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CHAPTER SIX
THE TRUTH IS LIE-LESS
and WHOLLY NOBLE
See also Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4
and BARBS ... 6 - 7
MUDDLING THE MODELS OR
MARVELLING AT THE MAJESTY
It is because men do not know God, being alienated in nature, polluted in principle, ignorant by detachment, placed in an invidious seeming situation that they START out as outside the covenant, the clauses of beauty and the domain of holiness (Ephesians 2:12, Psalm 51), no more integral in purity, nor knowledgeable in divine things, friends of God only in prospect and potential, and that only by the grace of the Sovereign of creation and sinners alike, even so far gone that they even imagine silly things about God.
Take for example the alien concept (you do not need to go to space for aliens, for they are all over the earth, except for some who have been reconciled to God by the appointed means, the Gospel of grace and goodness and mercy from the Father of lights and the God of all understanding), that God might lie about concern and care in all straightforward integrity! Can even a child, in all usual circumstances, not totally en-devilled, think this of the mother ? Yes, it may, but this is more exceptionally unless where evil has its dramas and takes extraordinary possession, as is increasingly but by no means totally the case. We KNOW faithfulness and love and mercy and profound pity, and it is not lacking in the earth, despite its wobblings and eruptions.
But consider God more directly, the source of all, and the folly of polluting Him, even if only in the vagrant imagination.
If God wanted to lie (and as the Almighty, Original, Everlasting Source of all, such a characteristic would be before all creation, which with the patience demanding time is a construction from Him who need wait for nothing and no one, except for the sake of what is made), then what ? Then Deity would desire to speak act in mind or space or time or any other domain, or any combination, first, and then having something to deny, lie about it. It would be an affirmation in word or deed or both, followed by its negation in word. This however would involve four obvious and initial impossibilities.
First, it would mean that the Being of almighty power had two opposite desires, to state or do, and to unstate or undo with respect to the same matter and in the same regard (otherwise it would simply be something different, not alienated from the truth). In that case, it is wise and best to understand at the outset that anthropomorphic intrusions into the concepts concerning Deity are not merely a model confusion, placing what serves in the Creator alongside what serves in the creation because it IS a creation and has limited but vastly significant freedom and liberty to love and hate, propose and depose; but it is more. It is intrinsic collision in thought.
If God of all might made and in this His power, wished to deny it, then both actions being fruitful since there is no stopping the will of God when it is determinate, and both opposite, we merely surmise an impossibility, like the square root of minus one. There is and can be no such thing. It denies what in the number system, you affirm; and the claim that it could be done as applied to the number system in question, for from this come the terms, is nonsense. You merely deny what you affirm. So too with God and your affirmations or negations concerning Him.
You can suppose an almighty clash of opposite wills or actions, but since God is almighty, it could be envisaged further as mutually destructive and so nothing, or simply perceived as impossible.
Suppose He WANTED to have this collaboration of opposites for fun ? Then incomplete in Himself, He would be seeking fulfilment for His insufficiency which is true only of a created being with circumscribed or delimited power. If He wanted it for fulfilment, the same is true, but yet more obviously, for an unfulfilled Being is certainly not original, being subject to controls, forces, constraints, liabilities and inadequacies which indicate a created being, gifted with these inadequate elements, and hence such is true only of a creature.
Suppose yet again that He wanted to see what would happen: then He would be short on knowledge and acting with a delimited mind which in an open universe of actions, needed to find out, thus as envisaged, a mere creature once more, and a mere extrapolation from man, not the source of all.
In general, if God wanted anything contrary to itself, or supplemental to His knowledge or being, then God is what He would not be, but a platformed impostor, invented by man's mind, a surrogate and pretence, having nothing to do with God Almighty.
Lying is impossible to God as Titus 1:2 tells us*1.
Further, and beyond this initial outlay, we can see a perspective about these things. Thus if the desire is to contradict (the truth which He made and has at His complete disposal as original and without limit, and as Author of all that is not Himself), then it is a psychic clash, a moral clash, a clash engendered from a mutually opposed spiritual base, and hence something unresolved whether as to its unfulfilled ambition or psychic understanding, or in the domain of contrary will. In all such cases, the imaginary non-god masquerading in the human mind as if God, is merely linked to inadequacy, in the domain of insufficiency, a derived entity with this or that potential for disposition and resolution, incomplete and set in a system of unknowns, potentials waiting for fulfilment, contests awaiting consequence, not to mention impossibilities because of infinite aspects opposed to each other, which merely is a construction of thought in self-contradiction.
If the will is concerned, it is in infinite clash of desires, impossible to effectuate. If the heart longs, it is a self-defined admission of inadequacy to have such a situation. If the playful wants satisfaction, then the Being is unsatisfied, and hence limited by origin, design or designation to being a site with potential and openness that tosses itself against limitations which it seeks to overcome, fulfilments it wants to accomplish, and is a mere creation.
GOD IS NOT ONE IN A CROWD,
NOR SELF-CONTRADICTORY
When it comes to God, there is a sanctity which has neither equal nor comparison. We are not dealing with a number of gods. If this were so, it would be an exercise in a form of created beings, entirely irrelevant to God. They would need their set-up of system, as mutually delimiting each other, accorded power and place, relevant dominion and opportunity, communication system between them and its origin in design, mutual workability and the source of that in provision, and would simply be a special field of creation, definable in all their ways in their relevant situations and donations of opportunity and prohibition by which in their distinctness they could both act and continue.
As with atoms and such speculation, there is the space between, the set-up for all, the law behind the set-up and the institution in the first place in their systematic correlations and so forth. It all has to be done. Fixation on atoms, some infinitude of high-pressured point or anything else delusive and invasive with imagination of what is not conceived with calm and clear thought, is mere mystification. Get all things with this amazing limitation or provision ? How ? Why ? Who made it ? Why ? It is mere effusion of confusion, side-stepping, begging the question and adorning it with nonsense to boot. Gods is array and correlation so that co-operation is conceivable and communication correlative to mutuality are mere provender of creation, and if they COULD not know each other, who then invented that situation and stipulation, and if they could, who provided the means as between them, these not being the one or the other!
We however are talking about God, and this clear, have few options even for thought. The chief one is to import a false model, as above, and see where it fails: a futile waste of time.
What then of God Himself ? There is no room for anything that is internally deceitful since all facts are from Him, and that would mean war on what He has Himself wrought, in word. But as His word is infinitely powerful, and His deeds are backed by infinity, this is a mere romancing, the two only being manufactured by thought, as if God were mere man, and knowing little, and vagrant in unfufilled learning, knowledge or power or understanding. Place the infinite opposites together and all you have done is contradict what is before you, and this, it is the molestation of the model, not the revelation of the truth! COULD God then in all co-ordination with what He is, desire to be affirming what is not so, after making it so ? Only by being less than God in either or both actions or realms. Combinations of God and not-god are so brash, rash and common in man, who seems to have a species of self-imposed ceilings to his thought, in his alien mode as sinner, that they often act like an atmospheric ceiling for aircraft of a certain type. In their present condition and nature, they cannot go any higher.
If however in His infinite wisdom, God begins to open the eyes (as in Hebrews 6), then the ceiling lifts, rather like clouds a the sun comes up. Then you realise that God is not open to insertion, like new genes for experiment into some genome, by the limited and delimited concepts of man. What we are is very definitely infinitely different from what He is in certain crucial aspects. It is so in POWER. It is so in the ultimacy of PURPOSE. It is so in LIMITATION, and in unfulfilment, and in ignorance, and in the need to experiment to find out, and in psychic inadequacy, the lot of man without God, as also an opportunity. If however there is psychic urge unfulfilled, then there is a limit which has made it so, an engendered aspect true only of the created which, being what we are, is merely with indolent and undisciplined mind, wafted where it is systematically absent by necessity, so achieving mere contradiction of thought.
True of man, this is impossible of the One who has no ceilings, no limits to His will and wisdom, knowledge and power.
To lie, the god of whom this is surmised opposes himself in word and deed, a being at war with itself, or if you conceive it a desired war for knowledge or power or fulfilment or anything else to be GAINED: yet is it war, war in word on what He has done. This is the office of the alienated, the internally adversative. If this were so, the infinite power in both directions merely marks the impossibility. God is not susceptible to things like that. It is only for such as we are, subordinates. God is inordinate in power and knowledge and resolution of all things, so that to speak is to do, and to do is not to be undone by mere adversatives. The alternative options with power to match simply negate each other, prohibit each other. God is not the Being whose will is vagrant, for that is possible only where there is room to wander, pasture to investigate. Of the same thing in the same regard and in the same domain without differentiation, lying is mere mismatch with deity, a proposal of the impossible, as if a man would propose to drink the ocean, or to conquer God by force of arms.
What however if God has a plan, so that what He has done is firstly to invent death for abuse of life ? What if it were not some impossible requirement, or immodest and harsh rule, but a perfectly reasonable one as in Eden. Giving opportunity at the very level of reality for one able to communicate with God, in His image, He gives what in man develops. It is not He but man who is proceeding and finding and discovering and responding step by step.
It is intensely reasonable to say to beings such as we are, DO NOT do this till the time comes, or avoid that till you are grown, or have developed in experience and perception making you ready to appreciate it in its proper and true setting. Do not immaturely dabble, but grow into maturity like an oak, stable and sure, certain and true, lost in wonder at the God of your life, and found in joy in obedience as you serve Him.
Failing this test, the first pair became polluted (Romans 5). Life in its intense purity does not go on in a myth or mirage; it suffers. It is soiled, spoiled, the heart is numbed, or hardened or worse, addicted. Guilt has grown, like a fast-growing tree. Suddenly, it is immense because affecting all like some deadly virus multiplying itself by its very nature, polluting as it goes. God then having made a limited being, infinitely inferior in power, merely made in time, and yet capable of communication as if in another realm, one without intrinsic power but having optional gift, and in this way in the image of God, capable of tuition and fellowship as from a father, what then ? If then for this being, man, beyond all system, linked by a marvel of construction, God has made provision for contingencies, as man might for a light-plane that can crash if it is used contrary to construction parameters, what then ? Is this some kind of a difficulty to reason ? On the contrary it would be impossible to understand if He had not, for in wisdom He is infinite (Psalm 145:3, 147:5).
This however is more personal, since God being personal, and man capable of personal intimations and exercises, we have an inter-personal disrelish and disaster in sin, the movement from instructions and what is good, to assertive and ignorant will, wanting to become autonomous when in simple fact, it both is not and could not be so; for God always is and when ignored, fact is the finder, and truth is the minder, and ruin awaits.
CONTINGENCY PROVISION IS NOT SELF-CONTRADICTION
Is it some contradiction, then, if God then has contingency plans ? To ask is to answer; for this is mere provision, not revision.
However, when a standard is up and about and true of a creation, so that this IS the creation, how can this result of disjunction, even death of the actuality of the vitality of the creation, of its purity and loveliness, its lack of defect as a result of the all-knowing God, who needs and desires nothing from anything merely for His own benefit, being already of total eternal benefit by naturein all things: how can this be dealt with except by contradiction ?
In short, how could man live if he must die ? Is this not self-contradiction ?
Not at all. If God had said, Do this and you die and there is no answer to that in any way from any source forever, and THEN it was not so, that would be lie. In that case, knowing all things, and this about to be reversed, He would be aware of what was said and what to the contrary would be done, and hence there woouuld be lying.
BUT this is NOT what He said. He specified a result, the reason for it and the intensive irony that followed held more ballast, for man knew what he wanted to find out, a ludicrous and imaginary status as equal with God and being one of the group that governed (Genesis 3), indeed. However man knew it not as it would have been known if all things had gone as under divine direction, in joy and understanding when the time was ripe, but as one who BECAME evil and hence knew it quite well. Some accomplishment and the very flight of doom, was this!
If now God wanted to have a free being so acting if it wished, and foreknowing all, knew what it would freely do, then providing for the crash is nothing to marvel at, except in noting how the Creator who wanted nothing FROM the creation, to embellish or improve Himself, being already complete and not a mere potential activating or even actuating Himself, or actualising, thus His new deeds would show Him indeed, to others.
What then did He do, and what was so shown ? God provided a ground for covering the impeachment due to man, a mode for releasing the result, not denying it, and placing it upon Himself. Yet some might ask, How could this be done in all rationality ? (for in all these things we are using the reason which God gave us, concerning the God we found as we followed reason to the Bible as in SMR).
He wanted man, as a creation, not in this able to be compared with Himself, to have what man was WELL able to show and know, namely not inadequacy and failure because of one fatal fault, but fulfilment and removal from banishment because of one fertile victory, to be divinely made for him. What sort of a victory is that ? It is one of love over guilt, to do good to one who has done evil even to the reputation and reality of God; it is to overcome evil with good.
But what could undo what man had done ? Nothing could do so. What could counteract it then, if God is not to contradict Himself and so lie ? Anything which bore the burden, assumed the guilt, redirected the fatal consequence, not as if to deny it, but the more to affirm it, yet to quash it. But what could so quash death ? cover it accurately, and yet overcome it actually ? and for many ? It is God Himself who could; for He has no limits, and never having said there would or could be no solution, the way in truth was perfectly open for Him, who makes no mistakes or omissions, and says as far as He wills and so acts in accord with what He has said.
What then is adequate to cover the case ? Death must be borne. How could it be borne relevantly to man, since it was man and not some god who sinned ? Easy to thought, colossal in challenge to action, this is where God once more shows Himself not only great but glorious. He took the form and format of man (Philippians 2), minus the sin and its inhibitions, pollutions. In Person (Romans 8:3, I Peter 1:19, 2:22), He remained God, but in form He took that of a servant and served. In what way then did He serve ? He served in plucking the sentence of death out of the air of the soul, and voiding its force on Himself, He the Creator, for the creature (Galatians 3, Matthew 20:28, II Corinthians 5:17-21). Such was the passion of the Inventor, for man His product, His product in His own image, one with the potential therefore to be adopted as a child of God, redeemed and not original, a part of the family of faith IN God, as He is, by these, His means, as in any adoption. These means are wonderful, since He is.
Yet how could this undo guilt ? If guilt is what God declares, and is applied as God sees fit, and repentance is a logical prelude to its removal (Luke 13:1-3), and Christ is the butt for its folly and result, then the guilt transference has no impediment (Isaiah 53), applicable to those so healed (the "we" and "us" in Isaiah). God takes it out on Himself, in a form and format both apt and appropriate, as man (Hebrews 2), as Himself in the test-tube in terms of the nature of the suffering and trial and test and vulnerability. That, it is of course not to find out, but both to SHOW the truth and meet the case. In supreme tests, it is then that actuality tends to surge and evince itself!
He having shown Himself just to TRUTH, mars in man His very format, allows His life as man to be snuffed in shame and humiliation and mockery, all apt for such guilt as man displayed and continues to display, and cries, Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing! (Luke 23:32), and continues to do so over a time. He cried in the time when this same mankind nails the body which broke death for others and healed thousands, in this its excursion to crushing itself, that it must even try to crush God: which it could try only for justice' sake, and fail because of prevenient wisdom and power.
GOD DOES HOWEVER IN THIS AFFIRM HIMSELF:
GLORIOUS AND WILLING FOR GOODNESS, TO THE UTTERMOST
No wonder Paul was moved to write this, "God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world," (Galatians 6:14). This is not mere greatness; it is glory, a unique combination of such things as divine grace, love, mercy, goodness, self-control, self-discipline, patience, power, plan, prevailing, so that in the resurrection of that self-same body, there is the attestation that demonstrates that the power to raise the dead before crucifixion was sustained in truth IN the crucifixion (Romans 1:4), which lash as it would, subdue as it might, was itself subdued, so that the Healer Himself smote death like an axe-man a stripling, and cut it down both to size and to remove it.
It was not, as Peter declared at Pentecost, possible for death to hold Him (Acts 2:24): that was all planned, and death was as real in sin-bearing, transferred guilt, as any, but as ineffectual for Him as for all who would receive this remarkable remedy, and rejoice forever in the solution to sin, manufactured in history by God, foreknown before it, intended from the first, effectual to the last (Ephesians 1:11,John 5:24, 4:14).
What then of this miscreancy of the cross, invented by man but prepared for deliverance of man, by God ? That in the wisdom of God (I Corinthians 1) was precisely what He foreknow and even planned as part of His own plan for rescue of man (cf. Hebrews 2:1-3). It is quite impossible to outwit God, even in trying to spoil His plan for acquittal, in a guile and folly inestimable. In the end, it is only the man who is chronically desirous of autonomy, of rejecting all appeal, entreaty, practical love, grace and goodness, that is not reached.
This too, though it might appear as frustration for the Almighty, is not so: for the NEED of God for His own part, is zero, and His kindness is as kindness is, not force or farce, but an outgoing, an outreach, a readiness to make for the creation, what is becoming and best for it. If liberty is to be in the making of the IMAGE of God (II Corinthians 3:17), then assuredly it is in the restoration. NO is a possible answer, by man (cf. Acts 7:51), even a multiple and multi-partite answer! It is in line with the actual nature of the creation.
To be sure, God knowing all, knew where the NO would be and where the acceptance of His grace. He knows and always has known who are His (II Timothy 2:19, Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:29ff.). This does not FORCE the issue. Again, sin pollutes, and in his own sinful nature, as a fallen type of being, born now that way, man is blinded by his very divergence, concerning the knowledge of the needful realities of God (I Corinthians 2:14). Distortion as in astigmatism or cataract, comes here, there, in this subtle or blatant way or that. However if man is blinded, God is not so bound. He can intimate and infiltrate and bring thoughts to the mind, and activate the very dead.
After all, as in Hebrews 6, there are some who taste heavenly things and the power of the world to come, and yet flippant or flipping, never swallow, come in heart. Yet it is not only this which transpires, as God may elect to bring it forth in history, but the original foreknowledge which inspires the position. God KNOWS who prefers darkness (John 3:19), even when the light of Christ has come (John 3:19), and it is this which is the final differential: divine foreknowledge of TRUTH, in the face of the extent of His love (Colossians 1:19ff.), and of love which does not selfishly seek its own, but in beauty, seeks what it may find. All of this the Lord knew before creation.
Predestination secures the result which in all integrity was foreknown. You will never find God feeble or bewildered! None is lost who would come, none is gained who would not: truth prevails, and disease, dilution, pollution does not. God knows how to deal with a polluted creation, both before time and during it and nothing hinders Him in this. It is His plan. He may elect when furious spuriousness as with Pharaoh or the case in Hebrews 6 or 10 is in view, where the love of the truth is not received, but made a toy or torment, to permit relevant disease to attest the residue of such rebellion even against deliverance, in ruin.
Delusion can become (II Thess. 2:10-11), as in delirium tremens, the result of such toying. Never play with reality was the sound word in one of Le Carré's books, a word of caution. Disruption of reality can have results in the domain of the lie. It is never wise for ANY purpose to tell a lie, to invest in such a scenario. Reality whether in science or psyche must be sought without corrosive, corruptive or delusive self-affirmation in various exclusions. Truth is one, and many modes are there to find it; spoil any, and you are near to foiling: foiling what ? why what but your own integrity! Is it not enough to sin, but must a man toil to spoil ? to continue spoilage! to spoil salvation for himself, or a woman for herself!
Whether in deliverance or departure of the ultimately and initially unwilling, God knows what He is doing even when we do not! As is the title of one of the volumes in this domain, Let God be God! Do not maul the reality with tired and untrue thoughts, but learn ... it is in learning from Him and His word, in leaning on Him and His word, that rest is to be found. That as in Hebrews 4,is one of the ingredients of the rest of spirit, in those found.
In this, it is even more important to FIND IT OUT, in life, than in thought; though both apply. TASTE AND SEE that the Lord is good, and swallow the therapy, the goodness in Christ who died the just for the unjust to bring us to God.
NOTE
Lying is impossible to God as evil is impossible for what is totally filled with goodness, and value is impossible for what is total trash. It is simply a contradiction between proposed ideational action (by the thinker) and the One to whom the thought is to relate. They disjoin, like an aircraft taking off in heavy, molten tar. They are inappropriate concepts, have no collusion, jar on each other. If God wanted to do such a thing, it would ruin who He is; and since He is eternal and all-knowledgeable, such dabbling by the thinker into time in the presence of God is mere impertinence in the strict and logical sense.
Truth in fact pours like a stream from His presence as does mercy, but it is best not to watch the stream from afar, feet set in volcanic lava from the passions of the soul, and instead, to draw near to God, so that He may draw near to you (James 4:7).