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CHAPTER TEN

The Creator in Wonder and Wisdom

Creativity and Concern

The Span of Spirit in Man

and the Scan of God in Salvation

Isaiah 40, et al.

RATIONALITY, CREATIVITY AND LOVE

Have you ever considered what it is to create ? With us, mere humans, staggeringly complex in our undergirding, in the apparatus of our action, whether physical or mental, mobile or at rest, there is even here a positive marvel, that leaves the galleries of paintings like superficiality, and the depth of philosophy like the shallow waves in which children play, by the sea.

It is not with the physical today, that we are concerned, for this has often been regarded in the strictures of its structuring, the methods of its procedures, at the logical level (cf. Waiting for Wonder, Appendix, Jesus Christ: Defaced, Unfazed... Ch. 4 and The gods of naturalism have no go!), which is, if not paramount, yet so invasive as to be like the cement with which bricks are built into a wall: it makes it hang together. Nor is our concern, direclty at least, with the implications and the necessary involvements in our mode of being and acting, thinking and procedure, which receives considerable treatment in such sites as Repent or Perish Ch. 7. Rather is it in the very nature of creativity, whether limited or not.

Let us start with the limited, to which most of us have immediate access daily. First, we see something. We consider it, ramify concerning like things, compare with similar sequences, note the habiliments, texture, lighting, mode of development, degree of the static and the mobile and so on, especially if there be any mystery, or if it seem intriguing. We create express or working hypotheses, actively or recessively, depending on time, concentration, assessment of importance and relevance to our pursuits. It duly becomes satisfyingly explained, imperiously obvious or mystifyingly challenging, and if all goes well, it comes at last to be agreeably declaring itself to our thoughts, at times in terms not expected but capable of anticipation; on occasion, initially at least, frankly baffling.

If the thing matters to us, we may begin to alter the types of orientation used, as if to see beyond mere appearance, to what is conceivable as activating the object, or accounting for its presence. If necessary deep thought is called on, probes are made, intellectual experiments may be summoned - IF it is this, then surely such and such should follow, but in this case not. Hence there is need either for alteration of the terms, the perspective or the ambit of thought ... and it the challenge matures, enhancement of understanding. All this is CREATIVE.

We are studying, pondering, considering things known and probing for things unknown, and all the time imagining or imaging, in sight or mind, pondering possibilities, thinking up thought-enhancers, mutating in mind the scene of deliberation.

Into bafflement, suddenly, an IDEA comes.

What IF ... a new scene appears before the mental eye. A new set of terms announces itself, and is tentatively and then perhaps more confidently applied, till the scene becomes a setting for the scenario, and we begin to comprehend. WHY did we not see it sooner ? What provoked this amount of effort, what were the ingredients of the initial hold up ? Endeavours to generalise, apportion forces and forms, functions and features on a probing basis now become more confident. It is all a matter of creating ideas, tests, formulating functional features in comprehensible terms, relating these to parallel functions or finding reasons why this cannot be done, to ensure a maximum of rationality and comprehensiveness, without compressing too intensively into past thought, in case there should be new parameters, too witlessly assumed. Possibilities of this are considered, and discarded or woven into the structure of thought to achieve more stability of effort, more enterprise in securing comprehension.

All this is logical; but it is also creative, to FIND the possibilities, to REMIND in select TERMS of the analogues, to secure to the mind restrictions on method or amplification and reasons for this and the choice between such moves, and their degree and scope in contributions to the whole, and then their mutual harmony in so doing. These things do not appear on a screen; they are brought to mind by the process of creation. We are creating ideas, thought, distinguishing between the conceivable and the ostensibly inconceivable, considering the grounds for the distinction in this case and the possibility of presumption or omission, constantly inventing the architecture of thought that best fits the challenge of the case.

Now let us move to another scene of creativity. We sit in the twilight, and the birds flit to their rest, the rays of glory suggest their schemas and flirt with the imagination; the lights of sunset make artistry a global event. The atmosphere penetrates to the heart, enlivens the soul, the life. Imagination pours out to see past the glory to its source, past the multitudinous events to their type, to their nature, to the entire scenario and its wonder, to the sort of powers required for its invention and sustenance, to the delicacy of the flitting wing, the artistic gradations of colour, the parcelling of form in the living panorama.

We see past it, and ponder its production, its sense of rest and the vitality this rest betokens, before it came to its function, the wonder of mobility, whether of thought or action, form or formation, visual or tactile information, constructions of the same into a network of comprehension. One may write a poem in creative thrust, exposing the beauty, the peace, the principles of action, their relation to ourselves, our relation both to the scene and to our senses, and these to our thoughts, and those to our capacity to envision, and that to there BEING a vision to envisage, and its relevance to the total panoply of phenomena which with such art, artlessly declares itself.

Teeming creativity works in the midst, inventing, assessing, expressing, probing, testing, resting, and then if so be, we ponder the cause of it all, of ourselves, of the conjunction of itself and ourselves, of the matrix of our thought at work in the matrix of its created nature, and the creative nature of our response. We look to the source of the logic in it, in ourselves, and of the creativity to consider other modes and modules that are not there, but perhaps could be, and what that would entail (cf. SMR pp. 262ff., 284ff.); and then suddenly turning, we relate just to the actual. How is this come, are we come, do our thoughts come, does the magnificent correlation between our thinkable thoughts and the investigable logical realities vested in and so pursuable in what we consider?

What is the LOGOS, the word, the expressibility and the conceptualisable force, function and creativity back of the whole, so that within we may respond to like ingredients outside, which enable such investigation; wherein lies the source of the joint logic, of the power needed to input it into the visible, so that we viewing, may perceive the invisible with our modes of viewing, and then verify this!

It is one, in us, in the universe, in thought, in deed, in the DNA, in its language, sovereignly selective in all cases, specifying operative reasons for results, more always beckoning, always innovative, always being discovered because already in place to be discovered.

Creator of our creativity and the creative expeditions into what is already created, their fit, their logical acumen in conjunction, the power found in this correlation: where (cf. Job 28) ?

We turn to God, from whose logical Being the two logics emanate, from whose power the linguisitic brilliance of the DNA comes, in His one and only one language of life, of the unity among all diversity, of the unity for good, as in disease resistant modules in our type of construction, and on the other hand, liability to it, in such a world as this.

So we create thought, we match it with what we view. WHY is the good so vast and manifest, from the structure of bird wings to their immense flappability states and rates, perhaps hundreds of times a second in insects or birds. There lies both potential in engineering exquisite, mathematics sensational, and performance in practice, no mere additive, but the confirmation of constructive splendour.

What total brilliance is this! So it is written; it is done; it is manufactured, but with art. Look at the designs (use normal definitions and do not waver because of callow counsel^*1, in the wings, such beauty, such assessable art, such smartness, or quiet beauty, such declaratory blazes of colour and contrast. Indeed, consider the design of atoms, molecules, combination characteristics of the same as of sub-groups, thoughts concerning these and concerning the validity of thought^*2, analyses, and the response of what is investigated to such probing, yielding its secrets as if MADE for it.

How it stirs, how it bays at the mind to make conquest of its meaning, discover to what it beckons. Systematically, it is a joint creation, to view and be understood, to flirt with mystery, to reveal its meaning, to understand and by some, to be understood. How staggering is the packaging, whether of DNA protein constructive facilities or information oversight office, of the brain in its billions of co-ordinated cells, the trillions of connections, in the egg, in the fruit, nicely prepared, preserved with skins of diverse colours, shapes and art-work, the atoms, molecules, fitting, flirting with capacity and yet designated to order.

Nor is this beyond a beginning.

What makes the rationality, the reciprocity, the groundedness, the conformity to order, organisation and validity as available with rigour^*2A! What source thought ? What source ideas ? What source vitality of spirit and thrust of penetration into the aesthetic and its principles, enticing, inviting, rewarding^*2A! What course is found in the world, that the magnificent is laced with the horrid, the wonderful with the seemingly bewitched (as in terrorism, murderousness, slander and the like) ? How can such magnificence of form be latched to such oppression of misuse of the wonderful ?

As with creativity, every day we have the answer. It or its shadow can occur in our very selves, and sometimes struggles for expression. Romans 7 speaks of the vulnerability for those who are not immune to truth. Evil seeks a haunt within, and for the Christian, must be fought in all conscience in the power of Christ, while many simply rename it 'good' (cf. Isaiah 5:18-23). The good appears, and the test comes to see whether we will follow it, or what does not accord with truth, lies or steals or is incompetent through laziness. Is it to be the path of effort or effrontery, self-trust or realism concerning the source of our powers and the necessity for their upkeep. Is it to be a blind stab in the dark, self-assessment, a prodigy of pretence or pretension, not always because of incompetence, but through pride or swaggering self-attestation, or its muted versions of subtle alternatives, through this or other pre-occupations, unproductive, presumptuous, unclean.

Devilishness arises like a spiritual cancer, activated by sources of its own, torturous twistings of the truth, of bones, surging invasions of flesh, diabolical inventions of torture, frank evil exulting as in the recent slaying of Christians in 19 villages in Nigeria, where one of the murderers openly delights in his morbid fascination with slaughter, as if summary executions exalt the flesh and refine mankind, that he be better than he was, more tolerable, when in fact he falls in the network of snakes, poisonous, writhing, contriving, pretending to receive messages from above with no warrant, no justification, verification, as if children ruled, the stench of battle their fragrance. KILL, till all follow their religious inventions^*2B! they cry, as if power altered fact, or foulness of fiction justified folly.

This is merely ls one example, Hitler's curse on Jews quite a parallel, for in his case, all had to bow to the god he invented, not this time Allah, but rather the racial pre-eminence idol, the embodiment of the lust for power and the arrogance of presumption. How many of the mandates that matter only for the shouting, come from creativity drowned in desire, from spirituality misled into pits! Is this not the biblical picture of ancient Israel in its declinations, again and again, as in the Book of Judges (cf. Judges 5-6), in the day of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 5) and of Isaiah (Isaiah 1 and 29!)!

Can the Gentiles not learn (cf. Romans 11:17-19 ? Yes, in part and at times they have learned, and great have been the nations resulting! but then they depart and remain fascinating with what is not fact (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!), and subject themselves to what is not there, processes and bits, as if their base came by magic, their existence, laws in which they delight, though they be not in fact found (cf. Karl Popper, SMR pp. 145ff. ), and the matter is as figurative as an ice-skating master.

It is not new; but old and senile with wrinkles, the embodiment of evil in the name of good (Isaiah 5), and the use of 'vanities', things that do not have even the privilege in reality to exist, in place of realities found where alone reason points (cf. SMR Ch. 1, TMR). You see this in Deuteronomy 32 (e.g. vv. 15-18) in the review of the calamities smiting Israel, and in the restoration on their departure, that already present in prelude, and to come with the restoration of reality, of the Messiah who has come as in Daniel, millenia ago^*2C, and who will return when these disseminations and evil dynamics have done their time, imprisoning man, who therefore needs release from on high (cf. Isaiah 61).

The evil is present with the good, sometimes invited, even implored, sometimes met like an enemy, militant after much incitement from many, seeking seduction both in consciousness and in action. What could have produced the one and yet the other, often so closely joined ? the wonder and the woe, the magnificence and the shame, pursued often with passion, even glorified as in Nigeria! The very inventiveness of thought, at with much else at which we have been looking, is a ground of the misuse and abuse. If we did not have power freely to think, to envisage, to imagine, to order our thoughts diversely or even contrary to what is before us, what could be done! But we do have this power: it is good and intriguing and marvellous in its intricate functions, and its correlation with the activities of the universe is enthralling and instructive.

There is a common logical theme, investigability capacity, and availability. Evil is as open as the day and often actively sought while it lasts; good is brilliantly present, in readiness to sacrifice for our children, church, nation, sympathies, empathies,s eeking better things, adoring the God of creation, delighting in His redemption, seeking to share while air remains. It is happening all the time: creation, presenting in its midst, by this means and that, good and evil.

The evil tends to abuse the properties (intellectual, equitable, physical) of what it infests. The just regards them. It can be direct and personal (cf. SMR pp. 590ff.), or present as impediment or diversion. The evil tends to presume to destroy, alienate, manipulate, without respect for truth, as if it were a god, not a recipient, its imagination diverging not only for understanding, from what is before it, but from conformity to its underlying realities - such as WHO created an idea, a law and so on, and WHY and WHEN, often contested in an act of intellectual theft.

WHY ? It is because we have the capacity to distort, as well as imagine for information and deepening of the meaning in contemplation, and this liberty being present, it is used or abused, just as food may be, in obvious conformity to the needs of stomach and its supply chain from it, or in equally clear gluttony or disregard. Tests accrue from the Creator, whether of appetite, moral, mental, physical, as if it were god and could dictate, or of repulsion as with 'classes' or races or types or whatever else suggests itself, and many fail abysmally, often while lauding their own enlightenment, which but darkens counsel, and sets heads at each other, as if they did not contain the most marvellous designs^*2seen visibly on this earth! The Designer is ignored, and so the product is polluted, first actively, then residually, while results accrue, and safety nets are torn, flesh ripped and morality scorned, as if it were mere choice, when our very bodies are not at all our choice, except for more abuse, but directed and dictated to the last point.

Yes it includes the results of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as in effect attested so well by Professor Sanford of Cornell^*2D, with deterioration over time, increasingly acute for the generation by generation of our physical structure. In a fever of perversity, the myth of integral progress in our lot continues despite evidence not only lacking, but to the entire contrary. We have become in much a very heady, unsteady, dreaming, scheming race, increasingly antipathetic to actuality, mordant concerning God, as if gods and goddesses, who tell our Maker we will remake, and invent as if our human race had never been invented. They study circumvention, and achieve folly, for which they may then blame their Maker! They ask for evil, get it and complain, in a very ecstasy of artful connivance with what the Bible calls 'vanity' - that is the worthless, the ostentatiously pretentious which has no reality, the dreams of delusion and the clamour for confusion, lest truth dawn.

Despite the due rebukes to folly, tempered by mercy, morality laments, weeps at these travesties. Many dismiss it, as if a small and provocative child, whose hunger however, must be met. Yet morality surges when many are vexed, they complain at its breach by persecutors, those who ruin. Thus it erupts on the tongue, when injustice or laziness or presumption or arrogance or irresponsibility or recklessness enters: how DARE OTHER people do such things! While God is dismissed, rights are invented from nowhere. Past dismissals, thus standards revive. It is as if the morals were timeless, as they are, and yet they can be mouthed by modern gods and goddesses, only when annoyed or deemed to have suffered transgression.

The mutable standards in the fever phase, inventions of the 'meaningless' in a wild desire to be meaningful anyway^*2E, pass like dreams. The results of the imagination thrust or bust mentality, void of fact, they are erected like refugee camps with variable population and deprivation. They are subjected to increasing imaginary categorisation though enduring truth, to the duped crowd of confused contenders, is as vomit, while virtue is derided and righteousness is decimated, like the Jews under Hitler, held as unbearable, or the Christians in many Islamic lands, dispensible, even to the death.

The beauty is destroyed, even to the heart, the children are mentally molested, as if to inset a furnace of destructive imaginations in their hearts, as myths are taught, as if the predictions of the Apostle Paul were being followed as a script and a scenario (cf. II Timothy 4) and those of Peter as a compulsion (II Peter 3).

Liberty, logic, imagination, capacity to program, to institute, though first constituted, or to overturn what is just and to invent and invest things with what is frankly self-centred, and hence wrong, since no one of us is the centre of the universe: it is at work. Man can, and very often does, act as if his will were paramount, irrespective of reality, because of imaginative constructions, unverified, unvalidated, nestling in the heart (cf. News 19, On Stand-By) .

The self-centred approach (whether it constructs mighty morals or amorals to taste or philosophies to sate appetite or whatever form it may take) is so clearly a lie, misleading, that it is subject sooner or later to the result of conflict with the Maker of mind and spirit and creativity and design, and the continuum of logic between observers in certain cases, such as man, and the observable, between imagination and actuality. Maker as well of the power for merely intemperate disjunction from truth in stuttering dither which is the substance of much of philosophy, which therefore changes like the weather, He gives man temporary power for the illicit, for the cantering to peril, the rush to ruin, the laments of tragedy and the scope for learning lessons which do not lessen, no, not at all. Results like weeds may take a little time to take-over, but their progress can be deadly to productivity, and drastic in overview!

WHY is it so ? How did the wonder come, for unless it come, it cannot be molested or destroyed! Nothing could not do it. Something must have done it. Something could not be invented from nothing (a contradiction in terms, for then it is not nothing but something with the potential at a certain time or modality, to act). Hence something must have been there always. If it were inadequate for the results, then they would not come: that is just a matter of definition. It cannot absorb more from nothing either, as it goes along, from no source, for no reason, and contrary to all reason, so not nothing but the Adequacy must always have been there, sufficient.

Causality must have been present whether in this form or that, depending on the modes of creativity used to bring to pass the things that the something made. Often enough, the inevitability of causality has been considered (cf. SMR Ch. 5, Causes, Predestination and Freewill Section IV). It does not budge, not for any fudge. You cannot even attempt to 'explain' it without using it as a datum.

WHY, however, was liberty caused in man with his imagination and power deliberately to schedule or mis-schedule, to follow reality or to deny it, to abuse or abort it, and to create a temporary confusion, before it is met ? What does liberty enable ?

It enables one to show regard for goodness and self-control and watchfulness and adaptation to reality; or to make war on it, and to seek to overthrow it, cast aspersions on its ways, and to elevate one's own wisdom, like a snake, elevating itself on its little tail, to seek to achieve an intimidating posture. Liberty in operation tends to classify, in much to self-classify, not in word which may be, and often is, a case manipulative mental squirming, often not in truth, but how ? It is in deed that it tends to classify, in deed that can speak for itself... deeds with qualitative criteria, in spirit, in mind, in result in aspiration. These deeds are in the mind, as sponsor, the spirit as author, the body as agent. They can be as foul as a dried up country lake in drought, or appear as beautiful as a salt lake, poisoning its pastures in surround; but their nature is investigable and their results appear. Christ exposed such things in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). Past the moral coastline, there is the interior.

There is then alignment potential in man. He can even seek to kill another person, so presuming to seek to control destiny, even when he himself is subject to instant death by heart failure, just as he was to not quite so instant birth, without consent. It is a massive subordination of what is not in one's own purvey, overweening presumption at man's mere option. Patience and forgiveness is another option, much praised in Romans 2. Here, instead of escalating unrealism and presumption, one gives more scope for recovery and reconstruction, aborting cycles of a destructive dynamic, where this may be done.

In liberty, there is also scope for love, for that practical alignment which seeks to understand and imagine and test and configure in the realm of relationships, and in pursuit of goodness, to find attraction in others, despite what may be in them, many undesirable features. This can come even as a love which imagines and seeks to implement what will improve and deliver the one loved: as with parents and friends. It is the correlative of hatred, just as mischievous imaginations are the correlative of honest probing for truth, and relishing of the verified and validated results of the same.

Without freedom, you could neither pursue goodness nor choose to love. You might respond in behaviour, but without understanding, like any other material thing. Freedom is the pre-condition of roaming, or diverse realisations with thought and principle behind them, of love, of goodness; for a robot is neither good nor bad, this quality residing rather in the creator of its activations, and their mode, and the reasons for that creation.

Creativity is the friend of imagination, and the ally of love; or of hatred. Man is full of it. The formation of units with controls, limits, licence for action, instruments for guidance and the like, is like a child at play, compared with making freedom (The Splendour of Biblical Coverage Ch. 2, Ch. 5 above, Not Only is God Great but Glorious Ch. 1^*3 ).

Only what makes spirit, individuality and power to weigh and imagine options, without interference, explicit or implicit, whether from statistics or other, can make freedom since it is a personal province. Only the Maker of spirits, whose realm is personality and not mere material apparatus, who IS a Spirit, not limited by constraints imposed (by nothing), CAN make spirits. He can spawn them freely, as the mother a child, a man an idea; for in Him is the capacity to make persons in His own image, not indeed infinite, since they are too late in coming, and incomplete in provisions, but capable of such a relationship with Himself that their potential becomes active, and their self-borne limits are surpassed (cf. Not only is God Great, but Glorious Ch. 1^*3).

In some ways, it is rather like a dog in human company: they can almost read your thoughts in much, at last. God however, with man, did not merely make a companion, but one able to construe and contest, however unwisely, to the uttermost (cf. Job 13:15-19), whether defiled or remedied. Remedy becomes the sine qua non, the ultimate necessity, for broken equipment can become not merely a nuisance, but a grief. Such a creation is like an island of meaning, amid a structure for its habitation; or if disruptive of the relationship to its Maker, it is like an island in the Sargasso, obscured, polluted with other growths that spoil, uncharted, unwanted. Such is the nature of equipment befouled, spoiled, and of spirit, unfurled in a calm, paraded in a storm, the sport of folly with all its tearful consequences, when passion does not rule, for contemplation (cf. SMR Ch. 3).

THE ESSENCE OF CREATIVITY

But what of the essential features of creativity ? what are they ?

This function involves imagination as we have seen, initiative and power to envisage, discernment, robust thought, feeling, assessment, but ever so much more. There has to be a soul, a life, a basis and a background just as for a gear to be operative, you need that to which it IS geared. Creativity needs what it is that discerns, thinks, chooses, moves with initiative (or not), with feeling (subdued, extant, massive and mighty, or not), with purpose (otherwise it is an event dependent on its matrix and core structure, a resultant, not arising to creativity, but to mere reactive behaviour).

What SORT of a life then is creative ? A dog may be creative in measure, for example as one has seen, with a sheep dog, when it HEARS what the boss is TELLING it to do, and does otherwise, the result being splendid, and apparently surpassing the lesser perception of his master! That is what one might call 'savvy'. The dog (and some are masterpieces of canine intelligence, perception, estimation and watchfulness, pragmatic, speedy in thought at the level given to them) used initiative, recall of past events or imagination or a little of both, intelligence and decision. Decision can enter in, as illustrated in the case noted in an animal encyclopedia, where an otter or some such creature, used to coming to the call of the feeder, was about to take some ingredients for a nest, to a point where it was swimming. It started to alter course to the feeder, then stopped, resumed the direction of the nest, and then this being fulfilled, duly turned back to the now secondary objective, the feeder. Much of the same is readily visible.

A dog may love and lie down and die by the grave or place of falling of the master, discerning life with and without the master, and resolving which course to take.

Sacrifice and love are as apparent as hatred and distortion.

To create, then, you may act within what is disruptive and eruptive, self-willed and unrealistic, or with anything right up to downright devotion, and preference for principles of undeviating love. You may create within these realms. You even have the options for either. There are psychic dynamics which tend to follow from earlier choices, to limit or disturb later ones. We, mankind, are not gods, a fact often forgotten. There are payments in series for choices made. Obligations and actions may be in discord and so clarity of thought may come to be in discard! Lady Macbeth's spot, which she would have, but could not have out, of her formerly murderous hand ... it tended to contain her thought, invade her clarity, evacuate even her sanity.

There are relationships of the life to good and evil, justice and truth and their manipulation, defamation and assault. There are consequences. The body is not the only place apt for infection, available for inspection, subject to consequences, just and horrid, since the cause was horrid, or more mellow and for a time, ready to wait.

Creativity is then of LIFE, through MIND and IMAGINATION, but in accord with PURPOSE, for while it may function discretely and dynamically, it is still relatable to the will of the recipient or proponent. It can be marred by an effort to justify oneself, where truth does not admit this motive, for example, or to disparage another, in the same situation. This is no mean thing in observation!

It can be distorted by a deliberate choice not to recognise the not-nothing, always-adequate Maker of things in their domains and limits, limitations and correlations. Romans 1 pursues this theme in Romans 1:17ff., showing how departure at this level, can lead to delusion (cf. II Thessalonians 2:10), can disorder thought and feeling and realism and make of life a writhing morass of intemperate thought, inveterate evil, disruptive ebulliences and hatred. This of course is precisely what is now being broadcast in empirical detail, in nearly every newspaper daily, as inconspicuous nations become newsworthy in horrors of hatred, murder, vilification, ambush, distilled viciousness, unnatural feeling and desperate desires and discardable designs.

THE RESULTS OF CREATIVITY AND ITS FUNCTION

Any departure from reality makes for results, not only in the logical processing (which has to be distorted to allow for the presence, like a fallen king, of the delusion in place of truth), but in the texture and quality of life relative to truth. A sour psychological taste, of which embitterment is merely an example, may tend to distort what is disturbed, like successive waves from different splash sources, from objects thrown into a lake. They multiply results, and these interact with one another, cresting and dipping.k

Creativity can however be pure, without such disturbances, without messages of manipulation or disdain based on imaginative but unrealistic self-elevation and the like, and can be exuberant, realistic and imaginative at the same time, soaring in thought, rollicking in reality, sighing with wonder, descrying great things and placing them with delighted agility to create or convey vision. It can even do this with felicity of form, format and sequence. It is the very opposite of 'bits' (cf. Ch. 8, above). There is a place of fluency, and of the static, of the bricks of a building, and of its architecture, and all efforts to remove the one of the other teem with reaction, for what is there may indeed be dismissed in thought as in imagination, but not in reality (cf. SMR pp. 332Gff., Repent or Perish Ch. 7 ).

More however, than this consorting of diverse aspects in life and its creative ministration from the first, to bring into being what now in this scope of magnitude, is found only in the maintenance phase (cf . Ch. 4 above), in the creation, the institution of the information concerning life, now stopped in its majestic deposition, and not found without intelligence in our more minor pursuits*, there is the actual life of the spirit. That is, in mankind there is scope for contemplation, consideration, imagination, consultation with many realms, purpose and motivation, vision and understanding, perspectives and prioritisations, perceptions and pronouncements irrespective of the actual available powers. A pauper can dream of creating a new aeroplane, even one harassed in prison, conceiving the perfect State, and one in dying, the grounds of life.

There is a specific spiritual facility, as there is a physical one, and though they are normally somewhat conjoined, this is not necessary. This is only one of the facets of freedom, singularly present in man amid the visible creation^*4. The spirit is freer than the rest, its restrictions being less intrusive, its speculations and hopes more liberally roving. It is this which is our nearest approach to the Maker of all the facets of freedom and law, power and weakness, brilliance and scope for revolt and rebellion, the obverse of the power to love.

God is not susceptible, as eternal source without constructive parameters hemming Him in^*3, to the limits which our assigned, written-up, as in DNA responding bodies, which have these things have thrust upon them, indeed as criteria of their very continuance physically. He makes the laws, since laws without God would be effects without a cause, delimitations without what delimits, constructions without a construer and constructor. What HAS to be so that anything with such premises could be, is by that very fact without the limits of what is made (as in John 1:1-3); as is the eternity which is necessarily His. With Him, is liberty without limit and power to dower limited versions of it^*3.

A spiritual being without the components of limitation, God has made man with spirit^*4, and the two may commune at His option, and indeed ultimately, that of man, as when one does not reply to an RSVP invitation. This, however, would be simplistic as a total image, since man may be subject to scrutiny, writhings of conscience, powers beyond his own control within himself, ragged relics of rebellion and the like: it is the ultimate result that is here in mind. In his mind, heart, life, conscience, consciousness^*4, man may alter reality into segmentations which do no justice to its lively keenness of integrality, adorn it with his own limitations and many things in between. These things constitute barriers which may ramify, as when silt builds up in a river, against some restraining apparatus.

In spirit, man may move as a sea-gull in an adverse wind: delicately, carefully, with some skill; but it is not at all like movement with the wind, or without the barrage and the barrier of contrary dynamics. He may move in spirit actively assisted by the God of creation, pardon and peace, with vision extended, or with subdued spirit because of some error, or with delight because of some divine exuberance, transmitted with illumination leading to the praise of God and the perception in enhanced vigour, of His words (cf. Ephesians 1:17ff.). The spirit of a man may deploy (or annoy) his mind, and stir his heart, and create with various adjuncts, as when many streams pour into a lake.

The spirit of creativity may extend and amend its course with realism, with discernment as shown in some cartoons, with splendour as in vision to cover evil conditions, with affairs of the heart, to find for love an outlet in improvement, and in the end, in not merely a clustering of so very many elements working together as with matériel, but a unity of its own, for which these are contributions and assets. This may be, while that same unity, his own spirit, may be in company of God in a greater or lesser measure, in happy consort. The sky therefore is not at all the limit.

Just as this good is possible, so is the correlative evil not only possible, but extensively visible on this earth, evil geniuses learning to genuflect to craft and distortion, manipulation and pure wilfulness, till the happy day becomes a clouded menace, a tornado of truculence, a vicious pugnacity, a very lair for evil even an observer of the madness of man, captivated by rebellion, captured by culture of his own, or his society or his choice.

It is all, however, invested with some kind or indeed kinds of creativity.

It all requires the constituent character of a person with correlative liberty, imagination, reason, investigative capacity, functional fluidity and imaginative power, capable of containing imagery and principles, moving them integrally in oversight, allowing for them, overflowing them with ardour and insight, beyond what is given, into realms where thought is the creation of spirit, construction the dower of deftness and knowledge the servant of enterprise. The person to have these qualities, facilities, agilities, innovative expressions, understandings, needs a cause correlative with these functions, which like a handbrake which may have many parts, has but one purpose and result. What is the cause of person ?

It is the consequence of what understands it, has the intrinsic and absolute originating power that the person is to receive in derivation and dependence, in the necessary realms of logic, comprehension and enterprise. Great as are the derivative capacities of man, then, vershadowing the thing itself, there is the uttermost facility to make what has this facility: it is a master-maker that is needed for the personality which makes creations of thought, and imagination, wisdom and outcomes desired past utility.

The master of persons, the Creator of their capacities, the Maker, has to know how to induce liberty, and hence to have it, since any lack there would be communicated in correlative and subordinate outcomes. The Father of spirits, then as He may be called, has to be as inventive WITH the construction of human spirits, as man is within his own domain, as a GIVEN from God. That of God is ultimately innovative; that of man is derivatively creative. The vastness of triumph of the divine enterprise of the Creator, is the beginning of our own adventures of creation. There is the magnificence of the ORIGINAL MAGNIFICENCE (Colossians 1:16, John 1:1-3,14, 8:58).

What of this, our own state and condition ? Its essence is a lively spirit, a competent mind and an articulative power, or its practical correlative.

The bit-work with which some disadorn their understanding (cf. Let's Be Reasonable ... Ch. 2, Chs. 3 and 8, esp. *3B above)), is a species of disintegration of the totalities involved, rather like French impressionist dot paintings, except that it is less, since they pretend to cover the case, and yet lose sight of it, the thing becoming mere disassemblage-ism, to coin a term, an obsession with parts that can be subsumed and contained in architectural wholes, though not all things are of this type, such as love and truth and purity and spirit. Elemental past construction, they are of course subject in man to constriction, spoiling the construction. Nevertheless, that apart, where parts limit, spirit may soar.

Yet where spirit may move, sourness can come, and this indeed parts the whole, making it a distasteful commodity, like a crashed car. Here indeed, in many capacities and facilities in man, parts or even departures tend to become conspicuous, because the architectural totality is ...alas, no more. Some seem so pre-occupied with the scenes of ruin, that they cannot move beyond their nature, like a car disassemblage expert, who has quite forgotten what an actual car looks like, or indeed what it is for!

The origin and source of these integralities, reason, spirit, mind, the body as architecture, is not available for disassemblage except in one case, where there were conditions. It concerned the Messiah.

As there is might and blight, creation and desecration, so there is a further but parallel prodigy: it is that of remedy. But how would it both be effective and become apparent to man, flirting with fancy and tragedy as if possessed, which often is indeed the case.

The Creator had not merely a provision in the field of disease, in an entire system, but for distress and degradation of spirit. He was not willing to have evil cavort to destroy His work, though its power to comment on misused liberty and man's arrogance is not bypassed! (cf. Isaiah 37:21-29). As shown in Isaiah 40, in the arch-originalities of His creation, so we see in Hebrews 9-11, the completion of creation in salvation.

Just as the LOGOS is apparent

	in our DNA orders, articulate, assigned, active, agencies of scanning and banning, direction and designation, and again;
	in our minds susceptible to success in such investigations of a similar outcome in logical construction and constriction in the universe outside, enabling the aggregation of power to man as he learns what is already there:
	so for the third part, it is apparent in the commands and conspectus of just one other book^*2A, not this time within, for the very construction of the body, indeed in every nucleated cell of the body, to the billions, for it is one written TO man, to remake him, not FOR him, to make him.

It interprets his plight, sets things to right, in scope and opportunity, exposes him to perspectives of comprehensibility, though these do not flatter, to the conspectus of truth; but it does far more than this in its testable grandeur^*2A.

It provides the answer, to be sure, to the meaning and plight of man, but it provides the method for his restoration to what his disordered soul needs, to the spiritual site from which it came, to the mind who gave man mind, to the Spirit which gave man spirit, to the source of his insights and blights in belittlement of folly, of his very life.

It gives the remedy, being more important and vital than any treasure map for fortune. This is not only possible, it is necessary (Acts 4:11-12). Restoration, indeed RE-generation, is not only good, but essential to the case of man, for God will not strive forever with him (Isaiah 57:15-18, Luke 13:1-3). This book is set in the very same organised, ordered, constrained, effective way that makes man generation by generation, and that makes his logic effective when deployed in the universe (when it is not disturbed by the tempest of irrelevant dreams, based on nothing, more or less expressly). It is the third and the chief deposition into life. Here the divine LOGOS has His quest fulfilled in word, as He enacted what it propounded, prescribed, in Himself in His appointed time^*2C.

The remedy will exhibit the nature of what provides it. Here there is vast and obvious cost simply in what man does to man, abominable in intensity, vast in immensity, twisted in misconception, withering, dithering, now dynamic, now implacable, now pursuing folly as pigs their slush, now arising with false magnificence, mere folies of misconstruction.

It is costly, to redeem from this, not only to restore the soul, life, mind, heart to godly peace and worship, understanding and purity of love, but to pay for the miscreancy and the errors, the wilful ignorance and its results, the abuse of mind and soul and vitality that has preceded. There is the negative cost of the lost soul, to make-over, pardoning, covering, making acceptable by grace; but there is also the more obvious cost of rectifying the outer situation. The former is now, in our Age of Grace; the latter is to come, when laurels won and follies dispensed with, the Lord who saves, returns for His people, and rules on the earth as so often foretold over the millenia (Psalm 2, 45, 72, Acts 1:7ff., Matthew 24, Revelation 19, Jeremiah 23, Isaiah 11).

Indeed, there is the cost, in the end, of a new heavens and a new earth (Revelation 20-21), untainted by sin, undefiled by folly: the first creation having been no small receptacle of energy as the atomic bomb, so much from even so little, demonstrates. The greatest aspect of the cost however, lies in another fact. It is that

	man being able to commune and communicate directly with God (as now fallen, when he realises where the telephone is, figuratively, in Jesus Christ),
	man in the divine image, though derivative,
	has needs reaching to the sublime, the image of which also he has degraded within both himself and his world.

The cost, in the sight of His divine purity, was not slight - for heaven is not in moderation, but in absolute truth and reality. It cannot BE heaven otherwise.

What then of the Creator ? What of His action in covering this aspect of the cost.

	First, in His own terms, He had to be willing (cf. Psalm 40), for love is free: He was.
	Secondly, He had to have purpose, since He is not subject to external forces in Himself and such a drama as this does not dribble into any forlorn existence.
	Thirdly He needed a form, since in His own form, He is invulnerable, having known all of His creation of time, before it was, and what He wanted and how to get it. He took the form of a man, as in Romans 8:1ff., to draw near to and pay in due form for the object of His solicitude and concern (Hebrews 2).
	Fourthly, He was willingly inclined to suffer for man (I Peter 3:18), even when man becomes insufferable, to cover the coming back to base, on the part of some, indeed of many. The divine enterprise was in their cases met with response. Back to Himself from the spiritual flings and intellectual dyspepsias of which man is so fond, they would come. Some: not all. Love is personal.
	Fifthly, He made it a legal matter, in part, so that what He endured covered what man had immured himself in, sin (II Corinthians 5:17-21, Romans 4-5).
	Sixthly, He did it amply enough to cover all, singularly enough to pay for those actually redeemed (Romans 8:32, Isaiah 53), the transfer of moral and legal funds, of coverage, reaching those destined, from the first, in love that seeking all, grabs none. Grace was not splather.
	Seventhly, having allowed disassemblage of the format chosen (God Himself being a Spirit able to assume whatever forms He pleases, that can represent Him accurately, even within limits of form for a purpose - Philippians 2), assigning grace to the ghastly, He rose with that self-same rejected body (Acts 2:29-34), thrashed, smitten, breaching a human judgment, as false as the hearts of those who imposed it.
	Eighthly, as broken in body, He breached the ultimate barrier, able not only to heal, but to raise the dead (Matthew 11:4ff.), and to BE raised if so smitten in His long planned and duly performed work of salvation, sole agent of payment, sole Saviour, past contribution from man, filled with grace (Romans 1:4, Ephesians 2). in His own mutilative death at man's hand as forecast repeatedly for a millenium and more (Isaiah 53, Hosea 13:14, Zechariah 11-12), God disrupted that disruption.
	Ninthly, accordingly, He not only did all of this, but did as long prescribed, predicted from the divine headquarters of communication (I Peter 1:10ff., II Peter 1:19ff.). Thus He who had made the body for man, despite His own viciously marred body (Isaiah 52:12ff.), rose from the dead as predicted, when predicted, with the results predicted, and with the Gospel attendant on this now for long operative, as predicted, indeed preached for some two millenia, and this with the consequences of that as also predicted, both for Jew and for Gentiles (cf. SMR Ch. 9).

There is the MAGNIFICENCE OF THE OUTCOME. Galatians 6:14 concentrates the focus on this very thing. God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ by which (or whom, as it may be translated), I am crucified to the world, and it to me.

It is

	available, having been a work done by Christ crucified; it is
	adequate, the ultimate for the derived creations now fallen, ourselves; it is
	final, the Lord Himself shown and stricken, by whose stripes HIS people are healed (Isaiah 53), and it is
	for THESE that it comes to be, that on HIM is laid their sin (53:6).

HO EVERYONE who thirsts! He cries in Isaiah 55. It is public, sincere, the outcome of love (Colossians 1:19ff., John 3:15ff.), using the income of the place of pardon, the mercy seat where the life of Christ poured out to death, pays for the transgressions, and makes eternal life freely available. It is not shut up: all are not merely invited but pressed (Matthew 22). Nevertheless, it is not for deceivers, liars and the like, whose repentance is mere flowers on the funeral casket of their own souls.

In this way, though a Spirit (John 4), God showed His glory in the face of Christ Jesus (II Corinthians 4), and His salvation for a spiritually wrong-footed race, to bring them home to holiness, back to sanctity, to the glorious spiritual fiesta^*5of godliness, where man with his Father, can once more know motivation, origination of guileless thought, love of the brethren and peace, part of the very environment of living as adopted child (Ephesians 1), with his heavenly Father.

Some spirits prefer ire and fire, and to them it will come (John 3:16,36). You CAN have it. It is available. You need only to continue, without His salvation, in order to join the ranks not merely of the lost (all men without God's salvation are in this era, in that position), but those of the eternally severed, where guilt is the governor of guile, and shame the substitute for glory.

NOTES

See:

Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny, esp. Section 2,

with SMR

See Deity and Design ... esp. Section 8.

	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 ),

	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.