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BULLETIN EIGHTY
THIS WORLD IS NOT A
SOCIAL SERVICE CENTRE
BUT IN A CONDEMNED CATEGORY
WITH ESCAPE HATCH
THE CHALLENGE
IF GOD IS INDEED, AS HE SAYS (Jeremiah 9:17ff.), THE UNGODLY MIGHT ASK, ONE "WHO EXERCISES LOVINGKINDNESS, JUSTICE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS IN THE EARTH," since in these things, HE 'DELIGHTS', why is there so much of the precise opposite in this very same earth ?
The answer is at once obvious. Mankind is free to sin, rebel, hate God and justice and righteousness and lovingkindness, and shows it so often in ways minor and major, individual and group, national and international, academic and ungoverned, high and low, in maladies and nostrums whether of false religion, feeble philosophy or gross manipulative politics, that it is a marvel that it has not yet blown itself up with dreary dynamics of restless power astray like a donkey with a blasting bray, as he fouls up its environment, atomic, physiological or psychological to the point of no return, or messes his biology till it becomes a writhing system of failed knots, tangled remnants of design and loathsome writhing.
Retired Cornell Professor J.C. Sanford in his 4th edition of his book, Genetic Entropy, reporting research oriented investigation shows over years of teamwork, what amounts to this: the evolutionary myth is in genetic reverse. The evidence attests that the human genome is deteriorating at a rather rapid rate, bringing in not superman but more seedy offspring, with aggressively and progressively more defects from the aggregating faults since the first, when the original genes were issued. These incremental defects in the code for life, mount like waves as the copying, generation to generation, of the genome for each generation, becomes a bin for their accumulation.
Small wonder former Professor of Harvard of much fame, Stephen Jay Gould, was wondering in heaven's name*1 (Wonderful Life p. 227), about the total misfit of the idea of gradual upward change, and Darwin famously about the lack of enormous quantities of rejected follies on imaginary the blind way to the magnificent features in our race. Where are they ? Evidentially, how is it that they cannot be found ? It is not a mere gap; it is a lack, it is an utter logical lapse in foundations, in myriad attestatons that should be systematically skewed in their blind profusion on the imaginary way upward. They are not there.
There was never any answer to such question of the fable of evolutionism, which has to start with NOTHING and by verbal quibbles tries to put something there anyway, for a start. It is deception and writhing twisting folly and evasion from first to last. But the genome, it still declines, and it is scarcely surprising that that staggeringly complex and mathematically complex thing, our genome, is not being healed in any way sufficient to overcome its continual collection of defects, and that it shows precisely the opposite. It is necessary, as Jesus implied, to open the eyes!
Do you help a murderer to kill, or man to career in wanton warfare and worthless, immoral deception, now to make himself into a virtual god (without either glory or power for the purpose), now to invent gods and serve their debased pretensions!
It is time now to consider the theme more
broadly.
MANKIND HELPING HIMSELF TO HELPLESSNESS
Ponder the presentation in God's word, the Bible.
There are readily traceable various stages, and one set is worthy of understanding. First since man is free to hate himself, his neighbour or his God, whether with emotion or decision or action, there was a test for his integrity as one totally provided for in a sharp and challenging but blessed world (Genesis 3). He failed that test. It is useless to claim rights, any more than rubbish does, or can, or could (Jude, Matthew 13:30). Wrested from God by will and cunning, subtlety and foul aspiration against his Maker (Genesis 3:4ff.), man was put into a new situation from the God of lovingkindness and justice, righteousness and truth, where deceit is like storms at sea, and foul misuse of what He has provided, is like typhoons sweeping vast plains.
From that testing time, man has a new challenge. The first situation was for him to follow in delighted care, and that failing, man has fallen into self-will, self-deception and collaboration. It is heightened by that same envious destroyer, whose interwork (he does not play except to work evil) is deep and subtle enough to teach deluded man lessons a plenty, but works not for his good. That left only one way.
It was to come back to God. Noah's work and words pointed to just that for full many a decade amidst his ark labours. But first there was the hatred of man for man, for this or that reason, leading to murder and all that this holds - such as corrosive actions, reckless false accusations, deliberate trashing or crushing of what is precious to another, or artful stealing of it, making way for gain, and other worthless abuses of power and liberty. It was as exemplified and exhibited in the murder of Abel, who did well, by Cain, who both did badly and then blighted Abel in a multiplication of mischief and an ungoverned arrogance of power play. That murder became more: a moral symbol of spiritual madness.
Civilisation became the new focus and feature, and without restoration to the Maker, many made many things, like students carving their names on their desks, instead of listening to the words about works and ways and the provisions made for them by the school. Then culture, as in the time before the flood, where all distinction between the godly and the ways of the ungodly was lost in one sinking sands episode (Genesis 6),unspiritual and sustained, that stretched to hundreds of years. This continued so that the imagination of man from earliest age was evil only in thrust. Then it led on to its RESULTS. It was the equivalent of a molten mass about the spewing core of a volcano, still retaining the name of 'man' was dumped in its pit.
In fact, the result similar, but in passing showing the need to wash to the foundations, there was the flood. That was the next step, the end for that climate of distancing from the Almighty and trying to impersonate Him, which grips so many nations today. Then there was this awesome act for the irrevocably corrupted. In our day, we proceed to the fire way (II Peter 3). The parallel needs to be realised. Ignorance does not help.
In that day, water was used and the lot was washed, though it did not become clean by the universal, terrestrial bath. The flood which has left vast, swept planation surfaces throughout the world, similarly created precise and often multiply unpitted layers, in rocks, like a multi-layered trifle in cuisine. Such, it is more and more apparent, could only be presented in those clean and clear ways in such depths and breadths and condition, by a watery deposition, such has rather recently been exhibited as the work of a matter of days, in the explosion and result layered down, in Mt St Helens.
The flood changed much and the aftermath offered
more. But man was not prepared to be remodelled. God, exercising
lovingkindness, justice and righteousness, since in these things He delights,
let man make many a step on the unholy hike to avoid the way to the
kingdom of heaven; and this imaginative mortal even managed to kill the
remedy, instead of merely rejecting it, as God predicted, would happened. This
had results.
HELP FROM HEAVEN IN SUBLIME SACRIFICE
One was this: that man might know himself and repent, and look and believe (Isaiah 45:20-25, Psalm 2). Indeed, God made a specialised excursion in the person of His own Eternal Word, who living, became incarnate and died for sinners. This matter, its cause and results and the appeals it held from the lovingkindness of God (Ezekiel 33:11, Isaiah 55, John 3), was a prime exhibit of the staggering extent to which the sinless and eternal God was willing to go, in the rescue of man department. All mankind is such (Romans 6:23, 3:19), but many reject the divine diagnosis, and so continue the decline and now spread their wares like immoral merchants, ignoring the one demonstrable site of truth in what God has said, and in parallel, done (cf. SMR). Where water is available, they draw sedimentary slush from abandoned wells, as is the thrust of Jeremiah 13, by a special acted parable.
Now mankind is largely specialising, like a group of anti-spiritual specialists, in making gods, gods of nothing in evolutionary myths - a progressive process NEVER seen, the DNA NEVER seen BEING written without intelligence, just as our own books are not composed without the organisation and conceptualisation and programming verbal power and ideational recesses of invention.
These conceptual concoctions, creative dreams to get something from nothing and continue it ad nauseam, what of them ? These are prime real estate for irrational legends, an affront to the empirical facts. We do not SEE creation ? You are not likely to see the creation of a car, unless you go to the factory, but you see and know the nature and nurture of the product. Moreover, WE create all the time, whether man makes lies or livery, trends (using words of intellectual and connotational type, as assigned AND understood by the recipients). We make verbal and mechanical and electronic wonders, working in the moral and spiritual and intellectual world in various ways. We relish it. We engage in it as by nature. In fact, it is the most natural of actions, like a type of mental breathing. Creativity pours from us, and its ways, and its labours, and its inward nature, and its spiritual and moral proclivities, whether luke-warm or hot or cold. God made us in this an image of Himself.
But man will not learn when to stop. He makes gods with all the careless if not casual vanity of a fourteen year old, sold on sin, recklessly rejecting all his father's counsel until he has spoilt the family and his own prospects. Often, in his adored immaturity, he does not care. He follows what he imagines as in their own way to many much more senior, at the spiritual level. You can create what you like, but does it work ? This word does not, and cannot because it is fundamentally in rebellion not only against the One who made it, but therefore against itself, for it is thus at war with its very own construction. The genes are merely one way this is now being attested as shown.
Yet there is only one source, shown by empirical, rational and observationally attestable means: it is the God who predicts and who heals, who judges and who restrains, who delivers but not from guilt, except through the chosen method, as with cancer at man's hand. For each thing, there is a way, unless where hope is gone. For man there is a way. This by divine action of a vast significance is through the Gospel of remedy, shown in the Bible, made workable in Jesus Christ. It works and its ways work and it is personal, for HOW could you change things if the nuts and bolts became nutty and bolted, if you were a mechanic ? How is man to be righted in the mass unless he is first righted in the heart!
But in his culture and civilisation and self-trust and dismissal of the divine, and myths and conceits about what he can do (while he has nearly, already made the world unlivable and the threat continues apace, as Christ foretold - Matthew 24:22), he continues. What then would you expect ? another flood ?
God has promised such a thing no more, but given the Gospel of free pardon, and renewal with changed heart. Through this, man is given a space of vast historical texture, as you see in Matthew 24, Luke 21 and II Peter 3:9. Indeed, there seen for example, are special particular attributes developing towards end of the Gospel Age (rather like a mass death rattle, this time for civilisations); and first and inexorably necessary, comes the command for repentance (Luke 13, Acts 17:30). To relent, repent, receive the remedy offered, the crucified Christ, and trust in the God who not only created but delivered from the desecration of death, being offered vicariously and freely to bear sin, and break through sacrifice its penalty (Hebrews 2,6,9): this is not an option, any more than a vacuum is an option for breathing.
But when, as predicted, this leads not to progress into purging and purity, but wild sprees going backward from the presence of the Lord, now even reaching the revolting horror of allowing the very young to have physical surgery for sex change at their immature will, an abuse extraordinary, a generational folly resembling the old setting of children in the hot brazen arms of idols, a daring foray into mini-massacre, a wild rambling of despoiling adulthood and betrayal of the young: when such thigns happen, what then ?
Judgment awaits and has its own modes at the end (II Peter 3). Meanwhile, as in any fouling of a wonder, misuse of a system or invention, depending on how vast that misuse may be, man's world is falling apart with angry, empowered segments of folly acting as if they were indeed the god, though they will all die (Psalm 82:7). Hence this whole degeneration which has become more and more atrocious, with some false religions even misusing the exploits and name of Jesus Christ, for their cocktails of creation, with billions following, a situation also predicted (II Peter 2, I Timothy 4, II Timothy 3-4),lurches towards its destiny. It is characterised, this amplification of the fall of mankind, in both Romans 1 and 8:18-25.
Let us look at one small part of this. "For the earnest expectation of the creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creation was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him who has subjected the same in hope." However, Paul proceeds to proclaim, there is provision in Jesus Christ for "the creation itself also" to have a remedial change. It will be "delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." By this he means as he explains, that through the Gospel there is provision even within this created wonder which has been so fouled, and accordingly so suffers when it continues to be insufferably proud and unholy, braggart and brutal. That provision is for healing and help, pardon and peace, new wonders and spiritual blessedness, wisdom and health. Such is the overall message.
It may be cursed as often, or taken as cure. Burning now like drowning before, is an option.
NOTE
*1 See Wake Up World! Ch. 6 in particular for full references to Gould in this connection.