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ALPHA and OMEGA:

DISCOUNT THAT

AND YOU'VE GOT A MUDDLE IN THE MIDDLE

If You Don't Grasp That,
You'll be Grasped by the Wrong Party

Epilogue

You start with God, you end with truth;

if in the middle, you find him where he always was,

and rejoice.

 The fundamental and transcendental beauty is this, at the practical level. If ANYONE wants God, to meet Him, to be with Him,

pardoned and at peace, then let that person call upon Him, call Him up in Christ, where the line is clear and cleared of all static, appointed for each in eternity from the first.  Remember always, Acts 2:21, Psalm 145, Acts 16. In a word, predestination, so far from limiting the scope for  salvation in man, guarantees that nothing will be missed where love finds it place. If it is not for you; then what do you miss ? God laments, but you are guilty even at the final of all levels, and hence THAT is the condemnation (John 3:19). If it is, then God has known this, even where you are too paralysed in will to know. Nothing is ever missed.

No mystery is to be found, but the profundity of His liberality, the courage He exhibited in His mode of salvation on the Cross, cancelling apprehension with demonstration and the wonder of His tenacity to save, such as we are. Amazing love, that this could be, that Thou my Lord should die for me! It is true. Mystery is in its grandeur of majesty, humility of holiness, purity of truth; but not in logic, which sings with praise to the Maker of all. His words are not wreathed, stupefying and difficult, but clear to the one who understands. It is sin, and not prolixity which is the problem.

Like vast mountain ranges, this profound, deep as life, love and mercy of God (as in Micah 7:19ff.,  Micah 2-3)  is stared at with something like reverence; unlike mountain ranges, it is considered WITH reverence. Its mystery, it must be emphasised,  is one of  love, not logic. His love is selective where selectability is, and foreknown is the soul, each one, who as conceived without the pollution and superiority and inferiority that sin brings, is found by Him as His, before this world was so much as created. You marvel ? Does not even a human author revolve his thoughts, ponder his plot, consider his characters before they are made ? Many of them so do, and if man makes words and God makes people, is it too hard for the Lord, so to do ? It would be profoundly amazing, indeed incomprehensible if He did not do so. It would also be wholly contrary to the Bible (Romans 8). .

How does He select souls for salvation ? It is not, in final form,  a matter of making a condition, but finding our position; and it is done in eternity, before the will's incompetence for the point at issue. If we conceive it as process, yet He, beyond our time, has it as knowledge. It comes out in the Gospel Age, in our time. He finds whom He may, even under the hedges, outcasts, whomever. He does not arrest them and bring them in for a new personality; He is not like the Saul who became Paul: anything but like it.

Such a One as this is surely not hard to find, if you seek Him with ALL of your heart, as shown in the example of Jeremiah 29:13, for God is no respecter of persons, desiring all, neither indulging any, nor lacking desire for any, but calling all.

You cannot seek for Him with all your heart ? Nothing is impossible with God. If you are foreknown, then you will do just that, for truth will out, and His enablement will LET it come out.

The irresistible grace He shows to you is not a formula for imposition, but a form of expression; He desires all, and hence you, and if you desire Him, you are in the down-flow of an enormous wave of truth which will then lift you onto the deck of the rescue ship, at hand at call.

His word makes it the case, that despite His desire to save the world, persons get in the way (John 3:16-19), the stated anti-selection agency. Get out of the way by coming to Him; for then you are no longer in the way. He has weighed the matter already, and in releasing you, through the gift of faith and the work of regeneration, He is doing no more, in principle at least, than fulfilling His desire for you, in HIS knowledge - that is His own description of it (Romans 8:29ff.), albeit foreknowledge, yet still KNOWLEDGE. It is this on which predestination is statedly based. It surpasses your will, in default, but not the truth concerning you. He knew you, if you are His, before the world was (Ephesians 1:4). He did not know what is not; but what is. This is not a puzzle but a purity: there are no mistakes. What is discerned, is sealed; what is sealed is embraced with certitude.

THAT is not a limitation in His love, but on the abstractions from it, that you have there in action. It reaches, like an ocean wave, a mighty tsunami: fit to cover all, standing in its path.

What is it like ? It is as if some part of the land, wishing to escape the wash of the mighty ocean breaker, has found an opening beneath the shore, to which it may suddenly pour itself,  a thing shut off by a heaving of the earth. It is not the wave, then, but the escape from it which is the failure. It is a failure in the scope of man's desire, even before time gnawed at the vitals of his will, and not in scope of the love of God; a negation in man's ultimate accessibility to the tender and untruculent thing that love is, which limits love, not its profundity of scale, immeasurability of nature (Ephesians 3), in the marvel of the divine One.

On earth, there is no hope of this coming by free action of the will, on the part of man; but earth is moved by invisible forces, and man is subjected to these as need arises,  as a child may be, outside his own competence, by his mother's or father's hands. God KNOWS His own, and IN rescuing them, relates the fact, in action, that this is so. He does not invent it by force. He finds by knowledge and implements by power what is found. Those whom He knew, these called, come. Love found them, life embraces them, truth astounds them, repentance embroils them, eternity receives them, for Christ has paid for the way home, and sealed such who hear and then receive, with the Spirit of God Himself (Ephesians 1).

HOW is it so ? Love is like that, knows when to stop, when only force could conquer; but in endeavour in cost and outreach, stops at nothing.  God knows the heart; He knows His own, but this not because they are better or more pliable or receptive in their sinful states. It is because in His love He understands, and finding takes where love fits before history comes, or sin paralyses to the point at issue (Ephesians 5:17ff.). When history comes, what was found, abounds. What is lost, is so because it was thus before and remains so, and is left because the only way it would come, would be by a violation of reality which would abort love itself, and make of truth a lie.

God being God, is not prepared to do that: if He were to become false, then lies would remain in riot, and heaven would cease for any. God is not like that (James 1:17). Lies are an attack on what He has done, and hence war with Him. If HE were at war with Himself, then being infinite in power, He would delete Himself; but time is a mere creation, and its works have no jurisdiction over Him, who made it. Eternal, He has no change. He is and remains love, the truth, the path to peace and the profundity beyond man, by which his will has point and meaning, and may with rest of him, be rescued.

In that love which Christ had towards Jerusalem,  overflowing with divine desire, He yet would do nothing to make a fraud out of faith, and have models, papier-mâché people become pseudo-substitutes for the actual ones, gifted with liberty, made in His image. He would not forcibly spare Jerusalem, nor make it in the LAST analysis, after several centuries in this case, visible in history, to be turned into something else. If it WOULD NOT COME, then judgment WOULD. Some, like Jeremiah, known before he was ever in the womb (Jeremiah 1), DID come. Most did not. All were wooed; some were found.

How can predestination be so unyielding, foreknowledge so encompassing, will so involved in the knowledge of God, and yet defunct in the actualities of history, in this field ? It is as shown, and in vain do people argue, adding this or deleting that out of some apparently misconceived bad logic, that draws improper conclusions form one or other of these scriptural facts. All these things are true, and all need to be articulated, and nothing else. HOW they fit together, is to perfection; but only when they are all there.

Such has been shown over the whole scope of the HEXAD, and given exposure in short form in such works as:  Let's Be Reasonable, for God is! Ch. 6, and this one; and in The Glow of Predestinative Power Ch.     4,  Great  Execrations ... Greater  Faith Ch.  3,    7.