There are three aspects of the work of God which this morning I should like to consider. These are motion, emotion and devotion,
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CHAPTER 5
LOVE, LIBERTY AND THE LORD
Introduction
God is love, says I John 4.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,
says II Corinthians 3:17.
I am, and there is no God besides Me,
states the Lord (Isaiah 44:6), and His verified and validated word, the Bible. This His works, including the universe, and His ways illustrate constantly.
You cannot have love without liberty, since then it would simply be constraint; nor liberty without love in the background, for then spite and hype and war and wicked subtleties and self-reliance and self-affirmation with needless ignorance distort and wrinkle the living surface of the earth. It is liberty within as well as without. Nor can you have peace without the Lord, for He has made it a point to overthrow all godless government, indeed any but that of Christ, till His return to rule what He has redeemed on this earth, and replace it in due time. You find this divine determination in Ezekiel 21:26-27. Turban and crown alike will be overthrown until He comes whose right it is, who then on this earth vindicates His wisdom, as in Isaiah 9,11, 32, Psalm 2,Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34.
Only He can create peace and all its requisites, and man's labours amid divine rebuff (Revelation 8-9), illustrate this more and more totally (cf. Matthew 24).
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There are three aspects of the work of God which this morning I should like to consider. These are motion, emotion and devotion, |
with some reference to
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commotion, demotion (Romans 5:12ff.), condemnation
(Matthew 12:41-42), |
MOTION AND CREATION AND DEFAMATION OF DEITY
As to motion, the creation of things that exist and persist but are not the source is a vast undertaking (which Hawking considers, it seems, to be best accorded to nothing or anything or something or other somehow, thus making inordinate vagueness the captor of reason, which will not slave for it: nothing does nothing, something must be adequate for all or it will never be). The things must be, to move, and move in accord with the laws of logic, to be analysable after the event, in workable fashion. In this made universe, logic must be created and constantly rule - the very term LOGOS means not only word but logic, expression; and God's expression is exceedingly clear, as we draft the law which drafted for us, was ordained by the law-maker. To make anything, you need to have what it takes.
To sight and research, beneficial mutations involving new information are not being found, nor is new information seen written in new DNA. As God stated, the creation is finished. This verifies that. It is factually finished as declared by God Himself. Found: only complete sets of cells, organically complex and not new, can be turned on or off; but their step by step genesis is no more discoverable by observation than creation itself. What is finished includes unified gene groups which are switched on or off. They no more act as still being made, than the optional facilities like air-conditioning in a car (cf. Journal of Creation 28(2), 2014, Beneficial Mutations: Real or Imaginary? Part 2).
What is more, as to creation (Appendix), the overall genome actually decays, as declare various notable scientists after much research, and this has become a major new emphasis; indeed the human genome, it is now found, is decaying overall so quickly that the idea that it contradicted the well-known second law of thermodynamics is now seen as ludicrous. Our terminus on this earth as a race becomes quite obvious (cf. Matthew 24:22), except where God intervenes. This is what Christ declared in Matthew 24. Small wonder an Oxford emeritus Professor of Physiology declared that the neo-Darwinian theory which still lingers, is now disproved in every particular - John Noble. After all, copying errors could never hope to cope with creation, nor nothing for its basis! Fads apart, it just fades. Researchers like J.C. Sanford, Emeritus Professor of Cornell ("Genetic Entropy" a volume of his), show the losses cumulative.
Creation is the name, whether of our creations, making us most familiar with the process ourselves, or of those God has placed, before whom we live. We are at different levels all specialists in it and know it so well. There is no excuse for pretending to be surprised at it. Then, with desecration, there is commotion (Eph. 4:17ff.), with wilful ignorance (shut eyes), alienation from life, the spiritual torpor of being past feeling, and the acrid sensationalism of living, as many now by death as principle (foretold Revelation 6). For mankind, demotion has invaded arid commotion (Romans 5:1-10).
DIVINE EMOTION AND RECLAMATION BY DEITY
Read Isaiah 59! its bent and its end! Now we move from motion to emotion. In the Journal of Creation Vol. 28(1), this year an article on 'overdesign' - the vast array of what surpasses any possible need for survival (once you get the creation), shows as example a fascinating array of facial expressions on a boy, staggering in their diversity. Sensitive EMOTION is heavily drafted on that most variable face! We as a race are experts in emotional diversity, and in artistic variation, in thought exercises, in creative engineering in mind and matter, yes and even in spirit (Psalm 99:8,106:29), for here we as a race tend mostly to arrogance either in false dynamic or disregard: for the set way is provided, as in a car manual, in the Bible but offset by desire.
The Lord is not an aloof oddity, as in Aristotle, nor only expert and mathematical, logical super-power, legislating Creation, thus enabling science in the discovery of His physical rules or laws. At that, they are not new laws, but novelty is simply man's slow discovery of them! They are THERE and things run on them, but back of them is God. It is He who is their cause; and as He looks on His work, even man in His image, He is far more than this, even concerned Creator and Saviour who gave all to gain any (John 3, Colossians 1). In Jeremiah 48, for example, we find Him stating that He will destroy much in the idolatrous Moab, but that in doing so:
"My heart will wail like flutes for Moab," even a nation not His own specially adopted one.
Again, of Israel, He declares in Isaiah 48,
"O that you had hearkened to My commandments,
then your peace would have been like a river,
and your righteousness like the waves of the sea,"
just as in Luke's Gospel, we find Christ weeping and lamenting, What longing and desire for the man in his self-ruinous follies, the Lord possesses; and He does not lapse till all is done, and completed, goes to its place. Again, He declares with vast longing,
"If you had known, especially in this your day, the things that belong to your peace! but now they are hidden from you eyes!" - Luke 19:42ff..
As a hen her chickens (Matthew 23:37), so would He have gathered them, but they were unwilling, He states. That is why He did not do so, He reveals. He is no tyrant, far less mind-manipulator.
Yet He would have all things reconciled to Himself (Colossians 1:19), and cites as in John 3:19 their preference for darkness, that it is specifically this which provides, despite all He has done, the ground for their condemnation. He foreknew who and why, for all. He is obviously more than reluctant that any pursue unrelieved and elemental rebellion, and in fact He went to the lengths of incarnation and crucifixion to make a free path out of ruin available (John 3:16) to all and any. The other options have no sustainable ground, but their results make refuse out of what mocks or ignores even divine grace (weeds not wheat).
So here is the divine emotion, and thank God for this, for His caring heart does not force or manipulate, but does from the very first in His own foreknowledge recognise His own. Before man was made in history, or fell, His was that same love that is evident in Christ. It was just as widely toward all, as when He was on earth, incarnate. He does not change (Hebrews 13:8).
Within this, He knows His own (II Timothy 2:19, Ephesians 1:4). Indeed, as in Isaiah 26:19, just as in HIS body He demonstrated the end of the terror of death for the error of man's life (Hebrews 2:14-15), so in the magnificence of His Creator's power it is as His body that each believer is raised likewise. The Prince of Life Himself is the paradigm and guarantee (Daniel 12, I Cor. 15:50-5).
Thank and praise the Lord His love is both practical and powerful, and as unsuperficial as the sea. But this is not the only loving type of action of the Lord, even towards a miscreant world.
DIVINE DEVOTION AND SUSTAINING BY DEITY
Thus, for example, There have been some most remarkable healings in recent years in the South African missionary site of Kwa Sizabantu, arising from European farmers who founded a mission, partly through the longing of one of them for an activity in Christianity today more like that in Christ's day. Though the emphasis is Gospel, the results include as if an aside, one of the most prodigious and sustained cases of thousands of persons coming, staying and seeking revival or restoration, so that even in Adelaide, as in other different places, a subsidiary is to be found. It is rather like the earlier staggering thousands of cures wrought in Jesus' name by missionary's wife, Elsie Salmon.
The power of God in honest exhibition like this can stagger, but it is no surprise when you study some of the marvels of sophisticated artistry and mathematical subtlety used in the creation itself, of which healing is a special restorative feature. Here is the work of the Creator in the name of the only Saviour (cf. John 14:12, 5:14-17). Everything about Jesus the Christ invites wonder, attesting His glory with the deity from whom He came, while exhibiting the message and regeneration offered.
Devotedly He cares, not only in body, but in all the actualities of life, right down to bringing down pride and bringing up help. He does not readily chide, but He can deeply challenge any superficiality, worldliness, sick traditions or self-reliant follies. You see some such things in principle laid out in Psalm 107, that cherishing and illuminating divine despatch, as in Mark 7.
To trust Him in crises is privilege (Psalm 46), for He is never outwitted; but it also can be purifying, for He suffers no niceties to obscure His concerns.
It is a life which He guards, as given, as given by grace into eternity, in John 10:9,27-28, just as David directly sought it as in Psalm 21, Paul relishing it in Ephesians 1:11, and glorying in its Giver (II Timothy 1:12). Psalm 73:24 lovingly reveals this: "You will guide me with your counsel and afterward receive me to glory." Eternity is man's home and hell is its omission. It is a design designation, a place to go, and everlasting destruction is not. It does not fit, like the missing life which precedes it. How blessed as in Titus 3, following the words on the love of God to mankind in Christ,
"but when the kindness and the love of God towards man appeared,
not by works of righteousness that we have done,
but according to His mercy He saved us,
through the washing of regeneration and the renewing
of the Holy Spirit."
A crown, declares Paul, is laid up not only for him,
"but for all who have loved His appearing" (II Tim. 4:8).
Divine love with the liberty without which it is mere forgery, and the eternity, lacking which there is mere pretence or pretension of what is far below God, like coal below the stars, endure with truth, in glorious wedlock (I Cor. 13). Who needs alternative! all such straying seethes.
Rejoice therefore in your Saviour, Guard, Guide, God, Gracious Sovereign with the brimming stream of His ministrations awaiting in prodigies of mercy to refresh. Call upon Him and never upon the flesh, rest in Him by faith who paid the ransom, is the redemption and sustains the restoration.
Original and Reverse Engineering
New data constantly manifest themselves and call for acknowledgement in their place, when the hallucinations of organic evolution are being exposed from time to time. People have different ways of starting with nothing, as the alternative and logical institution of man horrifies many, including the would-be autonomous. Something is now there. So you need a change from nothing as a supposed starting place. Otherwise, something not only is not going to be there, but imperviously cannot.
When you want to make something out of nothing, and then claim it is a natural thing, you must first evacuate yourself from this initial state (though there is nothing for it of which to be a state), since manifestly you were not there before made. Then you need to rid yourself of all the encumbrances and pretences, such as the operating system of cause and effect and the systematic field of substance, since neither of these is nothing. Next evacuate logic from the situation, since that is an ultimate organisation of systematics and semantics and symbolics and their assignations or denotations for which account must be made unless defeat is acknowledged. It has to come. It is there now. Nothing is not a good provider.
Then remove stories or modelling accounts based on the presentation in terms of logic itself, and hence traced in a logical seeming way, since these rely on what is not there in the model. With that done, there is nothing left; but while this is failure, why worry ? since this is the preferred base anyway, in this model, from which base effort is often made to have a universe constructed, in a combination of some sort of abstract solipsism, solecism, invalidity, antinomy and antithesis. This, nothing, at last as by definition at first, can do and does nothing. It is just for some, it takes some time to realise this.
But by contrast the results of ACTUALITY - which includes such elements in its nature as those captured and evacuated in the model above - whether employed prospectively or retrospectively, are very different from this. The nothing model ends with nothing necessarily and by definition which, if broken, removes the model. We are not talking about changing definitions, but creating worlds! It is best not to talk beside the point.
So something is always there since we are dealing with the TOTALITY, and if this EVER were ONLY nothing then it would have always to be so, a special case of the above. Moreover, what of the causes for a given model of universe creation ? These need to be adequate for the result which, once seen in its widest application is just and due. It is called creation and at our own level, we are involved in it continually. There is no excuse for pretending it is a strange thing; it is one of the commonest for us both as experients and observers of others. If the something in the model proposed, is not adequate, quite simply it CANNOT be the causal basis.
But let us proceed to the new work exhibited by Alex Williams in a relatively recent edition of Journal of Creation, Vol. 20 (1), 2015.
Williams was a co-author with Professor John Hartnett of Dismantling the Big Bang, and his articles appear always of great interest, including Parts 1,2 and 3 of Beneficial Mutations: Real or Imaginary? in the Journal noted.
Now when you cannot do a thing going forward on a given model, as with the nullity model above, or any of its equivalents, it may occur to some to seek and see not only some other model, such as what does not logically exclude itself and prevent success, by definition, and in particular some part of a striking character as a variant of study.
Williams shows us one of these, though of course with all the rest, it would be excluded by the nullity-at-the-outset model. Put differently, what fails reason overall, at the outset, has no place for regard or validity anyway; but we can put what does NOT do so, what still logically lives to the test, and refine our results accordingly.
So we come to some part of the end result, as now, as in living cells, and consider what they have that the non-living ones do not have. Indeed, you could consider what on partial dismounting, a living cell would face to be restored to where it was. In fact, to use the terms of Alex Williams, you could concentrate on WHAT LIFE ISN'T, the title of the article. Then you have a clearer idea of the portals of life, the necessities, the actuality of their coming into being, their creation, bringing into existence, advent, arrival, the sufficiency in the model for WHAT LIFE IS. After all, whether for all or part, the arrival is to be made logically valid and scientifically confirmable in a consistently articulated causal complex, adequate for their evidence-based arrival in the model. The evidentially pedigree must be presented, in due accord with the model chosen. You do not define your model in terms of one thing and then make it do another, a vapid mode of confusion.
Thus a DNA in vast, correlated, effective conjunction with the OBEDIENCE to its commands must be produced somehow, so that
1) the cause assigned in the model, can do it,
2) it is adequate in conception, not being a case of antinomy, and
3) its results are found in practice within the terms of such a model.
Thus this, DNA in a major actual component and method of the generation of life. It IS found in fully synthesised profundity, provided but not noticeably now being newly made. In other words, there is a current absence of the same process by any demonstrable presentation, that shows its scope in what is already here: that is, the drafting of such basic constructions in their activated and innovative totalities. Things have to be workable, and work. This is just as the Biblical Model declared. In this, God, adequate for this, and with collateral attestations, acted, made existences and logic and cause and effect for this universe, speech with assignable results in a coherent, functional whole, in a decisive output. THEN HE STOPPED doing this.
We in general type, not pitch, most familiar with it, creating letters, theses or perhaps trouble, but then electing to stop. What we had in mind is done. So problems of understanding at that level vanish.
We live in the stoppage phase of universe creation in terms of seeing its mode in operation. We see the results of a kind we do not see being instituted now. This is a profound verification. It is an implicit prediction, explicitly verified. It is in front of our noses, to be missed only by looking the other way. That, incidentally, also is a verification of such a ''method" when man in rebel mode faces the works of God.
Let us turn now to the rigour of this matter. Let us look at an item of precision in its place.
What then! given merely or initially, the systematically correlated, brilliant receptacles of order and method mathematics and functionality which are the entities within the living cell, let us see these without their covering membrane, the cell wall, the sac in which they are placed - except that it is no mere sac, but a selectively porous membrane, this cell wall*1. It is found to be strengthened against ready dissolution. Even though enabling interaction with elements outside, it is effectively exclusive of the the disintegrative effects of total exposure to external elements.
As to that, Williams spends time on the disruptive effects of water in the domain of the so-called Brownian movement, and shows its enormous power when in relevant areas of an uncovered set of cell constituents, to disrupt, disperse, destroy. Indeed, he gives a very short time for this disruption of the unclad cell (that is, of all the merely imagined contents of a cell without its membrane, of a potential cell, as yet uncovered, (since God did not present processive planned mock-ups but creation, another verification, this time through absence). Speaking, then, of enormous capillary forces in action Williams gives the figure for the time in which, to survive, an uncovered collection of parts would have to gain that cytoplasmic membrane, the cell wall. It is measured in pico-seconds which units are in size, one million millionths of a second, far less than a micro-second.
Imagining therefore achieving this last step in the imaginary but needed construction of a cell. There is found to be no way this highly specialised membrane can relevantly form. It would need to cover the imagined-into-place highly sophisticated series of working bits ready to live, astonishingly contrived, with correlative conceptual reality, and this in a time inconceivable by natural means, a thing not found. There is, just as for the one, so for the other, a bloc to be built, a bloc to be overcome and a model to have what it takes in place for this.
With the membrane, there is no way by natural processes such a select contrivance could so quickly form, so that an absolute barrier to progress from conceptually constructed objects, namely the contents of the cell that is not yet there, can be covered. The cell, even with contents given, may be imagined to be but is never seen to be constructed by 'nature', let alone before she is there to do it. Moreover, time is a fatal constraint. The contents, even if given, are simply breached. The membranous cover is required too fast, while yet necessary, involved and complex in type for minimal action. In terms of cell construction, water is a chief component and there are such devastating forces in view that non-provided powers are provided. The idea of nature creating nature before it is there to do it, is not only a flimsy fabrication of fancy, but a persistent creator of problems. Materialism (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7) shows creativity (in the mind that makes it), but not creation for the people who use it.
Hence concludes Williams, "The physical properties of water require all the machinery of life to be encased within strongly constructed cell wall with all necessary properties and no weak spots, on a picosecond time scale. Water thus sets a secular threshold for cellular origin that excludes all scenarios other than Genesis style fiat creation."
It is always so in the end when you try to treat as naked of conceptual power, what lives in a way which exhibits concepts, their application and their methods. Blast mind and you make its products orphans. It is the same with skill in general. Try to make a moron a master and your underlying concept is foolish. It is not time but the species of symbol and assigned meaning which cannot be accomplished by thoughtless matter. Assuming it otherwise, does not appear a fit way to overcome the difficulty, rather like assuming you are out of debt when the interest bills start to arrive. Omitting fact is no way for science to proceed, but its very opposite. It is not heuristic but rather casuistical.
SHOW it and then seek to find why it happens. Empirically and rationally, in every dimension, first ascertain your data. THEN pondering what is never found to happen and what lacks the means is a vacation from the discipline of science and a reversal of its testing process. It is toying with mental myth, ignoring mental criteria and a pre-occupation ruled out by failure in application.
Thus in this case of cell wall, we see not only irreducible complexity but irreplaceable supervision, inimitable methodology and incursive conditioning. Efforts to avoid all that is definably involved are merely evidential subversion. We are not here interested in just-so stories, to cite Lewontin's phrase, but actual needs and their rationally stateable mode of being met. Facing issues is always better. Testing all things is not only the biblical way (I Thessalonians 5), but the ostensible way of science. There is no exemption when it comes to studying models, nor presumption permissible in assuming something and not something else. Men of faith in the living God are not unaware of it; but testing all things, so far from being a error here, is a command: truth is fearless and has good reason to be!
For more on that broader topic, see
THE BIBLE: NOT THE DECLAMATIONS OR DISTILLATIONS
OF MAN, BUT THE DOCTRINE OF DEITY Ch. 4. This includes something like that below.
There are many distinctive and distinguishing general features in living things. One of course is the famed irreducible complexity. What are some of the other phases then ?
There are for example*2:
indivisible integrity,
indissoluble co-operation,
inter-and intra-systematic proliferation,
coherence of logic and symbolic notation with
executive receptors, skilled to catch meaning and execute orders,continuity of sequence from
connotation, to denotation, to implementation,
in a series of systematics
incomprehensible except in totality,
meaningful in comprehensiveness,
in part arraignable or directible by will.