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CHAPTER TEN
A TIME FOR SPACE AND A SPACE FOR TIME,
CREATION IS COSTLY WHEN OUT OF LINE
THE SET UP
God as Spirit and spiritual source of matter which has time and space as correlatives, is infinite past these emblems and examples of creation.
As to their extent, time in its material, created format is part of the universe's creation and comes into existence with it. It ends when this type of creation ends. Many sorts of time and space are possible to all power: our sort is causatively dependent, in nothing independent, systematically endued and subjectible to any type of truncation, extension but to no extenuation, as if it were a free agent. Being created, as in all other design of imagination when competence creates, it has no room for whim of its own. All that has that, is MORE than mere creation, though still in that category. It is then creation PLUS cerebration, relative to the material aspect, and intellection to the mental one, and it has moreover spirit in order that it might dispose intellection at will, being honest or dishonest, devious or exemplar of fidelity as the case may be.
For the will of God concerning this created item, time (in itself limiting space, since with it, it has a beginning and is circumscribed by invention and intention of Him who is divine) which had its causal inception at His will and command, we have to consult what He tells us about His will. This is that the universe started in a cosmological occurrence of sovereign initiation that explosively - in the sense of direct, divine fiat - came to its purposive height, its ultimate creative point in man. It is important that one does not confuse or mingle the sense of explosive suddenness - He spoke and it was done in what is given definition in terms of successive mornings and evenings, which terms are in creation quite distinct and well-defined- with explosive motion*1.
Nevertheless, as has been pointed out by Humphreys and Hartnett*1A, a vast issuance or stretching of space, or outpouring of material ingredients is certainly in concurrence with the biblical depiction as in Isaiah 44-45 for example. He stretches forth the heavens ALONE, and does so in supreme, unique, solitary splendour as the creator of time for them to exist in, space for their distribution and man as the surveyor of the scene in its completion (45:11ff.). Further, He speaks not only to creation to invent it, space, time and man, movement and matrix alike, but to man AS created; for in this case, there is an invention of facility for function relative to Himself, namely to HEAR what He speaks TO man (Isaiah 44:25-26). In this, He is careful, He states, to make what HE says HAPPEN in the space-time-matrix-meaning situation He has created.
He is equally careful to disrupt, disperse and render ridiculous the words of any who thinks to subvert, contend, display imitation copies of His wisdom or word or will or intention or inventions (cf. Jeremiah 2:27, 10:11-16, Isaiah 44:25).
. "Thus you will say to them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens.
"He hath made the earth by His power, He has established the world by His wisdom, and has stretched out the heavens by His understanding. When He utters His voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens, and He causes the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth; He makes lightnings with rain, and brings forth the wind out of His treasures.
"Every man is brutish in his knowledge: every founder is confounded by the moulded image: for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. They are futile, and the work of mockery: in the time of their visitation they shall perish. The portion of Jacob is not like them: for He is the former of all things; and Israel is the rod of his inheritance: The LORD of hosts is his name."
Indeed, man is inclined to set up idols not only in visible form, but in the heart (Ezekiel 14:7), the invisible in the invisible, as in this mockery of organic evolution, where neither the skill nor the will, nor the imagination nor the invention is present in the cause, but only in the result, a work by very definition of terms, of myth: results from no causal interface of sufficiency for the purpose in hand. As with all idols, their work is not seen, nor their word found, by which they bind and are bound, and in which things happen.
Indeed, what IS to happen in this imaginative and causatively defective scenario of organic evolution ? It is this: allegedly, things must then just come in hi-tech, architecturally advanced and innovative fashions beyond the creative power even of man, while in surmise they nonchalantly, like some sauntering galoot, just slowly arise, and in demise, then they depart in the face of some new theory of brilliant eruptions from nothing much at all, for none works: and so it goes, till a new idol is formulated in foolishness and applied in stunned shame, where bold brashness is the substitute for demonstration (cf. Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6).
God carefully makes a mockery of these mockeries while His own word being truth is ALWAYS fulfilled, however amazingly detailed or distant in future prediction (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny esp. Section 8, The Pitter- Patter of Prophetic Feet Ch. 4, SMR Ch. 9).
THE ONSET
So did God act. But why ? Reason ?
God decided to make a personal, rational, spiritual, imaginative, relatable
being in His image, in His domain of personal action and response, not
merely to be at His will, and for it, but to hear and answer Him, love or defy
Him; for this is the minimum for love, that it is not necessary, and for
fellowship, that it is not compelled.
This spiritual image is created and so confined in space and time at the will of God, but it is no mere part of that canopy, but rather an agent within it. Hence is the profound folly of those who mock God, as if He had made an item of thought and will, understanding and powers of intellection, comprehension and communication who was no more responsible than what is simply responsive, no more accountable than what is of no account but to do what it is directed, compelled to do by its very creation.
In this lapse of thought, man makes an idol of himself, as if he were a little god, accountable to none, found like a child left on a door-step, omitting the one who leaves it; but his death is always a reminder of carrion, that this is not vested in gods, so that when he is carried off by his heated imagination to slight God, and invest himself with ultimacy, he comes to a sudden and ironic end (cf. Ezekiel 28:9, Psalm 82). Will you still call yourself god when I slay you ? God asks.
This profound, actual origination of man is part of an original divine decision to depict a created originator, meaningful to the sublime level of spirit, able to TALK to God, and to understand divine speech from Him and to make human speech to Him. This was the coping stone, spirit enacted in formulated matter, in space and time, of the creation; but man's creation as such was not the height of the sublimity, set in existence in time and with it in fast-moving creative exercise, by God, The correlation with God, as created by Him for man in a consciousness of spirit which could commune with Him, this surpassed even the establishment of man. THAT function is greater than the preliminaries of setting up man by design.
If you will, the software surpassed the hardware; but then this image is merely subordinate, for the glory of the thing is precisely this, that it is not ware at all, in function; but in awareness of God as of space and time, truth and falsity, heights and depths, it moves and acts and has its day. Yet it does so derivatively, so that if the basis be departed, so is truth both in logical reality and availability*1B. Such is man on the move, seeking to shove God to one side, the God who made space and place for man in it. What then of this alienated wonder, when such he becomes ?.
He then becomes the meaningless miracle: in fact, the disturbed personality that so imagines: since he divorces from Maker, matrix and meaning, and so becomes meaningless only in perception because of his parading.
This function, however, whether first used or later abused, brought man into things divine, though he was created; and into thoughts eternal, though he was in time. Failure to realise this, or act on it, or success in deviating from it has brought on man the whole conspectus of confusion in philosophy and religion, where the empty, worthless mockeries of mankind come with portentous potencies until they are subdued by realities, and the civilisations built on them, fade like flowers that flourished till dried up.
The outlay of created space, another facet of the environmental structure for man, in a scale of magnificence that adorns both the skies for man and the intellect in its vast ingredients of wrought out tissues and issues of latent comprehensibility, then becomes a stage, and not wrong are those who so project man. Yet it is not a stage for amusement, or parade, but for enactment, and for life!
This stage and indeed the staging, is parallel to the DNA for life, where the speech of the mouth of God in Genesis 1, is laid down in explicit detail for living forms - so that it may be read more and more comprehensibly as man spends TIME in looking both at space and speech, from God.
As to this space, it is a space for time, just as time is a provision for space; and as both are of necessity inventions of God*2 (and thus NOT BY necessity, but freely), its free purpose has it adequately fixed for the time. Such is the way with stages. Of course, actors who cavort and mistake are apt to have things shaken up not a little, and so this stage of ours is to be subject to increasing reminders of man's profanity, secularity and idolatry (as in Revelation 6-9), not excluding such things as asteroids (Revelation 8:8, 8:10). Yet let us return to space as such.
Neither is in itself infinite nor could it be; for all that is derivative from the divine, sent into existence at, by and through His will, and in this current form, is bounded by that will, limited by His creative Lordship and assigned in and with and through time. As our kind of time passes, so becoming complete both for initiation, computation, indication and termination, being not in intrinsic infinitude, but as its direct opposite, so are fulfilled all the volitional limitations assigned to its currently created format, and tableau and setting, for divine purposes. As to these, the Bible makes it clear, they are finite.
THE SET TO
The ONLY thing infinite is then that Spirit (John 4) who IS God, and that form of eventuation into eternity which is His, and which He both can and does confer on His children as a nub and crux of the entire creation. It is a prodigy of liberality and a dynamic of donation; but its purpose is readily obscured by disciples for duplicity, follies in satisfaction and fraud in thought. This freedom, itself the counterpart of love, so that without it, in creation, love cannot be, has its way and day, and end when terminable because of untruth; and that, it is contemptible in form and in judgment (Daniel 12).
Thus given infinitude in continuation are those spirits, those persons, those among mankind to whom God assigns not merely time and space, nor alone potential for fellowship, but its fulfilment, its eventuation, its culmination and its consummation. This does not make them ETERNAL, since they had to begin, but it makes their end eternally non-existent, since life eternal has no end.
As His word, the part sent not FOR creation, but TO it as now created, to man's cognitive capacities, not this time to create them but to activate them (this tells us the way to surpass the limitation of space and time and find this obviously now aborted fellowship with Himself*3 , in this aptly to providing means for it), it provides the way. As directions tell you how to open a can, this instructs you how to find the causeway to eternity, the road to reality and the One whose the creation is.
That is His EXTERNAL Word, just as DNA is something of His internal word, correlative to the staging of creation; for continuation of some of the externalia, the externalities of man. Thus there is his consciousness, spirit and will, cogitation, cognition and expression, and there is his material apparatus, just as some have their own computers for use; and then there is the environment, in man's case, not only this earth, but space and time with it.
Here is found the intimation of God's incarnation, His sacrificial intent, His becoming man that man might find the way home, and stay there (II Peter 3:18).
In this infinitely surpassing both His creation - by command as in DNA for life, and even His pronounced words, the Bible, in that He Himself ALWAYS was the crux of command, the executive Creator of the universe and man, the LORD of Isaiah 44-46, of Philippians 2, of John 1, that same omniscient and Almighty Being whose is all creation and eventuation, God arrived on site.
In so doing, and in His mission and plan of salvation, in this site of earth fulfilled, God has remedied the reality of man's pollution, plight and predicament (Galatians 4:1-4).
It was this Word of God, we learn and find in history (cf. SMR Chs. 6-9, Appendix C and D, Bon Voyage Ch. 1, Israel Ch. 1, Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8, Repent or Perish Chs. 2, 7), who became man at a space in time, for a time inhabiting space. In this, He surpassed even fellowship with and for man, and function with a display of the Creator's might both unique and definitive: and so gave Himself (Galatians 6:14). This was the supreme action of the Supreme Creator.
This He did in two ways: He came and was discerned in dynamic and grace, and He went in sacrificial sublimity, to atone for sin and destroy the power of death by presenting His own innocence to its demands on guilt, and His own Person to quash its scope of condemnation (cf. John 1, Matthew 20:28, Hebrews 2) which it justly bore to man.
This time, as in Zechariah 3, the inscription was not on writing material, as for the Book of the Lord, but on Him, as the Lord of the Book, of man and of both creation and destiny. Such is love. What does it say ? this (3:8-9):
‘Hear, O Joshua, the high priest,
You and your companions who sit before you,
For they are a wondrous sign;
For behold, I am bringing forth My Servant the BRANCH.
For behold, the stone
That I have laid before Joshua:
Upon the stone are seven eyes.
Behold, I will engrave its inscription,’
Says the Lord of hosts,
‘And I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.' "
Here is the servant of Isaiah 52:13-53:12, the Covenant of Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6, amazingly one in Person and not only in written form; and in writing on this Covenant Person, sinners have a ground of etching what needs extermination, the guilt of sin, in what has what it takes it bear it: a combination of innocence and purity and the love of Deity Himself, on whom this message of repentance and this opportunity for redemption devolves.
What then ? So have we not only creation, and its intense, immense opportunities for good and evil, but salvation. But what of this writing, this etching on the stone so that IN ONE DAY the iniquity is removed, for those who in faith receive this ? (all covenants must so be received - Deuteronomy 29:18-21, showing the results of the converse!).
This time, then, the author was man, the author of sin and of its inscription; and He on whom he wrote was as a stone, a rock, indeed even a foundation (Isaiah 28:16 so depicts Him). Here came the new writing material for sinners who in the role of another and in this, less sublime Moses, should write not the word of God on stone, but instead etch on that stone, each one, his own sin. As to this 'stone', the Rock of Deuteronomy 32:4 and Matthew 16 with Psalm 62, He is God's reply to man's sin, a thing so vital that God Himself came to deal with it personally. This is the etching which comes from those who in repentance and faith proceed to write it, so providing an horrendous defacement, but one borne willingly by the Rock (I Peter 2:24), to abort the penalty, power, placement and priorities of sin and give through pardon. This is then done by the authority of the Rock, to those who believe the false code of sin absorbed in Him who awoke to life and broke death, who so become doubly created, adopted children of God (Galatians 3:26).
.
THE NEW SET
Why doubly created ? It is because, as in this manufacture of a car, man first had to be made then having marred himself, as a sinner, then had to be remade (II Corinthians 5:17ff., Colossians 3:10).
Thus Jesus Christ SAID that He did not pray for the world; but He certainly ENTERED it, and PENETRATED its darkness with light, and PROVIDED for its blight with right, DEPICTING its sin in His plight on the Cross, and EXHIBITING His power in His bodily resurrection, the work of the word of God to survey in advance in detail of both date and depiction*4, and of this Word of God, to perform.
Thus duly He came and acted, majestically, carrying life into the web and net of death, though the powers that be and which were and are against Him. Even these adversaries, however, were warned that this was what He would do, and this came a thousand years in advance. The arising of a murdered person, back to life, even if the death did not occur, to address his defilers with well observed fact is always a ghoulish possibility for any murderer. When however the death is doubly sure, in place, in time, in setting, in scenario, in guard, in timing, in witnesses, in results, then the guilt is a gross thing. Death itself is then broken that your life be confronted. Nor is it for the Jew and the Roman only, but for all who reject the thing He did, using the malice of man to present the grace of God. The Church, the Spirit of God and the word of His testimony in the always fulfilled Bible, has been this testimony to this world for some 2000 years, since that epicentre of explosive grace gave a new divine thrust for man.
It was not to make supermen, but to render man human, a just product of the divine, not a crabbed residue, a cramped child of sin, a person of guilt, with guile or pride alike, the veneer.
Certainly, all flesh and all devils are as water to rock, when God speaks: for what He says, it is simply done. It was at the first and will be to the last. This is His way (cf. Isaiah 44).
Revisit the scene of His explosive grace, on that first week day, that Sunday morning, the day evermore famous for man's deliverance, dwarfing the mere creation (magnificent though that undoubtedly is) by His personal pangs and grace, love and mercy, participation and salvation. Naturally, and indeed necessarily, it was on THAT day that His triumph was made apparent: before it, it was not so. It had to HAPPEN. What God says ALWAYS happens, and happy is he who realising this, does not betray it.
Where is the body ? they ask on that first day of the week. Provide it, they insist. But it is not there. The guarded and noted grave, the tomb is vacant; but the hearts of His people are lifted, because when in any experiment the thing predicted occurs, and the thing prohibited does not, then there is verification. It is of this that the Church for 2000 years has been both the recipient and the crier; just as it became the site for squalid infestation of those who seek to overturn it by pretence and pretension. Yet it continues, though bastions of worldly power fall.
This is what was to be, was foretold (II Peter 2, Jude, Acts 20:28, II Timothy 3,4, I Timothy 4, Matthew 24:24, 28:18-20), has happened, is happening and will shortly be fulfilled; for time is at a premium now, as its day is short (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). Proclamation continues; infestation proceeds. Remedy is through obedience, not the squalid folly of accepting invasion (cf. Key ... Ch. 4).
Remade then was man, as many as received THIS Jesus Christ (John 1:14), and not some spurious substitute of the mind of man, still willing even to cast God in the form of idol and worship that, even at times in HIS own name! In this remaking of people by God, in his spirit, man is delivered from the human futility of seeking in vain for God within the parameters of philosophy or the imaginations of thought, his eyes blinded by the very criterion which he uses to look, his sin.
It is to this that many come, and they do so, just as at the first they came to physical birth, one by one (cf. Matthew 16:26-27, John 3, Zechariah 13). This time, it is not from the womb of woman but from the direct work of God by His Spirit (cf. Titus 3:3-7). It is THIS Spirit of God, even called the Lord in that He is sent by the Son, the Word and the Saviour; It is He who issues from the Father (John 15:26) which then inhabits the Christian (Romans 8:9). Indeed, to this there are NO exceptions, any more than is there any exception to the heart in the babe born, if it is to live.
Thus the sin of man is not only confessed to the Creator, as it were written TO Him by the heart, but is written ON Him, as in a figure, a spiritually disordered DNA, for the only begotten Son of God is God, His unique, utter and total manifestation, representation and image, His eternal expression (Hebrews 1, Philippians 2). Here then, the ultimate letter of God to man becomes the recipient of the ultimate ground of division of man from God, absorbing sin in Rock, through writing! It is in response to THAT writing, that there is received the very gift of salvation in Jesus Christ, and that freely (Romans 3:23ff., Isaiah 55). After all, it is HE who did the work. To mix man's works with that is not simple blasphemy, for it is total obscuration of what was done: it is like a complex fracture, a complicated affair.
Such then is the configuration for eternity, the format of a child of God, one adopted through Christ; and in the resurrection each has its own body, for this is the completion of the creation of God for man (I Corinthians 15, II Corinthians 4:16-5:8).
In this way, just as man and sin are now blood brothers, so God has made the redeemed and the Redeemer, brothers through the blood of Christ (Hebrews 2). Thus is fulfilled the set teaching of His written word, the Bible, which is the sole authorised, written word of God to mankind, long set in man's midst. Incomparable above all writings and human thought is the thought of God to and through man (Isaiah 55:8-9), testable, verifiable, indomitable in truth, ineradicable in proposition, vulnerable in openness to falsification like Christ Himself - the ultimate in testability. Never falsified is God or His word and by this accordingly till time finishes, at all times, the words of man about God and his own race are discerned and tested, seen and compared, so that man may walk wisely in this teeming time of the rain of error (II Peter 2:19).
As to this, His word, Jesus said this (Matthew 21:42-44):
"Have you never read in the Scriptures:
'The stone which the builders rejected
Has become the chief cornerstone.This was the LORD's doing
And it is marvellous in our eyes' ?
"Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation bearing the fruits of it.
:And whoever falls on this stone will be broken, but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder."
Mercy cannot be mangled, though the Word of God was willing to be so for a time, that His triumph in, over and for His creation might be made dramatically, experimentally and verifiably supreme.
On this, see Romans 14:9, which declares:
"For to this end Christ died and rose and lived again,
that He might be Lord both of the dead and the living."
Of Him in this, Paul states His purpose further (Ephesians 1:10-11):
"that in the dispensation of the fulness of the times,
He might gather together in one
all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth - in Him.
In Him also we have obtained an inheritance,
begin predestined according to the purpose of Him
who works all things according to the counsel of His will,
that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory."
THE OFF-CUT
Even mercy has had its face slapped, for it abode in Him (Micah 5:1, Matthew 26:67), and what distorts mercy departs from this written word of God, and leaves love like a row boat departing in a storm from a yacht; and asserting itself, it becomes as an ungodly pseudo-potentate, playing with pardon and inventing its own terms in a muddle of atrocity and vicious verbosity, amid the raging waters which know no peace (cf. Isaiah 57:20).
But man, like the Bible, is written, though for man's part, he is by no means infallible, for liberty is granted to the human spirit, though it be limited, and though its validity be lost in sin, yet its integrity is present in principle! Alas, his spirit is smitten with sin - many using it to make new words or worlds, in the very face of God's word TO MAN. Multitudes follow them. Such leaves only wrath (John 3:36).
There is nothing else but wrath or redemption. Christ prayed not for this world, but for man in it, and for man, this is the gift (II Corinthians 9:15). Thanks, says the apostle, and we who are His with him, Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift!
But what of this gift, made
available to man ? To return it and hope for more is not only a gross
impertinence, thanklessness and belligerence to love, but constitutes a fraud
which added to sin's enumeration, helps nothing, really, nothing at all (cf. II
Corinthians 11!).
NOTES
See SMR pp. 179ff., 482ff., TMR Ch. 7 *3, Let God be God Ch. 12.
See for example,
The Defining Drama 3,
Christ the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch. 9,
Cascade of Mercy ... Ch. 6.
See Design and Deity... Section 8
Nothing as the original would have no outcome, and we are here. Hence it is not the original. Something as the original is necessary. Time is an institution which requires waiting and is inherently disposing, an ingredient of dictation - time and tide wait for no man. However, the original, adequate for all and before all, God, is not limited by anything preceding Him or antecedent in causality or consequence, and hence before time, is the ultimate provider of time, as of space, which being a delimiting format, is similarly a bond, and so an imposition and so not antecedent to, but resultant from God.
As such it is not infinite, being aetiologically derivative in type, and delimited with time in extent. If it had no bounds, there would be no binding by the word of God, but this is its raison d'ętre. Its material extent is limited by the purpose and the time granted. All that happens in space is dependent on the will and work of God and of His understanding. As man gradually comes to find more and more dimensions in this space-time-gravity-velocity situation, with initiating and initiated components, so he draws closer to the structure of creation, outside its main theme of the spiritual point of the whole exercise: man and his spirit. In this, man is like a violinist in a concert, where what is most obvious is surely the huge Opera House, the draping, the grouping, the clothes, the shining musical instrument, the sound of applause; but what is to the point is the agent.
Little, and perhaps scarcely visible amidst such variety of grandeur, the violinist is the portent, his music the product in view. For a little it inhabits the grandeur and its impact is made. Then the crowd disperse, the music is over. The critics await the next day for their publications. So is it with man: but in this case, as in human terms eventually, the 'hall' is to go, and be replaced, and the critic is God. He is not harsh; but He is not fooled. He knows each note, the power of the creativity involved and what is spontaneous exuberance and what harsh folly. He does not lie.
Judgment is like that, and in the end of the whole affair, it is not the extent of the production which is crucial, though this does matter, but the attitude of the performer, whether he is teachable, reachable, realistic about faults, ready to learn more, in the musical domain at all, attuned to its character, understanding of its ways. So with man, is he attuned to His creator, aware of His ways, teachable, reachable, and is he repentant for his errors, and above all, for having his idols in the heart, and not being even aware of who he is, why he is and what he is for, when it is writ large in the text book, and made apparent in the life of the Creator Himself, not a maestro among maestros, but the Maker of them.
It is well that the Lord has made in mercy a way to become a child of God, sensitive to His spirituality and aware of His will, in Jesus Christ. Were it not for this, man would be of all creation the most pitiable, aware of dimensions but not of his own depth, seeking extensions to his power but retracting from his path to God because it is not there, and so would he be futile. Yet it is less poignant when he wilfully distorts the reality, ignores the Book of the Lord and the coming to die for sin on the part of the Lord of the Book, all according to precise prescriptions long laid down, and faces 'fate' as if he were not in fact defacing his own destiny (cf. John 3:16,36).
See Ephesians 4:17-19, Romans 1:17ff., the newspapers, TV and tedious tantrums of man as he blights the creation, incites adversaries to God and indicts himself in every contortion and distortion almost, that one can conceive, so that truth lies fallen in the cultural midst and mission lies amid lies, lest it be found (Isaiah 59 cf. SMR Chs. 3, 5, 8). The fact that the remedy was not only foreseen, but predicted to come to Israel and go to this world is the vastly surpassing positive to this negative (cf. SMR Ch. 9).
See SMR Chs, 8 - 9, Highway of Holiness Ch. 4, and while on this, the reader might find it profitable to consult Ch. 10 in the latter as well.