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CHAPTER ONE
FOR THE WORLD TO COME -
SACRIFICE IS BASIC,
SERVICE IS CENTRAL,
GRACE IS THE GROUND,
CHRIST IS THE SOVEREIGN
This World's Ways ...
Lacking Distinction
It is utterly useless, whether from Reformed, Calvinist, Amillenial, Postmillenial, philosophic or other bases, to try to pretend that this world is on the way up. It has had its unprofitable adolescence, often repeated complete with the acme of disfigurement, in this case voluntary, and the vulgarity of vice, manifest during the last 150 years on the part of not a few nations, and now its roué stage appears.
Its resources men constantly seek to lift, lift while they quarrel about ideology, cannily misuse power and corrupt themselves by alcohol, perversion, dreams without power and puny power equipped with a pretence that is worse than pretentious. They destroy but what they construct is destruction in the making, since they being circuitous about God, find broken circuits and circles of devastation like mice in the field, rats in the home or locusts in the broad acres.
They imagine that with the innards of the atom at this world's disposal, unlimited power must surely solve their moral problems, intellectual irrationalities and inane superficialities, as they muse and scheme and invent schemas as if God were a dimwit and they, despite their ignorant performance, were the very acme of wisdom and the princes of peace. Power to destroy spreads like disease, as if to mock the delusion that power without wisdom is their basis, or input without understanding made understanding 'arise'.
The reverse being true, in kind, the world is in perpetual reverse, its accomplishments in savvy-seeming sophistication, a clownish counterpart to their disintegrating follies and ramifying collisions, not per century or even per year, but week by week, in the very depths of depravity and witlessness.
They prepare idols of the heart, they construct false and invalid ideologies and seek to promote them. They long to lord. They promote power. They gain it a little for a time. It is grabbed in vanity and deployed in enmity.
This is not mere lack of talent; it is talent divorced from truth, in its thrust. The world that crucified Christ has not changed in its heart or in its essence. When virtue arose like a mountain, vice poured in like an explosive asteroid.
Funds are spent; functions are misused. Action delivers; abuse destroys. Repeatedly, men seek freedom for the people, and the people seek control for the better abuse of truth, devastation of justice and angry thrusts against their enemies, outside and inside the land.
They abolish, but do not construct; they construct, but do not endure; they are delivered, and deliver, but do not breed beauty. They spend and are spent, and while writhing riots of feckless fury continue to devastate, and idols direct, men continue to seek means of destruction to avail themselves of petty power, dictating delusive designs while deploring their own design, and acting as if they were designs but for doom. This they do, despite the word of their God, with whom dispensing, they accomplish repetitive folly and litter the land with fast-breeders of hatred.
Now, what lords it in many a seminary and vast numbers of universities, in this field, inane in misconception, baseless in errors of invention like science in reverse gear, has become like a perpetual disease. Its fruits depopulate the earth, despite the rate of production of fodder for the educational systems, to mar and to mark youth as their own, inflamed with a passion which delights to avoid the testimony of truth, as though having divorced the husband, it wishes to delete all memory of Him from the children (cf. Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3, TMR Ch. 1, Ch. 8, SMR Chs. 2-3, Ch. 2 Supplement, Ch. 8,10, with pp. 422E-W).
In the background, there is the ebb and flow of the new and more insidious means, made populous but not popular by Stalin and his murderous company, by Mao and his militias of militant murderers, these not disdaining to get into the tens of millions category, making the hideous spectacle of many skulls bleaching out of what formerly were heads, and disjoined and derelict pieces scattered like rotting seed, out of the ingenious DNA, neither constructed by nothing nor a dimwit, but by deity as befits its declamatory design.
Hideous sights disadorn the earth as Christ foretold (Luke 21:11). The manglings of many delusions of the past merge with the rising graphs of sold souls and slain bodies, results mountainous in proportion as the dynamics of delusion seize contemporary power and assert woe, outside as long it festered within. Whole nations come up for consideration, for review in the grind of grinning folly, as black mountains are seen arising on the saddened landscape of pollutions that invite judgment and deserve scorn.
Such people argue, void*1 of reason, about God as if their very lives depended on sauce, depraved unsaintliness and ungodliness. Meanwhile, they erect religious leaders on fire for this world, some even feeling to usurp the throne of God, while without His wisdom or power: there are those, persons even declaring that on this earth at least, that is WHO THEY ARE!
While deluded dénouement, even to the uttermost, is what is to come (II Thessalonians 2:8), now already in the seeping streets of shame, bounders bring on this scorching contempt for the living God, so that they seek to share His office, power and grandeur, if indeed they recognise it at all.
They learn and contrive to act
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as if the Cross of Calvary had any
effective counterpart in man, |
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as if the Deity, who in love died in
human format, has any place for false performers, |
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as if the Christ whose body defeated death
and declared His salvation, |
This world is dedicated to power, force, irrational precepts and its own studied manner. While the ingredients fluctuate in priority, ideologies ranging from pleasant to opprobrious: to God it does not bow. The UN studiously avoids what it acts as if to supersede, and while many in it have most decided thoughts about deity, design criteria for the organisation seem to require His omission, and their own commission. As a site for manipulation and dash against whatever takes the fancy of participants as desiderata, it has become notorious, as for inaction in cases of horror, such as the Sudan. It speaks very much as this world, abasing what is most high, and elevating what is without basis, and hence variable as the winds, despite pleasant phrases.
This present world itself (II Timothy 4:9) ? It will not hesitate to use power, but if the danger is too great, then subtlety is its game. It will claim that lie of pretence, that man has God's commission in himself and is divine, if anything is, and declare what counters this counterfeit is against State security (as in China) or against the needs of the people (as in Russia Revolutionary Stage 1), or contrary to popular thought (as perhaps a few steps down the line from the 20/20 outrage in Australia).
Already, as noted in the introduction, there is a movement in South Australia that people MUST put various matters into the hands of the State, that it and it alone has power and knowledge and discretion to deal with these, and that NO OTHER training, authority or thought, understanding or wisdom, vision or wisdom is available to be effective. Verbal abuse and other forms are for it to determine. People are to be mandated as State couriers! In IT is wisdom, here is power and in that repository lies greatness. Truth must die before feelings, and much has already been wrought in this kind of sphere at further levels, though after a first parade, withdrawn in part*1A.
The presumptions of power grow as the concepts of popular control spread like weeds, like prickly pear newly re-liberated in the desert. But what does it matter ? If it is a gun which says, DO THIS and THINK THAT, and PUT THE STATE above all, or a Party Secretary, or a dictator, or an alleged popular conception given wheels by deals: what of this, for the result is in principle just the same. It is the same whether in SA or in the Commonwealth to come (when perhaps it has its Bill of Rights, the better to define wrongs and thereby to limit liberty by giving it in dollops, and when further, it is divorced from the religious beginnings of this nation as the New Republic), whether in Saudi intolerance or in the gashes and clashes in Tibet.
But Not Lacking Presumption
God in all these things is not to be followed, since the State is not God and it is to be followed. That normatively becomes the outcome of this breed of irrationalism, rebellion and elevation*1A-5 below (each endnote relates, one in one way, another in its own sphere).
In this, there is a resemblance to a medical injection. It is an inoculation against the operations of the Almighty, except of course for His judgment, and many will no doubt seek to put their 20/20 alleged vision (Australian version) into practice in due course, through solicitation, consultation, elevation and if following the norm of such things, seek such atrocities against biblical truth and divine morality as may from time to time seem good to them.
Already, as more and more approximation to marriage in what is not the divinely designed and designated form for the continuation of the grace of God and the race itself, and total indifference to sexual design on the part of many becomes increasingly politically authenticated and approved, legally implemented and received, the world shambles off on its way. Adultery becomes a norm, non-marriage for many seems satiation for desire, and children become State wards, if not in whole, then by virtue of the cradle to grave State provisions for ... education, as I think it is still called.
Thus those who in the Old Testament suffered the death penalty, and in the New, are excluded from the kingdom of heaven (as in I Corinthians 5, 6, I Timothy 1:10, Leviticus 19, Deuteronomy 22:23ff.) become sanctified by law, surrounded by echoing guns against any differentiation. That it is not the way inherent in mankind for its continuance is regarded as a trivial aside. .
Thus formalised is increasing condemnation of biblical morals, and moralising about the condemnation of what mouths them. In view of this, it should be carefully noted that this EXCLUSION from the kingdom of heaven applies, in the Gospel of grace, not only to perversion, but to the continued practice adultery and idolatry, as well in status to the thief and the fornicators as well.
You say, But surely we are all sinners ? Yes, but when did you last hold up a shop ? and when did you last make a practice of adultery, and bow before your personal idol ? In other words, imperfection is one thing, and a way of life is another. You CANNOT serve either both God and Mammon, or the Lord and any other Master (Matthew 23:8-10). If you fail like Peter in two massive incidents (cf. Keys ... Ch. 4 on each of these), then you are perfectly forgivable; for as you imply perhaps, WHO is perfect ? and from what does the Saviour save!
But if you make this your way of life, you surrender to the domain of Judas, if in any way calling yourself a Christian, and to the way of Sodom, or Nineveh, or Babylon, if you are not. While the former is obvious, a use of Christ's name in a fraudulent fashion, contrary to His call for obedience, saying: Why do you call Me Lord, Lord, and not do the things which I say (Luke 6:46), what of those who do these things and do NOT claim allegiance to Him ?
Why then, in biblical declaration and in truth, they are simply part of the great unwashed. This is literally the case, for to become a Christian you MUST be washed, and if not washed, then obviously remain unwashed. Titus has it like this in Titus 3:5-8:
"For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another.
"But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared,
not by works of righteousness which we have done,
but according to His mercy He saved us,
through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior,
that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs
according to the hope of eternal life.
"This is a faithful saying,
and these things I want you to affirm constantly,
that those who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works.
These things are good and profitable to men."
Whether then it is
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a question of what biblically is
called a hypocrite, |
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one who obeys his own concepts of
morals and binds them on others in law or teaching, |
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a maker and worshipper of a new and
imagined Christ in the mind, |
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the life in a sphere of what is otherwise contrary to the Lord's Christ: |
it is biblically all one in one thing.
You are out of the kingdom of heaven and until repentance sets in, with faith in Him and acceptance of His substitutionary sacrifice for sin, His salvation by grace for you, you are as brick-bats, not stones in the temple of God. Such is the result and the reality.
Is this so surprising ?
It is God or government, salvation or State as is increasingly obvious as by subtle or subversive, gross or violent means, men in the clothes of Caesar, seize morals and ethics, thought and learning, and apply the force at their disposal to indoctrinate, inculcate, distort, disturb and RULE. It is precisely as in Psalm 2, cited in Acts 4, when Christ was violently treated, yes and killed. It is the same thrust: The MESSIAH must GO and MAN must come.
Whether as then it was in the name of Caesar and the Jewish Sanhedrin, with its priests, or as later in that of the French Revolution, turning indeed from horrors almost unspeakable to substitute horrors quite speakable, in the name of the goddess of reason (violated the while) or in the Russian Revolution, in the form of the god of war*1B, or whether it be in the name of a perversion of liberty which removes it from those afflicted by religious renegades and assailants of the Bible, who seek to force on man other ways: it is all in revolt from God.
Man becomes the model for morals by virtue of his thought, based on nothing, invented from nowhere, as Paul puts it -
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"But they, measuring themselves by themselves, and |
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comparing themselves among themselves, |
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are not wise" |
How nodules from nothing, or from nothing known, can either come or be wise is a rebuttal in itself. Irrationality is its father, naturalism is its mother, whether or not she has fornicated with religion in special, flavoured forms. Mystic naturalism is still naturalism, and the squashing of some god into the matrix is not other than double negation: that of God on the one hand, and of reason on the other!*2 . Little goddies, things of nature, subject to or conformed to its ways, whether given pseudo-divine credentials, or mere implications of unauthorised power, can creep in and out of a political scenario, but they give it no more legitimacy than any other human invention. The God of creation is uniquely attested, validated and verified and that over time*3.
Substitutes constitute both fraud and blasphemy; but this of course will not stop the final aspirations of the biblically defined 'beast' of Revelation 13, and 17, with the final sepsis of the 'man of sin' (II Thessalonians 2) whose divine conclusions in his own sight are at infinite variance from his destiny. These incendiary clamours and conclusions are as grievously to be seen now on the way, as then in the fray with results as in the extinction of any other fire, in the realm of ashes (cf. II Thess. 1, 2, Revelation 19), and not difficult to understand. In the realm of theology, if such a title can be given to fraud any more than to false prophets in general, this same elevation of 'Nature' to provide in any part to man's construction, is not the better because of re-writing of the Bible, being plagiarism as well
While Jeremiah is a special messenger from the Lord on false prophets not sent by God, who present but a vision of their own heart, dealing with naturalism for example in 2:27), Isaiah presents devastating satire from the Lord in Isaiah 29:14-16
"Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder: for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid.
"Woe unto those who seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who sees us? and who knows us?
"Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay:
for shall the work say of him that made it, He did not make me? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? "
The New American Standard Bible puts a part of this very well from the Hebrew, which literally has - Shall the clay as the potter be counted, taking the words in order, yielding such a rendering as they have, which agrees with Green's rendering in the Interlinear Bible: Your perversity is as though the potter were taken to be the clay.
Let us then present the result in one piece:
"Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people,
even a marvellous work and a wonder: for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish,
and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid."Woe unto those who seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who sees us? and who knows us?
"Your perversity is as though the potter were taken to be the clay:
for shall the work say of him that made it, He did not make me?
or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? "
To this focus in Isaiah 28-29, we are to turn in Ch. 2 below, but here let us focus not only the Lord's then stated intention, one now fully realised, to do a marvellous work, by the incarnation of the Christ, not only to render perpetually ludicrous the naturalistic and theologically mutant machinations of the godless and the god-makers, the false prophets, whether of that or our or any other day, but to demolish the incomprehensible incomprehension of those who want a part of 'Nature' to make another part as its Creator!
This is a turning of things upside down indeed,
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a perversity of
mind, |
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a wilful
distortion of wisdom, |
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a causal
disturbance of acute invalidity*3A, |
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an irrational
oddity and a gross perversion of the purity of God, making matter speak its commands into DNA, or share the privilege of creation with what created it, as though a megaphone spoke, or the inert transcended itself and made
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It becomes the invention of validity for thought which exists in a model where there is no such thing as truth, mere reaction of formations proceeding, proclaiming as true what therefore cannot even in type exist at all.
But what does it want from the aetiological source of nothing, basis for matter likewise ? It desires a work of integral understanding, systematically related in all its parts, co-ordinated with the logic of natural processes to interpret them, one which is to project power to its constituents, to contrive its validity, and then use this to deny it! Is it possible ?
Does no truth, because such models have none to provide it, become truth by provision from nothing ? Is this the god of such self-contradictory suppurations ? Can you KNOW the truth when you deny its very existence ? Will you invent understanding from what exhibits it, by denying what constructs it ? Will you invent information*3B from resourcelessness, and marvels of constructive prowess from the hidden quarters of mere servitors ? Is logic to be invented by its absence, design by its devastation and are words to be re-invented as conveniences, their definitions deleted for the occasion? or will the mind of matter contribute to that of the Creator, and assist His inventions, this codicil to His will, this means to His devices, this implement of His construction! and will matter too be given aetiological exemption, be taken as 'given' in unholy hiatus from all the canons of science: that you must NOT ONLY give ground for your inventions, but COGNATE or at least COHERENT ones, relevant with interface to the point!
Is matter to exhibit, or produce, not only systematically formed exhibits of its remorseless enterprise of constrained imagination, but the power to understand and the presumption to USE imagined understanding to attribute it to no understanding as its source and maker or machinator or matrix former, in part or in whole ? What is this but an explosion into irrationality and a shard of devastation!*3C !
Yes. this world and its contused formulations of fantasy in fruitless and often brutal endeavours to escape from the God of their creation, of information and causation, of ratiocination and validity, of verification and declaration, of Biblical uniqueness without any rationally testable option, for His word: it does not lack. Does not lack ? you ask. Yes, as in our initial heading for this section, it does not LACK PRESUMPTION.
Nor without Biblically Defined Assessment and Destiny
Is a world, then, biblically defined to come to the point , where without the return of Christ, it could not even survive (Matthew 24:22), is this a home ? Is it then a palace of propriety and a scene of grace ? Is this a fastness for divine favour!
This, it is found only in the Gospel, proclaimed, that everlasting Gospel (Revelation 14:6)*3D , in its midst, and in the savour of the scent and salt of those who follow Him whose it is, and in the blessed and assured presence of Him who sent it, and came with it, indeed constituted in His own self and deeds, what it is. God is not found in antinomy and antipathy, but in access by the way provided in Jesus Christ whom He SENT for the purpose, in truth as proclaimed and persistent, surpassing reason which He provided for man, but in no way contrary to it, alone verified*3. and always available.
If the saints give testimony in blood and word as in Revelation 12:10-11, is this the arrival of the kingdom in some nice this-world generated manner ! Is Tibet a throne of grace ?
Is Moscow a revelation of sanctity ? Was it ?
Is China a bastion of liberty and an enduement of love ? Is its hideously misnamed education program, or re-education program for selected Tibetans, which inflicts psychological torture on those whose land they take, whose religion they assail, whose liberty they deny, as master craftsmen for their country: is it to be esteemed a satiation of joy ?
Is ghoulish work in Zimbabwe, or in the Sudan, is endless vying confrontation with ever more forcible weaponry, between nation and nation, is this a signal of progress in peace, and in understanding ?
On the contrary, as foretold in the Bible repeatedly, from II Thessalonians to II Peter, from Acts 20 to Matthew 24, from Habakkuk 3 to Joel 3, from Isaiah 59 to Isaiah 66, from Zechariah to Ezekiel 36-39, from Revelation 13-19, where invasive war from the celestial estate is the end of invasive war from the earthly one, there is a culmination in which this world is rescued from mere deletion from its own intemperance, but not from judgment according to truth! As to the celestial, the Lord, His coming is based on ownership and a liberty granted so far for so long that man faces only judgment: there is an end of folly when the Lord returns. It is then that the Messiah goes to part II of Psalm 2, and rules that the results of liberty appear, both in joy and anguish.
Is it then a mistake, that man was given liberty ? Not at all! Since NO ONE CAN go to hell without the love of God repulsed, as seen and known in the mind and knowledge of God, who has predestined all things so that none is lost who is His, and ALL are sought in His love for reconciliation, and DESIRED, however the results accrue in time (cf. Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2, Ezekiel 33:11*4), what then ?
Why this: then those who find darkness all right get it; and those who love God find Him at home.
Is music to be banned because some like to have physiological shudders instead of being creative in spirit ? Must all suffer the ignorance of God, and of life, so that they are to be left uncreated, because some prefer the byways of antithesis from life ? If some choose poverty must all suffer oblivion ?
So this world continues for a time, and the devil knows that his time is short ( he is quite astute in some things) as in Revelation 12:7-12. He stops literally at nothing, and nothing is much better than his end, for if there is one thing the Lord nails, it is pride and arrogance, hauteur and self-inflicted majesty, the potency of nonentity and the power of pretension. In short, the Truth is not enamoured of the lie! (cf. II Thessalonians 2:11).
If it is grievous and sad, how much more so is the infliction of the god of forces*5 in his crafty arts and vile force. Here is the seduced and often seductive might of the idol of nothingness and its adherents, working with the illusion of folly on those who know better, and who suffer in the love of God for non-conformity to enormity! Theirs is a triumphant testimony, a pageant of enduring love, if by any means any might be saved. Saved from what ? from the unblushing rushing to ruin, which the creative thought of man, misplaced from its own domain, and inflated into deity, seditiously seeks to secure. Thus, it is proceeding to embrace the ultimate lie (I John 2:22), which would have God neutered, muted, tied and bound, excluded by truth tax or obfuscated out of His own domain.
The climax to such things comes (I Thessalonians 1, Revelation 19-20).
It passes like a tornado, with great destruction; but then it is gone, until the culmination of tempest arrives in judgment. How many tornadoes ? When does man learn ? As in Isaiah 26:10, it is:
"Let grace be shown to the wicked, yet he will not learn righteousness:
in the land of uprightness, he will deal unjustly."
Yet love bears all things and hopes all things (I Cor. 13), so that there is yet hope even for the least, and the worst, the most sedulously seduced and the most tyrannically contorted, while the day is yet shining, before the night comes when no man can work (John 9:4). Moreover the light of this world, which shines in it, but is not of it (John 8:12), is still better than any dawn, sunset or noonday illumination; for it shines in the darkness, even though it does not comprehend it (John 1), and will never abate. Where its domain lies, there rest arrives (Revelation 14:13, 7::13-17) and a divine fellowship persists for ever (Revelation 21-22).
In the next Chapter, before considering in that following, the practical outcome of these things, we will consider the sovereignty of the sacrificed, its necessity, its strata and data, its beauty and duty in Christ and its impact for man.
NOTES
See:
Tender Times for Timely Truth
Ch.
8;
The Grating Grandeur ... Ch.
2;
Beauty for Ashes Ch. 6 (and Hong Kong, and the movement of nations in the last century a concern),
See in parallel, Divine Agenda Ch. 6, More Marvels ... Ch. 4, SMR pp. 911ff., 1032ff., Highway to Hell .
Force like sulphuric acid on delicate cloth, continues to rampage as it has done for centuries; but now its power is growing to come near to equating in deletion the work of completion for man, self-effacement at the physical level, since it is forgotten increasingly at the moral and spiritual level. Such is not wise, an insidious decree against life itself; whereas Jesus Christ came that man might have life and this more abundantly (cf. John 10).
When judgment sits, then the use, abuse and misuse of the divinely accorded licence for liberty is assessed, retrospectively. Blessed is the one who has fled for refuge to the salvation in Jesus Christ, before that day.
NEWS 156 (esp. Victoria),
Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch. 10 (freedom, force and faith),
FREEDOM document re Victorian pastors and deliverance;
DIVINE FACE 6,
Secular Myths ... Ch. 6 (Victoria and Britain);
The Pride of Life ... Ch. 3 (democracy, freedom, force and truth in the nations),
Galloping Events 7, esp. *2 - political, religious and educational liberty, on which also see
Secular Myths ... Ch. 6, *7 and
See also on the Web, VOICE FOR VALUES, which includes a parallel drawn between the Victorian debacle, and the SA Equal Opportunity (Miscellaneous) Amendment Bill 2006. The matter, still being debated in February 2007, after various parties sought to speak to those in government, including the Evangelical Alliance, was not carried, a profound mercy for this State.
See News 98, 37, Divine Agenda Ch. 6, Highway to Hell . See also *5 below.
*2 See The gods of naturalism have no go!
These points, in the text above, are clearly brought out in The Defining Drama Ch. 10, and are reproduced here as relevant to this theme no less than to that.
There is however ALL substance in the CREED, that is what YOU BELIEVE; for by FAITH you please Him, and without it you CANNOT please God (Hebrews 11:6). Believing what you please may please some societies, simply as an act of will; but it will never please God, for He is the truth, objective, imperial, immovable, immutable, everlasting. You can no more create Him, than resurrect yourself.
Even if you thought you could, you yet could not, since the ability would be baulked at eternity; for all YOU do has a beginning. HE does not have one. You are outwitted before you begin. It is because He is eternal that anything else can be temporal, including the institution of that measuring order of time; and because He did not begin, that anything else could do so, including the inception of defined existence, rather than nothing.
No amount of slowness creates what is not there; and at that, you need time to be there, in order even to be slow. After all, if you have to begin, you need something to begin with, in addition of course to yourself; for nothing, you see is so very unproductive, yet we are produced! That something has needed all that anything would ever require, or else of course, those anythings are by magic, which is an idea better for fairy stories.
Reason requires God. God has provided kinds, creating copy-making generics with provision for particularities of various kinds. Such kinds nothing ever bypasses, as is enshrined in history, their violation omitted from palaeontology, the parameters recognised by great biologists, Harvard's Professor Simpson indicating that kind-change is not the kind of thing you find, as emphatically does Professor W. R. Thompson, while Stephen Jay Gould for one indicates imagination could not breach the gulfs between major kinds (cf. History, Review and Overview ... Ch. 5, as marked, Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6, TMR Ch. 1, SMR pp. 206, 199-200).
Indeed, Michael Denton adds not only this, “nor is there the slightest hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth” (cf. SMR p. 120), which are of an ingenious intricacy, but that in the DNA and RNA record, now becoming available in microbiology, there is shown both an “extraordinary mathematical exactness in the degree of isolation” and a disjunction from any concept of evolutionary sequence for the various classes of living things.
For example amphibians, supposedly close, “are in molecular terms as far from fish as any group of reptiles or mammals!” (p. 285, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis). After survey, he concludes that “molecules, like fossils have failed to provide the elusive intermediates so long sought by evolutionary biology.” Moreover, their arrangements and character show mathematical precision, definitive design unlike gradational concepts, and no convenient continuity. In fact, he concludes from empirical studies that “The concept of the continuity of nature has existed in the mind of man, never in the facts of nature” (op. cit. p. 353).
Fossils,
micro-molecular data,
cells’ structure,
none support what is the most unscientific theory ever produced by man, that of organic evolution.
Logic laughs at it,
equipment is void of its necessities and
delusive insistence replaces theoretical collaboration with the evidence.
Scientific method is here in cardiac arrest.
Thus of Gould’s reference to imagination itself not breaching the gulfs between major kinds, we can affirm this. It would indeed need to be operative, even to formulate the folly, for nothing else does: nothing empirical is ever found of this kind, not to be unkind, namely the type that makes without intelligence new and discrete, brilliant and diverse designs in kind. Nothing cannot do it; what is merely a design-designate does not do it, for the quality needed is creativity. Man DOES not do it in life-designs, merely snipping and pasting, excising or touching here and there, what God has made. The designs themselves only God can make - find someone else or something else doing it ? Let us be practical when it comes to major forms and formats of life.
Even if man ever managing to do some copying, in his own relatively clumsy fashion (SMR pp. 119ff.), there is merely that combination of the difference in man, that he is made with designing skill, in the image of God, as the Bible depicts it so precisely. It is God Himself who is there from the first having nowhere to come from if not; without whom, you have man the visible highest creator, still in swaddling clothes compared with the works of which he is one, himself endowed and endued with a creativity far beyond his very modus operandi of thought (cf. It Bubbles... Ch. 9, Little Things Ch. 5).
One must recall a little logic at times: with nothing ever, at any time, phase or situation, all that was (and of course it would not BE in the sense of constituting anything, since its name is 'nothing'), nothing would come ever, since from nothing comes nothing; and if it did, nothing would be a false use of the term.
Yet nothing ever coming to be, as would be the non-product of such a start ? this is simply contrary to fact. We, reader, you and I, we are here.
There has never been 'nothing'. That is because there is something. These two are antithetical. Nor has there been anything altogether which is incapable to the last of producing what has been produced, however it be construed; or quite simply the results would be less than they are. Indeed, if you envisage some system augmenting itself with skill and knowledge, then it needs the potential to be able so to develop and grow, and this is not nothing, but a creation in itself, like any other, and it needs that from WHICH the augmentation is to be gained!
Place all this imaginary system (really begging the question) together (and beg the question a little more), and you are in no different plight than now, seeking to find creation's myriad minds and phases of life, which require a basis divergent from nothing, on the one hand, and in being something adequate for the result, on the other. In the end, it is the self-sufficient which is always there, or you merely waste your time trying to make what is not so by definition, exist without anything else, a mere contradiction in terms. Always, you deny reason or affirm adequacy always without any cessation. You invent nature myths, whatever the particular 'nature' you have in mind, vacuous in definition or vacuous in implication, or you worship the Maker.
There is one other option: you contract out of reason, in which case, of course, you default on an agent of reason, a proponent of any rational viewpoint, the means of attack and the means of defence for your position, by means of argument of any kind! You void yourself in order to prefer a void; and this, it is a high price, for if you did actually what you here do symbolically, it would be a kind of murder (since you did not make your life), call it suicide if you will, a vacation of human premises, reason's bar and truth's domain.
Let us recapitulate a little. If the ALL were not from the first sufficient, we would not have all. There is no escape from the totality which has all it takes, for the last, from the first: why ? It is because patching in the pieces requires the pieces, the integrative power and the understanding, conceived mosaically, which is in effect is able to be 'effected' precisely because it is capable of one concordant action for its integral life forms and totality of life structures. This concordance is merely a system in disguise, placed by thought as an escape from the grand scope of features implicit.
Machine your gods, this and that aspect of creation's power, precision, conception deposit, made into a source, and you still need to make the sources harmonious enough for co-operation, to devise and have active communication enough for the same, and to produce what is conceptually integral enough for the result's demands. That requires their own systems as a start (not from nothing), and the coherence (not from nothing) and the communication system (not from nothing), until in the end, you have to have the inventor of the sequence, correlation and co-operation in joint and mutual co-operation of the series, which is called, of course GOD. It is quite useless to make up imaginary concepts which merely hide what you assume, which one calls 'smuggling in God'.
To those interested in such escapades, one needs to say this: You may think smuggling is fine, if you can get away with it; but you see, we know the coves you are using, and getting away with it is just what you are not doing, even if this should appeal to you! Your subversive smuggling is not in the dark, for here it is brought to the light. It then becomes attempted smuggling, exposed as mere subterfuge.
To the contrary, we find that the sufficiency from the first is required; and likewise God has what is needed to the last, or would prove inadequate for the creation to come as it did. Accordingly, the term ' eternal' is not a theological fidget, but a logical necessity. When the temporary makes up its mind that there was nothing there to institute it, it is a wonderful expression of the liberty God alone does and can create; but it is nothing more. If all were temporary, then there would be a situation where the temporary inhered in the continuity of which its components were a part; which is another way of saying the temporary is not all what the name implies, and indeed could not be so. If it were permanent, indeed, how is it temporary ? If it is not, how do you proceed from the point where it is not there, and have nothing instead!
Avoiding these painful and ubiquitous dilemmas when you try to eliminate the logical, causal necessities of having what it takes for mind, matter and spirit as in man, whether by time or series (cf. SMR pp. 307ff.), and coming back to the point that assembly lines do not remove the conception of the assembly line, but merely stress and indeed demand it, which takes you back to the construction of the line, and so to the sufficiency which needs nothing, but invents what He will: you have simply the eternal God. He does not beckon things into being when they are not able to respond, by not being there! He invents them.
The beckoning of teleological thought is really the movement of the Spirit of God to the spirit of man to BE what he ought to be. It is not superman, alas, that is in the making in this beckoning, but defective man who is called to come back to where he belongs, which is where he both was and should be. THAT is the only empirical beckoning which anoints the eyes with evidence, or has means to back it, which appear. You see that in Philippians 2, Colossians 3, just as you see the renewal necessary to be able to discern what is happening, in John 3!
As to God, then, it is He who has done it, made the kinds as indicated in Genesis 1, pushed from behind to make each kind, and that, it is what you find. Basic kinds are the order of the Bible and of empirical fact. End of story. The inordinate effort of making some kind of machinery to upgrade, and hiding it so that no one would find it over the millenia, has always had the aura of the spurious, was ever unscientific in method, and is free from all but fantasy. The double ditch of having the hidden machinery (there but undiscoverable) and the hidden evidence of its results in changing design kind (there but never unearthed) makes of teleology a cause célèbre, in this sense, that it is a word void of meaning, except where the moon-beams dance, and have square dancing just for fun.
We are produced with our delimited systems, our legalised materials and our integrated circuitries, all enablements for expressing dependence or independence, towards God, the eternal prelude to the sinful symphonies of man; just as we also have attested evidentially, as by force of logic, the remedy for their follies (cf. SMR Chs. 5-6,8-10, The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy). If it were not so, we would not be here, for God is not mocked. This independence for man is expressed, however, rather than gained! Death is such a comment! just as irrationality is such a curse. It is so obfuscatory.
Faith moves mountains, but it still does not create God. Faith touches God, but it does not mould Him. Faith is like a child: it comes to the father with trust, and gains what is fitting from love. It does not attempt patricide, either by murder or by imagery, by attempt at sheer removal, or by substitution of some other 'man' or some other power. If it attempted the former, it would be remain patricidal in intent, low beyond all contemplation; if the latter, it would be the coping stone of presumption, the acme of arrogance.
That alas, it is where this world and its ruler is, right now (John 14:30). That is the flower of the present seed, which is of course is in symbol, the word of a witless world, spinning into ever increasing circles of unspirituality, dizzy to boot. It is not the word of God: it is not that which is the wheat; rather, the word of man, it is but a weed (cf. Matthew 13:24ff.)
That, it is also defined. The prince of this world who comes, said Christ, "has NOTHING in Me"!
The ultimate worldliness lives BY this world instead of merely in it. It is doomed with it, as if a baby kangaroo, dazed and paralysed with fear, were bent on staying in the maternal pouch, as the mother was caught in fire. The world is to be burnt up, together with its works (II Peter 3). Fancy trusting in the platform when you ignore the carpenter, the wood and the nature of design. Fancy trusting in the creation when you ignore the Maker, the Judge and the Disposer of Events. Fancy ignoring definitions when God is their author ... The writing however remains. It is both on the wall and in the book of the Lord. It never moves.
It is man who must move, back to base (Luke 13, John 5:39-40, 10:9). He must break with this world and its witless ways, and awake to the Lord; for He is not far from any one of us, and it is His love which draws, in which He came, for which He paid the cost to provide remedy (Colossians 1:19ff.). He has loved enough to create liberty and meet its misuse with love, the justice due to its vampings with sacrifice and the demands of truth with mercy: yet it must be sought where it is to be found. Do you seek an antibiotic in a flower patch ? Do you seek mercy by dreaming ? It is to be found where God's name is put, in His word, the Bible, alone able to satisfy the validity demands of evidence and reason (cf. TMR Ch. 5, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 - 7).
His name, it is still as available as it was, for man to call upon it (cf. Acts 2!). It is still the definition for all terms, the definition of mercy, of goodness, or righteousness, of hope, of the way, of love, of truth, of remedy.
The drama is not yet past. In this defining time, awake and put on the garments of HIS righteousness (Isaiah 61:10, Romans 3:23ff.), and live!
See, TMR Ch. 5 and
Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny
Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ,
Barbs 17 and
TMR Ch. 3.
The Pride of Life ... Chs. 1 and 5,
Predestination and Freewill Section 4,
Christ Incomparable, Lord Indomitable Ch. 4, where rationality and validity combine and
Deity and Design ... SECTION 8.
See
The Desire of the Nations ... Epilogue,
Little Things Ch. 3 (esp. *3),
Beauty of Holiness Ch. 4,
Dancers, Prancers, Lancers and Answers Chs. 3, 5,
Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4.
See the 6 volumes of
Deity and Design ...
and
which cover these things in detail).
See on this TMR 3 and Barbs 17 as above.
The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 4,
The Christian Pilgrimage Ch. 3,
Great Execrations, Great Enervations, Greater Faith Chs. 7, and 9,
To Know God ... Ch. 1.
See:
Manifesto of Deity Ch. 3.
