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 CHAPTER  SEVEN

The Gospel Gives

NOT

The Everlasting Destruction of Seduction,

BUT

The Light of Eternal Understanding,

Being Felicitous with Fact

and

Immutably Beautiful:

Index to the Waterfall of Life

ORDERS AND ORGANISATION

There are orders of things, and of facts, of functions and of felicities and infelicities.

It is useless to try to merge what is distinct, distinctive and sui generis.

The effort to ally good and evil, brilliance and stupidity, frenzy and peace, defence and assault, lie and truth, beauty and ugliness, to merge matter and mind, spirit and either, felicitous facility and shameless inability, erudition and ignorance, incapacity and performance is mere gaucherie. It has neither place nor ground.

That which is, is, and that which is not, is not. Is that not it ? It is.

What has one function demonstrates it; to moon after its having another is anti-scientific, false romanticism and cheery party-talk, with a different alcohol, that of inward vagrancy. Shunning logic and following fashions, such fads are not testable and the very opposite of triumphantly exposed realities. It would be well to consider the actual evidenced order that we meet.

First, there is the realm of the ordered, simpliciter. To be, everything needs order, so that it may have characteristics and be characterisable as this thing or that. There have to be consistencies in order for there to be pattern in order for there to be a rendition to make it thinkable and meaningful. Total absence of all order is tantamount to nothing; for as soon as ANYTHING is asserted of it, it is too orderly to cohabit with the concept.

Further, there is no such thing as an everything, or an anything. Even if you try to think of 'anything', the very word requires thought as to what a specific thing is, what totality is, and what therefore denies both. It is a concept but it lacks denotation. What you get is one thing or another.

In truth to which we shall return, there appear to be atoms which are building blocks, fractured bits perhaps like quarks, smaller bits like electrons, positrons, protons, neutrons, and these have architecture, dependent on powers and forces, make impacts and experience constraints and restraints as to conduct, change and interaction.

These can be used as building blocks, to be sure; but the building is of blocks that are distinctive, not 'anything', and the results conform to the laws relevant, or the building does not occur, but rather mere collation or repulse.

Yet from these designable units, buildings can come. Give the bits architectural location, mutual interface and plan, and behold, a creation, not required by the bits, the parts, the ingredients, but one to which, given imagination, constructive power and architectural facility, they are susceptible.

Thus indeed many things can come from units, but not from units alone^*1. You can build if 'you' are there and what it takes is within you.

What you are using to build, in our imaginary case, which deals with one of the many strata of creation, plus yourself, an articulate, ideational, purposive, inventive being: it has a certain typology.  It is ordered; it has orders; and these things being so, you may choose to create with it, using what is by nature, not entirely and intrinsically always ordered, your thoughts, but deploying what is ordered, that your wit might use order  to make novelty, innovation, imagination come true and vision show itself.

You might say, that it might use order ... 'It' ? That is, yourself.

In our first category, even outside the recognisable and functionally definable entity, 'yourself', however, we have really hidden two phases, and it may be best to turn each of these into a category of its own. Thus there is the material realm, with its orders inherent, inbuilt in form,  format, functions, correlatives, responsive criteria and notations that are written into its very being.

That is the first.

There are worlds within worlds, but they are wrought, taught, instructed worlds. This, then,  is the first cosmos, that of the architecturally ordered, the units, the forces, the correlativities. Even when one moves to questions of predictability of particulate appearance, as distinct from waves, one has the wave mode of prediction, and at this level, it is hard to get beneath the structure to the sub-structure,  to analyse what is the micro-super-unit, so that it may be traced; but if it may not always be competently traced as such, yet in its traceries and trajectories,  it may leave in waves the consignment of its presence. This we have investigated, in various contexts,  in SMR Ch. 3, pp. 402-422O.

Various motions in mathematics, such as those of Tullio Levi-Civita, credited with co-founding  absolute differential calculus, and so making possible the work of another Jewish scholar, Albert Einstein in his formulation of general relativity, in physics, in astronomy: these show further and further the ordered universe, which Einstein so loved to ponder (saying, God does not play dice, famously), with its fantastic detail of laws of this and that kind, governing various functions at diverse levels of time, space and dimension, all with functional correlation with adequate causation in type: a work of infinite genius, layer on layer of engineering, mathematical, formal and architectural giganticism like the song of a glorious bird, echoing wherever it goes.

This ? It is a SONG and not noise; it has style, elegance, virtuosity, pan-operation in the challenge-solution domain. By the nature of its cosmos, agency, activity, construction, operation and intrinsic mode of deployment and operational method, it is a work of art, mental action, concept correlation, ideational manipulation by command and construction. It is one not allowed to vary in its modes, past the kind concept of the elements within it,  authorised and activated. These may include provisions for downgrading with time, this as a mode deployed in creation for its limitations and delimitations, whether in the downgrading of available energy or the slow accretion of defects in the actual speech of DNA, though it be called code.

Further, it shows by the manipulation which man can give, in the case of mere matter, such a fountain of energy, locked up, and such potential for explosion with fascinating but horrendous violence, that it is apparent that given the means, the unlocking of available power can rise to all but unimaginable violence and devastation. Thus the word of II Peter 3, concerning the Creator of this conceptual-ideational-verbal-correlation, who indicates His intention of removing the whole thing and making a new heavens and earth, and the elements of power and heat to come, allies itself most readily to the nature of the case as now, some two millenia later, exposed by research and experiment, including what was not quite so experimental at Hiroshima.

What man can bring to a city, God with the greatest facility, can bring to the universe, when, like a scrap of paper from one's desk, it is finished in its service and disposed to the bin (Matthew 24:35, Isaiah 51:6).

These are not mystic ponderings but simple realities. Man gradually catches up with some of the wisdom of God, given a few thousands of years, but even then, not in power to do what He did, in making things of the nature of our universe in its entirety and originality, but with a dowered equipment of mind and facility of spirit and imagination and conceptualisation, to imitate or excavate or compose at his own level.

As to that Creator, He is no part of a system, since to be realistic, this requires what makes the same, and the idea that nothing will do has nothing for it, since its etiological contribution is nullity, and such inoperative nonsense, that even the famous physicist who once embraced it, has for good reason, abandoned it. God Himself is alone, eternal and the only option to nothing, a thing which is notably defective as a ground for everything. What lacks these qualities and means of their derivation is similarly stringently removed from consideration by evidential nullity, experimental nonentity, and non-citability as to any of its relevant operations, being irrelevant to the issue and a consignment of fancy where fact is required.

So did God in this, our universe, leave the echoes of all these scales of quality, quantity, architecture, the macro- in space and the micro- in atoms and cells,  always challenging, always leading on to yet more functions,  His mind spread over it like a bright light. We find more and more, and the more we find, the more it shines. His is the name accorded to the minimal and competent, etiologically adequate demand,  and the verifiably vast confirmation^*1A.

This is exemplified in biology, in the once misnamed 'junk DNA' now found to be a residence for essential governing and oversight functions,  abilities of fascinatingly stupendous intricacy and functionality dowered in this, as in so much else, to the creation. The ludicrously misnamed 'junk' becomes a site possessed of primary,  secondary and further functionalities^*1B, superb in composition and mode of action. These are characterised by intricate provisions of staggering proportions, including codes about codes, information about information, while the whole achieves that miniaturisation in visible cells that with man's invisible but highly operative spirit conjoined in personality, makes him so remarkable.

WORDS AND WORKS

It is ludicrous to ignore, deny, fiddle. You do not get what far transcends man's mightiest works of disciplined intellect and empirically constrained power from the absence of what makes it what it is, but from its presence. It must be 'something' ...or other: the brilliant hypothesis which becomes more modish than 'it is from nothing', becomes mere verbal disjunction from duty. What sort of a something produces poetry ? the inane, the moronic, the insensitive, the particle prodding ? Is that it ?

WHAT particles are there but words, with the semantically irrelevant physical elements that project their inner content, words as constructed and operative per se, the whole point! and what are words but symbols of meaning, and what is meaning but an element of truth, and when it works what is done but to show that the two are functionally correlative, and in what way ? It is in the way of sensitive perception and institution of symbolically expressed meaning, which is in the domain of perception and comprehension, ideation and conception. What is the use of pretending that everything is bits ? Bittishness in building materials does not even begin to disguise their integrality, functionality and symbolic purpose.

They specify; it happens. They are purposive in functionality, meaningless and useless without that. When as in life, you have codes about codes, then of course none of any of it is workable except in integrality, meaning content and conveyance, orders to order and consequence for the whole. Meaning in words, codes, this is the entire point; except where it is combined with command, this becomes a meaning-order combination, and where this is combined with commands and available materials, this becomes a building trio, each without the other, in vain. All in one becomes one for all; and the one to whom it is appointed becomes the symbol receptor, the comprehension consequence in body, and so is. These things, and not bits, these are in a cosmos of cause and consequence, ideational in kind, conceptual in character, purpose in denotation.

To be sure, transmission can occur by packing things up in bits, but the need to do this merely attests the packing device, and it is no more a concrete indication of the nature of the thing in view than is postal wrapping, which may contain anything from vomit to invention. It is the content which is to the point.

A particle^*1 is an opportunity for combination, manipulation or admiration. If it is buildable, then that is one of its inherent powers. Whether this be done by man or any other agent, here is immaterial. It has this facility for what has the facility to explore or exploit with it, and this includes the receptivity for man's type of mentality, the two being wedded in kind, and made to conform by adequate causation to an entirety in terms of which they work, one in the Bible called the Word of God, shown to be eternal (for from nothing, you simply neither can nor do get these things), the basis of all invention, composition and creation.

This word which we find written in us in DNA and its companions, has in our spirits and minds an imaginative companion, a creative facility, so that from the ultimate expressiveness, there are consequences not only is a word of order, but in the order of word-creativity in ourselves. Abounding in creative power, being created as creative, we have this consequential, this derivative functionality, even in the domain of words, by which we can create within the limits imposed. These in turn, are equipped in the logical milieu created for us and in the universe by its mode of construction, so that our word power becomes operative power and we can construct things by these means, as well as move to understand them, and embody equipment equally showing this facility, functionality and method!

All these mute and verbal originalities, the universe and man its verbal ascertainer, the ontological reality,  it has to be emitted, committed to be, ordered and engaged into its domain with its limits and powers; and in the Bible we read not only of its source. We find  that it is  from the Everlasting Father, the Creator, who does not have speech-writers, since all wisdom is His, and He as the eternal source has no lack. Who would impose it ? Who could preclude its removal ? As soon as you have ulterior systems and powers, limits, you have to have the causal force back of it, if not a magician, and this has to have its own genesis. In the end, you have nothing, which if ever all, always is, so that you never could have had it. Instead,  you have the creator of temporal causal system (which has constraints on its facilities), by the unrestrained causal capacity, which is His.

THE SPEAKER

He speaks: it happens, but He is not limited, since all constrained systems are such by His impulsion. In creating a time-delay system, subject to constraint in this way, God has utilised a non-time-delay power, so that those concerned about times and time of creation in process, simply do not understand the ontological reality: no checks on God.

It is the Person who is the Word who performs the creation from the Eternal Speaker, Creator, that Being unlimited and illimitable, who is what He is, and shows what that is both by what He does and what He says^*1A, and the testability of the criteria of both in combination.

That man has foiled and spoiled so much, and inherited what folly calls for, and so is enclosed in a causeway to destruction, while surrounded with oceanic beauties, to use an image for the point, being embroiled in the results of his endless seeming misdeeds, presumptions, dismissals of the divine and inventions of the same as the mood and fad takes him: this is a complication of no mean order^*1C. It does not however annul the realities of the causal necessities for creation, but merely exhibits the fact that when the Creator of matter and mind and spirit acts, it is not like some fuddy-duddy who smiles vaguely and watches ANYTHING happen. It happens, and though He is patient to the point of wonder, He DOES act. When He does, man tends always to wince; for the action after creation (from Him) and desecration (from man) is not always pleasant to the propagators of folly.

If it were, it would be unnatural and irresponsible, as if little children were benignly watched while they cut off each other's arms (and man does far worse than this, and often extends his tortures of fellow beings for years). Liberty is to love or to hate, and wisdom is there but not required, and penalties are there and often delayed, that all things showing what they are, can be assessed. All can learn both for time and for eternity; and this is not altered, whatever be the obstructive obfuscations to which many are drawn, like blind mice too intent on escaping the farmer's wife, with her implements, to see where they are going.

COSMIC AND SPIRITUAL CAUSES, THE FORMER CREATED

There is a cause of this universe, of man, and there is a disjunction from Him whose is it, and there are results: both to make things and for their misuse. These are short-term and long-term. What they are, requires attention, not dream; and God detests the idle and often naturalistic and virtually always reductionistic dreams that man uses when sin closes his eyes to the actualities of what has caused both himself and his troubles! Thus at one stage, Christ indicated a sharp rebuke- when asked for a 'sign' when in fact He had bathed the environment in miracles of diverse kinds - that He would give none but one. 'Perform please', say to a great mathematician, is likely to be met with a smile of dismissal and sadness, as if regarding a presumptuous and callow child.

NO SIGN, said He, to this adulterous generation (spiritual adultery is one of the features of this moral disease, that is, playing about with gods, godlets, pseudo-gods as in Communism and so on^*1D) - none except ONE! That ? It was the sign of the prophet Jonah. Which was that ? The man had been rebelling against God (point 1), he had gone on a vacation to escape duty for God (point 2), brought a storm on the innocent sailors paid to sail (point 3), admitted his guilt and offered to be thrown overboard (point 4), at last been reluctantly thrown out by them (point 5), was rescued (point 6) in an original mode (probably a whale-shark with oxygen containing shunt site for rubbish, sufficient to hold a man, as modern report confirms) which in shallow waters vomited him as the mode of that type of creation it appears, and then felt obliged to do his duty once more (point 7).

HOW did this piece of history, leading not entirely surprisingly to repentance in the city of Nineveh when subsequent to his 'sign' he went and preached - repent or perish - relate to Christ who made it His reference 'sign' ? It was like this. In the Bible you often find types and anti-types. This means that something or someone normally, is so like in some feature of his nature, or actions, to what Christ in His incarnation was or had to do, that it is like an illustration of the sublime by something prior, a parallel in part. Thus Christ did not sin, but He came as a vicarious sacrifice. This meant that He would take the sin, assume its guilt, though inviolable in Himself, heroically strap it to His own account, endure its penalty, and so for those who would receive this gift, grant eternal life, death being paid for.

Take yourself through Jonah's seven episodic features. Points 1-3 are taken up by Christ COMING onto the ship with man's sin - as much of it as would be surrendered to Him, that is as in John 8:24, Romans 8:32! Point 4 is partially paralleled in Christ's admission of (adopted) guilt for those whom He would redeem and being willing to be thrown 'overboard as in point 5, is His vast though exceedingly painful willingness to be crucified and so to be accursed, again vicariously taking the rap. The rescue is the resurrection, and the result is His justification of all who come to Him, who receive Him as the people of Nineveh in that day, received Jonah.

CONSEQUENCE OF ATTEMPTING TO GIVE
SHORT-SWIFT TO CAUSATION

AND OF INVALIDATING THE ATTEMPT

That was the sign. Thus we find that the creation and the redemption both have their attestations, and all things requiring causation and consequence, have it in abundance shown and even illustrated in abundance in pivotal points. It is not ONLY the material kind of cause-consequence; it is the mental and the moral and the spiritual as well. There are DOMAINS, and we should know this, for they are as conspicuously differential in type and mode, as are ships for the ocean and the air: they ... 'sail' differently, and have diverse requirements and characteristics for their beings and their progress ... or regress!

If however that very intrinsic feature of characterisability be abandoned, this a sustainable feature in a world of thought where cause and consequence are in its interstices, elements of its meaning, for it is what DOES this and that and so CAUSES this and that:  then argument is over and speech is superfluous, a high price to pay for futile innovation. If then, the call for cause concept be abandoned, so that logic becomes a thing apart, then so is speech, reason and power to argue, all sharing the common tip, each elementally concerned in the other. This merely makes the work of thought in terms of such a 'model', a mere mirage of total irrelevance to data and the principles of consistent rationality. If you want to be irrational, the way lies open; but for debate, the way is dead by default.

Nor can causality be subjectivised in kind; for if you 'explain' it away, as if to dismiss its inevitability, you are giving CAUSE for its inapplicability. Therefore, if you are right, then your argument is wrong, and this is what you have proved: your own futility.

Since the demolition of causality in this case is the aim in this specious field, the use of it to secure that dismissal  is a perfect example of begging the question. Worse, it simply uses what it wants to be invalidated, to pull it out; so that the success MEANS the defeat. If it WERE successful, then it could not be invalid. If however it IS invalid, then there can be no success from it. Validity is the issue.

Thus, if the argument requires what it wishes to extinguish, in order to achieve this, then its success, in removing its own means,  removes its relevance, force and applicability. It is like destroying a house full of people,  so that there is more room for more children from the mother in it. Then, however, there IS no mother.

Put differently: if it were true that causality were invalid, then the grounds used in seeking to show this, the causes of the competence and applicability of the alleged reasoning would invalidate the very weapon used. If you prove a gun does not kill, it is hopeless confusion and irrationality to plead that it was effective enough to do just that! If logical grounds in a relationship of events and powers, are not to be allowed to contribute their varied forces in order and according to their own powers, then the model excludes what it is desired to affirm.

You cannot then apply these very things in order to invalidate them. Invalid are they ? then the use of them has no force, is illusion.

Again, if the attack is true, then the assault is effective; but if it IS effective, then the weapon of attack, being annulled in reality,  becomes itself a hoax. If you try to kill with what you prove is not a death instrument, then your proof forecloses on your attempt. You cannot by using a hoax as a method, remove what the reality is required to do: hoaxes by nature do not accomplish, because they cannot, what they are supposed to do. This is equally true of all that pretends to be what it is not, and claims results from what it is shown it does not have.

That is the precise point. More generally, ALL argument becomes invalid on such a basis. The grounds to which it appeals, cannot be conjoined; for an invalid method cannot successfully deny anything, not even validity in an argument. Its own validity, if the argument were true, would be zero; hence its fruits and results would be the same in its use.

Having a 'go' at causation, by explaining it away in these or those terms, is using it to abuse it, and losing it in order to apply it. It is killing the one to be robbed, in order to get at its life. It is a little late, if you 'succeed', in your use of it; since then it is not there. Confusion has here a second masterpiece, to match that of poor Macbeth. Unbridled ambition is like that: its aims exceed its means.

Unless then the cause-consequence provisions of sustainable etiology be abandoned, and so likewise the power of logic and speech through differentiation of elements by words (cf. Causes), so that man becomes an abandoned concept, stripped of his powers of thought, and logic is dead, you have no other option: reason and God. It is this, or abortion and confusion, antinomy and antilogy, loss of mental cohesion and explicatory power (cf. Design and Deity ... Section 8). Since this renders all argument by its own model, invalid, it becomes useless for anything to be forwarded from this side. It merely capitulates.

Thus, in fact,  this universe is inexorably and inextricably the work of stupendous wisdom and elaborately cognitive conditioning.  If however on this model,  logic be dead, then so is argument, and by this means indirectly, as likewise directly by ratiocinative process, the reality of God is established, free from the encumbrances of methodological assault (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Barbs ... 6  -  7). To assault, you have to be there; for a weapon to assault, it has to be there: if causality is not there, if the complex of logic and grounds producing results for thought or anything else, is not valid, then its results are in the same category. Invalidity, however, this can show nothing to be invalid. Dead on arrival, it can kill nothing. Its assassination attempt is vacuous and achieves nothing. Causality remains operative, and magic, mere imagination,  and nothing alike, are mere words to avoid the issue.

It is rather like hell: you CAN go there, if you want deconstruction. Here, you CAN deny God, if you want to invalidate your own reason and strip to the chassis, mankind, then dissolving the residue in the acids of mindless rejection. However, when you do, you have no more consistent power to reason, and have fallen on your own metaphysical sword.

In the end, nothing provides nothing, and the basis of all constraint, form and law, not inherently demonstrable as self-productive, requires what escapes in the only way possible to thought, available to logic: eternal somethingness. This source must be sufficient to produce all that is, and cannot be subject to an extrinsic system, since that merely puts off the fateful day of finding the logical basis beyond the constraints of our time, for its existence with all in it. Just as the buck stops somewhere, so the causal grounds start somewhere. Nowhere will not do. Nothing is not adequate. Hence it must always be which can do all that has been done, including space, time, causation and law, organisation and the very ontology which demands an answer.

It is not hard to find, once the irrelevant byways are avoided, those romantic hideaways for a weekend without reason.

There is one eternal Being sufficient for all, efficient for all, whose creations include the power to desecrate, and the power to love; and whose verified and validated written word for man, the Bible,  is as exceptional and unexceptionable as millenia of demonstrations require. He is not on the sidelines having spiritual lemonade, but has come, His word tells us, into the interstices to rescue the foundling who founders, man, from the results of using his extraordinary powers to create gods or to make himself such, or what he creates. Man's Founder does not welcome obliterative agencies at work in His creation, whether within or upon man, the one from the other, often says so, and has exhibited the certainty of His negative response to the violence of violation by His redemption.

Thus, not inferior to man in his ordering systems and self-made plans, but infinitely superior as Creator, God has met the results of that creation of wonder in man, liberty to love or hate, conform or rebel, by acting as the Bible depicts, logic shows and history records (cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3 in necessities,  5-6 in efficiency contrasts, 8-9 in verifications, Appendix C and D in historical exhibits). He has involved Himself, who created us, in our redemption from the ratchetting horror of the devastations of sin, by accepting a devastating death as guilt-bearer for man, as many as receive Him. To ignore this, and imply His heartless incompetence, is merely to add sin to sin; and to accept it, is to find in one's own self, the resolution of problems both logical and psychological, spiritual and personal.

What then ? Let us return to the basics.

In fact, the universe ? what is it ? There, not only is there the whole gamut of processive precision and its distinctive arena of systematised operation, layer on layer, and synthesis on synthesis, with integrality over all, imbuing all codes, prevenient and dependent, and all fittings and correlative co-operations, but there is the ontological reality. NOTHING produces nothing. SOMETHING, the universe,  with form and fashion, actuality and operational containments, such as form and fashion, law and legislation, be it written or merely informed into the interstices of the product, requires its causes.

Its limitations and delimitations, different aspects of the same complex, contained, constrained thing, these are not within the capacity which adorns it. It can neither show it, nor exhibit its ways, be it prodded, examined, pushed or tittivated in any way whatsoever. Its corpse (at the being created level as one whole, or in information-bound capsules) is as dead as the ground after an atomic explosion. This we have often seen as in

Operation is not computation; action is not institution; extancy is not a magic. To produce the delimited, to make extant the definable, to produce containing constraints, so that this is what the thing in question IS, its ontological reality, is not the same as BEING that thing, and OPERATING on that basis. The entirety requires causation, ultimately, from what has no cause; for otherwise  you invent from nothing, what is requisitioned to the bonds or the containment of reality, by no means self-derivative, since its whole being is taken up with being what it is.

Whether however we speak in terms of a logical chronology, step by step in containment of what has to be created, or the entirety as a formal extancy, the eternal competence of the originating agent - equipped for comprehension of all aspects, all syntheses, all particularities of derivative personality - is a given from which no logic can escape. His products define the minimal powers, His nature as logical necessity removes all confinement from His capacities, time is His creation, this with form and law, derivative since it insists, and is not self-inventive, being concerned with being itself. Space is no less. Man is the same.

The manager-contriver-creator-inventor-conceiver-implementer-excogitator, called God, both in intimation and expression, both Father and Son, to deploy our terms where Spirit does not have procreation, it is He whom the word of God, the Bible,  describes in its self-verifying and self-validating uniqueness^*1A, without competition either for its indefeasibility or its endurance, its powers of prediction and retrodiction, and to whose Gospel concerning Jesus Christ, the eternal and living Word of God,  this word points (John 5:19ff., 8:58, Colossians 1:15ff.). Thus what logic requires, the empirical reality of history supplies, and the two wedded, have children in faith, the companion of reality, or in disfaith, that pathology of deprivation, willing orphanage for the self-deprived.

These things man is free to find out;  and they are very simple, only poised violation of reason enabling talk to continue, until over the centuries, here and there, it has to be reduced to show its folly of irrationality, including the special case of TRYING to be irrational, even worshipping irrationality, without the slightest realisation that this is to forsake argumentation; and yet they argue, like those dismissed still turning up at the office for work!

So you have the treasures of the Redeemer and those of the Creator in one. The different levels take you to the Creator and the desecration and to the intimations of displeasure and the evidences of His control of history, so that He is not a nincompoop witlessly allowing the horrific misuse of His magnificent creation, but one both reprimanding systematically in fallen 'nature' and inviting fervently in the Book of the Lord, the well-attested Bible, to repentance and the restoration of faith in Himself through the vicarious sacrifice as a buffer for guilt and an exemption from destruction.

What then concerning the availability of the works and the word of God ? Firstly, what is needed CAN be found for good reason, for it is PUT there to find. You cannot find ANY treasure unless it is first created. Secondly, it is found for the good reason that man has the treasure of cognitive, creative, imaginative, rational, ratiocinative, investigative, perspective-engendering mind and spirit, by which he is ENDOWED and with which he is endued, so that what is to be found, may BY MAN BE found!

NUMBERS

Thus we move to our first two  categories: what is ordered and what has orders.

The former is material,  and the latter is living material.

Already we have come upon the third cosmos or domain. It is what discusses order, implements it in conjunction with creativity of mind and vision of spirit (the vision of a building is not the same as the particulars which bring it to pass) and makes orders.

Again, this really has two features within it, which may best be made into two separate categories of cosmos.

Thus we now have the cosmos of orders, of having orders (the DNA for example) as SUCH written, that of analysis and discussion of orders, and the implementation of these by will, itself a dimension of spirit, which imagines, while the mind applies.

These four cosmoi run, each one, in its own way, just as does a Primary, a Secondary, a Tertiary and a Post-Graduate specialty, say post-doctoral works. They relate; but not utterly. They have connection, as does a cord with a machine, but they are not one, not the same, however mutual may be their ordered correlation when they function.

A body may be used as an illustration of this, in a figure. Thus the claws of a bird are by no means its chest feathers, nor are these its wings, nor are these its head, nor is this its eyes, nor are any of these the same as its synthetic capacities (increasingly plain) to follow magnetic fields, or various visual stimuli in an interpretive manner, apparently built in, through synthetic apparatus. That on a larger scale, is like the mini-protein-motors, which do some of the 'folding' which makes proteins, something one of the world's fastest and vastest computers can only slowly emulate^*1B!

It is quite useless to ignore these things; they are there. It is vain to make fudge factor the master and vacuity of mind the maestro.

Each, order inbuilt, order written-in, analysis and synthesis, vision and envisagement, reception and expression of order, realms of thought and spirit: each one is there. They may interact in stupendous facility and felicity; or at times some clash with outrageous folly, as when someone becomes paralysed in will because of the impact of ambition, its imminent fulfilment or denial.

Throughout it all, there are extrinsic causes for its being, and intrinsic causes for the consequences which AS being, it suffers or delights in (where capable of delight!).

There is in all of this, scope for wilful error, in thought, vision or application. There is scope for a desire blatantly to reduce, ignore, mock order, as when wheelies are done by some student of virtual insanity, on a beautiful sports oval. There is a whole cosmos of resentment,  pride, immorality, deliberate nescience, obscuration of actual motives and the repression, suppression and sunderings of functional unities of mind, body or spirit by this facility for destructive deletion, rampage or ruin, either in the aggressor or in the victims, those deluded in choice, charmed, fascinated or simply flirting with philosophy, may become. 

Delusion itself can be intentional, in a vice of resentment and folly, or a result of breaches of rule, order and law, which simply lead to it. Those rejecting God further may become the butt of 'meaningless' belligerence, and endure its outcomes; for there is the appearance of the meaningless when the meaning is voided in the first place, so that this too, it is a fitted result (cf. Psalm 1).

We move.

THE FIFTH COSMOS

We can thus recognise a fifth cosmos, or domain if you prefer: and it is this. It is that of the opening of spirit to its own destruction, the pathological provisions of perversity, and these not induced but produced by the person in an operation of spirit on mind, and mind on mentality and this on vision, even if the same is desolatory. Much of modern architecture, art and dress, behaviour and morality is such a pathological rejection of the basis of order, form, meaning, correlative unisons and spirit; and the irony is this of course, that it is DONE by spirit, which chooses or is driven to its means, even in those who deny the very dagger that stabs their own psyches!

Thus we have ORDER INBUILT (1)

                        ORDERS GIVEN (2)

                        ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS PROVISION (3)

                        IMAGINATION AND DESIGN FUNCTIONALITY (4)

                        THE IMPACT OF WILL ON PATHOLOGY (5) -

these in their cosmoi.

These are as distinct as distinctive, as correlative in their workings as the legs and wings, brain and motion of a sea-gull in high wind, but even more disparate as well; for though their co-ordination as realms has been achieved, yet the actualisation of orders and their giving in the first place, of imagination and its provision for operation in the beginning of the race, the will and its implementative modes, these are as diverse causally as they are in function. To make a car and to drive it; to specify an action for the fulfilment of a motivation, and the motivation itself, these things can be confused, just as riches and poverty, power and poverty may be; but there is no significance except desire in such an inanition.

The assemblage of these multiple and diversified components, a definable work of design^{*1A, *1E}, in a profound integrality, for which in kind - in its multi-conceptual configurations -  vision is necessary source and command or acquiescence is mode: this makes a means-plus-ends composition. It has means for ends; and at the created level,  the ends it may itself, in the human spirit, specify.

This spirit of man, It can order, it can envisage, envision, encapsulate, berate, commit, commission, create and DO. It has a mini-facility to parallel the maxi- nay unlimited facility of its Author, originator, constructor and of course, construer, working at these various levels, with the skills^*1B correlative to the attainments.

Moreover, the intense and immense complexity of the means is as nothing compared with the capacity to compose: in the first instance, the co-ordination of these things into a single and singular system, and in the second, the provision of equipment for will and liberty for the willing, so that truth may not only be sought, the mind being able to investigate this field, but be found. But where may it be found ?

This, necessarily, it must be where it lies, in the original imagination and command, which having construed, constructed and impelled into actuality, the entirety called man, continues unabated, being uncomposed, unsubjected to constraint: for the Author of all is servant of none, and assessable in power and procedure, by nothing. It is precisely this majesty which makes His decision to become a servant (cf. Isaiah 41:27-42:6, Isaiah 49-52) so amazing. Yet when the character of God is realised, that He IS love, that is, nothing contrary to it motivates, activates or sustains Him, has an over-ride feature to obliterate or harass, harm or make it asthenic, far less to suffer from inanition: then the willingness, will and initiative to become man in order to deliver as many as come to Him can indeed be appreciated. What better, more apt, less liable to misinterpretation, even by the considerable expertise of sin!

Is death the cleavage in man when the fault line of sin operates ? Then let the Creator, in showing Himself the Redeemer, suffer it! Is guilt the impassible gulf which leaves man paralysed at the brink ? then take it, as a servant, substitute and ransom! There is in God what is even now, sometimes seen starkly in man, often partly and frequently in dim witness to his base and basis.

Thus man's intrinsic delight in kindness, helpfulness, warm, living love, splendour of sacrifice, wonder of patience (in other people mostly, but at times as something for one's own heart!) is not without a cause. Parent for children, friend for friend and at times, enemy for enemy, man may be seen in such a mode in life's spring-time, which blooms from time to time. As created parallel, micro-image bearer of God, he has naturally such proclivities, inclinations and delight; and though it may be warped, hidden, despised, or even feared in the intensively selfish, who act as if their own lives were central to effort in the universe when clearly this is not so, being but aborted vision, yet in even the most hardened, kindness met can bring tears.

A sudden relish of heart may even in a marvellous gesture, episode bring kindness through cruel eyes, or depths of concern to those who felt themselves in their bitter or braggadocio, lost past it. When ? At times, the receptive side of it  may be met when all is lost, and yet despite demerit and irresponsibility, a result from LOVE from God flows like a stream in the meadows, bringing help and the pointing of a way out (of evil),  into a sound place (good). This may occur in an episode among the continuingly wicked, or in a change of life itself, in those won for Christ, like the slave-ship Captain, Newton, who became a Christian with new kindness, and millions of others.

For ALL things, there is a cause, at the height, in the depth, in the vast and in the minute, in this cosmos and in that; but the cosmoi are diverse, and so are the causes and consequences, while overall, there is the continuum of unity, for the synthesis while not merging, yet does enable conjoint operations in the entire spectrum of creation for some (such as man).

In a simple figure, thus you may AS ONE BEING experience

1) the buzz of a mosquito near your ear,

2) the beauty of a garden ,

3) a thought of reflection on a point in a book you are reading,

4) the impact of someone calling you,

5) the reek of someone's smoke,

6) a recollection of a duty,

7) a thought for a new novel and so on.

These things are different in kind, unifiable in the domain of ONE person with ONE set of morals, ideas, preferences, hopes and understood principles and either with or without God, falsely in distortion, foolishly in contortion, repressively in abortion or lustrously in integrity of heart. Unite my heart to Thy fear! says the Psalmist (86:11). Indeed, he says more: "Teach me Thy way, O LORD; I will walk in Thy truth; Unite my heart to fear Your name." Truth, will, unity, integrity, meaning, in the image of God, all unite when the course is correct, the heart is right, the reception is active and the co-ordination with the Maker, as one redeemed is proceeding in that narrow way which, though it be constrained, is all the more meaningful for that, not sloppy, but challenging, good and crisp, like air in Winter in the fair countryside.

Pathology may disrupt somewhat; but design deals and results beckon, confirm, entice, become consummated when the way is found.

Past these variations however, it proceeds.

Cosmoi converge, but do not merge. Design fashions such features, co-ordinating conception and conception-construction apparatus and spirit, with memory and body, stimulus and response allied in a basis called personal, which in fact is an overseer and initiator within the overall totality, the hyper-domain of spiritual perception of environment, oneself. While in each, such things tend to converge, where not ravished, yet they have a cohesive impulsion which is not always removed even by some of the most alienated activities.  Man operates as one moulded by and for, and in some cases, living in correlation as redeemed, and co-operation as serving, with the God who made him. His natural habitat, and ultimate environment, is plain and operative when he walks in that way, with Him who founded foundering man. This, it is through faith in His Servant, the Redeemer, cast in form as a man from His timeless eternity. .

What then ? If one does not know God, then that perception, like a shattered mirror, may consist of bits of ideas and ideals, hopes and fears, aspirations and intimations and so forth, a BSA as one type of motor-bike used to be called by some, Bits Stuck Together. It has a shadowy residual existence, often impelled and to some extent dispelled, but always there as conceivable in mind and operative in living. Compromised, it yet is still an actuality. It is all based, faced and in much, defaced^*1C. Yet it continues, the most amazing visible edifice of comprehensible categories^*1E, synthetic operation, apprehension and understanding, physical finesse and mental acuity, spiritual aspiration and visionary capacity on earth.

No design of man draws near it in the fulfilment of design definition^*1E.

	You do not get dates from thistles, knowledge from incomprehension, schema in verbal format, from the defection of knowledge and with it the evaporation of understanding;
	nor do you have system from its lack, law from its demise, the domain of thought from its absence or the construction of multi-exhibited commands that cause action in a supervised site,
	by omission of means
	suitable for these domains,
	sufficient for their operation or
	cognisant of their demands:
	but rather from their presence,
	so that what is thus created may itself  make commands, both in its recycled constructions, called the generations, and in the thoughts and the words, in and of any generation.

Nothing in our given order, before God takes it away,

can ever remove from the exhibits before us: 

the  logical necessities for each part,

any more than

	their diversity of operations,
	their combination in their diversity,
	their integrality in the combination,
	their code and commands, available to and adapted for
	the liberty to assert and find truth without insanity (so that it must be there, past comparisons, not automatically, by model, excluded).

Nor does anything obliterate the results of research which confirm verifiably, for the command into being of the whole, the precise creative causation^*1B.

As it must be, so it is demonstrated to be; and the necessity with the demonstration is so clear, that to avoid it, one must play dumb, avoid argument, ignore attestation, dismiss differentiation of results or insist on self-contradictions, each one as may be desired^*1A.

The operatives and causes for such functions are vastly diverse as are householders and houses, yes and these from builders; but they work in a causal nexus, where the very criteria of meaning in speech, presupposes describability and hence recognisable criteria and characteristics for such functions in matter, lower life, mind, human spirit. With the last, come the pathological novelties which may be wrought in the unison of creation and desecration, a cosmos in itself, by no means limited to the psychiatric arts, but found in much literature (such as Mein Kampf, Capital, Mao's Little Red Book, Origin of Species and so forth), where the dismantling and denial of various aspects of things becomes a splendour of seduction.

In (3) and (4) above we behold in increasing measure, as man applies himself to the multiple environments he meets - God over all, humanity itself in its multiple cosmoi, seeking or seeking to avoid Him, living kinds, matter, whether minute or astronomical -  the nature of his workings. These works both multiply and become diffuse, like oil spreading on water with pretty colours, but without pleasant results to the water. Man moves with ascertainable order and organisation, imagination and will, with inwardly creatable oversights, matrices of thought and inventible dispositions, whether factual, fanciful or fiascos; and we find he both can and does create compositions of understanding, architecture, political rule, metaphysical thoughts, derivative deities until the point comes when,  overwrought in pride of heart and irrationality of mentality, he can become subversive of what he is.

The side-effects affect and sometimes are almost indistinguishable from culture, which in turn is often all but worshipped, and indeed in China with Mao, in the USSR with Stalin, in the Roman Empire with the Emperor and in multiplied examples of religious and political cases ^*1C, a head, figure or project becomes obligatory for worship, for obeisance; and so the freedom of man, by freedom (of some, in their minds and use of their powers) becomes the means, through a very special pathology, of the deletion to a great extent, of that same freedom of others. They love then to talk as if there is no freedom, since this would be able to fan askew the protests at the efforts to delete freedom in many, by the cancerously growing freedom of some one or oligarchic group. Without God, there is no end to the misfits, moral midgets and deceitful workers, as revenge rages and hatred guts.

In this muddle, there are few medals.

The many tinny triumphs, of sodden non-spirituality and reductionist thought, frequently denying actuality by means of the removal of truth as available, while using it to dictate, or by the elevation of some one being as the monopolistic mutator of it, without ground, or through some particular theory, denied by fact: these flood the field. In various religions, the truth is confined in its authority to the word or words of one or more in a dictatorial phase or through oligarchic channels: and thus the creative thinker proceeds in seeking to coerce, whether with religious force, as with Romanism in the Inquisition, Islam in its invasion of Europe or pseudo-religious thrusts, as with the mysterious but unfulfilled laws of Communism in its invasion of Russia, or through mirage in China, where words and actions coalesce like fire and water with much steam; and these are but models^*1C.

So man, illiberal while liberal in aspiration for thought or control, swallowing too much for himself, elevating himself or debasing, according to the party involved, becomes like one gutsing food, out of control, with  libertine follies. Often with highwayman force, he can proceed in leading many to  the endless anomalies of fake autonomy, including the denial of that degree of autonomy that can deny what it will.

This it may do either for revenge, or jealousy, or self-interested results to be envisaged; and yet, at the same time, deem the forced conceptions valid while denying all objective truth, so making itself - often in fact, himself - a futility with legs. Yes, such become themselves mirages like the French jets, too fast to be seen, tremblings in the air, nugatory speakers, based ultimately on what they themselves deny.  So in squadrons does cultivated, coercive, hypnotised, irrational man of the twenty first century foist his faults on himself and his neighbour, nation on nation; and so far does he seek the final flight of wild imagination with this and with many other foibles that he invents with relish and executes with indifference, whatever takes him, so viciously enabling sufferings in millions of cases.

Let us ground, for the moment,  these mirages or if you prefer, Mirages; yet their illusory flights are still operative. Yes, let us consider the pilots of such crafts.

It is in such marvels of muddled maestros - sitting now on the earth, like a death's head on a graveyard used as an industrial site - that man misleads. First one is intoxicated in spirit, and then by intellectual mutations through imagination, then others are misled, seething fires of thought belying the cold facts of the stones in the graveyard, often those for mass burials, but sometimes even this too much trouble, with bare earth the only reminder.

So does the evil flame move:  activist and his prey strangers to truth, inventing its semblance or discarding its reality with an ease and an elegance that covers the morbidity of their toils. In making gods, in this unholy atmosphere, and erecting reverential emblems in the grave-yard, there is no end in this Age for man.

Yet to the God who

created him,

spoke to him,

died for him,

rose for him,

sent His Holy Spirit for those who receive Him, who

gave the Gospel for centuries before He enacted it,

and whose grace is sufficient,

without whom there is but

burlesque and burial of the dead,

the fallen ideas and their victims,

the morbid with the mortal,

the vacuous ideologies and their dreamers,

desultory when not militant, deluded present and former dreadnoughts:

to Him, man will not come.

You say: will not ? To be sure, this is the vast concourse of the millions; but there are some who come, and as Christ said to others, seeking to exclude Him from life, unable to listen to His speech, immune to truth, people who BECAUSE He told them the truth, did not believe:

You are of your father, the devil.

These who refused Him, they denied in Him the mercy which He kept like a treasure store, released on the Cross and made available to  all, paid up in Him at once for those who so received Him (John 4:14, 5:24, 6:50ff., 11:25, Ephesians 1:11, 2:1-12).

These things are sad; but greater is the joy to come than the tragedy that is. What then ?

THE SUPRA-COSMOS ABOVE ALL THE OTHERS

We come now, past this pathology, to man as, if and when delivered from this very active graveyard, this sad industrial sight. We thus come to those who have been reclaimed by God, each one by his Maker, each who now works for Him, lives for Him and acts as directed at His call. We come to the realm of the body of Christ as in Ephesians 4, Romans 12, I Corinthians 12, to the talents in man, differential and delightful in potential, when harnessed in holiness. This is the sixth cosmos, domain; but it is now possessed of vital features.

Firstly, the original design is now in place. It has been polluted but panel-beaten if you will, it is restored. It has suffered, but in a 'new creation' it is made operable again (II Corinthians 5:17ff.). God who created, has re-created, and He has restored in the new man, what was originally created (Colossians 3:10). We can now look into this sixth domain, realising however that this arithmetical nomenclature is a listing device, not a mere series; for in this, there is God Himself personally at work for good with what now are His servants.

It is in other words, more than a dimension, being rather a super-cosmos under the crown of Christ.

It is not only a place of peace within, but the site of His direct and gracious action, who innovating in man, yet made of this innovation, this creation, an image-bearer of Himself in this, that he could know and speak to God, realise and understand Him, and follow Him - or not. That is the past (Romans 5:1-14). This is the present (Romans 5:15-21). Now restored by redemption - the saved ones as Ephesians 2:8^*1F has it, those with an eternal inheritance as 1:11 in the same epistle puts it - these can operate on sound and sacred ground, not a grave-yard, actual or to be (cf. Jeremiah 10:11, Isaiah 26:13ff.).

Let us hear from the latter.

             And made all their memory to perish."

As Psalm 96 declares, all the gods of those without the God of creation and redemption, the Lord, are idols. They never lived, except in imagination and as deceptions, as log jams, in those turmoils of anti-truth in which the deceiver of man works (cf. John 10:7ff.).

From all this, in this sixth dimension, cosmos, ultra-cosmos, we come to the site of reclamation, redemption, of lives over which spill the waters of truth, gushing from the Rock of the Lord, Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 10), over the pebbles in the stream, those washed by the Lord, this in the environment of vitality which is the source of the spirit, the mind and the personality of man. That, it is cleansed. It is now washed, it is regenerated, it is enlivened. Here lies the basis of a sacred communion, communication, flowing to all the other domains of their living. Such is the way of those having-been-saved-by-faith ones, resting in the Lord, invigorated by Him, intent on serving Him.

It now becomes more than a dimension, rather like a high plateau of ground, a prominence for sight and insight, a birth-pace for creation for the race, not into something a quiddity, an oddity, but into the Redeemer, in a restorative reunion that is grand.

It provides logical meaning for man's mind, and hence for its resolutions, removes the antinomies and antilogies lurking in all other spiritual sites and quasi-domains^{*1A, *1B, *1E} (cf. Proverbs 8:9, II Corinthians 10:5, Romans 1:17ff., Psalm 36:9, John 12:35-36).

The last passage holds this declaration from Jesus Christ:

 "Jesus said to them, 'The light will be among you only a little while.
Walk while you have the light, so that darkness may not overcome you.
Whoever walks in the dark does not know where he is going.
While you have the light, believe in the light,
so that you may become children of the light.' "

It is the darkness of obfuscation, obscuration, wilful departure from the Light of the world,  God charges, that is the ground of the stumbling, fumbling about. This,  darkness aids so ably! To know where you are going you have to know, firstly, what you are. In other words, it is easy for a bicyclist to talk of going thousands of miles in a small time, such as an hour; but he is not on the conveyance needed: what he is, precludes what is in mind.

Secondly, you need to know what the available means are (for example, in some cases, you cannot 'get there from here').

Thirdly, you need to know the conditions: for example, there may be brigands or vast crevasses.

Fourthly, you need to know the overall government or constraints, for if death-rays play over part of the only path, mere geometry for travel is an inadequate conception of the trial and of the trouble which would be involved in knowing where you are going. Such things could knock you unconscious, as sin has a habit of doing, for the ungodly. Dizziness and daze obscure distant vision and alignment.

We are not talking, here, in terms of John 12, of knowing where you THINK you are going, but of where you ARE going. That difference can be as near infinite as man can get.

To know where you are going, you need to know the supreme, ultimate, indisputable Power and Provision. It is simple. In this journey, the author is God, the destiny is God and the irrevocable power is of God, and none can contest it. You have only to know God; but that in a certain way.

For example, you may know the King, as a figure, but have no personal relationship with him. You may even know him in business dealings, in some of his offices, seeing him pass through, without personal knowledge, status or relationship.

That is helpful. At least you know there is a king and that his power is visibly operative in his realm. To know where you are going, however, you need really to be known BY Him, accepted in His realm with His consent, rather than being a non-visa entrant, illicit and presumptuous. Furthermore, if you do not know Him, you will not understand His laws, or perhaps even find them, the more so in the current case where knowing Him changes your mind, mentality, perspective and opens your eyes to things previously invisible to you. Above all, where as here, the very understanding requires  that you love him, and love has a transforming effect of its own.

Further, if you do not know him, how could you love him ? Even if you did, there is still the truth of what he is, that you do not know, having merely heard of him. You still cannot know where you are going in the presence of a locked door to the acquaintance with your Maker, working only on ideas and thoughts of your own, autonomous and illicit, prevailing at will, interposing like brigands, having their own fitful authority.

If however you find his words, and if these assure you that in terms of his realm, there is a way in and a passport office and that you may enter by this method, then you might do that. But where will you find what He is like, that you may know if you want to know Him or be in His realm ? You may BELIEVE in Him, and so move through that office, and in that way find out about him beyond the conglomerations of varied impacts and desires. Your believing what his passport office says however will not make that true. It must BE true for you, if you are to know where you are going.

If you study the matters and find that it is incontestably true, then you may find you believe in Him and so proceed to enter his realm. Even then, however, if He does not cause you to understand what it is all about, you are still in a hypothetical situation, hoping and not knowing, at best. Many founder at the door, not entering, while examining its surface (cf. Hebrews 6 and 10, in contrast to 9:12-10:14).

If however, to come to the particular case in view here, behind the story approach we have here woven into the fabric of discourse, you are found by the King, and you realise who He is by finding Him, and you see for yourself who He is, and that His word is indeed His and He is indeed what is stated, and He causes you to understand as in Proverbs 1:22-23), then you KNOW where you are going. What He says, He does, and you are witness with the myriads before you.

In other words, to know where you are going, you need absolute truth, absolute knowledge and absolute acceptance by the deity who has this domain,  incontestable in knowledge, uninvasible by alien power, incapable of sequestration. In our sixth dimension, cosmos, our hyper-cosmos, that of knowing God and being in authorised and sure communication an liaison with Him, this is where you are.

You not only find that the antilogies and antinomies found in every other attempt to present truth are here lacking, gloriously lacking (cf. Design and Deity Section 8, SMR, Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ ...), but the power to preside over truth has a presence and the presence has a denotation in history that is testable and a rest that is the end of quest.

Thus a lively seeking (if, with ALL your heart, you seek Him, you will find - Jeremiah 29:13), an objective presence of a testable word^*1G, and the dynamic actuality of the One whose the word is: these are the preconditions of knowing where you are going.

When you find the way in, and go in and find the One who calls, and the activities of His Spirit whose word attests truth, then your mind being opened to truth, your heart to receive it, you know God (John 17:1ff.), and exist in a new realm.

It is one of celestial magnitude, where all is changed and the pathologies of the partial or the parades of lies are seen for what they are: foolish attempts, mere baying of hounds (cf. I John 2:22-24, Isaiah 44:20-21, Jeremiah 27:15). The heart rests; the mind is sated, the faith is natural: for man made by God, naturally rests in Him, made meet for mercy, by this marvellously is made replete in Him. It is sin which scintillates and send out rays that dazzle. Truth simply shines in all the depths and dimensions of man, when the excluding dynamic is put out of the way (cf. Ephesians 4:17ff., II Corinthians 5:17ff.).

Thus comes in the grace of God, that eternal life without which man is more like a still-born baby, than a living edifice, even though his physiological life attests the life which his dim wits had failed to find. In this was a terrible irony in man, that with a brimming vitality of enormous complexity, gloriously run with an acumen and meticulous attention to detail that is staggering^{*1, *1A},  he was unaware of the life that physically throbbed in his heart, enticingly called to his mind, and often deeply drew his spirit: ignorant of his being! Hence did he speak ignorantly of the meaningless, of the ironies of 'fate', of his ludicrous aspirations towards deity for himself, directly or indirectly, and thus is seen explicable in poignancy, the whole mad motion of the human race, which like a pouting child, examines its own navel. THAT, it is not that which is the point.

In the Christian, that is past. Where the Bible is the formulation, the information and the command, the invitation resource and the manual for the course, things old are given the go-by, the things of misunderstanding, and things new come into focus, as for those long blind, but now seeing (II Corinthians 5:17ff., John 3, 9:39). When its Author, according to written specifications, like a prescription, but for medicine, that of immortality, that of Christ Himself, found, then the life and the word in cohesion, the speech and the Speaker, make manifest the key that man missed, threw away, and the household of faith made for man. The pre-occupations without point are gone (cf. John 5:39-40).

Now at last, restored to reason and delivered from spiritual treason, knowing God and trusting in Him according to His word, the new man is supernaturally re-connected. No more is a part of 'nature', his own or something or somebody else's in the creation, made into a sacred emblem, nor is a created object, force, power or procedure given vain mystique; nor is a mystery now lodged in a symbol, a hopeful signal, as if man's ultimate. The misuse of Christ's name is of course routine; but where the Book of the Lord governs, this is the case. Through it, the Governor is found, and in Him, the words of His governance are seen in their authority, and experienced in their apt and explicit power.

No more, are categories smudged, fused, confused. The Creator is found^*2 just as logic insisted and truth required^*1B. As a creature, he becomes in unison with his Creator; and as redeemed, he becomes at peace with that inward dynamic, by which God works in him, both to will and to do (Philippians 2:12ff.).

Now no more is man, perhaps good to look at, notable in intellectual ability, strongly built, but dead, quite dead where it matters, in the realm where life is realised that it may be lived with Him who having made it for Himself, is needed that it may operate in the functions fashioned for it, even in the knowledge of God Himself.

Failure to realise and operate in each dimension, or to understand at least the sixth, the supra-dimension,  sufficiently not to be deluded concerning who He is and what one is and what 'nature' is, so becoming a tributary to idolatry, whether of 'nature' or one's own ideas, or those of another: this can become the silent imprimatur of death. Instead of flowing functionality, you have dribbling words and painful wanderings in the midst of a perspective that does not provide, an application which does not yield, so that man does not know who he is, where he is going, what he means. Yet in that state, does he live like a driverless car, the owner being unconscious of the actual road, playing with dice in the back seat, and prodding things from behind, now and again, and hoping, at best for no undue impact or foul end.

On the other hand, when one is conveyed into this supra-dimension, the sixth, the life of God with the life by which one CAN know this life (cf. Ephesians 2:6), then the knowledge of the true and living, operative and informative God, who restores the lost, reforms the deluded, conforms the ignorant (cf. II Corinthians 3:18), through the divine appointment of the very Word of God, eternal in heaven, crucified on earth: this supervenes. His word and His spirit becomes active in all the domains of one's thought, life, understanding and enterprise. This stabilises mind (cf. Isaiah 33:6), enlivens the spirit of man, give flair to imagination and restraint to the use of gifts, as one walks in the very presence of God (cf. Galatians 5:15-26).

There are elements in this supra-dimension which may seem like sight to the blind, but when found, appear normal and indispensable to life. Thus when one is there "sitting in heavenly places" as Paul puts it in Ephesians 2, filled with the Spirit whose is the generic for all (Ephesians 3:16, 5:16), abiding in the Lord (John 15:7), with a part in the available heritage (Ephesians 1:11, Romans 8), graciously equipped with His power, illumination, vitality and help, there is gladness of heart, peace of soul and spiritual life. There is oil to the mind, a vitality suffuses the soul, while one is given a prepared road for travel,

It is like a flow of vital waters (cf. Jeremiah 2:13, 18:14).It resembles the life-giving waters of which Ezekiel 47^*3 speaks, imparting vitality where they go, except the swampy places, immersed in their own water, which clings to them. So is man made all over again, a living soul with a virtuous, vigorous and valiant spirit.

It is so simple amidst the complexities of human pathology, peaceable amid that angry government which spreading on this earth like mould, filled with its own pride, and force - crazed in religious renegacy very often - sets out to kill and remove the challenge. In time, it governs simply to add to their own government (cf. II Thessalonians 2:4ff.). Where citizens of the kingdom of heaven (Philippians 1:2-21, 3:20-21) are concerned, the agents of spiritual subversion pursue their violence, both of the old and the young, as they indoctrinate; but of the Christian, they can but touch the body, for the soul is already in the Lord who by His own power keeps it (I Peter 1:5ff.). But consider for one moment the horror of actually pouring philosophic folly into the minds of children, to convert them to worldliness, to constrain them to idolatries, whether knowingly or not: what is the result ? Is it not then easy to understand the words of Christ found in Matthew 18:6-7.

It is better to be persecuted than to persecute!

Paul is led to write, in Philippians 3:17ff., these words descriptive of the domain, the supra-domain, the very kingdom of heaven into which Jesus Christ is the passport, His blood the visa and His power the assurance.

"Brethren, join in following my example, and note those who so walk, as you have us for a pattern. For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame - who set their mind on earthly things.

"For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself."

 

GIFTS, TALENTS

Thus there is a domain, the kingdom of heaven, which is the final repository for the spirit of man, where in the presence of God Himself, one may live and work and wait and pray, and resolve and complete the tasks given. Heaven has a kingdom and it is available on this earth; but as I Corinthians 4 and II Corinthians 4 show, it is not one for ease, for the slovenly exercise of personal-add-ons to one's psyche. It is for reality in the presence of the Creator, and for the love of truth, where the spirit is the Spirit of Truth, where Deity is not a name or word for reverential treatment, merely, but a reference to Him who so vitally presides that His presence is nearer than air to the lungs, ground to the feet.

But to what are these task, to whom are they given ? To saved souls - the having been saved souls of whom Paul speaks in Ephesians 2:8^*1F.  In what do they come ? They come with gifts attached, with talents embedded, given each one sovereignly as the Lord will (I Corinthians 12:6-7). There are appointments for service, not for pomp or display (Matthew 11:29, Isaiah 66:2). There are so many, misled, who act as if they were greater than Christ in their importance; but He, He was meek and lowly in heart. The gifts then, with the talents, the supernaturally conveyed and the naturally inherent, these come.

Let us look at the talents. Thus you do not ask a child to write a mathematical thesis, or a wrestler to play the piano in any normal range. God gives talents to man such that, if you take the very best of them, in mathematics, physics, astronomy, physiology, and the various disciplines, you see once more something of the sort at least of brilliance and capacity, functionality and facility which the very workings of our many-times self-reproducing bodies exhibit (via, to be sure, a duality of male-female, all part of it).

Then though the  greatest functional powers of man lie far beneath the least of those evidenced in the fabrication of creation, even the simple cell an exploit of sheer wonder, yet we find that LOGOS, the word of God, the cause, the expression of His mind such that in man it SHOWS ITSELF, intrinsically, in what he is made to be, and through man, it shows itself extrinsically in his works, again, less clearly because of sin, yet nonetheless most distinctively, in what he creates in thought and construction^*3A.

LOGOS-wrought in making, logos-taught in functioning, man is surrounded by words as a forest by its trees. Seen from without, it is vast and rambling, yet ordered and beautiful; seen from within, it is powerful and functional, logic so sheer in its splendour in man that he even toys with it, discusses it, tries to seduce it from its work by invalidating it, as if that could amount to anything: for if a man breaks a sword, with what weapon does he fight!

It is not man only who shows this functionality of finesse, but in man the conscious, contemplative, ratiocinative, perspective-creating, abstraction-inventing power is unique, and after the style, at least, of what is apparent within him. In his highest talents, the force of the original instructed information (it never is found to invent itself^*4) is found;  and it is amazing that despite the monument to sin which the human race constitutes, with a viciousness of disregard of his own equipment which is staggering to the sensibilities, that such powers still linger.

The parodies of truth will never remove the requisites for this information, this facility and this flexibility; for in man, the creativity is intense, immense and almost outrageous in its prodigality. The adaptability of mind is so great that he can even make of himself, his race, his thoughts, his ideas or his desires, little gods, sometimes explicitly worshipped, or make extrapolations of the powers involved, into fastidiously constructed little micro-deities which are no deities at all.

Yet the sheer effrontery, of such common and often clownish actions,  is in itself a testimony to the vast extent of man's creativity, the power not only to make information, but to inform or deform it and to set it in perspectives virtually at will. These, they are chopped off by logic, dismissed by the word of God, but they continue to wriggle like chooks, heads cut off, walking on.

So vast is this creativity - the originative side of creation, passed on to man 'in the image' of God, that it can rush down the runway of his mind, so that even quite brilliant people, in terms of some one talent, can yet behave like charlatans or duds in this area. Where the will works in the mind, the delusive dynamic can be like a torrent of flood-waters, stopping at nothing, and wrecking everything.

 He pays of course. His ideas and ideologues, his god-makers who will make anything to venerate rather than give worship to their verified and uniquely validated Creator^*1B, ^*1A, these lead to conflicts, abortions of beauty, ruin of duty, irresponsibilities of rampaging, and the follies of fancy (Cf. SMR Chs.   3,   10), that abuse of privilege: so becoming the undertakers of millions, and the torturers of humanity.

Yet the realms of the sixth, the supra-dimension, the celestial cosmos, the kingdom of heaven, these contain not only talents, but spiritual gifts.

While much muddled thought is given concerning these things, which appear sometimes treated like treasure to be stolen by covetous spiritual eyes (cf. Balaam, Numbers 22ff.), and some act as if gifts gave unction for strange function, disorder, irreverence, presumption rather than being mere instruments for spiritual service within ALL the requirements of conduct which Christ enunciates: yet the gifts of course do exist. This you see in Romans 12 for example. They include government, healing, helps, teaching, evangelism, and prophecy.

The latter is treated earlier^*5, but here it suffices to say that until the word of God in the New  Testament was complete, this gift could operate in two dimensions.

Firstly, apostles or those ordained with them, could be required to write the word of God, centring on Christ. Witnesses of Him and participants in His power, they were given remembrance (John 14:26) and with Paul, as one born out of due time, enabled to present as did the prophets of God before them in the Old Testament, what was the word of God (I Corinthians 2:9ff., I Peter 1, II Peter 1).

Secondly, others, not so called, could have expository gifts, and these took a certain precedence, since if you do not know what you are about, as we saw, it is a paramount loss! They could give understanding, but were of course subject to their fellows, and not monoliths (cf. I Corinthians 14:29). God has called many to many things, some to attest, some to govern, some to expatiate and exposit, some to be authorised to provide His word, some to heal, some to be especially brotherly, to exhort, and so the body of Christ functions; but it must be in love, since to contradict what God is, in His name, is ludicrous.

For all that, love rejoices in the truth (I Corinthians 13), and does not sell it for anything; so that the people of God are bold in the faith, but not for themselves, as most notably was Stephen (Acts 7!). His words addressing those who became his murderers have the sort of audacious authority which is found in those of Jesus the Christ, as set forth in Matthew 23!(cf. John 14:12).

The word of God, however, this is not bound for all and for any, and its impact may be continual, for it is a resort for application and implication for all, but the more so, for those so gifted.

As these gifts operate - shorn of sensationalism and domineering pretence - there is a service which quite surpasses the use of talent, for it is a specialised spiritual function, dynamised by God and directed by Him to serve in His body, the Church, that is, the organisation of spiritual people who, living in Him, the Head, the Redeemer, serve one another, and together seek for the lost.

There, there then is some part of the unsearchable riches of Christ, the loss of whom and of which leads to an impoverishment of this world so terrible, so prolonged, so chronic and so wilful that it is not only predictable in its end, like that of an engine into which the owner refuses to pour oil as a matter of principle or paralysis, but appalling in the nature of that end.

Yet despite this dire aggregation of the evils of dismissal by this world of Him who is divine, all in it may by saving faith be covered by the same word of grace that gives the Gospel (I John 2:2), in the same love that sent the only begotten Son of God, His definitive expression (John 3:16, Hebrews 1:1ff.), to die to delete guilt and enable pardon freely (Romans 3:23ff.). If it were not necessary, God would not have done it. The fact that He did so love that He gave this,  His only begotten Son as a sacrifice for sin and a testimony of the power of pardon in resurrection for those who come in faith and repentance to Him, as HE IS, and not as He is imagined to be, according to His word: what of this ?

It is this which shows the EXTENT of the NECESSITY. It is that which shows the inexpugnable guilt of what refuses this gracious pardon, this needful power and this operative wisdom, this salvation through Jesus Christ. There is no other (Acts 4:11-12). God is neither fickle nor ambivalent, a prey to lawyers (as Luke 11:53 with Matthew 22 shows), nor a changeable proponent (as in Galatians 1). He does not dither, and those who do, need hope for nothing (cf. James 1).

Such is the glory; such is the shame. So great is the glory of God; so vast is the shame of the sham to be found in our race, which mills, as lions for meat, about the entrance to the highway to hell (cf. Matthew 7:15ff.).

REJECTION OF RECLAMATION

The rejection of God the Creator, in His reclamation project, is to prefer marshes to meadows and malingering to meadows.

This, this preference which demarcates so much of the world in its tempestuous and increasing embroilments, now with the devil, now with false hopes, false prophets, false ways, false testimony, it has a terrible fate. That, it is just like the Calvary crucifixion of Christ. Damage your own life by stubborn refusal of the Redeemer who made you, of the Plan and the Person of salvation, and what is left but that for which salvation came ? That, it is damnation... so unnecessary, so elemental, such a fruit of the double folly, first to sin, and then to bid redemption farewell ... or even worse.

In the end, of course, they fight it in this, that they fight Him explicitly as now so often in various subtle, stubborn, sick modes (Revelation 19:19), Him who gives, and fight on behalf, when it is all finished and analysed out, of him who takes, whose own future is futility and whose word is lie (John 8:44).

Better the riches of Him who became poor that we might become rich, than the riots and discord, or the spiritual anaesthesia till this comes, supplied so cunningly by the devil, his artful analgesics an accolade to emptiness, and worse, guilt by guile.

Praise the Lord, as you read, the way lies open, through Him who died, yes rather, was raised again (I Corinthians 6:1ff.).

NOTES

*1

EXCURSION ON BITS

Bits -

unit items, as in a jig-saw puzzle, or an atom, or a molecule, a cell,  in ascending order of complexity in situ, in energic level, in presupposition of environment, power and composition, correlative features and with means by which all relationships are to be gained, these with interfaces single or multiple, associated, like neurons with many another by various means, the whole overseen and subjected to various criteria and contingency plans and the like:

these are not the whole.

It is not even slightly covered by saying that the whole is greater than the parts in this matter. There is a REASON for the part AS for the whole. Bits are subjects of composition and subjected to the constraints relevant for the same. They are called for, on grounds of usability, attraction, intrinsic or extrinsic properties; but as bits they exist, each one, as an item of subjugation, whether of force or of concept, institution (that they may BE there at all), and co-ordination, so that whatever concept or force may be in mind, the part, the bit becomes part of what is in view.

Not all bits fit; and in the human plan for humans, so often made up by man, the resilience of bits (in the 'model' of the maestro) may be in part true or false, desired for the subjectibility and the suitability assessed by whatever crazed concept may temporarily possess the mind of very-definitely-not-improving man, for a time.

Be the concept human (as misconceived in that case - even Christ's body is like a team with a Head), or material, mental (concepts and sub-varieties consistently snuggling in their domain, in the context of of philosophic or analytical thought) or spiritual, elements may be conceived as bits. How wisely this may be done is another question.

In the case of things material, it is in principle, quite sound, when devoid of reductionism (cf. Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13). Atoms have bits; even quarks appear to be bits broken; mesons are bits of a composition. Words are bits of a sentence, sentences of a paragraph of (hopefully) cohesive thought. Bits are thought of as such, when they ARE pieces of a cohesive whole. Being THINKABLE as bits, and in electronic methods, distinguishable as bits (the constraints being readily imposable when a system is running the composition, constrained by its initial institution), these items are not just junk. Whether in the non-coding DNA or in a computer program, there are certainly not simply thus!

Let us resume more generally, and move on to greater and greater specificities.

They are as far from that as furniture is from stones. They are processible, designable in terms of inter-face relationships. If a whole may be conveniently assessed for reconstruction, in an analysed series of bits, multiply constrained by ingenious forces and systems, this no more designates what a 'bit' is than does an envelope make clear what is written inside; nor is the cover any part of the system of reality of which the contents bear the burden.

Analysability, on the one hand, and discursive separation for 'packing': this has nothing to do with what the whole is comprised of, of which the bit is a part.

Cars have bits of cords, wires, airplanes miles of the stuff apparently; and the wires have connectors or connections, and these are to items of this and that kind, and the connecting elements are themselves part of an assemblage: and this is part of a composition which needs such an assemblage through schema, in parts, parts within parts and for parts, and the larger parts, with functions at diverse levels (not now just for electron flow, but perhaps for composed information sub-unit transmission) become like nodes of thought, emplacements for disposition.

These relate in a specified and composed way with still further features, such as navigation (with the now famed wing-tip indicators, designed for aeroplanes,  for computer use),

	and these relate to computers, which relate to visual displays,
	which relate to the eyes of the thinking-deciding-agencies of pilots, which relate to perception, apprehension, estimation, memory, rules of flight,
	which relate to various other countries and incoming and outgoing flights, which relate to the conceived and actual nature of space and time,
	which relates to the composition of the planets and the impacts of more distant material foci,
	which relate to the compositions of thought, in practice, of astronomers,
	which relate to their philosophies and observation, which relate to their education and to their own spirits,
	which relate to the composer of the same,
	which relates to His creation of the actualities and potentialities involved in all this,
	including the provision for men to be persons and hence to be able to be stupid or wise, knowing or knowledgeable ignoramuses,
	which relates to sin, which relates to sundering from God,
	which relates to confusion in profusion, which relates to history itself.

Bits then, are not non-descript items: not at all. To get a bit is almost (but not quite) meaningless, when you are seeking to ASSESS the nature of being. It is not a leggo block. Even this has some constraints, such as its mode of attachment, size and shape, and designations for modes of and limits to constructive facilities, for various creative ideas on the part of the user.

Bits in a system, an integral unit (such as a man) are multiply anointed with constraints so vast, conceptual integration so intensive (they have to cohere not only with each other, but with the totality in all aspects to which they must conform, both in actuality and in potentiality), that the idea of picking them up and putting them together is as ludicrous as it would be to put any other indifferently chosen symbol in any computing program at any point. It is an irrelevant concept.

Not only the ONE item, but EACH of the elements is pre-conceived, pre-selected, multiply constrained, and this not in this or that system only, which may be parts of an extravagantly conceived whole, but FOR ONE system to which its appointed correlation may be multiple. The systems within systems, and of systems, and beyond the systems, and the programmatic integrity which beings about assignable integrality, these are all like stars in a cosmos: they assume the cosmos, their initial keeper.

	Plans without planning, commands without articulators, systems without systematisers, constraints without constrainers, composition without composers, music without musicians, buildings without planners (you get an approximation to this in some cases, but even humpies have constraints of form and function), concepts without conceivers, programs without programmers:      even exquisite, multi-purpose, multi-appointed programs for diversified use,      codes which run other codes as in the human body,      information coded, about information,      and applied as a constraint,      this itself coded,      and the combination of codes,      each one quite meaningless without the synthetic totality of thought,      involved in each and for all:
	what are these omissions ?
	They are the romances of opium, the delusions of irrationality, the diversifications of causal suicide and rational composition.

If one is to become mindless, then mindless may be the imagined source of it, though in this case, it is a rupture of what one has as basis for integrality, rationality and validity; but even the 'mindless' among men are often brilliant procrastinators, who love to depart from the obvious in order to build concepts, in a systematic manner with verbal units of comprehensible kind architectured into pieces of folk-lore called philosophy, so that they may keep at bay the baying of the hounds of reason. They abuse what they use, even as they dismiss with delicious indifference to logic and life, what they deploy!

Bits ? Bits are what we lack in man's triple order, sequenced and sited in one: the conceptions, forms and organised forces  in matter, the concepts of mind and the willing of spirit. Thus the complex and assiduous functional correlation that provides simplicity, through the use of spirit in this evocative sports car, called the body of man, the steering wheel mind, the direction imparted in part spirit, is not even noticeably bits until you analyse its flowing functions. As to man's spirit, this is unprogrammable because given liberty to rebel at ANYTHING, the most extreme case being equivalent of physical suicide, the less extreme being more limited to intellectual suicide, moral or spiritual suicide, and enforced 'suicide'.

Yes, as in Iran at this time, forces which resist force can be called responsible for their own deletion, by the wielders of force, who would enforce their thoughts on the minds of their captives, and direct their spirits by their own. Such talk may be used by those in State authority, and often has been: it is frequently balmily used as if there had been due cause in non-conformity to the machinations behind the assailing force, for such action. It may be presented as if,  in some specious way, it could avoid the simple fact. That, it is the occurrence of mass murder.

The worst is truth's murder.

Machinations about nothing do not work. For everything, in its cosmos, totality and integrality, in all its nooks of thought and devices of concept, there is cause, adequate, sufficient in style and scope. For all combinations and potential for combinations, in all structures within and conditions outside the given case, there is cause; for all correlativities of the same, there is cause.

For all of man, with all of these devices, the extent of the causal origination of originality and liberty of heart to will in the domain of spiritual understanding, there is cause. As to this last, it is a work of such a prodigious character that man as a derivative creator, an inventor,  is not even near to it; nor has he the means for it. The more you program, order and organise, by the means at our hands, the more you implement your will, a dictator however benevolent, to the systems before you.

At his worst, man tries to program others, but this never works.

Of this, death is the outcome, and even multiply wounded psyches, at the hands of political psychiatrists, as in the USSR in its day (occasioning a protest from an international body of actual psychiatrists); and these in turn tend to create miscreancies so intense, that the complexities of the wonder of liberty become the more obvious from its wounds (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, esp. *1A, Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 7, Licence for Liberty, Deliverance from Disorientation Ch. 8, Great Desecrations ... Greater Grace Ch. 6, Predestination and Freewill).

Solzhenitsyn is no small example. His works are no minor testimony.

*1A

See -

DEITY AND DESIGN, DESIGNATION AND DESTINY, especially Section 8;

 

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

Bible or Blight, Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God

The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy,
 

The gods of naturalism have no go!

SMR, TMR,  in the latter esp.  Chs. 1, 6-7, together with Ch. 5; and in the former, SMR, see Chs. 1-3,10. In the verification field  see esp. Chs. 8-9, in  comparison with Ch. 5 and 6. In the field of review, see esp. Ch. 10.

See also *1 above.

1B

See Spiritual Food and Spiritual Drink Ch. 11 for a survey of many such facets and fields in created life and matter. See also Epilogue to the same volume, with The Holocaust of Morality ... Ch. 3, Sparkling Life ... Ch. 8. The machines to do what the best and most advanced computers of man find exceedingly difficult to imitate, even in principle, not in time, attest the requisite level of matter-moulding mind functionality needed.

Mind's attributes are never found in matter, but only in the implications of its performance; and just as you never find an author actually amid the pages of his book, a contradiction in terms since a creation by oneself CANNOT be oneself, so you never find but the results of the energy specifications, mentality originations and disciplinary constraints in such activities within the cells, and through them. The Maker is the maxi-source of the micro-resources.

They do not, because they cannot make themselves, as attested by all experiments, the nature of information and the necessity for adequate causality for all results, a fundamental principle of scientific method as well as of logic. Contradicting this would annul all argument, in its own validity. See Causes.

See also Message of the Words of God to man in the World Ch. 2 and The True God has GO... Ch. 4, on details of DNA and attributes of its different formats, on codes and encoding multiply; and Evidence and Reality ... Ch. 3, on the causal complexion of reality and the specificities of information, codes, books and command. This may be taken together with Man, in Prospect, in Retrospect and in Bold Relief Ch. 2, in which more recent and extensive information about information and coding in DNA is presented in its own milieu, with the multiple-use complexity contrivances which organise materials into compression with utility, miniaturising them with engineering facility, itself a work of creativity of concept, control and ingenuity.

In addition, consult -  The gods of naturalism have no go! Volume 5, at Ch. 40 review and introduction.

It is hard too often to point out that this type of work is NOT NOW SEEN, EVER! except in terms of applied intelligence; that the Bible states that the creation is past: that this is verification; that the concepts of the mythical non-thing called 'nature' doing it, is not in accord with such a stoppage, nor is it in accord with any type of observable or consistently or coherently arguable ability to do such things, ex-mind, ex-equipment, ex-example and ex-causal sufficiency of any kind.

Magic being the only alternative, the reasonable man has to believe in God. That is only the  beginning. As we see here and in such works as Swift Witness    6. and SMR, the end of the matter logically is not what He has chosen and attested to have said IN us, but rather what He has spoken TO us:  it is this which is paramount. This is not,  as in the body,  in terms of code in constituent cells of our bodies and brains - but it still deploys information. This, addressed now not merely to make us have physical beings, but to have spiritual direction: it is in words clearly understood, culminating in the Gospel of Grace of the Lord of glory, crucified to cancel the reward of delinquency in wandering man, and to enable free return to the wisdom of the God who made him.

See -

DEITY AND DESIGN, DESIGNATION AND DESTINY, especially Section 8;

 

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

Bible or Blight, Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God

The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy,
 

The gods of naturalism have no go!

SMR, TMR,  in the latter esp.  Chs. 1, 6-7, together with Ch. 5; and in the former, SMR, see Chs. 1-3,10. In the verification field  see esp. Chs. 8-9, in  comparison with Ch. 5 and 6. In the field of review, see esp. Ch. 10.

See also *1 above.

*1C

See Beyond the Curse with Spiritual Food and Spiritual Drink Ch. 1.

*1D

On this see:

Freud and Reductionism

Spiritual Refreshings Ch.  9, incl. End-note 1 (esp. programmatic psychology and its ilk), Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will Ch.   7,  including *1;

News 80;  44,

SMR 4;

Repent or Perish Ch.   7, Extension 1 ;

The True God has Go, Gives Growth and Glory Ch.   2,

See also SMR Index under Freud and Jung;

NEWS 51,  52, 152, 166,

Lord of Life Ch.   5, 

Red Alert Ch.   1 ; 

Beauty of Holiness Ch. 2 (human psychiatrists).
 

Marx and Communism

             The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy Ch. 9,

Aviary of Idolatry,  Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch.    5,

News 37. 44,  69, 97 (the exploiters, the fanciful,
the Communists, the de-godders and the realities),  98,
News 150 - Taiwan,
 

The Grating  Grandeur and Aggrandisement of Man,
and the Meekness of the Majestic Messiah Ch.  2

Beauty for Ashes Ch.    6 (and Hong Kong, and the movement of nations in the last century a concern),
 

Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch.   8;
SMR  pp. 925ff., 971-972;
  

Beauty of Holiness Ch.   3
(war and force, rising downwards, Tiananmen and truth),
Ch.  4 (liberty, Tiananmen, worship and its direction in time, its terms and code of truth); History, Review and Overview   Ch. 1,
Impossible to Men, Open to  God Ch.    5 

See also Lord of Life Ch.   8.

Darwin and Evolutionism

Highway of Holiness Chs.   5   4, with The Glow of Predestinative Power Ch.   7
on material expressions of super-natural qualities in creation;
cf. Life, what is it  ?

Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch.    4 (and Darwin dead); Ch.    2  - drifting doesn't do it));

News 84 (broad setting, as in Spiritual Refreshings Ch.  13),

Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch.  9,

Worn-Out World and Coming King Ch.   3 );

SMR Chs. 1-2; TMR Chs. 1, 6-7

Stepping Out for Christ Ch.   9 (tesselation and its tassels, concerning the truth -
the Magpie's contribution).

 

The Papacy and Romanism

SMR pp. 902ff., 1032-1088H

 

Islam and Submission

More Marvels ... Ch.     4, esp.  *4, 

SMR   pp. 829ff. , 1080

Dancers, Prancers, Lancers and Answers Ch. 3, *1A misconceptions about the Cross, variable and mutually conflicting, on the part of the Koran

Lord of Life Ch.  3 (and force), 1081ff. (and faith), Outrageous Outages  ... Ch.   5; 

His Wounds Opened Eternity Ch.    4;     3

Stepping Out for Christ Ch.    9,  

Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch.    8 (in perspective), see also *1,

Divine Agenda Chs.    6,  3 (an overview of religious truancies, including Marx, Darwin and Koran);

Highway to Hell (Koran citations in both, with ideational parallels in perspective,  in the former;  and in the latter,  futile depravities in endless ideologies such as Sudan has shown so significantly, Islam ablaze without glory),
cf. Overflight in Christ Ch.   1 (and the Koran's musings);

1493 (esp. Britain and sharia);
News 138,  Beauty for Ashes Chs.    4,   7

Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch.    5, Acme ... Ch.  9 , Great Execrations ... Ch.    3,  SMR p. 1O88D - three major religions in some ways in concert, astray.
 

News 138,  Beauty for Ashes Chs.    4,   7,   SMR pp. 1074ff., esp. 1079, 1081ff.
(These latter show this religion, with the other three major conspiracies  towards the ultimate - why conspiracies ? It is because men conspire, or breathe plans together for a control, rule or oversight not ordained by God: these are breaths of man, and the breath that matters is that of God, in and by which all scripture is inspired by Him (II Timothy 3:16, Isaiah 8:20), in the Book of the Lord (Isaiah 34:16), the Bible, and sustained and implemented by Him (Matthew 26:54ff.). Other ideas for rule are always unruly, since they always tend to use power for what neither reason nor truth compels.).

See also SMR pp. 822ff., 986ff., 1O88D, and SMR Ch. 10.

See also News 44, from which the following is excerpted.

TWO GENIES, BUT NO GENIUS

 So we have the same barren artifices at work both in biology and in politics, with disastrous results, as in the last two World Wars, paying tribute to the synthetic powers of bringing this vain survival of the fittest idea, into containment in man-management policies: organic evolution and communism in unholy but very convenient wedlock, a marriage of convenience if ever there was one. What a to-do ! Subtract a few millions of tortured relics from the earth: that is some accomplishment, some experiment! Some fantasy, some blood.

Biology and politics, then, are two fields of reality-evasion of enormous portent and ones which have exacting prodigious payment from fantasisers: or rather from their followers, such as Darwinists and the neo-contrivers who build on the same sand with different implements, such as Marxists and the like, as placed in China, which retains power by Marxism and makes money by free enterprise, as if duplicity of speech were the only way to go.

These two then: the vital and the political disciplines, have been used to the near demise of the race, for though many remain, the CONDITIONS in which they remain are far more suspect... now! The very earth is beginning to share something of the fever, through dire misuse, advanced extravagantly through preoccupation with power play and exploitation of people, whether for profit or management, in a web of illusion which ignores the only plan that works, that of the Creator whose it all is!

Thus we have been distinctively afflicted by these two undisciplined but not indisciplinable disciplines which, with scientific method in the basement, have built titanic skyscrapers above, as if to sink from space would hit bottom later.

It may - but with more thud! The first is courtesy of that publiciser of the magic of organic evolution, himself confused amidst confusion and attacking (quite rightly) the evidential basis of his own work as inadequate, that is, Charles Darwin; the second is per favour of his cousin in mind, Karl Marx. In each of these developments (and there have to be many when the thing is wrong at the commencement, as indeed it is in both cases), scientific method suffers duress (cf. refs. above, and SMR pp. 145ff., 931ff.), and observation is observably in demise. Thought rules, but is unruly, being irrational. What then of Marx ?

The task for him is simple. How to create a good State by evil means, gentle virtue by vicious virulence, a warless peace by a profusion of wars, a world of abundance by the politics of want, a time of liberty by the arousing of the genie of compulsion, good people by bad means, and a world like an earthly version of the kingdom of heaven (Christ said, "My kingdom is not of this world!"), from an assumed systematic matrix of history, which had no liberty at all: this was his task.

It fails in thought by simple omission of an adequate cause for the desired ( or, biologically, the observable) result which he proceeds to manipulate, even any observable power to coerce life-production into being even WITH intelligence; just as it fails in producing what is beautiful and good by assailing something amongst many things, compulsively, as if it contained all evil, rather than being a form of abuse of freedom. So Communism fails in principle just as it fails in history by the omission of the obtaining of it by the prescribed and clearly irresponsibly inadequate means!

That is what irked Sir Karl Popper in the University of London in his apt review of Marxism: it does not happen, it is simply contra-evidential empirically (see SMR pp. 145-148, 211ff., 266-267, 305-308, 925ff.). In addition, it is meretricious, adventitious, suppositious and pernicious in its dehumanised, products, both reductionistic in irrationality, and in integrity, making of man a comic mask, bathed in tragedy.

 WHAT does not happen ? NEITHER the Marxist predicted product happens, NOR does the Darwinian one happen to happen in any way practically apparent, or formulated with theoretical causative force: this was what Popper declared in his massive review of the actual evidences. As to ARRIVAL, not a SINGLE organ has been accounted for causally in the Darwinian mode, he notes (just as, in fact, not a single one has been seen in transitional stages, or clearly exhibits the same in retrospect). It is true Popper himself tries (metaphysically) to get reality inventing itself by prongs of interchange and development, potential realising itself; but all such efforts fail at once. The GRANT of the potential in the first place is the all-important question-begging commencement; to which one needs to add the potential to develop the potential, and then the actualisation of both potentials, which is merely slow-motion smuggling of the divine powers under phrases. These, however do not provide the reality. God's words can do this, since He has the relevant power; ours do not, since we don't.

Popper's account of the causative force of these 'scientific' theories, then, is fine. What in sum is that ? This: They never amount to anything, never account for anything. It is in this, an accurate review: for the simple fact is that in each case, it does NOT happen like that, though it be watched for, worked for, hoped for, dreamed of, for centuries. Logic is not about to capitulate, and to murder it requires its validity to be there, in order that one may logically destroy it; so it stays, and these results do not arrive by logic any more than by observation.
 
 

FREUD AND FRAUD

 The third effort, that of Freud and Jung was just as dismal. Mayhap the pre-occupation with sex in the highly circumscribed elevations of 19^th century Vienna was the real exhibition of creativity, central to man. It was however less than illustrious in its obsessive and obstructive pre-occupation. What then ? Perhaps the mind would be found in the grip of some sub-conscious ogre which would be the source and resource for its vitality and the usher for its mobilities ? Perhaps some NEW debasement of man could be put into some new theory which would similarly mock God, ignore much of the evidence and defy logic. Assuredly there would be readers, buyers in the trade for such trivialising of man. HISTORY showed THAT at least!

HOW Freud would KNOW that this was true, when the pervasive sub-conscious, the unconscious would, on his own premisses, be at work with its intrusive compulsions and fragmented repressions, he never got around to showing. And as Jung showed him, the idea of creativities as diverse as those of scientific imagination and opera singing in some way "arising" from a vague interface with what had no face, but was mere mental profusion, confusion and proliferation, was simply not worked through, not scientific, the mere work of ... dare we say it, some subconscious imagination!

Nor did Jung manage it either. With his ideas of archetypal figures of the past, experiences of the ages, managing to transfer themselves, documented suitably with leading roles, keys and symbols to be found in dreams, some mental energy flowing, as he put it, like a stream over time, some libido fashioning things for itself: this was quite as vague as Freud's misconceptions. Indeed, if it was (as it indeed is) refreshingly less specialised in its solemn, almost religious overtones than Freud's views were, yet it is no better in unscientific vagueness. (For the parallel, empirical failure in Jung's theorisation, at the level of non-verification, see SMR Ch.4, pp. 333ff, including 349D-E.)

It is just that in its broad spread of mental involvements, it is to that extent nearer to reality, less reductionistic, less obsessive and less reflective merely of some of the passionate pathology of a conventionalised society.

Whence the power to co-operate and the desire for goodness, whence the power to exist in all the mini-wonder of man, spirit, mind and body; whence the mental dynamics of man, with all their spiritual involvements, and remorseless ingenuities, forever met by underlying necessities ? From a cause adequate, using whatever mathematics, from a mind capable, with whatever reservoirs of mental energy, like holding tanks, from a Spirit unfettered, being free because eternal, and thus present as a simple datum, and not from some evolving quiddity!

Why, because quite simply, you cannot evolve without first being there! and to be there, in such a case of the logically necessarily existent Creator, is the whole point. And if you could evolve, then you would need the structure, the potential, the ingredients, the pattern of promise, to make it happen. Bees do not turn into flowers, though they do work and then die. Science requires structure as well as form, and reason requires logic, and well as desire. Desire does not create anything, but its frustration if it is not adequately equipped, or its world on its behalf. But then WHO would so have equipped it ?
 
 

FACT AND FANTASY

The small point that there is no evidence

• 1) that anything has organically evolved, or
   
• 2) how it could be done by our world EVEN with intelligence, which in any case partially removes the contention from relevance; and that
   
• it has NEVER been seen to be done nor a mode been envisaged with the slightest practicality, does help also, so that the blind might see, if only they had eyes, that nothing has evolved.
   

The only logical possibility, God, eternal, self-existent, being neither casuistically required to arise from nowhere nor inclined to, because having no need, being always there: He was there and He made what He would. When He finished, it finished, as indeed it is seen now to be, and there is none on earth to re-start it, as also is seen to be the case over thousands of experiments, tests, hopes and dreams. The One who did perform it, however, did it exceedingly ingeniously.

He so equipped things that not only did they possess, in the case of life, powers of re-birth, of having young, but of healing and of re-assembly, of course by product design and thus through OBSERVABLE mechanisms, of activation and de-activation of components and so on. Thus life, a static thing in terms of type, of types, of kinds, is extremely flexible in motions within those walls of creation, which were so ably and with such integral composure, constructed.

Instead, however, of admiring the flexibility of action within kinds, man became obsessed with the anti-evidential magic of new kinds coming. They were not seen. They had to be shown 'arising' gradationally, step by step, from the past. They were not found. The methods had to be shown in the laboratory. They were not found. The possibility had to be shown in logic; it could not avoid frank contradiction. Statistics was wheeled in, as if number-crunching would invent what was not there. It did nothing but produce astonishment in Professor Fred Hoyle, the Cambridge University astronomy professor, declaring that the whole idea of "chance", an unintelligent beginning producing an intelligent end and all that went with it, is "evidently nonsense of a high order" (SMR pp. 224ff.) , just as Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard found "gradualistic concepts" to be "literally incomprehensible" (SMR pp. 234ff.) . Which, of course, it is; but not in terms of motivation.

There it is eminently comprehensible. Man wants, in the case of masses of millions, in dozens of cultures, to do without, manipulate, mess with, dismiss or modify God; and even if he does not explicitly want this, he with notable frequency so acts as if to obtain it; it is just, you see, that he wants the liberty without licence, and proceeds to use it... in a world which, quite frankly, increasingly and disastrously looks like it. THAT is what you would expect when the source is so played with; and THAT, as always in truth, except where mercy intervenes, is just what you get.

We have had mercy, but truth does not resign; it continues while mercy is abused. The satisfaction of truth through mercy in the Cross of the penalty-paying Christ, who however by no means removes this from those who reject Him, is the Gospel option. It is this which comes from the word of the One whose words control biology in code, and history through the Bible, while providing spiritual power through promise to those who receive Him. J

ust as creation is not obtainable by itself, but by its Author, as is constantly scientifically attested; so its remedy is equally unobtainable by unfounded hope: only by express speech; for God did not create us to allow thousands of years of vanity, obstruction, obfuscation, error, anguish and pain; being complete, it gives nothing to Him but abuse of the will that created. He has spoken and has no plans to alter what He never has altered. The really GREAT mercy is this, that the remedy is unaltered, unalterable and still available in and through the living Word of God who came as predicted, performed as pre-programmed yet freely, and finished what; He came to do.

*1E

See *1B above, but more especially Deity and Design ...Section 2.

*1F

The Greek speaks in Ephesians 2:8, of the having been saved ones, those so received by faith through grace. It is a peculiarly Greek affair, in which  you are designated in a participial form, as having-been-saved-one; and in this case, it is plural. There is your CONDITION (having been saved), the mode (by faith) and the module in its fashion (by grace). In Ephesians 1:11 we see that such people ALREADY HAVE OBTAINED an inheritance, in the Lord, while John 5:24 intimates the same.

Indeed as in II Timothy 1:9, they were predestined to this. How do you know ? why when this has happened, it is what was pre-formulated (as in Colossians 1:4) and ordered (as in Romans 8:29ff.).

So far from failing to recognise man's preference, this is rendered ultimate through omniscience. In the sight of the all-knowing God, all this was known before creation occurred: a tender-hearted work since God IS personal and is here dealing with those in His very own image. His is the love which would have none perish and all come to a knowledge of the truth, indeed be reconciled to Himself (II Peter 3:9, I Timothy 2, Colossians 1:19ff., Ezekiel 33:11). It is that of the One who IS love (I John 4:7ff.), is not short of means to implement its glorious task of redemption where tyranny is not the method, and truth is the domain.

On this last point, see for example,

1) Christ's Ineffable Peace ... Ch.    2,

2) To Know God ... Ch. 1,  

3) Great Execrations ... Greater Grace Chs.  7, and   9, and

4) KH  4;  

5) Celestial Harmony ... Ch.   2 (including Calvin on Romans!).

 

*1G

See TMR Ch. 5 with Repent or Perish Ch. 7.

*2

 See for example,

The Secular, The Sacred and the Sublime Ch. 4,

Repent or Perish Ch. 7,

Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13,

It Bubbles ... Ch. 9,

Swift Witness    6. See also *1B above.

*3 See The Last Vast Ezekiel ...

*3A

EXCURSION ON LOGOS

Not only does the multiplicity and exuberance of creation attest itself as seen in this Chapter, not only moreover does the transforming analytical power of reason find both in itself (cf. Predestination and Freewill   Section 4), and in its practical application, complete facility for function and consistency of concept and mode of operation, all systematic to the last point, but part of the reason for the external aspect of its triumphant scope for success of reason is this. The universe which it investigates is correlative in the mode of logic, to that within us, which we apply. 

Conceptions of man do not find scope for conceptual housing in what is not man because they have diverse constructional qualities and modes, but because the underlying LOGOS is the same for both. Conceptual penetrability as in E=MC² , is a component in a system along with conceptual originality in order to penetrate, which works with that as one consensus and as from one prospective.

It is like a parent: whether he creates a scooter for his kid or talks to him, the processes of reason, always involved in its own domain along with the many others, is the same. It is one of the givens, like perception and desire, designs of mind to do this or that, and the designate character of mind itself in the human body, itself the most massive and immeasurable massif of concerted correlative, co-functional facilities in existence. If this were not to be CALLED 'design' then nothing else could definitionally qualify of all that is observed. ONE of the things observable is the far less impressive designs of man, far less in scope and force than is that with which we are confronted. As to his own designs, these he cannot deny, since he has designs on them and SO makes them! As to what operationally and conceptually surpasses them, sour grapes is no answer to the causal necessities back of them. It is better to face the fact that we are not very great and have the LOGOS far beyond us, though kind to us in making His word inspectable by us.

This sameness is expressive of the power and nature of what causes all of this not to be nothing, but to be both something; and more than this, something highly particular, specific and engineered in formatting, in essence and in nature. What provides this perspective, enables this procedure, institutes this species of ground and result, what ensures that it operates both intrinsically in what is external and intrinsically in what is internal to man, that it has applicability in use as well as in analysis of what it is, of in short, its breeding and of its racing both: it is a cause adequate, an instilling and a providing, correlative with the consequence of its action.

As noted elsewhere, the cause of our temporal causation system, which requires that one wait, which works in derivative, in constrained and delimited formats, in order that these be so differentiated from nothing and in this way diverse from it, is either to be taken out of the pervasive system of our thought by an arbitrary caprice and dream (as if one seeing a space rocket take off majestically, concluded it was time to use another method, in frenetic mania), or else pursued logically. If the latter (and the former  invalidates all argument in such a model), then the causal basis being unable ultimately to be time-constrained (for then it would itself require a cause which is not an answer but an abeyance of logic), must act where time does not limit. In fact, our time is an invention just like the rest of the constraints which demand a basis logically.

Hence the causal basis provided by the LOGOS in the end has to be non-time-constrained and the same occurs for every dimension, real or imaginary, which the mind might suggest, if it desires to deploy reason. Time is not operative WITHIN the cause of the creation of these things (and in practice we do not find new information 'arising'  cf. Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch.    4), but relevant power works,  in order that the creation  might be so constrained by command. It is this which becomes thus their adequate causative condition and provision. This, then, unconstrained by time, is of necessity eternal, being the only other option to nothing, so unimaginative and inept in its ludicrous conception as a basis, or a succession of creative powers,  which ignores the necessity and subjects all to time and allied systematic constraints, so ignoring the necessity back of all. There is ONE ETERNAL LOGOS.

Moving from the domain of demonstration of creation to that of the Bible, which as in SMR is shown to be the consequence of the testimony of the existence and co-existence of mind, spirit and matter, as in man, we find that this WORD, this ETERNAL WORD, always there, pre-creation as in John 1:1 (cf. The Bright Light ..Ch.10), is the expression AS WORD of the Father, the Speaker.

Instead of a series of words, like 100 volumes of literary works, all indicative indirectly of the author, we have ONE WORD who is the definitive image of the One whom He expresses. In this infinite God, there is not a serial word situation, as what is basic to Him, since NO ONE spoke Him into existence, nor merely words, though He speaks as He will. He being the Eternal which makes the temporary possible (and actual),  it is a permanent One of whom we speak, one endowed with the powers to endue as we find in our construction. His Word is first of all personal and a Being who with the Speaker and His Spirit, overseeing all, is the Eternal Basis of all, Cause of all temporal things, including temporal modes of causation and our powers to induce these both externally to serve us and internally to be analysable coherently by us.

This is He whose Word, having created the universe and with it ourselves (Colossians 1:15, Isaiah 45),  became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The drastic imagination shown in this reminds us of the power which He has given to ourselves, many of whom not only show massive initiative for good, but folly for evil, to desecrate what He has created.

When His Word become flesh, then His speech here included SALVATION as both available and necessary for man (John 12;48-50). In this way, He has spoken us into existence and then, when the case required it, exhorted us into the sharing of His eternity (not from the first, since that is now impossible for us, but to the last, His gloriously provided option, now exercised where faith receives Him as He is).

*4

See:

The Desire of the Nations,

Little Things Ch.  3 (esp. *3),
Beauty of Holiness Ch.     4,
Dancers, Prancers ...   Chs. 3,  5,
Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed: Barrister of Bliss ... Ch. 4,

Thy Word is Wonderful    Ch. 5.

 

*5 See the small book,  A Question of Gifts. This deals with the whole domain of spiritual gifts, both the distortions and the authorisation from God for the thing as such; and in particular it deals with the matter of prophecy, that in the Old Testament, that of the scripture writers, of the New Testament, and the phenomena at Corinth.