THE LOVE OF GOD

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CHAPTER 6

THE LOVE OF GOD, FREEDOM, PARDON,

PEACE AND ETERNAL LIFE

First let us view the biblical outline.

	God made man a free agent relative to response to the love of God, but sin clouded his judgment and distorted his understanding (John 1:3-5, Romans 5:9, Ephesians 2:1-3,12). Yet God, who in love would have all to be reconciled to Himself (Colossians 1:19ff., John 3:16-18), is able to penetrate the clouds of man's sin, and in fact knew those who were and are His freely, before sin or creation came to be (Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:30). He finds these when the time comes (Ezekiel 34:11, Matthew 18:11), and the power, purpose and intense but self-restrained love of God is thus fulfilled (Genesis 3, Romans 5, 6:23, John 1, Ephesians 1:4). He does not force (Matthew 23:37ff., John 18:36).
	The cost of the project was vast (John 3:16, Hebrews 5:7) but met (Colossians 1:19-22); and even this is by many still disdained or carefully ignored, like some spoiled or fretful child who has abandoned himself to himself or to his flutters of heart or mind (Jeremiah 2:11-13, Ephesians 4:17-18), some even "measuring themselves by themselves" (II Corinthians 10:12) in futile displays of muddled autonomy.
	But with God, all things are possible, and the salvation of souls is one of these (Matthew 19:20, Ephesians 2:17-18). Truth is inevitable (John 14:6, 18:36-37, Habakkuk 1:12-13, Deuteronomy 32:4) and pardon with peace is available (Isaiah 55:1-9, Ephesians 2:12-14) through the ransom provided by Christ (Matthew 20:28, Hebrews 9:12,10:10-14, Romans 3:23-27), freely provided and applied, and cause for eternal praise (Galatians 6:14, Revelation 5:9-13).
	Through Him and His work, adoption comes to many as the children of God (John 1:12, Ephesians 1:4-7,13-14) who are sealed with the Holy Spirit till the resurrection of the body of these (Romans 8:18-23, I Corinthians 15) by the power of Him who created from the first (Philippians 3:20-21, Colossians 3:10, Revelation 4:11) and keeps believers in Him not only to the last, but for ever (Hebrews 13:5, John 5:24, Ephesians 1:11, Romans 8:35-39, II Timothy 1:12, 14, 4:8). To these He has accorded eternal life (Romans 6:23, 5:15, John 5:24, 6:54,58, 3:16, Isaiah 51:6,22, John 4:14, I Corinthians 15:50-57, II Timothy 1:10).

PERSPECTIVES

Sometimes the freedom of man (in some respects) is stressed, and at other times the harassment or limits of man; but both have place in reality, and extremes become readily mere besotted remnants of thought interrupted by passion, preference or pride. The Bible makes both the initial freedom of man clear, in what respects (including the crucial one of responding or otherwise to the loving provisions of God, and to Himself as God), and the subsequent disfigurement of the countenance of truth before him (John 1:1-3).

How then is man any more accountable ? It is quite simple in outline. God is not thwarted by the pathological position of man, as if this made utterly futile the residual image of God in man, a ruined creation. Ruined he is, but not inoperable.

It is easy to do as you will, and then later cry that your education, missile type unruliness, condition and so on got the better of you and culture distorted you so that it was not REALLY you who did it, so that you deserve unlimited disregard of your actual actions, as if these were but a dream: not so to others!

Thus the nature of the self, its condition, its ruptures or psychic crevices are quickly noted in such cases almost routinely, where this is likely to help the sentence of justice. How then can man WILL as he will, and escape whatever entanglement from the pathologies of the soul may (in pretence or in actuality) be afflicting him ? In other words, doing what the self desires is one thing; being free from the clammy conditions of sin so that you rise above these turmoils and distortions to choose ultimately and meaningfully, that is another.

How could this be obtained ? If then God were to invade your soul, and convicting you of sin, drive you the way sheep dogs do with sheep, patiently but overwhelmingly back home, where would freedom be ?

It is easy for God to KNOW what is to be before it happens, since all depends on Him and has no being whatsoever before and without Him (Revelation 4:11). Spiritual things are manifest before the forger of spirits, not because they failed the design pattern of being free agents relative to Himself and His love, but because no design pattern, however far its initial failure, can exclude His light, however dark the interiors of the fallen soul.

The One who shed blood for sin is not squeamish about its purgation, about purification, about pardon. Indeed, the heights of imagination in some cases can perhaps be but mist (cf. Matthew 23, II Corinthians 10-11), and many of the "first" appear fallen further from the light of life than those openly immoral, who in pride take pleasure in their own integrity, attainments and selves (Matthew 19:30, 21:31), as if they as God were to judge their own selves, or even in their darkened ignorance, others also, though but they be but man, Thus they readily become cases of that ludicrous human default, their own auditors: indeed they may even judge firms (persons) where the books have never been seen, nor can be!

But which firm would impress which endeavoured to present its own internal audit as evidence of integrity! Not a smirk but raucous laughter might greet such arrogant self-affirmation.

God FOREKNOWS all the agents, and without force or intrusive disruption, gazes upon truth which is His milieu, and perceiving the disposition of the soul, before creation and sin arose, knows therefore who are His, responding by preference. It is thus true, for it is TRUTH which is known in advance, that those who prefer the darkness of continued abstraction from God, have this very fact as their stated, divine condemnation (John 3:19). God so loved the world that He paid crucially, that His only begotten Son might come to the Cross of sacrifice to pay in love for the works of evil on the part of all who receive this provision. He did not come to condemn the world, but to save it. He says so in John 3.

He WOULD HAVE all to be reconciled to Himself (Colossians 1:19ff.), but if man WOULD HAVE it otherwise for himself, then so it will be, God Himself foreknowing the soul, not a matter of its works or claims or clamours, but its allegiance, its love, its direction; and He discerns His own. He predestines them so that no evil or corruption or power will move them (Romans 8:30), who so freely desire, and they are thus saved freely, and He loses of all, none but those preferring darkness, who after all, get what they want.

Christ the exact image of the living God, the eternal Word of God, who spoke as His Father commanded (John 12:48-50), is no changeable entity, but the same, yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 1:1-3,8-13,13:8, John 8:58, Psalm 102:18-28, Malachi 3:6). He has spoken on earth, and is the truth (John 14:6, 8:26,40, Matthew 5:17-20), which thus requires that in foreknowledge with its outcomes, there is that same desire, in essence the lamentation (cf. Luke 19:42ff.) for those who refuse in whatever form as exhibited in His incarnate griefs; and it is this which so far from emptying His relevance, confirms it, and ratifies man's responsibility.

God the Trinity both foreknows and predestines accordingly, and in Him is no dissension! NOTHING moves man from the reality of what Christ, and indeed the word of God written, the Bible, repeatedly declares. The living, loving principles announced as true on earth are in essence true in heaven, which not least, is what gives it its heavenly lustre, God being like that, beautiful, immutable, merciful, articulate and just.

This does not mean that in such blessed cases of divine grace triumphant, there is from the first no sin (not as Adam sinned, but in parallel, continuing relish for or capitulation to sin) to act as a wall against God (I John 1:7), as if the eventual result would involve a free course without trouble to the kingdom of God, for such souls. Indeed, as Paul declares after being stoned and left for dead at Lystra,

"We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22).

Moreover, God not only USES those who prefer the evil autonomy as He sees fit, their desires being clear (Romans 9:17), and their follies made useful, but uses the travails even of His own foreknown souls who become children of God, as in the case for example of David with Bath-Sheba, to instruct and to humble, and even in some instances, as preludes to such a horror of their follies that some turn to Him not in a fresh and Spring-like simplicity, but in travail of anguish (Psalm 51). All however come to repentance at last, who are His, this being part of the way for the those who receive the Saviour, found and founded as lovers of truth; and repentance into the truth is a condition of entry, for there are no hang-overs in heaven (Luke 13:1-3, Acts 17:30).

So far from conditioning reality, the truth opens the way to it, though many may be the confrontations and exhortations before it is reached.

MASSIFS OF WILL NOT TO BE MISTAKEN

FOR SANCTION FOR REBELS

Thus man is in this, given even the power to will as he will! It is of course in one vital feature from which all the rest duly flow. Man may resolve, the freedom of his agency not being rescinded but special steps taken to preserve its integrity, that another self than the one with which he is gifted is to be desired. The state of his present being may lie morally or spiritually gutted before him, and in his spirit he may survey his own self, and even desiderata. To be sure, the Spirit of God it is who awakens, refreshing the mind, convicting the soul of sin, righteousness (of God), and judgment (of misdeeds and misalliances), and some become more aware of this or that feature of the entirety of the free transaction, from the first made assured in outcome by the foreknowledge and predestination of God.

Thus truth in advance is applied to the last, and as the rescue proceeds (called conversion to Christ), and regeneration operates (not a new kidney, as in surgery, but an entirely remade innermost heart and spirit - John 3, Titus 3), a given person may have more or less acute awareness of the challenge, the contrition, the horror or the hope, the necessity of faith and its operation, or any other feature; for it is God who acts, and through the travail of response, man is found. Indeed, negative results may occur where there is a merely superficial case: not truth, mere reaction.

This is illustrated in Hebrews 6:4ff., where the taste is not to swallow and mere attraction TO Christ is not reception OF Him; or in Hebrews 10, where the character of a person can recoil from the life in the Lord, being merely drawn, but if you will, not quartered. That is, it is merely a hanger-on and not the participant in regeneration, this person a transient with no roots as in Matthew 13:21. As he strives in his own efforts, this is quite distinct from the results of divine salvation, which is integral.

Again, man may fight rearguard actions and often does (hence in revivals, many may readily be reaped), or make inward exceptions to capitulation to Christ; but in the end, be sure your sin will find you out, for He Himself make one thing clear as in Luke 14. If you do not forsake ALL (your opinion of yourselves and your judgments on others as self-willed, your reliance on wealth, or on popularity or the respect of others, or a good name and so forth), then two things happen.

First you are NOT then a disciple of Christ. As to God, with Him (consider divergent DNAs as from the first, at the physical level, as if an option), there is no other mould, image, way of freedom and truth, love and duty, responsibility and spiritual power, blessing and peace. Hence if you do not forsake ALL, with a spirit which has dumped at His feet all that you value, what in the world are you doing, trying to do business with God ?

Is He an underling ? under your thumb, or power, or control, or would you make bargains with Him, to alter His nature! and so yours! You may, but it will not alter the reality, which has a way of prevailing in the end, and is better faced from the first (Galatians 1:6ff.). Am I to persuade God on your behalf, or you on His! thunders Paul as He is inspired to write (cf. I Corinthians 2:9-13). If the former, he would himself be no servant of God. Nevertheless God ensures that your disposition to receive Him or not, is neither falsified, nor forfeited, foreknowing before pathology set in with its degrees of various guilts, superiorities and inferiorities of position and so on. Here, where truth has full liberty, neither sin nor seduction of truth is even possible; and God knows what is the truth, and preserves liberty for it.

Thus, the result of the knowledge, the foreknowledge of TRUTH on the part of God, is that He not only knows who are His but who are not (cf. John 6:70), and may for all that use them, or love them sufficiently to give them every opportunity to repent; for the love of God is not a programmatic but a personal entity, and the truth in the foreknowledge does not annihilate the reality of the love, however aborted by man, in deft, deadly or disillusioned modes of self-deception or self-will (cf. Luke 19:42ff.). It consolidates and ensures it.

LOVE AND RESPONSIBILITY

As a doctor may implore, a father may exhort, a mother may plead, a friend may seek to persuade without manipulative devices but with deep concern, how much more then does God who made such a payment on such a cross with such a vast burden of adopted guilt on behalf of those who would become adopted children, with Christ a brother, a redeeming One, use many ways to seek for the lost. None IS lost because of a given, divine negative applied, in cases WHEN and WHERE there is no knowledge of the Saviour, that a person MIGHT know Him.

This is as shown in John 15:21ff., where we find explicitly that there was still a sense of hope which might be held out to some. Perhaps they would respond positively when they knew about what He was doing.

But no! in fact, well had they known and they had rejected Him... YET what if the case were otherwise and they had not yet heard ? Then if they had NOT known the acts, heard the words of the Saviour, with their offer from the heart of God, with the hands of God, then Christ indicated that they would still not face eternal judgment. If rejection is the key, knowledge is the lock for its turning. A negative in simple in ignorance is not enough. It IS enough for sin to be definable (as in Romans 1:17ff.); but not to in itself, invoke eternal judgment. Freedom is real.

What then ? It is not that they would not deserve judgment (Romans 6:23). It is futile to become confused on such a topic. They would. But that the love of God has kept this landing pad on the aircraft carrier of Jesus Christ, for those shown it, is obtrusively clear. Those who do know of it are, though deserving death in the ocean, yet not condemned because of the elemental purity of the divine mercy. More is therefore needed to complete the horror of such a thing, beyond the walls of mercy and the wash of His blood.

FIRST, the knowing rejection of salvation is necessary, this or its divinely assigned equivalent. All this is foreknown, every phase, stage, and the depths themselves; and God reaches with the unique Gospel in His own way and time; but His love is too intense to dismiss to hell because of a technical failure, a geographical oddity, or the failure of some servant (as for a little time, in the case of Jonah, who though failing, was sent again, and finished the job), to act in giving necessary testimony to others. Not only is God just but His love is that ALL whether in heaven or on earth might be reconciled to Himself as Colossians 1 declares, and so nothing short of the ultimate ground claims attention, when final and irremediable severance is in view.

Thus the IF you will, approach, often made, has a wide basis (cf. Proverbs 2:1-5 and the dramatic insurgence of Proverbs 1:11ff., and in particular 1:24ff.); for here is found the matter of the call and the contempt, with its furious divine disclaimer when the vast offers of Proverbs 1:23 are by those challenged, ignored. Opportunity is paramount. In Proverbs 1, did not God call, did He not offer to overcome every deficiency to complete His orientation and instruction, showing what was to be if only the sinner came to Him^*1, and was not His offer draped in vast abundance of provisions ? Yet it was declined. That is the immediate tableau; but though an 'IF' there becomes the form or formula, and is apt, yet back of it lies beyond this world and before it, a masterpiece of planning, wisdom and knowledge.

It is just as in the DNA for that matter, at the physical and coding level, there is a masterpiece of planning and systematisation, to enable the conceptual compilation of information, its collateral emplacement with commands and consequences, so that the commands do not hit the empty air, but impact on a body of works capable of doing two things. How great is the depth and anterior work in that! First, it has to recognise the commands (so that they are not like a foreign language, with however much significance, yet not of discernible sense to the recipient), and then there has to be the apparatus available to respond to the recognised command and implement it, in all the myriads of bypaths involved. It is a cross-information-comprehension-and-engineering matter.

The command to repent, from the same God of creation and life, however, is not like that . The authority is precisely the same (but being directed to persons, not conceptually to conceptually organised matter), it has an edge open to guilt and judgment, or joy and co-operation.

	Just as in the DNA, the God who
	made material things, imposed order and fashioned law, scripted meaning, as He Himself resolved in His eternity, acting in due course as their earthly cause,
	so removing the ludicrous logical impasse of having these things,
	such that even when they are not there, they nevertheless manage to make themselves^1, or else enlist nothing* to do it, or any other worthless nonentity, as if what was just a dream event, a burst of the irrational, erupted (out of nothing) to create what wonder investigates:
	so His commands to man are also sourced where there is no dismissal. These too do not make themselves, but are made and operate in clash or conformity.

If in the case of a person, then, the command is over-ruled by preference for something else, self-induced, instead of what God has produced, this is no shock to God, who foreknew; but yet it is a sorrow, and can be an intense grief.

Such is the majestic self-control of the glorious God who does not indulge ALMIGHTY power for His will, to grab by His will, as if His image in man could be that of a robot; but He leaves what prefers spiritual Autumn to Spring before Him, to have it. The colours of a spiritual Autumn are sometimes very pretty before the Fall; and this fall is fatal. So the divinely foreknown preference discerned before creation and sin, proceeds to wilful exclusion or to inclusion in the kingdom of heaven as children of the King. So comes repentance and free acceptance through the convicting power of the Holy Spirit, of the salvation of God, wrought by grace both in availability and institution in the heart (Ephesians 2:1-8, Romans 3:23ff., 5:17).

Enticement is near to the heart of evil (as in Matthew 4:8-9), and many solicitations may sway man before he falls, or despising corruptive goading, finds instead the very salvation of God, freely; and how great is this freedom. Seedily man often seeks to blame God, or whatever he appoints for the purpose; but God is very deep, and not only has He conserved freedom, even for the pathologically constrained (John 1:12, 3:19), but He has done it with the results in His own information store, not that of man. His treasures are such indeed, and He knows them (cf. Malachi 3:16-17).

THE HAVEN OF HEAVEN

WHERE LIBERTY OF HEART AND LOVE OF GOD

MINGLE LIKE GIANT OCEAN WATERS

Heaven therefore is filled with those who FREELY and in REALITY preferred the love of God to any other, and the reality of God to any illusion, the death of Christ for sin to any delusion, and the place of paid-for pardon to any nostrum of man or his designations. It is a free place, where love, the very love of the loving God, is key, truth is foundational and understanding has open discourse and availability, where loss is past and the gain of residence with the God of all glory, who deserves on every side the worship given, is present and eternal. Here are those who repented, realised, were released from sin's sovereignty by the spiritual and eternal Shepherd, whom to know is indeed life eternal.

God has made a prodigious provision, and its very essence involves neither the mere imagination of man, displaced by the production of God in salvation terms, nor the diseased will of man, in pathological terms. It insists on the truth; and the truth is to be found in the heart of all His people, not forced into line, nor grabbed and made agreeable, but foreknown in that desire of God for ALL to be reconciled, and in that love which would have the world to be saved (John 3:17-18). Foreknown it is implemented.

In spirit these are called out of this world, in the perfect integrity of what is far more than an Adam-type choice, which could be reversed into repentance, being in fact founded on a whole realm of divine labour, providing the wonders of God to match the very innermost desire of the heart known before stricken by sin, and before even its creation, even discerned by God, where truth rules. That is one of the great wonders of the Lord, that He both could and did create man in His own image, and in responsibility and love provided even for fallen man. Despite a vast exposure to corrupt and foolish philosophy as man sought to justify his follies or rationalise his ruin, and even discount, dismiss or disregard God's salvation in parallel with His creation, God does not fail but finds and keeps those who are His as foreknown. He thus created that amazing reality FREEDOM, and preserved its impact to the end, through His great knowledge and triune action concerning the soul of man!

No man can imitate this freedom, for it is a spiritual thing, a disposition of the mind, a direction of the heart, an expression of what is not controlled but contrived and made able to think about, look at and ponder a vast array of considerations, superficial or weighty; and God having done it, made such a creation as this, has achieved great things. NOW and because of this, mankind CAN LOVE. Freedom enables it, Capacity ennobles it.

It is not lust of sexuality (an expression in creation of procreation, or love in faithfulness to such a spouse) misused, or of a morbid desire for control or for post or position; it is not a thrust to achieve recognition, but a tenderness of heart, an enterprise of spirit, a disposition of heart which makes it sui generis, a kind apart. However much its soil is polluted, this can be cleansed; and however dimmed the eyes that look for it, these can be opened better than by laser for ocular cataracts.

Here in fatherhood and motherhood, love find a course in the creation of family; and here liberty enabling friendship finds a resource and a reality. Thus on this earth, marriage finds a co-partnership with love, both with freedom, and this with higher liaison yet, with God (Ephesians 5).

What then of marriage ? If the functions differ for each participant, the value of each party is the same as in Ephesians 5, and indeed there is onus on the presiding party to love sacrificially! But without this love of God, there is distortion and compression or repression or dissension; but what would you ? It is as with gems. There is genuine, what IS a gem, and there is artificial, what is not; and however near they come in some aspects, the difference is ultimate.

God does not lend ear to hypocrisy, nor give gear to the drives that centre in the aspirations of thrusting ambition, as if reality were subject to mere force, appetite or self-presentation, at all of which the devil excels (cf. II Corinthians 11, John 8:44). History tells and tolls its own sad tales where what does not work because it is not true to reality, is exhibited like flowers of evil, in almost any imaginable configuration or fixture, which becomes unfixed and exhibits a mere weed in the end. But there is an end to all this, and a beginning to that kingdom of God in which the rules and wonders of the kingdom of heaven being fulfilled and operative, the glory in human format through resurrected emplacement, of walking with God without assault is at last prevailing, like a prevailing wind coming from the gardens of grace.

EXCURSION

CREATION AND DESECRATION,

CYCLOTRON AND CYCLE,

CONFUSION AND CORRUPTION

VERSUS THANKSGIVING AND SALVATION

In Eden, God solemnly warned man against trifling with conditions, and of the extreme result. These grand gifts in environment and heart, in mind and thought, were not to be used to displace the work of God, but to relish it and enjoy it. When man heard the urbane and sophisticated voice of an unauthorised agent, the devil disguised, imply that God was a petty tyrant who could do with some competition, which this came close to being, it was an anti-evidential assertion relying on a prodigious lack of backing, an effrontery which could be swallowed perhaps by some roué past all bounds; but for the new Adam, the new man, to consider such rebellious rhetoric was almost inconceivable.

Would the author of life and mind and thought be ready to dupe man, the result of His labours in order to achieve something from the outpouring of His power, ingenuity and grace ? Would He seek kicks out of subduing what He created, deceiving that to which a mind had been given, when the eternal basis of all things at whose word all came to be and was directed, would thus merely put Himself on a par with His creation, as if an author were to fight a tyrant given life in his book, by some extreme confusion! The figure made, in this case man, has only what is given, and all absolutely depends on His continued upholding of the same (cf. Hebrews 1:3). What lampooning from the devil is here! and they were concealed in his sly imputations, which as normal, participated in his own corruption, a spiritual Ebola with which he sought to infect the new pair.

It is instructive as a norm, for being without truth, the ever so popular devil, author of deceit, exponent of the lie, deceives nations with his distortions, and students with their naturalistic, monistic and irrational teachers (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7), who frequently tend to make all from nought, and have all bought from a store which is not there, so that it might yield ordered and integrated resources, obey laws, find them for re-formulation by man, while he yet wilfully lives by powers without control as a concern, as if in order to see what kind of a mess anti-religious bigotry could make of student, nation and world! It all came from the God who is not there ? quite an achievement for the orderly association of energy degrading matter which sits doing what it is good at, never making mind and never giving information, just running down, evacuating its availability, specificity and standing.

The degradation of energy, its dissipation, its increasing subjection to entropy, its gradual dismissal of levels from which to fall as it falls into lower levels, in constant attrition of state, has only one direction. Empirically there is no other, and that is how the Second Law of Thermodynamics stays as a law, while thought so often strays from this law, imagining what is never found, and insisting on what is never seen, and what is the very opposite as if this were apposite, namely, a natural, self-elevating specificity increase, falling thus into the jaws of irrationality which is itself a sort of mental entropy, as what is caused (causes) by an adequate source, is attributed to an adventitious intruder from non-space. If however logic itself is summarily dismissed, so is the validity of any argument in favour of such figments of excited imagination, unempirical, incapable now systemically in such cases, even of being put.

It is then like a football match in which the other team sends on drawings of a match play they would have in mind, if they played; but they failed (empirically) to turn up.

Such provocations to the reality of the deity (as in Romans 1:17ff.), by nature myths taught like dreams held while waking, either invent principles of conduct quite opposite to those issued for the imaginary universe of their vile dreams, as illustrated in Jude 10-11, and mocked in Jeremiah 2:27, or so seriously at war with the delusive, governing dreams, that immorality is induced in the whirl-pool of confusion. It is produced and propagated, and people wonder why there is a moral entropy, as time passes.

It is just that the moral equivalent of physical energy, namely mental and spiritual energy - which enables spiritual work to be done, is no more available with impunity to distortion and digression than is the physical. In physics, such naturalistic dreams simply abort reason, relevance, rationality and understanding, ignoring the empirical and inventing worlds; in morals and mind however, such waywardness inserted like a poison into the field of rationality, requires confrontation as a rebellion not only from the Minder but the Maker, without whom these things are mere unserviced additives, ready for slow downfall.

It comes. Behold, now it quickens, we are back with head-hunters, exposed to the methods of impudent destruction, menaced and murdered, loads of ideological tourists rushing to fight with moral-free mouthings like gods without domain, seeking to induce terror and so error. The multitude of spiritual errors that mar the Middle East are having their Open Day! but the world outside, it is far from immune to such strifes.

Thus results of delusion accrue, while sporadic kindness is politically to be inserted into an imaginary world allegedly created by heavy-handed heartlessness; and thus they try to counter the delusive dynamics of naturalism, so that they can overcome by talk, the woes they create but do not find, in their false teachings of origins. Nor in dream, is this so hard, since the magics of evolutionary mindless creations never have been seen to work in one single instance on an upward path, as if in deference to the natural law, the second, the degradation law noted, which is that actually observed, grounded in logic and fulfilled continuously.

Did energy make mass ? but where is the equal observable anti-matter physically required for such a case! As normal in naturalism, the criterion is simply empirically not there, missing. An energy at the physical level which degrades into unworkability, such as is exhibited in the physical universe, moreover is not at all the need. This declines; where is the input of the capital, the original, what is ABLE to decline ? where is the basis for the CREATION of the energy so far from declining, actually upgrades, which is needed for naturalism to avoid nullification of its wares.

At this, however, it baulks, being enslaved by its own limits to one of the many components of creation, as if a car were of necessity to be made from a steering wheel or a tyre. Such limiting concepts do not work, and simply show a profound lack of understanding of cause and effect, input and output, imagination and outcome.

The NON-CREATION of such energy is thus an impasse for obfuscatory naturalism. It has no place for such creation, but such is nevertheless what is found. It is here. It is not found to inhere in what is made. What is made does not of itself, make itself. The origin of what is made is not its decline.

Nevertheless, since it is there, it must be accounted for, or not only science but logic is the cost. And what accounts for it must have consistent outcomes on all sides, with testable consequences, at which the Bible excels (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, Who Answers Riddles and where He is, Darkness Departs), which simply tells us that the Creator created as it were, the vital capital, so that it then lives on, while slowly deteriorating, like normal design elements in a creative configuration (Isaiah 44:24 - 45:19). Neither the First nor the Second Law of Thermodynamics dies because of wilful refusals to think and try and test. We have the non-repeating input attestation and the deteriorating outcome exhibition, and the latter has no logical relationship to the former, except attrition following exhibition. It is like an estate; it exists, but it declines without upkeep, and the more when the conditions are wilfully ignored. Such is both the biblical and the empirical attestation in intimate harmony.

The necessity for the creation of such advanced energy for use in this system of ours, not only in mere basic material areas, but in all areas of observable, operating dynamics - spiritual, moral, mental, aesthetic and so on - that is, the observable capacity to work in these fields, requires the operation of that eternal power with such creative capacities, with our universe as a creative expression of them. Short-circuit the existence of such a Being at ANY point in time and there being nowhere left for its arrival, there is nothing to come. Indeed, what is not there does not create and has nothing for its results. But our universe is not nothing. Eternal self-sufficiency and sufficiency for the outcomes energically is thus simply a datum which the evidence requires, and logic refuses to suppress.

That is, the Creator, Eternal, Self-Sufficient, capable of dower of dynamics, indeed of existence to created mind and spirit, as well as of created substructure in matter, a useful tool of the trade, is not an option; it is a logical necessity. Thus come matter, mind and spirit, consistent brilliance and staggering communication and information productions; and then stop... God acted and then finished that creative action in view, our universe.

No more is the overall outpouring of information found which is extant, the work of which we perceive continually. That outpouring of dynamic to create is not there. The matter is not cyclic, but unique. The evidence is not equivocal but simple. It does not happen now, but did happen. Its results are there as in DNA, as also in endless laws, mathematical precisions, all set up, instituted, constituted.

It is as the Bible stated, millenia ago, in Genesis: creative expression in orderly and sovereign manner, this occurred as a series of episodes in one creative explosion; and then as is a norm in creativity, there came its completion. That is the age-old testimony abundantly confirmed of the Bible, that wilfully disregarded handbook of the living God, who acts and makes living things from His eternity, and damps the ardour of devilish dynamic and wanton anti-wisdom. Desecration also has its results as the world, generation by generation, finds out.

Moreover, He is moral of necessity in this, that He does not create in order to blight what is good by His own intensive constructive care, nor does He foozle His works, for the simplest in cells is a prodigy, and a litter of errors is not found on the littoral of time, but sheer masterpieces roll off His assembly with the ease of adequacy and the triumphs of utter originality.

To His creation He does not wilfully set an unhelpful horror of mutual massacre, for nothing is needed in Him in spirit or power or capacity or relish; for any such Being is merely an imagination, based on something that does not satisfy, held back by limits He has not set, a mere creature. It is not this which is required, but the Eternal Self-Sufficiency so that temporal efficiency might be caused to be. The necessary God, whose power and nature - as Romans 1:17ff. declares - is obvious, can create; He can curse; He can dynamise; He can render destitute FOR A REASON. Attempts by mankind to escape his own responsibility appear contemptible (Ezekiel 28:9, Romans 1:17ff., cf. Jeremiah 2:26-27,35, 16:11-13).

When we pursue our theme as in SMR, we find the Bible is rationally required as divine instruction, and that divinely inspired declaration TELLS US MOREOVER, of this very thing, the divine curse on creation which while it does not obliterate it, does cause it to groan because of man's exaltation only to fall (Romans 5:1ff., 8:17ff.), and thus history in one element has become a teaching organ, a measure of folly, its place an object of ruin tempered for the time, until the Lord fulfils His entire redemptive program, and a new heavens and earth complete the current complete performance of redemption for man. But this world, it does not heed. Things therefore become as in a negative cyclotron, one fault inducing a whirling trouble, where further failure induces its aggravation.

The divine patience is vast, since the love is not past; but there is an end (Matthew 24:35) to folly and failure, rebellion and rearguard actions of sin, as Christ made clear, and indeed Isaiah in 51:6 for example. While Christ's words did not and do not pass away, the parking area for man will do so. Even that is divinely merciful since a new one, a new heavens and a new earth is to come from the God of glory and power (cf. Revelation 20:11, 21:1), before Whom a new universe is as a new book to an author. But the incessant chatter both of false dreams and machine guns and worse, it continues, as if the patient actually wanted influenza to turn into pneumonia, and the worse state to become the worst. There is scope for more yet (as in Revelation 6ff.), as this world of diplomatic horror moves on to yet more fatuous features of scowling prejudice and false glory.

Historically, you see just such a process in intimate detail in the history of Israel as for example in II Kings and II Chronicles (cf. 36:15-16), where the coming climax of devastation is noted, before the restoration to come so much later! (Ezekiel 36-37).

Thus, when God is heeded, there is no limit to the power provided; when He is not, there seems such an abysmal series of squalid falls for the nation, first in practice, and then in weakness of vulnerability, that it reminds of the USA and the UK in the last 80 years or so in particular, where massive power has led on to degradation of the same, dissemination of strength by betrayal and reduction in patriotism and resilience, as life is wrested from wisdom, and the car of State is driven by a sightless driver towards the precipitous cliffs of alien culture.

So much is this so, that some in this country of Australia, wonder how it is even possible for such extreme corruption and government errors to accrue as came in the last few years. Prosperity is turned to ruinous debt; some of the young have no feeling apparently for their country and its form of liberty; church attendance falls radically as irrationality comes as the focus of much of what at this level is still called science, in this area preposterously; and opposite principles are entertained by many, contrary to evidence and reason alike (antilogy), as if matter in itself both

	1) remorselessly decreased energy availability for work, being degraded, and remarkably ALSO
	2) led on upwards.

The latter is not seen, since God as He said, who is not to be confused with His products, ceased His creation in prodigious, vast scale events shortly, in preparation for the long length of looming history, at first a booming blessing. Matter does not do it, refuses to attest it; and God has ceased to do such works for His part, so that only contradiction remains to the outdated misconceptions which try to ram back into nature, what God did in its institution. What then of these two principles, the observed and what is contrary to it ?

Thus while the former, the decrease, is attested to the point a LAW enshrines the point (one exception to which would disenfranchise it from the title of law), the Second of Thermodynamics, and logic being a discipline invoked, the latter, the increase is invented by the mind, as if the eyes were blind. It is not seen. It is not found to happen. Christ indicated the reason for the failure to follow facts such as His own dealings in terms of this defect in vision: and what was that ? They had CLOSED their own eyes, a wilfulness that can grow like an inflammation and spread like a bushfire, and destroy viability as well. Voluntary blindness is not simply an affliction, but an addiction in nature.

This contrary and upward principle requires intelligence for creative occupation; and this applies now as it always has applied. Logic is not an otiose invention but an apt cut off. What fails had to have been available to fall; and what made it available could not be what provokes the fall, as if poverty were the cause of wealth, or starvation of strength. Creation has initiated what does not grow in information and its codification; life as it wears (and wars) on has reduced its potency and potential; and prospects of things arising like a house rebuilding are not only feverish in incompetent scientific method (cf. Scientific Method ...), but a simple refusal to have an adequate source for the commencement, its continuation and its genesis, when its existence in energy terms, in specificity terms, is DOWN, and not up.

Does going down 'lead' in some way to coming up ? does degradation in some way equate to creation, or does entropy substitute as a means and method of creation! Does debit make credit and does inadequacy match permanent sufficiency!

Thus abuse of reason to the point of both antithesis compared to observable facts, and antilogy in the entertainment of precisely contrary principles, when only one can logically stand relative to the systems in view, out of two opposites, is an adventure of anti-faith, as wilfully ignorant of the rules in their application, at the physical and often the moral level; and even where the latter is not directly so, it is always possible that SOME of the ten thousands of mentally butchered students, who must listen to this mental incoherence and sloppy substitution of claims for sight, will follow the implications of this divorce from reason, and leaving the God of creation, invent their own moral rules as misrule, since such accounts are formally so touted, and dement their own lives as forms of death (cf. Ezekiel 33:11, Jeremiah 2:13, 18, 13:27).

But why, why ? ask some, do we so degrade in ethics, morals and good behaviour, in sensitivity and in mutual regard, why is such grossness growing like a storm ?

The love of God allays the end (II Peter 3:9) in its devastation, and the liberty of man allows hope till the end comes, where judgment sits and destiny is defined for all. Liberty however is not enough though it is indeed wonderful. Freely choose what through the grace of God is enabled for you, but if you do not, liberty no more heals than does a life saver who was strictly admonished that his services would only increase the danger of death, leaves alone the foundering bather.