AUSTRALIAN BIBLE CHURCH

AUSTRALIAN BIBLE CHURCH - March 9, 2014

A Presbyterian Church following the Bible without Qualification
and the Lord Jesus Christ without Compromise by Faith

JOB 40:2,8

"Shall the one who contends with the Almighty, correct Him ?

He who rebukes God, let him answer it."

"Would you condemn me that you may be justified."

FUTILE EFFORTS TO CORRECT GOD

CHOICE OF CREATOR

Condemn God ? By what ? This wit of man ? What of this ? It is not the spawn of nothing. Nothing did not make it, in stages or absolutely, because as to nothing, by definition, it is not there. To envisage such a commencement is the same as saying this: I don't know anything about it, or anything else. In that case, there is no point in saying it, except as some form of communication of pathology.

It is not, in particular, the spawn of a magically enterprising something from nowhere, called matter, or void, or nature: with its order and laws, precision engineering and rational ways accommodating to the rational investigations of man. Magic is fun, for children. A rational mind with a rational universe, drawn from nowhere and product of nothing, is not fun for adults, but both myth and evasion.

Dimensions do not grow, like trees from seed in the ground. The dimensions of life, in mind, and will, where is their seed ? They require support, basis and ground. So does argument itself, for that matter. Ignore it and be silent. Groundless grounds are nothing.

Such implicit assumptions, acknowledged or other, are rationally degraded and operationally founded on nothing and while aetiologically vapid, imply what they deny. What then of this vacuous spectre of man's making, this self-made world ? this auto-generative product of nothing, and what of then criticising the Maker to boot, as you deny Him! You need not a nothing or a failure to think, but a rational ground for 'nature'; and that is the nature of the case. Fail there, and you fail reason, forsake all argumentation and are a voice in the dark.

Such avoidance of the issue is therefore of no validity. A causeless cog is fiction, and knows nothing.

Design is the pre-condition of man's meaning, method and validity. Ignore it, and you have the impossible yawing in its course and jawing in its follies, ingloriously ignorant of its baselessness, and baseness. Only when absolute truth is there and available can any model have validity in declaring it. Relative truth is merely reactionary and responsive, empirically of interest, ultimately without explanation or reason, perspective or basis. It is subjective by definition: it CANNOT get beyond itself. In terms of our definitions in TMR Ch. 5, it is subjectively subjective.

Design is that of which man is a fascinating example, his body the visible exemplar of its definition, past all. But he is far more than this. He is designed and designated not to move furniture, or earth or moons, though he may be able, in some cases, to do this sort of thing. He is designed to understand design, and his place in it, and to do this he needs to understand and to accept Deity's designation of himself as a site for spirit, and a location for enterprise, a partition not of a particle, but operative as a person. This is impossible without reference to his source, which being unique, requires a unique entry to itself.

This is not available to flesh, as babies, or youths or mature persons do not enter into this, as is very possible to observe, by any sort of tertiary growth pattern. It is to be sought; not programmed as are many of man's growth methods and results, gloriously apportioned in their continuity of maturation, geometrically, muscularly, skeletally, physiologically, mentally. It is something extra. It is part of the glory of man (not a glorious glory, aspirant for vainglory, but in the sense of his main attractive feature) that he is able to be a dolt, or discourse with deity. He is not programmed for this, but it is a perquisite for which he is prepared. It is a personal provision. That is why in Proverbs 1, you see deity in the form of wisdom speaking, appealing to man to do freely what he decidedly does not HAVE to do, and in Proverbs 8 telling man that "all that hate me love death."

It is true. If you ignore the absolute which made your relativities, then you are caught in the meaningless, by abstraction of an artificial kind from your meaning's master and source, thus being defiled in the defunct misconceptions of pride, of callow ignorance or both; and so you become an absolute inheritor of a heritage of exclusion. You aspire to the tip.

What else is the destiny of designs that do not work the way they are meant to do ? If you are a fan, then your efforts to dig graves will do nothing to validate your existence or as fan, make you worth while. This is not your task, your milieu, or your wit. It is mere obtrusive obstructionism, laced with folly and perhaps authored in pride. It does not work or fit. If you were a fan by design, it is better to whirr than to work anomalously, on the ground that you want to be back as you were. How vain is this, when never did you operate with more power or provisions for freedom.

The Creator is an infinite Being: unqualified, yet designed by Him, is not a logical option for the critic, since He is the final and initial and eternal reality. Where He informs you, is in the Bible, where the mind can confirm by the evidence in all His predictions, declarations and announcements, testable enormously, but never missing. You can invent gods at will; but they have no will but yours, since you create them, and this confuses the little point that the Creator is the one required for your being: it is not you who are required for His. In dealing with facts, do not reverse roles!

It is witless to condemn the One who is logically necessary to make your wits, without whom there is no validity to your overview, merely a mish-mash of events and relativities. Indeed, reason works or not, dependent on precision; it does not come in bits. But human will can be oblivious of facts.

CHOICE CONCERNING CREATION

Some may say (1), But I would rather CHOOSE what I am for, than be what someone else, anyone else may deem it fitting for me to be or do. This is the rage of outrage being outrageous. In fact, if you are made to be something, rebellion against it may be fitting when it is the folly of some al Qaeda, Communist or Nazi predator^*1, for that is a theft of your liberty that they so seize.

However if it against your Designer that you rage, how are you a captive, that you should aspire to escape ? Did He take a freedom from you which you had before you existed ? and if so, how could you be deprived before you were in existence in order to suffer it ? Think. Or do you imagine that once you were a god ? When, how, on what testimony!

If you were to say (2), I do not happen to like being made into a responsive and responsible being, and wish to register my protest, is this mere metaphysics ? Do you wish to state that you had pre-existent authority NOT to be made into anything ? How ? and on what basis ? But how could you HAVE this or anything else before you had ANYTHING, owing to the circumstance that before being created you were not there at all in order to have it!

Again, someone may say (3), However I have NOW been created, and do not like what I see.

Does this then mean that no one else may feel the same about you ? In other words, what makes you autonomous to be as god, declaring what you MIGHT have been and are WILLING to be, when you already are and had nothing to do with it! If however you were to say (4), Well I have been apportioned with my creation, a sense of justice, and judgment, and I judge it unfair to be made only to serve my Creator. I have other aspirations of a more subjective kind, what then ?. But who made your psyche to have the power to aspire ? If you say, He did, but I aspire to something other than He; then the answer is this.

THE CHOICE TO CONDEMN GOD TO JUSTIFY ONESELF

What then can be done by the revolutionary, the evacuee from God, the disdainful propagandist condemning so as not to believe in Him ? Many Moslems have the same policy, it seems towards Israel. Let us make a deal, to satisfy both parties, they say, having already taken most of the Homeland for the Jews, appointed first by Great Britain in 1917 and then by the League of Nations, to Israel for that purpose. But we do NOT recognise you! That is the frequent Arab or Moslem insistence.

But how could a divorced wife insist on a deal with her former husband if she did not recognise him as an actual being, being too incensed to allow that privilege ? How CAN you reason with a spectre, indeed with what is not there! You have to decide to reason with what IS there, or avoid the farce. With God, if you disbelieve Him, why criticise ? If He is not there, you would not expect much would you ? Indeed, you COULD not then rationally expect anything, and if you did, you would give claim to being demented. NOTHING does not do ANYTHING!

As we have already seen, there is nothing to criticise in the power you are given, in the options you have provided, in the love which is offered, in the deletion of debt you have at your side, in the knowledge of God as a friend which is included, once your disdain is gone. If you want to criticise pain, then both C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain) and Dr Paul Brand (The Gift of Pain) have written widely on this topic, summing up many points. Perfect people do not need pain, but introduce me to one and I will gain information! Often the seemingly best are rogues at heart, dishonourable, unreliable and self-serving if not self-seeking, when the final choices are made!

Man is guilty and his ragings, ravings and ravishments hurt, and create hurt, disjoin and create disturbance, and it increases, like late cancer, as Christ said it would (Matthew 24, Luke 21).

Many are godly of course, forgiving, kind, honourable, reliable, having trusted God and become more and more like Christ for decades; but they were not so from birth; and even now, lament their imperfections (cf. I John 1:7). We deceive only ourselves, says John, if we say we have no sin. To avoid it, you have to be as radiant and unselfish and sacrificial and intimate in the knowledge of God, at the human level, as Christ was; to know and go as He directs at all times (John 8:29), and to avoid thinking that satisfying yourself (judicial authority and aptitude ?), you satisfy truth.

Why do companies have auditors ? It is because at best, self-satisfaction and self-gratification are not the same as fact. Indeed, those adorned with these not only tend to be delusive captives of egotism, but in themselves narrow and insensitive to the entirety of calls and conditions.

'The perfect person,' God aside, more often occasions ridicule, since our race has a certain temper hard to lose; and what is not perfect tends both to be a pain, in the vernacular, and to receive it in the life! Moreover, as Brand points out, as emphatically in leprosy, it is often a grace and a mercy, to prevent worse things, and this is a chief purpose. Again, testing is apt for what is testable, and sincerity is something often revealed in stress and pain. Further, nations can be tested, AND follies revealed in the pain they cause. Indeed, the human facility in many sad cases for maniacal behaviour, can be like that of people devil-possessed. Thus man, wilfully ignorant of the knowledge of God, can become a lectern to teach what lies in mankind: and how vast is the necessity for healing.

A mother may exhaust herself caring for a sick child, showing love, and if some things hurt both parties, then it is still better than death. God has not merely been willing to pardon the iniquities of man, which soar like some vast universal pollution, convulsed in hurricanes in horror, but took action to cover the necessities of the case, die in the Messiah for the guilt, cover the sin with His own ultimate payment in death, expiate for the repentant and make a gift of eternal life to those receiving it in faith in Him and His gift, and not in man. You do not even have to receive it; though like a gas-mask in a chemical assault, you need it!

Is anyone critical of this ? Should He have gone further ? where ? in departing from heaven ? then it would not be heaven, but the abode of a usurper who did not create, does not understand. Our often odious earthly history has shown the type all too well in the past on this globe. There is no ground for criticism of God, even our considerable powers, as made in His image, misused, being the source of much of our potential pain; and He does not willingly afflict the children of men (Lamentations 3:33). Indeed, you read in Isaiah 48, this lament:

"Oh that you had heeded My commandments,
Then your peace would have been like a river,
And your righteousness like the waves of the sea..."

Many would not settle for less than BEING God and satisfying their very own selves, in order to be content. What else ? This is simply not available, since only God HAS ALWAYS BEEN, we arising only at the episode of our birth. With the totally mini-powers (though great beside much of creation), how absurd even to think of ruling all, when not instituting it, nor even understanding it! That is guarantee of folly. What we have on offer, is guarantee of eternal life and removal of all impediments, in principle now and in practice when the tests are all over; and the purity of peace is confirmed without adulteration or adultery of spirit.

God is unimpeachable, nor are there charges against Him: He not only pardons, but pays for the barrister who secures it (cf. I John 2:1-2)! You may neglect Him, but do not blame Him for your own neglect. As folly goes, that would be a paragon.

Dimensions do not grow, like trees from seed in the ground. The dimensions of life, in mind, and will, where is their seed ? They require support, basis and ground. So does argument itself, for that matter. Ignore it and be silent. Groundless grounds are nothing.

Man's sightless wit, profitless autonomy and propensity for programming seeks to make the validity of his wit the result of nothing, or one of its derivatives which cannot exist. Such specifications ? they do not swarm or spawn from nothing, or what lacks the requisites of the case. Such implicit assumptions, acknowledged or other, are rationally degraded and operationally founded on nothing and while aetiologically vapid, imply what they deny. What then of this vacuous spectre of man's making, this self-made world ? and then criticising the Maker to boot! You need not a nothing or a failure to think, but a rational ground for 'nature'; and that is the nature of the case. Fail there, and you fail reason, forsake all argumentation and are a voice in the dark.

Such avoidance of the issue is therefore of no validity.

Design is the pre-condition of man's meaning, method and validity. Ignore it, and you have the impossible yawing in its course and jawing in its follies, ingloriously ignorant of its baselessness, and baseness. Only when absolute truth is there and available can any model have validity in declaring it. Relative truth is merely reactionary and responsive, empirically of interest, ultimately without explanation or reason, perspective or basis. It is subjective by definition: it CANNOT get beyond itself. In terms of our definitions in TMR Ch. 5, it is subjectively subjective..

Design is that of which man is a fascinating example, his body the visible exemplar of its definition, past all. However he is far more than this. He is designed and designated not to move furniture, or earth or moons, though he may be able, in some cases, to do this sort of thing. He is designed to understand design, and his place in it, and to do this he needs to understand deity and to accept Deity's designation of himself as a site for spirit, and a location for enterprise, a partition not of a particle, but operative as a person. This is impossible without reference to his source, which being unique, requires a unique entry to itself.

It is true. If you ignore the absolute which made your relativities, that you are caught in the meaningless, by abstraction of an artificial kind from your ostensible meaning's master, defiled in the defunct misconceptions of pride, callow ignorance or both, and become an absolute inheritor of a heritage of exclusion. You aspire to the tip.

The Creator is an infinite Being, unqualified, and being designed by Him, is not an option, since He is the final and initial and eternal reality. Where He informs you, is in the Bible, where the mind can confirm by the evidence in all His predictions, declarations and announcements, testable enormously, but never missing. You can invent gods at will; but they have no will but yours, since you create them, and this confuses the little point that the Creator is the one required for your being: it is not you who are required for His. In dealing with facts, do not reverse roles!

CHOICE CONCERNING CREATION

Some may say, But I would rather CHOOSE what I am for, than be what someone else, anyone else may deem it fitting for me to be or do. This is the rage of outrage being outrageous. In fact, if you are made to be something, rebellion against it may be fitting when it is the folly of some al Qaeda, Communist or Nazi predator^*1, for that is a theft of your liberty that they so seize.

If you were to say, I do not happen to like being made into a responsive and responsible being, and wish to register my protest, is this mere metaphysics ? Do you wish to state that you had pre-existent authority NOT to be made into anything ? How ? and on what basis ? But how could you HAVE this or anything else before you had ANYTHING, owing to the circumstance that before being created you were not there at all in order to have it!

Again, someone may say, However I have NOW been created, and do not like what I see.

If however you were to say, Well I have been apportioned with my creation, a sense of justice, and judgment, and I judge it unfair to be made only to serve my Creator. I have other aspirations of a more subjective kind.

But who made your psyche to have the power to aspire ?

If you say, He did, but I aspire to something other than He; then the answer is this.

By all means, you are indeed as you evidently realise, free to kick at the goads, to ignore what you are and to envisage yourself as something other, some kind of god with power to declare and even create something else for what you are, in order that you might be it. However, there is a down side to this imaginative splendour which you operate with such facility, as was given to it in the liberties with which you were brilliantly endowed at creation. How is this so ? It is like this.

In that case, since you ARE what you are, and do not start with the advantage of being what you choose to become, you have to consider the price of this estimable alteration. SINCE you are a creature of God, there are limits, designed limits, designated powers and destined results. If you were a car, an endeavour to act as a forklift would have results. If you had will, you could try, but what you could not do is BECOME what you are not.

If you have the power to alter, it would be limited by the nature and nurture, the construction and conditions of your being as given.

If you try to alter being able to imagine, construe, consider, aspire, and then decline to seek your Creator where He may be found (as in Isaiah 55), so acting on the assumption that you have access to truth as becomes plausible only as a creation of the Absolute God who has it, so that you may urge your case, what then ? If, in fact, you therefore decide NOT to use these logical powers and spiritual resources, or to abuse them into making them seem to do what they are not made able to do, then of course you are dealing with your destiny.

Life forms like grubs may, in the course of a life cycle, turn into something else as programmed. That is the power of the Designer; but if, given the capacity, a grub tries to turn into a stick, it may succeed only too well, and die. If a man acts as a god to re-create himself, despising the conditions of his being and the liberties of his spirit by defiling their source, or even condemning it, destiny is indeed in his negating hand; but it achieves mere ruin. His power so to act is the resultant of liberty, itself a necessity for love; but this use of it does not liberate, merely making deformation amid an implicit defamation of deity.

THE CHOICE TO CONDEMN GOD TO JUSTIFY ONESELF

Thus if they become atheists or the equivalent, having all depend on what is not-God, in a vacuum of meaning and inventive power, then there is no room for complaint, or reason for that matter, since an eternal being is needed always to have what depends as forged in character, on creative power; if He ever were missing, then nothing would beget nothing, as our present state, a falsity. The other option is to come to the table and criticise. As we have already seen, there is nothing to criticise in the power you are given, in the options you have provided, in the love which is offered, in the deletion of debt you have at your side, in the knowledge of God as a friend which is included, once your disdain is gone. If you want to criticise pain, then both C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain) and Dr Paul Brand (The Gift of Pain) have written widely on this topic, summing up many points. Perfect people do not need pain, but introduce me to one and I will gain information! Often the seemingly best are rogues at heart, dishonourable, unreliable and self-serving if not self-seeking, when the final choices are made!

Man is guilty and his ragings, ravings and ravishments hurt, and create hurt, disjoin and create disturbance, and it increases, like late cancer, as Christ said it would (Matthew 24, Luke 21).

'The perfect person,' God aside, more often occasions ridicule, since our race has a certain temper hard to lose; and what is not perfect tends both to be a pain, in the vernacular, and to receive it in the life! Moreover, as Brand points out, as emphatically in leprosy, it is often a grace and a mercy, to prevent worse things, this is a chief purpose. Again, testing is apt for what is testable, and sincerity is something often revealed in stress and pain. Further, nations can be tested, AND follies revealed in the pain they cause. Indeed, the human facility in many sad cases for maniacal behaviour, can be like that of people devil-possessed. Thus man, wilfully ignorant of the knowledge of God, can become a lectern to teach what lies in mankind: and how vast is the necessity for healing.

There is no ground for criticism of God, even our considerable powers, as made in His image, misused, being the source of much of our potential pain; and He does not willingly afflict the children of men (Lamentations 3:33). Indeed, you read in Isaiah 48, this lament:

"Oh that you had heeded My commandments,
Then your peace would have been like a river,
And your righteousness like the waves of the sea..."

Many would not settle for less than BEING God and satisfying their very own selves, in order to be content. What else ? This is simply not available, since only God HAS ALWAYS BEEN, we arising only at the episode of our birth. With the totally mini-powers vested in man (though great beside much of creation), how absurd even to think of ruling all, when not instituting it, nor even understanding it! That is guarantee of folly. What we have on offer, is guarantee of eternal life and removal of all impediments, in principle now and in practice when the tests are all over; and the purity of peace is confirmed without adulteration or adultery of spirit.