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CHAPTER EIGHT

THE CHRISTIAN PRESCRIPTION

Lumbering Cargo-Planes Wait

to Carry Off the Confusions

but for Many

Their Mere Presence is Reproach

Time to Take-Off ...

THE FLIGHT OF CARGOES IS EASIER

WHEN THERE ARE AIR AND AIRCRAFT,

MEANS  FOR ENDS

Imagine it! A world of words, in which the very plants are as parchments with inscription, and every living thing is as if written inside and out, with attendant forms and shapes, with organs like chapters, veins like verses, conduits under  engineering plans  and the whole lodged in the Department for  Living Things which, not being government, is actually very level-headed and temperate, efficacious and comely, undisposed to  empty argument and carrying on  superbly. The foliage stirs in the palms, but within it the words continue their work. If it is like a publisher's dream or night-mare (depending partly on whether he enjoys his work), it is no dream. It is merely rather imaginatively expressed.

In fact, all  living things, whether the ants that work at the dead leaves, or the living leaves that work for the living plant, or the energy department in cells which work  for the cells' action potential, or the form and shape of the billions of cells  which are even in the human brain only, or the meta-information DNA which works to control information components and to oversee and make adjustments as needed to conserve the original and express it, or the enzymes, either in their production in the  first place, or their disposition to work at their right places (and times) in the second, all is as per print. It is established by command with no countermand, by special order with no little lavishing of lordliness, it is called to be by building by specification, without consultation, with elaborate provisions for continuity of specifications.

Such things as these, and their many logical relatives,  have been considered before as in Waiting for Wonder, Appendix, Evidence and Reality Ch. 6, Possess Your Possessions  Volume 6, Ch. 8, and further  elements  in Repent or Perish Ch. 7.

Today we have a more specialised or at least a directional  concern.

Let us consider the command-create correlation.

I have the capacity to  command. This is so whether or not anyone actually should decide to obey me. But to command, this is an option.  To do this, I have a number of things to do: whether these be automatic or not is not the point. I must have a power to  formulate, ideationally, so that I know what I am  talking about, instead of uttering gibberish. I need powers of imagination,  so that I do not utter solemn sounds without understanding or capability, leading to null outcome. In addition, I need a double-edged  communication situation.

First, I need to be able to use symbols effectively, words in effect and in function, so that what is in my mind becomes available for action,  whether or not the recipients should show any interest in  carrying out my orders.

Secondly, I need to have others with aural, visual or perceptive capacities who share my concepts of symbols, so that even with the best will in the world, or without it, the question of carrying out what I have in mind may be addressed, and even perhaps solved in apt action.

Some  of the things  I stand in  need of, then, are to be within my reach of power, and some beyond it, required in those to whom the commands are addressed.

Whether this be as

	in signalling in the navy, by agreed means with no point in and of themselves, or
	in Morse code similarly, or
	in mathematical notations in an agreed system which would need of course the additional facility of  matching mathematical actualities in order to be functional, however much agreement there might be; or whether. for example,  it be
	in words of that exceptional multitude to choose from that is found in the beautiful English language, assemblage of centuries with agreed and updated meanings, however this may come to pass:

whether I say in this means or with that,

suitable symbols are needed (cf. Jesus Christ: Defaced, Unfazed - Barrister of Bliss Ch. 4).

They have to possess a meaning for the commander and the recipient alike. There has to a standardising of definitive control, conceptually identifiable as practically operative. Concepts do not grow on trees, but in minds which generate them through thought and imagination.

The  command can act only in a setting of  comprehension, or a programmed one which is imbued with it, created for it and by it. The functionality has to be there, whether naked and direct, or set in contrived conveniences to imitate comprehension, based on the same.

Useless is it to talk of figurative things when you need concrete action. Imagery is not action, but description. We need action. There is the command will, comprehension, conceptualisation  for transmission in intelligible units. Whether by program invested with this, or direct, there is the orientation needed for  comprehension, a specific intellectual feat, the symbolic kit and its dual interface, transmission and reception in one language, as is the case in life products.

Beyond all this, there is the stability of the functional elements and necessities, so that they may occur, not as if lightning could illuminate for reading one evening, but to enable efficient action so that actual performance is not merely in one case, amid flux, but in myriads of cases,  amid order. A stable command-convey-communicate-receive-interpret-perform situation is required beyond a stable transmission site with all needful equipment, and a stable receptor site with the same, with both matching prior to any action, and any result.

Without result, there is little progress. For it, an edifice of things

visible, such as transmitters and receptors,  transmissive content and receptor susceptibility, and

invisible, such as the meta-code meaning which is to be transmitted, and receptor  interpretation - conscious or not, but entailing this at some stage,  prior to programming or direct - which is  to be effected, for the meaning is what it is all about; and the comprehension and concepts underlying in the transmitter, and the construction of the receptor, with all the capacity to conceive constraint and to formulate and format it:

these, both and all, are to be stably and functionally operative to enable billions of actions to be effected. Nor can there be any confusion in the profusion, but an articulation coincident with a conceptualisation as pervasive as action, and in command of it by specification of whatever symbolic portent.

These, then,  must be effected in  unsedated symbolic and practical sequence, in terms of   chemical  and physical properties and adjuncts, and chronological performance organisation,  so that sequences match in their internalities and dispositions. The parallel might be that of making metal from ore, and having trucks or other containers or flow-providers present in precise numbers and places to receive these; and other machineries to continue down the line, in multitudes of concerted action, till you have the sheets, or railway lines or whatever else is in need; and with these, have the trucks or railway containers for taking this off to the construction sites, and having the sites ready, in a setting with apt equipment to receive what comes, and workers ready to do the action in timely sequence, when these products are emplaced on site. Moreover, the site itself needs to be in that form and format which makes it apt for the workers to act, and so on and on.

This is the domain of order and organisation, symbol and meaning, intervention and imagination, disposal and disposition, concept and command, control and creation. It touches things visible and invisible, directive and dirigible, co-ordinated and impressed, synthesising organisational structures of many kinds, in arch-plans of hierarchical control,  all impressed and magnificently compressed so that a teaspoon of this DNA material can, we are told by Dr Denton (SMR p. 119), contain the instructions for all visibly living objects. That involves a wit beyond our own, just as the presence of matter involves a power beyond our own, together with the compressed and impressed energy which is correlative to matter.

EACH of these desiderata for command, is present. Getting them present is called creation. Getting them active adequately in concert is part of the creative synthesis. Organising the visible and invisible, the symbolic and the substantial, the controlling codes and the command impact to issue and gain results, this is the creative entrepreneurial enterprise. It is useless to seek to overlook  ALL that is required. If you went to Boeing factories, doubtless they would impress it on you that all this took years of research as to the meaning and means of flying, the ingredients of engineering and mathematical, inventive and creative thought involved, the empirical means and all the specialties involved, the knowledge of the elements to be faced when flight occurred, and the provision to prevent such crashes as would eliminate the work of imagination in a moment.

Compared with the institution of the universe, this is easy. In the origin-case, the materials have to be created as well as the space-time nexus, with all its preludes of power and disposition.

There is no way to shift logical responsibility,

	either by talking  of space-men or intelligent entities, starry oddities working wonders, all of whom need the same logical nexus, co-ordination, institutive devices both from nothing and from ground zero to  operational reality, with  systems, space-time, logical order and organisation and the like;
	or by talking up universes.

Consider the case of universes, which misuse the term, since if it be a UNI-verse, there is but one. Let us however institute for thought, a series of comparatively separable vast entities, a multi-verse. Of this complex, you need the first one, which brings on the usual decease of the thought without God. It is no  different whether you have more in mind, in order, really,  since you need to have the origin of extensible components to MAKE your universe in the first place. Then all is implied and applies for many, as  to our universe in the first place. It is merely a verbal  nudge,  an imaginary lapse of concentration to fuss about multiplicity, when the first and any others alike, require the same logical origination. You can make a fleet of aeroplanes if you like, but you still need the same basis for any of them, or a grouping viewable in logical terms. Ignore logic, and you cannot even argue for your own position, which disqualifies it as irrational. Use it and you cannot escape its consequences.

There is a universe with segments, or without, there being a unity of the requirements for supply of any as of all; and it has to be created. It ALWAYS has the same constraints, stepping on stepping-stones or not.

But suppose we ignore this fatal point at the outset.  Very well: then you need the transference means, from this to another, and the more the less merry with merely added complications to account for; and you need the means in any other 'universe', logically (without logic both thought and comprehensibility are vacant, as well as words), not only to get it there, and to have 'there' with this as an operational site for action from nothing in the first place, and then the same from the same in the second,  for what gets there from nothing.

That is the case if you want more universes to come from the one; but if you want them totally separate, still the very enunciation of the thought links them logically, requiring as before, an all-encompassing basis. If you want to proliferate bases, just to complicate things, to avoid facing the reality or otherwise, this too will not do. Several gods so acting in a logically surveyable system amenable to mind, require their own institution as a system with limits, and so return us to God. What is not amenable to mind cannot be argued for; logic dismisses what fails its requirements, and to kill it and resurrect it in defence of some idea, is mere loquacity without substance, a myth for modern man.

Return for a moment to universe one spawning universe two. Always you have to get ahead before transference,  to make the first to institute the second; and thus precisely the same logical impasse applies  in any other universe as here;  and trying to make some  sort of assembly line between 'universes' is perhaps fun; but it merely complicates the logical issue, which is not dismissed by complex starry interchanges of information, in what is now merely an extended universe, just as information is not found on this earth without intelligence: and that is one of the things you need in the first place, here or in any other place, site, or combination of sites. Information is word; word is not delivered as a bipartite reality without symbolic realities, recognised on both sides, whether programmatically or directly.

What is required for one, or any, or many, is a whole line up of multiplicity, institutive in power, diverse in organisational capacity, simultaneous as required in what requires multi-partite co-operation. The hen and egg problem is simply fool's delight. You need the SYSTEM in which what is, begets what is not. To get what IS, you need what has the power to create the code, the laws of working, both underlying and particular, the conditions for such types of operations, and to run them effectually. When God is in action, the making of systems in any way suitable, is no more difficult than for any other possessor of mathematical and engineering, architectural and geometric capacities. It is just that in making a universe, you have to conceive and create the original, like a first book, and the machine tools for its continuation in whatever needs it, as is the case with life. Indeed, if making matter and laws and information is so easy, even with intelligence, why does man's mind not supply a few universes, make what God made, including himself. It would of course, apart from the no-show part of it, be hard to make what is already made, without plagiarism.

In other words,  without God, situation unchanged, all fouled up, as the Second World War acronym had it; and the enterprise has no logical  standing whatsoever. Such is the logical position of escapees from the institution by God of the whole. But what about starting with nothing. Does this give hope to the desire to defy God in denying Him the creation  ?

Nothing is what you ALWAYS get from  nothing; and this is not what we have got. Such a view simply forgets the universe, which is the point at issue. It illustrates the desperation to avoid God, as analytically displayed by God in Romans 1:17ff., that such self-contradiction is even thought of.   The crash through lack of logical finesse, prowess,  communication and information, the habilments of design and the magnificence of mathematical constraints to not change. Nothing annot produce them without being instead, SOMETHING with potential, which is scarcely nothing, as any youngster might remind you!.

You need what it takes here or elsewhere (cf.  SMR 284ff.). Worlds do not remove our means of discourse,  reasoning or the requirements of the same wherever we notionally reach. We reach even the thought of such things ONLY BY THOUGHT.

Cause and effect is the name of the process in this world. Its necessity has been shown often before (SMR Ch. 5, Predestination and Freewill Section IV, Causes, SMR pp. 422Eff., 284ff.). Avoid it and you explain it away; but to do this, you need it for the performance. Only as you assign meaning and conditions and operative powers and their working together in a system, can you seek to eliminate causality by showing how it came. But IF you show how it came you show its cause. That pre-supposes the operation of causality IN ORDER to get it: crass question-begging. In this, you use it to in order to lose it, and thus lose our own case in the process, by simply begging the question, most elemental of logical foozles. Kant's failure has been shown in Predestination and Freewill, Section IV, in some detail, but its fatal dysfunction is elemental.

For every ingredient, in principle required, you need a cause. For the power to command, a cause; for the spiritual power to obey or not, a cause; for the visible adjuncts, each one, there is required remorselessly the same, a cause; for the things manipulable, such as atoms, a cause; for the synthetic conceptual apparatus which is attested in the constant order and organisation and modes of atoms and molecules, you need a cause. For their susceptibility to organic action in one schema of inter-relation and interaction, you need a cause. For the imagery back of action, you need a cause; for the will to institute it, you need a cause. NOTHING comes from nothing, not only in general, dismissing the ludicrous short-circuit of reason in the Big Bang^*1, but in particular. Each segment of the operational enterprise requires the impetus to make for actualisation, and the  total the grand planning to make for meaning, unification of systems and results on one grand plateau of synthesis and division, individuation and socialisation. That is how a system discloses its inner laws and working, functionalities and codes: it is made with them. Thus it becomes, and in no other way, for a logical mind to investigate them and find what was first put in. You find out what is put in.

Things do not just 'arise'. Bangs require force and power and space and time and destruction in their blasting and inveterate force. It is near to the mode of destruction as described in II Peter 3; but it has nothing whatever to do with creation, assuming some things, and then acting in a mode destructive of what is assumed, making a double negative that is anything but positive! It is a delirium not only of discontent, but of dizziness.

In any science outside this area, that is the schoolboy howler of which students are warned. You do not effetely imagine that you can just say it happens, or it arose, or it thrust itself force. Science is not about novel-writing but about cause and effect, what precedes and what follows, what constraints are operative and what not, and when and why, and how. It involves as is freely admitted the extensive use of both knowledge and of imagination, in order to try to find the operative concepts which command, whether in E=MC² or elsewhere; and to research this too, one is required to see whether, as with the Newtonian laws, it is subject to conditions and qualifications, and if so what, and when, and why and how.

It is directed, actual science, to discovery of what is there, using cause and effect systematic action, discovery and consolidation of discoveries, and modes of allying these and guarding against misinterpretation of the orders and organisation and commands and consequences that are all there, awaiting discovery, not conditional on discovery, but conditioning it. The moment you waffle about generalities that have no interface with input and output, you are turning to another trade. You must find the mathematical, the physical, the chemical, or the biological or the physiological, or the neural, or the various nervous system components and conduits, and give ground for your every assertion.

Some might object that this is by no means the level of actual science, but a mere model. True, many are nowadays making a harridan of the lady of science, treating her without consideration, so that unseemly utterances are freely made of just that ludicrous dismissal of what she is about, which is a disgrace, and always has been. In the field of creation and creator, and all relative to this, mind seems to submit to the ephemeral, the irrational, the anti-causal, the speculatively uncontrolled, the imaginatively phosphorescent, and mind puts in what observation never finds, either in action or in organisational provision. This pathological misuse of the otherwise respected name of 'science' fits another far better. It is here nothing less than the scientistic, a false claimant, an innovation using a word with a different definition, to gain acceptance where the reputation was built on something far different.

That, however, it is merely to note the culturally fashionable nature of the lapse, and so emphasise in its abused site of action, the character of the demise of scientific method in such places. Scientists are not always demoted for demolition of scientific method. In fact, they may be acclaimed, as in Vanity Fair, for being misdirected and preoccupied with the desolation of the integrity of what made things notable. Here the case is science, namely scientific method, to whatever degree at any one time, it may have been formulated.

The defect, selectively in this field very largely remains. That is not to say that obstinacy with error does not exist in other domains at all, when pride and position, self-importance and desire for acclaim are to be found, or when fear of exposure points to culprits or activates boasters. Phlogiston is often cited as an example, a postulated gas to escape when the point could rather be an imparted gas to combine. Both pathologies can coincide, like bronchitis and pneumonia, jointly. Pride and anti-God pressuring may co-operate quite nicely. The sheer twistiness of those who on the one hand insist on meticulous care in thought and method on the one hand, and then ignore the results of precisely this, is not so much a mere individual matter, however, where  religion and science meet, very often, but a principial one. If you DESIRE as deeply as your life, that certain things should not be, whether God or morals or duty or whatever, then means to facilitate this may come, consciously as in the case of Haeckel or the Piltdown man, or unconsciously, as where suppressed topics rule.

Logic works, causality obtains, penetrability exists concerning the universe in its internalities of operation, its laws and its lore, its conditions and its forces, precisely because our minds, which do the penetrating, and our senses, which provide the ingredients for perception, and our conceptualising, which conveys perspectives suitable or operative, find their correlative in the case in question. The investigator finds the investigated to his logical taste, in other words. What is in the world of our thought, is exactly what is in the world of our non-creation, that is the one out there to investigate, where thought correlative to ours, but beyond its powers, provides the rationally investigable. We made neither the one nor the other, but have the simultaneously effected combination of both in one logical array.

That it involves stability and order and organisation and conceptualisation and improvisation and methodologies of wit exciting admiration, just as our investigatory capacities have to have in measure precisely the same in order to proceed and to comprehend: this is the equation of destiny. It is the Creator-creature correlation in the use of the LOGOS, the organisation, actualising, ordering, causing power. What enables the one and the other, creation of what operates, and creation BY what operates (ourselves, for example), is required and present, and indeed presented Himself as Christ Jesus, as in John 1, 8:58, Philippians 2, Colossians 1.

There is no competition. Nothing like that has any testimony that is confirmed over the millenia as has been shown on this site more than once (cf. Sums ... Chs. 1, 6, 10, SMR Ch. 6, The Magnificence of the Messiah, Christ the Citadel ... Ch. 2). This applies whether to the incarnated Jesus Christ or to the universe, to man or to logic. These do not 'arise' but come from their due base, the one from the thought of God, and the other from His heart, in the plan of salvation. Like the other plans, it took work, shows it, and works.

THE END OF THE MEANS TEST

IN THE MEANING MASTER

If then the Creator were merely a part of some even higher domain, so that from something or other, he comes, and that comes from something else, you have merely a substitute for causality, and a self-imposed puzzle, which meeting necessity, quavers in intermediaries. You NEED an outset or nothing. Nothing gives nothing which we are not, so it is not the outset. You need what has what it takes, and what takes steps to institute it all in its methodologies and orders and laws, merely to start the recitation of actuality to be faced by any scientific method.

Since there must thus always be something, and the outcomes demand that order and law and reason behind them, and what has this competence behind that, since reason does not do much, but provide a system, in itself, and it requires what operates it, and so life for life, and imagination for imagination, abstract thought itself having little to do when it does not have application and the means for it, nor reticulation of thought, when it does not have an operating medium for actualisation: therefore we find the LOGOS is much more than reason. It is a Being eternally equipped with all it needs (since nothing in any amount of - therefore - non-existent time can do precisely what it is, that is, nothing, a useless component to meet the need). Thus in Micah 5,  we find that the goings, the actions, the working of the Messiah, introduced in John 1 as the LOGOS, are of an everlasting character. These show that you cannot get behind them.

That is what is required and it is certainly there. It is fascinating to learn from this same never-failing source, designedly available for scientific and other investigation with superb results

(Isaiah 48, LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST,
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS),

that this LOGOS - in Greek it means just as readily WORD, so that we face the Eternal Word of the Creator, has His own environment, and not just one of terms. It is a matter of facility for action in every mode and invention.

Like other words, He is spoken, that is there is a sympathy with speech. It is not alone. With the Creator, we learn from this book, the Bible, that from Him comes the word, and of the word, that He is in infinite intimacy with the one who utters. Indeed, before time was, He was spoken, and before chronological delays obtained, He was there. He is the everlasting representation of the Speaker, the express image of His Person (Hebrews 1:1-3), very God of very God. It is necessary concerning God, not less than, but more than in the physical world, what is what and what is not. You do not dictate to God. What He reveals is what is so, and in fact (cf. SMR 512ff., ), it has the very epitome of rationality in it, since this is His way, not in diversity from  spirituality, but as one of its blessed, cohesive and explicatory ingredients.

What then of the relationship of the Word of God, who became man, and  in that humbled mode for sacrificial service, referred to God  as His Father ? It is not a simply grammatical relationship, or even a semantic one. It is a personal one; and while we as persons speak our minds, God speaks Himself. His expression is eternal, personal and exhibited in a Being of His own stature. Speaker and Spoken, they act in simultaneity rather than sequence, in cohesion rather than differential. Nor is this all, for the very Spirit of God thrusts forth the execution of the Word, just as the Word exhibits the Speaker. Logically, these functionalities must be realised, and not confused. Thus the Word became flesh, incarnate, and man became the recipient, as many as believed, of the sacrificially realised and released pardon from the Cross of Christ^*2.

God is attested in this path of glory, and as in  Romans 1:17ff. in ways impossible to avoid without mere suppression of truth. It is from Him, AS attested in particular in His written word, the Bible, as in His spoken a nd sent, living Word, Jesus Christ, that we must find the ultimate affairs, the intimate ones, which are His so intensively personally. Christ is on record; the Bible remains. His word whether in the Bible, or through the prophets, remains operative,  testable, invested in history, manifest in the same (cf.  SMR Chs. 8-9, The Pitter-Patter of Prophetic Feet incl Ch. 4).

Thus the imagination, the conceptualisation, the intimation, the expression, the organisation, the law-making, the intervention-power, the concretisation capacity, the institution of thoughtful beings with their own imagination,  consciousness and conceptual power, of the personal-minded individual and the various correlations socially and so forth: all this has its cause, source, background and eternal basis.

It is not good to deride and seek to decompose the eternity of that on whom we depend. It is a rank prank and far better is it to follow science and logic, truth and investigatory zeal, reason and reality, and to stop imagining that explosions create law, and nothing creates what explodes and the same is back of their correlation and so forth, ad infinitum. It is better to keep to reason and attestable and verifiable revelation, rather than to progress by poetry, masquerading as science, NEVER attested, ALWAYS debunked, NEVER finding a reality which can so much as consist with its nebulous requirements. This we see repeatedly and indeed, consistently and coherently, so that it becomes a land of lapse that we meet in the naturalistic séances of this world^*1.

When however we return from fraudulent, falsifying dreams (cf. Jeremiah 23), to reality, we find that abandonment of the meretricious muddles of naturalism, and restoration to the glorious scope of the Creator lead to immediate results. Thus the Creator, not absolving man (Nahum 1:1-3), nor yet willing to destroy him (obvious, since He has not as yet done so), acted to cover the case. Death was the result of violation of life, since life is not mere breathing but spiritual kind, nature and correlation with God, at its human peak, as creature indeed, but in fellowship.

Destruction was the option, not entirely taken, though death reigned (Romans 5:1-12). Instead then of simple destruction (it is often kinder to do this rather than have multiple enormities continue in a depraved race - as with Sodom and Gomorrah, but that, it is the business of God, but the busy-bodying pre-occupation of rational people), God met the disease with the decease of His only begotten Son, taking care that it would be impossible not to recognise Him unless you did not want Him, a sort of self-cancelling method of exclusion, as in John 7:17 -

" If anyone will to do His will, he will know concerning the doctrine I speak,
whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority."

This took some engineering in the incarnation via a virgin, some compassion, in purposing at all to do it, but it took an infinite love to sacrifice pure perfection of the domain of eternity, in the form of a man (Philippians 2), so that the most debased, among fallen mankind, could in arrogant pseudo-superiority, but in fact utter abasement, mock the mercy and maul the mystery of His sublime grace in so acting. Yes, even do this WHILE He suffered on the cross in a way adequate to save any of them from eternal ruin.

Just as God met the riddle of man, one who had rifled life and uttered mutiny, and come to regard himself with an awe equal to the horror of sin, as if it were an angelic power of his macho self, and covered this evil with qualities in much the precise opposite, humility and meekness and sacrifice and service, lowering and not lowering (they are both spelt the same whether you start as LOWering or LAWering, as in hour), redeeming and not ruining, demonstrating goodness and not violence: so man muddled even this. The salvation was then trodden under foot by the many, and it still is. The world progresses precisely as indicated (SMR Chs. 8   -   9),
and seeks like Holland not into the aqueous sea, but into the drowning of doom, felt in increasing impingements, duly disregarded (as foretold in Revelation 9:20-21).

Here then is the simultaneous solution, indeed resolution of all that the immaterial inconsequential follies of materialism must ignore, to preserve its fraudulent self-worship (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2). Not only do we find WHY God did not obliterate such a world, such a race as this, not only do we learn the nature of His heart, but we find the meaning of all the things that exist on this earth, utterly inexplicable except from an adequate source who has implanted them amid the many other wonders of His creation.

THE COMPREHENSIVENESS OF THE SOLUTION

This has been traced in Waiting for Wonder Appendix from which this excerpt is now taken, accordingly (with very slight addition).

What on any naturalistic or monistic ground in metaphysics

	is mere discord (cf. SMR Chs.   3,   10),
	in aesthetics mere mumble (cf. SMR Ch. 5),
	in ethics platitude without meaning (News 19),
	in epistemology mere vacuity (cf. TMR Ch. 5),
	in politics defeatism (cf. Questions and Answers Ch. 7), or else towers built on invisible clouds,
	all reductionist, irrational or both (cf. What is the Chaff to the Wheat Chs.   3 and 4  ),

 

now on the supernatural origin of the regimented and volitionally active natural realm,  becomes

	meaningful,
	in essence predictable,
	and assuredly verifiable on the ground of the creator, whose verified word is without inhibition
	exhibiting the fitting conclusion, like a thunder-clap to a murder.

In all things on such a basis, it leaves nothing in the least difficult, whereas on the other model, there is nothing but failure, for there is never explanation for knowledge, existence, division, beauty or morals, but only tired reductionisms, without power, without ground and without the necessary result. It is simple fact that creationism in general, but more specifically biblical creationism with the creator who has acted and declared Himself verifiably in the Bible (cf. SMR Chs. 1-3, 10, 8-9, 5), accounts for everything as nothing else either does or can (cf. Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer).

Thus created man, in one mould but with spirit in an actual universe of knowable kind with a Creator who made him, rather than some glorified incapacity, can believe in culturally sanctified myths (cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic    7,   3, SMR p. 252I)) without too much trouble. This phenomenon can come from the consequences of will in his mind and in his spirit, so that he can readily believe the deluded and childish concept of organic evolution, by which he affirms whatever it is that he thinks he is in order to become more of it, whatever that is, though he never finds it making the substance of what-is, that great experimental absentee in any naturalistic viewing, nor does he discover the grounds of it, nor the way of it, but rather explores delusion in battling camps (cf. SMR Ch. 2, Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6).

He may even talk of principles^*7 as if they were powers to do, not mental conceptions to cover with words what actually happens - which, sadly for naturalistic man, such mere descriptions do not manage to do.

The Bible however speaks of diversification within kinds only, from the Creator in His initial impact, formation and formulation; and as to creation, it is over, as the evidence continually attests while man tries to prod, curse, bless or induce it to do some more, to which it responds rather like a dog having its toe-nails cut by someone with aspirations to be a surgeon. (Cf. The Defining Drama Ch. 10, TMR Appendix I, Ch. 1.)

Thus it is mere routine exemplification of the supernatural schema when we find that naturalistic man wills to be what his position voids in operation, both in its very statement and in its performance criteria, as well as performance exhibits; and this, by sheer exuberance of imagination, in one of the choicest pieces of ludicrous cant this world has ever produced; this while he is born and dies and is given his genes and is faced by his God, whom he ignores as if his very life depended on it. That is what will is about in a creation which has it, and is placed in a natural climate with supernatural access.

It is moreover, precisely what Romans 1:17ff., tells us about, a further verification in the specific milieu of the Bible. Further, it is precisely there that the remedy for this consequence of such a creation is presented, with its own verificatory testimonials

(cf. The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy,
It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Chs.   2,   7,
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST - 2 vols.).

 

On all sides, the spiritual, the moral, the aesthetic, the creative, the conceptual, the cognitive, the questing, the seducible, the squandering, the disciplined, the organisational, the wild, the educative, the manipulative, the pure and the holy, there is one cohesive, coherent explanation.

ORIENTATION

THE SINGULAR WONDER OF THE SOLUTION

Man is a problem to himself and to his fellow man. That is only natural since as a race man has specialised in avoiding the solution, on personal grounds, often sublimated into argumentative folly, as in any divorce one is rather likely to find.

When man  ceases  to  confuse the divine discipline with a mode of creation, slandering and libelling his Creator amidst his own rebellions, and realises that the deformities of hatred are the results of bad choices, the misuse of grand creations, and the curse on embedded corruption within his heart, and comes to the realisation that God is a loving sovereign who has no desire for ANYONE whom He has made to be excluded from His bountiful beauty and wonder-impacting love, that it is all his own preference for darkness which before God brings ruin: then he may repent.

He may not relent.

Sure is this. that if anyone might be found by what love in its chaste purity is, he will be found. There are no foundlings in heaven, come against their preference, and there are no tragedies in hell, lost because of something avoidable. GOD would have ALL to be saved, but would NOT have any non-repentant to gate-crash. Is that so hard ? That not only would spoil the 'party'  but make a liar of the gate!

Christ, the gate, is no liar, but wolves are by Him NEVER mistaken for sheep, one of the great advantages awaiting  more particularly, those of us who have been assailed by false pastors and failed by false companions.

You want Christ,  then take Him. You do not want Him  ? do not please attempt to cover your folly with philosophy. You either do or do not. If you have it in you to see what you MIGHT want, or that it is desirable, then you are a living monument to your own guilt. Ah no, someone says, I might have when young, but really, I could not change my ways now!

True, for a leopard cannot change its spots, and God says so. But this is not the way. You have to realise this very fact, and in so doing, you are already on your way. This is the first answer to anyone of this mood.

It is only when you realise that while the broken, forsaken, crushed and ruined human heart CANNOT change itself, that you are beginning. You are already ready for the revelation of the address of the holy hospital where such operations are daily performed. It is when people still try to pretend they are innocent, that there is no hope as you see in Jeremiah . In Jeremiah 9:6, you find the utmost environmental problem:

" 'Your dwelling place is in the mist of deceit:

through deceit they refuse to know Me,' says the Lord."

Yet some were saved despite this, It was rather when they both refused to acknowledge their guilt, and immersed themselves in their own ludicrous self-estimation that the end came.  Thus in Jeremiah 2:35, we find this situation:

"Yet you say, ‘Because I am innocent, Surely His anger shall turn from me.’

Behold, I will plead My case against you, Because you say, ‘I have not sinned.’ "

When  someone WANTS God, it is vain to say what CANNOT be done since with God nothing will be impossible. Moreover, He WOULD HAVE ALL to be reconciled to Himself.  If you want to be the obstacle, so be it. But this is for you. Thus blame on circumstances and any other element chosen for the  storage of your guilt before God, is illegitimate, the fraudulent excuse,  like that of a school-boy, diligently trying to provide a false excuse in order to gain escape from punishment.

Our sinful nature CANNOT please God, but GOD CAN PENETRATE our sinful nature. Fancy a theologian trying to make what is impossible to man, impossible to God! Yet it has happened, and I was there when it did so.

To be sure, it means a transcending of our impotence, and an overcoming of our pride and cursed condition,  a penetration of the impenetrable by its very nature, by One who in HIS very nature is excluded from nothing, but the barren heart which desires not at all that He be there. And even that, it is because as LOVE, God does not desire to save in a way which makes a travesty of love, but only in that way which makes an outcome within what it is. He does not alienate love in order to love; but penetrates with it where it is received. This He has done before time listed the fall, or sin created its moral diversities of superiority and inferiority, merit and demerit, indeed before the creation, just as man may devise before action, what is to be. In ultimate purity He has found whom He has sought, and since this is the ultimate factuality of truth, it is no less real on earth, so that many find different elements in their experience in the tussles with truth, the evasions or the incursions.

Foreknown, then, to God is the nature of all, beyond sin, for before time itself was His choice, based on His own often stated principles! (Ephesians 1:4, Matthew 23:37,Luke 19:42ff.). Thus the liberation of the soul from the sovereignty of sin into the hands of the loving Father is not a contradiction in terms, but an end of term affair, based on pure knowledge, fulfilling pure love, with historical episodes which vary, but which merely reflect the truth underlying. There is nothing blind or horrible about it, despite Calvin's crucial error^*3. God proceeds like a surgeon beyond the impossible cancer, removing it by supernatural grace, with supernatural knowledge, interpreting truth in action. Utterly sovereign (thank goodness!), He is utterly loving, and those who end in rejection against Him, have only themselves to thank for their preference.

There is nothing in life, nor is there anything in death, nor in the phases and functions of life, be these aesthetic or moral or ethical or national or rational or spiritual, be they matters of creation or destiny: there is nothing which is even an enigma

(cf.  Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, Who Answers Riddles
and Where He Is, Darkness Departs, SMR, TMR, Deity and Design ...).

 If we do not KNOW ALL now (as in a glass dimly - I Cor. 13), yet despite the mist, the outline is most clear, and the road most apparent, and the appeal most proper and the WRONG WAY GO BACK signals are most conspicuous.

Dilly-dallying with things relating to the infinite God is an awesomely horrendous thing. Back to reality: seek Him and believe in Him, find Him where He came to find you, in Christ Jesus the Lord, and wait upon Him. True, it is as as servant; but for me, I would rather be a dog with a faithful master, a sheep dog ready for trial, any day, rather than an ignominious devil, preening himself in his incompetent incomprehension, the more so if he were glorying in this very thing, as many seem to do, his luxuriant lambasting of God in slanderous confusion, or elevation of his own puniness, like an adolescent daring punishment: if not routinely, than at least often enough! The spirit of Sennacherib lives on in many forms, it would seem! (cf. Isaiah 36ff.).

In fact, I do not need to become dog, to have this Master; but doggedly, in season and out of season, to love and fulfil  my love in serving Him, at His command. To have such a privilege as one made in His image, this is beyond all dreams, all marvels but His own. His commandments are not grievous, but they are real, Life is a bountiful and a beautiful thing, but not when you try to save or change yourself, or even conserve yourself; for the former CANNOT be done, and the latter is a promised path to losing yourself (Matthew 16:25-27).

DISORIENTATION CONCERNING THE CURSE

One other way to become confused, is to  mistake the curse - which has pursued man's desires for freakish things  like autonomy, making his own laws though he neither made nor can make his own body - for a method of creation! If this calamity which has come  to this earth were the method of creation, then the Creator would be a calamitous being, inflicting evil where none was, using contemptible creative methods to inflict  affliction, building evil in the place of good, and no solution  would there be anywhere, but to endure, to die, to seek to out-horror horror, and to outdo the duplicities of design, which use devastation  to  create. That is that particular model, one attractive to self-purgers of guilt, and those glamorous beings who know no sin, except that voluntary blindness, to which they grow insensitive. The last such claimant to whom one spoke, had such manifest mistreatment of many that such an assertion of virtual sinlessness brought both amazement and admiration of man's power to  create, in this case, sadly, fictions.

Let us however consider further the model of a gruesome and  wanton Creator, inflicting with many afflictions, AS He created! The reason why this would appal is that ANY vast misuse of creative brilliance and outstanding equipment,  jars. In a war it does less so, since this is merely (in the best case of an evilly assaulted nation) an expression of evil already present in the  assault. Yet ultimately the ruin of wonder, the affliction of the vulnerable, the placing of burdens on the weak, the attack of what has glorious things to give, by what merely chops it up, is a contamination, a waxing of the ruinous, a species of plague.

Yet why should the Almighty be a plague to what has occasioned enormous outlays of energy, wit, wisdom, technical brilliance and utter resolve,and that indeed,  from Himself. One reason why we cannot create our own bodies is that the task involves technical, mathematical and miniaturisation capacities which are, even when given the help of visible examples in ourselves, vastly beyond our capacities.

Before we came, what was and is immeasurably more efficient than we are (cf. Acme ... Ch. 8), more proficient, went to these pains. Did the Almighty take pains for ruin ? Did He do it up in order to undo it ? Did He realise it so that He could ravage it, even in the very process of creating it ? If so (as shown in Sparkling Life in Jesus Christ Ch. 4), He would be hostile to His own powers, divided in His own doings, inventing for selfish satisfaction in anguish and ruin in the result, gloating sovereignty over the vulnerable by His own touch, or glad with impish delight in spoiling, promoting the parade of conflict, or the elevation of discord where it is most discordant with the needs of what He has created.

Such considerations are  all quashed by the simple  fact that in that case, we, or many of us,  would be more considerate than He, more restrained,  more benevolent, more merciful, more sensitive, more moral, more alert to the quality of results; which would bring the check-mate, that it is not there to be found. If HE does not have it, we could not do so. If what has shown to be Almighty, original and eternal (SMR), lacks these things, how could we with no such things in creation or the Creator, being made by Him in totality,  invent them, and bring them to pass ? and why would there be such widespread approval of the absence of such cruelty and distortion, contortion and ruin, in our midst!

Are there not limits  to abundance, and heights to horror, so that such waste, wastage and abhorrence come as a blast, not a blessing, a desecration, and not a creation at all. It is not even the case that information can be  created by non-intelligence, so that changing the design of man himself, in inert fashions, is no result available. It is God who makes new things, each in its kind, and if there is one thing the latest researches in molecular biology make clear, it is this, that information is neither self-adapting nor self-creating^*4.

Again, if He had needs to satisfy under ANY of these macabre headings, then He would be lacking in self-sufficiency,  equipped with a lacking totality, which NEEDED fulfilment and elaborate means to meet its deficiencies, on which He would then be dependent, like someone needing  salt tablets because his system lacked what it required for operation. If any such thing as this were so, He would be a creation, limited, subject to the  environment; and this applies whether the  need be psychical, moral, psychological or psychiatric: it would be need. It would not meet minimal Creator specifications of rationality,  that nothing should not be at the outset, but God from whom come derivative life and matter and mind.

Once you deny this, start with nothing, since it has no potential, you will end  with it: rubbed out by fact,  such as you and I constitute. Start with anything inadequate and you  imply limits  IMPOSED, beyond itself, so that you are not  talking of the eternal God on whom all depends. What has NOTHING BEYOND ITSELF (that  works in covering existence and life and matter and  all the other derivatives that require help, to be delimited and detailed  and  covered by law and characterisability showing a defined  place in the order of things): it is this which is the logical necessity to meet facts and logic, without which no argument can rationally be so much made, let alone successful. IF THIS supposed  god lacks those features, then it  does not meet logical necessities. Such a god as the one just described  DOES  so  lack. Hence God is not such.

We are not superior angels; nor  are the amazingly many acts of sacrifice which we perform for one another whether as parents or those who help the afflicted, the result of what lacks such qualities, let alone contradicts them.

What then can be the source of affliction ? It is need  for it, despite the wonder of  creation. But how could there be need ? It would come if there was misuse of liberty, of the grandeur of the vitality of conscious and moral and spiritual, yes  personal scope for decisions and responses, with awareness of principles involved. This is precisely what man has. If then  he has misused such things,  with evil disciplines, taunting afflictions, vaunting expansions, or simple cost of breach, then an imposed spoliation of equipment or the consequences of a spiritual crash, such things are in line. We ourselves tend not to ignore at atomic bomb or a maker of a plague. How eloquent are the condemnations of such misery-creators by many, when they proceed  from  mere freedom and adventure!

This too, it has not come from nowhere. There is a fitness about things, a wonder about their potential; and to ruin this,  as in  murder, is often conceived to be a due weight for the discipline of death, curse,  conquest or other things of note and historical frequency. There is the concept of justice, of giving to realities, their due.

If then the billions of such acts among men are seen and savoured - hatred with ruin, slaughter and genocide, single,  speciously cunning murders, child murder and the like, to name but few, then is this earth a sanctuary or a situation requiring results to meet this mayhem ? If indeed, man  has fallen as a race, and sin becomes a partner to each one, however uplifted in pride some perfect people may be,  despite the fact that some may be inclined to ignore this, as well as the pride that  enables such thoughts,  so adding sin to sin: what then ? Then as a race, man may well be subjected to  a curse, and such is the domain of the expected. Indeed, for the race to be allowed to continue to exist, to persist on and on, this becomes extraordinary. Thus one might expect international calamities, and rebukes to help the heedless, bring pause to the accelerated and to reinforce those warned.

But is there a warning ? It has been as long as man has been, and only in the Bible is this clearly stated, as from the first,  and indeed,  the remedy has likewise been stated from the first as in Genesis 3:15. Here then lies the answer to the lie that God is evil, and man afflicted, though innocent. God has spared us, but does not spare us reminders, short of ruin that is entire; and He has been patient for millenia, giving the remedy its open airing and finding many of His people from the midst of the moral ruin and spiritual corruption which, whether in pride or in desolation, is manifest.

Indeed, not only is the sin of man found in the slighting and careful non-sighting of the Almighty and His verified and validated word, as if it were as necessary as breath, such is the vast activity in this phase, but it is found in the slighting and spiting each of the other, in millions of instances, multiplied in spirit and thought, in the ruin of things tender, the violation of things sacred, the hardening of life as youth departs and the eliciting of evil as if it were a brother with so many novelty laws, prodigal forces, female mutilations, male abuses, female reactions, political abrasions, popular reactions, slightings of the magnificent, blightings of the munificent, jealousies and joustings:  that this alone is as a cloud of shame, sulphuric acid in type, pitting in result.

It is well to consider these things, for the burden of culturally constrained incomprehension is enormous, and is ready to be lifted off by the huge transport plane of truth, raising error to heights for dropping for its erasure in the pit of confusion. When voluntary confusion is lifted away, and the light of life is moving in, as in a dawn of sacred beauty, to the heart, then the endlessly and provocatively irresolvable philosophies of men (cf. SMR Chs. 3 and 10, Great Burials) cease their blighting and are seen to be mere slaves of uncertain ancestry, and certain destruction. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, these are best left to their own end, as the way out and on is provided.

It is as foretold in Romans 1,  this debasement, as to type, and having come to pass in our own world eminently, provides another empirical resultant from the Bible, precisely as  forecast for the end of the line for disbelief in God, in His creation and in His power. The Bible informs; history conforms: and this is experimental verification, in which the biblical depiction has always specialised. 

REORIENTATION CONCERNING THE WAYS OF GOD

To  confuse this result of sin with the method of creation is like confusing the death-sentence on an arch-criminal with the method of giving a warning. It is like treating caning in education, as if it were a violation and not a confirmation  of righteousness, justice and truth. It MIGHT be persecution, but if it  were, then  an evil Headmaster would be present. Some are thankful for discipline in youth, so that they might to some  extent get the follies of youth out of their systems, before they count entirely for ruin!

This confusion, contradicted entirely by the facts, is one of the elements of organic evolution, namely that affliction and death are the genesis of creation. It hard at the very first, since there is nothing to afflict; it is hard as you go,  since we  do not find upward elevation procedures in the DNA, and fail even to find modes of new information available in the world as it is, from means unintelligent. What is this upward move from within ? Where is it attested in the style of the DNA, in ancient DNA, and in modern ? Why think, if this be sciene, without and contrary to the evidence ?

Upward shift by mere  conflict is not evidenced. You always need what you needed in the start, in order to start: namely, the eternal existence (to avoid nothing) of intelligence with information capacities and assemblage functionalities, as well as existence power, that the delimited, the defined, the legislated and the controlled, with the glorious finale of liberty, might be.

The  facts do not permit such an hypothesis, any more than logic. IF the Almighty had done it for a selfish purpose, then that is impossible as shown. If there were no Almighty, then the question of purpose is not in view; but then neither is the existence of anything.

Accordingly, the curse on this world is not a divine joke, or joy, or necessity; but a divine rebuke. The Bible declares this from  first  to last. God does indeed create calamity (Isaiah 45:7),  but this is in  response to  concentrated,  continued evil (Amos 4 even shows this in stages). Not only does He measure His responses most carefully, but Hge controls His wrath repeatedly as seen in Ezekiel 20. This involves travail and patience on His part, which is the other side of mercy. He even resolved as He stated biblically from  the first, to use His own power to deliver mankind (Genesis 3:15 implies this^*5).

It would not be like creation, in this, that it would be a work  done to  deliver man. That man might have power to reject this was part of the very construction  specifications of mankind: in the image of God. This is the weakness for fallen will in man,  and the strength of life, that he might love and bless, and being restored and redeemed, be a  delight to the people,  a stirring of renewal in the midst of calamities.

Man as a whole has  rejected it. The narrow path is not overcrowded (Matthew 7:15ff.).

The British Empire was once an imperial Protestantism in action (only in form, it was far from actual in many things, since England was not  all Christians, and the State ran the Church). It is not so now, and the next in line to be monarch has touted another god, one whose way has been from  Mecca on, to use force in matters of faith repeatedly^*6. He has thus wrought the same evil as Israel did in its own day, of seeking to worship what God had not shown.

This becomes the way of desolation, re-writing the Christian Prescription, and turning to other  medicines that do not heal (Jeremiah 30:13, Hosea 5:13). It  also antagonises God, that what involved the sacrificial death of His only begotten Son to achieve, payment to justice, cover of iniquity, reason to pardon, is so dismissed, discountenanced and deleted. Prince Charles'  move to tell  President Bush of the wonders of the Mecca religion^*6 has been a treachery to England mitigated only by the fact that he was not at the time, as he is not yet, King of England and so (according to  current specifications) head of the Church of England on earth. Actually, for that matter, there is only one Head of ANY and of  EVERY Church on earth, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ (Philippians 2, Matthew 23:8-10, I Corinthians 12), only one Head of the body on earth which is the CHRISTIAN CHURCH. He is resurrected and not in a rest home!

Cocktail religion is not permissible now nor was it in the day of Israel, where it is ironically displayed when not vehemently denounced, or ardently warned against (cf. II Kings 17:40-41, I Kings 13:2ff.^*7, Hosea 8:11, and see II Corinthians 6:14, I Corinthians 5-6).

It is this precisely which both exhibits and adds to the violations of this earth, and calls for correction. If God did not  act, then Where is He  ? and Why does He not answer  ?  would be the  call. It would then be as in Malachi, where they call the proud blessed, and say 'Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD'. In this way, they object to the objectionable being left for a time. Thus, act and be condemned; do not act, and be condemned, with the irascible scowl of self-important, withered and withering man. Yet they wonder at the measure of His disciplines. It is pure marvel that the earth remains, a testament of mercy. Even this being misused, what is to be expected ?

Sometimes there is then, a delay, and an opportunity to repent as you see markedly in Amose 4. The flagrancy of the evil, however,  is however not without results. For example, just as England and the USA have drifted from some  very hopeful beginnings, so have their respective powers and privileges drifted, their heights fallen, their once strong finances degraded, their once dominant prowess and clarity faded. As for one, so for  all. Many have been the Empires that rose  to fall.  Many have been the lessons both in politics and philosophy, both failing after undue adulation, which have not been heeded. Daniel even listed major players, in order, coming to the time of Christ and His death, supplying even the date for that (Christ the Citadel... Ch. 2). God does not ignore things, nor is He harsh; but the earth becomes increasingly tantamount in attitude to that to occur, in the conspicuous final revolt for this Age (Revelation 19:19).

In  Amos 4, you see the divine response enacted in a small scale, for the people chosen to relay His message of redemption both into their own lives, and in some instances, far beyond, indeed a race in preparation for the reception of that  same predicted Messiah, first  to suffer and then to enter into His glory.  What then of ancient Israel ?

For various sins, they had  rain  removed, in part,  and various troubles. As they continually exploited the divine mercy, so  at last only one thing remained. It is seen in Amos 4:11-13 (bold  added).

It is therefore not only a miserly distortion of the brilliance of divine mercy to  speak evil of God, but a spiritual malfeasance, even to ignore Him. His mercy has been so far  advanced, that  to Himself He took the anguish, in order to banish it from  man; and so tender, that none is forced to receive it, in violation of preference; for  from the first He has know who are His own, recipients of that  expansive mercy offered to all, yes even to the point of seeking them out (Ezekiel 34, Matthew 22). Having done enough to cover  all, He has  found some. It is entirely ruinous to imagine of such a Being, the precise opposite of His kindness.

As Micah puts it, in Ch. 7:

Again, it is as in Ezekiel 33:11.

“Say to them: ‘As I live,’ says the Lord God,

‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked,

but that the wicked turn from his way and live.

Turn, turn from your evil ways!

For why should you die, O house of Israel?’ "

 

Indeed, in Titus 2-3, the Lord makes it so  very clear:

^" For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men,
teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts,
we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age,
looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing
of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,
who gave Himself for us,
that He might redeem us from every lawless deed
and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works.
Speak these things, exhort, and rebuke with all authority.
Let no one despise you."  

 ^"For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived,
serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy,
hateful and hating one another.
But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared,
not by works of righteousness which we have done,
but according to His mercy He saved us,
through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior,
that having been justified by His grace
we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
 

" This is a faithful saying, and these things I want you to affirm constantly,
that those who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works.
These things are good and profitable to men."

 

 

This is the Christian Prescription, and in very truth there is not only nothing like it,

but it in fact meets all the requirements of reason,  demands of logic, the aspirations of the heart,

the grounds of discontent. Its summit towers over our needs, as the starry heavens over our heads, and these, they too speak of His majesty.

Not to believe it, in Him, who both created and came, whose word controls history, this  affects due judgment; but it does not alter the mercy, the glory and the purity of God.

He  remains, with those who love His lovingkindness, truth and  mercy. Those who form a  wilful remainder may libel and slander both the Lord and His people. It will not change Him; but it will change their own original prospects. To be sure, these are already known to God; but it is the truth which is known!

It is sad that darkness so inclines the hearts of so many, that light is like a blast to their eyes; but as to the Lord, He is most hospitable (Matthew 22). He not only rejoices in remedy and in pardoning, but when even one  lost sheep returns to the Everlasting Shepherd, who once died, the just for the unjust to bring us to God, who sent Him from heaven, heaven alights! (Luke 15:7h). It kindles the heart to find that He might bring back even one in His time, with many to join Him, where truth is hallowed, love is consistent and the majesty of the Lord may be beheld by us, His most unworthy creatures.

NOTES

*1

See for example:

The gods of naturalism have no go!,

TMR Ch. 7, and in particular this section,

Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch.    9,

Cascade of Truth ... Ch.   6, Lively Lessons ... Ch.    5,

Dig Deeper, Higher Soar ... Ch.   1 .

See also SMR pp. 140ff., and TMR Ch. 1.

 

*2   EXCURSION on the TRINITY

See on the Trinity,  SMR pp. 512ff., and Sums, Summits and in Sum Chs.   9, 10

From Sparkling Life Ch. 4, we have this presentation concerning the matter. While reason could not predict the trinity, it can relish it, and find there the answer to potential problems for itself; for here there is found the fellowship within God, and it is eternal, so that in inventing man He did not find what He lacked before, but merely applied it. Thus, moreover, not only may He come to earth in this manifest form of expressiveness, the Trinity being a Spirit and not partitive, in full accord with Himself; but in so doing, proceed to deliver us who believe and will believe, from spiritual bureaucrats like priests and fallen systems with their own sin, giving ground for pardon and with this, giving us direct passage to the very presence of God in Christ.

The excerpt from Sparkling Life ... follows.

What is the equal, on earth or in heaven of this living exposition of the heart of God, the word of God, the Christ, God incarnate (Psalm 89:6, 45, 2, 16, 49, Isaiah 48:16, Zechariah 12:10, 3:9, Isaiah 43:10-12, Acts 4:10ff.)! The Designer inhabited His own design. It is He who is equal with God (Philippians 2:1-12, John 8:58, 5:19-23). Thus, it is God who is the ONLY creator and the ONLY Saviour, who is also the Christ, God expressed (Isaiah 43, 45, Colossians 1, John 14, Acts 4).

That is the declaration of life. The furores are  those of death.
 

In heaven, as on earth, there is none even LIKE the Lord, the trinity, like Him who came to earth as man (Micah 5:1-3). There is no other God (Ex. 20), and of gods there are but idols (Psalm 96).

Not in clash but harmony, not in disjunction but intimacy is the one God expressed; and it is HE who expresses HIMSELF, presenting His will, law and predictions, then taking the very form of a man (Romans 8:1-3)!  Not in the limits of creation, but in the illimitable power of the Holy Spirit does He then apply the work He has done to the hearts of man (John 16:7ff.). It is from Him sent, and in the word given earlier sent on many occasions through the prophets, that God has spoken (Hebrews 1:1-3), and quintessentially in His Son (Luke 1:35), whom we must hear (Mark 9:7). Death does not make a good hearing aid. Imposing on mortality with erratic improvisation can be mortal.

It is in God, in Christ His wholly expressive expression, the brightness of His glory, and express image (Heb. 1), that we find truth, as man giving it to mankind. And what did man do but take the Lord  so sacrificial, whose zeal know no bounds (Psalm 40 and cf. Joyful Jottings 22), whose compassion was like volcanic passion, whose eruption was mercy, whose death inflicted was on Himself, for man, as many as received Him (John 1:12)... and sacrifice Him! This ? It was not in the solemnity of achieving atonement, but in the vehemence of rejection, which wisdom turned to account! (cf. I Cor. 2:8, Luke 11:53).

No reason could foretell a divine righteousness that was at one with a love so intense, that nothing complete till justice was met,  the Son should bear the judgment that would open the way to home in God,  for those who should come to Him, in our stricken race. Christ ... did they not make Him  like Goma in stricken Congo ? as it were, in a day a city with no inhabitant but He: for He was immersed in the ash of human contempt!  When HE had finished His redemption (John 19:30, Matthew 26:52-54, Zechariah 3:9, 13:1, Hebrews 9:12ff., 10:10,14), He cried, "It is finished!"

It has stayed that way (Hebrews 9:25ff.) There is no other and there is nothing more.

There is no more for love to do, nor further righteousness for redemption to receive; but as to the souls of man who exposed by His light, see the ruin they have escaped in this celestial Goma, wrecked on their behalf (Gal. 3:10-13), and risen new from the ashes, alive for their shepherding, who in faith, repentance and surrender, come to Him, these are caught up in the resurrection realities He displayed. They  know the very power and the presence of God (Luke 14:29-33, John 14:21-23, Matthew 28:18ff., Hebrews 7:25, Ephesians 1;17-19, 2:6ff.), before their final home-coming to Him who commenced our race.

The many however continue to seek their own ruined Goma, spiritual self-made victims, like the shoe-bomber of aeronautical fame. They have to do it - so they say; and despite mercy, they continue to seek the glory of man till  its shame reeks to hell. The last century has been acrid with sulphuric fumes, evil emissions, as man pollutes even in a figure, his elevated Lake Kivu, with the molten passion of Mt Nyiragongo. Yes, even his hope in the Lake is polluted with the ash and molten imaginations of man; and ever new fraudulent versions of the authentic Christ are made, as if by so many breaches from hell (II Cor. 12, II Tim. 3, II Peter 2, Matthew 24:24). Pollution, not the British Navy of yore, it is which rules these waves, while it waives all rules. Foolish however is the one who thinks to fool the Lord!

Meanwhile many escape the acrid penitentiary for Christ's sake: these are the children of light, who do not seek to add to the words and works of God, or to subtract from His free and final redemption, complete these millenia (Galatians 5:24, Ephesians 5:8, I Thess. 5:5, Titus 2:7ff., 3:5ff., TMR Ch.3 , Barbs, Arrows  and Balms 17).

 

Again, in All This Rot about Not Believing, there is illustration and  application,  as below.

 

God is, and must be known; even to know that He must be known, He must be known. Oh yes, you can show the NECESSITY, as we have done in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, that He must be; and that He has spoken - but as to WHAT He has said, until you READ it, you know not what the highest and final assessment of all things is.

Now you may of course read it, and yet know nothing. How? In this, that you do not BELIEVE IT! It matters not at all that it is PROVEN that it is true; if you do not BELIEVE it, then as with anything else you do not believe, you are not in possession of this thing, but alienated from it, divorced, it does not inhere in you, is not one of your operating facts, features, or functional contributors.
 

II. The PERSONS OF THE GODHEAD

But why does this relate ? Surely persons who comprise God are not to the point here or yet ? On the contrary, it is vital to know and to understand this. Let us start by making the distinction between personality and person. It is just a verbal definitional matter of preventing confusion. If we define personality as:

	The operating system and proclivities which constitute the deployment of will and desire, understanding and thought which works for and between human beings as such - if you like; and we call it,
	That combination of mind, matter and spirit, in the special case of human beings in whom this trilogy enables unitary action and interaction with others such, both physically, mentally and spiritually:

then we can at once see the danger humans may have.

This synthetic unity is susceptible to INFLUENCE, from within, from without. It can be damaged, deranged, polluted, infected, distorted and so forth. Its springs can be poisoned, its vision vitiated, its desires contorted, twisted, sick, unrealistic and ruinous, and all this without it being realised; for when the unity is wrong, the results are wrong, and the unity may be more or less unaware of the condition with which it is afflicted. Sick personalities are not automatically self-analysing! (hence the highly dubious value of pscho-analysis - dubious because, to put it in a symptom, many psychiatrists commit suicide, or more formally, personalities without truth are not good assessors, and truth is not an automatic result of ANY human education as such).

If THAT is personality, what is "person" ? We now define this to refer to:

• the underlying reality of which the personality is the expression.

Beneath the contrivance, or the cultural conditioning and so on, lies
the identity which was created. It is what it HAS BEEN MADE. THAT is the first and most obvious difference between it and God! He IS WHAT HE IS!

 

The person then, is the goal. THIS is what matters most. For man, the design specifications thus matter much, for even the person may be from birth imbued physically or mentally or spiritually with poison, with needless limitations of decline, as well as with necessary limitations which belong to all that is MADE, or in this case, CREATED. Still, we move nearer in terms of the design basis, to the truth.

GOD comprises three persons. As shown in Part IV of Chapter 7 in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, they do not ADD UP to Him! He is not an integration of 3, since He always was, and hence there were not three in independence which had to be made one in synthesis. You simply have to stop thinking in terms of the processive and the progressive when you think of God; for that is the childish matter of the temporal, when we are here confronted by the Eternal. Hence in all details, we must preserve this necessary perspective.

As to BEING: ONE. As to PERSONS: three. As to NATURE: ONE. As to individuality, THREE. The three with the identical nature, character, yet have a differentiation of function. All this was dealt with rather well by the Cappodocian doctors, early in Church history, but it is well to become aware in our own time. There is in infinite intimacy of the three, a dynamic without interstices, so that there is not SPACE or THING or OBJECT beyond them, but rather their very beings and inter-relationships all are without confinement, condition or conduit. From this arise our CREATED and IMAGE-of-GOD related families, loves and so on. That is the basis of them all, this Creator.

As created, they relate; but also as created, they lack the supra-temporal, supernatural eternity which always was, and from which 'time', our time, came as we know it, and experience it. Indeed, it is precisely because of this, together with the fact that we are made BY and FOR the Eternal God, that there is such glamour and resurgence of interest in so many drug related feelings of unity and depth and so on: there is the natural impetus even in deformed and defiled personalities to experience or know ... God. Mischievous manipulated substitutions attest the form, through ... even disease.

Now let us look at an illustration which I have often used, and we shall not extract this, as indented below.
 

III. The Illustration

"Where to go ?

• It is GOD who is the only sound quest. His SON is the only verified way. His SALVATION is the only offer on record to man, to give righteousness. His CROSS is still the only remedy which covers man's sin, showing that God is just and we are not - but that He has a way to make up the difference. Heaven has greater values (I Peter 3:18, II Corinthians 5:19-21) and better strength (I Corinthians 1:20-25).

• But that way takes repentance (Luke 13:1-3). How CAN you meet God's specifications in your own life if you have not even studied them. God-given FAITH in Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord enables you freely to RECEIVE the GIFT of ETERNAL LIFE (Ephesians 2:8, Romans 5:15): just as a wire admits electricity, surging from its generating equipment into your house.

• YOU do not create the electricity. It is like a lake on a mist-shrouded hill, with a waterfall of sparkling, thirst-quenching blue waters leading you by its stream, to the top. The lake at the summit? it is like the Father who sent His own Son. You will note that lake and waterfall are both water; and without that, your thirst would be unquenched. Christ declared: Before Abraham was, I am (John 8:58; 5:19-23; cf. Isaiah 48:16, Zechariah 2:8, 3:9, Psalm 45, I John 1:1-4, 4:9-10, Micah 5:1-3, ).

• Jesus said: Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst! But the water .. will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life (John 4:14). Note the vitality. He also stated: I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes to the Father except by Me (John 14:6). Then, for our picture, the stream rushing down, spills over a rocky precipice to fall where hydro-electric works are built.
  
  
   

• That jagged place is like Christ's Cross. Thence, pylons convey the power to needs of the city: like faithful people passing on the message of God's love and salvation (II Timothy 2:2). True, in some houses there is no electric connection. That is like unbelief. Some prefer candles (Romans 6:23, John 8:12, 3:19-21). They show less dirt, but also less beauty. Perhaps invisible to you, there is a highway: it is called the Highway of Holiness. No don't wince! Holiness is wholesomeness and real devotion to God your Maker, in Christ the Saviour. With mind undivided, it has the gift of peace. On this (Isaiah 35:8), we read, that "the travellers, though they be fools, will not go astray."

• Let us consider this. When you are in love, it is not the experience of love which concerns you, but ITS OBJECT. It is not whether you speak in poems (which may be poor), or tongues of glory, or not. It is not tongues but truth that matters! It is the OTHER PERSON whom you love. It is whether you are at peace with your loved one - and near. God's people love Him, and thus love His sacrificed but risen Son (John 8:42, Ephesians 2:12-22), and His words; and so plan to keep these (John 14:21-23, 8:31). If you don't know His words, you can hardly keep or follow them. God's people are set on a highway. Are you ?"
   

This gives you the illustration. The movement of God to express is in the Person of His Son - not of course biological Son in eternity, since GOD is a Spirit (John 4:14); but the Eternal Son is the eternal EXPRESSION (WORD, John 1:1 - there being only one God, as is demonstrable - SMR Ch.1,3 - as Biblically affirmed very often, as in Isaiah 41-45 - this is the One with GOD, and who IS GOD, as in Colossians 2:9, 1:19-23, John 8:58, 5:19-23).

The FACT of human sons indicates the REALITY of transmission in our terms, of being, nature with tenderness towards company and mutuality, with continuity, and so on. The REFLECTION of God, in whose image we are, is that HE has the EVERLASTING SON, to whom, in due course, He gave biological expression in the person of the ONE formed by direct supernatural intervention (Luke 1:35) in a human format, through the person of Mary. The result was this: the ETERNAL SON, WORD of God, the living person became flesh, took for His current or contemporary format, that of man, while He went as sent to redeem those who would come to Him.

It is most important to realise this, as the passage in Colossians 1 just noted, attests, that it was to ALL that He came - GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD*²; but it was not a world of system. It was PEOPLE IN IT, for whom He came. The corrupted people have a corrupted system, and no system, however fine, ever works or could work or even should work, because they leave out God and the Kingdom of Heaven (see Ch.2 in The Kingdom of Heaven; and The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 623-631A). The way is narrow, like that waterfall from the lake. It is beautiful, clean and serene; it is real; it IS. It must be negotiated; but only God is able to do that. YOU must repent of sin, submit yourself to Him, call on His name and accept Him, believing in the PERSON of HIS SON, because THAT is the PERSON of the TRINITY who is sent (Psalm, 40, I John 4:9, Zechariah 2:8-9, Isaiah 49:16). There is no other pathway to glory.

Forget the trinity ? You might as well forget your visa on an international tour. It is HE who is the entrance - John 10:9. Without Him, your flight does not even leave. You sit meditating (transcendental meditation? ) on the tarmac. But in this, there is no lift. Feelings do not lift aircraft. You see, we are dealing with reality, with what is, not with what it seems to be, should be, might be, could be. We deal with the things that are.
 

*3      Christ's Ineffable Peace... Ch.   2  gives extensive cover of Calvin's  decretum horribile,
                and    there is reference also in  Possess Your Possessions Vol. 1, Ch.    2, Vol. 10, Ch. 6,
                Vol. 12,      Ch. 4, The Unsearchable Riches of Jesus Christ Ch.   6,
                 Massifs of Pure Splendour Ch.     7.

                See further in Christ Incomparable ....EPILOGUE*,  Serenity, Not Serendipity... Chs.  5, 14

It is quite essential not to crimp, short-shrift or condense the love of God, as if an  atmospheric mist of loveliness anointing all the hills, were suddenly turned into a few gallons of water. Its extent in His surveying love is intensely broad (Colossians 1:19ff.), just as its application leaves many far from Him (John 3:16-19,36). Since God IS love (I John 4:7), so that nothing contrary to it and its sublimity is to be found in Him, it is a sad  lapse indeed to change it from the scriptural extent, whether with Calvin,  mysteriously and confusedly, or otherwise. See further, Trust God ... Ch.3.

Hatred of what  spoils, soils and disrupts the divine love, of what distorts or scorns its sacrificial intensity, brutal or banal, is part of its purity. There is no other reality than God, beyond all, and what dissipates the truth blinding many, is a just subject of divine scorn; but this is consequential, not quintessential,  this scorn. It is like that of a doctor for a leering wag, who pretending to be a doctor, is injecting many with a fatal flu vaccine, pretending it is for their good. Berkhouwer was right in moving in this direction, in his Divine Election. The love does not fail, and this appears one of the reasons it does not do so; for so far from extending itself where it is not received, as eternally known to God, it exposes the perils of acting as if gods, far from the Father's care.

Further, IN His love, He has made us able to love, and hence to withhold; and so to reject. Without this, there could be no genuine and considered love. Our sin limits are current participation in this field, but it does not limit the foreknowledge of God, apart from any works of ours (Romans 9), of who are His own.

*4

See on self-made information and creation, for example,  Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis pp. 290-325;

The Desire of the Nations ... Ch. 2, Epilogue.

Little Things Ch.  3 (esp. *3),

Beauty of Holiness Ch.     4, Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4.

In the visible world of the living, at the constructive side, neither rationally, statistically nor chemically is there attestation of the vast complexity, utter mutual dependence, common linguistic style of speech, mental functions with implicit conceptual impartation of meaning for both exporter and importer of information. Information does not 'arise', but has to be invented, with its classificatory, conceptually controlled, reciprocal meaningful aspects in tow.

Indeed, biological cells have the hilarious status quo, for the gradualist without ground, of being non-development-oriented in type. Thus there is no evidence of preparatory models, according to Dr Michael Denton. Leaps of faith are not an option of a romantic spirit, but a groundwork requirement for all gradualism,  contradicted as it is on all sides. This applies even to Gould in his lament of the seeming fantasy of trying to find ways to generate new designs, when the fact, as his chosen model is deemed to indicate, is that around 90% of the major types of design have been lost in the supposed period of their generation. Modes of adding to explain loss is rather profound in appearance, but confounded in fact. Gould's anguish is not surprising (cf. Wake Up World! ...Ch. 6).

Loss is the nature of the evidence; creation is the type of the evidence; design fits the definition of the occurrence. What it is defined to be is what is found (Dig Deeper, Soar Higher ... Ch. 2, esp. here,  deals with this at length). Rambunctious seething squalor in intellectual irrelevance seems the chief defence of those who want to characterise the matter in terms opposite to logical, verbal and empirical evidence. This, in turn, is empirical verification of Ephesians 4:17-19, about the alienation from reality in what rejects redemption among this sinful race, as of Romans 1:17ff., in the typification of this rejection in terms of suppressing, wrestling against truth.

As the Bible, seen in action in these and vast tracts of terms and occurrences, continually shows its truth and explicatory power, so the absence of foundation for the makers of a foundling universe, continually leaves them without support empirically.

Incidentally, while Denton refers to the amazing complexity of the brain as noted below (from  Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4), more recent material vastly increases the sheer interface with intelligence, where its definition (cf. SMR pp. 211, 224ff. ) is met par excellence, and so refusal is logically  irrelevant. Creation Magazine, No. 3, 2011 reports a Stanford University result.

Senior researcher, Stephen Smithy comments that they have found that the brain's complexity is beyond anything they had imagined, "almost to the point of being beyond belief." Thus in the cerebral cortex alone, there are found to be over 125 trillion synapses, each one of which also functions as a micro-processor. Moreover each synapse contains some 1000 molecular switches of its own. Observation from the research:

"A single human brain has more connections than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on earth."

This illustrates the constant confirmation of order, insight, intelligence,

	compressed in form,
	miniaturising in the dynamic of its dispositions,
	intricate,
	continual,
	sequential
	self-directing,
	programmatic,
	copywrited in the SINGLE biological language of the Maker,  the singular skill imposed symbolically and the executive ability conjoined:

Indeed composed, compressed, it shows the mode of mentality, the functions of assignment and the consequences of consignment. That the exquisite EXTENT of it continues to amaze, merely adds lustre to the light, confirmation to the logic and specification for the empirics of the case.

When we find matter giving orders (not following them), without addition of man or creator, simply in its inorganic state, and when we find thoughts from nowhere unburdening themselves into symbolic command enterprises, it would be a good time to start thought about what is not seen on this earth. It would then be a matter of finding in this (currently unknown species of matter) the programmatics, as now in DNA, which govern these things, with the second order information coding, as in the DNA situation, where information about the use of information is present in order to perfect and control it all, like a dictionary of terms, or navigator's handbook. In the realm of the mental, this is standard functioning; in the advanced nature of the script, it phenomenal, indeed meta-phenomenal, since no phenomena on earth appear to emit such things, or show the means for doing so.

New types of world are always creatable by man; but only in the imagination. In this one, that is the way it goes, and the funeral of its pretensions is found, to mention but one  bewailing force, in the Second Law of Thermodynamics (cf. News 82, Repent or Perish Ch. 7 as marked esp.).

The other alternative is that God would be making something new in worlds. This will happen, at the last, indeed, but it is not till after the judgment! The verified reason why such information mega-leaps, and ultra-specifications of ingenious symbolic manipulation in programmatic collations, commands and frozen attached concepts, commonly called creation, does not appear, is as stated some 3 and one half millenia ago, in the Bible. In the beginning God created ... and on the 7th day He rested, having finished the creation of His works.

It is well to try to get used to the ways of God.

He acts as He pleases (Psalm 115), tells man about it as needed, and stops in any given program, as notified. On this, see Amos 3:7, Hebrews 11:1ff., and 4:1-16. Such action involves decision, and thus will, and personal criteria. As we are personal, so is our Maker; and beyond the language which by symbolic interchange creates us in the world made to relate and respond, in bodily form, with mental apparatus for use by our spirits with their imaginations and decisions, priorities and probings, there are persons who do good or evil, squirm or turn to the Lord.

It is well to find the salvation of the Lord, which removes the residue of revolt and the remainder of unforgiven riot in man. It is great to find in this, the way to the adoption as of a child of God, just as our bodies and minds are children of His thought and will and decision to act.

*5

See Possess Your Possessions Volume 6, Ch.   2.

*6

See on this religion the following.

More Marvels ... Ch.     4, esp.  *4, 

SMR   pp. 829ff. , 1080

Dancers, Prancers, Lancers and Answers Ch. 3, *1A misconceptions about the Cross, variable and mutually conflicting, on the part of the Koran

Lord of Life Ch.  3 (and force), 1081ff. (and faith), Outrageous Outages  ... Ch.   5; 

His Wounds Opened Eternity Ch.    4;     3

Stepping Out for Christ Ch.    9,  

Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch.    8 (in perspective), see also *1,

See Divine Agenda Chs.    6
with  3 (an overview of religious truancies, including Marx, Darwin and Koran)
and Highway to Hell - (Koran citations in both, with ideational parallels in perspective,  in the latter two;  and in the former,  futile depravities in endless ideologies such as Sudan has shown so significantly, Islam ablaze without glory),
cf. Overflight in Christ Ch.   1 (and the Koran's musings);
 

1493 (esp. Britain and sharia);
News 138,  Beauty for Ashes Chs.    4,   7

Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch.    5,
Acme ... Ch.  9 , Great Execrations ... Ch.    3, 
SMR p. 1O88D - three major religions in some ways in concert, astray.
 

News 138,  Beauty for Ashes Chs.    4,   7,   SMR pp. 1074ff., esp. 1079, 1081ff.

These latter show this religion, with the other three major conspiracies  towards the ultimate - why conspiracies ? It is because men conspire, or breathe plans together for a control, rule or oversight not ordained by God: these are breaths of man, and the breath that matters is that of God, in and by which all scripture is inspired by Him (II Timothy 3:16, Isaiah 8:20), in the Book of the Lord (Isaiah 34:16), the Bible, and sustained and implemented by Him (Matthew 26:54ff.). Other ideas for rule are always unruly, since they always tend to use power for what neither reason nor truth compels.

 Possess Your Possessions Volume 8, app.,  Volume 11,  4,   11,   5
(national character and character of Islam).

See also SMR pp. 822ff., 986ff., 1O88D.

*7

The latter case is shown below from I Kings.

^"And behold, a man of God went from Judah to Bethel by the word of the Lord,
and Jeroboam stood by the altar to burn incense.

" Then he cried out against the altar by the word of the Lord, and said,

'O altar, altar! Thus says the Lord: "Behold, a child, Josiah by name,
shall be born to the house of David;
and on you he shall sacrifice the priests of the high places
who burn incense on you, and men’s bones shall be burned on you.'

" And he gave a sign the same day, saying,

'This is the sign which the Lord has spoken:
Surely the altar shall split apart, and the ashes on it shall be poured out.'

" So it came to pass when King Jeroboam heard the saying of the man of God,
who cried out against the altar in Bethel,
that he stretched out his hand from the altar, saying,

 'Arrest him!'

" Then his hand, which he stretched out toward him, withered,
so that he could not pull it back to himself.

"The altar also was split apart, and the ashes poured out from the altar,
according to the sign which the man of God had given by the word of the Lord.
Then the king answered and said to the man of God, 

'Please entreat the favor of the Lord your God, and pray for me,
that my hand may be restored to me.'

" So the man of God entreated the Lord, and the king’s hand was restored to him,
and became as before. Then the king said to the man of God,

'Come home with me and refresh yourself, and I will give you a reward.'

" But the man of God said to the king,

'If you were to give me half your house,
I would not go in with you; nor would I eat bread nor drink water in this place.' "