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THE SECULAR, THE SACRED AND THE SUBLIME

Rev. Dr. Robert E. Donaldson

Published by World Wide Web Witness Inc.

November 2008

ISBN 978-0-9805471-0-8

PREFACE

The secularity of the secular is just the worldliness of this world. The sacredness of what is sacred is the reflection of the Creator, and the sublimity of the sublime is the manifestation of His power, presence, personal nature, wisdom, brilliance, majesty, holiness, compassion and mercy, wonder and grand creativeness, the anterior to our own passion for it, the ground for it and for as many as receive Him who made them freely, who paid for their restoration and redeemed, the culmination of it. HERE is the real creativity: GOD who created first man, has created the solution to the sin which is the necessary aptitude of liberty, and in so doing has sent His personal expression, His living word, the exact representation of His being, incarnate as His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to bring the Eternal to the Present, the Everlasting to the Temporal and the Life Eternal to the recipients.

It is part of His creativity and holiness that it is free; for any earning differentiates between recipients, and all are so lost that the gradations of grey would be mere illusion. When you are doing mouth to mouth resuscitation, then the differences in physical robustness, this apart, are relatively insignificant. When accordingly there is the need to infuse life into what is not merely slightly shop-soiled, but eminently disgraced, trying to work and walk without God, or at least succeeding in doing so, itself the natural lot of fallen mankind, then the differences in the basis for salvation in each of this kind, mankind, are absolutely insignificant. Contribution by man, zero, that by God, total (Ephesians 2:1-8).

It is precisely this which is a chief stumbling-block to this illicit race, so often self-assured, even talking as if to thumb the nose, in terms of self-belief! The self: it is this which is born in ultimate and intimate vulnerability and normally exits in much the same way, and to trust ... in ... itself, it is a folly as eminent as doing a brain operation by your own hand, on your own brain! To repent becomes an incubus, but it is a necessary prelude to a divine incubation, where what is old passes away, like the shell, and what is new arrives, like the chick. But man has zest for the parody of life which is without God, and often prefers by any devious diligence, to rid himself of His very presence. Man his own saviour, how he tries! and how many more millions of the race are to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to do the impermissible, the impossible and the impudent.

Such hallucinatory philosophical or psychological drugs are more dangerous than pep pills, and just as misleading.

Strength lies in truth, not in lies; and truth lies in the God who making all that is not He, knows it; and is found in Jesus Christ, who being incarnate, Creator of all (John 1:3), constitutes it (John 14:6). It is all so VERY simple. We are because He is; and we are not what we should be, even total blindness scarcely being able to lift its stricken eyes at that; and what we could be is what we are enabled to be by an act of prodigious mercy, kindness, grace and self-sacrifice on the part of God. It is this which is made available, just as was the original created body of the first man. It is all created. You can take it or leave it; but this changes no truth, but it does at least in time, exhibit whose you are and where you are, or on the other hand, are not.

Such is the basis for understanding, for man, for life abundant, for escape from the hideous monotony of foolish philosophies and trust in man, in himself, this little self-evaluating midget of hideously mean proportions, who looks like a dizzy bee when no more under the direction of his source, in this case the Lord of glory.

In this volume, the comparisons of these things, the secular, the sacred and the sublime will be our occupation, in order to make clear and impactive, the actual environment of man in the hope that some may be awakened by these facts, and no more deluded by the scientistic or the narcissistic, find the God who made them, loved them and laid down in the only Mediator, Christ Jesus the Lord, His life that we might find it.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

THE CAUSE, THE CONSEQUENCE,

THE CORRUPTION,

THE IRRUPTION AND THE ANSWER

A WORD FROM HISTORY and

A WAY SHOUTING TO NATIONS

Chapter 2

The Superb Construction of Salvation
and the Sublime Sovereign of Salvation:

Difference from Dissidence
and Stability amidst Disintegration

Practical Christianity in an Impractical, Pragmatic World

Chapter 3