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CHAPTER SEVEN
THE BIBLICAL TRUTH AND
THE SPIRITUAL EVASION
The Loveliness of Love
and the Unspirituality of Shove
THE WONDER OF DIVINE SELECTION
Is it not a marvel that I was saved! says John Newton, former slave and slave-ship captain, man of resource and wit indeed. How many echo this, and I amongst them!
It is a distinguishing mercy, beyond human means, past all questions of psychic tremulo or crescendo, where the reality dawns, and the perspicuity arises in one's heart, so that the distemper and the deliverance, the vision and the virtue of the Lord come like swelling tides to overwhelm the status quo, with understanding, and banish the equilibrium stasis, with surge. It is like hearing music: you do or you do not. If you do, you can find yourself where realms unthought of abide.
It is more than this, but not less. Truth appears unanswerable, and peace appears like a more virtuous Versailles, the price already paid, with no reparations.
This however does nothing to distinguish any glory in weak point of Calvinism, although it does make the superficiality of Arminianism appear the more clearly. God assuredly is active, like a volcano. It is not a matter for resistance, though it may be queried: for it is overwhelmingly obvious, the wind-screen being wiped, the mirror cleaned, the glass in the mirror remoulded to precision. What had been unclear, is manifest, mysterious is like light, groping, is grasping. Such is conversion, not a tumult of emotions, though they exist like thought and spirit and perception, but an entry of light which makes manifest.
Those who have not found Him, do not know the Truth, because He is it, and it is no mere abstraction or series of abstractions: it is instruction where the dynamic is sui generis, which comes when man comes to God.
Nor is it an ultra-personal illumination, but intensively personal; nor is it wafting like a Spring breeze, but intimate and intent like a sudden gust. It is no more abstract than the udder of the cow from which the milk is gained. The milk comes, the udder stays, the conjunction does not need explication. So is the feeding from God.
It is not any feeding, moreover; for it is the feeding from the word of God, not inarticulate, not visionary merely, but pointed, precise, enabled, given by grace, founded in the definition of God, Jesus Christ, the express likeness of His nature, the manifest demonstration of God to man in human form, not to delude into superficiality, but to preserve from abstruse philosophies and imaginary abstractions (Colossians 2:8).
God knows what He is doing. He has had not only all time, but before all that, eternity itself in which to KNOW who are His (Ephesians 1:4, II Timothy 2:19). He invented the time which is a limit, from His mind which has no imposed limits whatever, since there is none and nothing to provide it. We experience it apart from His own actions, as a limit; but He does not.
IN KNOWING His own, He knows the truth. In having it as His good pleasure that all should be saved and brought to a knowledge of the truth, and all things reconciled to Himself, through the sacrificial death of Christ (Colossians 1:19ff.), He knows where this desire can with decorum be fulfilled, where love can without abasement to force, have its own way. Gain is not His unabashed desire, as in extortioners; love's rescue however is. He seeks the lost, but does not manhandle them! It is the TRUTH that He knows and applies, WHEN He sovereignly and with divine discernment, finds His own. Yet it is not some mystery of His making which ignores His repeated assertions to the contrary and the whole fabric of divinely interpreted history in the Bible. There is nothing in the least mysterious about love desiring, but BEING love, not forcing. That it SHOULD DO SO, however, this is the delicious mystery, that of His intensity and purity, in which is due and true worship.
THE INITIAL IRRELEVANCE OF POWER
MATTERS OF PURITY
Being mighty, or even almighty, has nothing whatsoever to do with it in selection. In love, might helps; but its resort cancels all reality if it be applied in the processing! It is literally beside the point, except in this, that once the reality of the love is established, then force may be used to protect the one loved; but this is a very different thing from having it enter into the rescue itself. ONCE rescued in non-force love, THEN one may be KEPT by the power of God indeed, as in I Peter 1:3-8. It is necessary to analyse each thing in its place, and in doing so, follow what is written in the Bible, the word of God Himself. HE knows. It is HIS mind... and heart of which HE speaks.
Why is so much nonsense talked when GOD HAS SPOKEN, both of the extent of His desire in love, and of the limit of His reaching in love, as well as His own sovereignty both in knowing His own and finding them ? It is one of the saddest of things in this entire universe that so many futile quarrels occur by sending away this or that part of the Bible, when the parts fit together precisely as do the members of the human body. You have to OBSERVE the body to see what it has, watch the way it works, to see how they fit, examine the relationships; but behold, it goes.
So here. You have to OBSERVE all the components of the body of this truth in the Bible, watch the way the Lord works them together, see how they fit, examine their relationships, accept it as He tells it and because He tells it, and then marvel that this alone explains all that man has of freedom, or can justly claim, and all that limits this, and how and where and why such limits may be overcome in truth; whilst making it clear that there is no freedom to be gods, nor any necessitous power to make man robots on the other side. Man cannot do anything; he can do some things. He can revolt against reality, and very frequently does. He can obscure or even become obscurantist about his power (in brattish mode) or his weakness (in realism, or as excuse); but to take his power to dispose thought and impose his will through it, as if to be the ultimate, and from this high post to make its applications, as illusory in grandeur, so this is mere illusion.
As to man (Jeremiah 17), his capacity for devious deceit is almost unlimited, but in so using it, he shows a racial capacity, dependent on imagination and the power to construct illusory systems for non-illusory motivation! He is very clever, and even if one said it was forced on him, not so the relish of his frequent impudence toward God or others, where a riled derision can obtrude like an elephant's trunk, examining a grass-hopper. Indeed, were it so, were he robotised, set in program amidst the programs, and this were his available world, then he could not know it, and his containment within the functional fuss of his directive forces would make no truth available, even with which to deny it, or assert anything, such as determinist or autonomy.
That is one of the asininities of being a rebel against reality.
Free enough to sin, fool enough to continue in it, man meets his Divine Deliverer, and none but He could - but that is the way with the uniquely clever constructor of man - lift him out of his dilemmas of obstruction with the wisdom and wit of true instruction: NONE BUT HE on whom all depends, and who does not fight Himself in uttering what is His good pleasure.
Man in manacles is indeed rescued by a sovereign grace. Just as surely, man by love is never rescued by what ignores the image of God in him, defiles the reality of liberty: for however obscured it may be to man, it is not so to God. Nor does He Himself come to possess, like a vacant house, amorphous, a thing, what is in fact a being that God has made with an elements of disposition of will and mind and imagination, with a sub-typical resemblance to His own.
Is Romans 9 true ? Of course; is John 1:12 ? naturally. Is John 3:19 ? necessarily. Is it REALLY man's fight against truth which is the divine ground for not applying His own multi-stated desire to all, and so saving them ? Statedly so. Is this fight out of the hands of the consciousness of man, because of its pollution ? It is manifest (I Corinthians 2:14, Ephesians 4:17-19). But CAN GOD go beyond the pollution of man's liberty to understand it, and so KNOW who are His own ? But of course, what is to limit Him, whose knowledge IS truth!
It is sad that man, even within the Gospel bounds, wants to break its boundaries and become god-like, or shrink to a speck within it, and become robot-like, a shanghaied-object, when God has SAID what He would like, and that it is AS HE LIVES (Ezekiel 33:11), and that it is His good pleasure (Colossians 1:19ff.). He would have ALL! Yes, take that further, and be explicit: ALL THINGS whether in heaven or on earth. Do you want to have it like a distorting new review by some wiseacre, or accept it!
Who is wiser than God ? Is it he or she who ignores what He has said ? Is this to be the ultimate in tele-perception, extending not to body, but to spirit, and implementing vile restrictions on the scope of the love of God, or extensions on His restraint! Is this to be done when God has spoken expressly, often and in applications all but innumerable, to display this fact. There does not lie wisdom, but human wit pitted against the very word of God. Do not rejoice at this.
Praise God that He has said it all, the mystery the wonder of such a love as His, such a restraint as He shows not once, but constantly in Jeremiah, in Isaiah, in II Kings, II Chronicles as He extends warning, invitation, incitation, demonstration, remonstration, offer upon offer (as in Jeremiah 17), and at His own time, proceeds with lament (as in Jeremiah 48, Isaiah 48). Why make effigies of the divine way, wit, wisdom, when He has already sent in His Son and His written word, the precise reality! If there is more to learn, there is not less, for His word is in heaven forever as Psalm 119 tells us, and while the light of common heavenly day will make the former knowledge seem unnecessary, yet it will not rob it of its truth, for the word of the Lord endures forever (I Peter 1, Isaiah 40).
It is really intensively good, intensely gracious of Him to spare us all this sort of question, stating His mind clearly, so that you see His words and movements at work in His principles and procedures, and watch it all in awed delight, like a body of wisdom, move. Praise God for His open honesty, incandescent integrity and utter reliability, who changes not a jot or tittle, in whom is no variability of light (James 1:17). What a privilege to know Him, what a delight to be found by Him. If one must then take up one's cross, what is that, when the road, the reason, the procedure, the point, the destiny and the life is not only clear, but dear.
What a Saviour who shows not only restraint (Isaiah 48:16ff., Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff.) in NOT acting by a sovereign molestation of liberty, even to deliver, though burdened with inimitable desire (Colossians1:19ff.), yes desire such that it goes to the very blood of Christ ON OFFER, from the heart to the heart (I John 2:1ff.). Yet it is also He who shows perfect consistency and reliability, for He WILL not break the bounds of what He has made man to be, so that solicitation becomes sequestration, and desire becomes Lord. What nobility is His! It is the LORD who is Lord, the sovereign of sovereignty and the person who yearnings to man, for his turning, have spread throughout the scriptural record of history, like grain on the stalks in harvest.
How utterly beautiful then is such a statement as that of Isaiah 16:11. "We have heard of the pride of Moab," the Lord has said in prophetic review (for all time is as one before Him, itself an invention with its testimony for the works of His own nature to occur in such a setting, yet without distortion, as if it could disturb reality). Here is the professorial, the maternal, the objectively empathetic, where desire does not distort, but is yet apparent: "He is very proud." Alas objectivity requires truth: "Of his haughtiness and his pride and his wrath..." God is most aware.
These alas, in Isaiah 16:6, are to be found in the exam paper of his life. There is no hiding this attestation: it is there. Only dishonesty could forbear to disclose it for assessment.
"But his vain talk will be no more." There is a place for error, correction and concern; but also for endurance of the best. Liberty has lavish headquarters in the human soul, but truth is incorruptible in God. In judgment, all is shown; in history, whether the wheels grind slowly or flash fast, the impacts come, both in particular cases, as here, of notoriety, and generic historical movements, where irony can play its due part, as an antidote to complacency, and a challenge to spiritual idiocy, of which this world has much, blinded by passion, in spiritual as well as amorous things. What more irony than this, that the Jerusalem whose rulers killed Him who is the truth, should later lie in the dust, from their desire for survival! What more compassion than sought and was refused! What more heart than that which wept! What more integrity, self-control, unblemished regard to truth, in maximal mercy, than this!
"Therefore Moab shall wail for Moab." A proud nation will have itself revealed to itself to the point of a grief explosive, but not entirely expulsive. Sorrow for exposure is not the same as sorrow for sin as such, against the love, reason, truth and mercy of God.
In Isaiah 16:9, we find admittedly in anthropomorphic terms - but why not, that shows nothing but a form of imagery to convey accurately and penetrating the reality in view, this being not to conceal, but to reveal the more - we find, I say, just this:
"Therefore I will bewail the vine of Sibmah, with the weeping of Jazer;
I will drench you withy My tears..."
It is, we need to remind ourselves, that this is the burden against Moab (15:1), from the Lord who declares,
"My heart will cry out for Moab ... for the waters of Dimon will be full of blood; because I will bring more upon Dimon..."
It is not Isaiah who plans to dispose of history, and to bring this and that on them, but the Lord, who speaks. It is not Isaiah who from his own psyche (cf. II Peter 1: 19ff.), is noting that
"In mercy the throne will be established: and One will sit on it in truth,
in the tabernacle of David,
judging and seeking justice, and hastening righteousness."
God is speaking.
Then, as if for the blind, the Lord adds in 16:13,
"This is the word which the Lord has spoken concerning Moab since that time.
But now the Lord has spoken saying,
'Within three years ...the glory of Moab will be despised
with all that great multitude,
and the remnant will be very small and feeble.' "
The prophet has not become the Almighty.
So let us return to Isaiah 16:9, and proceed to 16:10: "Gladness is taken away... nor will there be shouting ... I have made their shouting cease." Isaiah has not contrived to secure and sovereignly order and organise such a situation. The prophet did not make the shouting cease. It is the Lord who speaks.
What then is the position regarding the heart of the Lord in all this judgment. It is important to take Him at His word, since so many like the notorious Dawkins*1 invent a new heart for God, contrary to the Bible's depiction.
THIS is the position regarding the heart of God even in this case:
"Therefore My heart shall resound like a harp for Moab,
and My inner being for Kir Heres."
He continues from His own omniscience:
"And it will come to pass, when it is seen that Moab is weary on the high place, that he will come to his sanctuary to pray, but he will not prevail."
Isaiah is not announcing clairvoyance, but pronouncing the word of God, just as Jesus the Christ did in Luke 19:42, even weeping WHILE disclosing that the city would be destroyed, seeing they did not know the day of the divine visitation, in the Person of Jesus Christ. IF I HAD NOT DONE, IF I HAD NOT SPOKEN, Christ declared (John 15:21ff.), the works, the words which no man has, then YOU WOULD NOT HAVE SIN. But NOW, YOUR SIN REMAINS. The issues were who was who, who sheep, who goat, and eternal the results. Yet if HE had not PROVIDED such direct data, not dabbling but express and clear, they would, for all their deserts, be held unaccountable to the destiny.
God tests. The ultimate and final test is of this type: knowledgeable rejection or its equivalent in truth and mercy. HE has said.
Why invent ? If God says in Colossians 1, that it is His good pleasure, with the sacrifice of Christ complete, to reconcile ALL THINGS, why assume He really means SOME ONLY. Good pleasure in His heart is evidently NOT the same as eventuation in history, since His determination is not indulgent, but just, and His witness is not self-satisfaction but love in truth. Desire and performance are not the same; though decision and performance are, with God (Isaiah 14:27).
How dare muddle make its false and falsetto message, to state or even imply that when GOD declares that He SO loved that He gave His only begotten Son NOT to judge, but to save the world, so that WHOEVER believes should not perish, and that the kernel of condemnation in this sphere of revelation, just made, is to be assessed in terms of MAN'S LOVE OF DARKNESS RATHER THAN LIGHT, in the very face of this divine love: He really means that it is a sort of interference in His own heart. Nothing COULD be clearer than this, that the ULTIMATE and irremediable ground of rejection is something CONTRARY to the divine action, but a certain contrariness in man. HE is not to blame. HE has done all. HE is delightful.
There is no horrible decree in God. In God, there is NOTHING horrible, nor any such thing in Him who dwells in the light unsullied, self-sufficient without need, His word the truth, unbesmirched, untouchable in holiness, Himself before time, beyond any time, author of all (cf. Barbs ... 6 -7, Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4).
No, there is no darkness at all, and as to the light, God is love (I John 4:7ff.), so that nothing contrary may be accuracy be asserted. If a THING be hated, it is because of its unloveliness, untruth, collation with miscreancy. If an object comes to be hated, it is only because in tedium it has finally and irreparably rejected the truth, and so is mire, is like chaff. Odium has to be acquired, and while God always has known where it resides, His eyes behold, and His eyelids try, and He is not a foreigner to actuality, but its source, whether to discern the good or the evil. The good is enough to die for, to be discovered, even re-invented. Love is like that.
How could it be horrible when He is weeping, either in the New Testament or the Old, in the very process of showing the application of His sovereignty in judgment!
Oh that men would realise once and for all, that God IS sovereign, but it is a gracious sovereign as much as a sovereign grace which applies. It is HE who describes Himself as He will, who is sovereign, not some strange, mysterious interloper.
NOTHING will make Him wilt in truth, and He WILL find His own, whatever the situation; but He will NOT find what is in this very final field, designated as preferring darkness to light, since that would be a spiritual kidnapping, and He is the God of truth.
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Not only is it a
sovereign grace, therefore, but a Gracious Sovereign, let us not be
impersonal and hide; |
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Not only is it unconditional election, but licensed liberty, |
for in FOREKNOWING who are His own (ex-works, as in Romans 9), He is NOT FOREGOING the inhibition of love towards violence in its own field, constantly shown in Him, or the prohibition on grabbing by assault, as if this were love, nor is He surrendering the integrity of love which as in Isaiah 48:16ff. can commune in a profundity of tender sorrow for what has been lost. If it come to that, then there is the time in history when it is seen and shown as not to be remedied, seeing that there has been a resistance to mercy that is inviolable, this being its nature. He does not change adamantine, once it is so perceived by Himself, though He CAN change it, where love reaches, not mere force.
THE IMMENSITY AND INTENSITY OF DIVINE LOVE
There are restraints in love, not in its intensity or immensity, but in what would soil its purity, and make RESULTS displace its integrity, finding a matter not of its own kind, but an absurd name for BINDING!
Just as He WOULD have done many things for David if only he had not fallen with Bath-sheba (II Samuel 12:8, an individual parallel to Isaiah 48:16ff.), so He WOULD have done many things for Israel, we find in Isaiah 48.
What then ? These, then in turn, He would likewise have done for Israel if only it had not been saturninely unspiritual before the divine KNOWLEDGE which depends on foreknowledge for its precision, before and outside time. It is not only an aspect of history which lies here, but a very texture of truth, this profundity of incomparable love and this restraint not to snatch rather than win, so that the eminently desired becomes the lost for all that. Accordingly, power is not at all to the point, except to ensure that the purity of truth itself is not sullied, and what is true, is what is final. As at the beginning foreknown, in the heart and mind of God, not dependent on history (Romans 9), is what is destiny. WHOM HE FOREKNEW is the beginning, and GOD IS LOVE is the quality, and POWER is the quality assurance. It is important not to get these things mixed!
HE would have done these things, longed to do them, was all but desolated at their not coming to be; but for all that, being incapable of being tempted, He did not distort in order to gain. Despite this strong desire of heart, having found to the ultimate in truth beyond all time, what is what, He acts on it. NOBODY can deceive God and He IS the truth. What reliability is there, what comfort, what certainty, so that if with all the heart one desires Him, it shall so be (Jeremiah 29); and NO ONE is ever left out because of a shortage or possible short-circuit in the love of God. God knows, and He knows His own, nor does any pathology pre-empt this knowledge.
Rolls Royce engines may fail for some reason, even those, so famous, in the 380, wide-bellied aircraft; but God will never fail (Zephaniah 3:5). His ways are everlasting (Habakkuk 3:6). It is His own word that speaks: I WOULD, and YOU WOULD NOT, and THEREFORE. Berkhouwer, in principle, was quite right in his Divine Election about the 'therefore', even if much more is needed.
Where freedom lives, there knowledge in truth has no superiority, and none is superior in equipment, all being in His image. Here, susceptibility before sin is equal, as is any good thing; but the reality of being in the image of God, this is not broken in the mind of God, nor does it muddle Him! You are never chosen because of merit, superiority or eminence; you are always chosen because the love which WOULD STATEDLY HAVE ALL THINGS reconciled to Himself, has found repository, not in the folds of sin, but before and beyond it. In this world, He says, IF, but beyond it, it is His pure knowledge worked out in His own mind and perception, which nothing can distort, disturb, where truth rules.
Liberty does not lose its appeal to love, nor its relevance; for God is not One SO loving receptor kits, but so loving mankind, not wired toys but people.
Again,
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it is irresistible grace, but also impenetrable love in God. |
HIS love NOTHING will move
to a fraudulent pretension, or
to something which, though there to be sure,
does rather stop short at the distinction of heaven and hell.
It is not so small, the love of God,
that it does not quite reach up to that level,
or have the SO great side to it,
that WHOEVER believes will not perish,
but rather has the SO little aspect, that this is only so because in the end,
He had spat them out, inscrutably.
THE BEAUTIFUL
NOT THE INSCRUTABLE:
BEAUTY IS TO BE BEHELD, NOT RAVISHED
Is I WOULD, and YOU WOULD NOT, inscrutable ? Is IF YOU HAD KNOWN, EVEN YOU the things that belong to your peace, if this had been so in the day of your visitation, THEN where would be the need for weeping ? But now! desolation comes as a dream of horror, and He weeps (Luke 19:42ff.). To remake God is not admirable, and to give to the humanist unholiness a false witness concerning the love of God, this is an anti-evangelical distortion.
The love of God, NOTHING can subdue, and its integrity of passion to the depths of the blood of Christ in the interests of ALL THINGS being reconciled to Himself, this is NOT a POSTULATE but a pronouncement. Calvinism has given much insight to many; but it has no less given a ground of division and imprecision.
Is it not strange that Luther went too far on the attack on the Jews ...
and Wesley went into a foreign land in freewill, not seeing the depth and scope of the matter ... misstating while correcting opposite errors with new ones,
and Calvin went too far in his distortion of divine love and foreknowledge with his horrible decree from the delightful God in a muddle that has marred many for centuries!
So some who have done wonderful works have yet failed here or there. So does the Bible reveal. It is easy in the heat of battle to err. It is necessary in the blessing of peace to recover. What then ? Let us not languish but study to be workmen who need not be ashamed. It is enough to be fallible, without seeing faults and leaving them there, like some housewife, discouraged, who leaves dirt in some places, since it does seem to be such a menace!
Let us then correct from the Bible those errors, and rejoice in the abundant provision of so much so good, outside those lapses. Let us trust in Him alone and His word as His own, and wait continually upon Him.
Some shine and seem great; but this, our God reduces us, that there is no question of the mighty being superb, and without fault, while babes are mere machinery in the church.
Even Moses erred ... not a little, but in a sudden flush. Thus, even he transgressed, though amazingly meek and patient in heart, waiting and waiting on the Lord and seeking from Him only, the deliverance in the vicissitudes of the desert, his tenor a marvel in this, that it was NOT his own sin which brought about 40 long years of wandering in the desert, but the sins of the people. All this, he bore nearly always. and yet on a fateful occasion of huge significance, he fell. He who in innocence of rebellion, at Kadesh Barnea, HAD TO BEAR BOTH IT AND WITH THEM who failed for 40 years!... even he fell, once.
ANY assumption of the glory, majesty, autonomy, power and reality of God makes idols smartly; and even the inadvertent testimony of exasperation, alas, can mar. This did not disturb the relationship of Moses to God, always his friend, but it did mean he lost the opportunity of personally entering into the promised land. To be sure, it was relatively easy, in one sense; but it was a removal that meant that unlike the brazen serpent, which men came to worship in confusion, there would be no such attitude to Moses. He CAN err, and it is what GOD SUPPLIES by him which remains. He is to be honoured greatly; but no more. Rest in the Lord ONLY and in HIS word. So is it also in I Corinthians 3, where one is to be NOT of Paul or Apollos. Do not worship the jug but drink the water.
MUST WE BRING FORTH! said Moses, in effect, do we have to get you the water, you rebels! (Numbers 20:10ff.). Oh no! In fact, it is not 'WE' who are to do this, but God. Oh woe! he has exalted himself in the very fragmentation of futility and exasperation, making a statement amiss, before all in the very midst of the urgency and drama for the seeking nation.
It is not as if there were not some leadership, for leaders lead; but there is to be NO autonomy, for it is not as if there were to be some spice to the majesty of the leaders, and they had this quality, this certain something in them, awesome and intrinsically profound. It is rather like priests making the bread by which to REMEMBER Christ, into a repeat sacrifice which CANNOT help since only with BLOOD is remission (Hebrews 9:22), and blood implies suffering. Not so, for this assumption and presumption to contradict the express teaching of the word of God, is making the priest the exalted ministrant, and such is not to be. Far less is it to be so, when Christ has replaced the priesthood having by HIS OWN offering done all for all for all time, as it is applied where it is required.
Exaltation brings humiliation as now increasingly the lot of the priesthood of Rome, out of date by 2 millenia (Hebrews 7-10), for our High Priest is IMMEDIATELY accessible (Hebrews 4), as well as successful once for all in His own sacrifice, which is of Himself! To fail to come BOLDLY TO HIM, and to enquire with others, is to display delay, not show worship. If priests once used these things, yet they were symbols; realites are of God Himself, and there is thus only ONE mediator between man and God, the man Jesus Christ (I Timothy 2). God has not borne twins, or had multiple conception. It is the ETERNAL Christ, the everlasting word of God who has come (Philippians 2). There is no surrogate, nor ever could there be (cf. Revelation 5, Acts 4:11-12, John 14:6, Hebrews 1-2).
Are we not to learn NOT to trust in leaders as PEOPLE, like Paul or Apollos (I Corinthians 3), but ONLY in the Lord (Psalm 71, Jeremiah 17), and to find through His servants help, but not the final authority which is of God only (I John 2:19), as though man became the new intermediary, and God sat only in the background, and His Spirit did not teach as John 2:27 declares. It is as unwise to refuse help and disdain gifts, as it is to make reliance on MAN.
This business of endless extremes, like a baby almost, which MUST have this toy or that, is so devastating that one could almost weep for those so bewildered, but be moved with some sense of outrage at those who so mislead. It is necessary to purge the heart of man-reliance and come to the word of God, not to traditions which say that God cannot or must not or will not do this or that, when the word of God manifestly and expressly and repeatedly and in the very continuity and vision of its declarations and intimations, says that He both CAN and does.
How wonderful however to be permitted to pity the belligerents, those attacking gods of straw, who would distort the love of God, the naturalists like Dawkins, who has even made crusades in the field of education to capture schools for the mythical mockeries which in his presentation, rest on a mythical god who is not there anyway*2, with mythical features, wrought by his own mind in dereliction of accuracy.
Such the scientistic teachings of organic evolution attest, when any god is permitted by the autonomous, to enter. He rejects the god who is not of the Bible, in favour of one he manufactures from his own mind in defiance of the scriptural text and testimony. He does not like his construction. That, it is merely an internal psychic matter, like not liking a poem one has written. Yet he expands it and brings in his horrible evolution, as if the suffering and horror were not the sanction of judgment against just such lies and falsity (Romans 5:1-12, 8:17ff., Beyond the Curse).
WHO CHARGES WHOM: THE TRUTH OF THE POINT
What then ? God charges man. Man in Dawkins charges God, except that he does not believe in Him, and accordingly invents something else.
To be sure, these things fulfil the Bible's prediction for the last times in II Timothy 4, that men will want myths, bemuddling, befuddling folly of mind. Yet pity for the young so oppressed by this Hitler-youth type boot-camp for minors, this indoctrination assemblage that claims the teaching of so many modern schools, AND colleges AND universities, this has and must become, a sorrow and a grief. One can pray for wolves, but more for the lambs.
What is it like ? It is like someone SOWING WEEDS in a fair field! Can one congratulate the educational mafia which insists on this ? Are they the less guilty because they know not what they are doing ? If it may reduce it, it cannot purge it. Mercifully, repentance is still an option, and God is merciful, and it is for them as well that one mourns, for each such teacher has a soul; but the carnage wrought, however confusedly, on the part of some, it is still ... carnage. You do not need to go to Israel to find certain Arab or parallel religionists killing kids. You can find its mental and spiritual correlation even in Australia and the USA. It is in schools. In South Australia, in science they may not even present, reject. They are tightly bound, as if by Palestinian terrorists.
Alas for the sins of the flesh, of the manacled mind, of the passionate misrepresentation! Small wonder one both exposes and seeks, COME QUICKLY, Lord Jesus. He IS coming. It is near*3, and as in the civilisations of the Amorites (Genesis 15), there IS an end to this molestation, false imputation. It, with all sins of distortion and dereliction and defeat, has ALREADY led to the cross of Christ, as we have seen in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 above. It leads on to spiritual crucifixions, massive mischief to the young, except where that very real, selective divine grace, founded in love, executed in irresistible grace, finds and keeps His own! Rejoice with me for that! and be good to the young, for each soul transfixed is accountable, and mournable.
NOTES
On such works of Dawkins, see Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3 with
The Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdoms of This World Ch. 9,
Possess Your Possessions vol. 7, 3, vol. 8, 3.
*2 See Possess Your Possessions vol. 7, 3, vol. 8, 3 and 8, 5, and further, Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, The gods of naturalism have no go!