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SUMS, SUMMITS and IN SUM

Adding Things Up, and Getting Things Down

CHAPTER 5

Pain, Penalty, Innocence, Goads, Glory and God

In Sum

Vice, Virtue, Liberty, Love and Pangs

OTHER MODELS, OTHER MASTERS, OTHER COSTS

Pain, Pang and Purification

If you elect to be an electrician, then electricity is a tool and a task-master, a servant and a potential eruptive force. One still recalls a kindly electrician who referred to the pangs rather lightly, for when he received an unexpected jolt from this power source, he called it a 'little nip.' Another of my acquaintance, received a jolt of one million volts, it was said, but presumably of very low amperage, since he survived. Death was close. It is like that with electricity. On the other hand, you can cross the road and be smitten by a driver studying a map as he continues, thinking no one near.

If you wish to serve God, there are costs. It is free entrance, but disciplined living. If you do not like discipline, you will find it hard. If you do, it may seem more like little nips, for much of the time; but not always. For oneself, it is always a question of what the pain does: IF and only if it is causing evil, what makes vitality ebb or dynamic pass, to be avoided, and re-establishing strength and capacity for living as one ought, then it matters far less. Indeed, it must be suffered. If it is per ardua ad astra, as the Air Force motto had it (and perhaps still does), so be it. That is the cost.

Moreover, if it purifies at the same time, removing a lax attitude, a complacent one, some measure of that odious and notorious self-belief which is so illusory if not delusive, to bring one back to an active trust in the only One in whom trust is finally rational for one's life, the God who made it, then well done! Who wants illusions! It is far better to be awakened to reality than to drift ready to die, or be deleted in meaningfulness, removed from the true place. If this hurts, so be it. What is pain for ? IT is nothing illusory. It is either the cost of correction, the price of testing, the retardant for folly, the endurance test of love, the taunt of folly, the warning of waywardness or the payment for the attestation of sincerity and faithfulness; indeed, it may even be the exhibition of the glory of God, that one suffers it to show this to others, an exuberance of love in the service of deliverance of the lost. Such is much of what is called pain.

But pain, it is not just one thing. It is a category, and this not only in its cause, but in its nature, its manner of suffering.

Thus if pain is associated with guilt, it is a purgative. If associated with confusion, it may be a steely rigour investing itself to encourage realism and realisation combined. If however pain is the price of love tested, then there is a certain glory attached to it, for if LOVE is THERE, then this is its channel, here it arises, is aroused, displacing cost with the zeal and even the zest of dying to achieve life, being smitten to find salvation.

Thus the mother rushes into the burning house to deliver her sleeping child, pain a virtual irrelevance, almost obliterated till the hurt mounts to the heavens, afterwards. Yet love is sated. This is what it does, because of its values, disposition and reality.

When Christ went all the way to descending into hell, preaching (I Peter 3:18ff^*1), having become a sacrifice for sin rather than allow what He loved to become an unsedated experient of its powers (cf. Colossans 1:19ff.), it was a matter of love in motivation, sustaining the pangs, investing the anguish, realising its power in the face of what it took to bring about the purification of others, that they might be able to be glad in glory, being exculpated by His inculpation, lassoed out from death by an undeletable life (Acts2:23-24), by God Himself, who in the format of Christ, was simply doing what He said (as shown in Hosea 13:14, 14:7, where Deity exposed in advance His plans to engage as sovereign in sufferings for His sinful creation, to save some, just as surely as in Isaiah 50-55).

DARKNESS AND ITS DESIRES

DESPATCHES LIGHT WHILE SOME EXALT IN IT

Why, someone asks, could not God, who knows the end from the beginning (Acts 15:18, Isaiah 46:10), being in effect present in both (as in mind, is an author, who knows the book he is writing), both ALPHA and OMEGA Himself: Why could He not have deleted desire to make the bad have any place in history at all, and have created only the good, and so have made a perfect world, with no pain at all in it ? After all, it might be pursued, "in Him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" as in Colossians 2, so why not USE them with some effectual foreknowledge in this way ?

There are, however, some major reasons against such pre-empting in secret, such exclusion from testing and such an elevation of an aristocracy of the good, reaching even to the non-invention of the evil, that is, the extinction in advance of any opportunity for the lives which would move in that direction: on the part of deity.

First, it would mean that authority would reign without the light. Like suppressed governmental information, never given the light of day, keeping watchful and concerned eyes at bay, while it wallows or works in the dark, would be the findings of foreknowledge then in view, pre-empting performance, foreclosing on faith, making mummies. Many in hell, the final destiny guilt that prefers itself to truth, that of guile that puts it hand to aspiration rather than its repentant heart into the hand of God, then might ask with grounds, WHY ME ? Why am I here ? Is it just, or is it fair, that I recoil into the folly of my ways, while many in heaven are mere prigs, favoured lovers of themselves, rats that left the ship of human striving to get a safe place, self-serving hypocrites!

Such, the disputatious denizen of hell might say, were this to be the case and those to be given no scope for living out their trials, such are those who rule with Christ in heaven (Revelation 22). Waxing eloquent, the silenced damned might call the dwellers in heaven, as he stayed in hell, names from his gall. They ? he might spit: they are mere survivalists, unprincipled, supple, self-willed and self-directing, affecting love while loving most of all, themselves! We at least are honest. To be sure, they might not even be created at all, and their scope annulled altogether; but this merely accentuates the point, since their deprivation of scope would then be total, their will, ways, hopes, endeavours, assurances untested, untried, their lives given not at all the light of the day.

It would not be a pleasant situation. One reason for this is quite simply. God is not only love but also light (I John 1:5, James 1:17), and not this alone, but even "the Father of lights" as James notes; and in Him is no darkness at all, nothing amiss, nothing of selfishness to mar the glory of His will, ways and works. If a human needs saving, then He is after it, for He WOULD HAVE ALL THINGS, not only on earth but in heaven (cf. Revelation 12), reconciled to Himself (Colossians 1), and come to a knowledge of the truth (I Timothy 2). In His very heart, there is no pleasure at all in the death of the wicked; for it is a thing contrary to the love in the light which is His so that He would instead that they would turn from their wicked ways and live (Ezekiel 33:11, Jeremiah 13:15ff.).

Accordingly, He does not willingly afflict the children of men (Lamentations 3:33); for He is not willing that any should perish (II Peter 3:9), and weeps where will whips the wandering to their own self-deliverance into a destiny, which He went to the Cross to avoid, for them, each one. He KNOWS His own and pays for them (Romans 8:32), but His heart so views all. His accounting is held open to all (I John 2:1ff.), even though those failing at last to receive Him, butting the light with blighted eyes, offered all, are given not ransom, being unreceptive. God does not force. Open to all, it is paid into the hearts that receive it, and this is their free gift, just as the rejection before Him, who in foreknowledge knows all, is their free rejection (cf. Serenity not Serendipity ... Ch. 14).

The fact that there are results in life should never obscure the manner of their being gained, even if the result gained be the loss of the soul! So does life misused, abused to the uttermost in the very face of mercy, gain its whole world, and lose its Maker, being subject to eternal destruction, unmade the condition which it has made of itself, undone as the word used to be used.

God broadcasts life with light to man (John 1).

Being LIGHT, then, He does not hide. There is nothing to hide. While His authority rules, and He is not the subject of unruly passions, either on His own part or in terms of those who would seek to manipulate Him (Romans 9), yet it is only with much longsuffering that He comes to the point of condemnation (Romans 9:22); and this, though foreknown, is not the less real for that, but rather the more so, being not episodically a matter of psychic stampeding in the lost, but one of due process.

NO ONE will ever be able to say in the ceaseless stretches of eternity, that mere authority in its secret lairs has damned. All is tested (Psalm 11, II Chronicles 6:30-40, 32:24-25,31). Why did the Lord act with Hezekiah, after giving him miracles of martial deliverance against invading Assyria, and staggering wonder in healing a deadly condition in his body, as well as supply an amazing astronomical verification of His intent to the King through the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 38) ? It was that He might "know all that was in his heart." Yet He knew it already in foreknowledge, and so why then expose it in the light of history ? It is because of this, that God IS light, and this is His mode, manner and procedure. If some things are hidden now (cf. John 16:12 - "I have still many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now," it is not for lack of light or its exuberance, but for effective teaching, testing or maturation. You do not show a young carpenter how to perform artistic marvels before he knows how to use a hammer with strength and adroitness. Yet the Book of the Lord has it there, ready for the mind alerted and reading in the light of the Lord.

Light ? Since the Lord IS light (cf. John 1, 8, 9), there is not merely a presence of this, but an inability in anything to have it obliterated. If sins are covered, what covered them is love in the light of God, and His covering is just, nor is wisdom to be found in uncovering what is covered, for its very covering was wrought in public and confessed by those who receive it.

No, there is no cover-up of truth, for things are to be shouted from the housetops. From the NKJV (Thomas Nelson), the following speak:

Matt 10:27 "What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light:
and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops."

Luke 12:3 "Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light;
and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops."

Matt 10:27	"What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops."
Luke 12:3	"Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops."

God does not scarf things up, envelop reality in a smoke or mist, hide in obscurity from truth, or fear its revelation. All things are manifest with the One with whom we have to do (Hebrews 4:13), and God being light, DOES MAKE MANIFEST, as this is what the light does. This Paul declares in Ephesians 5:13, saying: "All things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatever does make manifest is light." That is how it serves; and in principle it does not vary. Temperance is not tampering, and preparing the heart of His people for more truth is not to disguise it, but to make it comprehensible.

God and shame are antithetical. God and dark secrets are contraries. God and subterfuge, self-service are contradictories. Light blazes into reality, and when it is seen from God, it is found from its source. As to Christ, in Him was life and the life was the light of men (John 1:4); and indeed, of John the Baptist, it says in this same Chapter,

"He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him."

If the darkness did not comprehend it, is this surprising ? is the asthenic the athletic ? or the disruptive appreciative ?

Thus the whole world is based on light, its Maker as Light came into this world, and before that, He in Himself constituted the light of reason, for research, which unveils all having nothing hidden from Himself, that is presented to it, and evokes in man the love of the light which makes him non-animal, ready to be non-devil, able to delve and to find. It is a light which in man can flicker, and be put virtually out by desire; but then that is part of the function of understanding, to wreck itself if it will. It has light enough even for that. LIGHT is one of the matters which, beyond all matter, chatter, blather and boasting, is with will, constitutive of man, and with reason, amplified where dark longs to go.

The concept then that God would keep things FROM the light, would be schizophrenic in type. He is not so, does not do so, and questions and expects answers as in Job 40, that we might answer "like a man." I John 1:5, tells us that "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." Judgment similarly (Romans 2:1) is "according to truth." God does not deny Himself, as if ultimate power were in some way to be compromised with a nature at war with itself, a 'given' added to God by whom ? That, it is mere avoidance of God, and misuse of His name.

HOW THE LIGHT LIGHTENS THE LOAD

Manifest and open, it is truth and unremitting as such. The profundity of mercy found in the ways of the Lord is not least this, that IN TRUTH, in the LIGHT, there is a way of remission: for such is the payment of Christ for sin, of Him who became sin for us that we might be made, through faith, the righteousness of God in Him, by free transfer of status and dynamic of deliverance (Romans 5, 8). It is not a deviation from justice, therefore, but simply this, its fulfilment; and that marvel, that instead of truth with justice damning, instead is this: that through faith it may actually expunge guilt through the offices of the Saviour. It would then be unjust to condemn (I John 1:7ff.), since having paid the price of liberty because of love, it would be to afflict a second time if pardon were not freely given! Thus to takers of His mercy in Jesus Christ, He actually forgives in ORDER that He might be JUST! That is what is written.

Here is grace to the ultimate, and mercy in marching order, impervious to pleas for judgment, such as Satan might make in his intractable hatred. Instead is mercy to be found affirming itself in the very face of justice, by CLAIMING IT in presenting pardon through purchase, peace through payment, exculpation through the Saviour's inculpation, the transfer of an innocence attained by Christ and drafted anew to His children, bought with a price (Romans 8:3-4, 5:1-11, I Corinthians 6:20).

The darkness of sin therefore alighted on the face of Christ, who dismissed it, He being light eternal, which nothing could obscure. Is God then to be thought of as darkening counsel by withholding truth ? Far from it, for He could not be clearer. Firstly, having extended in love so that none might perish, even the Son of His heart, the One in unity infinite with Himself, made incarnate, the only begotten; and secondly, having sought and wrought all this with judgment on the off-beat, to overcome it since love loves to do this, and man is the object and objective (Titus 2-3), what next ? It is this. He announces that while this effulgence of light for love, is so for Him, for man in his defiled condition, it is far otherwise.

In fact, many will condemn themselves, even the midst of this, His magnificent mission. Light does not adopt darkness, but offers to replace it! This glory, this gory wonder, this intransigeant love, is normatively dismissed in this our race (Matthew 7). What! you say.

Yes, alas it is so. What then is the principle ? let us have it in the light, that all might know. Let there be no vain theology talking out of both sides of its mouth, while daring to say, Watch my lips!

The principle? It is this. It is burning like a galaxy in the light. Yes, this principle is readily statable, and indeed, GOD has stated it. "This is the condemnation." He signalises it. It concerns light as well it might, since God IS light. Nothing contrary to light or love is to be found in Him; and nothing which fouls either is permitted. "This," then,

"This is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world
and men loved darkness rather than light."

Nor was this all. It was not a mere whim. It had a ground, a reason, this intolerance of the Light. It was this, being also directly stated in the intensively brief context: "For their deeds were evil."

Light and goodness are inseparable twins, as it were, in the Lord; and darkness and evil, the haunting lairs of sin, are so also, in some of the creation, remaining so even when the hygiene of holiness awaits and invites. While ALL need to be reconciled to God (Luke 13:1-3), all have to be covered by the blood of Christ, His willing death (Ephesians 2, 4), yet some amazingly, it might seem, do not LOVE the light, and prefer to have just that stultification, that clandestine authority over themselves, in hiding, that self-love which is not open to investigation: being mere will in wilfulness, unwilling to languish and find its source in the light, but sequestrating what it can of the creation for itself and its purposes. God is not like that. Nothing is in secret in principle, however much must wait for a time till many are ready for it, and indeed, till heaven makes stark what some keep in the dark here and now.

We are advised to TEST ALL THINGS (I Thessalonians 5), a magnificent liberty; and God Himself, He also tests and makes evident both the nature of those tests and how the destined results relate to them, when judgment sits and acts according to truth (Romans 2). Thus, for example, did God wish to act in historical light and see, project, what was in the heart of Hezekiah, exposing this illustrious king to new trials, different sorts of trials, not merely dwelling in what He knew before our world was, but on what He would expose (II Chronicles 32:26-31) by due and new test. Always when great eminence is gained, great test is to be expected, lest as with Job, what it glorious in kind, in co-operation with the Lord, appear a mere aristocracy of spirit. It is anything but such! The best must be tried in the least!

Thus the Lord in this was not confining Himself to ascertainable comprehension, known from the first, but moved on to verifiable and open expression. hiding nothing. He used evidence to attest. If Hezekiah was not perfect, this perhaps needed showing and God did not exclude it. He does not make heroes out of clay, but saints out of redemption and the sanctifying power of His active Spirit.

The same sort of testing occurred earlier in another prototype of testing, namely Joseph, whom the Lord tested in prison (Psalm 105:18). In this case, much of the testing occurred FIRST, before the eminence; but to the last, remember this, that Joseph had to maintain self-discipline even when at last in power in Egypt, for his heart as we see in Genesis, was longing for his kinsmen who had betrayed him, and he was willing to go far to deliver them, when at last they came and were tractable. Many are those who may seem set up on hight, and yet there is an underlying need for self-discipline as evils and sour follies are readily accepted, and one waits for what love may do when its time comes. Such are testing times, for all their possible eminence; and if stability proceeds past this trial, it is trial none the less for that, but occasion rather to glorify the God of all patience and grace, whose hand reaches to help, whose Spirit moves to strengthen (Ephesians 3:16), whose power is all-sufficient (Ephesians 3:20), and whose grace covers the case (II Corinthians 12:9).

Seeing Joseph as a leader, God did not at all exempt him from testing. Light is not like that.

Rather, willing good to Israel, He allowed one of a set of brothers to become a victim of the envy if not rapacity of the rest (though they varied in this, in the scope of their wickedness, from one to the other, somewhat). He permitted this to become a test of that one, to see and show, in the openness of light readable by all, what was in his heart. Joseph was firstly sold as a slave by an act of fraternal betrayal at its depths, then redeeming the time, worked for a soldier who recognised his talent and reliability, only to be falsely accused and put in prison. There he not only had to endure the double dynamic of two betrayals, and its results, while seeking good, suffering evil through these diversified adventurists, but had to have PATIENCE in suffering.

That patience, it was not merely a principle to follow, but a practical endurance test, an affliction: it was shown not only as an attitude, but as a testable one.

Thus we read of this, in Psalm 105: "He sent a man before them - Joseph - who was sold as a slave. " Very demeaning and base, was his condition, as well as being originated by all but insufferable hypocrisy. It proceeds: "They hurt his feet with fetters, he was laid in irons." Irritation can make irritable ... weak, wilful, the more so when one is abased unjustly, and clamorous fraud and falsity is emitted from ostensibly just authority, though it be corrupt, corrosive and erosive of all good. This is precisely what one suffered oneself in the first stages in the Presbyterian Church of Victoria, when false accusation was the reward for warning the Church of betrayal. When one's very name and work is assaulted, and that by evil that is active in betraying the Church, which is inclined to slumber through it all at first, this has its own tang.

It proceeds: "He was laid in irons. Until the time that his word came to pass, the word of the LORD tested him." Whose word however ? Would we not better render 'His word' than 'his word' here ? It sounds rather more like the word of the Lord coming to pass, when it ordains his release, in the light of the context and what it is designed to reveal.

Is test not best ? God KNOWS, but exhibits grounds. In the end, ALL is tested (John 15:22ff.), for IF, said Christ, HE had not come among them and both done and said what none other had done and said (the superb, supernatural power being never known in anyone before Him, since He was here not a mere agent, but the Actor Himself, the Word of God incorruptible and illimitable, full of grace and truth), then what ? Why then they "would not have had sin."

Since destiny is in view, this is destiny. You CANNOT get to hell without preferring darkness, and this not as a part of a system inscrutable rather than beautiful, but on the contrary, where THIS preference is in the face of an effectual love, even that of Almighty God, whom no technicalities can limit, nor restraints bemuse. Preference in the foreknown heart against salvation in view of evil, this is the criterion. Foreknown is not unknown, but accurately known, and readily displayed.

HENCE you cannot get to hell except over the dead body of Christ. That is how intense is His love. It is love in the light, without mere personal satisfaction in what is preferred, as the criterion. The matter proceeds, certainly in the foreknowledge of God but then in testable history in principle, or its equivalent. Thus mere human will, that of beings made in His own image, is suffered to exhibit itself. It does not do this autonomously, since firstly, only God is the intimate ultimate, and secondly, man is too defiled to have the purity to discern without salvation, for his own sins and obscurations, differences and helps and hindrances mount up and fall down, like giant breakers. He is not free as himself, when in sin, but only as known by God, who seeing beyond pathology, acts in truth.

When then these specific features are recognised, these limitations, these in no way limit God. HOW is the matter resolved then, who to hell and who to heaven ? What is definitive before the knowledge of God, this true God who would have all come to a knowledge of the truth, rather than perish, and be reconciled, rather than die, and who says so ? The principle is STATED and RE-STATED and again stated; and it is just and true.

Love does not selfishly seek its own in the dark of desire, but KNOWS its own in the light of the truth; and this not because these are superior, there is no talk of this, but rather the precise opposite (I Corinthians 1). Indeed, it is because in HIS foreknowledge, they are KNOWN. His gift by grace is here received in His sight, and this being in the light, is just and accurate. It does not lie. Made in His image, life is not mirage at the ultimate, despite the delusive intrusions of sin, as a generic. On the contrary, it is a masterpiece of test and grace, gift and godliness, reaching and teaching, offering and removing the irrelevant, so that the ultimate principle is divinely stateable, indeed stated: GOD SENT NOT TO JUDGE the word, but to SAVE it. It is MAN who intrudes, and this is the condemnation: those in this case, even with light in this lvoe and with this intent come into the world, PREFER DARKNESS.

THE DIVINE ENLIGHTENMENT IS NOT A PHASE OF HISTORY, BUT ITS BASIS

Foreknown it is, yet there is the test; and in history, where this light has come, so has the consequence. NOW, Christ stated of the same people as in John 15, those who had seen Him and yet not believed, THEIR SIN REMAINS! If you divide a number by another number, you may well have both a result and a remainder, if you speak in terms of integers. Here, if in integrity of truth, they prefer darkness in the very face of the divinely seeking light, then there is a result, and a remainder. That ? It is their sin. Nothing further could have be done; and all being done, this is what remains when all that is done, is done away!

From the above, we find that God being light and being love, so that nothing to the contrary of these things in the divine being can be admitted, neither manipulation, shanghaiing of souls, or dismal neglect of them, therefore He does not allow mere secrecy to retard the manifestation of the truth. ALL is to be revealed; there is to be NO admittance to mere authoritarianism. What! will one SO love this WORLD (the one that He made is consistently in question in John 1-3), that He gives His ONLY begotten SON in order by His infinite perfection to achieve redemption of the utterly imperfect, and yet hang it all up in a darkness which is subject to evil thoughts, where scrutiny cannot pass muster! Will He pay all in order to show nothing, and allow misconstruction, misconception and indeed defilement of His love and attitude, to mislead man ? Will a billionaire give away a fortune and yet shrink from, move apart from a taxation enquiry! Will light live like darkness, and will what is transparently lovely, hide in the dark!

While the knowledge of our race and its individuals, before our world was, is total, and the obscuration of sin makes the very perception of truth far beyond mere autonomy, yet the foreknowledge of God outwits the differentiations of sin and the obscurations of its desires, bruising the very equipment of perception to man, but not for God! Where sin is not, differentiation does not determine, but will can be seen without barnacles, paralytic agents and pretence or pretension. If therefore God speaks to your heart, draws you, and sin beleaguers, do not imagine you are facing a sovereignty of the psyche, though to be sure God knows your will, or an adverse trade wind against which your sails are powerless. The love of God is as sure as His power and His love of mercy: therefore leaving His pre-world knowledge to Him, act on the revelation of truth, of His desire. It is not that which is the headwind. The condemnation is NOT of Himself, who as seen in John 3, did all for all; it is of man. Therefore do not project sin onto God, but rather case it there, and rest in Him, who desiring all things to be reconciled to Himself, would assuredly desire you.

When one comes, there is cost; but this is a resultant cost, not a cost to enter. If you love, then you pay; and when you pay, in sufferings such as Paul describes, you love to do it, however much at times, it pinches and assails.

To be sure, there is cost in this. If things must be tested, and there are many of them - families, nations, individuals. philosophies, political concepts, psyches, sidlings, sidings, sightings, clamours, claims - and if truth is going to lay all to rest in the light, then it costs to be tested, it costs to be maligned in the process of evidencing truth WITH love, rather than mere vengeance. Cost in human bodies, minds, psyches, this readily involves pain; and this pain is not insurmountable, but can be most real.

It is true that NO test past our powers is permitted (I Corinthians 10:13); but the power given man can be considerable! For all that, as the case demands, the way of escape is provided. So it is written, and so found.

You see something of the spirit of this in Elijah. He feared no king (I Kings 17), no harassment, no punishment, no, not death. He cried that it would not rain to the wicked king, and three years attested this truth. He fearlessly met the King, rather than risk the neck of someone who found him in this period, and confronting him, declared this: It is not I who trouble Israel, but you! It was the same in my Melbourne seminary when I had to make it clear in the years of defamation, that it was not I who was troubling the Church, but its false teachers, aborting its just principles and the Bible itself, in unsustainable assaults. Indeed, in the prime cases, it was failure to answer the response that led to the use of force, as normal in such situations, of whatever kind such irrelevance may be.

Elijah faced immediate death. He faced the false prophets with a vital test on Mt Carmel. WOULD they do the impossible and bring down the divine fire to light the sacrificial offering, or would he ? Whose God was real ? The test was good. It happened, and his God, having the advantage of being real, of being there, acted; while the god of convenience for lust and dreams, it may have done all it could, but being nothing, this did not amount to anything.

Elijah was devastated AFTER the victory and the purging. His own life was sought the more. The Queen would get him or else she would be forfeit herself. She was; but this was afterwards. Under his juniper tree, Elijah confessed he was no better than his fathers. God tested the prophet, but it was in a relationship of tenderness; for he was, after all, the Lord's, one of His children. Yet test there was, and it did not facilely abate, but went only when done. THAT is a principle. God tests the children of men. In the end, ALL is tested and NONE can complain, either for the sake of their imaginary merit, or the merit of their imaginative ideas; for history forecloses on intemperance, and truth overcomes lie.

Pain is the cost. It may be varied. It may be to pride, to dignity (as perhaps in Job!), to body, to mind, to liberty of movement; it may come from slander, from treatment assuming evil which tends in some to induce it and so enable unjust condemnation when one slip means imagination runs riot. It could be to teeth, left to throb in pain, beyond treatment due to confinement, while persecutors argue, as in an inhuman Inquisition, performed by people in bodies, against other people in bodies, often as if the latter did not actually have them! It is like the winds on a cliff which does or does not crumble. For those on the Rock which is Christ (and not somebody else - I Corinthians 10, Psalm 62, II Samuel 22:32ff., Deuteronomy 32, Isaiah 51), HE does not crumble, and being IN HIM, engraced by His faithful presence, the ultimate in fidelity, one is kept by the very power of God (I Peter 1, Ephesians 1:6).

Yet there is pain. It is an item of test; and it can be soaring like a rocket, dull like a beat of foul music, heartless- seeming before alien oppressors, acute like that of an abscess, or slight but wearing like the waves. It is the cost of liberty, itself the necessity for love. Wisdom enacts that it be in the light, and that authority in itself, while certain, is no hiding place for truth, rather judiciously allowing distemper and misconstruction, however irrational (cf. Job 40). Yet divine wisdom, granted by grace, is rather a tower for truth. It enacts that the truth be made MANIFEST, just as God Himself was in Christ made manifest (II Corinthians 5, Hebrews 1). What it is what it is shown to be; and what is saved is what is known to be, and what is known is the truth.

Against all this, a subtle misconstruction can damn. Some may take it upon themselves to be their own saviours or co-saviours and show their brightness by pride, refusing to allow that by grace only is anything that stands to be achieved; and that this involves both a prior transformation and a later sustenance from the Lord (John 3, Titus 2-3, Romans 3, 5, 8).

ALTHOUGH truth is inseparable from love and light (for false love is the most unlovely), yet the METHOD of love for sinners is not to estimate their worth, but to know their will. There is NO worth before the incandescent brightness and purity of God, for ALL have sinned, fallen, start outside the very will of God (Romans 2-3), to be redeemed by grace without works entirely (Ephesians 2,4). Thus while truth tests, and light exhibits truth, yet the truth is this: that no man or woman or child is good enough in its own heart, to stand before the light which God is. No one can even make an
effectual contribution; for if it were so, then work would no more be work (Romans 11), nor grace grace, by which one is saved. Words are not for political rampages, when it comes to God, for an exhibition of the truth in love.

HENCE, truth requires free salvation without works, for ANY work is too little to achieve what is needed in absolute, undimmed, eternal purity. All is tested, but since God has invested life with His own, to GIVE it in redemption just as He GAVE it in the first place, so that man was created, there is a double gift. Truth requires this to be both acknowledged and accepted. If that is too much pain to pride, or wilfulness, or deceit, or deviousness, or sheer arbitrariness, or laxity, or evil works, or whatever other thing, then so be it. Will can largely disregard pain in both directions, either in test (because of love of God), or in failure (because of the love of self, man, idol or whatever); and if in some, it is pain which is the determinant and they will not yield themselves, yet in others pain is the resultant as determination insists and persists, standing on the holiness of God in His redemption and its power.

Nor is a pain-determinant permitted to induce the gates of heaven to open freely. It is not pain-relief but faith's presence, a faith which has found, received and worshipped God, which is to the point. Though God freely gives this, it is not a flatulent farce or feeble fiasco. God foreknows His OWN, not His sycophants; except of course, in terms of judgment for deceit. Hence there is little more defamatory of defilement than that found in Matthew 23, where God excoriates religious hypocrites, USING God for their own purposes.

Pain has its place. Test has its place. Reason has its place. Truth has nowhere to be put, but since God is light, it is everywhere, even judging the false judges of this earth, like a tape-recorder, for those awaiting trial. This world has reason in all things. That is satisfactory. Revelation provides that to which reason points. God is most merciful, gracious and exceedingly kind.

What is marvellous for this world is this, that it has love beyond all things, is judged in the light, where mercy having interceded, recedes like a giant all covering wave, only when it has achieved its vast, all-man merciful impact. Despise that, and mercy being your enemy, then justice is not your friend!

NOTES

See Aspects of the Glory of God ... Ch 5..