, Micah 5, Isaiah 40, 11),
evidently displayed in this same Bible (cf. Galatians 1-3),
and eminently displayed in history (cf. SMR Appendix C and D):
first in mighty power,
in marvellous compassion,
in supernatural multitudes of healings,
in amazing words of the stature of the Creator *11 ...
then on the Cross,
next in the resurrection,
who came.
Then through His Spirit,
He has sent into the world His Gospel and His commands (Matthew 28:19-20),
the good news about meaning,
the message about man,
and empowering enlightening and directing man
as in Acts 5:30-31,
He has found very many indeed.
Thus has God provided the nest for the long migrating bird,
the return for the wanderer, for the man, the woman, the child
who comes in faith to trust,
and in heart
to abide in this Person,
Jesus Christ the Just One (Acts 3) and Prince of Life,
as to abide in His word (John 15),
which being part of His work for man,
needs to be received (John 15:7, 14:21-23).
As creation was free, and God did it,
so is salvation (Romans 6:23, 3:23-27, Ephesians 2, Galatians 3);
and as God draws all as Christ is lifted up,
and knowing He would have ALL,
ANY person need not fear but take what he seeks,
in Christ,
He being freely made available, but never forced.
It is like a wind, for it is for you, and not a headwind;
but if you draw back, then it is in your own sin you do so.
Should you desire Him, but fear,
then receive Him by the faith He enables, and so set sin aside,
for THEN His power is for you! for you are His.
Then man is back where he came from,
with all logical questions, issues, problems
concerning his life and place before God,
the beginning and the end,
meaning and mission, purpose and destiny,
truth and peace
answered as is the case in spatial arrangements,
when a torch is turned on in the night.
Then, you have to look around a bit (Psalm 119:20),
seek divine help (Ephesians 1:17-19,
but it is there.
Not merely is there design,
but purpose, not only is there creation,
but desecration denied and overcome,
not only is there method,
but mission,
not merely call
but commission,
not merely work to be done,
but help of spirit from the Spirit of God
while it is being done.
"Behold the Man!" the persecuting fillip of Pilate (John 19:5),
who betrayed justice to judge Him, and admitted it (Matthew 27:23-24, John 19:10),
remains the necessity.
That is where a man can behold himself, in the mirror of those sufferings,
of Him who arose from them all, intact and resurrected in His very own body,
and this is where also he may find life.
NOTES
See Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 8.
See:
Licence for Liberty Ch. 1,
Bon Voyage Ch. 2,
GLory, Vainglory and Goodness Ch. 2,
Bewilderment, Bedazzlement, Bedevilment and the Beauty of Holiness Ch. 6,
History, Review and Overview Chs. 4-6
The Defining Drama Ch. 2,
Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 4,
See
See for example:
The Pride of Life, the Prince of Life and the Destiny of Man Ch. 5,
Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13.
See:
Repent or Perish Ch. 7, News 57, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9.
Re immeasurably small things, hidden from sight because of the nature of our 'spectacles' and hence from intensive investigation, see the following excerpt from Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 3, with its references.
There is nothing irrational about this: that POSSIBLY there is an INABILITY to FIND what happens at certain low levels of magnitude, because the MILIEU in which things interact is not available for inspection at that level (as Ford postulated SMR pp. 405-408, 418-420). Firstly, the upholding of all things by the divine power is necessary if it is to be preserved as logically apt, substantially mobile and energically adequate. It is POSSIBLE to conceive of something self-sufficient, but NOT when it is plainly running down (2nd Law of Thermodynamics) and CANNOT be eternal (for the resources being used up, cannot constitute, though limited, a sufficiency for unlimited time, so that even Paul Davies talks of a beginning).
It is possible to think of a different universe indeed; but THIS ONE IS NOT LIKE THAT.
See SMR Chs. 3-5, 10, Deity and Design ... Chs. 2 and 8.
See:
Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ),
Deity and Design ...
See: *2 above.
See for example:
Flight ... on Standby.
See Christ, the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8,
Repent or Perish Ch. 2.
See Ch. 6 above as marked, with
Great Execrations ... Greater Grace, Chs. 7 and 9, and
The Pride of Life, the Prince of Life and the Destiny of Man Ch. 1).