THE NATURE OF THE COSMOS AND OF THE CHARACTER OF MAN

THE WORD AND THE WISDOM OF GOD

AND THE WAYS OF MAN

Chapter 1

Though SMR, TMR and numerous other elements on this site present in a highly systematic manner, the necessary grounds for belief in God and Christ and the Bible and redemption and the provisions of God both as Creator and Redeemer, it seems good to make a short overview from a particular aspect to which some may simply and readily be able to relate. While it is on the same background and in the same presentation in type, it is to the point for those who seek smartly, while their wounds perhaps smart, to seek instead of delusion, quite simply the truth.

WHAT IT IS

With what do we come endued ? First it is with material things. I kick my toe, it hurts. Then it is with mental things, more intimate. I indulge in an error, it brings trouble, because it does not fit. I learn. Then there is moral trouble. I decide I am a fantasy of my own creation: it impacts unduly in the world, and creates a double image, a bifurcation, so that I cannot see straight, or become confused; and I realise that it is not for me to create myself, because of the obvious circumstance that I am here already, and have no power to make myself either into superman or into a mouse, a spider or a wolf. I may imitate such, either in spirit or character, and man is a magnificent imitator, often deceiving even himself; but I do not change. I may breach my barriers, as when the ocean flows into Holland; but submergence, though a difficulty, is not a change of nature, merely of circumstance.

I think of new worlds, where right is so obvious that you cannot do wrong except you are quite mad, and this has attractiveness of a sort; but it removes the individuality and the deliciousness of liberty, which can conceive and create, but not itself, nor its own limits, readily found on application.

Moreover, as I invent new worlds in my mind, I may delude myself into thinking that what I think is what it is, when it is obvious that the whole point of the thinking is to find something different, and not the same, with a solution to the crowding horrors of crowing humanity, subservient humanity, either as nations or families, or to abused wealth or arrogance or murderous thoughts or hostility and macho drive or whatever else comes to the heated imagination of ambivalent mankind. This creative style thinking and plan, whether to remake the mind with Freud or Jung, invalidated by the one already here in so doing, or matter with the Big Bang of the stuff already there, a hoax, or law from chaos with Marx, or the nature of life with Darwin's non-drop-outs, another hoax, as if this invented anything, is no more than that. In no case does the theory fit the facts^*1. The evidence is inscrutable to reductionism, and immune to mere imagination, and makes it look merely absurd.

Again, a person may decide to make his own morality, but then it jars either with the nature of his body or mind or spirit, so that what had seemed liberty and a fascinating capacity to make a psychic basis for life, becomes merely the detritus of the glaciers of the cold human heart with heated head to make volcanic eruptions.

In other words, no more is morality,

what is RIGHT for man, what fits and is apt for the entire, intricate, involved, inter-related complexity of the laws and cause and consequences into which we are built, like it or not,

to be merely imagined and then instituted, as so many do, even in proud nations,

than is matter to be instituted because I think this or that.

Merely making up what it is, is entirely irrelevant, except for the obstinate who insists on the dream. As with all dreams, when you try to live it to bankrupts your coffers (as with the USSR in the denuding nineties) or your mind (as with the debased who dabble in drugs, lordliness or luxury as life) or your heart, which after all, is not for your making, but for you to find its place, right or wrong, as with any other reality. It is not your creation, though it is your possession, up to a point, for if you mistreat it, it can backfire and make your lordly suppositions mere dreams again (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 10).

WHAT IS SUBSTANCE AND STRUCTURE

What is, is. That is it. Substance is. What is it ? asks the philosopher. Is it atoms, mere numerical items within it ? Then where is the it, the entity, itself ? Is it a numerical, or a legal, or a dynamic, energic, or a compositional thing ? It is all of the above. It has aspects, a system, elements in system, laws over elements, workings within system, laws over workings, and these are not made by captivated scientists, say what they will, for they are merely discovered. Their minds are no different from mine, merely with a more isolated focus.

If ANY of us start inventing the obviously partial and placing it in imagination as the whole, it is simply childish. All reductionism is childish. It is important to grow up, and face reality as it is, not as its inventor, but as its percipient, or perceptor. IT is the entity to be perceived; we perceive. IT has the laws, we find them out; IT has the mathematical magnificence in which laws like E=MC² inhere, and are applicable, because it IS a mathematical thing. It has elements of law and mathematics and form and format and inherent constructions and extraneous constraints, with a character, not as in a car thought of as nuts and bolts and bits, but of design; so that its entirety is no one part of its assemblage, nor is it mere association, but dextrous arrangement to enable a constricted construction to have just these impersonal, projected, protected means and meaning, reducible in barren thought more readily than in reality by explosive means. It subsists with energy in one encompassing construction, with even laws for interchange into the accepted format, by formulae also inherent and applicable.

It also has a certain impartiality: it is not personal. What it is, it does. It contrasts, this element of the cosmos, with the character of man. He also is what he is, but WHAT he is is no mere recipient of laws, order, schema, program, control and constraint (though there is much of this in his body, and available to his mind). He can think. He can think otherwise. He can try to force his thinking into political, social, legal and physical reality, murdering with Stalin and Mao and Hitler and being called great or horrid by many for doing so; but in all, there is no change in the reality. There arrives only one more lesson about the arrogance of reductionism and the midget might of mind when it tries to pretend to itself that it is the Creator. The folly is a sorrow or mirth for the next generation or even sooner. What is, is; what is not, is not. Thought does not make it alter, no, nor even itself! Creative, it yet is not by itself the Creator either of itself or the universe, or logic. It finds it out, as it does the empirical more generally.

Creator, it is not. It merely works within the creation. It is what it is. Mind is what it is. Neither invents itself; each has a character, a limit and a domain, and where imagination has place, it does not automatically possess its world as its butt, whatever the shrieking pedants may offhandedly declare (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!).

Substance is a name for what has a certain reality, like it or not, and is often used of the physical. It is not a thought or a hope. It is there. It is not subject to man's invention; it has been made already. Its various facets of law and constraint and form and format and information, either in code or language as in the DNA or in the formulae of diversified forms and interactions of contrived powers and interactive resources: these do not make it. They operate in it, or on it, or both; and it bears not a load of this and that, as if to take a finger and address its reality forgetful of the body to which it is attached.

Rather it is a constituent of a material whole, governed by the immaterial which it is not found to create, just as it is not found to create itself in toto, as in the first law, that of the conservation of mass and energy. This is not found what occurs, whether empirically or logically, as if what is not there can make ANYTHING, or what is partially there comes from NOWHERE, and needs no reticulating cause in the causal system which being ours, itself needs institution for its logical force and applicability. NOTHING comes from nothing. ONLY from what is adequate for all can ANYTHING come, from, the first, or it would not even by definition be ABLE to come.

But matter: It has atoms and molecules and capacities in circumstances and incapacities which may be observed. It is an object of mind, but it does not think; it has the imprint of legal constraint by formulated law, but it does not encode, nor does it invent itself. It is there. If it does, show it. If it does not, know it. If you can find the means even, show them; if not, act evidentially to match logic, and being composed in thought, be disconstrained to work on imaginative futility, as if it were the ultimate utility. Choose sound thought and spectacle, not the specious.

Matter ? You can speak forever, but it is there, to be observed, as is mind.

This latter has its logic and its perceptibility, and its realm of analytical techniques and moulding of information and correlation of this with what is, reality, or with what is imagined and given to it to work on, though this does not work, is not found to do so, since what is imagined and what is real have different parameters, reasons and results. It is magnificent in logical and processive assemblage, but it is what it is. It is not some marvel that has non-seen powers which imagination tries to foist on it: without cause, while using causal language to explain, without evidence and without investigable means, in a domain lacking these things just as the logical-personal domain is found to have them not once, not per day, but per hour, by the millions of instances and billions of incidents, as the fashioned outcome of what mind is.

Mind is above matter as an architect beyond a house. It is an excellent investigaable, ideational, overseeing, error discerning methodological wonder. In man, it is thrust upon him, as are his first teeth when young, and his musculature, ready to be sure, for development, but once more, what it is, and not some imponderable resource. Let us keep to the evidence, for it will be a refreshing change.

The mind of man, however, even it does create either itself or its world. It is there to perceive it, and to utilise its opportunities which its logical sharing of its own nature with that inherent, but not now creatively active in matter and mind, enables it to have.

It is there. You use it as it works, or you do not. That is your option. You cannot logically or without confusion use the term for something else. This is its given nature; and being given, it requires as matter does, a cause, and as matter likewise, one which fits the necessities of the result with the proponent of the cause. Nor let it be clear, is God the First Cause, for this is merely to misuse the terminology of understanding for another realm of institutive power. God is the AUTHOR of our form of causality, which implies conditions and patience to wait for what is beyond our power or the nature of what is formed to produce. It is an imposed constraint, and the sufficient and necessary basis for the temporal, for matter, mind and spirit such as man exemplifies but neither does nor can create. If you use the term 'cause' therefore of Him, it must at or near the time be made clear that it is not as a component in a created-type (type B) causal system that He has acted to meet the logical necessities. He has invented our form of causation from a form which lacks our constraints, having only its own. That is why ' First Cause' is such a misnomer, since by its very usage it refers to a sequence, which this not only is not, but cannot be without confusion.

He is the SUFFICIENT CAUSE where cause is defined as that which, being adequate for results, so operates to obtain them, in a milieu where the origin, arrival and potency of what is in view is before us. He is this in an ultimate causal domain, sufficient to make what He will, without or without patience phenomena, such as when miracle does not occur, the norm, we have. The domain is not something containing Him, as if He were part of a constraining system, for logically this is to deny what is necessary, what is above constraint and reciprocal involvement in a given sphere. His is pre-eminent causality, above what is merely reticulated causality, where inherent authority is matched by expository power without limit, but not without reason, which is another of His focal features.

Thus the very term LOGOS in Greek, as attributed to the eternal word of God who became flesh, means not only word, and expression, but reason, the rational basis and source and account. He has fashioned not with things contrary to Himself, either matter or the mind of man, so that the latter can investigate the former with a delicious and challenging sympathy, affinity, resolvability of problems, on the one hand, and with a tutelary vein, as man in his created mind and his created causal system, meets the mind of God in His creative adventures, if one may call them not, innovations in toto!

So man with his mind meets the creation from the causal power and mental inherence of the mind of God, and knowing the ways of mind by multiplied billions of instances of his own and of his own system in their correlation, he is able to discern these operations and their type of functional facility, from time to time declaring in mathematical or ordered form, the WAYS of matter, to the extent, and only to the extent, these are shown and showable, and not to the extent, they are not showable and merely imaginable. You can imagine that ants built a Boeing 737 if you want to do so, given time (after all they are far more proficient than is mindless matter), but this has no bearing on reality, testable, investigable, showing both grounds for assertion, means for the grounds and assignable method for reason to accept, and acclaim. Matter however never shows the ways of mind, only in its institutive nature, the operation of these ways to create it.

Thus man with mind and spirit, has option in terms of the world of matter, and indeed of mind where others have the same facility and ability in mentality.

How do you have this option ? It is because you have something to direct your mind, give it tasks, tell it to work things out for you in this or that project, desire or dream. This, it is that function in you as man, that can imagine and hope and decide and show courage and have character of this kind or that.

WHAT IS SPIRIT ?

It is called spirit. It is the most important since this is what DIRECTS your mind to do this or that, and USES your body to achieve this or that objective, be it folly, dream or dynamic and just. It uses likewise other constrained formulations of matter, with whatever design specifications, constituting the account of their order and method and constraints as given, and forming their character.

The spirit of man seeks to understand. Sometimes, jaded, it gives up, surrenders its powers and becomes cynical (cf. SMR Ch. 3). This does nothing to change what it is, any more than leaving your car in the garage all year removes or in any way alters the fact that you do have a car. You are and remain responsible for it, even if you disdain responsibility. It is yours, giving in this case displacement dynamic for you, whether you use it and this, or not; just as the fact that you can do this, is what nothing dissipates, so that come what will, you always COULD have used it. It IS there, and so are you and so is your mind and so is your planning, imagining, purposing power, your spirit. You ARE responsible, not for being put there, but for what you do with this fact. Nothing will alter that.

You can concoct theoretical worlds till you die; but that will never alter this one. You can tyrannise over it, but it is still just that assemblage of form and format and information and dynamic, diversified into matter, mind and spirit as purpose function for mind and matter, the latter itemised into individual atoms and the former put in individual people, with spirits with their own histories and inventive powers and twisting or truth constraints, as their case comes to be, during operation. Thus you have cells, expressive of ideas, but non-ideational in creative power, or ideas, creative in their propositions as formatted by manb, and open for direction, by spirit, which imagines much, but as to creation of itself or its surrounds of matter and mind, it has no power to create. Indeed, it is humbled continually by their being babies born programmatically according to transferred language constraints, inherent and operable in man without his forethought or permission, which grow and use the growing powers of mind as they do so, and inherit the more and more manifest powers of spirit as their equipment matures for use.

Man is continually made to start where the affairs of mind are apparent, but it is not his mind, and the laws of matter operate, but he did not make them, and the opportunities of spirit lie, but neither the powers nor the opportunities of spirit has he created, nor does he even understand how it could be done, nor have analytical power to discover what it would be like to be an inventor of what is spirit, his very programs which ar perversely named as 'intelligent' being merely manipulated forms and formats of intelligence, his, which do precisely, if in any amount of indirection as to method, but not purpose, precisely what he wants.

It is all given, its nature according to logical necessity of causative power, and its operational facilities what they are, unsusceptible to change of KIND except by imaginative confusion, which changes man's destiny in part, through ruin and obfuscation and the results of the same in multiplied injustice and despicable tyrannies, but does not make him new at all. Indeed, he is in all this, just the same; he does not change, except in many, like an ageing air-filter in a car, he becomes increasing polluted unless cleaned.

It is what it is and so are you, your mind, your body, your spirit and your opportunities; and for that matter, your importunities. How can he avoid misuse of potential, not to BE God, but to act as made by God, in wisdom ?

Some cry to the Maker of this assemblage, since nothing can never do it, and it never makes itself, try as man might^*2, to find what is right, and if they seek where that information lies and has lain these few millenia of life as we have it. Then some, they find it; but they must seek with ALL the heart (Jeremiah 29:11-13), for listless or arrogant or careless or imperial pursuits do not work in information gathering. They merely distort or leave unearthed what is there. You need to put your heart into it, be reasonable and not wither in irrationality as you go; as not to allow mere tradition or prejudice or desire to dictate to you. Moreover at that, as with the babe, so with the begetting again, with the reformation of man made possible only by God at the essential level, the spirit and its nature and nurture which is His own gift, it is not of man's making.

It is not man who knows what is wrong and what is to be found for it and where, and how; for he cannot even create himself, far less undo his desecration of himself by foolish imaginations and views and systems, and acting according to these, like some perverse machinery which ruins itself in a methodical manner; but man is not (though he does possess) a type of biological machinery, and is accountable as you see so well in Jeremiah 7:8-14, or in Proverbs 1 or indeed in his very being created in the image of God. It is He who being the I AM WHO I AM, that is the eternal, self-sufficient, not-dependent and free Being on whom all constraint, law and being depends, having made man in His image (He being Spirit as in John 4, so that this is a metaphorical instance), has given to him something of intense and immense value.

What is this ? It is the other side, the obverse if you will, of accountability, of responsibility which is man's to the uttermost. It is the power of liberty which the French Revolution so greatly desired, most understandably, but sought where it is not to be found, in man or his creations, whether dragged through the streets of Paris or not. It is this which shows the love of God and accountability of man to an eminent degree. Because AS SUCH man is given liberty in degree and kind such that he is able in himself to say yes or no to God, who instructs but does not program his response to the restrictions of Genesis 3, in test format, THEREFORE he is answerable. God loves for us to reason together with Him; and He IS reasonable (Let's Be Reasonable, for God is!).

It is not presented in the Bible, whether as to man's genesis as in Genesis, or in his evaluation, for one solitary moment, that man is by essential nature NOT free; but rather that he is by polluted nature, made servant to sin, just as Israel was made servant to other nations, even foolish, as part of its discipline for under-valuing quite freely, the wonder of the gift of God's grace in freedom and, in misusing it, aborting something of its operation. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (II Corinthians 3:17). Man is not then bound, just as he was never bound to worship God, and hence in choosing, opted NOT to do so. IF then man is freely essentially, but through acquired pathology, not adequately so to choose righteously and so find the Lord by his own will in operation, despite his inherent capacity from the first, there is room not only for grace but for gracious intervention by God, not only in providing the free basis of His own costly salvation, but in enabling its free acceptance. Though distorted and misdirected through sin, man could have been allowed to go on his way to the spiritual dust-bin with results not attractive to contemplate, though requiring much understanding to survey, as C.S. Lewis points out, concerning everlasting destruction. It is necessary to consider in such cases the nature of the causal system in which specified events occur, whether now or when judgment comes.

However God intervened, both to provide the basis and the grace to secure those whom He chose before time in satisfaction of the scope of His saving desire and pure and holy love. Even the gift of divine righteousness, to provide adequate purity and place for redeemed man, as many as receive Him as He is, not only a donation, but conveyed freely - it is the gift BY grace (Romans 5:15-18).

Thus God is not outwitted by sin; but He has done more than pay for its results, providing eternal redemption for all who receive His salvation in Christ Jesus, who died the just for the unjust to bring us to God (II Peter 3:18). He has also foreknown us each one, easy for the One who makes even an individual human brain with billions of connections (as in *6). In this, it is not a matter (Romans 9) of knowing what we will do, for this is in polluted format, and God is beyond this and not limited to or by it,.

Rather, and instead, at His own will, just as an author is free to act on his own stated principles in writing a book, He chooses to introduce himself as an author his thoughts, or even his own participation, as a character. Then he can take part, but on his own terms as creator of the book. So God has done and seeking for the salvation of all, brings home those who in His perfect knowledge, are foreknown to heed the call, not in history, but in the all-knowing divine mind. This, indeed, it is not AS created beings, for before time they were emphatically not created; but it is as His enterprising grasp of all things has revealed the actual and essential case to be for each, and this freely; for here the theme is not direction but divine knowledge, which predestination, as in Romans 8:30, next in logical order, directs and so conserves. Before man fell, before pollution paralysed some of the operating features of his will, before comparative differences in virtue arose, sin being a subsequent variation medium among men, He chose as His passionate love enabled, coercing never, securing where love and not force found place.

Who willed to create, but the Lord ? who willed to save but the Lord ? who would have ALL to be saved but the Lord ? and it is He who repeatedly said so: why is it that some will not listen to Him!

Who was unwilling to force into salvation, but the Lord, who disdains the empty propaganda of those who promise freedom only to secure bondage as with Communists and other innovative religionists who do not stop till they satisfy themselves, that all should bow to them and to their empty ideas! (cf. II Peter 2:19, *1 and*4).

Who is it send His only begotten Son to save the world and not judge it! Who chose the method ? Who chose His own chosen ones before time ? Who selected the sovereign method of approach and the sovereign principles on which choice freely was granted ? It is God.

Why some seem unable to comprehend that sovereignty is not mystic and total direction without regard to the KIND of nature of what is sought, but the power and will to determine what is to be and how it is to be, and on what terms it is to be: this is a strange conundrum. Some sovereigns as amid the Gentiles, as Jesus pointed out, ARE of such a type, but what is of God is VERY different! (cf. Matthew 20:25-28). It is not to be so among you, He indicated, for it was far removed from anything in Him, in His own way, in His procedure.

Thus assuredly, salvation is of God who wills, and not of man (John1:12). But WHAT God wills is to bring ALL in heaven or in earth, to reconciliation to Himself. We know this because He says so (Colossians 1:19ff.) and alas, so many as at my own former Seminary in Philadelphia, seemed unable to read this verse, just as many of the Jewish religion seem to have a problem even in reading Isaiah 53. It is however, whether in the one case, or the other, written. Whatever treachery one may encounter, or has encountered, it is still written and NOTHING will ever alter that, whether from confused theology or philosophy. THIS is the biblical model, which explains all, meets every cavil, challenge and is coherent within itself and in dealing evidentially in all fields, as nothing else is or even could be, since it alone^*2B has the very foundations needed for coherence and rationality and consistency.

DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE

AS BIBLICALLY DEPICTED AND DELIGHTED IN

Thus one can say that in divine foreknowledge, God has foreknown, not episodically, as in human works to come, ruled out in Romans 9, but essentially as in divine works and knowledge, what is the case. It does not depend, the result for any man, being for or against the Lord, on the operation of polluted will with its defects and deficiencies (as in I Corinthians 2:14), for it is specifically both foreknowledge (Romans 8:30ff.) and divine in kind.

To be sure, God COULD if He so chose, penetrate even into the polluted will of man and find the reality behind; and in conversion some may indeed experience something of the divine action, for the foreknowledge is of what is REALLY the case, and not of a mere construction such as men may make for themselves. However, He essentially foreknows apart from works, the way of the will of man. In Biblical Christian Apologetics, showing the essential rationality and meaning and comprehending power accorded through the biblical depiction, we may make a model. In this God sees what the will would have chosen if it had not been polluted, and so foreknowing, then predestines in the logical order shown in Romans 8:30, where such knowledge precedes in this manner, the ACTION of predestination which merely making things as found, to be sure, is no monster or anything of the kind, but a kindness to obviate blindness.

This serves to illustrate the rationality and perspicuity of the case. However if someone prefers to be more abstract, and say it in another way, that is an option. We can go deeper and watch each point sensitively to avoid misunderstanding; for the fundamentals are not optional.

Thus God KNOWS what the soul has, what its will is, and knowing this in advance of sin, fall, the fiat of the making of man and of history, so appoints in predestination. Concerning this, let us stress that biblically it is DIRECTLY stated to depend on HIS knowledge, foreknowledge, which is in HIS statedly unchanging nature and life, a work of love with the principles that He would that all might come. In so acting He chooses those accordingly the elect, the outcome of His searching and seeking, which though not limited to time and preceding it as we have it, is yet real and indeed, the more so. There is no mystery about the WAY and NATURE of His search, or about its being pre-time or apart from works. Likewise it is apart from merit, as before sin entered there was no differentiation through its wiles and woes, and His selection being not on character but on will as He knows it, in the pre-fall condition, it is not subject to some preferable X-factor of divine approbation, but moves with the dynamic of universal desire and the restraint of love with the wisdom of perfect knowledge. .

IN so acting, in the COURSE of His divine foreknowledge, God is always the same, and it is always His good pleasure through the blood of the cross to reconcile all things, yes in heaven or on earth to Himself, as Paul declares. With this intention and these principles He acts before time, and it is fulfilled in time, for God has no technical problems, and according to His heart, so it it.

He does not change, and as Christ therefore, so the Father (cf. John 14). We know this because He says so and swears so (Psalm 102, James 1:17, Malachi 3:6). What is God is not variable, nor is Christ is failed but a triumphant funnel (cf. John 8:29, 12:48-50). It is also the nature of the case as has been shown a number of times: for as in Romans 1:17 the divine nature of God and His power is obvious, though man tries to pin it down, as if wrestling with rebellion with the truth. He who made the time for patience on the part of man, is not subject to what He made, and in becoming man, the Word made flesh, the Eternal visiting the temporal (Micah 5:1-3), He expresses with definitive precision who God is (Hebrews 1:1-3). Variation from this is to nullify what God manifested, and a fall not as of water in falls, but from purity to pollution.

Let us emphasise the state of His glory. Thus what Christ showed in Luke 19:42fff., Matthew 23:37ff., and what God showed before that incarnation in Ezekiel 33:11 or Jeremiah 48, or Hosea 7, as has been pointed out, as indeed in Colossians 1:19ff.: namely, the divine desire to save all, the divine discomfiture in not so doing, and the divine restraint in not shanghaiing people anyway, having enormous self-control (cf. Matthew 22 in the parable about the highways and byways): this is not subject to variation. It does not go away. Calvin is precisely wrong in imagining some kind of ludicrous and anti-biblical division or discursive difference between Father and Son in this matter, the low point of his christology (cf. Cascade of Mercy, Torrent of Truth Ch. 9, and re Spurgeon, Possess Your Possessions Volume10, Ch. 6).

Because He IS the same, and Christ IS the deity (as in Philippians 2, John 5:19ff.), THEREFORE what He shows, being precisely what was shown in the Old Testament, is truth. It is always true of God.

Thus in foreknowledge, this is part of the divine research, search, if you want to put it in our sort of manner, or of His penetrating total knowledge, if you do not. He knows the will of each one, and implements it. It is not divorced from reality, but what underlies it. God is God and so let Him be God and not have Him dealing with deterministic souls, as if He had not made freedom. If this were so, then God would be making what CANNOT but be damned, and so become responsible for precisely those acts of unkindness, non-compassion and hardness of heart with which He so justly accuses man (Romans 2:5).

The morbid kind of non-biblical election in which Calvin for one indulges, is a mystic oddity without biblical base, but only misled philosophic intrusion, which would have God choosing NOT because of the nature of the will of man, to be this or that, but for an unknown reason, one paralleled by the phrase: "hideous decree". But this is precisely unjust and unfair and unbiblical. What is in the heart of God towards all men is not only stated in Colossians 1:19ff., in I Timothy 2, in Ezekiel 33:11 and aired in such texts as those in Jeremiah and Hosea above, but a constant perspective in dealing with man, in lamenting at his failure to act when he might have done (as in Isaiah 48:16ff.), and this with a profound pathos (as in Jeremiah 13:13ff.).

The biblical position is this: God would like to save all, has gone as in John 3:16ff. () to the uttermost length consonant with this, but short of violating liberty, and calls all everywhere as able to answer with divine assist, not according to desire, but according to reality, for God IS the truth. If man is of another will than this, so be it. He does not invade. He does not undo the reality of creation in His own image, nor does He suddenly die to lament and to invitation, exhortation and condemnation for hardness of heart, even that insufferable because done by specific and needless decision to abort mercy (as in Matthew 13:15ff.). God does not change; sin does not change in kind; and the divine desire does not change. Its implementation in salvation does not change; the mode of Christ crucified and bodily risen over the death which is the doom for sin, does not alter. It is signified, symbolised and accomplished (Hebrews 7-10). It is finished as in Ephesians 2:8, Titus 3:3-7. It is foreknown and predestined. It is not open to chance or change, being founded in reality.

The divine plus, the human negative, not only in life, but in its predecessor in divine foreknowledge, it is all there. Freely man is made; with liberty towards God he is accordingly made in His image; with will for or against God He is foreknown, according to reality which nothing can supervene before the majestic splendour of divine knowledge, in this case, foreknowledge since statedly it precedes in kind, sin and this world and the creation and hence the fall and its results and obscurations. NOTHING obscures anything before God. He knows and He foreknows, and it is not according to works (Romans 9:16). If one who is against knowing Him, like Pharaoh, is to be so, then such a one may be used to help others to see, his own position being as it is, and nothing done to divorce it from its source in foreknowledge, namely the free will of man. It is there that in THIS respect it is free; and deterministic intrusions of an alien model into biblical exposition is for dunces and the provocateurs.

Man NOT being programmed in spirit, but a responsible, accountable, personal being is foreknown by the Spirit of God as to his spirit, even by Him who WOULD like to have all saved, but stops short of force and making souls other than they are in their own liberty, in order to save. If that were done, then it would not then be man that was saved, but a construct from his dissolution. It is not so with God, who continually remonstrates and demonstrates His love and protests His desire for good for all to the uttermost, showing the results of negation by man as accountable, with a sad and sometimes co-ordinately indignant mien as in Jeremiah 7.

Just as these things are indisputable biblically, so they are resolvability logically, with the logic God has dowered us. God who made all, would like all to be reconstituted and regenerated, so in divine largess bringing peace and accord where it belongs; but will not impose His will, even for this, as if to make of man a mere member of some deterministic squalor; for He has made man free, and is Himself not invasible by speculative philosophy any more than logic yields to it, as if a deterministic mind could know what is the case, when it has no liberty to do more than directed, and no capacity to move beyond its determinate limits, or to find and evaluate truth.

Hence many never find God; but as in John 3:15-19, HE has done the uttermost for man, even wishing to save the world, and specifically NOT to judge it. This concept is not germane to the issuance of His love and mercy in the sending of Christ, in its outcome search. Yet, this being so, there is a failure of man to come; and this is not such that it is impossible to do otherwise by divine fiat forestalling man's meaning, but such that in contrast to the declared desire of God, man evinces and evidences, attests and exhibits a contrary spirit, wilfully shutting his eyes in a way bringing just condemnation.

After all, IF he had been foreknown as other than this, God would have ensured that the grant of life would have reached him, and He who is able even to penetrate that which in its own nature cannot choose God because of sin, is able to liberate what by supernatural illumination is enabled so to act, in receiving Him. Yet even this is transcended, for God has foreknown in reality, not some prescribed push in man made in His image, but what is to come, and granting liberty, has then so acted as to ensure its working and operability.

It is YOU, He declares, it is MAN, He specifies, who by his own PREFERENCE for darkness, obscures and removes the application of what HE has done in love for all the world and in a move NOT to condemn it. HE has so loved that He gave. Man has so willed that he is nevertheless not saved. THIS, God declares, both decisively and incisively, is the condemnation in view of these things, His divine desire and the scope of it and the nature of it and the cost He was prepared to pay for this aim and desire: this is the condemnation.

What then is the ground for condemning man on the part of Him who so desired and so exhibited this profound desire that He so gave, yes for the use of the entire world, yes in order to avoid judgment ? What so aborts such love ? It is this.

MAN has PREFERRED darkness (John 3:19); or in large volume this is so, with the achieved result of abiding in the wrath of God despite the positive and loving attitude of God toward the whole human race, man and his salvation (Titus 2:11f., 3:4ff., Colossians 1:19ff.). Evacuating from this Gospel, man is then impelled to just judgment, for inveterate sin and avoidance of salvation, both the one and the other. If man so acts, in terms of the avoidance of grace, and the distancing of the divine cost in God's desire to enable this salvation, then the fires being lit, and the water avoided, the blood despised, man inherits the intensity and immensity which Christ bore for all who receive Him (John 3:36).

This is not the work of a sovereign of strange will, unnameable will who makes many for the purpose of their damnation, but of a grace and a love strangled for each recipient of judgment, by the sheer impious grandeur of human preference. Just as this, for each soul, is known before and beyond history by God, so it is implemented accurately and without possibility of error, and secured according to the reality of the love of God and the essential liberty in man, by God.

This He does sovereignly, according to His truth, love and mercy, all fulfilled to the uttermost (cf. John 6:65),His word and stated attitudes and motivations, precisely as so often stated. The revised version of God who does not know what He is going to do, and the other revised version of one who has a secret counsel not about who is who, but on what grounds any is chosen, both stray into the woods where mist abounds, and have nothing but negativity to the divine counsel in the Bible.

Alas for those who ignore this, they may so readily like Calvin be involved in the inscrutable substitute for what is ineffably clear, and this only by contradiction of what is so clearly written. In this, love in its scope becomes mystery, and eternal obscuration of light by the clamorous will of man despite the desire and willingness of God, contrary to John 3, becomes instead, a matter of divine thrust at the outset. Where light is given, darkness is projected in a way obfuscatory and obviating the glorious resolution of any such mystery which whether in principle or practice, the Bible gives.

Thus, instead of eternal light becoming a matter of divine gift at the outset, seeking all, finding some, apart from works, and not only this, but wholly apart from any predeterminate or deterministic view of man, there is a hideous distortion, leading to Calvin's 'horrible decree', sanctioning to many without hope, by mystic sovereignty, with no scope for effectual solicitation, an unprofitable, yes a torrid end. Such thoughts however are the product, not of God but of philosophy with all its languishing contradictions.

WHAT has God foreknown ? it is not nothing, and if not the will as in the Bible, it is the being, and if some HE prefers in this unbiblical light, then what more eminent in construction than what has such divine appeal! One must avoid both the fallen Calvinist philosophy at this point, of such implications of error, and the unbiblical nature of such assumptions, remaining far from their anti-biblical position. It merely makes problems where light is the way, but is over looked! and beautiful is the path of truth, and wonderful the nature of God, glorious His actions and His way in all respects. He has not given to us a mind to find otherwise, but to find this, if we use it on the one hand, and study His word, this above all, and FOLLOW it.

CONSTRUCTION OF WILFUL SYMBOLS AND SIGNIFICATIONS:
FUN ? BUT NOT FUNCTIONAL

What then, whether in theology or philosophy, moving this way or that on man's various assumptions, man being essentially free, with whatever means distorted and distorting, does not hesitate, but wrongly pursues his thoughts, often errant, frequently erratic, sometimes despotic, at others, making man himself all but sovereign. It is all illusory; God is sovereign, but SUCH a sovereign; grace is irrevocable and total, but not languishing in darkness of the unknown for strange appointments, but accords with those whom the man-seeking God has found among all sought freely and ardently, foreknown, before found, ransomed and then kept.

Forgetting the centre, man thus creates all kinds of symbols and systems and ideas and tries to make the cosmos and his character fit into these; but they never fit in all philosophy over all time, except where God is first found and what He has done is pursued without endeavour to dismiss Him and take over, whether through push or imaginary palliatives.

	Only from the mind of God comes salvation, understanding;
	for what it is, is what He has made, and what He is, is not subject to change (though in the crucifixion, man tried sufficiently hard to make changes in Him, as in the philosophies that killed myriads in recent times, since Marx, Darwin and Freud^*3);
	just as creation with its time and space and form and information and format and law and constraint and constitutive character
	is not made by man, nor is it subject to his whim:
	but he has it as given environment.

What DOES make the verbal form of it, DNA, as it is NEVER found being made naturally now as a matter of fact - is not in this our Age, so operative, nor for that matter is matter being founded. In its essence and nature, place and performance, it is here already, the system and its make-up. As the Bible has made clear for millenia, once God acted, He made, then He rested from this - and is not subject to His creation of time or place. It has long since arrived, and squalid has been its treatment, abortive the fashionable fantasies of man, while if it were possible, it snaps its fingers in the face of man with his pompous pretensions.

As to the Creator, what He does not do in institutive phase, does not happen. There is institution and there is constitution, and the latter is the case, as the former was the case, and nothing will induce the second phase to revert to the first! It is just not so. It is done, finished. Indeed, whatever God says in the Bible is true to empirical fact, this providing understanding not of what is not, but of what is. As He declares it, so it is; and it neither makes itself from nothing or by manipulation brilliance, being constituted and confirmed as to its powers and constraints alike.

In vain do they try to make this or that an evidence of creation of KIND, or some new kind of space. Apart from defoliation, denudation, the sort of decline noted in the Second LAW of Thermodynamics, it continues, since the flood, as it did, before it, from the creation. To be sure, it has been laced with many a catastrophe of this kind or that, sometimes as tutelary, to help man not to sleep entirely (cf. Amos 4, Genesis 9, II Peter 3:5); but to consider the orderly cosmos in which man is found, and realise that order requires ordering, and the mental contrivances involved require thought, and thought thinking and thinking mind, and mind direction and direction purpose and purpose something to be FOUND OUT BY MAN is a first step. Thankfulness for its amazing extent and the zeal back of it, is the next.

Realisation of the pity which does not abandon man is a third step, and of the need for repentance is next, leading on to thankfulness for salvation as inscribed alike in the prophetic scriptures and in the piercing of Christ, and reception of the same by faith. So it ends, that it may begin, the salvation reaching its target, the truth its quarry and eternal life its recipient.

Before time was, God was there to plan it, make it, and provide it, along with that call for patience and its restraints, which is part of our generated cosmos in its created state. God is bound by none of this control, for if He did have, it would be this sovereign source that would be God, who imparts conditions to His creations, as is normal in design work and its manifestation. Moreover, just as in this world, deterioration of design is normal in time, as the above noted Second Law, humanly discovered, illustrates, so the genome of man himself, is deteriorating(cf. *6). It is man who has the option to change. This is as befits the case, a change in spirit, through restoration of the knowledge of God and regeneration of the life which then awakens as from sleep (cf. Ephesians 5:13-14, II Corinthians 6:1ff.)

This however is not as if man had the power to become other than he is, for all the illusory panache of the new man of ludicrous Communism, which starts with what is to make all the rest, as if reason rested one day and reality came in while all things dreamed, by some inadvertence. Such wandering thoughts explain nothing, assuming and acting on assumption with no basis or ground; and even its alleged laws do not work (cf. SMR pp. 925ff.), granted that it first begs the entire question^*4. Man is what he is. It is necessary to know what this is, and not to pretend it is less than the threefold reality: matter in the form of body, mind with its logic and spirit with its purpose and imagination: this, plus their functional synthesis and adorned with the bodily operating system in code.

On the contrary, if all were relative, absolutely nothing could be known about man since there would not even exist the capacity for truth to exist, in order that it might be stated. Then it becomes true that truth cannot exist on any such model, which to breach by announcing it anyway, is mere antinomy and antilogy.

Just as man is not a part without a Creator, all is very far from being relative; though there is as in any design, the relative side.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN ?

Thus, for illustration, you make a great picture, and you are Titian, for example. Very well, each colour has a relationship with every other colour, both direct in space and indirect in aesthetic aspect, and so with form; but while this is undoubtedly so, depending on the power of the mind which produces and which considers these elements and aspects for it to be known and realised: yet this is so far from the point of the picture that one can only laugh at the comedy of the solemn farce of thinking that it is, or weep for the folly of proud blindness that cannot, because it will not see.

The picture beyond the facade of form, shape and colour, has a meaning. The contrivances of art have all kinds of material bases and mental contrivances, but the spirit of the thing, what it conveys, that is ENTIRELY different. These are means; that is end; that is purpose; that is vision, that is idea and ideal, sense of right and wrong in whatever form, format, dimension or depth it may be expressed.

What is right is no more manipulable than is matter. Each has its existence, laws, nature and results. The body is not a play-thing for the mind, but a deposit for its use. The mind is not an invention for adjustment, but a deposit for mental use. There is a right way to use these pieces of equipment, which knows what they are and where they are from and what they are for, and is responsible and accountable; and there are almost infinite numbers of wrong ways. You only have to choose any unrealistic direction and then pursue it to any number of degrees, and then combine this with any number of other figments of vain dictation or desire, in turn and in order, to find this out.

Truth is one; error is all but unlimited. You can go wrong in a marvellous number of ways, like someone on the moon, not sure if it has atmosphere or gravity or water or liberty for being bombardment, and in danger while finding out. Man is not however left so. He has been told not only in DNA beyond his means programmatic, what he is to be in physical format and contrived equipment for use by mind, but by the word of the Maker what is to be done; although as Romans 1:17ff. specifies, much of this is obvious. Yet not all is so. For anyone sick, SPECIAL means are needed to regain health. Man is not too well, no, not at all...

Discovery then ? Man has done largely this for a long time. He has found out a lot, but he is not willing, in this world as a whole, to learn from the Maker and often defies and defiles the most obvious, in his usage (cf, Amos 4), sometimes even becoming regressive in his regress, making of error itself a more systematic thing (cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth). As Christ put it of the version of revolt in His own day as Creator inspecting the earth, giving it opportunity for correction, one at a time, one nation at a time, one family at a time (cf. Luke 19:42ff. with Acts 17:27), they not only close the eyes lest they should see, but in addition, they have an objective of spirit in so doing.

They actually have a purpose in this. It is LEST they should see and being turned back to God, be healed in spirit and mind and find the truth and operate as under and for and toward God, as is the purpose and character of their equipment and the opportunity for their spirits.

BEING MEAN ABOUT THE MEANING

This is the testimony, that as to truth, in large thrusts and moves and cultural proclivities, they do not wish to have it, but rather the morbid or virulent fantasies of their own desires (Romans 1:17ff.), which have their own impetus which makes for secondary pollution as well.

The truth, they do not desire, as shown in consummate development in Isaiah 59! As in Jeremiah 23, they prefer to dream. Dreams are very costly and THEREFORE man is paying and then staggeringly, braying at the cost as if taking Dad's car and smashing it were a reason for complaining that the arm hurts where the crash occurred, blaming Dad for the damage and become offended in a riot of folly, irrationality and dream. WHY, they ask, this and that earthquake ? Why, I ask, can God stand such buffoonery especially the solemn salesman type which merely acts to delude many as from Darwin, Marx and Freud for example*⁵, and who bluster away in defiance of fact and reality till their dreams are as red with blood through proud delusion and confusion, as the red soil of the desert, itself apt symbol of the aridity of man's wilful follies.

Substance in matter, it continues as created; mental substance, or to use a better phrasing, the reality of mind, it continues as created and spirit does just the same except for this. In that case, it is the very domain of spirit to construct and create and consider and purpose and conceive, so that when as now, it does so amiss to the point of international distraction and nearly approaching destruction as Christ foretold (cf. Matthews 24:22), its very virtue becomes productive of evil instead. Thus man tries this and that, often not admitting his failures, but they admit him to their charnel house of dead bones, like it or not; and he pays for his morbid pre-occupation with the mortuary of ideas. Man declines in spirit as in genome^*6, and does not pay heed. His arrogance and his pitilessness, his insistence and his emptiness continue like a beserk tsunami, equipped with demented mind as it surges; and then he complains.

Just as the actual creation has actual right and wrong, factuality and information conformity, or not, where it has option as man does, so the spirit of man misapplied, makes endless seeming figments of thought and perspective and understanding and of callow comprehension of the comprehensive reality, without God, and founders as he must, since reality does not accommodate mere wilfulness; and he pays, oh yes, he pays.

You see this in Proverbs 1 most aptly:

"Wisdom cries outside. She utters her voice in the streets.
"She cries in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates:
in the city she utters her words, saying,

How long, you simple ones, will ye love simplicity?
and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?

"Turn you at My reproof: behold, I will pour out My Spirit unto you,
I will make known My words unto you.

"Because I have called, and you refused; I have stretched out My hand,
and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all My counsel,
and would have none of my reproof:
I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when your fear comes,
when your fear comes as desolation,
and your destruction comes as a whirlwind;
when distress and anguish come upon you.

"Then shall they call upon Me, but I will not answer;
they shall seek Me early, but they shall not find me;
because they hated knowledge,
and did not choose the fear of the LORD.
They would have none of My counsel:
they despised all My reproof.

"Therefore will they eat of the fruit of their own way,
and be filled with their own devices.
For the straying of the simple will slay them,
and the prosperity of fools will ll destroy them.
But whoever hearkens unto me shall dwell safely,
and shall be quiet from fear of evil."

HOW does the one who listens to the Lord dwell safely ? It is certainly not in any merely material sense, since this is a spiritual theme. It DOES however involve a material aspect, since the heart being at peace, the life is in the domain of the splendour of the Lord and has a peace past all understanding and a meaning as a soldier does, who having joined the army, has directions in terms of the destiny in view for the armed forces. Moreover, since this God is as He declares, love, there is nothing odious or abominable or iniquitous here, and in heart and spirit and mind he dwells safely. Even if he is killed, that is the safest of all, for it is in the transfer department, back as they used to say, to Blighty, to safety in the realm of sending, as once, say, back to England from Flanders.

	Morals do not change;
	nor apart from deterioration over time as in man's genome and in his world as he ruins it and suffers very sparing but often large judgments on it as seen in Revelation 6ff., does man;
	nor the cosmos, except that it runs down and its opportunities become more limited as for example, man loads the atmosphere with various radioactive and other delightful things, ready to fall or wither or pollute.

POLLUTION IS NOT REMOVED BY THE GREEN GOODNESS

BUT THE RED BLOOD,

NOT OF SINNERS BUT OF CHRIST

As man defiles even his spirit, and hence this world more and more, and refuses to learn in the realm of philosophy and ideation, and insists on making his own ideals, however perverse these may be (often literally so as well), he approaches a climax. In some ways, it resembles a long-established firm which having newer and more modern management, after the style some time back of one of England's most prestigious and oldest banks, manages to induce losses almost unthinkable to the rational mind. Yet man takes off, like a jet, and screams into the air of vanity with great ease. In this case, it seems to have meant debt more and more obviously unpayable or devastating.

Similarly, the USA is suffering at the present time, from much of the same thing. Having most generously contributed heavily to the rebuilding of Europe twice in 40 years, and having dabbled in the immovable and been engaged in trying to make it move, as in ideals and morals, and having imitated this world more and more with less and less restraint, it is becoming gaunt as humanity itself. Alas for it, it is increasingly growing like a New World within an old framework, and its once religiously flaming fires are now becoming more and more ashen, as church after church submits to illusory reconstructions^*7, and unbiblical innovation, many becoming merely parasitic on Christ, and using the name for their own ideas, illicit in morality and in spirituality, and subversive of truth. Worst of all, in Christ they proclaim it, and in His grand works, justly a subject of boast, they name it. They despising the truth, defile it the more, and naming the truth, revile it with specious praise.

This also, it costs. It has results; for reality does not change. Man's plight, however, this does and it changes as reality is ignored; and the greatest of all realities is the Creator and the greatest of all ignoring with shut eyes is His redemption, and the most active of all remedies being itself polluted by invasive philosophies (as seen earlier in Jude, but now in its perfection, as Jeremiah 23:18-20 puts it), is the testimony of Jesus Christ. Yet as they stopped not at His murder, so is the truth murdered with a mockery sometimes open, and at times deceptively phrased so that, if it were possible, the very elect might be deceived. So it was predicted to be and so it is (Matthew 24:24).

The most wonderful of wisdoms remains His who has come to bring man back freely and gratis by grace to His kingdom; but man dithers as he withers, and in distress calls on his resources instead of on his God! (cf. Psalm 50:16-23,Luke 12:18).

Man is instilled with wilfulness, not as a constitutive fault, but a chosen path. It is NATURAL to be ABLE so to choose; but unnatural to have made THIS choice while under the sovereignty of unforgiven sin (I Cor. 2:14). Hence this erodes his very freedom, and possessed with preoccupations ludicrous and unrealistic, man becomes increasingly slave of his own idiocies or idiosyncrasies or invented characteristics, which no more elevate him than does scratching the back with barbed wire, because it is itchy. Change ? in a way yes, but in principle, not at all, just abuse.

It is only because man MAY know God that his freedom DOES have meaning, or for that matter, his life; for without God there COULD be no truth, and hence no way to go for it or against, and so no liberty to be other than what one is, which is mere conformity, however idiotic it may be. SINCE, however, God is there and Christ is there and redemption is there, man's capacity to know truth is not unmet with the reality of having it; it is available, but there is a cost.

Error, both elemental and derivative, has been costly. It has all but ruined this earth already, to the point that its continuance could be balanced, had one the knowledge, in its horror with its removal and this abrupt end, and a decision attempted as to which is worse or better! God however is not changeable; we have the liberating option, enabling liberty through knowledge of the truth, made freely and effectually available in Christ Jesus the Lord; and it is not God who prevents our finding it, for He is entirely for it, that we be redeemed, the delighted Creator who has paid much for the redemption of this extraordinary creation, which has the power to depart, just as He has the power to bring it back.

How wonderful that He does not shove! As He made man free, and man has spoilt his liberty by many sins, so His appeal is to free man from bondage, not to remanufacture him as something else. It is to WHAT HE WAS that man is to be moved (Colossians 3:10), and as to his liberty to choose, if it is now lost where it counts most, as part of the pollution of his very spirit, yet God is not lost in knowing who are His. Indeed, this He has done as befits Him, before time was with its pollutions and its restraints and constraints (Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:28ff.); and desiring all, He finds those where His declared love rests, in the domain of foreknowledge, where sin has not made some better or worse, before time in reality, before the first breath stirred or the first pollution swept in.

Therefore NOT to follow the Lord and receive His remedy is mere wilfulness of an eternal dimension; but someone who wants to turn, then turn, for the Almighty is not He who would arrest you. If however you dither or delay or waylay others or depart in this or that other option, so be it. What do you lose ? It is, in such a case as that, not what you desire after all. As to God, HE SO loved that He sent His only begotten Son that WHOEVER believes in Him might not perish but have everlasting life. His motivation and capacity is unlimited in quality, though it does not become force instead of love, in nature, by any means, for that is not to fulfil or to consummate, but to desecrate. It is man, not God, who desecrates.

There is nothing like that in His forthcoming love. He did not come to judge. Looking to Him then receive Him; and if not, never blame Him, but to all eternity, only yourself. Yet if you do come, never congratulate yourself, for without His foreknowledge and salvation and concern and care and coming and dying and resurrection of the body, there would be nothing there to come to, but a shut door. Indeed, left to yourself, you would be in darkness forever. Praise God, then, and you are acting like someone back in the truth. Without this, man is unmanned; with it, once more he becomes in the domain of the children of God, for in all truth, without redemption man rots, is defiled, is disjoined from the site where life is, and continues an ambling, rambling, a contaminated product by desire. Who can quench the results of this, inherent, yet free, ultimate and provocative against all hope, not because of defilement, but so as to create it.

NOTES

Matter is - or if you prefer 'substance' as material, substance is - that underlying basic provision in time and space of a substratum,

	impersonal, formed and formatted,
	susceptible to ordered transformation on a given basis, and to interchange with energy,
	divisible into parts, characterisable as a whole,
	capable of being probed as cognate in conceptual basis to the thought-mode of man,
	in measure, commandable as a basis for certain of the operations of the human mind in this earth,
	and indeed susceptible to the conceptions of mind within the limits of its own character,
	creatively organisable within its own modes with the direction of the spirit and mind of man
	into creative forms, while also possessing functional features for the realisation of purpose,
	being fragmentable by the energy and fictionalisable by the mind of man,
	yet limited in power and observable capacities.

Mind is that organising, logically susceptible, data absorptive, information processive, analytically apt marshall-yard and disposition-dynamic in man which can use matter within its limits, and find what is there, or apply itself to itself, with internalised limits, or to spirit to observe its operations.

Spirit is that imaginative, determining, deciding, desiring, uncoded, personal and roving capacity and series of personal functions in man, unified as personality, dynamised by creative drive, which can deploy mind and dispose of matter, both according to their appointed limits and powers and pretend that what is not, yet is, and what is, yet is not, if it wants to do so, or even be driven by delusion resulting from former dreams.

These things are matters of observation and analysis, not fictionalisation, which is merely a woe of ideas forgetting what they are about. You may create imaginary worlds in your mind, to satisfy your spirit, but this does not alter this one, except to the extent you be a dictator or are lordly enough to make your errors spoil or foil good things in the creation as such. Yet spirit may also seek to overcome some of the products of folly from the past, and this is a constructive mode.

Endowing any of these delimited powers of man with higher or lower abilities is mere chatter. Freud, Jung, Marx and Darwin were all deluded in this, that if matter or mind or spirit or life were really of the kind imagined, then there would be no absolute reality available to whom to appeal, so that the truth, as distinct from operating reactions, could be known. Hence their own formulations are fictions on their own bases, incapable of being true. To them, therefore, truth is irrelevant.

Thus, you cannot dispose of God without your dream being disposed of. The Big Bang is merely in essence a materialist projection which systematically and multitudinously fails to meet the evidence, being a mental construction but not a material constriction, experimentally and in terms of investigation. Its constant conflict with fact makes of its system no less a story than any oher just-so story. It has nothing to do with reality, but much with surreality.

On this, see

Cascade of Truth ... Ch. 6 ,
Christ the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch. 9,
SMR pp .127ff.,
TMR Ch. 7

On bits and pieces reductionism, see:

Waiting for Wonder ...Appendix,
REFLECTIONS 4, NOGO

Message of the Words of God ... Chs.   5, 4,
Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2,
The gods of naturalism have no go! 14
Evidence and Reailty... Chs. 2, 5, 6, 7
Impossible for Men, Open for God ... Ch. 3,
Dig Deeper, Higher Soar ... Ch.    1,
The Kingdoms of This World and The Kingdom of Christ Ch.    8,
The Holocaust of Morality Ch. 3,
Glory, Vainglory and Goodness ... Ch. 1,
God's Gift of Grace in Christ Jesus Ch.     7,
History, Review and Overview Ch.    5,
It Bubbles ... Ch.    9,
Spiritual Food and Spiritual Drink Ch. 4,
Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 7,
Possess Your Possessions ... Ch. 3, 3, esp. *2, *3.

See also:The Majestic Might of the Merciful Messiah Ch. 5,
The Track of Truth ... Ch. 1, 150 4,
The gods of naturaliskm have no go! Ch. 1,
Spiritual Food and Spiritual Drink Ch. 11.)

On Freud, Marx and Darwin, see:

Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 9, incl. End-note 1 (esp. programmatic psychology and its ilk), The Marvels of Predestination ... Ch. 7, including *1;
News 80; 44, 97, 98, SMR 4;
Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Extension 1 ;
The True God has God ... Ch. 2,
Earth Spasm ... Ch. 6;

See also SMR Index under Freud and Jung;
NEWS 51, 52, 152, 166, LORD 5, ALERT 1 ; BEAUTY 2 (human psychiatrists).

On Determinism, Materialism,

see Repent or Perish Ch. 7 with Christ Incomparable, Lord Indomitable Ch. 2 and the above, esp. bits and pieces reductionism.

*2 See nothing doing from nothing.

*2A

See t*6 below.

*2B

Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will Ch. 6, *2, will and meritless operation;
Ch. 2 (selections);

The Pride of Life, the Prince of Life and the Destiny of Man Ch. 3, *1
Tender Times ... Ch. 11, esp. pp.172ff.;

Great Execrations ... Greater Grace Ch. 9;
His wounds ... Ch. 4 (also contrasted with Islamic deficiencies);
Sparkling Life ... Ch. 7,

Scaling ... Ch. 5; Gratitude for His Glorious Grace App;
Downfall from Defamation ... Ch. 3; Licence for Liberty Ch. 1
Serenity not Serendipity ... Ch. 12 (trinity, reality, man and liberty);

See relevant section of *1 above.

See *1 above, with

Aviary of Idolatry, Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 5,

News 37. 44, 69, 97 (the exploiters, the fanciful,
the Communists, the de-godders and the realities), 98,
News 150 - Taiwan,

The Grating Grandeur and Aggrandisement of Man,
and the Meekness of the Majestic Messiah Ch. 2

Beauty for Ashes Ch. 6 (and Hong Kong, and the movement of nations in the last century a concern),

Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 8;
SMR pp. 925ff., 971-972;

Beauty of Holiness Ch. 3
(war and force, rising downwards, Tiananmen and truth),
Ch. 4 (liberty, Tiananmen, worship and its direction in time, its terms and code of truth); History, Review and Overview Ch. 1,
Impossible to Men, Open to God Ch. 5