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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GOD IS FROM EVERLASTING TO EVERLASTING,
BUT MAN NEEDS MORE THAN BLAST TO LAST
MAN AS MADE AND AS MARRED
"God has made man upright, but he has sought out many devices," (Ecclesiastes 7:29). One is the atomic bomb; another is the divergent heart; a third, is utter unfaithfulness, changing the Rock for rockets (Psalm 62:1-2), divine power for human ideas and these often for inhuman devastation; with results apparent, step by step. It is impractical, improvident and self-vaunting whether using oneself as base or criterion directly or indirectly.
Man is free to delude himself on his own importance, as if a garrulous god, and find his life wasted (Proverbs 1). There is no greater waste in kind, available to man (Matthew 16:23-24) than following self-trust or any trust anywhere before trust in the Lord (Proverbs 28:26, 3:5).
Mankind for example is free to seek first this world and its canons, and to die in vain in its polluted paths. He can invent individual canons of his own, and live and die with or for them. Yet originality is not salvation, but presumption, when it comes to the gift of eternal life from the Maker of all life, and the necessary divine satisfaction made for one's sins. When it comes to positive engagement, therefore, with life from God, not the pursuit of corporicity with corpses, with spirits lost forever, what then ? Then it is a narrow way, as in all excellence; but this, it is the narrow way of God (Matthew 7:15ff.).
Past all the murky ways of self-appraisals and pleasant seeming or gross rationalisations, past innovations made by people as if gods and their ilk were some kind of fantasy land, made at one's pleasure, is the knowledge of God Himself. First it is His knowledge of us, leading for those who seek Him, to man's needful knowledge of Him. Before our world's time, before sin could insinuate (Ephesians 1:4), evil contaminate, a wilting will evacuate, or a spirit bent on idols or self-glorifying operate, God knew His own (Romans 8:30), and how to keep them throughout coming history, saved at the first entirely in grace through love (Romans 3,5,9,11).
Delighting in love to have all mankind saved (Colossians 1:19, I Timothy 2:6, Ezekiel 33:11, John 3:15-18), lacking nothing, giving all in the cross of Christ, God turned man's murder weapon against His Christ by His glorious grace into salvation available to man, as a sacrifice for sin (I Corinthians 2:7-16). Blinded by nothing (Hebrews 4:13), He saw all.
Yet just as man blinded himself (Matthew 13:15, Ephesians 2:1-10, 4:17ff.), so God saved such as could be saved, this with abolition neither of love in favour of force, nor expulsion of truth, so yielding to mere pretence or pretension, in runaway ruin (Luke 19:42ff., Matthew 23:37ff., Jeremiah 13:27, Ezekiel 20). Those are this world's ways. But His own (Ephesians 1:4, II Timothy 2:19), these He has kept, not varying from the pathways of love for any substitute (Galatians 1:6-9, Hosea 7:1-2, Jeremiah 51:9). Now see its scope.
King David lamented, wishing that he had died for Absolam, his son (II Samuel 18:33); but the Father sent His Son to die for us, humbling Himself, that holiness in its infinitude might pay for the sin of man, as man (Philippians 2, John 5:24, II Corinthians 5:17ff., Titus 2-3, Matthew 20:28, I Peter 2:23-25, Romans 5:1-11). With all the fulness of God (Colossians 2:9, John 8:58) His body irrupted from the penalty of death, resurrected into life. So the Son of God fought as man for man to bear his misdeeds meriting death (Hebrews 2, 9), with payment sufficient for all (I John 2:1-2)., but applicable only to those who, as in all disease, receive the remedy (John 1:12-14, 3:16,36, Luke 13:1-3)
Foreknown in love (John 6:65, Ephesians 1:4), liberated in grace and kept in the power of God (I Peter 1:5-12, Romans 8:30ff.), these are justified by faith (Romans 5:1) and at last glorified; for God is neither capricious in heart, unsound in wisdom, nor deviating because of technical difficulties! He is not impelled by undirected passion, nor deceived in any way by the all but immeasurable deviousness of the human spirit, deceiving even itself (Matthew 24:24, I John 1:8, Ezekiel 28:9, Jeremiah 17:9-10). God knows.
Therefore, none can cunningly arrive in heaven to pollute it, making heaven hell, for great is His gift available to man, and it comes with no pretended saving substitute allowable, recognised or capable (II Corinthians 11:4, 10:12). God knows His own mind! This is dramatised, as in Matthew 22:11 in Christ's parable, where a presumptuous 'guest' came without the free wedding garment, the cover of Christ offered, and was accordingly cast out.
It is the reception or rejection of this cover which simply excludes or includes. In none is a truly repentant heart's desire for salvation rankly excluded and dashed to death! for the principle stands that God would have all reconciled to Himself (Colossians 1:19ff.). Thus the repentant sinner who comes to Him in faith, He will not cast out (John 6:37). Yet it is not as god makers (roll your own principles) with new images for man from his own delusive will, that they come. Instead, it is in terms of truth (John 14:6, 8:21-29,40), which does not vary (James 1:17). In this alone is the way open, from God to God (II Peter 3:18).
Accordingly, if anyone seek the Lord, love life and wish to receive from its Beginning, its meat and meaning, as also its designed end or culmination, rather than simple outage for presumption and wilfulness, such a person need not fear some horrible deterrence proudly to block his path. The target of the salvation of God that Christ provided was THE WORLD, escape from the ways of which is a profound relief (Hebrews 6:19); for its wiles are so vain.
Trial ? yes, and it exposes to reality. Contempt for wilful delusion ? certainly, this also. Yet God has not abandoned mankind. Indeed He would have ALL to be reconciled, whether in heaven or on earth and says so in so many words. Having made peace by the blood of the cross, He would have ALL! (Colossians 1:19ff.). Hence past all trial, the truth is desired for man, for "where sin abounded, grace abounded much more," Romans 5:20; and what He desires with all His heart, He activates (John 16:5-8), even into this late stage of the Age (Matthew 24:22).
Eternal life, including that supernatural change in the heart of man, in restoration of the original image of God for man from the first (Colossians 3:10), is a gift of grace. As to ordinary life, this original image of man is loaded with information, never found to be produced in kind, without the operation of intelligence; nor is life ever discovered making itself.
The opposite is the case. The human genome indeed, in fact is found significantly declining over the generations, through environmental pressures and copying errors (attested in the work of Dr. J.C. Sanford of Cornell, Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome). The decline of the genome, the natural, is down, not up, formed and informed, and it has its own law, the Second of Thermodynamics. Eternal life, on the other hand, like creation, is the gift of God and it has its own Lord. At the last as at the first, there is the way of truth and the way of error.
The facts do not alter. Man was made by intensive and extensive commands, exhibited in the DNA where such are recorded, with information moulded with Spirit from the start, and man needs remaking and restoration (Colossians 3:10, Titus 2-3) in spirit. This is provided in regeneration (John 3). Mercifully, it is available, exposed and made manifest.
But God cannot be transformed into any evil angel (the Evil One specialising in this kind of imposture as in II Corinthians 11:13-14), or manipulable stooge (Galatians 1). Rather is He bent on calling man home in Himself as a hen her chickens in the very Person of Christ (Matthew 23:37ff.). He is not as for a fool (Psalm 14:1), calling his comrades to folly, but as faithful, calling the lost race home (Proverbs 8, Isaiah 55). The door is Christ Himself (John 10:9,27-28). The world has its own style of standards (variable of course, and worthless as in disjunction from the living God), and it judges by them. That is interesting; for God Himself has His standards, not ephemeral but eternal, and He judges by them. That is crucial.
Those who avoid His call, meet judgment naked (Acts 17:31, John 3:36, I Timothy 1:9-10), as with containers to be filled, but left empty: the greatest of these inflows being His own love (John 3:16, I Corinthians 13), by Himself defined. This is the necessary operative on earth and the inherent one in heaven. Indeed, it was this that motivated the sending of the Messiah (John 3:16). Without this, there is neither approach nor acceptance of man before God. With this, and what He has done through it, there is both salvation and payment of its cost (Acts 4:11-12, Romans 5:6-11). In all this, just as love is an indispensable element of life, so is truth, justice and mercy as in Psalm 89, Matthew 7. Many were the prophets who foretold what Christ in time came and did, and great was His fidelity to every specification, His words to this hour, like no others, fulfilled to the letter in history (cf. SMR Chs. 8 - 9), His death the satiation of justice..
Christians are called to bypass this world's standards, though they lose the whole world, to serve God and follow His directions. Humbled or even killed on this earth (Matthew 16:24-26, John 16:2), they meet challenge in His strength; and as they love God, so they have the first and final example in Christ's eternal redemption by the sacrifice of Himself (Hebrews 9:11-12), even as sole sin-bearer. It motivates even more than did the love of liberty at Normanby.
The love of the Christian, inspired from the love of the One who first loved us (I John 4:19), seeks heartily to do His will, breaking off known sin and rejoicing in His power. In this, Christ is not only the exemplar, inspiration and aid (Psalm 40:1-8, Hebrews 10:5-7, Acts 4:11-12), and the payor to faith in Him for the deficit, but the precise fulfilment of millena of biblical predictions, including His death date (Mini-Messages with Maxi-Point Ch. 10. Reception of this His gift, by faith, is a grand event for anyone, and a decisive operation!
The world may judge shallowly, just as mud on a car may bring negative judgment of the vehicle itself, from superficial people. This, however, is mere appearance, covering the underlying creation. That, the made, warrants upkeep (Isaiah 5:1-6, Colossians 1:10ff.). Not only that: it requires the deliverance by deity (Romans 8:17ff., Hebrews 2:1-3, 6:19, John 8:24, Jeremiah 2:27,32-36), saving and guarding from sophisticated but barren substitutes.
These clutter as man swerves from truth to the delusive desolations of sin (Ephesians 2:1-12, Acts 4:11-12, Isaiah 43:10-11), like a drunken drug addict. To pour molten gold into the ocean would be far wiser than pouring God's provision of eternal life, replacing judgment and spiritual bankruptcy, into the sea of forgetfulness and abandon.