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CHAPTER ONE

CONTRADICTIONS ARE NOT ACCIDENTAL,

NOT IS GLORY AND SHAME,

NOR IS THE DIVINE NAME

Such kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, brilliance and incurable block-headedness, amiability and hostility, eagerness to learn and demise of all apprehension, such clever perception and endemic opacity, elaborate thoughtfulness and intricate deceit, restraint in government and asininity given new regions of definition, wisdom and blindness, capacity and incoherence: look for this if you want in this world, to find man.

Governor of mere animals, imitator of the worst of them, inventor of new regions of corruption and pageants of  hypocrisy, subscriber to innovative devilries, aspirant to sainthood, in millions milling about the cross of Christ, some worshipping a representation of it, some putting it around their necks but far from their hearts, some using it as a disguise for duplicity, some replacing it with a religious gun, some orphans of the universe, some children of God: if you want to find man, look for these various signals, signs and behavioural particularities.

Man is quite meaningless in himself. His potencies are applied to every variety of morals (cf. News 19), his spirit to each summary of folly, inventing with inveterate imagination inept every meaning for himself, like a child gone wild, but putting mature personality into harness, under furious drivers, chiding himself, murdering millions, finding meaning in blood, milk, water and tears. Man ? it is he who drowns in  un-inhibition, soars in gradiosity, depresses himself into grey states of mind, and plays the maniac, not merely in psychic dramas, but in philosophical systems given arms of power. With these,  he buries the race. If you want to find man, look for the tombstones of the articulate discoverers of quasi-meaning, who know no God but their own inventions, being little gods, or making them for themselves or their appointees, a populous pantheon of pretence.

In this volume we look in retrospect to guile, godlessness and gullibilities of man, but also in prospect to the paralysis that pride and aspiration in mere air will bring to what makes man himself, while as a race rejecting all definition but that of divinity, and finding the dynamics of devilry. So becoming a god without glory, a beast with soul and a fool in grand delusion, illusion, confusion and contemptibility, he invites that definition in truth, which comes eschatologically as judgment. If you want to find man, as the years roll on, look for these things.

But of course, if you want to find what man not merely is but ought to be, read Matthew 5-7, the Gospels, the Book of Acts, then John's Gospel and finding that when it comes to the only definition of man that works, in the context of the kingdom of heaven, in the presence of God as friend, and in the absence of scope for the devil as himself, look right at Jesus Christ. The introduction to Him is the Old Testament, the meeting with Him, for this, read the New Testament, and there find His diagnosis, prognosis and coming judgment for man. But perhaps, since He ever lives, and is life's creator, you want to meet Him not only in evocative truth, but in inter-personal reality ?

What then ?

If you feel like resigning from the human race, as some apparently may do, then don't just act like an atom, bent on you know not what, for nil perceived purpose, whirling and turning, able for constructions but dirigible to command, as if to dissipate into lower levels of the programmatics of your construction. Rather and instead, resign sin into the Cross of Christ, where there is ample scope for its reception, your self-government into government by God, guilt into the payment of the Passover become Christ crucified, and your power into the correlation with the commands of God, whose is meaningful propulsion, your love to the Lord Himself, so bringing faith to fruition; and He will lead you. Here you will find your definition not merely in words, but in that new man who is the reconstruction of what was, was to be, and will be, in the bounds of the glory of God (II Corinthians 5:17-21).

Man re-defined, he is not in principle new; only is CHANGE as in an operation to restore movement to a ruined limb. The new creation in Jesus Christ is not a novel one, but a reconstituted and RE-generated one (Titus 3:5-7), where eternity, the lost home for which man is made, comes back no more as a deceptive rental agreement, but as a gift.

The Christian, therefore,  is man returning to base, finding his basis, and in belief in the truth, recognising at last the Lord of life, the King of glory, the meaning of life, his own in particular,  together with  the cause of the curse which appears not only morally, in reckless delinquencies unspeakable, but spiritually in insensitivity moulded into passions, including that of the dynamic of indifference, and physically in the agencies of doom, in disease and pests, droughts and floods, earthquakes and tempests.

When this troupe of truth comes, then look for man who is defined not in contradictions, but in blessings, found not wallowing in unwisdom but walking in the Spirit of the loving God. When man is thus found, it is a pleasure to meet him, clothed at last in kindness and knowing in whose family he is to be found, at last not an illegitimate of nothing's breed, a whelp from nowhere, but a child of God, whose Father is God, whose Saviour is God, whose way is wisdom and whose work is gained by communion with his Father, the God of all comfort, of strength and power, so that now he is of a sound mind and a gracious disposition.

That is man, in part in prospect, but the other part is what persists in illegitimacy of concept, of aim and of self-coloration in kind. Man manages in his various magnetisms and responses to the same, to become both limited and bound, often in the name of liberty, which he abuses to the point that the irony is too gross to consider closely. When, however,  he dismisses his own dispensary, and becomes what not nature but God designated for him, then the enigma departs, coherence and consistency return, individuality becomes like a bunch of flowers, not a degree of dirt, and the lost clause in his grammar, if you will, becomes clear: GOD IS LOVE (I John 4:7ff.).

Love does not force; love does not do nothing; love provides.

The lost book itself becomes a highway of understanding, the Bible restored to his eyes; and the lost soul, instead of endless and often circular new self-definitions of himself, his plight and his position, becomes like a car seen no more in a distorting dream, but in the light of a transport medium, remarkably made. Alas for man, the dreamings are not pleasant in the end (Jeremiah 23 has much to say on this), and what he makes without God of himself, is more flimsy than fainting, more foolish than wheelies and more conquered than the moon.

If, said Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness! Indeed, man in this dark light, how he grates, man on man, like orange peel against the grater, constantly changing hands, till most of the crop is ruined. Does he speak like an angel only to act like a devil ? Yes, the orphans and the illegitimates may do so, and seek to despoil and mar the children of God. But what do you expect of one whose origin is God, whose basis is glory, whose liberties are phenomenal, whose scope for defining himself is as broad as his ability to defile himself, and whose God has provided a way back to his true and lasting, his unchanging destination and meaning. This in billions, man ignores, despises, dims or diminishes by words and ways, or to this,  he gives assent only in distortion, reckless reconstructions of God, as if his life depended on it, calling it 'nature' or this or that 'religion', and losing his own nature in the attempt.

Deicide was his response to the vulnerable format God gave Himself when He came as a sacrifice for sin in Jesus Christ; and suicide is the result for himself in the end, except that instead of mere deprivation of life, this action at the spiritual level is an endless shame (Daniel 12).

Man ? God has given him a bold relief indeed, and that in two senses.

Firstly, man is seen exposed in the Bible with a brilliant brush of artistry, and made to show his pathological dimensions in the light of the forsaken glory. That is bold relief, and if you cast it in bronze, you could see it outlined and carved into its corruption in the fading light of the wonder of his past, before it became a present of ill-presentation at man's option, frozen into artistic presentation.

However, since God IS God, there is another bold relief. It is the bold enterprise of God in coming to this earth and crying, Come to Me, all you who labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. To find in what circumstances this may be found, read Matthew 11:27-30, and Galatians 3:1-10. To find what you have to do, read Ephesians 2, and then Acts 2:37ff..

In this work, then, these are the parameters, and now here, now there, we shall seek to find these elements, the glory and the shame, the hope founded and the folly hopeless, the slither and the soaring, the wonder and the praise with the contemptibility and the spiritual profanity which, being life wilfully without God, is like swearing not as an action, but as life itself. There in this same locale, with these unremedied restlessnesses, is the only definition of man which is endures, covering all the cases and conquering all the discursives that occur to man: it is definition by God, cover from the Creator, meaning from mandate, comprehensibility from creation and functionality from the Lord of life.

The extemporary brilliance of man is no accident; symphonies do not write themselves, nor do Ph.Ds come by leaving things alone, nor do symbols arrange and organise themselves into systems, nor does nothing provide the scope for action and the correlativity of command and option for effect accordingly. God provides these things, and it is that name which is no accident in assocation with man. It is like light in the dark, which suddenly distinguishes where you are, enabling you to see. It is as if you were in battle, and all about you were shapes and explosions, sharp edges and traps. When the light comes, it is comprehensible, can be managed when the inward light responds to the dawn of day, the day of the Lord as He opens your eyes. Then the darkness can wax profound, but the light that shines on the way makes of it merely a diabolical provision for perplexity. The name of the Lord is by no accident given for man. It is however not automatic. One must CALL on the name of the Lord, to be saved!