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CHAPTER THREE

The Self-Consciously Splendiferous

and the Simple Splendour

Fame through the Grant of the Splendour of Christ's Celestial Beauty

and Corruption of Man's Wisdom for the Sake of his own Splendour

Progress into Disaster,

or Regress in Repentance,

to Find Unfailing Brightness where Sin has No Place
 

News 464

Now ? The Dash Downwards:

The  Topical to meet the Typical

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal May 2, 2013

*1  below

LEARNING TO SWIM BY BATHING

It is not difficult. It is never really difficult when the Lord is with you, and your need is apparent, and you call upon Him, and He succours you (Psalm 107). Profound is He, but much that is challenging is so because of a dull heart, a pre-occupied spirit, a tempestuous setting self-sown,  or a liability to sin. When He anoints what He appoints, when He grabs the willing mind, then it is as if you were listening to a beautiful melody, it is almost like the voice of many waters; you are not lulled into a spurious serenity but led into a clear perspective, given an understanding heart and the natural, like vast rocky mountains, seems to have affinity for you and you tend to scale it, as if with a seasoned guide, until you can even exult in the splendour of it all. Indeed, it is then that you see that vision and view, which being from the Maker, sings with meaning in the very air. But if you swerve to avoid it, then in voidance there is emptiness.

That is some part of the meaning of Ezekiel 16:14, appearing in the title of this Chapter. Speaking to Israel, God looks back on their initial sinful state, their simple unattractiveness (cf. Romans 5:1-12), and how He brought them up and adorned them with His nearness, ways, company and help. Alas, as this happened their fame went out, and many nations were astounded at the power and the priorities, the single-mindedness and the help received by Israel. As Moses was moved tersely to put it in Deuteronomy 32, How could one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had sold them; yes, for the LORD had surrendered to rebuke those who fought Israel, in those earlier times, and often subsequently!

THE POWER OF THE SPIRITUAL OCEAN

Ïn other words, the startling exploits under Moses and Joshua, for example, not to mention David, were because of a divine power, which not being duplicated in those later hiding in the transient nothings of their own idolatrous pre-occupations, could nowhere near match! God is there reminding them of the cause of their distinctiveness. Thus in nations which have in this or that measure, drunk deep of the wonder of God and His Messiah, sent on time (The Christian Prescription Ch. 2), in the fulness of time as Paul puts it in Galatians 4:4, there has been this or that measure of splendour.

In Protestant Britain, for example, there was rank power, organised splendour, wonderful development, tremendous discipline and a vast Empire. It was not all good; but many were those deeply devoted servants of the Lord Jesus Christ who attained to high power, and did wonderful things, like General Allenby and General Charles Gordon, many those caring Christians like Lord Shaftesbury and William Wilberforce, who changed vast numbers of lives through their contributions at various times.

In the USA, the case was not dissimilar. Many were the outstanding lovers of the Lord, like Abraham Lincoln, preachers like Nettleton and Moody, missionaries like David Brainherd, who gave savour to its salt, and pith to its point. It grew because of His splendour, but then corrupted its wisdom for the sake of its brightness (Ezekiel 28:17). Indeed, from the latter context, we gather that this was an initial flaw in the heart and character of Satan, of the light-bearer Lucifer, who fell not only in heaven (Revelation 12), in embroiled self-will, but on earth (Luke 10:18), in overpowered relics of betrayal, though he fought hard, and many followed. His exhibition through Tyre was this: "blameless in your ways, from the day you were created,  till unrighteousness was found in you!" (Ezekiel 28:15). There is not so much a prototype, as an archetype, a beginning for the evil, in its purest form, descending to the discovery of the nature of evil, by becoming it!
 

HOW TO DROWN

In Britain there were various movements and perspectives which began to take hold, now in this way, as now in the Tractarians, now in that as in Imperialism for its majesty, and in two World Wars, it lost much that it had gained. Most of all, in increasing measure, it lost its vision. Thus, among the nations,  its incomparable hold on things began to wane, till Britishness for some became almost synonymous with idealism and grace and power, in its own right: till it was corrupted by reason of its beauty, which the Lord had given.

In the USA, a rampant secularism loved to induce forgetfulness of their founding, of their famed notion, 'in God we trust,' set on coins as if to show the criterion of commerce, till it degraded, and the statistical strength of Protestantism became harrowed by a humanistic idealism, so that just as Britain sent forth much in their vast Boy Scouts movements, ideals without an explicit foundation in Christ, so the USA had its Peace Corps, in much the same condition, and each sought in such ways to contribute to the world.

Then in the USA, just as majesty became a danger in Britain, an attribution of their splendour to their innate kind, nature and national character, so in the USA there was a subservience - almost amounting, if not actually doing so indeed - to freedom which gave to this entity, to liberty the status of an idol. Man became not an upheld set of individuals united in a nation which WOULD NOT  bow to imperious imperialism in religion in particular, but a set of self-indulgents, at least in overview, whose will was their word, and whose word was their way. Instead of delighting in what the Lord had provided for their nation, they allowed legal entrepreneurs sitting as Judges, to evacuate the splendour in the name of the idol, as if it were impossible to marry liberty with its former or desired foundations; for without God, there is no liberty, but only dull contest, clouded in vision and beset with manifold and increasing differences as diverse sins multiply. There is no peace, or agreement; and how does the current division in the USA, where more than once, they have hardly been able to reach any kind of a compromise on certain themes, between two different major Parties, so as to GOVERN!

Then the current President made what may yet prove a fatal pronouncement, that the USA is not a Christian nation:  "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation", Ankara, Turkey, 2009)^*1 . To be sure the statistics one has viewed suggest only a slim majority of Protestant Christians, at 51%, and only near to 80% affirming something going by the name of Christian, but still that is a majority, and the impact has been far greater in the past. In what President's mouth, therefore, is such a narrowly legal intimation to be found ? It is in one which has already indicated that the USA would never make war on Islam.

How can you tell in advance what body -

whether Islamic or Nazi or Buddhist or Communist,

with whatever ideology

undergoing whatever change from time to time
seems good to its proponents

who founded it, or who carry it on in their anti-God activations,

or their new-god intimations (gods newly formed, as  Moses put it in Deuteronomy 32:17) -

will  make war on you ? Do so, indeed, by means invasive or subversive as often now, and will thus need repulse on pain of losing the freedom which now being almost worshipped, is thus to be lost!

Such often is the irony: idolatrise what in its place is a good thing, and lose it altogether, as debtors so readily to, to creditors, as the USA may to China or others by the same means.

Meanwhile, with American participation, nation afternot a chr nation in new uprisings, moves in Africa and in the Middle East, lurches towards one of the most legalisticaly oppressive religious coverages of the affairs of State, that is available.  We do not hear when Obama visits Israel, from his lips that Judaism is a good religion, as he affirms in Cairo of Islam. This is not to say that he should; but that he should take due care in identifying so gloriously what rejects Jesus the Christ, namely Islam in this case, not to spawn a new one, or glorify an old one for the nation, one which often just like some other sects, persecutes Christians.

So it does now vastly in Egypt, at its will, in Iran, often in India, in Syria, in Pakistan. There is a story of news that USA is on the point of delivering new tanks and aircraft to Egypt, and that one Senator has registered his aversion to any such thing; and with reason. Is that how a nation with so largely Christian a past attends to the needs of its citizens, so to exalt the will - in part - of less than one per cent of its populace at the expense of so very many others; and so to enable persecution which, apart from all else, is ruin to liberty, horror to love, intimidation of valour and rule of force in religion itself!

Is the President of the USA, then, happily to endorse what his country has so greatly disendorsed (with that same less than 1% noted as Islamic in it) ? Is freedom of religion to mean exaltation of what despises the chief one in the USA ? Is the way of a militant religion, to be endorsed, nations primed for it, when it raises persecution as its procedure, amid the religions as it sees fit!  This merely adds, as in Britain, to the rampancy of a rampant secular viewpoint asserting itself, inventing its own religion as it goes^*1A even in spurious religions^*2, as in Britain in the midst of its earthly glory, in former days, in such large part endorsing the dead religion of Darwin^*3. Survive ? they can survive, stripped of glory and wealth alike, wandering into or out of Europe, from the horrors of which both under the Holy Roman Empire and at other times as with Hitler, it in measure escaped.

They for their part can hardly decide whether to stay in Europe as part of the EU, or not! Some want out, some want in on better premises, some want little change, some much; and most seem increasingly not to know what they want in terms of ultimate vision, for the glory is departing, and this, fast.
 

ISRAEL, TYRE AND EGYPT

So it was in Israel as shown in these two passages of Ezekiel, namely 16:14 and 28:17. For every event, there is a cause (cf. Causes  1, Predestination and Freewill Section 4, SMR Ch. 1). It may be personal; it may not be articulable in terms of mathematics or quantifiable in terms of equations and consequences; but it is there. Even the double-minded may waver between making war in response to a cause, or not, or seeking agreement, or compromising for a good outcome... or not! The results have a cause, in terms of the decision, and the decision has results in terms  of what it is. In things personal, there are of course personal modes, means, insights, principles, priorities and visions, and there is either truth or not, for any inhibition concerning reality can throw out an express train at one particular corner, or a life at one particular decision. The modes of causes vary according to the case, personal or impersonal, and the insight in the former varies, from clouded to clear, and from godly to mere dissipation; but they are there.

Thus in I Samuel 17:29 we find young David, a mere lad or youth, when confronted by an elder brother relative to his presence in, and concern about the unanswered challenge of Goliath, ascribing a bad motive to him, has a reply. It was this: "What have I done now ? Is there not a cause ?"

There was: it was indeed a cause. It was nothing less than the concern for and interest in, indeed the allegiance to THE LORD, and the alliance with HIM, and this in the face of such a daring and obstreperous challenge as was coming, day by day from idolaters, and their giant contender, Goliath. They confronted and their champion Goliath was vaunted. Who could contain him! Let there be one to match!

Someone should do something about it; and if no one else felt so disposed (in a quite disgraceful way), then even a youth should act; for out of the mouths of babes and sucklings comes perfected praise.

David did act. Why ? It was for this reason:  there was a cause for action. It was personal. It was religious. It was clear. It involved fidelity, trustworthiness and trust in the Lord. It was there. It could be ignored, as things can be in the realm of the personal; or made ground for action. This could be seen and not done; or seen and done. David did it!

Just because causes operate at the personal level also, it does not imply or mean that there is any compulsion. How you respond has a cause! Many wish it were not so, when they review their submission to their own Goliaths; but the cause is there. It may be honesty or frankness, discretion or prudence, integrity or kindness, but it is there. You act because ... of cowardice or courage, conviction or faintheartedness; all personal, none compulsory, all attesting to what you are, and indeed to whether or not you have been freely remade, regenerated by the Lord (as in John 3).

As to the merely numerous items, in view, there may be some of these things disjoined from their source, so becoming virtual idols. For example, some in a given nation may incline to seek democracy for it, even if the METHOD leads to Islam and with it,  comes to involve Sharia Law in the outcome, with null democracy. That is initial and terminal democracy all in one; for where Sharia law is present, WHERE (please specify) is liberty to vote it OUT to be actually as distinct from theoretically to be found! When it is in, then democracy appears observably absent, since the options cease to exist when it is used as a method for hegemony, rule and even tyranny. If you have idols, then your service of them is costly. Imagine even suggesting to a non-Islamic nation Sharia law (as has been done)!

That is to use the ideas of a religion which is not normally democratically chosen, and may be that only of a small minority; and even if as in Egypt, perhaps, it is chosen by a majority, then its removal unless freely and frequently available, WITHOUT persecution in the interim which would sway the vote, being absent, may be excluded by chains of law, intimidation or even eradication of this or that.  Cases of another kind may differ; some may allow with full goodwill and real liberty the Sharia to be put out like a small fire; but such would need to be first itemised, for inspection! As in organic evolution, the first thing to do is to SHOW it happening, as has never been done, nor can be done, since the apparatus for it is missing, and what did it is not now in this, active. It is as the Bible said, and as this magic world of fantasy does not stay: there are kinds and there is within them variety; but there is no current creation ab initio; it is FINISHED^*4.

There is a cause and a result both for surrendering to what is not believed, or to what is not verified, or to whatever is not God. As with Hitler, it may paint itself one way, but grow up quite another. When you do not choose the Lord as a nation, then you are open to moral  bankruptcy, and nice dreams of being little gods who are so cute and peculiar and just want this or that, die in the slaughter house of reality. We are NOT gods, but One is; surrender Him and you are for whatever self-will, subject to a thousand breaches. Tyre was like that. It was breached; and so was Babylon, Nineveh, and alas, for a time, Jerusalem of old.

That, then, is a cause of the cost. Choose and cause; chew and find results. Though they are personal, may involved special mercies, yet they are not evacuable without the mercy of the Lord Himself. The curse, says Proverbs, without cause does not come. Self-sufficiency is a dream that may attract it; and dire may be the dudgeon of such, when their misunderstanding is exposed.

The Lord in His kindness and longsuffering, as with Israel (cf. Ezekiel 20) may long bear with provocation, but when He does act, was there not a cause! David is so right in this matter...

Logic does not cease when tyranny arises; or when it ceases. Love may, but logic moves on with its bases in personal traits and absolute truth, whether this be a matter of molestation of reality or immersion in its removal, like boulders sent downstream because of the flow of released waters.

One has merely taken massive examples in this field; and this in no way leaves out others who might be cited for the same direction of flow and type of fault, such as increasingly, Australia, which may at least inhibit some of the fall by election; for this is still in that respect, a free country.

It is however not the examples which are the chief concern here. It is the nature of such a case in anyone, individual or nation, this or that, now or then. It is the affair of corrupting you wisdom by reason of your splendour, or on account of it, or for the sake of it, or in terms of it. There is a quaint, yes and then a peculiar, and then a poignant bitterness about such things. There in the midst of an earth of many barbaric features - where sin rules, as in sending terrorists to corrupt nations by intimidation for no sound cause, or killing a few million here or there for this or that false and unsustainable vision - an enormous incubus. There is a vast payment made, and this is done repeatedly as if this world CANNOT learn. Satan is able to deceive the nations, as we see in Revelation 20:3 and 8. But for this, there is a reason.

It is because man becomes vulnerable when not only is virtue lost, and innocence, as happened in the fall noted in the record of Genesis 3, but also remedy is removed, as in the crucifixion. This applies whether in the initial one  in body of the Lord, the sacrifice, sent in such sublime beauty which did not fade, and confirmed in the resurrection which did not fail, or in the subsequent spiritual replays, where man quashes the Gospel in favour of the lawlessness of the libertine, spiritually, morally or legally.

WHEN that wisdom is lost on account of the splendour, the pre-occupation with what one is (or a nation imagines itself to be, or a people or grouping of any kind), and the results of divine kindness become instead viewed as a resource for personal or national preening, which Russia may once again be now pondering, though one must hope not: then there is a cause. There is a cause for further fall amid the complexities which without fail arrive at the funeral of what might have been faith: indeed this can even occur  as some come to show respect for the dead, but cannot agree.

So the funeral can become the site of a new war, with new adjustments to old follies; and this indeed may be looming in Russia as it expands into the Mediterranean, with whatever subterranean desires may be operative, or exalted visions. So a capitalism-conscious China, departing from the modes of its former idol, can become a hybrid, with new modes of seeking national greatness, international submission and power to spread. What goes, lingers; and what comes, it attracts, and the turmoil continues. There is no peace when the Lord is thrown aside; for there was a day when vast were the Christian missionary works in China, and great the contributions. However, the mainland nation has now, as distinct from the Island refugees, just as by a different mode, Egypt has in the Middle East, a new thrust toward a tyranny which can only act as a substitute for truth.

The world is thus mixed with many prescription, and with increasing intensity, this world's immensity much admired, while many seek for control over its greatness, which is made in heaven from the Lord, and to excommunicate as earlier to crucify the Lord (for Rome in that affair co-operated with Israel, and NEVER let that be forgotten). So does it act through many mutually eyeing powers,  with many posing as lords in the place. Such things do not, cannot and never did work.

Man is not great enough to be his own lord, for he quavers, wavers, exults, is debased, pretends, lies, is fraudulent, has repentances in part, surges back into squalor and so forth, till it becomes like a game of monopoly, thrusts headlong this way or that, and the greatest result becomes a new idol. With such competitors, what IS the greatest result, since ALL are very liable to have sold their souls in the interim, in the play, the work, the passion of their various preoccupations ? It frequently rests in debt, loss, horror at the inhuman and loathing at the horrid Thus do they lose their wisdom by reason of, and even an account of their splendour. It is like surfing: the sheer splendour of an unusual wave (or opportunity) can become so intoxicating that before the peril is past, thought leaps beyond reality to surge with the opportunity to whatever may come (even if it be quadriplegic living).

Alas, as we see in the other noted verse in Ezekiel 16:14, the very brightness originally CAME from the Lord. Given by Him,  firstly in the creation, then in the offer of redemption, in the very splendour of love precisely as in Ezekiel 16 and 36ff.,, the former showing the stages of divine giving progressively as kindness becomes an ascending divine grant. Alas, when as often,  used in gracelessness, leading only to abuse on the one hand, and haughtiness on the other (Ezekiel 16:50), so the cause has a result in  judgment that comes, like the next wave ... and that not without cause! Indeed, does it not tell us in Ezekiel 16:15 that the crucial failure came to this point, that "you trusted in your own beauty."

As imperiousness and slipping morals, autocratic manners and self-assured modes proliferate, so the evils spread. Adults capitulate past love and grace and the creation from the Lord of redemption; but they do not rest there. Very often, and now in this our land, neither is old or young, mature or  youth spared, just as in the toils of that anti-truth of naturalism, the young are not spared now.

"Moreover, you took your sons and your daughters, whom you bore to Me,
and those you sacrificed to them to be devoured.
Were your acts of {spiritual} harlotry a small matter, ,
that you have slain My children ..."

No, it neither was (physically and spiritually and morally) a small matter, nor is it in its own domains so now. Children by their ten thousand are being, if not to abortion, then to aborted truth, misaligned concepts, unscientific myths, masquerading without ground^*4. 

Is there not a cause!
 

You can ignore the causes, but you can't ignore the results. They happen.

HOW TO CORRUPT WISDOM

The donation of the things which the Lord founded in His own name in this land of Australia, to a mightily delusive secularism is as one-sided - for nothing was perfect but Christ Himself on the earth among the people - to a self-aggrandising pre-occupation with culture (what we do or have done or plan to do), is merely a fascinated folly. It borders on adoration of one's own beauty, beautiful thoughts, ideas, plans, as if one were God, and God did not actually have to make the laws and forms and mathematics and engineering and consciousness and spirit and heart and understanding and architecture of body and mind and spirit; but they came from nowhere, just as we NEVER find being done in such matters in 'nature', which simply means what He has done already, in terms of what we have then done with it, and His responses to such things. It is as in Romans 5, with steps laid out.

WHY can Russia, or could England, or the USA, or sundry other nations become so fascinated and intrigued with their own freedom or greatness, or might, or imposing majesty or whatever, their own power to gain or to affirm, that they become so inclined to take hold of an innate splendour. This is just as safe, by itself, if you are living on the second floor of a building, and forget about the need for a foundation, so that you can be held up to this level; and so, as a result of this oversight, find yourself floating amid fragments and much noise (as often found, to change the figure, in the Parliaments of such falling nations). The fall is not prepared for, is often not even more than dimly sensed. Yet when it comes, it may be to an increasingly foul end,  amid dust and confusion.

This vast indebtedness, whether in once significantly Christian Europe (not so  in formalism, but in myriads of individuals). or Britain, where Christianity was formal, or in the USA, or now in prospect at least and increasing in fact, in Australia, is merely one feature, a mathematical one, of the fall. To be in such debt, for example, to an explicitly atheist nation  bears a terrible and tremendous closeness in kind, to Israel waiting on Egypt for deliverance; when it was just another nation, due to have (and going to get)  its own settlements with the Lord.

Was there not cause for that error of Israel in that ancient day ? You find this most explicit in Isaiah 30-31. This is so evocative that it needs to be quote, first from 30 then from 31.

The Lord is not dilatory about these things; though His protective mercy is so great that a certain indolence may be imagined, when in fact it is a patience so intensively loveable as to be unique, source of much that is not sour, but splendid indeed (cf. II Peter 3:9). To mistake patience for permissiveness, however, whether in actual toddlers, or in nations, is one of the best traps, like some sudden Yorker in cricket. It is done so frequently, this sudden thing,  that it is almost like a cheat in examinations, who cannot stop cheating, since it is ingrained. In history perhaps far more than in cricket, the prospect is repetitively overlooked.

But you cannot cheat the Lord, and in the end, the question comes, as it was relevant from the first:

"Is there not a cause!"
 

THE CAUSE FOR LOVE IS FOUND

IN THE ETERNAL HEART OF THE LIVING GOD

There is a cause for love, and it is the fact that the Eternal One, the God of creation and redemption, the Saviour, IS love (I John 4), as seen in the dynamic act, so long predicted, shown in John 3.

There is nothing in control over, or in heights within Him to displace it. If despite it,  its evacuation by man proceeds (as in John 3:19, where God shows the ground of unbelief to lie in man, not Himself), so that it is rejected, or something else is preferred, then what ? It is indeed so,  for love itself being brother to liberty so that it may BE love and not mere charm or force: it must be freely given, as God foreknew.

Then what ? It is this. Then love being a splendid but not invasive thing, you are freely without it, and so live beyond its bounds, and so find your actuality, as Israel was told so incisively in Ezekiel 16, to become repulsive, not in mere exterior or externals, but in spirit and in heart and in reality. That is summed up in John 3:36, in the results category, this time fundamental and final, when informed and rejecting life is done. Then in the brooding wrath of God, liberty to escape from love is achieved! It is not merely a matter of preference; but of a PARTICULAR sort of preference, one averse to truth, peace and reality.  If a dog insists on not trusting a good master, then is it a dog or a cur ? If a cur, does it enter into life as a loveable dog ? or does it slink away into its sulks and desires!

If the liberty made for man when he was first created,  is lost in sin, in a dumbfoundedness before the reality of God, even where this presents the Gospel  to rectify and allow reception of what love provides (I Corinthians 2:14, Titus 2-3), then it is lost to man and not to God. He, having created man WITH LIBERTY, knows how to preserve it, both in foreknowledge before sin or creation or  time as we have it (Ephesians 1:4), even beyond the era when these so much as existed; but He is able to impinge this truth also into history, where no law can exclude Him, nor any prohibition direct Him. Where freedom lay, it lies; and where there is evacuation of the guilt of sin through faith in the saving work of Jesus Christ, this is a free action wrought by God in restorative mode, for the soul so saved. He implements what He knew; and fulfils what freedom desired. There is nothing to prevent the supernatural which knows the natural, from saving it supernaturally, but with sensitivity to the natural, so that the outcome is what it really desired.

The movements will be profound. If volcanos erupt, and in so doing break the established surface, this is mere illustration that what in norms may be excluded, is not to be presumed so when God acts! Giving liberty to man as made, He is able both to indict it through the pollution of sin, and to deliver it through the penetration of truth. Made, marred, in salvation man is fashioned now as the Lord will, with love's liberty intact.

God does not change the nature of man or liberty or love or mercy; He is changeless, and what images Him conforms to this. Yet He may indeed treat man in any given pathological condition with medicines past man's power, and with methods past his understanding. Freedom is thus preserved, before time began its natural course, through His foreknowledge, and in history's natural course, despite its annulling deadness. Nothing breaches God and God breaches what He will, but yet in truth and not in rampaging, in redemption and not in mere drafting, in granting the liberty He created its consummate result, beyond time, yet for time; and as He planned, so it is done. The cost could not be greater; and the love could not be keener, while the integrity of the Lord is gloriously perfect.

When God is concerned, death can no more dictate, whether of spirit or of body or of mind. It is within His power. As the output is within His power, so the input was first prepared so that reality and liberty and truth and integrity and that lovely thing, the love that arises without fraud or pretence or superficiality, might keep man from the chains of mere compulsion.

By sin, man became less than he was in the image of God, and his path grew contrary to the word, will and ways of the Lord; but when light arose and liberty was fulfilled, in the voluntary act of sacrificial substitution for those who receive it, wrought by Jesus Christ, then restoration, not deformation is the result (cf. Colossians 3:10). God redeems; He does not contort. His sublime power is restrained, but it aborts pathology's fitfulness, closing with the truth for each one; and He  does not falter; for indeed both His love and His mercy are uncontainable. Freedom is not subverted in order to save some; but it is restored and in being so, it has served God's sovereign will, that THIS - and not something else - should be the condemnation, the preference of the heart for darkness. That HE can know it is the point, not merely in sin, but past and before it, where it constitutes the differentiation known to God, and implemented likewise inconformity to this fact, by Him.

These beautiful and restorative provisions of God may, however, be rejected as we read in Acts 7:51. This may be episodic or perpetual; but unless repented of, ends in the latter. If received, the result is equally perpetual in abundant life.

As it is, so it needed to be; and God is our all-sufficient completion of every need. Having made mankind, His illustrious power has given him the ways, that of truth and of error, provided in love the facilities, and according to the case as in John 3:19, so it is caused to go. That a supernatural control and insurance of true outcome is in place as for a hospital, is the need; but better than in a hospital is the assured restoration of man as an intact being, liberty redeemed but neither harassed nor overturned (Romans 8:29ff., Ephesians 1:11). Such is the power of our God.

The spectacular gift of love is of God. But it does not disguise reality, but rather by contrast the more exhibits the follies to which man is heir, often with the lust to inherit all available outside the Lord!

So great is the corruption of wisdom, on account of man's imagined and originally donated splendour, so great was his beauty which was given not for some type of philosophic and empty, vacuous narcissism, whether individual or national or cultural, but by gracious gift, that in its results,  it cannot long be hidden. Great houses (persons, nations, groups) may glory in their given grandeur; but it is all the more pitiful, poignant and inherently calamitous when their fraud is exposed, as in the case of Tyre (Ezekiel 28, both the city and the spirit behind become a cemetery). So sad is the spiritual inebriation which sails forth onto boiling acid, thinking its fumes stimulating, only to drown in its strength! But the protective hand of God can penetrate and remove even from this, those whom He has foreknown, even freely, aware from the first where His love rested, and liberty was so moved. Of these, Lot was a remarkable example! (Genesis 19). Rebellion is like cutting your arteries; but weakness the Lord helps, not even caring to break the bruised reed (Isaiah 42:3).

No small wonder that Christ wept over Jerusalem of old;  love is like that, and God IS love; and it is on account of that - for there is a very profound cause - that He has sent His only begotten Son so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish, but have eternal life (John 3). On account of this love and mercy, has He penetrated past mere sin, to knowledge, foreknowledge, and past the pollutions of sin, to reality and salvation so that He neither forces nor aborts man; but rather gives him in regeneration, restoration to what He was (Colossians 3:10): now in salvation for many is liberty intact in integrity, past the domain of change, sin's evil sovereignty quashed, holiness restored, regeneration enacted.

There is a splendour that does not end; and it is His. What in the end has focus on itself, it loses, since this is a kind of self-abortion.

NOTES

*1

An extensive report on this topic more broadly as to certain US trends, is to be found at this link, for the stated date: http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/may/2013-05-02/obama-determined-united-states-will-not-be-christian-nation#.UZvpcWwiOUk

*1A

One example of this is as noted in Ch. 1 above.

In fact, here is an application for our time. it is precisely like Australia which, having had children heartlessly taught the nullity of organic evolution for years, in a monopolistically exclusive manner, in breach of scientific method and open-hearted learning alike, in a cabal from kindergarten, now has taken two more deplorable steps. First as the thing ramped up, it threatened freedom in the press^*2, and then, that at least for the present past, it still threatens freedom in expression^*3; it makes mouths at free speech, following an effort to task people if they offend others in word, as if truth were absent. Thus are adults in utter danger of being trivialised,  as were and are the children. Not all abuse is physical; vast is the mental and spiritual abuse going on in many a school and college, intractable before the truth (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go! , SMR pp. 140ff.,   News 57 and Ch. 4 above). Great funds are to be spent on education, in planning; but where is the plan for purity and truth, discovery and genuine enterprise, not lordly declamation of feeble philosophies that cannot even marshal facts to show the things operating, that are announced so grandly and glibly!

See for example,

The gods of naturalism have no go!  TMR Ch. 8, Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3.

*2

See Sects and Errors.

*3

See for example:

Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamics Chs.    4 ,    3 (shrieking for their idols, but in vain),
 Earth Spasm ... and Renewal of Life Chs.    1.    7

 

*4

See *3 above.

When the word of the living God, the only systematic claimant in existence, declares it finished, and when as is the case, it has done so for thousands of years, and contrary action is not found, it might perhaps occur to some that ... it is finished! That is the testimony of science according to scientific method (cf. Scientific Method ...). In contrast, note the opinion of a Harvard Professor, indexing his ideology in place of science in this field. This is excerpted from The Lord of Longsuffering Ch. 2, with minor revision.

Lewontin, notable figure in the aggressive evolutionary program wrote this: ("Billions and Billions of Demons," The New York Review, p. 31, January 9, 1997 - emphasis in original)):

Here we see many non-scientific philosophical assumptions, some impossible logically, set not as an admission of a zealot, acknowledging the fault of putting personal ideas into a container unit, in which science is to be sovereignly suppressed, a sort of papal pronunciamento on doctrine, with a new kind of authority without ground, but as a glorying, in true religious zeal.

He freely admits how ludicrous is much in materialistically captured science, as may be seen in recent  volumes on this site, as in SMR and Repent or Perish Ch. 7 and Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2,  where such basic concepts are shown to be logically incoherent. It has to appear so, the point he admits,  because it is so, and this truncated insistence, based on nothing, is a mere nullifying preference. This MUST produce such ludicrous results, such just-so stories, since it abandons just use of logic and causality, and what this requires. Despite the ludicrous results which Lewontin foreshadows, this religion drives the action. It is no friend of logic or empirical fact.

These admittedly appalling looking results come as  simple verification that such cut-down science is incompetent, that it does not produce logically coherent results. It does not stand when what is removed from the actual evidence, and it moves in terms of what has been  called THE CULT OF THE FORBIDDEN (cf. SMR pp. 150ff., 330ff.), where some testimonial contestants, and evidential channels are actually excluded by the dictates of an authority beyond science, which may cull or even kill it! It is a cult to remove such matters, to prefer such philosophies, themselves bankrupt (cf. SMR Chs. 3,4, 4 Extension), in the face of hostile fact. This not only ruins scientific credibility in these forbidden cultish procedures, but cuts away truth, and leaves a desolated result, much like Hiroshima.

Incidentally, some of the self-contradictions of Kant are noted in SMR  Ch. 5 and Predestination and Freewill Section 4.  See also Things Idly Lost ... Ch. 3,   *2.

See for example,

The gods of naturalism have no go!  TMR Ch. 8, Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3.