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BULLETIN ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FIVE
It is man who has made the mischief, not God.
Indeed, it is precisely because God is the truth, the absolute Being which is logically necessary for anything to BE ('nothing' is so continually unproductive, since it not even there for potential or actuality alike, and is the only alternative, other than begging the question), and available (on His terms), that there can be and is any truth, or any ultimately verifiable truth. On the atheist model, it is not there; and you cannot have what is not there to take, like an ice-cream in the desert. It is mere mind-wandering to think so.
Contradicting the truth (in active operation, lying) in God, would be contradicting Himself, preferring to bring to light what is contrary to fact, and thus showing His own inadequacy and need for support outside Himself.
That is the mark of what is not God. Such a Being is not-God, being a mere participant in a system, limiting and limited. The use of such a term of such a Being would be a hot steam of words only, vacuous gas, self-contradiction.
As written in Titus 1, God cannot lie. That is another way of putting it. It would be like calling a passion-fruit a fountain pen to attribute to God the horrendous human failing of lying, often systematically and callously carried out.
To create a system allowing free beings this power, and telling them no instructions about their purpose and point, or even requirements, what would it be like ? It would be to create with brilliance the whole trillion-unit biological thing called human life, the mental capacity called mind and the imaginative and willing abilities called spirit: null and dysfunctional on arrival. It would be like a 'teen-ager in anguish, blowing up a bomb in a garage, under provocation, confusion and despair.
To imagine such a thing, is merely an exercise in futility. It is self-contradictory, like being rich and poor in the same respect at the same time. Hence there is - for such a polluted and polluting word as this (generation by generation, and that cumulatively). It entails a certainty that there is truly divine speech directed to us. It is a matter of finding it and verifying its quality. This is presented in briefly in Redemption or Revolt Ch. 2, *4, as in various other places on this site. The first named has something like this.
Consider and marvel. If you are dissatisfied with this fallen race, do not blame God. He HAS spoken AND acted, and done so entirely self-sacrificially, and being omnipotent, effectually. He has done this in providing free redemption for man.
God as the Bible indicates, CANNOT lie. The term 'God' would then be self-contradictory. If He were to do this, it would mean His denying what He freely did, and thence having dissatisfaction with it, and looking for something different. That would be a dependency on other things, the mark of a participant in a system. It is precisely in the creation of systems and all order and rationality that God Almighty, as shown in SMR, has accomplished His feats. Not least of these among the world of mankind, He has told the truth.
To the supernatural God, author of man and of nature, this is natural. God does not lie but He HAS spoken, and in order to be understood and to achieve this, that the junction of freedom with decision should not by deficiency, by vacuity for man, become a fixture of folly. He did not create man in order to display a defective dysfunctionality, dynamically ignorant of reality, discerning His presence but ignorant of how to approach. He has told us for so long so often and in so many ways: for the supernatural God, telling the truth is natural, and here it is.
He even challenges us to face the facts (cf. Isaiah 48). But increasingly obviously, mankind instead seeks heedless happenstance for his hymn of praise, obliteration for his opportunity, for his beginning and end" preferring dabbling in the dark, despite the divine importunity for him to seek life where it may both be found, and worthy of praise.
The ultimate and supreme has need of nothing, for nothing is what could contain or direct or limit Him: in other words, there is definitionally, nothing there to do it. Nothing has the negative property of non-existence, and hence non-function. Whatever is recklessly ascribed to it, quite simply, it cannot be done. But with God, eternity is the antidote to there ever being any situation in which nothing is all and all is nothing. There is no other option, but the Eternal God, nor possibility that He would lie into self-contradiction, nor that His speech would not complement the structure of man and the function of liberty, and that includes available remedy for defect, deficiency, inadequacy, incompleteness.
God did far otherwise than manufacture such an abortion. Providing to mankind the ability NOT to love, but instead at will to hate, to reject, to rebel, He also endowed them with the ability and even agility to love. These are correlatives. Then when this love was trivialised by mankind, through Adam and Eve, the solution which He provided came at once.
The news of the solution to this beginning of evils for man (Genesis 3:15) was spoken from the first, and duly in the laboratory of history, the Lord carried out the prescription. You don't have to take it; but it is there. The disease of dissidence from the Director and Creator of life may be left alone, and it has all the world to help it thrive in its disruptive and irrational dynamic! But the truth remains. It does not wander, waver or fail. Truth may be rejected, but there is none to rescind it. Over the millenia therefore, this Gospel of God does not alter; nor does the name of the appointed Saviour change, Jesus Christ.
It is this marvellous speech to His creation, mankind, this action, this personalised redemption, which He also called into being, and worked into history culminating in the Cross (cf. Galatians 6:14). It is this rather than a self-contradictory, systematically clashing, deficiency-creating God, compelled from inner constraint to get (and hence to will, since He is Almighty) a clash with His own sufficiency through a strangulated, inadequately produced, insufficiently informed, brilliantly constructed creation: one horribly defective in direction.
To want such a thing as that, such a guideless calamity, would be a signal of dependence on His creation for His satisfaction, which is a signal of NOT-GOD, to use the term used by Moses in Deuteronomy 32. In other words, such callow self-contradiction as a wandering, lying, frustrated, ignorant race with power to invent, put forward as if this were the divine creation, is a contradiction in terms. What God is and has would thus be invented in contravention of Himself (cf. Sparkling Life Ch. 4 ), what the Bible calls idolatry.
Moreover, using normal logic in demonstrating the power and presence of God is not using something adventitious to acknowledge Him, some foreign ally. Logic is not extraneous to what God has given man, but inherent, integral to his existence, a design gift, without which you cannot validly even argue, all operations to subvert its use being invalidating to the viewpoint or model being used, which thus makes of itself a feckless farrago of irrelevance. Yet the use of this God-given faculty and facility is open to exposure, and would be, were there no object, the Bible itself, fulfilling both the coherence of the case and the verification of its mode; nor again, does it in itself, as being examined, fail to astound and confirm its source, quality, origin and authoritative substance, by its unique and inimitable qualities. This world has nothing even slightly comparable.
Indeed, to make a race lacking what they need for peaceable and fitting operation according to initial specifications, and to then deny to them that very need, when it is readily in your hand to do it, would induce a condition of warring desires: theirs and that of their Maker. There would be a resemblance in part to those systematically and wilfully plagued, with no way for redress; for ultimately, this would constitute a special condition. Which is that ? It is that of contrariety, contradiction and mutual impact.
To create war on Himself, for the Creator, would signify dissatisfaction with His peace, hence inadequacy, hence limitation within a system, and hence again that the Being in view would not and could not be God. On the other side, in providing a remedy for the magnificent gift of freedom in his design in God's image, when it is categorically abused, as in Genesis 1-3, answers from the outset this relevant question. How is it consistent for God to allow injustice, when He is just, unrighteousness when He IS righteous, being both prototype and base for it, He alone able to objectify and explain its existence ?
It is by having a plan, already nearing its operative end, and dynamically available in its relevant feature to man's predicament. And that ? It is called the Gospel, good news, and it involves not only judgment, both past, present and to come, but its cumulative impact in destiny for each of this race. Yet it also provides free pardon in terms of another initiative which God took, and has used in this sinful situation, along with that of creation.
That ? It was to use, in His long-held plan (Revelation 13:8, Hebrews 4:13) the fact that man was made in His own image (a spiritual type of image, since God is Spirit) at creation, and Himself become incarnate AS man. Hence in a way prohibitively costly, explicitly sacrificial, utterly adequate, He met the payment, the penalty due for sin, adequately for any, relevant to all, useless to those who did not want the reconciliation. He did not become a tyrant even in mercy; nor did He allow injustice, fraud, unrighteousness (which ultimately, unchecked, would make life and its working meaningless, indeed functionally inoperative) to live free in the scope of the life of mankind.
There is a cost, and He met it with the fullest possible demonstration of empathy for those concerned, and hatred for that disease called sin, a correlative of the liberty attached to man from the first.
This remedy met the case, and applied in all fairness and love, it not only vindicated the wisdom and purity of God, but showed a love of prodigious dimensions. Logically also, it meets the case, and the presence of the Bible is the other exhibit, allowing further verification not only that the remedy is there, but independent testing to exhibit and authenticate it in its own prodigious proportions.
Scientific method is only one part of that verification, exhibiting on every side, inadequacy and insufficiency or irrelevance, as and when many of its misplaced and anomalous misrepresentatives abuse the regularities of its investigated systems working before our eyes, with some kind of imaginary warrant to found them on nothing (whether explicitly or notionally): and THAT, it is not only NEVER seen, but logically a simple matter of contradiction in terms, and acute perverseness of irrelevance. On this phase, we cite from the introduction in our library to Religion, Religiosity and the Reality of Christ*1.
Indeed, it is man, not God who has sought, rebellious and irrational, to rely on such a mental confusion. It is God rather than man, who has the solution of the fallen creation (cf. Romans 5, 8); it is man who may throw it away. In His foreknowledge and predestination God has ensured there will be no error in the eternal results (cf. Bulletin 152), nor will anything prevent His knowing beyond all all barriers, all things being manifest with Him with whom we have to do. For Chapter 2, the context, here is the link.
There is no possibility of a speechless God who made speech and would be self-contradictory if He did not speak it into a world which He made and sustains in being (Psalm 94), while it lies in profusion and finds increasingly, the truth about itself to be offensive, and worthy of death in many places, slander charges in others, condemnation in media, rejection by hypnotised academics, and mutilation with its pre-occupation with what the Bible calls "the lie" in shameless educational programs in this area (cf. That Great Rock. Ch. 8, and Lead Us Not into Educational Temptation).
Bringing rebellious muddle to those not yet inundated with all the anti-truth and truth-trivialisation in which this world indulges, and this at times with a relish like that of a dog rushing into the ocean for a swim, is like having a golden spittoon, an arsenical aspro or a mallet for handling china. What a fate for youth! but even here in Australia, it has been substantially operative for decades.
But certainly God is not and cannot be so. The word must have been spoken. The Bible is without competitor in testability, reliability, power to make its words happen, giving warnings thousands of years before fulfilment, focus on the remedy from the hand of the Lord, gift of the same, and distancing in every way from the paths of disruption, disorder, malignancy towards life. Nothing else has the power to perform in this way, nor does it evidence itself, nor do emotions substitute for performance, nor does the God-given power to love or hate, to choose or reject, ultimately alter God. It means instead that one may be uplifted from sin-driven, rebellion impassioned condition of heart, freely and functionally by the mankind-loving God and so escape the curse which foils a defiled creation.
The Gospel is the final divine answer to the need of mankind, for grace to banish sin, where power and divine provision join forces, and this with a capacity to which there is no answer (cf. Psalm 84).
If however man says No!, that is the ultimate answer to the ultimate need, and the indictment of sinners in those cases, remains operational, in a world increasingly unfit to continue, as it moves towards being unable (cf. Matthew 24:22).
Other files are available in this site touching on these aspects, and the certainty of speech from God (including the verificatory step of finding where these words from God are to be found in some location or situation in this world which for communication would distinguish themselves cf. Isaiah 34:16. This need is already met that distinguishes the Bible from all else: with criteria such as reportedly being the world's most sold book, one inviting scrutiny and challenging attack, as in Isaiah 41, 48, while avoiding refutation by all means, even when irrational fictions are rampantly used against it. Moreover, one finds on decades of inspection, that it resolves, if its principles are followed, that it has rational answer to every problem that philosopher can ask or hatred hurl. There is nothing else at all like that.
While SMR is the original post-doctoral work in this site, the presentation in these intimately-connected spheres over the 243 volumes is intentionally multiple and in and through various aspects, facets and phases, and with Christ Himself, a central matter.
Speech ? Why our very DNA is a type of speech, communication telling comprehendingly responsive servants in the body, just how to build one of these maestro marvels, prodigies of profundity that change suddenly their mode of gaining oxygen from womb to lungs an arrival through complex equipment carefully prepared. Thus even babies teach the wise that gradualism is a suffocating invasion of manifest, programmed system-mutation, where seconds count in the performance and success depends on instant replacement being operationally available. It is then not only the phenomenon of speech, containing concepts and commands, apportionment of meaning to symbols that order and receptors that receive and execute (whether directly or via prepared orders of command), but the success of the same, not surrounded with attestation of multitudes of misfits on the way (for they would have to die anyway), in the fossil evidence, but as normal in God's working, with direction by operational dynamic.
It is, of course, as in our own minds, created by the Creative Creator and creative therefore as a consequence, quite easy to understand ONCE you have all the necessary gifts. For intelligent speech, we have that. For intelligible speech the Eternal, never absent Creator has all needed. What He has, we gain: one is eternally engraced with it, while we are born with it, whether with the necessary logic and defining capabilities, or the imagination or the desire.
We have so much speech even IN US, that given its repetition in nucleated cells, we are virtually a walking library, housing trillions of items and their interconnections. They direct; they inter-connect, they are part of an integrality, fashioned into a person with equipment. Mankind - physically, words make him and he makes words. There is no lack of communication: and God did indeed speak man into existence. We now see the words for it.
In this, we who are Christians believing the word of God have a companion in the Bible, and with that, a fellowship with the Lord. So far from anything being missing, HE is found by Christian believers, according to His word, to be present. History can only bow to His prophetic specifications, surging in multitudes through His word, the subject of challenge by His confrontations (cf. Isaiah 41, 43, 48).
In commands, then, such as the DNA has in each, for the construction of the body each generation, there are not only information and deposition of meaning, but the need for this appointed meaning to be mirrored in the receptors in the building process, that is, to what has to DO the job and that in interconnective multitudes of complex, often inter-dependent processes.
These three correlatives are now being found and formulated as to meaning, holding therefore concepts that they might in turn be conceived, whether now in investigation or in building from a baby. Certainly concepts, as in the translation of DNA, cannot be derived from a system without their first being put it, and many and mighty in power are they as in mental implications. Begging the question is ever a forlorn and jaded art. To be sure, it is not we as babies who receive all this with life, who put them there; but there they are, integral to our very composition and its commands, the wording derivable and its meaning, in the highly complex, specific and sustained media, symbols of spiritual drive. Hence we can from the base provided in DNA, express it.
For that matter, the laws of chemistry and physics likewise being conceptualisable, have conception as one of their master features and institutional forms and formulations. Though this field is not our present topic, yet its parallel is part of the harmony and coherence of the whole, of the stamp of its Creator. Verification never ceases to sprout on every side.
Concepts are a phenomenon of mind, their use a facility of it and their appointment, one of will. The will of God used concepts to make the body of man, by His creative desire, and left the programmatic copy of it in that very body, to be examined and even interpreted by us, at will. Shakespeare used verse as a form for his expression. God has used concepts as a formula for His work in the format of life. It has this characteristic. Other procedural laws discovered by science likewise are discoverable because in that form they are there, working: basic to science absolutely.
Seeing all different facets of it has a collective harmony and confirmation so great that it becomes incapable of arrest. Like the day when opening the eyes at first, it ushers one into a whole world of connections, corrections and comprehensibility, which does not stop at words, but in this divine case, includes the works as well (cf. John 14:11).
NOTE
If reason were unreasonable, where would validity be in any knowledge ? If truth were unknowable, where would the statement to that effect be! (cf. Predestination and Freewill, Appendix on Kant). It is however given as a gift, and like other gifts must be used to the uttermost, since it has been proven to be inestimable value in much. Declining to use it in any one field is mere arrogance and intemperance, allied to whimsical caprice or worse (cf. SMR pp. 150ff., 330ff.). It becomes a scientistic folly justly named "The Cult of the Forbidden." Contrary to scientific method, it is merely an export of an invalid philosophical assumption, simple begging of the question.
Using reason however as in any field without fear, and in this in particular, it becomes eloquent by results. Finding the necessity of God by it*B, we find the testimony of God through it, like using a geiger counter to test for radiation. Having found what He has to say, and using reason to show it must have been said (cf. Psalm 50*C), we verify by showing it has the calibre, or better the qualities which could in any case have come from no other source. When we also find that it resolves all questions of validity and truth in passing, while analysing and extraditing man as the source of his own pangs, pains and tragedies, declaring the prognosis of his diagnosed disease, and foretelling what is needed for understanding and convenience, the resolutions are complete.
Indeed, when further, we find the basis in the Bible for resolution of all psychic, social and political problems, and the call to come out of the problem-making kingdom into the kingdom of heaven, then the practicalities become as grand as the principles. When even more than this, we are told of the signals for the action of the Great Physician who is also the Judge, and that this is imminent, joy should know no limits (cf. I Peter 1).
There is an exception here. When this diagnosis-prognosis and resolution which applies on all sides is rejected by will, so that as Christ put it, light has come and darkness is preferred to it (John 3:19), then there is assuredly no cause for rejoicing. But this ? it is like a man who having a cancer which can be extirpated by operation, refuses it.
See also the volume on scientific method.SCIENTIFIC METHOD, SATANIC METHOD
AND THE MODEL OF SALVATION
As to other files on the particular topic of this present Bulletin, God's speaking to man, see:
SMR pp. 92ff. - Simplified Schema, pp. 590ff., No. 27,
Lord of Life Ch. 6,
Sparkling Life Ch. 4,
Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed Ch.4,
SMR Ch. 1 as marked, at God is non-lying,
Repent or Perish Ch. 2.
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