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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:

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*1B and 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

 

*1

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

See also, TMR Ch. 7 as marked.

 

 

*1E

See

Not Only is God Great, but Glorious Ch. 5, incl. *1A

concerning this, and in broader surrounds, and Ch. 8. Indeed, the necessities of divine diction and the exclusives of its attestation represent a theme of great significance as seen in SMR esp. Ch. 1 and Ch. 10 (1992 and 1997) and  

Reason for Faith, Life from God  Unpubl. Th.D. Thesis, Berean Christian College, Oklahoma, USA,  1978.

See also Repent or Perish Ch. 2, Ch. 7, Barbs ... 6   -7,and indexes.

 

*1F

See Scientific Method ...

 

 

*2

See

Repent or Perish Ch. 7

for a coverage more fully on this topic of materialism and its ludicrous antilogies, per se, with

SMR Ch. 1,

and see also

Downfall from Defamation Ch. 1, with

It Bubbles ... Ch. 9,  End-note 1,  and

Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will Ch.   7,  including *1;

The True God has Go, Gives Grace and Glory Ch.   2.

 

*3

See SMR Chs. 1,3,10, with TMR Ch. 5, Possess Your Possessions Volume 9,  Ch. 2, together with .

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

This is a pair  of Volumes: Opus 128 and 129, of some 2.3 million words.

On the response by the Creator to the human  ravages and rebellion,  see Romans 1-2, Isaiah 1, Genesis 3, Isaiah 28-29, Matthew 24. On the constructive action  taken, see  Sinners Only, Romans 5, II Corinthians 5.

 

*4

See Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Ch. 2, Chs. 4-6, TMR Ch. 7.

 

*5

See Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny.