It stopped

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CHAPTER 4

STOPPING IS MOST IMPORTANT

THE NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR OF STARTING

REASON FOR STOPPAGE

It stopped. You know how, at a beach festival, the merry-go-round, goes round and round, merrily rejoicing the heart of the young, producing reminiscences of joy in the old, with horses seemingly vying with one another, a sense of enthusiastic excitement, evoking thoughts of horse warfare in a few left over from long ago, or perhaps, of hunting on horseback in a few more. On and on it goes, chomping and chortling in atmosphere, in its mini-spectacle, sui generis, a psychic cloud enveloping it.

Then it stops.

It goes no more. If you want more, you must buy another ticket, evoke another quasi-tremulous event, have the machinery supplied with power once more, the switches turned, the geometry enthused with motion, the thoughts of the craftsman accepted once ore, as his crafted machinery leaps to action,and the merry-go-round goes round once more.

You know the rest. It stops.

You do not say, Oh, it arose, this merry-go-round and the reason why it stopped was this: it came for no reason from nowhere and when it had finished coming, it provided joy for many for no reason. They just happened to be around, and after it was done, the non-reason for its actuality seized up or ceased, so that it stopped. What could be simpler ?

So the riot of unreason could go.

ANYTHING could be simpler!

A thousand correlations came without reason; the adjustment of the whole to those nearby had no point; the starting up of power for the plant was of no consequence; its termination meant nothing. In that case, why think ? Why reason at all, if so much in so much with so many correlative applications is stranger to reason, and if the scope for operating the machinery is perfectly matched to the operator, is but a bagatelle, if that! Why then think, if while the machinery remains wholly distinct, needing subtle, imaginative and innovative crafting from whoever is good at that sort of thing, from conception to inception, and the relation of all to persons, to operate, enjoy, imagine, delight in, is a thing unworthy of thought ? and incapable of rational explanation, based on clear-cut causality in this world, and its interchange with effect!

For example, a billy-goat would not be good at it, at so crafting so subtly the merry-go-round; for past all else, it would lack the prior construction of thing, leading to meeting them by such machinery, even if it could make it. Nor would a wasp suffice, ingenious as is the construction of his hundreds of eye lenses for the exuberant fulfilment of his ways, wrought in wisdom. His creation is a work of magnificence, creativity to the ultimate; but even the dragon-fly would be no good at making merry-go-rounds. You have to listen to reason if you are going to reason^*1. Listening here goes with speaking, and the call to reason does not mean that you day-dream instead.

There are principles behind the manipulation of matter in finesse and fashioned results, correlative to actual needs, and modes of being used. Figs do not grow on thistles (Matthew 7:16), and expertise does not "arise" from domains dominated by their own demonstrably limited capacities and observable incapacities. In particular, as Paul Davies correctly points out (see below), atoms do not craft code, being for such purposes, 'stupid', incapable of such requirements, internally not so placed and planted.

Code commands, but it needs first to be commanded, written, enforcible. The merry-go-round does not descend from the clouds, even if there were clouds, or space or time or specificity to have. It is started as a contrivance, functionally formed and formatted of such and such a quality, for a reason and stops on the same ground. That is simply where it sits; but its nature and its action and its diversified correlation-potential with operator and client, this is not a marvel of groundless enterprise, but of adequate cause. This being of the creative type, the conceptual variety, it is started (that is what it is there for), and betimes it is stopped. It is that sort of thing. Its relation to creativity is of that type; creativity is in that domain.

It goes round for its time. It starts for good reason, and it stops for the same. In fact, stopping is just as dramatic as starting, and quite as significant. Take Shakespeare (but not too far, for he has much that is good to say). He started. There was a reason. It appears he wrote plays and acted in them, before perhaps an eye tumour wrote in unmistakeable terms, STOP. There was a reason why he stopped. It was a very important one. The abilities, facilities and human functionalities of this richly endowed man, with his distinctive Gospel and biblical utterances (cf. The Gospel in Shakespeare, by Hubert V. Little), and high moral purposes exposed with thrust and vigour in a good many of his plays, worked, for he was there to work them. He wrote them. That was why they were there. A sufficiency of cause proceeded before the efficiency of result.

The plays came. They effused in abundance indeed, sometimes with brilliant and evocative communication which bespoke person to person empathy and connection, speaker and spoken sharing a common consciousness and interpretive capacity, in various degrees, all substantial. He wrote, people acted, all-coordinated; people listened, interpreted, all in the domain of symbolic presentation and prior understanding. The plays wrought, and results accrued in a stimulus-response situation, spiritual in kind, intellectual in matrix, moral in thrust in the main. They acted, being adequately and intimately based relative to results, equipped for all the interplay and inter-working of personality; and then it was different.

Then they stopped.

No more was the effectual cause of his plays, at work. It had not presumably been by his own will that it stopped (though abstractly, such might have been the case). That is why they did not keep coming, over the horizon into time, like swallows flitting, yes or directionally magnificently equipped antipodean birds, changing their north or south quarters. This facility, plus will, was no more. Not a play further came by this author, with that signature of understanding and wit, verbal facility and understanding, sensitive perception and rotund conception, revealing reflection and essence-like epigrams. Not one was to be found, though they might be searched for, like the celestially evacuated body of Elijah (cf. II Kings 2:16ff.). It stopped, for good reason. They came no more.

Now if the playwright had grown weary of writing, instead of dying, or had felt that some play reached the summit of his desire, before death, then he might have stopped for another reason. It would have been the exact correlative of the reason for starting. To start, he had not only ability, facility and functionality, personality, but purpose. To stop, he could lack any one of these, including the last. If purpose was no longer present, then performance would likewise cease. We do not normally find the correlation of power and purpose, capacity and conquest, cause and effect, sufficient ground to resound in results so very hard to find. We may find it a little difficult to find WHY it was a purpose.

As noted before. C.S. Lewis was quite scathing about people who took it upon themselves to know why a writer wrote, the circumstances and conditions. Knowledgeable they might sound, but when you have the advantage of BEING the author, it is easy to compare the wise surmises of literary critics about why you wrote and so forth, with the facts. He found no matches!

If you forsake reason, then you cannot validly argue, for that is to use reason. If reason were invalid, then invalid is the performance of someone believing that, and then arguing by its aid. If however you do not so forsake, then you are merely forsaken in imagining that the reason the multi-functional performers, Shakespeare or the merry-go-round, performed, was this: nullity. Some by imagination may wish to work in some kind of a mad world (cf. SMR pp. 284 - 290); but this one is investigable by reason, and by reason are the investigations assessed, and the results considered, and approved. If it be assumed at any POINT that reason had no relevance, then in that type of thing, domain, you have an irrelevance, should you wish to reason. If you found reason for considering there to BE such a point, then that reason would be invalid too, since the entirety of the method with its sub-units of thoughts rests on but one basis, without which argument is irrelevant. Giving reason for what is outside that domain is simple self-contradiction.

THE RUN DOWN ON RUNNING DOWN

So is it with this world. Its observable nature includes a movement to reduce available energy, towards entropy^*1A so that this as far as process goes. Such is the case in this world which is being investigated, this object in which information is sought. In this investigable domain, there must have been a preliminary store made UP, so that it could COME DOWN. As Europe attests rather well, spend what you have not got, and you become very troubled; imagine it there, and it does not help. Imagination is great, but not for a substitute for reality. Any number of entities or one, it makes with precision, no difference. SOME OR ONE of these must have had the goods, for ANY ever to be able to make use of it; then it is simply a matter of finding what makes the goods, and as always in science, avoiding the specious and keeping to principle (cf. Lively Lessons in Spiritual Service Ch. 5).

Even Paul Davies Mark II, as in Sparkling life in Christ Jesus, Ch. 8, came to admit such things as these:

1. The known laws of physics, chemistry and biology do not explain the origin of life.

2. Ideas of chemical evolution, as in the Miller Urey experiment, are not relevant, since "Throwing energy at amino acids will not create delicate chain molecules, just as putting dynamite under a pile of bricks won't make a house."

3. There is no evidence for an inbuilt bias or even conspiracy to create life, in 'Nature'.

4. Chance is not favoured (after all chance is merely the name of structure or system in which one's purpose is not held in view cf. Ancient Words: Modern Deeds Ch. 13, Deliverance from Disorientation Chs. 1, 7).

In apparent exasperation, quoth he, "How did the stupid atoms spontaneously write their own sof'tware ... Nobody knows ..." The atoms were not stupid; merely limited, delimited, equipped to be atoms, as we to be human, and what they were, they did. What they were not, they did not do. Is that really so very hard! It is when you ignore the etiological reality, what is really needed, that you run, like Stephen Jay Gould^*1Band so many others - though he was especially outspoken - into inevacuable troubles.

Nobody knows ? Well there must be a lot of nobodies, since nothing COULD be more obvious. Information science is quite clear about the writing of software of this kind, such as DNA^*1C. Using factual information about information, so that this world and not imagination is in view, ONLY intelligence writes such software, and it is quite apparent why this is so (cf. Not Only is God Great, but Glorious, Ch. 5, Jesus Christ Defaced, Unfazed...Ch. 4).

What then ? Let us examine for a little the sadly sickly alternative of authoritarian irrationalism, such as with many is now all the rage, in both senses of the term! (cf. SMR Ch. 3, Wake Up World! ... Chs. 2, 4, 5, 6). Something neatly arranged with force and pressure and space and time and interactive constituents, all to be watched and crooned over, which does not do anything like what it is supposed to do when it comes of age^*1D, expands with a force without ground, all prepared, constituted, arranged and organised, and THIS is the irrational tableau. It is like accounting for a carved table. Well then, there was this site and that wood and it all was moved by vast forces that came from nowhere, in a domain that did not have any reason to exist, and the things somehow or other, in ways we find impossible to make reasonable, all somehow again arranged amongst themselves to get a very nice, logical, accountable world going in which thought about the disorderly becomes orderly, and the disorderly becomes investigable and works according to reason, so that all you need, is there from the start, and acts as if it had made it already, but that from nothing and for no reason.

So does unreason defile rationality, and provide the ultimate fudge; but dodging the bull does not remove it, and dodging lack of funds with empty cheques does not supply funds, despite any pause while the bank assesses things.

It is not a blessed concept, except to excite dreamy children, who find it easier to consider than the careful handling of evidence and reason. So the myth mounts like a radioactive cloud.

The merry-go-round MUST have no cause. Its wheels and whirls, music and correlation in functional power leverage to human hands, this CANNOT be for a reason. It indeed cannot be that some stupid (his word) atoms spontaneously built the thing, but it all worked out the way things are never witnessed to do, though some want them to do it anyway, as if invoking an ogre amid the nuclei, first to spawn and then to activate them: but such powers within nature are not to be found. A principle may be invoked (cf. News 57, 59, Prospect, Retrospect ... Ch. 5, Dig Deeper ... Ch. I, *1A), the one you do NOT see working as you observe what is happening, and it can be turned into power by sleight-of-mind; for you need not only a law or principle, which describes what happens, but the THINGS THAT HAPPEN THEMSELVES. Principles without that are fairy-tales; notions without that, are illusions. You are fighting World War II with Spitfires that never left the drawing board, and so lose!

What happens when you ask for splendour from the failed, or grandeur from the spiritually demobilised, or action from the stoppage ? You are rationally inert in that case. Reason, however, stands and such "nobody knows" dithering is mere space-filling waving of the flag of irrationality, mounting the NOTHING charge, or the invisible principle thing, a thing of nothing in observable actuality. So is it moved in the mind of imagination, in order to make the better progress, not bothering about actualities, about horses and all that sort of thing, in the thrust of a spirited charge. You charge in principle, though never a horse is to be seen, or seen moving!

Might they not come from under cabbages, these laws, formats, powers, production mills, writings, structural preliminaries, logical applicabilities ? Oh to be sure, you never SEE this happening, information is just not found making up its concepts and their application, and doing the thing ab initio! Don't worry about that. THIS is science!

Is it not very like Europe, allegedly in much living beyond its means and wanting moneys ? THIS is where money comes from, surmises one ? but where ? and from whom ? and from whose work to make these symbolic tokens refer to anything ACTUAL!

It is true that in practice you DO see how birth occurs, of ideas and of humans, that sort of creativity thing; but don't worry about it. It may only make your hair go grey before your time.

Such is the sort of progression which logically is in place, in whatever form, concerning the many who ignore the logical necessities and follow the nothings they prefer. They act as if to prefer concerts without concert halls, music or musicians, and to enjoy the reasoned analysis of the music that does not result. Somewhere, somehow it must have come, they say, and it is grand how it responds to reason when you entirely ignore generation, foundation, power and qualities. There is a wonderful execution of things, which can be imagined, and as to the results, let us inundate in these, though they lack heritage, and wallow in wisdom about what had none, these things arising at need, the way they do in no known case, except there be what is independently capable of MEETING such a need.

Such approaches may find in many a preference to be pre-occupied with what it now does, even if it never conforms to hope. But it must go further, when we come to the institution of things. First, they just come and grow like Topsy. Then they stop, for a few thousand years. That too is just a hiccough ?

Thus, WHEN it STOPS, equally, stop thinking about that too! This is the intellectual short-cut. So this brand of science is some sort of irrationality procedure, for in this field, the appeal is to what is not now empirically found, whether in action or in principle of information deposition. But science never made its name by that, but rather by the sort of thing Dr Werner Gitt does and illustrates^*1E, looking at what happens and seeking coherent grounds for it, that stand up to testing. You don't tell the tests where they can't come; you just test. You don't invoke what is not there; you look instead and find what IS there in the way it is, not in a pre-prescribed notion instead of pursuit of reality. That is merely truncation instead of truth.

What then do we find ? It is this. The FAILURE of information to come, so that atoms can be called STUPID and no possible source, and the FAILURE of principles (descriptions of what adequate power and capacity does) to substitute for actuality in the making, leaves us with the point that what DEMONSTRABLY and ACTUALLY and experimentally IS found to create information, can stop, as well as start, and it is because of its necessary minimal nature that it both can and can be expected to do just that. There in causal source is causal reason both for commencement exercises, and the cessation at end of Term, for an output and a completion, and so a stoppage.

THE REDOUBTABLE POWERS OF CREATION

We DO this sort of thing day long, coding information into formats that work. The domain of code and the symbolical together with represented things and results, whether in communication or other creation, is what comes naturally to us. It is a function of the spirits which we use continually, to soar in thought, to ruminate, to decide, to respond with reason or unreason, frankly or equivocally, to assess and to cogitate, with error against standards of thought, or not. Hence we can deploy our minds, either to create or to destroy; and yes, in either case, to start and to stop. It is simply a function of capacity.

The Creator, intelligent, resourceful, required logically, has done more than the makers of a car model which may last for years. He has acted for several thousand in the present creation, even leaving His card in the DNA, enabling mankind to continue in this Age, more or less unchanged, except for variations provision for which is inbuilt, degradation through adverse impact and wear, and of course having to respond to changes in conditions... such as the curse which combined the magnificence of creation with the enervation of discipline (Romans 5:1-12, 8:17ff.).

Creation itself, however, from the personal thoughts and invisible spirit of man, at his own derivateive level, or from God as His matter-making, image-making work, is a domain to which mankind is intensively close in his constant living, and to argue to the contrary REQUIRES the very thing in view, in order even to do it!

THE CREATION OF INFORMATION STOPPED at the institutional level in the universe.

First, it came in torrents, man in particular requiring what some declare the equivalent of 1000 encyclopedic volumes of it, integrated, rational, interwoven, with provision for the WAY in which such information is to be used, also programmatically BOUND, in his DNA commands, by which the externalia for new copies are made before his very face, at each child-birth.

The creation torrent proliferated on the earth. Like a dam, it had its source.

You see such torrents in their own kind and vastly lower measure, not seldom in man, the mini-creator, the visible type one, called man. An architect pours out buildings, and then stops. Sloppy way of putting it ? you may suggest. No, it was deliberate, to encourage some thinking. The architect pours out INFORMATION, and various agents under orders, ACT according to these, because there is a symbolic counterpart in the recipient of the information (foreman, labourers, material providers), to the provider, the creator of the information. It is really terribly simple in kind, though staggeringly brilliant in execution, teaching man like a university, by logical investigation, more and more of the un-mysterious and rational marvels which it has in order to work. What he does, within him, is some of what he IS.

Information was, says one. Wait a while. It CAME into being by means of articulation, symbolical conformity (DNA is in all life known, in only one language, for there is order, system and a sweeping scheduling for events, with an equally sweeping arrangement which enables all these things to find their counterparts, in timely fashion, ready at each point to do what the planning schedule is supposed to do, so that anything can happen, and orders not just be rot).

Information, then, came into being. It was sent, commissioned into relevant being in order that creation along the lines of reason in it, might occur. That as noted, is only part. Thus if you are writing an essay, for the thing to WORK, much is needed. For example, you, the intelligent maker of information, are needed. The instrument for recording the information you select, choose to impart, a pen or computer, must be there THEN. The paper too, must be sitting just near t o you. The energy for this particular purpose, a composite of thrust and conformity to intent, must be there.

The capacity of what receives your information, whether atoms (if you had that kind of power), or eyes, if you have an examiner or reader, to gather from your symbols or words or code, what on earth it is all about must be there (a correlation of meaning in symbol production, and finding that meaning in symbolic reception); and that of course, requires rationality for application of relevant processes to the task. We do this all the time. It is no mystery. We CAN do it because in PRINCIPLE, this is the tying up of capacities required, to make such symbol-comprehension/apprehension, total resuglt actually work.

We do not in science, teach the universe what it or anyone or anything else can do. We rather find out what is done, and rationally, testably, verifiably, seek to understand how it was made to happen, involving ourselves in near matches of things cognate, in order to have ratification on all sides, as far as possible, while also finding what does not conform to the needs, and discarding that. Such is science^*1F. Such is reason for respect. Calling atoms stupid and incompetent is a rather idiomatic way of rejecting an invalid hypothesis; but it will do. Yes, this is not for them, and in this Davies is right, who employed this phrasing, as above.

The minimal needed we have traced, and the impossibility of materialism, we have shown elsewhere^*2, a mere stopping place on the way, ignoring the ultimate necessities of HAVING the material and the reason with which to consider it, and the relevance of reason, so that it is worth while so considering it! Neither are the thoughts concerning it, nor the means of reasoning concerning it, exhibits of the verifiable modes of matter, but interpretive invasions, seeking from other domains, what thought can check, and what matter can do.

IMPROPER PRE-OCCUPATIONS

The pre-occupation with our own format is worse than a kind of human provincialism; it is irrational chatter. That the amazing insertion of reasoning and creative thought capacity and imagination into a being with much programmatic and semi-programmatic hardware is triumphantly done, is more than startling. It is a coup! It is a creation indeed. But that this is the only way it CAN happen, is mere trifling. It is about as rarefied as you could wish. FANCY creating so vulnerable a thing as man with such vast recesses of reason and understanding available for the right and effective use of his powers!

What a perfect prodigy of invention, with so many systems included in the program, in order to protect from a multitude of woes, automatic editing in cell structuring in duplication, disease defence systems of their own internal intricacy, all this, with thoughts into eternity, beyond time, a spiritual being: it is a wonder. Many would worship the One who did it, eternal that nothing might not convey nothing. But there is far more reason than that, for worship, as we will show later.

We have been considering that all this information started. We have noticed that it stopped. It is so because matter does not in any case have what it takes to make information, being an informed resultant itself, in order to be and be delimited as it is. But there is something else that started.

Man misuses his equipment, physically, mentally, psychologically, physiologically, emotionally, often so hideously that you need something worse than 'appalled' to describe it (cf. Ch. 3 above). He falls, he stalls, he envisages great things for himself, he fails, he resents, he charges falsely, he revenges and so on. It is not pretty, and often one finds, alas, too near the saying, "the best is a briar." Such is the fallibility, that matches the splendour, on the other hand, of sacrificial love, and merciful wonders. Man is made in magnificence, but falls into ruin. Nor is the creation without result. As he has played the pig, so has the wonder of it become in some ways, rather like a pig-pen. Man has roved in self-righteous decline from God, and God has given him the environment suitable for such games! As Paul declares with inspiration from the Creator concerning the point, in Romans 8:17ff., the creation has been subjected to vain elements, and suffers.

This has certainly started, in marked contrast to the technical proficiency in the creations such as man, and the wonders of which even he is capable, when acting in a way suitable to being together, and being functional, fertile and productive.

Information for creation and power likewise, it came, and so the creation is there. It has mercifully also stopped, in principle. Ravagement continues, entropy proceeds, but the creation that made the universe no longer provides its information and power in that mix which is executive in power!

Things are getting worse, as the brew boils; but that is partly because the flames continue, and the cause of them, the sin which brings retribution not only because of misuse of equipment, FROM the equipment, but from the Creator, who is unimpressed, as He has made exceptionally clear in the Bible, with its verified and validated text^*3. However, the principial elements remain, a magnificent creation, a curse because of sin, a cure because of Jesus Christ, and an end to the testing period.

Another thing to start in due course: judgment, you know, like Nuremberg, but utterly just, precise like the DNA, and being directly from God, without any deterioration which itself is a thing comically contrary to evolutionary illusions, and in fact part of the way things are with its own furores and pretensions. On the contrary to its failed hopes, this is what is happening^*4. The lift is going down, and so does not lift. For that, you need the other way.

So creation, information production, from a source that is not so delimited as man, and which is not dependent on being itself created like man, with his many programs and delimitations, but able to account for such creation infinitely better than nothing or mere figments of the ferment of imagination without ground or reason: this BEGAN.

This ceased.

For millenia, that is the case. It is time to avoid sleep as a pseudo-religious exercise, as you see in Matthew 25. Asleep with symbols, as with those bridesmaids, may have a feel good aspect; but it is by no means wise. The point looms ... it stopped, having started and completed a vital pageantry and a summit for reason and thought, spirit and meaning. It cascaded. It ceased. The books is written. What of the characters within it ? First, it is well to note the fact: it started, was brilliant; it stopped and cannot be invoked or provoked into action. The thing pends.

That is precisely what the Bible declared. How long is it to be before it is realised and adequately attested to students and others that this is confirmation, verification of PRECISELY what the Bible declared; and that meanwhile, just as 'stupid' atoms cannot create information of themselves, as Davies puts it, so the One who can, did, and stopped doing it. All is as stated. It came. It flourished. It inter-connected. It came in one language, the mono-speech type used by the Creator, in the DNA for all known life, and it continued till it was finished. That is why it stopped, just as merry-go-rounds and essays do. What was in mind is done. Information is a method. It is apt in some cases. This, our universe, was one. Thus in six days God created and then stopped, and SO, as Genesis 2 reminds us, did God act and then stop acting. It was over. It remains over, but its destination and destiny, and that of those in it is no more forgotten than is the life of those who get off the merry-go-round when it stops.

OCCUPATION WITH ACTUALITY

Creation came. It was finished. Super-men are not only invisible in KIND, but atrocious and awesome degradations walk like hail on crops, about the earth, rule nations, kill millions, prod themselves into yet more pride, glow over puny and punitive powers which they seize, while untold further millions consider abortion of truth, and teaching it forcibly to captive children in classes, and things like same-sex marriage, as if the design were to become butt for the assault on the Creator of the same, in a flowering of rage, a stampede of assault, a flitting of fingers at His glory. Is it to be expected that this treatment of design^*5 is inconspicuous, any more than slapping the face (cf. Micah 5:1) of the Creator, were this still possible!

Creation remains, and men try to restore some of its damaged parts; but it was constructed and it continued.

Then came sin and salvation. The sin continues, the method of salvation does not change. It is like having some magnetic resonance equipment checking you out medically. It starts and it stops. The purpose and method of the director of the medical ways, is fulfilled. Then there might be an operation in view. In the human race case, the cancer of sin is diagnosed securely at once, in that man does not relate to the directions of his Creator, but toys with or becomes truculent about it, or ignores it; and in any case, takes time to find it, injured as he is by his sinful heart.

Salvation came. Its information came in the Old Testament and was consummated in the New (cf. Barbs... 17). Its action, correlative to the information (just as the action in the creation was correlative to the code, which was commanded as the Bible states - God spoke and it was done): this too came and was done. As Jesus declared concerning it, "It is finished." As Hebrews 9-10 puts it, by one sacrifice once made God put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, not that He should suffer often, but once only, in one redemption once made, so that those justified should be covered for ever (Hebrews 9:12-15, 25-28, 10:10-14),and so we find in Romans 3:23ff. 4:25-5:1-12).

So that too is finished, the information and the performance, each matching: what was to be done and the doing of it. There is nowadays much talk about information, and it is great to see technical advance and a better understanding of what is involved; but the fact is that the PERFORMANCE related to information is just as important, whether it be in response, personally or indirectly, programmatically or in some combination. Jesus Christ as the Word of God pronounced, before incarnation, the information, as one might offer for a tennis match (and Psalm 40 shows this willing offer cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25, in advance).

Then He carried it out. This was creation-servicing, or salvation, since the myriad crippling results of sin are astounding, abounding, mortal, lethal and corruptive even to the point that some imagine that they are at least as good as God, and He had better receive their proud, unbroken selves. But it is with them, as with young colts, they have to be broken in, by being woken up! It is sad, but it can be most costly; and worst of all, many prefer to sleep.

It was so in the parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25:1-13).

Next time you call in at your work, or your holiday premises, consider this, that then you STOP, not living, but moving about. You are then PLACED. The transition from the former to the latter is complete. You may rest or work there, but you are in a new domain. There for the time, you stop. The motion is not unceasing.

Nor is life.

When it stops, just as creation has stopped, you are in a new domain, you are placed.

But where are you placed!

You buy shares, and place an order by information, and by a series of marvellous communication components, what you want is then done. Your money is gone and your shares are placed. Then the market will in effect judge your case. If you pass on. Then there will be a result, and if the shares are sold to enable distribution of funds, so that the case is wound up, the result will be what it will.

So with your life. Christ came not least to enable life more abundantly (John 10), and as with many a cure, this involves much. In this case, it included being willing to bother, to come, to act, to die, to be hated, to be a sacrifice for the ridiculous failures of others, and to have empathy in the understandable fixes they got themselves into, and yet in all this, to love them, and to pity them to the uttermost, so that their sin could be borne, and they could be born anew.

If you ignore this information, flying in formation with other planes set on going, and not stopping anywhere in particular, except in dreams, based on nothing, and meaning nothing except illusion, then so be it. You did not then manage to do what the Creator did when He created: make a correlation of information and action that was effectual. The information in such a case as the one which is here imagined, it is there; the action, it is not there. It is then as if the world as created in its first phases, when confronted with the divine command for life, simply refused. Then it would not have happened. But God has power and it responded. He has power to provide salvation, and we may respond. It involves diagnosis and prognosis, as in things medical.

THIS, said Jesus the Christ, is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men have preferred darkness (John 3:19). It is not that God does not love enough as you see in John 3:1-19; nor is it because He did not bend enough to make realistic efforts on our behalf: how COULD more effort be made than having the deity become man so that man might be reconciled to God, and have the cross added, to secure the result in ACTION, and not just in word (II Corinthians 5:17ff.).

Action is necessary, for if you withhold your life, you keep your sins and their guilt and potential shame, so that you wind up as one sentenced (John 8:24), you die in your sins as Christ put it, instead of being newly remade and restored, ransomed, pardoned, forgiven, adopted and blessed by God.

There comes a time when opportunity stops. Life has its fragilities, in its present condition the more. It is time to act (II Corinthians 6:1). The time for methodical muddle is past!

NOTES

See TMR C h. 1, SMR Ch. 1, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, incl.*1 and *2.

See also *3 below.

*1A

See Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Ch. 2.

*1B

See:

Wake Up World Ch. 6,

Agitation, Cogitation, Aspiration and Conclusion Ch. 2.

See also SMR Ch. 2, for correlative information, over time.

*1C

On DNA, see Waiting for Wonder Appendix, with

Not Only is God Great, but Glorious, Ch. 5,

Jesus Christ Defaced, Unfazed...Ch. 4.

*1D

See for example,

Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch. 6, Lively Lessons in Spiritual Service Ch. 5, Dig Deeper ... Ch. 1