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CHAPTER 6
REVOLUTION,
EVOLUTION, REMEDIATION,
CONFRONTATION and
CONVERSION
leading to the
FOUR Rs
Back to Reality, Reason and Revelation in one Dynamic
Disengagement and Re-engagement
WRONG REVOLUTIONS
The concept of creation has been known from the first. You do not have, you imagine, you envisage, you project, you nurture thought, you find beyond thought, you engage with your finding, you discover means, you invest energy, you create. It is mysterious only in this: where does it come from ? It is not 'from the unconscious', a mere misnomer. Of course not all we know is kept in conscious store, and there is a foreconscious arena where one stores; but the idea that one is carefully repressing data which leap to the surface is nonsense, in creation. One is inclined to it, maybe even pines for it, but it is not there. Then it is there.
You may say, Well, it is being formulated in ways hidden from the conscious mind. This may be true, but still, it is not merely an input output situation, for the creation, if it is to have this name, is precisely what surpasses such a confinement. You find before you what was not there, thought of, or if thought of, understood, or even if understood, not available in the collation of concepts in integral unity which has its own life, almost like a child.
You see, in one of the National Geographic Magazines, a depiction of Charles Dickens, with his various characters arrayed about the room, as if to see the place in terms of his imagination, and there in his knee, is one, maybe Little Nell, and in various corners and places, there sit others, enlivened with a life of their own in his mind, and placed externally about him, in the picture, like a family, loved, appreciated, understood, and yet not wholly directable!
The operational fact, the functional reality is simple. In our total mind-spirit ensemble, we are enabled to move from known and viewable to unknown and at first unviewable; and just as skin tissue is patiently replaced when sheered off, from new tissues, about which we know nothing in our perception, but which may be traced in their programmed performances, so what is NOT there at all COMES to be, in unprogrammed manners in our thoughts and spirits. Here vision of one sort of another is present, impulsion of imagination is perceptible, but the manner of it is neither predictable nor necessarily even understandable in advance. It happens like the rising of the sun, and in some ways, as much beyond our control as it is!
This is what creativity is. It is. It is not something else, any more than hair cells are really liver cells.
The really*1 crew are often merely the non-reality shrews, who cannot face facts but must make them over into something else. Try that on a car, and you not fix your problem but make a mess. Facts and functions are to be understood, not made into the subject of shut-eye leaps of impatient substitution.
We create; and we are created. Just as all creation comes from beyond itself, and it is not there as such until the action is wrought, the deed is done, so are we. That is why, when people search for us in slime, they are really quite as irrelevant as the evidence shows them to be. Kinds are central, often last unchanged throughout all assessable history, have their characteristics and while they may have slots for sub-functions found in other creatures, just as one might use the words of a poem in another setting (cf. SMR pp.252H-J), citing them in a piece of prose, yet they do not merge through numerous failures, part-buildings into what is the creation in kind or give the slightest evidence of becoming something else in kind, or having the capacity in code, to do so. Creations are like that (The gods of naturalism have no go!).
Indeed, when one creates in direct obedience to the call of the Creator, in writing, in words, there are times when a special type of enablement comes, so that the awesome business of creation becomes the more so, enlightening, illuminating, almost like an enduement, perhaps the way a horse might feel with an informed rider on his back! This is of course in full accord with the nature of gifts - they are things without which your capacities are categorically given, and relate, as distinct from talents, to spiritual service in the sight of the Lord who gives the enablement for His wish. It becomes very express in the case of persecution, as when Christians are brought up to authorities on false charges, or for their faith (as in the promise of Luke 21:15, with Matthew 10:19ff.), and is part of the way, in numerous features, the Lord deals with His Church (Romans 12, Ephesians 4, I Corinthians 12).
These are specialties within the creation accorded to man as a work to do; but the generic of creation, with or without this blessed additional help, is part of the feature and function of man. In fact, such has been the divine moulding and sending out of my own ministerial life, that the protection and help signified in the passages above in Matthew and Luke have been experienced, just as one might experience, at the physical level, a jolt from an electrical shock. It is not the jolt but the help which is most remarkable in this case.
Such then are features, facets, kinds and their accomplishments (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 5, News 74; The Defining Drama 10. ), whether in the creation of God, or in peculiar and impressive features, in the creativities accorded in various ways, to man. .
This is the evidence both when we look within at our own creations and when we look outside, at the attestation of forms over time. DISCONTINUITY, as Denton put it, is what is seen; CONTINUITY is found only in the mind of man, relative to the forms of life. As to these, they vary with ingenuity; yet the more they vary, the more the kind is apparent, as in dogs and man, plays and dramas, novels and short stories. As to the works of divine creation, their functions remain in essence the same; the form variation is ingenious, we find, as more and more of the methods of what was once wrongly deemed junk DNA are found*2, and found to be enormously and intricately precise and powerful in various modes of intervention. It is ingeniously rigorous in keeping the kind and allowing it variation, which is part of the spice of life: consolidated construction with fascinating variation about the norm.
Man however, whether in his thought or government, loves to make new kinds. In government, he is not satisfied with mere power, since it is an assault on his kind. It tries to make of man a mere bauble, a play-thing or a work-horse, or to squeeze him, like the fat feet of Cinderella's sisters, into some alien mould. It explodes, in war, in revolution, as in Great Britain in the 17th. century in various stages, in France in the 18th., as in the USA, and in Russia in the 20th..
These were ideological revolutions, for good or for evil, seeking new kinds. In Britain, they sought and gained freedom from mere kings, in stuttering stages, at least in salient measure, and for ideas, approaches, understandings, ways of life. However they tended to put the Church, as a stimulus and stalwart morally and in vision for the nation, under significant government control. This error was made more and more apparent, since the nation is by no means all Christian, and putting Christian things in any way (short of legal requirements of proper behaviour without physical violence) under the nation thus becomes an eccentricity, centrifugal from Christ. It is convenient but wrong, misaligned.
Hence when as now the nation is deteriorating morally and ethically and culturally to an enormous and all but unrecognisable degree, the Church not unexpectedly is becoming a byword for equivocation and almost division on such basic issues as whether the male part of reproduction should be linked in some kind of marriage or performance not with the female, but the male, as physiological inept as biblically reprobate.
In France, enough of all this aristocratic and Romanist misrule in government and religion! Let us have men as brothers, not beat-up relics of due liberty, and let them have with liberty, then equality, not summation in squalors unthinkable, and with that, make them acknowledge who they really are, all one KIND, and so have fraternity. Yes, but on what basis ? On that of guillotining a CLASS of persons who crossed the moral boundaries you affirm, and then doing the same to some of your own who tangle with your perceptions as a crowd on the rampage, and so make that sharp-tongued lady, the guillotine to be in place of the God whom you deny! Wonderful! Such liberty, such equality in death, if not in life, as power struggles continue in the absence of acknowledgement of the Maker, and people try to force this or that view or crew onto the quivering multitude with swaggering equality, present only in name.
These revolutions had at some point, a relevance; but at most points, they failed, and put what mattered most into alliance with what does not, or what mattered little above what mattered most, until man as god became first too powerful, and then in many ways, infamous, wallowing in wonder, hoping for better things while growing in any direction, either for lack of basis, or a basis too broad, mingling mere human ideas with the necessities of our kind, in the kindness of the Creator.
Then in the 20th century we had another huge ideological revolution. Dissatisfied with their profound defeat and demoralisation in World War I, many were grabbed with hopes of land, by atheist improvisers, who made ludicrous theories without evidence, descending from hatred, failure, fiascos found, but without basis except in new KINDS, or classes, which became the new machinery for demolition, as a society of illusion was set up, to be devoid of imperiously imposing classes, but in so doing, making them all the worse, as classes of government and governors became more and more formidable, as the effort to construct man in new forms failed, leading at last to perhaps 30,000,000 liberated citizens being liberated not in life, but from it, in the mortuary, or on the ground where listless they might lie, enfranchised with torture, horror, deportation, a virtual deforestation of the kind called man.
We need now to consider the revolution in the USA. It did not want England, and later on it found it was not keen, most understandably, on slaves. It wanted freedom for the pursuit of happiness under God. Which God was discretely not made sufficiently clear; but then, in the mêlée, you could perhaps find this out for yourself anyway, and was this not part of the magnificent liberty which is part of the birthright of the kind called man! Wonderful! many millions seem to have become Christians, as in England earlier, and much in the nation savoured well, but ... just as England put too much governmental intervention into the Church, so the USA put too little to distinguish the God of creation and redemption into the God who was to be honoured, whether or not anyone actually put faith in Him, this being a private matter.
Hence, when the nation found it convenient to have power instead of purity, in increasing measure, and force instead of faith, power politics with Kissinger instead of truth politics, with ideals, vision and Christ before it, when it chose to banish the Lord's prayer as said in schools and then to move towards removing notations of biblical verses (not written, but signified) even from gun-sights, when it considered male-male marriage and the President swears to enable this kind of thing on an increasing scale, when the Koran is called holy and the nation takes its hat off to any god of whatever kind that seems convenient, then once more, you move into a realm of disengagement from any recognisable basis, anything being called God, even if force is its famous milieu from the days of the invasion of Mecca by Muhammad on.
Revolution always seems to have its point, but like a pressurised tank exploding, its dramas seem in substantial measure to carry carelessness, inadequacy and quick-fixes which are obviously inept from the first, and take more or less time to show it, that we might note it, in due course.
Ideological revolution is little different, very often. If you are inventing new morals, then since the God of creation is neither ineloquent nor anything like silent, but in word and deed has blessed - enemies say 'harassed' ) the earth, these CAN only be wrong. Thus the revolution called evolution came into its heyday and prime, as nations began to see new light, though it was darkness indeed, for dither, dynamic and devastation in various times and places, as time evidenced its role, so that the glories of this or that nation now had a new flag to wave: WE are superior, whether under Kaiser or Hitler or Stalin or indeed with the Emperor of the land of Hiroshima. WE will prevail because of our this or our that.
What prevailed was death, until after World War II, there was a new heyday, of very contrary enlightened humanism, as MAN, kind in his kind and wise in his age, would become the new amoral Moses, and spout out whatever ideas he thought of, such as this, that all children should be brought up with the concept of the brotherhood of man and in peace; which hasn't really worked AT ALL. If EVER there was a time of systematic, bucolic, obstinate, impassioned war and hatred, this is it. Millions die at the flick of the wrist of some unspeakable tyrant, possibly insane, certainly inane, inventing morals of force, survival the great thing, as if some villain should survive, and hence be most blessed, having learned by duplicity, complicity, vengeance and violence, untruth and slander, invasion and intrusion, speech and outreach, how to intimidate others and make great his own little name!
Without logically based morals (cf. News 19), the United Nations has become merely an arm of whatever power forces have seized the control, whether by Islamic voting power from many nations, or other power blocs determined to get what they can and give what they must. As humankind reverts to being a KIND, after all, and nothing of advance is to be found, either in brain or main, in spirit or in heart, but only retrogression to ideational infancy, and mutative degeneration*2, the fancy notions of self-creation continuing with grandeur, become like rotten applies, mere decay by-products of illusionary minds, depraved concepts and imaginary forces which cannot even make information, though they are to be conceived of as creating for no reason other than desire.
Working in desecratory mansions, they deny the truth with their lore, and makes laws without moral foundation, amoral at best, desolatory at worst; and man brays and is content, a little, while he squirms in discomfiture, seeing no end: though end there is, if not an ending to be desired.
Very well, for this revolution as for the others, there has been desire and fire; but there is only burning. It is inadequate like all the rest, untrue like each of these, partial, inept, incompetent, blind to what it does not choose to see, and seeing what is blurred by desire.
It is neither revolution in general nor the elusive necromancy of evolution in particular, as an ideational sub-unit, itself as invisible as the rest for its fine results, being confused like them, that sufficiency either for cause or for consequence is to be found. Nor is it in the fallacies of gradualism, as if vast feats can be wrought without grounds in creation and cause so long as they happen slowly, when in fact, NOTHING can achieve anything without the comparable powers for the laws, which lore can never make, the discipline of structure, either in thought or design, or the diligence to invent in innovation, what controls mere drab basics, themselves with neither thought-creativity nor spiritual schema, but only obedience to their structure, be it pin or universe.
As they TRY, in making a trying universe in both senses of the term, they fail; and they fail and fall because they are illusionary, seeking what is permanently elusive, because causatively ludicrous, inadequate, merely imagined, never seen, not at all found, contrary to logic and yet in preposterous anomaly, endowed to invent it, and that with none to endow on such a model! The truth is not there, and it is sheer waste, not only of time, either to look for it there or to seek rest for man, or vitality and life, in any such lairs of unreason.
THE FOUR Rs
What then of the position of this race ?
Confrontations of inimical members of humankind have been numerous, vicious, violent, oratorical, vile. Putin is reminding the world of the Cold War, in the terms of which he seems fascinated, with desire to continue. China seems bemused with its grandeur, as with an imperial emperor of old, in communal dress (but not VERY communal, as report suggests there may be more Christians in China than members of the Communist Party, though their care is great only in confrontation, intimidation, infiltration and defamation). It is impressed with this, but not with that, will keep commercial characters if it likes, in prison for years because in its OWN (as Rudd insists, 'due process' , but WHAT process is so reclusive that is just!) ... in its very own opinion, they are guilty of breaching this or that law, which in its own, in its very own opinion, is applicable.
They say so, so thus it is to be. Such withering justice may seem sweet for the select, in this least of all egalitarian political processes, but in the end it will and must turn sour. What is of the light comes into it, and gladly; and what cannot stand, often cannot stand public scrutiny because light is foreign to it. If it is not so, let it then be shone, with openness as citizens of other nations are afflicted with laws susceptible to absolutist control*3 , interpretation and varied institution. On the other hand, who will be so foolish as to put himself, herself into such a situation, merely for profit. Life is more than profit; but for life, for the gospel, many might well taste the ironies and the perils, as did Paul (cf. I Corinthians 4, II Corinthians 4).
Atheistic communism, however adapted for profit by either or any party, has absolute power with comparatively puny power, compared with that of the Lord. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, its testimony of tyranny has surpassed the days of the Czars (SMR pp. 971-972).
Trial ? Judgment ? Decree ? This is always the jingoism of the junta. WE say, and now YOU know. End of story.
Nations sufficiently
servile, to do business on any such terms have, at the governmental level
at least, lost
crucial aspects of their understanding. What is it worth to sacrifice your
citizens to this sort of wild thuggery which, whether it occur in some given
case or not, is always an open slather from the source which has no ground but
man himself, and that in illicit misconception*3 ? Is income more than the people for whom
it is being made ?
Remediation, ah yes, they may say, but of course! We will induce people like the atheist government of China, new USSR in moral type, to play the game. As with Clinton as Secretary of State, we can tell them that moral issues need not now be stressed, as they need to export and the USA to import, so let's get going and solve our material problems while China lends and the USA borrows, forgetful of the extent to which this applies: the borrower is servant to the lender; or would you use the labour oppression so often found in China, to an intense degree, as a basis for borrowing of its rewards ?
Yes we can do that, they may say: just as Kissinger so brilliantly brought peace to Vietnam and received the Nobel prize of perhaps some 50,000 dollars for his efforts, so that, in the actual result, force should rule not only Vietnam but Cambodia nearby, and kill some two million there, especially teachers, doctors and leaders who could be a nuisance to the dictatorship which was apparently misconceived as some kind of liberty, diffusely considered.
No, none of these things do the work needed, neither revolution, evolution nor remediation, lost in inadequacy, wanton in irrationality, at last and increasingly, writhing in turmoil, worry, force to cover and stress. It is not here that the basic criterion of deliverance is to be found for mankind.
You need to learn, not as at school, the 3 Rs, but the adult 4 Rs.
These are: regeneration, redemption, realisation and finally, repentance. This we have been told for generations, centuries, millenia. It is not so much in the telling but in the doing that failure occurs! As with Jeremiah, many consider it as a pleasant song; but they do not sing it. It is however more than song, for its basis is truth, reality, rationality and validity as nothing else has, nor is there any competition at this level*4 .
In this case, each individual is to meet the necessity, not from force, unless the force of reason should impel not a little; but even this is not used to dragoon, but to inform. It is not a new system or brilliance of enterprise into the unknown novelties of pseudo-grandeur for man that is needed; these incongruous nothings may appeal, but in the end, appal. There is something good for man from the God without whom there is neither goodness nor the possibility of even defining it.
Liberty is given for love; and without love, the power-thrust kind of treatment is mere massive distortion of humankind with mere cruelty and force, madness and appetite, self-will deployed in endless contrivances that work only ruin, since mankind is not made for that, but for an intensive co-operative kindness and understanding. For this, our lives were formed for this, and with this, they operate with engaging joy and peaceful hearts. That is why cunning and intrigue, power domination and heartlessness only breed more of the same, in unending swirls and cyclotronic escalations, until the race is ruined and the world unlivable. Jesus Christ predicted this syndrome and this outcome, and now it is with us, as soon, biblically He will be (cf. Answers to Questions 5.).
By all means save your own life, look after number one, ensure a good return in the power, privilege, comfort, self-satisfaction stakes by all means, but in so doing, you cease to have life, but rather enter the sad shrine of deception, death and mordant judgment. It is available because of freedom, and freedom because of the love of God which dowered it to us, and which requires it for operation; but when the poisoned cup is drunk, even drunkenness is a better option )(cf. Matthew 16:24-27).
Steadfastly, our lives refuse to be coerced by force, controlled
 |
by inane thought-manipulations
of this or that erroneous system of ideas, |
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by the erratic
psychic dynamics and dramatics that many project when in power, |
|
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by palpable
self-interest of empire, nation, society, group, or even of oneself, |
It tends always to be resented, resisted, like a plague, like cancer, like stomach ulcers, as a thing intrusive, delusive, ludicrous, comic in its pretensions (hence much in the way of satire is formed, like pearls under duress in the mother of pearl shell). It leads in wars to wars, in revolutions to revolutions, in hatreds to hatreds, in asininities to asininities; and it does not work, for man has work appointed for him to do, his very own, and using a pen for a plough never will work.
His own work, this is in line with the fascinating, intriguing, magnificent coding brilliance by which successive generations are constructed before our eyes, in body, and endowed both with the mind that can investigate the works of the Logos, Jesus Christ, applicator of reason so that its works CAN be investigated by reason, and source of salvation, so that it can be delivered from ruin in unreason, uncouthness of heart and servitude of spirit to ignorant lusts. Indeed each of us has a body so constructed, before we even think! a mind so that we can investigate what is mind's product, and a spirit so that we can add to the weeds, unwise before their harvest, or become laden with wheat (cf. Matthew 7:15ff., 15:13, 13:23, 12:24).
THE FIRST LOVE
Love appeals because love congeals thoughts into a compass understandable, mission into a reality desirable and meaning comes like a fresh breeze, as we relax and expand in the wonders of mutual association, first with God our Maker (as with our bodies, on His terms who made us, and they are not grievous but deliciously free, being chaste rather than chased), and then with others of like mind. But there is one flaw in this striking result: it is this. Since even then, the source of love can be bypassed, the remedy can be pirated into false practice. Thus the very word becomes nauseous to many who become accustomed to its misuse, as it is made to mean almost anything, from long-term self-embracing, self-advancement, to lust and self-indulgence: a form of oppression as often seen in the Taliban in their treatment of women, almost as if they were possessions or playthings or properties, not peers.
The source of man and of the love for which his nature is made, is not only loving, but pure, holy, has standards unbreachable, moves in wonder because of purity and mercy and peace; and as to people given the magnificent liberty which we have, to despise or aspire to the grace of God, to love His Redeemer Jesus Christ, alone verified and validated in history as the source of truth, indeed truth itself*4 , these can treat it with disdain or indifference, or grasp it as a child its mother.
Man can flaunt his imagined powers (like those of a child in a play-pen, who without understanding himself or his pen, finds he can push it a little, and rejoices!); he can imagine God will simply overlook sin and squalor and murder and horror and intransigent wickedness and pride and vanity and self-will, as if it had not been, and swallow the consequences like some kind of spiritual boa constrictor, if they have such a contradictory concept of the purity of God, that they befoul Him with their own filth, their lot begins to approach the finale of unforgiveness; but this is not the way of the verified word of God, of Jesus Christ.
God WILL NOT behold iniquity (Habakkuk 1), consider its sway, allow its presumption, be party to its presumption (Habakkuk 3, Isaiah 59), or fail to consider its violation and inundation of much. It is all before Him, and He INSISTS on meeting the cost of these violations, injustices, braying wickednesses and moral presumptions in Himself*5, not as merely bearing WITH them, but bearing them in transfer of guilt and penalty upon Himself, maintaining that utter justice which has no favourites, and truth which never smudges facts with fancy. For this, He requires regeneration, the reconstruction of the sinner in a renewed format, in a changed milieu, and to be inhabited by His Holy Spirit (Romans 8:9); and He acts in all, from His infinitude of justice and power, to cover the case in Himself (cf. Isaiah 53). In His so doing, justice and mercy have met in peace (as in Psalm 85:10ff.).
Peace on earth and goodwill toward man can be proclaimed precisely because HE who so proclaims, has paid for the gap, covered the case with His own spiritual wallet, in fact His own personal and definitive expression (Hebrews 1), Jesus Christ. Thus, liberty is given, superior types, from education, instruction, environment, have no advantage, and man either does or does not receive in redemption the free gift which emancipates, dependent not on the will or flesh with its advantages, but on the knowledge, indeed the foreknowledge of God, who desiring all, neither allows duplicity in any, nor fails to find those whom His touch reaches.
Justice, mercy, truth and peace are resplendent; but the Cross of Calvary, which paid for it all, was not resplendent, nor is any other sin which seeks the adornment of preference for more or less sin, and mandates of preferability from self-seeking hearts, as if to seduce their Maker with their own selves. Not so is redemption, its cost, its power, its pre-conditions or its results.
It is no matter of making a remediation for unchanged sinners, but making new people in Christ, restored in mind, bodily control and spirit to their Maker, in the greatest creative act since creation, and the largest divine payment since the Fall of man.
THEREFORE is categorical peace available, which this conniving world knows nothing of, whether in religions arrogantly imagining that you can pacify God by some inferior things which you do (being yourself inferior in sinfulness), or otherwise; as if even perfection negated prior wickedness, though such perfection in man is not here to be gained or seen or observed or found in any way; and were it there, it would not atone for what was there before!
THE FALSE LOVE AND THE FINAL RESTORATION ...
WHERE APPLICABLE
Man is disregarding this, or replacing it, or presenting baubles in world religions. seeking in part or in whole to take over salvation from God, about as useful as a leopard trying to deal by deleting his spots. Acting in such ways, contrary to evidence, and making such delusions new grounds of war, attack and profound evil as if evil were so endemic that it must rule him, they war on each other, seduce each other, and the greatest of all seductions is of course the spiritual, for in its bag lie all the rest of the powers of man! So it does, and will do, enchaining or being enchained, enhanced or debauched entirely, whether in admiration of himself or disparagement from all, unless he finds the Lord.
Thus there is not only the behavioural nightmare which man is now finding as power increases, to be so disturbing that the question comes nearer and nearer to this, WHO has the nuclear power and will recklessly use it in some fit of pathological denaturing, and remove the race! There is more.
For those who do not know God, the point of this nuclear brandishing and liability may appal; and indeed, without Christ, as He declared in Matthew 24, the race would assuredly perish. What it knows is how to destroy itself in unfit fitnesses, and survival of the corrupt; what it needs to know is how to be saved from itself from its Maker, this NOT by its ingenuities of man (which in free people have their place), but by the plan of salvation of God Almighty, who has been telling it for thousands of years, without change, in one place only, the Cross, in one Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, and in one structure, the Gospel.
Indeed, to find Him in this, you have to abandon all your magnificent and unruly, discordant and self-opinionated flummeries and receive life afresh. This is called regeneration and happens when He is received by faith, and indeed, this very reception which God performs, just as a mother has the babe come with her urgings, from the womb, comes with faith and regeneration rejoicing in each other like twins.
With this, comes realisation (as in Matthew 16, Colossians 1:9-15); for this is light, and walking in the light (John 8:12) means that understanding comes like the answer to some problem which is so obvious once present, that it brings relaxation with it as well, and joy. With all that is repentance, for when truth strikes, though it does not force itself, yet like a mighty wind, it prevents complacency and presents one with the certainties of one's own shortcomings (John 16:8ff.), especially in having lacked saving faith in the Saviour, in contrast with His prevailing performance and eternity.
This it does with such vigour that repentance is not an act, but a work wrought in one's heart (Acts 11:18), as if by a surgeon, a surgeon of the soul. Without this, there is only perishing (Luke 13:1ff.), for it is life without light and this means darkness for the soul, obfuscation for the mind, and demurrage for persistent delinquency, whether in pride or hide.
There is time given to reflect; and this is it.
NOTES
The really crew are those who are never content with what is there, is functional, performs, has its own ideational level, or thought content, or mode of operation; but it must, as if by some neurotic and certainly erratic compulsion, try to change the raw data into something else, pinching it here, squeezing it there, making it really some other thing, something with the mere appearance of doing what it in fact does. In this sort of way, thought is really matter in motion, or matter is really thought without wings, nerve impulses are really all thought is, or thought is really all nerve impulses are, as participants in these desultory illusions try to subsume every feature or facet under some one heading, as if to make ALL numbers zero or one, or only one and zero, or by some other unscientific and extraneous impulsion, anything into anything.
Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13, and SMR Ch. 3 give some illustrations in philosophic history of this craze, which is one of the worst features in scientistic imaginings, often masquerading, by invasive assault, in the field of science. See also Scientific Method ...
*2 See Sums, Summits and in Sum Epilogue, and in particular this excerpt:
From Waiting for Wonder Appendix, we find this remarkable attestation by Dr John Sanford of Cornell. It is here placed in some of the context, in which it is placed, below.
Williams is especially interested in meta-information, which is information about information, such as any student, whether over long years or shorter ones, needs to understand in order to be semantically functional. You have to know language in order to convey it, how it works, where it goes and does not, and to be really effective, why! *T1
Thus, from Williams, we have further data (p. 115, op. cit.).
Not only is this meta-information case what is found, he declares, but in the regions yet to be more fully investigated, there appears to be a situation where all or almost all of this type of DNA is engaged in the work of gene regulation. This is an arena of current thrust in investigation. Rearrangements and circuits, orders, need some device to protect and to inject, and this meta-information seems full of it. Brilliant devices to use massive information structures to gain specialised variations on them, come with that fluency of mobility in the fixity of underlying structure which allows generic specifications to be adroitly adapted, like Mark I and Mark II automobiles, for example, as people await with expectation what variation on their desired make will be forthcoming. The mobile genetic units called transposons are one such device, which in one aspect, almost seem to resemble working mechanics, hands-on.
Williams moves (op.cit. p. 116), to note the work of Dr John Sanford of Cornell University, citing the latter's Entropy & Mystery of the Genome. Here, the mutative exercise considered in the genome, which as with most designs exposed to the elements, involves deterioration, not progress. This is what could be called the Gould phenomenon: things in terms of design KINDS or types, are going down, not up (cf. Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Ch. 6). This is in part the Werner Gitt phenomenon: information does NOT arise without intelligence. There are laws, and these need to be known and applied*T1 (Journal of Creation 2009, 23(2), pp. 96-109).
In other words, these are areas of a kind relative to humankind, the way they go at the physical and physiological level, in overview.
What then of this finding of Sanford of Cornell ? That is the correlative both of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and of the basics of information science. His contribution is reported as showing that "deleterious mutations are accumulating at an alarming rate in the human population and that both natural selection and even the worst possible nightmare scenario of eugenics is powerless to stop it." This results from the enormous synthesis of variables, in holistic accords, weak points arising after several thousands of years, in hidden and varied ways. What there is to select from is being impaired, and the old chestnut, that to remove the worst creates the best is seen in its practical drabness. The best is going down.
As a matter of cultural interest, one may note this: As to such decline, you see it in schools too, where declining standards make the best more and more what used to be nearer to the middle: and this is so in English in particular, where there has been some sort of ecstasy, it might seem, in reckless ignorance as if creativity were some kind of squirming of the psyche, and needed no expertise. To be sure creativity is great and wonderful; but the power to create well is itself not without discipline. In fact our liberty and our due use of it to implement it well, both are needed; there is simply no point in rushing to extremes, ignoring this or that facet or feature of humankind, or its construction.
That however is a cultural aside, where will is involved, as also a wearisome wander streak, as man becomes more bombastic about the accomplishments of his race, and less concerned about what it can be in his own life and spirit, its source and responsibilities. In the language of the Song of Solomon, he is learning to neglect his own vineyard, where tractors are often to be seen rooting up some of the best vines. They did it by the million in the World Wars. Let us however return to the physiological side.
Williams proceeds to the genetic point that "everyone is a mutant, many times over." Suppression can help eliminate some of the defections from the pre-derangement situation, but it does not remove others, hidden in the forest of myriads of data in various bundles. The rate of deterioration being immense, there is therefore an increasing basis for more degradation, and since control genes have a magnified aperture for action, this moves things yet more adroitly off the sensitively poised course. Inhibitive editing programs for gene copying, pure marvels of wisdom, tend to delay the inevitable (except for divine action), but they do not eliminate it; and if miracle is in view for our race in its current mode, it is alas not in receptive mode.
The due results of ignoring reality, reason, certified revelation, the word of the living God in the Bible and as Jesus Christ, these accrue; and as in many physical processes, so in this spiritual one, once the decline starts, its forces can interact and quicken the consequences, as when a bus sliding a little, then tilts and tips down a decline.
Renewal is certainly not directed at the world itself, which fails inwardly and outwardly simultaneously. Nor is that accidental; for God moves with finesse both morally and materially. The renewal which is available, now as always, is at the individual and Church level, where God is plighted to His people in this same Jesus Christ, and revives, renews, blesses, refreshes, give understanding and resolution, rescue and strength (cf. Acts 3:19ff., Colossians 1:9ff., I Peter 1:3ff.). This is the spiritual opportunity made by the God who made man, and it is for man by faith, through which, in full accord with reason, he reaches the Lord of life, and learns to work with and for Him, before His salvation complete, He comes to judge, to rule, and to complete the work for this universe of His: for as to Him, to create a universe, or a new heavens and new earth, it is as for an author to write a book.
But what of the world ? Life is not really a grand and gory tea-party in which you slay what is unfit, and so become better. All deteriorate rather rapidly, the opposite to evolutionary progress, and fully in line with Gould's famous apostrophe to the heavens, as he looked at the so-named Cambrian era material in the Burgess deposits. HOW are we to explain progress when in terms of major design types, we have regress! that was the core of his almost cantankerous response to his findings (cf. Wake Up World! Ch. 6). Without God, man plods.
*3 See *2 in the preceding Chapter. k
See for example:
SMR,
Jesus Christ, Defaced Unfazed
... and esp. Ch. 4,
TMR Ch. 5,
Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer.
See for example for background:
Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4, Waiting for Wonder Appendix, Repent or Perish Ch. 2.