THE DIVISION OF GRACE AND DISGRACE

FINALE ON GRACE

THE PLACE OF GRACE

See also The Word and the Wisdom of God and the Ways of Men Ch. 1.

Thus it is all of grace.  This is not some doctrinal conformism of an idle tongue, but a manifest fact. God did not NEED to create us, being self-sufficient, gifted by none with anything and having no limits by anything, the eternal sufficiency, efficient and independent source of the entire creation which, without such eternity as basis, could not become temporal or temporary. A deficient God is mere imagination, setting such a god in a system about and before, or controlling him, so explaining nothing and inventing a nothing.

It was grace therefore that we so much as exist.

It was undeserved kindness, to be graced with being.  When I consider, as David does in Psalm 139,

	the wonderful way in which we are made, with organic structure and sub-structure, programmatic stricture and information about the use of information, banks now found in what had been with rueful folly, called 'junk DNA',
	the systems for systems and
	the intricacies of mode mathematically and in engineering terms with which our totality is talked into being and commanded as all cogitatively invasible commands must be, by enterprise;

and then compare this

	with the way the word of God in Genesis 1-3 TELLS us it was done, through His word,
	and consider the aptitude and accuracy of that self-same uniquely verified and validated word of God*1:

I ask a question in all gravity.

Did we did deserve such grounds of our existence, such exquisitely proportioned programmatics, such a form of creation that it continues without writing any more structures into being, for thousands of years, in programmatic continunace and with emplacement of existing programs in new entities, these being part of the controls, as if buildings begat buildings, and then these even in much repaired themselves ?

Did we deserve that things should be so clear, that our totality of orders and programs about programs and continuation provisions for babies to be newly made continually without intellectual demands on our part, our genome, should be deteriorating at a rate which is beginning to threaten our race^*2, and helping to awaken our minds. This too is grace, just in case we should forget that we like other things, are made, and just as in general the Second Law of Thermodynamics^*3 involves decreases and not increases in available energy and stature, or more precisely increases in entropy, and designs tend to suffer with time in an environment such as ours, so does our very mode of existence command, generation by generation. 

So far from DNA writing new programs, or instituting new parameters, or configuring new types of information, so that we can trace its positive and constructive innovation coming from nowhere in particular, it is stuck. Minor adaptations abound, as in many a design, enabling modes of adaptation to environment, and this programmatic control is a feature of our design. Yet information configuring itself in new modes or with new language or with new types of design, we find not; and as Gould pointed out, the basic designs from what he terms the early Cambrian Age till now, feature vast loss, not input.

All this information, ready-made, to-hand, to make hands, to make brains, in themselves masterpieces of trillions of connections and billions of cells, each outside blood nucleated with its own DNA, with many provisions for duplication and arrangement of duplications for continuation of life: it is a work of grace. It is in youth and young manhood, womanhood, a marvel how much is automated: this a fact realised when the eighties remind one again, this time with age, of how much was done for one, when young, such as the provision of a beautifully tough and well-oiled skin, and resilience almost unimaginable in the face of adversity.

The gift of mind is a work of grace. Imagine being able to generate one's own thoughts, to be critical about them, to assess them with laws of logic, to discover (as one might discover gold in a river bed) such laws, to refine formulations of them to match the nature of the contrivances of the logically wrought and investigable universe which matches just precisely these minds so that questions are resolved, and from the departure point of Creator, answers teem to reasonable questions (cf. Deity and Design ...). It is a wonder which makes Niagara Falls, both their US marvels and their grand Canadian counterparts, pall by comparison.

One can tussle with difficulties, mathematical, episodic, material, mental, spiritual, and enjoy the confrontation, and find the solution, and marvel as its brilliance of conceptual formulation, discoverable and re-formulable in our own created minds which so assess creation. So great is the liberty granted to our formulated functionalities, that we can, though ill-advised, work to mar mentality as in autocratic rule, banish liberty as in authoritarian thrusts, disturb the marvels of our construction, as with drugs or alcohol, and invent ingenious nonsense and call it fact, as often attempted in organic evolution (cf. The Lord of Longsuffering ... Ch. 2, *2), and even deny our own Maker. Rebellion is as permitted as irrationality; though neither helps, each is moving into the very stratosphere of liberty. We even have liberty to rationalise and try to excuse ourselves from downright dishonesty, trying to cover up against our Creator and so take over his equipment for our own use, as if grace had died and invention were growing on trees.

Consider the wonder of the word of God further, and how it banishes blights in thought.

It is all of grace that we exist. If it were otherwise, and God had made us for His pleasure and impious self-satisfaction at our expense, then He would have to have a defective psychic condition, NEEDING fulfilment outside Himself, so being in a contrived condition, involving limits and a given nature which commands and limits, and about which He would devolve. That however is merely to make Him a creature, which is to bring in a counter-model without saying so, and is mere logical slippage.

Moreover, the grace is accountable in almost never-ending components as we were seeing above.

It is of grace that we may gain saving faith in our God and Creator. Being a race manifestly acid-eaten with sin, hatred, odium, odoriferousness, vileness, violence ... you interrupt, but I am not like that ? What then, are you to be congratulated that you both have sought and found God and know Him, and seeing the evil, have overcome it by His power, and understand the cause of your life, and exercise its powers responsibly not as if God were present but as TO HIM who distinctively IS present ? And even if you had done all these things, would it be cause for congratulation, when your capacity to escape from mere self-centredness as your own subjective life unfolds,  is of Him also, as is the payment for it ? You are not to be congratulated then. Indeed, do you have an abundant ignorance of God, and find it within yourself to do what you must, and live by your own counsel, knowing neither the height nor depth of time or cause of your being, nor your responsibilities except by self-made morals, as if you were happily assured that being your own auditor, you can only achieve distinction! There are more manners of revolt than are found in the unholy horrors of endless revolutions which burn what they sought to liberate, over and again, as the selfishness of many, the ambitiousness and the self-service of many, abound and bound over the ages!

There is a subtler form of rebellion in the plain ennui about God in the very midst of living the life which by grace He made, coupled with the ease of making nonsense idols.  Do you live indeed by a life-force, when wisdom not force is the point in the constructions of DNA! Do you nod vigorously to respect for all 'faiths' in order to have peace, and so make of yourself an annulment program, unwilling to decide which side of what fence is better ? and if so, is this not confusion as substitute for clarity, and your own godlike power to distance from your source, as if protracted vagueness in the face of overwhelming evidence, were in some way morally sustainable, ethically conceivable or not an insult to the God who contrived your creation and by His efforts, forged your bring! ONLY because of Him could you rationally even conceive of truth, for otherwise you merely find what works. If HE were not there past all relativity to unknown sources such as what would then be the mind of man, the whirl-pool of events would KNOW no truth, so that it could not be true that it was there, and only confusion results. Truth would then be meaningless, mere empirical happening coded.

For if He were not there, nor would truth be, nor would there be possible grounds for any view of the status of man, what he really is and what he really is for, whether conceived as nothing or something being merely various options. All religions in that case which state the truth as this or that would be unworthy of any respect, so that it would be mere pretence to respect their acclamations. Moreover even the view setting them in this light could not be true, since truth would not exist, so that confusion only comes into view. If so, in such a case what is it better than pride which blinds itself, ignorance which shuts out facts, and complacency a drug. The very elevation of the morals of man without God is like congratulating children for not cutting off each other's heads, and merely fighting or lying or contriving ideas about self-advancement, as if each were the centre or even meaning of the universe, which manifestly is not so.

In such a state, for the human race to have access to faith in God, a faith which is not a piece of piecemeal poetry, or flowing hope, but based on objective evidence, irresistible reality, the word of God Himself, the provisions in history of salvation by that word: it is a grace indeed and a gift, a gift of grace (as in Romans 5:15). If God had desired, nothing beside Him could have been instead of the created universe; and the grace to have life in an intensely ordered universe would not exist. Further, even when the grace of existence is given, God might on man's failure in holiness, being made free at His hand, have crushed the race, as one does a piece of blotted paper. He could have removed the talents, or abased the pride and left no scope at all for the rising to heights of understanding or movement to depths of principles, so that one might understand. Confusion could have become automatic, as when one might smash a beautiful sports car, having no mechanic or source for parts. In such case, though truth would BE, divine blight could prevent the grace of its being made KNOWABLE or even ACCESSIBLE. Why unfold His graces to falsely dynamised despots of life, who take it into their own hands and actively compete with Him,  the Maker, for its determinations and direction!

God is not like that, to extract pleasure of a distorted kind, for His regaling of satisfaction, to overcome internal lacks and appetites not met; but acts by grace. When this grace is defied, defiled, disjoined, then the folly of man in the first place is merely amplified. Man then becomes doubly responsible, first for severance from grace into the godless folly of being virtual god; and then for the gross rebellion of refusing free restoration.

Despite all this, God did not so act. It is man, not God, who is back of the sin-syndrome, whether in not knowing God or not receiving His salvation. When what God statedly wants to give is statedly rejected or apathetically disregarded, then this highlights both the good and the evil: as to the good, it shows the patience of God in protracted history (II Peter 3:9), till the last of mankind is found, as many as will come. It shows no less the depth of man, when before the God who KNOWS HOW to win the souls of the defective and even the derelict, as it were going to the hedges and highways and byways looking for them, to drag out their saddened bodies and bring them to desired light, he rejects the deliverance. What God wants, no technical defect can abort; and when it is man, it is as He says, man and not God who gets in the way. Penetrating the humanly impenetrable so far from being a problem to God, is a specialty as Daniel so much acclaimed and SHOWED!

Thus the Lord did not abscond from His creation, or allow it to be so swathed in pathology that it was not possible to find Him; but in His own supernatural power, could find any, as also He foreknew them, and in the midst of thick darkness, expose the truth. He did not abscond. Instead as the Biblical Model depicts as the testable and validated word of God^*1, He  surrounded the race with grace, though it defiled even this, and gave it access to repentance, though many defiled even that, teetering and flitting about without finality (as in Hebrews 6), and provided also access to faith, that one might be so linked to God that the walk with Him can resemble in much, walk with a father when a small child, so close is the companionship and reliable the provision.

Nor did the Lord  merely fling such graciously forged opportunities into the human ring, for souls to scrap about, and become more defiled than ever. To be sure, souls DID scrap about these things, and one religious body even took to using physical violence amid defilements of its own, to force others to share those (cf.  Ancient Words, Modern Deeds 14 ).

Nor was this unique in the religious or the secular field, this or that other body acting imperially regarding God, whether through violation of biblical prohibitions (John 18:36), scrapping instead of seeking,  or invention of gods without the pedigree of time in revelation, mere modern make-shifts. Such late inventions, belatedly trying to cover the case long since creation, gods newly come up as Moses is moved to put it in Deuteronomy 32:17, are mere coat-hangers for idolatry. They are manufactured, machinations of the mind of man, without heritage listing from their eternal past, since they don't have one.

While such movements of miasmic god-multiplication, together with  violence, abusing the free spirit of man, now made blind with sin and dead in trespass, with the drug of sinfulness, have brought untold suffering and pain, they could not control God or void His approach to man Above the wreck, access to living faith in the living God continued, and in the Reformation much of this violence was overthrown, and the Bible gained renewed scope for study and understanding in more liberty. Man was not then so systematically if vainly squashed or pogrommed, as had been the case in such baleful measure. He never could be entirely pulverised indeed into entire submission to evil programs and pogroms, past or present, civil or religious.

The restoration of a more pervasive anti-God force,  however, as the end of the Age draws near like a steam-train, belching its steam and leaving its passing cinders on the landscape as it goes, is something coming like flood. With some it is by plain decree - death if you leave this or that, honour death if something else, with others, obliteration by human bombs if you annoy in some other way, governmental lack of permission for this or that missionary body, or for others again, execution on false charges of missionaries, destruction of churches, invasion of youthful minds with anti-God irrationalities given star status like some rugby player intoxicating the crowd.

Thus by democratic decline into disabilities for God-believers who follow His word, shameless discriminations become rampant. In Australia,  as contrary even to the UN Declaration on religious discrimination in a marked degree^*4, there come educational abuses to present philosophies of fables^*4A, and assault scientifically and logically confirmed reality^*1. It is the fashion, the custom so to do, and it comes with increasing use of other unbased prejudice now in history as well.

Whether, then, by imperious laws from potentates, or the subtle ploys of cultural captivities by politically based academic infiltration^*4A, the one result is moving shamelessly in seductive sham and invasive violence alike, towards that one 'new world order' where orders will indeed be comprehensive (as in Revelation 13, 17).

For all that, the light of divine grace, grace only, by faith only, in the work of God only for which He only paid in the only begotten Son sent by kindness toward man and not just some of the race (cf. I John 2, Titus 2), is not obliterated. It is now not the earlier stages of the fourth and Roman Empire^*5 , specialising in splitting heads rather than teaching them,  and the mauling of  lions. That is past; but now there have come as if orchestrated for many, by an aspiring conductor,  the preparations for the final version of that empire foretold by Daniel. In this later phase, we find and see the building up of  foundations laid, topped by the super-structure, adjusted for rule both imperial and imperious.

Nations once veritable bastions of Christianity, now decline, both in singularity and morals, in testimony and in willingness for it, as in power. In former times, there was in England a formal liaison with Christianity and indeed Protestant insistence on biblical truth, and its Empire was vast, aiding dispersion of that truth. In the USA,  despite vast abuses on the part of many, there was strong Christian testimony in social dynamics, so that in large measure the nation tended to be an actual liaison with Christianity,  in terms of what was done with the liberty to trust in God.

A national prayer day now as proclaimed by the British War Office for Dunkirk's time or as ordered in that of Nelson, seems far off now; as does the brimming tide of US testimony in vast branches of social endeavour and political enterprise, legal structuring and function, and inherent disrespect for Christianity. Indeed, biblical Christianity is in legal matters in schools and various issues, if not being targetted as a stated aim, so treated as an apparent result.

Both the testimony of their faith and the principles it holds are being violated, and other forces are worshipped, as in the USA where Obama joins a form of Christianity with what is far off from it. This is found not only in the exaltation of Islam, that is, of what utterly condemns biblical Christianity, stripping Christ's deity and sacrifice from it, but in no less an exaltation of another common routine. It is that of that form of force and violence in an imaginary creation with disdainful disregard of counter-teaching. This was made by Obama, through assertions of an arrogant kind about organic evolution and its fanciful mysteries^*4A. Again, the CIA appears from many recent revelations, by no means to have had the constraints of the ethics of Christ, and survival seems increasingly a first necessity for the nation, as man conceives it, and not a result of reliance on the God of the Bible, on the Christ of the Gospels.

That this was never nationally formally so there, in law, it is true; but now it is far from functionally so as well, as the government and the law system skews things in contrary mode, more and more loudly divorced indeed, from the things of Jesus Christ! Will they call then on Him whom so many in so many high places disdain or dismiss or toss aside while the REAL business is done ?

You cannot serve two gods, if the actual God is to be in view. His zeal is not available for what is biblically called spiritual adultery. You either worship Him in His reality utterly, or you have a cocktail religion, which intoxicates. The entire book of Hosea makes this point, and this concept is almost endless in its application whether in Psalm 105, 106, or Ezekiel 20, Isaiah 1, Deuteronomy 32 or II Kings 17:33-35 with II Chronicles 36, or Ezekiel 23:14-32. Yes, we read in the last named of Judah, "Yet she multiplied her harlotries, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the harlot in the land of Egypt, and she lusted after their paramours... Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom ... Behold I will arouse your lovers against you..."

Yet it is not hard, when near the ocean, to discern its presence, for all the barbed wire enclosures or the trees on nearby cliffs. You do not require genius to realise its presence; nor do you need colossal wit to see the power of God (cf. Romans 1:17ff.), and find His word, that Bible of such endless fame and vast distribution for centuries, thrust out for millenia in this and that phase.

A man, a woman, and even a child, in the worst or better times, could still find God and the race was not buried as in a tsunami or earthquake, in the destabilised rubble, which in spiritual matters, is of man's own making, either directly or by ...invitation! The grace was still free and freely available; the faith was still free, and freely available. Man polluted with alien and rank spiritual passions; but the word of God did not shrink. Man sought to make it a crime to pursue it, as still obtains in some countries today; but the word was not displaced. As public bodies widely disavow the Bible, so private paths are found for its dissemination. It speaks for itself. Yet what of the masses whom it does not yet reach ? Many hear of it, but to what extent do they understand ? While much of this is specious confusion, there is need of certainty regarding results, for eternity is not 20 years.

What did God do to find His own and bring home those who as made in His image, despite manifest distortions over time, desired Him, and this not merely as imagined, but as He is ? It was all of grace ...

But how could it be gained, and in what way could the race escape the programmatics of man abusing the created programmatics which God made for us, and the invasion of mind and heart by mere physical violence, vileness or law ?

THE FIRST IN FOREKNOWLEDGE

FROM GOD WITH LOVE

God in His word tells us that before time awakened or the earth was groomed into being, He knew, in fact foreknew His own people, His elect. There is no room for chance. He KNOWS as in II Timothy 1, whom He has predestined and in grace receives and keeps them. HOW does He know ? what are we told on this ?

He knows the beginning and the end, as if some great architect could in mind walk around the towers to be built, but this livingly, with persons (Isaiah 46, Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:30ff.). His Spirit can probe and indeed mould events, so that the wicked like the Egyptian Pharaoh, treated patiently, yet may be met with a controlled plan making use of his obstinacy to being helpful as a lesson for others. As to God, before the mind thinks (Hebrews 4:12-13, Ezekiel 38), He knows it. Before the spirit of a man decides, he knows it. Nor is this all for the Maker of logic and imagination, liberty and the provider of love. Having ascertained who are His own, He shows us His own nature with which He acts, and principles in terms of which He moves. We are led into the mystery of choice, His!

It is not a sovereign selfishness by which He chooses, as if a potentate chose carefully the choicest looking servants for his pleasure, to indulge whatever his desires might be. We have touched on this already. IF God lacked anything to mind or internally, then it would not be God but another being in view, one involved in a schema of another basis, and so a mere component, like man, of the universe, and not its Creator at all.

He tells us that of love faith and hope, love is the greatest (I Cor. 13). He states that it is not that we loved Him, which is critical, but that He loved us (I John 4).

He declares that He for His mind and desire, would have liked to save the world and not condemn it; that indeed, He took ultimate steps to this end, so that although He had given man power to hold his own preferences, freely this love could deliver him (John 3:15-19).

He even endorsed a situation such that WHEN He SO loved that He surrendered up His only begotten Son (as in Luke 1:35), sent from eternity in heaven to enterprise on earth, anyone who believed should freely receive eternal life, free from the horror of severance from God and all His gifts of grace.

This overwhelming love is not however used so as to deny liberty, to deny man, to deny what He had made. The solution, the resolution of sin indeed is not to debar man from being man, but rather to enable its restoration, manhood, the image-of-God reality. Thus although God SO loved that He went to the ultimate in gift, one involving personal pain and anguish in the format of a man for the incarnate Word of God, He did not so use force that He undid the love and made it mere manoeuvre, manipulation or truncation. THAT grace is truly overwhelming, not by mere force, but by its quality.

If you do not like God, want God, seek God, hunger and thirst for God, then liberty is yours to ignore His gift, even to mock His action, to belittle His grace and to hate His perseverance. You may choose to resent Him as interfering with your own personal preference for being autonomous, by even mentioning your erratic course, or ignorant walk. Though in fact, autonomy, meaningful self-will and all its powers and apparent grandeur,  this is impossible since without God, your systems and the ones in which you are placed, have no need to co-operate at all, even to give you being. Their placement and their co-operation and availability to you are all of grace. Even to will, however, without God, is a function of what you are; and if the light of truth is denied to you, because God is for you a neglected option, then in truth you CANNOT operate. You may do what you want, but not elect to be what you want so that you might do what has sound survey as basis, and not imperious desire, or paralysed wit, the will itself more and more machined by events, desires of this or that kind, a ramp installed, so that you follow its direction. There are problems in not being God, but wanted to act in that exalted domain, the captain of your soul; and they never end, chronologically or logically.

Still, you have the liberty, however superficial,  to make your fling, seek to make a new universe, as Communism did in the USSR (cf. News 98 *2), though many of the inmates found it by the millions, a good imitation of hell. Faith in it proved as illusory as faith in the bottle, when one might be disappointed, or in a masked man with a gun, when in a dark alley.

This opportunity for opportunism is not denied you. It is a grace to be without fetters to your spirit, and to be allowed to ramify in thought and mind, in life and in living it, and assess where you find yourself to be.

God being without limit, is still in His own way, able to find anyone, in whatever condition he may be. He does not need a mobile phone or any number, to build towers for communication. Knowledge is His, without limit, and our means to sift it out are provided by grace for our race: for Him, the future is like pages of a book, turned over without effort. It is for this reason that He is so readily able  to predict it, and He appeals to this evidence as a logical testimony (cf. Isaiah 41, 48). We have minds in order to use them.

The Maker of our minds has one of His own, so vast in power that the MAKING of MINDS is one of His own tasks! He has not only foreknown His own, and the end of all, but has made sure of the results of this knowledge by predestining His own, so that they cannot be missed in the flurry. Indeed, all things are so ordered (cf. Ephesians 1:11, Romans 11:36, Isaiah 14:27, Isaiah 46:10), that He can declare the end from the beginning. BECAUSE there are no specifications, indications, events beyond the scope of His wisdom and awareness, He knows what is to be; indeed, He moves upon it, as wind upon the waters, before it can ever come to be, pruning or purging, intruding or not doing so, using evil to exhibit its own folly, though detesting it, and showing goodness to exhibit His own love, and delighting in mercy. THEREFORE nothing unexpected can transpire, nor anyone achieve a rout or surprise.

Since then this our God is not operative in order to gratify selfishness, but has provided a work of grace and giving, to confer from Himself and not to gain for Himself, HOW WAS IT DONE ?

In what way, and by what principles did God select His elect, and how with this, did He preserve the power to prefer on the part of anyone, so that such preference is underwritten by God to the very point of violating His stated desire, as in John 3:15-17, to save the world and not to judge it, and to save everyone in heaven or earth, so that they are all reconciled to Himself (Colossians 1:19ff.) ? In the end, a given soul CAN decide not to know God. The shallowness of such non-knowledge is a separate point.
 

THE GRACE OF DIVINE ENTERPRISE

How is all this combined ?

It is by love, in this, that the payment for procuring and restoring lost souls is made by the deity Himself, to provide such a result.

It is by grace, secondly, in that there was no necessity binding Him to make such sacrifice as would attain such a gifted result.

It is by penetration by the light into the darkness, so that the real nature of each case is accurately known, and not merely passed over as too disgusting or laborious for concern! That is gracious.

It is so wrought that the desire to save all is operative where it counts, for God does not change (Psalm 102, Malachi 3:6, James 1:17). Therefore in foreknowing not only WHAT but WHO would be His, and HOW, the same principles were operative, for God was fully alert to the persons, the programs, the processes, the trials, the tests and the power was not lacking. The desire to confer salvation was so intense that He SO loved as in John 3:16ff., and SO sacrificed as in Hebrews 5-7. You can make a model, for explanation of perspective, such that God seeing in advance, before made, all as in an hypostatic awareness, as if in inter-operative interchange, and probes and knows the condition of heart, the movement of will, the type of preference each has, and knows it of each person before any person is fouled by sin, and before our time mode in our now created universe became operative.

You do not have to have precisely such a model. It merely shows the entire reasonableness of the ways of God.

What you DO have straight from the word of God is this: God desires to save all sinners, has not lost this desire, does not change, and cites man in contradistinction to Himself, as the cause of the result of all BEING saved, not occurring. If He made it happen, gone is the image of God in man. Thus He does not do this. If He left it to sinful man, then sin can so foul the atmosphere of thought as to make it irrelevant to seek God where He is, rather than make new gods to taste or have none for waste (I Corinthians 2:14). He can not even see the road as he is.

However, although MAN cannot as sinner find the things of God, lacking in foolishness or vanity, cannot be grounded in them, as I Corinthians here shows, yet who is God, that man's inability binds HIM! It is man who is servile to sin, not God. It is man who is bound to it, not God. It is man who is blind, not God. It is man whose eyes are tight closed as in Matthew 13:15, not God. He can make the dead live.

Indeed, He can (as exemplified in Hebrews 6) stir the heart and yet leave the rising corpse as it fastens back to sin in the very time of call.

He knows the end. He does not for that reason remove the means.

God knows the disposition of each soul, before and without sin, and this is the biblical fact. He even chooses His elect before they issue into being, as in Ephesians 1:4, and those who stumble are likewise foreknown (I Peter 2), right down to Judas Iscariot (John 6:70). One of them was IN FACT a devil, and his actions were fore-traced in the Psalms (as in 69, 109, 41).

Therefore with heart and the strongest possible emotion, He appeals to man (Proverbs 1, Ezekiel 33:11, Matthew 11:27ff.), and in the same passion reveals His vast grief when the appeal is lost in the characterless horror of rejection as in Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff., Isaiah 48:16ff., Jeremiah 48:36.  The nature of the relationship of man to destiny is not such that it is mere necessity; for foreknowledge has it governed so that the exercise of liberty is incorporated, the predestination an insurance policy, and not a violation of the code of liberty, without which, there would be no problem for man, confining regularity his nature. Man would be desired and got and the case would not even exist.

Some strain at gnats. HOW can God be omnipotent if He does not get what He wants ? However, who said He did not get what He wants ? He does not get what unrestrained and rampant love wants, but the purity of His love is such that He does not misname it, and pretend that it is love when it is mere desire at all costs. THAT, it is not His way: whatever the cost for love's fulfilment, He will and does pay. He does not however misname things as if involved in vapid politics, and fulfil desire in the name of love! That would both insult love and make meaningless the operation in its name.

He has principles on which all of our morals are built, as you see in the disposition of the First and the Second great commandments (Matthew 22:36ff.).  When will you be made clean ?  He once asked. When will it once be ? (Jeremiah 13:27). He does not take them by the scruff of the spiritual neck and clean them anyway. He ASKS, He requests, He remonstrates, He grieves, He seeks, He makes new ways of finding the doormat home (Jeremiah 17 provides a wonderful example); but He does not change the case. If men prefer darkness, despite God with all power and knowledge wishing something different for them, then as in Proverbs 1, that is what they will have. No pathology pronounces against Him, no technical difficulty delimits Him. He would not make a system which would defile His principles. He is God and not man.

Thus when God seeks for man, His Spirit indeed convicts of sin, righteousness and judgment as in John 16:13ff.. Man may resist as in Acts 7:51). He may indeed make a practice of it and "always resist," so forfeiting blessings whether general or particular (cf. II Chronicles 36). Thus a culture of man might make a habit of it as Stephen so clearly showed (Acts 7:51-52). They may even make it their business to slay the prophets of hope, the spiritually sent ambassadors of mercy, as again indicated in Christ's parable of Matthew 22:6, and in His words of Matthew 23:34-36. His patience in such processes is attested at length in II Kings 17 and II Chronicles 36, as in Psalm 78 and Ezekiel 20. He may elect to endure with much patience, being the God who is love as in I John 4, what is to be apt for destruction; but this is because He is real, and knowledge does not banish His heart, but the more enables it to be effectual.

As God probes man by His Spirit in terms of the revealed Gospel of grace, man may thus be stirred like the corpses at the time of Christ's resurrection, for a time (cf. Matthew 27:52-53). Vivified by the Lord, what by rebellious nature eschews Him, may be enabled to concentrate and focus on Him; but unless the word penetrates to the heart, this will be but a passing gift, and die like seed that has no root. God however, knowing His own, may effectually render the will operable, regenerating as He does so, so that the reality of the case becomes enacted in time, as before in eternity.

The will, defunct in its current condition to make a decision, is nevertheless enabled to exhibit the reality of its liberty, and with the power and penetration of God, and His enablement, brought to life, it shows what was foreknown as true to it. Thus God shows to man the reality of the part and place of his will and preference, together with the entirety of the divine grace which can penetrate to the depths, but does not manipulate, working only on knowledge before time, at the ultimate point, this being in terms of liberty to the ultimate point, brought to light as the Father's heart rejoices profoundly (Luke 15), and the Son's payment for liberty is justified to the uttermost.

Is there grace in our creation  ? assuredly. In our equipment of mind and body ? assuredly. In our received and perceived donation of spirit with which to imagine or revolt or dully conform or willingly embrace things and persons, is there grace ? Enormous grace is here. Is there any Sovereign SO gracious as SO to preserve our liberty out of pure love, and so to grieve at our loss, in pure pity ? None.

Is there grace in liberty ? to be sure. Is grace to be found in its enablement to be exercised, despite the forfeit of its present powers relative to returning to God ? Yes, and it is vast. Is there grace in predestination ? Yes, for it ensures no confusion, no power of any authority or rebel to snatch, and take what alas was merely unwary. Is there grace in foreknowledge ? It is vast like an endless reservoir, for imagine having such respect to the integrity of His creation, from His own indomitable and awesome power, as an endlessly Almighty Sovereign, that He will grieve rather than govern amiss!

It is ALL grace. NOTHING does man deserve, and in NOTHING is His wit or power whether of discernment or anything else, the differential which brings deliverance. It is all of God; but this in such a way that it is true to man, and not a mere impress, shanghaiing, imperial direction shrouded in mystery^*6. Does it elevate the elect ? What, when God made them as others, and gave them liberty as others, and gave them scope as others, and offered them grace in effect, as others, and in their pre-creation sinlessness, allowed their preference to  count! 

Are they better because their liberty is the same! And what is this preference ? Is it a gift of some kind, when without sin, the light is apparent, before creation ? Is it a special measure of understanding given to some, when the power to opt is part of the creation, and all have it as foreknown by God, before sin's lure! Does actual liberty in the image of God construction, as is the case for that creation called man, mean that it is not actual ? Is definition to be used from some other model in interpreting this one!

Is what is common to all better in some because it is exercisable! Is liberty then to be redefined to make some irrelevant model without biblical construction or divine constriction ? Why is this ? What is the value or mere romancing; but even if some other model were made, in what does it profit ?

THE WILL OF MAN

 Is the will of man, as made and created and brought up in environment, physical, cultural and psychological, to become a site of liberty and a ground for the arising of evil, if it is defunct throughout history ? What would that explain ? Is a man to be made in physical being and psychic nature so that the result happens, result of what a man is ? If that were so, it could not even be known, since a defective liberty, a determinate set of co-ordinates merely proceeds. Being able to be outside it all to know it as it is, is contrary to any such model. It is both impossible and non-actual. We have guilt because we can be shameful; and we feel it keenly precisely because within we are aware, past  all self-contradictory supposition, that it is so. We can weigh, elect principles, achieve desiderata, wilfully, knowing this to be evil; or not; and we know both (cf. Predestination and Freewill). Man can lose his liberty by severance from its source, and become merely wilful, resounding to his will which twangs like a guitar. But God can regain it for him.

In fact, it is the result of liberty^*7 that man is brought in or out, the liberty of man before God: hence explaining the existence of evil, and the reality of love in one step: for if man is allowed liberty, he need not follow truth or reason or morals or God at all, and can work with evil powers at will! Hence history. God can overturn and intervene to prevent the entire loss of it, while showing the folly of such loss; but He does not stop the process which educates and intimates and lectures man as he goes; so that he may freely respond. In the presence of God Almighty, there are no bars on what is impressed on man.

God being both there and what and who He is, with His principles, then even the danger of being so dangled by invidious dynamics that no freedom is left so that the matter falls into mere resultants, is overcome. God has foreknown and not only activates the dead, but penetrates to the heart, so that what is foreknown in its liberty, is shown in its reality. The only superior thing in man is liberty, which given to all, is not identifiable as special for any, in the pre-temporal choice of God.

The final grace is this: that God does it Himself. It is not left to our waning or warped sensibilities to make the ultimate decision, just as it is not removed from our spirits to show that same response in reality and not mere phantom appearance, even in their fore-knowing by God. There COULD NOT be anything more gracious or effectual in this; for if man were made final and supreme in his fallen state, then what he is becomes his director and so freedom is lost to the workings of mere history and forces beyond. Again, if God did not Himself act, then matters might be cluttered or clustered in various inward or by various outward dynamics, so that confusion or error could creep in; but with God there is no error.

Our wills are totally relevant before God, in this domain of preference for light or otherwise, as He states in John 3:19. There, having told of what is the case for Him, for His part, in SO loving that He SO gave that WHOSOEVER of the entirety which He WOULD like saved, He tells us of what is the case for man, that he MAY elect in preference to have it otherwise. He may say no.

He may come. It is not that he must do so; or may not. In this context, as in the sight and presence of God and His Gospel: it is open. The realities are preserved by the power of God, so that the responsibility for man is total. God BOTH knows the reality of the mind and will of man, and has foreknown it; and again, penetrates to the depths of the heart, and can make man know it. The perfection of His knowledge simply ensures the reality of the response. God is not in the business of losing souls by an oversight, but WITH a penetrating and positive oversight ensures two things: that not one is lost that love might gain, and not one is found who remains a foundling, a mere trickery without truth. It is a solemn thing to be present before God, and a necessary one not to rest till He is found, not in mere preference, which so readily finds darkness, but before the searching light of an active truth which is not simply abstraction, but one of the names of the Maker of man.

He only, as original, CAN have it. We as derived, by grace only,  MAY have it. It is glorious in grace that this is so, and that our rights to be wrong, though really mere liberty and scope, are protected with a precious integrity that does not sway as a tree by the wind, but moves in and through truth, with the ardour of love. There is nothing like love. It is never satisfied with mere form, or appearance, or excuse to quit (I Corinthians 13 outlines this aspect). It MUST have its total completion, and stops ONLY when what is NOT love has to enter for anything further. It does not die in order to live, or become something else in order to prevail; for that is mere defeat in any case.

Thus man may freely come! When God tells you what is the lack, what is the dynamic, what is the criterion, by which His stated desire is met with something else, then to ignore this is in effect, for this purpose, to make a new 'God'. That has nothing to do with the One who has spoken.

I HAVE NO PLEASURE in the death of the wicked! He declares, and so proceeds to appeal, to exhort, to speak in terms of His very life, as to His sincerity and heart-deep desire that they turn (Ezekiel 33:11). He said this because NOT turning is the stumbling block, and the scope for human intervention between His stated and passionate desire and the happy result. Hence He grieves or mourns later, when these or those are not found, but rather conduct their lives in some devilish spree, or ludicrous comedy which is yet tragic in the end.

His grand statement in Ezekiel 33:11 disdains the abuse of His heart, the knowledgeable superficial findings about the extent and passsion of His love. In NOT turning, they die, but turning, it is that they may live. In so turning to the mercy of the faithful and covenant-keeping God by faith, they are quit of impending judgment (33:15) and receive abundant mercy (Isaiah 55:7) in the form of PARDON, whether Jew or Gentile (Isaiah 42:6,49:6), and in the Messiah so sent to one as to all in the affairs of life and death, for "the mountains may depart {as in Psalm 46) and the hills be removed, but My kindness shall not depart from you, nor shall My covenant of peace be removed," as in Isaiah 54:10 and paralleled in Ephesians 1:11, II Timothy 1:8ff.,John10:9,27-28.

Faith is in fact, objectively in the Lord or it is not, and when it is, as He has revealed Himself in His prophetic word and in Christ in conformity to this, there is no limit to His mercy, just as when there is mere superficial playing about with Him, there is a shrivelling of the seed of the word of God in the heart not broken, the soul not repentant and the life not willing (Matthew 13:20-21).

It is not a question of the Lord's being sparing in mercy as if there were not quite enough, or its scope was set on a margin, as if its thrust towards all mankind really was not at all relevant to the profound depths of His being (Titus 2-3), any more than it is one of  making it a joint affair, as if man were co-Saviour. In biblical fact, the gift by grace enshrines every step and divinely stated principle on the way, and so is confirmed to the end. As it is preserved to the last, so it was founded from the first (II Tim. 1:8ff., Ephesians 1:4), because the divine passion for mercy and principle of NOT being the source of withholding in His primary thrust of compassion and mercy (John 3:15-17), leaves ONLY MAN as the obstruction (John 3:19), and hence divine lament as the grievous outcome for the lost (as in Luke 19:42ff.).

It is not that God does not mean what He says, but that man does not consider, in His often inane calculations, just what is said; but would erect barriers that cloud the heart-simplicity of divine utterance with philosophical ponderings which limit the Holy One and prescribe conditions as if man's thought could invade the very gates of heaven.

What is written, it does not alter, and what is stated, it is not moved (as in I Timothy 2, Ezekiel 33, Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 4:10). Many a doctrine may be marred by such trifling and insertions,  but EACH doctrine stands in its own right; and in fact, it is ONLY when this is done that the glorious fulness of divine wisdom is seen, and the confirmation and defence of the Gospel as in Philippians 1:7, shows its consummate entirety! for what solution is as this solution, and what God is as this one, about whom is light incalculable and who resolves riddles (Daniel 5:12, Proverbs 14:6), who satisfies from above oneself (Proverbs 14:14, Colossians 3:1-4, Hebrews 2:1-3, Psalm 21, Proverbs 1).

Thus it is not the generation of the heart of man which saves, nor the will of the flesh (John 1:12), as if it were co-saviour, but the will of God who as in Acts 9, above all, invests some as foreknown and both found and founded, and like s surging torrent, surges to their rescue. Others inherit the condemnation that despite the scope of His divine desire for all, they prefer darkness, with no excuse from human pathology in time, or as if divine penetration were limited by circumstances (Hosea 7:1, Jeremiah 51:9, 48:30-31,36. Luke 19:42). It is not in the all-knowing, all-calling, all-seeking God that the limit is found, but in the differential realities of mankind, all deserving both death and hell, but none exempt from divine outthrust even before time, or inworking of what is sublime. These are HIS principles and He WILL apply them faithfully from first before creation, till last before final judgment, and there is nothing exempt from His all-knowing coverage, but in comprehension, perception and application.

Turning the heart which likewise turns in His grace, God acts in one simultaneity of divinely wrought wonder which both interprets the reality as seen prior to time, and ensures its application. Grace permeates all, issues the call, penetrates the heart, knows its reception, shrinks from nothing, never aborts love nor confuses liberty with simple pre-emption, and reaches its sublime fulfilment without diminution of its universality of thrust as in Colossians 1:19ff., its passion of desire as in Ezekiel 33:11. Nor does it fail in its poignancy of restraint where man has not so been found before time, where it is inapplicable because of a divinely discerned preference which God Himself will NOT violate (John 3:19, Proverbs 1). HE has done all. It is man who alone is the obstruction. Evil is the by-product of the remorseless work of human liberty, differentially found by God and sovereignly by His own will, applied just as in Proverbs 1, the offer is vast, total, the response is recorded and the result is announced. LOOK at what I will do for you, He says, and even make My words known to you. No! Then I will laugh!

Such is the record. Grace is all but outrageous in its amplitude, willing that its Author be spat on, derided, mocked, but it perseveres to the end, not willing that any should perish, until at last the ultimate becomes apparent in time as in eternity (John 15:22ff.); and God does not persist and insist till salvation would become destruction of love, and its alternative, mere pre-emption. In the end, what is lost is what will not be found as known to God, where grace is met by the implacable reality of liberty, as granted to man by God from the first, who will no more deface the human profile as created by overturning its place and powers, than ignore its need and limit His exhortation, offer and passion merely from within Himself. HIS principles are such, and His achievement is total, therefore, even when much is lost.

Grace and love are divine indeed, not only in status in Him, but in beauty and holiness. As to the divine love, in its scope, and grace in its immensity and its intensity, nothing is left out, that might apply to any, in order to save; and nothing is brought in, to abort its integrity.

Not only is it all of grace, but it is a gravely beautiful thing that you CANNOT go to hell because of divine negligence, or dispassion, or lack of concern, or simply focussing on something else, or uninterested bypass, or pre-occupation, or some  mystery by which you are overlooked. God has not only SAID how to get to hell - that is, bypassing His love and grace and sufficient sacrifice to cover all, and pursuing a contrary preference of your own in the very face of this - but made it impossible by any other means, than fouling His offer, forfeiting His grace. Thus in John 15:22ff., Christ tells them that sin would not be their lot if He had not COME and DONE and SAID what He did; but SINCE He has done so, and they STILL have not come to Him, THEREFORE they have guilt, a guilt that stands steadfast and (short of their later repentance), FINAL.

PAIN AND PURPOSE

God is a GOD OF GRACE. In all, there is grace. If your lot is unbearable, then you need to find Him by His gracious offer in the Gospel, and CALL on His name and being saved, cast your burden on the Lord and FIND in experience HOW He delivers you (Psalm 55:22, I Peter 5:7). He can prepare a Joseph (as in Psalm 105:17) through giant rigors, as He can forge a David, amid soul-searching adversities and finding and demonstrating integrity, despite imperfection, he can use what becomes personal, freely honourable and available.

Again, God can rebuke a marvellous leader for unholy hegemony when a lordly approach might grow (as with Moses, Psalm 106:33, Numbers 20), if it were not rebuked, and so polish.

He can lead a simple youth to regality, through many woes as with David. He can dismiss the mighty, as with the two-stage dismantling of specious, meretricious and deceptive Sennacherib (as in Isaiah 36ff.), and He can deliver the erring saint as in Jonah 4. Hauteur of exclusion, or dimness of anguish that WILL NOT SEEK Him, alike can find the ashes; but deliverance is to hand, not from suffering, for even Christ suffered, and that most pointedly and purposefully (cf. Galatians 3, Hebrews 5:7), but from insignificance, meaninglessness and purposelessness. It is such negatives as these which can come to those who act not as if products of an intensive creation by the all-knowledgeable God, but disjointedly from Him, like a piston in a car engine, flinging itself out in an explosion onto the scrap heap, too hot because of refusal  the hand of the mechanic, and ignoring that of the Maker.

There is no freedom from pain; but there is from profitlessness (John 15:7). There is no freedom from the requirement of God's children that they love, as having been loved; but there is freedom from having to learn the folly of becoming heartless, God in grace impressing this lesson on the heart! There is no freedom from hypocrisy, without God,  but there is when you receive the Lord, and beholding Him in spirit, find His presence working within you (Colossians 1:27, II Cor. 3:18); for where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty (II Cor 3:17). He does teach, and restrain, and exhort, and educate, and rebuke as a Father, and refine. It is freedom from being unrefined which matters, as there is liberty from oil-lessness in a well-maintained car.

God is gracious; but when His grace is dispelled in rebellion, quenched in folly, pinioned in puny power, what is left but disgrace! This is found persistently throughout the Bible (cf. II Kings 17, II Chronicles 36, Psalm 106, Isaiah 48:15ff.). Since all that is good is of divine grace, what leaves this fold, this folding, this contour, this grandeur, lacks it; for there is no other God, and hence no other way. Without grace, there is as in Daniel 12, only disgrace, shame; and it is the shame of sham and when this condition is final, it is eternal. Reality is; God is source of all besides Himself, eternal, ever-sufficient. Leave that, and DIS-GRACE becomes your very name. It is like the typical and the atypical, or the septic and the aseptic: what is not one, is the other.

There are many grades in many things; but if a thing is NOT septic, rigorously, in the sense not at all so, having no part in that domain, then it is aseptic. If it does not follow the type, then it is atypical; and assuredly, if you do not follow grace to its source and find it on the terms of Him whose it is, beyond all, in all purity and reality, then in its absence, you are dissociated, deprived. Indeed, this ends in the endless; for then in terms of the divine purity, which otherwise beckons, you are moving over the precipice into the depraved.

Lack what makes you what you in fact are, and elect discharge from it, and depravity in the end, is the taste of the thing. It is a wilful violation that destroys integrity systematically. It is not simply inherent, for all are sinners and those wages are death (Romans 6:23). In fact, it becomes far worse than that, for who blames the one, ultimately, made so and without hope! When however such results come from the condition of misused choice^*8, then the result is not a choice condition. Surrounded with effectual liberty, the soul pursues what defiles truth and instead of finding permanent regeneration, loses life into the place of de-generation, as all must, that lapse from their very conditions of life.

THE GROUNDS OF JUBILATION

Cheer up! There is no need for it: for whoever will CALL on the name of the Lord will be saved. If you were in hospital in a bed, with a bell, would it be deprivation for you to have to press the thing ? So is grace. It is offered. Act on it, and find it; or face its loss and pat  yourself on the back, as well as you can, for having a will that shrinks from nothing, although to its possessor, alas, it brings the end result in something far worse: shame. Grace is wonderful; voluntary disgrace is other.

God is other than all this world, but His image is found in it in man. He has featured it, blessed it, given it test for the truth and curse for folly (Romans 5:1-12, 8:17ff.). This however is not all. He has also granted to this world to hold not only the exhibitive status of rebellion, but that of divine grace. With this, there has come  the one vast division: grace or disgrace; restoration or displacement, reality or revolt.

On the one side, there is scope for reconciliation and redemption in the Saviour sent in such love for such a purpose, so that even the giving of salvation is itself free (Romans 5:15); there is no handling charge (I Corinthians 9:18). GOD handles it, and His servants are but ministers (John 15:5, 6:29, Ephesians 2:1-10). On the other there is opportunity for spitting at the salvation, ignoring the grace and affirming your own self-sufficiency or ultimate desirability.

The offer remains, gift of blood, child of grace (Ephesians 1). There is no excuse for seeking to dissolve the offer, or otherwise removing it from sight (John 15:22ff.). Why NEED an excuse ? If you are late for school, do you have an excuse ? Why DEAL in it in this way; why not come, not so late that the time is up, but on realisation, at once. Dilly-dally may be good for wasting time and losing life; but it does not serve at all when the issue is life itself! To lose a possible bride may seem sad; to lose a valuable friend may be a gap; to fail to find beauty and splendour in God's creation is deep departure. To fail, however, to find the source of life, the wonder of His brilliance, the brightness of His wisdom, the significance of His splendour, the marvel of His light, the personal depth of His affection as of a Father or brother, this is a failure to make all others seem but dust by comparison.

Why fail then ? The offer is near, clear, consistent, insistent, even for the resistant, till the spirit fails and the time is gone, and the ultimate is lost amid the time of pointless denial (Isaiah 57:15ff.). Praise God for He is the point of ultimate return, reality, and more than a point, the very plane, and more than that, the sphere, but past all that, the Author of space and place, who has yet in His creation and for it, a place prepared; and this is for all and for each who becomes His child through grace, in the Gospel's liberty and in the outcome of the very love of God.

NOTES

*1

See in this field,  for example the work:

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

Bible or Blight, Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God.

See also *8 below.

*2

See Waiting for Wonder Appendix.

*3

See:

TMR 1, pp. 8ff., 17ff.; TMR 8, pp. 200ff., 210ff., 224ff., 226ff.,

News 68, 82 cf.

SMR 329ff., 315Aff.,

A Spiritual Potpourri Ch.  4, pp. 58ff.,

Swift Witness 4, 5 (Stepping Out for Christ Chs.  2, 3);  op. cit.  8, 9, 10;

 Wake Up World Chs.  2, 4, 5, 6
(incl. overview of the torturous windings of a meandering river, that ends in silt), and Epilogue. 
 

*4

See Mystery of Iniquity.

*4A

See Secular Myth and Sacred Truth, and TMR, with The Word and the Wisdom of God and the Ways of Men Ch. 1,
and for broader reference, The gods of naturalism have no go.

See also News 98 *2.

*5 See SMR pp. 886ff..

*6 See Possess Your Possessions Volume 10, Ch. 5.

*7 EXCURSION ON LOVE AND LIBERTY

If, contrary to biblical principle, statement and practice, the cause of divine rejection is isolated and segregated from the will or preference of man, and landed into some anti-biblical field of the mysteriously unknown, so that God is no more the Saviour of  all men, especially those who believe as in I Timothy 4:10, and Christ's righteous gift was not towards all men as in Romans 5:18, and if to be deleted is the point that He would have all men to repent and come to a knowledge of the truth as in I Timothy 2, so that altogether we would have a new Bible, what then ? Then would be a false and contrary revelation, to that of the Bible,  one created by the thought of man, one in which not God's sovereign will is stated, as He shows His heart and passion and desire and design and action accordingly, in its own terms, but some other will of some other sovereignty which reserves its heart concerning mankind, even the bulk of it. Then we would have not a bowdlerised Bible but a stripped one, in which ardent divine passion in generalisation as in John 3:15-19, Colossians 1:19ff.  is replaced by strange self-contradictions and mysterious insertions.

In this, concerning those in the end to be lost, and concerning the love of God to ALL whether going or coming, even His initial outthrust of love before the consequential concerns of judgment,  known before our time  came into operation and was, we have question instead of answer. We have  quiddities instead of certainties. If bereft of biblical amplitude, God's love towards even those who will not receive free salvation by grace both in the gift and in the giving of it (as in John 15:22ff.), becomes vested indeed, to use Calvin's term, in a 'horrible decree'.

This then substitutes for man's baleful and needless restriction in which the leap to lordliness jumps over the precipice of grace into the abyss of judgment. While God SO LOVED that He SO GAVE such a GIFT so that the world might be saved, and not lost, and out of it whoever believes should have eternal life and not perdition, we have a god who was so circumscribed that foreknown and foreseen judgment is not a consequence of what becomes effectually, the discharge of grace by man, but outside the preference of man altogether.

Who ELSE has power in the matter  ? Is God a subject then to some force, animus, power, passion of unknown and unchartered character which flashes out in lightning strikes CONTRARY to His own oft-stated  principles ? Are we to witness the construction of a sovereign whose entrancing love and remorseless exercise of it in passionate practice even to the Cross as in Colossians 1:19ff., Romans 5, is crucified along with His Son, leaving alien mystery as the mists of human intellection take the clear and biblical generalisations, and make of them things of exception and removal, so that the  removal vans can be seen scouring across the country,  vainly robbing some of His glory!

It is this which is the horrible theological decree of man! To imagine that in order to 'save' God's sovereignty, there is need to reduce the scope of His love in the area of salvation is merely confusion. Uzzah seeking to stablise the ark has long since taught us the vital character of such error (II Samuel 6:6). There is no such need, even if such intrusion were not in principle a presumptuous practice. Even man is able fully to understand the meaning of having the POWER to do something, but NOT USING it because the PRINCIPLES of his heart will not let him, his ethics vomits such lordliness or oppression or disregard.

We cannot rightly mark a man as weak because in principle he is strong; but rather the reverse. When GOD Himself shows such a constraint in His love that it would rather in wisdom abandon a wonderful work than ruin the reality of His heart in the process, and breach the purity of His creation in mere invasion of the personality to change it, we admire it and understand it because we face on our own minute scale, issues not dissimilar. Love is like that, always has been, always will be. God did not SO love to save the world and give eternal life that He turned the love into grabbing, in the gratuitous misnaming of 'grace.' These are opposites.

Praise God that His purity, like gems and crystal, is deep and profound, that His light is utter and intense with no darkness or shadow of turning, and that when He STATES His principle of condemnation, by which some do not have what He passionately sought for all, and the scope of His love vested with salvation, He is not turned from it by theologians, inventing divine protectorates under their own gracious dominion, as if to constrain the Almighty to their narrowed constraints, confusing the continual scriptural exhibition of consequential judgment, known with the fruits of grace, before our time awakened at daybreak on the first day, with something as far different and defective in kind, relative to divine claims, as the moon as reflector, from the sun as protector.

Then, not the operative power in sin of man's will towards choice of God, but the relevance of the will itself, even before the face of God, being gone, what is left for imaginary grounds of choice ? If it not in MAN, then the only sovereign and all-governing God becomes the ground, directly, and without regard to man as obstacle. All scriptures then which indicate that he is, as in Luke 19:42ff., would go. What however would come ? God would then be selecting on some basis other than the response of man, even before time,  since this would be the asserted ground of it all. If the matter is between God and man as in I Timothy 2, as in Colossians 1, as in Romans 5, and man's will is not even  relevant, that is, it is not even as before the all-knowing, pre-temporal planning of God, relevant, and so not in FACT relevant, then God, the implication would be forced on us, is Himself making many so that, whatever they might wish, they would never know Him.

It does not matter how grand the language, or how much the fact of divine sovereignty is confused with its NATURE and His will for its application, if this be so, then grace is aborted. But it is not so. If some X-factor is the ground of choice, to gain acceptance, not the underlying willingness of man as foreknown, then what is it that appeals to God Himself and to His godliness ? Is it not something which better meets it ? and if so, how is there any liberty, since some are thus made!

Thus evil and liberty alike are left stranded; and the Bible with them; and grace is no more grace, but some kind of direction. Direction is fine if it is based on liberty, but when it is outside the very will of the recipient, then the image of God in man is lost and the grandeur of the grace of God with it. If no one deserves heaven, which is true, and  all deserve hell, which is true, does this mean that the WAY in which God in grace chooses to extricate some is irrelevant to the question of the way in which He does not choose to extricate others ? Certainly, He chooses as He will, but to rebuild a God who is to abandon His oft-stated and applied principles of HOW He chooses to choose, the very bases of choice in Himself, is reconstruction. It makes sovereignty in itself the criterion, and kindness in looking at any, to be divorced from kindness in looking to the point at all mankind, as one of the marks of SUCH a SOVEREIGN as THIS!

If man is irrelevant to the choice, this again deserts the ultimate relevance of  human choice, for how is this to be fancied ? If it is not will or preference, is it character ? and if so, are conditions for its formation irrelevant ? If before time, this is the way they are made, where is liberty ?

There is in fact no way to have liberty and love and grace, but what is written. Man must be able to choose what he will, but also to will what he will: that is, must not be bound to his blind will, if it be disabled, but must be liberated so that even it is no barrier to his final placement. God ONLY becomes the SOLE source of the determination of where EACH one is placed in heart, as before sin, and in  fact. If God would have ALL, then that principle is thus fulfilled. It is an entirely sovereign, sure and certain way of choosing from souls made in liberty, what they are wholly disabled from fulfilling in themselves, yet in away which instead of bypassing liberty, maximises it by having God Himself its protector. If then He weeps for their misplaced will, as He does, it is not about a natural phenomenon, but wilfulness as a specific and added cause in some, a desperate wilfulness which is their avocation, and not merely a determination before and beyond them, so that they come only to go, not only in resultant, but in very nature.

If one wanted to make a system like that, why weep having made it! ... as Christ did. Lamentation is for what despite desire  becomes fact, not for what is formed and formulated in terms of desire. Love CANNOT, in order to be love, go beyond and invent a new sort of thing for the loving, make what is worth loving in order to  love it (Romans 5:5-7); for that is merely an option to dump and rename in illusion. Love is directed to what is, not to what is not; and in so acting, love seeks to redeem the lost, not to lose the redeemed in a confused cadenza, full of noise but without definition ...  It loves what is NOT worth it, and redeems it,  so that although restored, if so be, it is yet the self-same being freely found, and not a supplanting substitute. Regeneration is of those loved before regeneration both logically and chronologically.

It is this in its integrity as a being (however defiled, polluted, disenabled from its own inward powers), which is redeemed, in its own image-of-God reality, so that it is indeed the case that despite the embracive love of God that the world might be saved, THIS is the condemnation, and HERE is the conduit to hell, that LIGHT HAS COME and darkness has been preferred. It is not inscrutable principle which throws out, but man's perceived preference which is cited; and God, in love satisfied though He lament, though His heart is stirred like pipes, as it is put in Jeremiah 48, DOES ensure in His pre-temporal sovereignty, that there is NO way ANY CAN be lost, without this cause, for before sin even stirred in mankind, or creation called him to be, God had in His divine enterprise, the knowledge of who are His own. He did not shrink from the realities any more than Christ did from the Cross. Infinite love is all the purer, and makes it all the surer that integrity is real, and response, however found, is sincere and representative of the reality.

Praise God that the whole Bible aborts such misconceptions and the grace of God is everywhere and in everything for man, and the distress signal can be heard without dulled ears, and the pathology of man is not the divorce of the power of God.

*8

EXCURSION ON THE HEIGHT AND DEPTH OF LIBERTY BEFORE GOD

No less, one praises God because here is not only the complete solution to all the problems in this area, vexatious to many for millenia, held right and tight in the Bible, when one is willing to follow it minutely on all sides, but the ONLY possible solution. These things have been shown over the seven volume set on predestination and freewill , and not a little in Volume 7, Predestination Review. Let us consider it.

For liberty to be real for life,  where knowledge is in short supply, and comprehensive knowledge is not available, there has to be not only the liberty to do as you will, but to will as you will. Now short of God (an infinite distance for all that is not the infinite Creator), you cannot will as you will entirely. The liberty needed is simply to have options when it comes to having the knowledge of God and the available life of God, or else anything without Him, depending on the scope of the person concerned in power and position. How can you will not only for your choice of what you want, but for liberty FROM your will so that it is not your limiting and bossy predilection centre!

Can you have ability not only for your choice of what you envisage that meets your will, but of what you are willing to have as a will source! If  you are a parrot, you are free in some part, to choose whether you will to fly this way or that. If you are a man, you are free in some part, to do the same, or to choose the dream that appeals. But to WHAT does it appeal ?  It is to that same old will. It is YOUR will with your past and experience and cast of thought all secure. CAN you look beyond this to regard this STATE of being and this NATURE of disposition as ITSELF something to will for, or NOT so to do ?

How would you ? Can you get outside and beyond yourself ? You may say, Of course I can, for I can envisage other worlds and thoughts and imaginations and play-act and choose some model or person to imitate, or even create one and set about BEING that. What more liberty could you possibly have, you might pursue it, than that!

You might ask Shakespeare's Richard II that question, and he might reply that his way had fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf, and that he would give almost anything to have fresh young shoots rather than a sagging personality, and proceed that unfortunately there was no power to choose beyond himself, that scope and tilt of imagination, those cloisters of thought and that style of estimation of things. He might tell you that he was bound to himself; or might choose to go on and tell you, intimately of course, that actually it was a prison just to be himself, or that he was appointed to be disappointed. Others might admit they thought only of finance, and long at times to be other, and try, but find a natural bent that some mocked, of which he was at times proud, but which seemed to be his life; or much the same of other phases or stages or plateaux for living.

They were aborted by themselves, and could only be that particular configuration of desire and overview, oversight and insight, as set up; and while this had much to enjoy, the self was in fact bondage. Others, to be sure, could mock such a disposition, and say that just to do what they willed was vast fun, enormous liberty and unthinkable as a subject of concern, although their friends might not feel the same way about them, and could wish perhaps that they less rambunctious, or unctious or hypocritical, or had at least some measure of understanding of themselves, or of others, or of reality.

Being yourself, whether you happen to like it or not, and it is not entirely of your choice, though there is an ingredient of it, can be very limiting. Yet it is not your feelings about the limit which is in view, now that we have sighted it, but the FACT of it which is here the focus. To will as you will, to get outside the admittedly most delicious capacity to think and get what you want (if not always, then in principle as an achievable possibility), requires several ingredients for you. First, there has to be the actual option to move from your current state of being, to another available one. With this, you need the power to implement it, and the knowledge to make it more than guesswork, lacking which is scarcely liberty, but rather liability!

Further, to overcome this lack of knowledge and power, you need a personal being with knowledge in the form  meaningful to your mind and life, and in exactitude in the field, so that the knowledge you thus get is reliable, an ingredient of liberty. Far beyond this, you need an honest such being, and a loving one, moreover one neither deceived nor deceptive. There is only one such Being in existence with relevant knowledge, power and reliability, neither seeking gain at your expense, or some measure of it, nor using your interest as a basis for roguery.

God is that personal Being. Inventing some god or other for thought does not help any more than dreaming of honey provides sweet energy, or of a boat, builds it. You need the actual God, who in fact as we learn from His word (as in SMR), the Bible, is loving, does not seek advantage, does not even have it as meaningful to be seeking personal lacks (cf. Psalm 50:12) as if He were part of creation, and has love which thus is unselfish, reliable and knowledgeable. Indeed, we find that He is willing to drain for you, like a good father, from the reservoir of reality and provide you with the optimum realisation of potential as made, with a vision for you: and this,  not as if of or from some ambitious or tilted entrepreneur or teacher, but in fact of and from a grand and wonderful Being, in whose light we see light, and from which draw as in astronomy, the moon from the sun.  As He says, "in Thy light we shall see light" (Psalm 36:9). Here is a trustworthy, loving, reliable, knowledgeable and more, a discerning, undeceitful, ultra-visionary Being, who is not limited in the way that simply in yourself, you are.

Because God by nature is the only One there is like that, and since He declares His desire to be of just this character (cf. Psalm 23,  II Samuel 12:8, Isaiah 48:16ff., Ezekiel 33:11), moreover one which is so pure that it is like dew on new-mown grass, so creatively loving that it beggars imagination, and is true:  therefore if HE should offer to the will of a man or woman or child, the power to will differently, this would be a magnificent reality in the domain of liberty. You would no longer be your own dispositional dynamic, limited by yourself to yourself, or what you anointed for yourself from yourself. 

You COULD by trusting Him, receive the free offer in the Gospel and be regenerated entirely, so that your past is not your master or begetter or throne (if you are like that!), but your starting block for a pilgrimage to what is NOT yourself, what redeems yourself from the function of sin with its clouds, distempers and deceits, and indeed, propels not merely into a life of that new character for willing, but one of comradeship with Himself. Therefore, it is not just a matter of some instant at the outset, but proceeds in  the onset, so that there is development in the way you called for, a continuing light of the new day in power assisting you in a growth no more mere DNA-directed as in the body, or thought directed as in your delimited and delimiting mind, but in the vital relationship with One far greater and of intense goodwill, who made in man even the capacity for thought at all.

Thus, you have a new KIND of option, to will as you will in SO proceeding or NOT. As we have seen, this option is protected by the foreknowledge of God, and the secure foundation in the correlative predestination, so that it cannot become merely illusory (cf. Romans 8:29ff.).

Without that, however noble or notable your lavishing of your power to get what you will (in principle, in part, as at least something entirely relevant even if able to vanish in an accident of mind, soul or body, to no small extent), you are forever bound to yourself. You can choose this or that wisdom or vision or philosophy, but it is still the limited and aforesaid you who do this.

Further, there is the liability that your heart is not unified (cf. Psalm 86:10-11), being adrift from its Maker to whom it relates, and it may have psychic chores or cause for disjunction in part from your will, as in drug addiction, whether to pleasure irrespective of wisdom, or fame, or power, or gratification, instability or pride that blinds. You may thus not even be true to what you are or cohesive in what you want, or capable of directing your course as you would, because of dither or wither or shiver, through deterioration of will or consistency or code; and this is merely an aggravation of the condition of doing what you will, even in principle! Even the residue has some value, but adrift from reality and without means of knowing it, when God has not been found, man has one dimension of liberty, and this erosible, as well as limited. ANY being out of line with its transmission and source will have such things in one of its dimensions or other, and of course, the most limiting are those of which one is unaware, so that they are not even combated.

That having been said, man is a being of analytical power, and capacity to rove and select philosophies to some extent as he will, though rationalisation may replace rationality in specific pathological types, and lust displace reality, even as far as it is known. That liberty is no small thing, even at that residual level, unreliable as it becomes. What then when the power to will as you will comes into sight and into operation ?

Vast as is the liberty given to man, as he is, this new aspect of liberty is categorical, quintessential and multi-partite. It is indeed not ONLY the power to be other even to the point of being free to will as you will; for the freedom has two poles of intense significance. If you are self-satisfied, or given to fear and lack of trust, or unloving and love to have it so, and so forth, then you have the delusively attractive option of continuing just like that, till wear and tear, or adverse or converse forces make it a mockery, especially in confrontation, affront, sickness, loss of competence or death, this last, always an aggravation. On the other hand, the other avenue for becoming available at your call on the Lord,  as provided in Acts 2, for example, is not just something or other simply different. What is before you then is far more than even that. It makes all the difference what that difference actually is! You may call on the name of the Lord, acting on His promise, apt to follow His invitation, and find THAT intimately related, omnipotently active and deeply related Being.

It is to your Maker you thus gain access in personal terms, to Him whose grace has surrounded mankind in enormous varieties of ways, as we have seen, in generic terms; and you are enabled in this same certain fashion, to make peace with this God, not with some power or other, but with your own Maker, and so to find removed a whole characterisable obstruction to instruction and to reality. This,  otherwise,  systematically tended to blight your thoughts and dissolve your dreams, unless these were so superficial that they could continue in their little mode till death thumped them. Indeed, it relates to the certainty IN this field of choice, of having eternal life, which does not dump you as one sees in John 10, and thus of avoiding the disruption of desire for the delightful, the magnificent, the noble, the exhilarating, the splendid and the majestic, the glory of God, Himself the background reason why anyone could value such things. This being man's background, these things are even found rendering themselves for many, indispensable, so that to lack them would make life not merely a  partial liberty in kind, but an unkind blinkering, like an apple, however luscious, without a core. What then of this enablement to WILL as you WILL ?

The ingredients of such avenues, one or the other, are present in the only way in which they could be effective as distinct from being envisageable. There COULD be no other source for this capacity to will as you will, since only with the God who is like this, does the possibility exist. It is moreover not only a possibility, as explained in detail, for it is all worked out in terms of your unalloyed liberty, before sin or birth defects or circumstances seeking control, could mould or mar you or make you into a clod, or self-glorying fool or someone so wise that only his friends could not see it.

Finally, one word on the topic of choice. The reality of choice is not lessened by the  mode in which man in sin is enabled to have it realised. On the contrary, this merely makes it more certain. Yet while choice concerning God is therefore beyond the normal operational ability of the sinner, it is not beyond the reliable power of God to render what is potential, as operable just as was liberty with Adam: that is, ACTUALLY so. Starting with foreknowledge, and concluding with penetrability IN THOSE TERMS, in the field of history, there is the divine option which GOD HIMSELF has exercised of making liberty real, past pathology, past detriment or current rebellion. You can thus in the field of choice, resolve your way, with Joshua and his house (Joshua 24:15ff.), which he declared, and this was the way of the Lord; but it is not just a superficial choice or a simple one as with Adam. It is one which by enormous grace, in the will of God, the work of God, the anguish of the only begotten Son of God, is activatable in you so that it really IS your choice. Hence you are always responsible. Trying to be irresponsible is itself just as much a choice as seeking by conformist pretension to cloud the issue, and sit on the fence in reality.

What then of man before God ? For all that, though sin has made you thick in this area (cf. I Corinthians 2:14), it has not made God so FOR you. Such is the biblical teaching (Hebrews 4:12-13). In a marvel of perception, tenderness, triumphant faithfulness, glorious Gospel provision, breach of the unpleasant disruption of death on your behalf,  offered whether to one who is or is not foreknown to be His (Titus 2:11, 3:4-5, Hebrews 2:9), your choice is the outcome. In the positive field, it is indirect, but it is the more sure; for when God Himself handles a thing, its certainty and security is total. It is His performance (John 6:29) on our behalf, based on the scope of His provision (I John 2:1-2), enough for all.

From this reservoir of grace, released to faith, secured in wisdom, the Lord chooses and in choosing neither abuses nor neglects, but statedly seeking ALL, finds and funds where His favours rest, in the unspoiled realities of truth before time (Ephesians 1:4). It is so:  whether the case be loss (Hebrews 6:4-6) in the very midst of the beginnings of enlightenment, as King Saul may have done, the negativity being thus the more tested and demonstrated; or whether the case be one where, by active and actual faith, beyond experience as base, refuge is found n Christ, who never fails, once rested on (Romans 8:29ff.), the soul so gaining an anchor beyond the veil of approach, in the very presence of God,  kept by our vicarious and victorious forerunner, Jesus the Christ (Hebrews 6:18-20). Here then is the positive outcome; and the Lord of all grace, comfort and pity, He knows His own (II Timothy 2:19), as categorical as sheep amid goats, as clear-cut and as certain, wrought in clarity before Him from eternity, taught in life, enabled in weakness, kept by the power of God to salvation reserved in heaven (I Peter 3:3-7).

To them, His redemption goes and flows, the payment enough for all, transmitted to some as always (cf. Deuteronomy 29), for it is not the offer which pays, but the transfer, and the remission of sins and the payment for them are one step, in one salvation (Romans 8:29). When Christ is actually delivered up for you, we read, then ALL things are yours, grace abounding being now in its fruitage. You see that also in Isaiah 53, where it is those who are HEALED, who are the ALL whose sins are placed on Him. Wisdom belongs to God, with grace, and faithfulness, with knowledge, love with discernment and truth without limit.

In the ultimate and primary regard, HE chooses you (John 15), not you Him; but in DOING SO, He surpasses your limits and enables that willing which though beyond you in your set-up and sin, yet is your very own. What is not possible with man, is not able to resist the provisions of God; and where only grey is visible to man, God can evoke colour for all that; and where meaning dissolves before the eyes of man, it is not dis-assembled before God. Nor, for that matter,  is He disenabled to procure and present it to man, so that what was discerned by God in eternity in all truth concerning any person, becomes what is discerned at length by man in history, as all events unfold. So does man become so gifted that in this, the most vital regard to an infinite degree, he  has been made free to will as he will. It is all of grace. It is not autonomy; but it IS liberty.

Hence Joshua could speak as he did about himself and his house, telling Israel to choose as it would, while as to himself  knowing where his choice lay, he was sided to abide with and in the Lord.

The POINT is the liberty which, even in  potentially disastrous circumstances (as if you were a refugee in the waters about a sinking ship) such as increase your liability, is compromised; but which by the plan, power and Gospel and grace of God, is sustained. You do not have, fateful and final, destiny in sin together with its condemnation, as in John 15:22ff., UNLESS in effect, you have heard and seen what God has done, in Christ, and have for all that, not desired it. That is the principle and God is not short of the means to render any one or all of His own principles, what transpires in practice! Life is not merely as imparted, but as envisaged by God, foreknown, understood, the eye of the Lord penetrating all, knowing all, perceiving all, seeking for that matter, not only some, but all also; and only with a reluctance in love, is He relinquishing any, who then become consignees to what is godless, a residual estate. God is able to do all this, or secure its spiritual equivalent in full reality, for mankind for whom time is an invention, along with its own nature.

When Christ thus confronted some direct, man before God, He made it clear to the point of transparency (John 15:22ff.). THIS is the nature of the nurture and the splendour of the love of God. ONLY in this way, may man meander his way and find his route successful, in getting to hell, to judgment without cover, like a naked babe, insisting on crashing into the ice ... but alas, it is not as a babe he so decides, and the responsibility is intensively his own! (cf. John 3:19, Proverbs 1, Isaiah 48:16ff.). So is evil resolved at its source, man's destiny seen in its uttermost reality as his own responsibility differentially, for God would have all men repent and come to the knowledge of the truth, and be reconciled to Himself, yes all whether in heaven or on earth (Col. 1:19ff., I Tim. 2:1ff., II Peter 3:9ff.),and passion is there (Ezekiel 33:11ff.).

Freedom is not futile, nor is it a mere mockery, but as in kind it is experienced so beyond its marring,  is its reality; as its guilt is felt on misuse, so its reality smites, and as its pondering principles of option are known to man, so are the results made visible even to experience. Evil powers and principals of rebellion against God do not alter their application to man, as if he had to be the first in order to fall; for responsibility inheres from first to last, and company does not alter it. The vast character of the depth of God's MODE OF MERCY in the Cross is thus matched by the profundity of His wisdom and the limitless character of the thrust of His grace. Its outcomes are assured from His foreknowledge from the first, but the incomes of grace and His unalterable nature are as operative then before time,  as when Christ, the Son of the unchangeable God, was on earth (Hebrews 13:8). God is wonderful and any machinations of man to alter this or that or ignore the other, merely scatter light, and do not allow its biblical focus, in which all problems stand resolved, as by nothing else.

Whether it be the nature of evil, of liberty, of responsibility, of predestination, of foreknowledge, of truth, of love, of mercy, of duty, in the Bible, it is all coherently, implacably, indomitably, intransigently, inoperably clear, coherent, systematically pure, incandescently vigorous, intractable. How many times does the Lord have to state His intention, His plenitude, His mercies in their scope and coverage, before man will listen! God has said it in His word, the Bible, and whether or not man is pleased to use the solution to his problems of mind, as of sin, it will remain as He has spoken it, pure and without blight, resolving all issues; while He calls to man to listen and to come, for the larder is full and the fountain is free (Isaiah 55, Revelation 22:17).

What then of the grace of God, of His love ? It releases not inconsequentially or mysteriously, but with a judicious knowledge which seeks better things for any as for all, and becomes judicial only when the will of man dismisses His desire. IN doing it in this fastidiously faithful manner, God has granted a liberty so great, so gracious, so profound, so wonderful, so telling that it makes heart's ease amidst tribulation, and worship amid trial! Love like that, knowledge like that, integrity like that, grace like that, it is outrageous even to consider not being grateful, delighted, all but incredulous, while lost, because found, in praise!