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CHAPTER 5

NOT HOMOGENISED 'LIFE'

BUT THE BRILLIANT FIRE OF   GOD

WHO FORMED IT

 

In the last Chapter, we saw the necessity of creation, its spiritual nature, and its biblical depiction, verified to the uttermost.

Now we note of course that what did not BELIEVE in a Creator, and moreover, in One who DIVULGED His way, COULD NOT KNOW the truth, even if this was deemed, in stark irrationality on its own behalf,  to be the contrary of creation. Not only is empirical evidence aghast at the solecism of evolutionism, but logic itself stares in pity at the mystic mythicism (see Ch. 4) of the truthless model which asserts the truth.

Truth must both BE and BE AVAILABLE, and beyond this, be available without the limitation of the blindness, limitations and occlusions of the mind of man. The finite cannot capture the infinite, though it can, if He be pleased to enable it, discern the testimony in mind and matter, in spirit and reality, of His works and the first appearances of His power and His nature.

Truth must both be absolute and be absolutely willing to be known by its own power, for man to know it; otherwise it is not known, so that those who profess it in any way, are already at war with their own model, in such a case.

This we have often seen. Among the sites which in diverse ways provide these aspects are:

TMR 5, 7 ; see Cartoons, SMR  pp. 146, 271, 295, 422C, 1138;

Wake Up World Ch.  5, End-Note 1A, Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch.  11;

It Bubbles Ch.   9, esp. *1A,

Repent or Perish Ch.  7, pp. 152ff.; Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch.   6;

Barbs...  29,  19; A Spiritual Potpourri Chs.  1-3; 

SMR Ch.  3, Little Things Ch.  5, TMR 9, Epilogue, News 94; 

The Defining Drama Ch.  4 ;

 

and in other ways, sometimes in synthesis:

SMR 41-47; 100-101; Repent or Perish Ch.  2; A Spiritual Potpourri Chs.  6, 12; 16;

Acme, Alpha and Omega... Chs.  9 , 11;

To Know God ... Ch.    5; Barbs ...   6 ,   7 ; Wake Up World ... Ch.   2; 

Tender Times ... Ch.  8, News 122;  Spiritual Refreshings ... Chs.  16 ;  13;

BEAUTY Ch.   4; Deliverance from Disorientation Ch.   2 ;

Stepping Out for Christ Ch.   7; KNOW THE LORD  16, 30;

It Bubbles ...  Ch.   9; Sparkling Life ... Ch.   4.

 

These things being so, it is to the point to observe in principle one of the other mystic features of the confusion which literally reigns in the minds of those committed to organic evolutionism. Perhaps for some the use of this last term may be surprising, but then it is time for surprise. How long has the empty vacuity, the nebulously profane, the arcanely disoriented concept been promoted with some brassy contrast to reality, though its foundations do not exist, its confirmations are absent and its anti-verifications mount like atomic weaponry after the last World War! It has even been given the title 'organic evolution' as if it were something other than a theory of desperation, wrought in distemper of logic, violation of scientific method and blindness to empirical reality and scientific law.

 

THE BOOBY PRIZE FOR THE PRIZE BOOBY:
WHICH IS A BOOBY TRAP

It should be evolutionism, with the booby prize, and creation as the clinically indicated, never contradicted reality. In fact, it is biblical creation which has, scientifically, the palm amongst all creation, since its prescriptions, for absolute creation, are the oldest, the most invulnerable, the most perfectly fulfilled and the most detailed in fulfilment. This is quite apart from, though concordant with the fact that biblical creation, as part of the biblical message, is independently proven (SMR Ch. 1, TMR).

To revert, however, to our theme, evolutionism has the entire weight of scientific law against it, in that the three most important and pervasive scientific laws, as so designated by Professor Tom Barnes of the University of El Paso, Texas (TMR Ch. 1, Ch. 8, Ch. 7) are specifically in verification of creation and clash with evolutionism. In vain is it to try to counter by the claim that in some other universe things might be different.

If we are talking science, we are talking empirically in the first instance; we are making generalisations built on never-unverified concepts, built on countless events, and the causal conceptions in terms of which they are explained, both generic and particular; and even when it is implications of theories that are in view, for verification or otherwise, in the last analysis, something somewhere has to actually happen and be considered because of that fact, not merely be put in some kind of acoustic isolation, and protected from the light of common day, kept inviolate, like some religious guru, always talking, never doing.

Let science be science, then, and not a toy; let it do its joy, not become a panderer to illegitimate philosophy, blinding it with unreason, hope, irrationality and confusion. Why is it not so, then at this time in this field ? It is simply because the KNOWLEDGE of man in this particular format called 'science', is the knowledge of MAN, and MAN as such, in generic terms, short of his rescue in the hands of his Creator, is in the grip of such a dynamic to worship the creation instead of the Creator (as the Bible has so accurately stated and with such magnificent verification from evolutionism's mystic mythicism, in locations such as Romans 1:17ff., II Timothy 4:4, II Peter 3:3-5) that reckless children at the seashore, he drowns in it, in droves.

One always remembers with sadness the story heard as a child, from memory, of a bunch of scouts who, in hot weather and escaping from the city of Geelong, rushed to Ocean Grove, where we so often camped by the sea shore, knowing full well its perils, and came to grief in the midst of the churning seas about hidden rocks. Intemperate haste brought, it seems, loss of the power to hurry. So in this field, except that the lemming syndrome seems operative as well. Reality not being good enough for their yearnings, they rush into fantasy, and proclaim it with all the zeal and violence that belongs to other forms of autocracy and dictatorship. So has it been in this State of South Australia, in effect (cf. TMR Ch. 8). As with those scouts, one is grieved for the children, in this case conducted to this untimely grave of truth in their hearts in this phase of life. Let us however return to our thrust.

As shown earlier, even if some other kind of universe be conceived, or other phase, it is all the same. This merely violates, for the case in point and its requirements, the laws of causation. As these are so lethal to logic when they are lost or impugned, they are likewise so to the defence of the propositions that agnostic or atheistic controversialists, or allianced religionists might wish to espouse in an effort to elect irrationality as their modus operandi, since reason will not buy into it (cf. SMR pp. 284ff., Cause, Joyful Jottings  5, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, State of Mind, Calibrating Myths... Ch. 6, Secular Myths ... Ch. 7).

Realms in defiance of reason, destructive of causation, airily and in faery fashion (old-fashioned fairies are more airy-sounding, to fit this bill), asserting their imagination's ontology are good stuff for Christmas rejoicings with children, perhaps; but are in fact merely one more effort to get something for nothing, evacuative of rationality as in all the devices of that deceiver, the Satan who is both fraught with fancy, and enticing to the godless, or to those who want anonymous and controllable gods for convenience. To spend an inheritance, you must first have it, before you violate it; and spending God is not available, because of His integrity.

ALL mystic realms which evacuate the creator, all lack causal grounds, whatever their permutations and combinations of poor long-suffering 'Nature' which they may seek to evoke. Have some converse world pulsing DOWN and it still first must be built UP. Nothing is available by way of evacuation from the necessities of construction. Spending money no more amasses it, than does degradation 'arise' without first having something to degrade, and the necessity of its origin, whether through inheritance, payment for services or whatever. Such flutings and fiascos of thought are mere romances of unreason.

THIS world however, and OUR logic, without which we cannot even reason, require that we ponder the DATA before us, and the LOGIC within us, and find the GOD whose word fulfils the requisitions of logic, and the tests of scientific method, uniquely, who both in practice and in principle meets all of these criteria with ease. All other attempts to follow factuality and reason meet merely disease, distemper, self-contradiction and obvious futility in that they seek what is, from what is inadequate BOTH in witnessed experiment and in logical necessity to meet it.

Thus, we should not be seeking in the normally confused manner of our day, to find some 'underlying' LIFE which is to explain everything. Nothing explains symbolic logic, and its causation, which ignores its genesis in man, and the sufficiency of grounds for such an event, without becoming itself first the casualty of its own model. The viable and reliable case is entirely different.

The SOURCE of life, the CREATOR of life is the POWER and the FUNCTIONARY which is SUFFICIENT for it, and of necessity being outside matter, itself ground into submission in its very formation, constrained beyond itself, this spiritual Being unlike that mere product,  is not some mottled marvel of uniformity within diversity, but quite simply, its full and sufficient source. This phase of life we all know from our own creative powers, so that not only necessity, but personal acquaintance of the style though not the scope of creation makes readily conceived the One whose creative prowess simply

bullet inputs the logic, the executive powers, the assembly line techniques,
bullet the high-level from the outset of sophistication into creation,
bullet with those levels of conformity, uniformity, on the one hand,
bullet and those aspects of brilliant improvisation
bullet (such as the systematic action in its undergirding in protein synthesis and the cohesive conception in symbolic command tied to executive functionalities),
bullet of differentiation and individuality on the other,
bullet which are the very order of our own day, in our own way, when WE create.

To ignore in the institution of something, what we ourselves continually DO, when instead, people in inebriated-seeming starry eyed mysticism try to make matter, without any of these evidenced powers, to be the criterion, is perhaps the most unscientific avoidance of an issue that has ever been seen in the long and most variable history of science. It is equal to the worst outbursts of irrationality which have ever dizzied themselves into the dark depths of man in delirium, astray and straying like some wild-eyed sheep near the precipices of death.

To be sure, that this is the worst such feeble foozle of man's mystic madness or inebriation, that is a large statement, in view of the almost incredible human tenacity in science, to cling to the outmoded by tradition, as with the phlogiston case which has aspects of similar hilarity; or the Lord Zuckerman case (SMR pp. 172, 204ff.), when his colleagues, by his own testimony, showed a rebellious spirit in the very midst of careful scientific evidence of the most sophisticated kind; and the tendency to follow this or that philosophy, with veneration of Aristotle or spontaneous generation in the days of Pasteur.

Nevertheless, what CAN surpass this mythicism of obscurantism in its very scope of the betrayal of the whole method of science! Logic is its divorcee, and it refuses to tend to the children, empirical facts, which scamper about, have scampered about and continue to scamper about the laboratory, as if disowned. Their shrieks are the ungodly din of the place which should encourage thought and watch facts 

Making imagination the substance and hypothesis its fruit when facts roar at the outrage, or rush discharged about the disorderly laboratory, is the modern malady. Preachings of science falselly-so-called, that form of this knowledge so often abused and as noted generically in the Bible for avoidance (I Timothy 6:20, this is the work of false religion. Its ruin is soon and its ambit is pollution (cf. SMR pp. 208, 226ff., 251ff., 419ff., 422Eff.).

It is no accident that creationists are some of the most original scientists of all time, including Newton by some given the crown, Boyle, Maxwell, Faraday, Cuvier, von Braun ... indeed, as noted in Wake Up World! ... Ch. 1, how vast would be the abyss in history, if these were absent from it. Let us recall this.
 

bullet Where without Kelvin, without Faraday, without von Braun, without Newton,
foremost originator of calculus, physicist of profound genius, without Maxwell,
Hooke in physics, Boyle in chemistry, to name merely a handful of the great inventive generators
of scientific thought, in history, would we be!
 
bullet What profound omissions would have been made without their testimony as indeed,
that in realms like the area and arena of Shakespeare, whose works are almost
a living glowing sermon in morals, and exposition of doctrine
(cf. that brilliant little work,
The Gospel in Shakespeare),
apart from their famous drama;
of Browning, Wordsworth, Tennyson;
of  Francis Bacon moreover in his instructions on scientific method itself,
of Kepler, Herschel in astronomy, Gladstone in our history,
Dalton in chemistry's atomic theory, Joule in physics, Babbage in profound mathematical and engineering preliminaries to modern day computing,
Lister or Fleming in medicine, the latter in his amazing work in penicillin.
 
bullet Their talent and testimony, in logic and thought, in work and resolutions, concerning Christ and concerning His works, it has aided in vast domains the extension of the knowledge of the Saviour.

 

A THING OF SPIRIT,

so impoverished that it does not know its own value

Now the material side of things can be fascinating, as can the recording of tape-recorder on its cassette, or the digital camera's contribution by giving a material REALM for the STORAGE of the understanding of man, which makes it worth-while having such devices. To imagine however that the storage invents itself is worse than simplistic; for it is to starve the mind of science in the interests of pure magic.

Matter does not have or remotely attest any aesthetic capacity, or self-arraigning, commanding methods which it has vested power to institute; but man does. Matter is his instrument, just as his own mind is another created facility of great interest, being correlative to his own person, to his individuality and to the generality, at the same time, which comprises his being in the image of that Great Spirit which dowered spirit to him, enabling will and purpose to outdistance program and provisions of visible design. It is fascinating indeed to watch the automatic and semi-automatic programming within that amazing, that most amazing of all objects with material componentry within the total construction, which is called man.

This palls however besides the point for which it is made, man himself, personal, imaginative, creative, methodical, erratic, despotic, kindly, humane, urbane, courteous, wild, distorted, incredibly confused, magnificently endued, as the case may be. It is not a mere whirl, but all rests perfectly clearly with the very dew of heaven on the dawn-covered grasses of morning freshness, when it is seen analytically in terms of the biblical perspective provided, like the mind, matter and spirit trilogy which is man, to go WITH IT, and so with him.

To be sure, some people always find the car more interesting or attractive or impressive than its driver and purchaser. They are intrigued by means, and forget man. But is it so really ? WHO made the car, but man ? who though of it but man ? who engineered it but man ? WHY is man so despised that what he IS is made subordinate to the most elemental of the matériel provided for him! Why is logic so insulted that the user of it is made less objective than his own imaginings about the nature of the material world, and the spiritual and the mental world about him!

Why is the necessary validity of his thought -  if material things are to be conceived as actuality AT ALL, despised in the interests of some theory of his own mind, about such things! Is he demented that his own mentality is ignored! No, just feverish with the wanton unwisdom of seeking to abstract himself from God's authority and power, unique work as Creator and so to make himself his own. It has been so since Eve was tempted by the CONCEPT of being like God, filled with knowledge of the most elevated kind. She merely showed the irony of it all, when, indeed she knew good and evil after her little venture into rebellion from the Creator, for the missing element of EVIL in her knowledge, she imported by BECOMING IT!

Such is the continual waywardness of man who makes, and is making this world so near to uninhabitable by wild ferocities of arms and philosophy which habitually precedes, as Nietzsche preceded Hitler, and Hegel Communism, with suitable inverted projections of his thoughts (cf. SMR p. 128 with associated references).

 

SACRIFICE ? IT IS ONLY A QUESTION OF WHICH ONE

Man in general would sacrifice ANYTHING for liberty to call his universe his own, even if logic, if empirical reality, if scientific method, if lives are all lost in the process. His lust is inveterate, ineradicable, ineluctable, irrepressible, pathological within the world of nature; but it is capable of cure when the disease of spirit is brought to the One who actually MADE man, his world and the inter-actabilities*1 of all domains of creation, their congregation and co-operation.

This perverse passion, often operative in man, is one of the later verifications of the very magnitude of the divine work of Creation, attesting of this creation called 'man', his remarkable power even to abstract himself from the hand of His Maker, and spit on it; as of the handbook in which He has shown to man this very pathology, and with it,  the way out of the mess which in spirit he has become: pride, dominion, power, lust, folly in unhandsome legions working their myrmidons of man,  increasingly like puppets, slaves of secular desire, or religious desperados whose actions are often mere substitute rebellions for form's sake.

The answer is and can be found nowhere else. NOTHING else offers a change by the power of the supernal and unlimited God of the man who is sick, and in this, the divine action is kind. It is first by justice meeting the penalty for man, mercy paying it and person being it, in the Redeemer which is Christ. It is operative where it is received, like medicine, and indeed has been called the medicine of immortality.

There is no other remedy, and without remedy man is insistently insubordinate, in such a sickly style towards his Creator, that he even glories in it (cf. Romans 1:17 to the end, II Timothy 3, II Peter 2).

Just as the 'life' which man vainly tries to construe as some distillate of living things, becomes merely a kaleidoscopic folly of thought, thus eluding definition through misconception (cf. What is Life !), so the 'solution' which man vainly tries to find (see Life, what is it for ?), in himself,

bullet either as part of nature,
bullet or in his psychology, in his politics,
bullet in his science-falsely-so-called,
bullet that is, his philosophy invading scientific method:
bullet it is a kaleidoscopic folly of desire,
without solution or resolution,
rational grounds or verification.

Just as the Creator in His creation, answers all the questions of logic, and puts to refreshing sleep all the disquietude of reason, awakening it to its homeland where alone it is not restive, so the Redeemer, who enshrines and provides the ACTION OF GOD TO BRING REDRESS to the vanity of man in his passion for erecting false barriers against God, indeed barricades against submission to His most loving sovereign, brings to rest all the feverish efforts of man to bring substitutes for the truth. There is INDEED a LIFE which is to be found, self-defined, and it is that of life's author; just as there is a PLAN to be found, and it is from life's author, and man's, as is necessary from the depth of that originative understanding and institutive wonder which is the parent of man, though he increasingly does not acknowledge Him.

Even if he does, it is coming in plague proportions, to be in the realms of fantasy, unevidential excrescences, untallying leaps, whirls of emotion. It is not that emotion or any other basic faculty of man is inferior; it is just that to avoid God, the failure to use ALL of man's equipment is the payment; and the price of such payment is that one is lost.

God however is not lost; it is just that only by Him can man be found.

 

THE WORLD IS NEEDY, AND OF THAT NEED,
HERE IS THE CULPRIT AND THE CURE

What is needed by man is the transfer of this Life of the Lord, that life of the Author of man and the universe, in order that there may be freely conferred on this sinning creation, from beyond this time-space matrix at the physical level, beyond this sin-smitten ruin at the spiritual level, beyond this mind-invaded rubble at the mental level, this bifurcation of brilliance and desolation, man in the 21st Century, freely given, that eternal life which is as freely offered as the creation itself was freely consigned at the first (I John 1:1-4, Romans 6:23).

It is this which is on offer, has been for millenia, and has been foreshadowed from the Fall (cf. TMR
Ch. 3, Barbs ... 17, News 87, The Biblical Workman Ch. 7, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs.   9,   10). It is this which has been verified, validated and vindicated in the Messiah, who

bullet not only performed at the prophesied level, indicative of the uniqueness
and grandeur of the glory of God Himself
(Repent or Perish Ch. 2, The Magnificence of the Messiah ,
Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God ... Ch. 8, It Bubbles ... Ch. 8),
 
bullet not only has been incapable of being defenestrated by those who,
post-crucifixion try to contort history to their comfort (cf. SMR Ch. 6),
 
bullet not only personally predicted the situation to which this erratic world has impelled itself
to make its very own
(cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5):

but surpassed all things ever made

This He did, in His apt and just, majestic and beautiful combination of

bullet tenderness, truth, condemnation and approbation,
bullet uncontainable thrust,
bullet willing sacrificial calm,
bullet passionate desire for His people,
bullet empathetic brilliance in healing all kinds of diseases, even dismissing death repeatedly,
bullet power to prevail in all conflict of word and deed,
bullet dynamic for the performance in the face of age-old disclosure to the enemy of precisely
what He had declared He would do,
bullet in the prophetic scriptures,
 

before doing just that.
 

Thus proceeding, He left Pharisee and Sadducee, scribe and Roman alike

confounded after the resurrection, so that just as He ALWAYS was able to do what He said,

and the Book of the Lord had for a millenium prescribed for Him,

so they, by that contrast which is ever that between man and God,
lacked power to achieve anything whatsoever to the contrary, being
 

bullet unable to provide the body which was so much sought,
bullet despite incomparable goodness and power for good,
bullet which walked off,  and went on to build His Church,
bullet on power and performance,
bullet purity and prophecy,
bullet reliability and reality.

 

What is needed is this, which has always been needed.

It is NOT the Road Map for the division of the spoils of the Jews,

who having helped much in the Wars of last century, even being rewarded with Palestine in the midst of their plight, so accurately forecast from Moses on (Deuteronomy 32, Leviticus 26),

have now become the customary BUTT of the belligerence of man,

when he is not assailing Christians,

now increasingly by the false prophet Muhammad's legions of murderers, by their own confession, agents of death, in masses, children, infants even not excepted.

It is not some anaesthetic of pretence, or diuretic of purification on man's terms. It is, this necessity, that one should come and receive from the MAKER of LIFE, the actual basis, and necessary cause of it, which nothing else can meet in power and performance, validity or truth, that eternal life which is His, for which man yearns in his buildings and politics and dynasties and philosophies, his evolutionisms (they are legion and at each other's throats in dismal verification of the biblical truth which, as they squirm in each other hands, they unitedly reject), and his depressions.

Thus it is, that this acme of this form of creation, man, should indeed live for ever, not on myth and fanciful nature worship, but in terms of the only possible source, and the only valid ground for truth and reason, evidence and attestation on all sides, God Himself; and that in the only indexed and verified place, the Biblical salvation of Jesus Christ.

GOD's on MAP has this, the HIGHWAY OF HOLINESS and THIS is the way, provided IN CHRIST, through Him and in Him, with whom the people of God customarily walk (cf. Romans 8:9, 5:16ff., John 6:50ff.,62).

God spoke and we were made; God wrote and we were told; God came and we were delivered; man rebelled again and he awaits judgment, or the consummation of becoming children of God, in the remedy of God, the Redeemer, Jesus Christ. You do not have to wait for it, and ought not to do so, any more than a man waits for a cancer operation, when the tumour is already swelling in his brain, and soon will reach inoperable proportions.

Man is not god, is not autonomous, does not create himself or his universes. He must come back to his beginning and consider his end. It is one thing or the other; but if it is not the provision of God, then it is the revision of man which, being mere rubble and rubbish from his myth-making imagination, is in that case with justice and despite love alike, consigned where rubbish goes.

Is it not enough that Christ wept as He saw the coming destruction of Jerusalem ? (Luke 19:42ff.), as He told of the stark refusal of most of Israel to come to the One who came for them after all those centuries of prophecy ? to come to the Creator who had led them and delivered them times almost without number (Psalm 106) ? But if it is not, and consider your Creator in human form weeping ... for you, then is it enough that He cast Himself ruthlessly into the ruin that is man, by actually bearing sin, and removing it as far as the East is from the West by shouldering justice on man's account, in His own demise, and then breaking the penalty in His own arising, all as foretold: this is immediate foundation of His Church!

This Gospel goes throughout the world according to His word (Matthew 24:12), then there has already come the "beginning of sorrows" which are almost swamping this world at this time (cf. SMR Ch. 8), and then their crescent, their zenith, so that the world COULD not continue to support man unless God intervenes (Matthew 24:22) - sufficient comment on his active delusions such as secularism, humanism, militarism, rabid violence to MAKE things right, evolutionism.

That merciful and timely coming of Christ to reign, the mercy long having been offered: it approaches like the dawn of the coming day. It is near (Answers to Questions Ch. 5), and it is necessary: for God went to the Cross in Christ (II Corinthians 5:17-21), for man, not for fun, but for favour, acting alike with truth, for pity with mercy, for justice with joy (Romans 3:22ff., Galatians 3, 5, John 3:15-19,36, Titus 2-3).

God has left nothing out; but if man leaves God out, it is like one who having a prescription from a world-famed specialist for some chronic disease which brings agony deserved, and death assured, yet 'forgets' or does not bother, or despises it, in a rancour of folly, approaching death like a typhoon looking for its own end, amidst the surrounding destruction.

The comfort is far greater than the discomfort. Showing the fraudulence of all these follies of our race, in the grace of God, in terms of His word, in giving a reason for the faith, one reveals yet again amidst the myriads of millions who have done so in the past, the exquisite beauty of the all-answering remedy of God, satisfying as nought else to logic, to life, to emotion and to love, bringing a man, a woman, and yes a child, from the driving rain of the tempests of our times, to the sheer, exquisite loveliness of the ripe peace of God. This continues untouched by the rampancies of flesh,  over-arching all with the sunrise of His mercy, in the clear skies of His purity.

Comfort ye My people! He said as they were prophetically seen called back from the aggressor, Babylon in ancient days. In our own day, another Babylon has arisen, Romanism with its squadrons of related misuses of Christ, doing business with secularism, evolutionism and humanism, New Age, squandering opportunity, abstracting people from their promised land, in the very presence of God.

It is necessary now, as it was then, to return, and to find in the King of Jerusalem, who died there, and whose it is, the King of the earth, the Creator of all and the Redeemer of many (Isaiah 6-11, Matthew 26:28), in repentance for the deeds that brought this alienation from this ‘land’, and to love Him with an open faith and a joyous heart.

If this way is logically necessary, and it is, it is yet not emotionally compelling to those whose desire is this world. So be it: repent or perish. You can CHOOSE to perish, but to come to the Lord is dependent on INVITATION and the INCULCATION through His Spirit of the desire to do it. The Spirit ‘blows’ where it will, said Christ. You do not know where it comes from or where it goes to. It is so, said the TRUTH, with all who are born of God (John 3).

Yet it is His DESIRE that you find Him (Colossians 1:19ff.), so with passionate desire, look to the Lord and be saved, now as has for so long been the unchanging prescription of the God of grace and of glory (cf. Isaiah 45:22ff.).

 

THE CONSUMING FIRE

The consuming fire, the burnishing of beauty, the energy of creation, the issuance of might, the casting into form of the thought of God, of spirit into the heart of man, of salvation into the life of this world, not as a component but an offer, the fearful dynamic and the magnificent investiture: it is ALL small comfort to the errant kings of this earth.  Every one in his castle, arrogant in autonomy, divested before God, walking into Aids, al Qaeda, international terrorism, whether institutional and official, or disorientative and religiously awry, into radiation, into fears of it all, into cancers, conquests, divisions, rebellions, vacuous pomp and earthy degradation, in comics, in cartoons, in catastrophes, in conferences: these have no fireproofing.

Put differently, the accounts are out of order, and the divine audit is not conferring mercy where only arrogance has dismissed the restoration of funds due, as attested by divine accounting. It is one thing to be poor, and needy; it is another to be graceless in ingratitude, and so by inveterate dissidence, seeking not to come to God, but to acts as gods. Yet, says the word of the Lord to such (Psalm 82:6), "You will die like men."

In South Africa, we learn (TV Channel 10, December 15), that 600 die daily from Aids, that 4 million are infected with HIV. Thus the so-called 'saviour', Mandela, cannot defy God, though he reputedly disbelieves. God is not mocked. Intractable is truth to human inventions. Mandela has shown remarkable courage and great insight in desiring a removal of the furore and clamour of revenge in the interests of a nation, and in this is to be admired; but the concept of 'saviour' imputed to him, is ludicrous. Even the same TV presentation sought to bring him to account for NOT using his then immense influence when national leader,  to challenge his nation, as the Aids epidemic, indeed now the pandemic developed.

The sexual subject involved, he explained, was not desired by many. He had other needs to meet. He left it till his retirement to campaign in this arena. By then, one on this program attested, the time was late, grievously so.

They still die, then, if not from white oppression then from their own deeds, and for many, the results of the deeds of others. As Mandela himself declared of Aids, "it is not like a cold that you catch." It has other origins.

So the world in its inadequacies proceeds with its false pomps and superficial glories, always inveterate, always rebellious, almost most-knowing, never in tune with truth. Such is its way, and the way of its leader (John 14:30), whom Christ condemned in advance as having "nothing in Me."  It still despises Christ, mangling Him if it were possible, this at least verbally and in the minds of millions, into misshapen relics and forms, such as bread, or some invention of Muhammad 6 centuries later, misusing His name for his own purposes, or similar degradations and revilings as in the unitarians, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons, the Christadelphians, many indeed of the Liberals, those who wanted a kingdom without a king, and a God without glory, or so acted, as if this were their very heart's desire, themselves the only recipients of glory.

With such hollow spiritual voluptuousness has even a vast number in the West proceeded, making mockery of the very Christ they name, whom they defame, rather like mad scientists, re-naming just ANYTHING with the titles accorded to actual bacteria, or animals or birds: talking with style, acting with guile.

Treading under foot HIS blood (Hebrews 10:29), whether in Communism, which makes saviour of the people, or here of Mandela, whether in 'Christian' Europe whose entitlements are in blood, but not that of Christ in its often so evil history of oppression murderously, in that VERY name! it is a common practice. This, it is just as He indicated would occur (John 16:2): it is a popular pastime. Still do multiplied and milling masses declare, "Christ Almighty" amid their festive conversation, paying a tribute in distortion to the truth they require, but continually fail to acquire.

 

BLOOD FOR BLOOD ?

Blood for blood. The 'bomb' sent myriads to death and agony, one of the focal features of our Age (as predicted in Joel 2:30, cf. Acts 2:19); now its polluted waters and dispersive gases cloud and infect more, while its menace brings hearts failing for fear, to many more (just as Christ predicted would be the heart of the many, in Luke 21:26). Wars decimate; tribes are chillingly sliding into the pit with war and famine, infection of spirit and of body. Madness has come to our race as Revelation 6 descried, as Christ declared of its inveterate follies (Matthew 24). Death is becoming a godless guillotine operated by the passion of man, astray, inveterate, impassioned, in false furies and pretentious religious, secular and mundane fiascos, which many ask all to treat with respect. It is man who is to be treated with respect, not his maruading follies that threaten this globe, smash designs called mankind, thrash the innocent and steal riches for greed.

As to Christ Jesus: Where His blood is stilled in its application by the arrogant hand of rebellion, then readily is man's blood being spilt by the fouled heart of ilk, frenzy both philosophic and physical, seizing his hand like a mad thing, and using it to destroy.

The comfort lies here, that whatever anyone else does, institutional or religious, king or commoner:

YOU may receive NOW His pardon BY His blood, that is His death as a sacrificial payment in strict and stringent justice for your sin. It is applicable upon receipt. Eat His flesh and drink His blood ? Of course, as if He were the lamb of God; but since this is a figure, and He was the feature who died, the reality is as He personally declared, namely this: "The words that I speak to you, they are spirit, and they are life", in that very same chapter (John 6). What, He asked, if the Son of man goes where He was before! Where I go, He cried, you cannot come.

You cannot 'eat' like that! That is more than obvious, as Chinniquy declared. Otherwise at the Supper He would have been eating Himself. Thus He could never have gone to the Cross. It is staggering how man evacuates simplicity from faith, and falls in his own complex inventions; yet as in Proverbs 1, this is the fate of despising His injunctions and rejecting His wisdom. WISDOM MADE US; WISDOM provides salvation. FOLLY rejects it; but YOU need not. And if you are His already, then in HIS wisdom continue, in His word, for then are you really His disciples, as He declared (John 8:31).

Glory ? Yes in the cross of Christ glory, the Road Map, indeed the LIFE MAP that finds in HIM the way, the altar which alone is authorised, and finished in its work. What did Christ say (John 17:4): "I have glorified Your name on earth. I have finished the work which You gave Me to do." What did He say on the Cross, "It is finished" (John 19).

What does Hebrews 9 declare ? that He has purchased eternal redemption, that He died to sin ONCE, that it is NOT often, for OTHERWISE He would suffer often: but now once has He died, ONCE has He become the ever-availing sacrifice.

 So it was to be, so it is, and THERE and not in masses, priest popularities, or popular gurus, or ministers, or Ministers, or Presidents or United Nations or EU's or other aggregations of confusion is peace to be found. You may be delivered from oppression in order to die of Aids, as in South Africa in multiplying hundreds of thousands; from priests to die a terrorist; from secularism to become a communal-thought addict (cf. SMR pp. 867ff.): and in all, dying to truth, dead to life, you may become a manipulee of this world.

On the other hand, in the truth is comfort, the God of all comfort (II Corinthians 1); and in that comfort is peace. This is, in the grace of God,  because peace ALWAYS belongs with truth, when that truth is the absolute truth which lacks no depth, covers all fields and knows the source and destiny of all. It finds no horizons but is propositionally declared by God Himself in words never falsified. How marked is the contrast of this stability with that erratic non-science, that devious 'science falsely so-called', a due component of 'knowledge falsely so-called' in its polluted and fallen state, in the hearts of many!

A captive of philosophy, this specious substitute for science fails not in its own field, but in that falsely added in the domain of religion,  to the point of ridicule. Its words of a few decades become ludicrous in many cases, its false clamours of passion, often substituted for fact, becoming so derisible that even some of its own non-Christian sons declare them incomprehensibly void and ridiculous (as in the case of Nilsson, Hoyle, Stephen Jay Gould*2).

Thus, even many of  its own sons pour passion of contempt on what the many had been chanting for decades, in the name of science! It takes but a few years, but with the Word of God, the Bible, centuries, nay millenia do not suffice to debunk its minimal points, or touch its message of things past, present and to come.

Science itself, like a people by many betrayed during a war, in the case of many of its practitioners is voiding its own method, and in this adding itself to the legions of false religions, making trust in man its zenith, till man wishes to apotheose, and so become so much more ridiculous, that only those who, by defying the truth, are vulnerable, could possibly be deceived (II Thessalonians 2:4-10).

Virtue however, and knowledge properly so-called, inclusive of science in its dress of humility, when it loves facts and does not indulge in contra-law fiascos, this speaks as realities occur; yes even the integrity of God Himself declares what endures: beyond but in accord with what man actually finds rather than imagines deviously, He has spoken for millenia, yet not one particle of it ever falls to the ground. Man's word of presumptuous 'knowledge' in which he merely makes imagination his guide, this falls to the ground, while the word of God marches on, celestial in magnificence, coming from heights of infinitude, going to depths of depravity, rescuing by grace divine, encountering sin by the face divine, and outfacing it, breaking death with its light and delivering man from his plight. Facts, law and faith are in glorious harmony; dissidence dies many deaths, first to integrity, starting with the thought of man, the desire, not what is wrought before him, then to cohesion, then with obscurantism as a failing brother, then with myth and mysticism without basis or validity, then to life as its basis, then to mercy.

It is the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus (II Corinthians 4) which brings comfort; and the truth is beautiful because God in His holiness is beautiful, His compassions practical, His provisions pure, His way unalterable, like cleanliness, His power immutable, His grace like the channel of a fast-flowing stream, specific in course, but refreshing in depth, providing peace.

 

NOTE

 

1

It is interesting, this word, but it is worth looking at this and saying a word in favour of a little originality in our words, for they had to be made in the first place, so why should we dully leave off their development ? Webster's has in its base margin, 'actable' which would mean 'able to act'. As it notes 'able' as a suffix, so one can develop this into 'actability' the quality or state, capacity or ability to be acted. When one wishes, therefore, to consider what can have this capacity relative to inter-action, one needs only build.

The dead hand, like that of the English driver who dead at the wheel, could not apply brakes, of custom is given too much rein. Past habits can be given much rein, and future developments, lest custom reign and death obtain. This then is not about one word, but about the spirit of creation in language. This in turn is part of man's spirit's operations, that he can rise above program, debate program, criticise it and abort it, thwart it or conduct himself in ways conducive to its operation or rupture. While this is not so in all (he does not have power to control his heart), it is so in much as a testimony to the creative powers of the creation called man, whose false creations are his ruin, whose creativity in critical liberty or effusive spontaneity are merely one of the natural, nay necessary outcomes of what he is.

It is amusing to see how some seeing that word 'necessary' are quick to quip that it is not free; but this error, like that of Davies noted in TMR Ch. 7, is nothing but an invalidity. It can be necessary that you free your prisoners, or that you exercise your spontaneity because it is THERE, without this RESULT of its ACTUALITY in any way denying it. Rather it verifies it to be there!

 

*2

See for these things, SMR Ch. 2, Wake up World! Ch. 6, TMR Ch. 2, Ch. 4 above, and indexes for those noted.