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CHAPTER 5
SUFFERING, SQUANDERING AND SALVATION
If it were not that God is longsuffering, man would 'have been doomed long ago. He would not be in his present invidious and insidious state, calling for it to increase, as he decreases sanity, increases profanity, sleeps with anything and storms at anyone daring to point out that you need to cut your coat according to your cloth, not invent dreams for a world that is not here. What has not been corrupted in action, is frequently corrupted by legal and financial intimidation, as corruptive practices, slithering past all considerations of design, mock the design without which they could have no bearing on truth, themselves, being then mere participants in slither, relativity models, except that in that case neither relativity nor anything else could be true as to the nature of man, and he would have in all logical consistency have to resign or use force to corrupt all things to his mere will. He tries that frequently, but it never works. It was Jesus Christ who both bore with the madness of man, healed his sicknesses, left all free in salvation or repudiation, but never let any get away with supposed argument for folly, reducing hypocrisy as some now with fat suction, try to reduce weight.
Mankind is now in its own dillpot dither, slither and pride-desperation joint mode, because it is too much for us to be intolerant of bad spiritual food, the same as we may well be of bad nutrition in any other field. Results don't even matter. You do WHAT YOU WANT, then try to minimise any curse in the results. It is like seeing a WRONG WAY, GO BACK, sign on the highway, and while (of course) ignoring it, trying to go the wrong way without the police noticing you.
Consider again: If you do not believe that God gave man opportunity and man foozled, failed the test, then you are blaming God with a presupposition to the contrary, at the outset, and have already been settling the issue by a type of negative faith. It is contrary to the operational functionality of man to be unable to see or respond to a challenge, and in fact, he tends to manufacture, imagine, select, pursue challenge and to meet tests of thought, work, action, accommodation, resolution as if his earthly life depended on it: it is natural to him. Just as a dog tends to confront, a cat to insinuate, so a human being tends to discover things geographical, physiological, astronomical, spiritual, with more or less success, depending on the degree of occlusion in the process. Thus the internal eyes may be shut by desire for wealth, popularity, godlike independence (in intention), judgmental ranting or whatever else for whatever has appeal.
Beyond this however, just as health is beyond disease in normal operating conditions, man tends to consider, challenge, seek to subdue, interpret, answer, find out.
His mind is enabled to consider principles of operation, whether moral or scientific, logical or obfuscatory, in various assumptions of an irrational character, invented with tedious indifference to unworkability, as a basis for non-thought seeking to argue this or that case, with inbuilt guaranteed invalidity because of his model.
Man is, moreover, right to this present hour, insulting God, deriding Him, making up new gods, by multiplied and meaningless thoughts, seeking to re-establish moth-balled ones, making himself marvellous and godlike and to be obeyed, when he has religious or irreligious ideas, the latter used for all that with a sense of religious ultimacy which having no god, is merely pride and presumption in variable mix. It is the worst of ancient Israel all over again (as in Deuteronomy 32:17-20). Headstrong, heedless, thoughtless, ponderous, imperious: yet we at least in some nations, are beginning to go beyond and condemn those who point out our peril, legally, as if a political dementia were coming already to our race. One newspaper article, in a babbling assault on a conservative book, made it appear that it is evil to say that certain practices are evil, and that this was an appalling gaffe.
But what is the difference ? EACH has a moral code. One says that contrary-to-design sexuality is evil, in the sense of betraying the Creator's construction and its safe-mode aspects, its generational indications and its results in double-gender families. Appeal is made to the functional realities and to the Bible. Another party (in the newspaper) implies it is featherweight, absurd, incredibly authoritarian to say that this thing is evil, and then insinuates that it is evil to say it is evil. That is the code: be neutral on all such issues as a sign of tolerance, understanding and a generous level of understanding of the uncertainties of human life. That is a code. If it is not a mere dictatorial and authoritarian declaration, with no basis known, it is certainly a moral code in action.
This is a case of a subjective declaration on a moral topic being used to attack what has at least objective grounds, testable in their Book, for action, as well as something more visible than mere will.
Both declare on the basis of morals; one has a basis supportable by logic,and it does support it. Another does not. The other attacks the one.
It is not however something hard to distinguish from a hypocritical assault, that is, one condemning what you yourself are doing, or confusion or both.
Thus you see the virulence (I do not recall seeing more assault words per square inch before) of the assault, the subjectivity of the basis and the tendency not even to STATE that basis, but simply to assume it, though it is contrary to reason. If all the naturalistic premisses are true, then truth is not in existence, and hence not available. Hence such premisses cannot true either.
Man propounds, expounds, and often merely interprets a yen, will, desire, dream, and surges ahead like Hitler, like Stalin, like Mao, like Napoleon, for the nation, the idea, the power or the glory. The end lacks the glory announced; and the reason is that false gods (named or merely operational in a theory which omits the tag) do not work. They are not there.
But man! he is well able to consider, conceive and test in the realm of God. He even gets carried away to the point of acting as the judge of God, as if his pathology were in some way a credential for assessing the One who made him and gave him power to assess, deliciously ignorant of the fact that if He were deficient, so would man be. However as shown in SMR and the other general works of biblical Christian apologetics on this site, God is the only available result for the use of reason, and His own actions and activations are objectively validatable as requiring no less than He as both Creator and Redeemer.
As man is STILL FALLING from God, the concept that he never began the process of will-thrill is verging on the ludicrous. What he has done in a masterful series of delusions for millenia, and loves to do, facing facts with the executioner's axe (cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, Deity and Design ..., esp. section 8), and still does, he cannot do ? Just as he does it, so has he done it: you have only to read history... When man was begun, so he spun. He fell. He is still falling. When as one made capable in the realm of seeking God, you do not repent, the pit is bottomless. Man is not now reaching near the bottom, for this reason, that there is none, and secondly, it is because of divine mercy: otherwise we would long since have been cashiered as a race.
In fact, then, based on man's manifest capacities and tilt, he is responsible, has been responsible and continues as such. He seeks for destruction (oh! of another nation, or another group, or another land, of Europe, or China, or the USA, or Israel, or the Sudan, or the British Empire, or the USSR), and then implements it brilliantly, even inventing an atomic, nay a hydrogen bomb, and using it. He pounds the earth, other peoples, other ideas, invents gods, serves them with often silly zeal (Hosea 7:11-12 likens ancient Israel when doing this, to a 'silly dove'). Thus man is making himself guilty as he orders others banished, imprisoned, defiled, raped, expropriated, and altogether gives a commanding exhibition not of playing the fool, so much as working at it!
Certainly, he has often had to defend himself against the latest crazy notion, built up into an Empire, just as Babylon and Assyria were, cruel, devastating and a little later, devastated. It is his way; his will.
When however man decides - as with the recent Australian cricket team desolation - that time is up and he must meet investigation, and when the topic is not cricket but the player, man himself, then when he is not trying to find someone higher up to blame, or something lower down to accredit for what is beyond it categorically, but still somehow responsible: then things happen. In other words, when prevarication, rationalisation and excuse are in diminuendo and truth becomes significant to the mind of man, there is hope.
When man repents, he finds that truth is no more obscured by the simple discovery that opening the eyes has all along had this as a proper target (cf. Matthew 13:15ff.). When he seeks and finds his Creator, instead of harrying those who have been telling him, and reviling them, and when he discovers at last that the Creator did not stop at being man's inventor, man's indicter, but went on to provide a ransom both to free man from folly and to pay for the past efforts of those who take Him up on it, then a peace comes which needs no support from villainous theories, or from surviving while murdering ideologies, or the like. Then you find what life is all about. The Redeemer having come from God and gone to God, the redemption remains, until the Redeemer terminates the discovery time and judgment sets in, like a Winter rain. If it is dismal in feeling, it is not so in light. Man is to be judged according to truth (Romans 2:1ff.).
If you did not bother to accredit God, holding out like an enchanted mortal with nothing to answer to any, then there is the reason for this; and it is not itself rationally based, but a psychic preference. From this same preference, comes the whole gamut of disaster and disgrace which disfigures this our human race.
What then ? BLAME God for our sins ? One is tempted to ask any such controversialist: Blame someone else for man's maestro position in the heart of evil of nearly every imaginable kind ?
Why ? on what basis ? Because corruption and intrigue is objectively present and declares itself! Scarcely. Blame someone other than yourself for what you have done with what you did not make, cannot make, but can and do mar! Is that what man as a race is substantially about ? Why ?
Do you blame God for giving you the freedom to set up as autonomous, in a myth which death denies ? Do you blame Him for giving you power so great that some quaint souls imagine that man is the must, the mist, the power, the centre, the splendiferous bearer of life towards wonderful things ? even though they and their ideas routinely die, unrewarded by any type of confirmation at the bar of evidence!
Moreover, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics*1 would indicate, and research now attests*2, the human genome is deteriorating, normal a for design with specifications in this world of challenge, and this at such a rate that it is a threatening fact, just as is the social, political, military and financial deterioration, greatly aided by squandering stupours, that do not understand how to advance by regress, and continue confused, like a thief who has lived ... beyond his means, and now faces old age. It is not just an individual youth who may spoil his inheritance; the ENTIRE RACE is experiencing advanced years amid its sneers, and the rebuke is as clear in Ecclesiastes 11-12, as in Romans 8.
If you believe that God gave man opportunity to match the matchless wonder of his virtual language by which each new generation is re-made, far beyond man's practical powers, that diversely automated DNA, with direct speech to him as a person, and hence gave him due trial while he is on earth: then human failure is apparent. It has become inherent in the race, which tends with a natural infelicity to spoil, ruin, destroy, disrupt, corrupt, misuse, abuse, foul up, tenaciously be pugnacious about devious and disruptive things, to sink into despair or arise tyrannical domestically (either side), in work, in unions, amid nations and the like. It is more than this, but overall, certainly no less. Much is much better than this, but vast cascades of evil water flow over the rock of life, being infected by selected evils from the heart of man. If man is impotent before evil, it is because he has refused its remedy.
To blame the God of the Gospel for this refusal is inane. To refuse it is deadly. To take it removes the problems of rebellion against the Maker of yourself, like warring on the Society of Mechanics WITH your car! The DNA amid the foolishly misnamed 'junk DNA' has meta-information: code presented information about information, a systematics for system control; and the Bible has meta-information, beyond the realm of mere man, concerning how to deal with the plight and position of mankind. How do you HANDLE sin and rottenness, self-centredness and puny pseudo-morals which find a blind push better than an understanding heart ? It is all there, the diagnosis, prognosis, the remedy and the cure. It is testable, tested, attested, demonstrated. This is the status quo. To ignore it is to insist on driving your human car when the water is already boiling in the radiator, a sort of bucolic buccaneering.
If man failed, as he has failed and continues to confirm, then the race is entailed. If you do not like it, and prize freedom (to criticise for example), then you insist on perfection not only at the outset, but in the onset, which is merely an insatiable and childish demand. Don't attempt to blame God for your inherent aristocracy of thought.
If you accept yourself born into a wonderful world, one admittedly cursed along with yourself (Romans 5:1ff., 8:17ff.), but one of inherent grandeur, pockmarked with the conspicuous but not totally corruptive powers of due rebuke, then you should systematically be grateful for each alleviation, miracle, marvel of deliverance, and offer. You would be askew if you acted as if God HAD to meet your imperious insistence on ALL GOOD FOR ME, even if I am not good, and am born into what is not good. If God were mute in the face of the horrendous guilt of man, inventing, parading and shamelessly following sham when truth is both evident and available, there would be criticism indeed.
THEN, someone might ask for data! WHY doesn't He DO something! would come the cry. That avenue however has been closed from the first, and still is. The Lord HAS done much, both condemning evil, bearing in Himself its penalty in power and guilt for man, so covering as many as receive His divine remedy: such being in the first place divine creations (not thereby divine at all, but crafted by divinity for divinity). As He bore death, so He wore resurrection (cf. SMR Ch. 6), and this is made applicable in good to His own redeemed: and in so doing, He has shown that life triumphs over death, EVEN AFTER guilt is met.
TO ignore this, is to ignore not only what reason requires (as in SMR), but what health and even survival on this earth (abuse HAS limits) demands. To blame God AS you do this is like being a prisoner who blames the Governor for giving only a pardon which implies guilt, and insisting on desolation until he is pardoned with no guilt, that is released with grounds for assailing the Judge!
If you face Everest, it is no use saying, It ought not to be there! Soaked sooks are two a penny. You have to find a way to overcome it, if for any reason, it is blocking you. If you reject what God has done, our very dating system having a date with this event, just as the death of the Messiah was at a date foretold centuries beforehand*3, then so be it. But you cannot rationally then BLAME Him for YOUR defective response to the most gracious action even seen or known! Is it possible even to consider blaming oneself ? It is, after all, in this instance, rather worse than the case of prodigal son; for he at least repented and returned and found grace; but here the blame on oneself is rejected, perhaps bitterly, even as one rejects the grace of pardon!
If you want to blame your own will, and heart, and say it is hopeless, others have not found the same challenge to be so, in the order of many millions. If you WANT something, then want a new heart and a new life. If you CANNOT, being weak, then simply capitulate to God and accept the Gospel. If you cannot do this, then ask Him to enable you to do so, for if you have faith in Him, you can; and if you do not have faith in Him, you merely confirm your own mutinous mutilation of opportunity. Don't expect your will to be thrilling; it is the will of YOU! If you regret this, then repent. If you do not, then blame yourself.
If your mind wants satisfaction, ask God to meet its needs. If you decide it cannot be done, you merely are prejudiced, in the sense of pre-judging. In fact, as shown for example in SMR, the mind cannot, systematically, be satisfied with anything other than the living, redeeming God, except by prevarication and twisting, irrationality in whole in part. If you say, I CANNOT turn my heart: how true! Ask God to turn it. If you CANNOT ask Him to do that, ask yourself why ? If it is because your mind is unsatisfied, see the obfuscatory perversion of rationality involved in that, where shown. Besides, you will find your mind has a voice. ONLY if God is NOT on your desire list, can you fail. When you seek Him, you will find Him: to seek is to find. If you don't, then blame yourself, not God.
Consider the word of God, not in the DNA, but in the divine direct speech, the verified and validated Bible
(cf. LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST,
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS).
Look if you will, here at Jeremiah 31:18-20.
"I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus:
'You have chastised me, and I was chastised,
as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke."Turn me, and I shall be turned; for You art the LORD my God.
"Surely after I was turned, I repented;
and after I was instructed, I smote upon my thigh:
I was ashamed, yes, even confounded, because I bore the reproach of my youth."Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spoke against him,
I do earnestly remember him still:
Therefore my bowels are troubled for him;
I will surely have mercy upon him, says the LORD ..."
If you WANT God, then tell Him so, and in that case you are already trusting, and need a thorough-going repentance. If you do NOT WANT God, then why blame Him for your opting out. This is the ultimate option. Its darkness simply inherits itself.
He IS wonderful. Try and see.
NOTES
See:
TMR 8, pp. 200ff., 210ff., 224ff., 226ff.,News 68, 82 cf. SMR 329ff., 315Aff.,
A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 4, pp. 58ff.,
Swift Witness 4, 5 (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;
Genomes may wear out (as Professor Sanford of Cornell attests - Waiting for Wonder Appendix), in the march backwards which is evidential but not political.
See Christ the Citadel, Ch. 2 and the associated references.