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SUMS, SUMMITS and IN SUM

Adding Things Up, and Getting Things Down

CHAPTER 10

The Trinity, the Truth and the  Time

A Father-Son Dialogue

DAY 1

Why ?

Why what ?

Why is everyone at school talking about silly little things like matter, Dad, and how it works, as if this were some sort of a way of life, instead of an undercurrent and a sub-structure for action by what uses it, as anyone can see. We use our spirits to direct it according to our thought, and yet they act as if we were some kind of robots, moved by mental habits, in psychology, and desires,  like dictatorial appetites, and had neither spirit nor heart nor conscience nor command, nor meaning, nor responsibility, and as if everything anyone did could always be explained by this or that feature, when people differ intensively in how they respond, by their own spirits, their aims and understanding, self-control and reason for it. Are they blind ? or mad ? or is it a disease ?

Well, son, you are now getting to the end of your secondary education, and are rather advanced ...

But Dad, I have known these things for years, though I could not have said it the way I want to like this, for long. Why do they not see ?

They shut their eyes.

Why do they do this ? aren't they aware that they are injuring themselves ...

And other people, David.

Yes, in millions and for years, and all for nothing, for imagining anything at all,  and following that, or refusing to see anything at all, and following themselves, or blind leaders, and then TEACHING US this sort of ungoverned garbage as if it had anything to do with education, and not with their own pathological spirits.

What is a spirit,  my son ? tell me.

It is a sort of feeling, no it gives a feeling, a perspective, a light, an illumination, a way of seeing that has focus and realism, or it can do if it is not sick.

Could we say then that man is not only a body, each cell a marvel of construction past the powers of man, though he is endued with power to probe, and he has billions even in his brain, inter-connected for a totality of unity with functional thrust, which is what design is. He is also a mind, which has been spliced with the body, so that they can act as a team. In addition, there is a force of understanding, which may be anaesthetised, but is there as a potential, and a sense of destiny, though this may be paralysed by doubt and self-probing without any understanding ...

Yes, Dad and that is his spirit.

Yes, the spirit of a man is more than thoughts, even than the discipline of logic applied to them,  more even than what he is after, his thrust or bust, his design for himself. It is the animation which lends a basis for his mental agitations and operations, a meaning to his living, a connection-plug if you will, for the power of God, a sensor for peace, a transmitter-receiver for joy and a connotation-basis for his personality.

Could you say this, Dad, that it is the aliveness of man as man, as distinct from the life of his parts, or even  their organisation in a vital fashion. It is what man is, at the last analysis, over all, just as a designer sees the car as an operative unit, with a purpose, and not just or even chiefly as the bits and the precise ways in which they are connected ?

You certainly could. You know, the trouble with most philosophy is simply this: it tries to start with the end, man,  and to move to the beginning as if it were in no need of existing. It just is,  like Topsy. Hence they try to account for cars in terms of cars, not engineers, knowledge, design, purpose, and so make asses of themselves. Why ?  for even as they CHOOSE to look at it like this,  as if the answer to pens being in existence is found in how metals get along in their domain, and ink in its, and so on, and not at all WHY they conform to a unitary function which gives them meaning. Thinking about the way cars are put together does not tell you HOW they were put together, or WHY. In man, the difference is lodged in his spirit, the integral reality, the personal point of a man.

In other words, it is this: that everything is not only the bits, but the point; not only the construction modes but the operational reality; and that not to  focus this is to be so blind that it is like seeing the first aeroplane fly, and wondering how the wind and the ground made it.

Precisely. Occurrence is not composition, and methods of construction are not the constructions unitary function.  You can't look at points and avoid the point or consider how things in general go (which is never to construct things by bits of imperial ordering arising from nowhere, like absent-minded DNA imagining that it could make itself and doing it inadvertently, breaking the rules of logic), and then say, of what they are never found to do, Oh well, they must have gone like this.

 This is anti-science. In actual science, you FIND what they DO, and then reflect. You do not say, in adversity to reality, this is the way they must have gone, although they NEVER are found to do so.

Why, why Dad, do they do it. I am sick to vomiting of their brilliant folly and talkative inanity,  always stressing how great science is,  by which they seem to mean their own thoughts, backed by prejudice in the sense that they imagine what they never find and bind it on us in the class-room, and yet always being themselves so great that they do not even need to approximate its methods.

It is because of one  simple fact. They either do not want God, or they prefer to make one  they can control, or approve.

Isn't it a bit like the way some men have mistresses, Dad ? They are married,  that is the fact, it is a conjunction of two spirits, that is another, it involves how our human race continues, and without it, it wouldn't do so, so it is essential to our natures; and yet they FEEL as if they would like to use sex for pleasure with some other person, and without intention of having children or being fair to the wife who has had all the trouble of bearing and looking after the infant. They  just must do it,  they just will not think, be fair, isn't that so ?

It is. In fact, the Bible speaks of people , as in Proverbs 6-9. You see it there, wisdom crying like some woman with heart and appeal for them to come, but in the parallel, the woman of ill-fame and lustful appetite doing the same for other reasons! You see of it those having other frames of reference, other gods, than the One who made them and called them.

In fact, son, it is as if they were the harlots men go  to, instead of abiding in God; and it speaks rather in that way of nations too, who forsake the living God having had some knowledge of Him. I remember, Ezekiel 23,12ff. even talks of a nation being intrigued by the powerful young men of some foreign nation, as if this was a sort of god to follow, a love en masse, a sort of passion for some other fashion than their own nation's past. For pleasure or power, seeking majesty or glory, man in individuals or nations plays the rat on God.

Then there is a special kind of suffering for that ?

Then they scream at the trap about which they had been warned, and say how cruel it is, that when they deny their Maker, things happen to the wander-lusting person, nation, power. Psalm 107 shows some of this sort of episode. When you carefully lower yourself into a man trap, is it surprising that it snaps. But they WILL do it.

Why ?

It is  called lust, very often. It is an undisciplined, irrational desire for things to be different from what they are,  so that one can indulge whatever novelty, idea,  governing philosophy, way of thinking or acting or being, and become a sort of novel being written, with the author oneself.

They become sick of God ?

Very often, it is that.

Why ? He is beautiful and marvellous and without Him,  life would be rotten.

It is.

You mean all this international hubbub is the stink of rot ?

Very much. Man without God is like meat without refrigeration.  It is fine, but it soon stinks.

Dad, they even  seem to forget, the teachers at school, and the  texts, that they themselves HAVE a spirit, even when they USING it to deny it, and engaging in a perspective hunt, in order to find what appeals.  Appeals to what ? To sodium, to bicarb of soda ? or to themselves, to their assessive, cogitative, possessive, imaginative, ruminating, desire-possessed, vitality of thrust of mind and personality by which they are rightly known.

To deny what one uses, involves the use of logic as the means, except they admit to being irrational and hence unable logically to defend their position. Logic involves a thought structure which has to be the means of communication and application, yes and demonstration.  Unless, therefore, they are simply indulging themselves and calling it teaching, they ASSUME that logic is true and right and sound. But does it weigh ? or does it require obedience or else confusion ? Does it not impose just this!

It is like a sub-structure before any stricture, defensible notion ?

Yes. For any world at all, you need it, in order that its bits might have meaning, its compositions control and its formulations be forged in conjunction. Without it, the world would be uninvestigable, its nature without law and order, and all theories about it without any possible basis.

In other words, Dad, in the beginning was the Logos, the word, the logical structure, the expression, the control of reason and meaning and method.

Certainly. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.

Nothing could be done without the logical sub-structure, its ordering and commands, its qualities and its composition constraints,  so that things could be characterisable, indeed have a basis for this.

Yes. But a logical sub-structure is a set of orders,  commands about composition constraints, and in itself is no more than sign--posts for roads, and a map of directions. It does not DO anything; but is a filter and force concerning anything done.

So the Word of God is MORE than a logical sub-structure.

Yes, but not less is in its domain; and it involves the application and imposes such a condition on what is made.

It is the reason for it, the method of it, and the power to do it, the Word.

Well, that is what our words are, aren't they ? They have a logical sub-structure for comprehensibility and rationality, for point and purpose to be executed, they have grammatical constraints and they reflect our thoughts.

Yes, but our spirits seek about for them, you know, as when we are thinking, thinking, how shall I put this or that, and  searching about for the right word, and seeking to have the right inflection in the word, and to make the words reflect the spirit which is in us and which is the one through which we look at the other person,  assessing, conceiving, considering. 

That is just how, although in a merely human analogy, God speaks in I Corinthians 2:9ff., about the Spirit of God not only searching out the deep things of God, but in presenting these to mankind, in the Bible, teaching them in words which He selects, applying what comes from God to the uttermost..

So then there is the logical sub-structure, and constraint, and expression, and there is the spirit in which this moves and acts and then  ... Dad, then there is the thinker who by his spirit is finding the words, and the word by which He articulates His wish, mind's counsel, and authorises it. He knows it, thinks it, speaks it and applies it, each Person in constant communion,  co-operation, unitary strength, oneness of Being, sameness of nature and beauty of integral holiness.

Yes, even we, as persons, reflect the trinity; but then,  as the word of God in the Bible, which IS that word to mankind, as it depicts it,  we are IN HIS IMAGE.

Since God IS a Spirit, then  that MUST mean something not at all to do with His appearance!

Certainly. It means we are relatable AS spirits, AS persons,  to HIMSELF as a personal being. We can have meaningful interchange, we are not as it were, plugs in the wrong hole, hands where the equipment is not to be found, mutes in the massive majesty of a foreign universe.

Dad this is great. Why don't they teach us this ? After all, if matter were all, there would be no way of SAYING so, for that is thought, and not matter, or thinking so, for this is neither of any colour, or weight, or material character. And there would be no truth, only occurrence,  so SAYING this is all would be all a contradiction in terms.

They are bound by their blindness, misled by their mental lusts, their spiritual pride. You see that in Jeremiah 13. It is profoundly sad. There is the King and there is the prophet, and the prophet sees, because the Spirit of God has shown Him the word of God, and Jeremiah can see what is about to come,. It is tremendous,  long delayed destruction, deserved,  call for, put off as in  Ezekiel 20, for ages, but now to be delayed no longer. DON'T BE PROUD! he tells the King and the Queen Mother. That is in Jeremiah 13:18. Give glory to the LORD, your God, the prophet cries, before you walk in darkness, and do not know what you are stumbling at. They will not give Him glory, face reality, operate in truth.

That is, the One they know, the LORD, the revealed one, the One who had carried them  for so long... That's why He is called the LORD God, isn't it!

Yes, as Isaiah put it, moved by the Spirit of God, "In all their affliction, He was afflicted ... " (Isaiah 63:9), but He adds, "But they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit..."

What then ?

It goes on,  "So He turned Himself against them." Yet in mind He kept the beauty of what had been, could be, should be:

      "Then He remembered the days of old, Moses and his people",

the whole picture before Him of His deliverance in the Exodus, of the slave people from Egypt, even His very OWN people. How lovely were His opportunities and blessings: for He

 

      "led them by the right hand of Moses, with His glorious arm,
dividing the water before them, to make for Himself an everlasting name,
who led them through the deep, as a horse in the wilderness,
that they might not stumble."

Was it more personal even than, the movement of God's Spirit on the spirits of His people then ?

Yes, for it proceeds: "As beast goes down into the valley, and the Spirit of the LORD causes him to rest,  so You led Your people..."

But in Jeremiah 13, then, the King was too proud for all of that. And God, in His Spirit, He grieved for them, didn't He ?

Yes, it says,  "Give glory to God ... but if you  will not hear it,  My soul will weep in secret for your pride, My eyes will weep bitterly, and run down with tears, because the LORD's flock has been taken captive."

God goes on to say this:

 "Say to the king  and to the queen  mother, 

'Humble yourselves ...
Where is the beautiful flock that was given to you, your beautiful sheep ? ..."

Isn't it sad that they did not know their responsibility and cover it with joy!

Yes, David, for God speaks to and through the prophet, and the God who would become man, the most intimate form of  speaking possible, and speak in our own form itself, thus could Himself speak in terms of tears, such as the prophet might shed. Indeed,  He too in the flesh was showing it direct as in Luke 19:42ff., when Jesus wept over the insistence of Jerusalem for its own destruction.  Why was it so ? It was because they WOULD NOT listen to Him. God wants no such thing to befall them, but has  made man, not machine, and He has made him with spirit and with responsibility, and while He seeks and has sought in every good way, yet man devastates himself.

It is growing in force as I grow up.

Yes,  and as you say of your school, that person after person, teacher on teacher,  does not even realise very often he or she even has a spirit. In this way, while abusing both it and God, they are separating themselves. It is rather  like some mouse afraid of the cat, and in hysterical confusion, assuring itself that there is none, no nor is there man, but only cheese. It does not alter anything; except the result ...!

DAY 2

Dad, I see now what it means, in Zechariah 4:6,  when a great restoration and reconstruction in Jerusalem  was to be done,

"Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit says the LORD of hosts."

He is moving by HIS Spirit, and it is this which inspiring and firing and making man like a flame ..

Precisely as in Psalm 104:4, He "makes ... His servants a flame of fire."

Yes, the CRITERION of HIS action is spiritual, is not mere dynamic, mere power, important as this is when you want  to get anything done. Past all that, putting it into the shade in your mind, is the overwhelming, overriding POINT of what you do, and the manner, tenor of your doing it, the very incandescent flame of desire with thought, heart with understanding, emotional attitude and purity of perspective in purpose, and it is this on which all else depends.  God is personal and first and foremost acts as a personal Being, and having given us spirits, expects us to do the same.

Hence gaining the whole world and losing your own soul, the special  life each person has, is a form of spiritual madness,  suicide.

Precisely.

So in the beginning was the Word, the Expression, what God had to SAY, enunciate,  speak, utter, extending His thought into word, into acting format.

It was into His very own word, special, sacrosanct, unalterable, principle and precept, truth and warning, forecast and appeal, as He deals with man.

Just as it says in Genesis 1, that His Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, so by the Spirit God gave the word, brooding on the face of the peoples, moving with power and grace, vast and imperial, humble and lowly, a king above kings, a comrade for His own, better than any friend.

Yes, it was not enough to  SPEAK it, order it to be (just as any author does with words). In its being sent in the Bible to man,  it had to be superintended by His Spirit, positively fashioned with this vision, expressed in words, in mind. Thus God expressed Himself, and  it all was brought into conformity to what the word expressed, to what God thought. That's what it is saying in I Corinthians 2.

It is put in some such way. Moreover, WE tend to do just that. We think and in spirit have thrust and ambition and desire and perspective, which is essential to our very beings, and we ruminate and understand and SPEAK, and as we act we superintend and watch our constructions so that the very spirit of the thing is preserved in all its facets, phases and in every part of what we build.

We are almost like little trinities, then ?

In image, yes. That is, THE TRINITY is an infinitely intimate personal being in whom the Speaker and the Spoken and the Spirit are EACH ONE,  persons, who acting as one together are ONE Being, such is infinitude of intimacy. We however, do not have three persons, but three aspects, being a created image. We have a reflection: He is the original. We come from a creative impulsion of extraordinary and gracious gift; He is the author of our relatability, and as to that, what could be more magnificent!

Yet our spirits can get out of joint with our minds, and these with our bodies!

Yes, even our pathologies reflect our origin. With God however there is no pathology, nor is there any limit, so that as Father, Son and Holy Spirit (when you come to the incarnation 'sonship'), there are three Persons, in love bound as One, in being not formatted but final from the first, operative in unison, with fellowship before any fellowship was, original and eventual, unchanging, alpha and omega. .

Dad, you are beginning to sound like a creed.

Why not ? It is just saying what the Bible  declares, and we reflect in our limited,  created state. It is so easy to understand that, like a kid with a psychological block in mathematics. Thus,  assured he just CANNOT do these sums, he faces them in vain, attitudinally defeated.  it is at times hard to understand why people do not always understand such wonders as God so readily propounds.

People are like that Dad. They often will say, "Oh I CAN'T do those things!" as if this were some sort of achievement, when perhaps they could; but many seem to prefer to be characters rather than face it down, and take it up!

There's more to it yet. For in this case, they hide not simply from the pain of effort, but from the shame of not knowing God, not wanting to do so, and preferring to be part of some whole where NO ONE has to answer to ANYONE (if you can get away with it) and ALL that God has made becomes  yours, or partly yours. This tends to give the sense that there is no limit to the abuse and misuse which can result, for pleasure, love of power, of prestige, of robbery: for that is what it is, for the sheer panache and pride of being important little beings.

But Dad when they are like that, look at the sheer, horrifying, brutal bestiality of many governments, and bodies and regimes, they become more like beasts, and worse than that,  like devils.

Those are the parameters of spirit, David; for you either live in the Spirit of God, by whom you know the Lord, whose word is the intelligence of our part and place in life, or your spirit is like a cut-off branch, and as to that, well it is not so supple, so lithe, so vital as a living one, and becomes a thing to be scorched in the sun, gradually yielding to disintegration.  Modern history is increasingly a report on disintegration.

So in the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He made everything,  and life was in Him, eternal life as in I John 1. He became flesh itself, man, and He was full of grace and truth, and He was given the Spirit of God, not by measure (John 3:34). This One who came to  tell it in Person, He speaks the words of God, I read,  because He is not given the Spirit of God by measure. There is this sense of totality of application, implication, roundness of Speaker,  Word and Spirit in a glorious tri-unity which gives meaning to man, and opportunity to receive this grace.

It is grace or disgrace. There is nothing in between.

Why, Dad ?

When GOD becomes man, as you read the Old Testament, say Jeremiah 9-33, Isaiah 6-11, you see that this is a finale. It is an amazing action since man not only fell away from God, with this same, sad, mangled, new-fangled, brittily bangled self-importance and mistrust, that Eve showed,  daring to consider that maybe God did not want us to be 'up there' and was not giving but seeking to get, or some such thing.

David, He even actually continued to ignore opportunity, hunt mercy instead of having it, and to lust  for every kind of fascinatingly mad control of his own, suffer as he would, had to and did for such fantasy. The final solution is not to kill Jews, as Hitler thought, as if to  efface the promised continuity for that race which God promised (so dramatically amongst other things, in Jeremiah 30-31, as in Matthew 24:34,  Hosea and Micah 7, Deuteronomy 32). It is not to dispossess Jerusalem, as some Arabs and  Moslems seem to think, as if to defy God's word and defile His determinations about who should be where, and His intention to come back to the city in which His Son was crucified (as in Zechariah 12-14, Matthew 19:28, Micah 4).

What is the final solution,  then, Dad  ?

It is to have done what He did. It  was to  come in Person, as the WORD, and to die as the SON of God, being born through a virgin (Matthew 1), so that in this birth nothing less than God with us, Emmanuel resulted. By these means, He was to speak words and do amazing deeds such that only God could (John 15:22ff.), and to leave no  cover for sin, and meanwhile to provide ALL  COVER for sinners who would face  their disease of mind and spirit, and come to Him in repentance, and receive the gift of eternal life, the guilt being borne for them.

Is that all ?

It is the core. But of course, the crucifixion was known from eternity (Revelation 14:6, Colossians 1), and the resurrection is like a right  hand to the left, in terms of the crucifixion,  like the proof of a premise, the outcome of a promise,  so that His very body rose, unconquerable, for that is what it is like with God (Actws 2:23), and He sent ...

Yes, He sent of course, His SPIRIT, superintending, applying, brooding over, encouraging, enabling,  keeping in terms of being the Spirit of Truth itself, all things open to Him, all hearts attunable who knew Him, these all keepable, and kept as He promised in John 10:9,27-28. The children of Christ - as you see in Isaiah 53, I John 3 - it is these who are all kept by Christ.  How lovely it all is!

And WHEN He sent His Spirit in this New Covenant, as promised  in Jeremiah 31, following the babe being encompassed by a woman, God being the Father as in Jeremiah 30-31, as it is all put together there. It was seen as a flame of fire touching the head of each person, and it was called most aptly,  a BAPTISM, a touch, like a sprinkle, a finger of flame to  anoint, to appoint, as in Acts 2.

Then what was in their hearts, came into their mouths, and God used their words, engineering a translation in an anti-Babel sort of way, and the Gospel was underway, after the Cross, in view of the resurrection, authenticated to the very year,  as in Daniel 9, worked out with the power of healing and help,  as God chose to use the various gifts.

That is the Church, as basis, though when some churches fall, others must carry on fearlessly. It becomes like His body.

So God testified, by His Spirit, through the prophets, that's in Nehemiah 9:30, I was reading it earlier.  He applied the result of the constructive work of the Cross,  by His Spirit, just as He applied His plan in symbol,  when Nehemiah was building the temple:

"Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit!"   It is the Spirit of Truth  ...

And the Spirit of holiness as in Romans 1:4.

Isn't it like a  river, flowing with peace and grace, somewhere  ?

Yes, this is reflected in Isaiah 48:16-18, where their course WOULD HAVE BEEN like such a river, but was not, because they refused and rebelled against the very God of their Creation. It is He, Himself God,  who in that very place is seen to be sending the Lord,  as God, into the world, and doing this with His Spirit likewise. The Trinity is inseparable, distinct, wholly distinctive.

In fact, David, the same water imagery is found in John 4:14, where the Spirit of God is like an inextinguishable welling up supply of water, and again in John 7:37, where it is so vast in exuberance, if you could put it that way, that if flows out from the midst of man to the world,  applying, reaching.  Yet again, such reference is found  in John 16: here the Spirit also convicts of the sin of unbelief in the living word, the written  word of God, of the righteousness of Him who came and rose and went leaving the Gospel till His return. It moves, it arrests, it bathes in the truth, warns, communes.  The Spirit also convicts  of judgment, for WHEN HE COMES AGAIN, this same Jesus Christ, this He will do.

The Spirit continues to work, then, doesn't He Dad ?

Yes, in convicting of sin, righteousness and judgment, as  Christ declared, and one of the convictions is NOT to use the Spirit to ADD to the Word.  The Spirit does not speak of Himself, we read in John 16:13, for He takes of the things of the Speaker, the Father, and applies them, giving them, those very things, which are the Son's also, for as He declared,  "All that the Father has is mine" - that in John 16:15.

Is that why some are shipwrecked ? They refuse to build on the rock of Christ, of His words, as in Matthew 7, rejecting or lessening them, or adding to them,  and so build on  sand, some even evilly attributing their pride to the Spirit of God, gaining more words of doctrine while subtracting the purity of the truth! God HAS spoken, and finished His offering in words: it is His Spirit which convicts, convinces, attests Him and His words. Indeed, it is all fixed as in Galatians 1, and proclaimed in Revelation 22, NOTHING to be added to these things, NOTHING removable as in Matthew 5:17-20. In this way,  to change this Gospel that Paul had preached one little bit, to add to the word of the living God, the basis sublime for believe, as Christ is the Rock impregnable Himself: it is like dabbling in potassium cyanide,  as a face powder, or a cleanser for one's hands.

Yes, it is all in doctrine, in data, in expression given by the WORD of God. The Spirit does not speak of Himself, but as He hears, He speaks. The WORD has His part and the Spirit His, and mixing the two can become a catastrophe, like that of the Twin Towers.  It would be rather like saying to a friend,

Look, I do like you, but just a moment while I do a little surgery on your nose, and restructure your ears with this scalpel. You'll be far better then.

Yes, it is HIS FACE. The spirit of your relationship is one thing, and how he is expressed,  what He is, that is another.

The SPIRIT OF TRUTH, then, moves in the TRUTH, and the WORD  expresses it. What  God has to say, HE says. He HAS said it, and that is why Revelation is so strict, I suppose about people adding to the THINGS God has given there. It is finished, in work, on the Cross, in power, in the resurrection (the same power available to God's own people as in Ephesians 1:19, for their various tasks), and it is applied in counsel, in heart, in understanding, in undertaking by His Spirit. If, said  Paul, IF I SHOULD PREACH other than he had already preached, then what ?

Then, I think, he says he would be cursed, the same as anyone else who dares to intrude his little thoughts into those of God or to attribute to God what he finds when the book of the Lord is closed, the Gospel finished, the work done. Hebrews 9:12ff.  puts it: it is eternal redemption which He has purchased by one action, done once, to be attested always.

God knows His own, His own words and His own works. HE declares things, and HIS WORD is the criterion of His speech.  it is not even for an apostle to invent anything, no nor any angel, says Paul. It is fixed and final from the first. Paul preached it and if he should alter it, add to it, his curse would be like that of others. When God speaks, let man be silent as to the original, but say much to apply it, and show its truth as needed.

You mean as in I Peter 3:15, or I Corinthians 10:4-5. That last I love, and I saw it put this way:

"We demolish arguments and every pretension
that sets itself up against the knowledge of God,
and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

Yes, Christ Himself never varies (Hebrews 13:8), God never alters (Psalm 102, James 1:17), the Gospel is fixed and final. It is all done. There is nothing more but to come.

I guess we are too sinful to play God; and in any case, it would be the height of arrogance and presumption. It is He who speaks BY HIS WORD. Let it be so then for us all. Playing God never works. It is He who in salvation has done the works as in creation, isn't it!

Assuredly so. God made the universe and finished it as in Genesis 1-2:4. It doesn't do it now; you never find information coming down and making new things. God made salvation through the Plan of Salvation, fixed,  foretold and final, given in the immutable Gospel, and it is finished, just as Christ finished the work for it. The Spirit applies it, not with His own words, but the word of God He applies, as given in Christ who is the word, and who authenticates in Himself,  what was given as in John 14:26 as what had been given, in Matthew 5:17-20.

So the wise man builds on the Rock of Christ! He doesn't blast it, or put concrete on it!

 Fooling with the Rock, facing it with one's own little ideas, as if one were not in essence a spiritual being oneself, this is asking for it.

For what Dad ?

To be crushed to powder as in Matthew 21:44.

There is not much spirit in that.

No, it is an impoverishment for pride, and a crushing for what believes in force, BY misusing its own spirit, and ignores its source with sauce.

Yet God is pitiful, and we saw in Jeremiah 13, how He pleads.

There is no special pleading in this: that truth will not alter, God will not and cannot lie for He cannot deny Himself, who having all, does in the first place what pleases Him. It is His word which stands while all else falls, and His Son invites, while all else like Harpies, croons and swoons and booms, and perhaps sweeps like fresh executive with spiritual brooms, while in the dust, he coughs and coughs ...

It is a dirty world.

It has become increasingly so; but for it there is offer of a wonderful clean-up.

Thank goodness for that.

It is by His Spirit, through His blood, in the power of His purity and the grace of His gifts, in the wonderland of eternal life, for which all of this is a mere preparation.

It is about time this world listened, isn't it Dad  ?

It's rather like catching a train: however late you are, it is never TOO late until it has gone. Then it is.

When is it too late ?

It is when Christ having come, and having been seen and heard, and His word being faithfully preached, and the heart having rejected Him, and He returns to judge... it is then that it is too late.

That hasn't happened yet, so it is not too late now!

No, it isn't yet, though it is near now since Israel has now control of Jerusalem, and proclaimed it their eternal city, in 1980 (Luke 21:24 makes that clear). So you can tell your friends at school why you believe God, if they are willing to hear, and why they should turn where the Rock is, and not sit under it as it falls.

The Rock of Truth.

It is also the Rock of Salvation, in which, and not in breaking up concrete homes on slopes, you can hide.

And from this Rock, your spiritual home, you proceed in peace,  to delight in the opportunities to serve the living God, according to His word, His covenant and His promises.

God bless you, my son, David.

NOTE

*1

On the merely reductionist concept of 'bits', digital representation being confused either with the creation of the originals, their analysis or their  transference, see the following. The relevance is both direct and indirect, concentrated and discursive.

Message of the Word of God to Man in the World Ch. 5, Ch. 4,

Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2,

Ch. 14 of The gods of naturalism have no go!

Evidence and Reality Chs. 2, 5, 6, 7

The Open Door ... Ch. 3, Dig Deeper ... Ch. 1,
 

Religion, Religiosity and the Reception of Christ as Lord

The Kingdoms of this World Ch. 8, The Holocaust of Morality ... Ch. 3,

Glory, Vainglory ... Ch. 1, God's Gift of Grace Ch. 7,

The Christian Pilgrimage ... Ch. 5, It Bubbles .. Ch. 9,

Spiritual Food and Spiritual Drink Ch. 4,

Repent or Perish Ch. 7.