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CHAPTER ONE

STRANGE, THE PEOPLE YOU MEET

 

Look at radioactivity, he said, this alone proves all your biblical ideas wanton rubbish.

How could it be wanton if it is rubbish, I responded ? Wantonry suggests a rash and crash type misuse of equipment, by injudicious and outrageous oversight of responsibility and realism.  In fact the biblical approach is precisely, most precisely, the exact opposite. In fact, if radioactivity, to take the case you mention,  attests one thing more than another, it is this: that current concepts of naturalistic, self-explanatory, self-making of the universe are as corrupt evidentially, in terms of scientific method, as they are defunct, in terms of logical basis. If it made itself, it doesn't show the means, or the efforts, and what is not there does not have the option of doing anything, far less of making itself. Think of it in an entirety of perspective and it is obvious that all that is being put is that you grab from nowhere all you need when you need it; and nowhere isn't even a place.

I have only  a few minutes, he replied,  so make it snappy.

Very well, I replied, but remember it is all in detail available in the disc I have already given you.

First,  let us look at this item you mention. As far as radioactivity is concerned, there is too much argon and helium in degeneration sites for particle emission, to allow ages of the orders of millions of years for the rocks concerned*1. Coal remains of alleged vast ages give evidence of compressed and double halos requiring rapid formation*2, just as granites with last stages of fast polonium decay attest very fast formation*3, and greatly enhanced speed of emission rates for the supply of such fleeting products to be left without visible progenitors, these sometimes altogether missing on several sites. Again, absence or small amounts of final product, lead*4, where millions of years are supposed to have transpired, is a contradiction of current rates. Moreover, remnants of blood*4A on the simplistic, naturalistic assumptions of uniformitarianism, are to be found in areas dated over 6 millions years, whereas the thought of anything remotely that for some of the delicate structures involved, prior to this discovery, has appeared axiomatic.

Ludicrous variation between radioactive results for age of rocks*5, when different substances are used on assumptions of decay rates like those of today make a farce of any pretence to  scientific accuracy, for the conflict in different estimates of age from different radioactive methods give indications not merely of different ages, dependent on method, but those differing by billions of years in a prodigy of surreal pseudo-science that is nothing but erratic persistence in being scientistic for lack of willingness to conform to normal and correct programs with coherent results. Scientific investigation showing the extension of decay time by billions of years, and increase of decay rate by billions of TIMES,  depending on the plasma or other state of materials, together with results which obviously do not match current gradualistic, uniformitarian concepts, and demand another basis,  for any pretence of scientific discipline, merely enhance the case for change of concept. What consecutively fails in various methods and applications requires a different approach: this is not politics. If it fails, it fails and so falls. Here it is being held up by philosophic and even some kind of religious opportunism, and mischievously allowed to retain the now irrelevant title  of  'science', like some fallen 'saint' who turns out in practical  terms, to be in fact a gangster.

In all these things, as Dr Andrew Snelling points out*6, there is current investigation concerning possible causes,  different rates of emission for different particles differently affected by different conditions; but there is more. It follows in any case from the fact that In any naturalistic explanation, which in effect means that  you get  'nature' - laws, forms, particles, assemblages by definition, constants, astronomical predictabilities and the like, from nowhere, no cause and merely assume them, and  so is utterly and entirely unscientific:  for there is simply no way of overcoming the contradictions, such as the similar temperature throughout space, and a supernova distribution ludicrously contrary to naturalistic expectation*7. Expectations In terms of time,   on the naturalistic basis, require far more for such temperature equality, than its time theory allows*8

 Supernova remnants are, similarly, in nothing like the extensiveness in space, which the imagined time of naturalistic thought, would provide. Thus they err on both sides, too little time, too much, and the theory is giving out mayday cries of distress, which the junta in many universities with extraordinary disdain and a strange-seeming ease, disregard. Such is not the way of science, but it is not only in politics and literature that people can for a time become intoxicated from convention; it is assuredly the case in science also, as Lord Zuckerman*8A, one of Britain's most distinguished scientists pointed out. This he did with no small force in his work, Beyond the Ivory Tower.

In any supernatural explanation, which simply means that you do not assume anything, but find adequate and independently attested cause, and so move back within the limits of science, to what is adequate for such production, and then test that: there is no problem with SET-UP SITUATIONS. In any case where there is coherent creative construction surpassing the mere input powers of the ingredients, you look for the nature of the design, and the powers of the one who did the building. This is not argument by analogy, but comprehension in causal terms, the denial of which merely leads to antinomy*9.

Similarly, when you turn from the obsolete and incomplete concepts of a self-made universe, you are free to see HOW the rates of construction OR decay may vary through the difference of creative thrust, or design wear, induced or simply produced, whether at the time of creation or of judgment or both. It may be for any purpose in the line of creation, just as they do when the power of constructive engineering is applied to a building at some  stages, while mere minor work is done at others, and rates of production at first, and then of decay arise, and are conditioned by the forms and forces used, when they are used and why.

In particular, rates of decay of any production are a very different thing from the rates of construction.  So elementary and elemental are these considerations that there is a major prediction that must come from the supernatural model, which so far from being an illicit add-on is a necessary causal input. It is this. Naturalistic cut-offs, mere philosophic prejudice as well as scientific delinquency, MUST have scientifically irresolvable problems, not a few, and these, elemental in nature; and this will be far removed from  the case for what faces this issue, and gathers evidence from various sources for the nature of the input,  supernatural or otherwise, and seeks coherence in these open-minded, scientifically neutral terms.

Two issues are involved here: firstly there is the felicity of the solution, as distinct from endless ad hoc assumptions built on air, found so incessantly in naturalism which NEVER ONCE has shown its imaginary powers at work in the desired degree or even kind of action. It is a form of pseudo-science which is not even rudimentary science, but a kind of philosophic chanting. Secondly, there is the openness to evidence, a normal  pre-requisite of scientific method, which is not so much involved in TELLING us as DISCOVERING what is to be said.

Let us seek things correlative to radioactivity first in terms of time, and then in terms of outcome and requirements for this.

When the considerations of

bullet the rate of attrition of mountains, continents which do not conform to  old earth scenarios*9A, and the implications for maximal times, before they are levelled, together with the impacts of vast ages of marring forces on vast level plains,
to which they are then strangely immune,
 
bullet the attrition of magnetic field in the earth and all the elements of this*10,
well considered by Dr Russell Humphreys, who made predictions based on Bible-related constraints,
and had them verified in recent data collection in the field of astronomy*11,
 
bullet the rate of input of minerals into the sea, and the maximum time this would permit for their accretion
on the uniformitarian basis11A,
 
bullet the cooling rate of the earth*11B,
 
bullet the recession of the moon, its rate and maximal presumptive time for this*11C,
 
bullet the massive flood accretions of non-local, maximal assemblages of materials from different earth regions,
such as Nilsson noted in his disgust with the uniformitarian nonsense*12, which is mere contra-evidential bombast,
 
bullet the spread of supernova, wholly diverse from the ages of the uniformitarian philosophy,
which simply does not meet the totality of facts, but does relate sharply to the young earth approach,
 
bullet the failure of the expected finds of failed exhibits of proto-creations, moving up the scale with billions of mess-ups,
the very opposite being found*12A, and
 
bullet the brilliance and sophistication in enormous mathematical and coded complexity, with tiers of commands
and  specifications past our own best engineering finesse,  found written in our very DNA,
something that is a challenge even to penetrate with
 
bullet the necessary level of systematic thought, and so find the combination of intellectual prowess
and absence of 'experimental failure', and far more, non-experimental nonsenses:

there is actually no contest.

ALL that is to be expected by due causality at each level of product information and implication, is found. MORE than might have been expected,  to a massive degree is found. There is not only evidence of the input, but of its quality, where man appears as recipient of instruction just to consider it, not as lordly superior bending his massive intellect to ponder the childish proportions of former things.

Trees*13, as if in comic mood, show their trunks, without attachment, as violently severed from the original environment, moving in one piece through millions of guesswork years, lines of demarcation between the deposits of vast ages, here this age, there that one, appear with little if any sign of attrition of layer one, in the vast ages before the deposition of layer two, overlays of thousands of square miles appear across America*13A, on continental scale, with no signs of overlay, in wrong order, and in general, flood origin meets all problems, whereas assumptions of vast ages do not.

As Dr Steven Austin shows*14, the Grand Canyon on any regimen but catastrophic and fast action, is incomprehensible, just as the Cambrian beginnings, and the pre-Cambrian attestations,  refuse to provide systematic, step by step evidence of developments, but provide mere more types of design-types, in macro-structure, by far than we have now, so that at this level, there is attrition not upward prowess, something that left Dr Stephen Gould of Harvard in justifiable confusion and amazement*15. Declaring that it is not good to account for loss by methods of gain, he looked about for some way out of his dilemma. What MUST be right, was in opposite mode; what COULD NOT be right, attested itself! What a scientific problem that is, unless of course you abandon what does not fit fact, and start to find the hypotheses which meet ALL facts, ALL the time with MAXIMAL felicity, and without mere guessworks without evidence, and contrary to evidence.

Here guessworks and gasworks may have much in common.

Dr Michael Denton gives no small attestation of the failure of conformity, as if in a progressive building situation, between micro-biological changes and variations*16, and macro-biological types, so that as he puts it, there is a hierarchical framework*17,  where a sovereign input, conceptually based, is evident rather than a series of configurements about a slow-moving and ungoverned progress.

In all things,  from logical items to physiological*18, from things geological to astronomical, from things palaeontologic to psychological, there is high specification, even programmatic assignment, high level form and formula, or conformity to it,  format and force marshalling and ordering, just as in things psychological; there is configurement and control, constraint and modes of it, there are methods and laws for it, and there is nothing of the spatter-scatter of disorganised forces ineptly moving to their devastatingly indifferent conclusions; nor for that matter, can naturalism so much as provide the correlation between force and form, far less the arrival of anything in any form, or indeed at all.

For each level of attainment in the creation, there are means of continuation, control, constraint, correlation*19, as is the case no less for the laws of logic, which penetrate the nexus of things apparent from the source of the mind of man, things external and internal to it, objects for investigation and the cast of mind of the investigator both of the same mould, and each working concurrently and effectively with the other. Intelligibility itself is a function of intelligence, comprehensibility of conceptual configuration which can be detected by what conceptually configures. The logos back of the mind of man in its comprehending faculties and facilities is the same one that is found in the field of his apprehension, whether local, national, cosmic or universal. Indeed, all fields in their basic character yield without antinomy or antilogy to the mind of man when it is directed by the perspectives in the Bible, the supreme imprint of the creating Logos, whose life made life what it is, and how it is to be found.

Indeed, a different universe in all respects is the product of naturalism*20, the product of fantasy and question-begging, neither accounting for anything, nor for its own internal validity,  far less that of its external application. Neither is truth obtainable by reactions, but merely is assumed without ground, nor is it to be found in contra-evidential ramblings, incoherent, ill-attested, often contradicted.

It is  found where it meets every test, and this is in the Bible alone*20A, for no other religion is objectively testable, let alone defiantly challenging any takers to  APPLY test for their own good, in terms not only confirmatory of the reason why our minds and their logic can penetrate external reality to explain it, but of their arrival in the first place, differentiation qualitatively entirely from matter, and for that matter, that of our spirits, able to direct mind in its working, and even knowingly and purposefully, to corrupt its results by desire, as in rationalisation.

While all the elements of this discourse and more, are at length attested, investigated and considered for implication in this 174 volume Christian Biblical Apologetic Library, it is convenient simply to have a glance at them in their current state, as one might look out the window at an approaching car, and happen to notice than in several seconds it will make impact with one's own vehicle.

In such a case, a little movement, yes perhaps a rapid thrust on it, is to the point. It is not good, facing an accident through wanton blindness and intoxication in the mind, to move on to destruction. It is popular, yes, but most wasteful of the most carefully devised equipment: not only the car (the environment), but the drivers (mankind).

What should I do then ? he replied, for by no accident do I wish to be deprived among those who are depraved in dissidence from deity, evacuate from the clear, compelling and ineluctable testimony of His displeasure with this race, just as its own displeasure with itself (each with the other) mounts, disaster threatens and logic becomes a plaything of the mighty who not only strain but strangle relations with the God who having made us, has not forsaken us, but has declared His mind. He has done it, I now see, for thousands of years, never changed the indictment, and done prodigious things in a combination of love and mercy to make peace; but our race, it makes war,  and I certainly am for peace with my Maker, and any other with whom it may justly be found..

What to do  ? Repent of being so slow to see the footprints of the Lord in your past  life, accept the Bible's depiction of your origin, take the original method of God for salvation, being one of His creatures, and be glad you don't have to work for it (Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2:1-10, Galatians 1, 3, 5, Titus 3:3-7).

Work for it ? I should think not. If I did not contribute to my creation, as you show, I certainly would not consider any system which made me contribute to my re-creation.

Why ?

Well, if even to become one of these fantastic spectacles of law and logic, gifted with the freedom to love and hence if wrong-headed and wilful, to spoil and lie, required nothing but being born on my part, how much more if it is a question of fixing this amazingly complex and exceedingly astray stuff.

Good, then you will be glad to know that we are freely justified, that is, set right before God by His own action (Romans 3:23).

How would He do that, for I am sure it would be free!

It was, like E=MC2, simple because it involved vast understanding, and in this case, vast action.

What  action ?

God did the hard work of creation, with illimitable logic and power. He did the work of salvation with nothing less, but it was more personal, for after all, He COULD have simply deleted man, rubbish tin job.

I like the notion of God acting personally, because I am personal and any theory, model, hypothesis or approach, which as with creation in general, so here, throws in personality with its conceptions and creativity, its logic and it fallacies often chosen for personal advantage, its nobilities, often sacrificing the person himself or herself, for love, is merely delirious. We are to ACCOUNT for things, not make up things like them, but lacking their essential nature, and calling the shots in entire irrelevance as, I  must say, naturalism consistently does.

God acted, then, personally in salvation. He came TO the creation (just as a mechanic comes to your car, in an action quite separate from the factory work in getting the thing made at all)), to fix it. You see that in John 3:15ff., Titus 2-3, Isaiah 48-55, Psalm 2, 16, 22, 110, as in Isaiah 40, Micah 5, Zechariah 9-14, Daniel 2, 7, 9, for example. You see it foreshadowed*21 in Genesis 3.

How could He do that ? and why not just act in supreme and distant power, marvellous and mighty, practical and effectual, but not quite so personally involved ?

He became a man, just as author could readily project into a book being written, and take up a post within the narrative as one of the characters. It is not difficult at all, since you are so far beyond them, and have imagination, and know what people are, and what you want to do.  In fact, it gives you immense power, although in realism, it may require some payments and troubles to which you would have to be willing to go, freely, since they do not understand.

He did that! I must say, this explains my sense of wanting to be taken seriously, for the whole thing IS serious, and nwo I come to think of it, I am not so much interested in being routed by a bureaucrat even if the name were that of God.

It is then fortunate for you that your pet aversion does not here arise.

What did He do ?

He showed His power, in simply correcting diseases on a magnificent and masterful scale, overturning the worst in droves*22 ; He spoke works to explain how we should act and why; He met fallacious foolishness with inescapable wisdom, challenge with power as in the command to the paralytic to take up his very bed and walk, when challenged about His personal know-how and position (Mark 2). He risked everything repeatedly, with sovereign poise, putting things up for experimental verification AT THE LEVEL OF GOD, the author showing the characters by self-appointed test who he was. Many were  delighted to meet the author, and were not ashamed to listen to his analysis, his diagnosis and prognosis for the race, and as a Physician of body and soul, demonstrating His authenticity continually, regarded Him with amazed and thankful delight, learning from practical lordliness, and applying it with assiduity.

I say, I like this. Does it have a centrepiece ?

It does. He declared, as God had done for millenia, that sin requires two kinds of results, one or the other. You can, as it were, naturalistically, try to excuse yourself, and declare, Why, this is just me! this is what I do! (with the more and more normal lack of grammar as man goes off the rails in speech, rather as Orwell suggested he would do, in vacuous self-destruction, bit by bit, with morals a close second). In this way, you ignore the realities. The other possibility: You face your inferiorities - no need for a complex, as with a squeak in a car, just oil the thing! You look for pardon, you hope for peace, and you look up, not down or merely within.

Seems good to me.

He was most realistic. Millions, no billions do the same thing in much the same way. They die. This is part of the program which goes WITH deposition of life, by birth, relinquishment of life by death. There is an author's reason for that. Sin is impossible for life, for although it can take it, it mocks any thought of continuing for it for eternity, in peace or with understanding. It grows, it seeks to justify itself, it lusts for power, it resents, it has jealousy, it hates, it harrumphs, it glisters with its own goodness and attacks others, it misunderstands, it judges, it is a lout and a rubbish bin, a lordly denial of truth in the midst of a morass of mess which it does not even recognise, because it has never known any better, and refuses all inconvenient evidence as an obsession.

My! it would take something to penetrate and rectify that; but with the Author, no doubt He has His ways with salvation, just as He evidentially did in creation.

It did. That something was the Author's own life. Of course, as Author, he could resurrect Himself outside the covers and come back. Christ foretold repeatedly not only that He would do this, be physically resurrected, as the Bible had foretold, His very body being excluded from the normal process of rotting, but when it would happen. It would be 3 days after they killed Him. He also specified that they would ABHOR Him, and use His innocence as a spur for spitting, clouting, and vastly evil killing. This in fact had been done from Him as Author long before in the history of the book.

He did this then ?

Step by step, without haste or delay, He met it, took it, was crucified, a spectacle of sin its being borne, sin as a guilt with penalty and nature on display at Calvary, and having done this, duly rose from the dead, so that people in their normal rationalisations, are always trying to escape this; but Rome under whose rule it happened, could not escape it, the Sanhedrin, the semi-force and law body, religious as it was, could not stop it, no one could produce the body, nor limit it, nor could the well-known, well-marked tomb display contents.

What of the soldiers ? Clairvoyantly, they told what had happened while they were asleep, in one of the most anti-scientific scams you could imagine. What a witness ? Did you see the accident and can you testify what happened, my good fellow ? Oh yes, he replies, why I was asleep in the car when it happened. Such a  man would have to resemble either a moron or a lunatic. We however are not dealing with such, but with a coherent account of the greatest train robbery of all time,  Christ the author evacuated from the dungeons of hatred,  EVEN THOUGH He had foretold that this would happen AND WHEN (quite an exploit, to 'rob' where and when you say, and not be found out!), hold up the train of death, and leaves it with the treasure, His own body.

It had only to be displayed. There only had to be a rational explanation; and there was; but it was of something else, just as is creation a revelation of something else, not mere question-begging humbug.

What was that something else ?

It was the continuation of His disciples, with miraculous power and conviction intact, once they saw Him, and He met reality checks here as always, allowing Thomas, scientifically inclined,  to poke about in the wounds, to assure himself it was the same person and one who was THERE, while not allowing himself to be limited as before death, when the need to be fully human prevented improper liberties being systematically present. He ate with them, He spoke with them, He served them breakfast, He consulted with them about the nature of His actions, and taught them from the Bible where it had all been indicated before, that which He had now done.

After He left, donating the Gospel for the time before His return, AFTER this supreme test for man, one that FOLLOWED the one in Eden, when man fell, allowing this time not departure, but return to the Lord, He . ..

The Gospel ? what is that.

It is the facts so far noted concerning the incarnation - that's the name for His becoming man, starting in infancy, the rejection of sinners of His sin-solution, His presentation of it anyway, on the Cross, in cancelling guilt by assuming it vicariously in Himself, offering Himself as the Just for the Unjust, His attesting the power of God as before in miracles and words in confrontation, now with body and teaching afterwards, with provision this time, following the death and resurrection, for the power of the Holy Spirit to meet His people, as it did and is recorded in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, and concerning repentance  and redemption.

I see, we have to acknowledge defects, suffer a recall for rectification, and He pays for this recall, and since He did not have to, but the things had to be met, and the errors met, it is called, person to person, redemption, a buy-back.

Yes, and thus the wrath of God at the spoliation of His creation is met by the anguish of His own death in the person of His incarnate Son, His Word,  thrust like a novel that is transcended, yes a person who expounds, exhibits and in Himself presents God, and the pardon of God becomes concrete in the resurrection.

I have to receive this ?

More than that: you have to receive HIM!

Of course, that is a delight, since God is the ONE PERSONAL BEING I desire above all else.

But you see, it is not just a feeling that you receive, or a philosophy ...

Of course not, I would not take that from anyone, it is God whom I take, in Christ, and than God for that.

 

 

NOTES

*1 See Refuting Compromise, by Dr Jonathan Sarfati,  pp. 341ff.. This work gives in this area, a convenient summary of many features in the dating area, which have been explored and developed by many for decades. Argon residues from other processes in rocks or materials contributing to the formation of a given rock, can greatly distort values, making unknown parents the source of the alleged age of their progeny. Since argon is readily moved, its considerable presence in allegedly ancient rocks becomes one more anomaly for the ancient dating concept, just as is mirrored in so many other lines of evidence, such as the continued existence of the continents on this earth, if it were as old as alleged, in view of current erosion rate.

The whole world would have to be changed, in laws and evidences, were naturalism to be true: it is quite simply dealing with a different world with a different causal system and beginning than the one we are in: and theirs is made far more easily that the universe that God made, for in their case, it lacks reality (cf. Reflections ... Ch. 5, Ch. 6, SMR pp. 264ff., 284ff., Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4 ). You simply imagine it.

Results readily attain to more than the puzzling level.  Thus, the argon factor enabled it to be determined that rocks from a recent volcanic eruption in New Zealand, were millions of years old. Argon residues which can provide such distortion are further evidence of a younger world, for they have had too little time to escape, in actual fact!

Similarly, helium (cf. Sarfati, Refuting Evolution, p. 113) lingers where its dispersal would be expected. Sarfati, notes that the RATE scientists (a specialist group of researchers concerned with Radio-isotopes and the Age of the Earth) found that helium is a gas subject to ready diffusion, and that it should all have disappeared from the rocks after about 100,000 years. However, it appears some 58% of that to be generated from the decay in view, is still there. This topic has been the subject of extensive examination in the various elements for many years, and these recent findings merely confirm what has long been protested.

 See also Radioisotypes and the Age of the Earth, by the RATE scientists. ,

*2  See Sarfati,  op. cit. pp. 358ff.

*3 Sarfati, op. cit, pp. 358ff..

*4 Sarfati, op. cit. pp. 383ff..

*4A Sarfati, op. cit., pp. 355ff.

*5 See article by Dr Andrew Snelling, in Answers magazine, January-March 2010, pp. 72ff., with numerous references to the points made. See also Radioisotypes and the Age of the Earth, including Chapter 4. See also Sarfati, op.cit.  p. 378, and Refuting Evolution, p.  110, for processes which readily distort presumptive assumptions, and give reason for the anomalous results, self-contradictory from different methods, and contrary to the input relevance for the mathematical model.

*6 Snelling as for *5.

*7 See Refuting Compromise, by Dr Jonathan Sarfati,  pp. 348ff.. See also TMR, Ch. 7, Section E.

*8 See astrophysicist, Dr Jason Lisle, in his explanations in "Taking Back Astronomy", pp. 48-49.

*8A

Re the findings and work of Lord Zuckerman and others in this domain, see SMR pp. 172, 204-205, 248.

*9 See Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny, Section 8.

*9A See Sarfati,  op. cit., pp. 384ff.. He traces the anomaly, on uniformitarian grounds, of having any continents left after the alleged billions of earth. Still more acute, is the problem of explaining mountains still here after so long a time, in view of current attrition rates. In conformity with these mysteries for those mentally manacled by such theories, is the points that vast continental plains exist, with very uniform surfaces in terms of expectations, had the ravages of time in fact exhausted themselves on such surfaces. The overlays noted by Morris

*10 See Sarfati,  op. cit., pp. 333-341.

*11 On this, and the successful predictions of Humphreys, see for example,

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/tba/age-of-the-universe-2

In particular, it is to be noted that Dr. Humphreys’ model made a verified prediction of the magnetic field  strength of the planets Uranus and Neptune. The verification came from the Voyager spacecraft. Likewise he predicted residual magnetism for Mars. His underlying, Bible-based concept, has allowed application with success to many astronomical data, in some cases, in stark contrast to predictions present from naturalistic sources.

Another fascinating fact in this astronomical area has the same confirmatory result. When cosmic rays strike nitrogen, high in the skies above, there is the production of C14, the radioactive variety of carbon. This has a relatively short half life, that is, time for half of the amount present to emit and cease to be radioactive (halves continue for each period, of successive residues, until shortly, there is only the most infinitesimal amount left). The maximum time for which this fast-departing radioactive element can continue and be able to register itself reasonably is  100,000 years. Nevertheless, this radioactive variety of carbon is still found in allegedly ancient substances, such as coal and diamonds. The date of naturalism readily assignable for coal could be in millions of years, for the diamonds, a billion. The difference between one billion and 100,000 is four noughts. That is, the expectation is denied 10,000 times: it is as if to say to naturalism, not 1000 times no! but 10,000 times no!

The astro-physicist, Dr Jason Lisle, points this out in his work, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, pp. 22ff.. 
 

*11A

See Scientific Creationism by Dr Henry Morris pp. 153-156.

 

*11B

Dr Harold Slusher moved on from Kelvin's young earth estimates, derived from the rate of cooling of the earth and the time for this, to take account of radioactive ingredients, found in the top part of the earth's composition, and in The Age of the Earth found that the result still left the earth with a cooling time, even if assumed of great heat at first, far less than uniformitarianism required. In his work, The Age of the Cosmos, he brings his astronomical expertise to bear once more (pp.39ff.), in analysis of nickel inputs into the oceans, their considerable rate and again, on uniformitarian assumptions, the necessity of a time far shorter than required by such theories, for the concentration observable. This is one of the elements relevant to 11A above, which is a very composite item with enormous concurrence of rates and results, in the direction of a young earth. Dr Henry Morris considers this in his Scientific Creationism, pp. 153ff..

If you want to assume things you do not know, and imagine things of a relatively static character, you meet continual contradiction from facts. Things in fact did not reach their current state by just being, as they have causatively both to begin and be developed. To assume they were always moving along, without production or development, gains these empirical results in collision with such assumptions,  as would not only be expected, but virtually predictable.

When one relates to knowledge FIRST however, and finds data and interprets it, there is only one result, and that is an earth of an age so markedly contrary to that culturally made convenient, with endless-seeming propaganda, as to be almost comic in conception.

Trying to force data to fit theories by making more theories which in turn do not work, you find the opposite of science, peace of mind or adaptation to reality. It is like books: it is not really a matter of measuring how fast dust begins to lie on them in a shelf, or how fast the pages yellow. This might be relevant in an exceedingly limited environment, and one in which they do not need, in order to be, first to be conceived, then written, then printed and then set in combination with shelves, and then caused to lie there in a given environment. Such mystic misfits, anti-causatively, for an ingenious universe just arriving from nowhere in particular, or just being through the virtues of some magic, muddle or irrationality in the field of origins, or alighting as from someone's imagination, whether this be the idea with things large or small, find only the anomalies in practice, which their antilogies gain in principle (cf. Deity and Design,  Section 8).
 

*11C See Sarfati, op.cit., pp. 353ff.

*12

Nilsson's remarkable work, in which his disgust with the slavery of many years trying to apply inapplicable theories to flood data, and his relief at moving at least in the direction of data-constraint, bears the name: Synthetische Artbildung.

 Heribert-Nilsson has been professor of botany, Lund University, Sweden, and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.  See also

http://creation.com/gould-and-heribert-nilsson

 

*12A

See Dr Duane Gish: Evolution: Challenge of the Fossil Record.

*13 See Henry Morris in Scientific Creationism pp. 107 ff., where he gives evidence not only of trees appearing through several strata of coal and rocks, but displaced trees, upside down, with no soil base, requiring rapid burial.

See also The Answers Book, Ham, Sarfati, Wieland, p. 76. John Mackay of Creation Research has dealt with this topic in combination geological excursions and videos, dramatically exposing the repeated evidences over wide areas. Among recent videos on exploration in such fields are: Darwin on the Rocks, and Darwin's Evolution. Darwin's intimations and extrapolations are among the most deleterious exhibits of what reduces 'science' to contra-evidential guesswork, unadorned by logical basics, known in the history of man, since the ancient Greeks - that is, in what purports to be serious thought. Producing magnificence out of removing dead stuff is another delusion, which ignores relevant thrust and power, as if it were the last thing to be considered. In this, Darwin has become the maestro of the missing interface, for relevant action.

Worse, if possible, he acknowledged that the rocks were the greatest enemy to his theory, and seemed oblivious of the enormity of supposing that evidences of botched failures should vastly and continuously attest the witlessness of the literally witless, in trying or in some way moving to make things of genius, man not excluded.

If genius works, that is notable; to create or made or bring into existence what has this power, by moving particles about witlessly, when for alleged millions of years they do not even incorporate wit, and bringing the notoriously brilliant from the depths of what lacks it, is a fantasy on causality which only a detestation for his earlier thoughts of clergyman, or similar emotionally disturbed aversions,  could well produce. His sadness at losing a sense of beauty is a psychological addendum. The human mind can be tortured only so far, before it begins to yield to abuse, whether this be intentional or not, short of a miraculous divine intervention (Isaiah 57:16). Delusional Darwinianism finds comfort nowhere in relevant evidence, a point well made by Denton in his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.

*13A See The Genesis Flood, Morris and Whitcomb,  pp. 180-210.

*14 See Austin's extremely clear and well-attested volume, filled with geological detail:

              Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe.

In Chapter 6 in particular, he shows from practical realities in rock sequence,  that even isochron methods of dating can bring what uniformitarian assumptions would make the youngest rocks to appear to be those found at the greatest depth, in 'pre-Cambrian' formations, while 'oldest' rocks are found 'on the surface among the Quaternary.' Similar discordance between evidence and theory of deposition type and order in rock strata is shown on a large or even continental scale, by Dr Henry Morris, in notable work, The Genesis Flood (for example in pp. 180ff.).

Here he attests ready and almost seamless lines between strata supposedly developed one on the other, with a disparity of millions of years, along with unsustainable ideas, to save a theory, concerning massive overlays to rescue a supposed order. This anomaly he exposes. Time is not so kind to surfaces, and massive plains do not lie so level for so long.

Such is neither natural nor explicable in the scale in view, being thus in line with normal erosion of evidence for the sake of theory, in naturalism. This theory thus becomes a name for the unnatural and the ill-attested; for there is nothing natural in what is based on pretty ideas, but what in fact has adequate causation both for its existence in the first place, and mode of existence in the second from forces and foundations correlate to what is found.

Assumptions which do not match independently ascertainable realities are to be changed, not chosen. Similarly,  fossils in the Canyon rocks (Austin, op. cit., p. 147), in general trend, contradict uniformitarian assumptions in major points, just as Nilsson at such length declaimed, in his catastrophic scenario, evolutionist though he was. In changing, he had some relief. Thus, a flood derivation of actual fossil order in the rocks, and origin, with many seemingly almost wholly uneroded seams between alleged strata with millions of years between deposition (cf. op.cit. pp. 42-43,74-78), gives a perfect answer to the demanding data. Moreover, cases like those of Mt St Helen's provide verifiable evidence of considerable similarities of structures formed suddenly under catastrophic conditions.

It is necessary not to allow ludicrously anomalous and preposterous ideas, based on philosophic preference, to displace actualities, or assumptions such as made in dating techniques, showing vast divergences among themselves; nor to let departure from physical requirements of a practical nature, to rest for all that, in the minds of man, if truth is to be found. Evidence may be tempest-tossed among men; but the suffering of the process, this is merely to ask for tempests of a more contemporary character.

On the contrary, truth is indispensable, and mercy follows on its heels, for it leads to Him who gives both, and has given them (SMR).

*15

See Wake Up World! ... Chs 4-6, esp. the last.

See also on Gould, and Nilsson, http://creation.com/gould-and-heribert-nilsson

When such topics are debated, with gradualistic opportunism wanting to sprout new designs from nowhere, you have, in view of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the realities of information production, the fossil record and the collision it bears with the facts, such interesting confrontations as are often hilariously shown in debates. A good example is found in some of the blow by blow reports of them, shown in the work From Fish to Gish, by Marvin L. Lubenow. 

Re the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its downward direction for energic level, in increasing entropy,
the norm for anything created as may be seen in this world, and which has yet to find an exception, see:

SMR 1, pp. 8ff., 17ff.; 332Aff., The gods of naturalism have no go!   7
TMR 8, pp. 200ff., 210ff., 224ff., 226ff., BEN 68, 82 cf. SMR 329ff., 315Aff.,

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

Swift Witness 4, 5 (STEP 2, 3);

Stepping Out for Christ Chs.  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 Wake Up World! ... Ch. 4.

Together with this, on the parallel topic of information production, relevant and parallel,  see:

The Track of Truth ... Ch. 3, together with:

THE DESIRE OF THE NATIONS ... Ch.2,  Epilogue

LITTLE THINGS Ch. 3 (esp. *3),
THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS Ch.     4,
DANCERS, PRANCERS, LANCERS AND ANSWERS Chs.    3,  5,
JESUS CHRIST, DEFACED, UNFAZED: BARRISTER OF BLESS Ch.   4,

THY WORD IS WONDERFUL  Ch.        5

Beautiful for hilarity is the side-steeping marvel that would try to avoid the impact of observational fact which is behind the never-observably falsified Second Law of Thermodynamics, which shows falls from specificity towards inertness as the trend.

Let's take a case.

In this wiggle, there is the concept that you can multiply universes (sorry, multiverses), and in some way imagine a way out of what is found in empirical fact. To  do this, you invent a non-seen universe and make this one go down, so that overall, our one might go up, as it once did, in that first of all it arrived and then increased as Genesis 1 indicates, and history shows,  in kinds of things, each sovereignly made in kind.

Suppose now we start, as is becoming for the naturalist, with nothing. After all, why solve problems by begging questions ? Anyone can do that, whether in metaphysics or in politics. The first logical step from nothing HAS TO BE nothing, since  nothing has no components, including future or past.

That won't do, so let's watch them as they go. Next try ? Just HAVE (begging the question again ? but without God there is nothing anyway for anything to come from,  except for beggars, who perhaps have hope of some non-divine pittance coming from somewhere or other . .. up there ... somehow) a universe. Make it nice and simple. Now have another (don't mind if I do ? ). That makes two, all for nothing. Now have one go up (but that's the whole point, to get it up ? don't worry about it, just put it there, for this has to become and is virtually another version of the beggar's opera!). Now the one you sent up, having gone up, the other one can go down, and it still is neutral overall. But how did the other one get up enough to have anywhere to GO down  ? Again, don't worry about it, keep to the beggar's theme.

Right, then one goes up,  and the other goes up, and then after only two major miracles in kind, one  can go up more and the other down a bit to compensate. How do they manage doing all this without information from intelligent sources ? Answer as before (put it on a tape and replay, simpler).

In other words, you have to GET UP in order to come down. And the net begging of the question is always the same. The power to go up is missing; playing about with assumed things you just have stashed around does nothing but prolong the agony. If things only go down, when left to themselves without new information or intelligence, you can't get up. Imagination will always do it, as when sodden labourers, finished and drunk, imagine upwards while the payment for the drinks is yet to be met.

If you want a new universe, one is available and will come (Isaiah 51:6, II Peter 3), but wait for it. You can't just make these things. You have to find the way to deal with life in this one. Fortunately for mankind, God already knew that before He created (Ephesians 1:4). Imagining God to be dumb is one of the dumbest anthropomorphisms ever made.  WE are not as dumb as all that. His plan is restoration through regeneration, first of sinners and then of a universe. It is useless and unproductive to make up new ones, with other laws, in the mind, and to try to inhabit these. Imagination is productive when the power adequate to apply it is to be found; but it is not so in man.

 

 

*16

See Dr Michael Denton: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 277-278.
 

*17 As for *16 above, and see also Denton's exceedingly informative Ch. 5, op. cit., where typology is examined historically and evidentially with similar hierarchic conclusions.

This ordering on a systematic basis of type, and not on an aggregative basis of procedures upwards, is one of the empirical realities to which Denton insistently and persistently proceeds. Typing,  either making to a type, or in a way susceptible to reflection in type-style analysis,  is the result of typing forces, creative actualities which IMPEL and do not merely accompany indifferently in logical forms and formats, what comes to be. Denton attests that there is a correlation between impulsion and compulsion and when we move past species level, what is found to be a fixity of kind that is both inescapable and confirmed by multiple lines of logical evidence within the array of life.

Not continuity in living forms, no, not a climbing as it were on each other's backs with singular aptitude and address, and so creating conditions and constraints of their legal own, despite their 'lawless' nature, this is not the attestation of the evidence, as Denton shows in successive investigations of aspects of this field. It is not this, but its very opposite,  discontinuity, which is the order of the day, and to the empirical and systematic point, Denton insists in this area, that discontinuity is what is empirically found in nature, in the matter of living things, and continuity is found only mentally, in the mind of dissentient man.

In this, he is accurate, for the extrapolation from of minor and often governable variation by deliberate design provisions, such as Williams so well attests (cf. Helpless Hitches and Holy Healings, Godless Glitches and Divine Dealings Ch 4, ), to imaginary progressive upward mutation with no results available from information production, despite this being the internal coded nature of the DNA, is like that from earth to air, air to thought, thought to will. It is baseless in observation as in information theory. It is of the same order as that of a political promise machine, which gains access by being full of promise, and exit later, by being empty of facts in accord with the words!

To move from such minor and design-despatchable variants, as in the thought of the exponents of the secular mould, to creation's masterpieces,  by a milling mix-up of what lacks powers beyond those internal to itself and discernible in its actions, whatever be its troubles, this is one of the schoolboy howlers of the invasive troops, now grown a little, which seek to overturn creation. All they create is a fuss and a confusion which does little to help the earth, except to move to judgment. For this, it is increasingly and in many ways, showing great aptitude (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5).

 

*18 Observable Conformity to Type.

As has long been noted, the conformity of humankind in type at the physiological and even psychological level is astounding in its completeness and competence. Vast arrays of sophisticated apparatus, apart from the degradation and disease natural to a design in the presence of forces which can molest differentially, operate in staggering degrees of conformity. Anatomy and physiology have vast conformities and complex constraints.

Again,  at another level, one can relate to people of all nations, even noting the deforming, informing or reductive effects of culture, in this or that case, and finding how it is an overlay readily dismissible normally, once obsessive feelings drift. One can find humour, tenderness, kindness, even in the cruel, sold out to surviving, like a captain interested only in number one on the bridge. While different conventions can become axiomatic, social critics often expose these; and whether they be good or bad, populations sometimes veer sharply in this way or that, before returning from rigid extremism.

Of course, the Creator only can bring absolute change to a heart, so that it is restored to its original and workable state, but on the opposite side, you have the Red Guard Revolution of horror, in China, where a nation strong on devotion to parents and moral confines, lurched like a car under a drunken driver, into horrendous passions of overthrow. After a while, things of more realism, began to revert, and other ideas came to the fore; and many viewed with disgust these ferocious features of a fallen philosophy, where force became god, and faceless humanity suffered what Borneo natives might have sought, years ago, and wrought by military and suppressive means. Pre-occupation with the features of man has often led to passionate revolt and assault,  whether from head-hunters lifting off faces literally, or loss of face socially, so culturally forceful in China. As the one went, so may the other; but not so readily goes the pride, fear of mockery and desire to remain important, lying back of so many of these posturings.

For that, the power of the Creator in regeneration is the specific, empirically, and logically (cf. SMR Chs.  3, 4 , 5 and 7).

This is expressed among many other foci, in two features. One is language. As illustrated in Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4, language is itself a fascinating, complex, richly invested deposit in many, with vast hinterlands of operational felicity. It is like a castle in a kingdom, the moon over the earth, lustrous, informative, a gift vastly effective in conceptual analysis and scientific investigation alike, subjectively alluring, objectively confident. This symbolic means of externalising and implementing cogitation is also seen in the Bible, as the work of God in this field, made available to man, and in Jesus Christ, the Word of God explicit, whose Work of manifestation, declaration is no mere function, but integral to the godhead.

Thus there can be, and has been communicated to man, not in words only, but in deeds with voice attached, an entire cosmos of comprehension, meaning, an investiture of identity for man, and a commission for healing, not by bureaucratic means, but direct and intimate personal action. It lies in the word facility of man, the word projection by God, with the understanding thus generated, and the WORD of God incarnation by God, to perform the actual works that the words projected, foretold and offered.

As to man, in actual empirical fact, his bodily structure is generated for each generation by means of precision and program, brilliance and artifice, wit and wonder, and no wondering about things can alter this basic fact. If you get a golden egg for breakfast, this is not an area for reflection about statistics, but production interface and premises. For man, the immediate cause is rigor and precision, program, that verbal or symbolic representation of thought, so that what is symbolised is secured firstly by the symbol and activated as desired, and secondly by the propulsion of directed power and minute application. This same precision of symbolic utterance is also evidenced, when the new child comes and grows, in facilities to match the agilities of the programs, before even the logical power to interpret and survey its engineered causes comes to maturity, and in parallel, the spiritual and moral power, to decide how to use the lot.

What then of this provision, this time outside the DNA, both for the spirit and mind of man by language, by word ? Not with man, who is a created derivative, but with God, there can be creation of anything in any field of His desire. We make bridges, He is the Father of spirits.

What of the race's reaction, not only to its environment geologically, aesthetically, inter-personally among its own denizens, but to that word on which it depends, to that exposure in handbook and in holiness in Jesus Christ, the artificer, attested in the Bible as in history ? What has been man''s response to this abundant testimony both to what he is, by utterance both in non-verbal symbol and in verbal, and not only in verbal but in incarnate intimacy ? How has he responded to his source ?

He has flayed his neighbour, robbed him, lied about him, and lied about God. He has disguised, misused, maligned the evidences and sought to suppress the ineluctable realities by repetitive and often childish fetishes about his beloved 'nature', a mere recipient with himself, of the coded messages, and legally aligned directions in whatever force or format they arrive, so that they might integrate in one total overarching system, to which mind and spirit in man may then address itself.

The address has been brutal, demonic, devilish so often, at the highest places of human power, has been taught and wrought by so many fantasies of pride of intellect, arm, weapons, by so much callousness of heart and callowness of thought, that it is an amazing testimony to the LOGOS, the Lord, on whom all depends, that our race still exists. True this is the negative side, but pride and downfall have been so common and called for, that it has a cumulative effect, now ever growing, like that of a cyclotron.

The LOGOS, whose systems of mind inhabit our genes and our geniuses alike, whose systems to which thought can reach with intimacy of engagement with the universe about us, who has revealed Himself as predicted and performed in oversight of our history as He Himself predicted, when, Jesus Christ He came in love to redeem, continues. He acts as He said He would. He came as sent and has sent His Holy Spirit to do what He appointed in words, while here.

He came. What did man do ?

In fact, as to the joy of the Lord for man, this is often jerkily removed, either once by predicted crucifixion of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, or often by mental parallels to the same. Israel specialised in the first, and the Gentiles join them in multitudes in the accomplishment, this time internally, of the second. They scoff, they scorn, they ignore, they twist evidence as though it were the arms of Christ, being bent once more to carry His cross. This, it is the mental parallel, the spiritual parody at the same time, of the glory of God in the mocking mouth of not so pathetic man.

Even this, in the mercies of God, does not remove the use of language and the potential for understanding, in the matrix, in the mind and in the purvey of man, in view of the unitary applicability of spoken word and the divine power, observable in any race. Man continues, but not unmarred.

Man can only inherit an increasing inferno of power and vainglory, in all this by misuse, abuse or neglect of this provision both in his own speech and in his salvation by the speech of God.

However, MANY amid mankind may and often do escape from the clammy culture of using gifts for dissociation from the Giver. Instead, they trumpet His glory, His gifts, His grace, His foretold favour, His accomplished death, its precision of date of death (Christ, the Citadel ..., Ch. 2),  just like the precision in our own genes, His buoyant defeat of all effort to align Him with such as Lenin, a mere tomb item made visible with refrigeration his temporary respite, but this for the body only, is made clear, even what stirred His people to enthusiasm and courage, so that Europe its tormentor, sought to make itself a Christian body, in a few centuries after His death. His words remained; their impact and their fulfilment continued, people came as whole worlds of civilisation went. But the black-house effect of sin, this continues and it grows.

Thus in mankind, the cultural mode of reactionary negativity to salvation, the solace and the solution sent by word of God to what He made able to comprehend, this remains  prominent, and for many will  remain dominant, despite all that a divine grace has done.

Despite these morbid horrors among man,  the powers and underlying kind that is humankind manages to continue,  albeit while paying a heavy price for each ravagement of its fixed and splendid environment of mind and spirit, as it equally despoils in ignorance and lust, the physical one in which it breathes and heaves. In other words, even sin does not at first categorically alter man in his structure and functional capacities, though vastly in his quality, yet it does not leave him without the scars and debilities altogether, cumulatively crushing the race, in some cases compromising different functions, but this by no means entirely, the degeneracies of disease apart.

Naturally, this process is showing itself increasingly, since it is moved on the whole, by an aversion to leaving sin and finding health in the Creator by His long appointed means, the Gospel (cf. II  Corinthians 5:17ff.), while it continues to distance man's life from its inception in the day of creation. 'Long time, no see!' in this case is like a trumpet of doom. It is not that a fearless human  arrogance is to dismiss such a concept as cowardice, any more than having brakes on your car is cowardice, or a seat belt; it is rather this, that the more you erect your unbowed head in ignorance, while in fact dependent to a degree on specifications of a logical and ordered kind for the very existence of your life, and that about you,  the more you become a contradiction in terms, and refusing the merciful terms of God, you merely underline the conflict.

To be sure, as to the progressive deterioration, despite magnificent editing devices, in the midst of the modes of our race, and its conduct, this being the trend in any design for decrease of function over time: this does not leave man as such wholly immune! This pejorative feature is applicable to our very genes, as attested by Professor Sanford of Cornell University (The Word is WonderfulAppendix).

There is, he reasons, in statistical fact, a continuing downward series of multiple lapses in man's  genome,  which threaten the race. It is not moving upwards; it is moving downwards. It is not found inventing itself; it is found being subject to loss, reduction of efficiency and effectiveness. It attests which way you go without due care, amid troublous results of troubled hearts, in this case in the mire of its own misdoings. You do not become supermen by magic, but dunces by misdealings. You grow in knowledge, only to use more power to destroy more with more facility! and what does it show, but the concordance of divine mind with created mind in the areas allowed for participation, man and the fields on earth about him. Learning by gift, he assails the gift, and making gods of naturalism and mystique, as if mistake were endemic, as it is to the extent that sin governs, he kicks about now with ferocity, now with devilishness, now with callow pride, now with slit-eyed steeliness, until he exhausts all that he can find in perversion of reality, distancing from deity and desire for innovation, only to find he has gone nowhere, but is flinging himself to destruction (as in Hosea 14).

The race, the genome on the physical side, the mind on the mental, the spirit in the comprehending and surveying realm, it is not creating itself. Rather, it is being compromised as well as desecrated. It is suffering increasing lapse, as well from genetic loss as from confrontational dynamics directed as the mind and life of the Maker of its source code, conceptually investigable, brilliantly competent, unitarily productive in a multi-phase personal complex of equipment available for the mind of man, which is dirigible by his spirit. If this is often a new loss, the mind and body directing a servile personality, this too is mere degeneration. The need from God, it is regeneration; the plight of man, it is degeneration.

The point is that generation of these things is neither magic nor what is inadequate, but what has all the competence to configure, the address to imagine and the desire to create. The second point is that when it degenerates, it needs to be regenerated; and in this triple field of mind, body and spirit, there is only One who is competent. There is a manufacturer's recall, and it has been on for millenia; and some 'motorists' heed and go, and have the refit, but rather instead, for man, the new birth which is restoration in pardon and peace to the creative power of the rescuing God.

While these individual and church dramas continue, so does the hate, the vilification, the vileness in many, in many governments which increasingly hum with unholiness, and seek more unities of control to take over all the earth in one mandate, made by man, ignoring his Maker, seeking to blast a way through rock, not returning to the Rock which is higher than he. In all his puny pomp, he is mere derivative. He is not master even of himself.

The genome degeneration, little by little, year by year,   provides one more reminder that gifts are for a purpose for a time. Their eternity is not a matter of course, or nature, but of further gift; and the desire for eternity so strong in many, is a natural result of being created by the Eternal God. Aborting this is a kind of suicide, but its end is not so simple.

Everything is on gift, as you see in James 1:17, for a purpose; to ignore it, intellectually or spiritually, morally or physically, merely pleads the power of the creation in the face of judgment. By its very nature, such a procedure is blighted from the first and being blatant, judged in the end.

Why be judged for folly ? It is simpler not to commit it, and better yet, to be pardoned for it in terms of the Word of God, first in the Law of God, in  Isaiah and the Psalms, which projected truth and righteousness, then in Jesus Christ, incarnate, fulfilling manifold and manifest foretellings of His coming, in Him who paid for lie and unrighteousness for all who receive His pardon: this is as great as its coverage is effective (Isaiah 53:1-6, Romans 8:32). It is always sufficient and He has known from the first, before time, as an author his book, who were to be His, and of these He misses nothing. Meanwhile, He has spoken to man, to cities, to civilisations, given His invitations, given His judgments, and held up the testimony for all (cf. The Pitter-Patter... Ch. 4), consummating it in Christ Himself (cf. SMR Chs. 6,    8   ), saying, Come! Come! (cf. Matthew 11:28-30, Proverbs 1).

What then do we have on the positive side ? Freedom from the cyclotron of mutually operative charges comes for those who receive Him, and do so because HE has PAID for all that is to be redeemed, is available to faith, that is, by taking God at His word, and so acting. Indeed,  what a lot there was to pay! Be thankful therefore, repent and being regenerated (Titus 2-3, John 3), be replaced in the Father of spirits, from which you have come, before you go, not only with damaged genes, but in a death which yields to the spiritual pressure of rejection in the light of truth.

Unpleasant as with all disease, it is, but more so by far is the morbid pleasure to ignore it. God has an operation in store. THIS operation is not optional for life; it is compulsory for continuation and blessedness, for which life is formed. The fall and the curse on this earth, in its despatch, are past; your life is present; your future needs attention in the light of the past, both your own, and what God has in the past provided. It is not an illumination into man's hidden powers; but an awareness of your climate of sin. All outside Christ need a climate change, a new heart and a restored will, guilt stricken from the list of meetings to come.

As to the Gospel itself, it does not change. Its KIND is as sure as any other.  Moreover, being from the mouth of God, it is not even subject to deterioration (I Peter 1:24-25). It has been coming long (cf. Barbs ... 17), one theme. Man continues; but for any individual, nation, city, the end can be as sudden as any event: Olympic or otherwise. You may train for years; but the time comes. Here, it is time to know the Lord, and seeking peace with pardon, to receive His redemption from the Cross that speaks purer things that mere works (Ephesians 2:1-8, Titus 3:3-7, II Corinthians 5-6).

That is one of the blessed facts to which peace and continuation in kindness would seek, and there they find it.

*19 See Reflections ... Ch. 6, *2.

*20

See Wake Up World! ... Chs.   4,   5,   6.

 

*20A

This fact is rigorously attested in major fields in the approximately 2.3 million word 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

It is also given  exhibition in DEITY AND DESIGN, DESIGNATION AND DESTINY,

while the Bible's status is demonstrated in SMR, and applied in TMR. Its place in terms of reason and revelation is shown in REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER

while the place of science, organised and carefully assessed human knowledge in a specialised domain, is shown in SCIENTIFIC METHOD, with specialised application in TMR Chapter 1, and Chapter 7, Section E.
 

*21

This is the protevangelium (Latin based version of protevangelion, with Greek affinity, but the same thing)g. In this, man being subverted by the supernatural but limited power of deceptive Satan

(whose productions include countless deceivers ever since, often with the same appeal to distrust in truth and expedient adoption of some transparent lie or slightly adorned deceit),

has need of deliverance. 

In Genesis 3,  we find that God, in kindly delivering a curse for the present, before the actual death penalty would take place, as it has done for millenia, also gives the pre-gospel of redemption. Someone from woman,  He indicated, some man in the future,  would be gifted with a power  so  vast and a heart so pure that he could, no, not wind the clock back, but remove the power of the devil, whether to deceive or cause death. In so doing, He would be hurt, but not to His extinction, and the devil would be ended in all his power, to be removed for eternity. That is the prophecy of the heel and the head: His heel, Satan's head.

This supernatural advent, of a power not affected by the sin with which man is now afflicted, and so able to beat the devil, and thus of one which would be invulnerable, and deliver the race, being its source, and not merely one of them: it would be the end of the horror of sin in the world (cf. Romans 5). This would first bring health to the conscience and strength to the heart, a renewed vision and a peace past understanding, with holy living the joy of the road; and then it would bring the end (as in Matthew 24:12). The Age of Offer would become the time for the Return of Royalty, of God incarnate as Messiah.

God traced the plan in succeeding books and years, through Moses (Deuteronomy 18) and the prophets,  giving the date for the death pangs to be suffered by the Deliver in Daniel (cf. Christ the Citadel ... Ch. 2), and the manner of the death, its reason and result, as in Isaiah and the Psalms and many prophets.

In this way, He allowed the world to continue until Christ came and did what had been so long divinely in mind,  and declared to man, and this He did, at the appointed time. He performed the work of redemption.

Now we await this next step, equally foretold for millenia and for long before Christ: the end of the Gospel Age, and the judgment session (Acts 1, Matthew 25, Daniel 7, Isaiah 66). Christ's advice ? Be ready (Matthew 24). His provision  ? His own life as death penalty payment, together with an inhabiting strength through His Spirit, with adoption of redeemed sinners as children of God (I John 3).

*22

This is attested in various first hand accounts, such as those which follow,  and was both one reason why so many followed Him in such throngs,  and why those who elected not to follow Him went to such lengths to  rid themselves of one whom  they both envied and feared,  just as they feared there might be repercussions from Rome, which had conquered the nation.

In particular they feared that if His popularity became a basis for a popular presentation of a kingly crown (as in fact was attempted, as you see in John 6), there could be repressive results from the imperial throne. In fact, of course, not only did He dramatically attest the opposite, and show this in word and deed with Pilate and at His arrest, but it  was  also so manifestly contrary to His whole teaching as in the Sermon on the Mount,  as to be  mere craven mockery, or a cunning connivance with deadly desire for the status quo at all costs. It indeed, to be at all costs,  as history would shortly show; for  as  they were bent on  removing the Prince of Peace, so they inherited the devastation He had foretold (Matthew 24:1ff., Luke 19:42ff.), and that amid His own tears, shed like His blood for them; but they were less effective, though they did show the heart. People may weep over you, and it is beautiful, their compassion; but it is the blood, the death price of Christ, which is needed to be received, in order for the mercy of God to be effective.

The folly of fearing other things, and this the more when they are based on irrationalism, readily refuted (John 18:36,  Matthew 26:52ff.), is amply and even  abundantly shown in the fact that in one generation, Jerusalem, having committed the greatest and the least of all  murders in all time, did not even have a building to stand:  its soil was polluted and its people were evicted by that very imperial  Rome,  for its own reasons! So does fear breed what is feared, and unmanliness (John 11:45ff.), unman man!

Matthew 4:24 And His fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought to Him all sick people that were taken with various diseases and torments, and those who were demon-possessed, epileptics, and paralytics; and He healed theme healed them. Great crowds followed Him - from Galilee, and from  Decapolis,  Jerusalem, Judea and beyond Jordan. .
Matthew 12:15 But when Jesus knew it, He withdrew himself from there: and great multitudes followed him,
and He
healed them all ...
Luke 4:40 Now when the sun was setting, all those who had any, sick with divers diseases, brought them to him; and He laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them.
Luke 6:17 And He came down with them, and stood in the plain, and the company of His disciples, and a great throng  of people out of all Judea and Jerusalem, and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon,
who came to hear him, and to be
healed
of their diseases ...
Luke 6:19 And the whole crowd sought to touch him: for virtue went out of Him, and He healed them all.