CHAPTER 7
THE FASHION OF
DIVINE PASSION
Shown at the
First, Consummated to the Last
EZEKIEL 18:19-31
and 33:1-11
JUSTICE DOES NOT EVACUATE FROM TRUTH
NOR MERCY FROM MAN, WHEN HE IS PREPARED TO RECEIVE IT
It
is good to get back to the thrust, glorious like a sunset, one that
lingers and continues as if its gloaming never ceased its final roamings
over this and that valley or patch of sky-works, to enlighten and give colour,
of the impassioned love, the relentless surge of it from the Lord, culminating
in Calvary and the resurrection even of the body of Christ, the fundamentals of
the faith, and the peaks of the works of God.
Consider these two passages in Ezekiel, then,
I
THE CONTROVERSY
There was a strange controversy between God and many in Israel.
Oddly, they seemed to feel that there was too much mercy. GOD for His part, was
prepared to pardon the sinner when he turned back in repentance and faith, to do
otherwise; but man felt this unfair. Moreover, God would not endorse punishing
the son for the father, or the father for the son. The soul that sins shall die:
unless mercy is sought and obtained where it MAY be found (Isaiah 55). Instead
of strutting hard-nosed moral superiority, they were faced with universal guilt.
God then taught.
The divine message, at this point, is clear: There is a gap of
grace. The term transliterated agape in New Testament relates vitally.
God WILL NOT EXACT the past of the returning sinner, but pardons; and He will
not exact on one family member because of another. Man is made in the divine
image, and each is to be so treated. Not fair! said the controversialists in
Israel. Why not ? Can God not do with His own what He will ? Moreover WHAT is He
doing but pardoning, so that He is not trying to exact, like a flinty usurer,
what He can get, but is interested in gaining the soul and spirit in loving
obedience and wise living, where He may without violence, achieve this. It is a
matter of a better perspective for a better result than mere judicial
penny-pinching. Far more, life itself is the exaction that COULD be made of
one as of all, if you are going to despise divine grace: the soul that sins
shall die (Ezekiel 18:20).
Having made such things clear, God shows them a deeper heart, a
more profound love, a mercy that delights to operate (as in Micah 7:19-20).
one that both would cast all their sins into the sea, and subdues their
iniquities, casting aside payments, swallowing up errors and strengthening with
self-discipline and desire, so that man may serve Him in fruitfulness of
function and peace of heart. It is God in person (Micah 5:1-3), who to pardon
in purity, strikes through sin in Himself!
EZEKIEL
18:30-32
2 THE RECOMMENDED REALISM
There is then a series of prescriptions for pardon and peace.
THE CALL TO REPENT
TURNING FROM
TRANSGRESSIONS - ALL OF THEM
SO AVOIDING
INIQUITY AS RUIN
CAST AWAY THE
BREACHES
GET A NEW HEART AND
SPIRIT
DO NOT DIE, WHAT'S
IN IT!
GOD IS NOT HE WHO
DESIRES THIS TRAGIC LOSS.
What did God Himself both program and perform in the thrust of
this love ? Indeed you find in this with Jeremiah 33:11 a overpowering wonderful
expression of His love and pity, determination and resolution that man
might not destroy himself.
You could describe it in many ways,
but here is one. It is like a Symphony in P and God. Survey 18:30ff., and 33:11.
You find FIRST:
 |
the passion for mercy
|
|
|
the precision of judgment, the
profundity of kindness |
|
|
the purity of love |
|
|
the perfection of self
control, that does not
seize, shanghai or force, but would rather
lose some and lament for the self-excluded, foreknown in heart before all
time. |
You find SECONDLY:
|
|
a gap, where God Himself
covers the sin He mercifully chooses to disregard
on repentance and faith,
|
|
|
the agape which
desires such liberty and licence, such dismissal of debt,
|
|
|
and the grace which urges and
surges into such sovereign splendour,
the heart of the King. |
As to what God did, you find back in the day of those prophets,
points aplenty, and even also before Ezekiel's day and Jeremiah's, long before
it.
Thus
Jeremiah in 31:31, dealing with the virgin birth (a woman in an
entire novelty encompassing a child with divine intent relating to pardon -
31:20-22), deals also with the New Covenant. In Ezekiel 16:60, it
is called the everlasting covenant; and likewise the prophet
indicates in 16:19-21, that the revelation of God is to come to the Gentiles,
who will cast away their pallid substitutes for truth, their vacuities,
emptinesses, seeing them at that time, as lies. Indeed, Isaiah in 45
appeals to the "ends of the earth" to look to the Lord and be saved, just as Chs.
49-55 tell of the basis of the new and everlasting covenant. The
justice, judgment of the Lord in His equity, is for one and for all.
Essentialised in Christ, it is fallen on Him for those who seek His cover
(Isaiah 53:4-6). This divine moral grandeur, this pardon, does not grow old,
even though the theocratic State of Israel for an Age would cease to be its mode
of exposition (Isaiah 65:13-15,62:6,11).
That State had its
own place in His plan (Isaiah 42,49), the blind to be brought back to their
land, the very opposite of the spiritual, this returning contingent (42:10-19)
being those who had been near and were now far from the Lord, those the
Lord's servants specialising in blindness! God is deep as Paul points out
in Romans 11, and has many plans; but only one Gospel. His witness is in all
things, both small and great; but His focus is on salvation.
The place of grace
and equity, pardon and peace, it is in the Gospel for Jew and Gentile alike,
so let us learn from Ezekiel 18. Bear your own sins, do not seek to export.
Find your own regeneration from the regal pardoning power of Christ. Do not try
to have it by proxy. Repent in your own heart, do not participate in a group
mood instead.
EZEKIEL 33:1-11
3 THE PASSIONATE PRONOUNCEMENT
So great is the glory
of divine grace, that failure to heed it is a prodigy of pity, so that even
Christ wept over Jerusalem, mourning that it had not heeded. But He came.
Many do NOT come WITH the Gospel He
came to pay for and proclaim. There are responsibilities, the outthrust of
divine love.
Ezekiel was appointed a warner, a watchman by the Lord (Ezekiel
33:7). The terms of reference are clear for such. IF you warn and they do not
heed, as was the case of the Jerusalem of Christ's day, then their folly is on
thier onw heads, and you are clear. If however you do not warn, and the
battle comes, the blight and the horror of it, then its blood is on you.
But what a message you have, what a bounty of divine pity goes with the pleas,
what a glory of persevering love is illustrated in God's pursuit of a lapsed
people, what grief when they did not take the wonderfully free offer of His
consummate action on the Cross (II Corinthians 5:17-20).
Who correspond most clearly to these
watchmen today ? In Acts 20 you find Paul, having called for the Ephesians
elders, telling them of his own faithful zeal in warning, teaching,
reaching, continuing with them, providing the whole counsel of God, and
applying this to themselves. He tells them as overseers of the flock, that
they must guard, for not only a wolves to come, dripping with their
well-known fangs and furies, flurries and importunities, but these
spiritual wolves will be savage, ravening with their special emphasis! Thus the
elders, as overseers, have authority, and women being denied this, they cannot
be elders (Assault on Timothy). But
that is far from imagining they may not be counsellors, and warn. Indeed, the
fact that the elders were so charged does not mean that others may not warn; it
is just that these warned AS overseers, a specific task. People are
appointed diversely, but needs must be met broadly.
Who may NOT warn when a wolf
launches an attack! In the case of Numbers 11:23-30, 70 elders were
appointed, to help Moses, but two people, Medad and Eldad, also
prophesied, and one reported it with concern to Moses. His reply ? I wish
ALL the Lord's people were prophets, and that He would put His Spirit on them!
This was his vigorous response! In fact, Hebrews 3:13 tells us to exhort one
another daily, in view of the vital importance of the Gospel of grace and its
place in life. Its place ? How, it asks, shall we escape if we neglect such
great salvation! (Hebrews 2:1ff.)! And so we move to the grand loveliness of
Ezekiel 33:11.
Here the prelude to
the announcement is the need to be faithful in warning, and it deals with
watchmen. If you speak and they do not hear, you are clear. But SPEAK! Do other
souls not matter to you ? They matter to God. How much do they matter to Him ?
In 33:11, we find
these components, in theme as in 18, but in this place with individuality.
THE DIVINE
DECLARATION IS AS DEEP AS HIS VERY LIFE.
NO KINK CALLS FOR
DIVINE PLEASURE IN DEATH, HOWEVER WICKED THE ONE.
THE DESIRE IS TO
REPEL IT AND TURNING TO THE CREATOR, TO LIVE.
THE CALL IS
REPETITIVE, EXTREME IN PATHOS, DEEP IN INTENSITY,
'TURN', FOR WHY PUT
IN A TENDER FOR DEATH!
Professor John
Murray pointed to excellent features in this verse: they were such as these -
the asseveration, the affirmation, the negation, the exhortation and the
interrogation. That at least was the thrust of it. Yet for all the wonder
of this, there is more, for vast are the implications, and just as the tenor is
sovereign, so it is entirely solicitous. God desires as He will, appoints as He
will, and loves without limit, as His yearning loses nothing.
On this occasion,
passion and depth conspire to produce an infinitely clear depiction of divine
love. There is nothing hidden; there are no mysteries. God is open. With ALL His
being to the life itself, He has one desire for man, even for the expressly
wicked. It is that they live, that they do not suffer ruin, and He calls
repeatedly as in Matthew 23:37, with an insistence unmistakable (cf. SMR
Appendix B), to one as to all. There
are no aristocratic chambers: God wants ALL as in John 3, where His mission in
Christ was NOT condemnation but salvation, the world into which He came (which
is one) being the object likewise of His desire, and that, for its salvation.
Whoever you are and wherever you are fallen, this is His desire, unmistakable,
unshakeable, implacable, otherwise specifiable only by the most profound
contradiction! If you hear it, respond. If you want it, come and get it.
Let no theological
anodyne or addition confound you. Consider the depth of the divine passion, and
its breadth, its startling comprehensibility and its sovereign splendour,
mistaking none and nothing, sending the one Gospel of divine selection, to the
people of this world, that He might reconcile ALL things (Col. 1:19ff.), yes
even in heaven as on earth.
When you go with the
word of God in your heart, as for example did the famed Small Woman to China,
you find those appointed to you and to Him, and your going has its result; or if
as in Ezekiel, you are appointed to a rebellious house who will not hear you,
yet in his case the testimony they rejected, many since then have accepted, and
in his prophecy are passages as here, of such grandeur of love and
passion, compassion and thrust that it enlivens the heart and many have been
found for millenia in this. Francis Schaeffer even used part of this prophecy
for the very title of one of his books.
The Lord grants the
grace of repentance according to His own mind (Acts 11:18), just as He appoints
salvation according to His own Gospel, sovereignly selecting it according to His
own mind and heart, not waiting but knowing, just as love so pure as His
comes from the very Being who He most blessedly is. Past the torment and
treachery of many human bastions and braggarts, ideological distortions and
contortions, lies and deceits, false prophecies and fatuous philosophies,
there is a fidelity so grand that God has even found those whom love discovers,
unveils, displays on the screen of His desire, as before all works, and apart
from any works save His own, He knew the very beings of those yet to be
created. THAT is His foreknowing before the going, the security before history
happens, and the assurance that no technical problem will distort, disturb or
spoil what He has found. This He WILL find with that passion which even
descended into hell*1 in His circuit of
wonder.
This is the testimony
of truth, the assurance of grace, a divine way to accomplish ALL His desire,
losing nothing, in the splendour of His seeking for all, stopping short of
take-over, as by imperious grabbing, with all the restraint of love.
Thus not only is the
result assured by foreknowledge, but the means are foreknown, and whether it be
a case of sending on the Calvinist schema, where the love of God to the lost is
truncated into 'horrible decree' of sad misconstruction by that theologian*2,
or on biblical lines, where that love COULD not be more extensive, in either
case, the one who is sent to preach and teach in Christ's name has no knowledge
of who is to be saved, but the going will bring, unless it be intended purely as
a warning ministry for those to be lost (the tenor of Ezekiel 2:1-6 with
3:1-6), just those souls whom the Lord, knowing in His love in advance who are
His, has appointed for redemption.
Those not found are
not forced, and when their day comes, as they have differentially not responded
before the eye of eternity, so they go where their preference has divinely been
known ultimately to go (John 3:19, I Peter 2:8-10). Thus in the light of the
love of God for the world and His desire that all things in heaven and on
earth be reconciled to Himself (Col. 1), there are two
outcomes. One is that a person believes in Him, and so has eternal life.
The other is the preference for darkness in the face of this light (John 3:19,
cf. John 15:22ff.). In this case, there is condemnation, for not only has sin
soiled but preference has rejected washing.
The stated
ground of this resultant, is that preference in that context of light. It is in
categorical contrast with the stated desire of the Lord, being the
alternative outcome, the ruin from which He urged escape; and what is made
eminently clear is this: it is NOT GOD on who acts to depart from the criterion
of judgment, but man on whom this in His knowledge, rests in its selective
impact. The deity does not depart from it, evade it, avoid it.
As it is, so He
acts, having sought to remove it by ultimate sacrifice, and removing it
for many. It is MAN in His image, defiled and so divinely both known and
foreknown, on whole all negation rests. The outcome binds, but the input
precedes logically. The criteria show it; the Lord knows it; and the works of
light, thus not desired, beyond the flesh and in the certainties of divine
knowledge, differentially consign to condemnation, alas most grievous
(John 3:36). Man however was not made in the image of God for nothing; nor is he
turned into a machined object or mutated manipulee in order to be gained. GOD
KNOWS, and so acts. The truth is the criterion: love provides the escape freely,
truth knows the resultants.
The going of the
missionary will make precisely the different appointed, in either case, that of
the appalling concept of the horrible decree Calvin invents, or in the glorious
majesty of truth, which explicitly and repeatedly and both in principle and
practice seeks the whole world into which Christ came, the ALL THINGS of
Colossians 1, in terms of the very blood of Christ by which He has made peace,
surging to all, reaching some. It is in some ways rather like static: the
message comes but interference distorts. He would have all, EVEN to the depth of
the blood of the sacrificial funding of Christ: that is what He tells us in
Colossians in John 3, for example. Yet the divinely discerned differential
in preference that no time can prevent, nor anyone distort, past all works and
all the power of man to manipulate, in truth as it actually is, is foreknown to
Him: the essence divined and the certainty brought out to His light. That is the
emphatic biblical message. Where God has plainness, Calvin has mystery and even
a horrible decree, whereas in fact, what we have is the outcome of a wonderful
love, past all inhibitions of debased human will in the flesh; and where it is
foreknown to be balked, yet it remains pure, and does not distort.
Consider the missionary venture. Who knows when a word from the Gospel will unchain a soul ? when one is to be won
? Whether in the 'horrible decree' of Calvin, the matter be visualised as if
God were unknown as to love's nature and scope, or in the biblical profession,
it is in this all one in this, whichever model be followed. If you do not go,
you fail in love: this too is the same. If you DO go, then souls otherwise ready
to be lost, and currently in that state, may be found, who without your going
would have been lost. That does not however mean that their destiny depended on
your nearness to obedience, but that God has you scheduled to do it and
foreknew that you would; and in his plan that is the only way it is going to be
done, so that without it, it would not be done.
IF that were so, and you slackly
refused to go on mission, then in His love, which does not blight mercy's
approach to one because of the sin of another, He would have had a way to
perform the same result, negative or positive as was in His foreknowledge. Yet
it remains true, your going makes the difference. That is how He who knows all,
has it worked out.
Worlds do not turn on you if a
missionary, though guilt or responsibility does, in the eternal
consequences of the divine love of stated depth and dimension; but rather is it
that eternal things are wrought through you. People are not extinguished because
you sin: God told Jonah He was not keen to obliterate Nineveh: because they had
received an ultimatum did not make them consignable without hope. He is always
looking for a way to deliver, since He has no pleasure in the death of the
wicked but that he should TURN... TURN! He declares so very clearly.
Worlds however may indeed turn with you, as you fulfil your given charter,
instead of bringing a divinely perceived need to have a more reliable method.
While this reduces the paramountcy of man, it only stresses that of God, which
is how it should be. From Him, to Him and for Him are all things (Romans
11:36).
The main grave
difference in the schema of sending out messengers or missionaries and finding
is one, that in the Calvinist case, the horrible decree is mixed with his
concern, for on that basis it is not known why there is this gap, this negative
in the sovereign desire; whereas biblically there is NO SUCH GAP. There is no
mystery in love, its extent, calibre, quality being unsurpassable,
magnificent, brilliant, effectual and both unduped and unbaulked. Love stops
where it would become something else, if it went further! It is satisfied with
that, though it long lament. To be sure the Calvinist might contend that he
trusts that the reason for exclusion is a good one, a good pleasure, but if the
theologian be followed, the biblical coverage and extremity of this divine
interest in love, is cut short, mystery where the mountain lay, and if he be
followed yet further, a sense of horror inhabits that mystery.
Alas, that the
direct, divinely stated thrust of John 3, apart from all else, is
not faced. One world, one God, one Gospel, one Christ, one desire for the world
into which He comes to be saved, one desire that it be not condemned, one
provision for escape from this, one balking agency, the divine knowledge in
truth that some differentially prefer darkness (John 3:19). This is in contrast
to the divine urgency, being both categorical and conclusive. Moreover it is
stated definitively.
THIS is the one
condemnation of this one group, known by the One before time churned or light
was thrust aside.
In biblical fact, love
states its nature and where it will stop. In the one case there is the sheer
delight of the sovereign will of God finding all to be found, without failure,
for this phase, and at the end of all phases, which is as far as the limitless
love of God to the lost will go. This it does without becoming impure in its
use of means, all so appointed being found (cf. Revelation 5:9-11).
Nothing contrary to love seduces the matter*3; for it does not distort itself in
its purity, in order to secure a false end of the issue, as if the soul were
re-made in ORDER to be saveable, instead of remade because saveable and so
foreknown not in works, but in essence.
What splendour of sovereign
majesty and glory of heart, grandeur of grace is shown when one moves as in the
tender dawn to those without Christ, that the word of God might find and nestle
in the heart of ALL of His people, all His works declaring Him until all being
found, it culminates in the consummation of that free love which is that of the
heart of this, our Sovereign Lord and kindly King.
Of this, the afterglow is to all
eternity (Revelation 5:13).
NOTES
*1
In
Chapter 3 above, this point is dealt with, as
shown below. See also
Aspects of the
Glory of the God of all Grace Ch. 5, and
The Kingdom of
Heaven Ch. 4.
But God deals with eternity as lost man with time; and He knows
where each person is and will be, from eternity. Even when man forgets
himself, from the heights He clutches His own (49:15), drawn and delivered
from above (Psalm 18:16, 144:7). To the depths He has gone to find and to
feature (I Peter 3:18-22), His triumphal journey to the cross not stopping
at the world then current, but exposing salvation's wonder to and for all time: even to the nub of former
judgment. the flood of devastation, He proceeds. Made alive in the Spirit, that is
realm to which He went as the Apostle's Creed
rightly declares.
It is not a flit back
you find in I Peter 3:19,22, but a progression forwards, with Christ featured inveterate in
His saving thrust, moved indeed in the immensity and intensity of His commission,
and indeed, He has gone on to heaven following His circuit (I Peter 3:22),
where all is subject to Him. 'Spirits in prison' is not the biblical
designation for those now living: prisoners indeed, but not spirits in prison.
This is the language of Jude for the lost. Such then was the inventory of His
passion and compassion, that as He has foreknown, so He has proceeded to preach
(I Peter 3:19).
*2
On this, see:
The Glow of Predestinative Power Ch. 4,
The Lord of Longsuffering
... Ch.
6
Celestial Harmony for
the Terrestrial Host Ch. 2.
The Christian Pilgrimage
Ch.
3.
More broadly, see:
Great Execrations, Great
Enervations, Greater Grace Chs. 7
and 9,
A Time to Praise God, Appendix 1,
with
Message
... Ch. 9,
Marvels of Predestination
... Ch. 4, Ch. 6,
Supplement 6,
The
Spiritual Sagacity of Predestination in Love
Ch. 4,
The Pride of Life ... Ch. 7,
Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth
Ch. 6, esp. *3
Massifs of Pure Splendour Ch. 7.
A further Useful Grouping
that may be taken separately,
on Love, Predestination, the Bible and the Beliefs from the Word of God to
the Mind of Faith ...
The
Glow of Predestinative Power ... Chs.
4,
5;
The Christian Pilgrimage Ch. 3,
Christ's Ineffable Peace
... Ch.
2
(extensive),
3,
Massifs of Pure Splendour Ch.
7,
Jesus Christ Defaced ... Ch.
2;
Gratitude for His Glorious Grace
Ch.
2
Outrageous Outages ... and the Courage of Christ Ch.
9;
The Majestic Might of the
Merciful Messiah Ch.
5
(the
extensive
attestations
in the
Bible,
of the
love of
God for
the
lost,
without
attenuation
of
heart),
with
Anguish, Ecstasy and the
Mastery
of the
Messiah,
Chs.
8,
9);
Great
Execrations ... Greater Grace
Chs.
7, 9.
*3
Browning
expresses this facet of love poignantly in his poem on SAUL. Here you see the
loving heart of David, used to harping, not in distasteful words but with
literal harp and song, to soothe the tormented spirit of poor King Saul. Though
still young, the young shepherd lad senses the misfit in the spirit of Saul,
with life, and wishes he could grant him what is needed, something new,
indeed even a new life, so that he might recover from his melancholy mood, so
gravely near to inconsolable depression.
He
says:
I
yearned - 'Could I help thee, my father, inventing a bless,
I would add to that life of the Past, both the Future and this;
I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence,
As
this moment, - had love but the warrant, love's heart to dispense!'
It does not
say, "to dispense with love's heart", as if to do without it, which would
contradict the flow and mood of the moment, the intense desire of young David to
help Saul, as well as add "with" to form an idiom not used here by
Browning. It DOES say, "had love but the warrant, love's heart to dispense."
That means that love needs a warrant in order to give out and yield and enact
what it would really want, and want to give, like a dispenser of
anything. It cannot, without being love no more, just act out its desire,
however, and invade, seize, grasp the mind and soul of its object, the one
loved, as if its very nature as love grew wanton, and love mere
command.
What is that
necessary warrant, that David requires for love to act out
its desire ? It is outside the domain of love to inveigle, intrigue
superficially, manipulate, shanghai or force. That is another affair entirely.
The nature of love involves a certain reciprocity if action is to be. It is seen
whether in the love of parents or suitors. Even a good desire to
reconstruct and renew is not to be effected in an unwilling object of that love.
Consent is necessary, as implied when Christ said in HIS love,
"How often would I ... but you would not," (Matthew
23:37), and again, "If you had known, especially you, even
in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden
from your eyes," (Luke 19:42ff.).
What HE would
like to be, is found NOT to be that which the object of His love is willing to
have. It WILL not consent to, have, accept, respond to the
ardour of the love, or its desire; and this exhibits a terrible poignancy when
the love is that of God! This is found constantly in the Old Testament in the
grieving, relieving, appealing, hortatory, pleading, enablings, that yet
stop short of personality change, though it is offered, or making what is loved
to be such that now it responds, without regard to the will, since this is then
simply bypassed.
It is NOT bypassed.
That is the continual exhibition of such words as those of the progressive
Psalms, showing both the mercies and desires of God and repetitive refusals,
contrary to His heartfelt wishes, as in Isaiah 63-64, Psalm 106, Ezekiel 20. To
be sure, He is sovereign, but not the swaggering or corruptive kind, but rather
unique in the purity of His heart. He would rather endure the cross that stoop
to that; and He did. He would rather do all necessary that justice being
sated, mercy might sound freely, that thirst be quenched, and yet not use a pump
to insert the water, or a revitaliser, to remake the heart so that heart by
passed, a new heart arises which though not that of the one loved, will at
least love as desired! That is not loving someone; it is substituting what one
desires for a site, so that a differint being loves, and the fraud is apparent,
mere self-deception, and pitiful at that.
Certainly God,
from His word, the Bible, refuses to leave the final result to the mere
conundrum of unconverted spirit and heart; He has, as befits such majesty,
bypassed mere circumstance and found the essence, the vital reality of
each soul; and from even HIS omniscience, He has foreknown who receives and who
does not, His desire. Romans 9 tells us it has nothing to do with future works,
but is the personal prerogative of God to KNOW in fact (for God doe snot 'know'
what is not so). He knows, for man as made in God's own image, with scope
for disposition, before all sin or fall or history of the creation,
who is His; and this He ensures will happen.
That is to ensure
this much evidenced and highly prized liberty for man; not to deny it (cf.
Ephesians 1:4ff., Romans 8:29ff.). In view of this, none CAN come in the field
of history unless the Father draw that person (John 6:65) and so grant. There is
no POSSIBILITY therefore of error, and no unfortunate calamity, when
someone who MIGHT or would have found God if given the technical aspects of a
history made different, does not because of something getting in the way,
ruining the reality of eternal preference. In John 3:19, we learn that
accordingly, just a God would have liked to save the world, not judge it,
so those despite this universal love of God, in its primary and inward
function, who have a darkness preference, will be judged by that very
thing! The ELEMENTAL does God know; and this He sustains against all tide and
circumstance, all corruption and all devices of the devil. The Lord KNOWS who
are His (I Timothy 2:19), and secures them.
If love had only the
warrant to seize, then BECAUSE God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son, therefore the world would all be saved. But love is not so,
and the Bible shows in drama, narrative, exhibition of the heart of the Lord
directly as in Ezekiel 33:11, Jeremiah 48, the latter even of Moab, and
indirectly, as in Proverbs 1, the insatiable ardour of His love together
with the inveterate realism in the face of what is shown and known to be a
contrary preference, even in reality, beyond all time, before creation, and
known by God assuredly.
God, like Christ in
the temptation (Matthew 4) would rather lose the world than force it, manipulate
it, take it without consent. For NOTHING would He alter in this, and He would
not be bought even for EVERYTHING this world has. The integrity of love is
crucial and since God IS love (I John 4:7ff.), so that nothing to the
contrary dominates Him, it also means that the realities of love prevent the
sort of superficiality which socialism so readily dispenses, and the sort of
sovereignty it equally so readily begins to seize, over the very lives of
the peoples. Thus peoples will (in the purer cases) become the
dictation to others, and man-made ideas turn from lore to law as in Australia at
the present, currently threatened with making biblically defined sexual
perversity sacrosanct by authorising law, and so dictating to those who no more
accept it than using a shoe horn for a tooth-pick.
That is, in biblical
language, it is an abomination, that does not fit the design, and is
unnatural (Romans 1:17ff.). Like adultery, it led to death in the Old Testament,
and leads to exclusion from the kingdom of heaven, unless repented of, in the
light of the Gospel.
Weakness is one
thing, and sin may be forgiven; but wantonry and living such ways in
principle is rebellion, worse than witchcraft, in the Bible's exposure of the
reality of it all, as the word of the living God (I Samuel 15:23).
But what of those who
invent priorities and morals and socially man-handle reality to desire, and so
rule their fellows ? On that basis, people become God, as in the idea of
reasonable people or those of reasonable disposition or attitude or approach
DETERMINING whether something is acceptable or not, in society, as ultimate
arbiters,while fines or worse await the non-conformist. That has very much in
common with some of the worst phases of the Church of England in former
times, when acting as State Church, it turned morals to theocratic law,
without actually being a nation governed by the Bible.
This current
autocracy, as is emerging in Australia, however is far worse; for in those
former times, there was at least some relationship to the God who in
making man, made him in this way and not that, and for this purpose and
not that, so that right and wrong became intrinsic to the case. Such
religious dictation as is looming on the political horizon here, is of course
contrary to the Australian Constitution, for it is assuredly tantamount to the
institution by the Commonwealth of a religion, or answer to ultimate question of
right and wrong, basis and actuality, valuation and priority, articulated
perspective to the uttermost height of all phases of practical
living.
What then would be
the mouthpiece which so speaks to the nation ? it is nothing other than
some of its people, whether majority or not, commandeering the lives of all of
its peoples, or attacking them. It is wonderful that the Constitution of
this land guarded against such terrorising tyranny as that would be. It is hoped
it will be respected, or Australia will quickly realise the constitutional
freedom based on reverence to God Almighty in the setting of our creation
as a Commonwealth, was indeed worth fighting to protect. It is easy to discard,
if truth falls first (as in Isaiah 59).
God loves. It
is nothing like that. David in Browning's poem was well aware that even the most
ardent desire for good for a person, even to make-over the whole life in order
to avoid foreseeable grief, did not constitute a mandate to do this. While this
is a literary composition, a poem of Robert Browning, it is entirely in this in
accord with the testimony of the Bible, which is not surprising in this
instance, or that of personal love as distinct from lust, which agrees
with both.
Mercifully, this sensitive perspective
found constantly in the Bible, was that shown in the Declaratory Statement
of the Presbyterian Church of Australia, founded in 1901, as part of its
outstanding CONSTITUTION. Unhappily in 1991, in effect, it nullified this
aspect, and became what appears to be simply a confessionalistic church, no
more bound simply and utterly to biblical statements ONLY, as criterion in all
doctrine.
Extreme -isms on both sides tend to obscure
the beauty of biblical truth; but digging into the word of God shows the
resolution of all mysteries for logic, and the wholesomeness of refusal to
depart from what is written, for the sake of any theory. Textual fidelity is an
inalienable privilege of any Presbyterian Church, though many seem now to
short-circuit it in favour of mere theoretical preferences, a problem starkly
revealed since Christ's declaration of Mark 7:7ff..
See on these features such sites as: SMR
Appendix B, Possess Your Possessions
Volume 10, Chapter 6,
*10,
with The Biblical Workman
Ch. 8 and Prospect, Retrospect and Reality Ch, 3
Epilogue, *3.
See on resolutions more
generally, for example, SMR Chs, 3,
5, 10, and
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES
AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS
Bible or Blight,
Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God.