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CHAPTER FOUR
LOGICAL MERCIES
How marvellous that there is only one religion which meets all logical specifications, just as there is only one known universe, and one type of logic and one preponderant DNA design and one universe of thought (cf. Predestination and Freewill Section IV), one salvation rationally attested and one confirmed destiny for good, multiply confirmed.
Likewise there is one successful destiny for man, one source for his possible freedom and one deliverance from his evil dynamic, practised by many religions but forbidden to the Bible-girt Christian.
It is not just that there is nothing else rationally supportable (as in SMR and TMR and considered in method in What is the Chaff to the Wheat Chs.3 - Ch. 4, in particular), but that the TYPE of thing is nowhere else to be found which is logically necessary and specifically confirmed as part of its procedures.
Thus, without repeating individual considerations, so often presented in this or that part on this site before, there has to be one God for nothing produces the same, and I am not that, and even if a person were deceived, it would have to be there to suffer the delusion; and logic admits confirmation of what may be rigorously.
The God would have to be one, since any system of gods requires a Maker of the system which is not the gods but their co-ordination, and a god which requires a system to live is merely a part of a system and hence a thing called into being within system and not God.
The one God would have to be not a liar, since then any explanation would help confusion and not truth, and so damage all access, and prevent verification.
Hence we find in Titus that God cannot even lie. It would contradict His minimum logical specifications. If he could lie, then he would lack the sufficiency which has no limits or prescriptions for him, being open to seduction from sources other than himself, and so subject to system and communication from beyond. This therefore would exist and he himself could not then be it. To be able to lie, in other words, is to be able to be a part of a system and anything able to be that has this facility, and so is not as such, eternal and beyond all, basis for any and condition for condition rather than conditioned by causality.
The opposing force can lie, and is exceedingly good at it, being cause of this facility in man, apart from the freedom which is constitutive of man, ground of his power to love, to think and become unruly, ridiculous, macho, mastiff-like, dove-like, angelic or hell-bent, surveyor in thought and detacher through deliberation of considerations from the automatic, irrational and wild, without being thereby insulated. It is the source of guilt, for despite some appearances, mankind as such is not lunatic, many having the habiliments of sanity and the grill of guilt.
As to the freedom of man, it is harassed by pride, dented by ambition, dirtied by deceit, tangled by sophisticated programs to prevail, dangled from delusion and much more; but it is there, like a broken hand. and under divine protection can operate in various degrees and deliverances. That is why many so much long for, hope for, feel for truth and understanding, feeling on the brink, or at the entrance, yet still wondering. There is need for access to truth which is not BY the very pursuit of it by a compromised party, twisted or tangled or obliterated or skewed.
There is only one place as shown in Predestination and Freewill in particular, where that truth exists, and that is in the One not subject to any, nor to entanglement through ambition or dissatisfaction, which would indicate a subordination to a compromising system from above and beyond it. In other words, such would not fulfil the minimal specifications for God without whom nothing - that is, nothing without an adequate cause as distinct from an inadequate begging of the question.
Therefore in that place, it is to be found, both in actualisation of concept, and in admittance to contents. This requires a divine willingness to share, and that an invitation. What is tangled in the domain of truth cannot in truth persuade what it wants to come clean and come out into the open. It is too closed itself. But what it CAN do, what man can do, is seek. That is the way for discovery, and if faith thrusts it on, so much the better. To assume yourself the product of what is not-God is merely delusion in itself.
What is next needed is to find empirically that there is such an invitation. For that you look for evidence, and may be much fortified, since a lack of that contradicts reason in making deluded and dissatisfied man necessary, feckless or reckless, hence portending a weakness in God, one to be filled if it be God indeed, and hence from outside Himself.
As shown in volumes noted above, and others, there is one book which opens itself to verification (we are not given reason in order not to use it), on a massive and continual scale over millenia. There are no others in this rationally adequate frame for such a test. Its word is frequently opened to test, and despite many confused and ignorant or deluded efforts, generation by generation, it stands. My own 25 year work in this field with its 25 or so million words and labours, has been an example. Verification and validation*1, both in concept, consistency, rationality, super-natural specifications and fulfilments, available power and testable direction are not only there, but attention is directed to their presence in the name of the Lord in this Bible, repeatedly, and test is encouraged (cf. for example, Isaiah 41, 44, 46, 48 with I Peter 3). It is rather fun to insist on test of what you know triumphs in it; but this is far more than fun.
I personally have found, almost without limit, attacks on the Bible so feeble, irrational, blinded by battle and confused by a sort of spiritual lust, that it may be said that my chief trouble has been even to see what on earth some of the assailants have in mind, and never was this more obvious than in seminary, where such captious and headstrong wisps of confusion were customarily presented, that my meeting of the challenge to refute at a crucial time in the lectures led to expulsion, the only answer to my exposure of the error in the material presented to us, which I ever got. It is true that the General Assembly of the denomination later instated me, after some ten years, but it was a strange argument, requiring force that was neither logical nor equitable, nor just nor in terms of the challenge made to us.
Reason has no answer to the refutations of such attacks, and this was an (expensive) illustration of that fact; the Bible continues to the present its long rational rule, that is, unique performance in terms of reason.
This then is the rule. We look, seek and find but one centre of testable communication matching the logical needs of deity, opening the rational tests for realism, and meeting the specifications required at the outset for such communication without which man is the dizzy product of deficient design.
The very finding of it is the first part of the answer. It had to be*1; it is. That is a just confirmation.
Then we verify by testing its various properties against the statements on its nature and origin, and finding this to a staggering extent, with a natural atmosphere for such a divine communication, that is one fitting, we accept as in any other rational discourse and discursion. It fits. Nothing else does. This is however far better than that. It has the NECESSARY minimum TYPE and nature of ingredients as noted along the way as we sent. In these things also, as to type, it is unique. It is in a logical category by itself.
It satisfies reason in profile as well as in procedure; in its demands, overt and overall; in type, as well as in detail. It can come only from its stated source for it requires it in order to be, and be explicable. It has in this, not only testing foundations but logical definitions to rely upon; and the most open avenues for light to enter and find, as when one enters a cave, or the rock structure at the top of a mountain.
It is systematically and adventitiously, rationally and continually co-ordinated with requirements, and constitutes unique confirmation of reason in its field, and the source of resolution of all logical problems confronted in philosophy, as to overview, so that nothing remains in confusion or contradiction. This has been shown especially in Light Dwells in the Lord's Christ.
It is when life is added to the spread, so that what one lives is itself a laboratory, that one finds the scope of these things. Misuse and faith alike have their results, and many are the verifiable features of the promises of God, negative and positive, as found throughout ages. The impossible (to men) becomes a part of life.
NOTE
See for example the following; also SMR Chs. 8-9, and main index on Bible.
Bright Light and the Uncomprehending Darkness Ch. 7,
Repent or Perish, Ch. 7, pp. 152ff.; Ch. 2;
TMR 5, 7 , It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, esp. *1A,
The Bright Light ... 7,
Christ, the Wisdom ... Ch. 6; BAB 29, 19;
A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3; SMR 3,
Little Things Ch. 5, Wake Up World! ... Ch. 5, End-Note 1A,
Tender Times ... Ch. 11;
Barbs ... 29, 19;TMR Epilogue, News 94; The Divine Drama Ch. 4,
Grand Biblical Perspectives 7,
SMR pp. 146, 271, 295, 422C, 1138;
TMR Appendix, Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 7,
What is the Chaff to the Wheat! Chs. 3, 4, 10, 11,
Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny Chs. 3, *3, 8,
and indeed all of this presentation of between 2 and 3 million words.